Transcripts For CSPAN2 Sen. Michael Bennet The Land Of Flickering Lights 20240713

Meeting. Im Senior Editor at politics and government and i am pleased to be your moderator joining us today senator and democratic candidate Michael Bennett representing colorado since 2009 before serving as superintendent of Public Schools in denver where he worked to improve accessibility and quality of education and also the author of a new book called the land flickering lights we will talk about the book for the back story with a hyper partisan conflict calling washington out to restore integrity we are excited to have them here with us. [applause] we will talk about the book obviously we will talk about congress for covert you were born 1964 new delhi india. But is not a very good origin story but it works. Tell us the circumstances. I was there because my parents were there. [laughter] that makes sense. They were working for the embassy theres chester bowls with the ambassador to india and with the jfk view the United States had a role to play with countries like india i was there for 18 months. I have been back but now when i get introduced the only senator in the history of america born in the only hospital in new delhi we were chatting before we came out here that your mom was born in poland and the way they look at the world and with the holocaust they didnt leave poland because my grandfather didnt want to leave his family behind but everybody was killed except for them and an aunt. Then they went to stockholm sweden but then they went to mexico city and where the mom registered herself in school but in the second grade they asked her to line up in order of whose family had been in the country the longest or the shortest period of time and i was the answer to both questions my dads family can trace all the way back to the mayflower and my moms was by far the closest in time and that is made a huge impact on me. My grandparents were the most committed american citizens i have ever known. There is a Great Sadness they felt with a sheer joy of being americans that i cannot express that they were just so grateful to be part of this democracy and Pluralist Society that we live in but they gave back as much a way ams supposed to work. So what do you make of trumps comments . But if those who choose to vote democratic he knows what hes doing. Atenries old if jews are loyal to the country. He knows exactly what hes doing. Its amazing for a guy that appeared in thing has never read a book including the one that he wrote. He does have a natural sense of the reactionary autocrats playbook, and this is the kind of thing you would hear somebody in the rightwing government and polling say. Very unusual for an american president to acquire power by dividing the American People in the way donald trump did thats the way he did it and that is how he is trying to hold onto power now. He has taken such little effort to reach out to anybody that didnt vote for him. He goes to states he did and when. It seems like it would be relatively easy to make those. Now you know what its like to live in a place like turkey if your president believes that he owes nothing to anybody who didnt vote for him and all he owes his allegiance to our the people of who voted for him and he sees at the same way. By the way, my view is that if im fortunate enough, my expectation is to spend as much time in places i will never win more than 40 of the vote and in the places where i have won 70 of the vote because i think it is a critical way to begin to try to stitch the country back together again. Its sort of the opposite of the way trump has thought about it. It sounds like you did a bit of that after you got appointed senator you went to colorado but not deep blue parts to listen. What did you find out because you didnt run for Office Coming for the accidental senator appointed by the governor when ken salazar was appointed interior secretary. The accidental senators, what they called me to hurt my feelings id been a School Superintendent i had no feelings left. They had been beaten out of me a long time ago. It is my responsibility as a senator that represents the state that this third republican, third democrat and whether they voted for me or not or agree with me or not, i feel obligated to go to places where we have this bike on the Affordable Care act. I was in the red parts of colorado having town hall after town hall saying this is why im voting for it. Not saying you should agree with me or my hopes you will agree with me but its been fascinating. Its funny because some of those places what are you reading i would like to know what you are reading and sometimes the meetings are better. When i go to boulder if i disappointed Rachel Matthau that week that is a tough conversation to have and sometimes even tougher than in the red part where they think im a socialist. You said you were the superintendent of the school when you were somewhat surprisingly i think appointed. There were some figures were they appoint somebody to run for office. How surprised were you by what you found . I was shocked and it was a close reader of the newspaper. I actually grew up in washington, d. C. My father had worked on capitol hill for years and democratic administrations of one kind or another. So, i think that its safe to say i knew more about the way the government work then your average person does just because of that. And i was shocked at the level of dysfunction and the level of pathology sociopaths that occupied the national legislature. I really was and i continue to be shocked about it to this day. Particularly