>> @ good evening and welcome to the campus of george washington university. i'm tavis smiley. we have assembled a wide-ranging group of journalists to talk aout "america's next chapter" three-hour long conversation about where this country is in the first decade of the new century. let's thank c-span for covering this conversation. [applause] he is the chief political correspondent for cbs news, please welcome david brody. [applause] she is the co-founder of voto latino, maria teresa kumar. [applause] political columnist for the "washington post" please welcome dana milbank. [applause] she is the creator of one of the best sites on the web, huffington post, please welcome arianna huffington. [applause] the anchor of "at the closing bell" maria bartiromo. [applause] he is the best-selling author, please welcome dr. cornel west. [applause] he is a best selling author and former speech writer for george w. bush, please welcome david frum. [applause] the ceo of sybase and a committee of 100, our friend, john chen. [applause] i think want to start our conversation with dr. west. i do that because i was reading clips of some of your immediate appearances, one in particular, you were asked about this conversation. i thought we were friends. until i read this conversation -- we talked about how america can return to its greatness. i want to talk about -- we have three hours to drill down on this, but you took exception in the piece i read on a particular media outlet on the notion of america returning to its greatness. i want to let you unpack we have to say about that, but talk to me philosophically, politically, socially, culturally, how you see this notion of america's grade is and whether it ever existed and whether we can never return to it if it ever existed. >> thank you for bringing us together. we need to have this conversation at this moment at this history of this experiment called the united states of america. what i meant is that the very notion of a great nation is ironic because i come out of a christian tradition as is the greatest among you will be the servant to the port. i don't know a nation that's treating its poor with the level of dignity and ought to. alexander the great was not great to me. he dominated in concord a lot of people. napoleon was not great, he dominated unconquered a lot of people. the legacy of martin luther king, how are you doing with the prisoners, the orphans, widows, the fatherless, the motherless, the working-class -- military might, america is unbelievable, technological innovation, america is unbelievable. rights and liberties, america is unbelievable. but greatness has to do with how you're poor and working people are doing. that is the vantage point to me. the legacy to me -- the future of america rests on how we respond to the legacy of martin king. when i look at our poor people are doing, not very well. downward mobility, the newport, chronic poor, locked into a prison industrial complex, militarism, not just iraq and afghanistan, but the pentagon, the military budget being 50% of the u.s. budget which means there's no wiggle room to deal with the situation of working people and poor people in our debate about the budget. then there are the spiritual issues, the spiritualism, but narcissism, the spiritual malnutrition and moral constipation we see in the nation. the emptiness of the soul and the right and good being stuck in you can get out. that is morally constipated. the right and the good want flow. i'm not just talking about are wall street brothers and sisters. they are human beings like anyone else with two much greed. a military industrial complex of private contractors, too much monopoly. our debate about education, privatizing taking place and to teachers and teachers' unions being cast as welfare queens. teachers need to do the job, no doubt about that, but $4 billion a month in afghanistan and -- for me, coming out of the legacy of martin, curtis mayfield, and other great freedom fighters, we are in very deep trouble. not returning to america's greatness, it is trying to make america greater with great courage, great love, great commitment to public interest and the common good. for me in the end, no nation is going to be great because every nation i know is going to be shot through with greed and domination, oppression, and the best we can do is try to gain some accountability for the poor and working people as the elites, oligarchs and others continue to dominate the government and economy. [applause] >> if dr. west is right if sedation is trying to become greater, and trying to juxtapose that notion with your recent best-selling books, "third world america." you argue if we do not change a lot about the way we do business in this country, we may end up a third world america one day. get me from west talking about we need to become greater to your notion that we are slipping toward becoming a third world america. >> first of all, i want to say i would like to spend the next three hours listening to dr. west. [laughter] i was just completely spellbound and that at some point, i said he's going to come to me. i would so much rather sit here listening. one of the reasons we are all so starved of poetry in our public discourse. everything is so prosaic. just listening to cornell riot -- reminds me of how not malnourished we are would become to that. i don't think there's any contradiction in between wet he said and what i wrote. we can never return to anything, even if there was such a thing as american absolute greatness, including toward the poor and working people. my greek compatriots, the philosopher herodotus said you can never enter into the same river twice. everything flows, everything moves on and everything changes. having made the philosophical point, practically, as an immigrant to this country, this accent is for real. i am acutely aware of how we are losing the american dream because i lived it. as we are looking now at the possibility of upward mobility, the possibility of working hard and playing by the rules, doing well and your children doing even better becoming impossible for millions of americans, we see that since the middle class is at the heart of any first world country, if we lose our middle class as we are in danger of doing right now, we do become third world america. the statistics, i hate to cite statistics after dr. west, but we have 100 million people who are worse off than their parents were. when it comes to upward mobility, we are 10th, after france, after spain, after the scandinavian countries. to be behind france in upward mobility is -- i