cia agents to recruit people for a covert war in iran so she would look at that as proof that the u.s. isn't involved or is this a conveniently timed p.r. campaign and it looks like the pressure is getting to congress senator leahy has just announced that he is rethinking some of the most damaging aspects of the protect ip so can we say that all of this is a testament to online activism travertine from the electronic electronic frontier foundation is going to join us why have all that including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. the fall out of the video of u.s. marines urinating on dead taliban fighters continue the former marines in the video have now been identified and reports are saying that they could face charges of war crimes now not because they care about the war in afghanistan but because they love scandal the mainstream media is sticking to the story. more of the disturbing and disgusting video that we talked about yesterday showing our u.s.

marines urinating on taliban bodies it's not just about the instance about america and the impact on america's image it leon panetta once again condemning the actions of a handful over mean seen on tape urinating being urinated on or urinated on by marines of dead taliban fighters multiple investigations being launched as this as the pentagon tries to really control the damage defense secretary leon panetta has come forward and said the video deeply troubles him he's ordered a full investigation there is deep seated concern here that any time something like this crops up that enemy forces could use it to to rally their forces even as a recruiting tool. now there's been a lot of commentary out there since this video came out but there's one person that really takes the cake when it comes to showing how sick and twisted and wrong headed people can be in the face of stories like these so let me just play a little clip for all of you from the radio of dana loesch. can someone explain to me if there's supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of

a taliban fighter someone who was a this is part of an organization murdered over three thousand americans i drop trial and do it to let me go i want a million cool points for these guys is that harsh to say come on people this is a war what do you think this is. she dropped her out and do it too and she thinks that these marines deserve a million cool points now i have quite a few thoughts on this but let me just start out by saying that dana which she later says in the video she says she thinks she's being politically incorrect by saying it really you think that you're being politically incorrect everyone else is just too sensitive to spew the same kind of filth as you let me tell you something it's not being politically incorrect it is i think morally deplorable but even more so it's a sure sign of how an educated and misguided people are about this war in afghanistan it's politically ignorant is what i call it you see people like dana loesch say that this is war get over it now i made

a comment yesterday saying something similar in the sense that yes this is war and horrible things happen every single day every single day when you're at war and that's why the mainstream media deserves critique because they only remember that war war when we see an incident like this but the point is not to get over it and just move on the point is we have to ask why we're war to begin with why thousands of soldiers have been dying over the last ten years in iraq and afghanistan and countless others have been getting injured maimed returning with p.t.s.d. and horrible psychological trauma as dana thinks of the troops are fighting to keep us safe safe from who the war in iraq was based on lies and had nothing to do with keeping america safe the war in afghanistan was originally launched in retaliation to go get osama bin laden and have can't stand hasn't been about osama bin laden for a very long time and that's why we saw the military the foreign policy establishment scramble to change the supposed goals a million times over it's gone from bin ladin and stopping afghanistan from being a safe haven to al qaeda to fighting for women's rights democracy winning hearts

and minds and building up afghanistan's own security forces. meanwhile completely shielding our eyes to the fact that the government of the us props up afghanistan is corrupt it's full of just as many crooks and killers as those that we speak out against the war lords that we pay off for safe passage through afghanistan are helping keep american troops keep america safe give me a break so what i think is the people to dana should really be taking issue with are those that attacked her for her statements about supporting the marines the you're an eight on dead taliban she should take issue with those that sent the marines there in the first place the people who are keeping them there beyond any sound logic we all should but here's the kicker to see after the mass outrage that was expressed towards lho she decided to write a response and he went for her argument or her defense was she claims that liberals are just angry with what she said because they don't like the military way to divert to an argument that makes absolutely no sense liberals go crazy when we see videos of our troops urinating on bodies because we hate the troops so much that it

makes us happy to see a scandal that's b.s. and you know it liberals real liberals of which i'm afraid they're too few out there because they get scared off they get pushed to the center by people like lotion fox and anyone else on the right wing real liberals they don't like war they don't agree with the notion the troops are dying on our behalf thousands of miles away have been doing so for ten years and to what i meant to cover up the embarrassment of the mistakes of the pentagon and all the generals themselves know that it doesn't make any sense to cover for the lawmakers to keep funding our wars on the sake of not looking soft on terror and creating more work for defense contractors to line their pockets and contribute to their campaigns the military and the troops are not the problem it's the military industrial complex it's the blood thirsty war hawks that run our government and strike fear into the hearts of americans on our t.v. screens to keep those pointless wars going. and so now let me bring all of this back to c.n.n.