the fact that i came from the School District where we were fighting for the lives of those that we have in the rePublic Schools. The Public Education is reinforcing the equality. We had rather liberating people from it and made changes in denver. Every single day, whether we were agreeing or disagreeing, people were trying to do what they could do including the kids themselves. I got to washington and people just waste each others time. Particularly in the buck on the Freedom Caucus that served into the congress in 2010 and 2014 basically and ever since then immobilized or exercise in the e selfgovernment and they have acted as tyrants who believe they have a monopoly on wisdom and it is then we have to rescue our Government Back from these people. No matter who you are whether you are republican or democrat if you believe in the exercising selfgovernment, we have to overcome these people. They are immune to compromise and will not compromise. They need to be beaten and closed over and its going to be hard to do that. They are not the cause of all these things in fact you describe five different episodes that you focus on which our negative and positive. You describe it as a place that is hyper partisan and cant work across the aisle anymore. But that message you are talking about on the campaign trail coms that what democrats want to hear, that we need to have more cooperation . Not all democrats want to hear that. I believe strongly that we cannot accept that you cant go into the Freedom Caucus is diminished view of our institutions. We could accept it and there are democrats in the race that you accept it. Where this will lead us as a oneway ratchet down into the complete dysfunction. I quote this in the book its not like we havent seen this movie before. When you go back to what was happening at the end of the roman empire, it is the same kind of stuff that they went through and its described as the parties losing such faith in their own capabilities that they have nothing left but to destroy each other and i think that is kind of where we are. But we put this in terms if you dont mind but i think on the campaign trail people say to me all the time we need to act urgently on Climate Change, and i agree we need to act urgently. We should ask ourselves how it is via th we have a climate denn the white house and ask what are we going to do to make sure that never happens again. Its important. We need a durable solution if we cant accept the way that it works in washington and create a durable solution on climate. You cant accept the politics where you put in a set of policies during four years of the Obama Administration and the others without and four years later were two years later you put it back in and they rip it out. I dont think that is anyway to regulate a Banking System or support education but you certainly cant feel of climate. As a definitional matter you cannot accept the current political in america outside of washington to overcome a broken washington that is what we are going to have to do and it sounds really hard, and it is really hard but there are no shortcuts in democracy. This is why the debates to get rid of the filibuster is of particular interest to me because the question is can you win states like colorado, arizona because if you cant come youre not going to be able to make the kind of changes that we need to be able to make. Democrats are putting forth a lot of ideaworld of ideas and te thats gotten the most attention is the Green New Deal not so much anymore. Shes buried the hatchet. The longer you wait the tougher the solutions are going to deal with this. We should never compromise with scion ever and thats why i actually support the findings of the Green New Deal but say weve got to get to this by 2050 and theres other things in the finding that i agree with, but i think that another approach to the policy is going to be more likely to be successful for the reasons i said earlier if you come to colorado and have a conversation with people and say my climate plan by the way we act urgently and my plan is we are going to retrofit every building in america the next ten years and give everybody a paid vacation and give everybody a paid job and Bernie Sanders Health Care Plan pretty soon people are going to say that doesnt sound like a climate plan they left off a highquality Public Schools for every kid in america. They are invisible to the progress of love in this country and so the tragedy of the last we should be disqualifying for the white house if you den denid that Climate Change should be disqualified on moral terms but on other things that should be disqualifying on political terms because the majority of americans believe Climate Change is real and the majority believe we need to do something to fix it. The argument that is a disgrace we should have never lost a close on economics and he won an argument where he said if we deal with Climate Change is going to lead to an economic catastrophe for america where the reverse is true it will be an economic catastrophe for america that is an argument we cannot lose against. Theres a description in the book about the Keystone Pipeline votes and this is a thing where i voted in a way that wasnt consistent with the environmental communitys view with whom i have a strong relationship we moved to colorado because my wife was the regional director of the earth justice and Rocky Mountain region. It galvanized the base but it didnt bring everybody to the table. Somebody said to me for who gets to pick the symbols, the movement or the politicians and then the question from this friend of