on thursday california congressman henry waxman announced that he will be retiring at the end of his term waxman has never been the flashest of politicians but he's certainly been one of the most effective a tried and true liberal and during his forty years in the house of representatives he's helped house crucial pieces of legislation like the one thousand nine hundred clean air act amendments the safe drinking water act amendments and most recently the affordable care act obamacare and waxman finally packs his bags and heads back to the golden state congress will lose one of its most effective negotiators but also lose a way of looking at the world waxman grew up in an era of on peril of prosperity for american society and like many people from his generation believed in the power of government to do good during his time in congress the country has changed a lot and in many ways for the worse our society is now more unequal than it was

then and waxman's belief in the goodness in government has been replaced by cynicism about power and the anti-government philosophy of the reagan years union presence in the workforce has dropped from around twenty five percent in the early seventy's when waxman came to office to eleven percent now not coincidentally over the same time period the middle class his share of income has shrunk dramatically but waxman and other people from his generation leave politics when i want to remember what it was like before reaganomics and what we ever return to the prosperity that that generation and the generation before it and the generation before that enjoy joining me now for more on this internets conversations the great minds are. co-founder of the campaign for america's future our future dot org and richard esko senior fellow at the campaign for america's future robert richer thank you both for joining a pleasure peter let me let me start with you robert thank you richard. is an old

saying that. has been attributed to various folks that when the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies the next great war becomes inevitable because you know we remember the glory but not and and there's this generational change that's happening right now you know the boomers are. within twenty or thirty years of stepping off stage and the millennial zx don't have any recollection of a country where people were not afraid to start their own businesses people people didn't worry about whether or not they would get sick because health insurance was thirty bucks a month and what was the big deal and anybody could get a job and you could go to college for free you could work your way through college we're going to part time job in a burger joint literally i mean my wife worked a way through college as a waitress in a howard johnson's i was you know a minimum wage d.j. and i worked in and bob's big boy what. what what how do we transmitted that how do we share that. that knowledge how do we make sure that

somehow the generation coming up both the general gen y. who don't remember pre reagan and in particular the millennial so it looks like are going to be a very activist generation understand that america actually did work at one time or at least did work for many people. your thoughts on that but i think americans you know are famous for not knowing history and not caring much about history on the other hand i do believe that generally in our politics. there is a constant sense of nostalgia for the last period that conservatives have it about the fifty's when they think we're in a different place. than eighty seven about the sixty's and the roads have been about the sixty's and about the period after world war two when we had shared prosperity and that was that was very widely shared so i think those stories and that sense of a last period is a very strong theme in our politics right now i do think that the millennial.

innovation will have to invent its own politics it will have to invent different ways of dealing with problems that will be very different as they grow than the ones faced by those old generations but that sense that there was a period when this economy worked for the many and not just the few i think we i don't think we'll lose that richard we just saw the election of the first socialist number of the city council in seattle and she is being widely celebrated. as a socialist alternative i believe is the name of the party she was on our show. is this is this going to be the news i had guys to thank for the millennium goals and what does what does this mean for the us. well it's hard to say tom i mean we've had bernie sanders who has described himself as a small less socialist at least in the senate for quite a while and i know you have your lunch time with bernie pretty regularly i think you know whether that i think there will be a news item so i think the question is a whether it takes the the label socialist or not remains to be seen that's one way

it could go but i think it shows a thirst for experimentation and a recognition that the paradigm that's been presented in terms of two parties in a system that's dominated by corporate money is unsatisfying and isn't producing the results that people would like to see you know want to interesting thing about socialism it as a word is that among the younger generation voters it now has an approval rating according to the last polling i saw the word itself then it did and quite some time and i believe if i recall correctly a higher approval rating than the word capitalism dead so ironically i suspect that may have something to do with republicans castigating everything they don't agree with this socialism and i think a lot of people may be saying if that's socialism i'm for it but whatever it is i think i think that what we're seeing here is is this what we're really seeing in this ike i it's. is the sense that we need new paradigms we need new models we need

new channels i think the working families party in new york state in new york city is a very powerful new paradigm for the future so i think we're going to see more experimentation more diversity of ideas and hopefully more electoral change as a result of that you know when you think about the difference in consciousness of these generations the boomer generation the middle class kids the kids that working class. parents as you said since they could get a job get an education or anything you know on economic questions they were very confident and so they had their focus turned to the civil rights movement the woman's movement the environmental movement the anti-war movement eventually to spreading the prosperity more to changing the inequities of the society and we really sort of assumed a decent economy at least the economy was a center piece of our of our politics i think for this millennia old generation to

