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Transcripts For KCSM Journal 20141009

there are a few more days to go before voters go to the polls in scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and leave the united kingdom. 4 million people are eligible to vote and an increasing number are saying yes. it would mean a centuries-old dream fulfilled at last. the id of scotland becoming an independent country was a nightmare. it is not a surprise that an opinion is particularly divided along the border between england and scotland. >> scotland welcomes you, reads the scott -- reads the sign. there is little to show visitors have left and went. the border runs along the river. here in the town of coldstream malcolm campbell applies his trade. he takes tourists on fly fishing trips. most of the visitors are english and yet he is in favor of scottish independence. >> i am very much a yes of voter. there is no anti-english sentiment at all. it is not westminster. westminster is a huge dinosaur that is not fit for our populace. it takes too long, nothing happens, it is a waste of money. >> malcolm believes scotland has enough resources to survive without support from the u.k.. he says industries like salmon fishing, whiskey, and oil will keep scotland afloat. >> we can lose westminster or go it alone. >> you can make your own choices. >> it is time for scotland to make its own way without westminster holding it back. a little further down the river lies a town which is a part of england. gail jones was born in scotland but says she wants to remain british. >> i am a firm believer that the nation is stronger together. it would be a sad day for scotland to feel like it needs to go to isolate itself from the rest of the united kingdom to be heard. i don't believe that should be the case. >> gail runs this shop. she sells talk let -- sells chocolate and souvenirs. teddy bears made in scotland sit next to pregnant -- sit next to baskets from england. at the moment in bush and scott lish -- and scottish banknotes are the same. >> in terms of the financial aspects it is a really difficult matter because there is a lot of uncertainty there for people without really knowing what that currency with -- currency would be. >> scottish toffees taste best with english tea. her heart may be scottish but she is a firm advocate of the united kingdom. the union was formed over 300 years ago but soon there could be border fences and passport control stations. bill parkin doesn't want to see the border closed. he is an english resident so he will not be able to vote in the referendum. bill has family and friends who live in scotland and england. he says the voting process is flawed. >> our family came from a few generations back. they are not getting a say because they live in england. it seems to me rather false. >> bill is also worried about the effects of independence. his company exports metal parts to scotland's oil rigs. many of his employees come from scotland, just a few of 100,000 scots who crossed the border to work in england. >> i think it is a heart over mind thing. i do think they should be part of the union. >> ill says made in britain is a brand that stands for quality. he feels that great britain will remain great only if it stays together. it on the other hand malcolm campbell says scotland can deal with any problems by itself. other small nations have managed to stand on their own after gaining independence. he feels that scotland can do the same. gail feels that scotland's 5 million people have waited too long to say goodbye to the u.k.. >> we were the first country to be colonized by england and the last one to leave. people are scared. they think if we're -- they think we are better together but we are not. >> malcolm campbell is looking for to the day when scotland votes on its future. today that will decide whether the border will remain invisible or become the line that marks the edge of britain. >> speaking of the talk of the own the village will be taking -- the village canopies -- cannot stop talking about one subject. it is in the ordinary place where people from the czech republic have known each other for decades. they tend to talk about people who stand out from the crowd. in the village we are reporting on now, that would be a man called -- >> a little check village between the capital of prague and -- and there is one topic of conversation that keeps coming up. >> he takes care of lots of animals. i cannot say much more about it. >> he loves animals. he wants to rescue them all. if someone has a sick animal they take it to him. >> he never lets an animal down. >> when it comes to animal rescue he is the only man for the job. it is more than just a hobby for the pensioner. >> i have 1500 animals here. storks, llamas, keys, dear, heron. animals live in the wild but humans destroyed. on a tree gets not down baby chicks get knocked out of their nest. who takes care of them? no one. i take them home. >> keeping them cost him 600 euros a month. he and his wife live for the animals. they have been taking care of these buzzards for six months. now it is time to set them free. >> they are back in the wild where they belong. >> the people love him for his work and even if they do think he is a little crazy. they feel more confirmed when he expanded his menagerie. >> i took in the king of the animals, a lien. >> every keen -- every king needs a clean. two line -- needs a queen. they are both a year old. he says they are both happy here. >> why would they want to leave? they have it good here. they're never hungry, they eat and sleep when they want, they are not at all aggressive. >> the local kids come to see the lions all the time. until recently they had only seen lions in films. now two of them are neighbors. but their parents are not quite so thrilled about the new habitants. the lions are the talk of the town. , it seems dangerous to me. there are people living here so of course they are scared of what could happen. >> keeping lions in a village is going to scare people. cats and dogs are fine but not lions. >> how is that possible? the fences are too thin. >> but what can we do? >> one thing they can do is