as an american express cardmember you can expect some help. but what you might not expect, is you can get all this with a prepaid card. spends like cash. feels like membership. good morning from new york. i'm chris hayes, and while my new programming airing weeknights at 8:00 here on msnbc launches tomorrow night, i want to assure you i'm leaving "up" in good hands. steve karnaky will be the new host. meantime, the staff and i selected some of the best "up" moments from my tenure here. a month after the show launched a ceremony was held in washington, d.c. for the unveiling of dr. martin luther king jr.'s memorial and with president obama giving the keynote address we thought it would be a perfect time to look at legacy of dr. king alongside

the man who walks in his wake, the nation's first black president. we discuss dr. king to occupy wall street. we were proud of that segment then and still are today. take a lock. >> back with msnbc contributor and columnist, one of my favorite magazine "the nation," melissa harris-perry and bob herbert, author of "waking up from the american dream" and our special guest whose play "mountaintop" opened last week. want to play this clip from dr. king on "meet the press." it's awesome we have the nbc library and got to watch every appearance of dr. king on "meet is press." this is dr. king talking about the efficacy of non-violent direct actions and demonstrations. >> recent polls suggest that in terms of national reaction, demonstrations are now

counterproductive. by continuing them, don't you run the risk of doing more harm than good? >> again, i contend that we are not doing more harm than good in demonstrations because i think demonstrations serve the purpose of bringing the issues out in the open. i have never felt that demonstrations could actually solve the problem. they call attention to the problem. they dramatize the existence of certain social ills that could very easily be ignored if you did not have demonstrations and i think the initial reaction to demonstrations is always negative. >> dr. martin luther king speaking in 1966, two years before the end of his life. you and i are about the same age. we were not there. >> we were not there. >> we were not that. >> not even thought of. >> i wonder if you're watching what's going on with occupy wall

street and those words have a resonance in so far as dramatizing the problem, calling attention to the problem. i feel like we're talking more about economic inequality and the banks now than we were a month ago because of this dramatization. have you been following, it and what's your sort of feeling about what's unfolding? >> you know, i've been really following it from the sidelines because i've been in the theater and doing my show, but, you know, you can't escape it. it's everywhere, and i actually feel like it's an amazing time because i -- my generation, we, you know, we were inspired by the civil rights movement but we're so far away from it. oh, that's marches are over. we didn't know how to protest our anger and our disgust and i think occupy wall street is an opportunity for us oh, we can demonstrate and use protests to call attention to the problem. obviously, it's not going to solve it, but i think it's really beautiful to see all these people different ages and

different colors, you know, standing together in the way that we did in the 1960s. i think that's really remarkable. >> it's funny though that occupy wall street has the same problem which i think is gradually becoming solved by that king had at the end of his life which is the question is exactly what do we protest, so it's one thing for ten people to have kind of an unfocused cynicism, but how do we come together to actually create a program and king himself after there was the civil rights act of '64 and the voting rights act of 5065, his idea was what do we protest now because in his wake there were more violent and spiking kinds of protests and he was opposed to them more or less. they thought he was too gentle and the poor peoples movement is something that was taking fire a a and he died before it was put together >> sniv was non-violent.

>> that's an important correction. >> it's important to think about the transition that king does right at the end, right, and it's this idea that he's already accomplished the 5064 civil rights act and the 5065 voting rights act, and it's 1966 and he writes where do we go from here, chaos or community, and the idea that he could have been at that moment, after all of the things that we think of as the capstone accomplishments of the civil rights movement and yet he's pausing in that moment and going the possibility of chaos is still the very real possibility of american racial dissent into that rather than a kind of movement towards community, for me it always -- it's so useful, for example. we have to give a little bit of time in history to pause and look back on what actually counts as an accomplishment. we don't always know in that moment, and king, you know, he had done some -- some ugly compromising things. you know, he sold out fanny lou

hamer and the mississippi freedom democratic party and kept them from being creeded by selling them out to the democrats in atlantic city. that was martin luther king, our great courageous leader had nonetheless done that, silence and rusted others in his movement because they were too hot, so i just think it's so important, not only humanizing him in his personal safe but that he was an imperfect leader and still exceptional. >> i think we don't think about the latter part of kick's life very much. we don't talk about the post-victory king. >> absolutely. >> it was only a few years because his life was cut short, but he was struggling with this problem of what -- what are the demands, which is something we hear about right now, economic justice, what does that actually look like and then more specifically to maintain the sort of -- his sort of centrality to the movement and non-violence as centrality to the movement and this sort of extremely religiously grounded vision of christian brotherhood

and sisterhood. >> i just like to make a point. i was very much around. what i recall so clearly about '66 and especially 1967 when king gave his famous anti-war speech at roadside church was the idea that we -- we -- that was a time when things began to go haywire in this country and we really lost momentum of that post-world war ii period and the two things that king was talking about at the time and that we didn't pay enough attention to was the importance of the war and violence on the one hand and the important of economic justice on the other hand, and now we're at this moment in 2011 and we've got this -- we've escalated in afghanistan, we're intervening in countries all over the place, and we have economic injustice like we've never seen since the depression, so that is what we need to keep

in mind at this moment going forward, and that is what occupy wall street is doing us a great service by focusing us on those economic injustice issues. >> a lot of people just don't know that he was actually dealing with economic injustices at the end of his life. people didn't know about the poor people's campaign. >> what is the poor people's campaign? >> when i was could go research for the play the poor people's campaign was this amazing new march on washington that dr. king was trying to create, and, you know, it was like 1968 he had started it, thinking about it a year before. they had really come together, but then even inside of his ranks people were like maybe we shouldn't be talking about poor people. maybe we should talk about civil rights, civil rights, civil rights. king was taking this triple-pronged approach to injustice. he was talking about the war and economical injustices, talking about everything. an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. >> remember what lbj passes, the

legislation that is the great testament at the end of king's life is the national fair housing act. it is an act that was meant to move the civil rights movement out of the question of southern injustice, although that existed into this question of housing because housing is where economics, wealth, environmental injustice, everything has to do with us living in -- your access to education, to all of these things, has to do with where you live, so the great crowning achievement, the last one comes after his death and it's lbj and that housing act, so i think, you know, that is the legacy of king is that it's economics. >> if you think about black history, think about the voting acts right of 1965, fair housing in 1968 and then what, in terms of drama and what you might write a play about it's really hard to come up with the drama of black uplift after that. it's been harder to know where to go, and in the same way i think king's drama had ended. if he had lived, i think he would have become a very

respected statesman, but i don't think that there were any more concrete walls for him to break down which would have been very frustrating for him so he was kind of symbolic of the whole black liberation movement in general in that way in his life arc. >> katori hall, playwright, your play "mountaintop" now on broadway. lovely having you on. >> absolutely. >> we have some seldom seen footage of martin luther king facing down the mainstream media coming right up. ♪ [ female announcer ] life is full of little tests, but your basic paper towel can handle them. especially if that towel is bounty basic. the towel that's 50% stronger. in this lab demo even just one select-a-size sheet of bounty basic is stronger than one full sheet of the leading bargain brand. everyday life? bring it with bounty basic. the strong, but affordable picker-upper.

