the president has taken some steps of administrative leave where he can. the president does not pass laws. the constitution says only congress can pass laws. the president has the right to use his discretion on how we execute the laws which is why there is now this lawsuit against the president which is a crazy thing but the house has now sued the president for trying to enforce the laws. i have limited resources on immigration. we have border per troll that is four times what it was when i came to congress in the 1990's and doubling in the last 10 years and size. honestly, they've done a pretty good job in the recession help as well to stem the flow of people coming in the country without documents.

there are ways to make it work better. i can only have so much money. i'm going to enforce the broken laws, i'm going to try to do it the best i can. easy give me resource money to deport them because they are here without documents, let me go after the criminals, the drug dealers, guys trying to do us harm before after -- before i go after the kid in school who might be the valedictorian. president opposed a program called deferred action for children, daca. kids who were brought into this country usually through their parents when they were very small and have spent most of their life in this country and most of them do not remember the home country they came from. many have gone on to be valid dorians and many are going to great universities.

rather than go after those folks and trying to hunt them down, let me have down the ones trying to sell drugs to our kids. using his discretion on how to use the resources to deport people in the country without documents. that is the use of executive discretion. sinceesident has said house republican leadership has told us last month that they will not pass any immigration legislation for the remainder of the year, the president said ok, i waited in your request to see if the house would pass a bill so we could reconcile differences and get a bill that fixes the statue, broken immigration system and you are now telling me you're not going to do that? i'm going to do what i can within the confines of the law to use my executive discretion to try to implement the law as best i can. the president right now is

reviewing what he can do using his executive discretion to make immigration laws worked as best as possible. what might he do? he might try to do some things that diverged or redirect resources away from -- again -- going away from the mother trying to buy groceries and go toward the guy trying to recruit someone to be a gang member. when you're going to find disease going to target as much as he can towards those who are trying to do us harm. it's going to be somewhat imprecise. how many people will it help? it's very unclear. how far can it go? he cannot change a lot. he can only enforce the law using his discretion. program, daca, the deferred action program for these miners to are right now not going

be pursued for deportation is only temporary. they are still subject to deportation. at any moment the program could be canceled. those kids are now out of luck and they are back again in the deportation line. he cannot change the law but changes how to enforce it. they want to go after the guys trying to do us some harm. hopefully what will happen is we will pass a law to make it very clear who will earn a chance to stay and who will not. rather than going after people where if we had passed the law you would have been able to stay, let's focus on those we need to get out of the country as quickly as possible. i took too long.

luis, and before you go we will pick two more names and then we will close for the evening. and, batting cleanup, jim duree? last questionr her. luis, estella, then jim. good afternoon, congressman. we believe in the rule of law. we do not support weakening laws to protect children in the heat of a short-term crisis. we ask you to keep intact the trafficking law from 2008. >> this is the law that deals with the border kids, wilbur law passed inh

2008. i want to make this clear. it was passed in 2008 bipartisan. your to bush was president and he signed it. but it essentially says is for children, if we find that they arrive at our border and they are unaccompanied, we are going to try to figure out what's going on so they can come to our border. in may not remember but 2005, 2006, 2007 and finally in 2008, a lot of kids from china were coming in these container cars on these big cargo ships. , these human traffickers -- a lot of times sex traffickers would oftentimes put little girls in these cargo containers and they would ship them on boats as if they were part of the freight and they

would pay off people and get sexe kids and put them into trafficking essentially slave conditions in the u.s. we saw that smuggling going on. everyone came forward and said we cannot do this go on. we have to go after these guys trying to smuggle in human beings. most of the kids were coming from the asian countries overseas and it was just under severe conditions. can you imagine the long trek all the way from china and a cargo container you cannot get out of? in the wilberforce law was passed for that reason. because most of these kids did not know english -- they did not know whether circumstance was them to be -- we provided with legal assistance to see if they make a claim where if they got shipped back they would not be persecuted or killed. that was the reason for the wilberforce law.

some are saying we now need to change that to not provide the due process for those children if they come on accompanied. they said we should process them in five to seven days. if you are saying please don't change that law, i'm with you. i don't believe we should be eliminating due process because we want to have the system move faster. the way you have it move faster is to get rid of the bottleneck. don't make it to where it take so long. you can give these kids chance to make their case without them of someip rights to make their case. i'm hoping what we will do is figure out that we can do this quicklyt way but do it to prove it to the world that if you have a real claim, we've always been willing to take a someone seeking asylum but it has to be a real

claim. jim. luis, estella then >> i am so glad that you are here. we get a lot of information and you are doing a wonderful job. >> i asked her to say that. >> no, no. that's not true. >> i heard on the radio, i think it was this week, that social security by the year 2023, there won't be any. , but my it want happen worry is that a lot of people are on social security and they say where we only have so much cut it in half.

america is not the way it used to be. we know that and we understand it. we have been here many years. nation iscause our pushing many states down. they are losing their homes. money comingbs, no in. on the other hand, china is out working us. many people were having a good time and others are dying because there's not enough help for them. i wish i could say more but thank you very much for everything.

