communities are supposed to. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here see some other part of it and realize that everything you saw. i'm sorry as we.

are back to the big picture on tom hartman coming up in this half hour sound the alarm police violence against civilians is increasing at a shocking rate so officers be held responsible for their crimes investigative report is out surrounding the deadly explosion at a west virginia mine that killed twenty nine people last year details of how the accident could have been avoided who dropped the ball and the next time you run to the grocery store don't expect to see dolphin safe tuna tell you what we have to do about the world trade organization and other so-called free trade agreements internet stealing take.

last week a year long investigation of the cause of the upper big branch mine explosion in west virginia they killed twenty nine miners was released written by an independent panel of safety experts the report finds that manmade errors led to the disaster areas that could have easily been provided the report says that the explosion of the mine own by massey was a completely predictable result for a company and quoting the report for a company that ignored basic safety standards and put too much faith in its own mythology end of quote. blame was also pinned on the coal mine watchdog the mine safety and health administration dropped the ball on forcing regulations so at a time when republican lawmakers are trying to peel back even more regulations on mining companies what can we learn from this report to prevent another tragic accident the future jeff biggers is an independent journalist and author of several books including reckoning at eagle creek secret legacy of coal in the heartland and

joins me now to offer his take on the issue jeff welcome. thanks for having me a bottom line who's to blame for this mining disaster in these dead men many people are to blame sama i think first and foremost of course is the massey energy company you know someone named a conscious decision to break the law and i think something that still are hoping u.s. attorney's investigation will follow through with the criminal investigation infractions are very basic you know there was improper ventilation there is improper maintenance of the rock dusting and there is the improper use the getting rid of the methane gas these are really basic issues in coal mining that we don't with over a half century ago that shouldn't happen at all or the second people who really need to be held accountable it is the mine safety health administration who according to the american to report really failed as the watchdog if you have the coal miners is

a you talk about the justice department holding somebody accountable it's been a long time is there any indication that there will be prosecutions i mean you've got a you've got a bunch of dead people here and. i'm forgetting the name of the guy richard what was the fellow's name or was running nasty at the time don't blame john blankenship thank you very much not just running around loose he's running around loose and rich i mean. is anybody is there are there any indications that somebody's going to be held accountable. you know really i'd like to tell you tom that we know unfortunately the only kind of investigation we have so far is with the security chief and it was not about the mine disaster itself it was on how to be followed up and lied to investigators on information so the actual culprits the people who told coal miners to cut corners to not follow up on operant relation to not follow up on removal of methane gas and once again these were conscious decisions both people

have not been held accountable and we're still in the midst of an investigation so i think what we're saying is we need someone to be held accountable because even though you've got. even today a federal judge ruled that massey energy and peabody energy in peabody of course is the largest scroll company in the world it had to force them to turn over documents to the mine safety health administration because they've been refused to hold certain kind of information so even the mining safety administration is having a tremendous problem just following through on their own and that's that's amazing what role would a union have played had it been there at the my at massey mine with this disaster have happened had there been a union there. you know that is a great point it's a very important point every major disaster has taken place at a nonunion mine and the think about crandall canyon disaster in utah nonunion the sago tragedy and nonunion and of course what we have now with the upper big branch

and so many other mines the little mine disasters we've had recently in kentucky and west virginia these are almost exclusively the domains of nonunion mining companies that really feel they can operate outside the kind of laws this is really not really a continual state of violation and getting away with the report indicated the twenty six of the twenty nine dead miners had indications of black lung disease how prevalent is black along in the in the core lines and what's being done about it what can be done about it. you know black lung disease i really feel is one of the great scandals in america and really one of our darkest secrets every day three coal miners still die from black lung disease and this is a disease that we god knows ten eighteen thirty one but black one sort of symbolizes the great big cold denial because you know up until one thousand nine hundred sixty eight the coal companies even deny that black lung caused any kind of