be very different i think they are and you know one of the worst economy since the great depression and they are the ones that go to college are bearing these huge student debts and their focus on what's going to make this economy work for people again is reflected in the movement i think and it's and it's going to pose a set of very different questions for that generation. you know i was in s.d.s. town and i have to go ahead richard. i was there i was just going to interject here to follow up on bob's thought that you know there was an incident where they put the d.n.a. of the one nine hundred eighteen flu virus on the internet and then took it down because they thought it could be replicated that can be done in a positive way to even though people don't remember the one thousand nine hundred eighteen epidemic or may soon not remember the glory days of the post-war america will have the information will have the d.n.a. we have more information accessible online than ever before and i think the millennial generation will have. that at their fingertips if they want to rebuild

something better yeah and i win i wonder to what extent the stories you know how those stories are going to survive because. you know as a as a former member of s.d.s. . it was perceived and it is perceived in by most people today as an anti-war movement but the port here on statement and i think sixty four had nothing to do with the vietnam war or if it did it was very peripheral tom hayden and the people who wrote that it was all about social justice economic and racial and gender and i mean a very big dissent against the cold war and this division yes between both this time terry and socialists on the one hand and this the capitalist military industrial complex on the other which it was it denounced yes and so maybe were seen that rebooted i don't know. what what do you think you know many historians say that the you know the general the wealth that we had in the sixty's was the

main thing animating guys to that era i think i think the prosperity was assumed for a lot of middle class kids and it made them. very free to experiment in a whole bunch of ways and to do movements and to do politics out of that economic security and reading of we're going to have a very different politics now because for a bunch of middle class kids and working class kids they don't have that economic security so it will both constrain their politics but it was also formed in different ways well we and richard we had an opposite. as it were in the late sixty's early seventy's which was you know government is bad and the government was trying to kill us in the vietnam war and then along came richard nixon and he was trying to bog us and i mean literally put a plug in our eyes and figured it. really and figure it out and and. in some ways it's kind of very similar to the rand pauls i guys did today the libertarians and the and the and. even the black bloc folks among the reoccupied

thoughts. yeah i mean i think that's right i think that's insightful i think that the if you want to summarize it is that counterculture rock n roll cow culture i think of fragmented in one off in a couple different directions one emphasized social justice in its roots in the kind of you know pete seeger love the commune ality and and shared interests but i think there was also a kind of up against the wall break the you know break the windows kind of don't tell me what to do kind of emotional dimension to it that i think went off in a different track first of all a commercialised by you know rock n roll labels record labels and so on but it also went off into a kind of howard stern you know i'm going to express myself with sexual acting out an over consumption of goods and you know and a rejection of political correctness which at the end of the day is just

consideration for the feeling of others so i think there was a very anti communitarian stream that came out of that too that's resurfaced today in the in this sort of hipster libertarianism in the or in the random rap. cyber libertarianism apropos of that in the in the one thousand nine hundred fifty one or fifty two when russell kirk wrote the conservative mind he warned conservatives that if the working class ever became the middle class and the other was a big sufficiently prosperous that the nation would devolve into chaos and sure enough of the sixty's and seventy's suddenly all these folks were saying wait a minute what about us and. women african-americans gays i mean stonewall happened in sixty nine as i recall and and from conservatives point of view it was like oh my god russell kirk was right we've got to do away with this middle class we've got to stop being. you know we've got to stop the middle class from being so prosperous

. i think that that is a possible richard that that thought is in the minute we have to liberate is still animating the republicans and conservatives. well who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of the men. and they are largely man but i think the short answer is look i think there was a fear of an educated middle class i think there always is because an educated middle class makes independent choices and the kind of john dewey philosophy of educate children to be informed well to do citizens is a threat to the power base that modern conservatism represents so who knows maybe you're right yeah it's a very very interesting thought and i mean there are there is a strain in the conservative movement bill buckley used to talk about those about we just can't have this many people having that much wealth much fun yeah. absolutely horrified conversations and great minds of. spring.

dramas that try to be ignored. stories or there is still a few in the. world. picture of you.

join me. in park and finance commentary in for me and much much. only.

