inject nitrogen into overheat reed actors to keep them from exploding. in the ivory coast, the president is refusing to give um by force. they re inside his compound as they try to remove him from his underground bunker. this has been going on now for four months. now our series, a stronger america, the black agenda. the naacp released a new report entitled misplaced priorities. the report claims that spending too much money on prisons and too little on education from minority communities is exacerbating achievement gaps and stunting the movement. ben jealous now joins us. great to see you. let s talk about your new study and what you see as the problem with spending so much on prisons. we have to spend money on prisons once people are convicted. they have to have a place to go. how do you get around this?
debbie wasserman schultz what else does she bring to the table? it is a very different kind of choice for the dnc. absolutely. i ve been racking my brain to think when there was a house member sitting on top of either national party committees and i can t for the life of me come up with a name. it really is an interesting choice. she s very aggressive and very ambitious and very smart. and so they expect that she s going to work very hard both raising money for the committee, and also working very closely with the white house on distributing the resources. the dnc will still be in charge of voter registration and voter turnout operations. which, given her house perspective, could be a boone for some of those house members as well. jean, let s bring our viewers inside, you know, sort of behind the scenes. a couple of other factors as well. first of all, she supported hillary clinton, not barack obama. second of all, she s not close to speaker pelosi. in fact, pelosi passed over her
its elite fund-raisers, so the called bundlers. jean cummings joins us now. these are the big fat cats, the bundlers. what is their new obl geogigatif you will, as far as the obama campaign is concerned? they asked their major donors to try to generate about $350,000 a piece this year and next year for a grand total of $700,000 for each of the bundlers. it is a high bar, bigger than 2007. but it illustrates how quickly they re trying to get their machine up and going and get the money put together so that they can start hiring people and expanding nationwide. now, speaking of big campaign fund-raisers, one of the attributes of the new head of the dnc is she was, i believe, the biggest single fund-raiser among all members of congress during the re-elect, all members of the democratic caucus.
is ceos and stockholders. that is not a good idea. well, let me just play devil s advocate here, what they would say is unless you do something about medicare and medicaid, there can t be a solution to the really the huge challenges that we face, that the deficit can t be solved in any other way, the long-term deficit and america has to take come to grips with this. so how would you deal with it? medicare as it now exists can t continue forever. well, i sure would not do it the way he does it because essentially he s giving a big tax break to the wealthiest americans, that s in his budget plan. at the same time, he s dramatically cutting down benefits to seniors by more than half of what they otherwise get and transferring that money over and the decision-making over to health insurance companies. that is not the way to solve our budget deficits. we have to be more balanced, more fair, not unbalanced, unfair, which is his approach. let me ask you a question that was raised in
country, which is actually to invest in our public universities. when i was a kid in california, the state budget put 3% down for prisons and 10% for public universities. and that s what led that was the 70s and that led to the sill convalley boom of the 80s. now california puts 11% into prisons and 7.5% into public universities. folks in europe say, you can only afford to be rich and stupid for one generation and we re like 30 years into this. we have gone a generation and a half and it is high time for us to turn around, get smart on crime, cut bait with the failed tough on crime policies and use that money to actually create a better future for all of our kids. ben jealous, thank you. i look forward to seeing how that conversation goes tomorrow. thank you. thank you. and it has been 46 years since malcolm x was assassinated while giving a speech in new york. much has been written about the leader, including the autobiography written in 1965