well i'm sam arbonne in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight the big picture award winning author walter mosley joins me for our first half hour for this week's conversations with great minds discuss the latest book which starts the discussion about how to get out of america's growing poverty rate and destructive way of life. for the reason democratic victory in new york's twenty six congressional district could the republicans just varies fully now before things get any uglier and the nation's

largest states are not represented on capitol hill so what's the answer to this problem state division of talent i'll break it down on topics for the fourth shopping brock's internet stealing take. it's friday which means it's time for conversations with great minds joining me tonight is an award winning american novelist who's written thirty four critically acclaimed books perhaps his best known work is it best selling series of historical mystery novels he treated as active named easy rawlins as want to know henry a war a grammy and an american a lifetime achievement award his most recent work is untitled twelve steps toward political revelation examines an american struggle with poverty or pressure and self destructive behavior and how we can turn things around pleased to welcome from new york walter mosley author walk i'm. just great great to have you with us

you open the book in fact in the introduction you talk about your own personal addiction alcohol and cigarettes when you were young how is that a metaphor for the american body politic. we know. and when you're human you're a social creature and if you're a social creature it means that necessarily you form dependencies in life some of these dependencies make sense you know you're dependent on food on water on love. social communications you depended on oxygen there are things that you need better fine there are other things that you're dependent upon which aren't necessarily so good. there could be they can be drugs it could be alcohol would be cigarettes it could be fast food but also i think the government itself if you're dependent upon it for one thing and you're not getting that thing but which makes you needed all the more then you need to be questioning what your dependency on your body politic

is and what form it does that dependency take right now in your in in your perspective here in the united states. well i believe that a lot of people think that america the government of america is there to help support protect and make sure that our lives are the happiest lives that we can live and indeed it's working completely against all of those schools working for. basically the economic system which we often. confuse for our democratic system and you kind of define me as those hierarchy of human needs and it's pyramid at the basis on your stays above the safety and everything about that is the mental stuff you know that can kind of good stuff and and it seems that the founders when they talk about you know life liberty and pursuit of happiness in the declaration or or the common. good the common good and

that that this whole notion is providing people with that basis in the social safety net the foundation on which we can build our law. lives how are we not providing that to whom are we not providing that and how should we. well i think that the begin with the people who are not getting what they need is the working class now if you ask most americans what class they're and they're going to tell you i'm in the middle class but it's not true eighty percent of america is in the working class you define the working class by saying that a middle class person if they quit their job nothing in their life will change for at least a year before they have to really somehow replace what they've lost by working class person two weeks in their complete life change their mortgage where their kids go to school where they eat everything change and it's the working class is

not getting what they're needing they're not getting the right education they're not getting the the right medical care they're they're not able to retire in any kind of comfort they are able to age with dignity i mean there's a whole list of things that are just normal everyday needs and actually they're not just things that we need that we don't deserve there are things that we should have that our labor and that our country pays for should pay for. and this leads to this concept of of wealth you know the republican moderate right now is the country is broke i can't tell you how many times i've heard that stated over and over and over again on network television and never ever challenged and yet you point out that not only are we not broke we're we're wildly richer as a nation than anybody is willing to acknowledge even even the democratic side you know if you want to put this our political spectrum. well you know when you say

republicans and democrats for me you know ever since the failure of the unions or the summation of the unions by reagan the republicans the democrats are supported by the. same groups of people to support by corporate america they take different roles they act in different you know slightly different ways but in the end nobody wants to tell the american worker what he or she is worth i mean if you look at america that all of america the public lands of america the air the wind the water the oceans the minerals the intellectual property if you look at what america is every person in america could be a millionaire. the fact that we're not allowed. to use or to exploit the wealth of our nation is what our government is keeping us from this not just the republicans the republicans or the you know the uglier face of it but the

democrats are supported and so are you suggesting that for example our mineral wealth should be held as part of the commonwealth and we should do as as it has as a rock did as venezuela has done as as in large part mexico has done nationalize our oil nationalize our minerals and then say the money from that is going to pay for national health care program for decent experiments and things like that so i think i think that we should be able to say in clear terms look the bottom line wealth of america is and tell every american will your piece of this you know it when you get a little thing from social security this is how much you're going to get when you retire you can say your wealth is as an individual citizen taxpayer of this nation two million dollars three million dollars that's what you're worth and it's broken down into all these various things after that we can decide ourselves well should we use this maybe for our education should our part of it say well maybe we should

