i'm all about 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 deimos his washington office leo hindery chairman of the economic growth smart globalization initiative at the new america foundation and a member of the council on foreign relations natalie foster co-founder of the rebuild the dream organization and from the university of california berkeley former labor secretary robert reich so welcome back so far we've looked deep into the abyss into which the american people are plunged in two thousand and eight in the really scary prospects for countries of conservative ideology prevails going forward so let's shift gears now and focus on solutions that could actually work in the novel idea what's going to take to turn our economy around what's it going to take to rebuild the military the middle class and create greater opportunities for

all of us moving forward so to kick start this conversation to play a video made by natalie your organization rebuild the dream here take a look at this. project for the american dream has. all right now marijuana and invest in america's infrastructure point number two great joins version three energy jobs three invest in public education for medicare for all five make work pay six though she has it cued says in return the fair tax rates. tax wall street night and wars and invest at home ten restore our protect and win new democracy you've got to close the revolving. natalie how did you come up with these particular ten points yeah well you know last year. early in the year people gathered in wisconsin to stand with everyday heroes who are under attack. tens of thousands of people came out and people

started tuning in from around the country it was clear that something was happening so we partnered with campaign for america's future and move on dot org and us out of whole set of other partners. to launch rebuild the dream and the first thing we did was said what are what are we about you know what is it that we want to see in the world and so we turn to our members and asked them and crowd sourced the answer so one hundred thirty one thousand people came together and put in ideas for what they thought this country could do to get back on track and then we took the best ones in that house meetings around the country and folks deliberated and came up with a ten point contract for the american dream which you can outsource crowds arsed crack the wisdom of the crowds which you can see it rebuild the dream dot com and in fact endorse over three hundred sixty thousand people have endorsed the contract for the american dream and that number is growing that's a that's a substantial base. point number one invest in infrastructure creating green

jobs char thirteen here shows the united states now ranks sixteenth in the world when it comes to infrastructure behind singapore south korea and iceland shouldn't this be seen as an opportunity as a as an opportunity to rebuild america and use that as a stimulus get over the you know an investment it's a huge opportunity and a huge imperative you know that sixteen is sort of a neutral number we're talking about bridges that are collapsing we're talking about companies that lose markets because our infrastructure our transport is so inefficient we're talking about water that is increasingly dangerous to people's health because our clean water systems are antiquated and now we can borrow money at near zero interest rates we have a construction industry that's flat on its back with construction workers unemployed there will never be a better opportunity to actually rebuild this infrastructure to create an infrastructure bank that leo. has championed to put the resources in to do to

modernize the base of this economy and the base of the public health systems that are vital to the people. robber rights secretary on paying people a fair wage i remember back in the sixty's there in mechanization automation and all this stuff was coming along time magazine actually did a special edition on the new leisure society that was supposed to be coming the jetsons cartoon george jetson complained that the his his boss mr space lee was a slave driver because he had to push the button three times a day. there but instead as we've seen and with charter fourteen is productivity surged upward wages stayed stagnant all that extra wealth that was created by that extra productivity didn't go to the workers that went to the shareholders so how do we give workers the income they've earned and utilize automation to pray a leisure society or at least a more prosperous middle class. well i think the key to the key questions on is how

do you make sure that working people in this country have a fair share of the gains from productivity like they used to have for three decades after the second world war i the answer is i think there's not one magic bullet but there's several things that can be done number one we need stronger unions not only in manufacturing but also in the service sector where you've got so many millions of jobs a restaurant a retail hotel hospital janitorial jobs these people deserve unions they need the bargaining leverage the unions give them and they are not competing directly with foreigners they're not even competing directly with computers i mean a lot of these people are in personal service work and they need strong unions another thing you know i would raise taxes on the top and i would provide a much much broader as i alluded to before something called the earned income tax credit which is a wage subsidy i'd expand it to go right into the middle class so average working

people could get the benefit of higher wages and the wealthy in this country would be through their taxes indirectly subsidizing those higher wages i think wall street also needs to be confined i mean i you know get bring back last eagles separated investment banking from commercial banking also control and limit the size of those banks kept the size of those banks so we don't have a wall street that is that is driving companies to very very short term profit making decisions instead of investing in their workforces investing in in job training investing in developing the capacities of their workers you know don't get me started tom i can go on for the use up the entire rest of the program on this topic but there's much much that can be done the good news is that we don't lack for ideas the real challenge is getting the political mobilization getting people mobilized and energized to do something about this and. a lot of those things that

