collective are we listening to? because it's not ours. and i think that's why, you're right, it's painful to discuss. it's very shameful. it's shameful in this country, it's not shameful to be poor in other countries, people don't ask you right away, what do you do and how much money do you make? they ask who are you? who are you in our community? >> severheryl, respond any way want to respond. i'm in confusion now, because if we try to situate it as a political question is difficult. trying to situate it as a moral question is even more difficult. >> we take care of our own people. isn't that the value of our

country, that we need to take care of our people? but we don't take care of our own. >> everybody b about it flows from our value system and we act as if it doesn't matter, and it does matter. and when our value system becomes corrupt, everything else becomes corrupt. >> i totally agree. my question is whether or not you think the majority of americans, or certainly elected officialings do you think they see poverty as a moral question as opposed to a choice? >> no, no. who's problem is that, we elect them? >> i want to give the point of view from the media, because that's in half the sky, we say the world challenge of our time is gender inequity, poor women, poor girls lead to gender inequity even in the u.s. as well. one of the major problems, why

it doesn't get so much coverage, why people aren't so interested is, part of it is the way that we tell it. so much of what is covered in the news media and in television is how you tell stories. more investment and thought needs to go into how we tell stories. what we do is we actually tell individual stories of women who have faced challenge and have also come out of those challenges. i think that's really important. even when we talk about how to engage elected officials. you need to not only tell the story of the challenge, but also the way out. people want to focusing on solutions because they want to help. but if they don't have a way to help they don't have a menu on how to help. there are many, many ways of helping. we need to focus on that. >> if i say to you that to my mind, there is a bipartisan consensus in washington. if i said to you there's a bipartisan consensus in

washington, and that the poverty doesn't matter, there's a consensus in that town that the poor adult man is just not a party in this country. >> one of the words, and we talk about the falsely of the discussion about poverty. we don't talk about what the cause of capitalism are. let me just be clear is that what capitalism does is it creates policy. the people that have the payday loans, they're making money off poor people. the people that are using these credit cards, you've got a great credit card i hope you'll talk about it. but the people who have these prepaid, they're making money off of it. we talk about the many, many ways that poor people are extorted. dr. martin luther king when he accepted -- no, actually -- in 1968 in where do we go from

here, he talked about economic structure. he said that there's 40 million poor people in this country, and when you ask that question, you have to ask the very structure or the economy. he went on to say who owns the oil? who owns the iron ore, if the world is 2/3 water, why do we pay water bills? don't try that with the water company, it will not work. but it's true, we have seen in the past 20 years the income distribution become more inequal. we are only second to sweden in our inequality of our income distribution. if you talk to the other people. they will say, oh, this is class warfare, where you begin to talk about the differences of who earns what. or they need to work hard. there's nobody harder working than an undocumented person who's cleaning up somebody's

house and getting paid under the table. >> i want to go to cecilia in just a second. but in reference to the prepaid card. you have a card that's called the preapproved card, tell us about what make this is approved card different. >> let me say there's big business in people being poor. the more poor you are, the more you pay for insurance, the more you pay for everything, the more muff money they make off of you. so i would not disagree with you about capitalism, there's a good side to it and there is a horrific side to it. today in order to do business, you have to have plastic. you can't carry around cash.

but you can't tell that to a latino company, they will not walk into a bank. so these people are called unbanked. when you are poor, you have bounced checked. when you have bounced checks, you cannot get a checking account or a credit union account. if you can't get a checking account or an account at a credit union, how do you get a card to transact business? you need a piece of plastic to order something over the internet. to go into the grocery store so you're not robbed. fine. there was a big business where many people bought what was called prepaid cards, cards that you didn't have to qualify for, but they were issued and you deposited money on them and you used them. many of them are highway robbery, they charge you $35 to $50 a month to use it.

