60 Minutes - Sunday, November 10, 2019

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

In an interview with Lesley Stahl, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase talks about Elizabeth Warren and the state of the global economy. Journalist Maria Ressa tells Bill Whitaker that reporting in the Philippines on the Duterte administration, is "worse than any war zone she's been in." These stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The story of Jamie Dimon is the story of modern Wall Street. Remove $6 trillion of money every day. He sits atop the country's largest bank, but has never sat down with 60 Minutes until tonight. This is the most prosperous economy the world's ever seen, and it's going to be a very prosperous economy for the next hundred years. Should executive pay in this country be curbed?

What does that mean? Cut back. We asked the CEO of JPMorgan Chase about income disparity, a surprising investment, and presidential politics. Did you ever think of running for president? I thought about thinking about it. You thought about thinking about it? I talked to one person, and I decided to think no more.

Few countries are more dangerous for reporters than the Philippines, and many say the president, Rodrigo Duterte, is to blame. Have you been threatened with violence? Yes. Have you been threatened with death? Yes. Have you been threatened with death? Yes. Has the violence been described to you? Yeah, blow my head off or bury me alive.

They're just made up. The president and his rhetoric bear no responsibility? Because people in this country know this president. He's a teaser. A teaser? Yeah, he teases people. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes.

What's your next adventure? Everyone deserves a chance to do what they love. Pacific Life helps you reach financial goals while you go after your personal ones. Plans change over time and your financial solutions can too. Pacific Life has a variety of financial solutions that can help you complement your life goals and passions while managing the uncertainties. Thank you. Institute. The freedom to go after whatever is next for you, that's the power of Pacific. Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help give you the freedom to do what you love, or visit www.pacificlife.com. The story of Jamie Dimon is the story of modern Wall Street. He sits atop the country's largest bank as CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase. He oversees more than $2 trillion in assets and a quarter million employees from Manhattan to Mumbai.

He was there when banking went from button down and buy the book to flashy and too big to fail, through the 2008 financial crisis and into today's era of even bigger banks. And now presidents, prime ministers, princes, and sheikhs seek his counsel. So who better to ask about President Trump's tariffs and trade war, the income gap, and the recent criticisms of him by Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. So Elizabeth Warren said in Iowa the other day, our democracy has been hijacked by the rich and powerful. And you jumped in and said this week about her that she was vilifying successful people

and having harsh words for Wall Street bankers. What I was commenting on is that anything that vilifies people, I just don't like. I think that most people are good, not all of them. I think you should vilify Nazis, but you shouldn't vilify people who have worked hard to accomplish things. And so my comment is I think it's American society. We're just attacking each other all the time. She said the system is working great for the wealthy and well-connected, and Jamie Dimon, she brings you up, doesn't want that to change.

I'm not going to comment on anyone in particular. But she's commenting on you. You've become a target, whether you want to respond to it or not. You're her target, and you're Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's target. I understand that a person in this seat is going to be a target in this day and age of certain politicians and stuff like that. But the notion that I'm not a patriot or that some of these other forces aren't patriots, that's just dead wrong.

So my view is let's all work together, and I don't mind if a few barbs are thrown my way by anybody. You're tough. I'm not that tough, but there's nothing I can do about it. The stock market is going through the roof, and yet manufacturing production is down over the past year. Wage growth is slowing. So when you look at the state of the economy right now, what do you see? Do you see strength? Do you see petering out?

The consumer, which is 70% of the U.S. economy, is quite strong. Confidence is very high. Their balance is in great shape. And you see that the strength of the American consumer is driving an American economy and a global economy. And while business slowed down, my current view is that no, it just was a slowdown, not a petering out. You sound pretty optimistic about the economy. Well, I am. Well, what about the issue of unpredictability right now on the economy? Is that worrisome to you? It must be worrisome to every businessman in the country. The world is unpredictable. I think it's a mistake. Well, more unpredictable than usual. No. If you look at history, if you take a newspaper and open it any month of any year,

you'd have the same list of hugely unpredictable things. Why doesn't it feel that way? Why does it feel as if we were in a particularly uncertain time? Human nature looks at fear and reacts to the short run. But again, there have been like 50 or 60 international crises since World War II. Almost only one really affected the global economy in the short run. What was that? Vietnam? No, Vietnam did not. Vietnam obviously has totally changed America, but it was the oil crisis in the Middle East in 1973 when oil went from 2 to 20 and we

had a global recession. There have been wars with India and Pakistan. We've had Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam. China had wars with Vietnam. China had wars with Russia. None of those things affected the global economy.

