it's about international economics and what's happening to us. and finally, i just finished a book called "unaccountable," which will be released in september, written by marty -- [inaudible] whowho is one of the leading surgeons at johns hopkins hospital. >> for more information on this and other summer reading lists, visit booktv.org. >> mike lofgren, a former staff member of the senate budget committee, recounts his 28-year career and what he deems are the current dysfunctional aspects of the federal government and both political parties. it's about 45 minutes. [applause] >> thank you very much. um, i promise to detain you only briefly before we get to more interesting things such as your questions.

the message of my book is that our political institutions have become dysfunctional. they have become dysfunctional in that they don't serve the broad public interest. that's because they have been captured by wall street and corporate money. both parties are owned by corporate money. the democrats rather shame-facedly and hypocriteically, the republicans proudly in a matter of principle. [laughter] that said, both parties are not equal in their responsibility for the dysfunction of our systemment the democrats at least take a stab at governing even if the results are mediocre at best. the republicans, by contrast, want confrontation over compromise, issues rather than bills and gridlock over functioning goth. their behavior caused standard & poor's to downgrade the nation's credit rating last year, and that caused me to write the book

as a warning. this country has enacted legislation 87 times to increase the debt limit after world war ii, but last year it was different. republicans wanted to hold our credit rating hostage. the government accountability office found later that just the transaction costs from the gop's little stunt cost the taxpayers, you, at least $1.3 billion. my warning is that you cannot, repeat, cannot delegate governance over the world's largest economic and military power to a cult-like political party that thinks obama's birth certificate, muslim subversion of the government and death panels are serious issues. of course, by no means all republicans are like that, but increasing numbers are becoming

unhinged. there are three main theses about the gop in my book. the first is that the gop worships wealth and the wealthy and subordinates every other domestic economic issue to that fact. while they try to make the deficit and debt reducti their signature issue, as a former house and senate budget committee staffer, i believe that is a phony claim. they will always subordinate deficit reduction to giving tax breaks to their wealthy contribute's. mitt romney's current tax plan is a case in point. it would increase the deficit by $6 trillion over ten years. ask yourself now, which loopholes is he going to close to make up the difference? in -- he doesn't say, and there aren't enough loopholes to do that this any case. in any case. most middle class people, like

you, do not consider the mortgage interest deduction to be a loophole. unlike the deductibility of dressage horses. [laughter] and in the recent past, congressional republicans have refused to repeal even the egregious tax loophole on corporate jets. so the deficit hawk claims are herbally fraudulent. essentially father-in-law lent. it's simply bait for the ruse. and, yes, they consider all of you to be potential ruins. chapter five of the book describes republican tax policy as follows. quote: although you won't find it in this their party platform, the gop's mission is to protect and further enrich america's plutocracy. the party's cater walling about deficits and debt is so much eye wash the blind the public. in reality, republicans act as bellhops for corporate america and the super rich behind those

corporations. in the calculus of washington politics as practiced by the gop, wealthy individuals and corporations are interchangeable. mitt romney may have said more than he knew when he pleaded that corporations are people. they are, indeed, people, a very select group of people in executive suites and boardrooms who draw wildly disproportionate shares of the benefits from the tax code, a tax code the gop has manipulated relentlessly to produce exactly that outcome. as for the rest of us, republicans have of late been strangely indifferent. some gop presidential candidates have even offered proposals that would increase taxes on people of modest means. one might think republicans would be enthusiastic about extending their tax cut agenda to low-income earners paying regressive rates on their payroll taxes.

these folks who struggle from paycheck to paycheck just to keep their heads above water would benefit the most from tax relief. but the gop has been uncharacteristically hesitant when it comes to tax cuts for the ordinary americans they claim to represent. and all this is because of republicans' iron resolution to protect our society's overclass at all costs. that's the end of that passage. now, my next major thesis about the gop is what i call their war worship. the gop accelerate my worships at the altar of mars. how many americans know, and for that matter has the media ever bothered to inform them that candidate romney, the great deficit hawk, plans to add as much as $2 trillion in spending to the pentagon budget over the next ten years.

