movie with as many people as possible and hopefully they will chase their dreams as well. >> it is inspiring, motivating and good luck with it. the documentary debuting this weekend. and dieing to will do dyingtodo. you get all the information, the book and the movie. >> thank you very much, steve. good luck. here is piers morgan tonight, coming up next. tonight he wrote the book on money, power and sports. >> an ugly girlfriend. an ugly girlfriend means no confidence. >> what does michael lewis think about this? i'll ask him about the wall street protests and why we should be worried about monks in greece. and harry belafonte. one of the greatest entertainers of all time. ♪ >> but you've rarely seen him on race and politics. do you think america is more or less racist since the inauguration of the first black

president? >> i think what barack obama is going through is more about race than anything else. >> michael jackson. >> i watched him transform himself from the child he was to the figure he became. all those facelifts and distortions. i found it to be a very sad, sad journey. >> this is "piers morgan tonight." good evening, we start with breaking news tonight. a live shot from downtown new york. the clock is ticking on a potential confrontation of the group occupy wall street and the city. the city says they have to clear out by 7:00 tomorrow morning so they can clean up. they say it's an excuse to get them out. the united autoworkers union is going to show up. my next guest knows more about

this than anybody else and why these protesters are so fired up. that's michael lewis, who joins me now. what do you make of all this occupy wall street? are they right? do you know what they are protesting about? do they know what they are protesting about? >> well, nobody's put a fine point on it, but it's not hard to see why people might be outraged by wall street. i mean, it is incredible, really, what's happened in society. you have a private sector that went -- the banking system went basically insane. it generated the conditions for the financial crisis. it got bailed out by the taxpayers, all the big wall street firms would be out of business if big government had not stepped in and rescued them. and then restored to health, they promptly set about any attempts to reform them. against this, there is a backdrop of rising despair and

worse unemployment prospects for young people. it's not surprising that something had to give at some point. it's a little hard to see right now where it goes, because the minute -- of course, the minute the demands become specific, some part of the group is probably alienated. i can absolutely understand the outrage. i think the thing has legs because it's justified. it's just a question of how it gets -- how the anger gets directed. >> clearly, i mean your view is one that i share, the anger directed at the way that wall street has basically got away with it, and its responsibility of what happened with the financial crisis. that is a real scandal. nobody has been held to account. like you say, i have been reading your book, "boomerang." you cannot look at companies like goldman sachs and other

companies and think, it's all right for you, isn't it? you got bailed out by the taxpayer, and you're rewarding yourselves with great big bonuses again. meanwhile, the joe public are left unemployed, homeless and really suffering. >> yes, take it even one step further. that is, these firms were rescued because they were said to be and seemed to be too big to fail. they've gotten even bigger and even more dangerous to the system since then. so that the problem hasn't been sorted out. it's not as if they were a run on goldman sachs tomorrow and they looked like they were going to collapse and the government could let it go. so we've got this -- it's a very strange situation. because you've essentially got socialism for the capitalists. they are backstopped by the government. they can do what they do because the government is there to back them up if something goes wrong.

you have a kind of social support for elites, for the best paid people in the society. and at the same time, you have red and tooth and claw capitalism for everybody else. and that -- that's the sense of unfairness that gives rise to -- i mean, i feel 2, and i'm well off. i can only imagine what it feels like to be 20 years old, lots of student loans and no job prospects and wonder why the world is the way it is. so, to me, it's a very interesting social movement because it isn't half baked. it's fully baked. there are real reasons for people to be on the streets. just kind of a question of, why now? and i think the answer to that is, the pain had to accumulate to the point where people felt they needed to do something about it. that people -- i think for a while after the financial crisis, people thought, oh, we can go back to normal. and it's now pretty clear we can't. >> how bad do you think the situation really is. just today, harrisburg in pennsylvania declared themselves

bankrupt. now, when whole towns in america start declaring themselves bankrupt, this is a sign that -- this is pretty serious, isn't it? >> um, yes, but i'm not sure what a bankruptcy of harrisburg means. i say this, if you look at where the united states is vulnerable in the way that europe is vulnerable, vulnerable to a collapse in faith in the financial markets in the united states to the point where people won't loan money to go about its business as usual. the federal government, you know, in a state of extreme paralysis and declining to raise the debt ceiling suffered a downgrade of its debt a while back. standard and poors downgraded its rating from aaa to aa. the financial markets responded to that by saying, rushing into

