the thai government is set to discuss the fate of alleged russian arms smuggler who is facing extradition to the u.s. is comes after a bangkok court dismissed new charges against the businessman effectively removing the main obstacle to his extradition who is wanted in the u.s. on charges of terrorism and money laundering if convicted he could face life in prison. we can't allow ourselves to be out communicated by our enemies the vanguard of u.s. international broadcasting calls for more cash to battle rising media voices from around the world reporting to the broadcasting board of governors america's voice is being drowned out by independent foreign media its head has come in for criticism for what's being labeled as cold war perspective. and anger in europe at

fresh u.s. demands for data sharing critics say america is violating personal privacy and travelers washington is hoping to get access to fingerprints d.n.a. samples and banking details members of the european parliament argue that the measures won't help in the fight on terror. over to our washington studio next for the alone a show this time we take a look at why goldman sachs is chief economist says next year the u.s. economy will either be bad or very bad coming up next stay with us. welcome to the loner show where we get the real headlines with none of the mercy working we live out of washington d.c. now the chief economist for goldman sachs just sent an e-mail to clients forecasting the state of the economy he predicts either a two percent growth with higher unemployment or the economy is going to return to a full blown recession great news right all reasons anthony rand as it will join me

to discuss how accurate goldman is for addictions really are and talk about an odd couple the media and military officers are becoming more chummy than ever but is this dangerous development are we beginning to see the start of the military media machine tom engelhardt co-founder of the american empire project will join me to talk about these strange bedfellows then it's one step forward and two steps back frito lays sun chips brand boasted that they were going green with a new bio degradable back when customers complain that the new packaging was too noisy and frito lay went back on its old design to its old design does that mean that the entire green movement is completely screwed if we can't even deal with a noisy bag then according to the head of the broadcasting board of governors r t this station is the enemy that's the view of the b.b. g.'s chairman walter isaacson when it comes to international broadcasting oh and by

the way be paid for by taxpayer dollars like my taxpayer dollars so i'm going to speak with foreign policies josh rogin to find out why isaacson is picking on international news outlets like ours and we'll introduce you to role d. as pena in venezuela he's considered a dangerous terrorist that somehow he's now living in miami as a political prisoner our correspondent john happy's will explain this bizarre turn of events and how it is that being a got involved in the first place but now let's move on to our top story. what would you think if you received an e-mail that said the following we see two main scenarios i fairly bad one in which the economy grows at a one and a half percent to two percent rate for the middle of next year and the unemployment rate rises moderately to ten percent and then a very bad scenario in which the economy returns to an outright recession that doesn't give you much hope for a country's we're covering economy does it it's like are you kidding me right only

two options are fairly bad or very bad for the truth is an e-mail like this did actually go out and it was sent out by jan had seen as the chief u.s. economist for goldman sachs to their clients then just yesterday at a forum in washington he placed the odds of a renewed recession around twenty five to thirty percent then just today a jobs report said that private employers unexpectedly cut jobs again it's september so when we make of all of this gloomy news do we start preparing and saving for a double dip or do we hope that unexpectedly everything will magically get better well joining me to discuss it is anthony rand as a director of economic research for the reason foundation anthony thank you so much for being here long time no see now before we get into the details of what was said i want to talk about the person who said it you know i mean we have economists that give a gloomy forecast every single day no one really seems to pay any attention but then

we have the chief economist at goldman sachs and thanks in large part to i guess the financial crisis and people finally becoming curious we found out that this is goldman sachs has a very broad reach its fingers are everywhere so when this guy speaks do we listen we should listen we have a massive internationally focused financial institution that depends on the knowledge of its particular economists and knowing what's going on and they have been incredibly successful and their success has come from knowing what's coming down. pike being able to see at least to some degree what's going to happen in the future and of course they miss the bubble in large part just like everybody else did but they have been the best position because they figure it out before most other people did so when goldman sachs says something a lot of people do listen because they have a track record of knowing what's going on and profiting as a result but is that just because they're also very kind of the culprits here maybe . maybe they're acting like they're making their addiction in three days that they

really secretly plotting i i don't buy into the goldman sachs conspiracy there are plenty of people out there today saying this is just one massive con they're saying this is so that people will rush to safe assets which they've already bought and that's going to make them money well anybody that's smart right now with or without this statement is going to be invested in safe assets and so the price is going up they're going to make money so it's i don't think this is one massive conspiracy but people should know goldman sachs isn't perfect they predicted for instance ten year treasury bonds would hit the low at about two point five percent in their two point four percent right now so they're not clear voyant they don't know everything that they do have fingers in a lot of places because they have been very profitable and very successful and they have a lot of money to go to a lot of places but this isn't one massive great conspiracy the satellite they get is i'm just saying if you have more if you're skeptical and especially there's just such a huge lack of trust after you know the financial crisis that happened to these things we kind of have to question everything i think would be are crazy if we did it but