think france was behind us in [unintelligible] that is my concern and we have a lot of time to discuss that ultimately i am optimistic. i know you wanted to start with the darkness and it's good to dwell in the darkness for a while, but ultimately, i believe and this incredible american character and compassion we see express dollar and the country in our small communities. lead to scale it, accelerated, and make it part of our everyday life. >> i want to pick up on something you said -- i'm trying to juxtapose docked suggesting what we are missing a focus on the poor. i hear you saying we have to save the middle-class. how do we focus on the middle- class if that is your suggestion, when doc says what we are missing is a focus on the poor? >> i don't think there's a contradiction at all. the middle-class are the new poor. [applause] they are adding to the chronic poor. if you look at what is happening in our homeless shelters now, at the food banks around the country, there are more and more middle-class people who lost their jobs and lost their homes. about 2 million people, 2 million families have lost their homes in the last two years to foreclosures. stop and imagine that. last night, at the president eulogized in incredibly eloquent and moving terms, the nine year- old who died. our hearts were broken by the death, but what about all the 9- year-old around the country who have no hope for the future, with talent and gets but cannot actualize them? the greatest way to honor christina is to focus on a 9- year-old from the country and all the other kids who are homeless, who cannot get a decent education and who cannot live the american dream. and they are still alive, so we can do something about them. [applause] >> not so long ago, dana milbank, a report released called the rasmussen report and it find that almost half the american people think our best days as a nation are behind us. wrestle with that for a second. almost half of us think the best days of this nation are behind us. whether you believe numbers like that or not, it's clear to me that -- i've been around the country and we all do, this feeling of tanks, helplessness, hopelessness and concern about the future and whether or not their kids and grandkids are going to do as well as they have done, how do you move a country forward? how do you put a country on the right track of half its citizen rethinks its best days are a behind it? >> it is a grim statistic. to the extent there is any good news here, a lot of the reason we're all feeling so bad is because of a short-term problem in the economy. we have two problems -- one is that we have just fallen off this economic cliff which has made all the statistics worse and has made the american public extraordinarily dour. 75% to 80% of the people think we are on the wrong track now. that gets at the statistic you are bringing out because that's overlaid with the sense that our problems are greater than the economic cycle. we probably have reached a point where improving living standards are going to slow down for demographic reasons. we have reached a point where the rest of the world has caught up and america will no longer dominate the way it once did economically, militarily, but that does not mean we necessarily will suffer lower living standards. we have these two things coming together now and our problems are large but not insurmountable. what's happening right now is they seem insurmountable because 15 million people are out of work, because so many people believe we can't come to grips with the short-term problems. >> john chen, dana says we have to recognize the fact that we as the united states can no longer dominate. if the 20th-century belonged to the united states, does the 21st century belong to china? do we need to accept the fact that we won the 20th century, but it belongs to china in 21st century? we all know the leader of china is headed to this city in a matter of days to spend a few days with president obama at a summit. does the 21st century belong to china? >> i have a few comments before i enter your comments. i did not understand half of what dr. west said -- i run a around the world and unfortunate -- and i'm fortunate enough to do a lot of business around the world. we beat ourselves up pretty bad. there are a lot of countries out there that would love to be america. they love americans. the fact of the matter we are all sitting here talking about this, very openly, a very diverse background, that's a good sign. there are a lot of cultural- political-factional power is out there that these kinds of discussions would have ever happened, nor would any thing happen as a result. [applause] we have to not be ourselves up. but now i will answer your question about china. it is the rate of growth. it's like companies. mature companies grow slower, met -- china, we have been telling them how to do things, do it this way, and eventually they do, when they did it, it worked and the rate of growth is much faster. their attitude is very different. they are a lot hungrier than us. but they also have issues that attempted the to grow peacefully, and i'm sure we will talk about security somehow, if they don't continue to grow peacefully cut the political and social stability will be called into question. as such, right now, if you ask the chinese people, the majority of the 300 million in the middle-class -- a total of 1.3 billion, they still have a lot of challenges. but the middle-class and the other who aspire to be middle- class would rather have the current growth structure than some of the stuff we would like to impose on them. given that, they have big internal demands. everyone wants to put money there, including us, to grow their market, and they are hungry. the next decade, we will see a lot of development over there. >> i want to come to the other side, david brody, you work for a network most people woulds conservative in its beliefs and values, political that is, and when i listen to what john chen had to say, in the midterm elections, there was a lot of anti-china rhetoric in the campaign we heard from a lot of folks on the right. it is easy to beat up on china because china cannot respond in your specific district, and not suggesting there are not issues in china that don't need to be discussed, but there was a lot of anti-china rhetoric in this last election. it's one issue where there is a big divide in this town. i was saying somebody -- alice saying to somebody this week that there's a lot of stability -- i was saying to some be this week that there is a lot of civility because congress is not