the events, more than 100 events around the country. i discovered when you lay out what to big to fail means, it does not make the audience members very happy. . .

that idea is to take us on a little tour of what has happened on this country since the reagan administration overturned the antimonopoly laws a generation ago. we can start with eyeglasses. if you go out and go shopping for eyeglasses he might go to pearl vision, you might go to lines crafters, if you are on a budget you might go to target optical or sears optical. you might go to sunglass hut.

the facts are the biggest chains that sell sunglasses owned by one company, the giant italian firm. you say okay i'm not going to go to one of these chains, upscale, one of these boutiques. if you go to one of these boutiques it is also a manufacturer. as [laughter] so pretty much any boutique you go to if you are buying donner caring or oakley you are buying their products. toothpaste coming your standing in the store and see this huge ntray of boxes in front of you brands and different tastes. the two companies are pretty much responsible for every one of those tubes of toothpaste, that includes [inaudible] [laughter] and you know what these

companies do every day? de kuhl lewd. there is a practice called category management and with the category management means is the two companies get together and they decide to get their how they're going to display their products together and price their products and how they are going to defeat the market share. pet food from the bill rell during away -- if you go to a pet store and say bewildering the way of options but anyone who paid attention to the pet food recall that happened three years ago will remember five of the six companies that sell branded pet food in this country and 17 out of the 20 companies that sell private-label pet food, they all source their cans and certain holders of the food from one company, one plant in kansas which is called mannion foods.

mulken not long ago i was in a wal-mart in elizabethtown, tennessee. to walk up to the cold case and see all these different options, gallons with the name pet dairy and others would say mayfield and great value, the private label of wal-mart. well afterwards i did a little research and found out pet dairy and mayfield are owned by the same company called dean foods, it also provides wal-mart with its private label milk so when you are there and standing and have these choices it's all one company. and dean does heavy rifle. dean controls about have the milk in the united states and the other is controlled by dfoa, dairy farmers of america. they also operate, collude in much of their work. i can go on and on and walk up

the soil and down that aisle and up and down the mall. you guys get the picture. i don't have to do that but consider some of the stores we shop in. we all know now that wal-mart is a big but we may not know that wal-mart actually controls 30 plus% of most of the basic sales of goods in this country and in many cases it is above 50%. soap, detergent, pet food but it's not just discount. the high-end department stores a generation ago in this country there was more than 1,000 independent department stores from coast to coast. now there's a company called bcts come the of 1,000 department stores in the one chain. the ingredients inside the food we buy probably a lot of us know a lot of the processed food has corn inside and we also probably suspect most of that corn comes

from feedstock that monsanto owns but did you know that ascorbic acid that vitamin c that is used to preserve that, 100% of the escort acid is controlled by a chinese vitamin cartel, the stuff that we buy in our country. the materials inside of the store, the iron ore that goes into the steel and the beams, the aluminum that goes on the shelving, three companies control almost the entire supply of iron ore and aluminum in the world. two of them recently tried to merge and pretty much cooperate openly. in tire systems in the economy have monopolies. if you go around and look at the automotive industry, here at least is a case in which we have real american cowboy capitalism

even the most countries are now japanese but you've got 12 companies or more selling all these different brands, all these different types of cars. what happens is as the companies are outsourcing their supply activities over the last 15 years the monopolies were coming in from below and will learn that control over many of the suppliers so appear you see many heads down below increasingly one body. you know, just to sum up i could go on and on but you guys might know jim cramer of msnbc's "mad money." i should let him get a sense what has happened. a couple of years back when the justice department approved the takeover of maytag which gave will pull a 75% control over all of the washers and dryers in

this country, he said if there was ever any doubt in your mind that we have a government of, by and for of the corporations, if you thought for a second we were all right back in the gilded age, if you had the least amount of faith in the regulators to do the right thing, you should give it up right now. then he went on and said on tv i play god that is just out to make you money but when you're not trying to get rich you should feel free to get mad. so in one generation of this country we have seen a true revolution at least in the structure of our political economy. so how does this revolution affect us? we all know from seventh grade civics class monopolies affect us as consumers. i will give you one example. the chinese vitamin c cartel pretty much the day after they finished consolidating the power over a vitamin c ascorbic acid

