and we never get to say that anymore. so for all of us, it's a good thanksgiving week reminder, on the shortest, darkest november days, the sun rises and shines and sometimes things work. even in washington. best new thing in the world today. that does it for us tonight. it's time for "the last word with lawrence o'donnell." have a great night. great news, america. as of tonight, you're no longer being governed by a supercommittee. >> congress could not reach an agreement. >> protect the rich. blame the poor? [ screaming ] >> go get a job right after you take a bath. >> i think the congress ought to take a bath. >> there will be no easy off ramps on this one. >> the committee has announced it can't reach a deal. >> the lowest congressional approve l rating ever. >> worst congress ever.

>> we know republicans don't want tax increases. >> republicans will not see taxes go up under any circumstances. >> fighting so hard to protect tax breaks for the wealthy. >> there has been a war, it has been waged. the victims essentially of that war are the 99% of the people in this country. >> campus police pepper spraying peaceful occupy protesters. >> militarization of our police department. >> they are being sprayed at pointblank range. >> this is absolutely disgusting. >> it looks pretty horrific. >> go get a job right after you take a bath. >> go back and get a job? what's wrong with you? it's disgusting. it's absolutely disgusting. >> go get a job right after you take a bath. >> someone needs a bath and i don't think it's the people from occupy wall street. >> go get a job right after you take a bath. >> it's much easier to wash the body than it is to cleanse the soul. >> take over a public park they didn't pay for. >> support for newt gingrich

continuing to grow among republican votes. >> use bathrooms they didn't pay for. >> the statistical tie of the lead. >> i'm beginning to miss the wisdom of sarah palin. when is the last time some of you obama voters stood up and cheered for the president? well, tonight's your night. president obama has mastered the politics, the policy and the strategy of budget legislation better than any president in history. that's right. any president in history. and he proved that tonight. with his brilliant veto threat after the supercommittee announced the inevitable that it could not agree on future budget cuts. thereby, setting the clock ticking on the automatic budget cuts that have been written into law in the event the supercommittee failed. >> already some in congress are trying to undo these automatic

spending cuts. my message to them is simple. no. i will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts, domestic and defense spending. there will be no easy off ramps on this one. >> you see that? how surprised did the president look? that the supercommittee failed to reach an agreement? not a bit surprised. that's right. this committee was designed to fail and the president knew it. an equal number of members, from each party, an equal number of members from the house and the senate. no tie breaking representative from the obama administration involved. every republican member of the supercommittee had signed a pledge not to raise taxes in any way. every democratic member wanted to raise taxes in some way. failure was built into that

design. the cuts that will go into effect automatically will hit defense heavily. something many democrats have long wanted to do but it will protect medicare, medicaid and social security. the most important programs created by and constantly defended by democrats. but most importantly, most importantly, none of the automatic cuts triggered by the supercommittee's failure will take place until the january 1st that occurs after the next presidential and congressional election. the deal that created the supercommittee in the alternative automatic cuts was part of a package which included immediate spending cuts reported, reported at $900 billion. in order to raise the debt ceiling. something that had previously never been a difficult or controversial thing to do because congress always knew

that failure to raise the debt ceiling was not an option. at the outset of the debt ceiling saga, the president's announced position was that he would like to raise the debt ceiling in one simple, one-sentence bill with nothing attached to it. in other words, the president was in favor of exactly zero, zero in deficit reduction in order to raise the debt ceiling. now let's see how much deficit reduction the president has really agreed to in order to raise the debt ceiling. recall that the president found himself drawn into a protracted negotiation with congress including house republicans. the stagecraft at various times involved dramatic exits. first by eric cantor, then by jon kyl, then by john boehner. as the president's offer on deficit reduction skyrocketed to a peak of $4 trillion. an offer that horrified some democrats afraid of the spending cuts but was, of course, reje

rejected by house republicans as the president knew it would be because it included tax increases on the top tax bracket. the president then feigned disappointment over the final boehner walkout, but the president knew that to voters, he appeared to be the reasonable man looking for a solution while he was actually painting republicans into the absurdest corner of standing for nothing but low taxes for the rich. and so the supercommittee will cut no spending. the automatic cuts will not take place until the beginning of the next presidential term which should leave you wondering exactly how much spending will be cut during president obama's first term in exchanged for raising the debt ceiling? the answer is $21 billion.

