As the Senate holds its first-ever public hearing on drones and targeted killings, we turn the second part of our interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield." Scahill charts the expanding covert wars operated by the CIA and JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, in countries from Somalia to Pakistan. "I called it 'Dirty Wars' because, particularly in this administration, in the Obama administration, I think a lot of people are being led to believe that there is such a thing as a clean war," Scahill says. He goes on to discuss secret operations in Africa, the targeting of U.S. citizens in Yemen and the key role WikiLeaks played in researching the book. He also reveals imprisoned whistleblower Bradley Manning once tipped him off to a story about the private security company Blackwater. Scahill is the national security correspondent for The Nation magazine and longtime Democracy Now! correspondent. For the past several years, Scahill has been working on the "Dirty Wars" film and book project, which was published on Tuesday. The film, directed by Rick Rowley, will be released in theaters in June.

Full transcript of the discussion available here.

[NSFW, Language]

This is your moment of clarity #205: After reading a book called "Four Horsmen: The Survival Manual," I asked myself, "Does Western Civilization have all the signs of a collapsing empire?" Watch the video. Then check out the book and the film. http://buy.fourhorsemenfilm.com/.

Keep fighting,

Lee

The folks at Fox News say that a new book written by a fire fighter in a Canadian town known as the "Polar Bear Capital of the World" is proof that "the polar bears are doing just fine." However, years of extensive research by scientists shows that many areas populated by polar bears are in decline, and that these beautiful creatures are at risk of extinction due to climate-driven loss of Arctic sea ice.

Media Matters reports:

On the February 5 edition of Fox News' America Live, Trace Gallagher reported on a new book by firefighter Zac Unger that chronicles his experiences living in Churchill, Manitoba, a small town on the Hudson Bay that is known as the "Polar Bear Capital of the World." Unger planned to write a book about how climate change is impacting polar bear populations in the Arctic, but instead he concluded that "polar bears were not in as bad a shape as the conventional wisdom had led me to believe." Gallagher seized on this to suggest that despite being cast as a symbol of the impact of climate change, "the polar bears are doing just fine" and their populations are "exploding":

In fact, the polar bears located in the region that Unger lived in are one of 8 subpopulations in decline, according to a comprehensive review conducted in 2009. The following graphic illustrates the 19 distinct subpopulations of polar bears, only one of which is thought to be increasing:

While polar bear populations have increased since the 1970s thanks to conservation efforts, climate change could threaten "the survival of polar bears as a species," according to a 2004 assessment. And the U.S. Geological Survey projected in 2007 that changes in Arctic ice conditions could result in "loss of approximately 2/3 of the world's current polar bear population by the mid 21st century."

And while Gallagher suggested that the prevalence of polar bears in the town of Churchill indicates that the population is "exploding," it may actually be a result of climate change. Polar bears in the region return to shore each year to await the freezing of the Hudson Bay in early autumn. But experts say that Arctic warming has already shortened amount of time that the bears can hunt for food in the bay, increasing the risk that bears will wander into town in search of food.

Continue reading »

In this video, a flashback to 2011, Occupy the Boardroom:

"We brought 99 red balloons down to the headquarters for Goldman Sachs where we hoisted up messages from the 99%. Our balloons totally got their attention — I could see people in offices and board rooms waving and snapping photos with their iphones. So strange. We didn’t quite reach the penthouse, but we did manage to carry them up to the 20th floor. Quite a feat!"

"We also had a couple of signs: “Goldman Sachs -you’ve got mail!” “Can you hear me now?”; “Goldman Sachs - we need to talk.”'

Now the latest from Occupy the Boardroom:

"We are honored and humbled to announce that, because of the power of the stories that everyone has submitted since we created this space, the non-profit publishing house N+1 has agreed to publish a book made up of your letters to the 1 percent!

This isn’t their book and it isn’t our book. It’s your book, drawn from the thousands of stories submitted to Occupy the Board Room since we launched in October of 2011. These are stories from Democrats and Republicans, property-owners and struggling families, business people and retirees, immigrants and Mayflower descendants, religious leaders and fervent capitalists, and a lot of bank employees past and present.

You’ve been polite, funny, outraged, moving, instructive, and inspiring.

And that’s why we are putting your words in print – so that you can inspire the creation of an America that works for all of us."

I had the great privilege of being able to help in a small way on this project, and it was amazing to see so many poignant letters pour in from all across the country. There used to be a great stigma attached to having financial problems, and especially for families who were going through having their home foreclosed on -- they suffered in silence, and felt ashamed. Occupy the Boardroom ended that silent suffering as people began to realize that they weren't alone.

