Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On American Mojo 20151010

Rights, the middle class, gender and more. For complete Television Schedule visit booktv. Org. Booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors, television for serious readers. Now we kickoff the weekend with Peter Kiernan talking about the history of the middle class. [inaudible conversations] good evening. I am the director of the redwood library. Please excuse my voice, my little twins came home with a gifted daddy yesterday and that was watery eyes and scratchy throat. First of all, a bit of housekeeping duties, if there is up fire you go out the front door, just push me aside and i will go down with the ship. Please turn off your cellphones. It gives me great pleasure, when we think about that i mentioned earlier, the word that is offputting to so many people, a public place where operators might try out their orations. A forum, two weeks ago we had the good people from newport show a documentary and richard holbrooke, a man whose values perfectly aligned with the intent of the redwood at its founding. I see this speech as continuing in that vein especially since when we think about the rise of the publics fear in the eighteenth century, that much theorized occurrence where the middle class pushed against king and court, the middle class is of capital importance in creating democracy the and and very important today as Peter Kiernan will tell us. I wont go on and on about all his exploits and there are many. He is an accomplished finance year and author but what is most important to me is the tenor, the thrust of the work he has been doing recently which is to remind us, excuse me, of what is important. These are really important, all the problems facing us today, it is the call to conscience and clarity of thinking, was watching the video where he talked at length about philanthropy and it was astounding. Thank you very much for coming and please help me to welcome Peter Kiernan. [applause] thank you very much. Thank you. It is so nice to be here, welcome to the free free debate. There are so many great friends and old friends and people i respect some much in this audience, this wont be a speech, this will be a conversation. I was told by my publisher whatever you do not come out with this book during the election. I turned and said i wanted to deliberately come out exactly in the middle of the election because i have been frustrated and many of you have with the generalities, with stale ideas Common Notions that have been tried and retried that get us nowhere by a polarity to get even the simplest things accomplished. So with your permission i published this book deliberately right now, not intending to interrupt or preempt donald trump or the rest of the gang on stage but be that as it may. I am a lucky man for many reasons. My wife and daughter are scheerer and they are some of my Many Blessings but one of the things i count as my greatest good fortune is i loved my first job. When i was in college i went to work for an afternoon newspaper. Imagine such a dinosaur. Our job was to get within printed by 1 30 so we would at home on your doorstep so you could read it before that evening news came on television. That was our life and while i was there was invite of the watergate iraq and sell all of the far more senior reporters were chasing their own dreams of glory and watergate opportunities. Something i came to love was to write the daily obituaries for the people of hudson, new york. When i first got that job by was put off by at but over time i came to love it and are made it my business everyday as i wrote these small daily histories to find the one thing about the person i had just gained an acquaintance on their passing. One thing that made him special, unique, or contributed to society. And in the process by was working for beer money at the time and my adviser said i needed work many hours. I came to a conclusion about life itself. That is it is the role of individuals far more than prognostication or a plank in a party platform, would have to do with how our society operates. Some of these individuals are the point of the spear, some are key ark in a narrative and even bey ark in a better than anythi is going on and they traveled into a devastated garden. There, hanging on the fruit trees were five patriots smoldering in the sun. The father lifted the boy up and held him as he gagged in reflex close to the feet of those patriots and ordered him to peach kiss each many football. As the boy win. He said sun, that is the smell of courage. That is the taste of liberty. That this has lingered in my mind for a long time ever since i read the words and we gave our own sort of kiss okay. You might when to hold iant. I left in the middle of the kiss. That is a terrible thing to do. I am not going one bit further. That is it. 16 million americans come back from world war ii from theaters of war, places they worked in the country and can you imagine 700,000 wearers of the purple heart. If we had a line today of every adult in long island we would run out of adult before we run out of purple hearts. That is how many google came back having given to their country. Led me interrupt one second. Lets take a minute and fix the sound system and then i will be happy to carry on. Come and do what you need to do and i will be happy to go ahead. Come on up, it is all yours. Excuse me just for one minute. There are six people here today and it is working just fine. I am going to turn this. Okay. My only thought is to keep your mouth close to that. Okay, i will try it again. That is what we need. Testing 12, testing 12. Back to the kiss. I just cant get away from it. Of day. Excus. Excuse kay. Excuse. Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. For the 16 million men and women who came home, government, business, but the law, regulators, bankers, insurance companies, politicians, everyone reached out and said we owe a duty of care, we owe a kiss to the people who sacrificed for us. As a result what happened . We became and where the world super power certainly financially, certainly from the standpoint of manufacturing because of the rest of the worlds manufacturing capability was smoldering in ruins and how did we respond . The middle class responded with a fire. We rose to the occasion. It was easy to define who the middle class was in those days. It was largely white, it was the final by what people earn, the aspirations were easily affordable. You could get a house with 90 down and if you bought the appliances you could walk into your first house without putting a penny down. We educated people, we bought them homes, we treated the men and women who came back as if they were true citizens and they responded. What was the progression like . Our economy was 200 billion. By 1945 it had grown to 300 billion. By 1950, 500 billion. We were on a roll. We hit the trifecta. We were by the mid 1950s largest agricultural provider in the world. We were the largest manufacturer in the world. 1956 we were the Largest Service economy in the world. Nothing could stand in our way. How hitler might have handled that position we dont know but instead of guard dogs we came back with of a marshall plan. We rebuild japan, we rebuilt germany, we build the new europe and fed it with our growing middle class. In 12 years we had basically gone from manufacturing superpower to Service Super power and by 1956 most American Workers when they went to work put on a white collar shirt. We have evolved so quickly when the rest of the world was trying to pull themselves together. In the 60s, 70 of families can stay at home parents, typically moms but by the late 60s, social unrest started to creep in and cracks started to form in the facade of this fantastic middleclass masterpiece we created. By 1970 the three uglys descended. Double digit inflation, double digit Interest Rates, double digit unemployment, those were brought on by not one but me to commodity crises the second of which, the oil embargo of 1973 got all the attention but the first was far more pernicious. I will pause for a second, last the impact on the middle class. We shifted from a Gold Standard to Gold Exchange standard. Subtlety in all but the worlds of economics until people started to look at what that really meant. The Gold Exchange said it meant you could exchangeable for two currencies. At that time those currencies were the u. S. Greenback, the dollar, and the pound sterling. At no time the dollar surged past the pelham sterling as the currency of choice. In the 1970s they opened badly and one of the things Richard Nixon realized was people were taking their dollars in europe and saying we want to exchange them in to goals. What was developing was a run on the bank and the bank was us. Without spending as second with trading partners or anybody in the free world we dropped the Gold Standard and we impose tariffs on imports and froze wages. For brief shining moment enough to get Richard Nixon reelected it worked. Until it didnt. Then it was an unmitigated disaster. The three uglys crushed us. What happened to the money supply . Most people never looked. In the 34 years before we created this Gold Exchange standard our money supply only doubled. And the 34 years after which takes us to 2008 the money supply increased 13fold. We were a long way from the Gold Standard and we were borrowing and creating an economic colossus with serious flaws that theed directly at the middle class. And seeing a market crash. The market lost 20 of its value and to include the inflation, 60 of market value lanier terms was lost. It largely with and reported. That slow crash played to us until Ronald Reagan and paul volcker came to the scene and broke down the garbled mouth full. And they had no idea to fix it. The inflation was run away and jobs and the economy and growth were going nowhere. The prime rate went up 21 . Think about that today. 