u.s. treasury bonds. it's a very strange situation, but to some extent, the worst federal government manages its affairs and the more of a sense of impending doom it creates, the more people will lend to the treasury because the treasury is still less risky. at the local level, with states and municipalities, it's not true. anytime whispers begin about defaults in the municipal bond market, investors flee. and what you're seeing i think is -- it ceased to be -- the crisis has ceased to be a financial problem. it's becoming increasingly a social and political one. what you see on the ground, i mean in my home state of california, for example, yes, we have a bankrupt city called vallejo but we have bigger cities flirting with bankruptcy. whether or not they declare it is almost immaterial. the big thing is, they can't afford the services they need to provide.

so you have this degradation of public life that -- that is a little scary. i mean, you have cities cutting their police forces and fire departments by half. and making the world a little less safe. i think people are feeling that. but it's slow. i mean it's a difficult story to perceive moment-to-moment because the pace of change is pretty glacial. >> it sounds like an extraordinary thing to contemplate. isn't america basically bust financially? >> well, america has been living beyond its means for a generation. so, bust is the point where greece is, right? that's the point where people decide you will never pay it back, so they won't lend you more. but, until it gets to that point, until the chinese, for example, won't buy our treasury bonds, we are not bust. we are living on borrowed time.

to me, the unsettling thing, what is scary to contemplate is this isn't as some cast it, a sort of dysfunction at the top of society. dysfunction just with political elites. this isn't a matter of us having elected the wrong people to do our business. the problem is that the american people seem to be getting what they want. the polls show what people want in public services but not to pay for them. and so it's a matter of public attitudes that need to shift. the only way that happens is that we do actually flirt with being bust. i don't see anything between us and eventually being bust. >> what do you see as the politics in all this? clearly, the next election in america is going to be fought on the economy in various ways. when you look at the gop runners it looks like mitt romney and perhaps herman cain are now pulling away.

do you believe barack obama can win a second term or will it literally come down to what are the jobless figures and the credit rating of america? where do you see this politically? >> you have to accept that like everyone else in the world when i answer that question, i'm just guessing. i mean nobody knows. as you know, all sorts of things could happen to change that have nothing to do with the economy. i mean, what if there are terrorist attacks in the united states? there are all kind of factors that may enter into the election that we have yet -- we can't imagine, and don't imagine. strictly, if the election is fought, strictly on the economy and the economy is the way it is now, i think when it comes to a general debate between barack obama and whoever the republican nominee is that the republican nominee is not going to look good because they don't have

anything to say. obama has made, what seems to me, a clearly sensible proposal of a large short term stimulus to create demand in the economy. we are suffering from inadequate demand. it is a classic case where the government should step in and spend money in the the short term. the responsible way is to have a short term stimulus and actually seem to be or actually sorting out our long term entitlements problem. but obama's proposal is dead in the water in congress. it's dead in the water because republicans have -- they don't like it. the republican nominee isn't going to like it. what is he going to say. they say okay, mitt romney, you disapprove of barack obama's plan to fix the economy, what is yours? his plan is not, i think it's

going to sound like austerity to people. and i just -- so i actually think i'm bullish on obama. i know that's not a fashionable sentiment. i know it would be very unusual for a president to get re-elected in this economic climate. but i think he's going to have a pretty compelling case to make. >> it's been an unusual climate. when we come back after the break, i want to talk about why a bunch of greek monks may be to blame for all this mayhem. [ male announcer ] every day, thousands of people are choosing advil®.

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and even better for your customers. ♪ for safe and secure ways to stay connected, visit usps.com/mail [♪...] >> announcer: now get a $250 airfare credit, plus save up to 65%. call 1-800-sandals. certain restrictions apply. my guest, michael lewis. your book, "boomerang" tells your adventures. iceland, ireland to greece and retell the horrifying stories of the financial collapse in each of those countries. what made you do this? before did you go looking for whatever it was you found?

