tv The Dylan Ratigan Show MSNBC November 4, 2011 4:00pm-5:00pm EDT
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let herman be herman, sure! let's just make sure herman isn't president. thanks very much for watching. dylan ratigan is here. and he'll take us forward. dylan, all yours. >> thank you so much, martin. hope you have a wonderful weekend, by the way. >> same to you, sir. >> i won't be seeing you, but it will be nice, i'm sure. >> invite me and i'll come and see you. >> you've been playing music without me. i know how it is. the show starts right now. all right. the big story today, reading the numbers. good friday afternoon to you. i am dylan ratigan. and as always, it is the first friday of the month. and as such, the u.s. unemployment data for the previous month is released. in october, the employment rate did inch down a tenth of a percent from 9.1 to 9%. some would say, let the good times roll, although not too many these days. it comes as the european debt mess serves as a backdrop for a meeting of the g-20. that in the south of france.
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truth be told, our country, america, needs 30 million jobs added here at home, not 80,000. but to the cheerleaders out there that say, hey, at least jobs were created and that's better than nothing, that may be inadequate at this point. two friends of this program joining us now with what i think will be two different views, but sincerely and impassioned points of views towards creating jobs in america. peter morici and jared bernstein. let's plan on splitting this thing in half. quick and dirty on jobs, peter? >> another mediocre month. 80,000 jobs is not a heck of a lot. the good news is, it was widespread. lots of sectors picked up a few jobs. banking lost a couple, telecom did. but we expect that, given what's going on in those industries. we simply have to do better than this, and we're not. >> jared, two cents on jobs here, and then let's get to the g-20. >> well, look, one sector that continued to do badly was the
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public sector, shed 24,000 jobs, over 350,000 over the past year, down in the public sector. now, states have to balance their budgets and localities and cities have been just shredding jobs. cops, police, firefighters. the president actually has a plan to help, but it's going nowhere in congress. >> real quick, let's evaluate the politics on jobs and cut to greece and the g-20. is anyone expecting anything of consequence on the policy front between now and the end of the year, jared? >> only one thing. the payroll tax holiday, it's almost unfathomable to me that congress would allow taxes to rise. the payroll tax holiday expires at the end of the last month. i expect at the last minute, we'll see that renewed, at least for the next year. >> peter, anything you're anticipating? >> i think there'll be some benefits that are renewed or added so it will be a balanced package and equally attractive to republicans. that's about all we're going to get. >> now let's talk about our fabulous western banking system, which works perfectly, as long as the math works out.
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but when the math doesn't work out, you can run into a little bit of a hiccoup here and there. we find ourselves, much as we did, it would seem, in '07, '08, with a very high-risk borrower, and it was the subprime borrower five or six years ago, it is now greece, a very high-risk borrower having accumulated a pile of debt a la the american consumer. you can sort of see the parallel. and once again, in this case, jared, it is an economy, in greece's case, that literally is smaller than dallas-ft. worth, texas, and yet the producers that work for me here on this show in new york and the folks that work on the trading floors in hong kong and people that work in, you know, factories and biotech companies in india are all sitting around wondering why it is that their job and their raise and their future this next year may be affected because a
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country smaller than dallas-ft. worth has apparently become so important to the western banking system -- >> it reminds me, a few year ago, a comedian said, i don't get, a guy at the end of the my block forecloses and iceland goes broke. this is a matter of int interconnectedness. this is an interconnected story. it's the result of a monetary union that is not a fiscal union. it's the result of some pretty prof la gat and riskless features, on the failure to reflect your borrowing in your books. you know, you're absolutely right, dylan. it's probably a point that's not made enough. it's almost like you've got one of these shadowed banking investment structure vehicles on the side here where people can't even figure out what's going on. we do know the way forward, which is rip off the band-aid in greece and have a big enough
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bailout fund to actually get things going. but, boy, the lurching on the policy side has really been very unfortunate. >> peter, let's be honest. even if we get the resolution and the write-down in greece and we improve everything on the list and can right now and blah blah blah. as long as you have a banking system that does not have capital requirements, that's incentivized, has a financial incentive to manufacture debt will not the financial system always seek to manufacture debt where it is easiest manufactured, which is with the poorest and most desperate? in other words, against? >> you hit it on the head. the last couple of years, goldman sachs was over there helping greece mortgage their airport revenues into the future. you know, push the problem out just a little further, so now it is completely unmanageable. bankser are great at that in america. they're doing the same with state and local governments here. sell us your parking fees. but what is really dangerous about this greek situation is
