tavis: good evening from los angeles, i'm tavis smiley. tonight conversation with economist, author and the president of bennett college for women women, dr. julianne malveaux. the book is called "surviving and thriving." also tonight we'll remember actor peter falk, the man who became one of tv's most iconic figures as colombo passed away last week at the age of 83. back in 2005, peter falk joined paul riser on this program for a memorable conversation.

difference -- >> thank you. >> you help us all live better. >> nationwide insurance supports tavis smiley. with every question and every answer. nationwide insurance is proud to join tavis in working to improve financial literacy and remove obstacles to economic empowerment one conversation at a time. nationwide is on your side. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. [captioning made possible by kcet public television] tavis: dr. julianne malveaux is a noted economist, author and columnist who also serves as the president of bennett college for women in greensboro, north carolina. and is the author of the text

"surviving and thriving: 365 facts in black economics history." dr. malveaux. good to have you back on this program. >> good to be here. tavis: black folk may very well be surviving these days. they are not thriving. we have been saying for sometime now this is the worst recession since the great depression but for black folk in particular, we are now at depression era levels. we are surviving but not thriving. >> a few of us are thriving but this is a horrible, horrible recession for us. it is like fiction. reading a mystery book. one in six. it is really something like one in four african-americans who are out of work. half of the brothers are simply not working. how can you have a community with the base of half of the men not working? i would have to say if it was any place else in america, if it was an laicha or california, don't you think public policy

perhaps would have targeted those men? public policy has ignored african-american people. you know one of the reasons i wrote the book, tavis, is no matter how rough things are for our people, we do survive and thrive. if enslaved people could purchase themselve they can think of entrepreneurial things to do. i'm concerned about the apathy in our community, the folks who take it lying down. i'm poor. i'm broke. broke is a state of pocketbook. poor is a state of mind. >> it is not just black folks who are suffering. a whole lot more white folk in poverty and unemployed than there are black folks so if white folks can't pull themselves up is it really that black folk are not creative enough? >> i'm not blaming us at all. i want to inspire us. look at folks who are able to

put pennies together. a sister had a second grade education and started a bank. put the pennies together and they will grow. this recession has hurt middle america. black america. any america except for the top. you know, tavis, i want to say about 1980, the top 10% to have population, the top -- the top 1% of the population had something like 2.5% of the income. disproportionate but now, the top 1% has 10% of the income. so in roughly a two-decade period, their share shazz grown four-fold. what that means is at the bottom the share has dropped off. so the richest people have gotten much richer but those impoverished have remained that way. many times you have seeing people doing the things we did in the depression, doubling and

tripling up. mamas now have three generations living with them. young people graduating from college, 1/3 of them have nowhere to go in terms of employment. no jobs. no graduate schools. moving back home. one woman wrote a book "generation debt" talking about how so many young people coming out of college average about $30,000 worth of student loans, starting out shabblingd before they even begin. tavis: while african-americans are catching more hell than anybody else in this economy, there is an african-american who sits in the oval office who has had the same three things on say consistently about black unemployment when he has been asked about it at white house press conference. i'm not just the president of black america. i'm the president of all of america has said this president. i scrant a targeted approach to black unemployment.

he has said the same thing ronald reagan said that a rising tide will lift all boats and third, his answer to black unemployment was the stimulus yet we know now that the stimulus money never trickled down to black folks, businesses or anybody else. those are the three responses we have got frontline this president. here is the point. he is now obviousfully re-election mode. he has to have a significant turnout in his own base to have a chance of being re-elected. what is going to happen? >> when he said rising tide, some people are rising and some people are rowing. even in no bode we are not in same position. some people are chilling. i understand the difficult position that is this president seems to find himself in. he has been the target of all kinds of racism. he is kind of walking the tight rope. i can't believe that he doesn't

know and refuse to accept that he doesn't care. i think he is doing political maneuvering. here is the bottom line. it is not going work. people have to know something is working. if the unemployment rate does not drop i fear for the re-election of this president. in addition to that, there must be some target. you don't have to say it is to black people. you can say it is to urban people. you could say it is to pockets of high unemployment. let's do some wordsmithing around this community. tavis, i have neglected to bring you greetings from bennett college. you knew it was coming. i appreciate that, tavis. i put my bennett hat on for just a moment to say how this recession has affected some of our students. you people who two years ago didn't need financial aid and this year need enormous

financial raid. parents whose small businesses were doing very well are barely getting by. people who lost six-figure jobs. a financial aid package awarded in april, didn't need much and come back in july and say uh-oh, just lost a job. people are hurting. our president has to respond to that. yes, he has other things on his plate, libya and afghanistan. all kinds of stuff. that is unacceptable, however. you will not get fed in your mother's house if you don't put the the plate to the table. in your mother's house the food was very good. black america has to ask for what they want. the gay community has to ask for what they want. we're so busy being in love. i sat with reverend jackson. he said he got goose pump bumps every time he thought about president obama. somebody told me i rolled my eyes.

