night we're partnering up with the campaign for america's future to bring you a special teach in the u.s. economy campaign for america's future is also joining forces with rebuild the dream organizing network move on dot org and free speech t.v. and other groups around the nation that have spread the word about tonight's program together these groups have organized local teach ins where people are tuning into this program at universities union halls and community centers around the country they're calling this whole thing the national t.v. teachin to take back the american dream so the answer to an inn and especially a whole load the local teach ins watching around the nation so why are we here well we're here because our nation is in a difficult time in a disparate desperate need of real solutions to get americans back to work to create a sustainable economy the benefits not just the top one percent but all americans and to make the united states competitive once again in the global marketplace we're also here to discuss what ideas won't work and why and i will set the record straight and offer specific and popular policies that congress and president obama

can get to work on immediately to get us back on track we're going to focus tonight on three main questions number one why and how we almost plunged into a second great depression a few years ago to what kind of future will americans have if conservatives control the economy and finally three how do we rebuild the american dream luckily we're not alone to find answers to find answers to these questions in fact we're joined by some very very impressive panel alongside me here in the studio robert borsak the co-director of the campaign for america's future and a center for ideas an action that works to build an enduring majority for progressive change campaign for america's future also runs an annual gathering of progressive called take back the american dream heather mcghee is the director of demos his office washington office demos. attack you have heather is also de deputy public policy director for domestic and economic policy on the two thousand and eight john edwards for president campaign and she coauthored a chap. on retirement insecurity in the book inequality matters the growing

economic divide in america and its poisonous consequences leo hindery is the chairman of the economic growth smart globalization initiative at the new america foundation and a member of the council on foreign relations leo is currently an investment investor in media companies and is the former c.e.o. of telecommunications and liberty media and their successor eighteen t. broadband natalie foster is the co-founder of rebuild the dream an organization focused on strengthening working families by creating good jobs and making sure that all americans pay their fair share of taxes natalie was pivotal in organizing more than nine hundred house meetings across the united states' image ally for those attending selected priority issues and created the contract for the american dream and finally joining us from university of california berkeley is robert reich the chancellor is professor of public policy at u.c. berkeley and former secretary of labor under president bill clinton he's the author of thirteen books books including his most recent aftershock the next economy and

america's future welcome to all of you like to have you here with us let's get started with issue number one how the one percent crash the economy and plunge the u.s. into a deep recession with a slow recovery robert let me start with you let's set the stage for what president obama inherited when he took office george bush was had a pretty abysmal job creation record the average monthly job growth for prime age workers was its lowest during the bush administration in any time since one thousand nine hundred eighty eight and that doesn't include what happened in two thousand and seven this chart chart number one here in two thousand and seven unemployment two thousand and seven unemployment sort of four point four percent and by the time barack obama took office in january two thousand and nine four million americans have lost their jobs the economy was in freefall with four hundred thousand people a month getting thrown out of work and by november of two thousand and ten the unemployment rate sort of nine point eight percent so what caused the economic stagnation during the bush administration and the adventure. two thousand it

meltdown well the stagnation comes from the the economy headed into a lot of headwinds you know wages were declining the top one percent was capturing literally all the rewards of growth during that decade we were hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs and so what you could get was slow growth despite large deficit despite the low interest rates and what that produced was a massive bubble what drove the economy off the cliff so that it was in freefall as you put it when obama inherited it it was not an accident it was really a crime this was the banking financial community the big banks the hedge fund operators using their political power to remove the safety protections that were built during the new deal and kept banking boring. they took those apart they then managed to stop any new regulations and they had a wilding they went on a wild drive they turned the mortgage market into

a casino they got higher and higher and made bigger and bigger bets until careening out of control they literally drove the economy off the cliff. and looks like they're fixin to do it again they're ginning it back up again it's pretty remarkable how they're clearly the two thousand and eight crisis didn't happen overnight there must have been some deep structural issues in our economy we have a chart here chart number two of wealth inequality shows the amount of wealth concentrated in just the top ten percent wealthiest americans began steadily climbing upward right after two thousand and two i'm assuming this corresponds of the bush tax cut but you could tell us and by two thousand and eight had reached levels not seen since before the nine hundred twenty nine stock market crash so how did this growing wealth inequality lead to the two thousand the way to create a sound economy that is sustainable is truly to have a strong middle class and so if you look at that long period of time where after the great depression after the for. the gilded age where we had pretty much in