damage whatsoever they even said in front of the u.s. congress that black lung we cured loss' and so here we have twenty six out of twenty nine miners who who are killed we have lacked one disease typically about six to seven percent of our working miners today have black on disease so the upper big branch was really a bombshell to say that we have to really begin to force more laws because once again black lung disease like these other disasters is completely of wood of all it's something that can be prevented if you follow the proper regulations oh it's just a matter of keeping the coal dust out of the air where that we're going to breathe air having to wear respirators when they're in environments where the risk or those doesn't right exactly and other little things like keeping your your curtain closed and a lot of things that ultimately are are ignored when you have an agent you have a mining company if forces you to meet a certain quota you have a certain level of production that basically tells you to disregard humane human

rights and workplace safety it's so remarkable jeff biggers thanks so much for being with us and thanks for having me because issues of the massey mine before the explosion were republicans dream come true little or no regulation complete corporate control of day to day operations and what did it lead to the tragic death of twenty nine workers just like lax regulation led to the death of eleven workers on the deepwater horizon oil rig and the gulf of mexico last year this isn't just about profits it's about lives and those who fight against commonsense regulation frankly it appears don't have. damn about the consequences you know it's really arguably the philosophy the whole the whole ronald reagan right wing let let corporations do whatever they want whatever they do best because they of course know what they're doing best and to hell with the workers around regular war on organized labor in one thousand nine hundred one when he went after patco and it's been going on ever since you can really take it back to one hundred forty seven

when congress in the election of forty six when the republicans took control of both the house and senate for the first time in a long long time in decades past and past half hearted which made it you know created this thing were individual states could opt out of the provisions of the wagner act the national labor relations act and idea thirty five and thus we could have a new so-called right to work for less states but it's the for last and see which every time it's tried around the world whether it's forced on countries by the by the world bank or the i.m.f. or whether it's being forced on us by republicans now and conservative democrats for that matter has just lost it doesn't work this whole this whole libertarian notion of we can have. that somehow we the people doesn't count that big government is not of by and for the people the government is some remote and evil entity that needs to be constrained. well yeah appropriate constraints should

be on government in fact has barack obama pointed out during the presidential campaign bill of rights the constitution is a negative bill of rights for the government constrains government but we also need the government to be doing some things and frankly unions can play a large role in this as well in a free market labor has to have a say labor needs to balance the power of capital of of the ownership of the management i mean if without that what are you going to have you're going to more people die in coal mines labor should have had a seat at the table i mean all law why don't they well go back to taft hartley in forty seven go to reagan in eighty one it's again this whole philosophy this whole idea of oh well you know we don't regulate we don't you know us think of regulations we're on the you know and we don't need any. and it's it's frankly a crime and it's leading to deaths this is the labor. labor it's this power thing labor balances money basically the power of organized

money is where corporations and the power of organized workers is what labor is and if there's not a balance between the two what you're going to see is what we're seeing right now are going to seize the corporations making massive profits in the c.e.o.'s taking huge paychecks and labor crashing from the middle class the working poor and you're going to see the c.e.o.'s living in luxury and the workers as happened in the massey mine dying in the coal mines. police officers have some explaining to do last week a video surfaced of washington d.c. police brutalizing a man in a wheelchair on a local street here take a look. easy

natural police issued a statement justifying their bloody actions claiming that the man was resisting arrest something that cannot be seen from any angle on this video course this isn't the first time video has surfaced of police beating up someone in a wheelchair. so what's going on here well police officers be held accountable in this case as police brutality just the name of the game nowadays for more on this i'm joined by david sirota journalist nationally syndicated weekly newspaper columnist and host of the david sirota radio show and author of several bestselling books including his latest back to our future of the one nine hundred eighty s. explain the world we live in now david welcome. is this

a case of more problems being recognized as we now have cameras and cell phones and more video is showing up. i think it's hard to say we can say is this is that there definitely been more cases filed i mean the usa today reported a couple years ago that the caseload itself has gone up twenty five percent police brutality cases since since nine eleven so the caseload is up now whether that's a combination of better documentation or not that's an open question i would say this whether or not it's a it's a situation where we're just better documenting what's going on or whether the actual rates have gone up the fact is that fifteen hundred sixteen hundred cases a year formal cases of police brutality that just reported cases in the united states this is a very very severe david back when the at the olympics came to atlanta i was living

