Transcripts For CSPAN2 Panel Discussion On The American Dream 20160425

American dream, american greed, its a very provocative title everything today we are in for a real treat. Were going to try to have a very lively 30 minute discussion and then going to try to leave room for about 10, 15 minutes of obvious questions before we break, and we have a hard stop because of cspan2 today at 10 50. To kick us off, both of your books are so well conveyed and really so captivating, id like to ask each of you to kind of take us off with maybe a two to three minute elevator ride to the top. What are the major points in your books and what do you haver to say about them. Im going to start with bethany. Before i do, shaky ground is the title. Its very timely today come this week unfortunately japan is in the news again, a very severe earthquake. In 2011 i was in tokyo for the big earthquake there which touched off tsunamis in a Nuclear Emergency that they are still trying to deal with. 2008 our Global Financial system melted down. Eight years later bethany says were still on shaky ground. Y. , bethany . So ive always been fascinated by these two large companies, fannie mae and b freddie mac. Freddic, they are the largest Financial Institution in the world withth over 5 trillion of outstanding liabilities. These two countries were created to serve the American Dream of homeownership, to help enable the flow of mortgage credit in the United States. Its funny because most people in the financial world dont care about fannie or freddie. They are part of the infrastructure of our lives we dont think about until the no function, but they already critical if you have a mortgage come if you want to get a mortgage because of the availability of mortgage could help shape your ability to finance your house. Your house, and homes are still the most important financial asset that most americans have, and theyre actually critical to our economy. Way back in the 1920s Franklin Roosevelts treasury secretary described housing as the wheel within the wheel of our economy, and it is. Housing makes up some 1520 of our gdp. So if the Housing Market isnt healthy, the economy isnt healthy. Basically, i feel like everyone should care about the strength and the fate of these two companies. And some of you may remember they were taken over by the u. S. Government in the fall of 2008 and put into a state called conservatorship where they were basically supported by a line of credit from the treasury, and the idea was this was going to be temporary. We were going to figure out a a way to resolve this. And instead, here we sit going on eight years from the date they were taken over, and they still sit as wards of the u. S. Government. Someone told me it was the greatest example of government dysfunction hes ever seen, and while that may be an exaggeration given whats going on in washington, nonetheless, the point probably holds. Theyre being drained of all their capital, and the profits that they produce are being used, basically, to cover the budget deficit. And the problem with that is in the wake of the financial crisis the big ideas been get more capital into Financial Institutions, and the whole system will be safer. And we have, collectively, the largest Financial System in the world that instead is being drained of capital with no real plan for their futures. So i think that leaves all of us in a somewhat precarious position. Thank you. Well, that leaves me with even greater unease than when i read the book. [laughter] maybe ben can give us some more happy news, but i doubt it. His book is entitled indentured, the inside story of how a few people took on the injustices in College Athletics and how the industry is where it goes and who gets it. I have to kind of make a confession here. Before i read bens book, i was very much on the side that said, hey, College Athletes, theyre getting a great free education. Why do they need to get paid . Theyre not employees. I have to tell you you know that line in Jerry Mcguire where they say to tom cruise or she says to tom cruise you had me at hello . Ben, you had me at page 2. Half and im not that [laughter] and im not that easy. Indentured, cartel, gestapo, mafia, some people in the book are compared to j. Edgar hoover, even darth vadar. Is this fair and why so harsh, ben . Sadly, i think i have more bad news to follow bethany. So good morning, everybody. I think you can break up the problems with College Sports, theres sort of three buckets. And the first is the money. College sports is a 13 billion industry now, so that, if you can believe it, is more money than the nfl bring withs in. So this is a brings in. So this is a lot of money. And theres coaches that are making 5 million and 10 million, there are conferences. Were in acc country, but i guess were also in big ten country now because of maryland. They all own tv networks now, and they make between two and 300 million a year. The men who lead the conferences have 3 million salaries. Most of the coaches 4, 5 million salaries. And of all of this money players, you know, the ones driving the revenue, driving the interest, see what amounts to less than a sliver of this. So you have this financial dichotomy. The second piece is that the ncaa has a 400page rulebook that, basically, governs every