the jack the price 400%. but we know that is what happens. that is just the way it goes but we should also keep in mind it affects us as consumers in the variety of product put in front of us and the quality of the product put in front of us but how about jobs because that is a big issue today. i'm sure that tonight the president will talk a lot of jobs. now, simple common sense tells us that monopolization will reduce the bargaining power of the people who work for those monopolies who are in the control of those monopolies, and just to get a sense of how this works you consider the advertising industry. some of you watched that show, "mad minn." and it's about all of these sort of scrappy little companies, jay

walter thompson, leo burnett, all of those companies in the recent years have been brought under the control of three holding companies, omnicom, interpublic and wpp to the people who work for those companies compare to even ten years ago they got a lot less ability to trade their labor on the free-market. but the monopolization also affect the number of jobs in the country. we all probably know when there is a merger the mergers often destroy jobs. a year ago january 2009, pfizer the world's largest drug company was allowed by to take over wife in a 60 million-dollar deal. the manager said we are going to do this. it's a good deal because it's going to allow us to get rid of 19,000 jobs. that is just one case and that is in some ways not the biggest issue because what the monopolization really does is it

doesn't just eliminate the existing jobs. it eliminates the potential to create new jobs. it does so in a couple of ways. one of these makes sense which is that the monopolization for a big company, monopolization essentially eliminates its incentive to create new jobs. if you own the market one of the first things you can do is cut back on cost, you can get what you want by charging your customers more paying suppliers less. but what about small companies? in recent years we have come to understand most new jobs in the country are created by small companies. the problem here is when you have monopolization of the upper levels there is less and less space for the small companies to occupy, there are fewer niches for them to move into. they might have a better idea, they might have some entirely new idea but the powerful are so

powerful that there is no place to bring that idea. in the united states of america the markets are increasingly closed. also on the issue of jobs it isn't only an issue of salary jobs. there's a lot of folks in the country that have a dream to own their own business, pay their own way, be their own boss. some people regard that as right. there was a recent oecd study that came out over the summer. i have 22 nations, 22 rich nations, united states came out in terms of the percentage of the population that owns its own business, 21st.

>> [inaudible] >> luxembourg. we were behind france, behind sweden, behind japan, behind germany. here to in one generation is prove that we've had a revolution in the political economy but this case it is a social revolution. over the last generation millions of families come millions of small-business people run out of the retail businesses, run out of their farms, run out of the service sector businesses like optometric some to understand how radical the revolution is, the social revolution that the political sense i am going to quote one of the people who helped shape the previous political economic system in america. this is supreme court justice william douglas 50 years ago in a case in which big oil companies were attempting to take control over independent

retailers. he said when independent source of wood by the trust and entrepreneurs become employees of absentee owners the result is a serious loss in the citizenship, local leadership is diluted, he was a leader in the town becomes dependent on outsiders for the actions and policies, clerks responsible to superior and distant place take the place of president proprietor's beholden to no one what he said reflects a very simple vision which was america should be a nation composed of independent citizens in which power is distributed out to the states come out to the communities. as anyone who is a little bit older will remember until reagan came along that actually was pretty much the way it was in the retail, there was a true

distribution of power. today a generation after the change of the law to put in perspective, i know i'm repeating myself, more than 50% of the many lines of business in america have been concentrated in the hands of the people who own and operate one company and that's wal-mart. how is this revolution accomplished? the simplest answer is that we were taught to view ourselves differently. in this country for 200 years we view ourselves as citizens and when you view yourself as a citizen would you want and what you seek his liberty about a generation ago we were told we were something else, we were told we were consumers, that we are consumers. what do consumers want? they don't want to liberty, they want stuff.

weant a lot of cheap stuff i want it to make important i understand i'm not making some kind of hippie rant against materialism, i'm talking about the law because that idea, the idea americans are not citizens but consumers was actually used to refrain how we enforce an entire body of law which was the antimonopoly law. for two centuries in this country we use the entire monopoly law to protect ourselves as citizens, protect against concentration of power. we used to protect independent retailers and producers against rhodesian by people using concentrated capital in the corporate institution. this is part of the tradition in the anglo-american tradition that goes back 400 years come back to the elizabethan times in