this is what bugs me is that they're saying that our only options are either fairly bad or very bad i mean well i mean it's so depressing that or it is the pressing but they're not the only ones that are saying this i mean these are about twenty thirty percent chance of another dip knurled brini said forty percent chance of a dip they aren't the only ones that are saying this and why is that because every major indicator right now is pointing to a real lethargic growth or another recession coming down the pike in the next couple years it won't be technically a double dip. because the first recession is over so that we complete the separate session but what are we going to do to get out of this consumption will i get demand is down and the threat of taxes coming coming down the pike that's not going to help and i think one fourth of the consumption right now comes from the top two percent of america which everybody wants to tax is getting rid of their taxing them and hire a private company. but it's not going to be exports because we're competing rest of

the world it's not going to be housing because we've got this massive multi-year foreclosure problem which by the way wouldn't be bad as bad right now if the government had been trying to fix the housing sector over the past two years they just kept pushing the foreclosure problem further and further away we so we had two years in which we could have been working on foreclosures and now we have to start doing that so that's another couple of years so it's not going to be any of those particular indicators what is going to be investment is going to be wall street will clearly not dodd frank rules potential taxes and capital gains and there's a whole way out of a delay because of all the uncertainty right we find out that corporations are actually just buying it we know they're getting loans and they're just having these piles of money that are stocking up solely because they can but they don't actually want to invest in any jobs or you know in the economy because of the uncertainty but there's uncertainty because they're not investing. and they should cycle that i feel like we can't get out of it's it is a vicious cycle but you know what organization that's not helping that cycle is the

federal reserve which continues to keep interest rates low which just encourages buying government debt and the government continues to spend money so they need to borrow money from from investors for that private sector instead of that money being invested elsewhere in the economy what's going on in washington is perpetuating this really nasty psych war in and that's why goldman says look it's at that best it's going to be one or two percent growth which is going to feel like a recession if not an actual recession depending on how bad the shadow inventory in housing really is we don't really know. depending on how she directs rules coming out of the f.c.c. or the federal reserve really are trading or what happens elsewhere around the world i mean the united states' economy does depend somewhat on what's goes on in asia in europe right now the irish debt problem of the great problems are getting worse and worse every day the german banks been shown that they really aren't as capitalized as well as everybody would like them to be so with new restrictions

coming out of what's called the basel committee they're in trouble so we could see sort of these variables here have other economies you know that are on their way up that are also it's now starting to counter i guess the u.s. power and influence around the country but i. have to wait and see what next prediction comes anthony thank you so much for being here all right still ahead did you hear the taliban is in negotiations with the afghan government to end the fighting have we been hearing this exact same headline for years now i'll give you that story when we come back and are the military and the media becoming a little bit too cozy i'm going to pose that question to tom engelhardt editor of time dispatch and co-founder of the american empire project when we come back. every month we give you the future we help you understand how to get there and want

to know. the best in science and technology from across russia and around the world . join us technology update on our g. i should be trying to. remove it. from some stupid shit. don't talk don't come. the latest reports out of afghanistan say the president hamid karzai is in talks with the taliban the washington post says that the secret high level negotiations could mean the end of the war and they report the both sides express sincere interest in

ending the war and are seriously considering coming up with negotiations for peace in the country now this would sound like optimistic news from the region so if there is one little problem you see these alleged peace talks have happened several times before earlier this year the nation report of the two groups had secret talks in the maldives last year al-jazeera english mentioned a very similar conference and back in two thousand and seven and as n.b.c. claimed that karzai even offered taliban leader mullah omar a seat in the afghanistan government if it meant and in the war you know these are just a few of the headlines that we've seen over and over and over again over the years . so i guess the obvious question is how do these talks if they're even happening differ from the ones in the years past when not the something if after all of the time of the u.s. has been fighting in that country the two sides just worked it out amongst themselves without our help you know tomorrow marks the ninth anniversary of the

invasion of afghanistan and i can't help but wonder what anyone including nato forces have learned in the last nine years what's changed how we figure out what our goals are and when we're going to leave and don't worry you're going to hear all of our thoughts on the war in afghanistan tomorrow when we do take a look back at the past nine long years. now are the media and the military getting a little too close for comfort just think of the massive media blitz is that we've seen general go on in the last few years the increasing openness with which they lay out their war strategies and even let a little trash talking slip i'm talking about the mcchrystal the betray it says and odierno the world make no mistake this is a new development and then think of all the softball questions of the media throws their way the unwillingness to be critical or cross any boundaries lest these generals shut them out or reporters are no longer granted access to embed with troops overseas think even of the programs where the military embeds their