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as i said to a group last night, nobody else can do this for us. no document can do this for us. no lincolnian emancipation

proclamation do this for us, no civil rights deal can do this for us. if the negro is to be free, he must move down into the inner resources of his own soul and sign with the ink and pen of self-asserted manhood, his own owe mans pace proclamation. >> a montage of photographs of different streets named after dr. king from across the country. we're talking today, of course, about martin luther king's legacy, and while going through our archives this weekend, i was struck by how much the mainstream media seemed to be at war with dr. king in certain ways. between 1960 and 1966 he made several appearances on nbc's "meet the press" and just about each question that was posed to him was extremely scent call, bordering on hostile. we strung together a few of those moments to give you an idea of what i'm talking about. take a listen. >> are you saying that the end justifies the means and you're

apparently breaking local laws hoping for a better conclusion? >> is it correct to say that you don't oppose racial intermarriage. >> i've been told there are places in harlem that refuse to serve white customers, do you know if that's true? >> how many white members are there in your church in atlanta. i'd like to know where does communism and collectivism fit into your program of resistance. >> have communists infiltrated the moment? the a.p.p. reported the other day a picture of you taken in nan 57 at a tennessee interracial school is being plastered all over billboards with the caption martin luther king as a communist training school. will you tell us whether that was a communist training school and what you were doing there? >> for the record, i was only at a communist training school for a few short weeks back in 1993, the montessori communist situation. aren't those shocking? i think they are reason to

shocking to me, maybe they shouldn't be shocking, the reason they were shocking is because we have this vision of him as a unifying figure and santa claus martin luther king i went back in the archives thinking everyone would pay him the devrance that's owed to the man carved in granite on the national mall and would understand he was obviously on the right side of all of these issues and question after question is aren't you saying people should break the law? aren't you a communist, and is there some black person doing something bad to a white person that you should have to defend, and it struck me so much that how -- just how much even i who knows abstractly and intellectually that he was a polarizing figure watching that made me realize in reality what that meant. >> clips like that get me in trouble because i'm supposed the black guy who doesn't understand that there's racism when it's really i say how much and how much does it matter and many people say more than you think,

john mcwhorter and clips like that, considered an enlightened and intelligent person, that was normal canopy living room conversation. at this point america is far from perfect on race but those sorts of things look properly backwards to us because we've moved ahead so i always feel, wow, certainly not like that. think of the progress we've made and other people tell me, no, we're still living in hell. that's the big question for me. >> i would suggest that the question now wasn't it a communist training school, was it a madrassas? isn't it true there's no white people don't go to the united church of christ and isn't it true that you have a pastor that said god "d" america. i'm with you for us to say this moment isn't just like that moment but some of this discourse about if you are -- if you are pressing against this

system you are necessarily not even part of it. you're not even a citizen. i mean, these are some of the very same kinds of anxieties that emerged over the past three years in the context of obama's presidency. >> less mainstream now than those things were then but i take your point. >> no question it's less mainstream now than it was 40 or more years ago, but it's still pretty rough out there. >> and the fact is the mainstream is not the mainstream anymore. in other words, we're in a lot more niched in terms of our media. there was a time where everybody in the country was -- >> 30 million people watching this right now fyi, just so we're clear. >> aside from this show though. >> but the fact is that, you know, someone like beck or limbaugh when they say these things or "fox & friends" they have a -- the difference between what was mainstream and what they are now is -- there is no one sort of chain of media, and to a certain extent i think like

the hat that she was wearing, you have to comment on the hat, that's a perfect metaphor. it was a lot more blatant at that point, and -- and -- >> well played. >> i had to bring up the hat, too. >> to get to your point that the idea that king in fact was a polarizing figure at the time and you have to keep in mind, you know, that the majority of americans were against desegregation of public facilities, against desegregation of the public schools, certainly against mixed marriages. i saw the idea that that question came up and in many parts of the country it was illegal for whites and blacks to actually get married so he was very much a polarizing figure. >> and that's part of why in lbgt movements the language is we can't put civil rights on the ballot. imagine we put the civil rights on the ballot at that moment, you wouldn't have gotten a majority of americans in support of it. >> exactly right. >> and just to give some context, the great thing about

the interracial marriage question, it's clear from the context of it, that he's asking the question to reveal just how deeply radical king is because this is -- this is the craziest thing -- this is the craziest damn thing you're ever going to hear. don't you support interracial marriage? >> i'm sitting here as a proskt early mysogenation. i can remember going to my mother who was wyatt to the swimming pools and we were at the wading pool and she looks at my father and she says, bill, why will r there two swimming pools and my father who grew up in the jim crow south, diana, that's jim crow, but it was still true in my childhood. >> and the supreme court law that strikes down the law is virginia and the anxiety that you see in the press, a white

establishment press is unreflective racism. also i think the anxiety about direct action which i think is very interesting. we have the images of the bridge and the selma, montgomery march and the fire hoses on the girl and all the black and white images that we have of the civil rights movement makes us think in our mind as sort of romantic and obviously right and not as threatening disorder, as threatening chaos, as something that even sort of sympathetic white liberals were a little not sure they wanted to go along with, and i think that also drains -- and a lot of black people, and that drains some of the radicalism and makes us not realize when we are facing something ourselves like occupy wall street or some other large mobilized direct action that if you have a little reticence new. that's normal but that's part of the way that it goes down. >> part of my sense of why society digests martin luther

king the way that we do, that we see him now as he couldn't have been a polarizing figure is the same sort of i think thing that happens in terms with the broader civil rights movement. there was some street heat. >> right. >> that within the context of that movement, martin luther king was on one end of the non-violence spectrum. there was another end of that spectrum where, you know, the guys really promoting the second amendment were guys showing up with shotguns in oakland to meetings. >> right. >> and so we -- >> but are you saying you're advocating that? i mean, that was a joke. that was a joke. >> trying to calculate my youtube hits. >> my question was is what do you think of that? >> listen, i think -- i think there is value in a movement like occupy wall street put in today's context that essentially makes, you know, the sorkin piece in the "new york times"

the other day where he writes, he admits himself, that a bank ceo called him up and said should i be worried about these protesters, and he says, i don't know, i'll go down there and check it out for you, and he frames it in this notion that the bank executive, rather than being worried about is this going to be an accountability moment for my bank, am i going -- he's worried about his own personal safety. i think that's unfortunate because that's not the idea. the idea of social unrest is the only leverage that people have in not going along with what the program is. >> i want to pause on one quick thing and remind ourselves, one, that there was tons of civil unrest, social action, occupying of buildings from the 1890s until the 1950s. it didn't begin in the 1950s and it was crushed and crushed and crushed by the state. it failed and failed and failed so our memory of the civil rights movement isn't the first time it happens, it's the first time it succeeds so one of the things i want to remind us and part of the reason it's successful is because of the

violence against it. >> yes. >> and the fact that that violence was publicized. >> was on tv. >> that was crucial. >> and what's so important is that it's not just the action against it, but it is the will, and, i mean, not just a matter of pushback, not just cowardly. people died, right? the street heat was that people were murdered repeatedly. >> and the other thing is there was street heat on the other side. let's not forget that there was -- there were white riots. >> yes. >> there was people from in the streets disobeying the law which is the order of, you know, desegregation order showing up at the school to bar, you know, that's why they had to send the national guard. >> but there was tv, and it meant that people in the soviet union could watch this going on, and the kennedy administration was embarrassed about this open racism in the united states and what it made it look like on the geopolitical stage. there are a lot of contingency. it was tv and how people felt after world war ii, it was the anti-communism movement. all of those things made civil

rights actions have more effect then than they had had before and maybe can now. that's the problem. >> all right. we're going to talk more about this actually and about the role the press plays in civil rights and in struggles for social justice right after this break. there's a reason no one says "easy like monday morning." sundays are the warrior's day to unplug and recharge. what if this feeling could last all week? with centurylink as your trusted partner, it can. our visionary cloud infrastructure and global broadband network free you to focus on what matters.

