same time if it's manager negative, i will report that. one of my books lists the dismissal of williams sessions as fbi director over his abuses, and this book takes louie free to task and says he really was even worse than sessions. so at the same time when the fbi does something right, i say that. for example, that's why we have not been attacked since 9/11. the fbi every few months rolls up terrorists. it's a myth that the fbi cannot function as an intelligence agency that develops clues and leads to future plots. that is now the main priority of the fbi. >> the most recent book by ron kessler, "the secrets of the fbi." >> civil rights attorney connie be rice recounts her life and legal career next on booktv.

ms. rice, second cousin of former secretary of state condoleezza rice, recalls her upbringing and education as well as her numerous court cases which include legal actions against the los angeles police department and the city's bus and school systems. this is a little over an hour. >> it is a great pleasure to be here and a privilege to address you tonight. thank you for coming out, and i've been on this odyssey in l.a. for about the last 20, 23 years. and i figured before i hit 60,: i'd better while i still haveá the memories, i'd better pullá some of them out and put them down there. i'm 55 now, and i wasn't sure that i'd be able to do it in another ten years. : á á : : : :

>> she seemed more the barbie: doll mode of journalist, not th real investigative journalists that i grew up with, so i really didn't want to go to lunch with her, but i went. and i started talking about these kids who were live anything jordan downs housing project, and i wanted her the -- her to focus on my client, and i wanted her to understand that the reason i went down to watts every day after court was because i was win anything the courtroom, but my clients were losing their lives. and that while i was having great success as a lawyer, i was doing nothing to change the ecosystem that they were dying in. and so i wanted her to focus on that. and instead she says, oh, connie, poverty's so boring, you know, i want to know how you and condoleezza got so different. [laughter] poverty is so boring.

i was livid. and i had to bite a hole in my lip which i've learned to do and count to ten so that i didn't slap her and get arrested for assault and battery. and i said that's not what i'm here to talk about. i will talk a little bit about myself. i am boring. poverty is not boring. try living it. and, um, i realized that we had allowed, we, progressive people who think like the quakers, who think like martin luther king jr., who think like, who think like the great progressives and humanists who think like gandhi, who do not think like ayn rand, who do not think about greed and self-enrichment. they actually think about community, and they think about helping people who can't or won't take care of themselves. for folks like us, we have

allowed ourselves to be erased. we're not even in the discussion. they talk about the center, well, they left out the left. it was like a bird with a right wing, you know? [laughter] and and i said, that's our fault. we allow these debates to go on, and we allow the terms to be defined so that my clients are out of the picture. they're not even counted in the census anymore. they're not counted in unemployment statistics. so i wrote this book to explain to my friends and to this journalist who finds poverty boring why ignoring people at the bottom of the economic scale and leaving them at the bottom of the well as the great, late derek bell would say, if you you leave them to

a to grow, they never of violence, guess what? they germinate dangers that come back at the middle class. book. would give me a blurb, but i also have chief general -- i'm sorry he mcchrystal. stan mccristal.

likely dad. and said, you know something? insurgency. sustained, incipient, and tavis smiley. that is a great lineup, you've

so intense. mean to sound like i've and i know i sound that way. television. one-foot-square

read. we learned to the read at age 3 nomads are particularly tribe. of much as we did, and we moved families. officers, and lot in texas, even graduated from high school in

i do think we [laughter] [laughter] you know, i think, i think i go help them achieve their, their aspiration. [laughter] i have been incredibly pioneers before painfully aware that we were not the first talented

amazing thing. the mix, the cocktail mix of my blood could only have been done a jambalaya of in struggles. straight from five windshields bashed

108th street. and i just maaed in because mercedes marquez had said, connie, latino families are moving into this african-american housing project. you're talking about african-americans who never recovered from slavery. five generations in public housing. in jordan downs i estimated that the unemployment rate was 70%. what we're facing right now in our sustained recession/depression, they would be throwing a party over the levels of unemployment that we're suffering now. 20% unemployment would be a gift in this community. because there are no jobs. there are no jobs for the underclass. and in the surrounding area where you had a very vibrant working class that used to work ott thed the budweiser plant, 127,000 jobs

left that area during the+ bradley era. so the whole working class got hollowed out. we didn't even hold a city council meeting about the 120. if 5,000 jobs leave hollywood, we'r.be all over it, aren't we?@ so when i went down to overtan. overtan -- jordan downs, it wasb to learn what those kids faced. it was to learn firsthand even.b though i was in my st. johns. suit ander if fall mow --er if.$ dam mow.$ pumps, but i want dow$ there to hear what those folks.$ needed from.b us.. . and also because mercedes said. we needed to.f get, we needed to talk to the african-american. .b families about not attacking th@ latino families.. and later on we did a lawsuit. where we represented the.$ african-american families who. f were fire bombed out of ramona gardens project. it. was there to protect.b.b racially-isolated minorities inb all of the housing projects.. . we always did our cases pairingb

the tribes so that the cases. .$ could not be used as racial.$.$ wedges. we needed interracial harmony..$ a city like los angeles cannot afford, the race baiting that @ see in the.b republican primarib we can't afford the tribal, the. pitting of one tribe against. .b another., . a city like ours won't last if we do it..b.$ this book is about my journey.b@ through gangland and through..b cropland.. . because i had to learn both, and why. would a civil rights lawyf go down to jordan downs when.$, it's ease yore stay in federal.b court in

