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tv   Journal  PBS  June 22, 2011 6:30pm-7:00pm PDT

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that's a huge difference and that's a very unfortunate. in my view, that's something the media ought to be focusing more on rather than vice president gore's disappointment in the fact that president obama isn't giving enough speeches about global warming. >> ifill: and to correctly characterize his argument, it was more of an attack on the media for not making the case than an attack on president obama. >> 98 scientists here, two scientist there is against saying that doesn't happen and they both get equal time. >> ifill: are we having the right arguement. are the climate skeptics being given too much? too little? no attention. >> we're beginning to have right argument, which is interesting. you have to "new york times," an environmental reporter seriously upset over the fact that the u.n. i.p.c.c. intergovernmental panel on climate change let a report on renewable energy be written by the sierra club. this is a huge scandal of unprecedented proportions. and some of the environmental left reporting community are furious. are livid over what's been done and the discrediting that's going happen to the entire u.n. environmental movement. so i think now we are beginning
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to have the right debate. it's no longer oh there's only a few cranks and a few people with tinfoil hats. there's a real problem with the politization of climate science and now if we have that debate >> but ken, that politization has occurred on the right. the national academy of sciences released a report two months ago that found that 96% of all the global warming studies that have been peered reviewed by scientists were all pointed in one direction. increased... >> again, it take two sides... >> increased emissions are leading to global warming and we've seen the story that was on right before here. the flooding in minot, north dakota. it's the exact kind of affects that scientists told us for years we were going to see and now we're seeing extreme weather in 2011 and 2010 that is record- breaking. >> ifill: glenn hurowitz, you're never going agree but let me ask it this way. how much of this, whether you believe there should be government action or not, should have the public clamoring to change? how much can they stomach? especially at a time of economic stress? >> well, i think the public
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needs it and... >> ifill: we also need broccoli but we don't all like it. >> that's true. but i think what vice president gore was saying in the article was that it's hard for just the environmental community to stand up against entire republican party, against the fossil fuel lobby with all their money. there needs to be leadership the white house. historically that's how we've made environmental progress to pass the clean air act, to pass the clean water act, to protect public lands and national parks and without that kind of leadership we won't get the agenda we need. and in terms of just day to day putting bread on the table, like i said, revitalizing the economy means investing in clean energy. it means investing in ecological restoration. and in order to do that, we're going to need leadership the white house, that's how it's been accomplished in the past and i hope president obama realizes we're in a new economic paradigm where the country that wins the future is going to be the country that wins the... fill still that realistic? >> absolutely.
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and that's what president obama has been say bug more importantly has been doing. in addition... >> ifill: as much as it should? >> as much as we have been able to accomplish with... congress has blocked him because of a wall on opposition from republican senators. >> ifill: that's why i asked whether this is realistic. >> it is but politics is the art of the possible. there was just a survey released by yale university a couple weeks ago that found overwhelming majority of americans-- include a small plurality of republicans-all support action to reduce carbon pollution that causes global warming. it's not a question of the public. it's a question of off political party, the republicans, it's the only major political party in any western democracy that is denying climate science. that wasn't true four years ago or three years ago. in fact, john huntsman, newt gingrich and tim pawlenty all did ads saying we must reduce global warming and now they're all appealing to their hard right of their party. >> ifill: ken green is shaking his head. >> with all respect this whole language about the new green economy is silly.
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if you look at the experiences of the countries in europe that have tried it they have found it economically unsustainable and are now backing away from subsidies. california, a world leader in environmental quality, everybody agrees that, look at their job situation. look at their economy. this idea that by renaming it, we're in a new paradigm, a new paradigm where gravity is less than it is, my scale would thank me but you can't declare it by fiat and final words. >> ifill: i have to ask you a brief question. what would you like to see the president do? >> i'd like to see him focus on getting people back to work. unless economy is prosperous people are not able to afford environmental protection. it's when people feel prosperous they will set aside forests and protect streams and the air. when people feel that they're not doing well they put aside environmental issues. if you care about it you want us to be prosperous. >> i think the number one thing he has to do is enforce the laws that already exist and use his tremendous administrative power to implement protections against
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america rishgs against soot, smog, and especially carbon pollution. he has the power to do it, he can do it, he should do it as fast as possible so we can clean up the air, protect people's health and save the planet. >> ifill: realistically what would you like to see? >> all of the thick which is glen says will create jobs according to studies by universities. issue fuel standards so cars get 60 miles per gallon by 2025, that will create jobs, save millions of barrels of oil. set a new ozone smog stan dhard will protect public health, save kids from having asthma attacks during the summer. >> ifill: daniel weiss, glen hurowitz and ken green, thank you all. >> woodruff: next, questioning some basic assumptions about public pensions. cities and states around the country are pushing to overhaul or make changes to pension plans. this week alone, there are big votes in atlanta and new jersey. tonight in his third story from rhode island, economics
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correspondent paul solman looks at the debate over how to calculate investment returns for that state's troubled pension fund. it's part of his ongoing reporting effort: "making sense of financial news." >> i'd like to call the meeting to order. >> reporter: rhode island treasurer gina raimondo, a democrat, presiding over the board that runs the state's $7 billion pension fund. >> we're still about a billion dollars off where we were before the market crashed when we were at $8.4 billion. >> reporter: the fund is now billions in the hole, in part because of past investment assumptions that proved too bullish. >> what we're trying to do is set the most probable scenario that we believe will come to play based on the data that we have today. >> reporter: the question here is one confronting states across the country. what's a realistic rate of return assumption? the answer could mean higher taxes, lower pensions, bitter politics. >> i'm going to ask you to please put the politics aside.