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[ robert ] we created legalzoom to help people start their business and launch their dreams. go to legalzoom.com today and make your business dream a reality. at legalzoom.com we put the law on your side. we're just learning there are reports out of chicago, the chicago police department has made 175 arrests in grant park. grant park is where they have set up the chicago version of occupy wall street. saw some photos of it last night with tent and so forth. we usually check out big weekend editorials and op-eds and today we wanted to focus on the dedication of the national memorial to martin luther king so here's what we found, contemporaneous accounts. james restin, august 28th, 1963, coverage of the jobs and justice mlk march on washington and i offer this as an antidote to the clips we played before, someone in the moment at that time getting what they are saying. this is restin writing. i have a dream, he cried, again

and again and each time the dream was a promise out of our ancient articles of faith. phrases from the constitution, lines from the great anthem of the nation, guarantees from the bill of rights, all ending with a vision that they might one day all come true. he was full of the symbolism of lincoln and gandhi and the cadences of the bible, militant and sad and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journal he been worthwhile. what a great piece of reporting, james restin, like he really nailed it, and i wanted to read that specifically because the flip side of the kind of hostile press role that we saw in that montage is that there is no question that at a certain point the northern white establishment press particularly, which had unprecedented kind of monopoly of the public's attention in the 1960s came to see what the true nature of southern segregation was, and that coverage really changed perceptions, wouldn't you say, bob? >> i absolutely agree with that. what i think is different now, you're talking about the mainstream press.

mainstream press is much less important, actually much less existent even than in the old days. the times is still really important because it is the paper of record and people come to "the times" to see what the heck happened and i think what's different now with the occupy wall street movement and the issues coming up today is that these issues resonate with so much of the population right now, so when you were talking about civil rights in the mainstream press, the people looking at the mainstream press saw the victims of the oppression as the other, but they thought it was intolerable what was happening to them. now what's really interesting is less of a mainstream press, much more in the way of communications but very fragmented, but issues that really resonate with the majority of the population. >> so you have this -- so back then you have this sort of concentrated mass media shining the light on an issue about how we treat a minority in the country. >> exactly. >> now you have a balkanized

media which is sort of minoritaran in itself trying to get the story of how the majority is being screwed. >> be careful just a little bit as the reminder, that, of course, the real turning point was not the violence for example, against john lewis, it was the murder of white allies, the incredibly brave, courageous young white students who came south and were murdered, and -- and also of some white southerners who were there and doing that work who were murdered that -- that helped to bridge this, as you point out. >> that's true, but also the -- the young girls who were murdered in birmingham. >> the innocents. >> and also the fire hoses, yes. >> and the snarling dogs. >> the provocative counterfactual i want to ask you is in this environment, and i might be curious what you think about this. in this environment where you don't have this as an impeering al fact of how many people watch the evening newscast and how much people watch the "new york

times." is it possible to find an arc median point of leverage for the kind of social change that we need in the absence of that kind of concentrated media. >> i mean, i think it's -- i think it's a question of what the social change is. i mean, one of the problems that i think we've had in this country is that our press has become so sequestered, for the most part, on economic lines, that the urgency of what's been going on in this country in terms of prolonged unemployment and loss of wages hasn't been felt by that -- by that group of people enough to really appreciate the urgency that's going on. [ ship horn blows ] no, no, no! stop! humans. one day we're coming up with the theory of relativity, the next... not so much. but that's okay -- you're covered with great ideas like optional better car replacement from liberty mutual insurance. total your car and we give you the money to buy one a model year newer. learn about it at libertymutual.com. liberty mutual insurance.

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pneumonia. a health clinic in tulsa, oklahoma will resume screenings tomorrow for patients of a dentist accused of unsanitary practices. hundreds showed up yesterday to see if they contracted hiv or hepatitis. letters went out to 7,000 patients. christians around the world with celebrating easter. pope francis led his first easter mass as pontiff and in his message he called tore peace in the world and asked for a diplomatic solution to the crisis on the korean peninsula. more news in an hour here on msnbc. nobel prize winning economist paul krugman and former obama white house press secretary robert gibbs still on the best on "up." [ watch ticking ] [ engine revs ] come in. ♪ got the coffee. that was fast.

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after the 2012 presidential election as the dust from a very long and very expensive campaign began to settle, i gave a toast to my brother luke, an organizer who worked as the nevada state director for the obama campaign. luke was one of the thousands of

organizers who spent countless hours knocking on doors, making phone calls and doing all the unglamorous work that doesn't pay well and rarely gets mentioned when we talk about politics but it's people like my brother luke who make our politics and democracy possible and on election night when the results are announced it's the organizers who can fully appreciate victory knowing all the hours and work it took to make it possible. here's what we said about it at the time. i want to finish today's program with a final thought on the election. on tuesday night after the race had been called for president obama the first call i made was to my brother luke. when i got married in july 2007 luke had to take a few days off his new job as an obama campaign field organizer in nevada to attend the wedding. that was more than five years ago and in the intervening 64 months my brother has spent every single day working for the obama campaign and its sister organization organizing for america. he's worked in eight states, at times literally living out of clothes in trash bags while putting 87,000 miles on a beat

up white ford pickup truck. 60 to 90 hours a week, 52 weeks a year for five years, my brother worked to get barack obama elected and then from his perch as the nevada state director this time around to get him re-elected. i'm biased, of course, but to me tuesday's victory was luke's victory as much as it was anyone else's. luke and the thousands like him, organizers of every hue and background and creed in states across the union working preposterously long hours, doing the grueling, sometimes comically mundane labor of making democracy work, calling people, knocking on doors, sending e-mails, sitting through endless meetings and conference calls and sorting columns on spreadsheets and buying office supplies in bulk or slightly used so as to come in under budget, negotiating leases for field offices and getting yelled at by disgruntled volunteers and by diva-esque local political officials. thousands of people across the

country like my brother doing this work and not just for ofa, local candidates and city council on up, from the amazing, successful, historic progressive ballot initiatives that passed across the country, giving us the first popular victories for marriage equality in three states and a beginning to the end of our insane policy of marijuana prohibition. when the victory bell rings, we all rush to talk about the great men of history who made it so, the candidates and the master strategists who ran their campaigns, where we point to the exit polling demographics and say it was destiny, fated and nothing is inevitable and progress only comes about because of the tireless labor of organizers who never get to give speeches at podiums and don't get vacation home money like the brand name strategists and don't show up on the cable news unless they are in the background of a photo op. the reward they do get is the fulfillment of the soul that comes from struggle and the defeat and boredom that are inevitably part that have struggle makes the rare moments

of victory that much sweeter. if you want to see what that looks lying, check out this video from election night of richard from the group that fought the anti-marriage ballot initiative in that state. 1:45 a.m. he addressed organizers and volunteers and told them it would be too close to call and go home and sleep and feel proud about what the work they did, win or lose and communications director announces the a.p. has called the race. >> i couldn't be more proud to have been in a position to lead you guys for the last several -- for the last over a year, and i can't thank you enough for all your hard work and dedication. it's blown my mind. every time that i feel like we've -- we're just about to hit a wall, you guys blow right through that wall to make this a reality. i want you to go to bed tonight and be very, very proud of the result that we have.