personnel with the media outlets so they can better understand again expertise in influencing the emotions of audiences and then think of the diminished role that civilian leaders of come to play in shaping public opinion of war it seems the pentagon is laying the groundwork to master the media and the media simply going along with it those is a passing trend or is it going to last we're earlier from our new york studio i caught up with tom engelhardt editor of tom dispatch and co-founder of the american empire project and author of the american way of war how bush's wars became obama's now i first asked him what he made of the fact the general that are currently leading our wars have become the main media actors making strategies public leaking documents and speaking out more than our president. yes it's an extraordinary a new development i would say and it's and it's been a long time in coming if you remember with the first gulf war we had our our the

war was narrated basically on t.v. on the news by retired generals who were often. telling the the story of how the generals they had worked with were the younger generals who were fighting so you knew you had the development of retired generals but the with this with the afghan war in particular in the later stages of the iraq war you have something new which is which is the actual commanding generals of the war begin to narrate the war in more or less real time and they do it as david petraeus and ray odierno who was the iraq war commander who was leaving in august both of them organized. basically media blitz is from their headquarters and in baghdad and kabul and they were all over the press patrol has organized a media blitz in which he basically released a one hour interview with the new york times a front page one of our interview with the washington post front page on the same

day the david gregory of meet the press came out watched him do pushups and did a special program with them you know with a lot of softball questions and he got to put forward what increasingly has become a kind of mix of war policy and foreign policy that isn't even necessarily the literal policy of the president of the united states it's a very strange development it was absolutely an aside from i guess general mcchrystal because there was more trash talking here the fact that even though they're directly i guess undermining the u.s. president and what his plans are for the war there is no such thing as punishment because these guys especially general david petraeus have become media darlings but you know the other thing is that they're not the only ones there are other layers of this too we have perhaps other analysts pundits out there who have the bill crystal's of the world that are saying that the only way that we can achieve peace is through war and so we're constantly inundated with this talk but they're doing something right i mean somehow do you think that they're actually convincing

audiences that this is the only way to go. well i would say that that first of all you have to look at the weight of this it's not quite a machine because it's not quite coordinated yet but if you look at the layers let's say of the machine you mentioned bill kristol but you you have the you have the war commander so you have the secretary of defense then you have what i would call either military or militarized intellectuals who reside in think tanks you know the brookings institute. the center for new american security there are a whole bunch of them these guys some of them were in the military and have retired others are actually have been hired by mcchrystal petraeus and others as their advisors but they go out to the war zones they get face time with the generals they get flattered and then they come back and for the media they are the they then become the object of experts so that's a that's another crew you've got then you've got a crew that's returned as if from the past and that's the old neo cons i mean

crystal you could say but i'm thinking more of the guys who blew the wars in the first place you've got to l. paul bremmer you've got a former deputy secretary of defense paul wolfowitz you've got richard perle you've got a bunch of these guys who were utterly wrong to begin with and and they are still the experts of our moment in crucial moments anniversary why every day is that al and you have in addition the all those retired generals who still are a consultant. to various. t.v. show so you've got you've got quite a weight of opinion a lot of which on t.v. looks looks believable or objective i mean but if you thought about it for a second i mean you really these are the record of these guys given the the wars that we've been fighting is absolutely terrible why anybody would listen to them and take them seriously i don't know nonetheless the you can say they have no answer that answer is yes because they are it reason as catherine meat on the fact

that everything these people say these. these neo-cons these experts is simply taken at face value even on everything that these generals say is taken at face value i can't seem to find anyone in the media that actually wants to ask critical questions because these days it's almost as if they have these people hostage to that you know if you ask something that they don't like they'll simply shut you out and you know no more opportunities for you to be embedded and get a first glance of what it looks like on the ground in our wars it's a kind of i mean the literal imbedding which started with with the invasion of iraq in two thousand and three. was i think literally a kind of stockholm syndrome i mean reporter american reporters grew to love it many of them anyway and there's the equivalent not literally being embedded i suppose but there is a kind of imbedded and stockholm syndrome feeling about the media in general when it comes to our work commanders talking about talking about their wars you know and