2 of month for most borrowers. Our economy was crushed. The only way to bring the fever under control was to nearly bankrupt the country. They raised the prime rate higher and higher, crushing manufacturing. Crushing automobiles, chrysler went bankrupt, crushing the building trades, crushing everything that required borrowing in order to grow. By 1983 the fever had broken. The fever had broken in the form of structural redistribution. What had basically happened was inflation dropped to 3 . The problem is for the middle class that relevant inflation. For all the moderation of inflation did not go down. What does it have to do with the middleclass . Middleclass life meant a new house, new car, healthcare, a college for your kids, retirement and the belief that your children were going to be better off than you are and that got absolutely crushed. How did they respond. Trace they put mom to work. By the 1970s 43 of women were working, way up. At a time only 10 had degrees. By 1960 of a 60 working and the third head degrees, today 70 , near complete reversal from the 70 stay at home moms the relevant inflation kept climbing and real wages were flat and family after family kept asking the same question. What do we do . How can we make it . How can we possibly survive . And then like the dawning of a new date occurred to them. Borrow. In 1957 there were a handful of credit cards. Ten years later in 1967 there were 100 million credit cards. By 2007 there were a billion credit cards in the country. By 2008 Consumer Debt stood at 123 4 trillion. Today we face an entirely different middleclass and global competition has gotten so acute that is where you have to look if you want to know what is going on with the middle class today. Outside our borders. Do not Pay Attention to the domestic policy, the solution is over there. Most people know that china and india sit at well over a billion people. There are a billion more chinese than there are americans in population. Lets get down the list, who is no. 3 gee q way down from those billion is the United States at 320. That much is well known. In the last five years change on the leaderboard has been pronounced and now the next five countries in terms of size of indonesia, brazil, pakistan, nigeria and bangladesh all with economy smaller than ours but growing much faster than our own. If you look at italy and spain and britain and france. Their 16 million, germany, it is shrinking. How much is japan shrinking . They expect their population will shrink by a third. There are whole cities in japan without a single woman of childbearing age. They are using, country after country, there part of the strategic plan, as the centerpiece, there are a billion new members of the middle class outside the borders. And the billion more, outside our borders in 20 years. One of the things that strikes me when i think of the United States ahead to pick one word that describes this when we are at our best that word is frontier. Whether it is the frontier of the west or the frontier science we have a new frontier and it is feeding the growing middle class of all of these countries that have middleclass as a centerpiece of their strategy. Inside borders for the middleclass. It is the most basic math, the solution, wages continued to stay flat. To give you a sense from 1948 to 1973 productivityand so did wages. From the oil embargo of 1973 to today productivity has increased by twice again, doubled again. But real wages have increased 4 . Where has all that money gone . I am afraid to say it has been structural distribution and we have not been told reliable information. Every month we get the jobs report, jobs data but the most important piece of information is left out, the market value of a job. Job is a job is a job. We are creating entrylevel lowwage jobs. And that is one of the big challenges. The face of the middleclass is changed dramatically. If you did the makeup of the country there are 45 million poor people in the country today, entirely too many but just above that are another 50 million that i call in my book covering for, a twist from an experience of poverty. One of the leading causes of bankruptcy for the lower and middle class is cancer diagnosis, a trip to poverty might involve something as simple as an accident in your car or a kid and sudden illness or the loss of a job so all these poverty fighting organizations whose sole motive was to get people above the poverty line, that no longer works. Take a much that snap, food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program this. Look at how that has grown. In the year 2000 we spending 20 billion on snap. 2012 we responding 83 billion, 48 Million People in our country were on food stamps. When i talk about having poor, 40 of the children in this country will spend some part of their childhood receiving food stamps. That is how the face of this countrys middleclass has changed. I want you to do me a favor. Imagine in your mind every Single Person living in the city of los angeles, everyman, won man child and add to that every man, woman and child giving in the city of philadelphia. All those people, that is how many people there are between the ages of 16, and 25. They are not in employment, education or training. Can there be anything more diminishing the being 20 years old, dropped out of school please see is ago, you dont read at grade double, you dont do math at grade level. Job opportunities, prospects, that is an anchor on the middle class and what is the solution . Too often incarceration. You then think of all the people in the world, 350 Million People, 7 billion more, think of all the people who are in jail, 25 of them are in the United States. No country in the worlds has a higher proportion or absolute number of children in prison than we do. I have gone to Rikers Island, i have gone to the high school fair. Kids in prison trying to study in high school outgrow their shoe size during their stay in prison. What do you get for that experience in