the. what's up guys i'm abby martin and this is breaking the set of all assistant secretary of state victoria no one's taken flack this week after saying f. the european union and reference to the e.u. is an action on ukraine's political crisis while speaking of geoffrey pyatt u.s. ambassador to ukraine on the phone granted it was supposed to be off the record but actually the f. the e.u. part of a scandal the least interesting part of the conversation see during that phone call the two diplomats are overheard discussing what the role of ukraine's opposition leader should be and the need to solidify regime change in the country while talking about ukrainian opposition leader vitaly klitschko no one says i don't think that klitschko should go into government i don't think it's a good idea which piatt later responds in terms of moving the process ahead we want

to keep the moderate democrats together. so if there is any doubt before that the u.s. is looking for ways to meddle into a sovereign nations internal affairs this lead conversation should confirm that suspicion look there's a revolution going on in ukraine right now and the outcome should be the will of the people not the us europe russia or any other foreign state actor so good luck to the state department at the damage control on this one it's about that time to break the said. the butler was a. very hard to take. to get along the line i have you ever had sex with the terror threat there are those. that believe.

in. the to sleep. sleep. sleep. sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep. sleep. sleep that. yesterday i spoke with pulitzer prize winning journalist chris hedges about the notion of crisis cults in the collapse of complex societies but we also discuss the nature of the economic machine that's responsible for this collapse this system is fueled by profit and although its nature is so blatantly unsustainable humanity appears bound to it the insatiable greed that drives the gears the machine has never been more evident than today with global inequality at a record high it's a topic i was able to explore with hedges more in depth. talk about that new oxfam study that recently came out that shows how eighty five people control their quote

in the bottom half of the world's wealth what's your response to people who say that we just have to remove those eighty five people. well it's a system of corporate power which is not necessarily driven by individuals so much as driven by corporate interests exxon mobil citibank goldman sachs so you can arrest and imprison the head of goldman sachs lloyd blankfein which is where he belongs but somebody will take his place. what has to happen is that we have to break the back of corporate power which is now global. and break the logic whereby everything is about profit that nothing has. any value beyond its monetary value that's an extremely dangerous moment for any

society to live in because when nothing as an intrinsic value whether that's water air or. human in human beings then the ruthlessness of those corporate forces mean that you will squeeze every ounce of attentional profit i mean everything becomes a commodity and you squeeze those commodities until there's nothing left and that's exactly what's happening so it's not individuals it's the rise of corporate power which is a species of totalitarianism defriended differs from past systems of totalitarianism but it is no less totalitarian than fascism or communism or totalitarian forces right i mean the system is a machine at this point those people died today would still grind on. in a recent article you wrote discuss the menace of the military mind and how only devotion to established forms of behavior

a result excuse me individual success how do you think this concept applies the director of national intelligence james clapper and his feelings towards journalists expose and. right well i speak as a former war correspondent who spent twenty years covering conflicts around the globe latin america the middle east the balkans africa. so i know the military really well and blind obedience. aggressiveness resort to violence. all of these things you know destruction of kind of individual individuality all these things work really well on a battlefield they don't work very well in a peacetime society so when clapper made this comment edward snowden and his quote unquote accomplices and he was clearly referring to journalists such as. glenn greenwald should be prosecuted i understood exactly what he was saying that he

comes out he was a former lieutenant general he comes out of this military culture which detests the press and has always made war on an independent press. their version of journalism are all the little sort of lackeys who sit through their press conferences and follow them around and write sort of glowing tribute to their heroism or whatever they're directed to write in press pools but actual journalism is something that within the military culture they're deeply hostile to. the triumph of military values again is symptomatic of a civilization in decline. the rigidity celebration of hyper masculinity the lack of empathy the belief that every problem should be dealt with by force both internationally and domestically. militaristic hypermasculine regimes speak exclusively in the language of force and then you see within popular culture

subsequently a celebration of those hyper masculine military values and you know i've been and enough combat to tell you that those values are quite. useful in a firefight but they will destroy a civil society and i think again that is another window in to how tattered our civil society has become and how we have shifted our allegiance from an open society from empathy from a capacity to embrace various opinions and outlooks and political stances to this increasingly rigid militaristic society and clapper is a figure who. exemplifies precisely this sickness chris in a recent speech you gave you said quote i do not know if we can build a better society i do not even know if we will survive as a species but i know these corporate forces have us by the throat and they have my