>> it's not the right to free speech. only a slave-owning aristocrat would think that the first right to freedom is based on speech. because they are men of -- they were land-owning, white men. brilliant, i love our constitution. but a lot of them owned slaves, and they were so used to being catered to that they wouldn't think about the right to eat or the right to shelter or the most basic of all rights, the right to safety. freedom from violence. if you don't have that, you don't have any other rights. that's the bedrock of all human rights. and so as a civil rights lawyer when i discovered that children died every day for saying that they were from the wrong neighborhood, that they dodged bullets to get to school and often would not go to school because they couldn't get there safely, i realized that there were gang zones and kill zones in our own backyard.

the richest city in the richest country on the face of this planet, and seven miles south of my office there were children who couldn't walk to school because the gangs were having crossfire. they actually dodged bullets. and the point of this book is that even though the conditions there are better and even though we are now enjoying 50-year lows in crime reduction, the violent, visible crime has been replaced by a more insidious threat in these gang zones. because as the violence goes down, the power of the gangs actually goes up. that's what the military commanders are trying to tell us. that's my story -- that my odyssey through gangland. not just learning why these macho men think, you know, adopt a culture that says to survive you have to have a gun, to be a man you have to kill, it's a cult of death. i had to understand it.

and let me the tell you, as a feminist, this journey has been very interesting. i am the black murphy brown. you do not put me in the middle of a bunch of macho gangsters. it is a sitcom when it isn't dangerous. but i stuck with them because as i told my feminist friends who said, connie, how can you hang around with men who hate women this much? and i said, listen, people who are stupid enough to discriminate against us because we're women, i mean, anybody who thinks they can actually discriminate against me they're either in the jail, they're dead, or they've lost a lot of money. you don't come of after women like us. yes, we face discrimination. but they face annihilation. and my bet, my bet was that if i stuck with them and learned how to talk to them and they had to learn how to talk to me and, boy, did i mess up, and i had to have a translator. i remember a little insane, this

little crip, i was talking to the kids, and they didn't understand a word i said. i may as well as i told molly, my law partner, i may as well have been a white woman from pasadena because they didn't understand a word i said. i was an extraterrestrial, and insane would stand up and say, look, connie white, but she down. [laughter] translation: we can't understand a thing she says and we don't know what he's talking about, and she looks funny, and she sounds funny, but she's here to help us, so let's accept her. and they decided to call me laid lawyer which this that world is a real honorific. and i so appreciated them allowing me to learn enough about their world, enough about their ecosystem that i could figure out how to help them. and the women of jordan downs said, ms. rice -- after they cutsed me out, after they cussed me out royally which i will not say because this is being taped for television, it's in the

book, read it -- they called me everything but a child of god. and as they should have. and this one woman said how dare you come down here. you have left us in the shooting gallery. i have to put my grandchildren to bed in a bathtub because the bullets come through the drywall. my older kids have to sleep on the floor. and you, you come down here and ask us to treat latinos with some dignity. and i said i'm still going to ask for that, but you're right. we've abandoned you, and you should be angry with us. and at that point this other woman stood up, and she said, please, just help our men stop the killing. and that's what launched me on my journey through the gang. truces through gangland. the other part of my journey is lapd, and i'll make this short and sweet, and then we'll open it up for questions which will let me get into some more interesting areas and find out what you're curious about. with lapd, it was kind of a

shotgun marriage. i sued the sheriffs and the lapg a whole gaggle of great lawyers, all from the aclu. we had hugh man us in, we had carol watson, 47 lawyers, and we just woke up every day, and, you know, every time i was in the shower i was thinking of a new way to sue lapd. every day i got up to figure out -- we were at war with. at war, okay? and everything that we could think of we did. and we ended up switching, long story short, we ended up switching to representing cops because it became a certain coe practice -- serpico practice. you can win in court, but until you get inside these agencies and help them change their thinking, and you can't leave. lapd just gave up because i wouldn't go away. and if you sue people long enough, kind of like a shotgun marriage. they end up kind of, sort of attached to you because you have

all these consent decrees, and they can't get rid of you because the court has said you've got to do she says -- what she says or what this group of lawyers says. so it ends up being a shotgun marriage. and lo and behold 15 years they realized i wasn't there for money. i was there because without a great police force you can't keep people safe. and believe me, having run with the gangs for 15 years, i know what they're capable of. i also know what brutal police are capable of. and you've got to get the brutality out of both of the cultures. so i ended up walking with the police after bratton came. he opened the door, and i could go inside. and once i was there with bratton, chief bratton, the second transformative chief -- parker was the first one -- but chief bratton began the end of lapd's imperial culture, unaccountable to anybody.

unaccountable to -- the city council, they held all the power. the politicians were terrified of lapd. now, has it changed completely? no. but the fact that my first book party was given by -- [inaudible] and they were lined up around the building, we've come a long, long way, and we are thousand tight allies. on my truth, i the city even for the gardens housing projects, we're going to make it safe for them. thank you. [applause] first of all, thank you all so much. i hope some of you have read the book so you can ask some questions, but what did you find curious?

what did you want to know more about? wait. -- you have to wait -- >> tom will bring the mic around, and he'll pass it down if you're on that side. and can you just hold it really close to your mouth so we all can hear. >> how's that volume? >> perfect. >> good. ms. rice, as we look at budget cuts in the state and how they will affect the courts, what have you noticed about the the slowdown of justice? >> about the scroll down of -- >> slowdown. >> you know, we are facing, um, devastating cuts. i don't know how school districts are going to make another billion dollars in cuts. all of the progress that we made with the school class size is gone now. we're losing librarians, we're losing -- we lost the nurses a long time ago, and this is the only place these kids get any health care. t a terrible slowdown. it's a terrible slowdown.

