individuals so you could buy the position of treasurerrer of france for a abide the position of the treasurer of france for a big sum of money and collect taxes and keep all the taxes for yourself and not only that but you could take this office if you could give it to your children as part of their inheritance. this was officeholding and comes from this french practice. how do the french do it and fix the system they try to reformat several times in the 18th century and hadn't had a revolutionary and beheaded all the people that have these offices. so that is in the first volume of this political order series. talking about the progressive

era in the united states from the 19th century the united states has a spoiled system or patronage system in which every office of the federal government all the way down to the local postmaster was allocated on the basis of political patronage dividend to somebody as a reward for political support by a member of congress or representative or whatnot. this system was ended beginning in the et nates as the result of a grassroots movement where that grandmothers would get access to that they are a fourth class postmaster. it was the assassination of james garfield in 1882 at the hands of a would-be office seeker that finally embarrassed to the congress into passing

something known as the pendleton act in 1883 that set up the first civil service commission and it's not going to be done on the basis of the civil service exam and so forth and to serve as an example of democracy fixing itself. >> listening to you this very exciting. )-right-paren he commented you were saying that iraq was the biggest mistake from beginning to end. i don't think that you are going to. you wrote back saying how you signed something so saddam hussein had to go. i put my phone away but.

what do you have to say about that movement in general clicks debate co- >> it's an easy question to answer because i wrote a whole book about this: america at the crossroads. i think that they made a fundamental mistake which is the overestimation of what american pair to cut military power to could do to retake the recovery shape the politics. they are way too optimistic about this. we are creating a prosperous democracy and we failed i think despite huge investments of manpower in both of those countries and if so so i think

that we need a more modest foreign policy. that isn't a foreign-policy foreign policy of the complete disengagement. so i think that we still need to influence the way that things work and deal with threats and so forth but the lesson of the two is that american power cannot concretely shape and outcome on the ground in that part of the world and we should stop kidding ourselves so i support the error strikes against isis in iraq and a serious but i think the objective was to ambitious. i don't think we are going to do it. we haven't destroyed al qaeda after 13 years of trying and president obama went from excess if passage of the two once again overpromising what american power could deliver.

>> it's against the country where they lead into default. on the ruling that led to the default. >> this judge ruling on the holdouts is a very narrow question. i think it is a somewhat questionable ruling but that isn't a big issue in argentina. the big issue in argentina is long-term pervasive macroeconomic policy. argentina is a classic case of a country that doesn't learn from

history. it did and learned from the hyperinflation that it had experienced over the years. it always gets into the populist political passions. the argentine government spends much of the money that it could take and it could and borrow on the international market so it started printing money. the vice president actually thought the company that was printing the currency to benefit from it and then when the statistical agency said this is going to lead to inflation or this is leading to inflation everybody put their own people there and so talk about that. argentina has been a poster child for bad government for many years and so the judge may be wrong in this particular case and in this one i would may be signed with the argentina

government a little bit more but that isn't the fundamental problem. the fundamental problem is a government that does not know how to run an economy. >> let's take one more question. >> for american citizens beyond what you spoke to about becoming and staying informed what are your ideas about our abilities or our responsibilities and how the government is now and trying to change it back to where the people have more power instead of corporations and also it isn't planted on one side to the other. >> we got a problem dealing with money and politics. that is ultimately at the root of many of the problems. this effort to grab the political system and use it for their own purpose is fueled by

money and the court said that money and politics is a form of free speech protected by the first amendment. that is a very strange decision and i think that many other democracies are able to control. so, money is important in any democratic system. but other democracies are able to control the amount of money much better than we are so it is not impossible to do. given that the court has spoken this way we are kind of stuck and this is one of the reasons the system is so hard to inform because you have to either get a new court or constitutional amendment which isn't going to happen and i suspect in my lifetime. so i think what it depends on his scissors and mobilization. that's the way that they work. people get mad about something. they mobilize and organize and come up with a plan a concrete plan.

they use the political system. that's the story of the progressive era that could have informed after the financial crisis that has not come so that is the task in front of everybody today. >> wonderful. thank you so much and everybody for being here. [applause] we would love for you to be mobilized in that direction so let's do the book signing please and get a copy of the book. thank you for being here. [applause]

throughout the book it sounds like there is a level of anxiety that you can feel about being in poverty and a level of fatigue and just kind of a constant fear that you are going to get below. >> in reading your words back to you, what were you thinking when you wrote that? >> i was thinking about the flood when i wrote that. when i was pregnant with my child and my husband decided to go back to school she had been held back from iraq so we applied and got him into school and moved to cincinnati and we are going to be on the stipend because you get your bill and tuition paid and it is dependent on the zip code of the school that you are in and so somewhere in between 12 or 1400 month it was enough to barely live on.

we could barely make it through the semester. then the money never came. there was a paperwork screw up. we would say that the stipend comes and they would say not this week come back next week. eventually we got jobs at burger king and the the craftiest apartment we could find because without it it was going to be temporary. we would get a huge check for the back pay and put a deposit on a decent apartment. the money just kept not showing up. we were living in this awful apartment and then there was a summer storm and in ohio the drains were not properly maintained in the building and everything we lived in the littlest apartment in the basement and everything we had

was pretty much destroyed in a flood. we had no money and no place to go. we didn't have enough to pay on the motel or the apartment so the landlord served us. if you've ever been to ohio in the late summer it's not an effective management technique. it was crazy. and that is what i was talking about was knowing that our baby was on the way and we have done everything right. there was nothing we did and do right. we had to school and funding in place, we had an apartment and good life plan. we were going to be moving forward. and then there was a storm and all of it was gone.

we had some of the stuff that we salvaged when we left and that is what we had. >> clarence page talks about the collection of the tribune columns on race, politics and social change that he's written over the past 30 years. this was hosted by the center of the old naval hospital in washington, d.c.. it is one hour and 15 minutes. >> what a pleasure to welcome clarence back to the center who was also a guest on the hill. and his new book called sure were a year because -- culture warrior. as you