host c n n the poor laws confuse the redheaded stepchild of the mainstream media c.n.n. as i'm sure most of you know is losing big time when it comes to their ratings losing big time in comparison to m s n b c and especially to fox and so in response they've been desperately throwing whatever they can to the wall to see what sticks and to try and compete from holograms of will i am anderson cooper is pretending with snooki to people trying to make earth trying to make the people believe that erin burnett is just like that that she's the girl that everyone can relate to you know all the while they like to call themselves the most trusted name in news they like to pretend that they're different from their other two cable competitors because they're nonpartisan they're unbiased they're down the middle and not left or right and so what do they do to try and prove things like that will they pay contributors hire people like dana loesch and erick erickson and think that if they just pick them up against some liberal i mean they're showing both sides of the story and giving everybody a voice please if you think the paying people like dana loesch and giving her

airtime to spread her vile commentary give you some shred of credibility i don't know what else to do but laugh or maybe cry i don't know overall i kind of just feel sorry for you the only thing that would give our mainstream media any credibility in this day to age would be returning to covering actual news for example the war in afghanistan america's longest war or how about being a government watchdog again questioning those in power rather than regurgitating their every word not buying into the partisan political game that keeps all of america distracted and completely ignorant of what's actually going on of what wars are being fought in their name and never asking why do you see all of that that's of the mainstream media chooses to miss. well tonight we're going to shine a light on some of the most secretive private aspects of our financial world for starters just yesterday a transcript was released of the federal reserve's meeting in january of two thousand and six filled with lots of laughs

a lot of praise for alan greenspan as well as complete lack of knowledge for what was to come now for the economic crisis we're living through right now another think any presidential campaign brings out all the skeletons for a candidate but perhaps one of the most interesting and the one of the most important developments here is mitt romney's pastor of bain capital not only has a damaged his credibility as a job creator and instead painted him as a vulture capitalist it's also made people finally start asking what is it that private equity firms do anyway the shadowy world and one that maybe just maybe when i come out into the light throughout this election cycle let's try to break through some of these secrets joining me to discuss it is william black former federal banking regulator and associate professor of law and economics at the university of missouri kansas city he's also author of the book the best way to rob a bank is to own what and then from our studio in new york we have josh kosman author of the buyout of america how private equity is destroying jobs and killing the american economy gentlemen thank you both for joining me tonight and i guess so

much to discuss josh i want to start with you and i want to start with bain capital and start with private equity firms i think that a lot of people out there probably don't know a whole bunch about that they think that find you know you take the company out of the public market something happens in between and then you reintroduce it to the public market so what does it all happen in the in-between. well i think this is what mitt romney is trying to do right now he's trying to throw a lot of dust up in the air so we don't focus on private equity yet ninety percent of what he did was leveraged buyouts which is what private equity used to be called when michael milken was funding those deals and today it's called private equity for private equity firms own companies employing one out of every ten americans they are america's largest employers if you combine with all the companies they own from e.t.a. the largest hospital chain to dunkin donuts they are very they have a big impact on our lives and it's high time that people learn what they do and what they do is they buy companies by having those companies borrow the money to