and it's all because the distribution of public wealth is skewed. we have the money. any city that spends -- any state that spends a billion dollars on plastic surgery has money, you know? we spend more on tanning salons than we do libraries. we need what martin luther king called a revolution in values. and we should not mistake the progress that we made for anything permanent because as you've seen from these cuts in the budget, they're now coming down to the municipal level. we will lose almost every single gain that we made in education, we started down a road of wrap around care for the homeless. that's going to go by the wayside because the funds are gone. so almost every single substantive area where we're talking about putting a floor underneath extreme poverty for a

ending extreme poverty for progressive politicians who actually pay attention to policy get to the civil class actions. don't even think i could get my cases tried these days because at least in the state courts, and the federal courts are now getting impacted, can't get any judges appointed because washington won't appoint the federal judges, and the state courts are so impacted that they have lost their staff, they've cut back their hours, and we're doing so many drug prosecutions that you can't get to the civil cases. i hear it from judges all the time. so we have to ask ourselves do we want a functioning democracy or not? do want a democracy that holds the california dream for the children coming behind us? or are we really going look at the children coming behind us

and decide they don't look like us, so we're not going to give them the dream? we're going to shut the doors, the coffers, we're going to take our riches and go home. that's the debate that we're having nationally and in california. and we need to tell jerry brown don't give us bait and switch initiative that's going to -- where you've already made a deal with the correction guards to continue the mass incarceration strategy. we are not going to allow the jail money, the jail-building money to go from the state to l.a. county so that we can lock up even more people. we need to be -- instead of getting 10,000 more sheriffs' deputies in a jail that's run like the bastille right now, we need to not build a new jail, we need to build a rehabilitation center. we need to hire mental health counselors because we lock up the boor and the drug addicts and the mental health patients because we don't take care of them. half the jail doesn't even need to be filled.

now, the folks who are doing drive-by shootings and murders, they need to be put away. i'm not talking about violent criminals. i'm talking about the 70% of people who are in our mass incarceration jails draining our coffers, by the way, and chief justice -- not justice kennedy, but in our prison overcrowding case, this is how he described our crime enterprise, our crime-fighting enterprise in california. he said, california's state prison system is crimeogenic. i love that word. because what it means we are so stuck on stupid with our punishment that we're actually creating more crime. that's what crimeogenic means. i want a criminal justice system that actually makes us safer, doesn't create more violent people, doesn't brutalize people because they're going to prison. rape inside of prison is outrageous. you know, we should not be

brutalizing people. we should be making them safer. we should be making them safer for them to come back to the community. but because they don't come back mainly to communities like ours, we don't really care. so the bottom line for me is just the cuts are the latest assault in this regressive movement. i don't call it conservativism because we're not conserving anything. we're destroy what it took 100 years to build and if our voices don't get loud, really loud, i don't think this book is quite loud enough, but it's my first salvo, if we don't get really loud to say you want to know something? rugged individualism is great, but all those people who are billionaires and millionaires, and i would like to join tear ranks. i have nothing against folks who have a lot of wealth. but they wouldn't have made that wealth in china. they wouldn't have made that wealth in brazil. they made it here because we collectively, together as a culture and as a society have built the infrastructure. we built the free enterprise

ladder, and they brought the system and greased the skids for themselves, but we're going to fix that. we have a captured republic right now. and people who have captured it are selling us op an idea that -- on an idea that we don't band together to create progress. slavery would never have ended without the quakers and the abolitionists and the tuskegee airmen and jackie robson and thurgood marshall and martin luther -- and fannie lou him aer and the suffragists. it took all of us together, every single amount of progress that we've made has taken all of us together. no rugged -- let me tell you about the rugged individualist, they ended up scouts, okay? and it wasn't until the federal government decided to steal the land from the native americans, and i am about a third native american and a third african and a third anglo-celtic. as i said in the book, i'm an

afro indo-celt. i could sign my own reparation check, okay? [laughter] you know, this is why i said i could only have been created in the united states. and, frankly, i'm delighted by it. you know, i'm very sorry it all had to happen out of misery and tragedy. it is what it is, and i am what i am, and i'm not apolo eying for it. but the bottom line is, there isn't anybody who made it because of some ayn rand, i am the individual. the biggest takers right now are my elite friends in the financial sector. and so we need to pipe up loud and strong. these cuts are unacceptable, we do not need to be building a bullet train when the kids in jordan downs are still dodging bullets, okay? and we need to let jerry brown know we're not doing this. we have to set the priorities. if you can't put a floor and create the basic safety for all children to learn and thrive no matter what station they're born

into, that's the minimum. i'm just talking -- i'm not talking about the kind of safety you've got in bel air, i'm just talking about safe enough for kids to walk to school, not encounter a gang when they're in the bathroom at school and be able to learn without posttraumatic stress, and i'm talking about sufficient safety for them to be able to get on the bus or walk home from school without getting shot. i don't think that's a lot to ask. and i'm, believe me, i've seen capitalism create more wealth for poor people than i have anything under, and i'm not talking about going to communism. i'm talking about keeping the social compact that says every kid will get a fair shot. that's all i'm talking about. i'm talking about what martin luther king jr. was talking about. so the cuts, i'm sorry to give such a long answer, the cuts are devastating, and we are not responding to them in the right way. we can't just keep accepting this. and right now the dempublicans