that's right. not $4 trillion. not $900 billion. not some giant, horrible, onerous amount of spending cuts. just $21 billion. that was the price. that is what the president actually did to increase the debt ceiling. so the president will go into his re-election campaign having enacted no cuts that are painful to his party or his political base. that he will go into his re-election with the image of a president who has worked harder than any other only to be stymied by an ins transgent republican congress that pledged its soul to a republican anti-tax lobbyist even before they took their oaths of office. barack obama, the best budget strategist in presidential history? the presidents who negotiated with congress before social security and medicare were

working with budgets simpler than today's state budgets. so don't even think about them. and lyndon johnson, the last democratic president to accomplish anything great and lasting in domestic policy was able to do so because he had massive democratic majorities in the house and the senate and most importantly, because no one was counting how much it would cost. there was no congressional budget office. no one cared what the estimated cost of medicare was. when it became law. and no president, prior to president obama, has suffered the burden in his first term of facing an opposing party sworn simply to destroy him. >> you said, quote, the single most important thing we want to achieve is for president obama to be a one-term president. >> well, that is true. that's why single most important political goal along with with every active republican in the

country. >> and so president obama's mastery of the do-nothing congress moves us ever closer to fiscal sanity, as long as congress continues to do nothing. because if congress continues to do absolutely nothing, on january 1st, 2013, after the next presidential and congressional election, all income tax rates will increase to the clinton income tax rates which this country fondly remembers as the tax structure that delivered the golden decade of the 1990s. and on that same day, $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts will go into effect landing largely on defense and leaving untouched democrats' most important programs. and fiscal sanity will be restored in washington. thanks to a do-nothing congress

being outsmarted by a president who mastered the budget process. joining me now are "washington post" columnist and msnbc analyst ezra klein and robert reich, former labor secretary in the clinton administration. he's now professor of public policy at the university of california at berkeley and author of "aftershock." thank you both for joining me tonight. bob, i for one am very happy with where this situation has ended up with the supercommittee. how do you see it going from here? >> lawrence, i agree with you about the tactical brilliance of the president in terms of pulling this off. my only concern is this. the economy is still obviously awful. it needs a fiscal boost, whether you call it a stimulus or call it liverworst.

the paralysis we've seen so far is going to clearly continue right through election day if not beyond which means that the expiration of unemployment extensions, that unemployment benefit extension, and also the expiration of the payroll tax cuts are going to eat into agate demand. there's going to be less and less agate demand. it's going to be harder for any kind of a fiscal boost to emerge. i worry that even by the beginning of 2013, if you want to look ahead beyond the election, the economy is still going to be very bad and there's not going to be any fiscal boost at all. those cuts are frontloaded to 2012 2013. i'm just, again, concerned about jobs and the economy. it's not such a big win. >> let's listen to what john kerry had to say today, blaming grover norquist. >> unfortunately, you know, this thing about the bush tax cuts and the pledge to grover

norquist keeps coming up. grover norquist has been the 13th member of this committee without being there. i can't tell you how many times we hear about the pledge. the pledge. well, all of us took a pledge to uphold the constitution. >> and here's grover norquist on "60 minutes" in effect taking at least some credit. accepting what john kerry said. >> the republicans won't raise your taxes. we haven't had a republican vote for an income tax increase since 1990. >> and this was your doing? >> i helped. yeah. >> ezra, how are the republicans feeling about that pledge to grover norquist tonight? >> a lot of them aren't feeling so good. i think one unnoticed part of the supercommittee negotiations is that republicans became less willing to compromise than they were a couple months ago. remember that in the deal between john boehner and obama, the deal that was being struck behind closed doors, by the end, john boehner is willing to go with $800 billion in revenues.

in this deal, the highest republicans ever got was the toomey plan that had $300 billion in actual new revenue. so they went down from there $8 billion to $300 billion. the thing that worries me, lawrence, i'm not sure the white house sees the bush tax cuts the way you do. when i talk to them, they do not seem to want them to expire. they seem completely unwilling to let that happen. they have their own pledge to never raise taxes on anybody making less than $250,000 a year. if that's going to be the case, between extending most of the bush tax cuts as barack obama's current position is or extending all of them, as the republicans' position is, and the two end up in the middle, i worry we're not going to get fiscal sanity and will have lost one of the only real chances we had to get back a revenue base that could support the government going forward. >> bob, i agree with ezra that the tm democrats have gotten g shy about raising taxes. we have a lot of time between now and when the taxes automatically go up, and it seems to me that someone should