This book, "The Trouble is the Banks: Letters to Wall Street" is a piece of history that documents the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and it's told through the letters written by Americans, in their own words. You can order a copy at Occupy the Boardroom's website now.

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Greg Smith, the ex-vice president of Goldman Sachs who resigned last spring after publishing a scathing op-ed about his former employers in the New York Times, has a new book out (“Why I Left Goldman Sachs”) and appeared on “60 Minutes” last night to talk to Anderson Cooper about it.

Smith said Goldman, like other firms, started several years ago to use client information to bet with its own money, sometimes against its own clients. Getting an unsophisticated client, he said, became the “golden prize” because the “quickest way to make money on Wall Street is to take the most sophisticated product and try to sell it to the least sophisticated client.”

Greg Smith: So what Wall Street will do is, they will approach one of these philanthropies, or endowments, or teachers' retirement pensions funds, in Alabama, or Virginia, or Oregon, and they'll say to them, "We have this great product that is gonna serve your needs." And it looks very alluring to these investors. But what they don't realize is that up front, they're immediately paying the bank two million dollars or three million dollars because of their lack of sophistication.

Anderson Cooper: So they don't say to the client: the price you're paying for us to execute this trade is a million dollars?"

Greg Smith: That's a huge part of the problem. Not at all.

Anderson Cooper: How can it be that the client doesn't understand what the bank is making?

Greg Smith: These are very complicated derivative securities which takes a Ph.D. in physics or in engineering to understand. And there are pension funds and mutual funds that represent people's 401(k)s and retirement savings that are trading the most complex instruments out there without fully understanding them.

Anderson Cooper: So, did the people you work with want unsophisticated clients?

Greg Smith: Getting an unsophisticated client was the golden prize. The quickest way to make money on Wall Street is to take the most sophisticated product and try to sell it to the least sophisticated client.

Goldman rejects Smith's accusations that the company puts its own interests ahead of its clients and conducted an internal investigation aiming to disprove the charges. Smith really abandoned Goldman because his superiors refused to promote him to managing director and more than double his salary to more than $1 million, the company says. Blankfein this month that he's "not really concerned about the book's revelations."

Smith said he "absolutely" would have left Goldman Sachs told CBNCs even if they had agreed to his promotion and salary increase. With his book completed, Smith doesn't yet know what his next move will be. "I was not doing this in order to get hired at another Wall Street bank."

A full transcript of the "60 Minutes interview" is available here.

During an interview on "Moyers & Company" recently, Bill talked with Mike Lofgren, a long-time Republican who describes the modern dysfunction of both the Republican and Democratic parties. In Lofgren’s view, Republicans have become overly obsessed with obstructing President Obama, and the Democrats suffer from political complacency. Lofgren’s new book is "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted."

Here's a snippet from the transcript:

BILL MOYERS: The Republican Party now has the super rich and its corporate wing funding it and the religious right provides the ground troops. Why are so many everyday folks out there in the pews defending the prerogatives of the rich?

MIKE LOFGREN: That's something of a mystery. The Federal Reserve, in one of their recent reports, found that net household income fell about 40 percent since 2007. That's a tremendous drop. Yet, here we have as the nominee for one of the two major parties, we only have a binary choice in this country, is by all accounts the richest man ever to run for president and was a leverage buyout artist.

The party is really oriented towards the concerns of the rich. It's about cutting their taxes, reducing regulation on business, making things wide open for Wall Street. Now you're not going to get anybody to the polls and consciously pull the lever for the Republicans if they say, "Our agenda is to further entrench the rich and, oh by the way, your pension may take a hit."

So they use the culture wars quite cynically, as essentially rube bait to get people to the polls. And that explains why, for instance, the Koch brothers were early funders of Michele Bachmann, who is a darling of the religious right. They don't care particularly, I would assume, about her religious foibles. What they care about is the bottom line. And these religious right candidates, many of them believing in the health and wealth, name it and claim it prosperity gospel, believe that the rich are sanctified and the poor punished

BILL MOYERS: Many of those people on the right would tell you that the fall in the income of middleclass people and others has been because of Obama's economic policies.