are in charge in california. you do not need to take home nursing care and still keep the yacht subsidy. okay? we're going to have to get radical. i know we're all over 50 -- i am, i'm going on, you know, another five years i'll be 60, god help me. i know, we're, we're not spring chickens anymore. but we do have a voice still. and you want to know something? they're afraid of older people. politicians are afraid of older people. who has the mic next for another question? you're welcome. >> thanks. b i have a question about the last, one to have the last things you said in your remarks which had to do with not having to sue the police. and i'm wondering if you were saying that the culture of reform is now in the lapd or if there are better tactics to

improve policing in the city. >> it's both better tactics, and there's the beginning of a cultural change. what i can say is that the leadership has changed. i'm not going to -- and you know, and if somebody from jordan downs was sitting here, they'd say what is she talking about? i don't see any change. i'm not saying the old sergeant on back of the squad room who always does thumbs down on any change and came up the old way, i'm not saying he's changed. i'm saying that we have a transformative chief, we've had two in a row now. and chief beck is a prince of lapd, deputy chief. and what i learned in exploring how to help them change, when bratton told me to investigate the -- [inaudible] scandal which is also in the book, when bratton gave me that portfolio, he wanted to make me too busy to sue him, and he was very smart, he was right. and i went on an 18-month talking tour with the police, and the me listening. and kathleen, my intrepid right

hand who was raised by nuns, thank god for nuns because they thought girls could only be secretaries, so kathleen had to take typing, and she typed at transcription speed. now, if you go boo a room with a tape recorder, people won't talk. but if you just have a computer and you ask to take notes and you manage not to tell them -- we had very bait tim quotes from over 700 cops. i mean, a compendium of it's a window into the policeman's soul. it was like therapy sessions. and they would say things like, they would say things like, ms. rice, i'm not sure we want to change. we may need to be brutal to hold on to our identity. another cop said we tell so many lies, we don't know that we're lying anymore, so to us it's not lying, ms. rice. to you it's lying, to us it's survival. i mean, and i would have never -- and they were begging for help. they said, help us change this.

we don't know how, we're afraid. we're afraid if we extend a hand to the community that we've been brutalizing for 50 years that they're turn on us. and i've got to get home to my family. this society says keep these people contained and suppressed, keep the violence this these neighborhoods, and it ain't about providing safety for them. they're the one who is agreed with us. i kept saying it was a containment process we handed down from slavery. you had to keep the slaves on the plantation. it does not extend from robert peel. chief bratton and i used to debate this. i said, get a grip, you call came from the slave plantations. get a grip. i used to live in london, don't tell me about community policing. he finally changed his mind when i took him to a slave artifacts store, and he saw the slave police badges. they look exactly like modern police badges, only they have the plantation name, and he bought several of them, and he

stopped arguing with me. but the bottom line for the, the bottom line for us, right now, now is the time because we're having, we're having this cataclysmic, historic debate. but we're doing it through some stupid tv stations and a debate, a debating season in the republican primaries that hooks like the clown car -- looks like the clown car, a mean clown car. i don't think that's the way to have of the debate. our voices aren't there. and i really think that we've got to get, we've got to get a little bit more organized. and maybe i've got to get out there and start talking. i told condi we needed to do a joint tour to show people how you need to debate these issues. but debate with the idea of keeping society intact. what we can do is build to civil war again if we want, but i don't think that's necessary, and i think it would be really stuck on stupid.

>> i was wondering if you could talk about the realignment, the prison realignment from the state to the county and if there's actually any opportunities there to reduce recidivism or have some sanity? >> can the realignment present some opportunities? >> we, it can. will it? i don't know. it's been done with so little planning. the realignment of emptying out the state prisons and the enclosing to have juvenile state prisons and sending the kids back down to l.a. county and to the counties where these kids came from and sending adult prisoners back down to l.a. county, that's what realignment is. and in a lot of ways i agree with the idea of bringing government closer to the people because we will not raise taxes and distribute public wealth from the state very well, the state level very well. let's do it locally. we know what our problems are, we can raise and tax ourselves

with limited time periods like we did to build the schools. i couldn't tell the story of how we built the schools, it got cut out. it was in the 800 pages i originally wrote, it's now 300 pages. that'll be another book, on time, on budget and with the navy engineering. so it can be tone. we changed the culture of contracting. we can change the culture of incars ration. -- incarceration. we spent $8 billion on state corrections, but we produce more violent criminals, and we have a two-thirds recidivism rate. if you have a two-thirds recidivism rate, that's an f. we have failed. so we're wasting $8 billion. if you spend there are 8 billion of my money, i want to see results. i want to see people come out of prison ready to get back into society. there's some prisoners who are going to recidivate, i'd say about 5%. they can't be helped, and they're serial killers, and they just have to stay in prison. but not the million people we've got in prison.

that's ridiculous. so, um, the realignment allows things.ber of number one, for female prisoners, day prison so they can be near their kids. female prisoners, they're nothing like the male prisoners. .01% of the women really need to be incarcerated. and as a feminist, i'm not surprised. but men are a problem. the men, you going to have to figure out how to a's them, what they need. they used to fill out exit interviews, and they used to tell you i need drug treatment, job training, and they would tell you what their needs were. we need assessments of what the needs of exiting prisoners are, and if there are mental health needs, you cannot send schizophrenic out on the street and expect them not to have their delusions result in harm the to other people.