nationalize you know natural gas or marble on or the ocean so you know i mean if we felt that we were but the oceans that surround the united states were of value we might care more about the ecology. of our of our oceans the well being of our if each one of us i think that i'm i'm not i'm not i'm not trying to say that you know i don't need to make this statement that we need to socialize that i mean to say well this is what you're worth how do you want to use what your work. that's an important concept for us to be discussing and yet there's no discussion of this whatsoever in the in their in their in the corporate media there's no discussion of this in the in the political no realm and there's frankly little discussion of this even even among intellectuals in the in books and things why do you think that is why is it that we know that so many americans think that they're in the middle class when they're in the working class as you point out and the discussions of dialectical materialism for example are just don't exist you know the way it which

is the essence of what you're discussing. but our so-called leaders on both sides i believe don't trust the work. i had a meeting with a group of political progressive when first bush and then obama was you know bailing out all of the you know the banks and financial corporations that stole the money in the first place and i said listen we got what we have to do is push this that instead of bailing out the corporations let's give them money to every taxpayer who made let's say less than forty thousand dollars last year let's just split up the whole amount of the bailout give it to the taxpayers and let them decide who to give it to and what corporations and what parts of america they want to bail out the progressive left no we can't do that and the reason they said is because they don't trust the workers i think that the thing is and we use is really our kate political system our political system is like late nineteenth century you

know here we are living in the age of you know the internet and facebook and you know we go in you know into a booth once every four years and make an x. you know we need to decide for ourselves what to do what do you want to do with that money i don't think anybody want to give it to the banks well enough except the banks yeah and in fact franklin roosevelt did exactly what you're talking about i mean within a couple of weeks of the time that he was sworn into office he had ten thousand people hired by the c.c.c. his statement was you know the best welfare program is a job and you know was following keynesian economics john maynard keynes famously said if you hire one guy to dig a hole hire another guy to fill it pay them both and eventually that money that you're paying them is going to work its way into the larger economy stimulate the economy which i think is is what you just described so it's not like there's not a precedent for particularly among liberals i'm astounded frankly you'd be in a group of progressives who would say no we shouldn't do that i and i think that

there are a lot yeah but i well take me out of that list you would know these are people's names yeah there are you know this is there's a thing there's a separation there's a class separation. problem among all of the america the everyday people who are working people the people who you know get up every day and go to a job and you know which is you know not you know any kind of a highly touted position those people. others think that they're not smart enough they're not good enough they're not capable of defining their own lives and then they use experts and other experts are smarter and they do know more but they're hired by the corporations and so experts positions is to lie to the rest of us so the corporations and get what they want i mean that's just the way it is i mean any expert anybody who's an expert you shouldn't trust an expert as colin powell putting it yellow dots in the desert and we saw this in the tobacco companies we saw it with the best as companies you know the as close as anyone you know in the

ninety's or the cell phone companies today everybody else in the realtor and medical group in the world says cell phones cause brain cancer in america is another we're not so sure about that you know it's we're we're overwhelmed by the power up and we need to separate ourselves out and come together one of the things that i'm saying in the book is that the way we vote we vote against things rather than for things if we could set up an online system where people said where did their ten most important political goals. and let people work not for we don't trust each other before we come together then you know a living wage medical insurance aging with dignity safety for our children education for our children all of this would come before anything else and we wouldn't have to fight over those you know and sooner or later we have to argue

about stuff but in the beginning the most important things most americans agreed and yet we were having that discussion at one point franklin roosevelt just shortly before he died articulated his second goal writes it was exactly the list that you just went through and and that discussion now is off the table and you point out it's because the you know the corporate elites are basically running what we're hearing and what we're seeing how do we break that. we know i guess what i'm saying is i think that we have to number one the republicans and the democrats are not political organizations they're special interest corporations their constituencies do very rich and their power base is the working class the working class has the pulled up power base away and come together and one of the things that but you know we can't use the old system of politics we have we need a new system politics that's that's that's much more viable and much more every day you know people young people and old people like on facebook we could have like.

