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tv   Parker Spitzer  CNN  October 11, 2010 8:00pm-9:00pm EDT

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"i'm you" comment. i text while i drive. i was arrested when i was 16 for bashing mailboxes. you don't want me, no, no. >> i'm going to cut you off right now. these guys with me are neither witches nor warlocks. that's all for us. hope to see you tomorrow. "parker spitzer" starts right "parker spitzer" starts right now. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com good evening. i'm kathleen parker. >> and i'm eliot spitzer. welcome to the program. this weekend, i saw a movie, it made me angry. movies inside job, a documentary by charles ferguson tells the story of a financial cataclysm of the last couple of years. how everybody in washington went in on this, and you, the middle class, paid the price. if you lost a house, lost a job, paid your taxes, it went to the
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folks on wall street who came out with tens of millions of dollars and we came out with nothing. kathleen, we should be angry. >> well, i am angry. i went to see that movie, too. and i loved it not only because you were in it as one of the good guys, i might add. but it helped me understand how we got here. what i really loved about this movie is it helped me understand the complex series of events. but what really struck me -- you just can't blame only republicans or just democrats. you can't pin it on president bush or president clinton. it really didn't matter who controlled congress. it's just a story of runaway greed of a relatively small number of people who nearly destroyed our financial system. >> it's all of the above. it was president bush, it was also president clinton and the folks around him. the fed, the s.e.c., congress sitting there -- everybody bought into this notion that wall street could just make everybody rich. but they made themselves rich and we are poor. this is one big ponzi scheme because we had to bail them out
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and they kept all the money and gave nothing back to us. and that is what's outrageous and has people really angry. >> let's take a few examples of what these ceos walked away with. stan o'neal walked away from his job with more than $30 million in cash and more than $100 million in stock. he made the money, you paid the money. each and every taxpayer in america shelled out $13,000 to fix the mess made by a very rich man. he gave up not one single penny of his wealth. >> and you know you sitover to goldman sachs. lloyd blankfein, that comes out to about $13,000. and this is what was going on. the year before their banks went bust and right when we had to step in with trillions of dollars. they gave nothing back. where's the sense of loyalty and integrity in any of this? >> and what you heard them say
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was, well, yeah, it was wrong and we knew it was wrong but everybody was doing it. we were all in the same game. >> lloyd blankfein said, yeah, we did it but they did more of it. how does he know that? when did the other folks do it? he said it under oath. i want to know how and why he knows that. let's get back to question you asked before. why didn't anybody give money back? tim geithner should have made that happen. that's what's so frustrating to us when we have to show up with all these bags of money for these investment bankers and nobody said to them, that check for $10 million you took out last year, return some of it. >> here's another question for you -- why hasn't anyone been prosecuted? surely there's -- in my head, i'm going, guilty, guilty, guilty. i do want to see -- i want to see a perp walk. surely there's a charge for
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fraud. >> when i was attorney general, we made cases and i said, these guys are rife with fraud. we're going to talk later with a spectacularly smart investment banker who's going to show us and talk us through some documents that may be sort of the holy grail to explain this. these documents show the banks and the ratings agency knew these mortgages at the centerpiece of this were going to fail. somebody's got to be charged. i hope it happens. >> we're going to be talking about this more in the next few days and weeks. but time to talk politics now. two of the sharpest political minds joining us. let's go into "the arena." joining us today are john ridley and nick gillespie. >> welcome to you both. nice to see you. >> this is the season of fringe candidates, a switch has been
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flipped in the country and they are coming out of the woodwork. let's take a look at some tape from carl paladino. he is livened up the new york race for government. he's the republican candidate. take a look at this little tidbit we've got for you. >> and don't misquote me as wanting to hurt homosexual people in any way. my approach is "live and let live." i just think my children and your children will be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family. and i don't want them to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid or successful option, it isn't. >> i think the first sign something was wrong, anybody who calls them homosexuals, what's coming next is not going -- i love him dearly. i think pat of it is in new york, a state in which you're rumored to have some
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experience -- look, andrew cuomo and carl paladino, my mother was italian, i was born in brooklyn. i have 100% insulation against anti-italian ep -- >> people are beginning to stretch out what's acceptable. >> it's the followers that have let us all down. there's enough blame to go around. but it is true and it goes back to this dems and republicans. the 21st century, we all, i suspect, grew up figuring that we'd be in our personal hovercrafts by you or -- >> where's my jet pack? >> we have had ten years in this deck aid and it's the worst. it's really awful and we had six years of republican rule which was awful and disastrous on every level. and everything since then has been equally bad.