children by the throat i do not fight fascists because i will when i fight fascists because they are fascists chris glenn greenwald recently spoke about how one man at a word snowden has changed the world and that that singular capacity is the antidote to defeatism what do you regard as the antidote to defeatism. you can't talk about hope if you don't resist and edward snowden has certainly resisted. you know we must carry out the good or at least the good in so far as we can determine it and then we have to let it go the buddhists call it karma i come out of the seminary that's what faith is it's the belief that it goes somewhere even if empirically everything around you seems to point in the other direction once we give up once we stop resisting then we're finished not only finished in a kind of literal sense but finished spiritually and morally and so i fall back in moments of distress like this on that belief which is one that i you know learned

in some manner that we. you know we have a capacity. an inability and a moral duty to fight against forces of evil even if it looks almost certain that those forces will triumph. that was pulitzer prize winning journalist chris hedges and if you missed part one of that interview be sure to check it out online at youtube dot com slash break in the. money can be exchanged for something as innocuous as a piece of gum to something a shady is a black market narcotics and recently we learn that the crypto currency bitcoin is also not a new and being used for nefarious purposes so last week charlie shrem c.e.o. of bitcoin exchange bit instant was arrested and charged with money laundering for providing over one million dollars and bitcoins of the customers of silk road the

now defunct cyber black market that sold everything from drugs to weapons but while shrem feels the full weight of the u.s. justice system crushing down on him another far more culpable money laundering machine has gotten off scot free i'm talking about multinational bank h s b c you may remember how back in two thousand and twelve age s.b.c. was caught in a massive money laundering scheme for moving billions of dollars to the global financial system which pretty much ended up funding every international crime syndicate you can think of and leading to tens of thousands of murders as detailed an extensive and horrifying article by rolling stones mattei e.b. h.s.b.c. launder money for all qaeda mexican drug cartels and pariah regimes such as north korea long other groups that have just a few issues with getting the bank loans so surely based on the jail time that charlie shrem is now facing hundreds of h.s.b.c. executives receive criminal charges right now that would be

a little too just for the american justice system and in fact not one h.s.b.c. employee was charged with anything the bank merely had to. pay a one point nine billion dollars fine and if you think that made a dent their quarterly profits don't worry h.s.b.c. still made a killing in two thousand and twelve raking in a whopping thirteen and a half billion dollars in profit so heightened authorities press criminal charges against the mafia bank according to assistant attorney general lonnie brewer had the u.s. authorities decided to press criminal charges h.s.b.c. would have almost certainly lost its banking license in the u.s. the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been stabilized but i heard that before yep as per usual age s.b.c. was just too big to jail but at the very least i'm sure i'm sure the bank has learned a very hard lesson about the m.r. ality of funding global murder and actually according to former a just b.c.

employee everett stern the bank continued to engage in the same laundering activities long after it claimed to have stopped. so let me get this straight if you commit crimes while you operate outside the central banking system you receive a maximum penalty but if you're running drugs and funding terrorists inside the system you receive immunity because we all know when a corporatocracy the financial mafia looks out for its own. coming up i'll talk to author margaret heffernan about the notion of willful blindness stick around.

and scar for so that. the taliban and the finish line of the marathon. was a little trickier in the end for her. have

you ever tried to pass on information so earth shattering that you felt of people simply knew everything would change instead of acting on it they chose to bury their heads in the sand that reaction is called willful blindness and this notion occurs all around us every day from something as small as ignoring an extramarital affair to corporate accidents like the b.p. oil spill and even mass atrocities like the rise of the third reich well my next guest wrote the book on willful blindness her name is margaret heffernan and she's analyzed countless case studies on the human response to truth she joined me earlier and i first asked her to go over the example libby montana where one woman discovered that her town had an eighty times higher mortality rate than anywhere else in the u.s. . that is really one of the most extraordinary cases i came across where the

