but nothing to the global economy with my. no holds barred look at the global financial headlines. there's a report on our. welcome to the a lot of show we'll get the real headlines with none of the mersey are going to live in washington d.c. now and i would have two great panels for you first we finally find out of the u.s. and israel were officially behind the stuxnet virus so we'll talk about all the possibilities of this new frontier of cyber war as news comes out of another mass killing in syria pressure for international action is stepping up we're going to look at the divide between civilian and military leaders on that one and try to gauge the best outcome then we'll have our usual financial checkup of lauren lyster but with a little bit of a twist to the jobs numbers in the u.s. the unemployment situation in europe all the economic indicators are so bad we need

a couple people to talk this one out so richard asco will be joining laura tonight while all of that morphy tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look what the mainstream media decided to me. all right first things first one of the biggest stories of the day is of course the economy and it's not good. bad news on the job front and renewed fears the economy is sputtering yet again for the job market this morning has republicans and mitt romney taking aim at president obama got points for team obama a dismal may jobs report employers created only sixty nine thousand jobs in may just sixty nine thousand jobs were created last month missing expectations of more than twice that number is made worse for all the more painful for the president it's a gut punch just sixty nine thousand jobs were added in the month of may not such

great news because the cheeping up to be another brutal day on wall street the weakest jobs numbers in a year send the stock market tumbling the unemployment rate. to eight point two percent a disappointing also raising some concerns about the overall economy and the struggling recovery monthly rate rising for the first time in nearly a year now eight point two percent after a jobs report that was far weaker than most economists expected or the white house had hoped sparking fresh concerns the u.s. economy is hitting a brick wall employers created sixty nine thousand jobs in may the fewest in a year very bad news for the white house. now we'll get into a larger discussion about that on our show tonight too because that is some serious business but it's not the only news out there and there is another big story in new york times today put out a report that affirms that it was in fact u.s. working with israel who developed the stuxnet virus that attacked iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities and in fact it all began during the bush

administration with a program code named olympic games and the way the new york times put it from the first months in office president obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on iran's computer networks so not only another example of a continuation of the bush policy but another example of another expansion of another bush policy but anyway we're going to get into all the details of what that means in our first interview tonight but before we get there there's just a little something that i have to point out a little. something called hypocrisy you see the way the new york times put this story together was by speaking with current and former american european and israeli officials involved in the program as well as a range of outside experts and they did all of this over the range of the last eighteen months and as usual nobody will allow would allow their names to be used because the times wrote the effort remains highly classified and parts of it continue to this day so what you have is another report based on anonymous sources

delving out classified information and everyone was totally cool of it and the white house is cool with it because i'm sure that they approved of the story coming out because if they haven't noticed lately with the whole kill list thing they have really been keen on getting the word out getting the articles written the portray the president as a total bad ass signing off on executions waging cyber warfare by launching the most sophisticated computer virus of all time oh and how can we forget he also got bin laden now clearly i'm being a little sarcastic here i think you all know how i feel now about the many legal violations committed by our former constitutional law professor commander in chief violations so-called liberals are now ok with because it's obama that's committing them and he's our guy but just think about it to something seem a little bit strange to you a little off isn't this the same white house as waging an unprecedented war against whistleblowers charging more people with the espionage act than any other president in our history yep same guy same administration that's repeatedly used the state

secrets privilege in courtrooms because they don't want to damage national security but when it comes to leaking a story to the new york times out waging cyberwar around election time even though as they write parts of this highly classified program are still ongoing then suddenly it's ok i mean it really is just so in your face i do not know how people take themselves seriously and believe me so whistleblowers out there who have been persecuted for trying to expose fraud and waste and abuse well they've noticed thomas drake for example who's been on our show he was tweeting about this today saying wanna bet these officials won't get busted for his executive branch leaking i got to say that is exactly what you know who didn't notice any of this blatant hypocrisy today. that would be the mainstream media i didn't even see most channels or most shows talking about this and chuck todd gave it a few minutes today but it clearly didn't make the top of the list. it's a huge story and on any other day we'd be talking about this the u.s.

