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tv   The Dylan Ratigan Show  MSNBC  April 16, 2012 1:00pm-2:00pm PDT

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that's why you enjoy the sunshine. >> is that what it is? >> you know it. >> actually, that's correct. i don't dispute that at all. the show starts right now. good monday afternoon to you. nice to see you. i'm dylan ratigan. a summer-like afternoon on the east coast, perfect for today's big reveal. our government's response to our freedom for information request which was filed by the d.r. show and the huffington post. we have the transcripts, yes, right here, of key internal fed meetings from the height of the financial crisis and actual moments of horror. we'll bring you what we learned in just a moment. but first our big story off the top of the news today, the big reason for those closed door meetings in this book and a big symptom of how those meetings were conducted. the ongoing mortgage meltdown and paralyzed housing market in this country. today, state attorneys general
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are demanding that taxpayer-funded fannie and freddie, our money at the government, do more to relieve struggling homeowners. they say they want some of the mortgage debt that we own of our own money that the government canceled. they say we'll help stabilize the housing market and help at-risk homeowners. remember, fannie and freddie own 60% of our mortgages. in turn, it means you and i and the taxpayers own our own debt, if that makes any sense. so the good news is we're actually negotiating a debt restructuring, theoretically, with ourselves. make no mistake, unless this housing debt is restructured, the housing market and the economy will never fully recover. delaware attorney general beau biden is one of 11 that has sent a letter to the federal finance housing agency. beau, what's your proposal? >> well, this is a letter led by
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martha ckl as we a my other colleagues, harris in california, le illinois, real leaders on these issues. what we're saying, fannie and freddie, now run by the faha, should begin to do and consider doing more fundamental production of homeowners' mortgages. it's good for the economy, most importantly. it's not just good for the borrower, it's good for the neighbor of that bar rorroroweb it's better for the taxpayer. quite frankly, i'm stunned they haven't pursued this in a more agressive fashion than they have thus far. >> it is a very compelling argument for the sort of relief that everybody has been so desperate to achieve. there's one point of conflict that gretchen mortenson brings
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up that i want to read her proposal. gretchen says, if principle amounts on these first mortgages are reduced while leaving the second liens, which is the mortgages, the home equity lines and so forth, that those second liens become much more likely to be paid off over time with no principal reduction. the bank would have to write down these second liens. as such, these principal bailouts are more backup for banks that brought you the mortgage crisis in the first place. so why would he go with the more speculative position of the big banks? >> i respect gretchen a great deal, i just happen to disagree with her on this. the reality is that 60% of the mortgages that fannie and freddie own, not all of them have second liens behind them. first and foremost, we're going
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to make this very easy for gretchen and for demarco, they should do principal reductions for those that have no second liens behind. that answers that question. as it relates to those who do have second liens behind them, the reality on that as well, as you know, the first lienholder, faha, they're the big boys, they're the big actors, they're the big dogs. if they're going to take a haircut, they can force a haircut on the second. they can force this on the second lienholders, because if the first lienholders allow this to go into foreclosure, the second folks, the second people in the line, they got nothing. they got nothing. so this is very straightforward to me. >> what do you think is the greatest community? it's obvious what the individual benefit would be from an individual homeowner from a principal reduction. what do you think would be the greatest community benefit, state benefit and national benefit of deploying a program like this? >> i think it's a fundamental economic issue to help our
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economic recovery, not just the housing recovery. the thing that's lost in all this, and you cover it better than anybody, i'm concerned about the borrower. but i'm concerned about the neighbor of the borrower because the neighbor of the borrower loses 50% equity in their house when their neighbor is foreclosed upon. so this is something every neighborhood should be focused on. how can we stop foreclosures? it's out of whack, we should do something about it, and it requires a mandatory mediation. dylan, the week before this law was passed, 300 foreclosures in the state of delaware, since january 19, almost 90 days, there's only been five foreclosures filed in the state of delaware. we required banks to show up with a silver tire, a silk scarf or something. people foreclose all the time in my little state now. it's wacky, but we have to figure out ways to stop the
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foreclosures. we're finding out ways to do that by forcing mediations and also by pursuing principal reduction. not for the interest of the borrower, necessarily, but for the interest of the broader economy and the neighbor of the borrower. >> very quickly, how do you respond to those who i think rightly would assert this is unfair, some people don't own homes, some people pay the basic moral hazard that applies to that. how are you offering the hazard that applies to banks now? >> i understand it, but it is in the interest of the neighbor of the foreclosed-upon person or the person who is about to be foreclosed upon for that borrower to have a meaningful discussion with their lender, whether it be fannie and freddie or whether it be one of the banks. what we know is when the foreclosure happens, everybody loses. taxpayers lose on all fronts. people who follow the rules, they lose more than anyone else. >> beau, i would appreciate it if you could just stick for a
