the the. the. it's going on over on i'm abby martin and this is breaking the set and the cold war is technically over looks like a new kind of arms race is alive and well so european leaders have just announced they're forming a drone clone incision upand decades in the making and france germany and several other nations are pouring money into a new generation of armed drones to rival those used by the u.s. and israel looks like all the america's unmanned kills are leading to a bad case of drone and b. but it's not just europe that has set its sights on these deadly robots for the last few years iran has been working on its own drone fleet this week the islamic republic on the veil that's the largest armed unmanned aerial vehicles to date capable of striking targets almost anywhere in the middle east in fact the u.a.e. views are so popular now seventy six countries possess them according to government

accountability office one can only hope our world leaders are taking into account the alarming inefficiency and deadly outcome of these drone wars because if they don't we'll find out the true danger of a global drone race. the police look it's a. very hard. to. be ever had sex with the terror threat there.

this week another round of talks between the u.s. and eleven other countries regarding the transpacific partnership or t p p are taking place in salt lake city throughout the week people have been demonstrating and protest the potentially disastrous effects this trade bill could have in fact that include everything from sweeping changes to the internet to limited access to affordable medicine is joining me now to talk more about these latest protests in utah as well as the impact the t.p. could have on the world i'm joined now by former salt lake city mayor rocky anderson rocky thank you so much for joining me on the phone it's great to be with you thank you so rocky you were at the t.p. rally yesterday what was the main concern you gauge from the protesters. well there's a huge concern about the complete lack of any transparency these talks of been going on for years behind closed doors and there have been lobbying us for

some six hundred multinational corporations including of course halliburton wal-mart monsanto. but the people in the media haven't been provided anything and there is so much at risk for the public health for the environment for access to bible medicines for regulation and protection against the ravages of the too big to fell financial institutions across the board these folks have come together in secret to protect the interests of multinational corporations and all of it so detrimental to the public interest and in the most anti democratic ways certainly out let's talk specifically about you tom what implications but the t.v. you have and your state rocky. well this is something that's going to have huge

impacts for people across the country and across the world we've already seen huge unemployment levels because of these shameful trade agreements in the past and this is going to out do any of them you know it's it's not like we're we're paying low enough wages to people in china now we're looking to send those jobs to vietnam where they're paid about half as much this is going to now cost more jobs mean the offshoring of potentially millions of more jobs from the united states and with these trade agreements come lower wages fewer benefits fewer environmental protections and on top of all of that they're creating an extrajudicial. will or extra legislative structure where there will be the secret court that will have precedence over what our own elected representatives may decide to do to

protect the public health and that's everything from disclosure of g.m.o. some protection against contaminants in our foods to. buy local first initiatives as i said protection of the financial industry last i wanted to this is more about these these secret courts they are talking about of course you just mentioned the acts but expedition of race to the bottom an expert i am not yesterday there was a hearing on capitol hill where michael froman the u.s. trade rep said that the u.s. i'm sorry that the t p p is a living agreement and there will be absolutely nothing to change u.s. laws from this agreement with these secret tribunals do you do you believe them rocky absolutely not in fact one of the things that we've only found out because of wiki leaks and thank god for those leakers who are giving the people the information is that they're trying to extend the monopolization period under

patents which means far greater costs for medicines that are necessary for life threatening illnesses so that no i wouldn't trust these people i don't trust a thing they say the representative here in salt lake city for the trade u.s. trade representative said yesterday that they are aiming for and these were her words unprecedented transparency well abbie you're there with the media are you able to get their the text of their the documents that they're proposing because we the people haven't seen anything yet except for what's been leaked through wiki leaks absolutely not rocky but of course we know that over six hundred corporate advisors as you just mentioned most trustworthy corporate. sions out there how full access of attacks are on the negotiating table of course the people left in the dust in recent weeks as you just mentioned i mean significant blows the t.p. wiki leaks exposing part of the intellectual property tax congress finally speaking

out against the fast track do you think that without the fast track congress could actually pull the plug on this trade deal. but i certainly hope so and we the people need to let our representatives in congress know that we've drawn our ally and if they be trained on our democracy in such a manner that they would allow this to be fast tracked after all these years of secret negotiations they absolutely have no one title but to be representing us in congress most of them don't anyway because they're on the payroll of many of these same corporations that are trying to make the sweet deal for themselves and fleece the american people and fleece millions and millions of people around the world rocky we have about a minute left is this a corporate coup d'etat. it is their kill that's a great expression for it because they have taken over and i'll they've they've

already bought out congress washington's up for the highest bidder but now they're doing all this in secret and having the gas city to say that it should be fast tracked without the public knowing what's going on without any real debate in congress and without any amount that's so absolutely shameful and this obama administration has sold out to the corporate sector as much or more of them any of its prior presidents in order to get is this really a shock in the face of the corporatocracy is revealing itself thank you so much rocky anderson for getting out there speaking for the voice of the people former salt lake city mayor former us presidential candidate thank you.