air their complaints to this man, the head of the local veterinary office who gave him the all clear to keep his lions. he says check law does not contain any regulation against it. >> i know people are afraid but we have to stick to the law. if someone makes a request and fulfills all our requirements than we have no way of stopping them from keeping lions. >> the measurements of the cages are correct, the fences are in place, everything is in order. >> if the lions were to come into the village police would deal with it. thankfully he has it under control. >> everything is taken care of. he wants to get a white tiger next. if that means the villagers wil+ continue talking about him, so be it. for him the most important thing is the animals he cared for. >> conflicts in the middle east often spill over to europe, especially in the israel and palestinian territories. the result is sometimes tensions between jews and muslims are you dump years ago there were violent clashes between jews and muslims. a it has one of the largest jewish communities in europe. any are worried the two groups may clash again. >> the jewish community -- many of its members worked in the famous diamond trade. jews and muslims live as neighbors in peace. the gaza war triggered clashes. things were different five years ago. muslim youths rioted in the streets. a we talked to a comment member of the jewish community to find out what has changed. >> it is not as bad as it was a few years ago. back then there were incidents almost every day. when people who are easily recognizable as jewish because of the cap they were -- they wore or their stud locks or their beard, they were attacked in the street when riding a bike. things like that happened. i haven't heard of any such incidents in the last few weeks. >> but is it really just lock? a fish vendor chats with his girlfriend, who is jewish, while his daughter does the work. both agree that jews and muslims get along fine. those communities respect each other. one little -- >> it is no big deal. >> the two communities are happy to do business with each other. soria has many jewish customers. problems are usually caused by unemployed young muslims. >> it is always the same story. if you don't have a good education you don't have the future. that makes you angry and you look for a scapegoat. >> we set out to find an angry young man. someone who feels excluded and outcast. it does not take us long. >> you can see the choose have plenty of money and they invested in wars to kill people. that is not going to work for much longer. jews and moroccans have lived together well here but that is changing. i am 100% certain. at the mall go back to israel. it won't take long now. >> many jews we spoke to say that is true. >> more and more of us in our community are leaving. it is not tolerable. things are changing. >> a lot of families are leaving. they do not feel comfortable here. >> to counter anti-semitism spread by arab media and the internet the city divides support to moderate muslims. that is a big part of the community relations strategy. when we asked to visit this mosque we were welcomed with open arms. our film crew was let in without prerequisites. this koran class teaches young people to respect and tolerate other religions. >> our mosque is officially recognized. we receive subsidies and it is paid by the administrative justice. >> he also says prayers alone are not enough to keep the peace in the streets. he regularly -- to help prevent conflicts from surfacing. he says it is especially important to set an example. >> together with a catholic priest and with a good friend of mine we would go to the schools all across belgium to show young people we can live in peace together. even though we have different interpretations of the holy books. >> whatever it is some of it seems to be working for the jews and muslims. >> voters in sweden are going to the polls to elect a new parliament and it looks like the current government will be defeated by the social democrats and its allies. there is an alarming trend emerging. known as sweden democrats is parties affiliated with new not see groups. >> swedish flags emblazoned with a cross, a neo-nazi rally. he preaches a and swedish nationalism. yesterday they rallied. the party of the swedes take on one city after the other, establishing themselves in the political scene. anti-fascist demonstrators tried to provoke the neo-nazis. caught in the middle are the police. confrontations have become a weekly occurrence. thousands of protesters play into their hands, giving the neo-nazis the media attention and public sympathy they want. kim is index neo-nazi convicted of hate crimes and bodily injury. he dropped out after he began to see through the extremist rhetoric. he knows whole well how radical some groups can be. some go abroad to work with other neo-nazi groups. >> some of the swedish groups even train with the neo-nazis in ukraine. revolution tourism is on the rise. we are seeing these groups deliberately radicalizing themselves. it is something we have to take very seriously. >> sweden has been considered a paragon of openness and tolerance, a country that welcomes people all over the world. 170 kilometers south of stockholm lies a town like any other in sweden. the kindly older gentleman is the lead candidate for the sweden democrats, a far right party with links to neo-nazi groups. he explains his party's platform to anyone who will listen and his flyers have plenty of takers. >> everybody votes for the sweden democrats. young people, retirees, business people. and workers. >> the far right party is moving from the french toward the middle. they have been in parliament for four years. polls predict 10% for them. >> things are like this everywhere. it happens all the time. a new shop opens, keeps going a few months, then disappears again. >> sweden's economy has slowed to a near standstill. youth unemployment is over 20%. the state is running out of cash, cash needed to remodel its schools. this one had to close because of mold. democrats make an issue of it. sweden democrats are calling for tougher sentences for criminals. this used to be the finest hotel in