some senses it goes back a hundred years to the mad nagareda. the reagan administration 1981 changed this. they said the most important from now on we are not going to worry about antitrust in terms of consumers, i mean in terms of citizens. we're going to use it to protect the welfare of the consumer. it's important to note when the reagan administration did this, they had help. various factions in the consumer movement came to their aid. when robert bork of the chicago school came up with this for income consumer welfare frame there were a lot them that can from the democrats and to be frank the clinton administration in terms of consolidation in the country was in most cases worse

than what the reagan people did. but we should make no mistake about what mr. bork and his fellow chicago schoolers did with their welfare frame and this was to pass a essentially into the law the efficiency argument that has been favored by monopolists for centuries and what do i mean by that? john d. rockefeller, jpmorgan, the all basically had a single message, competition is wasteful. centralization of control in my hand, that is efficient. but consider how the logic of the consumer welfare argument plays out over time. the logic kind of goes like this, consumers want the prices,

low prices are chief best as a scale, ergo monopoly is the best friend of the consumer so here we are a generation later and it's proven effective again we actually see the greatest concentration of power in the country in a century and some cases it is actually worse because the last time around the finance use did not get their hands on a farm, they did not get their hands on to the retailers. if we view american history through the lens of the antimonopoly law, we sort of see the four heroes, the first was the first half of the 19th century and this was in which power and opportunity was distributed vary widely through the system, extremely egalitarian society. the second era began after the

civil war. first we saw the power concentrated by the private lords' using the corporations in the bank's, and then we saw in the progressive era dusty to get into the next and the next 30 years various forms of corporatism the country. the third era began 1935 some of you know there's two new deals, the second new deal began when the court, supreme court rejected the national industrial recovery act, the decision of 1935. after that, we saw an entirely different political economy built by the populists repressed up the time they came out of the box, they passed a law which is designed to distribute power out away from washington and wall street out to the states to the communities to the independent

citizens. since 1981, concentration, corporatism, finance years out of all control. last may in the atlantic simon johnson published an article called the quiet coup. that is a really big deal which i don't think has attracted enough attention in this country which is here you have the chief economist of the imf, a man who's been around the world and spent his time in russia, spend his time in indonesia and what does he see here? tecum spec and troubles on the world and comes back and sees in america what he called a financial oligarchy. i wrote cornered for many reasons, simply to highlight the degree of the concentration that has been achieved in this country. i don't know why other people haven't focused on this, but it's time to focus on it.

i wrote the book also to flesh out journalistically the basic argument that there was indeed some sort of a coup, there was a social change that was extremely significant. i wrote it also to assure the destructive effects because when the financiers have control of the corporations and use the corporation's only to extract capital, not to make things are provide jobs on of the things that happens is the assets, the properties, the real skills under the patrol of the corporations are destroyed. i wrote it also to give a sense of with the principles of the previous political and economic system looked like, the one that was overthrown by the chicago schoolers, by reagan and then was then ratified by clinton. but to do. the simplest thing is to make

the corporations, make the banks and a lot smaller. we have the laws, we just have to retrain them back the way they were before, we of antimonopoly, pricing,, encourage, there is a myriad of the laws. americans of the previous generations were really smart what we have to be essentially is rebuild all of the markets that were closed. but the last point that i want to make is there has been a lot of talk of populism the last few days. we have seen it this week in "the washington post," we saw james brooks write something in "the new york times," thomas frank and the "wall street journal" write about populism but we should be clear, we need to be clear there are in terms of the real populism there are two forms, the first form or one of the forms is destructive come

it's kind of barbaric and this is the form of populism that takes place when the rich and powerful or the merely ignorant direct the people's anger and people's power against the people's institutions, the people's own government, we are seeing a lot of that now. the government is the only tool we have to protect ourselves from concentrated power. the other populism is rooted in a democratic republican ken tradition that goes back through brandeis to madison to jefferson. it's based on conviction that the doctrines of the separation of power and checks and balances must be applied also to our political economy just as to the political system. now this is a principal populism, it is a constructive population that focuses on the breaking of the concentration of

private power that threaten the rights and the liberties of american citizens. right now i don't know which populism we are going to choose. i didn't think when i was writing the book the choice would come upon us so fast. i hope that the "cornered" helps people figure it out. thank you for coming. [applause] >> we are going to have plenty of time for questions and discussions, so i will call on you from here and very well take it. we have a microphone that will circulate through the room. you will let us know who you are, where you're from and state your question or comment crisp and clearly, and i've got to turn that on. but you all heard me, especially