i'm like man, you're grown. we're so busy getting goose bumps that we have forgot on the ask for what we want. yeah, we are all very proud of president obama. tavis: i hear the point you making and i agree with you, but it does raise the serious issue that i have been pressed ond and others have been pressed on which is how black people do this dance with the president. you and i are slarle situated on this. i try to have some empathy for black folk who know what he is up against. they don't really know how to maneuver and operate and make those demands because they don't want to be seen as aiding and abetting the haters of this president. >> that aiding i.e.a. betting, when you lift up your voice, thinking about -- the -- it was a. philip randolph who made the demands of president roosevelt

about black unemployment in world war ii. whites said they would not work next to black people so there was employment available but we could not get it. a. philip randolph said you have got to do something. roosevelt said make me. when he presented him with a plan for a march on washington on n the middle of a war. when you're fighting for democracy all over the world but you have anti-democracy forces at home, he said let me sign the executive order and get you black people off my back. i think positive action might be equally effective no matter who ever is in the white house. this is not an anti-obama type of statement. we have people making very tepid remarks about some things a the president said. let me be clear. i support president obama but let me also be clear. i am very unhappy with the direction of economic policy. >> for the folks inside the

obama camp wh they will tell you in a private conversation, they won't tell us in the private conversation. >> we won't have a private conversation. tavis: we know these private conversations are being had. there are two overriding thoughts. they know negros are not going nowhere. they know black people are going support this president. there is no need to put us at the front of the train. and if they were to do something specifically for a round, relative to black unemployment, this president might be accused of being tribal. >> well, there are all kinds of tribes in america. some have been fed and others have not been. more importantly, tavis, it is not that black folks from going to desert president obama, it is that the young, i think, are going to desert the ballot box. i don't think that -- i think you would probably have to put

strychnine down some black folks' throats to have them consider voting for a mccain or a bachman. however, some folks don't come out. the deliberate attempts to suppress intercity black senior youth votes, the obama presidency might hang on those votes being sup pressed. let's not dampen the enthusiasm of the base. the base will not go away. you know how young people are about voting. they are not that enthusiastic about it. when you high unemployment. the average unemployed person has not worked for 40 weeks. that is almost a year. it is 10 months. how do people survive without working for 10 months? these are people more interested now in survival than politics. >> you mentioned there is a lot on the president's plate. he has wrest wled the issue of the debt ceiling. what should happen with this

debt ceiling? should it be raised? >> it must be raised. if we choose not no raise it, we're willing at drake draconian cuts. cuts in the smart program that subsidizes students going to school to be teachers. math or science teachers. we have seen some cuts. they have been relatively modest. what republicans have been pose arrange draconian cuts, up to 40%. i don't think -- cuts in medicare and social security. i don't think we can manage that. tavis: are they right to connect that raising of the debt dreeling deficit reduction? >> i think in the long run they might be. this is not the time to talk about deficit reduction. this is not the time to talk about cuts. we actually want to put money in to stimulate the economy. but we want to stimulate it properly. the stimulus that we did last time around, too much money got stuck in banks.

banked changed their rules. that money was given to banks to lend. they held on it and changed lending requirements. some use ited it for right and some for wrong. some states don't even want stimulus money. unfortunately the president here is really stuck in a hard place. there will be some deficit reduction. i encourage him to keep it as minimal as possible. obviously the republicans have the house. the democrats still have the senate. we need to be clear about what it is we want. progressive people have not been as clear as they might be. tavis: you mentioned the banks and the house and the senate now divided. when the democrats controlled the house, the white house and the senate, they gave wall street what it wanted with no strings attached. now banks are sitting on a trillion dollars and will not lend. the president is begging home to

reinvest it into the country. what do you make of the fact that we build a them out. they are sitting on a trillion dollars and they won't turn around and -- >> we build a them out and they won't bail us out. this is why it was so important to have someone like maxine waters on the banking committee that was pushing that stuff. the bottom line is those banks cannot do what they were lent this money to do. the money needs to be taken back in taxation through any number of ways. the banks have become our enemies, not our friends. tavis: the larger issue, yppingt to move now -- i want to move now -- we have been talking about the debt ceiling. the numbers are clear in this country. poverty is growing at a rate that i don't think we can -- we can't stain this -- sustain this. the gap between the haves and the have nots continues to widen. my read of history suggests to me every empire in the history of the world eventually fails. what is its about us?

i don't know if this is our human being us are, our patriotism, what is it about us that doesn't allow us to condition consider this country could one day implode or get crushed under the weight of its own poverty? >> i don't know what allows us to continue on the path that we're going but every world indicator suggests that if we stay on this direction we will end up as a developing country. we will end up as a suburb, if you will of china. today, the premiere of china went to the u.k. this week, they intend to invest in the euro. they have said that the euro -- they believe in the euro. they believe in europe's role in creating a stable economy. someone said what is wrong that? it is an anti-dollar move. there were several eapt dollar moves that have been made. the arab countries, the oil producing countries have

invested in the euro. they are saying look, america, you are not the only game in town. we seem to think we're the only game in town and we're not. wwe have seen a couple of years ago 75,000 engineering degrees granted in the united states. sounds like lot. 350,000 in india. 600,000 in china. we're being dwarfed. they are investing in education and we're taking money away from education. they are not looking at the signals. there is a pure racial bias. if you look at the growing and changing demographics, more black and brown people, especially more brown people, we're not investing in inner city education and minority education so when that minority becomes the majority we will look like a developing country if we don't make sure these black and brown young people, especially young men where you that achievement gap, we don't get these young people in the schools, what are we going to