in atlanta and i was writing a novel about a private detective and or actually a series of them and a friend of mine was a private detective and he the georgia police academy for the first time it's one hundred thirty year history had opened itself up to private citizens going through the normal training because there weren't enough security people for the olympics and we want to make the guy on this private detective agency said hey you want me to get you in and i said sure and so i've got a diploma from the georgia police academy a badge and the whole bit but the day of graduation i was sitting in the cafe and there's this huge atrium in the police academy and there was this group of fifty brand new freshly minted state police i believe they were marching in formation in general in front of us indoors and i said have do you know how much these guys make . you know any threat a number of what it was because like thirty five percent they start up and i said you couldn't pay me that much to have people shoot at me and said you know that's probably that's probably true for a lot of people he said but i'll bet you about

a third of those guys if you give them a gun and a stick and let him go beat the crap out of people whatever they want they do it for free. and it really struck me that maybe we're not paying our police enough or holding them to high enough standards do you think that that's a is my is my observation way out in space or is that pretty solid no i think it's i think it's right on i mean i mean the what's frightening is that as the police right now are using more surveillance technology on all of us many police departments across the country are using either forcible arrest or legal proceedings to try to prevent individuals from turning their cameras their own cell phone cameras back on to the police and the reason that we should do that of course is not to emulate the paranoia of the police state of the surveillance state but to simply create some form of check and balance on police power because i think it's obvious that it's needed and as i say in the in the piece that i wrote about this frankly the only police officers who should oppose this are police officers who

want to be able to break civil liberties laws with impunity and i think all the cell phone cameras really do is suggest to police officers that part of their job is to protect civil rights and civil liberties and i think as the police brutality statistics show a lot of police officers certainly not all police officers certainly not even most police officers but a lot of police officers forget that that's as much a part of their job as anything else david what's the status of state federal or local laws against videotaping or cameras shooting the phone camera hewing police as they're doing anything well here's here's what's going on i mean. the easiest way for police to prevent this from happening if they want to is to what they've been doing which is arrest people and then simply drop charges against them so to get them to stop videotaping things in kind of unique sense and then simply let people know there are no laws against them. there are not as far as i know

there are no specific laws against non by. surveillance of police as long as it's it's stands outside of the idea that you're surveillance police for the purpose of the terrorists already so there are there aren't any laws that say if you're not a terrorist you're just filling police in the break you are public space but you can't do that but what i'm saying is that is that some police departments have simply tried to detain people without charge for doing this as a way to stop it sort of in the immediate sense was the way the bush administration to protesters when george came to town rodney king was a real turning point in american history if people can't videotape and thus prove police brutality in the minute we have left here david will we ever be able to do any about it well i think the answer is no although i think there's one one asterisk to that i think we're seeing more and more situations where police cameras

themselves are inadvertently capturing some of this on tape out here in denver we had a situation where a halo camera idea and a red light a very vicious police beating and what was fascinating and frightening about it was is that the police department in the office tried to move the camera away from that meeting as it was happening luckily it still got caught on tape so i i think there may be a situation where the police on their own cameras may inadvertently have recently creating some deterrent to this remarkable david serota thanks so much for being with us then it. is time to raise police pay and police hiring standards and and if anything encouraging videotaping of police misbehavior. after the break a daily take on our free trade is not only killing americans america's sovereignty it's also killing so.

let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right in the. i think. even on the well. we have the government says they're going to keep you safe get ready because their freedom.

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so sleek you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. it's.

time for the good the bad of the very very categorically doggedly the good minnesota state representative john cries during a debate to add a constitutional amendment or the minnesota constitution to ban same sex marriage crisil a republican stood up to his own party urge a no vote it group on his experiences as a wanted iraq and or a iraq veteran and so this. this amendment doesn't represent what i want to fight for this doesn't represent that happiness is so so hard to find for people so they find it they find someone that makes them happy . and we want to take that person away if there was a hell you know but here i would press it would be to want to. way to stand up for the gay bashing in your own party a bad kansas state lawmaker pete digraph kansas republicans passed

a law in the state house to ban insurance companies from carrying abortion coverage as part of the general health plans basically for forcing women to pay more money for separate health insurance coverage for abortions representative peter graf defended the bill's saying we do need to plan ahead don't we in life i have a spare tire in my car i also have life insurance i have a lot of things that i plan ahead for. because preparing for an abortion is just like preparing for a five time get another reason why men shouldn't have a say in women's work reproductive rights and the very very ugly eric cantor after a tornado ravaged missouri killing one hundred sixteen people and causing widespread damage the house majority leader was asked what type of disaster relief republicans will be offering up to aid those in need cantor said if there is support for supplemental it would be accompanied by support for having pay for years through that supplemental and translate that english by pay for his cancer is talking about