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that this is no resolution. if they do everything right, they run the table for the next nine years, they still have a debt that's 120% of gdp and most economists consider that unworkable. let's face it. even if they pull this thing off, we'll be back at this in 2012 or '13. greece is going to be back in trouble again. and that's going to mean, now, italy will be in trouble. already, there's a lot of nervousness about its debt. and if its borrowing costs get much higher, we can't get out. >> go ahead, jared. >> you mentioned capital reserve ratios? >> yes. >> there's a little institution you might have heard about recently, mf global? >> yes. they seem to have an interesting position they put on. >> so they're leverage ratio, according to what i've seen, was 44 to 1. >> that's all? >> that seems pretty stable. >> so just for our viewers, you know, conservative, really plausible kind of capital ratios are more in the 20 to 1 or lower kind of range. >> i remember karl icahn and ron
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pearlman as the barbarians at the gate in the '80s, it was outrageous they were, what, 8.5 to 1. >> yeah. the thing here, the question you have to ask yourself is, lessonlessons learned? >> yes. >> hard to really see it. it is the case that dodd/frank financial reform does have capital reserves in there, but it's up to the regulators to decide where to put them. and they haven't really been on that yet. >> and not only have they not been on that, peter, the swaps market, which is where a lot of this leverage lives, has little to no capital requirements and exists in the off exchange with nobody clearing it. i think it's -- blaming greece for these problems is like blaming the subprime borrowers. greece stupid? yeah, you bet, they're real stupid. but they're also the size of dallas, texas. so who's stupider? greece, who was like, we'll take all the money, or the western
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bank regulators who said it was legal to give the greeks this kind of leverage. >> well, look at the swaps market. the swaps market is anywhere between $300 billion and $600 billion -- >> trillion! >> trillion, trillion dollars. and the whole global economy, you know, its capital value, is not that much. it's a fraction of that much. which means if rhode island fails, just the swaps on rhode island's debt is enough to take down the entire u.s. banking system and ripple across the pond. and that's exactly the problem. greece is like rhode island failing. >> that's the interconnectedness, and that's why you need not just financial reform in this country, but financial reform that has a global reach. >> absolutely. >> one idea that has been proposed, or at least has been bandied about, for a long time, is to push the swaps market, where a lot of this risk is hidden, on to exchanges. we have our commodity on exchanges, we have our stocks on exchanges. we trade pretty much everything
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in at least some sort of clearing market, including in the debt markets. >> but it's a difference. >> i like it. >> there's a difference, though. >> stocks are -- there are limited quantities of stocks to be a publicly traded company, you have to list on an exchange and meet certain requirements. anyone who wants to can write a risk contract on any event, any place in the world. i mean, you know, will the. crops fail in iowa? so the thing is, how do you force all that nonsense on to an exchange? >> let me give you guys an answer. i asked dick grasso, who used to run the new york stock exchange, this exact question. i said, dick, how do you deal with the swaps market? he said, you take all the swaps, all the credit gambling that exists in excess of the underlying corporate insovereign debt, because wile would you have debt that exists, reclassify that as online gaming, which is what it is, and declare it null and void. you think they'd go for that, jared? >> i do. i actually think that's exactly -- the way i think about this is, look, anytime you have
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what's called a central clearing house, that means that two people who are making a bed have a third person right in between them, and that's how you get the transparency -- >> you have to go further than that, though. >> wait, let me say. every single republican candidate for president, bring this down to the political level for a second, i apologize, wants to eliminate dodd/frank. you may not love dodd/frank and we can talk about its flaws, but i haven't heard one idea from any of those folks as to what would replace it. and i guarantee you if you go down that road of repeal without replacement -- >> we're already there! who are we kidding? we're sitting right here. quickly, peter? >> well, what we have to do is limit swaps to the real contracts. >> yes! >> you can't write synthetic swaps, one on top of the other, so you're basically running a -- >> that's right. >> i learned about swaps like that growing up around the belmont racetracks. that's all it is, betting on the numbers. if you're going to replace dodd/frank, fine, let's replace
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and bring back glass-steagall. >> we've got a long list of things we've got to do. but at the very least, i do think the greece story is instructive along with the corzine mf global leverage. and thank you for noting that, jared, just to indicate -- listen, forget your politics. if you don't have capital in the system, you don't have a capitalist system. peter, jared, thank you both. coming up here, our job wars coverage continues. the political implications of this tepid job growth, where everybody from the sitti ting president, barack obama, to those who would be. along with a pro wrestling update on the tiny bits of legislation both democrats and republicans are bickering about right now. plus, a controversial assertion by our specialist today. he says civil rights are doing more harm than good. and then, big brother for astronauts. six men locked in a fake spaceship for a year and a half. how it could one day get us closer to living on mars.