the part of the crisp and concise question. let us know who you are. yes, let's start right here. >> i am dr. carol, i am a physician. i was wondering how he would apply your analysis to health care and health insurance. >> i generally try to avoid that question just because it's pretty complicated. from what i have seen of the health care argument debate discussion there hasn't been any really effective discussion about how to use competition rifle way to achieve the outcomes we want. most of what i've seen is how to concentrate power so we can essentially exert power down on to the providers of services and dictate to them the prices they are going to receive. this is something that we sell -- one of the cases this is something that i don't know if

you are very familiar with the group purchasing organizations and hospitals there is a case in which you have these -- the idea was to create these powers the would be able to -- the body and cooperative stuff would exert power on to the people who provide us with our search engines and medical devices and that's been an absolute disaster because those organizations essentially have been taken over by the suppliers and they are used to push product on to the hospitals. but no, i don't see any creative thinking about competition in that discussion. >> and with the naval postgraduate school. i really care about jobs. i think that's a very important thing because i think it helps define people and who they were

and have a mechanism for doing it. how do you go about shifting that? how do you change the culture which says having jobs is lots more important than having a gazillion dollars? it is a value system. >> i think the people who want jobs and need to get together and cooperate so that they can make their wishes known as a people who just want a gazillion dollars because right now all of the systems are run by people who just want a gazillion dollars and they are kind of laughing about it right now. it's like we -- they are dismissing the obama administrations the five efforts to rein in the banks and that is because they are not serious efforts. so, i mean, the simple answer is to focus only on those people, not to think about how we are going to provide this subsidy,

provided this job or tinker with this tax over here to create this job, let's focus on the people who have the power and are exercising their power in ways that destroy jobs. that would be a much simpler wholesale approach to dealing with this problem. >> i am just here as myself. one of caution: i would caution you in describing the period of the jacksonian democracy which is what i think you were referring to in the earlier 18th-century description as being sunni there were a group of people who probably didn't think it was that egullet terrie answer you might want a different adjective and i don't mean that to be sloppy, just a little snarky. first of all i think also to give milton friedman his do i think that the chicago school is more to him than i might bob bork although there's a whole argument there. i guess my question would be why

was the chicago school, and i'm going to push harder because as a matter of political philosophy, economics and law why do we think the chicago school was able to be as successful as it was? many people say it's the most recent financial problems is a real -- it's been written about so there's a golden moment, never the less it strikes me your critique, maybe you do this in the book i of and read it but doesn't take on hardy enough what it was an avowed philosophy to be as triumphant as it was because that was -- tested the economic context for that followed. >> it's a great question and before i get to it if you notice i didn't use the name of andrew jackson -- >> [inaudible] >> i know this is a problem and part of the problem here is to pull out, to extract what was good about the first half of the

19th century from what was not so good -- you had to parallel economies and one of them was actually -- there were some pretty remarkable characteristics about that and the other one was pretty awful. as far as milton friedman yes milton friedman deserves his do and was in so many ways the father of this revolution and you just go back and read carefully the one book from 1962 capitalism and freedom it is a very slim book but the basic arguments made ever since about the free-market, the basic arguments made a person about the free trade, about who owns the corporation, they are all in their, and they are actually not arguments, the largest series of assertions.

in terms of how was it achieved, how were the arguments pushed on to us, it is really complicated question because you also have the fact that you had a revolution in thinking in the democratic party i mention the fact the consumer movement ended up working as an ego chamber for a lot of what was being done. the consumer movement was essentially a throwback to the classical progressive era and in many ways there were mellon to become any elements that were not interested in the distribution of power. in fact the consumer concept how do you create a consumer movement that goes back to wittman at least 1914 he writes about it. so it's like this was a concept that came out of an era in the united states that was very corporatist in which people believed in the top-down control so you basically had to some extent an alliance between what you could call the laissez-faire

people preaching the laissez-faire which essentially let the people who control the private corporations will and then the people who expected to pick up the power afterwards with people who once those people screwup be in the state will end up in control and what's happened at various times it just happened now. we have this corporatist in place right now. so, one of the things we have to do is understand and what people would say on the left to help lay the groundwork for this revolution that was affected by the chicago school. >> and berger, i'm sensitive to the major desist to describe but let me raise a little conundrum. one of the things those who promote consolidation say is in order to compete in the world