how many of you out there have one of those. uh-huh, quite a few of you. so i decided i was going to do something about it and i created, funded it myself, something called the approved card. the approved card, you can use it the way that i ask you to use it, will not cost you more than $3 per month, and that $3 per month is for four cards. you can read about it at the approv approv approvedcard.com. i have never seen such opposition of outright lies from the television community, from the newspaper reporters, from everybody because if i succeeded in this card, the banks fail. if i succeed in this card, the

other people who have these prepaid card that they are making a fortune off of you, bam. everybody wants me to fail so they can continue to make money off of you. if you want to change things around, i am asking you to look into it because -- and then i'll stop here with this, in order to be more and have more, every single one of you needs a credit score, your credit score determines the car insurance premiums you pay, if a landlord won't rent to you, and your credit reports determine if an employer won't hire you. you cannot get out of poverty if you do not have a good credit score. do you understand that? you cannot get a good credit score if you have a -- one of the credit bureaus, trance union, they are going to look at the transactions that you make

on the approved card, it will not go on your credit reports currently. it will not increase your credit score currently, but if this experiment works, 24 months from now when you use a debit card it will go on to your credit report and you will get a credit score so you can be a viable human being. you got to work with me, because everybody else wants this project to fail. it's called the approvedcard.com. the $3 a month you have to pay will go away, because i want a card that's better than cash. >> i cut you off earlier, what were you trying to get in? >> when we talk about individuals politicians or public servants who look at compassion and who's doing what,

i want to be somewhat clear when this administration took office, we lost about, say the first month after inauguration, there were 8 million jobs that were lost. so let's put that in context. as soon as we got the recovery act in, we were able to put more funding in to help preserve a safety net, 50 million americans benefitted from that, 12 million children. now we come back to another debate that we had almost a year ago because we had to struggle with this new congress that didn't want to extend tax -- every time $1 of that ui benefit is used, it generates 2 more dollars. it keeps the gasoline tank filled. all kinds of good things happen, it's kind of a stimulus if you will. but there's still a lot of people in washington who believe that the ui program itself is

something that keeps people at home, that people just aren't look for work and they're using that as an excuse. these people are slackers. i know they're not. there's a lot of good working people that get up every single day looking for a job, but when you still have four people applying for one job, we aren't creating jobs enough. now government can't do everything, but we will try to stimulate, but we also have to have that partnership with businesses and corporations. and right now some of them are sitting on a lot of money. they made a lot of profits right now and we need to insent vise and we need to collectively tell those new members of the house and otherwise to get on the ball and make sure that we're passing laws that are fair. all we're looking for in this administration is a fair balance. >> let me push back, lovingly and respectfully on this notion

of insent vising them now. if you now want to incentivize, we gave this money to the banks to bail them out. we didn't have strings attached to pay back the money that they -- >> let's be clear, we also lost over the course of three decades, a lot of jobs that were outsourced. so this president's talking about insourcing jobs, giving tax credits to bring those jobs back home. and we should do right away and that's something that i think the public agrees with. so it isn't just the banks, but there's all this whole slew, chemical, oil, and other corporations that shove their money into tax savings.

we want to give you a break if you're creating jobs here in america. >> madam secretary, where's the evidence number one that those jobs are ever going to come back. i remember the conversation that president obama had about this -- he asked steve jobs, he said mr. president, those jobs are never going to come back. where is the incentive, seriously, where's the incentive for any american corporation right now to hire anybody, if they can do more with less -- the only reason you hire anybody these days in corporate america is if you have to because you have to squeeze as much as you can out for your shareholders. so those jobs are never going to come back and what incentive do they have to hire americans? >> let's look at the automobile industry. who said they wanted to make an

investment and who didn't. now there's $200,000 in two years, automobile industry, good paying jobs that put people back in the middle class. i'm talking about men, women, people of color. now they have profit sharing, you see assembly lines that are coming up. i'm not saying that it's all going to come back right away, but the policy that the president put in place, make new vehicles that are going to be competitive against korea and j japan. we need to do more, whether it's manufacturing overall, let's bring back those products, let's keep our raw materials here and incentivize our business. >> incentivize is a back end strategy and they should have been made to do it on the front end. >> i wouldn't be accused here of

class warfare and i was just in china, singapore and japan. and what is remarkable, and we talked about the factories and in our terms they're sweat shops, in their terms, it's upward mobility, but they have in china an industrial policy. this lady over here and the president, and i have issues like -- and i think that dr. malvo really put it the right way in terms of what the stakes are right now, in terms of the president and others. we don't have industrial policy in the united states of america. the auto workout, i call it a workout, it wasn't a bailout because a lot of people in labor who lost a lot of money because of dual pay scale now and things like that. but people, the auto companies couldn't access capital anyway. and so the government was capital of last resort.