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well, 14 million americans reported without a job, due largely, in part, of course, to the fact that congress isn't doing their. and the true unemployment in the country, as we know, stands at 30 million. the megapanel reunites, "the nation's" ari melber along with krystal ball, and lo and behold, guess who's back from wherever you've been, toure. where have you been? >> i've been here. >> no, you haven't, you haven't been showing up for weeks. >> i had a little trip to l.a. to do some work. >> is here l.a.?
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>> no, new york is the center of the world. that's where we are. >> politics and the jobs debate. the only thing the president -- i shouldn't say the only thing. the thing the president clearly has going for him politically is whatever criticism someone like myself or anyone else might level at the president's jobs plan, the counternarrative is either so vague or nondeveloped, that you'd rather be sitting in the president's chair. >> well, at least he's trying to do something. and when you look at the fact you have this infrastructure bill that failed in the senate. before that, we had a bill to support teachers and firefighters that 75% of americans wanted to see passed, dead in the senate. when you have that set of facts, he's going out and taking his case to the american people, and that's about the only thing he can do right now, aside from these little executive orders that east signing. which at least it's something. >> i buy it. >> yeah? >> yeah. >> what about the whole western financial system? >> i wouldn't buy that. >> okay.
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>> quickly, on the sort of reality of jobs relative to the politics of jobs. >> the thing we have to deal with is there is a non-violent movement growing and spreading in this country. >> and the world! >> you're talking about get money out, they're talking about, get money in. i want to be part of the system. and as long as washington is playing football with people's lives and their jobs, that anger is only going to spread and grow and get -- >> so all the chicanery only feeds the occupation and then all those sorts of -- >> oh, absolutely. absolutely. they have to get people back to work and stop playing football and being obstructionist and playing those games. >> apparently the occupation, by the way, is moving to hollywood. that's the big thing. they're going to occupy hollywood. whether, you know, just the heck to with it. they're out of here. straight to hollywood. they're going to make a movie and occupy hollywood. i actually dona't know any abou that, but they'll stay here as well. enough about that. let's talk about -- shall we talk about the new intelligence gathering methods?