one has to continually increase productivity, agriculture is a good example. the industrial business in fact began a long time ago of and has been a relentless and produced as they say the only product that has had a consistent balance of trade for example. the price of food has gone down in relation to everything else that we buy and we get a lot of it away. how does one in fact reconcile this constant quest for more and more productivity with distribution as you would see it that we shouldn't enjoy in the industrial sector? >> that is a great question and if you look at what was put together the political economy that was structured during the second new deal you see a balanced economy that was meant to deal with essentially the very things you're discussing and the people in the second new deal were not radical -- they were not hillbillies' running

around with hatches trying to break things in little pieces. what is it is okay in certain cases we need a monopoly. monopoly is the only natural and necessary rational way to deal with the problem that the monopolies shouldn't be run by private people for private property, profit, they should be run by the people indirectly or directly for the people's interest. then they had a system that was for the heavy industrial sectors, this would be like making metal or cars or chemicals. and they didn't break down the chemical industry, they didn't break down the car industry, they didn't break down the metal industry. what they did is left them in place, the engineered some rivalry but not a whole lot, like the case in point there would be alcoa. until 1945 echols 100% moly. on the making of aluminum in the united states.

with the new deal did the second new deal did is day after the end of the war, they sold off a bunch of plants the government alleged that had been run by alcoa and they sold them to other companies, kaiser and reynolds, that is why we had three companies making aluminum in this country. but it wasn't -- we didn't have 100 companies, we had three companies then you had this other sector in which they said well with retail, with the restaurants and plumbing services there is no case to be made that it actually boost productivity and in the case of agriculture there are cases that say bringing machines on to the farmer although some people would dispute this increase productivity but there are also a number of people who even today they will point to other countries in which output per acre is often much higher than the united states and there is

huge waste in the present agricultural system besides the fact that you have huge environmental problems. but i think that -- the question you raise is a very important and there were certain industries in which consolidation and of the scale is very important. >> my name is christine and apparently i'm the consumer. i've always felt my dollar was a vote and that if i could choose plans and noble as independent bookstore versus total corner bookstore and granted the corner store and bookstore are much more expensive but i always felt, and my question is am i wrong in thinking that i have some power how this against

wal-mart and other companies? >> your dollar is a vote when you actually have a real market systems and which you have many buyers and many sellers. in the present system it's really not much of a vote and actually in the modern concept the person who's been pushing this idea that if you don't like the way the corporation is acting that you should take your dollars elsewhere the father of the modern idea is none other than milton friedman again in the capitalism and freedom, 1962. the point earlier about freedom and as the father of this movement, one of the things i did this look at the frame free-market which is this idea there is a market system, there is this thing out there which before 1980 most people would say who creates wealth in this country? who creates new products and technologies? most people say it's people who do that.

what milton friedman did in 1962 is created the concept of the free-market he said they are created by the free market. he eliminated the people and this force, this public, this mechanism in right now most people, there was an article 10 years ago by a theologian in atlantic called the market and it's got most people in the country to look at the market mechanism as a sort of mechanical guide. so that one book, the one set of three main activities of one man engaged in was a remarkable achievement. >> let's go back to the front row. actually we will do one, two, three. >> i have a question, how do you feel the random consolidation in the financial service industry? do you see this as just eight example of the trend to discuss or something more perhaps one of the drivers of the trend

particularly amongst the consolidation with the top five major bank holding companies and also the increased and the overall share of the banking market amongst members of the federal reserve system. >> the consolidation of the financial services and banking is a huge issue and as you mentioned a share of the top five banks control doubled between 2000 to 2010. even so, the share of its controlled by -- it is a huge compared to other countries. until quite recently, one of the things about the consolidation in the financial-services you worry that certain people are calling to be able to say yes or no to whether you have a good idea or not, whether you are going to fund it, that kind of consolidation didn't come through the financial control over the financial system, it can through the control by the finance years over the

corporations come over the real world corporations, the real world institutions. that is how the exercise the power oute al world so they did not need to pursue the kind of concentration in banking that we saw in the 1890's with jpmorgan or 1912 with jpmorgan or in some other countries. >> [inaudible] -- for s sort of not at all? >> the concentration over the real world holding is a result of the changes in antimonopoly law and in the changes in the corporate governance to laws. on till the 1980's the corporations of the united states no one regarded them as properties. in the old regime corporation is an institution designed to