mine in colorado that was very disappointed with what he said about the lunch counters in the Civil Rights Movement and this is all in the book. They brought the north and the civitothe Civil Rights Movementd expanded the movement in a way that could overcome people in a way that they would never give up in this country. We need the same sort of relentlessness and approach on Climate Change. We have to be building a cool notion of people to change the politics in washington, d. C. So that we have an urgent and durable solution and i think that i believe he can easily do that. The coalition is waiting for us in america to do it but you cant just expect that its going to be there and you cant make proposals that divide people when you try to unite people and i want to end by being very clear about it. You cannot compromise on the science and we cannot compromise on the science. That isnt the same thing as saying we shouldnt be giving out how to build a coalition of people that can sustain a political outcome in this country. That is an honorable thing to do, not a dishonorable thing to do. I think that you b you be lid to this you are talking about segregation, civil rights, some of the big civil rights bill passed in the mid60s could never have happened. What has happened to the party not just on civil rights which is a little more understandable, but on scion. A perfect example a chapter in the book is called corruption of an action its about Citizens United and the way that i just described the effect on our country is by using Climate Change. I dont want to overstate it for the republicans havbutthe repuby honorable environmental tradition. Everybody knows Teddy Roosevelt but imagine this, Richard Nixon signed into law instead of the epa. Ronald reagan closed the hole in the ozone layer. He was a skin cancer survivor. Using a cap and trade system basically. George bush went to the United Nations and said weve got to do something on climate. In fact the dad went to detroit michigan and said people think we are going to get anything done on climate and forget about the white house effect and we are going to get something done on climate. My friend ran on Climate Change. What happened was in 2010 the Supreme Court decided Citizens United and the blood to fossil fuel people having a completely outside role in their politics where they first set out just in that year trequire every member to sign a climate pledge that said they were going to say that Climate Change was really if humans were not going to contribute to it so they went out and signed the pledge and ever since then we have been living in a world where if the republicans irepublicans in wask like they are going to do something on climate, they just have to rattle the coins in their pocket because in the supreme courSupreme Court we cat 30 million in your next primary and you are going to be dead before the season starts. And that has created this profound corruption of inaction the Supreme Court in their opinion i use to describe those reading a seventh graders paper and that is insulting to americas seventh graders, so i dont say that anymore, but the ignorance of that opinion where they were so focused on this idea of corruption of action, you give me 5,000 i will go write a bill for you or you 55,000 i will write a bill that has the appearance of being written for you. The court said both of those things we have a right to worry about and we can limit contributions, so thats why you can only get the 5,000 but then they said with independent expenditures by definition they are independent so we dont have to worry about it and thats why they could give a billion dollars into bodies and put their name on it and in effect they said it wouldnt cause the American People to lose faith in their democracy. 95 of the American People say theres too much money in our democracand ourdemocracy and ths control too much of it. This is one of the reasons we are in the mess that we are in. Its not the only reason. It was a confluence of the rise of the tea party reaction. It was being unleashed by the white house with the corrosive effect in that era of partisan gerrymandering that happened in the house of representatives. Those things cost together into a structural toxic stew that we are still living with so when my friend joe biden says this goes to the question of being a symptom, not a cause if we get rid of trump and go back to normal it ignores the structural issues that exist in the democracy that we lay out in the book, and many of the last ten years ignore that its now populated by a bunch of Tea Party People and bona fide kindd of republicans that were available to pass in the civil rights bill. We should all care about this. This isnt a good thing for democrats because as you pointed out, to get real legislation on big issues that will endure over time you need more than one functioning political party. You need at least two and i would argue it wouldnt be bad if we had more than that to be able to call us support so that it can last longer. You were pretty tough on joe biden. I think that it was in the first debate you were critical of him and the role that he played in the deal that he accepted and negotiated amount of the budget and the bush tax cuts. In the book you reiterate that. I wrote the book long before i saw him on the debate stage so this is something i thought of not as a tactic in the campaign. It is called the land of flickering lights and the reason its called that this every time we have one of these shutdowns in the middle of the night, i say this place has become the land of flickering