now, i didn't think that was common knowledge. the media remain all abuzz about chick-fil-a, the cultural signifier -- [laughter] rather than reporting on what a candidate for president pledges to do with trillions of your money. now, many people attribute this fondness for all things military to a quid pro quo. the dod contractors provide money for campaigns and jobs for constituents. there's something to that, but it doesn't tell the whole story. here's what chapter six concludes. quote: take away the cash nexus, and there remains a strong psychological predisposition towards war and militarism in a large part of the gop. this tick, greatly exacerbated in the immediate aftermath of september 11th and alarmingly persistent since then, undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness. it dovetails perfectly with the

belligerent, tough-guy affect one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. militarism springs from a psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies both foreign and domestic. to borrow author chris hedges' formulation, war is a force that gives them meaning. that's the end of that passage. i conclude that a country with a $15 trillion debt, failing infrastructure and very mediocre world rankings in terms of life expectancy, social mobility and poverty simply cannot afford the extravagance of reckless interventionism and a lust for an illusory world dominance. the third factor that i believe has made the present-day gop is the culture war and its basis in politicized religion. as i describe it in chapter seven, religious cranks cease to be a minor public nuisance in

this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the republican rank and file. pat robertson's strong showing in the 1988 iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. unfortunately, at that time i underestimated the implications of what i was seeing. it did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathens in greece. [laughter] a country that has been overwhelmingly christian for almost 2,000 years. i recall another point in the early 1990s when a different fundamentalist gop staffer, um, said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax.

as a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what i held to be a civil rather than an ecclesiastical calling -- [laughter] i did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of lincoln. if the american people poll more like iranians or nigerians than europeans or canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the republican party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. all around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostilities science. politicized religion is the she anchor of the dreary 40-year-old culture wars, and that's the end

of that passagement -- passage. i hope the listener does not construe this as a condemnation of religion. it is, rather, a condemnation of the herrier of politics and religion that we have been seeing occurring over the last 30 years, a phenomenon that debases both politics and religion. as i conclude the chapter, the united states has been fortunate to have avoided some of the worst aspects of europe's history. luck had something to do with it, but so did a system of governance that permitted and encouraged religious pluralism. what america did not do was mandate a religious test for elective office or base it form form -- foreign or domestic policies on someone's reading of the bible. if this country ever fully uncorks the gene think of politicized religion as the republican party has been attempting to do, we shall long regret it.

end quote. now, so much for the republican party. now what about the democrats? [laughter] as i describe them in the introduction, the democratic party coasted far too long on franklin d. roosevelt's legacy. it became complacent and began to feel entitled to its near-hegemonic position in politics, culture and the media. when the new right increasingly began to displace it in all three of those arenas, some liberals merrily turned into ineffectual whiners and cry babies or ivory tour escapists -- tower escapists. the bulk of the democratic politicians and operate i haves, however -- operatives, however, moved in a different direction. after three straight losses in presidential elections between 1908 and 1988, they abandoned the practices of their old beliefs while continuing to espouse them in theory.

these new democrats will say anything to win an election, an objective that in their minds generally requires them to emulate republicans. particularly with respect to money grubbing on the fundraising circuit. many of them last only a term or two because if people want a republican, they will vote for the real thing. what has evolved in america over the last three decades is a one-and-a-half party system as democrats opportunistically cleeve to the center which in the universe of american politics keeps moving further to the right. end quote. well, so far so bad. [laughter] i realize i've painted a rather dim canvas of what now constitutes the political system of lincoln's last best hope for mankind. [laughter] i do have some potential solutions because, as you have

no doubt heard, it is in my nature to be relentlessly upbeat. [laughter] those solutions are also in the book, but rather than my continuing to talk, how about some questions at this point? [laughter] [applause] >> first of all, i'd like to commend you on -- i can understand why it went viral. and we need to promote -- i will buy the book just to support you. i agree with everything you say. >> my publisher? [laughter] >> so the only problem is, i'm a liberal democrat, and i was born in 1947, i've watched the country completely change. it's, it doesn't sound anything like the country i grew up in in the 50s and 60s. as a democrat, my question is,

what should we do? would we do better to go back, um, to real democratic principles; supporting the middle class, preserving and strengthening, strengthening medicare? or will that just simply marginalize us further? >> it would be nice to have a real contrast between the parties. however, i think there are antecedent problems such as the avalanche of money in politics which impels both parties to be money grubbers, to spend, you know, anywhere up to 40% of tear time in congress -- of their time in congress to dialing for dollars and going to fundraisers. and every time a politician is either d, elected or retires, he

says, i hate the money chase. they all hate it, but their trapped this the system. .. it furthers the polarization of the country. >> let's go to the next question. >> i would like to know where, if any place in the pantheon of republican transgressions, comes

their despising, their demonization of government here government can't do anything, government is bad, eurocrats, et cetera, et cetera. >> i find it amazing people who keep getting elected to the public office are on the public payroll, relentlessly demonizes the whole process by which they are paid and under which they operate. but i've known people who were in congress, either members or staff, for 20 years, they've never been any payroll but the public payroll, and they're always talking about the lazy no good bureaucrats. you know, the one to inspect your airliner to keep it safe, or inspect your medicine to see if it is safe, or inspect food, or do any number of things that are very important. so obviously there is waste, fraud, and abuse in government,