homelessness has become an epidemic in the wall street journal fifteen thousand people in new york city's spent the night in homeless shelters this year breaking the record for a single night here in d.c. there's been a stunning rise in the number of homeless families just in the last year the number has grown by eighteen percent according to u.s. department of housing and urban development but the harsh winter effect in most parts of the u.s. at least homeless people in more crabapple climates don't have to worry about frostbite case in point hawaii c. there's an estimated seventeen thousand homeless residents on the big island alone and although they don't have to worry about lethal temperatures the issue is still a problem that legislators been trying to tackle for quite some time but thankfully one lawmaker is taking the matter and to his own hands see democratic representative tom brower i study unique way to tackle homelessness check out this report from hawaii news now. the man with a sledgehammer you state representative tom brower this is his contribution to

solve hawaii's homeless problem and i got tired of telling people you know i'm trying to pass laws i want to do something practical that will really clean up the streets. yes guys this is real this is not the onion this is a real state representative democrat mind you is wandering around the streets of his district beating the hell out of shopping carts full of homeless people's belongings all while boasting his well worn armani hat apparently brower hates homeless people so much for mucking up the streets of his rich neighborhood that he thinks he has the right to treat them like vermin now there are a couple different levels of sociopathy happening here folks the first is actually wanting to do something like this the second is actually doing it and the third is doing it as a representative then turning it into a p r stunt for your political campaign and to mention that brower is littering in the process by throwing the objects he finds in the cart on the ground and leaving their deformed skeletons on the streets thankfully community leaders are

flabbergasted at the cirrhotic and potentially dangerous behavior are speaking out against it mariya graham is executive director of the mental health america hole wyoming so that browers tactics were sending the wrong message she said his message to the public is that it's ok to commit acts of violence begets homeless people against vulnerable people it's ok for vigilante justice but brower has a great response of the critics who say his behavior threatens hawaii's most vulnerable. i don't want to be threatening to anybody but i think it's threatening to steal things and then walk around with them like it's their own brother since he has yet to take a car from a hole this person who's pushing it but that may be coming he supports other efforts to remove abandoned property. this is his way of pitching it away to embrace that aloha spirit brower you know. i hope this little political stunt destroys your career but this is salt on the poor in the dark side of paradise is

contrasted luckily by a much more uplifting story so new orleans residents are showing their solidarity with the homeless community in the big easy by choosing to sleep outside in order to raise awareness and money for a local homeless shelter so this isn't just happen in the crescent city it's also happening in places like boulder colorado just last week about eighty people participated in a sleep out which raised more than eighty thousand dollars for homeless and used in the city now overall homelessness is actually on the decline in the u.s. thanks in large part of the two thousand and nine stimulus with federal programs like food stamps and unemployment benefits being slashed the number may rebound soon already youth homelessness is that all time high increasing by seventy two percent since two thousand and seven so as long as legislators ignore this growing epidemic or solve the problem by beating up the shopping carts hopefully the ordinary people can improve the plight of the homeless one sleep out at

a time. coming up a failure of the updates surrounding b.p.'s oil nightmare for gulf residents and the silencing of critics. the. technology innovation all the latest developments from around russia we don't know if you average. twelve months of chicken legs literally you find the world we live in. our jeanne was there to bring you the full if you clash with the police the police are holding. a way to close a camp that is a dark spot on their field the barricades the bodies i take it down on new year's eve to guard little gmo recorders you can trigger a revisit the cuban said twenty three g. and outlining what to expect next joining us now we and kevin lowe and for our annual two other news literally. one easily. with our cheek.

