More information at macfound. Org. Park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The kohlberg foundation. Barbara g. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement company. Welcome. President obamas state of the Union Address and the rebuttals from the republican greek chorus already have been extensively vetted by the media. So as we say here in new york, enough already. Instead, we have a reality check from someone who artfully uses Television Drama to report on the state of america from an entirely different perspective from the bottom up. David simon was a Crime Reporter for the Baltimore Sun whose journalism became the material for two nonfiction books, homicide a year on the killing streets, and the corner a year in the life of an innercity neighborhood. Each became a tv series and led simon to leave daily journalism to create two unforgettable shows for hbo the wire, about the precincts of baltimore and the corruption of its institutions. You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you dont know where the [ bleep ] its gonna take you. And treme, about the people of new orleans grappling with a new and painful reality in the wake of hurricane katrina. What hit the mississippi gulf coast was a natural disaster, a hurricane pure and simple. The flooding of new orleans was a man made catastrophe. A federal [ bleep ] up of epic proportions. For david simon, the state of the union begins with the lives and stories of these people , which is why he told an audience at the festival of dangerous ideas in australia last november that whats happening in america is a horror show. His remarks reverberated through cyberspace, so we asked him here to tell us more. He came to new york to receive a career Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of america, east. Welcome and congratulations. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Watching the president s speech the other night, he was hopeful. He was upbeat. He was encouraging and inclusive and what he said. But i kept listening and thinking about that speech you had made last fall in australia, where you said whats happening here in america is a horror show. And i wonder, how do you reconcile those two visions of our country . I dont think that you can call the American Government anything other than broken at this point. And i think the break has come at the legislative level. I mean, thats the part of the government that has been purchased. You can buy these guys on the cheap. And the capitols been at it a long time and the rules have been relaxed. The Supreme Court has walked away from any sort of responsibility to maintain democracy at that level. Thats the aspect of government thats broken. And it doesnt matter whether its obama or clinton or bush or anybody at this point. If this is the way were going to do business, were not going to do business. You know, theyve paid for it to be inert. And it is inert. And ultimately that aspect of capitalism hasnt been dealt with in any way. Every president from kennedy to obama has insisted that the rising tide will lift all boats, but it hasnt happened. Yeah, i think supply side economics has been shown to be bankrupt as an intellectual concept. Its not only unproved, the opposite has occurred if youre looking at the divergence in the Economic Health of middle class families or the working class, whats left of the working class certainly the underclass and youre looking at where the wealth of the country is going and how fast. We are becoming two americas in every fundamental sense. So you werent using hyperbole in australia . That wasnt just to try to drive a point home when you talked about no. Two americas and the people in one of those americas has been utterly divorced from the American Experience that you, david simon you know, listen, a lot of this falls on people of color because, you know, theyre the last in through the door in the economic ladder. And if you look at the city where i live and you look at baltimore, maryland, half of the adult male African American residents have no work. Thats not an Economic System that is having a bad go of it, thats something that doesnt actually work. Thats an Economic System that is throwing away and doesnt need 10 to 15 of its population. Yeah, without work they have no value, no worth to society . Its existential, and what do you mean . Work is meaning for all of us. And its relevance and its our place in society is dictated to us by what we contribute and what were paid to do. And if part of america is validated to the extent that they are predominant in all of the luxury that the country can afford and part of the country is utterly irrelevant to the economic structure, you know, those factories are all gone. We dont need those people anymore, and weve let them know. And you know, the only factory in my city, in west baltimore or in east baltimore that was working, that was viable was the drug corner. And that worked like a charm. And ultimately, what i look at is the hyperbole by which we say were including everybody while were tossing people out of the boat left and right. Weve changed and weve become contemptuous of the idea that we are all in this together. This is about sharing and about you know, when you say sharing theres a percentage of the population, and its the moneyed percent of our population, that hears socialism or communism or any of the other isms they want to put on it. But ultimately we are all part of the same society. And its either going to be a mediocre society that, you know, abuses people or its not. In your speech you said that knowing that theyre worthless, these people, worthless, valueless because they have no economic means of