tv NOW With Alex Wagner MSNBC April 29, 2014 1:00pm-2:01pm PDT
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>> the walls are closing in around donald sterling. >> basketball backlash. >> effective immediately, i am banning mr. sterling for life from any association with the clippers organization or the nba. >> huge press conference by the nba. >> i will urge the board of governors to force a sale of the team. >> this is not new with the clippers. this has been going on since i was in the league in '76. >> he thought black tenants smelled bad. this was out there. >> this has been a plague, a cancerous plague. >> it feels like a plantation mentality in the 21st century. >> that is the mentality of a slave master. >> this must end. >> more than a dozen spaonsors have cut ties or their relationship with the los angeles clippers. >> i hope that every bigot sees what happened to mr. sterling. if he can fall, so can you. >> he's been picking on the
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little guy his entire career. >> it's over for you. it's terminal. >> now he knows what it's like to have people gang up on him. >> a $2.5 million fine and a lifetime ban. that was the penalty doled out this afternoon by nba commissioner adam silver as he announced the eagerly anticipated results of an investigation into racist remarks that silver confirmed were those of l.a. clippers owner donald sterling. >> the hateful opinions, voiced by that man, are those of mr. sterling. the views expressed by mr. sterling are deeply offensive and harmful. that they came from an nba owner only heightens the damage and my personal outrage. >> silver said sterling himself acknowledged that it is his voice on the tape.
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a recording that has created the most high profile crisis for the nba in years. the commissioner added that sterling did not, to silver's knowledge, express any remorse or other views about his remarks. and while $2.5 million is but a fraction of sterling's estimated $1.9 billion estimated net worth, the lifetime ban no doubt comes as a blow. silver added that he doesn't want the league to stop there. >> i will urge the board of governors to exercise its authority to force a sale of the team and will do everything in my power to ensure that that happens. when the board ultimately considers his overall fitness to be an owner in the nba, they will take into account a lifetime of behavior. >> key word, lifetime. as the clippers prepare to hit their home court tonight for game five of their playoff series against the golden state warriors, the team issued a statement of support for the nba's ruling, saying, quote, now
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the healing process begins. joining me now is the host of msnbc's "all in," chris hayes. gentlemen, thanks for joining me. >> thanks, alex. >> i thought that mention of the word lifetime of past behavior is the closest indication we have that the nba really, truly is considering all of donald sterling's life, all of donald sterling's racist maneuvers in meeting this out. >> i think donald sterling is a special case. he's objectively the worst pro sports owner of any franchise. just terrible at his job. forget everything. forget how horrendous the comments were. horrible at his job. horrible at running a team. has been for years. then there's the fact that there is a long track record. you look back and start looking at the allegations that surfaced in other lawsuits about horribly offensive things he said, lawsuits that were settled for
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undisclosed ams. you hear this, then you look back, the probability that those things were uttered has just skyrocketed in everyone's estimation. i think you're right. i think for awful the invective that will come from some corners, the thought police, we're going to fire people because of one thing they said in a private conversation, i think it's hard to separate the reaction right now from what's happening from the record he accrued and frankly, embarrassing state of affairs in which there was this kind of collective silence from the nba, from the local naa krnaacp that him an award. all while donald sterling was donald sterlinging. >> it became an indictment of the nba. as chris points out, the organization had effectively looked the other way for so long at the same time as previous nba commissioners were talking about clothing rules and dress codes for players because this is
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about respectability, they had on owner who was a known racist. >> right. not just a known racist and that he held impolite opinions, as a building manager, he systemically discriminated against blacks and latinos in some of the most egregious ways, ways that harkin back to segregation. he refused to rent to them. he asked his staffers to record their edadmicities. if you look at media reports in 2003 and 2006 when the lawsuits came up, people were talking about them and the nba just short of shrugged at the fact that one of their owners was engaging in federal housing discrimination and was settling for huge sums to get it off the table. >> which is, jonathan, a
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tacit -- it is a tacit acceptance of racist practice. the person we haven't heard from throughout all of this is donald sterling himself. except for on that tape, where he seems to disavow the idea that he's a racist. he keeps saying it's the culture, it's the culture. i'm reminded of cliven bundy who also refused to acknowledge he was a racist. as has been written, racist has become a term monstrous and meaningless. it denotes something so vial and inhumane that no real person might ever meet the standard, which is to say it exists in this other worldliness and even racists themselves can't admit they're racist. >> that's true. i think matt lewis might have put his finger on it, when it comes to cliven bundy and donald sterling, we're looking at two men, sterling is in his 80s, bundy is in his 70s. we're talking about men from another time, an ugly time in our history and they just
