in a wakeup call to america former labor secretary robert reich takes his lifelong fight for economic fairness to the big screen in the documentary inequality for all he believes the growing income gap threatens the american way of life unless citizens take action to lay out the problems the potential solutions and explain why some as things are still optimistic about the united states robert reich on politics with. politicking with larry king and joining me from new york old friend robert reich she was bill clinton's secretary of labor also served under gerald ford and jimmy

carter and he's now professor at the university of california berkeley and the bestselling author of more than a dozen books and the start of a brilliant new documentary inequality for all and equality for all opens across the united states this friday has already picked up a special jury award at the sundance film festival we'll talk a lot about that film a little while robert joins us from new york for some other things robert the federal government shutdown looms will the government be open after september thirtieth yes or no well mike betting is yes larry because the republicans don't really want the fall out they know what happened in one thousand nine hundred five one thousand nine hundred six people are looking for a way out on the other hand the very conservative tea party republicans don't want to compromise so inside the republican party there is a civil war going on and the result of that civil war will probably dictate what happens after september thirtieth. you're the economists this is hypothetical if

this shutdown what happens are does that affect joe citizen well it depends on how long it's shut down a shutdown this time around would be worse than the one nine hundred ninety five one thousand nine hundred six shutdown because then about six appropriation bills had already been and acted passed into law and so a lot of the government will have the money it needed this time around there is not a single appropriations bill that has been passed which means that the shutdown will have a more severe effect hundreds of thousands of government employees will not be paid even military personnel will have to get ious they won't actually be paid and that means a lot of money is going to be sucked out of the economy a lot of people will not have money to purchase goods and services that could have a negative impact of effect on employment in terms of direct services a lot of people will not be getting the direct services from government that they need social security checks will go out but a lot of other things are going to be delayed or stopped altogether what about like

air traffic controllers air traffic controllers will still be operating anything that is essential will go forward but again a lot of those people will be paid with ious they're not going to be paid with actual money because there's no money to pay them. a reasoned c.n.n. poll said fifty one percent of the public would blame the republicans of those the shutdown and thirty three would blame obama's the way you'd figure it i've seen the same polls that's what i hear that's what i see the informal kind of ongoing conversations i've had in around the country most people feel like this is a republican initiated shutdown and that there were hope republicans are saying in effect if we don't get our way then we're going to shut down the government and this really aggravates a lot of people even people who don't particularly like the obamacare the affordable care act they say this is just unfair this is not the way politics is

supposed to be played well if they're not going to shut that down because the senate is it going to do in the be a veto by the president so they're not going to get they're not going to close out obamacare so will they use they won't shut down the government who's going to go saying that the better heads in the republican party will prevail well i that's what i'm hoping for larry that the republican establishment to the extent that there is still and the republican establishment they know that they will be blamed and republicans in the twenty fourteen elections will suffer losses on the other hand i can't predict the outcome of a civil war in the republican party and now it's clear the senate will not go along with the house bill to defund obamacare the president will go along so we are if nobody compromises and the president's not going to compromise on the signal signature achievement of his administration we are going to go down the road to a shutdown and wes wise heads in the republican party stop the shutdown.

and you've already told us why this shutdown of that occurs would be a lot worse than the one when you were secretary of labor if the shutdowns averted there's still a looming pleasure over the debt ceiling and how serious that is for the layman how serious is the debt ceiling story while the debt ceiling story could be even worse than the shutdown larry because it means that the united states will not be permitted it will not simply have the authority to pay its debts to pay its creditors to pay interest on the national debt that means that financial markets would be roiled bond holders you know a lot of pensioners a lot of people who are reliant on bonds they would be hurt it's possible that we would have another downgrading of the credit rating of the united states that could in turn affect interest rates look the last time we went through this we got

through it fairly unscathed but it was a dangerous time we avoided a default but if again and this a lot of this turns on whether the right wing republicans are willing to compromise or not if they are not willing to compromise if they just are saying in effect we are going to vote against any kind of increase in the in the in the debt limits and we don't care what the results are and if john boehner decides that he is worried enough about keeping his speakership that he's not going to give this issue to the entire congress and rely on democrats to rescue him if he's basically he's not going to advance a bill to raise the debt ceiling unless his republican conference says they will go along then we're all in trouble then we are simply seeing the entire united states economy held hostage to a very right wing agenda as president obama says he will not negotiate over the