And the other thing is, people look at the negatives. There are positives. The Berlin Wall went up. The Berlin Wall came down. So there's a new... And the economy wasn't affected? Is that what you're saying?

Apparently. This is the most prosperous economy the world's ever seen. And it's going to be a very prosperous economy for the next hundred years. Diamonds even unfazed by the trade war and President Trump's imposition of tariffs on China. I've been in China, and the Chinese will say, he brought us to the table. You know, the tariffs, it's like a bomb that you detonate. And the problem is it falls on you. The bomb falls on them, but the bomb falls on you. Yeah, the risk of tariffs was that, that it ends up more being a trade war as opposed to

a quietly negotiated thing. It has to be resolved. It's not, this is not going to war, okay? This is trade and economics and resolution would be a good thing. And so I hope that takes place. China is the far eastern frontier of Diamond's global financial empire that he oversees from his office at JPMorgan Chase's headquarters in New York City. This is vast. This is the heart of the bank's empire. Little trading is done on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange these days.

Traders mostly buy and sell over computers on their own trading floors. This is one of several at JPMorgan Chase. This is one of six trading floors in the building. There's like 450 people on this trading floor. It equivalents this in London, half of this in Hong Kong, and in 23 other countries around the world. JPMorgan Chase moves more money in a day than most countries earn in a year.

We move $6 trillion of money every day. Every day? Every day. We deal with like 10,000 clients, which include governments, central banks, mutual funds. And wealthy individuals, including about half the world's known billionaires, an exclusive club that Jamie Dimon himself belongs to. Money every day.

He was born in Queens, New York, the grandson of a Greek immigrant who did well enough to become a stockbroker. Dimon's dad became one, too, so it was in the family. After Harvard Business School, he went straight to Wall Street, where he climbed quickly and helped usher in the age of the megabanks, earning a reputation as a ruthless cost-cutter. He became CEO of JPMorgan Chase in 2006, when profits were soaring on Wall Street

and the financial crisis was brewing. In the early days of the crisis, in 2008, Diamond got a phone call from the head of one of the largest investment banks on Wall Street at the time, Bear Stearns, which was teetering on the verge of collapse. The CEO of Bear Stearns called me up and said, can you lend me $29 billion before the night's out? Because if I don't get it, I'm going to go bankrupt.

But I said, even I can't get $29 billion. But then the Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, leaned on him to buy Bear Stearns. And Hank Paulson said, you've got to buy it, you've got to buy it, you've got to buy it. And I said, if I can responsibly do it, I said, I can't jeopardize my own company, we'll do it. Three days later, he did it. He bought Bear Stearns for $1.2 billion. We thought we saved the system.

You know, we thought that that would have been the domino that would have caused the whole system to go down. And it was because J.B. Moore was strong that we can do it. As I pointed out in Congress, it wasn't like buying a house. That was buying a house on fire. But it was banks and other financial institutions that started the fire by bundling trillions of dollars worth of risky mortgages and selling them, knowing in many cases that they were toxic, to investors around the world. This eventually led to the financial crisis that nearly brought down the global economy.

Looking back, do you think that there were some bankers who were outright immoral and unethical? They knew exactly what they were doing. I believe there are people, I'm not going to give you the names, who were greedy, selfish, did the wrong stuff, overpaid themselves, and couldn't give a damn. Yes. Greedy, reckless. Were you? No. Do you take any responsibility for the financial crisis in 2008? But your bank sold those same kind of mortgages, toxic mortgages. We, yeah, I do take some. We participated. So did mortgage brokers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the government, government policy. But yes, we did.

And it was a huge error, and it was hugely damaging. The banks were bailed out, and the little guy whose mortgages crashed lost his or her home. Many families were destitute. And that unfairness has just really hurt the sense that this country's working correctly. I totally agree that, you know, if you're the average American, you'd be angry what happened. There's no Old Testament justice. Too many people, you know, a lot of people lost their reputation, their money, but too many people didn't. And, you know, the small guy got hurt.

