i am reminded about the garment workers where frances perkins stood across the street in new york to see this building with a bunch of immigrant young women that were flinging and just flying out of the building because it was on fire. it was garment workers and there was no way of escaping because they didn't have the safety or protection or any type of plan in place to protect women who were low-wage immigrant workers, didn't have good command of english language. these were folks or just trying to make a living. those kinds of rings moved frances perkins and because of that we saw many reforms in the work place. and now as we see, think our labor laws changing and we hear about some of the great things that are happening in terms of in home health care workers and cabdrivers. there are women cabdrivers out there but we also see where women i think have also been stuck, stuck and i want to just give you a statistic. some of you are doing now it. women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to a man doing the same job. a woman of color who is african-american makes 64 cents. a latino

roosevelt's friend, frances perkins, sensed a collective shiver in the hall, a sudden sorrow over this public exhibition of what had been lost. there was a hush, and everybody was holding their breath, she recalled. everybody was sort of weeping inwardly. the old line politicians even remembered him as a very vigorous young pan at the previous convention -- young man, and here now was terribly crippled person, getting himself to the platform somehow be, looking so pale, so thin, so delicate. he reached the lectern. with both hands gripping the handles of his crutches, he could not wave, so he threw his head up and grinned. it just tore the place to pieces, perkins said. when the noise subsided, the voice that emerged from the weak figure on the platform was superb. the accent and enunciation were of the high church episcopal pulpit and the wall street boardroom, governor and labor. but the words were plain and blunt, and there was a note of fellow feeling that bescrooged any position that the speaker, however highborn, was a snob. the pace was stately, unhurried with pauses deftly time

and looked for, to fdr and france is perkins as progressive visionaries who started in new york and went on to change the nation. >> we are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. today we commit to a new progressive direction in new york. nearly a century, ago, al smith waged war on unsafe working conditions and child labor. it was franklin roosevelt and francis perkins who led the charge. it was fiorella la guardia, enacted the bill on the city level, battled wall street and championed a progressive income pack. it was new yorkers who challenged the status quo. who blaze aid trail of progressive reform and political action. who took on the elite. who stood up to say that social and economic justice will start here and will start now. let me be clear. when i said i would take dead aim at the tale of two of cities. i meant it. and we will do it. >> joining me now are msnbc senior political analyst, david axelrod, and former vermont governor, howard dean, former head of the democratic national committee. governor dean attended de

perkins." it is a candid account of his life, his second marriage to romance novelist danielle steel, a manslaughter conviction in a boating accident in francee first biotech company, genentech, here in san francisco. he and his partners launched genentech in 1976 with nothing more than a checkbook and an idea. >> the idea was to trick nature into letting us make something that didn't exist in nature -- in particular, human insulin. >> genentech's success led to new ways of treating everything from diabetes to dwarfism, and to getting rich. kleiner perkins' initial investment of $250,000 soared 800-fold to $200 million. >> that's what venture capitalists are created to do, and you can blame converting the orchards of silicon valley into parking lots partly on me and partly on genentech, because we proved that this kind of high-risk, high-tech venture capital could be an enormous home run, and everybody wanted to get in on it, including lots of entrepreneurs, and that's what got this whole silicon valley engine rolling, in my opinion. >> and it took somebody like perkins, with a background in science, to figure it out. he got an engineering d