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you're going to find people like o'donnell who did run. she beat a nonentity. mike castle is a life-long politician. the reason she won is she was saying, i'm going to cut spending. >> let me ask you what you think after this. i would make the argument that the republican party has been catering to sort of a fringe element for a long time trying to build a base. is this the devil demanding his due? are we finally now seeing the payback? buckley spent a lot of his time trying to marginalize who he considered to be the kooks. >> it was very difficult to get traction -- in my opinion, when you're saying no to everything. there weren't a lot of new ideas. but all of a sudden there was this anger cropping up and it's something that you can buy into, you can into tap into and you can use that. but it's like in california, we
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have all kinds of wildfires and all of a sudden you lose control of it. >> this is what i call pinball politics. the volatility is almost like volatility on steroids. >> i don't think it's volatile. what we're seeing -- not to go hegalian on an early evening show, but the republicans said, we're going to spend our way into the poorhouse, then you get the pinball which is the democrats coming in and saying, no, we're going to spend even more, double down on afghanistan and follow bush in iraq anyway and not clarify anything. what we're seeing now might be a synthesis. they're saying we have to stop spending. the government at the federal level, at the state level and at the local level, i'm getting screwed. the reason it's happening is because of the this metastasizing government at all levels.
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the candidates who can credibly say we need to reboot -- >> what is going on in my view is what we have seen is a public desperate for an answer latching on to anybody who stands up and says, i have an answer, irrational or not. >> part of my problem for what's going on, i blame president obama and the democrats. when this thing flared up, go to the berther movement -- >> when you say this thing -- >> nobody's really stood up against it. i think the president -- talking about the president of the united states -- >> shouldn't people be angry and you were -- >> people should be angry. we have an absolute reason to be angry. we just celebrated the tenth anniversary in afghanistan. nobody in the country can say, this is what we're doing. >> i'm not talking about the anger about the issues. everything we're talking about -- when you talk about reducing government, we have to do this or that, we have to get out of afghanistan.
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there are enough issues out there. we're talking about the fringe element that feels like it can say anything and that's the way it grabs on to votes. my problem is that the president, in my opinion, for too long has been standing above it all saying, it will burn itself out, people can say wha whatever they want and bring whatever argument they want to the table and at some point it will burn itself out. >> it is righteous anger at a government that's stupid in its actions. it's going to continue as all of the little tidbits come out about president obama -- you need a prescription to buy over-the-counter drugs -- >> had the president not embraced wall street -- >> i don't think he gets it. he's a total tool of wall street. >> i wouldn't say it quite that way. i started this show by saying tim geithner should be fired. >> everyone's like, geithner is the only one who can do it. he's a joke.
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he's a joke in hez hearings. he's been totally ineffectual. >> you can say who's a witch and who isn't. but they're not really talking about are we spending this money effectively? i know that you are going to not agree with that. but you look at the bailout, $60 billion is what t.a.r.p. is basically going to cost us at this point. it may cost less -- >> don't buy that. >> gentlemen -- >> if you buy that government accounting, that's one of the reasons we're in this fix. >> here's my thing, if you buy that government accounting at $60 billion, it could have started -- it started $700 billion. could have gone much further. look at procurement programs in the defense department. just give me a minute -- >> this is fascinating. listen. i'd like to point out that president obama is now recently lashed out at karl rove. is karl rove the reliable boogeyman? >> did you miss me when i was coming around to the numbers --
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>> defense spending could be cut in half with no loss to national security. karl rove is clearly the -- he's running everything. no, it's not even desperate. this is like a brett favre type of exhibition of, we have nothing left. if you're talking about karl rove, what year is it? >> i'm always a little suspect when they bring up very specifically people like rove, like gillespie and boehner -- not you, the other one. >> i want to point out that i'm not part of the ed gillespie -- i'm with the brooklyn gillespies. >> i really don't think that it plays across america. i don't want to put out there that people don't care or they're not bright or not dialed in. i don't think that that's what they care about. i don't think they care about karl rove's name.