start making the case for what the world was under those clinton tax rates and just how they would effect across the board taxpayers, if they go into effect. if you have this tax increase, for example, on the bottom bracket, what's the practical effect of that, what is the real cost of that? people should start doing the analysis of that from the democratic side so that day can prepare for the possibility of it happening, shouldn't they? >> absolutely, lawrence. you know, if you look at the upcoming election, the president does have time to make the case to the public that not only should taxes go up on the very wealthy, the small tax increases on everybody else are going to be acceptable. that the biggest issue we face over the long term is the budget deficit, but in the short term, this election is going to be about jobs. i mean, most people really are not into the details of the tactical pros and cons of what the supercommittee did, what the

republicans are doing. most people don't even know who grover norquist is. i mean, most people are really still in the grips of a jobs recession and they want this election to be about jobs. and about doing something about jobs. i think the president has bought himself some time now to really sell even a larger jobs agenda than he already has. and i hope he takes advantage of that time and that opportunity. >> ezra, is the white house talking about any kind of jobs agenda going forward? >> not beyond the american jobs act but they are talking about the american jobs act. one thing that was interesting in the press conference today was obama was very clear. he said, look, congress has a year, as you mentioned at the beginning, a year to figure out what to do about deficit reduction if they don't want the trigger. they need to do now a payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance because they expire at the end of 2011 and also deal with infrastructure, as he put it, get construction workers back to work. i don't know that they'll be expanding their jobs agenda. they've been very, very clear

going forward they expect that to be where congress turns to and intend to force the issue at the end of the year because it's tough for republicans to argue they can't raise taxes on the rich but can let the payroll tax cut expire for the working class. >> ezra klein, robert reich, thank you for joining me tonight. >> thank you. >> thanks, lawrence. coming up, coming up, no one attacks newt gingrich better than his fellow conservatives. you're not going to believe what george will had to say about newt. you've got to see this. that's in the "rewrite." and the continuing shockwaves from the video that swept the country this weekend. michael moore and one of the students in the pepper spraying cop's line of foire will join m to discuss the protests at university of california davis. to be more environmentally aware,

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ready to assign blame. mitt romney not surprisingly blamed president obama who was not a member of the supercommittee. >> i would have anticipated that the president of the united states would have spent every day and many nights working with members of the supercommittee to try to find a way to bridge the gap, but instead he's been out doing other things, campaigning and blaming and traveling. this is in my view inexcusable. >> the herman cain campaign released a statement reading in part. "president obama and his ultra liberal anti-job creating comrades in the democratic party are apoplectic because republicans are standing strong with the american people refusing to hike their taxes during obama's great recession." newt gingrich who now finds himself at or near the top of republican polls called the collapse of the supercommittee good for america. >> it's important to understand

it's not that washington is inherently gridlocked, it is that the current players behaving in the current way are inherently gridlocked. it's part of the president's fault, part of the congress' fault, but it's a mess. they're, candidly, in my judgment, being even dumber, creating a committee of 12 picked by the leadership to magically get in a room to come up with something that 535 couldn't solve. >> and michele bachmann said something that i'm sure at least made sense to her. >> this is a failure on the part of democrats, republicans, everyone, to meet this challenge for the good of the country. last summer i said that all 535 members of congress needed to sit down then and pay the interest on the debt so that we wouldn't go into a default. the problem with congress is that they don't want to make a decision. >> joining me now, steve

kronacki, columnist with salon.com. i find myself, in amazement, partial ll lagreement, the poin about congress made this worse by trying to break out of the mess he said by creating something dumber, a committee of 12 picked by political leadership to magically get in a room and come up with something. i am really glad on so many levels that this committee failed, because if they had actually delivered something, that would become the new model for congress. why should we do it when we can delegate it to a supercommittee and claim to have no blame for it and give it procedural protection and let it sail through the senate and the house? i mean, we just would have had this governing by supercommittee. >> right. well, and, you know, i think you have a point there, but i think the other point is this really was never going to work. and it was something that was really kind of designed to fail from the beginning. there were many reasons why. one of the reasons is sort of what you just showed with all these reactions from the

republican presidential candidates. i mean, i think the reality is whether there was a deal in the supercommittee or whether it ended up the way it ended up, every republican presidential candidate was basically going it be under pressure to say, you know, the supercommittee failed and had done a terrible job and sold out, or it was threatened to sell out conservative principles. because that's where the republican party is today. that's sort of been -- that's the story of the supercommittee negotiations. that's the story of the 112th congress. it's a republican party that decided at the beginning of the obama administration to really open up a two-front war. one war on obama and his administration. the second war on republican party establishment. which they believe compromised too much, sold out conservative principles too much for the previous decade and really enabled the rise of the obama -- of barack obama. so what that meant when you looked at the whole situation leading into the supercommittee and the debt ceiling drama over the summer, it meant basically that any deal that republicans might strike with obama would be inherently suspicious to the republican party base. and there would be a huge incentive for conservative

