tact was the blowers in fact for the last five years obama's website changed our gov has maintained a pledge to protect them by stressing the importance of encouraging people within government agencies to expose wrongdoing more specifically it reads. will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste fraud and abuse of authority and government obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and have whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process for access to courts and due process so that the bradley manning sat in a solitary cell for years before seeing his day in court or edward snowden who is already being deemed bit guilty in a court of public opinion and can't even come back to the us because he knows his face concealed well don't try to look for this pledge now because of last week and it no longer exists as obama's whistleblower protection declaration as well as all those other promises are now completely scrubbed from the internet according to

sunlight foundation which first published the news what will the front splash page for change dot gov as a link to the main white house website for years you can still continue on to see the materials and agenda laid out by the administration this was particularly helpful for those looking to compare obama's performance in office against his initial vision for reform yes perhaps obama's embarrassed about how many glaring contradictions exist between his initial platform and shameful performance as president maybe it was too hypocritical to claim to care about whistleblowers while being the all time worst president for whistleblower protection i guess it's easier to rewrite history than it is to stay true to your word and if this pisses you off to then join me and let's pray to set. a little more of ever seen anything like.

as the u.s. economy continues to tread the waters of the great recession some industries are doing better than others and if war is your profession then business is booming take for instance northrop grumman one of america's largest defense companies the corporation was just awarded a government contract worth up to two hundred ninety four million dollars for navy weaponry as it seems that military spending isn't slowing down the america's wars are allegedly drawing down and when the military spending taxpayer money well you can rest assured it's being wasted case in point northrop's two hundred and twenty three million dollar global hawk drone aircraft vertical problems yet despite the lack of demand for the drone production of it continues comes as no surprise considering the enormous lobbying power northrop has and congress get this the company is reportedly given one hundred forty one thousand dollars in donations to keep lawmakers voting on the global hawk program according to policy mike

apparently the price tag for buying off the right congressmen to keep these useless military toys in production but once upon a time blowing the whistle on this type of irresponsible spending meant an end to wasteful programs like the global hawk i was at least the case for a next guest james whole stricter former auditor northrop grumman who founded the company was inflating its the tiriel cost to increase government payouts after he blew the whistle richter was named a whistleblower of the year in two thousand and seven by the organization taxpayers against fraud however this is after a fifteen year battle against a defense giant so it's not about his case the current climate for whistleblowers i'm joined now by james hope mr hi ira how are you doing thank you for having me on the street so you're coming you're touring around the country to about this book and just just about your story first before we get into what happened what do you think about obama's remove. his pledge to protect whistleblowers from the website while i haven't looked into that myself every day or so i can't really answer. one

way or another on it and so this is news to me which you were just telling me and so i apologize if i can't have a definitive position on that ok let's talk about your story how did you find out that northrop grumman was falsifying and formation and how much money were they actually stealing from the government while it began back in one thousand nine hundred seven when i was taking a look at how materials were moving through their inventory system and i seemed that it looked like they were charging three and four times for the same part parts were being returned to the vendor fix and then charge as a new part on them back in and i brought this all to their internal security as well as to my supervisors and then h.r. they tried to get me to help them to to cover up what they were doing and the things that i was bringing to their attention and the next thing i know i had a federal agent on my doorstep telling me that if i didn't cooperate with them and talk to him he was going to put me in jail and come to see him in handcuffs and so that began a year and a half journey that i was cooperated undercover with the federal agents and in

their investigation of northrop grumman let's let's back up just a tiny bit as you just said some really expose the things first of all how much money are we talking about in terms of stealing from the government that well we had alleged that it was about a one point two billion dollar loss is what they were looking for and at the end of the day after seventeen and a half years they recovered one hundred thirty four million dollars from northrop they paid out of court was not. admitted to any wrongdoing and when you went years the period that arthur graham they actually said we want you to help you cover up these transactions well they wanted me to help them to hide it as they put it. from the customer and ultimately a customer was the government and so what happened next is that a federal agent was at your door yes. and he told me that he wanted to talk to me and i said i can't verify your credentials you could be a foreign agent or you could be just someone from northrop trying to set me up and so they'll verify your credentials and then i'll talk to you and he says that's not what's going to happen they're going to scare the hell. do you do you won't talk to

me i'll come to see you with handcuffs and i'll put you're in jail so this is before you reach out to the government yourself you have to say yes. so it took fifteen years i mean you know what happened in the meantime why did it take so long to finally settle and get this case closed well after three years to department of justice declined to intervene in the case and so we took on the case ourself and ultimately seven different law firms represented me under the false claims act and we continued to carry for an additional ten years gathering information and documentation and if you remember every this was all before the year of computers and so everything had to be done by hand and three million paper documents and seven million computer entries that we did ultimately get so by two thousand and one the department of justice came back into the case and really intervened and that's something that never happened before in the history of the united states that ten years after declamation they came back into the case and ultimately four years later it was settled. back up to that agent who came to your door i mean did