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i know there are pressures. i feel these pressures myself. >> reporter: like most states, rhode island invests about 60% in stocks. but over the past decade, the market has barely budged. consultant allan emkin. >> the 2001 tech bubble and the credit bubble in 2007, 2008 over those two periods you had a 70% cumulative loss and effectively over the whole period the equity market generated zero. you had a lost decade. >> reporter: since most of the other 40% is invested in low- paying bonds, the hired experts told rhode island: get real. drop your assumed rate of return from the current 8.25% to 7.5%. problem is, the lower the assed rate of return, the greater the official underfunding of the retirement
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plan, the more that taxpayers or workers must contribute to make up the shortfall that would arise from a more sober assumption. public employees, who make up almost half the board, were unhappy. said retired engineer michael boyce: >> and quite frankly i'm not going to vote for 7.5% >> reporter: that's because dropping the rate of return assumption would force the state to come up with some $300 million more a year to replenish the fund-- a huge hit to angry taxpayers or their new scapegoats, state employees. so board lawyer michael robinson, pushing to cut the rate assumption, targeted workers like boyce. >> if you were to act contrary to the recommendations of your expert without a sound and considered basis in fact would really constitute a breach of your fiduciary obligations. >> if i follow mike's rationale
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i would guess that we shouldn't even have to be here because if the actuary says 7.8, do 7.8. >> no, no, not at all mike. >> i have the floor please. i'm taking offense at almost being told that i better vote to what exactly he said. >> reporter: richard leecht, state director of administration, sided with the experts. >> while reasonable people can differ, past experience shows that we should be a little, a little more on the cautious side and i will vote yes. >> reporter: but, some economists say even a 7.5% target is far too high. >> they should be using something like 4.5%, because over any period there is no guarantee whatsoever that the portfolio of stocks and bonds is going to produce enough to pay the promised benefits. >> reporter: finance professor zvi bodie says to earn more, pension funds have to make risky
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investments that could fail, in order to pay for benefits that are guaranteed. so why not invest it all in safe u.s. treasuries which have been paying about 4% to 4.5% lately. that way the pension fund will also be guaranteed? >> those are long-term obligations which are going to be paid for sure, pension benefits are just like that. >> reporter: by contrast, bodie points out, stocks are subject to all sorts of risks. imagine the reaction to, say, an act of nuclear terrorism; a tsunami that drowns new york; a meteor barrage that signals a killer asteroid attack. okay, hollywood scare films may seem ridiculous for pension planning. but, says bodie, back in 1989, when the japanese stock market peaked, the disaster there since
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would also have been utterly implausible. >> you and i both remember in the 1980s how everyone you talked to thought the japanese economy was overtaking the u.s. economy. 22 years have gone by since then and the market in the u.s. is up. the japanese who were supposed to outperform us, the market is now roughly a quarter of what it was. >> reporter: so what about a japan-like catastrophe? we asked pension consultant emkin. >> could it happen? yes. is it likely? in my opinion, no. do you plan for the worst possible event, or do you plan for the most likely event, or do you plan for an average? >> we can't plan our lives as though we're going have a complete economic disaster. >> reporter: economist dean baker echoes the consultants, and makes the case that you hear from unions too: 7.5% is the
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least a state should assume, because its pension fund is eternal. >> governments are in a different situation from individuals. we as individuals are all going have finite lives. the market has its ups and downs, so it might just be the case we plan to retire in three years and it turns out, bad news for us, the market just fell 20%. same old governments are going be there indefinitely. >> reporter: moreover, ys baker, if you play it too safe, you're probably investing more conservatively than taxpayers or pensioners would want you to. >> most people in their own investments, certainly anyone who has a 401(k), they want to take some risks. and it's a little perverse if we say, here you could have an individual taking risks with the stock market, individuals knowing that things happen, that you're going to have to retire at a certain point in time, and on the other hand we have the government that's going to be there in principle forever and they can't take the risk. that would seem very perverse to me. >> reporter: but the government entity is taking a risk with its taxpayers' money. >> there's no way to avoid that. we'd be asking people, do you want to pay higher taxes in
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order to avoid taking the risk in the stock market? i think most people would say no to that. >> the stock market has been misbehaving. >> reporter: but professor bodie says that if pension funds don't make their assumed rates of return, the taxpayers will be in for a shock and higher taxes at that point. >> if things don't work out taxes are going to have to be higher on the next generation of taxpayers to pay the current generation's pension benefits. now, i'd say that's fine as long as everybody knows that is the risk that is being taken but of course nobody knows that. right? >> reporter: treasurer raimondo wants to steer a middle course on risk. at a women's shelter she helped build, she explained that cautious investing is expensive: taxes rise, services get cut. but at the other extreme, over- optimism could mean failure, and an empty till when retirees are due their money.