the center of town. now it houses refugees, whose numbers are soaring. this is the home's director. of he said so far everyone is friendly to the 180 refugees here when they go shopping. but tension is growing. >> either we close this place down or we are going to burn it. >> the shift to the right parallels the rising anxiety about jobs and prosperity. anxiety that they cannot drown in the alcohol they carry in their purple bags. and the rhetoric panders to such fears. kim frederick sohn confirms this is the strategy of his former comrades. but they are playing down xenophobia, hoping to appeal to a broader voter base. >> the social climate is changing and the extreme right-wing is taking advantage of it to put themselves in as positive a light as possible. they are trying to dominate the public debates. >> the us are neo-nazis and dapper presumes. -- these are neo-nazis with dapper pursuits. a >> maybe we are not that open a society anymore. >> the opposition is highly vocal in sweden. with hardly a week to go to national elections racism and xenophobia have become factors in the vote. >> one thing you can't call the seat of the french government is a functional office building. the current french president has now opened his summer residence to the public and yes they are curious. >> on france's mediterranean coast for years it was where french president came to get away from it all. shock and his wife came here often. his successors less so. francois hollande came only once with his former partner. now he takes his vacations elsewhere. the former retreat is ok -- is open to the public. >> our presidents have to do with international affairs. i am interested in how they relax when they have time. >> admission to the evil fortress costs 10 euros. >> it is better that people can see this part of our history. french people have a right to come here. >> the walls here have seen history in a making. this is where a gravely ill -- held his last press on -- press conference. the breakfast table. he wanted to invite angulo merkle for a visit but it never happened. >> i thought it was going to be more glamorous but it is quite modest. because it is paid for by the people it is it doesn't surprise. >> there are pictures -- they were calling with proper artsy. >> anyone can take photos from the inside and try to imagine what french presidents thought about when they contemplated this view. >> that report brings us to the end of this addition of european journal. think you for watching. do join us again at the same time next week. until then by for now. óxñx >> garrison keillor: martín espada was born in brooklyn, new york. he moved to massachusetts; worked as a tenement lawyer in boston, teaches at the university of massachusetts, amherst-- creative writing, latino poetry, and the work of pablo neruda. he's published 16 books, and his collection of poems, the republic of poetry, was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. >> at 16, i worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads-- yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as i slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue up and down the stack. no gloves-- fingertips required for the perfection of paper, smoothing the exact rectangle. sluggish by 9:00 p.m., the hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper, and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin; hidden. then the glue would sting, hands oozing till both palms burned at the punch clock. ten years later, in law school, i knew that every legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts; that every open law book was a pair of hands upturned and burning. ( applause ) ♪ south korea is experiencing a rise in single mothers who have never been

Transcripts For KCSM Moyers Company 20141116

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. that's why we're your retirement company. welcome. rarely has a novel been so universally acclaimed as marilynne robinson's "lila." "an unflinching book," says "the new yorker." "an exquisite novel of spiritual redemption and love," reports "the washington post." and that's just for starters in this latest of her books examining the lives of a minister, his wife, their son and neighbors in a fictional town in iowa. the first, "gilead," won marilynne robinson the pulitzer prize. "home" followed. and now "lila," nominated just this week for the national book award, filled, as one reviewer wrote, "with quiet epiphanies." exactly what we've come to expect from marilynne robinson. she has been described as a woman "who speaks in sentences that accumulate into polished paragraphs" with a mind that "skips the stones of a question across its ample surface." and of course that's how she writes, including her non-fiction work. in fact, it wasn't her gifts as a novelist that first caught my attention. it was her essays, in such collections as "the death of adam," "absence of mind" and "when i was a child i read books." those drew me to the way she writes and thinks, and to her strong belief in the power of grace and faith, and her devotion to democracy, which she fears "we are gravely in danger of losing." marilynne robinson, welcome. >> thank you. it's wonderful to be here. >> and congratulations for those reviews. >> well, thank you. >> i was particularly struck with one from "the new york times" praising you for frankness about a "truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment." and i wondered, why should anyone be shocked to discover today what can happen to a young girl like lila? >> i was also struck by that. it seems, you know, when you, you know, read dickens or something, i mean, the great subject really of the democratization of western culture has been the abuse and entrapment of people on the basis of economics or class or whatever, who are capable of wonderful things, you know, and the fact that they are mistreated ought not to be shocking. they're mistreated against the standard of what they're capable of and what they are. >> are we suffering some kind of loss of imagination that we cannot perceive the lived experience of other people? >> i think it is true. and i think that it's having effects