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>> i think even the vice president is trying to keep track of who the vice president is -- >> look, i'm with you. i think this is not a strategy that's going to work. the president should be talking about what his theory is for creating jobs and solving our economic crisis. pinning it on karl rove and bush isn't going to -- this is not an affirmative argument. the president of the united states should make an affirmative argument. >> he does not have one plainly. >> i think he does. >> that's what the stimulus was and it didn't work. it made everything worse. he's out of ideas. >> the problem is that -- >> and that's why he's doing this. >> the slogan isn't something you want to vote for. thank you for coming. koling up, simple rules on what politicians should not do on camera. "fun in politics" is next. and the man who predicted the financial meltdown has a smoking gun to show us.
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is this just pure greed or is this a conspiracy? is it incompetence? >> i think it's a combination of incompetence, things are going well and every problem will be taken care of with rising home prices. i think that this was a "what happens when the children are in charge?" . click on your symptoms. get the right relief. makes the cold aisle easy. the robitussin relief finder. it's that simple.
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okay, it's time for "fun with politics." a campaign season brings out the best and worst in people, especially when i comes to what they wear. >> oh, so true. a wardrobe malfunction can stop a campaign dead in its tracks. who can forget mike dukakis? bright, smart, savvy, this one picture maybe cost him the presidency. >> that may be an extreme example. but let's not forget john kerry in a nasa space suit. >> john, don't do it again. but even nancy pelosi, the
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ever-well-dressed nancy pelosi, take a look at this. there she is in a mattress factory in san francisco last week. >> pearls and protective goggles are a fashion no-no, nancy. >> the most important rule of all, let's take a look at this. >> mama, don't let your cowboys grow up to wear ponchos. >> that's tough. >> and whatever else you might say about "w," he came to play. >> and he enjoyed it. that's not a good picture. ♪
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this is a swamp, a seszpool, and somebody should be dropping 1,000 subpoenas on it right now. >> and it's been floating around in the public ether for the past three years. no matter how the market changes, your retirement savings need care and attention from year to year. open a t.rowe price smartchoice rollover ira, and let our professionals manage it for you. just choose the retirement fund closest to your expected retirement date. our fund managers will adjust the investment mix over time to become more conservative as your retirement date nears. all with no loads, sales charges or commissions. visit our website, or call our investment guidance specialists at 1800-681-2294 and consider a move that could make all the difference in your retirement. the t. rowe price smartchoice rollover 1800-681-2294 request a prospectus or summary prospectus with investment objectives, risks, fees, expenses and other information to read and consider carefully
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now for tonight's headliner, remember at the top of the show when we talked about the new documentary "inside job," one of the many things in the film that really made me mad was that it seemed like wall street investment banks knew they were selling bad loans before the mortgage crisis. well, that turns out to be true. there's new proof that banks knew that the hundreds of thousands of loans were bad, but they sold them to investors anyway. >> it appears to be fraud, plain and simple, which is why josh rozner is here. he's the head of the research firm graham fisher. tell us about these documents, what they say and how they came to light. >> what the documents are is -- when a mortgage was bought by an investment bank with the intent of then turning around and selling it to investors, they would hire a due diligence firm who would come in and explain to them how many of the loans met the underwriting standards that were agreed to. and the ones that didn't, were they fundamentally flawed or was
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there something minor that was flawed? what they found in these documents is about 28% of the loans that were bought by the investment banks with the intent of then turning and selling them didn't meet the underwriting standards that the investment banks agreed to -- >> yet they got the high ratings. if the banks knew and the ratings agencies knew they were not -- >> it seems to me there's a real problem and the documents highlight the investment banks had every reason to know that these loans didn't even meet their own standards. >> let's go through this in more detail. these documents were shown to the investment banks and the investment banks did what? >> the investment banks waved in the securities anyway. seems to have ig nord it. sold them to investors which we should remember, not only has the taxpayer been harmed here but the investor which, again,