shocking sort of mirror of what happened in this great crash you saw this period where we all grew together were destroying middle class with good jobs where you had communities that could actually thrive and so you saw the wealth was more commonly shared among people when you have a situation where only the gains are going to the top you're basically running an economy on fumes and that's what we saw so bob mentioned the housing bubble you had basically the middle class using their houses as an a.t.m. and all of that money all of the debt the creditors was a very wealthy class banks hedge fund speculators on wall street and it was a really upside down unbalanced economy and so the structural problems we had that really led to the middle class not being able to finance their daily expenses without going into debt without borrowing to make ends meet was a really important part of destabilizing our economy to

a place where we could have a crash in two thousand and eight so when we are able to rebuild the middle class we're going to have a much stronger more stable economy for everyone. from your lips to god's ears because secretary reich you always push back on some of the conservative talking points your conservative analysts love to blame the housing bubble and collapse of liberal or for its to get banks to make more loans within their communities they argue that liberals and government regulated fannie mae and freddie mac. forced banks to make loans to people who clearly weren't qualified secretary rice you've looked at this question what role do these so-called liberal reform policies play in the housing bubble and the ensuing economic collapse. what's on there absolutely no evidence that the so-called you know economic liberal economic efforts to expand housing were the key cause here i mean we know that there was a lot of predatory lending going on to not poor people but the lower middle class

average working people the banks were basically borrowing money very very cheaply and in fact under alan greenspan they could get money basically almost at that at zero cost and when you can get money that capably well what how do you make money will you make money by pushing the money out in terms of loans and so the banks were basically providing loans to anybody who could stand up straight they were doing it but many of these loans or these mortgage loans were you know had balloon clauses at the end people didn't even know what they were getting now you might say people should have been away or but i don't know about you i have i've bought houses before it's not easy to go through line by line annoyed exactly what you're doing you have to trust that somebody knows what they're doing and trusts basically was not called for because the banks were trying desperately to move the money to create loans to create this entire subprime loan market that padded the pockets of

a very a lot of very very wealthy investment bankers and traders and and others but ended you know who ended up holding the bag and it was a lot of average working people who discovered that once the bubble burst they were underwater. and leo hindery as soon as president obama came into office he passed the the americans recovery and reinvestment act known as the stimulus act three years showing a clear line of demarcation from when the stimulus ask act was passed and an uptick in job creation numbers were prominent businessman did you support what president obama did to stimulate the economy and if so. can you describe the results and why conservatives are calling the stimulus act a failure you know i think there was one clear message to the way to election and that is we're we're we're very broke and as an economy we're very united as the citizenry to try to fix this by bipartisan nonpartisan response to the travails

that bob in and heather have described for assist the secretary is well clearly you can't look at that chart and not believe that the stimulus act was was a plug in the leaking dike i come from the school that i think it was and it was mr directed i think it was underfunded but i certainly don't come from a school that says we shouldn't have done it at all i would have put a great deal more resources at it i think secretary rice has spoken about that in the past i would have done much more focus on the job creation aspect of it stimulus can only mean one thing it does it create jobs and it's not supposed to be palliative it's not supposed to correct societal ills it's supposed to create jobs and bob or size and i have often talked about the real unemployment travail that still burdens this country we still have twenty seven million women i mean in real

terms who are unemployed or underemployed so despite the success of the stimulus effort it wasn't enough so it's very disheartening now to listen to conservatives say we should have done that in the first place and for gosh sakes don't do any more which which brings me to a question for you natalie the stimulus act was really the only stimulus the president obama was able to get through there were a number of other good pieces that would have stimulated the economy but they got filibustered the senate in the minute we have left in this segment your thoughts on where should we you know what should what should we do if we had a majority i'd say look in two thousand and ten you know the conversation was about cuts cuts cuts to the social safety net to the the lifeline. many americans needed so security medicare medicaid and stead of a conversation about investing in jobs about expanding health care and about you know real wall street reform and that's what this country needed at that time and luckily i think you're starting to see that change i think you're starting to see the conversation shift toward jobs and investment and i think that's important and

hopefully it'll keep going in that direction. thanks to everybody for getting this teaching off to a good start so i'm take our first break coming up what will our future look like if conservatives continue to control our politics and our economy. it's all designed to keep you closed in your. world as a prison. you know you leave somebody in there for a couple hours like that in a stress positions. you have this fear of the unknown and this stress sort of building and. i've seen interrogations go on ten twelve hours they chose

songs i remember from marilyn manson and metallica slayer the two songs would be angel of death and raining blood out of me going to war coming up here into iraq i mean look into baghdad. charlie poole of the body said before which is the rock n roll band it was fitting for the job we were doing. wealthy british style. market. has come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's culture the no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune

into cars a report. welcome back to the special teaching for the american dream edition of the big picture i'm tom hartman for this segment we're moving on to question number two what happens to the american dream if conservatives win the next election or control the congress and continue to impose their economic priorities on the american people to begin i want to play a video that you made secretary reich that i think sets the stage perfectly for this discussion take a look. what's the problem with the economy let me connect the dots and show you the big picture in less than two minutes fifteen seconds the one since one thousand

nine hundred eighty the american economy has doubled in size. but adjusting for inflation most people's wages have barely increased. from its. second dot where did all that money go almost all the games have gone to the super rich the top one percent used to take home about ten percent of total income now it takes home more than twenty percent and the super rich over forty percent of the nation's entire wealth. the third dot all this money at the top is giving the super rich lots of political power especially power to lower their tax rates before nine hundred eighty the top tax rate was over seventy percent now it's down to thirty five percent and much of their income is capital gains subject to only a fifteen percent tax according to the i.r.s. the richest four hundred americans pay only seventeen percent for the dot this

means huge budget deficits tax revenues are down to less than fifteen percent of the total economy the lowest in sixty years so public services are being cut to have all levels of government. our kids are being crowded into classrooms with more and more other children roads bridges levees health care safety nets they're all being sacrificed the fifth dot instead of joining together for better wages and jobs many people are so scared that they're competing with other working people for the scraps that are left behind so we get union versus nonunion public employee versus private native born versus immigrants. final dot the vast middle class an able to borrow as it could be for no longer has the purchasing power needed to get the economy growing again which means continued high unemployment and an anemic recovery. so you see the big picture the only way we can have

a strong economy is with a strong middle class so certainly rice you mention that the only way we can have a strong economy is with a strong middle class but as the chart number four is showing right now the size of the middle class has been steadily falling since one nine hundred seventy not only that so too as the middle class the share of income in america which might have something to do with declining union membership is chart and we're five shows as union membership has declined since the since the late sixty's so too has the share of national wealth owned by the middle class yet conservatives are proposing more tax cuts for the top one percent because the social safety net ending medicare as we know it fired public workers not to mention the war on unions in states like wisconsin indiana ohio michigan so what effect will these conservative policies have on the decreasing middle class that you just identified. the conservative policies will make things far worse concentrating income and wealth and political power to an even greater extent at the very top of society we know the trickle down

economics has proven a cruel joke nothing for it goes down that means the rest of us will in all likelihood barely see any wage increase at all we would see probably unemployment again going very way a very very high we would probably see a spike as we have already seen in the poverty rate in this country and all of the social discord all of the anger and stress that people are feeling would be far worse the only way out instead of a regressive direction and that's the way the conservatives want to move us it's not conservative it really is regress of instead of a regressive direction the only way out is a progress of direction which includes a truly progressive income tax is good public services and public investments in education and infrastructure mix in large earned income tax credit that is wage subsidies or for people all the way up to fifty thousand dollars and

a renewed sense and the renewed emphasis on getting big money out of politics. heather as church number six here shows a clear correlation between lower top income tax rates shown shown in blue in this chart and more and more debt shown in red and not only that since the reagan tax cuts were passed in one thousand nine hundred it's gotten worse and it sure number seven prior to nine hundred seventy nine income inequality was relatively balanced among the five economic groups but after after seventy nine income growth growth for the ninety nine percent in some cases actually went down while the top one percent is exploded so should we expect anything other than more debt and more massive wealth inequality if conservatives control government not at all i mean we've already seen a great promise that representative paul ryan showed the american people exactly what he would do if he were in charge of the federal government he would end

medicare as we know it now and he would end medicaid he would cut taxes in half for the wealthiest one percent while raising them for the working and middle class and permanently cap our ability in this country to respond to urgent national needs so the sort of long and short of all of those different policies which really feel like a sort of doubling down on the trickle down economic theory are not only that working families would be much worse off but that we would have in fact rising debt it's not rocket science to say that if you continue to cut taxes and continue to refuse to invest in the economy that grows the real economy you're going to actually have rising debt which is exactly what paul ryan says that he's trying to address with this draconian budget you know the real catastrophe here is. what they're called doubling down these people are advocating exactly the same policies that drove us off the cliff that created the inequality that created the decline in wages that

hemorrhage the manufacturing sector of this society and they haven't changed a comma in the montreux that they do in terms of what they are for so instead of having the debate we should be having. about a much bigger set and bolder set of programs that then we have now to actually deal with the challenges we face we are instead having a debate about are we going to stay with these policies that or at least have stemmed the freefall or are we going to go back into the policies that drove us to ruin and natalie aren't these the same policies that the republicans were pushing in the one nine hundred twenty s. i mean this is basically hoover coolidge or harding coolidge hoover it's it's like reince wash recycled back charge number eight shows one in three one in three working families are now low income hourly pay is barely increased in thirty years four million homes have been foreclosed on one in four homeowners are underwater twenty five million americans can't find enough work just you know goes on and on and so are we on the verge of

