barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >> welcome. if you've read the espionage novels of john le carrÉ, you know that no other writer today has so brilliantly evoked the subterranean workings of government, perhaps because he himself was once a british spy. le carrÉ has a name for that invisible labyrinth of power. he calls it the "deep state." and now an american, you're about to meet in this broadcast has seized on that concept to describe the forces he says are controlling our government, no matter the party in power. but mike lofgren's no intelligence agent, although he had a top secret security clearance. he's a numbers man, a congressional staff member for 28 years with the powerful house and senate budget committees. over the years, as he crunched those numbers, he realized they didn't add up. instead, they led him to america's own deep state, where elected a

barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >> welcome. in our last broadcast i promised you more of david simon, and i'll keep that promise down the road, but right now, because of the news, my guest is a journalist turned activist who is often asked, how can you remain so optimistic and so energized when you've taken on nothing less than the threat of global catastrophe? it's a question he's even heard from me, and more than once, because i've known him for years now as both colleague and friend. after all this time, bill mckibben's stamina and soulfulness continue to amaze me. we met over a decade ago on a canoe trip together for the making of my series "america's first river," about the history of the hudson and the struggle to save it from industrial pollution. >> in the fall, and the winter, and the spring, it's pretty lonely, beautiful place. >> i had read his clas

barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >>> welcome. president obama's state of the union address and the rebuttals from the republican greek chorus already have been extensively vetted by the media. so as we say here in new york, enough already. instead, we have a reality check from someone who artfully uses television drama to report on the state of america from an entirely different perspective from the bottom up. david simon was a crime reporter for the "baltimore sun" whose journalism became the material for two non-fiction books, "homicide: a year on the killing streets," and "the corner: a year in the life of an inner-city neighborhood." each became a tv series and led simon to leave daily journalism to create two unforgettable shows for hbo -- "the wire," about the precincts of baltimore and the corruption of its institutions. >> you follow drugs, you get drug