>> the a.p. just called it. >> unless you've done the work that the people in that room have done, you can't know how that feels. so to all the people in that room, and around the country, and all the unsung thousands who toiled in the trenches of democracy, a toast. thank you for what you did. thank you for what you do, especially you, luke. i'm proud of you. you may be muddling through allergies. try zyrtec® liquid gels. nothing starts working faster than zyrtec® at relieving your allergy symptoms for 24 hours. zyrtec®. love the air.

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we have had writer and performer mike daisy on "up" three times and each time i couldn't be more excited to talk to him. i was blown away by his one-man show of "the agony and ecstasy of steve jobs." and i wanted to talk to him about his show and the story telling in general. mike said, quote, people who are in these roles have a responsibility. i have a responsibility, and when i fall short, i immediate to talk about it, and i need to

be open about it. well, when he was on "up," he wasn't open about it and only later we learned of the factual inaccuracies in his show. he misled me and american life to everyone who thought his show was factual. my thoughts about this are as complicated now as they were then. >> i first heard of mike daisy's monologue "thing a did i and ecstasy of steve jobs" last spring when two friends of mine went to see an early version of the work in washington, d.c. they were both blown away and i particularly remember one friend recounting to me what would be the monologue's climatic moment. when a chinese worker whose hand had within crushed and disfigured while working in a plant that made ipads was handed mike daisy's own ipad and saw the device turned on for the first time. as he flicks through the icons with what daisy calls his ruined hand, he tells mike daisy through the translator that it's, quote, a kind of magic. it now appears that moment never

happened. the man with the ruined hand appeared to have worked not at foxxconn but another factory and it's unclear if he actually made ipads or if daisy ever showed him an ipad. probably heard all of this by now because daisy has been in the news in the wake of "this american life" running a retraction of the airing of daisy's monologue. he lied to fact checkers about his translator's contact info and when the actual chinese translator was contacted and interviewed by marketplace reporter she contradicted many of the most dramatic details of the monologues, including him meeting with underage workers and the guards toting guns and the incident with the ipad and the man with the injured hand. daisy's defense is fundamentally he was miscast as the role of journalist, that he's a storyteller and theater artist and employs the narratives of the trade to tell a larger truth. he made this claim a week ago on

the show. >> it's a complicated subject because i work as a monologuist and a storyteller, so fundamentally i tell a story and i use the tools of story telling. i use compression. i use all these tools that the world of objective journalism doesn't use. >> that's a perfectly fair distinction to draw but i, too, took daisey at his word twice. when he said i met workers who were 15, 14, 13, 12, i thought what he meant was i met workers who were 15, 14, 13, 12. and it wasn't just my own knee ofity that led me to this conclusion. that was the explicit impression that daisey himself conveyed. here's an interview he did with seattle radio host where he's

requested on the factualness of his work >> how do you reconcile telling a good story with also trying to get the facts right, and when do you decide what is the more important goal? >> oh, well, you know what i've found over the years is that the facts are your friends, like if there's ever a case where i'm telling a story and i find the facts are inconvenient, nine times out of ten it means i haven't thought about the story deeply enough. i really believe in this because the world is more complex and more interesting than my imagination. so the world is full of really fascinating things, and you have so many tools on stage as a story teller. any time you want something to happen, you don't have to pretend it happened and lie. you can use a flight of fancy. you can say i imagine what this must look like. you can say anything, and you can go in whatever direction you need to go, but be clear with the audience that you are -- at one moment you're reporting the truth as literally as it happened and in another case

you're using hyperbole and you have to be clear about when you're using each tool. no, for me it's not actually -- it's not that -- it's not actually that hard if, and this is a big if, if you're pretty scrupulous about not believing you know the story before you see it. >> i've had mike daisey on "up" three times so a little housekeeping. when we booked mike on the program two weeks ago and had a conversation eerily resonant about the lines between truth fullness and good story telling i had no idea what was coming down the pike. second we reviewed mike's appearances and he made dramatic claims meeting underage workers that are called into question. that said there's a few red flags. at one point he mentioned he was interviewing hundreds of people in china but the number was more like 50. additionally mike said this. >> in china, the work day is eight hours long. >> right. >> in the books, i never met

anyone, literally never met anyone who even heard of the idea of an eight-hour shift when i was interviewing hundreds of people over there. >> this may have been a bit of hyperbole but even the official chinese news agency quoted a study that found that in china 86% of migrant workers work longer than eight-hour days. the "new york times" reported the norm at the factory is, quote, more like 12 which brings me to my final point on this. certain apologists are gleerfully taking the opportunity to excuse apple and the rest of american electronics manufacturers for the conditions in the factories in china that make their products. forget daisey even exists. the fact remains working conditions in chinese factories are incredibly harsh. workers have no rights and violations are common. there's ample documentation of underage workers though it's quite rare than you were led to believe and ample documentation for unsafe working conditions. a chemical plant explosion just last month killed 25 people. most importantly to focus on the most dramatic instances of

violations also loses the larger point for the vast majority of workers in chinese factories aren't underage and won't be disfigured in a gruesome visible way. no, for them the work is grinding and endless with no work rules or autonomy that might give respite. as one foxconn worker said women work like men and men work like animals. in the version of the monologue that i saw in washington, d.c. he had an extended riff that zeroed in on this point. he invited the audience to see what it would feel like to stand in one place for hours and hours and hours at a time with few if any breaks and do the same small repetitive hand motion, over and over and over in identical sequence, unending. the line in front of you never something to, the drudgery seemingly ending and the discomfort of standing still in the same position for hours beginning to light your nerves in your spine and legs on fire.

and how imprisoned in this monotony you might take a chance to just knock something off the line, down to the ground, to give yourself the briefest and most delicious of reprieves, to bend over and change position and feel those nerves quiet for just an instant, and he asked the audience to imagine the anxiety and dejection that might overtake you exactly midway through the motion of bending down to pick up the item that you've knocked off the assembly line knowing you are now halfway through this momentary break and that you're headed inexorably swiftly back to the prison. monotony of the line. that moment was cut from the play in the later version i saw, but i still remember it, and to me it's daisey at his best. why the "agassi and ecstasy of stove jobs" is so powerful because there's actual human beings with private lives and hopes and dreams and feelings and ailments and family and friends and souls like our own who toil to make the disembody devices that show up in our apple store t.forced us into a posture of empathy to consider

that under another set of circumstances those human beings on the other end of the supply chain could be us, our family, our friends, our loved once. it forced us to ask the question why it is that we get to be the ones who delight in the beautiful design of the nifty devices while others have to be the ones to work under harsh conditions to make them and what is our moral responsibility as fellow hue misto those other human beings on the other end our devices, and it's actually this reason that i find the distortions in daisey's work maddening because it undercuts his own project. that man with the ruined hand actually had a ruined hand, it appears, but didn't work at foxconn and the magical moment didn't according to the translator happen. if that man were your father or uncle or you, you would want your actual story told about what happened. you wouldn't want to be simply used as a narrative prop in some other story. genuine empathy means taking

that man's humanity seriously and honoring that humanity by being truthful to what happened to hip. to see him to a means to a theatrical end is to make him a cog in your own machine and we are called to fight exactly against that. it's delicious. so now we've turned her toffee into a business. my goal was to take an idea and make it happen. i'm janet long and i formed my toffee company through legalzoom. i never really thought i would make money doing what i love. [ robert ] we created legalzoom to help people start their business and launch their dreams. go to legalzoom.com today and make your business dream a reality. at legalzoom.com we put the law on your side.