lights where the standard of success is keeping the government from the hour or two or month or two and in the time ive been in the senate since the last decade, 40 of the days ive been there we were on continuing resolutions which are temporary budgets that just extend the dead hand of the past into the future. The thing about the deal is that it was a fiscal cliff there was a moment in time that they were all expiring and when the dreaded sequester was going to go into effect which was acrosstheboard cuts that have been written in such a way nobody in their right mind would ever vote for such a thing so it was meant to force Good Behavior and in the end what was cut, classic washington, d. C. Deal 2 00 in the morning nobody had read it i was one of eight senators to vote against it. Extended virtually all of the tax cuts forever. This extended them forever taking away the Central Economic argument going into the 2016 election. The other part of th the appeals if congress doesnt come to an agreement, which we voted in thn the next 90 days, the sequester would go into effect which it was and still is. Its a homerun for the Freedom Caucus and ms. Mcconnell and a defeat for democrats. Barack obama had just been reelected. The alternative was to say if you want to do video, we will just let these things expire. That is 4 trillion of taxes we could have been designed around that would reduce Child Poverty by 40 of the proposal to do that that would have given the middleclass in this country a real tax cut instead of the tip that they are given just to make it palatable to support tax cuts for the wealthiest people in america that would have made a big difference. As you know hes the frontrunner and there are question on that. I believe you need to work across the aisle and i need to represent all of those folks i mentioned before floor republicans in colorado many of whom are not voting for me, but i also believe that we need to rule out this Freedom Caucus into this particular group of people. We have to beat them and take a message to america that closes over them and its hard to do that when people are watching fox news all day but we cant have that be an excuse. We have to say heres why im repealing the tax plan and why i have a plan for universal health care. This is what we have to do on climate and why i spent the last two years with farmers and ranchers all over colorado on the issue in climate as im trying to build a broader coalitions with him but im more worried about is if you get rid of trumpet all goes back to normal we are in the fourth or fifth decade of an economy that has left nine out of ten with no wage increase and its come to the wealthiest people in the country. If the greatest income inequalities in 1928 and as i said earlier, we have an Education System thats reinforcing picks the best predictor of the quality of education is the income of your parents. There isnt a shortage of stuff for us to do which is why we have to beat these guys. Others on the campaign trail are doing that as well and some are calling him a big tax increase. You are running is more of a moderate democrat. Do you think that increase is necessary . For the reasons we had to pass the income tax through the constitution, if you want to have the wealth tax you would also have to pass it through. We should take the top left where it was before instead of giving with donald trump is proposing which is reducing the capital gains, we should take that up to the same tax rate that ordinary income is taxed. That is the biggest differentiator between wealthy people than everybody else and we should close the loophole. This massive buildup of wealth that is being passed generation to generation taxfree is preposterous and we are living in a second gilded age. In the face of that gilded age we have a whole bunch of work just like that that we are going to have to do to unleash the productivity of the American People. There was no guarantee that we were going to have a 20th century that where we had brought growth in the middle class. And it didnt happen by accident. It happened because the American People stood up and took action and that is what we are going to have to do as well. If democrats take control would you favor eliminating filibusters . What we should be focused on is getting the majority. Its not going to be easy to do. We are talking about states like iowa and colorado, arizona and maine. We forget that part and we shouldnt be. To make sure Mitch Mcconnell doesnt forget that for an old review im not sure why we are having a debate about whether to change the roster because there is only one person in america that has the ability to change the roster right now and that is Mitch Mcconnell. He hears every single democrat in this changed the rule, and i guarantee you hes waiting to stay in the majority in the senate and to have the majority in the house at which point he will change the rule and the fight we are going to have this privatizing Social Security with 51 votes to taking away a womans right to choose. The record is so terrible with that mcconnell, he cant put a background check on the floor. Its not because hes putting the protection legislation on the floor that isnt going anywhere either and i dont think theres anybody in america that is alive that has put more on the Balance Sheet of the country than Mitch Mcconnell and i believe that would be an interesting switch to carry into kentucky. Did you mean to send somebody to the biggest deficit ever go to washington, d. C. . We will see. The next that are being completely stolen from us. We have time to make it