i usually take a little longer than i should on social security because i hate rumors about social security. let me start out by saying this. social security has a challenge facing it in the future. i don't want anyone to think i'm trying to say that everything is hunky-dory. social security is not going bankrupt. it is not broke. -- not like once some of these banks, not like enron or worldcom, failed to pay in full and on time to every single american who worked in this country and retired or became disabled or the surviving spouse or child of someone who in and paid in. never once has it failed to pay those benefits in full and on

time. in those 78 years we have gone through 13 recessions. the last one, really bad. in the height of the recession when we were losing 800,000 jobs in one month, every single american on social security got their social security check. let me give you the simple math on social security because it really is simple. you can check and you can ask my office and i will send you the information. i'm not making these numbers up. i may miss it on the hundreds of thousands or millions, but i will be pretty close to accurate on the billions and trillions. the 78 years that social security has been around, how we contributed to social security? remember. it's not free. tax contribution every paycheck. our employer matches that, 6.1%

we get taxed and six point 1% our employer. it's not free. we pay for it. how much have we put in? trillion. i may be off a little and i probably have the number in my note book, but about $50 trillion. don't try to figure out how many zeros are in there. it's a lot. as more thanuation one variable. themuch have we expended in 78 years? how much is social security paid out to either you as a beneficiary or feared the administrative costs for the 78 years of administration for tens of millions of people? how much? about $14 trillion.

i know the math is tough but i think you can do the subtraction. -$14rillion brought in trillion sent out. what does that leave you? $1 trillion. $1 trillion of your taxpayer money, your parents, your grandparents, your kids that has never been spent by the social security system. .ocial security ain't dumb that money they have been collecting in excess of what they send out emma they don't just put it under a big social security mattress. treasuryt bills, bonds. the people who say there is a fiction and the trust fund and its funny money, you pay this. social security gets that money. the treasury says here's the

social security money we got for this month. treasury says thank you. bonds totreasury replace the cash you just gave me. treasury bonds earn 2% interest, not much. the social security money we've not used over this last several decades earned in interest? to $2 trillion. in much today is in reserves social security that has not been spent that is available? close to $3 trillion. social security is not broke. there's a challenge. i see the challenge in the room. as well.challenge i'm a member of the baby boomers. there's a whole bunch of us. me,re retiring now -- not

not yet -- but we are getting close. we did not have that many kids. so we don't have as many people working paying into the system for social security and now with blip of baby boomers retiring, all of a sudden it's a little offkilter. we need more people paying into make up for all of the people retiring. $3about 20 years, the trillion in surplus will be totally depleted. what happens the day after we use up the last penny in the surplus? itial security continues but will now be based only on what americans working paying their with contribute in along their employer. how much would the day after we penny in the surplus trust fund provide? through what taxes collected?

about $.75 on the dollar. today if you receive social 2034ity, imagine in someone who would want to get essentially 100% of what you are getting would only get about 75% of what you are getting. lopez tried to make clear, that stuff. as the challenge we face. it levels off. it does not keep going downhill. the kids today who are working and now watching their parents and the baby boom generation retire, remember that they will start to retire. it will be a bigger population now than the relative size of the population working versus the baby boomers so it levels off. whate wants to get $.75 of people today are getting on $1.

our challenge is to make sure we tweak it. we've got 20 years to do it. we want to continue to give a robust retirement benefit to those who work and paid for it. how do you do it? it's simple math. you either increase the inputs are you decrease the output. tax or other types of revenue. outputs -- benefits. to raise theay retirement age. people get money later in life so that means you pay less benefits over time. that's one way to cut benefits. some way to change the cola, the cost of living increase, so you reduce payments as they increase to keep with inflation. that's a cut in benefits. some people say to remove the cap on how much people have to how much of your income gets taxed at 6.1% taxed at

about $70,000 in income. >> let's say make $117,000. 6.1% single penny will pay in fica. than 100ffett mix more $17,000. he stops paying once he has paid on the first $117,000. everything after that, however tens of millions, it is all .ntaxed because there is a cap it is very simple, inputs or outputs. it's going bankrupt. we should let you have your own private account. to put ity, you get on wall street. by the way, you know how much

you pay in fees for your social security system to work? 1%. than i know a lot of you have 401(k) pass, financial advisors, have you checked how much they charge on a monthly basis to advise you? i guarantee that means they are talking to you every month. they still charge or fee. you know how much? at least four or five times more than oncwhat social security money for manage that 60 million people. one last thing, on top of the fact that it's never failed to pay on time and full through the 78 plus years it's been around, it's not just a retirement benefit. it's not just a pension plan. it's better than a pension plan because you cannot outlive social security. you can outlive your pension.

the commitment that every generation behind your has made. you work for this country, you pay, we guarantee for your life you will always get social security. live,tter how long you you'll always get social security. no pension in america tells you that. but people don't recognize is there are a lot of americans today who are not retired getting social security. why? they were the children or spouse of an american who worked and paid in so they get survivor benefits. you get disability benefits as well. a pension plan, life insurance policy, disability policy wrapped in one. go price that out in the private sector marketplace. go to any insurer and find out how much they would charge to

provide with disability, life insurance, and a pension annuity. find out how much they charge and comparative social security and you'll see why it's the best deal this country has ever made to americans. the population of seniors who are living in poverty is under 10%. women, you should attack anyone who tries to privatize social security. women outlive men by several years. rely onty of women social security for more than half of their retirement income. by the time to get into their 80's, it is almost 100% of their income because they have out and whatever meager pension they may have had and they begin to rely almost exclusively on social security. says she'sopez

