it's this is after the now infamous security leaker edward snowden went public over the weekend allowing his name to be revealed we reported friday that nine at tech companies face a whistle blowing allegations and the press they allowed directed government access to their servers which they now strenuously deny snowed in the twenty nine year old booz allen employee has drawn support from some unlikely that such as michael moore and glenn beck. and microsoft's former chief privacy officer advisor caspar bowden went as far as to compare crowded data outside the us as a privacy guantanamo bay we'll dig into the fine print of the security of mobile payments in just a bit and while we're talking about apple they just shared a lisa jackson through the revolving door she will become their environmental adviser the green hired gun was one to head of the environmental protection agency under obama she also served as john corps imes chief of staff when he was governor

of new jersey the wall street journal's and joseba rag you accused her of being and abusive regulator and that her role making bender at the e.p.a. ten ten used to drag on economic growth. and finally after a nervous couple of weeks of a nomics the might just be facing redemption at least in terms of national aggregate thanks to unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus japanese g.d.p. was guth to four point one percent as reported overnight the nikkei followed suit with its own a five percent rally all is well until that price inflation destroys the purchasing power and saving. let's get to work then your prime interest.

mobile money is changing the payments landscape allowing users to pay for taxis parking meters even pizza delivery guys all from the convenience of a. phone and according to tech research company gartner worldwide mobile payment transaction values will reach two hundred thirty five point four billion dollars and twenty thirteen which is supplements our drive towards a cashless society with all the concerns over privacy and government surveillance programs could mobile payments provide another source of data collection let's take a look into the fine print of mobile payments. until recently africa led to the world and mobile payments companies like him pave revolutionize the money transfer

industry expression and rural and less developed areas a lack of wired infrastructure as well as legal structure made the system straightforward to set up on the other hand in the us the regulatory structure has made building a mobile payment system more than difficult the bank holding company act defines a bank to be an institution that accepts demand deposits or deposits that the deposit or main withdrawal by check or similar means for payment to third parties or other. non-bank companies from many activities and financial markets but there is an exemption for issuers of prepaid debit cards which are used extensively by lower income persons who might not have a bank account and exemption was carved out in september two thousand and twelve for debit card issuers with assets under ten billion dollars the same legal infrastructure applies to mobile payments and companies from google to apple i have

been making an roads to push mobile payments as part of the next generation and retail banking one of the leading proponents of mobile debit card to mobile payment technologies is the center for financial services for integration or the c.f.s. their mission is to advocate for under-served customers under the financial service access to financial services c s i began as an affiliate of shore bank corp in chicago which is the oldest development bank in the u.s. with ties to president obama but in two thousand and ten shore bank ran into financial trouble and the f.d.i.c spent three hundred sixty eight million dollars to wind down the bank and in august of two thousand and ten shore bank was declared and solvent and urban partnership bank assumed all of the deposits a coalition of major wall street firms including goldman sachs american express. electric and think of america recapitalize the new entity with one hundred forty

five million dollars even more curiously the f.d.i.c allowed some of the executives who ran the shore bank even as it failed to remain on the board with the new bank and usual move even by see standards it seems that shore bank and its affiliates were the exceptions rather than the norm and apparently some important people wanted to make sure the work of the smallish community bank continued at the center of any money system lies trust trust not only in the government that backs the currency but also trust that the banking system itself serves those who use it institutions like c f i try to win that trust because there is legitimate resistance to the recent and i say data mining scandal highlights the fact that information we think is private might be shared with the government at any time as we march toward society for better or for worse everything will not only be

recorded but potentially tracked. and that's what's in the fine print in mobile payments. there's been talk of a new healer option in the senate lately don't worry we're not talking about geopolitics the senate majority leader harry reid is so frustrated with senate republicans to locking presidential nominations that he has threatening to use the nucular option that would change the rules for the confirmation process there are over one hundred nominees waiting to be confirmed in the senate using the sixty vote filibuster senate republicans are stalling several top government positions

the bipartisan policy center it just released their analysis of the nominations process for financial regulators along with launching and nominations tracker justin shard in the senior policy analyst at the center is here to discuss. thanks for joining us q can you tell us about the analysis that the center has done with the nominations process for financial regulators and what are some of the major conclusions so we wanted to inject some new data into a debate about what the proper regulatory structure is for these agencies and obviously when dodd frank passed everybody thought there needed to be reform but what was the best way to do it so we want to do we wanted to find out how the structure of the agency affected the nominations process how long it took we broke into two different variables we looked at how long it takes for the president to make a nomination and send to the senate and hold takes the senate to decide on or resolve that in some way and we also want to make it an interactive tool that would allow