govern activities. excerpts power over real people and real properties. but you can't own it. the city and miami as a corporation no one can own. harvard university is a corporation we can't own it. these are government institutions to set up constitutions that determine how you use these institutions. over the last 30 years what we have seen also is simultaneous with the changing into a monopoly law we see this shift because before the corporations were controlled by the unionized labor by professional managers by the state, the cold war state was pretty much in every important corporation's board room and by small shareholders that were there. now all of the power has been centralized, all the power for the institutions is centralized in the hands of a few finance years.

but that wasn't do through the exercise of financial power. it wasn't necessary in this case. it was used in the 1890's and 1912 it was financial power used to concentrate control, not this time around. >> thank you. first of all this is great work. i was wondering if you could speak to -- and you did touch on and a little bit but the connection with on the one hand ownership of the federal reserve and connection and fight over the federal reserve as well as john perkins and his book confessions of an economic hit man talks with the military industrial complex industry and he traces quite a continuity from world war ii and onward to if he could we've chosen to the story that would be helpful.

>> going backwards the military-industrial complex became a lot more powerful than 1993. just after the end of the cold war and again this is one of the works of the clinton administration and what happened is there was a secretary defense perry brought in the different people who running the defense corporation but said you guys have to merge, there are too many, it's confusing mess it creates waste in the offices, merge so they went for more than 100 companies to about five big ones. the five big ones obviously end up with a lot more control for the government than if you got 100 of them. it got worse rather than better after the end of the cold war things to clinton administration policy. as far as federal reserve, i

would prefer -- i think what i will comment on that is what is really interesting and this event is that we are seeing the populist and republican party, populist in the democratic popularity coming together and all the stock in the town is about how there is no cross party work being done but we are actually seeing it in this case because it is the people starting to come together on economic issues or concentration of power issues. spec we are going to stack of several questions in a row now to facilitate some time so let's go here and then in the back and in the middle. so these are going to be crisp concise and barry will address them all.

>> of and to bring together three ideas and kind of converge them. when is the supreme court told us that the future governments would be the best money can buy. number two post a consolidation system in which we are going to have mayor daley won in the political system. there is we now felt something called the neuroeconomics which we can manipulate how you think and how to decide what is our future in that circumstance? >> i am a retired economist but have a lot of problems with my fellow economists. the delight you did and i'm not saying that to be what you said in any way. but they have a fascinating hypophysis and furious, concepts and so forth and be making a

great argument but there are a lot of the people just as clever as you are and they make other kind of arguments and the average citizen is scratching his head wondering who is right and what is going on that it seems to me in order to be able to evaluate these issues one must first speak about what you value the most. if he were to go to life liberty and pursuit of happiness or freedom, liberty and justice for all, from that we could derive something because what we have now are in conflict with those things that half of you and then we have a base to evaluate these from. >> thank you. last one, right here. sprick i was interested in what you said about the role of government and law and regulations and promoting of

police. there is a special-interest protectionism, the small companies can't afford lawyers. >> can you handle that? bring knous home? >> i think the first question -- what is the future and i will tell you the second question, the future as far as i can tell at the present and i have a couple kids at home is they will spend their lives on their knees and serving of the people and they won't have much recourse to the law to protect them. as to what to do about it, you know, how to talk to folks because there's a lot of smart folks on the obverse side serving the power of concentration in fact they were a lot better over there so they could by anyone they want. i have huge faith and regular people and spent the last time

around a lot of time outside washington talking to people all over the country, peoria, birmingham, los angeles, and people felt side of this town are so much more able to use common sense. out there you say you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket people say no, duh and you say that here and they say about the efficiency? there might be cost if we get to buy two baskets. so i have a huge faith in the people of the united states because they actually -- our brains operate in different ways. the people in the world have not been indoctrinated in the we the people in this town have been indoctrinated. the other thing is there is an