concerned about social security getting cut, this is what's going on. the people who should defend social security more is not mrs. lopez but everyone in this room under 30. i guarantee you don't have the type of pension plans that my dad had. he had a defined benefit land which meant you contribute into your pension and it defines how much you will get when you retire. now we have defined contribution, the 401k, the ira. you put in a certain amount and you're not here and to do certain amount in your retirement. it's only guaranteed how much you have to put in and the rest is up to the stock market. if you put your money in enron, you don't get a whole lot back. more and more, you'll find a lot securityng on social for retirement income. if we're smart we figure out the right mix of input and output -- revenue and cuts -- to keep

social security stronger kid to believe they will see martians before they see their social security check. if we do that it would be good for all american. a told you i would go long on that. on the ranking democrat on the social security subcommittee and i hear from so many seniors who say, i got this letter in the mail asking me to send $15 per month to help send my social security and they just get ripped off. it just burns me when i get that kind of stuff because most of these people are on fixed income. shame on anyone who thinks it's ok to do do pay senior into sending them to inbox a month. --shame on anyone who thinks it's ok to dupe a sernior. dot's just not the way you things. we should send a border patrol agent after them. last question. forgive me. we ran a little long. jim, close us out. make it a good one. >> can you hear me?

ok, great. the issue that should be on everyone's minds nonstop is that we are currently marching into global thermonuclear world war iii with russia and china. bush crowd, cameron in britain, the queen and so on are hysterical that the british empire, wall street, is collapsing and that russia, china, india and others, the bric countries, are building a new system for the future. doinghe bric nations are are setting up a new monetary financial economic system to finance infrastructure development all over the world. my friend hunter mentioned the chinese moon program. russia has a similar one. obama says that we've been to the moon and we are not going

back. he also says we do not need fusion power and other newfangled technology. that is obscene. john kennedy is rolling over in his grave at obama's statement to that effect. i'm not kidding about world war iii. it is the assessment of the russian government that obama ad company are going to try thermonuclear showdown like the cuban missile crisis very soon except these clowns around obama think they can win a nuclear war. a are nuts. they're fascists. what's going on right now in ukraine proves it. inet with staff people here los angeles and you probably got a briefing on it. i spoke to your legislative director back in washington and also a lady who is your foreign-policy adviser up in the

caucus office, a turkish american lady. what a laid out then before the d'etat,day top -- coup this is what is coming and it has to be stops. >> i need you to go ahead -- obama's cia has now admitted to senator feinstein and other senate intelligence committees which have been investigating criminal activities of the bush cia -- >> i need you to get to the point. admitted that now contrary to his earlier testimony the cia has been spying on senator feinstein, her entire half, her entire colleagues on the senate intelligence committee.

now what do we have? obama says he has confidence in our cia director -- >> give me your question. >> are you going to impeach this not see -- this nazi like a real democrat or not? >> i hope your references not to people who have been elected to office. i don't think that's an appropriate way to refer to anyone who has been elected to office so i will not grace that comment with a response other than to say elected office is not easy. i'd tell you that as someone who has now served for more than two decades. i think the president is trying as best he can. i think george bush did the best he can. i disagreed with some of the things they do, but i do not refer to them as you just did. in this country, we are fortunate he can get to say that because we have the leaders who

have allowed us to protect the constitution to give you that right. trying to respond to your point -- [applause] let me respond to your point. jim, my sense is this -- how can i say this? it's a dangerous world. there's a lot going on right now in the world that we cannot predict. we, ourselves, by ourselves, cannot control it whether it is ukraine, syria, iraq, north korea. the situation in central america that we can see from these kids coming as desperate as well for different reasons. i did not get elected to tell you that i want us to be the cops of the world and not get paid for it. we are out there and a lot of places around the world. we have our armed forces, a lot of work that's being done, which

i think is important, but no one ever pays us for it. we foot the bill for all this stuff. someone should pay us for this more. did we have for people in the korean peninsula? i have not seen a check. i believe the u.s. has a major responsibility around the world because we have been successful, and everyone looks to us. he have responsibility to lead, but we do not have to be suckers. some degree, i agree with the said, in that was we have to understand what we are facing. from jim diverge another point you made, so let me try to summarize by saying this -- syria, i told the president

that if he was going to go in and use our military, because the syrian government, proof that the syrian government had used a chemical weapon, that i would support that. i have never been a big fan of using our military unilaterally. i voted against the iraq war for that reason. to me, it was important to make a point, that if we had proof that someone had used weapons of mass distraction and we said that is a no-no, then we got to show them it is a no-no. while i am not a fan of using military by itself, i was ok with the president to use .ilitary force, you try to use a weapon of mass assertion and you are going to pay the price. [indiscernible]

just finish. my point is the same now with regard to ukraine, iraq, i look at things a little differently from syria. iraq to me is not a country. it is a sectarian population. as i have said before, the day i see a sunni arab soldier defend iraq soldier defend shiaa iraqi civilian or a sunni iraqr defend a civilian, i will consider it a country. defense shia, sunni defends sunni. we just saw what happened in afghanistan where the afghani

military could not provide the security whether it's soldiers soldiers were who they said they were. countries want to be more responsible for their future, i am not interested in lives,ing american american as several thousand have done in afghanistan. in veteransout that affairs and health care. we got to be smart. we're never going to lose our role in the world to try to help bring prosperity to other countries like ours. at the same time, he have to be careful how we use our military and our forces. what i would jim, say i think the president is trying hard. i think he recognizes when you got soldiers who have served tours ofive times a month tou,