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haven't let go of their racist li leanings, their racist thoughts. the past lawsuits of racial discrimination that donald sterling has been sued over, those are things that happened to donald sterling in his other life, his business life. when nba commissioner adam silver was asked about this, he said those recordings were the first recordings to come directly into contact with the nba. now, i mean, they can be used as cover for why action wasn't taken before. when he answered in another question that the entirety of donald sterling's past will play into what happens in terms of forcing him to sell, that that -- i mean, people usually try to use their past to show how wonderful they are and how kind and warm-hearted they are. that's not the case here for donald sterling. >> chris, what has been weird and disconcerting in a lot of
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ways disappointing to me is something we talked about right before this show began, the reaction we've gotten from some conservatives who have proven incapable of acknowledging that racism exists and that what donald sterling said was racist and it should not be tolerated. rush limbaugh said this guy is a big democrat. the only reason he's in trouble is because he didn't give enough money to obama. bill kristol defending him this week, saying everyone goes hysterical from two or three sentences. in the press reporter, should someone lose their teams for remarks made in private? is this a slippery slope? you at least have the cover that this guy is a democrat. >> just don't take the bait. yes, really racist, terrible. ted cruz said that today. it is amazing to me. it's like they can't help themselves. nature ab hhors racism.
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he has some black employees. how racist can the guys be? >> some of his best friends are black, right? >> it is such a -- it is amazing to me how much -- this past week with bundy and with this, the squishyness of this term race, racism and racist, the difficulty we have as a society putting our finger on what it is, but it is, to get back to what jameel said, if there's one thing that's racist, it's driving people out of the apartments you own because of color of their skin. that ranks above saying horribly offensive things in a private conversation. to me, this is a moment where we look at what's going on in our society. we try to figure out why this is a firestorm. it is. i'm going to cover it tonight in the "a" block in my show. >> on your show "all in." >> it is a graphic
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representation of something pro-found in american life. why is it the case that the columns written in 2003, '04, '' '05, and '06. that is the stuff of racism. it is so much easier to talk about this. it is so much more accessible. there is this mismatch. that's the challenge. the whole game is getting from point "a" to point "b." >> we talk about cliven bundy. there was the supreme court decision to uphold the ban on affirmative action. i feel part of the reasons conservatives have a hard time acknowledging racism consists, in terms of policy, they are building or stripping away policy based on the notion we live in a post-racial society. right? >> right. >> this is the predicate for that supreme court decision, which is, you know, if you don't want to be racially discriminatory, don't discriminate based on race. it is why sonia sotomayor had her elegant and impassioned
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dissent. this goes to the bed rock of what's going on between the two parties. >> right. republicans, and i think conservatives broadly, have a hard time seeing that racism isn't just people being implolie or saying mean things. it's persistent across generational lines and are reinforced by actions we take. something like this does damage and rises hierarchies. not all democrats get that. certainly very fuel republicans get it. i'm not sure what it would take for republicans to see this. for me, it's easy to see. you glan at any statistic and it's right there staring you at face. >> the other thing that's been brought up in all of this, jonathan, is something that chris was talking about, the
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sort of i have black friends defense. one has black co-workers. one is the owner of a team where there are -- there is a disproportionate share of black players and fans, disproportioned as in a larger number. and that somehow becomes the excuse. then there's the added weirdness that donald sterling has a mistress who is half black. >> right. >> if anything, the weirdness of all that shows us just how insidious racial attitudes can be, that you can have all these things. that you can say to your black mistress, you can sleep with black people, just don't put them on your instagram feed. it shows how entrenched and psychologically complicated racism is. >> it's insidious but it's complex. i mean, strom thurmond had a black daughter. we've seen instances of this for years now in recent memory. this is interwoven into the
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history of our country. and the problem is, we as a nation have not been able to have this conversation in a calm, trust-filled manner. attorney general eric holder just may be a few weeks in his tenure as attorney general in 2009 gave a speech at a black history program at the justice department where he uttered the now memorable phrase that we are, quote, a nation of cowards when it comes to talking about race. i went back and looked at that speech. five years later, it's still true. we are a nation of cowards. it's because -- to have the conversation about race and what it means to us as african-americans and white americans, all americans in this country, it requires trust. it's such a personal conversation that you can only have that conversation with someone you trust. and the problem that we have is
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that collectively we don't trust each other to have that conversation. so while it's wonderful that the entire nation erupted in outrage over cliven bundy last week and over donald sterling over the weekend and right through today, those are easy reactions to have. the harder reaction to have and the harder conversation to have is with our friends and co-workers and strangers, frankly, about all of the little -- the small, the more nuanced ways racism rears its ugly head. >> chris, this story is not over. >> no. >> there's the question of what happens. it's far from over. the question of what happens to donald sterling, whether they can force a sale of this. what will clippers teammates do? what will people standing in solidarity to those people do? >> this is an existential threat to the league, a black league.
