system companies that don't do will get weeded out so the only companies that continue to perform and continue to survive under a couple systems are companies that have demonstrated some success in serving their customers willingly right in a capitalist system you have both the risk and reward and over the past thirty years or so any united states anyway whenever a bank or a corporation experiences any kind of risk or any kind of loss they lobby the government to change the financial laws to make it impossible for them to sustain any losses therefore they're not taking any risks they're just rent seeking they're just vacuuming at cash which leads me to my next question the concentration of wealth in america and britain has grown rapidly unequal in the past forty years as these banks and corporations simply vacuum up all the equity and take no risk what does this matter yes i mean clearly these sort of economic systems anything you've

seen them when we've discussed previously the examples of egypt and tunisia what they and you know the they come under the pretext of being good for the economy being good for the national greatness of the nation or they always find nice sounding pretext for why these just these interventions into the market economy are justified however the real consequences of it is always that it ends up either benefiting the status quo benefiting the people who are in charge or no no this isn't this the real problem with this is not just that it's not fair the real problem with it is that it's very destructive economically because what it means is that you keep the unproductive companies and the unproductive firms and industries you keep them alive and they continue to survive sucking up valuable resources that would be used otherwise in society and channeling these resources capital and labor office space the computing power all of that stuff they channel it into unproductive uses of copper. and the result of that the product that they produce

is something that is obviously not desired by society as evidenced by the fact that they fail on the free market so you buy by giving corporations the incentive to both be able to make profits and to make losses you give them again the idea of risk reward there is always a risk associated with when you try to make reward so if you take out the punishment if you take out the risk if you take out the possibility of losing from this you're going to end up with corporations that are unproductive and i think this is this is this is really the reason that the economies of the u.s. and britain i would say are stuck in a recession because so much of the productive capital of the country so much of the smart people so much of the office space so much of the computers in the country are being used in unproductive enterprises and unproductive industries and if these industries were allowed to fail people in them would move on to other productive avenues of economic activity and that would be much better for everyone in society

right so you end up in britain and in the u.s. with financial dictators and meanwhile the middle east the dictator corporatist like adopt the ben ali and move barack. they've been overthrown more last or in the process of being overthrown are there is this arab spring has been going on so what does this mean for the west of course the dictators in the west who rely on the resources that they were getting from the dictators in the middle east well i think the interesting thing is to see how if you look at a place like egypt right now we're seeing the very lucian's continuing the sort of struggle between the old order the of the remnants of the mubarak regime who are still in power versus the current. the versus the new forces that are being unleashed by the revolution i mean one of the key issues that is being fought over is the issue of the loan from the eye enough to egypt there's a lot of back and forth between the i.m.f. and different members of the egyptian government about whether. those laws are

going to take place or not and whether they're going to be provided to low interest rates or not and what sort of conditionality is attached to them. a lot of talk about it but sir for yet the egyptian government has not officially taken on those loans what's happening is that the rating of the egyptian government is being downgraded by. rating agencies and that the borrowing costs of the egyptian government are getting very high so people know we're expecting a fiscal or possibly a year monetary crisis in egypt which is you know obviously going to be a very bad thing the unfortunate thing is that this is being used as a justification for rushing through the i.m.f. loan and for getting into even more debt than other people looking at it logically and saying this road of spending and borrowing has brought us to the brink of disaster and we should just quit this idea of continuing to think that we could borrow from outside in order to build our country it has not worked for thirty years almost in which mubarak has been in power it has only served to enrich

mubarak and his cronies and it has not brought development of the country all that it has done is increase the indebtedness of the country and make people liable for paying more and more and more of their income towards taxes to go towards paying off interest on that and i think egypt needs to make a clean break with the past with these policies of the mubarak era from the respect of particularly by making a statement on the debt. letting the foreign debt should be basically repudiated and mubarak should be made liable for it and the domestic that they need to reach a sort of agreement with the domestic creditors that you know it saves the save the banking system advance it from a collapse by recapitalizing the banks in case they have a problem with liquidity because of the treasuries and then after that they must have a balanced budget that is no alternative to fiscal responsibility as you look at europe and what is happening in europe or in the us or in arab countries there really is no alternative for as an individual or as a country there's no. alternatives to being fiscally responsible so the pass