aspect of a College Athletes life. It tells you how many times you can eat at somebodys house, you know . Who you can accept a ride from. If you are a College Athlete and you want to transfer schools, you have to get the ncaas permission. You have to get your coachs permission. And whereas the adults in the room can leave school no problem, so the way the rules are applied to the kids, the athletes and the adults is wildly disparate. And the third thing is what is supposed to make all of this okay, as john mentioned, is the scholarship, this college education. So, yes, we have a lot of money. Yes, there are a lot of rules, but this is all okay because were educating these athletes, and thats what College Sports are about. Well, unfortunately, that isnt quite the case, because federal Graduation Rates for football and mens basketball players are about 50 . Anybody that has seen the news about what happened at North Carolina over the last 20 years where these athletes were funneled into classes, literally fake classes that the university knew about, that the Athletic Department knew about, they did not meet. The classes did not exist, and they were meant to keep the athletes eligible. At other schools you have majors like fitness studies that the bigtime athletes are clustered into. So the idea that theyre getting a meaningful education or any education at all is sort of fiction and hearkens back to mythological College Sports and ncaa that might have been around in the 1970s. But its not anymore. And so, you know, between the rights that are taken away and the education that is not delivered and the financial dichotomy that exists, you have a system that ends up being, you know, theres no other word for it than its exploitive. All of us, i think, love as americans, all people, we love authenticity. We also recoil at hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a threat i see, actually, in both your books. And you mention it explicitly, ben. Could you talk a little bit about how it seems like the ncaa beyond being just arbitrary, really kind of picking and choosing who gets rewarded and who gets the blame or who gets punished, could you talk a little bit about that . I dont think you have to look any further, Everybody Knows the term student athlete. Weve all heard this, yes . This is ingrained in the fabric of america, the fabric of Higher Education and college. And the word was made up by the First Executive director of the ncaa and precisely because there was a Football Player at a school in texas who got hurt playing, and his family requested Workers Compensation benefits because here he was doing a job for the school. He was an employee, and as soon as he got hurt, he was entitled to workers comp. And this terrified people at the ncaa, terrified people across College Sports. And what did they do . Be they invented the word student athlete, embedded it in all of the ncaas literature. Schools had to call the players student athletes, broadcasters on tv had to call them student athletes, and it was nothing more than a marketing ploy to avoid paying out Workers Compensation. And it has worked fabulously. But i dont think that theres a more obvious example of hypocrisy than sort of this word that is treasured in the United States today and treasured by colleges and by College Sports, but its origins and its roots are far more nefarious than we would realize. How about the markets, bethany . You know, weve all heard the expression too big to fail. Are there some companies, are there some banks that are way too connected to fail . I know you dont cherish your time working at goldman sachs, im told [laughter] but i wonder if that gives you some perspective on, you know, why it is regulators and the government allow some banks to be saved and others not. And theres been a pretty Common Thread from goldman. Am i seeing a bogeyman here . Is that why aig was saved . Its a big question. So i worked at goldman from 92 to 95. I was basically at the janitor level, so i cant pretend any great insight into the workings of our Financial System from that. But i did learn not to be afraid of Financial Concepts and, i guess, not to be intimidated by people in business. I think goldman is probably an easy bogeyman, but i think the real bogeyman is probably much, much, much larger than that. There is this back in the beginning days of our country, we were always scared about the power of big Financial Institutions. There was a lot of rhetoric about how we could never be a nation that had big Financial Institutions because of our fear of the power that those Financial Institutions could have. And one of the really odd things about the financial crisis is that for all the rhetoric about too big to fail and how institutions had grown too big and too powerful to fail, we came out of the financial crisis with institutions that were even bigger. And people will tell you that they are now much safer, that weve put in place all sorts of new rules and regulations that will, that have fixed all the problems. I tend tock a little bit to be a little bit skeptical perhaps from having billion around and for having a negative contrarian personality that weve fixed the problems. In the wake of enron, we passed a law called star babes oxley sarbanesoxley, and when president bush signed