all across the culture. education, for example, which has very subtly turned toward making a good working class, however well-paid, rather than humanizing people's experience, making them feel what it is to be a human being in the stream of history on this strange planet, you know? >> so what's happened to imagination? >> i think in a way, we've been talked out of it. but i think that there's kind of a influence of crude scientism that -- >> crude scientism? >> crude scientism that has no way of articulating the fact of mind, the fact of imagination, the complexity of consciousness. and what they can't articulate, they exclude as being not real, being illusory in some way. if you think that a human mind is a wonderful thing, there's an infinite interest in cultivating it. and if you think it's simply someone who works more expensively than a worker in the third world, you know, you have no interest in people except to make them, you know, a part of the utilitarian system that produces for the sake of producing. >> that would explain, i think, why you wrote that "the broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global." >> yes. it's impossible to achieve things like justice if you don't have enough compassionate imagination for any other human being to understand that they deserve justice. that shorthand justice is not the thing at all. you know, what can i say, i mean, my deepest, i think, religious belief is that we are amongst souls and we have souls. >> we are among souls. >> and that it is a kind, it's a blasphemy. it's not simply an ordinary offense to insult or to deprive another human being. i think that at our best, that has been the assumption we've proceeded from. and at our worst, it's an assumption we don't want to be bothered by. >> you once said that at one time, we talked soul to soul. when was that? >> well, you know, history is a ragged beast. you know, but it seems to me that in the great american writers, whitman and emerson and so on, there's the assumption that something magnificent is going on, human consciousness. and the world in which human consciousness is set as the interpreter. this is as true as it ever was, you know? i mean, there's something miraculous about human beings. they are, they exist wildly in excess of any sort of survival model that could be posited for them. we're not even very good at that. you know, we're a great danger to ourselves all the time. but if you create a sort of model, which is probably wrong itself, about animal behavior, and take that as an authoritative basis for describing human behavior, then you've simply excluded everything that we call human. you know, you've excluded imagination and art and, you know, the things that we have defined ourselves with over thousands of years. >> so what are you saying when you write that the soul is "the masterpiece of creation?" >> well, it's, you know, i always tell my students this first off, i mean, but the human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe. this is, science says this, you know? but i think that if the most exquisite expression of cosmic reality is the human brain, the human mind, this is a thing to be acknowledged. this is a thing very much to be honored, to be felt as a privilege. you know, a universal privilege. what a sweet thing, you know? >> are you using the soul as a metaphor for consciousness or, what do you mean by it? >> well, you know, here i am, plunging straight into my personal theology, but i do think that people really are too splendid to be contained in 70 years of life if they are lucky, you know? i think that there's a sort of, you know, if there's an economy, in reality, it would be, it's an enormous extravagance that we are what we are. and that, there's something very excessive about human beings. they are brilliant beyond any imaginable use, you know? and, i mean, who knows if we live another hundred years what we will have done. if we just can, you know, refrain from violence a little bit. it's amazing. >> you have often told your students, i understand through the years, forget definition. forget assumptions. watch. watch what? >> well, you know, one of the problems that i come across with people's writing is that they think that they can enumerate what are basically biographical or class traits. and then they think that they have captured a person, that because x and y and z are true, they must behave in a certain way, and so on, you know? when, if you pay attention to people, you find out that they're continuously original. they're continuously generating, you know, a new possibility out of themselves. and i, you know, to the extent that they are permitted to, and to the extent that anyone is alert enough to realize this is happening. >> how do you explain the paradox not of wealth and poverty, but given what you think of human beings, our tolerance for it? >> i'm, well, you know, i think it, wealth has been known to corrupt for a very long time. and people's perspectives change as they move into spheres of relative advantage. and i think it's often not so much that they're indifferent to the poverty of other people, it's that they can actually can be for all purposes, unaware of it, even if they read about it in the newspaper, you know? i think it's i mean, that is the kind of classic model of human civilization, where you have a tiny little population of privileged people and wretchedness as far as the eye can see. democracy has been meant to remove the artificial constraints, poverty is the huge artificial constraint, on human thought and action and so on and our mutual perceptions. and, you know, in this country, in various ways and degrees, there have been attempts to moderate that entrapment if, you know? and we've abandoned that, i think. that, you know, a lot of people politically and economically are persuaded that there's some merit in this terrible division that's settling in. >> what do you hear in our public language today, in contrast to what you once called the language of the character of generosity, the largeness of spirit. what are you hearing in our public language today? >> well, one thing that really bothers me and really upsets me is that