support and nothing economically theyre not relevant. Theyre not relevant. But they have to endure, as you said. And is that the horror show, the fact that they know theyre not needed and they have to go on anyway . And that once theyre in that situation, theyre not only marginalized, theyre abused. I mean, we are the country that jails more of our population than any other state on the globe. More than totalitarian states, we put people in prison. Weve managed to monetize these irrelevant people in a way that allows some of us to get rich. Now, were all paying for it as taxpayers for having this level of incarceration in american society, which is unheard of in the world. But we let some people, you know, get a profit off of it. The monetization of human beings like that, you know, anybody tells you that the markets will solve everything, the libertarian ideal. I cant get past just how juvenile the thought is that if you just let the markets be the markets, theyll solve everything. You know, america worked when there was tension between capital and labor, when there when neither side won all of its victories, when they were fighting. Its in the fight that we got healthy, that we transformed a working class into a middle class, that we became a consumer economy that drove the world for about half a century. And . Maybe a little more. And whats happened . Well, the fights gone out of labor. Labors lost the fight. Capitals won. There was to the victor go the spoils. There was a class war and labor, and the poor people lost and the working people lost. Let me bring up an excerpt from your speech in australia. Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickledown and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. Its astonishing to me, but it is. People are saying i dont need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. Im not connected to society. I dont care how the road got built. I dont care where the firefighter comes from. I dont care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. Its the triumph of the self. I am me. Hear me roar. What are you talking about there . Talking about greed, just greed. And its a selfdestructive greed to the economy that does lift all boats in the sense that, you know, were arguing about the minimum wage right now and making it 10. Or were arguing about welfare reform and eliminating forms of welfare. You know something . I know that if i pay a guy working a counter at a fast food place 10 or 12 or 15, i know if i give a welfare check to a mother of two in west baltimore i know that all of that moneys actually going back into the american economy. I know that every single dollar has a multiplier factor. Nobodys saving money on 12 an hour in america. Theyre living hand to mouth. And i know that every single dollar is going to be multiplied through the economy. You give me a tax break, you know, working as i do in the Entertainment Industry and at the level of a tv producer and i cant figure out how to spend enough of it, you know. I might you know, i might have a little conscience. I might throw some of it to charity and try to feel better about myself. But i cant possibly how many yachts can i water ski behind in Baltimore Harbor . And yet thats the kind of argument that supply side economics is. Give us the job makers, the money and well make jobs. Not with all of it you wont. A lot of its going to wall street and its going to sit there and its going to be subjected to much less tax liabilities, the capital gains. You know, the scam of it, the scam of what americas become, you know, give the money to the rich and theyll see that youre not poor. Is that really what youre saying . But you know, you actually argue about making the poor people a little less poor and then half of congress is running away as if this is going to you know, if you want your economy to grow, people have to have the money. They have to have the Discretionary Income to buy stuff. Thats what made us great in the last century is that suddenly a working class which was on subsistence wages at the early part of the century had enough money, Discretionary Income, to buy the things they needed and some things that they didnt need but wanted. And that grew us. And now youre arguing over whether this guy whos working every day at the burger king, whether he can have 10 or 12 an hour. Arent you ashamed of yourself . Arent you know, wheres the shame . There is no shame anymore in america. That brings me to another part of your speech. Lets listen. That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, which is that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress. And by social contract you mean . Those are the things that make life worth living, that make that give value to being a person, a citizen. If how much money you have is the defining characteristic of citizenship or of value or of relevance, of human relevance, and if thats all that were going to measure and apparently, since 1980 this all were going to measure youre going to get a society to live in that is structured on that metric. And its going to be a brutal one. But ultimately, capitalism has not delivered on the promise to be a measurement of anything other than money, of profit. And if profit is your only metric, man, what are you building . Where does the environment fit into that . Where does Human Potential and, you know, for anything other than having some money in your hand, you know, where does where do people stand when they have health needs or when they make a mistake in life . You know, it was said a long time ago, you judge a society by is hospitals and its prisons. By that standard were you know, we have a lot to be ashamed of. Those of us