leaders to call it a sellout, no matter what was in it. then if you look closer than that, any deal obama was going to strike with republicans would have to have included a significant revenue component, you know, with ref livenues on wealthy. that's another, an absolute sacred violation of conservative principle these days. the idea of raising taxes on anyone, let alone the rich. i think clearly there was never going to be a deal that would pass muster with the conservative base. if there was a deal, the republican presidential candidates would have to oppose it and come out and say basically the same thing. >> steve, if there was a deal, it would take place in what we would call the moderate section of each party, the design of moderate democrats and moderate republicans, a moderate republican being one who could somehow go along with some form of tax increase the democrats wanted. are there any moderate republicans out there? >> yeah. and this is the point i'm making

about the evolution of the republican party in the obama era. i think there are two things to keep in mind. the baseline statistic that i like to cite on this is, there's a political scientist who said at the beginning of this congress back in january, he looked at the 242 republican members of the house and he said that only 3 of those 242 could be considered moderates. this is historically an absolutely tiny number. i think there are two reasons for that. one is, that in the obama era, we've seen the republican party move very far to the right with the emergence of the tea party movement and there's this interparty purity crusade that the tea party movement launched and lots of very conservative republicans won primaries in 2010 and because the general election was so favorable to republicans, just because of the economic climate, a lot of them slipped into office. you have more true believers than ever who are in office on the republican side now in congress. the second component is, among the conservatives who are left who might have some pragmatic instincts, they saw what happened in the 2010 midterms

when one establishment republican after another lost in the primary. it terrified them. they have no incentive to compromise but every incentive to go along with the true believers. it makes the idea of moderates compromising impossible. >> wow. not that long ago most house republicans were moderates. steve kornacki, thank you for joining me tonight. >> sure. coming up, you've sieen the shocking video from uc davis. we'll be joined by one of the victims of the pepper spray assault of the protesters there. michael moore will join us to give us his reaction to this weekend's developments in the occupy movement. in the "rewrite" tonight, conservatives attack newt gingrich. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 let's talk about fees.

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is the pepper spray video that rocked the nation a turning point in the occupy wall street movement? michael moore joins me later and we'll also be joined by one of the victims who was hit by the pepper spray at uc davis. and in the "rewrite" tonight, i let conservatives do the work for me because it's just so much more fun to watch george will destroy newt gingrich than me trying to do it mice. conservatives attacking gingrich. that's next in the "rewrite."

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kind. i was being paid to offer a series. i did this, as i said a while ago, at a number of companies who came in and asked for advice on a long range of things. as long as they were topics i was interested in and topics i cared about, i was very happy to share ideas with people. what i didn't do, and would not do, is i didn't go and lobby the congress. >> that was an amended version of something he said in the cnbc republican debate. >> i have never done any lobbying. every contract that was written during the period when i was out of the office, specifically said i would do no lobbying. and i offered advice. my advice as a historian, when they walked in and said to me, we're now making loans to people who have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that's what the government wants us to do. i said to them at the time, this is a bubble, this is insane, this is impossible. >> pulitzer prize winning

conservative columnist george will knows a historian when he sees one. >> gingrich is an amazingly efficient candidacy and it embodies almost everything disagreeable about modern washington. he's the classic rental politician. people think his problem is his colorful personal life. he's going to hope people concentrate on that rather than on, for example, ethanol. al gore has recanted ethanol. not newt gingrich who served the ethanol lobby. industrial policy of the sort that got us solndra. freddie mac he said hired him as a historian. the bush administration was trying to pass a large entitlement in the prescription drug excite lmentitlement. right wing social engineering. he sits down and talks about cap and trade and climate change

with nancy pelosi and others. the list goes on. >> hours after george will hit gingrich where it really hurts, in the academic credentials, the conservative newspaper with the the washington examiner" ran an article entitled, newt gingrich was a lobbyist plain and simple. "three former republican congressional staffers told me that gingrich was calling around capitol hill and visiting republican congressmen in 2003 in an effort to convince conservatives to support a bill expanding medicare to include prescription drug subsidies. one former house staffer told me of a 2003 meeting hosted by representative jack kingston where gingrich spoke and brought one message to the members, pass the drug bill for the good of the republican party. two aides to other gop members who had been resisting the bill told me their bosses were lobbied by gingrich over the phone. sometimes citing politics, sometimes citing substance.