this in the rose garden, he talked about how now our Financial Markets were safe, and we put in place all sorts of things that made ordinary people protected. So a few years later down the pike comes the financial crisis, and you had president obama sign a law called doddfrank in the rose garden. And the speeches are remarkably similar. The similarities are quite depressing. At the school where i teach, its called the dwight d. Eisenhower school. Ike eisenhower warned about the military Industrial Complex. Bethany has a chapter in her book called the housing Industrial Complex. Is this housing Industrial Complex, first of all, what is it . And is it something we need to fear as much as the military Industrial Complex . Well, perhaps in some ways. So my perspective on fannie and freddie, these two giant companies, i think the tone of the book is a little bit how i learned to love the gses. Theres this notion of the American Dream as Home Ownership, as this thing that makes our country a better society. And its ingrained deeply in our society. If you go back to the 1800s, that was part of the concept that a nation of landowners would make us safer, stronger, more cohesive society. But frank and freddie during their heyday were immensely powerful institutions and immensely politically powerful institutions, and they managed to take this concept of Home Ownership and make it a way to make a lot of money. Because you actually couldnt challenge the notion of Home Ownership. If you challenged fannie and freddie and said they werent doing the right thing, you were challenging Home Ownership. And thats also largely part of the story of the financial crisis, because if you tried to rein in mortgage credit even though people were getting a all sorts of risky mortgages, the companies would go to congress and say youre hurting peoples Home Ownership opportunities. So it became an excuse for all sorts of behavior that actually had nothing to do with home Home Ownership. And theres a lot of money at stake. The Mortgage Market is a 10 trillion market. The american Mortgage Markets one of the largest bond markets in the world. Its incredibly lucrative. Everybody wants a piece of the money. And so you have what people have jokingly, not so jokingly called the housing Industrial Complex which is this sort of looselyknit, formidabling alliance of all the people who make money off your homes, basically. And theres been an incredibly Formidable Political force in washington, and fannie and freddie are part of that. So a 10 trillion market. Ben, you referred to 13 billion in College Athletics. Where is all that money going . And is some of it going for good things to improve our Higher Education system . Not really. [laughter] so of this 13 billion, much of it goes to very high coaching salaries. So when you cant pay the players, the money has to go somewhere. It goes into coaching salaries, administrators salaries. The head coach at clemson, school played for the National Championship last year, the head coach has a chief of staff that makes 250,000 a year. The strength coach of alabamas Football Team makes 600,000 a year. And so one of the reasons that they make so much money is because in this money has to go somewhere, and it cannot be given to the players. And the way to recruit the players is to build, you know, palatial facilities. And oregons football facility has imported brazilian wood in it. They imported wood from brazil to build this facility. And its gorgeous. And its, you know, 40, 50 million. But thats how you recruit players, because you cant offer them money, so you have to offer them a lot of cool stuff. But another reason that, you know, the best coaches, that nick saban at alabama can make 7 million is because when they bring in the best players, it is a tremendous Marketing Arm for a school. Right . And so when you hear about Football Players that get away with, you know, close to but not murder, right . They get away with, you know, breaking rules and mistreating women, its because they are so valuable to the school. And so you have this strange dichotomy where these athletes are both exploited financially and then coddled and a lot of, you know, bad behavior is allowed because they are worth so much to these schools. And the budgets, the Athletic School budgets are almost always separate from the main college. So very little money ever goes back to the school. Its contained, and its used to build facilities and pay coaches a lot of money. You know, we spend a lot of our time at the National Defense University Teaching leadership, trying to look at kind of what are some of the successes and failures of leadership and and how we avoid that in the future in terms of our students personal leadership development. You know, bethany has a great quote, actually. You know, when we look at the Global Financial crisis and we look at the situation that were in, you know, the story of the crisis is often mortgagebacked securities and Risk Management tools. But youve said the end of the day the story is really about people. With the enron crisis, you had some pretty visible faces out there, ken lay and jeff skilling, you had the faces of the excesses in the 1980s. Who are the villains now, and are there any heroes . Thats a really good question, and its interesting. Ive