duty, it is time to give the morass. unless iraq can give us something to prove that they deserve to be defended, i will wait until the next civil war. in ukraine, the russians are going hog wild. that is in their backyard. if something were happening in our backyard in this western hemisphere, what would we do? would we allow mexico to teeter? w would we allow the dominican republic or haiti get into a crisis? i suspect not. we invaded grenada, and so the russians fear what is going on. maybe not legitimately. but you got to get inside that brain, because i want to get inside that brain before i send troops to defend somebody i do not understand. flags tod to present

the spouses of fallen soldiers. it ain't fun. it ain't fun. and i'm going to make sure that if i present a flag to the spouse of a fallen soldier, it is going to be for a good reason, so i can say to that spouse, your husband, your wife died for your country and you should be proud, and i'm proud of what he did. i want to make sure i can say that with my heart fully behind it. jim, i do not agree with most what you said, but if i can agree to which you it is we have to be smart with the way we use our power and we have to be smart how we help the world, and cannot be duped into thinking just because we're the biggest power in the world that we should get involved in everything right away. with that, you have been great. we went longer. i thank you so much. we would again. --ueue all fortresses abated thank you all for participating. thank you c-span for coverage. you all have a good evening. c-span, visiting

historic places about some of the events, people, and places that you nation. tonight we focus on the civil war with the historian on the union victory at the battle of chattanooga on august 21, 1863. >> in a remarkable scene late that day the union troops will penetrate the confederate line at multiple points almost simultaneously and sent the confederate army retreating back from missionary ridge and back down into georgia. with the union success on november 25 and a brief pursuit on the 26th and 27th, chattanooga is now firmly in union hands, and it will be turned by the union army over the coming winter into a giant supply base, similar to our forward-operating bases today. it is from chattanooga that

william sherman would take a combined group and advance from chattanooga towards atlanta and into the military-industrial heartland and disrupt it and destroy much of it and bring the war to a close in the spring of 1865. observers and participants at the time believe the union success here at chattanooga it was a signal of ultimate union success in the war. some said it was a death knell of the confederacy. >> c-span's american history tour of the civil war tonight at 8:00 eastern.

former air force intelligence analyst leighton on the u.s. response in iraq. bato on the 2014 midterm elections. live on c-span at 7:00 a.m. eastern. next, a conversation about the .0th anniversary of woodstock star-spangled banner" plays] host: jimi hendrix at woodstock, 45 years ago, playing to crowds there. it is known as a music festival. here to talk about the political

and social implications is bill greider. is it true we think of woodstock as a music festival and not a political type of situation? guest: i don't know what young people think of woodstock. they may get us better than us i old folks. yes, it is remembered formally as this crazy rock on certain in the muddy fields of woodstock, new york. i was too old to be a woodstock kid. my wife and i were having babies at that age, but spiritually we were with it, you know? and i have a broader, more serious memory of that moment, surrounded by lots of other crazy things happening to this country at that time, like the assassination of martin luther king, like the convention in

chicago in 1968, where they basically had a police riot. i could go on and on. i think of woodstock as a kind of breaking through of all of that and saying, hey, we are here. get used to it. we are the kids. and our anthem is sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. and that was literally not wrong. but there was a kind of rebuke in that. and young people, teenagers, adolescents always seek some way to rebuke their parents, the authorities, and they then settle down and get over it. so i think they were saying this is more than just a tantrum. this is a statement of different cultural values.

it is also political in the sense that we don't think much of the political system that others call democracy. so those are all big things that were never stated very directly, at least not in the music, but that was the message. host: as far as going forward, what was the result of woodstock as far as its influence on political and social situations? guest: i think the general understanding is not much. if you look at the political system, george mcgovern got trashed badly in 1972 against nixon. i was a reporter at "the washington post" covering the mcgovern campaign and felt great sorrow because he was a really new voice and strong liberal, etc.

that was the beginning of the descent into a generation of conservative government, ronald reagan, followed by others. my view is contrary. the cultural messages of woodstock and the surrounding events have actually triumphed over the last 40 years, not as squarely and concretely as people can see, but i think that cultural shifts -- well, take some simple examples. the republicans ran against mcgovern in 1972 with a slogan "acid, abortion, and amnesty." it was a devastating slogan. he was not against abortion. and amnesty for those who had fled the vietnam war and went to canada.

today, there is a very different frame of those. it is a long time after. states are now legalizing marijuana and other sensibilities that i think are going to come back with new strength. so i am arguing that that message, that cultural consciousness was the effect of politics of the last 30 years, the civil rights, most obviously, women and feminism. the irregular rules that govern different kinds of behavior, etc. to me, this is the real energy of american democracy, and it is not winning about the white house. it is about changing people's minds, their ideas of themselves, their sense of what

they want the country to be. host: we are discussing woodstock as a political and social influence. we had divided the lines by age. you can probably see them on the screen. host: do you get a sense of what washington thought of woodstock at the time it was taking place or if there was some political response? guest: not formally. it was basically trash. democrats, for obvious reasons, especially if they were from california, had a softer, more supportive view of both the music and the other elements.

i would say even they kept their distance, because this had the shock effect on the country. and for some, including myself, it was exhilarating. but for the overwhelming majority, oh, my gosh, what are those kids doing now? and the pictures coming out of that festival did not help. there were kids rolling around in the mud, braless and shirtless girls. believe it or not, that wasn't a common view in those days. and all kinds of other behavior. and some of it on the margins was ugly. i think the message was liberation. the hippies were very much part of that. throw off those old farts who don't know what they are talking about and make yourself free. host: we heard from jimi

hendrix, joe cocker, janis joplin, crosby, stills, nash, and young. were they political? guest: not political in the sense of we want you to vote for joe or for mcgovern. although some of them obviously did. again, the cultural message was broader than political parties or campaigns. they had low regard for all of that. in a funny sort of way, even though i was a political reporter at the time, i could appreciate the meaning. it wasn't about winning or losing the 1972 election or the 1980 election. it was beyond that.