government essentially acknowledging that it is at war but in cyberspace with the wrong. dare i say they buy into the bad ass theory to any way i think you get my point of how the most blatant in your face white house hypocrisy the mainstream media chooses to miss. all right so let's move on to our first panel of the evening first we continue on with these revelations about stuxnet its development by both the u.s. and israel and the obama administration's very aggressive inactivates of the cyber attacks second we'll take a look another look at syria as news of another mass execution comes out in the push for international action grows louder from political leaders to ask what the real options are joining me to discuss is arsalan iftikhar our international human rights lawyer and author of the book islamic pact pacifism global muslims in the

post osama era and from our studio in new york is scott horton contributing editor on legal and national security matters for harper's magazine gentlemen thank you so much for joining me tonight now so we're going to start off with these revelations like i said about stuxnet about this cyber warfare and scott i want to get your take first because you and i have spoken about this before when i think it was last year suddenly we had military officials here in the u.s. come out and say that a cyber attack will be seen as an act of war that could warrant a military response so looking at what's going on here is this war. yeah well absolutely it raises that question i mean we know the pentagon has been working on a doctor in the shift for some time redefining what sorts of could be cautious betty that is cause for warfare and they've been. then forward the idea that a cyber attack on the territory of the united states could just as well be an act

of war as an attack by a missile or a bombing and now we see the u.s. has adopted as part of its covert war not so covert covert war with iran in fact exactly these same sorts of cyber techniques so yeah it certainly looks hypocritical but you know i think to me the really striking thing about these disclosures like the ones that came earlier in the week concerning the drone program the president's kill list is it all begins to look an awful lot like a program a sort of fake game show program that started the night live had called key in a mosque macho it is the obama administration gearing up for election season trying to demonstrate to the american public that is more as you said more of a bad ass more aggressive more willing to take risks and be proactive

even than its predecessor the bush administration was and i think that what we're seeing is the aspect of. campaign politics dominating the national security process and that's got to trouble a lot of people yeah there's definitely a lot of campaign politics involved i would say so but so then our son what's your take because i when hand if you look at the way that this piece the new york times has written it said that the president why had all of this to be as covert as possible they didn't want us to acknowledge that they were doing it because then other countries might think that it's ok to. say now it's ok for us to talk about it well you know my takeaway from all of this is that a cyber attack is better than any military attack or you know much of want to be jason bourne staking out iranian nuclear scientists on the streets of tehran you know right now you know they see this cyber attack this sort of a second parallel to the. the public diplomacy efforts that have recently taken place in france with officials to try and find some sort of political solution to

this issue now the main nuclear plants that are in question the natanz plants and the florida plant you know obviously the international community wants to make sure that iran doesn't need a rich twenty percent pure uranium under international law the five percent can't be reached for civilian purposes and so again i think at the end of the day a cyber attack you know in the twenty first century world that we live in is a much better proposition than military attacks or covert assassinations and so in that sense i guess you have to ask is is this just the next step is this going to be the normal thing already we have an increasing reliance on the use of drones and so you have people that are sitting thousands of miles away that are pushing a button to launch a drone strike and now i guess the next phase is you're going to have people sitting in front of a computer screen just launching a computer attack i mean is this mean that i guess it will get a little hopefully less bloody for us. well you probably have you know more guys in

there tell you why you sitting in their mom's basement you know writing up these gamer code viruses as opposed to you know these hit squads that are essentially going out and take have taken out several year on a nuclear scientists or you know the extrajudicial killings of innocent people and even american citizens of the drone system are now scott you know i'm curious too because we've lately heard a lot of ramping up from a lot of politicians from pundits from military officials about this threat of cyber war about how we need to allocate more resources to it and we've seen more resources allocated to it if you look at recent defense budgets you look at what's going on in congress and so. is it all justified or you know we've had discussions on this show asking how much of it is a little bit of the the yellow cake you know is it coincidence that we're the ones that are doing this first and yet we're saying that everyone else is we need to prove protect ourselves from an attack therefore pump more money into it. well i want to go back for a second first of this question of cyber warfare and you know and how much of the