entire political economic model that is just waiting to use and touches on the issue how do you fix it and it is we have the second new deal model, the second laws, what they did and how they fit together we can improve on that. so it's just a matter of doing a little digging into our own past and i think he will find that as we often to our parents were great grandparents were maybe a little smarter than we were. >> thank you. you did wonderfully. thank you for joining us. thank you to the few words on c-span and the washington notes .com and politics and prose bookstore is. thanks for coming and enjoy your evening. [inaudible conversations] >> barry lynn is a fellow at the

new america's foundation and author of the coming rise and fall of the global corporation. to find out more from this -- visit newamerica.net. we are at west virginia and university in morgantown west virginia with john temple, author of the blast loitered the fight to save death row inmates. mr. temple why don't you start by telling about the main characters, kenneth rose and boe jones, what is their story? >> there are two men about the

same age, they both live in north carolina. both jones was a farm hand from the plan, north carolina convicted of murder in 1993 for a murder that occurred in 1987 and he was sentenced to death and spent a believe 13 years on death row. kenneth rose is the lawyer who in 1997 took on his case shortly before boe was scheduled to be executed and he has represented boe ever since and i spent four and a half years following that case. >> what got you interested in this particular case? have you always interest in the law? >> my wife is a lawyer but it isn't a field i've studied. i was drawn to the idea writing about lawyers who exclusively

represent death row inmates because i thought, i just wanted to know why someone what do that. it's not a field that has a lot of rewards financially or in the community really. or in the legal profession. so i wanted to know and it's hard work. your clients often die when you give it a long period of times it can be really difficult. so that is the story i felt like no one had written about. there's been a lot written about the death penalty and some cases we followed and have written about in books but no one to my knowledge has written about the lawyers from the journalistic point of view. >> how closely were you able to work with the characters to get your story?

>> very closely with ken. but boe it was harder, he's a stubborn character and he didn't want to speak to me for a long time in fact he wouldn't work with his own lawyers for a long time. he had problems with the way they were handling this case and he can be a difficult person and that was something that was interesting to see lawyers working on behalf of someone who wasn't even cooperating on top of everything else even their own client wasn't working very well with them. >> you see it took a few years to put together the work. how much time was research versus writing? did you travel a lot? >> i did travel a lot. i considered it a work of emerging journalism which is difficult pilaf when you live in west virginia and in the case you are writing about is north carolina so i had to go down

there a lot. it took something like 17 trips for that for and have here period including one month i lived my whole family down there for a month. >> who do you want to read this book and what you want them to take from it? >> i think it's a book that can appeal to a wide variety of people because it is written in accessible style. i think it is not written primarily for lawyers. it's not really a book about death penalty -- it isn't aimed toward an audience that already knows a lot about the difficulty. it is a book that is a courtroom drama as the way i try to think of it and go about so a wide variety but certainly anyone interested in the law as well and particularly in the civil rights in the death penalty would be interesting.

>> and what are ken rose and boe jones doing today? to the have a relationship? >> they do. it's not particularly close. ken is continuing to work for other inmates on death row and he is a very important figure in that arena. he is probably one of the most -- it's hard to gauge exactly but he is certainly -- he's been doing death row work since 1981 since the day he got out of college or law school so that makes him by default one of the most experienced people in the field if not a huge field, so he's been very important and well respected in that area and argued a lot of three important cases. >> where do you stand on the

death penalty and did your views change of all if he were doing the research and writing as well? >> i didn't go into it for ideological reasons. i didn't go into it to write a book about why we shouldn't have the death penalty. however certainly is a book that concentrates more on one side of the argument and the other. i chose to concentrate on the death penalty lawyers, i mean the lawyers who visit the death row inmates. i don't know that my views changed a whole lot. i felt like going in that from the research i had done and from what i had read and people i talked to it was a system that doesn't work particularly well. and i think that view has only been reinforced. >> would you teach at west virginia university? >> the journalism school in the

associate dean as well. >> we've been speaking with john temple author of the last lawyer the fight to save death row inmates at west virginia university. you. >> here is a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals over the next few months.

in her book "the selling of the american economy," new door times senior business correspondent micheleine maynard or use the investment in the u.s. by foreign companies has a positive and back on the economy and on the lives of american workers. the university of michigan's school of business and ann arbor hosts this 45 minute event. >> good afternoon, everyone. i am the dean of the school of business and it's a pleasure to welcome you all here this afternoon and we welcome book tv who is taking the conversation this afternoon. the format this afternoon will be that we will have a little conversation here first between the two of us on