people to check it daily so that every if you. go to bipartisan policy dot org slash nominations there's a tracker that any nomination it's up right now it will every day it will update on exactly how long it's been waiting either for the president to work or the or the senate to act so we have four major conclusions they have to do with with the difference between single director heads of agencies versus members of the boards it has to do with the chairman of commissions versus regular commission members. obama president obama's nominations versus president bush's and also the senate versus the president and i spent a little bit of time going through the nominations there and we took some of your data and we compiled a graph of the data and you know what we saw is the difference what our graph shows is the difference of time for the president to nominate a financial regulator and then for the senate to resolve and we can see by the graph that it takes significantly longer for the president to nominate someone and all category and then for the senate to resolve it so you do you have any insight

into what type of factors we need and there's been a lot of speculation as to what the factors are we sort of thought we would put this data out and let it speak for the itself and we have some task forces there working on potential conclusions from it but that's the cliffhanger that will come in the coming months but you know you've hit on one of the main conclusions that we found is first that it does take the president almost twice as long as it does in the senate to act takes almost twice as long for the president to make a nomination one of the biggest things that we were surprised by was you mention the single agency heads. like the consumer financial protection bureau federal housing finance agency where there's one person running the whole organization as opposed to a five member commission it took almost two years for the nominations process for those people to take a fact whereas the average nominee of one hundred sixty four that we looked at the bottom one year or so was almost twice as long what are some of the biggest difficulty in getting a single director through the process and it takes twice as long as you have ten people you probably get ten different answers but i think one of the things that

was most interesting. is that when we're talking about a. two year process for the single heads of agencies you think maybe it's because they're the more important person right they have more power so they're going to take longer to vet them and put them through the process but we also found that when we're talking about commissions it takes much less time for the president to figure out who he wants the chairman to be it actually takes three times longer to figure out who he wants the other members of the commission to be seventy five days as opposed to two hundred forty days so it's not just that there's something else in the water that's causing that kind of disparity right and that after the white house does their vetting process than the senate does their own vetting process what types of things are being looking for and what would. somebody off the table to make them ineligible well i can't speculate on specific stuff but i will say you've hit on something right there which is that they're there often they're often working and can't in tandem with each other sometimes for instance if there are two if there's one seat up at the i.c.c. for instance the president will wait until there are two seats up nominate the

republican and the democrat at the same time so there it can be affected by things like that and obviously if the president doesn't think that a nominee is going to be confirmed maybe he will hold off and told him and somebody so it's hard hard to precisely gauge whose fault it is but there's such a difference between what the house and the. senate the president do it was worth you know and they have we seen any information about where more fingers are pointed and when you have a single agent our senior director at the agency averse to commission some speculate that it's easy to say that everyone on the commission can point fingers at each other so there's less accountability have you seen that as being how true in the work you've done i have heard the arguments on both sides about that about accountability and such but we did not deal with out in the paper so ok the other thing that's interesting was i think you also mentioned the difference between president obama versus president bush's nominees and we found a pretty big difference there as well and people have speculated about that too it has taken president obama about thirty almost thirty percent longer to decide on nominations than it did for president bush it's taken the senate more than sixty

percent longer to actually act on those nominations if you bring president clinton and into it he was actually his nominations took even longer than both of them but we only had a limited data set that we were working with there so it's hard to be definitive about it have you seen any speculation as to why this is i've heard quite a bit of speculation that you know both sides are pointing fingers at each other as to whose fault it is but so no correlation in terms of where you sit i think ok and . you know we have other agencies that are single director agency is like the opposite of the control of the currency and doesn't seem like anybody is raising any concerns about them being a single traktor agency and what plays into. yes in the politics i can't speculate on it but what are you hearing on that right and i think some people have argued that if we're going to have either single directory structure if that's better or if the commission structure is better maybe we should make it the same for all agencies and i think that's something that one of our our regulatory

architecture taskforce is working on they may or may not make a recommendation on that probably about september that they're looking toward and i'm going to have to stop here we're going to be right back after the commercial break more with just and. what we'll talk more with justice garden on the nominations process for financial regulators after the break prime interest producer bob english and i will also get into the day we still does how much money does the government spend on spying on stuff.

that's a. little . misleading. that really.

it was.