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when a young individual, let's say, a fan of yours, toure, because i know you're a big star in the music world and on fuse and all these things -- >> tweet tweet. >> when a fan of yours wants access, proximity to your sort of glow, your ambience, and they start searching for you on twitter and searching for you -- googling toure, trying to find your last name, where does he get his haircuts, like i do. i still don't know. >> now we know how dylan's spending his evenings. >> i'm like, toure, what's that guy's last name? i can't find it. that's the cia. the cia is no better than a curious anchor man trying to find out one of miss mega panelist's last name. >> this is an area where i'm actually fully expert, of the entire panel, i love this moment. but twitter is what you make of it, right? and it is an awesome news
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aggregator. >> are you suggesting the cia is doing a good job using it? >> twitter is what you make of it. it depends who you follow. if you follow losers, you get loser information. if you follow smart peter, like ari, he's a good tweeter, like krystal, like yourself, you're getting good information. and you're also getting access to an amazing sociological tool, where you're hearing what people really think. when you're out in public, you're wearing your face -- >> so you think it's good the cia is doing this? >> it's possible to use twitter as an excellent source of getting good information. >> and if i might just quickly add to toure's expertise -- >> i can -- >> you're just here to look good today. >> i'll be brief. it's not just in the content and in what people are tweeting, it's also in the networks looking at who's following on toure, who's following those people. so you can see the networks and how everyone connects to one another. >> right. do you think if this is iran, ari, that they would kidnap you
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and put somebody else in charge of your twitter account and start tweeting things on your behalf. ion how they do that in the middle east, where they take influential social media people. >> look, my avatar right now is one of the best pictures of me that we've ever found, so i would want to steal it if we didn't already have it. about toure, what i want to say about toure's twitter, a friend of mine who follows you, my friend allie said, you know, i'm following toure, but he re-tweets a lot of positive tweets about himself, and i find that annoying. so here's a note -- >> but you also re-tweet negative tweets about yourself. >> just a note. as for the cia -- >> on the air, had to deliver that note! >> as for the cia, i think what's going on here -- >> -- me before you -- >> i actually like what you do, and you give a lot of shout-outs. twitter is interesting as a network because you can say, i heard your idea, i'm replying to you or -- which is different than saying, "buy toure's book,"
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retweet, boom. but about the cia, they have a lot of traditional tools, right? and we know that and we expect them -- >> like tapping my phone and all -- >> they're doing surveillance abroad, in case of the nsa, sometimes they're doing surveillance here at home, and apparently without warrants this was an issue in the last administration, something i've written about and a problem. i think what's interesting about what's going on with twitter, though, which is given everything they have behind the curtain, this is to toure's point in all seriousness, they still want the conversations that are happening out in public because they are genuine. your resume will say the best things about you. what we're seeing on twitter, people end up getting casual and they say more. i think the cia and anyone doing research is going to look to how people talk to each other. this is becoming a genuine -- >> people's own guard is down more, so people are revealing more publicly than they ever had the issue. >> there's that and the citizen journalism aspect. i find out about stories that mainstream media are not
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covering, they become big things on twitter, people are talking about them, angry about them, "new york times" continues to ignore it. remember the ana jones story? "new york times" was seven or eight days late in that story. we had been fully through that story of the young girl murdered in detroit by the cops, fully through that story on twitter. that's something i knew about the world that the mainstream media was not covering. >> coming up next, civil rights gone wrong. our specialist joins the mega panel. ...was it something big? ...or something small? ...something old? ...or something new? ...or maybe, just maybe... it's something you haven't seen yet. the 2nd generation of intel core processors.
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than good. author of "rights gone wrong," he says civil rights have effectively been hijacked by opportunists, special interest groups, and extremists for any variety of personal advantage. and what's worse, the attentionmongering has taken the focus off of the real issues of the equality of the treatment of men and women that was the aspiration and intention of the right s movement. professor, it's a pleasure to have you with us. if you could, walk us through what you see as sort of the critical indictment of where the civil rights movement and its intention has -- has gone wrong and how you might go about correcting it. >> thanks for having me on the show. so, civil rights have been fabulously successful at dealing with instances of discreet bias, overt bias, jim crow-type racism. but they've been much less effective in dealing with the subtler forms of bias and the institutionalized bias that are now the biggest problems for equality for women and equality