that's not a reasonable expectation. we need to be creating, and this is one of the things. not just the day reporting centers for women, but also local prisons that are designed for how females get rehabilitated. for the men, we've got to build new central jail, but the policies in the jail have to because we created a beatdown culture in the county jail. you've read about that in the l.a. times. and i love the sheriff, he's a friend of mine, but he's not running his department the right way. instead of reconstructing a central jail, we need to construct a rehabilitation center. instead of getting another 10,000 cops who are badly trained, we need 10,000 mental health experts and psychiatrists so that we can get the mental health treatment. mental health treatment. these cops don't know what to do when they run into crazy. they don't know what to do. and we've got a lot of really sick, insane people in our prisons, and they end up coming out even more insane.

crime haveogenic. we're creating more and more insanity. so the realignment if we were to tell the county supervisors to get a clue -- and that's difficult to do even though most of them are my friends -- if county supervisors and the sheriff and the da could get together because they have our safety net, they have $24 with of our -- billion of our money. and we cannot seem to get coherent, effective programs for rehabilitation. so we're going to have to give them a design, we're going to have to design this thing, arm the mental health people who are very weak in our political system. and we're going to have to demand, no, you cannot build a jail. what you can build is a rehabilitation center and a

mental health center for the criminally convicted. and, and we are going to set metrics. you cannot have a two-thirds recidivism rate. and we are going to set up panels of experts, psychiatrists and doctors, krillnologists, jeannie woodward back in the saddle, joan peter silvia running this thing. they can't get into the political system because the connections union owns our politicians. and then that's the second thing. if we don't get the money out of politics and get our politicians to understand they're supposed to be solving our long-term problems, the people who used to, pat brown could have never have gotten elected. ronald reagan couldn't have got elected now. he now looks like a liberal. but whether conservative or whatever, green, libertarian, whatever party, nobody is

involving long-term -- solving long-term problems. this book is a plea to get back to solutions, the politic of solution. my journey is about how i took everybody i sued and made them an ally, and we solved true through -- through partially through civic sector allies. we created an army of them. we went and got the military, the cops, and it created an army of allies who were about the business of making life better for these kids. whether it was building the schools, we built 147 schools on track, or whether it was getting lapd to become a key partner with the gang intervention guys from whom i learned the streets. and melding them into -- believe me, we run the gang academy for our gang czar, and tony see rah

quos saw -- villaraigosa, he has stuck with these issues. the advancement project, and the best of those instructors, these are ex-gangsters teach. these guys who didn't make it through seventh grade. and they can stop the bullets. guess where they're teaching now? they teach in the los angeles police department academy and the l.a. sheriffs' academy. that's what this book is about. it's not about smaller government or no government or drown it in the bathtub. and it's not about just the thousand points of light. it's about joining andlinging together to solve some big problems. a thousand points of light are wonderful. we're all one of those points of light. but a thousand points of light have never replaced the sun. and this is what i've learned, and that's what this book is

about. it's about how you take the best of entrepreneurial culture, the best in government? government is our alternative to war, ladies and gentlemen. [laughter] it's not like we have an option not to have it. and if you attack it and keep -- believe me, i've sued so many politicians, i can't even belong to a political party. believe me, i have sued -- that has been my business. i've probably done more work with republican mayor than democratic mayors. so it's not like i'm not trying to hold government accountable, but i'm not saying destroy it, make it work for people. get it out of these k street lobbyists who own our politicians. they have to spend 40% of their time raising money. you know they're not solving our problems. and the supreme court, i'm embarrassed to say that i'm a lawyer because i think the supreme court has done more damage to our constitutional fabric than any other

constitution. i don't know what they were drinking when they did citizens united, but we're going to have to reverse it, so it may mean we have to do some constitutional amendments. we've got to get the money out. you cannot buy a politician, and i'm in the room with some billionaires. i mean, they think i'm the help -- [laughter] they see a black girl x they just think, okay, she must be innocuous. but i'm sitting there listening to them, and it was one of these conversations, well, white didn't you buy -- you know, you don't have a politician. they're talking about how they buy the politicians. and i said, oh, okay, i get it. and one of them said, no, all the good ones are bought. i'm not going to -- i mean, i'm privileged to listen to these conversations. i'm the lie on the wall. but, ladies and gentlemen, we need to get up off our duff.

these kids are looking at us -- somebody said, what would you tell the generation behind? i said, i would need to apologize to you for my futures in a capitalism bus they sorry.

>> it's where the gangs are right now. and they will slowly take over and more of our institutions just like in italy. i have a chapter called the road to palermo. i don't know if that chapter survived because we cut so much we can lose our constitutional democracy faster than you think. and if we allow these children to fester in the gang zones and we don't go in there with smart progressive policies, and we just do the reactive lock them all up go to war, what general

mcchrystal was telling me. awe didn't work. dig, deploy and build the schools that was working. we couldn't do it in afghanistan. there was no way to do it in afghanistan but we had better to do here or we're going to lose our constitutional democracy. that's what this book is about. that's what i learned in my odyssey to gang land and through land. that's what i learned in doing the lawsuits. it's what i learned from harry belafonte. it's what i've learned from all of the great leaders who came before me and i just took the baton from him, from them and kind of halfway ran a leg. i still got another half a leg to go. but my grandmother said, justice is a relay. it's a relay. and it's a long relay. and my grandmother -- my grandmother said, look, don't you ever get down. i don't care how backwards you think you're going because i can tell you one thing, we're never going back to the days when i