>> there were a couple reasons. i was working on my previous book about the u.s. financial crisis and realized it was only part of the story. effectively what happened in the run up to the financial crisis is societies had been allowed to tap credit they shouldn't have been allowed to tap. they were left alone in a dark room with a pile of money and left to do whatever they wanted with it. it was a temptation situation, and the temptations played out in the housing bubble, the subprime mortgage bubble. it told you the money was a way into places. in addition, it was really clear that the financial crisis was more than one act. act one was lehman brothers going down in the panic of 2008.

effectively what happened is that governments around the world stepped in and basically guaranteed their banking systems. said the banks are too big to fail. when they did that, they accepted the fact they would have to cover the losses of the banks. one of the characters i interviewed was a hedge fund manager in dallas named kyle bass. he said look at it this way. if you add the banking losses on to the existing debts of these countries, there's some countries that can't afford the bill. the countries are going to be what goes down next, like falling dominos. and he had had bets in place against, essentially, iceland, greece, ireland, france. and when you looked at that scenario, which is what we're in now, you saw that the -- not only would countries have trouble paying back their debts, but the effect on the global financial system could be much worse.

the last time we got out of this, we got out because the governments are credible. they could come in and say, yeah, the banks screwed up, they're all bankrupt, but we're behind them. and so you can still invest money in them. what happens when the governments themselves are not credible? and that's what we're living through now. that's why when greece goes down, all of a sudden it has this potentially devastating effect on lots of other places. >> what is amazing in this book is the story of greece. it seems to fall on the shoulders of some monks who are trying to raise money and they end up raising hundreds of millions of dollars and basically bankrupting greece. tell me about this. >> no, it's an amazing story. this is actually the trigger mechanism in greece. two years ago roughly when greece acknowledged that its books weren't what people

thought. they had their deficits and debts were much greater than had been previously announced. the reason it happened is the previous conservative government fell and was replaced by a new government. what caused the previous government to fall was a scandal. monks at the monastery in the north of greece who don't venture off their peninsula much. it's a gorgeous and strange place. mt. athos is a holy place only for men. they don't even let female animals on the island except for cats. they had a monastery to repair. it's a fantastic -- these places are are spectacular. they look like italian hill towns. they had a rubble of a monastery. they needed lots and lots of money to fix it up. the way they did it was they went through the vaults and

found they had thousand-year-old deeds to property in the north of greece. they got the government to recognize their rights north of greece. then they went to the government and swapped this pretty worthless lake for lots of valuable commercial real estate. the scandal is why the government did this. the exact number, i'm not sure. between 100 million and 1 billion. what the monks made on the transactions. that scandal is what caused the government to fall, the new government come in and say oh my god, it's so much worse than anybody knew. and that's the big -- >> michael, michael. let me jump in. when you have monks behaving like this, hasn't the whole world lost their entire moral compass? >> well, you probably give monks too much credit to start with. monks have not always been well behaved people.

i say it in defense of the monks. i went to the monastery and spent a little time. i became quite fond of them. i think that they -- it's not as if they were taking the billion dollars to live high on the hog. all they wanted to do was rebuild their place to set up there. they were living very, very awe a austair lives. in fact, the monks, i thought were moral example to the rest of greece. they were like every other greek person. they thought it was okay to go in and get what they could out of the government. this is a common greek problem. thgreeks treat them like a pinieda filled with goddys and everyone gets a whack at it and takes out what they can. the monks, unlike the rest of greeks had a collaborative spirit. they were doing it for the glory

of their monastery rather than their greed. i thought, actually very funny, in the last few days, i had an e-mail from a harvard business school professor saying they want to do a case study with the monks. the monks look like an extremely well run enterprise. >> maybe we should find some monks and send them down to wall street. after the break, i want to talk to you about baseball, about "money ball." i saw the movie last week. and about whether you've been a force for good or evil in one of america's great sports. >> three players. >> yeah. 47. >> okay. >> actually 51. i don't know why i lied just now. my doctor's again ordered me to take aspirin. and i do. [ male announcer ] be sure to talk to your doctor before you begin an aspirin regimen. [ mike ] listen to the doctor. take it seriously. that is better than today.