one of the things that i think that supports my view is if you take the course of party politics since that time, more and more americans have decided it is a busted system. they have contempt for it, for the institutions of politics, and in washington, d.c., where we reside, that is often portrayed as laziness, stupidity, a kind of craven cowardice, where people are too inert to engage themselves in the politics that matters. and i read a rather dark message about the state of our democracy. i think if you walk around the country, i think you would find that is a majority opinion. host: bill greider, our guest to talk about woodstock.

caller: thank you. i have two comments. one being, what would be the difference between the generation of the baby boomers, having been born and growing up during the american emergence on the world scene with regards to the actions we did covertly or not so covertly against other countries and the effect on the conscious and psyche of those young people growing up in that time compared to previous generations and that leading to the rebellious nature of the woodstock participants? my second question being, as a follow-up to that, i graduated from the class of 1999. i wanted to go to the woodstock

festival in 1999. obviously, a different experience. i was unable to go. a very drastically different compared to the original. i wanted to know if you have any comments on that. host: thanks, caller. guest: let me give you my not peculiar, but dwindling perspective. i was a child of world war ii. i was 6 years old, i think, when the war started, and it was resolved in four years, and we won. this puzzles people. but as a small boy, nobody in our family got killed. it was a glorious experience. i think that people my age would say something similar. it was an overwhelming moment

for the country, not just the winning, but the solidarity the country automatically felt and pressed the government to do your share, and there was a huge, continuing propaganda campaign, really, to teach that solidarity. at school, they gave us books and you could buy a stamp and put it in your savings bond. and it was trivial in terms of covering the debts the government was running up to fight the war, but psychologically, it made you a contributor to the war effort in a very direct -- if you went to the movies on saturday and you brought a crushed tin can and contributed to the scrap drive, you got in for free. i tell those stories because that spirit lived on for at least a generation after world war ii, and it explains why we had things like the g.i. bill

and all kinds of social programs, some of which no longer exist, but which were part of that same spirit -- we are all in this together. i'm giving you my deepest wish, that out of the woodstock generation, they could develop similar sensibilities and then sell it to the rest of the country. that is very wishful, as you know. but it is a different take on america and patriotism and what the government is or could be than what is now our current politics. all of those ambitious ideas have shrunk to kernels, which makes me sad. host: sandy from spring home, florida, attended woodstock. caller: hello. i was at woodstock. but your take on it is totally different than what us that attended it was. it was basically a protest for

us against the vietnam war and the way our vietnam war veterans, when they were brought back, how they were treated. they could not get their jobs back. they weren't given good medical care. people looked at them like they were less than local citizens. there was none of these tin can drives or any of that to help any of the veterans that were from vietnam. if you look on the streets today, 3/4 of homeless people that are on the streets are vietnam veterans who nothing was done for them and nothing is being done for them yet. that's basically what i have to say. guest: i agree completely with everything you said. that's part of what i'm lamenting about where the country is now. again, i repeat, i'm being

probably too wishful. but i think that is that feeling is still in america, and one of the things they are bitter about and scornful of government about is that it seems to be dead in politics. you have described some of the reasons. there are a good many more. let's not decide who is to blame, republicans or democrats or blah, blah, blah. they're all to blame in some sense. but it is true that we have lost that sense of cohesion. we could all name a lot of events that express that. the argument seems to me to be do you think that is still in us or don't you? i'm one of those old heads who believes, yeah, americans are perfectly capable of rallying around those same goals. i've seen this happen.

in some ways, it happens in politics, and it is as though the politicians are afraid to say those things for fear of sounding too mushy, too sentimental. host: james up next. caller: thank you. i would like to put a different color on woodstock. my brother herb went to school with the two on the front of the album cover, wrapped in the blanket. right behind them, walking up the hill with an army coat and a cowboy hat is my oldest brother herb. my second oldest brother, john, he was one of the mudsliders in the movie for woodstock. i was only 11 years old. when my dad was giving the final, well, boys, be careful

down there, i had hidden in one of the utility compartments in my dad's truck. i was ready to go. it got quiet. he said, where's jimmy? then the doors started opening and closing. sooner or later i was caught. he yelled at me and told me to get out of there. but what i remember from woodstock the most is the music. hendrix, santana, crosby, stills, and nash, and on and on and on. sly and the family stone. the music was incredible. yes, they were protesting the vietnam war. but i also believe that it was a buildup, too, from jfk to bobby to martin. it built up. guest: i think that is right. host: that last part, it builds up? guest: yeah, absolutely.

and that was heartbreaking. the resolution was richard nixon and the impeachment. what felt glorious or at least promising in 1969 turned to ashes and worse within just a couple of years, and there were reasons for that. it is partly political. i think largely economic. the core years after world war ii that i remember so fondly ran out of gas, and politicians made some bad decisions that made things worse, it is true. and then i think the country as a whole went for ronald reagan and his conservative government, which in some ways is still in the saddle, and what i'm hoping for in politics is an awakening.