whove seen the wire know that the people youre writing about are those losers. Theyre the people who are without value to society. And president obama is on the record as saying that the wire is his favorite tv series of all time. Do you think he gets it . I think he probably gets it. I dont think obama is any different from the person i thought we elected two election cycles ago. I think hes encountered a rigged game. And i dont think the next guy will have anything other than a rigged game. And i think, you know, considering the gerrymandering that has made the representative aspect of our legislative branch an absurdity and considering the monetization of our legislative branch, i dont think anybody gets a legislature that is functional. I have no faith in the ability of the legislative branch of my government to in any remote way reflect the popular will. So when the president says its time to deal with inequality, you are not saying hes insincere, its just that nothing is going to happen because of the resistance and the opposition . He said he was going to do a lot of things in a lot of state of the Union Addresses. And many of them were admirable in my eyes. Good luck. Good luck getting that passed, you know. Look at what happened with the Major Initiative of the first term which is health care. The money that was heaved by the capital that ran into the halls of government to spend to make sure that we would not achieve what most americans have said they want at a basic level, certainly at the time the legislation was passed, wed like to have it that all of us have access to some basic health care. That seems to be an entirely functional thing that many western countries have managed beautifully, but we cannot. How it happens, who gets what, you know, single payer, once you got done with what happened in the congress it was a marginal plan that came out and then our ability to affect it, were arguing over an it problem . Really . Thats what it comes down to . cause if we cant fix the computers and if we cant fix the administration of a program to and of course we can and of course theyre all, you know, if you look back at what happened when medicare came in, the bureaucracy was disastrous in the beginning and everyone problems. Of course. Social security as well. You know when we started out space program, which was, you know, an unqualified success in the end, the rockets kept blowing up on the launching pad. Somehow we figured out a way to keep launching rockets and do it right. And thats a very different america from the tonality of this one, which is selfish, which is i have my Health Care Still and i dont want to pay for anybody else to get back in the boat. This is about sharing. This about our loss of the idea of society. Listening to, watching the state of Union Address and when the camera would cut to the chamber in the house there, everyone in that chamber well paid, health benefits, pension plan, a staff to serve their needs, corporations throwing money at them to make sure they get reelected. And i wonder if people that far removed from where you were can even imagine the horrors of the america you describe. You know, ive had the sensation over the last twenty and before the wire even, i mean, when i was just a Police Reporter in baltimore of hearing people inside the beltway speak about the American City or about urban issues or about things that i actually knew a little bit about. And they would talk about it you know, id be listening to, you know, a gingrich or even some wellmeaning liberal. And i would think, i would love to have these guys in my Volkswagen Passat and just kick them out on the corner at monroe and fayette and you know, and just leave them there for a month, you know, and just see if they can you stop them from saying this stuff with just a little bit of aware what would they see . Theyre not going to what would they see at the corner . Well, theyd see human beings for one thing. Theyd see the america that theyve left behind and have left behind for generations. And now increasingly its not all just people of color. Now the economy has shrugged again and again and were leaving white people behind. And so all of a sudden, its encroaching in a way that people are getting a little bit more frantic. And its making some people more inclined to reflect on what the system has wrought. And its making other people more inclined to just dig the trenches deeper. The best analysis of obamas speech that i read came from the writer matt miller, who worked for bill clinton in the white house when clinton laid out, miller says, about the same vision that obama did this week. Heres what miller wrote, quote, yet in the years since, on virtually every metric progressives care about, the measures of a good society have gone in the wrong direction. Wrong direction. Wages are stagnant or shrinking. School rankings have sagged. College and health costs have soared. Our rates of Child Poverty lead the developed world. Decent jobs remain scarce. The accident of birth weighs more heavily in dictating ones destiny. All the compelling anecdotes or special guests in the chamber dont change that. Thats right, thats right. And you know, not to critique only the conservative logic and the supply side logic, you know, bill clinton in maneuvering to the center, he signed all those crime bills. He made the american gulag as vast as it is with a lot of his legislation against the drug war. And he made it so that these disposable people could become grist for that horrible mill. I am so aware of what at this point of having covered it for so many years of what the drug war means in terms of being effectively a war on the poor. Thats all it is. It has