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when i saw him twice -- i'll keep the money. >> okay, so billy says he'll pay for it himself but when he sells him for more money next year, he's keeping the profit. okay, thank you very much. we'll call you back. thank you. come on! >> come on! >> that's a clip from "money ball." brad pitt starring in your movie is cool. >> what do you want me to say, it's not cool? it's great. it's great.

every now and then, a lottery ticket comes in. >> tell me about the -- when i watched the movie, i'm a big sports fan. i wouldn't say i'm the world's greatest baseball fan, i'm more of a cricket chap myself. but when i watched it, i couldn't work out the concept, which i know is a real story behind this movie and the book, was a force for good or evil. basically, what's happening is a slightly bunch of mediocre players, statistically behaving the way they would be. where is the flair? where is the exuberance and the passion that comes with normal sport? what are you doing to baseball? >> the passion that comes with id yoscy and ire rationalities that's what you're looking for? >> no, what i'm saying is, it's a fine line. you hit the nail on the head.

you want it to be statistical and logistical, rather than spock from "star trek." i'm more your captain james t. kirk kind of guy. i want the big picture. the guy you want to spend $20 million on to win the world series. >> thank god you are not running a professional sports team. here is what i would say to they because this crossed my mind as i was writing the book. it does seem from a distance true that when you are getting more and more precise in the way you measure people and their value that it seems bloodless and without passion. in fact, the story had a great deal of passion in it. the movie has a great deal of passion in it. the question is why? i think it was kind of wonderful what they did. this business of finding value in people that sometimes even

the people themselves didn't know was there because the world told them they weren't valuable. it's a story of prejudices falling. so, i don't see why it's any less passionate for the players to be properly evaluated than for them not to be. it's always going to be more or at least as much art as science and predicting how cricket players or baseball players or any athlete is going to perform is going to be this, it's going to be -- it's an essentially unpredictable thing. but to get a little better at it, nothing wrong with that. as you kind of put your finger on it, when you are now managing a sports team and you make a mistake, it's a $20 million mistake. there was a time not that long ago it was a $20,000 mistake. the athletes have gotten so

expensive, that they demand to be more accurately assessed. >> what is next for you. you conquered almost every sphere of life. what's left? >> i was thinking -- i was toying with the idea of doing a book about cable talk show hosts. >> well, i think you'll find i'm exceptionally good value for money, despite the apparent semblance of mediocrity. >> that's not what the producers were saying. but the -- the -- so, i don't know. i tell you what's next. i know exactly what i'm going to do when i walk out of here. i'm writing a screen play for my first book, "liars poker." that's what i'm going to do next. i find the books, generally, the minute i figure out what it is, the last thing i want to do is

talk about it. once i talk about it, i don't want to do it. i'll tell you after i'm done, how about that? >> come back on and talk to me when it's done. is that a deal? >> thanks for having me. yeah. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. when we come back, harry belafonte, music, race and politics. and it gets pretty lively.

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it's a great day. great day. great day. and there are millions on the way. >> harry belafonte must have one of the most recognizable voices of all time. a voice he's used to entertain the world and change the world. his memoir is called "my song." welcome. >> good to be here, finally. >> you should have come sooner. you persisted a little, but you're here now. i want to know, if you had -- if i said you have five minutes left to live, what is the single moment left in your life that you would relive right now. if i had that power, what with it be?

>> the first time i met martin luther king in the basement of a church in harlem. he was two years younger than i was. he asked to meet with me, he was coming to new york, he was giving a talk before the ecumenical community. i went to see him speak, quite taken with what he had to say. a host of personal thoughts and objectives. it was an epiphany, the way he said the things he said and what he said, let me know that the course of my life was just in the dawning of major change. >> what kind of man was he? >> humble. without false modesty. eloquent. extremely intellectual and highly intelligent. but he was hunting for the meaning of his mission. and i caught him just at that

apeople, just at that crossroads. >> how far do you think america has come in realizing martin luther king's dream? >> there's no question we realize a good portion of it but we have not realized the fullness of it, the largeness of it nor have we touched on all the things yet to be done. had he not been taken away from us, i think the world would be in a very different place. i can say that about a couple people. i can say that about bobby kennedy, as well. i think there was a group of leaders emerging at that time that carried purpose, had moral vision, were politically very smart. >> what i liked about them, those two names in particular, they were fearless. >> yes. >> they were people prepared to stand up to anybody. >> yes. >> they didn't care about the

consequence of themselves or political consequence. they were driven. do you see that anymore in modern leaders? >> no, i do not. i think that is what is truly absent. a lot of guys are politically smart. they can play the chess game. they have lost moral compass. it's the absence of that moral vision and the absence of that courage that i think we suffer from. i don't see anyone out there that i can say would be able to pick up that legacy and move forward. >> did you think briefly that barack obama was going to be that person? how did you feel hen he got elected? >> i had hoped very much he would be that person. he apaid to be that person. i must hastily say that i think he can still be that person. i'm not quite sure who is going on in this period, in this time when he is finessing the game.