if we lost the auto industry, detroit would be dead. what happened was they took a risk. the secretary took a risk, the auto company took a risk, and we see a remarkable change. that was the closest we ever had to industrial policy. i think we need to have more of an industrial policy here. i think what we're saying on this panel is that it's important to shine the light so that people don't feel shamed, but it's equally important to have a set of strategies, both capital strth strategyings, industrial strategies, educational strategies all underlieded by values because it is our values of the united states of america, which is give us your tired and your poor. it is we are a country that will bring ourselves up, have the american dream, but we need those strategies. and i think what comes out of

this as i'm listening to the amazing ladies on this panel is that if we could actually collectively strange bed fofell as we might be, we might end up having a set of strategies that we all pursue, that would be a change in terms of fighting poverty. >> what would you say to those women and children watching and listening right now who have nothing against bailing out industry, but are waiting on some help for the individual? >> right. >> and i think that's what americans want some fundamental fairness, they see all this up in washington, and i'm not saying that any of that was necessarily a bad idea. but on 9main street, on the sid street, there is no help for women and children and it's unfair.

>> it is unfair and i think what many of us said on your first question about augs terity. when you're coming out of the biggest recession since the great depression, the biggist problem is augs terity. the fact that we lost that jobs act. what's happened is there are thousands of schools that need to be prepared. teachers every single day see poverty firsthand. they are on the front line of seeing it every day. and we fight like hell to try to keep schools open, to not destabilize neighborhoods. my teachers take money out of their pockets every day to buy supplies, to buy food and all of this stuff. we see it firsthand. but we have to have long-term as well as short-term strategies. we have to have a jobs strategy, but we also have to have a lifeline strategy. >> on my reds vegas, which is

100 miles by 50 miles, one of the things that we are doing in our community is taking a hard look at the existing way of educating our people. unfortunately, the western model created by somebody in washington, d.c. and it trickled down to our community, education, when it began in my community, was only to do two things, civilize us, speak english and be christians. the government first invested in education, it was not to teach us how to read and write, it was to say our father and speak english. today we are taking a hard look, and we have a captured audience, and this is what i like to say, the boundaries of my reservation and everything that goes on inside of there is our responsibility and it's up to us

as citizens of that community to look at where we've been, where we are and where do we need to go. one of the areas that we're looking very hard at is the educational system. we said education is the key to get out of poverty. however, not everybody can go to college. not everybody is going to be a dentist or a doctor. when you take a look at our community, what kind of jobs do we need to train our people for? our community, our land, we grow hay, we eat sorghum, we grow rib eye, we have a lot of cows in our community. and we have to take a look at what is it that we want our children to learn how to do so they can also make a living and live off the land and to provide for themselves and their community so. part of the challenge is to take a look at how to change hue we do business in our community and that goes back to changing the

educational philosophy of this country so that it fits the needs of every community in america. >> i've got less than ten minutes left in this very rough conversation here. there's a few issues i haven't gotten to in the way i want to. in no particular order, just like there's a link between randy ineffective education and poverty, there's clearly a link between poor health and poverty. talk to me about that. >> there is an enormously strong link between poor health and poverty, particularly among women, especially among women and it's especially tragic because not only do we fare less well in the health care system in our own experiences, but we are also mothers of children and when we are not healthy, our children can't possibly be healthy. and yet most health care policy programs are aimed at children