and we are back this is prime interest with just an sharda and as we were discussing the bipartisan policy center just released their nominations process for financial regulators their analysis behind it and their new nomination tracker as we were discussing at the confirmation for a treasury secretary. senator orrin hatch question jack lew on the one million dollars in compensation that he was given from citi group which received a federal bailout in two thousand and eight. explain why you. would take dollars out of a company that was functionally insolvent. taxpayers support center in two thousand and eight i was an employee of the private sector stated in a manner consistent with other people who did the kind of work that i did in the industry. now how often do we see the president nominate somebody about comes

from the private sector and have you built any information on if this stalls the process or not we haven't and that's an interesting angle that probably someone should look into as to whether that's the fact that we did not look into that in this paper so ok well the consumer financial protection bureau wish currently has no head was established with the passage of dodd frank and republicans have threatened to filibuster the dollar and the nomination of pressure cordray until there are structural changes made to the agency having a bipartisan board it's one of those do you think that we will ever see the structural changes that the senate is calling for does the senate republicans really have a type of power over the nominations process i think it depends on whatever kind of deal they can strike but we again we don't speculate on what the right one is one of our task forces may recommend but it's interesting to point out that right now i checked before i came over here secretary richard cordray has been nominated for

six hundred ninety three days and the senate action so as of next tuesday he will break the record at least in our record and in our survey he will he's been the longest the way the senate action is and what is the longest bacon thing you've ever seen so the longest the president to decide was two thousand and twenty four days you had two of the most interesting nominations actually come from the federal housing finance board maybe that's one of the reasons it doesn't exist in the more but friends of friends like was was nominated to pursue a seat that was vacant in ninety three and he wasn't nominated in mid ninety seven for that. then he waited another five hundred fifty six days for the senate to reject his nomination another three hundred twenty seven days for for him to be renominated by president bush and then twenty two days to be confirmed so it took him eight and a half years for that seat to be vacant and how many years back there's no doubt a tale we took everybody who was either in office at one of these independent financial agencies or had been nominated to one as of january first two thousand so we're dealing here not with political appointments but we're dealing with the i c c

c c f t c federal reserve board and the independent agencies that we talked about and who are we waiting for now for the president to nominate so at the beginning of this year there were eight positions that were awaiting a nomination for the president he's made nominations to five of them so he had mary jo white at the i c c he just recently nominated mr pugh war if i'm pronouncing that correctly in mystifying to the f.c.c. mel watt to the f.h. f.a.a. and mr metzger to the credit union association. and then he we're still waiting on three from them two of them are kind if you two of them are gary gensler and elizabeth duke at the federal reserve board expired last year but they're still serving in office the only one that's really clear is the federal reserve independent the vice chairman for supervision that was created by dodd frank it's been a thousand and fifty five days and there's still been no nominee for that and here we are waiting for the fall of the senate to confirm so the four that i mentioned plus they actually nominated mary jo white for two different terms one that

finishes next year and then another one for an additional five or six years after that so that one still waiting and richard cordray is the other sort of way that they're the senate is faced with six of them right now and only one of them has been for a long period of time and they think that now why mary jo white. and with that thing i think all directories of things right and with with no value judgments in mind they do fit the data quite well because you have mr watt as head of the federal housing finance agency one of those single director agencies it took. all of the time since mr james lockhart left the f f h. he was brought over from the office of federal housing enterprise oversight he left in two thousand and nine it's been until now with a with a one month period in between where there has been no nominee so it's about twelve hundred days and he's been in front of congress now for about thirty four days so it took a while but there is a nominee now. and i'm sorry with mary jo white also she's she's a chairperson it took about fifty days to nominate her and another fifty fifty to sixty days to confirm or so they both that with our data quite well what was the

shortest process you got there the fastest so gary gensler and mary shapiro both were nominated immediately the day that president obama took office and they were both i believe they were both on the confirm the same week or even a couple days later. but this is just a shard in from the bipartisan policy center and you so much for joining thanks very much appreciate it. it's time for the day we do it with bob certainly is do feel safe i don't know. that it's a good question i hope we can explore that today there's a lot going on yes well i mean the first thing i want to explore is how much money

is the government spending on by well i just throw some figures out here a billion two billion i mean we really don't know because it has to do with the way appropriations are made right i mean a lot of write all the cards right information so we actually have no idea i found an article from the atlantic wire and they estimate based on total program defense agencies and they divide it evenly it could be anywhere between tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a month so of course we have the pentagon budget they have these things called supplemental appropriation. which were but i mean just skyrocketed throughout the bush years and even continued into the obama years where there's really no oversight into the budgetary process and we saw how they got these fighter planes anything they want basically if they don't get through the normal budgetary process they just slip it in through you have plenty of tools just like bernie can mean. anything about that well one of the big problems are big projects the n.s.a. has spent two billion dollars on is the utah data center it sounds like