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it is a black league. probably the most prominent predominantly black institution in american life, the national basketball association. right? that's not just the players. that is the fan base. if you go to a basketball game, that is a far more racially deverse audience there than in almost any other place that you will encounter in america. this is existential to the league. this is what they are dependent upon for all those dollars that throw into the pockets of all those co-owners. the question now becomes can you get the whip count up to the 20 owners you need? i think it's 20 of the 30. to get him to force a sale? that is a fascinating story. if i were a writer for the house of cards version of this, i would love to be in the rooms in which those discussions are happening, in which every one of those owners are saying, i've said real messed up stuff that i hope no one tapes and i don't want my team taken away from me. >> tellingly, an nba official,
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said to the board of governors were not consulted and only found out what the board was going to do right before the 2:00 p.m. conference. >> chris hayes, jonathan capehart and jameel buoy, thanks so much. this is an important conversation. i'm glad i can trust to have it with you guys. check in all in" tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern. after the break, a major new development in the fight against the republican efforts to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. just this afternoon, a federal judge in wisconsin struck down that state's controversial voter i.d. law. i will talk with the aclu's project, next on "now." 's alway- who gets the allstate safe driving bonus check. rock beats scissors! [ chuckles ] wife beats rock. and with two checks a year, everyone wins. [ female announcer ] switch today and get two safe driving
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just hours ago a federal judge struck down wisconsin's controversial 2011 voter i.d. law claiming that it unfairly burdens poor and minority voters. the ruling could set a precedent for similar challenges. at least 16 states currently have similar laws already in effect. the wisconsin law requires all voters to show a state-issued photo i.d. at the polls, some that as many as 11% of eligible voters, primarily seniors, people of color and low income voters, something they do not have. the saga may not be over. last month wisconsin governor scott walker threatened to call a special session of the state's legislature if the law were overturned. >> people overwhelmingly told us in the state they want to have voter i.d. if the courts, regardless of
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which could it would be, were to say you could have it if not for this provision or that provision, we want to modify that so that a law like that were in effect before the next election. >> moments ago walker's office released a statement saying we believe the voter i.d. law is constitutional and will ultimately be upheld. we are reviewing the decision for any potential action. on a completely unrelated note, governor walker who lost the black vote by a whopping 91% in 2012 is on the ballot this fall. joining me now is dale hogue, the aclu was a plaintiff in this case. congratulations on this round. governor walker's office issued a ominous statement a few minutes ago. do you think that ruling will stand? >> i absolutely do think it's going to stand, alex. thanks for having me on today. we took this case to trial in
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november. i don't think there's anyone that watched that trial. listen to the evidence we presented. there are over 300,000 voters in wisconsin that don't have a voter i.d. this violates the federal voting rights act. there's absolutely no evidence of in-person voter fraud happening in wisconsin that these laws could prevent. i don't think there's a single person who watched that trial and could fairly say we weren't going to win this case. >> dale, the lawlessness of what governor walker has done is stunning to me. given the fact that he, you know, he is trying to actively disenfranchise the people who didn't vote him into office, in an election season. and now is saying he may call a special session of the legislature to re-evaluate these laws. it seems the only thing standing in the way are these judges, in
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arkansas something happened last week where a federal judge struck down another one of these voter suppression efforts. while that is a good thing that some emergency stop exists, it's also a little bit disconcerting that this is what's happening to our legislative process. and the only folks standing in the way of chaos are judges who are unelected. >> i agree with you entirely. it's incredibly disconcerting. what's remarkable to me, alex, we weren't talking about voter i.d. laws and voter suppression ten years ago. >> right. >> no one was concerned about this. people who are doing what i did, vote what i did, voting right litigation. most people don't care about it. then all of a sudden, 2008 rolls around, the electorate gets younger, more diverse and we have these voter suppression laws popping up all over the country, the voter i.d. laws
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that disproportionately target voters of color. as you pointed out, scott walker was not supported by black voters in wisconsin. we don't think these facts are coincidences. it's too strange to be a coincidence. >> really quick, what happens with the other efforts of voter suppression that scott walker has made. he's eliminated early voting, trying to equalize the voting process for rural and urban voters which disproportionately favors rural voters. is there any sense that those efforts will be rolled back in some way, shape or form? >> there's no legal challenge going on right now to the early voting cutbacks in wisconsin. we're certainly evaluating all of our options, just like governor walker is. be sure in the weeks ahead there will be more news about that. >> the chapter is not written yet. aclu's dale ho, thank you so much for your time. >> thanks a lot. coming up, paula deen,
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purveyor of deep fried racism is returning to the spotlight. details on her $100 million rehab project, next. this is k. to prove to you that aleve is the better choice for him, he's agreed to give it up. that's today? [ male announcer ] we'll be with him all day as he goes back to taking tylenol. i was okay, but after lunch my knee started to hurt again. and now i've got to take more pills. ♪ yup. another pill stop. can i get my aleve back yet? ♪ for my pain, i want my aleve. ♪ [ male announcer ] look for the easy-open red arthritis cap.