So I completely agree with that. I mean, the idea that the banks were bailed out and they caused the problem to begin with. I mean, the sense of unfairness doesn't begin to explain the fury. Yeah, I agree with that. I'm agreeing with that. I think we let the American people down. But also at the same time, because we were strong, we bought Bear Stearns. We saved 15,000 or 20,000 jobs. And so there's two sides to that story, too, a little bit. Only one has been told well. Let's talk about the wage gap in this country between the rich and almost everybody else.

How much of a problem do you see that? I think it's a huge problem. And I think the wealthy, I've been getting wealthier too much in many ways. So middle class incomes have been kind of flat for maybe 15 years or so. And that's not particularly good in America. But in particular, at the low end, you know, 40% of Americans make $15 an hour or less. They've particularly been left behind. You're talking about people who earn very little money. Listen to this statistic.

Compensation for executives, CEOs, grew 940 percent, 940 percent in the last 40 years. Your average worker, so middle class, middle class, grew 12 percent. We haven't done a good job growing our economy, and that would have fixed a lot of that problem. Executive pay. Last year, you were paid $31 million. Too high? The board sets mine. I have nothing to do with it.

Well, you could return some of it. I could. Is that going to solve any of those problems? I don't know. Is it going to solve any of those problems? No, but you could set an example, say, I'm not going to take all that money. I don't need it. I could. I'm going to leave it to the board to set my comp. Not you, not the press. You've answered every one of my questions, but this one you're fobbing off. Yeah, the board has to do it. Well, let me ask it in a general way. Should executive pay in this country be curbed? What does that mean? Cut back. Should there be a way

to say we're not going to have such a spread between our workers and the guy at the top? When you say something like that, you got to say, how are you going to do it? What does it make sense? I think you use the tax system to do that. I would not have cut the tax on the rich. I would have expended your income tax credit instead, which is like a negative income tax for lower-paid people. We probably should change the minimum wages. I don't think it's been changed for like 10 or 15 years. There are solutions to these problems.

The problems are real. It does not mean free enterprise is bad. Free enterprise has been very good for Jamie Dimon and the bank. Last year, JPMorgan Chase earned $32 billion in profits. One of the things he does as CEO is hold regular town hall meetings with employees, like this one in Delaware, to build a sense of team spirit. Hello, everybody. It struck us, though, as less like a banker's convention than a political rally,

which led us to ask... Did you ever think of running for president? I thought about thinking about it. You thought about thinking about it? I talked to one person, and I decided to think no more. I'm asking you because we came upon a quote of yours. You said, I think I could beat Trump. I'm as tough as he is.

I'm as tough as he is. I'm smarter than he is. And by the way, this wealthy New Yorker actually earned his money. It wasn't a gift from daddy. President Trump responded in a tweet about Diamond. He doesn't have the aptitude or smarts and is a poor public speaker and nervous mess. I've seen him after when I walked in the Oval Office and he said, see, you would love to have this office, wouldn't you? And I said, not really. In his office, Diamond's known as the great survivor. In a career that spans nearly 40 years,

he's managed to navigate his way through just about every panic, boom, and bust. You're the only CEO who was running the big bank back during the financial crisis who's still there. You're the survivor, last man standing. It's a dangerous place to be. Talking about survivor, you did have cancer. Tell us about that. How did you discover it? It must have been terrifying. I was shaving. I felt a little lump here.

And I went to see my doctor, and he felt and said, you have throat cancer. And when someone says to you, you have cancer, it is, I mean, it's almost unimaginable, like a punch in the face and a fear. And of course, but the hardest part, honestly, was telling my family. I just didn't know how to do it. I said, I'm going to tell you something, but I'm going to be okay. And the second I said it, it was ma'am. Wow. You know, and the thought that, I couldn't tell my parents. So I had my wife call. I just couldn't tell them that there's somebody died before them. Oh my God. So you're going

through all this stuff. And so. And you're clean. I'm on my fifth year. So that's. That's it. So far so good. That's what they say. Did you ever say I should resign? No. I love what I do. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is testing out a new kind of business investment in the city of Detroit. The idea grew out of Dimon's interest in changing the way the bank was engaging in philanthropy. He wanted to try and tackle a major national issue, like urban poverty, by applying the same kind of expertise and analytics to the problem that the bank uses to advise big corporations. His first target, he said, would be the city of Detroit just after it filed for bankruptcy. So Detroit is probably one of the biggest failures of an American city that we've ever seen.