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is the taxpayer, right? >> when you talk about securitize, putting these investment into pools and selling them into pension funds so these are the retirement investments -- >> that's right. >> the middle class retirement dollars that have been injured. >> correct. >> you mentioned the ratings agencies. they saw the documents as well? >> they've said, we don't have the information provided to us by the issuer nor to our own due diligence. it seems intentionally avoided collecting this information. >> and they're going to make money from giving this a hot rating? >> of course. the more deals able to be done, the more the rating agencies profit. that became a big deal of this profit. you've got investors who actually were told that the pools were full of loans that met underwriting standards that the investment banks seemed to have known they didn't meet. >> may i just pause here a moment? >> sure. >> eliot, you as the former
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attorney general of new york, is there not some basis here for a criminal charge? >> look, you talk criminal, you get into -- there is a basis without any question for the most rigorous examination. what i would be doing right now would be to drop a subpoena on every investment bank saying, i want to track this information, these documents came from clayton, the due diligence firm, see where in the company they went, who saw them, who knew about them and what did they do? and somebody who saw these documents and saw that there was 29% noncompliance and still pushed these mortgages into the security, boom, charge them right there. failure to apply the rigs you standards. charge them, recover all the money. and this time, i would hope the ax comes done, no bailout -- >> it sounds like fraud, muir and simple. >> and the investment banks in the prospectus would essentially say, mr. may be loans in the pools that don't meet the underwriting standards and at times, those exceptions may be material. so they covered themselves.
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>> this was the so-called fine print in about a 50-page document in one paragraph. >> correct. >> why did it take this long for these documents to emerge from the swamp? >> that's a good time. it took the fcic and a subpoena to force these documents out. why? because the investment banks didn't want anyone to see the due diligence reports. you would suspect that clayton didn't want to throw their own customers overboard. the rating agencies seemed to have done everything they could to have avoided knowing these documents existed. tnd and the investors have been trying to get to information to prove that the loans that were in the security that is they bought did not meet the standards that they were told and the servicers of those loans have been pushing back and avoiding giving investors the information they need. >> what's going on here? is this just pure greed or is this a conspiracy? is this incompetence -- >> i think it's a combination of incompetence, things are going
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well and every problem will be taken care of with rising home prices. i think that this was a -- what happens when the children are in charge. we saw the risk management culture of the trazing baninves banks -- the trading desks took over. what if the trading desk saw the documents, knew that 29% didn't meet the standards, knew those were sold as securities to investors and then with that knowledge traded against that by going short these securities. >> at the hearings and in this movie, there is an outtake of lloyd blankfein saying, we traded against the very documents and mortgages we sold to the entire investment community. we were betting on them going down, not up. if they did that when they had knowledge from these documents that they were going to blow up because 29% or more were not
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compliant, that is trading on inside information. the critical issue is who saw the document, when, what did they do with that information? this is a swamp, a kesz cesspool. >> this has been floating around in the public ether for the last -- >> why is the s.e.c. not jumping all over this to see if these mortgages were safe and secure --? >> it's a very good question. i'm flabbergasted when you called he and you had seen about these things and we began to talk. this is the holy grail that explains and is the blueprint for unmasking how absolutely venal it was. >> this has been fascinating and depressing. up next, the party you don't want to miss. our political party. >> we're not having the best and the brightest running anymore. when you have a christine o'donnell with an ad starting off "i am not a witch," we know
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we've sunk to a new level in politics. [ woman ] alright, so this tylenol 8 hour lasts 8 hours.
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welcome to our political party. this is a show about strong opinions and we thought what better way to serve up these points of view than with a party right here in our studio. >> dave ziron is author of "bad sports, how owners ruin the sports we love." we'll get into that later. >> for this party, i'd like you to refer to me as dave sunshine. >> and you're going to be ken. and ken sunshine who is a p.r. guru. >> and we have nick gillespie who is the editor in chief of reason.com, the libertarian website and julie mennen who is a television star and a civic leader in new york.