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couple of minutes. i want to bring the attorney general back in just a moment as we get now -- and bear in mind what we were just talking about -- but get to that freedom request with transcripts detailing what exactly was happening inside the federal reserve's meeting rooms during the financial crisis that was caused by the mortgage lending that we were just -- we were listening to the attorney general try to resolve. our hope, when we filed this request, was to learn the nature of the decisions in the bailout banks, where are they now. the obama administration, as we all know, claims very much to be about a culture of transparency, especially at the fed where we provide so much money and have so many problems. take a look. >> we have, of course, cooperated very closely with this committee and every other congressional committee in making sure we are as responsive as possible for all your requests of information. >> we're continuing to look for additional things we can do to be more transparent and more
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accountable. i personally have always been a big believer in providing as much information as you can to help the public understand what you're doing, to help the markets understand what you're doing, and to be accountable to the public for what you're doing. >> makes it pretty exciting to have this. a few weeks ago, we received 513 pages from the board of governors at the federal reserve run by ben bernanke who likes to give information to the public so they know what's going on. we have 513 pages, but there's 7,000, which means 6500 pages they didn't even want to give to us. and what we did get -- surprise, surprise -- mostly redacted. held blacked o heavily blacked out. here's a good example for you. a conference call. january 29. money is flying out the door. the memo reads in the requests, good morning, everybody.
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redak redaction, redaction. and any other questions or comments? again, it has been a long and very fruitful discussion, and i look forward to seeing in you washington in about ten days. thank you. it looks like a cia document full of national security secrets, but it isn't. they will release this eventually. remember, what we're looking at here is a meeting from january 20, '09, the height of the financial crisis, when taxpayers were being asked and did inject in excess of $30 trillion with a t into the financial system which is revealed by the federal reserve audit at the gao. and that's just one example of our money going in. we can't get the answers. the binder they sent us has page after page of redactions. we did learn some things, for example. they did break for lunch, for instance. which was good they were well fed. they threw special lunches,
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which seems pretty popular when someone leaves or retires. and on a more serious note, and this is the significant thing we can talk about, we did learn that almost three dozen folks who were in on these meetings at the federal crisis have leftshis and taken with them information that is off limits for you and me. and now these federal workers are working in the financial sector for big banks and investment firms with more information than you and i are entitled to have to this day. ryan grim is the washington bureau chief at the huffington post. he's been our partner in doing this report. ryan, obviously -- how surprised were you at the degree of restricted information concerning the rhetoric of transparency? >> well, i was actually, frankly, surprised they sent us a binder at all. i was expecting we would have to fight harder to even get to this
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point. so the fact that they at least started here surprised me slightly. and then once they gave the binder, i thought, oh, wait, maybe the fed has turned over a new leaf. maybe this is actually a new federal reserve and they are making a new commitment to transparency, because there really is no reason to withhold meeting minutes from 2007 today. i mean, there's nobody that would sit around and say, we can't do that because we're going to crash the market. there's nothing. so i thought, well, maybe they actually have done this and they've given us these documents. and then you opened up the binder and it looks like something beyond what the justice department or the holder of the justice department might put out. you showed redaction after redaction. why even bother printinghohen c
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black? >> why do that? are they just exercising in theatre with us? >> yeah, i guess that's what they're doing. and what's so strange is that in january, this coming january, they will release all of the 2007 minutes verbatim on their web site with zero redaction. it's completely arbitrary. in their letter responding to us, they recited a quote of a long-standing policy of releasing them on a five-year schedule. that's not a law, that's not regulation. that's kind of a fancy way of saying, look, buddy, this is how we do things and this is how we're going to continue to do things. >> let's talk about the revolving door, which is the most compelling in my view, and i think yours as well, is that it implies not just the federal reserves and the banks but it implies the entire culture of washington, you're going to the mining company, going to the drug company, whatever it is, it's just one example.