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it's the fastest, easiest way to create great-looking custom e-mails that bring customers through your door. sign up for your free trial today at constantcontact.com/try. to prove febreze can keep this car fresh, we loaded it with fast food, sweaty hockey gear, and a smelly dog cage. and parked it at a mall. in texas. for two days. then put a febreze car vent clip on the dash and let in real people. it smells good. like laundry fresh out of like the dryer. yeah. a man fresh out of the shower. nailed it. oh yeah. proof. febreze car vent clips keep your car fresh. another way febreze helps you breathe happy. okay why? more is better than less because if stuff is not le-- if there is more less stuff then you might want to have some more and your parents just don't let you because there's only a little bit. right. we want more, we want more. like you really like it, you want more.

right. i follow you. [ male announcer ] it's not complicated. more is better. and at&t has the nation's largest 4g network. ♪ hello from new york. i'm chris hayes. for the past 18 months we've been trying to do a different kind of television on "up." starting tomorrow i'll be trying the same thing in primtime with my new show airing at 8:00 p.m. mere on msnbc. "up" will continue the same discussion that we've tried to pioneer here. there was a striking admission by former press secretary robert gibbs, now an msnbc contributor. we were talking about how they handle the secret drone strikes in pakistan and yemen and that moment and discussion came to mind as we recall what we

consider the best of "up." take a look. >> the white house is where everything goes to die. the perfectly prepared statements. >> a prestigious job, zony. >> used to be when i was in ninth grade. now it's a graveyard. halfway interesting thing they do is throw a big dinner party once a year where they pat themselves on the back and rub shoulders with movie stars. who needs that? >> zoe barnes character from the netflix series "house of cards" who is applying for a job or considering aemploying for a job for the white house correspondents association and deriding it. this question of transparency i think is the deeper and more important one and the point that we all kind of agree with at the table is there's no great democratic stake in whether we know -- whether we can see a picture of the president and tiger woods golfing. i think that's -- that's my own personal view, like i don't care about that, what i do care about -- >> un-american. >> no, but what i do care about is the -- the

administration's -- the overseas legal rationale for its decision that it can kill american citizens in certain circumstances if they are an al qaeda operative. >> whether they can do that here. >> without due process, and on this, on this issue, particularly on national security issues, i feel like there really has been a transparency problem. i want to show a little bit of montage of the white house responding to questions about say the drone program over the years. >> in the google video chat the president acknowledged for the first time the classified drone program. >> i'm sorry, can you be more specific. >> the former director of national intelligence, retired admiral dennis blair, said i believe yesterday that drone attacks, unilateral drone attacks in pakistan actually did more harm to u.s. national security interests than good. does the white house have any opinion about these remarks? >> we believe our relationship with pakistan is essential to

fighting terrorism and terrorists. >> "new york times" reports vice president biden in these sessions talking about the way forward has pressed specifically for a strategy that elevates the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, drones and de-emphasized u.s. combat forces on the ground. can you tell us if that's true? >> i think you can understand why i'm not going to get into internal discussions. >> you can't say one way or the other if that's true or not? >> i'm not going to get into it. >> i understand why. >> you had to put that last picture up, didn't you? >> we got the guy. >> i guess, you know, i should say in defense of white house press secretaries, they do not make the decision. they are the person who has to get sent out to make say what we can and can't talk about. my sense is they don't make the decision about would you're not going to talk about the drone program but do you think the white house has been sufficiently forthcoming? seven memos right now, haven't seen any of those.

the white paper got released right before brennan, not by the white house, but leaked apparently. do you think that you've been sufficiently forthcoming and the white house has been sufficiently forthcoming on this stuff? >> well, i think you've seen recently the president discuss the need and desire to be more forthcoming. i certainly think there are aspects of that program that are and will remain highly sensitive and very secret, but let me give you an example here, chris. when i went through the process of becoming press secretary, one of the things -- one of the first things they told me was you're not even to acknowledge the drone program. you're not even to discuss that it exists. >> wow. >> and so i would get a question like that and literally i couldn't tell you what major asked because once i figured out it was about the drone program i realized i'm not supposed to talk about it, and here's what's inherently crazy about that proposition. you're being asked a question based on reporting of a program that exists. >> right.

>> so you're the official government spokesperson acting as if the entire program -- pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. >> right, yeah. >> i think in many ways, and i think what the president has seen, and i've not talked to him about this, this is my opinion. >> yeah. >> what i think the president has seen is our denial of the existence of the program, when it's obviously happening, undermines people's confidence overall in the decisions that their government makes, and in order to bolster that confidence and bolster the belief that we're making those correct decisions on this policy, you do have to lift the veil some to both acknowledge that it exists as he's done, but also to do it in a way that provides better understanding. i will say ironically the time in which the president probably talked most about the drone program, interestingly enough, was in an interview on "the daily show" with jon stewart, so

going back to that earlier discussion, well, why do you give this person or that person an interview, jon stewart asked a good question and then gave the president the space to give an answer, and my sense is even though you might say, boy, i watched jon stewart and jon stewart probably votes for barack obama other than mitt romney jon asked a very smart question and then gives the president the space to give him an answer and probably would have held him accountable if he would have not. >> took him to the wood shed two nights ago about these documents. >> i was going to say one thing that robert says that's one of the first things that he -- that they went through when he was becoming press secretary, they were thinking about this like in 2007. like they were thinking that they were going to hide xi existence of this program before obama -- >> to be fair on the calendar this. would have been after the election in 2008, and i -- i don't think i'm -- the drone program has existed obviously, if you read any reporting, has

existed -- existed well before barack obama took office. >> that you're going to go into the white house and not talk about, it's an interesting one and interesting statement about what the priorities were for the administration, but i do also understand, i think this is an interesting sort of -- almost goes back to our previous discussion, the reason to talk about the drone program is to avoid having secrecy about the drone program being the story. >> right. >> it is the pressure of the story. >> look, the drone program, it's a little bit of a tough case, right, because in these cases, you knee, you don't actually release information about cia spies going to kill enemies of the united states, so we would never -- if people had information about particular names or spies, et cetera, we would never, robert gibbs, when he's white house press secretary wouldn't do that, but i hear and i think robert actually made a very compelling argument for first amendment principles because over time these things do make people cynical about the government.