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thank you for joining us. there's a new word in circulation, refudiate. ed used it on "meet the press." >> that's why i'm here tonight. >> the leather jacket let us know you were from brooklyn. >> i understand he wears leather somewhere else. >> i'd hate to refudiate you guys. what is this new word? we thought we'd toss it out to the table. do you all have any new words for us? >> i have a new word that i'm using. >> you've used a bunch i didn't understand before. >> this is a new word. are you upset that your civil rights heroes have been hijacked by racist ideologged. you just got becked. >> i have one, too, it's with
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carl paladino and the crazy talk he's had lately, whether he's gay bashing or taking on a woman's right to choose. paladinuts. that applies to delaware and nevada as well. >> we're definitely into the proper nouns. >> i've got one which may be too blue for cnn. but it's a colleague of mine came up with the idea of re[ bleep ]. you're full of that if you say, you have to stop government spending and like newt gingrich you say, you're full of [ bleep ]. >> we'll see if we get bleeped on that one. it's a good concept. ken? >> i hate to -- julie took my thunder. but a verb to be paladino'd. add first you think it's the greatest gift you can get as a
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candidate to run against an idiot like him. but after a while, it's so icky and so embarrassing that you've been paladino'd. >> i'm not sure someone can steal the thunder from a sunshine person. >> i want to come back to you, ken. the whole thing is kind of icky these days. there's no debate. there's no rate out there where you can say, yeah, there are some smart people. i wouldn't mind either one of them winning. there used to be race like that, right? >> there's something icky about the whole process. it's not only the kind of people that are getting into it. some of the people that are being caricatured are not terrible people. i think paladino is a terrible person and there's nothing good about him. it soils everything. >> i think we're not having the best and the brightest running anymore. when you have christine o'donnell with an ad starting off "i'm not a witch," we've
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sunk to a new low. >> the worst was when she said "i'm you." let's not forget the wonderful moment in the past when we had such great people running for office. to pretend this crew is any worse than historical average, i can't believe that. >> everyone is -- >> there's no privacy. >> everything goes viral. everything that you say -- for example, when paladino bashed gays, it was all over the internet. >> do we have a moment where a pat moynahan would stand up and give a speech -- it was more -- >> you didn't have jeshgs like these people actually running for office winning primaries. >> what you're saying is that -- >> the fringe has become
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mainstream, unfortunately. >> are megawhitman and carly fiorina fringe candidates? >> no, they're not. >> you can point to nut jobs and people who are not. christine, o'donnell, i think she's got more than a few screws loose. but her campaign, which nobody wants to talk about, all she said is that i'm not going to be like mike castle, a career politician. and i'm not going to be like -- i was going to say jeff coons, which would be very interesting -- >> if you watch "inside job," when you see that movie, you will no longer make the argument that someone is not qualified. these are the brightest people in the world and they completely screwed us. >> the -- if the people who are going to run the government and are incompetent and fool,
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letlet' let's -- sn. >> the problem with the libertarians, you hand everything over to the people who ran -- the market is what's gotten into a lot of these problems right now. >> no, actually the government got the markets into problems by bailing out either -- what part of the economy did the government not bail out? >> but that's part of the problem now. >> what you need is a government that creates market. if you don't protect them from monopoly power -- the role of government is to -- >> the government has a monopoly on the money supply. >> you end up being a mouthpiece for plutonomy. >> detroit really was unfettered
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markets that destroyed detroit. >> that's glenn beck's argument. >> hold that thought. we'll be right back with more of our political party. don't touch that clicker. clicker?