the. saying that life has been hard for gulf residents following the two thousand and ten deepwater horizon oil rig explosion is an understatement see the spilling of two hundred million gallons of crude oil in the gulf of mexico has created environmental and a health nightmare but according to b.p. like in louisiana florida mississippi has never been better. than the south wanted you to the deep sea. to play. golf courses that are then in practice that special right migrating waterfowl all over the summer like ours so if

you visited earlier this year come on down if you are to come on back to mississippi or louisiana alabama america's getaways no matter where you come and help make twenty twelve an even better year for tourism on the gulf it's going to help me break their b.p.'s p.r. machine in the corporation's ongoing assault on its critics i was joined earlier by . that's a good journalist who's been covering the spill for the last three years i first asked him about the p.r. firm matter that b.p. hired to silence its enemies online. they were hired primarily to run the b.p. america facebook page and that's what they did in addition to basically doing the general p.r. effort for b.p. through the disaster to manage the message as they put it themselves and they did this very very effectively i mean for example when tony hayward made bad gaffe of

saying i want my life back it was it was over he that was in charge. of basically doing disaster control on that so they came in and started becoming b.p. apologist and making it appear as though well that was taking out of taken out of context in this sort of thing but that as well as all the social media so b.p.'s twitter feed as well as b.p.'s america facebook page and let's talk about specific examples of what was happening with people works pressing concerns on the facebook page and give us some examples of what this entailed problems arose when people were using the page as it was was to give b.p. face feedback positive and negative mostly negative about how they were handling the oil spill and one woman who goes by the alias marie because she is under she feels direct threat from people working for b.p. and ogilvy that were coming on the pages and people who were making regular critical comments against b.p. more than finding themselves receiving comments from what i refer to as internet

trolls people who go in and cause disruption in chat rooms and in comment sections in meeting places online and things like this and so she started receiving bellicose derogatory remarks degrading remarks and things and then this escalated to over threats trolls posting pictures of sidearms in even arsenals of semiautomatic weapons and then also contacting people at their workplaces and causing disruption there and this was happening not just to her but several other people as well and she ended up collecting reams of data screens tracking down these facebook profiles of these people and then carrying it all the way to directly linking them to people already working directly for b.p. or ogilvy so she believes as does the law firm that she's hired to investigate this further that b.p. and ogilvy themselves have hired these trolls directly to grass and try to silence critics of b.p. . breakdown really quickly going to what evidence is there to show that these

trolls do indeed work for the people. former b.p. directly she found the facebook profile profiles of the people making the harassment in the threats in things like this and then went through their friends lists and then found out these people's interactions with these friends of so she found people that were friends and associates with people working directly for other p.r. for firm and then in other instances some of the other trolls that were friends and associates working very very closely. at that time as well as in the past with people directly employed with b.p. itself and of course we know about the sock puppet accounts that you can kind of host up to ten different accounts and make it look like totally legitimate facebook profiles which could be the case here let's talk about outside the internet you talk about how scientists have also been blocked from the oil spill access to do their job to make proper assessment can you elaborate on that part of the story.

there's a woman i spoke with she's an associate professor of entomology at louisiana state university linda hooper we is her name and she told me that early on in the spill she was going out and collecting data to survey how the ecology was going to be impacted so specifically insects and spiders how are these populations in the marsh areas around the impact zone being impacted and they started to collect data or studies were going well and then she started running into a problem of sheriff's departments people working for the u.s. coast guard as well as people working for fish and wildlife who would come out all of them always accompanied by someone working directly for b.p. and then moore's barring her from going back into these areas where she had previously collected data barring her from going back in that continue her studies despite the fact that she had permits issued from the relevant states where she was carrying out her research that of course granted her access into these areas so she was being directly barred and then when she took this up with them and said look i

have the proper permits i'm a scientist just trying to do my research for my mate. university here they said look we can have you arrested if you if you try to push this matter so that she was literally barred from continuing that all on and then this prompted her out of frustration to write a rather searing op ed for the new york times on this matter criticizing b.p. for doing just what i mentioned and being afraid of the data that she was producing which was obviously showing very very dilatory this impacts on these insect and spider populations that she was studying from the oil spill and then when she did more in the same morning that she published this op ed with the new york times she actually worse received a call from a chief financial officer with b.p. basically asking her how much money she would need to be quiet or if she but that came in the form of how about we hire you and pay you whatever amount you want to ask for and she refused to do so and went public and made very public statements

about exactly what was happening and then was never contacted by this person again wow amazing story is this sort of intimidation still going on to this day or was this pretty much and then media aftermath of this bill. well the online intimidation according to marie who continues to track these things as well as some of her friends as she told me she says that there were there was enough pressure applied through the deputy of b.p. a woman named billy guard who then eventually took up the issue with b.p. and when the government accountability project got became involved shortly after that shortly after the finally replied to the government accountability project in moree most of the trolling in the harassment stopped but she said there do still appear to be two of the trolls that were active from the beginning that do still make a presence known on the b.p. america facebook page today so it was it was it is declined rather dramatically but it does still continue at least to a certain extent and then with people. receiving people who have compensation claim