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for racial minority groups in particular. so right now, we have the civil rights system that on the one hand, that continues to allow a wage gap between men and women, where women are getting 75 to 80 cent on the dollar that men get for comparable work, but at the same time, that civil rights system allows men to sue for ladies night. and even in one case, a man sued for a mother's day promotion, to top mother's day. so on the one hand, we have sort of trifrl lawsuits where the real problem is not being addressed. another example. over 50 years after brown versus board of education, the historic opinion that at the time people thought would segregate the nation's cools, today about one quarter of black and latino students still attended school that almost entirely non-white. yet at the same time, that same legal principle at issue, brown versus board of education, was in 2007 used in order to block
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modest efforts to integrate the schools. these are just two examples of the way rights have gone wrong. they can be turned against their original purposes. they can be deployed for any number of purposes by opportunists and extremists. and they're not dealing with the most severe social injustices that we continue to face, which are increasingly due not only to bias, but also to deeper, more systemic problems and require comprehensive reform. >> professor, this is krystal ball, and i think it's hard to argue that given the wage gap that you cited, given the unemployment gap, given incarceration rates, that we still have a long way to go. what i'm trying to understand is, are you proposing actually reversing some of the civil rights legislation that we have and what are you proposing putting in its place? >> i'm not proposing, certainly not proposing repealing the civil rights laws. they're still doing vital work, particularly in dealing with the
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instances of overt discrimination, of which that hasn't gone away. but what i am proposing is we shift focus. for one thing, today, almost every social injustice is understood as a civil rights issue, and people are trying to shoehorn a broad range of social problems into a civil rights framework that assumes that individual bigot and an individual victim. what i'm suggesting is if we shift attention towards more comprehensive solutions, it could work better. now, let me give you with an example. in the walmart case that recently -- last year's walmart case, a big part of the problem was that you had statistical evidence of discrimination against women that was fairly rampant across walmart stores. but it was very hard to -- that evidence didn't establish that any individual woman was discriminated against. so now that that large class action was rejected by the supreme court, because walmart, as a corporate entity, didn't encourage its managers to
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discriminate, and we don't have the specific evidence and individual cases, it will be hard to win those cases. >> and the point is, you need some sort of mechanism to deal with systemic, whether it's a systemic pattern with women or systemic incarceration of young black men and those sort of things. go ahead, ari. >> hi. this is ari melber. the question i have, professor, you talk about the 2007 supreme court case, which many people feel really put a block on immigration efforts that would have come out of brown v. board. that was a seattle schools case where essentially, justice roberts writing for the majority said, look, you cannot take into account race as a factor in trying to integrate these schools. what i'm missing from you is sort of, is that good or bad? i'll tell you where i come down, the audience can factor it in, i think it's bad and i think justice roberts' decision, you know, basically, put the breaks on brown v. board. one answer to that, just starting from scratch, it would be better if school districts could take school into a factor.
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where do you stand on that? >> absolutely. i think that parents involved was a terrible case. and as i say in my book, it's an ironic and bitter reversal of the civil rights struggle to tell the people who struggled for justice in 1954 what they were really struggling for was to prohibit integration. so i agree with you 100%. now, what i want us to notice, though, is that by adopting on approach that focusing on courts and that focuses on kind of an abstract idea, discrimination, it was possible for the principal that was designed to integrate the schools to be turned around and prohibit integration. so an alternative approach would give us better results. >> toure, go ahead? >> professor, i think that -- how are you, by the way? >> i'm well. how are you? >> good. i think you make an excellent point, that they were not dealing with subtle forms of racism. of course we can't legislate into people's hearts, you can't legislate tolerance. but i wonder if when you look at society on the whole, are you
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talking about an outlier group of things that are happening? is the bulk of civil rights law protecting most people in america, as it should be? are you saying that the bulk of the law is being misused? >> i'm saying that the bulk of the law is not protecting people as it should be. that in a growing number of instances, it's actually working for perverse purposes or against its original purposes. and again, i don't want to say repeal, i say reform. that we could harness what's powerful about the civil rights approach, but direct it toward more comprehensive solutions. ways in order to get businesses, for instance, to reform their day-to-day practices. most people who are a victim of discrimination never sue. they don't have the incentive to sue. they just tough it out. these are the people that civil rights laws aren't reaching right now for the most part. and we can do a better job by getting businesses, by getting police departments, by getting schools to enact systemic reform to root out hidden biases and