you ever follow up with who this person was why he was threatening you was that ever a person at all well in the sense that both threatening me he wanted to talk to me he just basically put it on the line for me that if i were involved in that coverup i could be ultimately held responsible facing a felony myself if i didn't speak with him as in here to assist putting me on notice is that the course he would take and so of course i cooperated with and for the next year and a half i was undercover taping documents to my body being asked to wear wires and meetings wow let's talk about today i mean as you said this was in the late eighty's i find they didn't settle until two thousand and seven by martin thousand and five of two thousand and five what about the climate now do you think that we're seeing the less people speak out less whistleblowers really having the gall and gumption to speak out now that we're seeing a kind of this crackdown on whistleblowers well more than ever and it's ration more than ever every i'm sorry there. seem to be afraid i spoke with several today at

the summit that you had mentioned earlier and it seems to be the running commentary of many of the whistleblowers they don't want to come forward don't want to talk and and really that's. that's by intention that's to suppress that that that avenue of free speech as it were to be able to feel that you're safe and that you have someone who has your back. your case was celebrated of course you were exposing government you know something that the government was interested in that event coverage was feeling money of course they're going to celebrate it but why didn't there is an enormous discrepancy between between the way that you were treated and the way that people who are exposing government criminality and war crimes are treated while i was working within the law with them underneath the false claims act and the statutory protections afforded to whistleblowers whereas there are others who have decided to maybe take their information to the poll of public opinion and so they're operating outside the law and so those with those

protections that are put in place to protect what some consider a protective act they don't have those and so then they're at the mercy of those people who can enforce those laws and sometimes there is no mercy right. you know is there any sort of oversight that exists right now the federal level to prevent this kind of fraudulent behavior with taxpayer money being invested in these defense corporations do you think that this type of activity still going on well absolutely absolutely it's becomes what's known as the cost of doing business if you can keep the money and pay ten cents back on the dollar you'll do it every day all day i mean it's just a cost benefit if you take a dollar you give back ten cents and you keep ninety cents and of course they do that and because there is no accountability and no one is held accountable they still keep their jobs they don't lose their jobs and right now in fact there are more whistleblowers right now in jail than there are of the criminals who perpetrated the crimes they blew the whistle about and you. you offer legal

constant consultations to whistleblowers to people who want to come out what advice would you give to people in the audience who might be watching and saying you know i i want to speak out but i'm scared well let me cry i have a degree in law but i don't have a bar license and so i give advice through an organization of taxpayers against fraud and that's at taft or going to a group of attorneys who have come together to help whistle blowers to bring new suits that when they become aware that the government has done big bender fraud and from financial means well then they can join and participate in that litigation to recover those stolen taxpayer dollars and in fact every since one thousand nine hundred six the false claims act has returned forty billion that's with a b forty billion dollars to the physical force and corporations don't like that well i'm glad that there are people like you in the organization that you represent really helping people and there is mobilized efforts of people to help you if you're out there and you want to blow the whistle on something thank you so much

for coming on telling your side of the story james hall reached or former north of common with shank you so much for having me on to say thank you. guys despite some optimistic reports indicating that america's financial situation is getting better i can assure you it's not a new study by the associated press shows that eighty percent of adults in the us struggle with joblessness and are either in or near poverty guys that's four out of five adults and one of the areas being hit the hardest is the housing market even americans who are barely keeping their heads above water could still end up fighting the big banks just to keep their homes take for example the case of katie barnett after going on vacation for two weeks katie return to find their home had been ransacked and most of her belongings stolen and much turned ismay resident

found out that it wasn't burglars or random vandals it was a bank see first national bank plan to repossess a foreclosed home across the street from barnett and hired a contractor to do the dirty work but instead of actually bothering to check the house numbers on the mailbox the hired thugs broke into barnett's home took all of her things and changed all of the locks as a result barnett lost eight hundred thousand dollars worth of personal property and after all was said and done the banks excuse for repossessing her home instead of the actual foreclosed home was the g.p.s. pointed them in the wrong direction gee wonder if the g.p.s. had pointed them up a bridge they would have jumped to but it's being wrongly foreclosed on losing all of your personal belongings isn't traumatizing enough first national bank doesn't seem all too eager to fix its glaring mistake see barnett created a list of stolen valuables that she wanted the bank to replace seems like