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this is in the foya release, a quote of bernanke on june 29, so this is after the real chaos had simmered down. and bernanke says, quote, we have one piece of business, which is to vote to approve the selection of brian sack as manager of the sorks ma. many of you know brian, i am sure. he was here. he went off to work with larry meyer for a while, and now we welcome him back to the fed family. you can go down the list. there are an incredible number of people who are in these meeting who know what was happening inside these redacted conversations that they don't want to show us, and now they're working inside financial institutions today; is that correct? >> right, and larry meyer, the one referenced in that bernanke quote, started a firm called macroeconomic advisers, which has won a number of awards for predicting macroeconomic trends, and they sell those predictions,
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those forecasts, to clients for a serious amount of money. david stockton is another one who left for macroeconomic advisers. that's three folks who have been in those meetings, take that information they know about in the most powerful federal bank in the world, then go and set up a company that specializes in forecasting what the economy is going to do which is related to what the fed is going to do, and they make a killing off of it. so they have that information because they were in those meetings. we don't. >> listen, ryan, it's been a pleasure to partner with you in all of this. thank you for the clarity. today, ryan grim with the huffington post. i want to bring back federal attorney beau biden. the rest of this is of no concern, i suppose, but ultimately, what is the legal parameter by which an attorney general or the sec or anybody could -- is there any way to prevent this sort of revolving door reality of people going
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from the fed to the bank? there's other people working on wall street who don't have the same advantages of those in those fed meetings, and we see this practice not just in banking but everywhere. >> well, it's difficult from an attorney general from a law enforcement perspective or from my jurisdictional perch, but this is something i am very interested in, dylan. and transparency in government, transparency in the fed is critical, and that's why it's so important why you made the request you made and important you're highlighted in this and important you're showing what they want to give now versus what they have to give in the next 18 to 24 months. all of these things come down to the credibility in our government and the people that serve us, that serve this nation. so i do worry about the revolving door. i probably, over the last 24 months, even if i wanted to go work at a bank, i probably wouldn't get hired there, so i don't have anything to worry about it. but look, we want to be able to have a situation where people
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from the private sector can go serve. they're very smart people in the sector that want to serve in this nation, they should want to do that and return to the private sector. so i'm not bright line against that, but we have to figure out a way so that those people when they leave public service, they then don't go work for the very agency they regulate and help that company subvert or get around the regulations they promulgated. >> isn't that as simple as a judicial recusal or policy? if you make policy on something, you shouldn't work in that industry for a period of time. >> yes. so there's two pieces. one, there is legislative efforts under way, whether it's congress to prohibit legislators from lobbying or going to work at these outfits, or there's also lawyers having an ethical, ethical obligation not to weigh in on matters that they have represented the government on and go work another side. the vast majority -- you know,
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lawyers that go do that risk losing their license if they go and work on an issue that they helped regulate on the other side or helped prosecute. so there are both ethical -- current ethical regulations as well as kind of moral ones that are out there, but you hit on another piece, it's a big hot spot in my book and yours, i know, and that's conflict of interest. too many people fail to understand basic conflicts of interest, and that's what's at the heart of much of this. >> i think it's where you and i agree the most, which is at the root of this country's dysfunction in general is a healthy mechanism to resolve conflicts of interest which begins by identifying it in the first place. a real pleasure. keep us posted on your advocacy with the right people. you got a healthy set of partners there, so i believe if anybody can make some headway, it will be you guys. beau biden, federal attorney in delaware.