it was back to conversations great minds i'm speaking with robert morris co-founder of the campaign for america's future and richard the senior fellow at the campaign for america's future our future dot org is the website and. the state of the union address was this week and i mean lyndon johnson came out and declared a war on poverty franklin roosevelt declared. if radical transformation in america barack obama proposed iras. are a that when they reach fifteen thousand dollars you are required to hand over to wall street that they have to become private. what's happened to to our country

well some of that reflects you know a divided city roosevelt had massive democratic majorities in a crisis johnson had massive democratic majorities and you know post kennedy assassination so they had opportunity that obama had in his first couple of years where he did big things and hasn't had since and so this state of the union i think reflected a very diminished presidency and a very different mission vision from the battles of the last years and a divided congress because he knows nothing is going to get out of this congress. what was interesting to me is the president's speech was that in the run up there was a lot of talk about inequality we're going to focus on this this is this is going to be the populist speech we're going to continue this theme against the right wing and against republicans and it pretty much got scrubbed out of the speech there was one section where he said look we have this recovery but incomes are stagnant. inequality is growing not enough people have good jobs and not enough people are

working at all. but the reason he gave for that was what i call passive voice populism it was well there are these you know remorseless anonymous forces globalization and technology that has that over the decades have caused this this inequality and that's the last opportunity because you know the reality is there are a whole set of policies that were you know this was done to us the rules were rigged by the few to benefit the few and they succeeded they waged class warfare and they won as warren buffett said and they changed the rules so that they that they benefited and the rest of us got hurt and to not explain that to people so that they understand how we got here and therefore it's easier to understand how we get out is a huge lost opportunity and if you blame it on the remorseless all that does is make people think well you know there's nothing that can be. and i just got to make

my way in this in this mess. r.j. your thoughts on the. rich rich well i mean sure the passive voice populist says shift happens when it comes to inequality rather than explaining why but i also think you know this is a town right now you know washington d.c. like any group of people as a culture it has its folkways and says this is this is a culture right now that it's fetishizing ronald reagan and tip o'neill at the moment in history when they were able to agree on something it's taken two individuals and a moment in time and made that a totem of some kind but what they forget is that both ronald reagan and tip o'neill were reporter ical firebrands for two very different points of view what would is missing from the debate now is that you know where reagan was a firebrand for conservatism o'neill was a firebrand for old school liberalism what we have now is a rhetoric of washington that that fetishizing talks are just cupper mys for

compromises sake and what gets lost in that idiology has become a dirty word in washington but idiology is the set of values and ideas you represent when you go before the voters so did the extent that they get soft pedaled or backtracked the voters lose out democracy loses out so i would say that this president lost a golden opportunity he said some good things but he lost a golden opportunity to draw a very clear line between to do now we can talk about why he did that that's another discussion but he lost a golden opportunity to talk about two very different idiology is lay out the choice that voters will be making at the end of this year and really start restoring the debate to the democratic process in the economic struggles we're facing he didn't do that again i think there are social even anthropological reasons for that but it's up to us to force that this gushing if that discussion isn't being instigated by our leaders and i think that's the point we're at now richard couldn't you. also the there's a there was

a very large piece of that when he opted to do the same thing bill clinton did bill clinton campaigned with his new covenant speech on a very f.d.r. platform and then as he was going into office larry summers and alan greenspan famously set him down and said son we're going to tell you the facts or i guess i was robert rubin and alan greenspan said and said here's the facts of life and obama when he started his presidency which you know back five years ago was bringing all the these these the summers rubin crowd along instead of the robert reich crowd instead of the genuine progressives. sure well don't you think that when f.d.r. took office that andrew mellon sat him down and said son i'm going to tell you the facts of life so you have to teddy roosevelt when he took office j.p. morgan sat him down and said son i'm going to tell you the facts of life the transformative leader is the one who says no i'm going to tell you the facts of life and that's what's been missing now and i think that you know you point out the commonality between the clinton presidency and the obama presidency i think that's

absolutely right and i think there comes a time that their base their voters have to say we're not going to tolerate that the next time around and come two thousand and sixteen that the head of our ticket better be prepared to answer some hard questions about the economy and what he or she is going to do about it or we're not we're not going to put them in that that candidate seat i think it till that happens we're going to see this breakdown happen over and over because the lure and the need for big money is just too great without accounting for it's coming from the public so robert that takes us back to the battle between the people and the plutocrats thirty eight years ago this week thirty eight years ago yesterday the buckley viva les ho decision was decided by the supreme court and it was the first time that the court came right out and said money is protected by the first amendment it's protected as speech but they say now i don't you know i recall jefferson going on at length about how we have to worry about the rich and you know bankers are to be more. fear of that army is always