series and how much of it that is objectionable i think if we look at what's going on with this attack described in the new york times today you know if it results in this able in a nuclear plant frankly that's not going to be cause for war and it's not so serious in fact i think most people the united states would be appy to have it happen if it's an act of sabotage that produced an explosion a nuclear detonation that killed a lot of people that will be a different question altogether so i think as described it's relatively innocuous and not so troubling but cyber war can be used for a much more aggressive the much more harmful sorts of attacks so i think the risk perception there's no doubt about it i mean we're moving into an era and which cyber attacks are i mean our new technology our reliance on computers creates with it certain vulnerabilities and you do have to protect yourself against them on the

other hand you know we've got a lot of figures including very prominent figures from the bush years who are out in the marketplace now exploiting this fear to make a lot of money so they're profiteering off of it so it's a it's a real risk but it's one risk of mugs the great many. i want to move on for the sake of time here too because we don't have too much left to syria where of course there was the massacre over the weekend where more than a hundred people were killed a lot of them children the houla massacre now today there's news twelve more people . i think i have that number right mass execution and you have a lot of different voices of course sort of all over the world you have william hague who's basically opening the door for intervention hillary clinton is saying that if syria falls into a civil war it's going to be russia's fault you have putin merkel that are saying there needs to be a diplomatic solution you have bill clinton who is saying this is a bosnia type scenario and then at the same time you have defense leaders here in

the u.s. in the u.k. and nato that are saying that this is not a situation where you need to have military intervention because there's no clear exit strategy there's no clear goal and so i just want to hear from each of you are so long you know what what do you think is going on here it is the situation getting to the point where someone is going to act no matter what maybe someone will act unilaterally or what's happening but i think that's the million dollar question i think after libya syria is now become sort of the global sticky wicket if you will you know where you have an oppressive regime the bashar al assad regime that has claimed on its own civilian population killed in excess of twelve thousand people let's not forget when we authorize nato intervention for libya we did so when. you had merely threatened to attack the city of benghazi which is about the size of charlotte north carolina as we know from the president's speech here we have people actually being slaughtered on the ground as you mentioned the recent

houla massacre were over one hundred people were killed over forty nine children that were killed the problem here becomes what to do in terms of intervention strategies so some people have suggested creating humanitarian corridors to turkey into jordan or c. theory as their seed zones which. be patrolled by un or nato or turkish forces the problem with that is the last time there was a safe zone was in bosnia and july one thousand nine hundred five were eight thousand bosnian muslim men were then eventually systematically slaughtered while the blue helmets stood by and essentially watched the problem is that we can't we can't see this devolve into a civil war because then it would become a regional war and the great thing about intervention is that not only has the french foreign ministry come out in support of some sort of an intervention so has turkey as the regional power series with their goals clout and so i think that there is a plurality of a consensus that something does need to be done now that doesn't necessarily mean

putting any boots on the ground you know we don't put boots on the ground in libya either but you know essentially to understand that if we continue to lead bashar al assad killers on people with impunity that it's going to turn into even more of a nightmare than it already is. you have the last word on this too and i'm just curious if you think if this is kind of a blame game type scenario where you know if you don't act that it really does devolve into a full blown civil war then you get to blame whoever didn't want to intervene if you intervene and it goes wrong then you get to blame the powers that are pushing for this type of intervention the whole time. no i think it's definitely an extremely complex and difficult problem for the great powers for the syrians for the regional powers but i just make two points here one is that you know of this missile of kofi and ions mission and the and the un's involvement that's a mistake in fact i think you know the un has definitely served the world community