when you have the republican president and in the senate and house pursuing this of policies that are so hypocritical we have never seen anything like that before. You could have an academic argument whether the matter or not. We are piling debt on our children constraining the choices people make and we are investing in them far less than our parents and we cut Discretionary Spending by 35 . Our kids should be enraged at what we are doing. You want in a white kids have to spend 25 years paying back the college debt its because we have refused to make hard choices to support them in a way that our parents and grandparents did for us and the easiest thing for politicians to do is to say just borrow the money and that is what we are doing nationally as well i may not be as good at it as somebody else. I do want to ask about that because jay inslee, the governor of washington dropped out and your friend john pick them over john hicken. They say to be on the debate stage you have to get a certain number of donations and a certain number of two or three of the polls so you are not bear on anthere on any of those i th. Is it viable to run for president . I think it is. They took the opportunity to say how undemocratic i thought they were rules were. We might as well call ourselves republicans because thats what they spend their time doing. At this time in the face when bill clinton was running he was at 1 . John kerry was at like 4 . Barack obama was yesterday points behind hillary clinton. He didnt have that distinction im told november before the iowa caucus. These decisions are all made in the last month in iowa and New Hampshire and its not ideal but im probably not going to become the next debate stage. If history is any guide at all the leading candidates in the field will not be the people running those early races unless they interfere in a way that takes the choice away from people that need to make the choice. I think that would be a bad mistake. The country has no idea what that meant an accredited party stands for, no idea and that is something we have to litigate in this process and thats why we should invite it rather than be fearful about it. Would you be pleased if somebody ran for the senate . Im the last person in the world should be giving advice including john hicken luper. It is critical at 1600 pennsylvania avenue and who is in the senate and its not just for me about the democrats. Its about what is the standard we want to hold our elected officials to, what are the conclusions if you can make it through the five chapters of despair the last 70 pages of the book are basically a love letter to the democracy through womens poetry, theres a lot of women in there and a lot of Frederick Douglass in the july 5 speech given on the fifth as the fourth of july was a slave trading day. The argument i made in the book was basically the founders did two incredible things. They went against the power that was successful but never happened before in human histo history. They did something horrific and we will be with that for all the days of our lives. When somebody comes north and meets with the Abolitionist Movement and they are saying at the time the constitution was a proslavery document cant douglass says no you have it wrong. It was an antislavery document. We are just living up to the words of the constitution. Same thing Martin Luther king said that he before he was assassinated in memphis which is im just here to make sure that america keeps the promise that it wrote down on the page. When i think about that history i think of Frederick Douglass every bit as much as being the founder as much as those that wrote the constitution just like those that fought for my right to vote and thats what i believe about all of us if you ask me what it is you are responsible for and how to think about your role as a citizen in a democratic republic is the role of the founder you have to think about it is that level of responsibility and duty and our expectations of the elected officials in washington have to be similarly that high. We have a bunch of people there that are setting up their own political mistake not going to work the American People need to do. One of the compromises if they created the Electoral College and some candidatecollegeand sog about getting rid of that. Itis that just a waste of time . I think we will all be dead by the time that is addressed so it is kind of a waste of time. Lets put people in these offices that feel the need to be responsive to the American People rather than the needs of special interests. We are here in california where 25 years ago there was a ballot measure that was the beginning of the end of the Republican Party in california because its demonized immigrants especially immigrants who are here illegally and now weve moved past that in california to the point people are strongly supported the path to citizenship and throughout the country it is still very much an open question in terms of how it is framed. How would you like to see whoever the nominee is framed the issue of immigration especially with Border Security, levels of immigration, who should be in the country, all those things. There certainly is racism in the country and prejudice for all the reasons i was saying about slavery. I dont happen to think that there was an antiimmigrant view in the country. People in the country thought before trump that immigrants were working hard and making a contribution to the United States. He then rolled down the escalator and said the mexicans are rapistwere rapists and by ty are not sending their best. Everybody that