going to stop but somehow they found money in the first amendment in the and then four years ago last week they they pulled together the that plus the old first national bank purse versus whatever it was case. and said and oh and by the way the fourteenth amendment protects corporations and i didn't know that you know abraham lincoln to gone to war does free the corporations but apparently he did and at least grade these conservatives on the court and so now we've got the situation where. the election business is a multi-billion dollar business and the candidate days your and we saw this writ large in the republican primary but it's just as evident in the democratic party the candidate is sure is the candidate that can raise the most money or you know if shelley ate olson decides he's going to throw fifty million bucks at somebody all of a sudden they're the candidate for him till he runs out of money or decides that he's going to support somebody else i mean this is not

a democracy this is this is an oligarchy or a plutocracy. what do we do when you've got more than half the senate there are millionaires now and that this is a hole in the lap of the house yeah first time in history the senate has always been the rich so. i think you know there's there's no question you this only works if there is a democratic movement that calls that the calls that you know people back to account and that sweeps the stables clean year and it has to be formed like the old populist movement that came out of small farmers and laborers against the big banks and the industrial make notes of the of the east it's got to be formed from people getting involved and taking this government back and if they don't look this thing is locked down now this is the system as revolving doors it has you know all these congressmen leave to become lobbyists they are nice to the interest they superintends and they get a good job when they leave same thing with the lead staffers they you know congress . people spend twenty thirty percent of their time talking to rich people raising

money it's a lock system and the only way it gets interfered with is that if there are people in motion that you know challenge legislators that take them out of office and that that get engaged politically what's interesting now though is that there is the beginning of leadership with a populous voice like elizabeth warren like sherrod brown like jeff merkley like tammy baldwin and others who are prepared to name names who are prepared to talk about the rules that got rigged and how they got reagan who read them and so there's a national platform for them. and people can use them and work with them to start building greater education across the country and we desperately need what the populous did which was teachers who went across the country to talk to farmers about how they're getting screwed by the banks we've got to go through that process one of the things one of the things that the populists did in a big way. back during the populist err i mean in the late nineteenth century early

twentieth century was they amended the constitution as of states and they in and they allowed citizens and the whole ballot initiative thing was a huge wave swept across this country in the eighty's to the one nine hundred twenty s. and mostly western states picked it up because they were you know many of them were just. more you know more malleable the less set in stone but. now we have this movement move to amend is is probably one of the best nexus points coalition of coalitions but there's a whole bunch of different organizations your organization our future i know you've talked about this to amend the constitution to say no money is not is not protected by the first amendment it's property and no corporations are not directed by the forty minute there to be out there voluntary associations and isn't that isn't that like step one doesn't isn't that dealing with the original cancer where you got to go after the original cancer i don't think it's step one and i think we've got to have that argument but we've got to keep building our. it's we're going to have

a very front we are having a very frustrating period of politics now except what's interesting is inequality in the way this economy works for the few and not the many and the way people are getting shafted is at the center of our politics even in this very conservative time that's the result of occupy that's the result of reality and the crisis that's the result of a bailout of banks by and by both a republican and democratic administration that you know threw money at the banks and paid their bonuses and any i.g. and you know jamie diamond has a rap sheet longer than anybody just got a huge bonus and just got a seventy five percent increase in his pay and those those realities were going to go through that you know we got billionaires that use politics as a plaything like eagleson that's not true that's not going to change is going to get worse on the other hand in that context people are going to get educated and they and they've got to start you know being pointed to the right fights and

they've got to start taking people out of this congress and holding them accountable and throwing him out of office it will take a while before this thing moves but if we don't have people in motion. nothing will move this thing will get worse richard we just have twenty seconds left with thoughts of thoughts apropos of. economic inequality is inherently unstable and can't last forever i think. i think you nailed it i think you know marx nailed it back in the nineteenth century and it's we need to be reinventing our economics as well as our politics richard. when i see of thank you so much for being here with us odd to see this in other conversations the great minds go to our website at conversations with great minds dot com and that's the way it is tonight friday january thirty first twenty fourteen don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get active tag you're. it.

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i was a new alert animation scripts scare me a little movie. there is breaking news tonight and we are continuing to follow the breaking news in the movie. the alexander family cry tears of the war and in great things rather that there has been rigged or geared toward a war zone. there's a story many sort of movies playing out in real life. coming

up on our t.v.'s if you bend there one airport in canada you may have been spied on new leaf documents by edward snowden show that canadian intelligence used free air for a wife five to turn passengers electronic activity even after they left the airport details of those revelations and a moment what does because i have in common with terrorist and edward snowden james clapper think they are all in national security threats either as testimony to the senate in the national intelligence director is only for this guys because i never preferred currency of criminals that really the case find out coming up. and in colorado food producers are being denied the option of a way willing their food as g.m.o. free and we'll talk about this.