as a legitimate -- as a way of legitimizing somehow taking care of women. and speaking of policy adjustments, we need to change that, we're also the care givers of our parents and other disabled. the affordable health care act, however for the first time, will provide preventative services without a cost sharing. meaning that the individual, the consumer doesn't have to put up a certain amount of money in order to get the care. and who would have ever imagined that we would engage in a major national debate over whether contra acceptity care would be included as a fundamental requirement under preventative health care. so in 2010, in the course of the year of 2010, 20% of women did not have coverage for their health care. and so what did that result? that resulted in prescription not being filled, that resulted

in not -- in postponing a recommended treatment that resulted in not going to specialists when we needed to go to specialists, that resulted in just a general state of a lack of optimal health care. and when i speak about health care, i think we have to also put into that category a freedom from violence against women in our society. the organization that i co-founded a few years ago, published a survey among 3,300 women in which we thought that we thought we were going to find the usual conversation that we have had here today for over two hours, economics, economics, economics. and we came back and we asked what do you believe ought to be the number one issue addressed in this country and it was to stop violence against women. and it is a marker of how we value women in this country and

our health. i am speaking to -- and our health when the only time we're concerned about a woman's safety is when she has been physically injured or has been killed. and that we really don't much care about the circumstances of her well-being, with respect to her safety and security, her health security, unless there are just enormous threats to her well-being. >> there's also data that links that cycle of violence to poverty. >> and it links that -- a homicide against women is among the highest among pregnant women. so i think it's really important to link the status of health care in this country on the uninsured. who are those uninsured, they are young women who do not have high school education, they are

women in a hispanic community, much more likely than in the african-american community. so the sub categories of womanhood are still those of which we really must address. and dare i say over and over again, these are not acts of god, they are acts of complacency, women are not victims, we have the power to change the circumstances and health ought to be the number one agenda. >> watching my time here, just about five minutes left. one other thing i want to get to that we did not get to in this conversation, you referenced dvr king earlier and quoted him a couple of times and king famously said that war is the enemy of the poor. that war is the enemy of the poor. that's true for all people. but it's especially and particularly true for women and children because those resources

that are being squandered abroad are not being used here at home for women and children. >> dr. king really looked at war as an act of violence, the combination between war and capitalism, because who makes money from war? and among women who are enlisted in the army, 40% of them are african-american women. there's an economic draft. we don't really have a draft, there's an economic draft, people go to war because they don't have a josh. you have women, tavis who have left their children with their mom so that they can go to war. you have people who have enrolled in the army reserves or the somebody reserve because they could get an extra $250 a month. the next thing you know, they've over there in afghanistan or someone. battlegrounds are a breeding ground for violence against women. the number of women who are

raped while they're in the military and the things that happened to them -- when we talk about violence against women, it's economic violence. patriarchy allows a economic difference among women. the situation that we're put in, the sexual harassment that so many people experience. people just say, you know, go away, quit. but some people can't afford to quit. so we women have to be more united. we have accepted the structure that discriminates us systematically, it starts with the culture, with the music videos, not to say tavis, what you end up with, i had to tell some students one day, it is not against the law for you to cover your body. nothing bad is going to happen to you if you don't show a body part. war and peace is a huge piece of

such resources out of our economy and women and children pay for it. >> poverty is the worst form of violence. in a minute and a half, tell me if you can why in this particular moment, with all the numbers, not giving us reason to be optimistic, whether or not you are hopeful and whether or not women and children in america should be hopeful? >> i am hopeful. starting tomorrow we're going to be celebrating the passage of the affordable care act. while many children, latino, african-american children are being covered. this is a 70-year span of time, finally this president got something done. and no one thought that it was going to be that hard. it was hard, but more people are reaping that benefit. when i look back at the past, 3.9 million private sector jobs created in the span of three years, 2 1/2 years, and you look

back at what the previous administration did, that president only had 11,000 jobs created per month. we have been able to really kick out the numbers and do a lot more. and part of it is because people have confidence, optimism and hope. and yes i do believe the numbers can improve if people believe that we can work with each other, build coalitions that empower each other and be sure that we're working together and we hear the voices of the public. bottom line is our destiny is wrapped up together. it's not the white house and us over here, it's all of us working together as a community.