and it worked. newt gingrich moved votes on the prescription drug bill. one conservative staffer told me. that's for sure. newt gingrich is the new herman cain. they were both lobbyists. they have both now enjoyed being front-runners in the republican presidential campaign. and they are both on their way to being losers. the other office devices? they don't get me. they're all like, "hey, brother, doesn't it bother you that no one notices you?" and i'm like, "doesn't it bother you you're not reliable?" and they say, "shut up!" and i'm like, "you shut up." in business, it's all about reliability. 'cause these guys aren't just hitting "print." they're hitting "dream." so that's what i do. i print dreams, baby. [whispering] big dreams.

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but, okay, maybe keep the indulgent supermodel cameo... thank you. [ male announcer ] innovative medical solutions. fedex. solutions that matter. can i help you? [ male announcer ] innovative medical solutions. yeah, can i get a full-sized car? for full-sized cars, please listen to the following menu. for convertibles, press star one. i didn't catch that. to speak to a representative, please say representative now. representative. goodbye! you don't like automated customer service, and neither do we. that's why, unlike other cards, no matter when you call chase sapphire preferred, you immediately get a person not a prompt. chase sapphire preferred. a card of a different color. (phone ringing) chase sapphire preferred, this is julie in springfield. today the university of california at davis police chief was put on administrative leave pending a review of two officers' use of pepper spray against occupy protesters. the two officers seen in the video using pepper spray against

protesters who sat on the ground with linked arms have also been placed on administrative leave. more than 2,000 students and faculty members had a solidarity rally today to speak out against the pepper spraying incident. the uc davis faculty association and students are now calling for the resignation of chancellor linda katehi. she so far refused to resign and instead offered this apology at the rally today. >> i'm here to apologize. i really feel horrible for what happened on friday. if you think you don't want to be students in a university like we had on friday, i'm just telling you, i don't want to be the chancellor of the university we had on friday. we need to work together.

and i know you may not believe anything that i'm telling you today, and you don't have to. it is my responsibility to earn your trust. >> one of the students calling for the chancellor to resign is my next guest, case wheatley, he was one of the students pepper sprayed and then later arrested last friday. case, i want to take a look at what happened to you on friday. here you are in this video. you're talking to an officer just before you're pepper sprayed. let's watch this. >> you're shooting us for sitting here? that's fine, that's fine. [ screaming ] >> get back. stay back.

>> protect yourself! >> she isn't resisting. >> shame on you! >> she's not doing anything. >> case, what did the police tell you before they did that? >> right at that moment, they told me they were going to shoot us for sitting there, for sitting there linking arms, they told us they were going to shoot us. i assumed they meant rubber bulls or pepper spray balls which are like paint ball guns. they never told us they were going to spray us with the pepper spray, especially, like, a foot from our face. they never said anything about that. >> kase, when it was happening, did you get the feeling that the police officers knew what the effect of that spray was on you? i mean, they were just drenching you in that stuff. >> i mean, i assume since it's their job to kind of serve and protect that they kind of know what they're doing and they kind of know the kind of weapons they

use, but i guess in this case, it was military-grade pepper spray. it's like the new and improved model that hurts even more and last s even longer. no i, i don't think they had any idea what they were talking about. i called the police station later that night around midnight because my body, face, my hands were still burning. i couldn't sleep. i asked them, what am i supposed to do? how am i supposed to prevent the burning to take place in my body? they had no idea. i called nurses. i couldn't sleep until 4:00 in the morning. my hands and face were still burning the next day. >> kase, i didn't really see provocation there for them to begin the pepper spray. so, i don't in a way, i don't understand why they stopped. why did they stop the spray? >> why did they stop the spraying? i assume maybe the crowd's reaction to it was overwhelming and maybe something clicked in john pike's mind, the officer

who sprayed us, that this was not the right thing. i want to hope that these cops, they are people, they are humans, they have consciences. i don't know why they did it in the first place. -- political descent on this campus. basically our reason for doing it was to kind of protest the police brutality that occurred on uc berkeley campus and to protest the fee hikes that we've been facing over the past five-plus years. and this is kind of ironic that we are protesting police brutality and this is their response to it. >> kase, i want to bring in filmmaker and activist michael moore. as you know, he's been active in this protest all the way through. michael, i want you to join us, and please tell kase and tell us where you see this incident in the history of this movement so