through it is to eliminate interest payments as a massive part of the budget and reformulate the budget in a way that doesn't hurt the poor and in a way that stops giving favors to the connected people from the regime and as a result leaves the budget being able to be balanced without having to resort to foreign borrowing because this is really the main problem if you get involved in foreign borrowing it leads to puppet regimes that don't have that it's a messy and for their people as mubarak and the not his regime are and it also leads to a massive giant drags on the economy as people continue to generate more and more and more money that goes simply towards paying off taxes to go towards paying off interest on the debts right move barack is gone but now it's time to overthrow the real dictator that being of course the i.m.f. now we've had the arab spring and then we found the occupy wall street movement now a new movement is taking shape around the world these are up protestors who are protesting again so people either stop on line piracy act and related intellectual

property laws that are attacking the internet from the corporate side the core protest want total control of the internet and is that a fair statement are is this a case of the corporatist who are attacking the innovators the entrepreneurs of the free marketeers do you see this playing out as as an extension really of this global insurrection absolutely i think it's what we're seeing with the internet is very interesting because as markets in the real world continue to be strangled and controlled more and more by the managerial state by governments all over the world the internet is really the place where the market where the free market has gone because in the internet you can click anywhere you want and you can decide to use any website you want and people have the freedom of choice and because they have the freedom of choice in their choices aren't and forced upon them upon which what so they should read which website is used for their e-mail they end up making choices on the providers of these services that are for i would argue better. and

what would happen if you had a central planner trying to dictate this to them under the pretext of some of the usual corporatist excuses so because the internet is a wonderful place where you can exchange all this information very freely it leads to good information marketplace as well as a good example of a proper marketplace what we're seeing with open people is just a very strong attempt to try and bring in the power of the state from the real world onto the internet and so now the failure and success of websites will none depend about whether on whether people want to click on them or people want to use them but the failure will depend on what some particular bureaucrat decides in some position of authority in the government so this of course it would be very dangerous you know from the from the perspective of the freedom of information because what it does is it leaves the knowledge and the information that is available for members of society to be decided by particular people who get to know everything and then decide what you should be able to know the optimistic thing about it is that the internet is just it's

a very resilient thing and it's really hard to clamp down on international connectivity and you know it was very encouraging what happened with. with people. in terms of actually. alerting a lot of people to the reality of the problems of the intellectual property paradigm it's the problem is much deeper than just these two acts which are probably going to die in congress now the problem really is in state and fortunes of intellectual property which serves. very pernicious way it harms those the artists who produce the art or the authors who publish the books as well as the then the fans or the readers who want to consume this material neither of them really benefits from intellectual property laws they go towards the middleman basically and what technology is allowing us more and more ways to cut out the middleman more and more ways for fans to communicate directly with musicians they like to listen to or readers with authors and this cuts out the profit that middlemen can make and so this is why did the. this industry's trying to bring in

the government in order to keep their old antiquated model so that they could continue to keep their job as the middleman and they want the state to enforce that that's exactly the definition of corporatism and so you see people like chris dodd going on about you know hollywood creates jobs or hollywood is an important part of the u.s. economy was basically you know it's a tiny part of the u.s. economy to study part of the world economy and you know most importantly it's very easy for them to find other business models business models that actually serve the artist rather than serve the old. production industry that really is out of date and out of place today ok seventy nine ers that's all the time we have on the kaiser report thanks so much for being on thanks let's. do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacy herbert all right thank my guests a for dinner most if you want to send me an e-mail please do so at kaiser reported r t t v dot ru until next time i started saying.