watched that said thats insane. Somebody making that argument cannot possibly be. What happened after that youve got a bunch of people on fox news spending 24 hours a day running stories about immigran immigrants, committing crimes in this country and that is all that was on the news and fox news to their everlasting shame. They spend millions and the immigration bill i wrote with john mccain and six other senators that have a pathway to citizenship for those that are here and undocumented they dealt with our Agricultural Workers and i wrote those positions with Dianne Feinstein and marco rubio and have 46 billion with Border Security. It wasnt trumps ineffective wall wit for this 21st century Border Security that would allow us to literally see every single inch of the border. We doubled the number of Border Security agents and we had internal security because 40 of the people that are here that are undocumented are those that overstayed their visa and we have no capacity as a country to know whether they have stayed. Every single democrat in the senate voted for that. A bunch of republicans voted for it and the only reason that its not the mall of the land is because the tyranny of the Freedom Caucus because in the house they enforce this thing to insist if the majority voted for it they were not going to allow the vote to go forward. 40 peopl40 people that have thes of this guy from iowa and these other republicans were able to stop america from doing what we wanted to do on immigration. That is where the public will is right where i just described. We have is tha a politics has bn created by the Freedom Caucus that we are now going to have to overcome. And now this is all about holding off by demonizing the weakest people in our society. And that is a wellknown tactic by people that occupy the territory. There were some people looking back that influenced but there were some who voted for trump or didnt bother to vote who heard the message and thought it was so much about immigrants and people who were not the white workingclass wors voters that felt there was nothing in it for them so how do you have the Party Without abandoning one or another . I dont think we have to abandon any of it. We should be the party if youre willing to work hard we will create an economy that you get to share in the benefit and your family gets to share in the benefit of that as well we are going to support an Education System that drives Economic Opportunity rather than reinforcing the inequality that we have that we have got to be focused on it. I have a proposal called the American Family act that would triple the Child Tax Credit in america and reduce Child Poverty by 40 and it would be a great middleclass tax cut and it costs only 3 of what medicare for all costs. I would rather not spend the next ten years losing battle taxing the middle class by 33 trillion which is the plan and by the way those are not republican talking points before bernies talking points hes honest about his plan childers are not. Id rather take 3 and reduce by 40 and see if we cant get an american generation that is coming after us actually a fighting chance to succeed. And i think if we are standing for that kind of stuff as a party we will win. But we have to stay focused on the economy. Its important. I worked for your father at the state department. What did you learn for him . He was a good guy. He passed away this year and i miss him a lot. The thing i learned from him more than anyone else as the Public Service is a noble calling and that we all have a responsibility to this democracy. That is what he believed and that is what animated everything he did. Thats why i do the work that i do. What is wrong with todays Political Climate that prevents you from being an obvious front runner to being the next president . [laughter] we are in a transition moment and ive wrestled in the book with the effect of social media on our democracy. It isnt obvious that it couldnt have been a positive to democratize the country and empower people in the country so far from the political point of view its been a disaster for democracy and it has created a celebrity that i think is deeply unhelpful. Ive got to figure out a way for my own purposes in the candidacy to contend with that. As a country that we have to figure this out and think about it oclock sweet. Its not this boo not this booka good dividing america that you can go on my website and find it a disc one is a collection of propaganda that was delivered over the social media platforms that facebook claimed wasnt even there. You can hear the anger in my voice because the lack of responsibility was just unbelievably profound. Take a look at it among other things it had the emblem jesus christ in front of it holding a semi automatic weapon and a can of dew on the other hand. Its the kind of thing President Trump wont even matter that happened to us and weve got this Bipartisan Legislation that we are trying to get to the floor and mcconnell will not allow us to put on the floor. My point is i have to figure out how to contend with it but i think this need to figure out how to contend with it. I write in the book i take it as a duty and a responsibility as an elected official in this country to take in the trail that comes to my Facebook Page and i dont complain about it but i doubt very much that we are going to solve the next generations problems along the lines of that conversation happening. Part of the argument in this book is we are much better when we are facetoface having a conversation in this democracy. You know the founders to go back to them for