evidence was in control at the time was being poisoned people's friends families and neighbors were dying of asbestosis which is a law an expensive and painful way to die and even though gail benefield got attention for this and in fact got help for it there were people who deeply resented the work that she was doing and they made bumper stickers that said i'm from libby montana and no i don't have asbestosis you know they would do and not to see what was right in front of them even on this show when i talk about different issues that i do people say no that isn't possible because either the media would have told me or the government wouldn't do that because they care about us too much margaret what's your response of these types of excuses for willful blindness well i would say a couple of things first of all i understand the argument i was having that argument actually my husband the other day. and he was saying oh you know if this

were happening we'd know about it and i'd say you mean like the way we knew about the iraq war before. happened in the way that we knew about subprime you know there are a lot of things that we it turns out the media doesn't cover you know the dog the ball so as much respect as i have for the media i think unfortunately there are a great cases where it has absolutely turned a blind eye but i think it's very important to understand this is a bad people and it is a bad institutions particularly this is human nature there's a lot of human biology that contributes to this and so what's much more important is to understand the systemic risk to understand why are we as humans willfully blind and therefore what can we as humans do to be more courageous to be better sighted and really have the nerve in the courage to look at the things we kind of

most want to and you know and you're saying even if the information is presented to me on a platter right here it's not just that it's out there it could be right from your face. and it wouldn't mean that change will happen correct so what is that next step to make change happen well i think there are a whole bunch of things i mean one of the stories that i tell in my book is about doctrine in. showed that the rising rate of childhood cancers could be attributed to the practice of pregnant women and in the u.s. in the u.k. to twenty five years before people stopped doing that why did they stop eventually well partly because she didn't give up so i think one thing that's really important when people see things going wrong that they have the courage and the call to speak up and then when they're rebuffed they don't think oh well i was wrong it was pointless they keep after it and i think this is really important because the more they do the more courage of the people get to do the same thing i think the other

thing that's really important is that in many companies in organizations where war it actually takes very little to tip the balance you know i write a lot about the the hard cases if you like. but it's extraordinary how if you could just all say the right question in a meeting for example when everybody's ignoring the elephant in the room and just this gentle question like this is everybody really convinced this is safe or how could we be more confident it's a. false give the question alone often gives other people the courage of the confidence they need to express their doubts too because usually in these cases it isn't that nobody can see it it's that everybody can see it and everybody's pretending not to take very little to tip that balance you actually found the statistics behind how much sign ones actually doesn't encourage across these

organizations. this is really challenging this is. fantastic research that came out of new york university that showed that when. they have issues or concerns at work that they did or it's an eighty five percent said they did not sound very high proportion and i think it goes a long way to explaining what is one of the biggest problems that c.e.o.'s agonize about which is how come i hire all these brilliant people educated smart articulate and i get so little out of. and while the eighty five percent silence could explain a lot it's not that they aren't thinking it's that they're not conveying their thoughts and so that has a lot to do often with particular cultures with our desire to fit in. our desire not to stand out it has a lot to do with whether or not we feel safe to speak up and it has a lot to do with whether or not we're working in environments where the leaders

understand that debate conflict friction is quite a creative act or it can be and that if there isn't enough debate. it won't be my. creativity there won't be much innovation and far from being comfortable the organization is actually most risk which brings me to the concept of whistleblowers but you kind of break down the mythology surrounding whistleblowers as friends or as crazy talk about how this mythology fits into the concept of willful blindness to edward snowden the n.s.a. leaks well so i think whistleblowers are really interesting because as you say there's a lot of mythology around what you typically find with whistleblowers is that they're mostly not crazy they're not anti social they're not weird. actually what you find is that they're fantastically dedicated committed individuals you know what upset snowden about what he found was that snooping on citizens

felt to him so american i'm sure he would describe himself as a profound patriot and in many cases of whistle blowing what you find is that these are incredibly dedicated loyal committed people who are just stroll by the fact that the organization that they are is not living up to the principles that they espouse very often and i know this wasn't the case but very often with many whistleblowers what happens is they try to get attention to the problem through the proper channels and of course if they succeed we never hear about that right there is a nasty ending stories it's when they're endlessly ripped off that they then kind of step outside the law and one of the arguments that i make regularly with organizations is if you have that why. processes in place to listen to these people they will solve your problems before you even see them so take them