Rikers Island . You get a good citizen at the end, someone who is trained to do something and be valuable, anything that is positive in terms of society as a whole . The only guarantees 70 of those young men in particular will be back in jail within 180 days. We have a fundamental problem with use in this country and we cannot ignore it. Anyone who is running for president and dozen have as part of their strategy what to do with these, that will cost us 1 billion the year annually. An anchor on middleclass development. One of the things that happens all the time is people say it is simple, this is simple, fix education and that will fix it. Fix education. End of conversation. I am going to take the other side of that. Just how good does that teacher have to be . Imagine the city of dallas. Dallas has got 1,000,002 people and growing. When the school bell rang today and the students walked out the door of their school, the number of people in the city of dallas, that is how many kids walked out of school with no home to go to. They walked out to their tenants, they walked out to the shelter, they walked out to their car, walked out to wherever they had to go, just how good does a teacher have to be for the eight hours he or she is teaching that young person to cope with the 16 hours of food in security, homelessness . We have a problem in this country that is multi layered. You cannot solve raised to the top or any Stimulus Program if people sitting in the class are hungry and scared and homeless. One of the things we have to do is face the world. We have to face the world because outside our borders that is where 80 of the purchasing power now lives. 92 of the Economic Growth is outside our borders. Pricing adjusts and now, we have the present that says he wants to create time and how for people at work overtime and im all for it, but those are necessary small steps are woefully insufficient to solve the problem of the middle class because heres the thing we should be in afraid of. If you really want to know a bit to be scared about, if the answer i dont know. I believe there will be 2 billion new members of the middle class, but what i dont know for sure is the middle class of the world is an endless shining sea of opportunity or is it more like an infinity pool where water spills over the edge and redistributes to other part of the pool . I welcome back to that in a second. What we do to rebuild our middle class again out of this notion of a time we come up with a new idea we must create a path to pay for it. Heres an idea that requires not 1 penny of additional Taxation Bureau did i think we should create American Infrastructure Development bank in that bank will not make a single subprime loan. It will do only one thing. It will fund the of the structure of our country, everyone democrat, republican, everyone rookeries and no one contests are infrastructure we go to to china, india they will say why are you letting the greatest infrastructure in the world with her way . There is no argument here except had to pay for. You commit right up front that we should write here and now commit we will spend a trillion dollars to rebuild our infrastructure and to do that at a Development Bank you need 250 to three and 50 billion. You go to every public pension fund, every Union Pension fund and you say we will put your people to work. You go to every hedge fund, every corporation and say now is the time. We want you to put money in this and you will benefit. You will benefit from our infrastructure today and its time for you to reinvest in that leaves about 700 billion we have to borrow. In world war ii we had world war bonds and now i say we create job bonds. You good every citizen and say now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of the country, pony up, invest in yourself you read what will happen is we will engage the American People in the rebuilding of our infrastructure. We will create great middle class and the beauty in virtue of the jobs we create is they are multiplier jobs if you build them someone will have to hire one, two in some cases three people, but more important than any of that is you create american momentum. We have let it sale pure and we have become a divided nation not just democrat or republican. We have created an architecture divide and that architecture of divide means lobbyists which used to the Cottage Industry has become a multibilliondollar industry with hundreds of thousands of supertalented professionals and think tanks which used to be places we went to get thoughtful pieces are many that have endowments bigger than some small colleges and they are deeply involved. Deeply involved with every elements of the policy formulation in our nation. This an architecture of divide and we can break with ideas like the Infrastructure Development bank. We are sitting here right now today with 4 million spectacular jobs open and available and ready to hire in this country. Of these jobs do not need to be created. They need to be filled. How are we doing on the Talent Management side . In the next 10 years we will create in our country a million and a quarter Computer Science jobs. These are great jobs and super multiplier jobs that will fill three people will typically be hired at the same time. How are we doing on the Talent Management side . There is no country on earth creating a kind of opportunity nowhere. This year we will graduate about 40000 Computer Science majors. If we do that for 10 years we will do thousand and. Sounds to me in a decade we will be seven or 800,000 jobs short. What other country in the world lets you graduate from college with no idea about what you will do . In china, if you have stem science technology, engineering and math at an early age they nurture and develop you and tell you how it is you could have a great job, so they dont wind up with 700,000 jobs to few. Mckusick him out with a study that said we will have in 10 years a million and have to few College Graduates and 6 million to feel high school graduates. Do you know today we have a crisis in College Completion . The average juniorcollege in this country, 92 of the parttime students do not to graduate in four years. Can you imagine a business where you tolerate a failure rate like that . 92 . We are talking about free college and maybe thats the way to do it, but the truth is the crisis of College Completion is a big part of the problem. 70 of the kids who graduate from our high schools go on to do training, college, Junior College and the majority do not finish. That is something that doesnt require the changes of job creation. It doesnt require the genius of any other than getting people the skills necessary to fill those jobs. In every state if i were in charge in every municipality is to create an office of regulatory sanity. [laughter] we had a nearly trillion dollar Expansion Plan and a time after time what i heard from washington when i went to research this book is we didnt have jobs and things and projects that were shovel ready. You my answer is . You get shovel ready. In world war ii at the beginning of world war ii in 1940, we produced a little over 3 million cars in this country. That was the leading car production in the world. From 1941, until the end of the war, because fdr said we are out of the car business we did not make 150 cars. Florida became an aircraft manufacture and other manufacturers made at liberty ships. The government of the United Estates is cloaked in immense power, but when it has lost the ability to focus on the vital, powerful issues that face it. We waste our time on nonsense and things like the crushing of our middle class is the dagger that is hovering right front of us. One of the things i think we should do is everything in our power to encourage business creation, Everybody Knows that the credo of job creation is new business. My attitude is they should not double the Capital Gains rate. Im saying if you go out create a business, and in three or four years you have employed people and prosper and you sell all or part of your business, your company, i think you are entitled to a giant tax break and i think you have done everything we want you to do this is building the middle class and we should help you out and if you want to cut out people to earn too much, fine by me, but we should be moving heaven and earth. We have 20 democrats and republicans and everyone of them claims to be champions of the middle class and i have not heard one quality specific from one Single Person running. Ive heard things like lets do zerobased budgeting. You know what that is . It tear up your budget and every years dart over a. We can agree in washington if its 10 15 p. M. Or quarter after 10 imagine what will be like if we go the army, navy and air force and say guess what you have to start from zero and decide how you will defend the country or medicare and medicaid. Zerobased budgeting is a fantasy, a fantasy of business and an even bigger fantasy and governments. We have fantastic notions like bumping minimumwage, bumping these things that have nothing to do with creating a strong middle class. What should we do about outside our borders . Magical stuff is going on. Some people in this country are pretty shrewd about it. You go to houston, and i will tell you something is magical happening. If you think which city in the country had the Third Largest after washington dc and new york , would it surprise you that its houston, texas. Thats not because of proximity to the state department, but there are over a thousand consulates there represent 45 countries and they are there because they want to build a relationship to create their own stronger middle class. One example i would say to you and you need to think about what would we do. Who knows better than americans how to build a strong middle class . With the needs are, what the ones are of a strong middle class. Just one example. If you look at all of asia except japan, take japan out of the equation and all of asia, the growing will probably be the asian century. The amount of money they spend on their healthcare is about 4 of their economy come about 4 of their gdp and as you know we are close to five times that amount. If im sure of anything, its that the chinese gain more middle class members, they have engineers earn money and one of the first things they will want for themselves for their wives, their kids, one of the first things they will want is quality healthcare. There is a company not 100 miles from here that just raised a 200 million round of financing and their strategy was they are in the tumor blasting business. They blast cancer tumors and their strategy to raise of money is they said we will take our technology to china because china will be the Biggest Country in suit with the biggest economy. It will have the most six pete sick people and the mostly with cancer anywhere in the world and we will build a business or bring a healthcare to the folks in china. The more we feed the growth of the middle class in these other countries, the more we will grow. Think how many cars out of a thousand people there are in the United States. Answer . About 450. Think how may cars out of a thousand people there are in germany. 