MIKE LOFGREN: I think they're suffering from selective amnesia. They also don't understand that George Bush doubled the national debt, that the original meltdown on Wall Street occurred during George Bush's watch, and by the time Obama became president in 2009, we were already well into the recession. Now I don't defend him in every way. I don't say that everything he's done is right by any means. I have all kinds of issues with him on the health care legislation. For instance, his willingness to play ball with pharma made the bill cost a lot more than it need.

BILL MOYERS: The pharmaceutical industry?

MIKE LOFGREN: Yes. That said, he was legitimately elected. We were in a very, very serious situation in this country. If the economy had fallen any further, it would be comparable to the Great Depression. So what is Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Senate, what is his first priority for the country? Is it getting jobs for people? Is it restoring the solvency of the financial system? Is it foreign policy? Is it any of those things? No, it's making sure Obama is a one-term president.

BILL MOYERS: It seems that some of these people are willing to see the government go down in order to win.

MIKE LOFGREN: That would be the case. I grew up in a party that believed in the traditions of Eisenhower, and for that matter, even Reagan. He raised taxes several times when the deficit threatened to get out of control. He pleaded with Congress to send him a clean debt limit extension bill without any extraneous riders on it. He knew what the stakes were.

But now it's basically obstruct. They're no longer a parliamentary loyal opposition. They want to seize up the wheels of government. And to most people that means you don't have federal inspectors of airliners. You don't have federal inspection of food safety. Your national parks will be closed. Federal law enforcement will go home. That's what that means.

BILL MOYERS: Why did you leave the party? You'd been a Republican, what, all your life?

MIKE LOFGREN: I left the party because it was becoming an apocalyptic cult. Because you cannot govern a country of 310 million people that is the greatest economic power on earth and the greatest military power on earth as if it's a banana republic. You can't govern it with people who think that Obama was born overseas or who believe in all manner of nonsense about climate change. They don't even know, apparently, where babies come from, if we're to believe Todd Akin.

Really a great interview, the full transcript is available here.

Economic anthropologist David Graeber talks about his latest book, Debt: the First 5,000 Years, and the debt-guilt complex fermented by austerity parties in Europe.

Chris Hedges at Culture Project's IMPACT 2012 Festival from Deep Dish TV on Vimeo.

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and war correspondent speaks about his latest book, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt", the economy, government, banks, and the Occupy movement.

This is a part of Culture Project's "Conversation on Economy", filmed on July 25, 2012 at the IMPACT Festival.

The panel was moderated by Sam Seder and included Robert Johnson, Taylor Jo Isenberg, Patrick Markee, and performances by The Civilians.

The famed award-winning investigative reporting team of Donald Barlett and James Steele have just published a new book, "The Betrayal of the American Dream," a followup to their landmark bestseller, "America: What Went Wrong?" As Republicans and Democrats continue disputing who should bear the brunt of the tax burden, Barlett and Steele argue that America’s middle class has been decimated over the years due to policies governing not only taxes but also bank regulations, trade deficits and pension funds. Their book chronicles how the American middle class has been systematically impoverished and its prospects thwarted in favor of a new ruling elite. Barlett and Steele have worked together for more than 40 years, sharing two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Magazine Awards. The duo join Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! to discuss the assault on the middle class, the great tax heist, deregulation, the outsourcing of U.S. jobs by companies like Boeing and Apple, and the end of retirement. "People are going to have to work forever, and yet what are those jobs going to be? What are they going to pay? And it also puts pressure then on people coming into the workforce. How are they going to get a job if people are having to work between 65 and 75 years old?," Steele says. The duo also discuss their past reporting on the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, headed by the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, and note he headed "an Olympic committee where that entire operation raided the federal Treasury like no other Olympics in history."

Full transcript here.

Jack Abramoff, a former lobbyist imprisoned for his role in a wide-ranging Washington corruption scandal, has appeared as a pundit on CNN. The BBC asks "Why have US television networks turned into comeback springboards for disgraced public figures?"

Excellent question, and nice to hear that others wonder the same thing.

Via:

On Thursday, Abramoff joined presenter Soledad O'Brien, New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza and others to analyse the recent US Supreme Court decision ratifying President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law.

Introducing Abramoff, O'Brien acknowledged he had spent more than three years in federal prison - then plugged his new book.

She questioned him about the impact of the healthcare decision on the lobbying profession and how lobbyists would seek to influence Congress on the matter.

"Always nice to have you," she concluded. "We appreciate it. Thank you."

What conclusion did they reach?

"The journalistic mission became secondary to using notorious names to attract audiences."

It's an interesting outsiders look at what the BBC refers to as "decline of public moral standards" in American television news. Full article here.