seriously don't marginalize them don't castigate them don't think they're all cranks grazing is listen to what it is they're trying to say they may. always be right but listening is a lot safer. and i worry about you know his revelations creating a lot of willful blindness about the programs that he did reveal and i really hope that we can galvanize some real change on that but you just brought up another good point which is kind of listening in ourselves up to the dialogue of people that we normally would in credence to talk about the importance of disagree and creating conflict talk about why humans should create conflict goes against everything that we've been told what is really interesting because if you look at how the neural networks in our brain are formed. they're really built to make our thoughts and numbers sponsors much much easier and what that means is that whenever we encounter

something that's familiar we'll prioritize that information it will just feel that our it will be conscious. and so our minds are kind of built biologically to attract and process and prioritize the stuff we agree with and slow down or forget about the stuff that we don't agree with and you know that's why if we have certain political views we buy certain newspapers we watch news channels and so on. actually to be smart and well informed and thoughtful we need to encounter the people the attitudes the information. that we're uncomfortable with not necessarily because we were wrong but because that's what thinking is it's taking alternative perspectives seriously and having a dialogue with other people and having a dialogue with oneself which is you know what the philosopher calls thinking which

is am i sure about this how do i know what's the opposite what see contravening information how could i be so my opinions are grounded in sound and i think it's quite alarming really in the united states and also in europe. that we have on the whole highly polarized media where conflict contradiction debate is no really pursued instead we're simply feeding people's established biases and prejudices that isn't thinking and it isn't safe stream or well. you know you've basically blown my mind about another concept competition you have an upcoming book called a bigger prize where you examine how damaging competition can be entering humans i mean once again flies in the face of everything we've been told to capitalism based on the foundation of competition that leads to better technology more prosperity better rewards you disagree and why

i have to say this is a really scary book i mean it's one thing to stand up for the so you don't believe in god you know people kind of tolerate standing up and say you don't believe in competition much much more frightening but actually when you think about it. i think we all know it or we wouldn't have regulation if it were if it worked we wouldn't put in place rules and process is to stem the side effects of competition if those side effects didn't exist so what i've done is i've really looked at well if we if we if we allow ourselves the dangerous thought that maybe competition doesn't always work and the best doesn't always get at all how in fact does it work . and it's quite a challenge talking notion that actually the more complexity if you make schools the more you teach kids to cheat have been earlier age rush kidder at the institute

estimates by the time our kids get to college ninety five percent of them will have cheated on the exam. that's in college and then we're surprised if they cheat when they get to work. you look at the field of sports the higher the. the more the money the bigger the prize is the more the doping the more we use competitions in high stakes games the more the outcomes are what economists call. you know they're not out which is to do with cheating corruption inequality this is a real concern because increasingly what i find even coming months i mean companies because nobody could make their mind up or because they're not willing to defend their positions they're saying increasingly just let the market decide this is a profound abdication we call let markets decide everything because markets get it wrong they're not fair they're equal people use secret information they're

profound it. in markets there is no free market anywhere. so if that's the case we need to think very very carefully about how and when and where we use competition to all of the questions that we should be able to in a full of ways a lot of huge ideas it's time to start applying them in our lives thank you so much margaret entrepreneur author of the upcoming book a bigger prize appreciate it thank you so much. and that's our show you guys join me again on monday when i break the set all over again and have a great weekend. there which i would.

pay be used you don't know if you don't pay the chorus you know no response to really. everyone in my life that i cared about their goal much when that happened i came to ski and well. i was so national champion in track and field and also i was able to go and qualify for the olympic games. you know nine hundred eighty eight i started to experiment with that the drugs i had lost all the financial means that i. was really on the street.

black market kids. to the great wall street. world. science technology innovation all the list of melanin still around russia we've got the future covered. we welcome eric nathan abby martin two of a terrific hosts on the our team network. it's going to give you a different perspective give me one stock tip never i'll give you the information you make the decision don't worry about how breaking this is the revolution of the mind it's a revolution of ideas and consciousness if frustrated with the system it's very

very apologists would be described as angry i think i'm a strong enough or single. thanks.