Behind me and that did not happen. You did not negotiate. We could get a photo of you afterward. Ok. Well, lets go to a committee now, not a subcommittee. The two gentlemen to my right and left have had ample opportunity to sit in the stuffed chairs behind me. Barney frank cocreated the legislation known as dodd frank. To my right is the honorable bill thomas, who served in congress until 2007. He was the chair of the house ways and means committee. And for purposes here today, he was the vicechairman of of the financial crisis inquiry commission. To my left is a member of the fcic who i have known for many years, headed the cbo for 4 years, was john mccains economic adviser, and was on the council of economic advisers. A guy who, for whatever reason, when he calls me up to do this stuff, i always say yes. There may be people who do not know what cbo means. It is the Congressional Budget Office. Barney and i have one thing in common, if nothing else, we were frustrated over and over ag
Rachel Maddow takes a look at the days top political news stories. Charge of grand larceny, a big stack of charges involving a large amount of money and potentially a large amount of jail time. The story they uncovered at the courthouse that day, for some reason, friedman had gotten this huge Criminal Liability he was facing winnowed down to almost nothing. All the prison time and felonies evaporated. Instead of being tried for evading 5 million in taxes, prosecutors let him plead guilty to one count of evaluating 50,000 worth of taxes. Not 5 million, 50,000. Instead of decades in potential prison time the deal he cut with prosecutors got him zero prison time. People do plea deals all the time they offer their testimony for prosecutors letting them off the hook and going easier on
them. This was like the mother of all plea deals. The amount he offered must have been very very valuable to the government given how sweet the deal was he got from them in return. That happened in late may.
Point. I could easily have seen how my life could not in a different direction. Host couldnt you have done with my brother michael and your brother james did. They joined the navy so they could divert the draft. Did you think about that . Guest i thought about that but by that time i was very politicized and i would have felt guilty that i was taking the easy way out. I think i knew that i could have gone into the military and i wouldnt have been sent to the frontline. I might have been sent to vietnam but by that time it was more the symbolism of it. I knew that i did not want to support that war. Host zero you know a lot of young people our age, black people our age at that time had difficulty reconciling or not having all the rights that whites had and then serving this country and taking a risk. Mohammed ali. Guest if i was going to fight for democracy i would have done it in mississippi and alabama. I didnt have to go 10,000 miles to fight for democracy. Host did you ever think ab
But use that technology to invite large numbers of students to take part in sending questions and questioning to what is and get to know each other or using the web. There are a lot of newfangled items going on about how this is presented as i am struggling to catch up with myself. They instructed me how to sweet and twitter and facebook and all these other things but a lot of things like the enhance ebook i cant do because i dont have and i had but i do believe in the possibility of the immediacy year and if you are trying to tell legitimate story that is important from history you need to take every resource, every chance you can to make connections. That is the novelty side of what i am presenting here and im interested in what you have got to think about. The notion of repeating, using some language, i 6 things together in these stories. Let me talk about misremembering, imbalanced sense of history, the urgency that lies in this book, why i want to do it, take this risk to try to m
Taylor branch presents his thoughts on key moments of Civil Rights Movement. This is about an hour and 15 minutes. Thank you, mr. Hale. Thank you atlanta History Center. Ive been here before. Im glad to be back, and im glad to be back talking about something thats been a subject thats been dear to me for my whole life, and its inescapable now that im getting older that it is by lifes work, and im glad for it. This is another round. Im going to take more questions tonight than i normally do. Ill say provocative things about why this history is significant and about this project, itself, which is a little odd to spend 24 years writing a 2300page trilogy and come out a few years later with a 190page book. A lot of people who road the other ones think its not true that somebody else wrote it, that im not capable of writing something this brief. [laughter] i assure you that i did. There is blood on the floor of my office because it involved eliminating or at least setting aside 95 of what i