i think he's got so caught up in the game, he's not translating the vision to the rest of us. we need to know what that vision is. >> do you think america is more or less racist since the inauguration of the first black president? >> certainly not a social activism. we are less racist than appearance. i think in depth, we are as racist as we have been all along. i don't think this country had ever dealt honorably with the whole issue of race. i think we have pushed it aside. we have glorified the things that we have done in the name of ending racism. in the truth of our existence, i think much of what is going on against barack obama is more rooted in race than anything else. >> i had morgan freeman on the show. you told me you watched that. he came out and said he fears a lot of tea party political leaders and their followers are

racist and he said it. he believes their sole intention is to get this black man out of the white house. what did you think when he said that? i subscribed to it. i was pleased that he articulated that point of view. we spent so much time trying to be politically correct as to being politically honest, we sometimes blur the picture. i don't believe that -- whether it was roosevelt or kennedy or eisenhower, anybody who ruled in difficult times with inordinate decisions to make ever had the kinds of problems that barack obama's facing. i think a big part of that is the fact he is a man of color and there's a mood in this country that cannot tolerate that. >> let's have a little break and come back. i want to talk to you about the shocking moment a white woman touched you on television. and, of course, deo. ♪

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a controversial appearance by harry bellafonte on the smothers brothers comedy hour. cbs deleted the segment. harry, i mean, it's controversial. it was. it was in the '60s, you were pushing the envelope and cbs moved in and censored it. what did you feel happened? >> i felt that something very important had been revealed. those in the place of power -- there was an audience and constituency. there's always a higher power that insists on what the hierarchy is having. the whole thing was actually, looked like a carnival. the smothers brothers invited me on the air. they said let's do the carnival song.

it was one of the popular ones in my repertoire. and behind it we will show the fiasco taking place in the streets of chicago. to reveal that in this context really disturbed the network. they said we can't show that. they asked a simple question. it's shown every day on the daily news, why can't it be in the context of this hour. they said it's not what this show is about. this show is about anything we want it to be, meaning the smothers brothers. they said it's not. they took it off the air. there's nothing that abusive about it. they took it off the air. to carry the punishment further, the next morning they fired them at the height of ratings. >> amazing. amazing. what was even more extraordinary, looking back on it now. 1968 you appeared on the petula clark special on nbc.

during a performance of a song, smiled and briefly touched your arm. let's watch this, because this caused national outrage. white woman touches black man. shocker. ♪ >> i mean it seems unfathomable that this would have caused outrage, but it did. the show sponsor, plymouth motors were apparently nervous. they didn't approve of the interracial touching. they felt southern viewers would be offended by it. >> the account executive that represented plymouth, part of the chrysler family was sitting in the booth when the show was being taped. when she did that, he personally got very upset. once i checked him out some time later to understand why he felt that way, i understood. he came from a deep southern

tradition, he was himself not pleased with race and equality and all those things. and he chose to use that moment to impose this rather silly reprimand on the people who were engaged -- >> just utterly ridiculous. >> absolutely. >> and yet, yet at the time, many people in america would have said, yeah, that's too much. we can't have that on the air waves. >> and he did. >> we have come a long way. that was 1968. so, we have come 43 years. >> why don't i touch you and see what happens. there we go. >> we're in the clear. we're in the clear. i'm not hearing advertisers have called in. let's move to music. given the impact you have had for your career, in this incredibly important movement in america, do you sometimes worry when you eventually leave us, i hope it's a long time to come, there will be the words deo,

odeo in almost every obituary headline? speaking of that, let's play it. so everybody who doesn't know, there must be about one person left. this is what i'm talking about. ♪ ♪ daylight come and me wanna go home ♪ >> can you sing it still? >> a note or two. >> do you wish you wouldn't have sung it? >> i'm glad i sang it. are you kidding me? every time i go to a yankee ball game and all of a sudden they sing it and 60,000 voices sing it, i say i made it. there's no validation -- >> that was obviously off the banana boat. released in 1956. the album calypso was the first album to sell 1 million copies. >> first in the history of the industry. >> isn't that amaze something. >> yes, it is.