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miami food blog it is time to get her groove back. quote, when i step out on stage, it's the most amazing feeling, y'all. i love that kind of adrenaline rush. by going on tour, i can see all my amazing fans in different cities across the united states. by across the united states, deen actually means across a particularly southern fried swath of the country. all of the dates announced thus far are in the deep south. just ahead, a few months ago, congressman michael grimm threatened to throw a reporter off a balcony in the u.s. capitol building. today that same congressman is now facing federal indictment, just ahead of election season. will republicans take a page from grimm's playbook? john stanton joins me, next. ♪
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congressman michael grimm does not want to talk about some of the allegations concerning his campaign finances. we want to get him on camera on that but he, as you saw, refused to talk about that. back to you. >> let me be clear to you. you ever do that to me again, i'll throw you over this [ bleep ] balcony. >> why, why, i just wanted to ask you. >> if you ever do that to me again. >> why. why, it's a valid question. >> i will break you in half like a little boy. that was the threat issued a few months ago by staten island congressman grimm. today it is congressman grimm who's looking over the edge at
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what could be a very big fall. yesterday grimm was handed a 20-count indictment after allegedly pocketing more than $1 million in revenue and wages from his manhattan health foods restaurant, healthalicious. the allegations include mail, wire, health care and tax fraud. in addition to two counts of perjury. but for those expecting a flash of contrition from a man who just got hit with 20 criminal charges so far, no dice. >> i know i'm a moral man, a man of integrity. and i also know i have a lot more service and leadership to provide this country. i will get right back to work as i always have. with honor and distinction, i will serve. and then, on top of all that, i have an election to win. >> soon after that defiant press conference grimm announced he was stepping down from the powerful house financial
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services committee. but for now, house republican leadership is standing by their man or at least they're standing by their talking points. >> do you think michael grimm has resigned. >> he stepped down from his committee assignment last night. i think he made the right decision. i think all members should be held to the highest ethical standards. mr. grimm is under indictment. he resigned from his committee assignment and i think he made the right decision. >> you're not ruling out backing someone else. >> i think he made the right decision. >> joining me now is washington bureau chief for buzzfeed, john stanton. it is an awkward position for speaker john boehner. is there anything the gop leadership can do about this guy at this point? >> no, i don't think so. there's a pretty well
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established pattern on both side, frankly. nancy pelosi has done this. speaker boehner has done this in the past. if you do something that involves taking your pants off, you get in trouble for that. you have to resign. if you do something that involves money or criminal allegations, generally speaking as long as you keep your head down, resign from a committee, you can stay around until you get found guilty of something. it's become essentially the rule of thumb in the house and in the senate, you know, sexual allegations are one thing. you can sort of slide over another allegation. >> i think that wisdom generally holds true except for an election year, if you're in a swing district and you've done something bad,. one would think if this happened before the filing deadline, the gop would have looked long and hard and said is there someone else we can run?