with the gsa scandal. that does not mean that most people don't want to do a good job. and that the job they are doing is in some measure very important. most people like to go to clean, well-maintained national parks. that doesn't come free. >> wheldon, is it anybody's -- well then, is it anybody's responsibility, whether the democrats or republicans, to point out some, all of these functions that are so essential, and i'm pretty darn well? >> well, i think it's the publicpublic's responsibility gn its hind legs and to say whether they want these services or not. and perhaps the media could be a little more responsible than playing the false equivalence

game. is the world round or flat? you be the judge. the controversy continues. [laughter] >> for a number of years i have watched with fascination as policymakers of both parties have championed the concept of privatization and outsourcing, it used to be inherently governmental. the rise of private contractors in a number of rounds, ranging from private prisons, education, to more recently military and security issues, has been put forward with much rhetoric but not a lot of evidence in terms of cost and effectiveness, for example. my question is simply, how much of this reflects a sort of blind faith precepts of the marketplace and adam smith? and how much of it is a payoff to corporations that benefits in

the future? and i might note i've written a book on the subject with regard to military contractors and there's very little empirical evidence, if any, about the cost and effectiveness of contractors doing logistical things, security work. >> i would say the correlation is more expensive, and you get less out of it. we've seen how well halliburton did when he took over the logistics of the army. the army cannot feed itself anymore, which is kind of ridiculous. and look at all the scandals in iraq, and you see these across the board. national security budgets is what i did, and at some point it struck me as overwhelming that these things were not working as the proponents have claimed they would work. and there's some things that, not only because of cost

effectiveness, i don't want some contractor looking at sensitive surveillance intelligence. i don't want some contractor choosing who's going to hit by a drone. >> hi. i'm a holocaust survivor and civil rights veteran. and what i see happening in this country is a move towards fascism, which very much results that of germany, which silenced pretty much the labor movement, which restricted voter participation, the media as well. we no longer have the media that takes on the lies that are being spread and that we're being fed on a daily basis. there are very few outlets where

you can actually read or hear the truth of what's happening with our government. and my fear is that we are going down really steep and very quick descent into fascism. and i think that is very worrisome. and i, i'm a fighter and i have no idea anymore how this can be stopped or, because i don't see that there is a movement. i met chris hedges when he said even when there is hopeless we have to continue to battle, but there doesn't seem to be a cohesive movement like there was in the '60s. so i don't know whether they have any suggestions about how we can go about this, or that you even agree whether this is a

worrisome aspect of where we are headed. >> if there's enough people to believe that, then out of the and in different really isn't an option. and the system corrects itself when enough people decide to become active. that's the problem we've been, you know, amusing ourselves in various ways over the last 20 or 30 years, and our voter participation rate, and not because of voter suppression, simply because a lot of people just don't turn out to vote. it's one of the lowest in the industrialized world. and that's not a sign of healthy democracy. and it didn't happen that way because of some grand scheme.

the public, for cultural reasons or whatever, became apathetic. >> i agree with that aspect. what is happening out in the many states that are targeting groups, hispanics, african-americans, the poor, the elderly, students, where it is so disturbing that i'm surprised that there is not a bigger outcry. i really am, and i don't know where the people can be so apathetic that they are not scared, that they are not scared for the future of their children, their grandchildren, for the future of the country. >> i wrote the book because i was a concerned citizen. >> thank you. >> my name is angela.

i like to ask you about the media, but let me make one to three bullets before you have a chance to comment about this. first, the media, from endorsing and supporting aggression which is a crime, according to laws, the media are a big lie. they lie to you, or important things not the way they are from the coverage of the olympics, coverage of what happens in syria. i find all that -- my question is, since the media are the new i think hope other people, keep everybody the same and a slate and believing what they say, how are we going to be able to rally those who want to change things around, if everything is put to sleep by media?