in session. we are about to enter this age of a divided government in this town. whether the issue is china or a litany of other things i could rollout, what say you about what is or is not going to happen courtesy of this new divided government in washington? >> if we had nine hours or longer we could talk about it. it's a complicated issue. i think it starts with a moral factor in this country as it relates to god. as i travel around the country and talk to people like jim wallace on the left and ralph reed on the right, here is one thing they agree with -- there's a moral crisis in this country as relates to everything from wall street to the housing market to what has happened across this nation, especially economically. i would suggest there is a lot of common ground that could be found in this area of economic catastrophe. i think that is an important part of it. as it relates to stability in government, what we need to see here, and this is pie in the sky, potentially, but as it relates to the tucson shooting and the divided government we are seeing, we need the elected leaders in this country and we need the influential commentators in this country, bill o'reilly and teeth -- andkeith olbermann, these guys need to come together -- >> did you say you think that they are going to do a psa together? >> i don't think i was holding my breath what i said that, but the point is if you are going to get through the clutter and really make a difference, there needs to be sent shock valley. if you are going to have shock value, you need to have people who would normally be in their own entrenched warfare's ounce to come out and start the dialogue. >> is that the problem, david frum? is this about a moral crisis? >> i would not say so. i think the people in the audience, the people at home, they know well what the problems are. i think about all the time that inside each of these problems, imbedded into the problem is the answer. we had a demonstration of this just this week with the terrible atrocity in tucson. that is the horror of america -- a week mental health system, easy access to deadly weapons, a breakdown in community structure. we know that. let's look at this -- this maniac did a terrible crime and the whole political system of the country snapped together. every loudmouth who had been pumping anger and rage into the country's bloodstream suddenly recoiled and look around at people blaming because the political stability of the united states is like a 100 inch living-room sofa. you cannot budget. we had this tense debate in 2010 over the american health-care system and its extraordinary wastefulness and we spend more than anyone else and don't get good results. within that waste, if the u.s. spends as much as switzerland, there is four points of gdp will of wasted money line on the table. if we could get a henry ford- type personality and squeeze the waste out, there are four points of national wealth. we have terrible unemployment, but that means we have able unskilled people ready to do the jobs the country needs doing. we have global security challenges, a hungry rival nipping at the country's heals, but that forces the country to be more competitive. it competes in a world of states that are adverse and the country has to be disciplined and focused with its resources. is also a reminder that more countries look to be knighted states as a provider of security and most countries -- look to the united states as a provider of securities and other countries as providers of insecurity. i hope can talk about how we display -- how we deployed be institutions of the country in a way that makes the solutions effective. >> you said a lot and i want to come back to some of that quickly. but let me bring in late maria into the conversation. what david just described sound too much like right. anything he can lay out that simple, that simply, if the answer to these challenges can be found in the problems themselves, housetop on stupak are we? we can't figure -- how stuck on the stupid are we? i'm not certain it's necessarily that simple. but we are obviously missing something here. what are we missing? >> i agree with much that has been said. what i have to push back on is my friend dr. west here because i think america is the greatest country in the world. i think we were great and we are falling a bit now, for sure, but we will get back to greatness again. let's not underestimate the power of freedom. we talk challenges and the rise of the east and a decline or bumping along the bottom of the west, but this is a free country. the aspirational power is also amazing. the fact that you can come from nothing and work hard and get all lot and achieve success, that's not to say we are taking care of all of our people properly. we are not. we need to better care for all income levels, all areas of the country, and we have work to do there. i think the problem is clearly the jobs picture, the unemployment story is persisting. i suspect it will continue to persist. we have challenges overseas with china with a billion 0.3 people, india with 1.5 billion people. of course, china will at some point be the largest economy in the world. america has to sell to those people. a billion people outside of america. american companies have to sell to those people. i think that's part of the story. >> i think it is clear that camera 3 ought to stay trained here the rest of the night. going to come back to you. camera 3, just get ready to stay trained right here. maria teresa kumar, i ran to her yesterday here in town -- >> where? >> none of your business. >> i thought i might make some news. >> it was at npr if you must know. we were talking at npr yesterday and i heard maria make a point i agree with -- when you look at the numbers, the negative numbers are hitting the hispanic community pretty hard. i'm part of the african american community in the picture here is in pretty to be sure, but the numbers are really hitting the hispanic community really hard. she closed by saying and yet with all that, the hispanic community may be the most hopeful community in the country about their future. i added to that, i have mad love for the hispanic community right now because no community in this country last year flexed politically more than the hispanic community. they flexed last year. [applause] if you don't like things the way they're going, you have to flex and raise up. politics is not a spectator sport. you have to get off the sidelines and get involved in the process. the hispanic community did that last year and yet there were a lot of victories. immigratio