a national virtual parliament where people could actually at least express their opinions if not actually make many of the decisions that congress is supposed to be making i think that we need to do that because if we don't. the the the lag and also all the various but built up between the working class and the elites keeps us from ever making decisions we're always two or three years behind whoever is making decisions whether that you know is newt gingrich or you know barack obama really didn't. fascinating but a world will continue this week's conversations of great minds with author walter mosley in just a moment after this break. let's

not forget that we had an apartheid regime. i think. either one well. or never government says there's the can feel safe get ready because you get their freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here sees some other part of it and realized everything you thought you don't

know i'm sorry is a big. magic conversations of great minds i'm speaking with award winning american novelist walter mosley who's written thirty four critically acclaimed books his most recent

is titled twelve steps toward political revelation hold a walk about you write and talk about one of my favorite topics that we don't like police as we like representatives and if we don't get out there and make clear to them what we want we shouldn't be surprised we don't get it can you elaborate on that concept and how it runs up against the wall of corporate cash that's been unleashed by the supreme court the citizens united decision. well i think that the that. and that americans. have been stunted we've been kind of kept and in the past and we've also been misled u.k. did we i thought the most people in this said well yeah i voted somewhat known and voting is the first step after that you have to continually put pressure on your elected officials in order to make them do what they said they're going to do because the corporations they have people in there every day they have people

lobbying the people in congress them the most important representatives every single day you voted you know two years ago or six years ago whatever it is whichever house it is and you're expecting that that that they're listening to that vote they're not going to worry about your vote again until a few months before the next election and then all of the you know kind of you know flummery or come out on television or on billboards and stuff but one of the big problems is and i want to keep going back to it is that there we need to develop structures to put pressure on those structures now most likely would be online structures internet structures in which we would have not a town meeting but national meetings every other week we would all get online and say well this is what i think is what i think people would talk people would think people would vote you know these might not be binding votes but it would it would it would least show the congress what we're thinking now if we told congress last week hey listen we want to pass this bill and congress doesn't do it they would

they will know that we just told them and we will know that they haven't done it as it is we're kind of waiting in a limbo in which to you know calm so we did know what you were thinking we're go about doing our jobs so we have to develop a mechanical structure in order for us to put stronger pressure on congress and on the president wasn't he's even on the core isn't that a piece of that structure a series of grassroots movements isn't. well i think that there need to be grassroots movements but you know one of the things is is that we have you know the grassroots political movements are all good and well but you know you and i both know in order to really work and make these grassroots movements work we either have to you know donate your whole life to it you got to work twelve hours a day eight days a week fourteen hours a day and for nothing and that's why i'm so concentrated on trying to create a mechanical method that we can just say listen on thursdays at seven thirty the

whole country is going to get together you know we get together watch television you know who is going to be you know the next star who's going to lose the most weight we can get together and actually make political decisions thirty five forty minutes a week you know so even though i think it is grassroots i want to redefine grassroots i want to pull us out of the late nineteenth century and enter into the twenty first century where we can start to talk together we can start to make if it's fascinating because if you point out in your book twelve steps toward political revolution america is actually an oligarchy you use that word in small detail democratic clothing most americans don't know what an oligarchy is and interestingly after i'd read that just the next day i noticed in the washington post in the same newspaper on the same day a reference to russian oligarchs and chinese peasants and no reference you know and i'm starting to think of the koch brothers as the american oligarchy and the bottom

in any way of america's working classes america's presence or we don't use that kind of language to describe ourselves but we used to describe others doesn't this betray just a fundamental misunderstanding by americans about basic economics and politics and how do we resolve that if so if you agree with. it it's absolutely true that i think that americans don't understand what value is they don't understand what cost is their. understand what labor is and that's because we're not taught and we're also taught that if you start to talk about something like capitalism that makes you a socialist that makes you a communist and therefore you are anti democratic which you know is completely ridiculous america is an oligarch e it's the the many ruling the few the many holding the power to rule the few but i want to add and i just want to say this and something i say that in the preface of that book that even though these there are these capitalists they're also bound by

a certain set of rules you cannot succeed in capitalism unless you perform the evils of capitalism if you all of a sudden you own some major corporation or run a corporation say listen i'm going to give child care to all my. workers i'm going to make sure that they all have the best medical care if you're going to go out of business if you will note you have said that at that moment major self no longer a member of the capitalist class in order to be a capitalist you have to perform these evils and so understanding the whole system is really important it's not like there's a bad guy it's not bernie made off the bad guy it's the system and we have to become a part of that system in order to change it and we're not we're not citizens we are denizen we do not our votes don't make the difference it's the corporate dollars that make the difference you use the word american ism it's it's