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the request is up on the take some time. it's a good way to learn how all this is set up. for all you bloggers or data minders out there, you want to know more on dylanratigan.com. it is uploadable, downloadable, searchable, it's public information. tomorrow, a 4:00 p.m. reaction for one of the leading advocates for that transparency. bernie sanders, he's our live guest at 4:00 tomorrow. we'll discuss more of the names who know and the rest who apparently aren't allowed to know. and if you think all of this is crazy with our government, wait until you hear about the spending habits from our friends at the gsa. not in my house. with maxwell house french roast, you let gravity do the work. [ male announcer ] maxwell house french roast. always good to the last drop.
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this is not staying in vegas. on capitol hill today, the first of four hearings related to the general services administration and their outrageous spending in sin city and elsewhere, the head of gsa's western division could hardly contain himself at the time. >> i pretty much promised to deliver an over-the-top, unforgettable, team-building experience. how did we do on that one? >> oh, yeah, baby, over the top and on your dime. that must be one heck of a team they built. the cost for the mind reader, $3200.
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commemorative coins, another several hundred thousand. the grand total, $823,000 of gsa team building in vegas. but the hearing in the oversight committee this afternoon, that was priceless. >> do you wish to make an opening statement? >> no, mr. chairman, i don't. >> it is my understanding from your counsel that you may want to assert your constitutional privileges and remain silent; is that correct? >> yes, mr. chairman, that's correct. >> let's bring in our monday mega panel, tim carney, and this was made for you on a platter. bring out the utensils. >> the story is not about $823,000, right? the story is the clowns -- no. this is what happens in big institutions, it happens in fooi private corporations, but it happens when you're spending other people's money. the key here is not that it was just waste, but it was waste
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that benefited thoseand those i money. in this case, the guy heading the organization, his guy got to go on the trip. the other people there in positions of power got to enjoy the hotel and maybe the mind reader. i don't know if i would. >> you never know. >> and when energy subsidies get created to make green energy, it's a politically owned company, and then there's the bailout. we know it's not the financial sector or the economy that benefits the most, it's the specific well-connected political people. so when you look at that guy in that hot tub, abc had a picture of him in the hot tub in the hotel that they were testing it out. when you look at him, think he is the analogy to goldman sachs, to general electric, to boeing, to all these other well-connected people, and that's what happens when government has control over all this money. >> we got it. and at this table, there is no shortage of agreement to the basic principles that goes to the need to update this culture.
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we largely, i think, even the four of us and many others, reach a consensus that the first step in fighting this culture, wherever it rears its head is transparency. that wherever it's made evident you can talk about it and get shame and all these things. you've done a wonderful job in outing the 200 people that are paying 80% in all of america which i still tell people that and they say, you mean 2 or 300 million people are paying the same money? you look at the nonsense with the fed, this redaction, how do you find transparency to be? >> i think this gsa scandal is embarrassing. i'm not sure it warrants four hearings in one day, but it is embarrassing. it's also embarrassing because the gsa had problems in the bush add manipulati administration that obviously weren't addressed.
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there was a lavish scandal. they tried to inspect the attorney general who outed the clowns and everything else. so there are things in this agency that haven't been reformed and hopefully that will come out of it other than the obviously funny video clips we're seeing. >> where do you think this will turn up? >> a sticking point is here. washington, d.c. became the wealthiest political area overtaking the silicon valley. that is wrong, and it makes me agree with tim carney, which is something extraordinary. all americans, pretty much, are agreeing with that. some changes are going to have to be made. you have to ask, where does the buck stop? yes, it starts with the bush administration, but why didn't they do anything about it? this has been going on for years. if i were a vp strategist right now, i would be thinking how can we make the most of this and i would be all over it.
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>> fox news has been all over this. it's been their better story for two weeks. >> i would like to see republicans tie this in not just to this obama guy and to the 823,000, but tie it into welfare. >> but even more broadly, i think, the point that even private institutions, when you have no accountability and people spending other people's money, whether it's if a movie studio and somebody else's money, or whether it's at the federal government, when you have that disconnection, you get -- >> but we don't care. >> the shareholders care. the government or the taxholders are the shareholders. speaking of government bureaucracies, next up we'll tell you the biggest bureaucracies out there and why our kids are paying the price for it. does aspirin even work on my headache?