always thought that business stories are stories about people. Theyre stories about human nature, and its one of the reasons i love covering these sagas of business gone wrong so much, because theyre human nature usually at its worst. Maybe sometimes at its best. Heroes are tricky in the financial crisis. My colleague who coauthored the book as well, there is this very human need to find the one thing to blame, the thing that is the thing we can say that villain caused all our pain, and if we just focus on that villain, everything will be better. But its usually an oversimplification, and particularly in the case of the financial crisis and all the devils, its a great line from shakespeare, hell is empty, and all the devils are here. It refers in my mind to the multicausal nature of the financial crisis. It was lots and lots of things coming together with lots and lots of villains, and we profiled the rating agencies and an greenspan and wall street executives and Mortgage Bankers who lured people into mortgages that they couldnt afford and in some cases homeowners who knowingly took out loans that they couldnt afford. Complicated. Are there any heroes . I dont know if any of you have said the movie made out of Michael Lewis book, the big short, which is great. And it portrays the small group of people who saw the financial crisis coming as heroes. And they were in a way. They saw what so many other people were unwilling to see. But usually in the financial world whistleblower come with their own, come with their own story. And in this case these people made a lot of money from the destruction of the financial crisis, that the financial crisis caused. So theyre ambiguous heroes, i suppose i would say. Ben, you actually chronicle some heroes in your book, people who really stood up to the ncaa whether its a group of players from North Western university, the sneaker guy and others. Is there one that kind of stands out to you with as kind of a Tipping Point . I think if there is a main character in our book, it is Sonny Vicarro who is fondly known as the sneaker pimp because he worked for nike in the 1980s and was the first guy to figure out that if you pay schools and coaches to have them wear nikes, to have the players wear nikes, it helps sell nike shoes. So he introduced this concept that has blossomed and absolutely exploded since the 1980. Hes also the guy who convinced nike to pour a lot of resources into signing Michael Jordan when he was coming out of North Carolina and to build a shoe around him. So he is a guy who sort of invented commercialism in College Sports. And then about 15 years ago he had seen so many players that he had worked with basically railroaded by the ncaa, by the ncaas rules and quit his job. He was at reebok then and went on a crusade. Theres no better word, a crusade against the ncaa. Hes the one who ginned up a federal lawsuit against the ncaa that went to trial a couple years ago. He toured the country speaking at law schools, you know, in front of crowds of, you know, 15, 20 people trying to explain the ills of the ncaa in this offthecuff sort of, you know hes not a linear thinker. So youd go and hear him speak, and, you know, you had no idea what he was saying, but you would understand the passion and the idea of injustice. Hes that sort of guy. And if there is one main character, he is the guy. This is a little bit more of a charged question, a followup here. Dale brown, the famous i hate saying famous, because i went to tulane university, and he was the coach of Louisiana State university, our rival. But he once likened this all to kind of having the whiff of a plantation. Racism. How, you know, you see a lot of this being played out on College Campuses all over the country, some courageous people at university of missouri for one standing up to how much do you see racism as having played a role in kind of the slowness to redress some of the injustices around the system . Yeah. I think if just look at whats happening. The vast majority or the majority of football and mens basketball players are black. The vast majority of administrators and coaches are white. And so this is a tremendous wealth transfer from, you know, some of the poorest, most vulnerable in our society to what are often uppermiddle class people. But if it was the other way around, if you had, you know, white people generating a lot of money that black people werely reaping the benefits of, would something have been done a long time ago . Probably. And i dont think anybody at the ncaa is thinking, you know, how do we, you know, take money from black people and give it to white people. How thats not sort of the way it works. But at the same time, the rules and the way that the system is set up, you know, a lot like, you know, drug sentencing, you know, the rules objectively are raceneutral, but they affect one section of our population far more than another population. Its just like that. And so the effect, the effect is that you do have a tremendous wealth transfer from young black men to other people on College Campuses. And theres absolutely no way around that. So were in the middle of a president ial campaign season, if you hadnt noticed. [laughter] and while its being dominated by kind of who can ride the subway better, who has bigger hands