no meaning in terms of narcotics or anything like that. Thats the shell game. But you wouldnt, you wouldnt connect that, would you, to the power of capital to buy the legislation . Its the power of capitalism i dont know if i think its that much of a plan, im not that much of a conspiracist. I think there are a lot of extra people left over when the factories all go to the cheapest labor. And you know, if youre going to move to the Manufacturing Base to the pacific rim and to mexico and wherever else youre going to have a lot of extra people. And thats going to make you nervous. And those people are not going to have well, youre either going to have to pay them to be extra, which we dont have were not that selfless. Were cutting back on welfare. Youre either going to have to pay them to be useless, youre going to have to find a way to completely reorient them and place them in the Service Economy in ways that they are not now relevant for. And thats a lot of money, we dont want to spend that money. Or youre going to have to hunt them, hunt them down. And thats what the drug war became. You know, we left one last industry in places like west baltimore and north philadelphia and east st. Louis. We left one last factory standing. We left the drug corner. And it was very lucrative and very destructive. And then we made that legal and then we made the laws against that so draconian that we could basically destroy lives. And then to make it even more laughable as a capitalist enterprise, we started turning over the prisons to private companies. And so they can, certain people with the contracts can find a profit metric in destroying these lives. President obama has said he wants a higher minimum wage and hell sign an executive order to do it in contracts that will come along down the road. And some jurisdictions will do the same thing. But why cant Congress Look at this and say, you know what . This is what we say we want these people working, we say we dont want welfare cheats, we say we dont want to welfare to grow. Here are people who are willing to work full time to be part of our Service Economy. Lets give them some Discretionary Income. Theyre probably going to spend it buying american product. It makes such sense, david, but at the same time, the federal minimum wage is 7. 25. If it had been adjusted for productivity gains and inflation, today it would be 21. 72. I know. Something like that. We are reagans children, we are thatchers children. You know, there is no society, theres just you. We bought this stuff hook, line and sinker and we are building that. Were getting the america weve paid for. And wheres the pushback . Shameful. Wheres the pushback . Well, you saw a great first act in occupy wall street. Its a shame they had no second act, but they had a good first act. And you see it, i think, in a very tragic way in the fact that most people are opting out of the political structure. I dont think thats, you know, i can say all these things about its a rigged game and yet i still go in and i vote and i still argue in public. But a lot of people have given up. And one of the attractions of this sort of antigovernment libertarian point of view, of the idea that government is the problem, you know, all those wonderful lines of, you know, im here from the government, im here to help. Thats the worst line you can hear. All that crap is in fact the flotsam and jetsam of everyones disappointment in where weve been going. And its being harnessed in a way that only contributes to the problem. You know, government and democracy in particular, it is about constant battle, its about nothing ever being fixed or ever being right. We will never solve a problem to the point where we can walk away from it and the machine will, you know devour the problem without our attending to it. There will always be conflict, there will always be competing interests that force us to engage in the hard job of governing ourselves. And so the antigovernment thing strikes me as a perversity. I dont think the Founding Fathers would recognize it. They were constructing a government of the people. Thats their language and i think thats their belief. And the idea that the government is some, you know, once we start regarding it as some alien force that we cant control, were done, democracys done. Thats the last stage of walking away from the responsibility of governing ourselves. If we cant control it, if it is going to be a purchased government, if we cant institute the reforms that are necessary, then were done, were done right now. But are we done . More on that question next week with david simon. In the meantime, at our website billmoyers. Com, you can see david simons entire talk at the festival of dangerous ideas in australia. And you can view excerpts of my interviews with pete seeger, who died this week at 94. Thats all at billmoyers. Com. Ill see you there and ill see you here, next time. Dont wait a week to get more moyers, visit billmoyers. Com for exclusive blogs, essays and video features. Captions by vitac www. Vitac. Com announcer funding is provided by anne gumowitz, encouraging the renewal of democracy. Carnegie corporation of new york, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. The ford foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide. The herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations Whose Mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at macfound. Org. Park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The kohlberg foundation. Barbara g. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement company. Next on newsroom, income inequality front and center again. 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