had to sit in the dark at 10:00 in night until 4:00 in the morning we had to hide our men and i had to get the rifle on my legs waiting for the clan to come. she said you'll never have to do that and connie that's real progress and that could only happen in this great country. yes, sir. take the mic. >> i'd like to thank c-span for being here, for those who couldn't make it here. it's beautiful that lady lawyer is here to start some action in the city of pasadena and to all those folks that are incarcerated, i thank you for being involved in the struggle and keeping on us. my big question now is, we may be a bit overwhelmed at what we heard here tonight, but what would be the best thing for us to do when we leave here tonight? other than buy your book. what's the best thing for us to

do? >> buy the book otherwise i'm going to be on skid row with a basket. this is my retirement plan. i certainly didn't make any money doing litigation. the best thing that we can do right now is keep your eye on how this devolution happens in california. and make sure that the supervisors know -- organize your neighborhoods to say that you want the money to be used in a different way. you do not want it to go to the corrections union. you want it to go to building the rehabilitation centers and you want it to go to rehabilitation services, number 1. number 2, we have got to organize ourselves to demand that the defunding of the schools get reversed. and that's going to mean getting to jerry brown. the governor thinks that his budget makes sense. he wants to go out with a legacy like his dad, pat brown. so he wants to do the bullet training and he wants to do some big investments but like i said, you don't get to do a bullet

train when you're taking home nursing care away from the elderly. we're balancing this budget on the backs of the poorest of the poor. we're not cutting we're not cutting dmv services for the middle class. we're not increasing the car tax. just bring the car tax back to where it was and you won't have to fire nurses for the elderly poor. so, you know, we need to get organized to lobby. there's groups that are lobbying up in washington but because they don't have money they can't do so. even if you start here in pasadena, you could get mayor bogaard to get his voice louder. he and mayor villaraigosa. if we let them know they're not going to get a new office, there's not going to be a next office if you balance this budget on our poor kids. we're going to have to get more vocal. i'm not suggesting you get tents and pitch them and stay in tents. we're too old for that, okay? and i'm glad that occupy l.a.

did what it did because it changed the discussion to something sane, like the disparity in the wealth gap. yes, we have to take care of our deficits you don't go on a water conservation when your house is on fire. you douse the fire first and then you can do your water conservation. the priorities are skewed because they're weapons of distraction. they're meant for us to think that this is the issue when we should be paying attention to something else. but the fact that kids had to go out there and get pneumonia in tents for two months tells you how ineffective we have been. as middle class -- and i'm just making some assumptions here. as middle class voters, who have clout. you read. you're intelligent, you know, some of you marched. some of us are still marching. [laughter] >> we have got to get organized. and we've got to let the unions know. you know union members.

the unions have not asked for the right stuff. they haven't fought the right fights. and they're cutting their own throats. they need to make themselves indispensable to these solutions. they don't go to a credit union. they act more like a union. you can't reach them. but the police unions we're beginning to reach. the teachers unions have got to understand you cannot keep excusing the ineffectiveness of how you teach in our poorest schools. those days are over. and i have sued unions before. i will sue anybody who's in the way, okay, anybody who's in the way of kids getting what they need. i will sue them. i will sue my mother. i sued -- in the mta case we sued ldfb board the naacp because i was working for the naacp defense fund and i sued our board members. do not get in our way. and yes i know i sound like i've had it and it does sound overwhelming. i don't know how to spoon feed this.

it isn't overwhelming -- we're okay. most of us are still okay. most of us are on our way to owning our homes. and in my neighborhood, people thought there was a gang because it was on a water grate -- there was actually -- get high properly spelled and punctuated and rebel properly spelled and punctuated and the person had pink hearts over the i and my neighbors wanted to know if this was a gang graffiti. i said no, it's a girl graffiti and she's angry because she was probably put on restriction because she wouldn't do her homework. we don't have gangs in our neighborhood. we're safe. but if we don't fight for the safety of the kids in our own backyard, we have child soldiers in l.a. i met a 9-year-old assassin, a 9-year-old assassin because the

monsters who corrupted him could send him out to do the killing and they knew he wouldn't get as bad a sentence but they killed that child just like they do in the congo in rwanda and in bosnia. they made child soldiers. we have them in l.a. we have slavery in l.a. and if we don't understand invisible l.a. we won't be able to help people trapped in these gang zones, trapped in human sex trafficking and i know i'm not making it any less overwhelming but i'm tired of doing this with just the colleagues i have. i need the people i have -- it's not overwhelming. we can fix this stuff. if we can't fix l.a.p.d., we can fix anything and now is the time to turn to the county because they got $24 billion of our money and they're not doing what they need to do with it. now, the county is overwhelming. if l.a.p.d. was mount wilson,

the county is k2. but you can still climb k2. it takes a whole lot more. i just -- i think i'm missing the fear gene. i don't get overwhelmed by the size of the problem. and often because i don't know enough about why i can't do it i end up achieving it because i just don't look at it that way. so don't look at these problems as overwhelming. notice they turned that bill back for intellectual property by i don't know how to do the viral stuff and i don't know to get online. i don't know how that stuff. i'm old school. i would hand-write stuff if i could and i will typewriter but i understand the power of technology. that's why we have healthy city at the advancement project. it's like google for nonprofits and it's the best thing in the country. and -- but my urban peace team can't have fear. they have to go out to the gang shootings. susan lee who runs the urban