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welcome bach back to our political party. let's do one more quick wraparound of the table. president obama's been out of the campaign trail with wonderful killer lines like "we no longer face the possibility of a second great depression." that gets people on their feet. what should the democrats' slogan be this fall? >> at least we believe the earth
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is round. >> good. are you sure we do? >> i'm not sure. but putting it out there, cavemen and dine saurs did not exist together at the same time. the earth is not 6,000 and we don't believe in replacing the constitution with the ten commandments and stoke that feeling that the government might be taken over by people -- >> good line. >> but not the good kind -- not the people destroying -- >> the democratic phrase could be, we may have had a rough two years but we don't want the inmates running the asylum. >> most people think the inmates are running the asylum. >> if some of those republicans that won primaries actually get in the senate, the inmates will be running the asylum. >> we need to say something nice about republicans, guys. >> i have nothing to good to say about republicans. but the democrats had their shot. just like the republicans did for the first six years of this horrible 21st century and they screwed it up. the democrats had a clear shot
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and they screwed it up. what the democrats -- the best thing that can happen to them is to say, wait until 2012, because you're going to hate the republicans as much as you hate us right now. >> this is halloween politics? >> the democrats are so bereft of ideas that they're focusing on things like -- the fact is that christine o'donnell as a senator might be totally incompetent. she'll be in the upper third of the distribution, i suspect, of the world's greatest democratic legislative body or whatever. but there's very little she can actually do to screw up people's lives in terms of the ten commandments. are you going to start -- >> i was just asked as a democratic strategist what am i going to do to stoke up my base if i can't put marijuana refer dumbs on all 50 states. >> nobody on the democratic side is in favor -- at the national level in favor of pot legalization. candidate obama talked about it. >> we prefer coffee. it can go on mugs, it can go on
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buses. coming up next, the best idea where we cut through the political fighting to find real solutions. >> tonight, we're talking to matt miller who has real solutions for our struggling education system. >> it starts with, i think, presidential leadership and talking about it right now. i know obama's had a full plate. there's been literally no conversation out of the white house talking about the deep inequity in funding. half the teacher corps is turning over in the next decade that's a huge opportunity or a huge problem.
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now for the best idea where we cut through the political bickering and figure out how to fix something. >> we both immediately thought of matt miller because he wrote a book called "the tyranny of dead ideas" and it is full of good, lively ideas. matt, talk to us about obama's educational agenda. what's your appraisal of that? >> there's been literally no conversation out of the white house talking about the deep inequity in funding. the fact that our teacher crisis is huge. half the teacher corps is turning over in the next decade that's a huge opportunity or a huge problem. the u.s. is the only wellalthy nation that leaves it to school districts to fund themselves and decide what kids should learn. >> what are the numbers? how much is federal money, how much is local? >> when you look at the spending, the federal contribution is around 9% out of the total kindergarten to 12th
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grade dollar. in most other wealthy nation, it's all done nationally. because local property taxes are such a big piece of the financing and related state taxes, that means the u.s. has these huge inequities between wealthier districts in suburban areas and high-poverty areas that no other nations tolerate. thousands of dollar more per pupil are spent in the wealthier districts. it means that because teachers are the biggest portion of the school district budget, it means the best teachers gravitate toward the better-paid schools -- >> so poor children don't have a good shot at getting a good education. >> it won't change until we say the feds have to take a bigger role in helping poorer districts lift their funding so they can compete. >> what's the other piece of this bargain? it's not a question of pouring
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federal money in. >> you need to have a grand bargain where we put new money in from the federal level in exchange for real ae form. a grand bargain for teachers would say, the feds are going to put up billions of dollars. in exchange, the teachers unions will have to give up the pay scales that they currently require where everybody has to be paid the same based on how many years they've been in the classroom or -- and how difficult it is to -- >> give up seniority as the basis of pay and put in place -- >> the ability to pay up for specialties like math and science where promising young people have better opportunities outside the clam to attract a new generation of teaching talent to the toughest schools -- >> it sounds sensible. but people don't want any more federal involvement in their local school system. teachers are going to rebel against that. >> i'm sure teachers would rebel against it. the unions i think would be open to this grand bargain. if you said you're going to put more money in exchange for some of these reform, tuff beginnings