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 i'm tom harpur welcome to the big show.

welcome they alone we'll get the real headlines with none of the mersey we're going live to washington d.c. now tonight we're going to speak to josh fox director of the anti fracking documentary gasland yesterday while attempting to film a hearing on the hill foxes arrested by capitol police so he's going to tell us his story then we'll take a look at what an earlier withdrawal plan in afghanistan really means for giving up and packing our bags and should we have done this much sooner robert farley is going to join us plus federal reserve chairman ben bernanke he gave a gloomy warning today in testimony on capitol hill he says the unsustainable

deficits have major costs and stops fears that the u.s. could be the next greece so is he right or discuss it with william black we're going to all that and more for tonight including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. it so yesterday secretary of defense leon panetta announced some big news that contrary to what the schedule has been thus far for u.s. troops to hand over control to afghan forces the end of twenty fourteen well all that might be happening more than a year earlier. the end of u.s. combat operations in afghanistan could come sooner than expected defense secretary leon panetta saying the u.s. hopes to make the transition from a combat role to a training and advisory role by the middle of next year the defense department is now targeting next year for an end to u.s. combat operations in afghanistan u.s. troops are going to stop their active combat part of the mission in afghanistan

that is happening next year right now ninety five thousand troops are in afghanistan twenty two thousand are scheduled to come home this fall and all u.s. combat troops are expected to be out of afghanistan by the end of two thousand and fourteen u.s. troops will stop fighting in afghanistan start training and advising defense secretary leon panetta saying some american forces will stay on to assist in the training of the afghan army but ground operations would cease. and this was much earlier than originally planned. are now this is a big announcement i want to get into what exactly it means and says about the war in afghanistan in our first interview tonight or later second interview tonight but first let's take a few minutes to examine the reactions you know my constant gripe with the mainstream media in the sense that they devote a really pathetic amount of time to covering our wars abroad so an announcement of the combat mission will be ending more than a year earlier than originally planned that's a big deal and i'm really happy that they're covering it today but there is

something that mitt romney said last night after the announcement that is of particular interest take a look. he announced that so the taliban hears that the pakistanis are the afghan leaders here why in the world do you go to the people that you're fighting with and tell them the day you're pulling out your troops it makes absolutely no sense does not even jerry is putting in jeopardy the mission of the united states of america and our commitment to freedom use wrong. now there are some of you out there that may agree and say you shouldn't tell the people you're fighting against when you're going to pull out troops because well you should do that but c'mon people with almost one hundred thousand troops in the country it's not like you're going to take anybody by surprise but there is a larger point to all of this say as much as mitt romney might be complaining about the fact that there is going to be a very large very big public change in afghanistan we have to realize that things like this will soon become rarities if the mainstream media already provides barely

any coverage of our wars abroad except for when big announcements like this are made or when an important anniversary is passed you can bet they are only going to go even less about what our military and our cia are doing on our behalf abroad in the future you think of the shadow wars that have been expanding other both the bush and especially the obama administration drone strikes in pakistan yemen and somalia think about the new strategic review that was unveiled that wants to put more focus on special operations give a lot more money to those robots that we flying in the sky and we've already seen all this in action and all we get are a little bit of tidbits ok there were two hostages rescued from somalia the other week but did you know that the weekend before that there was also a drone strike or how about the news today at the philippine military said that they killed southeast asia's most wanted terrorist yesterday in a u.s. backed airstrike did you know that we have had six hundred special forces deployed there since two thousand and two so the more spread out everything becomes the more we focus on small targeted missions the more secretive they will become and less

all of us will know the less will know that is unless we put more pressure on the government for. transparency the way that the a.c.l.u. is currently suing the government to get details about the targeted killing program of this administration specifically about three drone strikes conducted in yemen last year that killed american citizens including anwar all along the way we've seen reporters like jeremy scahill go to somalia report on see a proxy prisons there to tell all of us the real story now of course the problem here is that the mainstream media they won't do any of that reporting they initially attacked scahill for that piece he was criticized for revealing national security secrets because you know that nobody loves to keep a secret more than the mainstream media so they can keep their ties and all of their stores as high up in the government and at the pentagon and never get in anyone's way so just realize what's coming and remember that thus far in the build up to what will soon become the norm the mainstream media has consistently chosen to miss.