and going out there to tell us that progress is at hand and the. above everything else this this lobby overall is remarkably intent on urging us to maintain our military presence wherever not to leave the places that say even the president might want to leave like iraq they are really the it's a lobby it's almost a foreign policy urging that we stay generally i mean that's the most general thing you can say about it i don't know really hard now we only have one minute left i want to know your so in afghan i want to ask you one last question and i only have a minute left yes or i just want to say you know you say that for now it's not yet this media military machine because it seems like the generals are acting individually to push their own specific goals but what happens when they do seem to get it together i mean if you ask me the fact that they're now embedding with certain media organizations seems like there is a push for this you know concerted effort so what happens when they do become

a unified machine. well i hesitate i i think we human beings are terrible predictors of the future so i i hesitate to offer an answer i think the only thing that you can say about it is i think it's a dangerous development because in news terms it gives you it's a potentially powerful machine if it happens if it succeeds if it comes together and it would give us give americans a very skewed view of the of the world in which we're flailing at ghosts and and and and and and and proceeding with wars to which there is no and so i think i just think it's a dangerous developing world to go we will have to see and i guess the way that your title as well these generals after shut up what is have to wait and see tom thanks so much for joining us. it's a pleasure. well still to come tonight sun chips cause a lot of hype when they were still biodegradable backs but the public revolted and now the products being pulled from the shelves because the bag was apparently too loud so what does this say about recycling environmental issues here in the u.s.

are we totally screwed i want to discuss the topic in just a moment. magic your lights big city. differently. crystal clear water. organic. living in harmony with nature. sounds impossible. some people have already told. police.

going green seems like a popular catchphrase these days but the truth is that americans are so resistant to the slightest bit of change and so unwilling to make any sacrifices that our prospects for truly going green are screwed case in point for it ole had created a biodegradable bag made from plant based materials for their sun chips bryant now considering how many chips americans eat but it seems like a pretty big deal right the bear would be one less consumer product piling up in our landfills and the video on the sun chips website made it look pretty cool too. you. know we're. still. small.

well here comes the sad part apparently consumers have complained of the bag is too noisy leading sun chips sales to decline by more than eleven percent and ultimately making them scrap the environment leave the environment friendly bags now the outrage was so strong in fact that there's a facebook group with more than forty four thousand members called sorry but i can't hear you over the sun chips bag which just leads me to ask seriously if we can't even begin with the baby steps of going green because we can't stand allowed bags but what does that mean for our future when joining me to discuss it in the studio is kate sheppard environmental reporter for mother jones kate nice every back on the show. tell me this i mean there are certain moments in life when i feel embarrassed for american or by americans and honestly this is one of those moments for me do you feel like that i think is that's always the barest disappointed that you know we have this whole conversation about how do we take care of this planet

and ensure that there's a there is never people live on down the law and then now this is the very bare minimum kind of sacrifice that you might have a bag that you find somewhat pleasant to listen to it's so odd to me too because we went out today and we tried to get the new biodegradable environmentally friendly country was bad but they are to pull them off the market right away and this is a regular back and i excuse you know our producers it's going to hurt the very very very very. good is a noisy has so i just don't understand how a bag really could be that big of a deal this is absolutely so you know we. complain of our country enough but our bags they can't stand that. i like your suggestion best was that you know if they're so loud maybe people are going to start getting embarrassed maybe we should just use that as a giant tool so you have the loud baggy you know you won't eat chips anymore

because you don't want anyone to know about your habit oh absolutely i had a bag in my house this summer and seen them in awhile and discouraged me from eating them quickly i could ever do that i was eating them so every bit of work in that regard but i just said here that this was people to enjoy their chips that this was somehow impeding their pleasure. it's really silly and the thing is you know you can't say that americans are pathetic that they just don't care about anything i mean clearly people tell felt passionately enough to where forty four thousand people signed up for a facebook group to protest this i think you said there were one hundred fifty three other facebook groups about this topic so clearly people care but you know does this tell you where our priorities lie or you this is what really disappointed me about this is you know we can't get our legislators here in the us to pass meaningful climate or energy action or change our environmental portfolio here's a country but we can unite behind our potato chip bags and come out and defend

them and complain to lay about this i mean they could spend that time writing their legislators about something that really wasn't born but they did and you know i think it really depends on where you are too in the country because if you go to a place like los angeles like where i'm from where you know it's the cool thing to be healthy and be going green i mean people make a lot of money you know off of making these specific tailor made products that are completely overpriced that you find only in the health food stores that are made only from biodegradable materials and they make money there they sell because everyone is just so obsessed with it but then clearly that doesn't transfer you know to such other parts of the country to middle america the crowd currently was not a big fan of. this definitely is death i wouldn't say necessarily the same crowd that would be won over by the by oh great great ability of a bag but how do you get people to care i mean you would you would figure out you you would assume first of all that maybe chips aren't the right kind.