a word that i had encountered before what is it and why is it wrong. well i use american isn't the same when you use alcohol because you know we feel we're deeply the. on this notion of a nation that doesn't exist is what you were saying before we believe that we're in the middle class we believe that we're in the greatest democracy in the history of the world we believe that is our. choice and if anything fails it is our problem we don't understand that there's an under underlying system that betrays this and you know so you know it's like you're doing the drug you're happy so what this is make me happy so no it's destroying and you go to make you know to a fast food restaurant you eat this stuff that this is good food it's a no no no it's poison it's killing you and this is the thing that we don't know we don't understand that we have to. overcome this notion of

nationalism and actually become a real nation that cares about individuals and people and in that would be like the old time notion of america we're actually worried about the rest of the world. and about our own people at us and how do we as a culture branch the power from the americas ruling class we have now the top one percent taking twenty five percent of the income owning forty percent of the wealth without the i mean it where would you start. for me. it's so easy it's a very difficult question for me is very easy i started writing the book that we're talking about you know twelve steps i say listen i can defy i can show you where you're worth millions of dollars individually and as i was just a member of the corporation of america i can i can show you where you are not able to make the citizens the way that we do it again i'm going to keep getting back to this is we have to figure out how to unite how to come together outside of the

office cation of the republican and democratic party and to say listen i'm an individual because listen you could be. a white area and separatist in idaho or a black nationalist separatist in detroit but you're both thinking the same things you're both thinking i want to live and wage you're both thinking i want medical care for my grandparents you're both thinking i want to age with dignity these people actually want the same things and could work together if we create the right system i still know i'm going to say i'm going to keep saying that i think that the best way to do this is is the most advanced technology because technology is how human beings live and that technology the go see at facebook we just develop a political facebook and we say ok what's the most important things to you and everybody says the most important thing to me we don't have to care about if your gender your race. your sexual preferences how much money you have which is that

you are you have to say what's most important to you most of us have the same things in common and the whole nation will change. aren't you concerned suggesting this technological solution. if for example right now you can get a job working at home for one of several actually right wing think tanks editing. facebook editing with kapadia editing on line content to make it more to conform with the right wing worldview if you try to look for information as favorable for example to lyndon johnson or franklin roosevelt it's actually buried on now electronically you know in the on the internet under piles of right wing stuff are you concerned that if we if we turn to this technology the koch brothers and figure out a way to co-opt it just like me they're rewriting with a pedia. you know i'm not i'm not i'm you know the because what they're doing is

they're dealing with with a passive internet i'm talking about a very aggressive and it would definitely be two prong one would be a place where each individual says this is what i want this is what i want you no matter what the information say i know i want to job where i make enough money to live i don't need somebody to i don't need to look that up on google i know that that's what i want i know when i get sick i want to be able to pay for my medical care i know i don't have any teeth in my head but i'm worth three million dollars so i want to be able to go to a dentist and get some teeth in my head i think that's one thing and another thing is i think that would be undergirded would be something like twitter coming on and saying hey listen i said i wanted this would you say and people would be able to talk outside of it but i'm not talking about a system but that that's putting information on top of us i'm talking about us being very aggressive with the technology and of course is going to be problems with it but you should listen the problems that we have today in america are not

your mental so my saying well i'm worried that i might not you know be doing good i know i know a guy who was a therapist he had a guy come to me said well you know i do drugs and i do alcohol and i think that the sex and. and the guy said well listen i think you should come to therapy say oh no i can't do that so why would someone i don't want to be dependent. but the truth is we're already there and we're already living under a system in which all of our money goes to these corporations we're already you know if we make a hundred dollars we really only get about twenty that's already a fact so yes we have to take risks but i think if if we aggressively try to take risk we can undo what the corporations have done and also the corporations will acquiesce i mean they're not really living beings they're into these they're structures if we limit how they make profit they'll fit into the so that it has an extraordinarily optimistic and refreshing perspective and i thank you so much for

sharing it with us tonight walter mosley thank you so much for being with us thank you thanks for having to watch this conversation as well as previous conversations with great minds go to our website at conversations with great minds about. coming up and serve a columnist brian darling democratic strategist erica kennedy a conservative radio talk show host guy benson join me after the break for our big picture weekly ramble . let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right.