finance those deals and then they try to resell them within four to five years and for every dollar that the company owes if they pay down that debt their value rises the private equity firm because they only put twenty percent down if the company's value remains the same so there's a real rush to raise earnings and usually that is done unfortunately by starving a company of operating in human capital is there even any way to to measure that i mean bain capital for example has been incredibly secretive and tight lipped they won't release any figures but i'm curious if they even bother to measure how many people might lose their jobs along the way you know if the bottom line is just about how much money you're getting to your investors. that's what they'd like to focus about on today i revealed that i spoke to a managing director at being on background who was there during the romney years he told me the right before they were about to buy

a company fifty percent of the time they were they discussed laying off people as part of their strategy they never talked about growing jobs and they talked about laying off workers so often that it wasn't even a big deal it is just something that just came up in the normal conversation and mitt was in those meetings and mitt never raised an objection. well you might like to get you in here as well obviously do you think that it's good that at least some of this is finally getting into the public conversation now that it's an election season now that people are looking for something to attack other candidates with i mean i can imagine that obama is going to go after mitt romney for this but is he able to have room to speak you could say that a lot of the people that work around him the jack lew's of the world also have a history in private equity. that's true but mitt romney chose to make this an issue recalled that mitt romney's central premise is i'm a business person i'm part of the productive class i'm

a success because i'm brilliant that's what america needs and president obama has none of those traits and so that has opened up the bidding to investigate and romney can't really or to make public what bain capital does just like he can't really afford to make public his tax returns because they're going to be deeply disturbing to most americans and by the way they're most deeply disturbing to most republicans the most. unusual thing of the last ten days has been this republican attack on private equity which is unprecedented well yes i want to get a little farther into that line do you think that we're going through some type of shift when it comes to public opinion that they no longer like the capital is that was it very very called a vulture capitalist the people that buy or be eaten and do whatever it takes to

get ahead you know is the national mood shifting in that sense. well not shifting so much they've never loved to the vultures when romney made this a campaign issue back in massachusetts kennedy tore him alive with ads from the people that lost their jobs so it's remarkable that romney has decided to go this route again and he at least to date he has no better answers than he did when kennedy took him to what chad so americans hated. the earlier incarnation which as you correctly heard was michael milken mean people have to remember michael milken was and is a confessed felon who created it is enormous destruction

and became the end and remains wealthy through his frauds just any comment on that to whether you think of various them lot can change or maybe we're just now becoming more aware of it or maybe it's the economy but people look at these types of businessmen a different light. well i think so i mean that's probably why rick santorum came very close to beating mitt romney i mean if he'd vote swung the other way we'd be looking at this democratic the republican nominating process in a very different light and south carolina could end up not being a winner for mitt in this whole nominating process could change but i think what mitt tries to do just to make it kind of clear for viewers is he says i created one hundred thousand jobs by combining venture capital investments he made which was a small minority of the investments he made which were passive investments companies he did not control and combining that with the majority of what he did which were companies he did control and says net net i created one hundred thousand

jobs and to me they're just it's just apples and oranges and it's a way to try to get out of the topic right now let's move on to the federal reserve in this transcript from january of two thousand and six that we find there is a lot of laughs in there a lot of praise for outgoing alan greenspan and a lot of talk about the fact that well we can't predict the future nobody can expect us to predict the future and yet they thought everything was going to be just fine you know josh we could start with you what do you think that really tells us in this transcript that we've seen. i guess it tells us more of the same but it's still interesting how. you know the federal reserve was asleep at the wheel you know it's interesting because that you know kind of tying it in alone with what you were just talking about how you know there's people on the right who very much don't like bailouts but yet they're supporting mitt romney who private equity exists because of tax loopholes that's

a rigged game private equity firms take no gamble when they invest in a company. and here they're upset as people should be in my view that the government was completely asleep at the wheel didn't see this coming and i think as william just said i mean a lot of things have been papered over unfortunately i still think there's a possibly a big recession coming a lot of our problems in america have been papered over there are still here though and unfortunately if we don't get any stimulus money in there's no there's not another version of tarp if there's no invert another version of. we're going to face some real serious problems like europe's having no. i'm curious to hear what you have to say about that we see now unfortunately if there's going to be a history book written about this where they were two thousand and six and how unprepared they were are we prepared for something to happen again if it works and i mean just today right s. and p. is downgrading downgrading the credit rating of