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>> there's that possibility. i think they still -- they have, for whatever reason they've made this callation in theculation i. they did it with charlie wrangle, for instance. they ultimately decided not to force him out. he got into a tough primary challenge. for republicans, this is a headache politically because this really does make this district a pretty likely pickup for democrats at this point. it's never any good when you have 20-count indictment brought down on a guy that was in a difficult race to begin with. >> some people have said this is like getting al capone on mail fraud. the litany of things michael grimm may have done that may be questionable, it's a long list. he has a long and storied list of strange of course paying--
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occupations. there have been a few republican congressman in the recent weeks who have had troubles with the law or the standards of polite society. vance mccallister is one of them. moments ago, eric cantor called for him to resign from office immediately. tell me how you read that politically. >> i think it falls in this category of we will not accept your personal -- to bring shame on the house of representatives and our party, particularly in an election year. he's admitted to these things. he said he would resign. there's a certain amount of sense there, saying, look, you're not going to run for congress. if you stick around, it will be brought up over and over again. the election, whoever will end up replacing you, we don't need you to be causing this kind of friction for us. i would be stunned, frankly, if he's still in the house after memorial day at the latest.
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i think he's probably on his way out the door at this point. >> before we go, john, i feel like we've agreed on the terms of dismissal, if you will. at the same time, david visittt may be the next governor of louisiana. he's no stranger to sexual scandal. on a sea of waves and sea foam to asend to the statehouse? >> you know, he actually did a good job of it, honestly. he spent almost the better part of a year hunkered down, not talking to the press, not showing up on the floor. if he did it was quickly on a late friday afternoon when no one was in the senate. and then he slowly started to come back out in the public. he still doesn't talk to reporters, generally, except for controlled circumstances. he spent a year in the
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wilderness, essentially hiding from the public and getting the scandal away from him. that's what you'll have to do. in the house be it's a much more accelerated time frame because of the two years. this does not square, obviously with general notions of ethics and standards in terms of how you would deal with this. not much in congress ever does. >> that is true. a whole year in the wilderness, however did he survive? just feeding on nuts and berries and no blogs. buzzfeed's john stanton. thank you, as always, my friend. >> good to be here. coming up, a new study concludes that the u.s. is no longer a democracy. the huffington post's ryan grimm and the guardian's anna marie cox join me for a discussion about economic elite domination. that is just ahead. my guests are always asking me, "nathan, which dish is better?". now i say you can have it all with our new seafood trios! red lobster's new seafood trios is three times delicious!
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to date, the white house has never released official numbers for the total number of people killed or injured in targeted killing operations. drone strikes. in countries like pakistan and yemen. these attacks have been carried out in near complete secrecy and by the looks of it, that will not be changing anytime soon.
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according to "the new york times" mark mazzetti, the senate has quietly stripped a provision from an intelligence bill that would have required this to be made public every year. the chair of that committee has agreed to take it out of the bill. last may, president obama said he wanted to facilitate transparency on this very issue. but so far, with little action from either the legislative or the executive branch, america's drone war appears to be as opaque as ever. after the break, is the american empire starting to look a lot like the roman one? i'll talk with ryan grimm and the guardian's anna marie cox about a stunning new study that reveals the power of the few over the many. that's next.
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states won independence from great britain, ridding itself of the uk's class system, its monarchy and system of governance, more than two centuries after that happened, this headline appeared on the bbc, study, u.s. is an oligarchky, not a democracy. britain's broadcasting service is reporting on evidence that the united states has officially turned into an oligarchky. this is because last week, a study by two nobel prize winning economists concluded almost exactly that. after reviewing answers to 1,800 public policy questions asked of americans between 1981 and 2002, then breaking down those responses by income level and determining how often each group saw their interests enacted, the study found that u.s. policy rarely aligns with the preferences of the average citizen. but it almost always aligns with those of the economic elite. americans, the study concluded,
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do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association. but we believe that if policy making is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent americans, then america's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened. joining me now is correspondent for the guardian and spring fellow at the university of chicago institute of politics, anna marie cox and washington bureawç chief at the huffington post, ryan grimm. ryan, let me start with you, in terms of what or who is to blame, some part of this would seem to be an inevitable outcome of the capitalist system. but some part of it also seems to speak to institutional failure. where does the greater onus lie in your opinion? >> basically with unfedored capitalism, we have been taking the fedors off of it steadily since the 1980s. the more that you reduce marginal tax rates on the rich,