debt ceiling that's a hard line stance you believe you'll stick by that he has to stick by it i mean this cannot be negotiable because it will essentially can't negotiate over the united states paying its own bills. in the economic strata overall view of the economist how is the president doing. i think the president's doing as well as he can do that is his jobs program is highway building infrastructure program all of the things that he has talked about to get the economy back to where it should be by this time and the republicans have said no to all of it so given that they are recalcitrant and very disciplined and they can't get any republican votes or if they can get a vote it's one or two possibly at most i think the president's hands are tied i mean the economy overall is still as i said it's struggling to get out of the gravitational pull of the great recession this is not an economy back to where it should be i mean we have still have twelve million people who are unemployed or

underemployed we have six million people approximately six million people who have been unemployed for a very very long period of time and we have a norm is almost a record number of people who are too discouraged even to look for work so anybody who says that this economy is really in a good recovery is not paying much attention is there something the president isn't doing he should do. a good question i if there is i can't think of it i mean i you know he has gone about as far has he possibly can go with the republicans he there's certain things he can do administrative play but again congress has the purse strings of congress does not want to keep the government funded or cannot do it because the republicans won't let the rest of congress and if there are not the votes there to lift the debt ceiling the president simply is

powerless there's nothing that the president can do. the federal minimum wage is seven dollars a twenty five cents an hour that's about fifteen thousand eight hundred dollars a year forty hour work week what should the minimum wage be well if you took the minimum wage that we had in one nine hundred sixty eight for example and adjusted it for inflation the cost of living that minimum wage today would be over fourteen dollars and forty cents an hour so it seems to me that if the minimum wage was a good idea in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight it should be fourteen dollars and forty cents an hour today at the very least and if you figured in productivity improvements since then that is the entire economy much larger on a per person basis much more productive i could make a good argument i think for a minimum wage of close to fifteen dollars that's not going to happen right it's

not going to happen no but you know it's interesting larry when polls when people are asked about think the minimum wage should be raised over seventy five percent of americans say yes this country whether you're republican or you're democrat most people in this country feel like somebody who works full time should get out of poverty a minimum wage worker today is not like that minimum wage worker was thirty years ago it's a they're not teenagers most minimum wage workers are now adults half of them are you know of are bringing home a lot of their family income. oh we're going to take a break as we go to break we're going to show a clip from this new documentary inequality for all which won a big prize up at sundance we'll talk about the former secretary of labor his role in this inequality for all will open to wide release friday september twenty seventh here's a clip as we go to break watch the other thing you want to know about the snake over is it is small we are in proportion me and my car. my name is robert reich i

was secretary of labor under bill clinton before that carter administration before that i was a special aide to abraham lincoln. of all develop the united states as the most unequal distribution of income were surging toward even greater inequality. nine hundred twenty eight and two thousand and seven become the peak years for income concentration and looks like a suspension bridge. last year we made thirty six thousand government makeshift shells working seventy hours a week the middle class is struggling the people occasionally say to me what nation does about the answer is united states in the decades after world war two the economy boom but you had very low inequality you know rather a high during these economists when i was a bigger boys we've become i think it changed my life i had to protect people from

the people who would beat them up economically who is actually looking out for the american worker the answer is nobody. to the future. technologies the name in aviation is the game which is late he still might sixty feet into the much noble postal springs innovations and don't look around at the night shaped lots of things come to see a day here. it was. barry hard to make going to lead a long career as a plug in that has sex with the perfect there's no legs let's listen. to some.

limited leg lifts a bit. of a. that was a new alert animation scripts scare me a little. there is breaking news tonight and we are continuing to follow the breaking news. alexander's family cry tears of joy and great things out there that had to be added render at

a court of law found online is a story. playing out in real life. looking out for the american worker the answer is no but. workers don't have power they don't have a voice their wages and benefits start eroding. we are losing equal opportunity in america and they want to be able to feel cold just consider where we . are. and that was a clip from the documentary inequality for all directed by jacob kornbluth and starring bill clinton's former labor secretary robert reich who remains with us

from new york give me the genesis of this movie how to come about your involvement . well i've been writing and talking and trying to do something about this problem larry as you know for years and this got worse we now have a record level of inequality or record concentration of income and wealth at the very top about two years ago young director named jay kornbluth came to my office and said you know i've been reading your stuff i would like to make a movie about it and i was skeptical i don't know anything about movies i don't know anything about this industry but i said ok let's do. why not i've tried everything else and i was i was surprised frankly at how powerful the movie is we've had showings screenings from sundance film festival through a lot of film festivals about twenty screenings i've been to and almost every screening we get standing you know a applause and people say to me afterwards you know i laughed and i cried i was i'm