500. How may cars out of a thousand people in india . Ten. How may cars out of a thousand people in china . Thirtytwo. Ladies and gentlemen, these giants are just getting warmed up. They are poor, poor than we are. They are much much bigger than we are. China will become the biggest economy with a large capital, so when a no caps bases they will have a low economy, but you roll up all those billions three people and they will be a poor country with the richest economy in the world. Only way for our middle class to survive is to focus on the problems are home and deliver the kinds of services im talking about here. We are innovation nation. We are the disruptors. We have ways to change things and we understand things other nations simply cannot. If we want to give the worlds biggest gift to her middleclass , thats what we should do. Thank you very much. Is a pleasure to be with you. [applause]. I think if you are again there is time before the debate, but i think if there are questions i would be really honored to answer them. Yes, sir, i think they will bring you something. [inaudible] you added that a bank should resolve a lot of the infrastructure issues to the company by country by borrowing. Can you talk about your theory, the impact of the crushing weight to use your phrase, crushing of the outstanding debt of our country and how that is affecting the Economic Growth . Im glad you asked the question and honest to god its a seminal question, so let me come to it because there is so much in the book, but thats a great question and heres where the problems. We have to borrow about 40 of what we spend every year. That is not something i would recommend or sustain because the amounts are so big. There is only one country in the world that can provide that kind of lending and it aint japan, its not germany, there is no place else the china. If we somehow to fall out of love with the china we will not be up to finance our growth. We are in it codependency with china and the only way we can possibly live is to keep peace with china and figure out a way to reduce our borrowing. But, we dont have an educated view of how to be efficient in governments. Is the closest thing to eternal life is a job in government in this country. [laughter] as citizens we are not saying whys this growing so when theres a new program is never what do we cut if you want to put addition on a house and maybe you dont get your teeth fixed. The fact is there are tradeoffs we make as individuals that we dont of the government because no one really owns the problem. When i talk but in the structure Development Bank i guess it will probably have probably have the federally chartered, but i made it outside the purview of the federal government as it possibly can. Because the government is great at something and not so hot it others and customized deal picking for the government to put six, seven, 800 million in, what they know about one kind of Solar Technology over another i will just say it is nothing. They are completely clueless, but went ahead and spend it because they cant resist the notion of controlling everything from soup to nuts. The way i structured this is im sure there will have to be federal oversight but there wont be a dollar of federal money in it. Your question on the debt is essential and im not sure until we get new leadership we will be prepared to make the tough choices to fix it. What is the effect of raising the gas tax . The gas tax has not been raised since 1993, and we have gotten a bit of a dividend because what has happened with all real world is opec has fallen apart. Wiesenthal in a park . In large part they are responding to a sudden new compose competitor that is emerged of the United States, so places like saudi arabia typically when there has been a supply issue have curtailed supply in order to keep the price is high in this time they said not so much. So, last july it was over hundred dollars in the mid 40s today and i dont think that americans are showing any particular interest in reducing, but the American People have got a bit of a benefit. So, i get a little testy when people say you just cant do this because it will destroy the economy. You just cant add a small increase of 25 cents a gallon for the gas tasks because the gas tax was created initially to find them the structure. One of the challenges within the structure is that our government is typically thinking about the obvious stuff and now give you a story as example. Im involved in robin hood in a Charter School in the south bronx, in the worst of neighborhood in new york. At night the kids were hanging out on the steps of the school even on the coldest winter night. We had no idea why, so we sent someone to say, kids, what