>> and that can never get taken away from you. >> yes. >> that was huge in those days. >> very much so. >> in those days we didn't have internet and facebook and all those things, almost mouth to mouth, country to country, border to border. >> what are your personal other favorite songs. ♪ deo >> i'm trying to remember a great balance add with the fantastics. i sang a lot of songs that came out of the classic english tradition. a lot of irish songs. "danny boy." >> danny boy, of course. >> i remember i was an african during the we are the world campaign. during that great devastation. they were out there feeding the hungry, doing incredible work. i sat with them around the camp fire, one of the nuns said, hey, could you give us a little song. i said gladly. she said, could you lead us in your version of "danny boy."

here i am sitting in africa, in kenya with all these nuns singing "danny boy." >> fabulous. when i sing it, it's not quite as magical. when we come back, i want to talk to you about michael jackson, who i know you knew. and i want to talk to you about the demons you have fought in your life and overcome. he for whatever reason wasn't able to. so i was the guy who was never going to have the heart attack.

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♪ go back to the mountain ♪ go back to the mountain turn the world around ♪ ♪ go back to the mountain ♪ go back to the mountain turn the world around ♪ >> that is harry belafonte on "the muppet show" in 1978 performing "turn the world around." that was reportedly jim henson's favorite show. >> one of the best moments of my life. jim said i'd like to do something out of the african mythology and we'd like to make these puppets and we wrote the song for that show and when we

performed it, not only did it turn out quite well but the most repeated segment of all of the muppet shows, and his favorite. i sang it at his eulogy at a church, and it was a fulfilling moment. >> one of the extraordinary things you took part in is the we are the world song with michael jackson. funny enough, when we talked about calypso before the break, becoming the first album to sell a million copies, it wasn't until michael jackson's "thriller" that an album stayed longer on the charts. did you know that? >> i remember they said michael jackson's album just broke your record. >> were you happy or furious? >> happy. >> i would have been furious. >> unless you are smitten with extreme greed, to be on for the charts over 137 weeks. >> that's amazing. >> 137 weeks. >> tell me about michael jackson. what was your view of him?

>> like many, i was certainly in awe of his great gift and his talent. i always looked at him with a great sense of sadness because i knew a lot about his background, his family. and for those children to have been manipulated in the way they were manipulated not only by the family and their father, what had happened to him. but the way in which they were exploited by all those who earned livings off their lives. i think led them to a path that i don't know that celebrity is worth all that. >> obviously michael had real problems and this trial is telling us more and more about what those problems were. a lot of it relating to various addictions to painkillers, sleeping pills, fame. all sorts of addictive things in his life. you have battled some of these demons, gambling and so on. what's the trick to surviving this stuff? i mean, can anybody help you? and in the end, do you yourself

have to deal with these things? >> along the way there are individuals that help you to see a brighter side to things and can help -- and you can trust their view of what they say about you. and the distortions you may be living through. but in the final analysis, i think it's part good luck and something inside the individual that's awakened all of a sudden that you can then begin to nurture, because the gambling addiction for me was quite severe. i got out of it without any scars, but it was a hell of a struggle. >> it's a remarkable book and remarkable life as i said in the interview. when you look back, how would you like to be remembered? >> two things that define me. one is that so many branded me as a social and political misfit. they branded me a communist because of the things that i did on behalf of libberation. and although i saw many, met

many communists who i thought had great value and many great wisdoms to say. although i did not like the practice of many things that came out of the ideology, i'd like to be remembered as someone who deeply cared about america, cared about where it was going. and that for us, for people of color, it is the best place in which our game could be played. i don't think anywhere on earth, at this moment, offers us the opportunities we have here in america. if we will seize them and make the devil do our dance. >> well, it's been a great pleasure. the book is called "my song." there is an hbo documentary, sing your song. it's airing soon. it has been a delight. thank you very much. >> thank you very much. >> harry belafonte an impressive man. breaking news live shot from the wall street area where the clock is ticking on possible confrontation in the city and the protest group occupy wall street.