a second they had no expectation that we would agree with each other. It was the reverse. Their view was that in a free society such as it was because it wasnt free for everybody to him with a colleague republic one of the great virtues is that you got to have your own opinion which meant that not that we would agree with each other but with a profoundly disagree with each other and what they believed in was out of those disagreements, we would fashion more durable and more Imaginative Solutions than anything or tyrants could come up with on their own. That is why our system is designed the way it is. Thats what the senate is about and the house is about and the independent judiciary is about. Thats what its about. And we have completely lost our ability to do that in our national politics, completely lost it. And it is not what the cabletelevision discussion is about which every night for three hours a night asked the sacrifice of everybody in america except for three hours but its an endless partisan loop that runs over and over again promising no progress and asking for no progress. The social media stuff is a reverberation of that which means that today in washington i would say 11 or 12 Million People have watched this stuff and deal with social media are very well represented in washington and their activities are deeply represented nbc and the dysfunction in dc. My worry is the those who are just trying to raise their family or just trying to build a Small Business or just trying to do something right in their community and have an expectation that people that have the privilege to be any job like min ajob like my job are ay doing that job and today they are not. What sacrifice would you like to see americans make . What are you hoping americans sacrifice if you are doing it out on the campaign trail . I think on the fiscal stuff we talked about earlier we are at a point in this country where we are collecting 16 of our gdp in revenue and spending 22 . Thats not sustainable, thats created a massive deficit and much of it is trump since 2001, we have cut taxes by 5 trillion in fact the right way of saying that is we have borrowed 5 trillion from the chinese for the privilege of cutting taxes for rich people in america. We have borrowed 5. 6 trillion from the chinese to fight wars in the middle east and i think we need to stop doing that and part of what we are going to have to do is start paying our own way and that is going to require besides raising the tax rates on the wealthy what are you asking average americans to sacrifice . , what would that look like . I think we need to invest in education and in this country and everybody is going to have to pay for that. We are all going to have to pay for that. We are running our system of education 80 or 90 of what we spend if you are in a good district. Its spent on teacher salaries. The whole system in the way that we pay teachers was designed when we had a labo have a labort discriminated against women and said youve got to professional choices and one is being a teacher and one is a nurse. If you dont want to be a nurse, you can come teach Julius Caesar every year for 30 years of your life in the San Francisco Public Schools and we are going to pay a ridiculously low wage that no one else in your College Class whatever except for their labor but if you stick with us for 30 years we will give you a pension that will allow you to retire because your spouse died and that sounded pretty good. That made sense that makes no sense today. In order to pay for with the teachers are worth we are all going to have to pay more to do that. You talk about social media. There seems to be something of a bipartisan consensus might be too strong of a word of support for more regulation. Elizabeth warren is calling up in fact she put up a big billboard during the company Democratic Party convention saying breakup big tech. What do you think of that idea, hasnt gotten too big . I think it is very worrisome and i wouldnt say what i is up elizabeth has said it was every company is different but i do believe that the department of justice should open an investigation of all of the antitrust investigations and theres good reason why. If you look at even before you get to the russians and even before you get to the corrosive role that these platforms were playing extending white nationalists and White Supremacy stuff throughout our democracy which, you know, they dont have to do. They are not the government. There is not a First Amendment issue here as a constitutional matter, but if you look at the profits of publicly traded companies in this country, the profits on invested capital throughout our history use the four lines, these are the most profitable, this is the audiovisual portion of the [laughter] these are the most profitable entities are the next most profitable and so on down. And for history all of those lines on like that. And it makes perfect sense because if all of a sudden you start to earn a higher profit, somebody else come comes and cos that down. Thats the way capitalism is supposed to work. Since 1995 figures with those lines look like. Up until 1995, that is what they look like. In 1995, that is what they look like and this profit, all of the big Technical Companies and pharmaceutical companies in america. To me, that suggests there is no way to compete down the profits that they are earning. And so that is a difficult challenge. The other challenge is antitrust law typically asked the question about harm to the consumer and i think in the world today that probably isnt a broad enough definition we need to