very well so far in part by validating the reports of massacres they've gone on by documenting it by eliminating the government in damascus is ability to dissemble about all this that's something strongly important fact and laying the groundwork for some ultimate solution secondly i think i wouldn't be surprised if we didn't ultimately see russia and also china moving towards a sort of your many solution here that is one that brings pressure to bear on this side for him and potentially also a couple of other leading figures of his government to leave and stalling a new government that offers some accommodation to the opposition figures that's gotta be a better solution than arming opposition groups which would escalate the press towards a civil war which in the end of the day would result in the deaths of many

thousands more people that's not a desirable outcome there really has to be i think infosys here on the human rights dimension of the problem not the global politics dimension hi gentlemen love i got to wrap it out but i know this is only going to develop further i think i in the coming days and weeks i want to thank you both for joining us tonight things. high time for a quick break that coming up next we have another panel for your fashion edition of financial check out because there is just so much that i can honestly. our concern. might actually be time. that it's going to kill or break a. radio. you

know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you know. they're part of it and realize that everything. is a big. story with the. book and they alone and so they'll get the real headlines with none of them are the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and what actually matters to those viewers and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anymore if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back to t.v. .

to the capital account i'm lauren lyster. ok it's time for our weekly financial check up and there is plenty to talk about today jobs numbers released by the bureau of labor statistics for the month of may and they are not good the economy added only fifty nine thousand jobs in may and to make matters worse the totals from march and april or revised downward

a total of forty nine thousand unemployment rate ticked up to eight point two percent. and long term unemployment jumped to five point four million so that makes around forty two percent of the unemployed now long term unemployed now at the same time in the eurozone the e used to just ticks off as euro stat said that around seventeen point four million people were out of work in april and that is about eleven percent of the working population which is the highest level since records began in one thousand nine hundred five so how do a rabbi our heads around all of this bad news here to discuss it with me is lauren lyster host of the capital account here on our t.v. and joining us from our studio in los angeles is richard senior fellow with campaign for america's future and host of the breakdown we act radio in washington d.c. thank you both for joining me tonight and laura i'm just going to start with you in terms of all these numbers that i just spouted off mean how bad is this bad news well it's pretty bad news because as you pointed out there is

a lot of it to digest so in the united states where in the past month when i've been breaking down these jobs reports and going through analysis you know the headline number will look good and then you dig through when you see that labor force participation and long term unemployment and all these other issues below the surface where there is a major problem here you have this jobs report that is just so bad sixty nine thousand jobs created one hundred fifty thousand were expected to headline unemployment rate going down a little bit and you have to remember to these are government numbers they're massage they're rosier you have to imagine then what the real picture probably is so in terms of the u.s. jobs report these are really bad numbers in addition to those structural issues appear to still be a huge challenge and continuing to exhibit the trend that you mentioned a number of which in your opening with long term unemployment at forty two percent rising the duration of unemployment two times the historical average if these are just bad numbers you know they're very bad numbers here that's a really good point about the fact that normally you kind of have to dig through the headlines to get to the real dirt here there is no digging necessary it's just

all right out there and so richard. specifically when we talk about this issue of long term unemployment thanks to some congressional moves lately we've seen a lot of states take down their maximum unemployment figure for time from ninety nine weeks to seventy nine weeks in some places it's short is fifty nine weeks and so i'm just taking all that into account rate a lot of people are going to lose their unemployment benefits very soon and there's more people that have been long term unemployed how do we tackle something like that. well you know i think we tackle it first and foremost by telling the truth to people which is that even when you know it what we're saying now numbers aren't meeting expectations expectations were terrible when we had downsized our ability to believe that we can put people back to work so you know even the president's own forecasts don't have us going back to a reasonable level of employment by historical standards until two thousand and