a fair request write well check out what the bank said in response. and see katie fairly and equitably for her inconvenience and loss but has blocked it paying the eighteen thousand dollars she's asking for and demanded that i had receipts for all of my stuff that they threw away and i said well you know first of all i don't have receipts for all my stuff. if i wasn't expecting a bank to come and accidentally repossessed my house and throw it all away while you never know where to begin first they break into the wrong home then they balk at the idea of making up their mistake well this is kind of a horrifying errors in a recurring problem across the country right away it is by almost every major bank according to court records over fifty lawsuits have been filed from homeowners who have suffered similar trauma of a wrongful home foreclosure some of these cases involve stolen family heirlooms or even kidnapped pets despite the fact that foreclosures can only legally occur in

a vacant home and most cases even the most glaring signs of the houses occupied are no word like the house being fully furnished having all of its the lights on or having a manicured lawn no but perhaps the most bizarre case of all is that of michigan homeowner nancy cox she came home from work one day surprised to find her personal possessions out in her front yard smashed to bits with a sledgehammer her garage had also been vandalized with a giant drawing of a clown and a timeline that read another job well done i'm sorry about these guys working for a bank or game because the line between the two is too blurred to see. really what's the difference when banks are actually hiring vandals to terrorize neighborhoods and kick homeowners to the curb literally keep in mind we're talking about people who have paid their bills on time and with no oversight no accountability these hired thugs are smashing stealing and laughing

all the way to the bank. stick around coming up we'll be speaking to alexis baiting the mayor and the organic consumers association about all things one santo. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then. something else you hear see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought. i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. wealthy british style. time to.

market why not come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look global financial headlines tune in to conjure reports on our . business on the problem. because no one. commits. what's not enough wealth is a law in the local needs you might want to lend your most and will be. done for. i was fired i must fight so. i'll fight for. the right.

of the debate over genetic engineering rages on us government is once again pushing forward the interests of corporate giants. at the expense of consumer safety but this time the marriage between the two is being taken to another level see abject giants are no longer just pouring tens of thousands of dollars to line the pockets of politicians taking a cue from the n.s.a. it seems that monsanto is constructing a worldwide spying network to monitor dissent yes an article published in one of germany's largest newspapers containing a disturbing revelation the u.s. government in conjunction with monsanto tracking campaigners and independent scientists from around the world are new article several websites that publish studies and research have been the target of several cyber attacks the article

ledgers that an evaluation of ip addresses show santo not only regularly tracks the pages of these sites but several government agencies do as well including the u.s. army intelligence center so here to discuss this latest development and monsanto's war on truth i'm joined now by alexis baden mayer from the director of the organic consumers' association haiti i used to have you on that. i guess i'm not surprised at all that monsanto is tracking or looking at these websites that's in their interest but the army intelligence center i am very surprised why do you think the u.s. government is doing this well it's talk to me as well but months into collaborates with the u.s. government and every other aspect of policy and decision making we know through wiki leaks that the embassies have regularly work to santo to push genetic engineering on countries whose public has already stated that they don't want these foods so you know why not collaborate with the military to spy on scientists talk

a little bit more about the extensive kind of collusion going on between monsanto and the u.s. government when interesting and topical example is. he worked at crop life america the lobbying arm for my sat on the other big biotech and chemical and feed companies now he works for the obama administration after of course being a number one. obama fundraiser so that he got appointed into the office of the u.s. trade representative and now he's in charge of negotiating trade deals with foreign countries that don't want monsanto's g.m.o. but he's pressing this line of the u.s. government that they have to take them on believe michael taylor food safety czar former v.p. of monsanto you know the article also mentions that the chief agricultural negotiator for the t.p. is a former monsanto lobbyist i mean what does this reveal first of all about the t.v. i mean should we be worried about our safety here in this already yeah we should be

worried about every aspect of consumer safety when companies use governments to negotiate trade deals and the companies will get the governments to negotiate so much but the scary part of the trade to us is that once these trade deals are finalized they include a provision known as investor state dispute resolution this allows companies to sue countries any time they feel like a regulation that protect public safety is hurting their bottom line and just to make clear what of course was a libertarian i mean we're talking about international trade courts overseen by corporate heads that could actually sue a country if they do choose to label or mandate labeling what is terrifying what is really terrifying it is a marvel and the countries that are part of the t p p peru they just had a ten year moratorium japan they label g.m.o. those and when there's a contamination event in the united states as we've recently had an oregon over

a week they block imports from the u.s. so these are our targets monsanto and the government are both working to to stop the so called barriers to trade but you know it alexis it's ok because one santa along with dupont just launched this new website called geo answers dot com where they answer all of these. a lot of splaying to do and they answer a lot of grievances they talk about how healthy g m o's are providing transparency of course of the issue why do you think now i mean you know this website are they really feeling the mounting pressure here for what is going to happen eventually in the united states will probably pass the labeling law and washington this year in november it'll be a ballot initiative and we expected to pass that's the beginning of the end of this type of secrecy where consumers don't know what they're eating you know month santo hates democracy because democracy works against them the new york times just did a poll showing that ninety three percent of americans want to know what they're