and, you know, the twitter wars, theyre not talking about substance, the kind of substance that bethany describes and the kind of concern she lays out in her book. But i want to ask you, have any of the campaigns reached out to you . Do you see any of them kind of taking an interest in what you have to say here . In short, no. [laughter] so thats a really quick answer. I was actually thinking when ben was talking, this is a really interesting theme between our two books which is this implicit corruption, right . Its not that anybodys really intending or really the same holds true in the business world. Its not that youre always, when youre writing these stories, youre always looking for the moment where people met in a darkroom and plotted to defraud shareholders and plotted to destroy the Global Financial system, and you just wish you could find that meeting, right . Of the heads of wall street firms in this preferably smoky bar off wall street. It never happens. Theres never that moment, and these stories are always this weird mixture of a little bit about corruption with a lot of suspension of disbelief. And its this notion of implicit corruption. Everybodys in on it because thats just how its done, and everybody thinks thats everybodys come to take the system as it is for granted, and it sounds like thats a parallel theme between our two books. And sometimes you wish that there was a smoking gun, because people want a smoking gun so badly people want the smoking gun so badly and t to have people realy pay attention, sometimes youou need a smoking gun and then it doesnt exist and so your you f built a narrative and its a lot of well, obviously something is going on but without the smoking gun you dont have sort of this moment where everybody goes oh, of course. For this mode of absolutely conscious, willful deception and in wrongdoing and documents which were narrative we want a turning point to hang the story on. I think it makes these storiesso somewhat satisfying on a level but on another level that are deeper, very human story. That is the story of how things go wrong, whole lot of selfdelusion wrapped up with little bit of greed wrapped upup with a little bit of outright corruption. So nobody is focused on these issues now and it seems to take a smoking gun to really get action, but whats a possible way forward to try to fix fannie and freddie mac before it happens again . Its a really complicated question because on the surface you want to say lets just get these government sponsored enterprises, what on earth does that . Lets shut them down and get them out of the Housing Market. Why do we need a government presence in our Housing Market . Things that we take for granted as americans like a 30year fixed Rate Mortgage wouldnt exist if you didnt have institutions that guaranteed that risk, because the Financial Markets dont want to absorb it. So when you actually look at the cost of getting the government out of the Housing Market, it becomes, it becomes a lot less clear that thats the right answer, particularly in a day and age where income inequality is at the top of everybodys list of the ills in our society. If you didnt have these two giant companies around or some facsimile thereof, mortgage credit in this country would be much harder to come by for people of middle to lower income, it would be much harder to come by in parts of the country that arent as well off financially. When you really dig into this very clean idea of well just kill the two companies and get the government out of the Housing Market actually becomes a lot less simple. And thats part of the reason why we dont have any answer to this, is its not ideologically appealing, right . Because if youre on the hard right, you want to say, well, just get rid of them. And if youre on the hard left, you might say, well, lets just nationalize them and have the government do anything. And the government do everything. And the right answer is probably somewhere in the middle and probably actually somewhat close to the system that we had, that we had in place. And i think it gets to another sort of uncomfortable issue which is that a lot of times in the quest for perfect, there is no perfect. And you do the best you can, you muddle through, and you try to put safeguards in place that will make the system work for everybody. But i think one of the things thats holding up moving forward is ideologying, one, the quest for a perfect which may not exist. Then just this idea that, well, the status quo is fine. That pushing off making a decision is somehow not a decision when, in reality, it is its own form of decision. How about the ncaa . There have been some positive things which have happened in the wake of kind of all these efforts to try to reform. Theres now a concussion protocol in the ncaa. There are fouryear scholarships now. Now theyre, i guess, factoring in the true cost of attendance. Whats left to fix, ben . So there have been a number of lawsuits, and the Union Movement at northwestern really put a scare into sort of the status quo. But the system, there is a little bit of extra money for the players now. There has been incremental movement sort of toward reform. But it essentially is unchanged. And its really hard to go through the courts, because there was a suit over using players