Slowly but surely - the United States of America is being eaten alive by foreign transnational corporations. Today - news broke that telecom giant Sprint is being bought by the foreign Japanese corporation Softbank for more than $20 billion. According to the deal - which is the largest American acquisition by a Japanese company in history - 70% of Sprint will now be owned by overseas investors. The deal will likely be approved next year - making Softbank Sprint the third largest mobile phone company in the world. Not only that - this deal will suck billions in future revenue and profits out of the American economy - and into the Japanese economy. That's already the case with the nation's fourth largest mobile phone company - T-Mobile - which is owned by the German company Deutsche Telekom AG. In fact - there are so few American telecom companies and manufacturers - that our nation will likely have to rely on foreign telecoms like China's Wa-Wei to build the next generation of telecom infrastructure in the United States. That's how bad things have gotten for American industries. Every single second in America, over $4000 worth of our own industry is sold off to foreign investors.

In tonight's special edition of "Conversations with Great Minds" Thom talks with former George W. Bush speechwriter and CNN Contributor David Frum, author of the new book "Patriots." Thom also speaks with veteran journalist Kurt Eichenwald, author of the new book "500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars."

Guest host Sam Sacks fills in for Thom Hartmann and discusses the Wal-Mart worker strike, the result of private corporations running our nation's prisons and how the state of Montana really cares about our democracy. In tonight's "Daily Take" Thom looks at how it came to be that billionaires who kill jobs have become known as job creators.

Ask any economist - and they will tell you that the housing crisis is still very real - and it's still one of the major headwinds for our economic recovery. Yet - in the last Presidential debate - there was virtually no attention paid to this crisis and the millions of Americans who are on the verge of losing their homes. Why is that? Well - it's because both candidates know that the one best solution to the mortgage crisis is to make the banksters take a hit. And - as anyone who's familiar with post-Citizens United politics knows - if you're in favor of a policy that's gonna hit Wall Street - and you want to be elected to political office - then you need to keep your mouth shut about it. And that's exactly what both men did. But in Ireland - they're not afraid of the banksters. This year - the Irish government is expected to pass a law will force the banks to write down principal on their home loans, which will substantially lower monthly mortgage payments for struggling homeowners. Of all the nations hit by the global housing crisis - not a single one has taken bold steps to help homeowners at the expense of the banksters. But Ireland is trying to change that now. Here's what they're doing. They're changing their bankruptcy laws to make it easier for struggling homeowners to walk away from an underwater home mortgage. And when a homeowner declares bankruptcy this way, the bank gets nothing.