a number of european countries. yeah i would not conflate the federal reserve with the government the government and of course law or in september two thousand and four that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud and predicted it would cause a crisis and the industry itself warned that there were ninety percent of stated income loans were liar's loans by two thousand and six roughly one out of every three loans made was a liar's loans so the remarkable thing about the release of the fed trad scripts is that they absolutely refused to listen to anybody that was trying to tell them that it was a catastrophic problem in aus ng and that because of the financial derivatives the collateralized debt obligations and the c.d.s. the credit default swaps this was going to pose

a clear systemic risk and had to take down absentee ballot while it's mel host of the most elite financial institutions in the united states of america so what we've learned is a the federal reserve is really their economists are terrible in understanding the economy and b. they utterly ignore criminology to their disaster oh i guess that so is the role of release more bad news all the time gentlemen i want to thank both of you for joining us tonight. thank you thank you. all right just ahead of the show occupy d.c. might be getting a new address and new leaks are coming out about the u.s. warning iran about. that first which is going to join us to try to analyze if this means that things are really looking up. into the mirror military mechanisms to do the work to bring justice or accountability. i have every right to know

what my government should do if you want to know why i pay taxes. but i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know. welcome to the big picture. if.

i'm flooring mr. theater to believe the rock in the. protest nobody seems to know. the number of pepper spray to the face of the argument that they're being overly dramatic.

occupy d.c. has been one of the strongest and longest standing encampments since the occupy movement began almost four months ago located in macpherson square demonstrators have managed to stay almost untouched except for a few occasions like the one last month where police came in to tear down a structure that some campers and built but it looks like all of that could change and the occupy d.c. might be forced to move into a new home and district health department as expressed to sanitation concerns about the candidate saying if the trash is piling up as bring iran rats now after sharing their concern with d.c. mayor vincent gray it seems that he too is considering evicting the occupiers from mcpherson square and a lot of the national park service great talks about the health risks saying these risks are attributed to improper disposal and containment of trash and human waste this is led in part to an increase in rodents at and around the site inside tents and even at the food preparation area at a minimum to occupy d.c. sites and make fierce and square and freedom plaza must be consolidated to freedom plaza to allow for elimination of the right infestation cleanup and restoration of

the first square one thing here is though as w. j. reports a lot of people that live and work near the public parks say this rap problem is nothing new it's not too bad i mean you go where you are in the city. anywhere in the city there's rats everywhere you go out. you know everywhere you can be in the white house i never knew it b.c. map any ways you could do to me. so is mary great is using the rat issues an excuse to get rid of the occupiers you see when the movement first started he was in favor of the rights of people to protest here's a clip from october just a month into the movement where he spoke at a d.c. rally for democracy. the leaders of congress just chilling the way the days of the jacket got to tell you why the lights. ministrations on the journey clock just come and go but everybody keeps china nice to wait. but i'm sick and tired of waiting. while things change because last month he told

the washington post what is frustrating for me and i think of my own causes is what is the desired outcome here where you trying to get to you see signs that read end corporate rule well how do you do that gray's always been an outspoken activist himself on several issues and has participated in many demonstrations here in d.c. but it seems like he might be having a change of heart when it comes to being candid within his own city he looks to join a number a growing number of mayors across the country who have summarily evicted occupy encampments so we'll great take the advice to the sanitation committee foreseeing can't mitt was it a move or might he stand by his original sentiments i think we're just going to have to wait and see. well you got some interesting developments in the tensions between the u.s. and iran today the york times reporting of the obama administration has been using its secret communications channels to warn iran that closing the strait of hormuz is a red light and would provoke an american response in the meantime foreign policy magazine is detail the series of cia memos from the bush administration that had been leaked