twenty one and now we're doing worse than that so i think the first thing we do is remind people that we have a crisis in this country and it's not deficit spending it's unemployment so when people get these are human tragedies these millions of people who are long term unemployed and they're basically being discarded in the policy debate and thrown away and i think we say for them and everyone else look this is a crisis a human crisis for them for a generation of people coming into the workforce the younger people and everybody in between and i think that's how we start but in that sense because it is getting worse because we're seeing austerity really go the opposite direction for europe do you think that it might actually shift the political debate here a little bit move the republican party you know away from cuts because we also have the c.d.o. report right that came out saying that we were going to go off a fiscal cliff evolve the budget cuts were enacted well i think that there is oh sorry go ahead sorry go ahead lauren far as well the one thing i want to bring up

is when we had this debate about austerity what are we talking about with austerity i feel like it's become this catch all to mean something bad we don't like but that has to do with cuts i mean there are different things to look at what if you cut spending but also cut taxes i mean that's another thing that you could look at and when we talk about this debate about the deficit the thing that i do want to add is yes of course unemployment is a human crisis that affects people but when you look at employers and what's going to spur employers to hire and to spend you have a lot of lack of confidence they don't know what a government is going to do as far as regulatory policy as far as tax policy as far as this fiscal cliff that. nobody is talking about at the end of the year which basically goes to the fact that people don't believe and trust that governments are going to come up with any kind of a policy that they can agree upon and are instead going to fall over this cliff or have this massive disagreement that results in this kind of piecemeal craziness that doesn't create any kind of confidence and spur the investment that you need in order to create some of these jobs so i don't think that you can disregard that at all or probably would say that it's because of the president's policies right that

are making business uncomfortable in their business they're not business friendly but what about also i think the gridlock in congress i think causes a lot of this concern and of the unknown richard with your take. a look i was in the business world for many years and frankly all this talk about businesses lack of confidence and their concern about regulations is in my opinion silly because what makes people businesses not invest is nobody buying their products or services and what makes people not buy their products and services is if they don't have jobs or if their wages are stagnating or if they're fearful of the future so we need to stimulate consumer confidence and once we do that which we do by putting people back to work which we do by getting wages back on track and once we do that people will start spending again and trust me any c.e.o. no matter what he thinks of the president of the united states or anybody else any c.e.o. who has customers lined up for his product and doesn't hire people to serve those

customers will be fired in twenty four hours. lauren i want to ask to what you think is i want to get into more of what this is going to mean for the president and for the election a lot of people would just say that if things keep going down this path obama is done right and we hear that this is because the president's policies have failed to get the economy back on track but to get your take as to how the fed's policies also play into this well i think that you can't discount the fed's policies we're in a zero interest rate environment they've been at zero since two thousand and eight and this creates malinvestment this creates no price mechanism to know what the future is going to be what reality is going to be and therefore you're making investments based on speculation and that's a very odd environment and it's not natural and that's just one part of it on the other side of it you have zero percent interest rates which are allowing wall street speculation while at the same time you have just average americans who have lost values in their homes which is most middle class americans investment that

they count on that they can trust so you have that aspect and then you have an environment where they can't save by any traditional means and they've lost money in their retirements and average people feel and are a lot poorer and so i don't think you can discount how much of an effect that is and yet you have calls for more action every time you get a jobs report like this when. you're. not getting out. you know what's your take if it does keep going this direction we're not that far away from the election and so what does that mean for obama. well obama's made you know he started to correct a long term tactical mistake he'd made which was not talking about jobs or being direct and saying look if we invest this money now at the exactly the low rates that that lauren was talking about which means in effect you're paying the government to borrow if we don't do that in the short term put people back to work rebuild our infrastructure and then turn and address the deficit once we get the economy moving he should have been giving that story out all along he started to

now he's backed off into the lay listener there's not that much difference between what he says and what romney says so they're going to start measuring him on performance if he doesn't get back to the gospel of jobs he's in trouble i can't argue with that when i want to thank you both for joining me tonight thank you. well just ahead on the show someone is finally taking a stand again against actor and then tonight still time award goes to a southern state that refuses to acknowledge science shopper i know. it's part of american power can see. things are. might be resolute. that the rulers are. really.