spending elsewhere to help tornado victims by taking food assistance off the table poor families as tax cuts for the rich don't need to be paid for but help for grieving tornado victims does and that's very very ugly. if you thought our government was in charge of making laws think again turns out the world trade organization is telling us what to do yesterday that he took a bite out of us sovereignty ruling that america can no longer label tuna products as dolphin safe why because such labeling could deter customers from purchasing certain foreign tuna products that aren't often see those limousine free trade in america how can this happen back in one nine hundred seventy two the humane

society successfully lobbied congress to pass the mammal protection act which required us to have fisherman to stop killing dolphins both fishing for to often go off and swim above schools and tuna collecting a lot of the scrap food that the two leave behind knowing this tuna fish from and looking out for dolphins to figure out you know they look for dolphins to figure out where to drop their fishing nets unfortunately scooping up the tuna the dolphins get caught up in the nets too and die but thanks to the mammal protection act one thousand nine hundred seventy two hundreds of thousands of dolphins every year were saved in one thousand nine hundred eight one nine hundred ninety gulf and protection was expanded by outlawing foreign too in a fisherman from importing their products into the united states if dolphins were netting killed in that process but premium tuna sellers knew there was a market for dolphin safe tuna only bought from dolphin safe fisherman and the

dolphin safe labels remain. until today when this last remnant of dolphin protection was struck down by the deputy t.-o. so now with no incentive to catch dolphin safe tuna expect transnational corporations and seafood operations around the world to go gangbusters scooping up to an out of the ocean with no regard for what else is trapped in their nets expect hundreds of thousands of dolphins to die every year just so foreign fishing corporations can turn out higher profits. we're talking about some of the smartest animals on the planet dolphins are smarter than your dog their brain is almost as large and complex as ours and as mammals they have a limited brain they can feel emotions just like you me and our pets unlike fish that don't have limbic brains and pretty much just run on instinct and they're just being mowed down the dolphins would you be ok with eating a tuna fish sandwich if one hundred thousand dogs were killed to make it probably

not so we should be ok with dolphins dying either but this is another consequence of so-called free trade so-called free trade that's cost america tens of millions of jobs and tens of billions of dollars since we've bought into it and worst of all it's cost us our sovereignty. something that no one seems to be talking about. the u.s. has lost nine out of ten cases in for the world trade organization since joining that organization in one thousand nine hundred five that means nine out of ten times our nation was forced to change our own laws passed by congress and signed by the president because of what some massive transnational corporations told us. the b.t.o. is struck down laws in america the ban importation of goods made by child labor. we can't pass laws about laws that prevent importation of shrimp from corporations that kill sea turtles in the process we can't pass laws against them and laws that ban the importation of carcinogen like gasoline additives we can't keep them out of

the country we're letting the poison us and kill off the environment all for more profits for transnational corporations this is insanity we need to reclaim ice our sovereignty and drop the w t o and the rest of the so-called free trade agreements that are strangling america and frankly the rest of the world for that matter and the first political party that stands up and promises to do just that a political party that campaigns on protecting us industry again with tariffs closing tax loopholes for job outsourcers and reinvest in a new american infrastructure that makes all u.s. businesses more profitable the first political party that does that will win big at the polls we need to make things in the usa again or we know that the products are safe and are not killing hundreds of thousands of golf it's people you know it's what we did for two hundred years making things and making them well from the founding of our nation and so we fell for the scheme of free trade sold to us by

greedy transnational corporations and it's what we have to go back to if we ever want to again have a strong middle class and a real manufacturing base turns out ross perot was right it's time to pull out of the and nafta now. that's the big picture for tonight for more information on the stories we've covered visit our website it's all arbonne dot com and our team dot com also check out our you tube pages at youtube dot com slash the big picture artsy you tube dot com slash tom harpur and this entire show is available for free video podcast on i tunes and don't forget democracy begins with you if you show up and get x. tag your it will see the. wealthy

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