the kohlberg foundation, barbara g. fleishmann and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized, individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >> welcome. the nobel laureate joseph says the situation in america is grave. that's his exact word for it, grave, inequality too great, unemployment too high, public investments too meager, corporations too greedy and the tax code too biased toward the very rich. strong medicine from one of the world's most influential thinkers. he's been the economist most cited by his colleagues in the field. but don't despair, he says. the barriers to solving our problems are political, not economic, and we can change what's wrong if enough of us insist. our tax code, for example, wasn't handed down from the gods on mt. olimb bus. human beings devised. and they can revise it, this time getting it right as he said on our broadcast last week. >> we have a tax system that reflects not the interest of the middle. we have a tax system

the kohlberg foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. >> as fears grow of a widening war across the middle east, here in our shop we find ourselves talking about another war. the great war, or first world war, as it would come to be called, triggered 100 years ago this month when an assassin shot and killed austria's archduke ferdinand in sarajevo. through a series of tangled alliances and a cascade of misunderstandings and blunders, that single act of violence brought on a bloody catastrophe. more than 37 million people were killed or wounded. in america, if we remember at all, we think mostly about the battlefields and trenches of europe and tend to forget another front in that war, against the ottoman empire of the turks that dominated the middle east. a british army officer named t.e. lawrence became a hero in the arab world when he led nomadic bedouin tribes in battle against