>> perhaps the upside is that over the last many years, the viewership of the big media has constantly trended down. and there are things like the internet, which has its own oddities and dangers, which i think a lot more people are interested in independent viewpoints. and a lot of that decline in viewership of the major media is because people don't think it's particularly useful to them. >> so, i'm not old enough to vote yet, though i don't have any political opinions yet, and it seems like in my generation something i've learned is you have to take everything you see with the grain of salt because there are a lot of misleading articles, people, teachers even. i mean, we live in a throwaway

society. all live politics, also like effects or food. there's a documentary i saw called food inc. which was very interesting. and also i wanted to ask you how, what your thoughts were on private equity in the '80s and how that led to our financial collapse today. >> i think the term we use in those days was leveraged buyout. >> i know, but -- >> private equity became a euphemism. >> they change it so people wouldn't recognize it. >> precisely. to the extent that a company can borrow money and write off the interest costs to take over the viable business, raid its pension fund, strip the assets, sell off the pieces and then give themselves a pay raise, that's not a good thing, in my view.

countries like germany that have a strong and industrial base, the government would step in and not allow that. >> and also, i feel another thing is, i mean, a lot of politicians have also said this, not all of them, but some that i've heard speak, politics has changed a lot in the last even 30 years where now the everything is so and i'm interested in business. and i feel like another, like a kind of bad divide has also been created. a lot of people like, if you're into business you are automatically like a republican or something like that, or if you're not into business, you're just completely to the other side. i feel like it shouldn't have to be like that, and if you want to start your own business, you can be a democrat, whatever.

there's just a lot of unneeded social pressure in that aspect. >> god bless the american businessman. i'm for him. i'm for the henry ford's who, with their own money, build up a producing company. and by the way, and he doubled the pay of the workers because it occurred to him hey, maybe if my own workers can afford to buy the product being made, i'll make more products. a lot of people laugh over in june charged wilson who was the secretary of defense under eisenhower. they always mangled the quote. they say what's good for general motors is good for america. no, he said what's good for america is good for general motors, and vice versa. what he said was the fate of the company and fate of the country were inextricably linked. when one does well, the other

does well. not smash and grab. >> and one last question. another thing that just really annoys me is every time i buy something it says made in china. so i hate seeing that, and that's why that's something that, i don't know, i just have a very strong feeling about, yet, making domestic products. i mean, this whole thing with becoming dependent on china is really a problem, and the other problem is, because of the way a lot of businesses operate, you can't compete with china and it's very expensive to produce domestic products in the united states. and they are not that many companies to do that, and usually there are, they are small businesses. you know, a lot of people on the news say oh, it's easy, we could just cut off, we could say no to china whenever we wanted, just come back to america. and i don't think that's true. i think they have like a vice

grip on this right now. i don't am i don't know how in my come as i get older, there's ever going to be away to cut off from them and start making our own things again. because that will always stimulate our economy. >> well, i think we have a modern version of mutual assured destruction, like we had in the soviet union. if one side or the other does something, abrupt, it brings down the whole system. people worry about the whole trade organization. all, we can't have terrorists and all that. well, maybe we can't but our whole tax system is skewed towards favoring outsourcing and off shoring as opposed to building it here. so there are solutions we can undertake.

>> i have question about politics, more than policy. i notice you worked for politicians. i forgot to the senator was. i haven't read your book. so you worked for people who stood for office, campaign in the electoral systems. and the book is about policy and the failure of policy. seems to me that many, many people in the room as an example of it agree with your view in my view. i share your view, about policy. a problem it seems to me is the policy but the way out of this, that seems to me the question is politics. and leadership. and i don't see leaders out there, for these people who agree with these policy problems to coalesce around to find a solution. in other words, electoral

politics. so you worked for republicans. i worked for democrats. and i'm wondering if you see any leader out there who might precipitate out these people who share our feelings, in a way that might help to get a hold of the policies? but the only way to do that is to get a hold of an electoral system and use it. do you see anybody? >> not on the horizon. >> i mean, do you see anybody at all? >> no. and in any case, my days of endorsing politicians are over. [laughter] >> well, who in the past have you liked that you thought would have been appropriate for the moment? >> i like ike. [laughter] spent it has to go that far back? >> it has to go a ways back. >> all right, thanks.

>> well, first of all, thanks for your 30 years of public service. it's a great effort. we appreciate it. one dimension of the issues you've talked about i can well understand, and that's how congressional incumbents become captured by special interests. but a couple of dimensions of issues you've been discussing really, really do not make sense to me, and i hope you can throw some light on them. one is that why don't congressional candidates who genuinely represent the interests of the people in their constituency gets elected -- get selected to compete with political office? why is a we seem to get candidates elected at the local level who are already either captured or subject easily to capture by special interests? >> because we don't have open primaries. if you have closed primaries,

you get a very limited number of people voting. they are only the base of the party in these primaries, which are usually low turnout. and they result in a case where most candidates, at the congressional level, don't have to worry so much about the congressional election. they just worry about their primary. >> so we need to find way to open up that system? >> an open primary system might be one solution. >> in my second question is why on earth do 50% plus of white american males vote for these four candidates who are simply reflecting special interests and not their own? >> i was a political act, not a psychologist. [laughter]