a lost generation of americans well you know tom my generation knows that we will never do as well as our parents that there are far less jobs there's far less security and costs are rising and that's just a reality we face and that's in part why we're in the streets all over the country and that's in part why you've seen you know real rise against the policies that everyone has been talking about you know and i think of what's wrong in this country i think of wrath rafael who's a friend of of ours he's from ohio and he served this country into the year in iraq did everything this country asked of him and then he went to college on the g.i. bill but it wasn't enough because tuitions has gone up so much he's now forty thousand dollars in debt and working his way through life to pay off that debt who did everything this country asked of you know at and i hear there are many many like him throughout this last generation this is it really is a bizarre shift i mean i. i worked my way through college. as a d.j.

in a gas station my wife worked at her way through college as a waitress in a howard johnsons and my mom worked her way through college in the forty's you know washing. airplanes at the airport you just can't do that anymore leo hindery free trade has become a bipartisan issue with democrats and republicans both supporting at church eleven shows our trade deficits have been exploding since the one nine hundred ninety s. . and with the exception of the last few years thanks to the economic downturn chart twelve shows that along with our increasing trade deficits manufacturing is playing a smaller and smaller role in our economy do deficit's trade deficits matter and why is the anybody talking about it why is hasn't there been a discussion about manufacturing policy in america in the last thirty years of any consequence you know in time you can listen well in soberly to natalie and heather describe where we are today it is deplorable that secretary rice is described i mean even harsher as to how we got here i think i go back to one thousand nine

hundred and i think we for thirty years have decided that we can in fact live with trade deficits that somehow that's not a debt that we have to be paying attention to but more fundamentally and this goes back to some of secretary rice's comments we also decided that we can survive as a large economy the largest economy with only eight or nine percent of women and men actually in the manufacturing sector so that the credit crisis that bob led us into it at the opening of his comments secretary rice followed on was a consequence of the fact that we are so dramatically over weighted to the service sector the only way you can survive an economy like that is through credit through these credit bubbles if we don't change the trade deficit of this for that one shirt this roughly six hundred billion dollars a year half in manufactured goods mostly the china half an oil and gas that is accumulating at such a dramatic rate that the world that heather aspires to and natalie you'll never see it if we don't get more women i'm in roughly a third i'm sorry roughly

a quarter of manufacturing at women a man in manufacturing about a quarter of the workforce you will never. catch up in that in that environment as well you know the world that that secretary rice characterizes that off of his earlier segment where he said look just how cruel we have created this nation there is no middle i don't even know who the middle class is i think it's everybody but the top ten percent and it's a consequence of trade policies run amok and insensitivity to labor in general and particularly to the manufacturing sector so. the bourses what do we do about this well i think you have to have a set of new policies that make a dramatic difference in our policy for example on we've got to have a much more serious trade policy you can't run deficits of a billion dollars a billion a half a day we are borrowing that money from abroad you can't allow china which is playing by a very different set of rules than we are to use those rules in

a mercantile us way to take over our industries and to target our industries and embrace them you've got to stand up with a set of policies that defend this country and not allow the multinational sector to drive our trade policy we you know we had terrorists from eighteen ninety seven seventy nine hundred seven until basically the reagan administration started deconstructing them most other kind you look at japan germany taiwan south korea china they all have bad taxes that they reverse out when they export and that they double down when they import which function is tariffs we have nothing we have no terrorist we've got over taxes. and we have no strategy we have we have no discussion at manufacturers and this is what we do have is a trade deficit that's paralleled in mystery and that's what we do here well because it enrich is the people that natalie and you were talking about it's it's so self-serving to the large corporation the multinational corporation and to the women and men who have the privilege of running those corporations that it's to be expected this is by design this is not by happenstance this structural breakage is

by design and that's what we should probably talk about in the next segment this is this is almost like naomi klein's disaster capitalism all right so clearly the path that conservatives want to take us down is a dark one but when we come back we'll turn the corner after the break what needs to be done to turn things around and take back the american dream.

wealthy british style. is not on the free. market why not. come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's concert for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cons a report on our.

back to the teaching to take back the american dream and once again hello to all those local teach ins taking place around the country i'm joined in the studio by robert borsak co-director of the campaign for america's future heather mcghee director of the most is washington office leo hindery chairman of the.