well we've spoken a lot about hydraulic fracturing aka fracking here on the show the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock and one which the natural gas industry is increasingly using across the u.s. over fracking as negative consequences on communities and yesterday and a house side subcommittee hearing e.p.a. investigation into groundwater contamination in pavilion wyoming was being discussed and that's where josh fox director of the film gas land found himself arrested by capitol police for attempting to film the hearing boxes charged with unlawful entry and is going to have to appear in d.c. superior court on feb fifteenth but what exactly happened and what does it all say for the freedom of speech and the transparency which has been promised by members of congress joining me from our studio in new york is josh fox director of the academy award nominated documentary gasland josh it's nice to have you back on the show tonight and i guess if you could just start by telling us what exactly

happened yesterday how it is that you found yourself arrested. well we were doing what was kind of a routine thing for us which is to go and tape a public hearing we've taped hundreds of public hearings across the country and we've certainly done this in congress before the procedure the protocol is to allow the committee to know that you would like to to to tape and then usually what has happened in the past under democratic congress is they say ok well you can come right in since the republicans took over congress however we have had obstruction after obstruction and very difficult time being act granted official access to hearings on fracking and this started to happen with a case that's very sensitive and personal to us and it's at the core of our film the case of pavillion wyoming in pavillion wyoming which is featured in the first film gas land the e.p.a. has done a meticulous three and a half year investigation into the groundwater contamination there i mean really an

incredible amount of detective work and science has came to bear in pavilion what they showed was there was fifty times the level of benzene in the groundwater including other contaminants that were harmful that were associated with gas drilling and the e.p.a. report specifically says the likely cause is fracking you know this is the this is a huge moment because it's the first time e.p.a. has done that with this new fracking campaign of the last ten years the first time so what's happening here is the republicans are called here have called here to basically peat put the e.p.a. on trial they called in the investigator the regional administrator and they stuffed the panel with oil and gas lobbyists to attack e.p.a. report that showed fracking was the likely cause of contamination groundwater and since we've been following these and are activists cowboys and pavillion who've been petitioning for years to get their case reviewed and the results came back with what they knew to be true which is that their water was contaminated after fracking occurred which we want to take this and we were getting

a lot of flak so i decided after a second to you know i think you'd give us more detail where was it just knew that wasn't allowed to go and found this hearing where there are other crews there that were not allowed or did they keep the whole thing closed off. well usually the way we thought of hearings is that i go with my editor countermanded co-creator met sanchez and will cover it a very comprehensive way we were told that we were not allowed to film because we didn't have press credentials which is something that is particular to the hill there are a bunch of reporters that only work down on the hill we don't live there so we have never applied for those credentials but we never have made it to the first amendment is your credential the first amendment says congress shall make no law and that infringes upon the freedom of the press there are other things the first amendment says but that's definitely in there so we don't need permission to some a public area it's protocol because there are certain the just tickle things but in this case there was no one else there who had showed up to film this hearing we tried to hire accredited people who were not busy that day and that when we when we

were when they were told when we when they were asked who they were working for and they said us they were told they could not be admitted so this was very specific about us getting on well how did you know that there was a chance when you went and that you might get they might have to risk arrest dr salute i mean this was a moment when we had felt. shut out for long enough. and. i had appealed specifically to the chairman staff representative republican representative andy harris and they had not gotten back to us even though they said they would so we showed up knowing full well that there might be a confrontation oh this is a risk as a reporter to to walk into a situation where there might be a conversation with congress because you don't know what the repercussions are but that as it was we had nothing to lose we weren't getting a lot in the congress anyway we had already been shut out so matt sanchez who had his camera out in the hallway was told he couldn't come in the room he was blocked i had my camera in the case and