which described israeli mossad posing as cia to recruit members of jindal or to wage a covert war against iran and its keep in mind that all of this information comes from anonymous officials so we have to figure out what we make of this p.r. push here to discuss with me is christopher swift fellow at the university of virginia law school center for national security law christopher thanks so much for joining us tonight good to be back so reports of using secret channels to communicate with iran do you think that if that's true that means that the u.s. is really taking it seriously we've had a secret back to back channels to iran since the revolution in seventy nine some of them are through embassies and some of them and all through the suits the iranians carry their water here at the pakistani embassy they have a special interest section united states does it through switzerland the swiss embassy there are not doing it very switzerland is what they were they had these back channel communications and look these are very important not necessarily because they can solve problems but because having some transparency on both sides can lead people on both sides to take the steps necessary to prevent problems so do

you have any ideas though if it's not switzerland this time that. they should be inappropriate for me to speculate but we have had the united states government has had back channel communications to iran direct and indirect for a very long time and when we need them we use them they have the same thing with us when they need to send us a signal or communicate with us they don't always do it through president clinton shots office i'm curious to you know let's say that they did indeed close down the strait of hormuz or could iran even do it you know what they're naval power and so then what the u.s. is saying is that this would be a red line that this would. to elicit some type of an american response that does not mean there would have to be a military response where the response would be implemented by the military but it might not necessarily be a violent response it depends on what iran did to close the strait the straits thirty five miles wide the actual shipping lanes for you know what they call post panamax super tankers are only about two miles wide from a naval perspective that's really really narrow right down in the new york times

article described as having a knife fight in a phone booth so there are a lot of things iran could do to shut it down but depending on what they did i think that's what would describe would determine what the u.s. navy's response would be if it's mining they can deploy the minesweepers if you know they sink ships in the in the actual strait itself i think it's likely that you're going to see the u.s. navy go after the ships that sank the ships the question is how quickly does this sort of thing escalate if it does go military and one of the consequences and the consequences are pretty clear that it would be it would be short it would be really nasty and it would ultimately be very expensive primarily for iraq well it seems like there is an effort in some ways to maybe diffuse something i'm curious as to what you think about so suddenly today foreign policy is spoken to a number of former cia officials and these memos from the bush administration have been leaked saying that israeli mossad are posing as cia agents to like i said to try to recruit people to wage a covert war against iran and that the cia the bush administration really hated it

was really mad at israel for doing this what's your take well look the fact of the matter is an espionage people lie and pretend to be other people in order to get information we do it the russian federation does it israel does it every country on the planet does it so we shouldn't be that shocked that this goes on the timing of these things are interesting but i don't know if there's enough information available here and i don't know if the sources are credible enough for us to draw any connections connections we can draw is that the value of the iranian currency is dropping against the u.s. dollar by the hour the europeans are more and more likely to implement oil sanctions on iran. and the chinese are very worried about what's going on because they get all of that oil from the persian gulf and something going bad in the strait of hormuz means the china's economy and also japan's economy will hit the toilet so what do you think is really going to happen anyway we've had a wide variety of opinions if you have a problem iran is a state within a state right and a lot of people when they think of iran they think of the mullahs and they think of

bachmann but the fact of the matter is the iranian revolution guard corps has created its sort of own all of bill of terry corrupt all of the arche within the iranian state so when we talk to iran or and when rahm's making decisions about what it's going to do in foreign affairs we're not sure whether that's the iranian state or whether that's the guard corps so one of the questions i have one of the things that would be very interesting interesting to know is whether our back to communications are in fact to the state including the supreme leader and whether the supreme leader actually has the kind of control that we hoped he would have i would hope you would have over the iran revolutionary guard corps i'm totally with you there in curiosity i would love to know all of this and you know clearly there's something of the administration wants us to know if you have government officials leaking stories like this to the new york times that there are some kind of communications going on through these channels right right at this moment christopher i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight pleasure. why we are taking a break right. into the only military mechanisms that do not work to

bring justice or accountability. i have every right to know what my government should do if you want to know why i pay taxes. but i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything. i'm trying hard welcome to the big picture.