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you were just making a point about transparency in the age of social media. >> it's a conflict of the times. these days when you've got social networks and everybody is able to find out he did play basketball with his friends and who the friends are and who was on the five-on-five team and when you're able to find out things he had for breakfast via twitter and social, people thinks that means transparency also across the word. because i couldn't find out these kinds of things before about the president, now i should be able to find out about the drone program and find out about anything that anybody can tweet about. if we paid attention to twittery little bit more we would have found out they were invading bin

laden so people are thinking just because now we get this sort of new and sometimes unfettered access because somebody has got a smartphone on them that i should be able to get access to any question i ever wanted to because it's now just so easy. >> and i think actually in the clips we did show, that was the white house doing the noble work of holding the administration's feet to the fire. >> the press corps. >> the press corps holding their feet to the fire, and i've spent six months investigating who the president has played basketball with and spent six months investigating what the drone program is. there's two sets of information for the washington elite that wants the information that only a finite number of people have. there's a certain number of senior advisers, they have the information and that's what you need access to and there's the gossipy things and then you have the larger big "d" democracy questions about what you --

>> what is our government doing and who is it killing? >> and those are things that i think are much more important. >> absolutely. >> and to bring it around i think to the first -- the first discussion and i think the point you made, anna marie, some ways the perversity here is the fact that i don't get the names of tiger woods that become the story that force access much more than it's no one is acknowledging the drone program, right, and robert, what i'm hearing from you, and i think this makes sense is ultimately it is kind of political outcry that is the pressure that drives things, right? mean, when you said, look, you can't just shut everybody out because people will get angry and then that becomes the story, it does seem to me these decisions are based on political calculations, that's natural, it's a political office, if people are angry and up in the arms about not knowing about the drone program or these creating political problems you'll see more about it and if not not. >> yes, political pressure -- i want to maybe bifurcate this a

bi. i don't want to compare the drone program to the notion that if you didn't see tiger woods, somehow that causes you now to -- >> that's my point. >> look, there's a white house briefing room for a reason, and let's be clear. in no other entity that i can think of in this country does somebody wouk out there virtually every day and answer questions about different topics, and -- and we do that not because we have to but because that's how a democracy works. it only works if we're providing information on what the president and the administration are doing and how that affects people, and it only works if the press corps asks questions of the administration which may lead to more transparency on things like the drone program. >> msnbc contributor robert gibbs, former obama white house press secretary. a lot of fun this morning. love to have you back at table the next time you're in new york. >> chris, thanks for having me. .

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linebacker with the san diego chargers, the miami dolphins and new england patriots. thee years after retirement he killed himself with a gunshot to the chest. his brain showed he had daisey'sgoneagaintive brain disease related to repeated hits to the head and brain traum avrnlgt our discuss about whether football is killing its players. >> last spring nfl all pro linebacker junior seau committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest leaving his brain intact. two weeks ago his brain tested positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy or cte, symptoms. disease with depression and aggression and caused by repeated hits to the head. on wednesday the family sued the nfl saying the league is negligent and concealed damage of blows to the health and put money before the health of its players.

the family alleges that the nfl knew or suspected that any rule changes that sought to recognize that link to brain disease and the health risk to nfl players would impose an economic cost that would significantly and add verdly change the profit margins enjoyed by the nfl and its teams. the seau family is also suing the helmet manufacturer riddell saying the company was negligent in their design. in response to the suit a spokesman for the nfl said wednesday, quote, our attorneys will review it and respond to claims appropriately through the court. in the last few years seau was one of three retired nfl players who committed suicide and tested positive for cte which to date has only been detectable postmortem. ray eaterling and ray duerson were the others. like seau, duerson shot himself in the chest and asked the family to donate the brain so they could study the long-term effects and the easterling and duerson families are suing the nfl and many allegations mirror those of a separate case in the nfl brought by close to 4,000 players. all of this is an increasingly

dire legal and publicity threat to the nfl, a league that zealousy protects its image. the league has responded with rule changes meant to protect players from brain trauma. the deeper question one week before 100 million fans tune into the super bowl is the sort just too dangerous to play? joining us is the widow of ray easterling and kevin turner who played eight seasons for the new england patriots and philadelphia eagles. in 2008 he was diagnosed with als or lou gherig's disease. i want to first express my heartfelt condolences to the loss of your husband. >> good morning and thank you. >> i want to ask you what the last years of his life were like, what were the effects of having this -- this -- this condition? >> when i first met ray, he was

gregarious. he loved jesus. he shared his faith with youth. once he retired from football, he gradually became less and less able to deal with his injuries, but particularly starting in 1989 he began to experience insomnia and depression. his personality changed to the point where i had to pinch myself sometimes i didn't recognize the person whom i'd married, and he had difficulty dealing with authority. he was argumentive a lot. increasingly in 2008 he started to be late for all of his business appointments.

he did not handle money well. we became less and less financially viable, and the -- honestly, the thing that tripped it off was he -- he began to not be able to use his hands. he couldn't button the buttons on his share. he couldn't tie his shoes or write, so we sought the help of a neuropsychiatrist in richmond who diagnosed dementia due to the concussions that he had suffered in the nfl. >> kevin, i want to turn to you and ask when you were diagnosed with als, was your first thought about your playing career? >> to be honest with you, no. i wasn't very sure what als was, and i'd heard of it, but it

wasn't certain as to the details of the condition. >> and when you think back about your playing career, were you -- when you were playing, were you cognizant of the risks? was it something that people talked about, or was it just part of the game essentially? >> well, i knew, and i was very keenly aware of the risks to, you know, my niece, my neck and back. >> right. >> shoulders and things like that. all those things i certainly knew the risk and was willing to accept it. but what i went through over, you know, 12 years or 13 years after my retirement was something -- something totally

different than i expected, just with the changes that went on. they were subtle and, you know, kind of looking back i can see a lot of the things, but at the time, you know, nothing stood out, but i had a lot of the s e same, you know, things that mary described, problem with my organizing, planning, all those sorts of things, you know, and i wound up in '09 getting -- filing for divorce and bankruptcy in the same month. >> i want to let viewers know that the study so far from the national institute of

occupational safety and health finds death from degenerative nerve damage is three times-hour than the general population and deaths from als is four times higher than the general population. -- but, i wish it was more dangerous, like a monster truck or dune buggy! you can't have the same car as me! [ male announcer ] now everyone's going to want one. let's get a jetta. [ male announcer ] volkswagen springtoberfest is here and there's no better time to get a jetta. that's the power of german engineering. right now lease one of four volkswagen models for under $200 a month. visit vwdealer.com today.

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our visionary cloud infrastructure and global broadband network free you to focus on what matters. with custom communications solutions and dedicated support, your business can shine all week long. very good morning to you. i'm richard lui. the white house it's taking seriously the threats by north korea. on saturday north korea warned seoul the korean peninsula had entered a state of war and they threatened to close down a factory complex, the last symbol of interkorean cooperation. a bomb threat at the eiffel tower forced the evacuation of 1,500 workers an staffers. people were allowed to return and christians around the world are celebrating easter. in washington a tradition of

more than 35 years took place at the lincoln memorial. 6,000 gathered for a interdenominational sunrise service and at the vatican pope francis delivered a plea for world peace. it was his first easter mass since becoming pontiff. now back to the best of "up" with chris hayes. you're watching the best of "up." last week we sat dawn with paul krugman about the continued economic recovery and here's what happened. this week ahead of the president's state of the union address on tuesday the white house began laying the groundwork for yet another deal to temporarily stave off the looming sequester, a series of automatic spending cuts to discretionary programs in the pentagon scheduled to take effect in march unless congress can agree on a broader deficit reduction package. president obama said if congress fails to agree on such a package as seems likely he wants to delay the cuts to give lawmakers even more time to hammer out a