look at something more broad to consider the effects of a Company Never expected to earn a profit with the market cap thaamarket cap te to buy a Grocery Store chain whole foods and everybody elses market cap drops 20 . People in the industry have to make a profit. People are concerned about it and i think the bipartisan concern arises from seeing the damage that has been done to the public conversation from the social media platforms. And is there a role for government of their. I would love for them to take action themselves, but i think that if they are unwilling to do that, i think there is a role for government there. This morning nancy pelosi spoke you can turn on your tv and watch somebody could someone elses head off. You can turn on any of these, you can log onto any of this stuff and your kids can watch somebody chopping somebodys head off and they shouldnt be able to do that. Policy this morning at the dmv said that trump is not taking the russian effort to undermine the election seriously and that is a violation of the constitution. Where do you stand on the whole idea of whether or not he should be impeached and whether there should be an impeachment inquiry. There is an election lets settle it that way. Others say no, the congress, the house has an oversight function. So i think that he probably meant that hes violating his oath of office and violating the constitution and i think shes right about that. This is one i have a list of 10,000 things where i say to myself if barack obama had done that, he would be gone and just in the last week saying im king of israel, barack obama would be gone. Im buying greenland, barack obama would be gone. Seriously. He got someone for wearing a tan suit. You are disrespecting america. And this guy cant bring himself when hes standing next to Vladimir Putin to say i believe my intelligence agencies, not you, former head of the kgb. That is our president. And so, i, look, he is a menace. [applause] we cannot take that for granted. He is believed to be committed impeachable offenses but i have a problem with just do your duty whether he benefits or not. A democratic responsibility for this person to be a one term president in this country and that is what our focus should be and however it is we need to do that, thats what we need to do. Given all the things you have said doesnt it give theres a story in the book that is one of the saddest stories i know about what happened to the judges over the last ten years. Thats the story being relevant to sleep strategic and im not saying you im saying not being relentlessly strategic but in the middle of that is something i cant trump up the strategy its what he did with merrick garland. If that is where we are going to be maybe there isnt time to read i dont know if there is. I will review one minute. There is a tendency to think, you know, we have never been here before and there is a tendency to think what we do isnt that important. The founders read and knew once they severed the bond in the norms and traditions every disagreement becomes irreconcilable if we pursue the good of the party with complete disregard for the good of the country when we treat politics as a tribal war with elected officials and leaders we lose the ability to do anything worthy of our role. We lose the ability to reason and even converse. Consider the similarity of the content of our social media and Cable Television to Political Attitudes during the war described. Reckless audacity can be considered the courage of a loyal ally. Prudent hesitation, cowardice, moderation was held to be a cloak for thecloak for a manlin. The ability to see all sides of a question to ask on many. Once we consider the fellow citizens to be enemies, we invite the endless cycle of blame, escalation and retaliation that can destroy the republican government. This mentality is damaged our ability to do anything of consequence including tackling or that and dealing with our immigration system. Thats why i say we cannot follow much mcconnell down into this oneway ratchet up destroying our institutions because the destruction of those institutions is tantamount to destroying this exercise. The book is a fairly dystopian view of government right now. What gives you hope now that youve been out there running for president you have been in the public eye for some time now and what the book ends on a hopeful note with a message about what we all need to do in our responsibility and we are at a time of profound wreckage in this exercise of selfgovernance. But im still completely in love with our democracy writing this book, completely with the idea of what it means to humanity for the united stas of america to pursue how however imperfectly we have pursued it, this exercise, pluralism and this ins exercise and selfgovernment into the back to your dad and my mom, you know, this is something that generations and generations of dispossessed and powerless people all around the world counted on and at a moment when china is rising and exploiting its surveillance tape throughout the planet we have an Important Role to play as americans. We are not going to be able to do that if we are at each others throats over empty partisan stuff. Whewhen james had a much harder times that we are living in right now as he reminded us over and over again we must be friends we cannot be enemies and thats what it means to be a citizen who is committed to the republic on which they live. Please give a big hand of applause. [applause]. The book is titled radicals resistance and revenge. Thank you for being with us on cspan. You. Ank why did you write the