My view is, why can't we make Detroit an example of America's exceptionalism? Have people roll up their sleeves, get together, and change the tide of history. Right there, right now. So in 2014, Jamie Dimon picked up the phone and called the then new mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan. My assistant came in and said, Jamie Dimon's up the phone and called the then new mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan. My assistant came in and said, Jamie Dimon's on the phone.

And I said, that's an amazing coincidence. That's the same name as the president of the biggest bank in America. She says, I think it is the J.P. Morgan, Jamie Dimon. I didn't have any idea Jamie Dimon knew who I was. So I picked up the phone. A cold call. A cold call. I just know, no warning, and I recognized his voice.

He said, I want to help the city of Detroit. For Mayor Duggan, the phone call was about as unlikely as his victory just months before. He won, surprisingly, as a write-in candidate, becoming the first white mayor of Detroit in 40 years in a city that's nearly 80% black. Describe Detroit when you came in as mayor. Half the streetlights in the city were out. How do you get streetlights fixed? A third of the buses were in the garage broken down. People were

standing on street corners for hours waiting for a bus. There were only eight working ambulances in the entire city. There were times you could wait an hour when you dialed 911. And between 2000 and 2013, 250,000 people left the city of Detroit. I mean, that's more than the entire population of the city of Buffalo. So if you can imagine everybody in Buffalo leaving in 13 years and leaving all the buildings behind and empty? That's what Detroit experienced leading up to bankruptcy. This is what large parts of Detroit looked like. A bombed out war zone. Abandoned factories. Boarded up houses.

Initially, Dimon agreed to spend $100 million. Not a lot of money for the bank or Detroit. But he knew that J.P. Morgan had something in a way more valuable. So it's not the money, and this is a very important thing, it was about the help, the advice, the consulting, the ideas, the human capital. And it was about the data that the bank collects and crunches every day more information about business and consumers than the government collects. We use big data and artificial intelligence in running our business around the world for risk and credit and marketing. So here we actually have huge data, too, about how people spend their money.

Where their credit cards are showing up. You can actually see where people spend money on credit and debit cards and checks and where they're spending, like at restaurants, et cetera. That one piece of data creates where you can open a store, where you can do something different. Diamond had the analysts build a database just for Detroit. So we know in a certain part of town that you're traveling 20 minutes to buy milk or 20 minutes to go to a restaurant, which means that a store could be 10 minutes away. To help the young entrepreneur who wants to open a restaurant and you're telling him the best place to do it.

To help where you open a restaurant, where you put affordable housing. The first order of business was affordable housing. Other investors, like the owners of Quicken Loans and Little Caesar's Pizza, were already pouring money into the redevelopment of downtown. So the mayor asked Diamond to concentrate on the blighted neighborhoods that the bank's data identified as ripe for redevelopment, neighborhoods like this one in Detroit's North End. So this is typical, huh?

Yeah, this is a really good example of the challenges that the Detroit neighborhoods are facing. Sonia Mays runs a non-profit housing development company. She's a lawyer, former investment banker, and Detroit native. With more than $4 million from JPMorgan Chase, she acquired 30 abandoned homes and vacant lots so she could work on revitalizing the whole neighborhood at the same time. This is a big significant investment that is really meant to kickstart other investors, homeowners, residents coming into this neighborhood. I mean look at this. This is not going to pull anybody here. You have to figure out how to deal with stuff like that. You really

do have to attack everything that is blighted, that's potentially going to drive down property values. So you have to do the whole street? You have to do it block by block. She's benefiting from J.P. Morgan's special program of steering funds to minority businesses that wouldn't otherwise qualify for them. If you didn't have the J.P. Morgan special program, you wouldn't have gotten the funds? We talked to a lot of other people. Not just you, Jamie. Yeah, and the answer to that is unlikely. The answer to that is the best we probably could have done, but for this program and this investment, is do a house, finish a house,

sell a house, go to the next house, do a house. And at that rate, I did this math at some point, at that rate, like, you know, it'd take, like, you know, a couple centuries. Tell us about this. This house is one of several Sonia Mays has finished. Oh, wow. Her work in this neighborhood has been so successful, she's expanding it to other parts of Detroit.

Didn't you find, Jamie, that there was kind of a racial bias against giving loans to blacks and other minorities? Yeah. I think that's true in poor neighborhoods. But if you find out that somebody likes Sonia, not necessarily her, you give her a loan you wouldn't have before, but they're paying it back, are you beginning to think that what you now consider risky, has that changed in your mind? Should it change everywhere?