do? but we don't have the policy makers who are paying attention. quite frankly, while there was a lot of hope around the 2008 election, i never really saw -- i haven't seen in any of the democrats, i look at bernie sanders and that is probably the most iconic progressive voice we get that really tries to connect the dots, other than that, we have this sort of compassionate capitalism. but capitalism is not compassionate. tavis: how do progressives this time around raise their voice on these issues? >> we must talk and raise our voice and read my book. this book is really about inspiring us and understanding history. african-american people have always played the economic game. it is not fair. it is tilted against us but we play it anyway. that is a really important thing for us to consider. it is a bunch of facts about black economic history but also an inspiration for our people to

understand and for progressive people. we must talk about how to make this game fair. yes, we have to tax wealthy more. of course we do. most wealthy people of conscious agree. bill gates agrees. let people like michelle bachman keep their money. how much are you keeping when we have the poverty. tavis: the new book, "surviving and thriving: 365 facts in black economics history", dr. malveaux, economist extraordinary. good to have you on the program. always a pleasure, tavis. thank you so much. tavis: up next, a look at our conversation with the now late peter falk. stay with us. tavis: when we learned that peter falk passed away near l.a. thursday night we immediately thought of his memorable appearance on this program back in 2005. he joined us along with paul

reiser where the two played father and son. they turned out to be a very entertaining match. >> i wrote this for him and i had no backup plan. if he said no, it was going to be me and walter cronkite. tavis: why peter falk? >> i don't know. >> tell him the story. >> i'm telling the story. >> then i can tell you my story. >> do you to yell at me on national television? is that necessary? my dad is a little cranky. i grew up. i loved peter falk. i just always zeroed in on him. something about him sounded like my family. a couple years ago i was back visiting my parents and my dad had a peter falk movie on television and he was laughing. i said i have never seen him laughing at anybody the way he laughs at peter falk. >> that is the nicest way i ever got a job. i never got a job with wr the writer had a fond memory of watching his father watching me

on television and his father laughing and that's why i got hired. that's a nice way to get a job. tavis: that's a great story. peter falk reminds you of your dad in a way? >> there is something about him . tavis: your dad doesn't walk around in a trench coat and "and another thing." >> no. that's why we're not having dinner with joey bishop. peter is the guy. story closed. this movie, we are so excited about it. we have been going city to city playing it. people are loving it and relating to it. this movie has the lovely distinction of being turned down by every studio imaginable. people who don't even have studios would just calm and -- tavis: and so no! >> we said all right. we'll show you. we raised the money and went off

and did it independently. tavis: what is your sense of why you kept hearing no so much? >> because i'll tell you. in one sentence, i'll tell you what it is. not enough explosions. if you have a lot of explosions, you got a chance. you understand? >> there is no exploding in this movie. i'll tell you what it does have. i hope i don't embarrass you. it has peter falk's first ever nude scene and i will tell you -- >> i look pretty good. [laughter] >> you got to tune in for that. i don't think there will be another one. >> i'm not totally nude. >> it is done tastefully. >> i got talcum powder on. it covers me up. >> a nice veil of subtety. tavis: first of all, happy

birthday. why wait until 78 to do a nude scene? >> that is a good question. [laughter] >> there is some film, some ear film we have but we're not legally allowed to show that. his long overdo oscar will be for this role. >> this is what i would like to do. i would like to change the subject and talk about me. please. tavis: let's talk about you. >> no more. >> he drives like my dad. my dad and peter drive similarly. my dad says hey, i have never goten in an accident, which is true but everybody around him will get in an accident. have you noticed the pattern behind you? he and peter falk are very similar. tavis: let me ask you. i promised peter falk when we

walked in that i would do my best to avoid telling him a "colombo" story. i'm going to keep my promise. >> good for you. tavis: i know you heard this story thousands of times. do you ever get tired of hearing these "colombo" stories? >> never. tavis: because it allows you to talk about you? >> i have had enough of it. tavis: so you're proud of the work? you never get tired of people saying i loved you on "colombo"? >> no. to have a terrific character and to get paid a lot of dough and to have seats at the basketball game right on the court and you get them for nothing. it is not cancer. [laughter] tavis: where is that trench coat? is it in the smithsonian? >> i'm going to tell you about the trench coat. my closet in the second story

next to the bedroom, if that is smithsonian, that is where it is. tavis: so perhaps the smithsonian will now be able to add that trench coat to the collection of american memorabilia. falk also enjoyed great success in film ing two oscar national nations. peter falk passed away thursday at the age of 83. that's our show for tonight. we'll see you next time on pbs. as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at

>> thank you. >> you help us all live better. >> nationwide insurance supports tavis smiley. with every question and every answer, nationwide insurance is proud to join tavis in working to improve financial literacy and removing obstacles to empowerment one conversation at a time. nationwide is on your side. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> be more.