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subtle biases, rather than just focusing on individual cases. >> i got to wrap this up, professor, but would you basically use some sort of systemic analysis so that, for instance, the walmart data that was rejected would actually become valid in a significant way? or, for instance, the incarceration rate of young black men as a proportion of those in prison will become valid data sets for civil rights lawsuits? >> absolutely, i would want that reform. and stit could also be value day-to-day for administrative reforms, just for straightforward regulation. we have sophisticated statistical methods that would allow us to use that data to improve day-to-day practices. and i think that's where the next generation in civil rights thinking ought to go. >> it sounds like you're the detachment of individual wrong or right and the need to identify the individual wrong or right, and at this point, while, obviously, the critical necessary first step in the process has now actually created a hang up so prevents us from
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addressing some of the systemic discrimination that exists. is that a fair understanding of your thesis? >> yes, very nicely put. thank you. >> no, listen, i agree with you. >> he's an author too! >> i'm in the business of saying what you said, just differently. no, professor, it's a pleasure. professor, congratulations on the book. toure will see you for the rant. an extra hour. >> we're not going to use that term post-racial anymore, are we? can we retire that, please? >> i'm sorry. >> it's not where we are. it's not real. >> listen. i understand. ahead, what is real, six men locked together in a shed since 2010! what that has to do with a successful mission to mars. stay with us. [ male announcer ] nature valley
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no creature is going to contaminate my atmosphere. >> sorry, marvin, it looks like we may be one step closer to landing a man in your backyard. but it wasn't easy. today a team of six international astronauts emerged from being locked together in a fake spaceship for, get this, 520 days! a year and a half in a tiny bus-sized windowless capsule, parked in a moscow parking lot. all of this to test whether man can handle deep space travel. the mars 500 mission was designed to simulate all the actual stresses and strains of a real mars mission and see if humans could stay sane, let alone healthy, during a six-month trip to the red planet, not to mention, some time there and a return. the volunteer crew from europe, russia, and china ate the same
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canned rations actual astronauts would, only got to shower once a week, and received e-mail on a delay, simulating how long it would truly take to get web-based communications from deep space back to the planet earth. at one point, the crew even donned space suits and walked on a mock mars, a sand-filled chamber, supposedly akin to a stroll on the planet. they prepared, left, walked about, came back. scientists call the experiment a complete success and are now working on plans to repeat the exact same experiment in space, this time at the international space station. we talked to an american astronaut just a few weeks ago. and researchers' biggest concern for the six volunteers in the bus/capsule in the moscow parking lot for the last 520 days is the shock of returning to the real world, which you have to figure a pretty fair assessment. think of all that's happened since they left in 2010. greece and the eurozone is on
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the brink of collapse, protesters have occupied wall street, and literally more than a thousand other cities around the globe. kim kardashian fell in love, got married, and got divorced, all in less than 17 months. you can miss a lot on a mission to mars. welcome back to earth. next, here, an inspiring film being described as rocky for teachers, only tougher. we'll be back.
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so happy! i can't even explain how happy i am right now! gosh. >> kristi, i got my scores and i'm a national board certified teacher! >> break open the champagne, dad! >> "mitchell20" tells the emotional story of 20 individual teachers at mitchell elementary. it's an inner city school in phoenix, arizona. these 20 teachers took it upon themselves to elevate their own teaching skills, as they aspired and also became nationally certified teachers, the equivalent of passing the bar exam for lawyers and as the film reveals, it is not as simple as passing a test. like so many teachers across the country, the mitchell 20 were forced to contend with deep budget cuts, local school politics, and even immigration issues along the way. and with us today is the woman
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who spurred her own colleagues into action and proved that one person can make a difference in an educational system that can sometimes feel impossible to move. danielle robles is here along with the filmmaker who followed the group for two years, randy murray. it's a pleasure to have you both. danielle, just walk us through what it is you did. >> well, basically i became very discontent with my current teaching practice and really began to find national board certification, to be that rejuvenation for me. and when i achieved national board certification, i realized that the colleagues around me had made me that accomplished teacher, and so it only made sense that we were to go forth on a journey together, for multiple teachers. >> it's an interesting thing. we've all sort of been educating ourselves about how human beings learn. forget children, but all human