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>> because i care about state employees i want to make sure their pension is there for them and because i care about all of rhode island, including the women who are here, i want to make sure that state can afford and have enough money left for all the other services that we need. >> reporter: back at the retirement board meeting, the vote on lowering the assumed rate of return. >> treasurer raimondo. >> yes. >> richard liecht. >> yes. >> roger boudreau. >> no. >> michael boyce. >> no. >> reporter: by nine to six, the board cut the assumption to 7.5%, low, compared to other states. >> on the basis of what we've heard from our financial advisers, it was prudent to assume 7.5%. having said that, if we keep benefits the same and the investment return comes down, the taxpayer will pay more. >> reporter: in fact, the board has since voted to hike taxpayer pension contributions by 50%. the lower rate of return and the
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higher contributions go into effect next year. raimondo says the fund is still in crisis, however, and it continues to place most of its bets on stocks like pretty much every state in the union. >> woodruff: you can watch the previous stories in paul's series on his "making sense" page on our website. >> ifill: finally tonight, a film about the soviet union's past and russia today. it's part of the economist film project, a "newshour" collaboration with "the economist" magazine. together, we showcase independently-produced documentaries that take us places we don't ordinarily go. jeffrey brown has more. >> brown: the story of the collapse of the soviet union has been told many times, but not the way it was in "my perestroika." here we get the point of view as five muscovites talk about the
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changes they lived through from 1970s childhoods filled with communist-era propaganda to their adult lives today as they make their ways-- some successfully, some not-- in the new russia. the film maker is robin hessman, an american who lived in moscow in the 1990s. welcome to you. hi. >> brown: why did you decide to tell this story this way through real them? what were you after? >> i lived in russia from '91 to i 99 and there were extraordinary changes that were happening everyday. when i moved back to the states at the end of '99 it seemed that despite the fact that the cold war had ended and my impression had been that that entire decade there has been a lot of free- flowing investigation to the states it still seemed that none of my friends back home had really any idea of what it had been like for ordinary people. they had seen the gangsters and oligarchs and destitute people and short news clip bus it seemed that there were no opportunity for them to hear that real voices of the more
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quote/unquote ordinary people and the people i had lived there with. >> brown: and what did you want people to know about what you experienced and what has happened in russia. >> well, that's ate very complicated thing to make that transition. there's no one sentence conclusion to take away to make about the soviet union to russia to their striving toward communism to the capitalist world. i have the feeling that it's lot simpler and people like to have kind of the one-sentence take away, but for every individual it was a complicated process and still is today. there are many conflicting feelings about the changes and the effects of those changes on their everyday lives. >> brown: there's five main characters. how did you find them and who are they? >> well, the five main characters, there's a married couple who teach history in school 57 in moscow. and there's a former punk musician who's now in a punk
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bluegrass band, a very free spirit. >> brown: who would have thought right, the soviet union to russia, right? >> and there's olga, who was a single mother who works for a billiard table company and she rents out billiard tables to pub and a casinos all over moscow and the fifth is andrei who sells expensive french men's dress shirts. when i started filming he had three stores and by the end he had 17 stores over russia. and they were all childhood classmates growing up. one of the things i thought about as i thought how to approach telling the story of a generation-- and this generation, in particular, i should say, is very interesting in that they straddle both worlds. they had completely normal soviet childhoods and they were just coming of age when gorbachev came and they graduated from college the year that the soviet union collapsed. so they were not assigned a job in a workplace for the rest of their lives and they all had to navigate this new world with no models to follow. >> brown: all went in different directions and some successfully some less so.