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as reported by a political team this morning, the republican front runner hinting he would be up for shrinking the department of education. today's specialist says, forget education. learning is what it is that we seek in our culture, in our schools, in ourselves. mirek has become obsessed with bureaucracy and ignorant in its practice about what we're learning. the chair of common good which add voluntavocates reform of al they've teamed with the magazine to launch the fixable, targeting real solutions to our biggest problems, and up first, an educational system that simply doesn't have learning at the top of the pyramid. we could pick any system right here. we picked education because that's where your attention is
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today. we could put health here, we could put energy here, we could put anything here. what is your first move to approach a system whose incentives are not designed to solve the problem you're trying to solve. >> educate learning is a completely human endeavor. it's about humans connecting students, students connecting to each other, connect ingwiing wi schools. instead of that, we've come up with something completely bureaucratic. teachers worry about compliance, rules and regulations and teaching to the test. principals can't manage in part because of the union. up and down the line, nobody has the freedom to do what they think is right because the rules don't let them. >> how do you begin to manage that, because we could do that with incentives in health care. what can you do and other people do to even begin to mitigate some of that? >> our agenda item, and we have
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a meeting every month, everyone is coming in different ways saying, you have to blow the system up. you can't actually tweak the system. you have to restore the authority of teachers to run the classrooms. you can't have legal hearings every time you send a kid home. you're not sending him to jail, you're sending him home, just as one example. if a kid is crying, the teacher ought to have the authority to put her arm around him. couldn't do that today. you might get sued for a million dollars for an unwanted touching. if a teacher isn't doing the job, there ought to be an efficient mechanism for determining whether the teacher is up to it or not. >> what do you make of charter schools. is there anything to public schools learning from charter schools? >> sure. but being a charter school saint cu -- is not a cure-all. it liberates the people who try to succeed. there are wonderful examples. but they break all the rules.
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they go to school six days a week, the teachers work 12 hours a day. they're committed to their children. i have a daughter who is doing that. it's a non-stop job in the charter schools. public schools, they get in maybe about two-thirds, maybe, of the teaching time, and the teachers don't have the freedom that they're given in the good charter schools to teach their own way. sdp >> which basically makes teaching an asset. >> the other thing i might disturbing is that you're either a quote, unquote, informer or you're with the union. where can the common ground actually be found? >> well, the unions have to get on board here, but randy weingarten, head of one of the unions, says we have to blow up no child left behind and move to a structure that's a community-based structure. i believe in that. you have to get the community involved in schools.
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it's not just teachers, it's everyone else as well. >> this is a ground-up community restorati restoration. >> if i'm looking at a system that there's real resistance to change, a broad variety of people agree it is needed, i'm saying then who is standing in the way and what are they benefitting from it. i know in some ways the teachers' unions are, you're saying in some ways they're open to this. is somebody benefiting from the current, you know, mess-up? >> sure. it's like we need mutual disarmament. the professional educators are used to looking at every solution as a rule-based solution. >> as part of their culture. >> yeah, that's how they control it, that's how the department of education controls things. they have incentives from washington. we don't really need in sent ce from washington. if you give kids the freedom to do that, they need to be accountable for if they succeed.