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the more incentive you give people to become extremely wealthy. in the 1980s there was a real cultural push to celebrate greed. and what we have today in washington, for instance, is that staffers who come to the hill, they might want to do good, but then after five years or so, when they started out making $30,000, $40,000 a year and they were happy, now they're making $130,000 and they're unhappy because they're constantly dealing with people, lobbyists who are making $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. those are the people they're listening to. they come in, let them write legislature for them. the staffers think they have to do their bidding in order to get jobs on kay street. that's why the agenda is set by these big industries. it's not necessarily just campaign contributions. there's a lot more money going into the system that gets recorded. >> anna marie, the study is, i found, deeply distressing and the data that's revealed is farely shocking. if you look at the two graphs
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that we can pull up, one shows what happens when the average citizen wants something done? even if you get 100% of average citizens pushing for something like, say, gun safety reform or increase in minimum wage, it's probably only going to get past 0.3% of the time. if you look at economic elites, the more economic elotts want something, the greater the likelihood of its adoption. it's a flat line versus a sharply ascending one. when i look at that, i think, you know, it is a seering indictment, it's not just one party, it's both. and the studies, martin guillens, one of the researchers that put the study together, was asked is one party more to blame than the other? he says, no, both parties share in this. there is no party that effectively actively is working to further advance the desires held by the average american citizen. from your point of view as a spring fellow at the university of chicago's institute of politics, ho has failed more? to some degree i feel like republicans, poor people have
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given up on republicans in terms of them actually helping out. and in some ways, the democratic party has been tasked, almost solely, with this responsibility. it's failing, clearly. >> it is. if something will be done about it, it will require wholesale changes, radical changes where you need something like federally funded elections, national voter reform, do a popular vote rather than electoral college. candidates would have to campaign in all 50 states rather than just 10. if we had publicly financed elections we might see more people running for office that are not millionaires. right now, basically congress is made up of millionaires because it is expensive to run for congress. since the '80s, the price for running for congress has gone up 344%. it now costs about $1.6 million to run a congressional cam pan these days. i mean, no wonder they're getting outside funds.
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and then there's this thing once you get there, being rich yourself as a congressman you are surrounded by other rich people, it's kind of normalizing. i wish that, you know -- my ideas are utopian, i feel. i feel something that might actually happen is if we could just get congress to actually hang out with more poor people and more working class people. if there was some way, like if they actually went out and met them, maybe we'd see progress. i don't know. like i said, i feel like the real solutions are pretty radical. >> ryan, you interviewed thomas pikety. amazon has sold out of this book. it's not often that economics grab the american imagination by the stranglehold. you interviewed the guy. what do you think that is? it feels like the question of inequality and who is pulling the levers in all three branches of government, specifically the
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legislative, it feels like that's more -- that conversation is happening, that dialogue is stronger now than it has been in recent years. to what do you attribute that to? >> puts empirical evidence on what people already know, the system is pushing people down and it's helping the rich get richer, because there are two explanations that are offered for why people are suffering. one is offered by paul ryan. and he'll say that welfare is coddling people, making them weak. they're falling asleep in the hammock of government assistance. and it's their fault. the reason that you're suffering, it's on you. and people are -- but i did everything right. i played by all the rules. i went to college, worked for 20 years and i did a great job and then i got laid off so that my company's stock price would go up for two days. and now i've been unemployed for two years. and that's my fault? it doesn't make sense to people and it strikes them as
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fundamentally cruel and unjust. you have pikety come along and say, no, actually, capitalism, unless it is -- unless there's a dramatic intervention done, will consistently drive wealth towards the rich. and the rich will keep getting richer. everyone else will keep falling further and further behind. and that makes much more sense to people's lived experiences than paul ryan's story does. >> anna, you know, perhaps even more distressing is the fact that the machine that we put in place, which is a representative democracy, is increasingly nonfunctioning and we're outsourcing the big decisions to places like the judicial branch and the supreme court that are not accountable to anyone. how does one stop that runaway train? >> if i had the solution i'd be running for office. although i guess i couldn't afford to. i'm not sure what we do. at least we have a couple more branches of government. i mean, in some ways the judicial branch is actually more
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representative than congress. i mean, there are middle class people in the judicial branch. i agree with ryan. i'm not sure that anything can be done unless we can agree to sort of fedor the capitalist system we have. >> anna marie cox and ryan grimm, thank you both for your time. that is all for now. i'll see you back here tomorrow at 4:00. "the ed show" is next. welcome to "ed ed shthe ed i'm ready to go! let's get to work. >> effective immediately, i am banning mr. sterling for life from any association with the clippers organization or the nba. >> don't come to my games, don't bring black people and don't come. >> the hateful opinions, voiced by that man, are those of mr. sterling.
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