eating and whether it contains genetically modified organism also in that poll it showed that more than half of us would not be modified food if we did if we know so clearly democracy doesn't work for months they have to use other means and they have to use tens of billions of dollars of propaganda campaigns this website the prop thirty seven and the prop thirty seven campaign i mean speaking of labeling laws i know connecticut just passed that labeling law with all these strange were needed to be passed also by three joining states and it needed twenty million people in the states restricted population i mean what's going on with that i mean well you know just like under the trade deals a company can sue a government that's what states are worried about and they're worried that monsanto is going to sue them and a little state like connecticut you know they have a good democratic process they can give the people what they want but they're not sure that they can defend it in court so they put all of these contingent fee on it

to protect themselves if i would just a sad state of affairs in the state cannot pass legislation that its constituents want because of fear of a lawsuit from this giant corporation or is that i want to actually read. some of what's on that web site g.m.o. answers dot com and your response one of them is one hundreds of studies hundreds of studies have and continue to demonstrate that most do not present any health risk out there. well the american medical association last summer weighed in on this topic and they made a demand for the u.s. government they said please engage in pre-market safety testing these foods before you start feeding them to the american public the u.s. government has never required pre-market safety testing of g.m. us we've been eating this all these things under this big experiment that has no controls and is not producing a scientific study the scientific studies are completely missing so sure monsanto you know if they did their own studies and they've gotten approval for various.

crops and for food and to get it into the food supply but the studies are not meaningful and the f.d.a. does voluntary consultation they don't even really check the math on the scientific study and really i mean if nothing is legal then really how do we know how do we really study a human population that's been since one thousand nine hundred two but look at the u.s. population and all of the health problems that we have infertility obesity chronic problems that. you know most people are suffering from some type of diet related disease you know it's just that correlate with the fifteen or more years that we've been eating a modified food it does and once we get better science all of these things will become clear but there's enough science for me i mean you see the newspaper and you see these pictures of rats at the gigantic tumors and you read the study that says oh we've noticed kidney and liver damage that's enough for me. as your imagine human populations for decades and really no point of reference of where

these diseases are are coming from a let's talk about that recent scary development of the we never approved for commercial use found growing mysteriously in oregon how did that happen is that something we should be concerned with that's the very reason that the world turned against g.m.o. when they were first proposed it's because once you let this genie out of the bottle. be put back you have open pollinated crabs and even a test plot can contaminate and destroy an entire variety of corner or wheat or whatever it is the rice producers in this country really suffered because there was a pharmaceutical variety of rice that was being grown by a bear and it contaminated a top variety of u.s. rice that was non g.m.o. and was being grown for export that variety actually had to be recalled by the u.s. government. rice producers can't even grow this type of rice anymore because it

became contaminated and it with a pharmaceutical crop that wasn't even approved it was just in the top so i mean these things are terribly dangerous but if the terminator seed you know they're testing out an open field and not cross moments i mean what's going to happen then yeah it's the end of biodiversity that's why scientists for years have been telling us that these things are dangerous removable a lot more talk about them going to what's going to be a logics have they done more research with that with about thirty seconds well they're constantly obvious gating the situation it's the past aside you know about it's killing the beats and europe has figured out they banned the three major types of cotton i pads decide the united states is still saying oh what could it possibly be that maybe we should hire be allergic to figure it out for a bio be a logics and then never talk about calling you up this order. to do so i jewelers instead of ever coming on breaking down some of those conceptions appreciated your ideas. are you guys that'll do it for us here in d.c. tonight thanks for watching have

a great night we'll see you to break the set tomorrow. morning we could we go in for the metro center stage show some of. the. unions that you think are great. truths to stories to to. access . if the main competitor girl on the market is mother nature.

may customers struggle with goods. fight for each drop from an old dirty supply. let people think i are prices pure or want to. live on our teeth. they use it up there and wash their hands. and flush their toilets when the same water. nestle's is selling and spraying water. limbo. her mother lives. goodspeed. her.

i. look. like. a good. mother just some. kind of a little. to come right from the scene. first repeated live and i think picture. on a reporter's twitter. and instagram. to be on the list on law.

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the us was bradley manning will soon hear his sentence he could face life in prison if found guilty of aiding the enemy. all talk as israeli palestinian negotiations resume after years of failed peace efforts we take a look at the roots of the deadlock. and slowdown in the world's workshop as china posts modest world figures we figure out whether print those predicting a major financial debt are justified. thanks for tuning in this hour i'm lucy cough and alvin of course you're watching our team .