Are there things that we could have been doing anyway in normal banking that would have helped some of these communities? The answer is probably. Actually, he is studying that by partnering with local non-profit groups like the Kellogg Foundation and creating an Entrepreneurs of Color Fund that's an experiment on that very issue of loans to minority businesses. We started small, 40 loans. They're all paying back. But those were loans that you would not have ordinarily made. So you changed the criterion for giving credit to someone. So this is non-traditional banking.

I call it kind of venture banking. So look beyond what you do normally. Take a little bit extra risk. Give them more help. The loans have gone to open a wine shop, a health club, a restaurant. In all, JPMorgan Chase has helped more than 5,000 businesses here. Just writing a check doesn't really work very well. Diamond has also assembled teams of experts from the bank

who spend weeks at a time living and working in the city and providing a lot of practical advice. Very often these entrepreneurs, they need help in how do you sign a lease? How do you negotiate with the government? How can I start using a budget? How do you create traffic? How do you do social media? How can I enter the real banking system, which is what the ultimate goal is?

So, yeah, it may change how we do banking for small business, and we're getting better at it. Detroit was in a lot of trouble before the financial crisis. But the financial crisis just did them in 100 percent. That was crushing. Do you feel in any way that you're atoning for the sins of Wall Street when you go and put your effort into Detroit? Is that in your head? I wouldn't use the word atone. I all think we owe back to society. But Detroit specifically?

The financial crisis just decimated the city. Yes, and I think that we all have to re-earn our trust a little bit because of what happened. It's okay to say, yeah, we should do better than we did last time. And I think that's true for everybody who was involved in the crisis. The bank has also brought in additional investors. These are tough jobs to get. While the mayor is working hard

to lure big-time manufacturers back into the city. Early this year, he persuaded Fiat Chrysler to build a new plant that would mean 5,000 new jobs. The mayor needed to assure those companies that Detroit could supply well-trained workers, but... Our residents didn't have the skills to meet many of those jobs, and Jamie Dimon had J.P. Morgan Chase do a whole analysis. And it led to the program we have today,

what we call Detroit at Work, one of the largest employment agencies in the country, where we now get Detroiters, line them up for jobs at Fiat Chrysler, line them up for jobs in a whole number of areas. From here, they're sent to job training programs, which, based on J.P. Morgan's analysis, have redesigned their approach. We took all of the training programs in the city, and they now only train for jobs people are hiring for, which may seem obvious, but it wasn't before. Many of the training programs are run by non-profit groups like Focus Hope. So this kind of thing might be at the Chrysler plant, for instance.

That got a $1.3 million grant from JPMorgan Chase. He's just trying to control it, right? It's all part of the city's long game to reverse Detroit's long decline. It's an effort, the mayor says, that's a push against history. It goes back to the federal policies in the 1930s that would not lend in areas where people of color lived. You've had decades of federal policies that have worked against people of color

to benefit Caucasians leaving cities. J.P. Morgan Chase has now committed $200 million to the city. Is that enough? I mean, your problems cost way more than that. Nobody's saying JPMorgan Chase is the savior of the city by itself. We've got a lot of major investors in this town, but they've met an important piece. They pushed the recovery of the city along a track faster than it would have been.

How far along the plan have you come up to now? I'd say we're about the third inning of the game. Third inning of the game. We've got a long way to go, but we're definitely on the right path. JPMorgan Chase has now committed half a billion dollars to take what it's learned in Detroit and export it to, among other cities, Chicago and Washington, D.C. For more than 30 years, Filipino journalist Maria Ressa has risked her life in war zones. But she says what she's doing now is tougher.

She's waging a battle for the truth in the Philippines, a close American ally. She founded a news site in the capital, Manila, called Rappler. Her incisive reporting on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody drug war and his social media attack machine earned her recognition as Time magazine's person of the year. It also made her a target. Maria Ressa says she has been threatened with rape, imprisonment, and death for her reporting. Yet she refuses to stop investigating the government. She says truth is too precious to give up without a fight. This is far worse than any war zone that I've been in. In a war zone, you know exactly where the threats are coming from. I plan my way in, and we plan our way out. And you're there for a limited period of time. But today's threats

are longstanding. There's no end to it. We've been living through three years of this kind of hell. Maria Ressa is talking about the environment for journalists in the Philippines under the unpredictable and, as she sees it, increasingly autocratic grip of President Rodrigo Duterte. The raucous former big city mayor was swept into office on a populist wave three years ago. The people love him, but President Duterte has no love for journalists, something he made clear to reporters in graphic terms. You want to know my sentiments? F*** you.

