the headlines for martin international the best of the best the first sets of medals are awarded in softly as day one of the twenty fourteen winter olympics comes to a close. a team of german skiers and biathletes reaches out for assistance after its equipment fails finds a helping hand in the russian opponents who decide to put rivalry aside. street violence and goals bosnia herzegovina protesters clashed with police and seven government buildings ablaze amid soaring unemployment economic stagnation and corruption. and a suicide bombing reportedly carried out by a briton in syria the first such attack by a u.k. citizen in the country sparks fresh fears that westerners could pose a threat when they return home from war. we'll have more news in about an hour but coming up next it's breaking the set with host abby martin here on our team

international. 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 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.t.e. part of the scandal the least interesting part of the conversation 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 in the outcome should be the will of the people not the us and 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 time to break the said. the butler it was a really very hard to take. to get along the line he ever had sex with the terror threat there are those. that believe.

the. little. little. way. to. the us. 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 rest 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 has an intrinsic value whether that's water

air or. human and 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 it would still grind on. in a recent article you wrote discuss the menace of the military mind and how only devotion to establish norms of behavior of results excuse me an individual success

how do you think this concept applies the director of national intelligence james clapper and his feelings towards journalists who have exposed. 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 you know 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 racine's speak exclusively in the language of force and then you see within popular culture subsequently a celebration of those hyper masculine military values and better and enough combat

to tell you that those values are. 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 in clapper is a figure who i think exemplifies precisely the 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 work 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 an 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 seminary 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 a set. 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 learned 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 big quinn exchange bit instant was arrested and charged with money laundering for providing over one million dollars in bitcoins the customers of silk road the now defunct cyber black market that sold everything from drugs to weapons while

sram 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 h.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 finding 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 young 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 in 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 a just b. c. it 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 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 half human about the notion of willful blindness stick around. new york london. the whole world is. the true hero of the original one a further one down the end of their hang of the course that feeling at the end of the street another one the more transparent society gets the money or the public

tears become we see military and state police forces mobilized against people who blend into the city to mean hobbit the city the more people trust electronic devices the more defenseless they are the fear that has a thousand. hierarchy. the playing. field the big spirit travels with the flame from its place a grease. joint james brown for an elemental and a picture around russia and beyond. where i'd.

like. to. 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 oh 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 ice 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 have aspects to this you know they would do. 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 it happened and 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 that doesn't fall so as much respect as i have for the media i think unfortunately there are a great cases where it is 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 and 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 the. 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 x. raying pregnant women and in the us in the u.k. twenty five years before people start 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 confidence to speak up and then when they're rebuffed they don't think oh well i was wrong or it was pointless they keep after it and i think this is really important because the

more they do the more courage other 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. 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 say. also 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 occur across these organizations. this is really challenging this is. fantastic research that came out of new york university that showed that when all. they have issues or concerns at work they did or it's an eighty five percent said they did and that's a 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. there won't be much. 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 of wired 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 whistleblowing 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 falser and 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 certain 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 of what c contravening information how can 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 isn't thinking and it isn't safe stream or well so how do. 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 in trying to humans i mean once again a fly in the face of everything we've been told 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 and say 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. a 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 competitive you make schools the

more you teach kids to cheat and an earlier age rush kids are the. estimates of by the time our kids get to college ninety five percent of them will have cheated on. exams. that's in college and then we're surprised if they cheat when they get to work. you look at the in the field of sports the higher. 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. which is to do with cheating corruption inequality this is a real concern because increasingly when i find it in 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 there are profound dissent in markets there is no free market and where. 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 way it's a lot of huge ideas it's time to start applying them in our lives thank you so much margaret had for an 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 have a great weekend. there

which i would. like. down the fine. and the breath of life. if we think.

of different opportunities to get to information they get from the media. people can give them information to get trained of information across from us is actually quite complicated what we do is you need. to use a little range of sort of independent information we have build relationships for example with interpol helps us find out where that is drug trafficking going on. says he's a combination of. nowhere else in the world a conflict so strongly concentrated as here. so.