peace team for me has to manage the county agencies. it's not a matter -- we don't even have the power of a lawsuit anymore because we're not suing. we have to get these politicians and bureaucrats to change what they're doing without a lawsuit. that's school. okay? it does mean lobbying it means getting an agenda together and i will post an action agenda of things that people will do and it will be on the website and the book and the advancement project website. specific bills to argue for. and things to ask for at the county level because that's where the safety net and realignment and devolution from sacramento down to l.a. county and believe me l.a. county is getting most of that money. the five supervisors do not have enough knowledge to know what to do with it. we're going to have to help them. i want the plan, i want you to back the plan for the

rehabilitation center. so leave me your addresses. i actually have to start getting some grassroots -- i'm a lone wolf. i don't have congregations or constituencies. we don't have membership but i can see this phase of the revolution is going to require a grassroots because lawyers are only great when they're supporting grassroots movements and part of why president obama and part of why the democrats aren't very effective is because there's no voice, there's no grassroots movement. there's no demand. and without a demand, power concedes nothing. [applause] >> is this on? is there anything coming up on the ballot that might be helpful? >> thank you, steve english who is my law partner and without

whom molly munger my other law person would not be able to keep any trains running on time. yes, in this fight over how to raise taxes, the demand you have made with the politicians and the governor have you made a deal with corrections so that the money isn't really going to go to education. he calls it an education bill but i don't think he's going to give the money back to the education. i think he's going to give it back to the corrections guards and that's the first deal he struck. he struck a deal with seiu to make sure none of the monday goes to education. i do not want a bait-and-switch. demand to know and ask publicly, have you done a bait-and-switch? embarrass him, okay, because i plan to be at everything he's going to back and i want to know, have you done this deal? number 2, molly munger, my great partner is doing an alternative initiative. it may make it to the ballot. but molly who is the warren

buffett of l.a. county in terms of her outlook about wealth. she thinks that capitalism is not going to survive if we don't curb its worst instincts. if we don't curb the aggressive greed. we have thrown a party for the very rich for the last 30 years. we have deregulated. we have made what used to be illegal legal. we got rid of glass-steagall. we've just given them a free rein. what they did is they bought our politicians and sent everything overseas. and the bottom line molly's initiative is saying the wealthy have to pay their fair share and the only way that we're going to get the resources of taxation resources -- it's not going to be enough to do a value-added tax. you can't do it through the consumption. look at the numbers. we will post our graphs so that you can see the case yourself. you'll have to do it through income taxes. that's what president lincoln -- that's why president lincoln established the income tax. it was because all those tariffs

and fees were regressive. and they weren't providing enough for the common fisk for him to be able to raise the money. he instituted the income tax because it was the only fair way to make the very rich and the plantation owners pay their fair share and the commonwealth and the common good that they made their money from. the income tax is the only way. so molly has done an initiative and when it makes it to the ballot i need you to support is it. i need you to get out there and aggressively lobby for it. it is not the governor, the governors may well be a bait-and-switch. we may be able to fix that before it gets on the ballot. that's what steve and molly and i will do and i'll be damn he calls it a education bill and then it goes to the guards and we need the guards but they do produce more crime and i'm not happy for them and understand we are coming for them. we're not going to allow it to go on the ballot. the real initiative is saying

there has to be an income tax on the rich as well as the upper middle class including me, i'll pay more but it has to come from those echelons and it also to be broadened. so look for the initiatives. there will be some balance on the -- there will be some initiatives on the ballot. we may have to do the initiative and i wish we could reform the initiative so that we could get constitutional initiatives passed and that's also a process position that been bought it's in the hands of official connections i'm a harvard initial educated lawyer but we're going to post some very concrete things. it's a little early to say what -- because we don't know what the ballot looks like and we don't know quite what this

political season looks like but it's not too early to raise our voices yes to martin luther king junior's vision and not ayn rand. you all remember atlas shrugged that's a poisonous visionary in this country and we take and we all give this together and if we talk about all the folks who need to be left at the bottom and left to die, really, that's how the gangs think. that's how gangsters think. darwinian and brutal and don't give a damn about anybody. and they'll shoot you as soon as look at you and they don't think of you sharing their space or their democracy. so are we becoming a gangster culture? are you telling me that the gangsters i'm working with have actually a better democratic vision than the politicians we're looking at on tv now? we got to raise our voices. there's a lot that can be done.

thank you. mra[applause] >> for more information about connie rice and her latest book, visit powerconcedesnothing.com. >> i've written a book about the obamas. i think it on the whole a very admiring book. the administration has, i guess, disagreed. they've come out about some comments about you. what's it like to be in the political fire-fight. you're not used to being in the middle of it and what do you make of what's happening? >> well, it is a little strange because the book -- you know, i've been covering the alabama for years with the "new york times" and we have in the paper called the long run and trying to capture the lives of the candidates and especially

candidates are so restricted now. it's so hard to get access to them. one of the ways we learn about them is through their biographies. we delve deeply into their past and their characters and we really look at the whole person. and so this book in a way is an outgrowth of those stories which i've been doing for years and years and so the goal of this book was to really write about what i would call the big change when i started covering barom and michelle obama they were really barack and michelle and the extraordinary thing that i was watching happening was watching these two regular people become president and first lady of the united states and what i was seeing was that it wasn't a process that happened on inauguration day when somebody takes an oath but it's a huge learning curve made all the more dramatic in the obama story because of their freshness to national political life and also because of the fact that they're the first