He says outrageous things, and somehow it appeals to the worst of human nature in a strange way. This guy knows how to communicate. He also understands the psyche of the Filipino. When Rodrigo Duterte was running for president, he vowed to rid the Philippines of drug traffickers, to kill them if necessary. Candidate Duterte told Maria Ra he'd already killed three himself i must admit that i have killed i killed what three people i don't really like people who kill people you know um but for

someone to admit it on camera is fascinating. We asked President Duterte for an interview. He declined. But his spokesman, Salvador Pinelo, agreed to answer our questions. So we went to Malacanang Palace in Manila, the Philippine White House, where Pinelo showed us how difficult it is to get at the truth in the Philippines. First, it is not true that he brags about killing. He did say that.

Yes, but you should take this person in context. What is the context for saying that he killed drug dealers? There is hyperbole in this particular person. Like, when he says he kills, it doesn't mean that he really killed. So it's not true that he killed drug dealers? He did some during his mayorship, but in self-defense. Ressa says constant blurring of the truth by Duterte's government makes her head spin. When this first started happening to us, I really felt like I'd fallen into the rabbit hole. And I was Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter is in charge.

He said he was going to round up drug dealers. That would be popular, I would think. What has gone wrong? Killing with impunity. Ressa's news website, Rappler, drew the president's ire when it reported more than 20,000 people had been killed in Duterte's war on drugs, not the 5,000 the government claims. To even admit you killed 5,000 people

without any due process is also unheard of. How many people have been killed in this war on drugs here in the Philippines? If you look at our own Commission on Human Rights and the UN's estimate of the number of people killed in the drug war since July 2016, at least 27,000 people killed. That's genocide. All this bloodshed in Asia's oldest democracy, one modeled on the United States. The Philippines was a U.S. protector for almost 50 years through World War II. It remains an important U.S. regional ally. Enshrined in the Philippine Constitution, which is similar to the United States as the Bill of Rights. Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, these are enshrined.

And yet, freedom of the press has been curtailed. She says after Rappler turned the spotlight on the drug war's rising death toll, the president called Rappler, quote, fake news. He banned the website from Malacanang Palace and told Filipinos Ressa's news site couldn't be trusted because it had ties to the CIA. But he's provided no evidence to back that up. It's ridiculous. It comes out of power's mouth. What do you do? Ressa says she's fighting and losing a battle for truth. She can't match the president's firepower on social media.

And this model led many of Duterte's attacks. Mocha Usan had been popular on the web for giving sex advice. Then she switched to politics. And for more than a year, she ran President Duterte's social media, sharpening his attack machine. To demean and discredit Ressa and the Filipino press, Usan popularized the term, prostitute. The social media platforms have taken over the distribution of news globally. They treat a lie the same way you would treat a fact. And the lie that's incendiary, that is meant to anger you, spreads fastest.

All the studies show that. That's our battle. Without facts, you can't have truth. We cannot have meaningful dialogue, public dialogue, if we do not agree on the facts. And that's what these social media platforms have watered down. After Ressa reported in a detailed three-part series how President Duterte's campaign used Facebook and online trolls to attack critics and spread falsehoods, Maria Ressa herself became a target. So let me just go over the way they've attacked. The first is to incite hate, to incite violence against the potential target.

What do they do to you? Alleged corruption, alleged CIA. Second, with women in particular, sexual attacks. And the sexualized attacks against you? I mean, I've been called every single animal you can think of. So, yes, the sexual attacks, rape, murder, behead. At one point, I was getting 90 hate messages per hour. They wanted to pound me to silence. Were these attacks from people, or were they attacks from, I don't know, bots? Fake accounts. Fake accounts.

So they're real people that mask who they are. This is information operations. It's information warfare. Facebook has taken down hundreds of those fake accounts linked to a network of Duterte's allies. They were followed by millions of people. The government insists Maria Ressa is not under attack, but she is under investigation. She's facing multiple charges, including libel and tax fraud. She's been arrested twice. The head of that arresting group told our reporter, be silent or you're next. And that is exactly what the government is doing, systematically. Be silent or you're next. And that is exactly what the government is doing, systematically.