you've described are things that have worked in the past or they know it's absolutely i mean we knew how to do it people asked me you know what what kind of vote what european country do you aspire that america becomes and i answered and i answered and i say no european country what we should aspire to is what we had in this country for three decades after the second world war and what everybody grew together as was referred to before and which we had wide wide in quality of opportunity increasing equality of opportunity we didn't have it but we were seeking it out we also saw that the gains from economic growth and productivity went to a wide cross-section of america we built a middle class in this country we can do it again you know and then reagan came along and dropped the top tax rate from seventy four percent out of twenty eight percent and my wife says my tombstone will say it all started with reagan it's my mantra leo hindery if there's a lot of animosity toward wall street right now not just because of what they did to their economy but also because of how much money they're sucking out of the economy and particularly in proportion to the average american workers charge

number fifteen shows c.e.o. pay to average worker pay has once again shot up now three hundred fifty times greater on average on wall street it can be over a thousand times the rate or beyond changing the business culture in america what specific policies should we be putting in place to address this. you know when you listen to the secretary and frankly you listen in the earlier segments to all of us there is not a shortage of ideas natalie gave us some very compelling ones in her segment there's not a shortage of good history franklin roosevelt and mrs roosevelt gave us that history what there is is a fundamental absence of fairness saw in the church about c.e.o. compensation that's the tip of a very big iceberg but that iceberg is so fundamentally unfair and when the secretary stepped into the clinton administration here remember quite vividly even though we were roughly twelve years into the reagan revolution. in america still

was very comfortable at the top saying that it had concurrent and equal responsibility to employees to shareholders to communities to customers and to the nation and at the end of his stewardship for president clinton. in the most dramatic unfair fashion possible the business roundtable the organization of the largest c.e.o.'s tom said to the secretary and to the rest of the nation its shareholders only and so this this ballooning of c.e.o. compensation it's probably the most unconscionable evidence of this fundamental failure of this lack of fairness where did employees fall off the scale where did our communities our nation itself and even in the customers that build these companies and was there was a time before when when it was illegal or at least you couldn't deduct it from taxes for a company to compensated senior officers with stock options and when that changed i

think it was during the bush sr administration when that change suddenly corporate culture seemed to change because the the c.e.o.'s instead of serving the the employees and the company started serving only the stockholders milton friedman in one thousand nine hundred seventy two who tried to put this prospect forward that we would only serve shareholders of whom a large portion should be management and it was for decades as the secretary has said and then suddenly it was just embraced and so we sit out here with with lots of signs of break each but we don't see it with a shortage of ideas whether they be nathalie's on the macro side the secretaries on the employment side what we think we lack completely is this fairness and that's why the efforts of heather and natalie are especially important and i and the secretary can talk about the theories and the solutions but they are actually down there talking to the women and men who are being so adversely affected now all natalie the were also. and gauged in wars around the world church number sixteen

here shows this is one of the reasons why our debt is so i is because our to our defense budget has just gone off the scale. war spending a significant part of our economy how do we wind this down without causing economic damage now that our economy has been restructured to be a war economy well i'll just say we were very pleased when the president and. and brought home the troops and now i think it's important that we invest that money and jobs for this country and we've done it before and we can absolutely do it again so how do you see this as a process that has started now and we need to keep people in that direction yeah exactly and and the idea of dismantling empire i mean the departed the d.o.d. budget has tripled since one thousand nine hundred i think last time it happened was world war two are there loud voices among your members and constituents who are saying let's let's cut into that absolutely folks have been saying that for years

and years and years that you know if we were to just invest a fraction in education for example that we invest in defense that we live in an incredibly different country and we would be really this debate is too limited the president's budget basically freezes the defense budget it doesn't reduce it significantly it doesn't change the way we're going to live in the world doesn't change our commitment to policing the entire world which is preposterous and an affordable and what we need out of this teacher and what we need out of the citizens now is a mobilization and an awareness and education and. real investment in far bolder reforms than what we have in this country now and they've got to change this debate absolutely you know we've been through a lot of big ideas about what it will take to turn our economy around to make it work for the ninety nine percent when we come back how do we execute the how do we transform politics to get politicians to lead boldly in a progressive direction. download