i will again share my hopeless optimism. if you look at what young people today -- i'm talking about the so-called millennials, who came to maturity after the turn of the century, into the 21st century, and they are somewhere between 18 and 30-ish, they have very different views of where the country is and what they want to see, and it is a really interesting mix of conservative and liberal ideas. they are for big government creating jobs for people. on the other and, they want government to let it alone and let local folks decide on things. i find promise in that. it is a little different from woodstock. but listen to springsteen and

some other voices that are alive today, and they are not distant from what i'm describing. quite the contrary. host: did woodstock change -- guest: i think it was already president. some of it with politics is not pretty. it is disgusting. remember, federal government, after african-americans pushed it for more than a generation, finally delegitimized racial segregation. and that is still stuck in people's craw in some places in america, as we've witnessed recently, i think. i'm going to say this and it is going to make a lot of people angry. i have sympathies for barack obama as president because, as a political reporter, i know that, to some extent, underneath everything else, there are a lot of americans who really resent the idea that there is a black guy in the white house.

that sounds harsh, but that's what i think is going on. and obama has made his own mistakes, which i'm perfectly willing to criticize and do criticize. i thought naïvely eight years ago, six years ago, the election of a black president would dissolve a lot of that. i think that is not the case. i think the republican party, mitch mcconnell et al, decided we are going to try to stop this guy on everything he does. not just some stuff, but everything he does, and this may have not been conscious, but i think they were motivated by the knowledge that a lot of their constituents really don't like the idea of a black guy in the white house. host: bill greider is currently with "the nation," formerly with "rolling stone."

stephanie attended. she is from los alamitos, california. caller: woodstock was just wonderful. it was just the greatest time. but i don't think people realize that a lot of people were listening to music, which was the social media of the time. if you listen to the lyrics of the people who were there, you understand there was a message that brought us all together. it was like if you build it, they will come. we all did come. it was a wonderful time. i think it did express the hope that people had that they could change things.

being of that generation and having gone through -- watching nixon resigned, feeling that there was a chance for an actual process in the united states, and then having him pardoned, , it was such an abdication of any kind of justice. on top of that, we have seen what i would say is very little progress in the way of social justice, from martin luther king to today, even the immigrant thing, people have just not gotten it. the 1% is the worst kind of realization of everything we feared. the corporatization of the media, of everything in the united states is what we feared. the fact that we still do not have available health care is what we feared. what we did do for our -- for our society at large is bring to the forefront the ecological movement.

we were the ones to watch them land on the moon and to bring back that incredible picture of the earth. we understood it was one planet and that we had to coexist, and yet we've been involved in wars and killing people overseas who have done really nothing to us. the thing that i resent more than anything -- i do have a sense of disappointment. we had possibilities. they were not allowed to flourish. i regret so much that hasn't changed. and i hope people realize is that these are systemic problems. one president cannot solve this. we have to work together as a nation and to understand that we are all human beings entitled to our rights, and yet we see them abrogated every single day by so many forces. host: thank you, i appreciate it. guest: brilliant. you have brilliantly summarized that history. i would just again at a stroke

-- ad a stroke that makes it a little less stark. this consciousness is the element i associate with woodstock and the rebellions of various kinds, both african-american and immigrants and all sorts of groups. that requires people to change their own idea of themselves. that is what consciousness is about. and in that sense, i could make a case that the political, the fundamental political achievements of the last 30-plus, 40 years are driven by identity politics that are disparaged in washington as, well, that's interesting, the women want more power, but that is not the heart of politics. we do the money stuff.

this is right to the current moment. civil rights, race, feminism, women, their role in the society and their personal identity, latinos trying to establish new immigrants -- latinos and other new immigrants trying to establish honest and respectable status in our society, and a few other groups, lesbians, gays, i could go on -- all of that, i could trace back to that era and the events surrounding woodstock. that is probably a little too neat because it did require some courageous leaders, and some of them got killed, but what i'm

trying to convey is a very old and very corny message. i heard it from an autoworker once when i was a young reporter in youngstown, ohio. and there were some workers there trying to get something started. and this guy, i don't know, working for g.m., i guess, a black man, he said, what the people don't understand is that the power is in their hands. and if they would just believe that, we could do something in that room where we are having this meeting. and i thought, yeah. it is not that simple, of course, but it is almost that simple. and it is within people. they have the power, if they are willing to take the risk of changing themselves, enlarging their ambitions for the country and for themselves.

that's the politics that matters, and to me that's the politics i associate with the hippies and all of the characters of that woodstock nation. host: frank from florida. caller: it's a pleasure talking to you. i read your articles in "rolling stone" and i read at least one of your books in the past. what i wanted to ask you about, i will get on different track about woodstock -- the two concerts that followed woodstock, one was all to monson california -- altamont in california and another which was more important was one in newport, rhode island, which was the newport jazz festival in the early 1970's which got raided by a bunch of long-haired counterculturists who ended up breaking up the festival.