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here's a clip. let'look at this clip. this is four of the five talking about their... looking back at their childhood. let's run that. >> ( translated ): if you look at newsreels from the early '80s they talk about the great successes building socialism though by that time no one really cared. but we were still kids and at school they were trying to turn us into upstanding citizens of soviet society. >> ( translated ): yes, sure, lenin, the party, pioneers, ou wrote a red tie on your neck, but were you thinking about lenin everyday? of course not. >> ( translated ): i don't understand who could have enjoyed it. it meant you had more responsibilities, you had to hold meetings with your group, decide what kind of community service you were going to do. it was so much extra work.
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but on the other hand, i suppose it was actually a good thing because these kids... i mean all of us, we were always kept busy. >> ( translated ): working together, working with friends, is always fun and interesting. especially today when not only your class and not only your school but the entire country is working together on communist cleanup day. >> ( translated ): well i was very obedient at home, but out in the world this obedience of mine turned into conformism. i was a straight a student and a good child and, of course, i was a perfect pioneer and sometimes it got pretty ridulous. >> ( translated ): pioneers! to struggle for the goals of the party in the soviet union, be prepared! >> ( translated ): i remember once when i was it will it will television was on and i heard the first notes of the soef
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credit national anthem. so i stood up right there in front of the t.v. screen and gave my best pioneer salute while the soviet anthem played. what a nightmare! it was just awful. but i was completely overwhelmed with emotion. what was there to feel so emotional about? i have no idea. >> ( translated ): somehow by eighth or ninth grade it became clear that people all around you were saying things that didn't correspond at all with reality. because by then the system was all together in such a crisis that everybody knew it. so you saw with your own eyes that they say one thing, do something else and what was really going on was something all together different. >> brown: that's great, because you see the contradictions of their lives, right? the enforced conformism which in a way was quite comforting.
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then you have luba laughing about... what did she call herself? a perfect pioneer? >> it's true that also we got the impression that it was a lot more... that it was something very flight ng and for these kids growing up it was in a sense like the scouts. it was really kind of a normal part of their everyday life that they didn't question and to a large extent they didn't think about the politics of it. it was what children did. >> at the same time her husband at the end is saying there was a point where you could see that the system just... there was no "there" there. or there were bigger problems. >> certainly, as he got older. and one wonderful difference between the two of them is for lubya... her family would listen to the voice of america with the faucets running so the neighbors couldn't hear and he was pretty much aware of the sham exterior before some of his other classmates. for lubya it was pashg and glas most under gosh check that in her 18 everything was told that she was taught. it was a shock.
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she did go through the most profound transitions during the changes. >> brown: i want to ask you professionally as a filmmaker. what do you look for in trying to tell a story? what does it have to have? >> well, with this kind of story where so much is based on the characters, the five people of the film, you look for... you look at them and are they good storytellers? are they open? >> they're the storytellers. >> they really are and the story is made up of interviews and conversations with them. i tried very much to make them very informal. it feels more like sitting at someone's table but it's also me observing them as a fly on the wall. so i first found the couple and from there met their childhood classmates because people in russia were together it was the same 20 or 25 people from first grade through high school these people have had an enormous shared experience.
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>> brown: they tell the stories and then you have to weave it together and this's where you come in. >> yes, along with the editors. >> brown: the new film is "my perestroika." >> ifill: "my perestroika" airs on the pbs series "p-o-v" on june 28. check your local listings. and you can learn about "the economist" film project or submit your film at film.economist.com. >> woodruff: again, the major developments of the day: in an evening address to the nation, president obama said the tide of the war in afghanistan is receding. he announced 33,000 u.s. troops will withdraw by next summer marking the beginning of the effort to wind down the ten- year-old war. and he said the time had come to shift to focus on nation building here at home. and to hari sreenivasan for
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what's on the "newshour" online. hari? >> sreenivasan: there's more about "the economist" film project and "my perestroika" on the art beat blog. and see how investment assumptions affect state pension funds across the country in an interactive map on our making sense page. plus, amid concerns among educators about a high school drop out crisis. hear from students in washington, d.c. and new york city about why kids quit school. it is part of our student reporting labs project, in partnership with radio rootz. all that and more is on our web site: newshour.pbs.org. judy? >> woodruff: and that's the "newshour" for tonight. on thursday, jim lehrer interviews outgoing secretary of defense robert gates about the troop drawdown in afghanistan and more. i'm judy woodruff. >> ifill: and i'm gwen ifill. and we'll be back again here and online tomorrow evening. thank you and good night. major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by:
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and with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. and... this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. captioning sponsored by macneil/lehrer productions captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org does the firste
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of minutes, maybe, and this gives me a lot of ideas because he has idea i would never have. never. and so i start thinking and developing the thing, and he doesn't like what i did. so he changes what i did, and then i don't like what he did. and this is building and building up and up until we find
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