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a welcome back this is our final segment of the teaching to take back the american dream tonight's special program has been a collaboration of the campaign for america's future rebuild the dream move on and free speech t.v. we've touched a great deal on our economy was plunged into its current mess and what it will take to turn it around let's wrap up tonight's discussion by talking about how we can bring about the big changes in the u.s. economy that we so greatly need time for a little movement politics so let me just throw this out in fact let me start with

with you secretary rice schiff that's her right u.s. politics are so polarized right now how do we get past that polarity how do and and bring either rationality to the political party process or else just say ok if everybody's going to march in lockstep to paul ryan. we're going to be sure that the democrats take the house and senate as well as the white house. well first of all tom let me say that i am an optimist because you look back on american history and every time the regressive forces have started to assemble and actually push the country trying to push the country backwards you've got progressives in this country and you saw you know after the gilded age during the progressive era first decades of the one thousand nine hundred twentieth century you saw it again in the one nine hundred thirty s. and one thousand nine hundred s. you saw it again in the one nine hundred sixty s. progressives come together and they actually continue to push this country forward

toward equal opportunity toward more openness toward more tolerance toward a government that works for all of us so it'll happen the question is exactly how we're going to make it happen i thought the occupier movement and i still think the occupy movement has a great deal going for it we've got to mobilize and activate and energize people at the grass roots and make sure that they understand this is not going to be slow i mean there's not going be easy it's not going to be fast it's going to be a gradual process like most reforms are you know have been in the past we've got to make sure that people don't become cynical about politics that cynicism is probably our worst enemy because once we become cynical the other side wins we've got to in a sense make sure that people understand that it's not just winning an election it's once an election if obama is re-elected that's just the beginning of the of the process of putting pressure on washington on democrats in washington on on

independents on and on and republicans as well to move i progressive agenda leo hindery you want to make a comment time you know i've always had envied the secretaries optimism i sadly don't share it right now i think that in the in the prior sort of a jump backs. he talked about where the progressives moved forward in and took the country back and moved it in a more proper direction that was all before citizens united and i find that this overwhelming tsunami of money from the same people that we decried in the earlier segments that top one to three percent whether they be the large multinational corporation or the very wealthiest of americans that is an overwhelming force in so i'm more optimistic probably than i've ever been in my life about what we can do from here i do think we have to look at the at the state of this particular

congress it's almost paralyzed because of the election because of the animists that developed over two thousand and ten and eleven but don't think that there's a possibility of some blowback on what happened in california and carly fiorina and meg whitman thought that they could just walk in and buy elections they got kicked you know they got it in so you're not going to see the wealthy candidate go forward with it with quite the embrace that we've seen in the past that doesn't mean we're not going to spend three three billion dollars deciding who the next president of the united states is where i think bob and i would say is look there i think there are four things that republicans and democrats progressives and conservatives have said they can find some agreement around one is the national infrastructure bank one is what's called by domestic where we favor our manufacturers natalie is very conversant on the roughly five million out of school and employed youth there seems to be a fairly common embrace to that and we also have to be extremely realistic

about where we aren't in trade china is just dumping us to death notwithstanding the vice premier his visit last week we have to go after their currency manipulation and there are other trade abuses that bob talks about all the time those four things could possibly happen even as we run up to the november elections and the optimism that in the progressive movement that we sort of represent tonight could be the. i don't get it heather deimos is very involved in spoken in new york at your regular gigs a couple of times and there's a lot of activity around move to amend or organization and other you know some of these coalitions that are coming to actually say to the supreme court no thank you we're going to do like the thirteenth fourteenth fifteenth amendments we're going to reverse in which reversed dred scott we're going to reverse citizens united by amending the constitution do you see that as a as a move forward or or do you have an alternative you know i'm actually more optimistic because of citizens united than i would have been after because the fact