a very bland name but it's actually a huge center of us tucked inside the mountain valley a buffed out in utah there's a meditating mining machine is five times the size of the u.s. capitol building and with billions of dollars and cost and what is it monitoring what does that have to do with the whole scam that we're looking at that we kind of exploded over the last week it was part of the n.s.a. facility and it's not just mining phone calls and e-mails is also mining financial information such as credit card transactions stock transactions and i think it's kind of a good thing that this story is coming to light in the kind of reminds people that almost everything we do is monitored on some basis everybody carries around these voluntary monitoring devices called phones that information can be used and stored and what not and we don't know if it's being shipped to the or anybody else for that matter but it can potentially be used to get to it sometime hopefully know it

and if you're worried about that. you know we have another story from the new york times that reports that the government also spends a lot of money on government contractors and intelligence one of those being booz allen hamilton that's the firm that the n.s.a. whistleblower edward snowden was working for more that company earned one point three billion dollars last year for government contracting intelligence work and dues alan has profited immensely from the military industrial complex in the post nine eleven world. last year the company reported a five point seven billion dollars in revenue ninety seven percent of that was from the government putting them on the forbes list of five hundred largest public companies and i don't know where it stops this company is just expanding everywhere and good work if you can get it right but it just kind of exemplifies the cozy nature between the private and public sector and i think it's a little bit. disingenuous to say that you know this is privatization in the form these guys are getting

a lot of times no bid contracts i phone one study by the g.a.o. in which they were implicated two million dollars spiled project spiraled into a seventy million dollars project and the government was so mired in it they couldn't really extricate themselves so there's a lot of wasteful spending and a lot of these private contractors have little to no oversight well that's different from the independent foreclosure review which means also lucked out because once they wasted two billion dollars they did pull out a lot of opinions on dollars for those who need it and then the shots were sent to the wrong place and cetera et cetera but i think one of the interesting structures about booz allen is how it's capitalized and it's split off i think one of the subsidiaries became owned by the carlyle group it was an i.p.o. and that was in two thousand and eight and now carlyle group is actually in the majority owner in this in this company that has all these close ties to the government and then getting back to the independent foreclosure review it's an interesting parallel but you know we talk about tory financial group another cozy

institution the shadow regulator what can you say i think it was interesting your previous guest our guest for today brought up gary gensler mary shapiro as people who just sailed through the process the nominee to be more scrutinized so is there any way out of all this government snooping well if you don't want to completely capitulate to having the government watching everything you do we found a few mobile apps with cryptography apps that are available to you one of them is secret it's available for three dollars per minute. you can get a free three month trial you can register on their website looks pretty interesting and of the developers are from south africa they claim they can get around the n.s.a. and you guys have a chance to check it out leave us some comments on facebook and let us know how it goes so thanks for watching and. as we're talking about facebook make sure you follow us on facebook at facebook dot com slash prime interest and of course you

can follow bob on twitter at english p.r.i. and you can follow me at perry and our t.v. bobs thanks for joining i do. and it has been a day of overreach our prime interest first we heard that lisa jackson reeled and her long arm as an e.p.a. law enforcement officer to extend an olive branch from apple to uncle sam hope the payola pays off for embattled c.e.o. it tim cook if he can finally get to work on the next i phone out in the nikkei reached for the stars as they crawled back a week's worth of losses on i've been on a winding and there the senate was unable to excuse the penetrating analysis of justin sharpton who revealed their stall tactics on presidential appointments and

swiping your phones might seem as innocuous as waving a card but watch out for the n.s.a. peeping tom if you don't like government fishing expeditions load up on some benjamin's while they're still hot and legal thanks for watching everyone at prime interest i'm sorry i'm boring have a great night. sigrid laboratory jim mccurry was able to build a news most sophisticated robot which all unfortunately doesn't give a darn about anything tim's mission to teach creation why it should care about humans and worry that this is why you should care watch only on the r g dog. nobody chooses to be homeless no one chooses to me and my sorrow.

is that was for the show to. get in the six pm get out six feet six am. around man. things for the. man not to have a middle class group on the. course. it's tough to think about all of them comes. in to know that many of them may not have only been the last to choose won't just never believe me but they're also due to for closure so never should and.

i would rather ask questions for people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r.t. question more. supporters

of edward snowden the man who exposed the true extent of america's foster violence network played for washington not to prosecute as he disappears from his hotel in hong kong the ultimate whistleblower wiki leaks julian the sound exclusively tells r.t. that he fears snowden we persecuted for years. says however essential government surveillance mushroom main legal junior q. and a session here at the r.t. news center and the turkey riot police again storm. seems square as a crew from marty's arabic channel is caught up in the heavy crackdown.