i see the darker side but i tend to see some of the stuff as a dark scenario. i don't know why people have an tolerance toward jazz music. some of them want "their music" to be played. at the time, the newport festival was also hitting attacked by people on the uptight right in the area who did not want these outdoor festivals in the area anymore. then they get hammered from people on the anarchist left who wanted some of their music to be played and it ended up destroying it for everyone else. guest: especially altamont. i know the attacks on newport when i grew up on jazz myself before rock 'n roll. altamont was dark, and it was a kind of a warning bell of its

own kind. there is some ugly stuff within us, too, and sometimes, if people aren't careful, it will hit us in the face. host: for those who attended woodstock,, john from mount sinai, new york. caller: a couple of former callers have stole my thunder but i'm glad to see bill greider on c-span. i was at woodstock and i was pictured on the cover of the "daily news" that sunday in a sea of mud. pool ofected in a muddy water. woodstock was definitely about the music. there is very little political backdrop to it at that point. abbie hoffman got on stage and he was literally clubbed by pete

townsend of the who for bringing up politics. the songs that had political content like country joe and the fish, it was a celebration. those three days, we put the vietnam war out of our minds. we were definitely antiwar. at least in the new york area, baby boomers. i was at a festival a year later that reflected altamont where the promoters hired motorcycle gangs as security. at woodstock, there was no security maybe because of the naivete of the promoters and the problem at woodstock as they had no sanitary facilities because it was overwhelmed and there was no water facilities. woodstock went off without a hitch. there was no sense of imposing a

security force, though i heard governor rockefeller had deployed a regiment of national guard that was stationed over the hill. if anything did go wrong, he was going to send them in. i don't know if that's true but i have heard that. host: woodstock was relatively peaceful? caller: absolutely peaceful. there was no presence of security who would give anybody any gruff. guest: i think that's right. the spirit was the music and the music was the spirit. and it fits with what other people have been saying that you did not have to give speeches about that agenda. it was shared by the woodstock nation and driven by some of those events i have talked about. they did not have to interrupt the joy of the music. they were in everybody's consciousness.

host: a viewer from twitter -- can you draw parallels? guest: very much so. it was a rebuke to authority and it was also an announcement that the country can be different and we know this shock you. we get a kind of joy out of shocking you. i'm talking about hippies here. some of the music and just get over your fears and so forth. on that level, i think it is genuinely a disappointment of events that partly by the manipulation of political voices, it became characterized

as these noisy kids who were spoiled and who wanted everything their way and are messing up our placid, smooth-running society. i don't think the young people are entirely to blame for that althought they contributed some good material for disappointed old people. the working class, at that time, were not really included in that dialogue, and neither were older people. that is a failing that i think was the politicians who picked up on said these crazies in the mud don't vote anyway, so let's play to the people who are resentful. now, as it happened and the -- and developed, it became clear and 10 or 20 years after the war in vietnam was gone, that rock 'n roll was the working class and still is.

it's a shame -- because of patriotism and other values, the vietnam war created these splits which political forces could manipulate and exploit, and, to some extent, they are still there. but economic events in the last few years have wiped a lot of that away. host: john attended woodstock from fairfax station, virginia. caller: good morning, i want to thank c-span for giving me the opportunity to talk to mr. greider for whom i have a lot of respect as a writer having read his articles in "rolling stone." it's interesting, i was at woodstock, and i was in church sunday after woodstock. and the priest asked the same question -- who was at woodstock

and what do you see as a sociological significance of woodstock? at that time, i thought it was just three days of good music and fun and a wonderful time. now i realize we were in a bubble. we thought as soon as we got older and had influence and power we would end racism, end unnecessary wars, and solve these problems that were plaguing us. in retrospect, i now see that was hugely optimistic. i just did not realize there were so many different views across the u.s. that would oppose the directions we probably all 500,000 of us shared their. joan baez was there and there was some antiwar, but it was largely just viewed as a real good time for people who share common beliefs. thank you. guest: that's very good. let me ask you, where do you think things are today?

you know i am a bleeding heart optimist and i try to find a -- if you talk about ronald reagan, you show me a room full of manure, i will say where is the pony? that's where i am. caller: i'm not quite as optimistic as you. you see things like ferguson and when the iraq war came around, nobody questioned it, we just jumped in. the lessons that i thought would develop over time just did not develop. i'm not quite as optimistic perhaps as you but i'm not a complete pessimist either. host: kristi from palm desert, california. caller: hi, i am 44, and i felt

very strongly that the whole woodstock era marked the beginning of the complete breakdown in our family structure, our morality. woodstock was the just and probably first social experiment far from being a protest to our government. i think it actually served to create a generation of passivity and hedonism. i live in an area where coachella is a big deal. it is just filled with young people that completely are not contributing in any sort of way to our society or to our government and politics and whatnot. if anything, i feel like the baby boomers have been some of the most selfish, self-serving, and destructive parts and a huge part of why we are in the situation we're in now.

what they have brought about in this country is nothing good. i cannot have a conversation with people of that era that actually are informed and have a fair and balanced opinion about what's going on with our government. i feel very different about woodstock. host: thanks. guest: thank you. i dissent with some of that. passivity is present especially in the baby boomers. i can say accurately that i am older than the baby boomers. don't blame me. i think all of us on both sides of the baby boomers correctly, let's blame them for a lot of weaknesses that exist in the society. i have an old-fashioned -- this is a lefty view of things -- but

i think, of course, the people are to blame and people are always to blame, whether by their passivity or their stupidity or whatever. but i think the big events of the last 30 years have been driven by power and i'm in corporate power, the big money, the 1%. there are lots of different ways of defining that. "the nation" is a lefty magazine is making these very argument that people have made this morning. i am with them. i guess i'm arguing in a roundabout way for that powered to yield to the force of organized people. that is where we are weak. but it starts with individuals, not with labor unions or even reform groups and so forth, environmental organizations.