deal. >> if congress can't act immediately on a bigger package, if they can't get a bigger package done by the time the sequester is scheduled to go into effect, then i believe that they should at least pass a smaller package of spending cuts and tax reforms that would "rda" the economically damaging effects of the sequester for a few more months until congress finds a way to replace these cuts with a smarter solution. >> on the same day the president spoke the congressional budget office issues -- issued its updated fiscal outlook for the next deck ate and confirmed what a vast body of empirical evidence has told us, austerity has been a considerable drag on growth saying growth, gdp will grow slowly in 2013 because of the fiscal tightening by the federal government that is scheduled to occur until federal law. without that tightening gdp

would increase by 1.5% and they project economic output will remain lower than its potential until 2017 making a full decade of loss of economic growth and with sequester looming we find ourselves in an unfolding moment of the recovery and as you follow the various political lines in the story line and you'll notice that one voice will stand out among the rest. that of paul krugman, "new york times" columnist. his book now out in paper book "end this depression now" lays ought a case for more spending to get the economy going and my pleasure to have him here at the table. >> hi there. >> what do you want to hear in the state of the union on tuesday? >> what i would like to hear i'm not going to hear. i'd like to hear a full-throated endorsement of more stimulus. >> read from your book. >> mostly it's what i hope not to hear. we shouldn't be doing any of this. the whole business with the sequester, all of this is this

is not the time for any of this, and the less he says about the deficit, the better. i mean, really gratified by the second inaugural because he said almost nothing about the deficit. finally broke out of that beltway obsession with the deficit, so if he talks about other things, you know, the middle class, inequality, climate and not about, well, we need to balance the budget, that's what i'm mostly hoping for. >> funny that you said beltway obsession. one of the things interesting about reading your column at one level you're as inside as it gets. i mean, you won the nobel prize. you're extremely highly respected economist, you -- you are on the "new york times" op-ed page. you're not some scrappy outsider and yet your posture is very much as an outsider and you're very critical of what the very serious people are the beltway and i'm wondering how do you -- do you think about your relationship to what is the inside and your self on the outside and how you kind of preserve that distance?

>> part of it is actually preserving the distance literally. i'm not in d.c. you know, i'm mostly working in central new jersey, right, and so not being part of that circuit, but it's also coming at it from, you know, i'm still at some level a professor who is moonlighting in this opinion business, and it's a very insular culture in washington. it's one of people who hang out together, who talk to each other works don't listen. you know, what's odd about my position on this stuff is i am for the most part not doing any kind of odd unorthodox economics. i'm doing macro economics 101, but that is not what people in d.c. hear. it's not just that they don't accept it. for the most part they haven't even heard about it, the notion that maybe the budget deficit is not a problem when the economy is depressed is barely in the washington discourse and because i'm still in touch with american economics 101 i'm sort of out of it. >> why is there this distance?

this is something that's interesting is people that are like yourself that are making the case for kind of a macro economics, keynesian 101, demand stimulus, things like that have been relegated to the margins of the very serious people debate in the beltway and it becomes a political question ultimately, right, the kind of policy question is fairly clear, from where you stand and where i stand so why is there then the gap between macro economics 101 and what policy-makers in washington talk about? >> i think there's two things going on. one of which -- both of which are odd and disturbing but one is sort of grand and one is sort of petty and in some ways the petty may be more important. so the grand thing is washington has been dominated by 30 years by a right wing establishment whose goal is very much to cut back on -- roll back the great society and the new deal, roll back social security, medicare and medicaid and from their point of view, all of this crisis is an opportunity.

they see -- they see big deficits. this is an opportunity to rail against deficits and, of course, what you must do, therefore, is cut social security benefits 20 years for now for some reason to deal with the current deficit and that's -- that's a big part of it, and that influences the debate, but other thing is there are a lot of people in d.c. who posture whose persona is that of being serious, and you show that you're serious by willing to impose suffering, by being willing to impose cuts. the idea that actually the serious thing to do right now is to spend is very, very against that persona, and so they -- they don't -- i think i find it hard to even wrap their minds around the notion that the opposite of what they usually call for is what we need to do right now. >> that's particularly true in the case after financial crises. in your earlier book you talk about a sense -- there's a deep

and moral sense that people need to pay a penance. when there's a crisis there's sin and the only way to get out of sin is penance, and you have a great argument of that in "the return to depression economics" and i want to talk about that and about your role in the public debate right after we come back. [ coughs ] [ angry gibberish ] [ justin ] mulligan sir. mulligan. take a mulligan. i took something for my sinuses, but i still have this cough. [ male announcer ] truth is, a lot of sinus products don't treat cough. they don't? [ male announcer ] nope, but alka seltzer plus severe sinus does it treats your worst sinus symptoms, plus that annoying cough. [ angry gibberish ] [ fake coughs ] sorry that was my fault sir.

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good morning from new york. i'm chris hayes here with paul krugman, author of "in this depression now" and price winning columnist for the "new york times." i was asking you after crises there's a desire for penance. >> yeah. it's, you know, something bad has happened and the natural inclination is to feel that must have been the result of excesses. of course it is the result of excesses by some people and then the notion is that we all must sacrifice which isn't right. i didn't like obama's first fall rag. he had a lot of that boiler plate about shared sacrifice and, you know, when you're

experiencing a depression, you don't need shared sacrifice, you need spending to get the economy moving. you can see how wrong it is if you think about this. a family which has overspent needs to tighten its belt, but it doesn't as part of its belt tightening start by having one of the spouses quit his or her job. >> right. >> but an economy, when you do belt tightening in the economy it leads to mass unemployment which is crazy. >> the bank of england did a study recently that our segment producer found that is so fascinating t.talks about -- he looked at all the countries in the world and it evaluated the percent of country years spent in banking crises and for 1950 to 19790.9% of crises years were spend and from 1980-2010 almost 20% in total country years are spent in banking crisis. what is going on?

>> it's not much of a mystery. it's liberalization. we had from 1935 to 1980 we had a very tightly controlled banking system in just about every country because the great depression was right there in people's memories, the great bank runs. we had strong constraints on international movement of capital so in many ways it was an inefficient system, hard to get a loan, money couldn't fly too high but it was a safe system and then we said, whoa, this is -- we've learned to manage these things, let's open it up and actually since 1980 it has been one crisis after another. latin american debt crisis, savings and loan crisis, asian financial crisis and then, of course, the big kahuna which is the crisis we're still dealing with. >> is there a way of conceiving of a solution to that that is not just going back to what we had during the new deal, or is that the solution? is there some way to combine the insights of the policy revolution that happened in the new deal with the policy revolution that helps through

neo liberalism to create some third phase that gets the best of them or just the things we learned in the new deal we need to relearn? >> most of the things we need to relearn. there were things that weren't necessary. the regulation cue that limited interest on savings accounts was probably too restrictive, and in some ways you can't go back. we're never going to go back that a bank is a building with a row of tellers. the world is too complicated. this is my home field, international capital movement, right, and where is the sign that free movement of international capital is productive anywhere? there really is no evidence. people have looked and looked and can't find that it's done anything except increase the frequency of crises. >> some of the countries with the tightest capital controls are the ones with the success stories, right? >> the miracle of this crisis it's iceland which has come out in part because they broke the rules and imposed temporary