. against b.p. for example financial compensation claims so of all of these people around the gulf coast do. have have talked to me about instances where they have received harassment from people but they haven't been able to directly tie them to b.p. itself and as we know of course b.p. is fighting tooth and nail to not provide those compensation claims we'll get into that a little bit later but you know this seems like really counterproductive for public relations firm and the opposite of what they should be doing which is galvanizing support for the company i mean what's different about what b.p. is doing because i feel like if you're a giant corporation you have the money i feel like a lot of people would engage in these kind of tactics what's different about this. well clearly they have enough money enough resources at their disposal that they just feel like if they run the begin to spin campaign of. the newspaper ads radio ads around the gulf as well as around the rest united states for that matter

that they had they started the day the spill started and they continue them to this day that they have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into. vince everybody that they you know things are better than they really are and another another instance i always and is stephen marino is the fellow's name who worked for ogilvy the p.r. firm that convinced b.p. to set up the b.p. america facebook page and then let them run it and he gave a very interesting talk at university of texas austin exactly two years after the spill almost to the day and in this talk he's talking to a class of business students i believe it was a about the p.r. machine that they ran and he was very specific about the types of things that they would do he he gave the example of anyone who's familiar with the stories maybe seen there's a b.p. commercial where there's an african-american woman named iris and she claims to be from new orleans and from the gulf and she's working for b.p. and she's standing there with a shirt on saying you know i'm from new orleans i'm here with b.p. and we're not going to leave until we make things right he said they would run

these ads and then track the media impact of them via facebook and twitter gauge audience response. based on that response and then run them again immediately in order to quote unquote target the constituents more effectively so that's the level the really insidious in precise level that they were functioning on and from what i can see continue to function on today. daryn invested in the gulf since the deepwater horizon oil spill in two thousand and ten you know as you just mentioned if we walk b.p. commercials at the birdwatchers paradise the gulf fine come on down and the seafood it's all good can you talk about the reality on the ground as it stands today this is really many people down there are referring to it as a silent disaster silent not because it's not happening but because of really a media silence of the government silence around what's going on i mean first and most obvious there's been dramatic ongoing impact on the eco system for example

just this year. from march to august of this year three million pounds of oil. debris washed up on the shores of the state of louisiana that is twice the amount in the same time period for last year so every time there's a storm every day when there are seasons changing there's just a constant barrage of oil debris washing up still not just in the easy end up in alabama mississippi and florida these pictures are widely available today as a result we see a fishing industry that is in crisis so i talked to many many fishermen this last trip that i just returned from a couple of weeks ago and they're saying look one of the problems we're seeing is there's no babies we're not seeing baby fish we're not seeing baby crabs we're not seeing baby shrimp so what we're worried about is while we're still catching fish so fish numbers they're declined slightly but to dramatically yet that we're worried about the fact that there's no new fish coming in to replace what we're catching and that's very distressing to them particularly considering that we're about three and a half years past the the the origin of the disaster and we have to remember that

in the wake of exxon valdez in one nine hundred eighty nine alaska it took four years for the herring population to collapse so we need to keep that in context and so that's one of the big issues that's ongoing down there that people are obviously very very concerned about right i mean we're going to see the real of facts and for generations i mean this is a whole ecosystem that's connected to a lot of different things daryn of course that corrects it that highly toxic dispersant sprayed all over the surface of the water to make it look like there was less oil who knows what that's doing let's talk really quickly since we're almost out of time about the state of compensation claims in the gulf and b.p. originally predicted total had three around almost eight billion dollars but of course they've surpassed that and also do you think that they've been punished enough as we know b.p. was still one of the main oil and gas providers for the pentagon that the government do enough to punish this corporation we have about a minute thirty. absolutely there's they've been very very tight on paying out compensation playing claims they've paid out very very few just literally a handful of health related compensation claims none for psychological damage even

though there's a mass another silent disaster down there is a massive amount of psychological trauma. all kinds of alcoholism and drug abuse happening because of economic distress of people in the fishing industry in a state of collapse and all kinds of problems along those they have not paid out one compensation claim dealing with any of that and they've taken our defensive tact with the ongoing federal trial in new orleans saying well we're taking we're being taken advantage of people are filing too many false claims and this kind of thing so they're doing everything they can to effectively weasel out paying the compensation that is due and the federal government is not really in my opinion from what i have seen him from what everybody i've been talking to now in the gulf they do have these claims against b.p. they're saying look we're not getting help. investigative journalist as of our show tonight you guys want to break this down all over again.

down. to florida genome and. this. is just so special as the russian resort there is to welcome the world power the city's future. so this is a. very cold snowy windy.