i was hit emotionally and the other thing that's interesting is they said this is entertaining this is not an eat your spinach kind of movie this is not a movie that that bangs you over the head with a political message there's a movie that i found people say to me entertaining enjoyable but i learned a lot of the same time so people would be complements are comparing it to al gore's inconvenient truth which one oscar they suggested could this could do for economic inequality or gore's film did for climate change you buy that well there's one big difference and that is i'm much funnier than al gore and that's true and by the way it's also distributed people exactly what people would say but some people would say that's a low bar by the way but i. would not say that i would how do you get harvey weinstein to distribute it. we went to the sundance film festival at it won an award and there's a lot of excitement about the film people were very enthusiastic and there was

actually a bidding war a baby contest among various distributors again i'm a babe in the woods i don't know the movie industry at all i was just sort of watching with wide eyes harvey weinstein wanted to very badly i've heard of harvey he has a wonderful track record we met i said to him you know i hope you are you know you're going to do a lot of good work for this film he said i'm so enthusiastic about this film i'm just going to make sure that everybody sees this film let's take another look at inequality for all. country to popular the foliage globalization and technology how can we reduce the number of jobs available to americans these transformations have reduced their pay. it's not just that wages are stagnant when you take into consideration rising costs

the rising cost of rents or homes dramatically increasing costs of health care the rising costs of child care and also the rising costs of higher education rising much faster than inflation. take all of these into consideration and you find that it's much worse than just stagnating wages it's basically middle class families often with two wage earners working harder and harder and harder and getting nowhere what we want to accomplish with robert well i think a couple of things larry number one there's so much misinformation so much confusion out there about this inequality issue some people say it's all about class warfare. or other people blame the poor some people blame the rich you know if you're on the right you blame you know very often you blame government if you're

on the left you blame corporations there's a lot of blame going on but people don't understand what's really causing all of this so number one i want people to understand why this is happening and get out of the blame game understand that it's it's it's the system and it can be changed you know we write the rules of the economy the economy is not something that's out there secondly i want people to understand that it's not just a matter of issues of fairness this is hurting the economy when so much of the nation's income and wealth go to the very top the rest of the country doesn't have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going and that's exactly the problem we're having and thirdly i want people to be inspired to do something about this ok but if the system is that fault the system is taboo as it is socialism the answer no absolutely not you know every time in our nation's history when capitalism has gone a little bit off the rails when we've had access. in

a kind of concentration of income and wealth at the very top like it in the eighty's eight hundred ninety s. one nine hundred twenty s. what did we do we did not turn to socialism or fascism or communism like other countries did we reform capitalism we saved capitalism from itself from its own excesses and i think we'll do it again i have great faith in this country its resilience as winston churchill once said americans always do the right thing eventually after they've exhausted all other alternatives well america good did it with government involvement roosevelt's best programs that occurred what are you calling for now. well we're not in the movie itself larry we're not actually calling for anything i this is not a political movie i want this movie to attract and appeal to conservatives and republicans and independents but we do have a website and we do have and it's shown right at the end of the movie and it and basically we say to people look at the movies over but the work has just begun if

you want to reverse the trends toward whiting inequality go to this website you don't have to do everything or even believe in everything that is on the website but if you want to get involved here are ways you can get involved personally and we want people to feel like they can change this and they can in fact if anything is going to make this change and if the change occurs in america it's not going to start in washington it starts outside washington good people who put pressure on washington to do the right thing. very often we vote against our best interests right. yes a lot of people in this country do vote against their best interests why. well i think that apparently they've been sold a bill of goods i mean forget it for example the supply side economics trickle down economics the idea that if the rich get richer everybody else does better what we know that doesn't happen i mean after the reagan and then the george w. bush tax cuts what happened median household income started to drop and we had huge

unemployment after the bush tax cuts but there is still this mythology a bill with a lot of money behind it i mean remember the wealthy in this country have money and some of the wealthy not all of them and a small minority of the wealthy are putting a lot of that money into convincing the rest of the country that supply side trickle down economics make the rich richer everybody else does better actually is true so there's a kind of a big live phenomenon and you know what george orwell said about the big lie if you repeat it often enough some people actually start to believe it. and joseph goebbels of the same thing. the affordable care act you believe it's going to be enormously popular why in in the beginning and it's not in force yet why is it on terribly unpopular. well it's unpopular partly because people don't understand it