i am for all of them, but it really starts in your own guts. i get a kick out of the conversations this morning because even though a number of folks don't agree with my analysis, i know they have that spirit in their guts which is enough for me. host: from cortland, new york, joseph attended woodstock. caller: how are you? i would like to say hi to c-span and mr. greider. i was there in august in 1969. the people at that time, what i hear is that they were living in somewhat of a bubble of peace. they were not dependent on so much of the welfare and a nation to help them out. and to live day to day to abuse the system. they were having fun and it was

a good time. woodstock was a big organized group where people had so much fun. there is no problems and no trouble. i think one person died there or got hurt by the farmer's tractor. by the same token, people try to do the same as what we did in 1969. ain't going to happen. a big corporate america we call today, they see our young people to be held in the past. they control the future, corporate controls the future. the poor people, some are like that because they will get help from the federal government to live on. they are not worrying about wars

or iraq or iran. after two years, i went to vietnam and i was not against vietnam or the wars. but wars will always happen and but wars will always happen and we will always have problems with political and economic problems, the future down the road. guest: yeah, i think i'm going to argue against some of what you said, because you got back to the corporate power. i guess i disagree with the fatalism of saying the corporations run everything and that's all there is to say. if you look back across the history of this country, the whole 200-plus years, it has never been the situation that the people were in charge of the big agendas. that's just not the history. in fact, quite the opposite. african-americans can tell you about that in some detail. it is the case, however, that there are these moments that sometimes last for a generation

or sometimes more or less when the people rise up and claim their powers and assert them and they prevail. in one of my books where i was expressing this sense of things, i compared it to an underground river. it flows along pretty much unseen and that river is the people and their aspirations, which is don't get prime time in the political debate or they get distorted or they get manipulated, all those things are true. but events every once in a while give the people the impetus and they break through to the surface and the underground river suddenly becomes the new reality. here i am really going to make you roll your eyes -- my view is that we are on the brink of such a moment.

and trust me, i have not felt this way for a long, long time. in my youth, i did believe that the 1960's was going to generate big changes because they had all the right impulses, and that was mistaken. but all of the time through the conservative era of ronald reagan, i never bought into the notion if we win the next election, everything will go back to where we want it to be. you can believe it, but it did not happen, and now for the first time, i feel differently. i don't say it is a guaranteed yield but i think the potential for that underground river to assert itself is here, right now. host: let's hear from tim, greeley, kansas, hello. caller: i think this is a very timely topic. my wife and i just saw santana

in kansas city last night. the first words that were addressed to the crowd from carlos santana was how he could feel the love in the crowd. he carried on for all these years since woodstock with this message. it was an incredible performance, of course. but something else that needs to be mentioned is the elephant in the room of 1969 was the draft. we don't have a current draft donpeople don't get sent up to fight wars. basically, his people at woodstock, i don't think dick cheney was not there but other people were very concerned about having to fight a rich man's war. this was one way for them to stand up and say no, and it was also another way for them to say look at us, here we are, what are you going to do with us, how are you going to handle this? we know what they will do now with the patriot act and people being put under surveillance, and a lot of them would never have a job because they profess

these positions openly. they lose their jobs and get blacklisted and get a target put on them, and it's a whole different system and society that we live under now to where i don't think woodstock could even occur now. even on private property. like in ferguson, people had a peace vigil on private property. that just like the occupied movement, i don't think they would be given a stage the way we willingly gave them the stage in 1969. host: thanks. guest: that's good. host: do you think woodstock could occur today? guest: i do, but he has

described one of the crucial pivot points. nixon understood that and turned the switch that basically stopped the draft. there were complications on how he did that, but basically, he knew that and i think that is a major, major withdrawal of the cohesive patriotism that americans have always felt. now we have these armchair warriors like a cheney who sit in their offices and spew out propaganda with no threat to them or their families. they know their kids are not going to war. so that has distorted it enormously. i'm not for bringing back the draft because the draft feeds the bodies into the rich man's war machine, to use your images. but there are ways to deal with that so that if we are go to

war -- you will have to obey the constitution -- but once the decision is made, there are multiple ways in which the burden can be shared universally and taxes is one of them. there is a lot of work to do in this country. and you can do it with rather low-wage workers if everybody of a certain age and quality has to do their turn. a lot of other countries have a system like that. i have never been enthusiastic because you can think of the ways politicians might abuse that, but you have hit on a really important point. i obviously don't have complete answers either. let me add one more unpleasant thought -- i think we are in a really dangerous phase right now, and it's not barack obama's fault, but his history telling us --

you better back out of this illusion that you are the world's policeman and you have to go everywhere with your guns and restore order in the world. we are seeing what that leads to. we got three or four of those things going now. we have to make a transition out of that. that is hard to do. here is one of the reasons it is hard to do -- as you make the shift, the question will arise again and again -- if we did not need to fight all those wars, that means these kids who died in iraq and afghanistan and vietnam or wounded severely, died for nothing. and that is on all of us, all of us. and that is why it is so hard for the country to get back to its senses.

and the establishment clearly is not going to lead to that. it's got to come -- here i have a word to say for the veterans, but people in service -- i have been running with this for years and i have to admit that none of my left-wing readers picked up on it -- the military actually has qualities that are distinctive in this society, that are a model for what we could work on to restore our patriotic solidarity. they make a commitment in uniform up and down. they say we take orders and we

they made some cheap commitments. and now they have got thousands of kids with their legs blown off, or their minds screwed up by war. wore -- screwed up by war. host: we have to leave it there. >> over the next for friday nights, c-span travels around the country to hear from authors about some of the events, people, and places that shaped the nation. tonight, a focus on the civil war, starting with the battle of chattanooga, which has been of thethe death knell confederacy. confederate propaganda, a slave trading post in south carolina, civil war era medicine, the dred scott case, and more.