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beings learn. and it gets reinforced over and over, at every level, that groups solving problems, tend to learn the most the fastest. and it seems you effectively formed a group of teachers and said, we are going to form a group of teachers to solve the problem of being better in dealing with this school environment. is that correct? >> it's an absolute accurate portrayal of what happened. about colleagues really coming together, choosing their learning, choosing how they were going to go forth with that and having schoolside administration to support them in that effort. >> why was this worth making into a movie? >> anytime you get a chance to capture something so dramatic, is these heroes really taking control of the situation and changing something that needed to be fixed, and they're doing it themselves, how do you turn away from that? >> at the same time, there's more in this film than 20 teachers upping their game, right? >> actually, we started the film, you know, a group of us,
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kathy, andrew, and i, and we thought we were going to make a nice little documentary about teachers upping their game. and boy, when life happened to them, it just became very exciting. very, very heavy. and we watched what happens when teachers get knocked down, they get back up and they teach. >> and walk us through, what was the great -- why would there be any resistance? why would there be any drama? why would he have such a good movie, right? he's like -- he's like, you get the phone call. your problems were his upside. he's like, you hear what happened to daniella? it's going to be good in the movie. so what happened. >> so basically we had unintended consequences and many negative directions. and i think sometimes we perceived that something that's considered to be excellent for a teaching community and a bigger community may not be perceived that way. and sometimes i believe
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leadership has a different idea of what they want to do. >> elaborate. >> it's a complex problem we have with education in america. there's a lot of people trying to fix it from a lot of different directions. and in my opinion, as a filmmaker, i think that compounds the problem. the fact that we're coming at it from so many different angles, from the top of the period, from the middle of the pyramid, but we're not coming at it from the bottom, where the teacher has the contact, the teacher is causing learning with the student. that's what we need to be focused. those are the people that need to be changing policy and driving policy in america. >> at the end of the day, doesn't it not matter what anybody thinks you should do -- in other words, i recognize -- it's insane, because we know, it has been demonstrated how it is that people learn. shouldn't we just be doing that? >> well, there's a fear in doing that. because then you have a collective group. and i think sometimes -- >> well, groups learn? >> we have groups that learn,
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they become empowered, and they start to voice concerns and dissatisfaction about what they see on a larger scale. and that's when i think you start to see some issues with who's in charge. >> well, maybe those groups were to -- so you're saying it's a threat to power. that, basically, that the innovation of moving towards group-based problem-solving as a teaching model is a threat to educational, institutional power? >> a lot of people in the system are trying to do good, but if they give up any of that power -- >> trying to do good or trying to do what they want? what they believe is good? >> what they can -- >> can be the same thing. i guess it's like capital requirements in the banking system. i can talk all day about what the banking system should be. sorry for the hands. but you either are getting more capital into the banking system, which is making it more stable, or you're not. and there's many ideas, and it doesn't matter who you are, whether i like you or what the idea is. you either add in capital or not. i don't see how education is any
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different. you are either enhancing learning, which is student-driven, not adult driven, and if you are enhancing learning, it would seem that's something we should do more of. and if it's a system that's designed just to give tests doesn't make any sense to me. i feel like identify lost my mind. >> we measure our education system by rhetoric, not output. if we were measuring it by what daniella was doing in the class -- >> by learning. >> that's where we should be focusing our energy, not in politics. >> so let me ask you a question. we're sort of playing this up, but we act like, oh, my goodness, they've discovered the wheel. who knew it that the teaching system is not always aligned with learning. thanks for the headline. do you guys believe, both of you, that this movie will provoke further conversation to advance the need to reconcile the threat to incumbent power with the obvious need to transition to these group-based
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problem-solving type of environments? >> absolutely. the film has already started to change the conversation. and that's a piece that this is about. changing the narrative about public education and what's perceived is happening in our public school classrooms. we've seen it locally in phoenix and it's spreading across. >> and that is really the reason -- that's a reason to show up to work? >> yea. and that is why we made the film. that's more than we hoped for. it's been a great success, as far as we're concerned. >> what is your degree of confidence is one of half a dozen things we're going through, these big transitions, energy, health, other things, obviously the banking system, even the electoral reform. on the amount of education, what is your degree of confidence as our ability to move into the 21st century? >> i think my confidence relies on the teachers in the classroom right now. we are known to be rather massive and it's time that we start to really stand up and voice our concerns and take over our profession. >> all right. i hear that.