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but you don't need all these things that begin to make teachers feel like they're machine tools. >> what you're saying is human beings, if i understand you correctly, have a natural instinct to educate their young if we actually allow them to use modern tools and learn from each other as to best how to do that. we've basically lost our minds. >> we have lost our minds. no other country that's successful does it this way. they give teachers and educators locally the responsibility and freedom to do it their own way, and if they don't succeed -- >> they believe in the inherent self-interest of their country where the adults, they believe, have a natural self-interest to try to educate the children. >> that's absolutely right. the first question is always does the human on the ground have the freedom to be herself, to be spontaneous, to be funny? all the things that interest children. instead the children see robots. >> and the test makers make
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money. we should get in the test printing business. we should make tests, then you would get rich. all right. a pleasure. i mean, obviously you've got endorsements around this table. keep us posted. if you want to learn more, the common good of postingatlantic. they are running through a string of issues. what do these famous movie quotes have in common? >> ask yourself one question, do i feel lucky? well, do you, punk? >> toto. i have a feeling we're not in kansas anymore. >> we'll tell you an interesting science on what makes certain lines pay attention. where political writers were memorable. ♪ [ male announcer ] before the gold,
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fra -- from casablanca to e.t. to star wars, we've all had something stuck in our head. what makes it stick in our brains? some think they realize what makes them stick. more than 1,000 movies listed on the popular web site, i am db, they compare these with other lines spoken around the same time during the film. they found even people who hadn't seen the movie could pick the more famous phrase 75% of the time. why is that? well, the researchers think that the quotables have two factors
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that differentiate them. here's where the science comes in. they say the best remembered lines, whatever it may be, have more uncommon words in them. >> my name is montoya. you killed my father. prepare to die. >> and the second, the linguistics matter, are using a or an instead of the, were more memorable. plus, present tense is always better than past tense. the group also used the same formula to test product slowigs, prept present tense, in articulate syntax. guess what? it worked the same way.
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straight ahead to fighting the front lines to playing a marine on television. benjamin bush joins us to talk about his new memoir, including why he's written it at such a youthful age. ♪ there's another way to minimize litter box odor: purina tidy cats. our premium litters now work harder to help neutralize odors in multiple cat homes. purina tidy cats. keep your home smelling like home. i worked at the colorado springs mail processing plant
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while war seems to be everywhere in his life story, it isn't everything. joining us now is benjamin bush. you may recognize him from hbo's the wire and generation kill. he just penned a memoir "dust to dust" which has broken up into the elements for its soil, water, metal, stone, ash. very ordinary materials but meaningful to the author and the foundation of what has been an extraordinary life. benjamin busch joins us now. nice to have you here. congratulations to the book. >> thank you. >> why did you write it? >> i was in a pivotal point in my life when i returned from war. i was a father, and i lost both of my parents within a year. i then began to question my place in the universe. this is a portrait of my perspective, this book. >> give us in brief what the transition in your perspective was as a result of the
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challenges that were thrown into wro your life. >> well, i think all of us are rooted in certain beliefs from our childhood, which are carried forever. it's a certain defiance which i like about childhood and the magic of that, which is we're not going to die, our parents are not going to die. there's something about our inas a rule -- invulnerability as children, which probably was an obstruction of danger. i think all that loss happened in the same moment where i realized all my assumptions and my true childhood was over, in some ways. >> and what do you think is a benefit -- listen, the benefit of maintaining a child's frame of mind is obvious. there are benefits, however, to enduring the pain of the transition and releasing some of those -- the protection of that childlike thinking, and i'd be interested to know what you
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believe the benefits to you have been since you've squared up to believe in these traditions for yourself and your family. >> that's interesting. i think most people are unwilling to confront their disappearance. this book seeks directly to confront our disappearance, to show what really endures. and despite the fact that childhood will eventually end for all of us, there is something about it which carries us forward, and we can trace our personality, who we are in many ways, back through those memories if we follow these kind of associative paths. i still carry a number of these things as i move forward, and i find that when i thought i lost so much, which is, of course, what happened, i didn't realize the true power of memory until that was what i had. and in going back into my memory, i restored my parents. i was able to bring back things which i thought were gone.
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and there's something about the endurance of that, something about the defiance. >> that's an intriguing point, because what you're suggesting is that at least through the alteration of your own perception, your own relationship with these experiences, in one version you've lost everything, in another version, same facts, same exact fact, nothing has changed, you feel a continuity. >> yeah. we live one life, and the things we gather are experience, the human experience, is something far more than the dust we're composed of. there's something about us which has another element to it. and that's what this book seeks to, in some ways, give to the reader, which is this communal sense that we are all brief and we are all not destroyed.