a tripod so i just walked in even though they had said let me search your bag and i said no and then i walked into the room and i set up my tripod immediately when i set up my tripod i saw staffers come up and say you cannot tape record of course we were recording this the whole time and then. after about ten or fifteen minutes which i explained we appealed to the chair get the get the chair to weigh in on this then police start to arrive and the members start to run for the beginning of the hearing the members of congress all of a sudden i look over my shoulder and i realize this whole conversation is being filmed by members of congress and the only person there cameras are on their recording the only person being threatened us with the rest is me and the i value many of them are going back to. jobs and i know there are others i know that are also i think i'm going to delay here on gas land there's going to follow up here documentary is all that's going to be in it. well here's the here's the main thing . to one of the main focus is is a new form of contamination which is the contamination of money in washington

fracking money in washington every dollar that these fracking companies contribute to campaigns specifically in this case with the republicans is a contaminant in our democracy and that's what we're investigating and when you have a house panel that's clearly attacking science the investigators looking at the science and then you have investigators like myself reporting on this and they're locked up and thrown in jail by order of the chairman of the committee that's not government anymore let's just agree that's behaving in a way that's totally unacceptable it's a violation of civil rights it's a violation of the first amendment it's a violation of the constitution. and i would add that it's as shortsighted as fracking itself fracking is the short term a lot of money in a big windfall profit for corporations the new left the devil take the future you've left this contamination in the ground forever this decision might have been initially satisfying to lock me up and throw me in jail put clearly there's been

a backlash and i think that this shows the kind of snap judgment and instant gratification that motivates this particular. form of governing that is the hallmark of this republican congress well you know i think as i said the jam john boehner is promise of transparency was taken out with me in here goes up president obama actually addressed fracking when he was giving a state of the union address the other week and i'm curious as to what you thought of his message because on one hand he said the working to have regulations that if any of these companies want to do fracking then they're going to have to disclose the kind of chemicals that the bay use but at the same time he also you know a lot of the government said that fracking is a great thing and this is how we came up with these technologies so you know is he walking a thin line there. no it was more than that it was definitely an endorsement of natural gas drilling and it was the kind of very painful moment i think for many of

us who've been trying to make. it known the truth about fracking he also at length quoted statistics which are not true about fracking one hundred years of natural gas in the ground. at the same time so this is quite difficult you know at the same time his e.p.a. has been incredibly aggressive and specifically obama's e.p.a. obama raised the budget by the d.p.a. by i think was thirty four percent in its first year the biggest jump in e.p.a. funding increase in twenty years and the first time ever their budget was over ten billion dollars so they've been doing an incredible job the obama administration's also been shown to be sensitive to the will of the people into the protests to keystone x.l. so when taking a look at this in a bigger sense it's a mixed bag certainly we agree that the companies that have to be disclosing the chemicals and corporations should not be allowed to bury literally bury their

secrets in the ground at the expense of america's public health on the other hand i think the president is wrong about endorsing that for gas because it is the form of energy which stands in the way of renewable energy and sustainable economics and sustainable sustainable real energy that we need to make the transition to the debate over this certainly isn't going well and josh thanks so much for joining us tonight telling us your story and we'll catch back up with you when you have that hearing here in d.c. at the district court thanks. thanks love. i there's still much more to come tonight and everything all the details on. hearing adult like a more in-depth look at the drawdown in afghanistan with robert farley. people calling what you said for free and fair elections.

and we're still reporting from the summer as you can hear behind me loud explosions . in the. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome is

a big issue. for living under house arrest for four hundred and twenty days with a co-founder joining us on is finally having his day in england's supreme court if you remember song was originally accused of sexual misconduct by two.