you doing here. The reason they were there is there was no place else in their community that they could go to get wifi. A Digital Divide in this country and if we are going to leave the digital revolution and we are leading the digital revolution that we have to make of the structure and the more pipelines to build than just keystone. There are more things to do than just rebuild our road and the philpott holds. We up to make sure every kid in america is digitally connected because if we dont we will see ourselves at the wrong side of that if it in the pool and i think increasing the gas tax is a reasonable idea. It seems to 45 people just like people are horrified at the increase of a quarter percentage point in Interest Rates this september. Let me ask you something. Of me ask you something as american come a what does this stay about the state of our economy that we are basically at zero Interest Rates . It costs almost nothing to borrow. Inflation is nowhere. Our economy that notion somehow our economic recovery is so tender that it cant withstand eight 25 basis 25, you know, quarter of a point rising Interest Rates it tells me were not focused on the right things. I think we should frankly raise the gas tax and my guess is because Something Like Infrastructure Bank is a little too innovated or that they will let china do what they just announced. Fifty countries have joined it versus a dozen for our tpp. By the way, some of the first to join where britain, germany, france, so i think china is onto this and they are willing to be more aggressive than we are, but i think the notion is a reasonable one and i steer clear of it because i hate this notion every time we have a great i did the only way to pay for is to raise taxes because i think there are more great ideas, but i dont think its a terrible one. What you think of iran . Part of the trouble is a deal guy should never criticize another persons deal. [laughter] here i go. I know john kerry. He is a friend of mine and i am know john kerry. He was sent over with a job, which is to get a deal done and red lines turned into clients turned into i dont know whats. This notion that only alternative for iran is that they are going to go on and declare war therefore we should buy and accept a bad deal that will in my opinion destabilize the middle east, in my opinion, will create an arms race in the middle east be read in my opinion, will get more people who are allies of ours wanting the bomb. Dont think it that is a deal we should do. I dont think it has to do necessarily with our relationship with israel, even though they have been our closest ally and i dont think its necessary basically it moves around from the back of the pack to the preeminent nation. I can tell you ive friends involved in the oil business outside the United States and their describing iran is not the newer candy store. They cannot wait for sentients to be lifted. They cant wait to spend a hundred billion dollars there to build iran into the leading oil production. Egypt is diminished. Baraks apart and will never come back. Libya was was never much in the first place and theres not much now. The saudis i spend a force. That the Largest Oil Reserves and they can continue to pump at 40 a barrel and it doesnt matter because they still are plenty of to keep the populace happy, but friends of mine who know a lot about will say they are using more salt water to pump out oil and those who know anything about oil pump in the way you treat the big peeled like that is you treat it gingerly and respectfully. You dont over pump it. You can overpumping suddenly it loses productivity, but the truth is whats going on is if saudi is shrinking, if libya is shrugging, if iraq is shrinking who will be the leading force in the middle east . If you can figure out that iran policy because i have a hard time. Where are they with the isis, where are they in afghanistan, either with us, theyve against us . Know when is clever enough to figure it out and i think there is a reason that the persians did so well in the red business. We are not good in trade deals. I think ppp is a joke personally and i think there are people who are much better at particularly bilaterally, our bilateral trade deals to show what we have been in the last 10 years, weve done three. Colombia, panama, south korea. China has done 30 including a 30 billiondollar deal with ukraine including many of the countries and many people we would never deal with, so the answer to your question is i think its a dangerous precedence and i dont think we have nearly what we think we have. This notion anywhere anytime, there is nothing that sounds anything close to anywhere anytime, so that is one mans opinion. Peter, it was a great talk. Very disturbing listening to you and it seems the world there so much to be done, but as we all leave this room as individuals commonly this library tonight what would you like us as individuals to take with us . What can we do . The title of the book is american mojo lost and found . There is no more talented organism on the planet than we are. We are the destructors. Anyone who thinks we dont have new jobs, go out to the silicon valley. Go to the places in new york where they are thinking about different things. There is business cropping up everywhere and a friend of mine