Be silent or you're next. 11 cases have been filed against you? They were looking for some way to be able to shut us up, right? I think you just have to look at the pattern. The president's spokesman, Salvador Pinelo, called Maria Ressa's claims nonsense. A UN official says that the tax charges against her are being used basically to silence her reporting. I disagree. She has not been silenced. She's still at it. Rappler is still in operation.

What is she complaining about that she's being suppressed? After she was arrested recently, you made a comment that it seemed that she enjoyed being in custody. Well, obviously, when she is facing the cameras, she loves it. Really? I'm serious. I think so. Who enjoys being arrested and taken into custody? She appears to enjoy it.

Because she is always smiling. I mean, that's a ridiculous statement. I have done nothing except to be a journalist. And I will not stop being a journalist, no matter how ridiculous the statements are that come from Secretary Piniello. Few countries are more dangerous for reporters today than the Philippines. In the last three years, a dozen journalists have been shot or beaten to death. Then there's the president's rhetoric. Listen to the way he addressed a reporter at one of his press conferences. Why are you a son of a bitch?

On Facebook, people have called for Maria Ressa to be beaten and to be raped. I don't know about that. I told you I don't even know. That's true. This is true. I'm telling you. Maria Ressa is just one. There are many, many journalists who feel that they are under attack, that they've been threatened. I don't think so. A Rappler reporter made this video of Philippine journalists who say otherwise. She posted it on Rappler's homepage. Have you been threatened with violence?

Yes. Have you been threatened with death? Yes. Have you been told how you're going to be killed? Yes. Has the violence been described to you? Yeah, blow my head off or bury me alive. What will stop you from reporting? Nothing. Nothing? Nothing. Death? Did you have to kill me?

What death threats are they talking about? To my mind, they're just made up. The president and his rhetoric bear no responsibility? Because people in this country

know this president. He's a teaser. A teaser? Yeah, because people in this country know this president. He's a teaser. A teaser? Yeah, he teases people. The libel and tax charges against Ressa are no laughing matter. She could go to prison for 63 years. And as Ressa fights the cases in court, she's facing another charge. The president's spokesman, Piniello, has threatened to add a new libel case on her and Rappler for, quote, tarnishing his honor. I've committed no crime but to speak truth to power. Maria Ressa now has respected human rights attorney Amal Clooney coming to her defense. Clooney recently won freedom for two Reuters journalists who'd been in prison for their reporting in Myanmar.

The Maria Ressa case in the Philippines, like the Reuters case in Myanmar, exposes a cruel irony that I see time and time again in my work. Journalists who expose abuses face arrest, while those who commit the abuses do so with impunity. You're supposed to be able to write and speak and report, and there should not be repercussions. You told us that you do this because you want to protect democracy here in the Philippines. It could be said that your problem is that democracy is working in a way that you don't like. President Duterte is very popular here. Why is he so popular? He's a refreshing voice.

He represented somebody who was anti-establishment, anti-elite, even though he himself came from the elite. You know, the journalists here are surprised that we have this kind of precedent. They're shocked by his crude manner. But the more you try to destroy him, the more the rating comes up, goes up. We're not out to criticize him. We're out to do our jobs.

This politics of hate in your country and mine, it can tear things down immediately. But hate does not build anything. And we need to build. And that's my hope, right? If you can turn off the spigot of hate and lies, then let us continue to work. Then we have a fighting chance. Now an update on a story we reported in June called SGB, Stellate Ganglion Block. Military and veterans hospitals have been experimenting with SGB injections for post-traumatic stress disorder, notoriously difficult to treat and often linked to suicidal thoughts,

depression, and other psychological problems. SGB is injected into the neck and has long been used in chronic pain patients. We watched Marine Sergeant Henry Cotto undergo treatment at the VA hospital in Long Beach, California. The injection took less than five minutes. Within two minutes, Koto told us he felt a huge difference. Like I can't control my smile right now. Is it like a sense of euphoria? It's like a big weight has been lifted off my shoulders and my chest, and I can actually relax.

This past week, the journal JAMA Psychiatry published a new study of SGB. The randomized clinical trial showed SGB twice as effective as placebo injections to treat PTSD. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.