far. >> well, first of all, let me just say to kase, i'm really sorry that this happened to you. this is not what is supposed to happen in the united states of america. >> nope. >> and the fact that our police departments, now even campus police departments, have been turned into armies, they've been militarized. >> yep. >> mostly through grants from the department of homeland security. and actions like this now are occurring it seems like every day, all across the country. but i want to say that what you did there, what happened there at uc davis, which, by the way, my sister is a graduate of uc davis. it was just 11 of you sitting there, 11. just 11. this wasn't a demonstration of 30,000. this wasn't a large encampment

of 200 tents in portland. this was just 11 students in a not very well known uc campus. and the images of this have resonated around the world. in the same way that the lone young man standing in front of the tanks at tiananmen square resonated. this will be an iconic moment in this occupy wall street movement which clearly now has shifted to an even larger movement on campuses. and i think that people will remember months or years from now that you uc davis was the moment that occupy wall street went to the college campuses and this is going to just spread like wildfire i think across campuses in the country. >> i hope so. i really hope so. >> kase wheatley, can you please stay with us through this break? we're going to continue this conversation after the break. if you can stay with michael moore on the show here. we're going to be back with more on the occupy protests around

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i don't expect her apology. >> what would you say to the chancellor and other mayors, police cleaves arouchiefs arouny who allowed the kinds of things to happen on their watch? >> well, i agree with kase. she's got to go. and the mayors, sadly, many of them democrats, who have been responsible for sicking the police forces on peaceful nonviolent protesters. i think they should all be removed from office. it is absolutely disgusting and appalling where these, these

police forces across the country have not arrested a single banker, a single loan shark, a single health insurance executive. i mean, thousands of protesters now have an arrested, who were just exercising their democratic rights as citizens. but people who stole the futures of young people like kase, people who have rigged the system of student loans to where someone like kase and his fellow students are going to be in hoc 20 or 30 years paying off student loans, whereas if they were a student in any other western democracy, they'd never have to worry about this sort of thing. i just -- i just wonder when the police are going to start arresting the real criminals. simple question. >> michael, i want to get your reaction to the imagery of this.

you've -- your life's work is assembling images to deliver important messages. and now we are collecting a body of imagery about this movement. that first shocking piece i saw was pepper spray in manhattan, on protesters on a weekend protest there. now we have this latest installment. and tell us how this kind of building file of imagery tells the story compared to what we are hearing when mayors and others make their statements about it or when newt gingrich makes his statement about people like kase should go take a bath and then go get a job. there's that -- there's an imagery here, a visual imagery that's in a kind of battle with some verbal stuff that is pouring out here. >> yeah. yes. first of all, when gingrich says they should take a bath, i think

that's actually what the uc davis police officers are trying to do. they were literally bathing them with this pepper spray. i think, frankly, the reason that they stopped pepper spraying them is because they ran out. they had just unloaded everything in those canisters. you can see them in the footage starting to shake the can because he can't get more out of it. because he wanted to bathe them more with this pepper spray. so, but i'll tell you, the police in new york, the police in davis, california, doing this to nonviolent citizens, if you were writing the script for this, you would actually write this in, or if you were in the protest movement and trying to build the protest movement, you would try to -- you would say, how do we get the police to behave in this manner? because when they do, this thing is just going to explode across the country. it's the most insane thing and this has been said not just by me but many people in the last few weeks, and yet they continue to do it over and over again.

each time they do, the students at uc davis now have solidarity movements. in support of them. all across the country. there are students calling, i think next monday, for a general strike on the uc campuses in california. and i'm just -- i'm excited by our young people these days. and frankly, if you don't mind, i'd like to ask kase a question. it, you know, our generation, i'm part of the baby boom generation. when we were your age, our goal was to create a better world that you would have. you would be left with this better world. you would have a better life than the life that we had. that didn't happen. you -- it has been set up now for you to have a worse life, instead of a harder life, to not have the things we enjoyed. i'm just curious how you feel about this. where you've inherited, for

instance, the billions and trillions of dollars of debt from the two years that were started. you and your children are going do be paying for those. i'm just curious how this, you know, feeds into everything you're thinking about these days. >> well, i guess, i mean, i was actually telling my family this the other day, my whole life the economy has gotten worse, education has been harder to afford, it's more elitist. we've gone into wars. my whole life there's been nothing on the news but bad news. i'm sad about it but at the same time, as you can see behind me, there's a building, we're trying to have a dialogue between people where we can come together and look for solutions to these issues. something you want to say, on our facebook, occupy uc davis, you can donate to our cause. we need