>> thanks very much. >> how many people do we have in line bikes how many? four, okay. we are running out of time so let's do those were questions and then that's it. >> i, too, was a republican before, and the civil rights movement sort of knocked me off the course and became a democrat, and i finally a pox on both your houses like myself. my question has to do with political ideals which i think, 20 years ago, 40 years ago our ideals perhaps remain the same and i'm curious as to what the political, what your political ideals were, what were your republican ideals that you would still hope that somebody would represent a, decides not being dishonest? >> the interesting thing is in today's politics, ronald reagan would probably be too moderate for the party.

he'd raise taxes i think four times. he pleaded with the congress to pass a clean debt ceiling extension. when something went terribly wrong in lebanon, he didn't say we're going to stay the course. he got out. so it wasn't as polarized then. i'd just like to see some politicians, they can have strong views, they can play to the base and all that, but at the end of the day they know they have to cut a deal that their responsibility as elected officials to govern and to produce bills. >> thanks. >> so we have a rigged tax system that is systematically moving money from middle and lower classes to the upper classes. isn't this exactly the kind of

thing that constitution was designed to prevent? so why isn't it working? >> it's not working because the money that is in politics made it so. that's why k street has all those lobbyists. why the industry beats down the doors of the senate finance committee and house ways and means committee. all those provisions didn't get in there by happenstance. they were put in by interests that gave campaign contributio contributions. and for those contributions they got, you know, manifold return. >> so how are we going to get our rights back? we have essentially have lost a lot of the protection afforded by that great constitution were supposed to have. where is the? how do we get it back? >> that is something i've been

pondering myself. now the supreme court has made an even greater impediment, passing a law that would get the money out of politics. that's really the only way you could do it. i came to say that a publicly financed system of elections would be much cheaper in the long run, because the millions of dollars that halliburton, or for that matter solyndra, might have given, you know, i'm being bipartisan here, came back many times as a hit to the taxpayer. if we paid a little bit for his limited campaign season, there's no need for to your presidential cycles, on -- for to your presidential cycles, we would save money and the long run. we would have solyndra and

halliburton and all the others. >> following up on the thing of bipartisanship here i guess, and returning to the other question mentioned earlier, why is it we don't have a pro-peace party in this country? i think the pathologist of republican party, especially the neoconservatives, are fairly well understood. but they had a lot of help along the way. the glorious oxymoron of humanitarian war that the democrats seem fond of in the balkans and libby, now gearing up for syria with a lot of republicans endorsing it. it just seems to me there's something very profound at work in both parties that goes beyond money, goes beyond manipulation and makes it almost in decent for anybody on the right or the left to oppose the mainstream in

both parties that want to respond to every problem the world with killing somebody. you know, from your vantage point again, thinking more about the republican party, but why is it the democrats in some cases are as bad or worse as the republicans are when it comes to this sort of thing? >> i think they tend to say me, too, but slightly less. that's part of her one and a half party system. it does distressed me, perhaps rationale for the reasons for it is, i mean, they all represent elite interests. and when any sort of militarized empire, which is kind of what we have become, starts to go downhill, starts to have serious problems with its debt, their reaction isn't to say well,

let's pull back. their reaction is to double down on the very policies that got them into the mess in the first place. it's abnormal psychology because it's the only way i can explain it. >> the ultimate question is why have we gotten in this mess in the last few decades, and that's really difficult to answer. but more specifically, what role do you think the change in education that is happened, where we no longer teach thinking and questioning but rather just assuming things that are fed to us our packs? >> that's a big part of it, and i think it's a kind of terrible synergy with the media who just sort of feet out a lot of tabloid to people. it always struck me as interesting that in the 1880s and 1890s, presumably uneducated farmers have a lot better idea, just to the railroad interests were and how

they work shaft, how the big eastern banks were shafting them and how the grain wholesalers were shafting them. been a lot of americans don't understand how, when the libor is rigged, they are shafted. >> okay, last question. [applause] >> i know of his authority, but one more question. on the topic of education, how come they don't teach civics anymore? army, i find that everyone in my generation doesn't understand how the government works and i think that's a big problem is why people don't vote. and just last week i was at a conference that dated model congress and explain how bills

were passed and it really educated me further on what i already knew about legislation and what, you know, when you like someone, what they're supposed to do. how come they don't teach that in school any more? >> excellent question. the same people who don't understand libor, the kids don't understand the difference between the house and the senate and how a bill becomes law. >> thank you. [applause] >> you're watching the tv on c-span2. 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> now joining us on booktv are co-authors meghan mccain and michael ian black. >> no, michael ian black and meghan mccain. >> "america, you sexy bitch" is the name of the book. >> i was a guest on a pilot and