they haven't experienced it there's been a lot of lies a lot of you know a lot of mistruths being told about it you know a lot of money is going into advertising that that says this is going to be a terrible dangerous thing i'm not surprised you know in this country ever since franklin d. roosevelt had to make a decision about whether to include universal health care in social security and the medical establishment and the drug companies and hospitals and everybody else said don't you dare do that then harry truman tried it and then john f. kennedy and then lyndon johnson tried in bill clinton tried i mean this is this is been a struggle for years and years and years so undoubtedly vested interests many vested interests don't want this to happen and they're going to spend a lot of money they've spent a lot of money trying to avoid it happening before and there's not even universal health care this is a this is a very modest plan there's not a single payer plan there's not a even a public option if you remember that debate but still a vested interest don't like this they don't like the fact that they're you know

they may they may lose a little bit of profitability doctors some doctors some hospitals some drug companies brain and do as well as otherwise robert i remember years ago in the early sixty's i moderated a debate in miami between ed and his who was then president of the american medical association and you were humphrey a senator from minnesota later become vice president they debated medicare and the same kind of arguments we've made against medicare doctors who now would love it hated it then oh they were scared to death they were scared to death larry i and i remember those debates and i remember they in a. the johnson administration said look the public is going to like medicare it's going to in fact this is going to be a building block of of of america and and and a lot of people were scared there was a lot of you know a lot of a propaganda kind of machine against it but it wasn't acted and now you know it's

one of the most popular if it's a just about the most popular thing that government does in fact when the affordable care act was first being proposed a lot of conservatives i don't know if you recall this a lot of conservatives would say don't take away my medicare right now. you see we've come full circle i think that many republicans are concerned and worried that . some americans are going to enjoy you know going to really support the affordable care act when they know what it is when they enjoy its benefits that the best time to stop it and the best time to prevent it from even happening is now once americans know how good it is and how much security they're going to feel when they have it at then it's going to be impossible to eradicate it just like medicare you also say that the rigs are now being bitten by their own success what do you mean. well they would do better i mean if you were a very rich person in the country right now and we have somebody in the movie named nick hanauer who is

a very well one of the wealthiest business people in this country who says look i want more people to have more money in order to buy my goods i'm not making nearly as much money as i could if we had a wider circle of prosperity what many people who are very wealthy are starting to understand is that they would do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy rapidly growing because more people have more money in their pockets they can they can buy more stuff then they're doing right now with a huge share of an economy that's barely growing at all because the vast middle class simply doesn't have the wherewithal to to buy what the economy is capable of producing so people like harvey weinstein who is at the upper end of this can do more and self gavi. yes i mean look at we have warren buffett in the movie and we have nick hanauer and many others who are among the wealthiest in this country who are who are saying inequality is bad for everybody and equality for all and that's

why we came up with the name of the of the title of the movie and equality is bad for the entire country it's bad for the economy it's bad for politics in our democracy because we have more and more money in politics that is making more and more people cynical about our democracy it's also very divisive because if people can't get ahead they get angry and their anger is used by demagogues on the left and the right i mean if you would but you have polarization in this country like we have not seen in years you and i both remember you know joe mccarthy's witch hunts and the divisiveness of the civil rights era and the divisiveness of watergate and the divisiveness of vietnam well we have a country now that who's more divided but with less reason to be. divided i think a lot of that divisiveness comes from the fact that people are so frustrated and so angry they're seeing you know they're working hard or they're not getting ahead

absurd always good talking with you robert thanks so much thanks larry good to talk to you too don't forget the film inequality for all robert rice joining us the film inequality for all is out right now officially opens tomorrow to follow me on twitter at king's things join us again for another edition of politics. spice k two scooby snacks the insulting thing is that they actually have the nerve to call if. you smoke and chemicals in something that is laced with your own even though one. many many different hung on me. right there nose wheel. on. the regulations on. the must just be smoking

light with no idea what is in there. wealthy british style. tightly. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines in two counties a report. on the new home arm and why should be making news all the face time just like you know .

a pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today. hello and welcome to this special edition of technology updates where we look to the skies to see the peak of russian innovation on today's show he cuts a glimpse of bush's latest stealth fighter. we find out that's a cross between a combustion engine isn't just a load of. on the ground we learned about the mysterious night shades. but first.