african-american president and first lady and so we really see a couple things happening in this book. we see two people learning to take their partnership, which used to be this private thing and turn it into a white house partnership. we see michelle have a really tough landing initially in the white house and then actually turn it around and then the third thing the book is really about the most fascinating thing that i find about barack obama is his struggle with politics. you know, after all these years, i still can't get over the fact that the top politician in the country has a really complicated relationship with the business that he's in anyway, i worked for this book for two years. i published it. i've been working all those folks for years. lots of folks in the obama inner circle gave me interviews. they new exactly what they were going to into. i never misrepresent what i was doing and also i fact-checked

the book with an assistant before publication and we published an excerpt in the "times" on saturday. and then a really -- i guess a really interesting thing happened, the first thing is that people started discussed the book without having read the book and that's never happened before because as a newspaper reporter everybody reads your book in the newspaper. and the other thing is that the white house did start pushing back in some really interesting ways. they haven't really challenged the reporting in the book like i haven't gotten a phone call from david axlerod saying you got it all wrong and, in fact, a lot of his on the record quotes are in the book. something that really surprised me happened yesterday which michelle obama went on tv and she said, i'm paraphrasing, she said, i'm really tired of depictions of myself as an angry black woman and she protested portrayals of her fighting

directly with rahm emanuel. that was kind of fascinating to me because the book definitely does not portray her in any stereotypical way and also i'm very clear to mention that the clashes between her and emanuel were really philosophical in nature. maybe i shouldn't undercut my own reporting and talk about their differences in approach to political life but that's really what they were. if she did acknowledge that she didn't read the book so i have to imagine that she is responding maybe to the book itself and part of why i'm excited to talk about is to talk with the actual thing with you and with all of you. >> let's go to that political thing because that is one of the themes running in the book. it reminds me when theodore roosevelt went into politics, everybody around him said you don't want to go into politics. that's beneath people like this. what are the qualms about politics the obamas have? >> well, part of the reason i

think their qualms are important and should not be dismissed is that they're similar to the qualms a lot of us have about politics, right? i mean, we all see what's wrong with the political system, what's ugly about it, you know, whether it can really address social needs and whatnot. but, you know, this is one of the many things about obama that was such a big asset in the campaign that ends up being somewhat inhibiting in the presidency. time and time again in my reporting, in simple ways and very complicated ways, he had trouble acting like a politician. a small story was about the first super bowl party in the white house. you know, he's kind to everybody. he greets everybody but he doesn't want to work the room. he's got this kind of principled objection, right? he doesn't want to be the guy who's spending the entire super bowl schmoozing and he wants

this idea that he wants to hang on to a normal life in the presidency and, you know, in my reporting i watched that idea get tested and tested and tested again. >> there's another story in the book where they -- he insists on having dinner every night at 6:30 which means he can't schmooze with other power brokers and that's an admirable side. capturing a domestic theme? >> well, certainly wanting to preserve a domestic life. part of the drama of the situation is that barack obama gets to washington and not only does he have not so much managerial or executive or national security or economic experience, but he's also never lived in the same house as his family full time. and the house they're going to live in for the first time is the white house which is not in any way, shape or form like a normal life.

but, you know, i think the 6:30 rule, obviously, he's willing to miss dinner with his family for important situations and he's willing to miss it two nights a week. i just find in my reporting that the obamas are constantly seeking ways to kind of limit and protect themselves from political life. >> why do you think he ran? if he's ambivalent about politics? >> i think it was -- i think it was a rush decision and i think it was a hard decision. you know, his aides say that, you know, the summer of 2006, he was still really dismissive of it and it was only -- you know, they began to sort of test the waters then but when you think about it, their decision-making process only went from maybe the summer of 2006 through the fall. and what people kept telling him was, you know, your time is now, right? if you miss this window of opportunity, you may never get it again. and part of the drama of the situation is that michelle obama

is initially very opposed in part because of the family issues but in part because she thinks -- she's worried about attacks from the clintons and with standing attacks and she thinks a couple of years may benefit him. and what susan schairer, later her chief of staff said to me, the decision really weighed on her and, you know, i find her situation at that time so dramatic because the way people describe it is she really did feel her husband would be an exceptional president and yet she really wasn't sure it was the best thing for her family so how do you choose between what you think might be good for the country and what might be good for you? >> and mitch daniels didn't run for president because his wife had veto power. did you think they had those same kinds of discussions, arguments back and forth? >> well, yeah, the president and first lady have talked about it. and also, you know, the physical white house is almost a character in this book. you know, i spend a lot of time describing what it's actually

like to live there and what the structure is like and all of the restrictions that come with that life. and i will admit that that is fun to report on and read and that there is a little bit of, you know, exploratory pleasure in getting inside the house. but i think there are also two very substantive things about it and this to me is the sort of meaty argument of the book which is that the confinement and isolation of the presidency has two really important effects on our system. one is that it really limits the number of people who are willing to run for office, along with all the other factors that do, but the number of people who are willing to, a, go through a presidential campaign and then live this incredibly restrictive life is pretty -- it is pretty small and then the other thing is, you know, we consistently see these presidents get cut off in the white house and they all say it's not going to happen to them and it happens to all of

them. >> now, michelle obama is one of the first -- well, she's certainly the youngest person to have served as first lady since the sexual revolution. did she, because of just what generation is from, had a more difficult time than other first ladies? >> well, it's funny because she's such a pupil of hillary clinton's in that way, right? in my reporting i found again and, again, that she and everybody else in the white house had one eye on the hillary clinton situation. and also the attacks she went through in the 2008 campaign were really pretty painful for her and everybody around her to be, you know, that new to public life and to watch yourself caricatured that way was really, really hard. the twist, i think, to it, though, is that, you know, what her aides talke