controls on capital that's what you need to do. you need a curfew when you're having riots and this time it's rioting bankers and you have to stop them. >> i want to talk about your influence as a "new york times" columnist. you said those who hold the position if they know how it use it effectively have more influence on national debate than most senators. does anyone doubt that the white house pays attention to what i write? down how to use it effect sniffle. >> that was in response to debunking the people who said you should be treasury secretary. >> there's a little campaign for you to be treasury secretary and you were explaining you why you would not want to be treasury. >> in terms of getting your ideas into the debate i do pretty well. people do read and they do talk about it. do i actually manage to influence policy, that's a harder question, right but does anybody is always the question. look, it's a responsibility. you've got -- you've got 800 words in the most valuable journalistic real estate on the planet, you better at least

catch people's attention with it and i think i do manage to do that. >> we're going to have this sweater debate and we'll talk a little bit with the panel about that and here's what ends up happening. particularly in the eraft financial crisis, economic issues have been front and center and often economic issues that are fairly technical or if not technical described in technical terms and kind of obscured and what ends up happening is people on different parts of the spectrums have their proxies. all the liberals read you. it's just proxyism, right. we trust you, we read you and then ed prescott a nobel prize winning columnist will appear on the "wall street journal" editorial page and they will cite them and my question to you is how should citizens who are not economists go about trying to adjudicate these disputes that's one beat more sophisticated than just reading the person on your team? >> yeah. that's -- that's a hard issue. i mean in, fact what do i do on

issues -- i don't know the technical stuff, and i look for style. i look for people who seem to be actually looking at evidence. i look for people who have been willing on occasion to admit that they have made a mistake in the past, look for some sign that the person is actually seriously studying as opposed to just spouting a public line, but that's -- you know, i've talked about this. it's -- there's this issue that came out from the madoff scandal of infinity fraud where people seem like it's their guy and a lot of that going on in public policy where people listen to sources -- if you actually believe what you read on the "wall street journal" editorial page you would have lost a lot of money but they believe it because it seems like their kind of people. >> you talk about the willingness to make mistakes. what are the big mistakes, what are the big things you've been wrong about in the last ten years? >> the biggest was i was kind of expecting a deficit induced financial crisis in the early years around 2003 because the bush administration -- not just

that they were running deficits but that they were clearly so long term inresponsible, pushing through tax cuts long term, not temporary stimulus and i thought, gosh, the financial markets will punish up for that and i made two mistakes which are now clear to me. one is the advanced country like the united states gets a lot of slack. we're just not treated the way argentina gets treated. >> and you spent a lot of time in your research work looking at countries like argentina that don't get the same amount of slack. >> and the other is we're a country that borrows in our own currency and it's hard to tell a story about a financial crisis of that kind when you borrow in your own currency. the united states is a lot more robust and that sort of thing but i was wrong. i was sounding an alarm that turned out to be wrong circa 2003. >> what's the lesson from that going forward, shouldn't worry about deficits as much? do you take that to the next level, there's monetary theorists and had one of them on the program and i follow a lot of their work, this idea that

basically deficits if you're borrowing in your own currency don't matter at all? >> times are not always like this. there are times that economies are more or less at full employment and printing a lot of money sin flakesry. not now and what the mmft guys, we have no disagreement about what happens now. >> right. >> but they think that it's always the way it is now, and i think that, no, it depends on the conditions and i become a lot more orthodox when the economy is closer to full employment. >> do you consider yourself an orthodox economist? >> i think i'm a pretty ordinary economist. what's amazing is i've managed to sound radical and provocative while basically just requesting going from chapter 14 of a standard macro economics textbook. >> does that say something about the economics -- what is your judgment of how the economics field has perform the last ten years? very harsh on the beltway press and the industrial media complex. >> we've been terrible.

a lot of the field, instead of talking, you know, you want authority and want somebody to adjudicate. many people went with their political prejudices. they have just went -- >> people say you do that. every conservative i read is like you're just a hatchet man for the left. >> read what i write, read the blog because i lay out the case. it's not the "a" team liberal, and i have been on the other side of things in different circumstances, but, no, the economics profession, just generally, people threw away a lot of knowledge. shocking in 2009 how many people didn't know, you know, they were reinventing 1930s vintage fallacies thinking it was fresh thinking because they didn't even know the history their own profession. >> i want to talk to you about one. great mysteries of this recovery, one of the greatest mysteries is this divergence between profits and wages, the continued soaring profits and what the heck is going on and

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all right. here with paul krugman. there's two features that i think are vexing. particularly, difficult to work out why they're happening. one is this cash wording. you have march 2002, cash flow and capital investments for $700 billion each. by march 2012, corporate cash flow at $1.2 trillion. capital investments around $1 trillion and overall corporations have $1.9 trillion on their balance sheets. apple recently has had this bizarre kind of like crisis of having too much cash where the shareholders are telling them, you have all this cash, what is the deal? we don't know how to price this over a certain window of time. were is there so much money sitting on the sidelines? >> so we don't actually know the answer. one thing is striking is if you

think because companies are refusing to invest, that doesn't really fit the facts. business investment, corporate investment, it's not as strong as it was the peak of the last boom and not as strong as the clinton years. it's in the that weak either. if they're earning vast amounts of profits and they don't seem to want to invest it, probably because demand is this doubt dl. but also they seem to be sitting on the stuff and -- it's kind of a -- back in the early years of -- ben bernanke gave a speech about the global savings -- unfortunately, he was sort of saying not to worry about the u.s. housing bubble. but the point is right. there is a global savings glut and a lot of is it corporations. it's a lot of retained earnings just sitting there. not quite sure why, except that maybe they're making so much money, they don't know what to do with it. >> that brings us to the profits

mystery. 10% of gdp in 2012, employee compensation fell to a low in 2012. this is one of the stories of the recovery that's the most worrisome aside from the sluggishness or sort of the employment is that we have unlike europe, we have reachieved growth. we're in a recovery. but there's this tremendous yawning chasm between profits and wages. how long is that sustainable. at a certain point, either consumption-based economy, the profits coming from selling things to people and if people don't have money from wages and they don't have money from huge amounts of debt, where is that money and why are we projecting out profits so far? >> it's an interesting -- i mean, there's a point of view. some economists will tell you, well, the corporations are avail and all of those profits ultimately accrue to somebody so investors must know that the money is there so they're going to spend and real life isn't

like that. this looks like a big source, a sinkhole using the phrase, for purchasing power. corporations are accumulating. profit story is relatively new. we've had so many qualities since 1980. until the year 2000, it was all among earners. hedge fund managers and -- it was among people who were one way or another collecting a paycheck since 2000. it's been a redistribution from labor of all kinds to corporate profits. we don't quite know what that's about. might be technology, the rise of the robots, increased monopoly power, some combination of the two. but it suddenly has become, it's almost as big a deal as the great recession itself. is really transforms everything and not in a good way. >> how do we think about what to do about it? >> one answer is a lot of what the business interests are campaigning for is let's cut corporate profit taxes. cut corporate taxes. maybe not. maybe we should be raising them again because this is a big

source of our problems. we need to start thinking about paying for essential programs, in part by taxing capital income. by the way, a little bit of obama care, isn't that paid for by a special tax on investment income. we need to do more of that. we might want to think, if this is market power, how about, you know, revitalizing anti-trust enforcement. that went away in the '80s. that was probably a big mistake that we're starting to pay for now. >> thank you for joining us today for up. join me tomorrow night for the lawn of my new program at 8:00 eastern on msnbc. we'll have more of the best choices for up next weekend. tune in saturday, april 13th with steve kornacki. stay tuned for melissa harris-perry next. thanks for getting up. i was cooking dinner for my family.

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