names and images in tv without their consent and without paying them for it. And they won. And on appeal, the idea that colleges could now pay trust funds to players was overturned. While still saying that the ncaa had violated antitrust laws. So in essence, it was the rules are illegal, but they can basically continue as they are. And its because, you know, institutions like the courts and institutions like the labor board which weighed in on the northwestern case dont want to hit the eject button on the system that we have here and dont want to be the ones who are blamed for changing College Sports because there are so many College Sports fans, and people really like College Sports. And so to change, fundamentally change the system that we have, i think you mentioned the university of missouri. And basically what happened was there were issues of racism on campus, and they had been percolating for weeks and maybe months. And as soon as the Football Team stood up and said we are not going to play on saturday until something is done, the University President resigned in 36 hours. [laughter] 36 hours. And that is how much power that the athletes on campuses have. And schools have given it to them almost unwittingly because there is so much money now tied up in the games; tv money, espn, cbs and the concessions and the sponsorships. And so if the game doesnt go on, there is so much money at stake. And so just imagine if a team didnt come out for the final four and said wed like to renegotiate the terms of how we play College Sports. I think the system would change in half an hour. It would change so fast. Again, thats also really, really hard to do because these are 18 and 19yearold kids who want to play in the final four. And so to take a stand is really hard especially because many of them are just in college for a couple years, they have a pro career that theyre looking out for. But i think that is what its going to take to fundamentally make the system more equitability with bl. And equitable. Is it something that should be fixed not just for bigtime College Football and basketball . Were in the land of lacrosse here in maryland. How about lacrosse players . Yeah. I think the ncaa rules for all athletes, three things should happen tomorrow that would make it better for everybody. When you talk about salaries and actually paying the athletes, i think thats different for the football and mens basketball players because they are fundamentally on campus to generate revenue for the school and to be visible. And its different even than lacrosse at Johns Hopkins or maryland. But for them i would say you should get a lifetime scholarship, meaning that you can focus on your sport while youre in school and come back and get the education youre promised whenever you want. You should have Lifetime Health care, so if you ever get injured competing for your school, the school covers those bills for life. And the third thing is even at Johns Hopkins or a division iii school, if somebody wants to pay you money for your autograph, you ought to be able to sell your autograph. If the car dealership wants to use you for a commercial to endorse their cars or if nike wants to pay you to wear nike, you ought to be able to have control over your name and image and make any money from a Third Party Vendor that you can. Well, i want to leave some time for audience questions, so why dont i open it up now. Please walk over to the mic if youve got one. [inaudible] sorry, because its television. To ms. Mclean, i know what when i look at the meltdown of the Financial Sector in 2008, i think of it in terms of the, you know, greatest crime wave in american history. Yet nobody went to jail. Im very interested in what you think of that. I think thats the question everybody is still asking all these years later, and the fact that people are still asking it all these years later show that theres really no satisfactory answer to it. Im going to give you a couple of different answers. The first one is these are really, white collar frauds are really hard to prosecute. Even enron, which most people think of as a giant fraud are, was actually mostly what i like to refer to as a legal fraud which is they found ways to rip off the system and take advantage of loopholes in the system while meeting the letter of the law such that when prosecutors tried to go after it, it was actually very difficult to do it, because it turned out that accountants and lawyers and all the people in our system who protect top executives from the consequences of their decisions even when they benefit, even when they profit directly from those decisions had signed off on everything, making it really difficult to prosecute. The but difficulty alone isnt the reason there werent convictions in the wake of the financial crisis. There wasnt an appetite to do it. And part of that was because nobody wants to wreak more havoc on these institutions that wed just bailed out. And there was a very real fear, i think, that if there were prosecutions, that we would crater the very fragile confidence in these institutions that we just spent all this taxpayer money, all this taxpayer money bailing out. And then i think theres a third reason in the financial crisis that is really difficult which is that the regulators signed off on