in town has just discovered a clever place to be is in cyber. Cyber security. So, i dont know if he is here to nine, but i take a page from being west research. You listen to the officials in the ask around and he talked not to the call mine manager, but to the person who is facing the cold a foot away and one of the things i found is that in Cyber Security i was talking to someone who is a number three guard one of the biggest banks the world and he told me that 10 years ago he spent almost nothing on Cyber Security and this year they are at a billion dollars in just getting warmed up. Multiply that by every bank in every country. Are called rissman who sits on the commit the committee oversees says he is been shot by the arrogance of some of the ceos particularly ceos in the power grid. By the way, i am no terrorist, but if i was going to start somewhere and you really want to screw things up the power grid is sitting there and we are not doing enough thats one example of the kind of things we do. We dominate itself based Regenerative Medicine to read we in things like digital platforms. We dominate and what i will call the air bmb and uber of society. If you look at the fastestgrowing type of a job outside this country, its temporary. Everything is going to be done on as necessary basis. That is what uber is about, what air bmb is about. Everything is shared so that if you look at spot if i were you are the business of curating your music. We take what we need digitally when we needed. We know how to do that. We know more about finance that any country in the world, 2008, notwithstanding. We know more about Digital Financial technology, banks and insurance cummings will be disruptive like never before. That will not happen in japan. It will not happen in russia. We will figure that out, so the thing i would take is the confidence that we have, the reservoir, that the enormous sparkling reservoir of american talent and what we have to do is feed that talent, help these kids who have not completed their college or their juniorcollege degree. There is a woman we met at robin hood who had three young kids, she was going to Junior College and she stopped going. Not because she didnt love what she was doing or she didnt want her degree, the 80year old man who used to take care of her kids got to sit and she couldnt afford babysitting. There are people out there doing exactly what we wanted them to do. They are working hard and pay their bills in their rent, but we have set up little obstacles for them and we are being uncaring about blocking them and i will give you one more example. There was a woman who was 40 years old in new york, she makes 38000. She has a nephew who lives with her. She pays her rent every month. Her job is she is a special needs teacher. She is doing exactly what we want her to do. How did i encounter this woman . The bronx Apartment Building where she lives had a flood, a pipe bursts in her apartment and many others were flooded and therefore uninhabitable. She did not have the kind of w2 that would enable her to go out and get a new apartment. She did not have the two months rent security deposit. She did not have the ability to take her child and go and come up with the three months and going rent and other apartments. I first met this woman, this beautiful woman who is a caring special needs teacher in a homeless shelter. She was homeless. She had the capacity to pay her rent. She didnt have the capacity to clear a few hurdles and what we are doing is a country is great obstacles for people who want to be in the middle class. This idea that 47 are takers. Of course, there are people who are lazy and taking advantage, but the vast majority want to do something. We have kids who want to go to school and want to complete college and what we have to do, whats that wise and kind of thing that each one of us can do . So our american mojo can be found . Thank you very much. [applause]. [applause]. [inaudible conversations] youre watching both tv on cspan 2. Television for serious readers. Has a look at whats on primetime tonight, at 7 00 p. M. Eastern then metric talks about his book once upon a time in russia. At 8 00 p. M. A panel with former Washington Post reporter. She talks about the School Reform movement in new jersey and mark zuckerberg, 100 milliondollar gift to the Newark School system. Also, on afterwards at 10 00 p. M. Former meet the press Host David Gregory discusses faith and religion in washington dc. At 11 00 p. M. A look at the militarys Topsecret Research agency with any jacobson. That all happens tonight on cspan 2 book tv. Now three hours with nationally syndicated talk show host Thom Hartmann who sat down with book tv last week to answer your questions and discuss his many books including the crash of 2016, rebooting the American Dream and threshold. Thich of 2016, rebooting Thom Hartmann, how did you resh get into radio . Old. I got into radio when i a teenager. Haran, how ho first of all when i was maybe nine years old i built a little 100milliwatt transmitter, which would reach like three houses around her house and i had a record player. I was very into electronics and was a ham Radio Operator at 13. I built a little Radio Station at home as a kid when i was 16. In electro i got a job at msu in brody hall at the Radio Station