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>> if i'm understanding you, through the experience of the loss of the destruction that the realization of the permanence manifests. >> it took seeing the absolute opposite of what i had hoped. we all hope. that's the great thing about people, we have almost these irrational ideas about who we can be. religion from the earliest and primitive types have always given us a heaven. it's the next stage because it takes us away from worrying about the fact that we are terminal. what i discovered in finding these mortal facts with the loss of my parents, lot of my friends in combat and with my own peril in combat, the very fact that these things continue on, that memory takes us forward, that language ends up being the medium of memory, and that's what really led to the book was
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the fact that i realized finally the power of memory and language to survive me. >> who were the people that live in this book for you that mean the most? >> well, the two people i wish could read it most, my mother and my father, who are the two people who can't. it's not a biography in that way. it doesn't paint a portrait of my family, it's not a war memoir in that way in that it focuses entirely on the war, but both those things are what composed this book. it's really a message and i'm just the messenger. i paint a little bit of myself so readers can feel they're a part of this, because they are. the reader is hopefully going to be receiving some of these memories and going back into their own. that's what makes, i think, a book like this meaningful. >> and meaningful to us that you come and give us that level of understanding of it and meaningful to me that you would sit here with me and share that,
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so i appreciate it. a pleasure. >> thank you for having me. >> a memoir, "dust to dust." he explained it better than i ever could. next, a heated hardball. chris talking about the sex scandal. oh, yes. she's got a daily rant dedicated tomom. ♪ i am woman, hear me roar people in congress who'll come together and put partisan politics aside. not with radical schemes that gamble with america's future. but with a plan that requires washington to balance the budget the right way -- protecting the priorities of america's families. tell congress to pass a common sense balanced budget -- now. sign the petition at center-forward.org. hi, i just switched jobs, and i want to roll over my old 401(k) into a fidelity ira. man: okay, no problem.
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well, it's monday, which means it's time for keli goff's rant. >> hi, dylan. many people have focused on hillary rosen's comments about
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moms, particularly one comment in particular. when rosen said, guess what, his wife actually never worked a day in her life with respect to anne romney, it was likened to kicking puppies. the remark was not nearly as important or telling as mitt romney's own comments on vet same subject months ago. here's what rosen said in its entirety. >> what you have is romney running around the country saying, well, my wife tells me what women really care about is economic issues, and when i listen to my wife, that's what i'm hearing. guess what? his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. she's never really dealt with the kind of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids. >> 99% of that statement is true. the romneys' wealth is not a secret nor something romney says they should be ashamed of. i agree with that. but it also says they are removed of the economic struggles and realities of 97%
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of americans, meaning that as a family they have not dealt with the kinds of economic issues the women in this country are facing, which is almost verbatim what mrs. rosen said. despite a great feeling of grief under pressure, mrs. romney said the entire discussion is about women having the right to make the parenting and career choices that work for them. i agree with her. but the question is, does her husband agree with her? earlier in this campaign, governor romney had this to say on the issue of moms and work. i said, for instance, even if you have a child two years of age and need to go to work, and people said, well, that's heartless, and i said, no, no, i'm willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work. it will cost the state more providing that daycare, but i want the individual to have the dignity of work. dignity is a woman being empowered to be the best person and best parent she can be regardless of whether or not she is married to a multi-millionaire. of course, all moms work, including wealthy ones who have
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never held a job outside of the home. but there are plenty of moms who have to work a little harder than others to find a measure of dignity in our country. i'm talking about the moms working one or two jobs with no health insurance. i'm talking about my own mom who started her working life picking cotton in the deep south before juggling single parenthood with college and work and also managing to be a superstar at other other full-time job as a mom. all moms deserve dignity, but they also deserve the policies to help them get there. dylan? >> very well presented, and i'm sure your mother very much appreciates your acknowledgment in such a profound context. thank you very much. >> thank you. >> keli goff. that will do it for us on this monday. if you want to check out those fed minutes, head to dylanratigan.com. every last one of them is up there. you can enjoy the redactions. a friend of mine ran a word search and found the

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