a lot of what was happening, so it adds it goes back to my first explanation. A lot of the things that we find the most reprehensible, that are the most deeply immoral are not necessarily illegal. And what i dislike about our modern markets is that it often seems like these immoral decisions arent punished in other ways. You would like to believe that then there would be a deeper punishment in the term of career lost or shame felt if the punishment cant be legal, and our world doesnt seem to work that way anymore. Floor is open. Thank you all very much for a wond thank you all very much for your wonderful presentation. I find myself utterly blown away by the institutional greed that you have described. I know, knew it existed but now i am just shuddering. My question is for ben strauss. I have read recently that some of the problems with College Tuition is exploding is that some of that money is going toward supporting the sports portion of the college. Is that a rumor or is that true . And secondly, the human face of the students who are not able to take advantage of the money, the hunger that they experience, id like to hear a little bit more about that. Youre talking about studento fees, and so theres been some coverage of student fees. At the bigger schools, were talking about acc and the sbc and the big ten, the student fees they are, its much more of an issue at smaller schools that dont have tv money to fall back on or to tap to pay for, you know, the things that they want, the bigger stadiums and more facilities, more money for coaches. But at some schools that are not florida, that are not usc, the our student fees that fund athletics, and over four years they can be as much as 1000 which when youre going into debt to pay for your college education, any more money for the Football Team, use sort of shake your head at. Hools, tha its part of the tuition. At smaller schools that is an issue. As far as the human face, i could tell you the story of the prologue in our book is a player at the university of connecticue a few years ago, and he was investigated by the ncaa for taking an impermissible benefit is what they call it. Its really more about what happened to his mother and his family when you are under investigation. To a single black mother, and she had accepted money for a family friend, from a familyth friend to go on a recruiting visit with her son. This is basic parenting. This wasnt a guy who is trying to steer the player to a specific school. This is sort of a human kind and, yes, you can go be a pair and go be with her son on his recruiting trip. The ncaa sent five investigators to her workplace, took her out of work and took her to a hotel and interrogated her for five hours, sort of for widening andn shes a single black mother, asking her about every single check that shed written for thh past two years and having to prove that it was not some sort of unseemly or back channel money to recruit her son. And so the ncaa and College Sports is one of the very first really one of the only places that you can think of where youre guilty until you prove your innocence. So as soon as youre under investigation, you cannot play. Your School Suspends you until you prove that you did nothing wrong. And so this the mother ended up losing her job also because, you know, she was under so much stress, and, you know, the investigators went to friends houses and friends workplaces asking about every single, you know, deposit in her bank account over the last number of years. Its sort of insane to think about, you know, institutions being able to do that, you know, in america today. So thats sort of when you the human face of getting investigated by the ncaa for doing something that really doesnt seem like a very big deal. And, in fact, is not a very big deal. Yeah. And unfortunately, thats just one of many stories like that that ben and joe chronicle in this book. They really get your blood boiling. Next question. I wanted to take a different perspective from the last couple questions and hope that nobody throws Rotten Tomatoes at me. Bethany, as you said, its human nature to want to blame and to want to blame the gses or to blame the ncaa administrators. But the reality is that they wouldnt have had the power that they have if we werent the ones tuning in to the basketball games and the Football Games and if we werent the ones that love our houses and want nice houses and take out loans for home renovation. And so im wondering how much each of your books address the real cultural nature of the greed that gets embedded in these systems. Right. I have a line i sometimes use when im talking about scandals which is that every scandal, every story of business gone wrong in some ways always involves the complicity of the victims, because we all buy into this belief that in something after the fact is clearly going to seem too good to be true, and certainly in the financial crisis, home buyers bought into the fact that home prices would go up forever. Im a big believer in personal responsibility. Without it, were all completely lost. But i think something that has gone wrong in our system is that there isnt often a corresponding feeling of responsibility. I think responsibility does have to be a twoway street. And i was firmly in the camp that this was the