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quickly? >> yeah, i just want to say, quickly, teachers, when you see them like i did, they are so inspiring. when you see what they're doing with the students, you know -- >> teachers and students, doctors and patients. those are the pairs that solve problems and the system should support it. it's nuts. thank you, guys. "mitchell20" is the movie. tonight in new york it oppose? >> tonight in new york, tomorrow in miami. all across america if you go to the website. >> if you're looking for a movie, there you go. coming up on "hardball," the latest on herman cain. his poll numbers rising, despite the pr crisis. what's that all about? and is it really a crisis if the numbers are getting better. chris matthews takes a look in just a moment. but first, toure's here with a rant. does just talking about racism make you a racist? the employee of the month is... spark card from capital one. spark cash gives me the most rewards of any small business credit card. it's hard for my crew to keep up with 2% cash back on every purchase, every day. 2% cash back. that's setting the bar pretty high.
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ladies and gentlemen, toure. >> this week i'm proud to say, rush limbaugh called me a racist. >> toure on msnbc, where the motto is resist we much, that's right, toure. for 23 years i've been hearing it. maybe not from you, but people all over your side of the aisle. for 23 years, i'm racist, and i'm not. never have been. you guys are. >> well, if that's not a badge of honor, i don't know what is. when i heard that, i said, mama, i made it! but whatever small comical victory that moment represents for me, it's part of a loss for the country. it shows you the american conversation about race is devolving, because some people want to destroy that conversation. the absurd idea that we are post-racial has emboldened many
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to reject the legitimacy of talking about race. to them, discussing race in and of itself is racist, because you're playing the race card and injecting race into the world, as if it's not already there. for some people, racism is a word to fling around in an attempt to distort the meaning of the word and contort the necessary race conversation into meaninglessness. and wherever the conversation is pulled into the gutter of meaninglessness, we all lose. because we still have a significant racial problem in this country. we still have much to work on. racism nowadays is more subtled and nuanced than ever, and that means un-nuanced thinkers like rush can play dumb. what do you mean i'm not racist? i don't have slaves, i'm in the klan? what do you mean you experienced racism? you don't have segregated fountains, you have a black president. why are you still complaining? well, white people who aren't racist still accrue the benefits of being white. this in a world of institutional
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racism and glass ceilings and white men with felony convictions being more likely to get jobs that be black men with clean records makes it too much to accept quietly. while some things have changed so much has not changed. smart people understand we've got to talk about all this. >> oh, god, i love being white. i really do. seriously, if you're not white, you're missing out, because this [ bleep ] is thoroughly good. but, let me be clear about it. i'm not saying that white people will better, i'm saying that being white is clearly better. who could even argue? >> pointing out that race still matters isn't racist anymore than bad weather is the fault of the weatherman. i'm not the problem. people who want to destroy the still-necessary american race conversation are a big problem. the refusal to feel white guilt is understandable, but the almost violent use of the word racism to battle against actual instances of racism and pointing out racism and trying to silence
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those who would call out racism is, in fact, disgusting, and frightening, and that is racism. >> and at the end of the day, even in a rant like that, you obviously don't expect rush limbaugh or anybody who has that thought process, that you're going to persuade them to think differently? >> of course not, of course not. >> at the end of the day, when you look at the conversation we were just having with the stanford professor that wrote this book, "rights gone wrong," richard thompson ford, how do we move collectively toward an advocaticy where we're resolvin the race conversation in this country, but moving towards an advocacy of equanimity, which is the intention of skricivil righ. the intention is, you and i are equal, and me and him and her are equal, and that is our aspiration. and i guess, quickly, interested in whether you think we're closer towards that or moving towards it? >> i don't want know. is there a desir
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