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of a deal. the real opponents are the 95,000 local school board elected officials who are a huge constituency and want to become state legislators and higher officials. i think we have to challenge that because in a global economy, we're going to leave millions and millions of kids behind. >> how do you make sure when you put the federal money in, localities don't reduce the amount of money they've been putting in? >> you have to find a way to make sure they keep skin in the game. and you can design the program in a way that would make sure that they have to match what the feds are doing -- >> how do you pay teachers based on performance, which is the critical piece of this bargain that you're talking about? >> it's a piece of it. but it shouldn't be the only piece. other countries do performance-based pay. in sing pore, they've got the top kids, the top young college graduates going into teaching. finland and south korea, they attract from the very top of the class. we tend to recruit for our teacher corps from the bottom two-thirds of the college class
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which is one piece of the problem. not all those countries do performance pay. but we want to pay up for those who are getting demonstrable gains and for the specialties where kids have other options. >> how do you measure what makes a good teacher? >> it's a tough question. i don't pretend to have the full answer. lots of experiments are going on where they talk about using student achievement gains as a piece of it. using the standardized test, using the principal, using all this other stuff. some countries don't do any of this. finland has outstanding results but because they recruit so selectively, one in eight people get accepted to teacher training, they have a kind of training in advance in a sort of professional ethic that says, we're going to work as a collaborative group of professionals like doctors. >> you described something and you put out a report with other folks on this issue. how do you create within
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those -- the universe of people graduating from college that desire to become teachers? how do you create that? >> one piece is clearly money. when you talk to young people who are at the top of their class, in the u.s., the options available to top third college graduates are huge. and when you have average salaries -- starting salaries around $37,000. the maximum average salary is around $67,000, that doesn't compete. it used to be a generation ago but partly because women and minorities didn't have opportunities outside the classroom. the quality of the teacher corps was subsidized by discrimination in the u.s. those days are gone. we need to pay up in exchange for reform -- >> is anybody out there carrying this message, this notion of a grand bargain, money for fundamental reform? >> michelle rea was the closest of anyone to putting these issues on the table. some people think she's been an
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imperfect messenger for this because she can be somewhat abrasive. but she does it because she says, this is in the about the adults, this is about the kids. >> thank you so much, matt. we appreciate you coming. >> thanks for having me. we'll be right back. hey, did you ever finish last month's invoices? sadly, no. oh. but i did pick up your dry cleaning and had your shoes shined. well, i made you a reservation at the sushi place around the corner. well, in that case, i better get back to these invoices... which i'll do right after making your favorite pancakes. you know what? i'm going to tidy up your side of the office. i can't hear you because i'm also making you a smoothie. [ male announcer ] marriott hotels & resorts knows it's better for xerox to automate their global invoice process so they can focus on serving their customers. with xerox, you're ready for real business. until the combination of three good probiotics in phillips' colon health defended against the bad gas, diarrhea and constipation. ...and? it helped balance her colon. oh, now that's the best part. i love your work. [ female announcer ] phillips' colon health.
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i'm anderson cooper. more of "parker spitzer" in a
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moment. first, the latest. in chile, the first of 33 trapped miners could be pulled to safety within the next 24 hours. the latest test of the capsule that will carry to men to the surface was a success. final preparations to reinforce the escaped tunnel were completed today. we'll have the latest tonight on "360." many mexico, conflicting reports from authorities about whether two suspects are being pursued in the case of a missing man. he was shot in the head while jet skiing on. . carl paladino is defending incendiary remarks he told about homosexuals. paladino says he doesn't want children to, quote, be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid or acceptable option.
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rich lott, a republican candidate for congress in ohio is taking heat for being a world war ii re-enactor on the german side. he says his hobby is being taken out of context. i'll talk to him tonight on "360." that's the latest. now back to "parker spitzer." eliot, you're the one who loves bumper stickers. tonight we have one that works for both of us. it is "lord, help me be the person my dog thinks i am". >> this is why there's a dog sitting on my lap. ollie is a blind toy poodle. he was delivered to a shelter. but my friends loaned him to me one night after i had dinner at their house and here we are a year later. >> what does he think you are in
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keeping with our bumper sticker theme? >> he thinks i'm a goddess, of course. >> when they're blind, you can persuade them of anything. >> you stole my line. he is blind, so he thinks not only am a goddess, he thinks i'm perfect in every way. >> my dog thinks that. we have a little dog like this that's a little bigger. and we have a terrier who thinks i'm his personal trainer. >> you have hairdo dogs, too? >> no. >> dogs that look like a hairdo. >> they look like dogs. this is my terrier is like a real dog. >> he's been done. he's got -- >> when you meet james, i'm not going to tell him you said he'd been done. he may not take to you the way ollie has. >> thanks for joining us. be sure to join us tomorrow night. >> good night from new york. larry king starts right now.