fault of homeowners until i came upon this institution called Washington Mutual who talked about how you persuaded people to take out a much riskier loan instead, because it was much more profitable to Washington Mutual, and they could turn around and sell it to the big banks for much more money. And so it was a script for their sales people about what you did when someone came in and said, no, really, i just want a safe 30year fixed Rate Mortgage and how you changed their mind. And so i think to your point we are lost without personal responsibility, and we are all to some extent complicit in the story of every business gone wrong. But that doesnt mean it is all our fault. Responsibility has to be a twoway street, and there has to be responsibility from people about the decisions they make but also responsibility from corporations about the decisions that they encourage people to make. I think we have time for just one more question. I have a question for bethany. I am an economist by degree, but ive gotten to the point of not caring anymore and not following whats going on in the economic arena. Talking about the financial crisis, as a simple taxpayer you mentioned the guilt of fannie and freddie, but you didnt mention anything about ginnie. How are they structured now . How are my tax dollars supporting the subsidies that is going to the the three megainstitutions . Thank you. Right. So right now fannie and freddie are essentially supported by a line of credit from taxpayers, and theyve actually they took 187 billion from taxpayers in the form of their bailout9. People thought they would never be able to repay it. They actually have paid almost 100 billion more than they took back into the u. S. Treasury. And weve been able to use that to reduce the budget deficit. The big problem with the way theyre structured is that the taxpayer is totally on the hook. Capital absorbs losses in a football institution. Financial institution. Every Financial Institution needs capital to absorb losses. Because fannie and freddie under the direction of the u. S. Government are being drained of all their capital, in a few years they are going to have absolutely nothing which to absorb all those unexpected loss, so guess what those losses are going to happen and where they go . Right back to all of us. So thats why i believe its a problem we need to fix. Well, i think thats just i think thats just about all the time we have. F indentured the inside story of the rebellion against the ncaa, im converted. Shaky ground the strange saga of the u. S. Mortgage giants im very concerned. But other than that its been a very pleasant experience up hern other want to say congratulations to you both and thanks. [applause] president obama recently nominated carla hayden to become the 14th librarian of congress. She is currently ceo of the Pratt Free Library in baltimore. If confirmed she would succeed James Billington and become the first africanamerican woman to serve in the position. During her congressional confirmation hearing this past week she laid out her vision for the future of the library of congress. As i envision the future of this wonderful institution, i see it growing in it stature not only in librarianship by tim howell people do libraries in general. As more of its resources are readily available for more people online, users will not have to be in washington, d. C. Everyone will have a sense of ownership and pride in this national treasure. A child on a reservation in new mexico of the same access as a High School Student in st. Louis, missouri. A fifth grader in bowling green, kentucky, would be able to view abraham lincolnsapers from his home computer. Bandish i tend to greater in mississippi with dreams of performing would be able to view the libraries collection. A student from a Community College in kansas could look at and even download revolutionary format for a class assignment. And this would help libraries across the country, a Small Library in arkansas with a modest budget will be able to help patrons assess primary studies of George Washingtons papers. And Rural Library in alabama will be able to connect with live feed to the National Book festival and seek and hear their favorite authors. I envision a library of congress that can balance its various roles, important roles, and a digital age at a time when libraries throughout the world faced many of the same challenges when their very existence is being questioned to the library of congress should continue to be a leader. I would be honored to be part of the legacy and accomplishments of my predecessors in this position. To be part of a continuing movement to open the Treasure Chest that is at the library of congress. This can be done without threatening the libraries core responsibility to support and advise congress, to serve users of the copyright office, and assist researchers who benefit from its exhaustive collection. If confirmed he would be my privilege to join the dedicated staff and supporters of the library, to ensure that its treasures are secured and shared for many years to come speak to us in egypt to set a date to vote on carla haydens confirmation. Author nick adams, if you read your books, i think its probably safe to say that you love america more than anybody austin the whole world spin i