is that our elections are being bought and sold by the better a long time before citizens united we really needed publicly financed elections before citizens united we had corporate lobbyists of which there are twenty four for every member of congress running washington before citizens united but citizens united was like a wake up call to people it really showed and crystallize for the american people what was wrong with their government it wasn't that it was too big it was who was paying for it and that it was just a very narrow slice of our elite so we have an opportunity in this country to actually create a movement that is going to galvanize progressive tea party members independents and it's about taking back our democracy so there are a number of things we can do the disclose act is just a basic sort of sunshine transparency if you're going to be buying a bunch of political ads if you're going to be spending in our elections you've got to say who you are as filibuster by the republicans in the senate exactly but it's back in this year and it's incredibly incredibly popular with the american people

so that's one thing quick that we could do this year and then we got of course. constitutional amendment that could really change the balance of power and say that you know what democracy writes the rules of capitalism capitalism doesn't write the rules for democracy. because in fact i do i think you know when you look at the beginning of the last century. gilded age the congress was much more corrupt then mean literally congress people were bought and sold on the market. as they were on the cheap but it was kind of mediated through an election system. and so money was even more overwhelming then unions were literally illegal they were a restraint of trade that the supreme court ruled was unconstitutional and it took a populist movement the progressive movement people challenging both parties in the streets educating themselves demanding change and they passed the concept the

constitutional amendment to have an income tax they changed banking in the system they took on the power they curb the power of the big trust recollection the sun an extraordinary reforms it took movement and that's the lesson that bob started with and i think it's a really important for people people to see that it doesn't happen through the electoral process it doesn't happen through the two parties they are now corrupted it will take citizens in motion cleansing this process and challenging it and putting forth very bold reforms in demanding a lot for this to train takes us to the occupy movement natalie yeah and i think it's important that we have citizen voices in d.c. but i think it's also important oh yes it is in voices challenging corporations in this country a young woman on our staff is twenty two years old. got graduated from college no job thousands of in student debts and bank of america wanted to leverage a five dollar fee. on her credit card and she said no she started

a petition and it went viral and i want to run the country and days later bank of america you know backed down so i actually think we live in an era where people can make a difference and people coming together can change the world literally started i remember that you know when that happened that whole it started with one woman in your office line up you said that's it i was not in office was an under employed nanny just like many millennia. also has graduated off a cliff and she decided to do something about it and i think you see that happening around the country and that's certainly what the occupy movement was about or people saying we've had enough other thoughts and we're going to how we can encourage this make this play out as you go or show. secretary rice your thoughts on that and how this might play out and how we can encourage it to happen in a way that's that's healthy rather than destructive. well i think again the time is going to happen the question is exactly exactly how and when i want to go back to something bob or it was talking about i mean grassroots mobilization an energized

a citizenry there's just simply no substitute for i mean going back to the the women's suffrage movement the civil rights movement the union movement every time you want to challenge the structure of power in the society you've got to do it and that can only do it through a citizens movement at the grassroots and we're beginning to see that. and leo i respect your your your relative pessimism but but i never seen among the young particularly and i i think what gives me cause for optimism is that i am i see young people all the time people who are between the ages of eighteen twenty five thirty years old they want to make a difference they are determined to make a difference and they want to take back our democracy they want to take back our economy and it's because of them that we are going to see dramatic change. your final thoughts when the final twenty seconds here yes. you can do you really ok

thank you very much that'll do it for our special teachin to take back the american dream i want to thank our amazing panels even robert borsak heather mcghee leo hindery natalie foster and secretary former secretary robert reich for your great insights one final note this can all seem forbidding after all this is the worst economic recession since the great depression the greatest inequality since the eve of the great depression the worst long term unemployment since the great depression the worst housing crisis since the great depression the worst trade deficits ever and college students carrying the deepest debt ever but here's the reality we were pretty clear idea about the policies and the excesses that drove us off the cliff and we have a pretty clear idea about major reforms vital to rebuild the middle class revive the mirror. question is whether we the people can do enough mobilizing and organizing and educating and agitating to challenge the misrule of big money and

special interests of conservative ideas and corrupted politics we've done it before starting at the beginning of the last century with populous from the rest of movements challenge the reign of the robber barons now we have no choice but to do it again so occupy wall street has shown us don't or don't agonize organize remember democracy begins with you get out there get active tag you're it we'll see it tomorrow.

wealthy british style sun. time to rise. markets 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 cars a report on our.

morning news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china corporations are today. anger on the streets of spain were at a steady protest face a brutal police response of desperation bros and the euro zone's fourth largest economy with the highest unemployment rate.