a complex problem cannot be acknowledged as a complex problem. you know, the president makes, you know, a proposal, or establishes a policy. nobody would say, well, this is good on one hand, but it's problem from another point of view. they attack it as being something, you know, something subversive or something, you know? and the public should hear policies talked over as if among adults, you know? it would have this good effect, it would have this negative effect, we have to choose, you know? that never happens, it seems to me. people find the most ridiculously minor, most opportunistic points of attack, and the attack is all that matters. it is disgraceful that we have to watch people over and again descend to the level of meanness, which we see so often. it seems sometimes as if political discourse is the cheapest intellectual environment that you can enter into. people have more dignity under most circumstances. they're not pandering to anybody. i think that pandering has seduced a lot of public behavior, made people operate at levels that they would not really consider worth of themselves. >> i remember you once ask, who among us wishes that our hymns, our sermons, were dumber? but there are a lot of people who do. >> well, as far as the sermons and so on, i think that people who feel that certain things are associated with an elite feel that they effectively exclude, that they give signals to other people that they're not welcome within the circle, or something like that, you know? which, when you consider that, you know, that william tyndale's bible was written for the illiterate, you know, i mean, and it is perhaps the masterpiece of the english language. or luther's bible, you know, i mean, he would apparently hang out in marketplaces to hear how germans spoke german, being so latinate himself. but to hear the melodies and to hear the nuances and depths of ordinary speech has been the most fruitful thing that we have done in this civilization in the last 500 years. we, you know, to respect people, to be attentive to them in a way that makes it so that you actually are using these metrics of culture, to re-express it in art or politics or whatever, you know? that's what all the great people have done. >> you had this contradiction we were talking about earlier between the high sense of america that walt whitman articulated as something more than politics. it's poetry and it's prose and he captured that spirit of it. and then you see what we did to the indigenous, what we, the europeans did to the indigenous people, the slaves, the freed a slaves. i mean, when you and i were young, black men were still being lynched in this country. >> oh, i know. >> and children growing up in the gilded age, and even today, we have what you call, "a bracing and punitive severity toward the vulnerable among us." >> well, if you read european history or british history, hanging people for stealing rabbits, you know, this kind, i mean, the, or people falling into poverty and then they're put into these horrible workhouses where they basically starve to death. you know, if you really look at history, which we tend not to do, it is grotesque. and what you see in the best reformist impulses in america is a moving away from history that was profoundly entrenched in western civilization. and, you know, certainly we never broke free of it. and certainly when we're feeling atavistic, we relapse into what are these ancient models of cruelty and injustice. but what we do, i think, that is a mistake is we fail to value progressive change because it's never perfect. it's never absolute. we're dragging this onerous history behind us. ameliorative behavior is utterly to be valued. >> you've said in my favorite book that you've done, "when i was a child i read books," you wrote that, "the language of public life has lost the character of generosity," and that, "the largeness of spirit that has created and supported the best of our institutions and brought reform to the worst of them has been erased out of historical memory." >> that's something that just is amazing to me. one of the ways that i got started writing the kind of history that i do is that i was trying to think of a moment in which people understood their situation and reacted to it appropriately, effectively. and that led me to the abolitionists, you know? >> the abolitionists? >> yes, exactly. who were, you know, they were people that stepped out of privileged places in new england, lived on the open prairie in kansas or wherever, you know, set up colleges to teach greek to whoever might settle around them, you know, and so on. incredibly, wonderful people. i mean, beautiful writers, beautiful, you know, people that created these amazing little institutions like oberlin and grinnell and so on, that maintain the character somehow that was invested in them. you know, i mean, this sort of reverence for high learning and all, and i don't, they were very effective. they turned things around. people don't realize that slavery was as entrenched in western civilization as computers are now. you know? every once in a while they make this amazing discovery, you know? i mean, there's a book just out now about how mortgages were leveraged against slaves and so on. well, you know, harriet beecher stowe wrote about that, you know? that it was not a small thing that they accomplished. they overturned basically the economic order of contemporary america. and they are, abolitionist is treated as a bad word in many contexts, as if they were some, you know, you'd have to be some sort of frothing maniac to think that slavery should be abolished. >> and you make the case in, "when i was a child i read books," you make the case that after generations of attention to public education, public health, public safety, access to suffrage and equality under the law, those values are now under siege. >> they are. these voter identification things, you know, the whole public education, these attempts at reforming public education that seem to me to be designed to model people into a kind of productivity again, making them useful for other people's purposes rather than making their education an end in itself. you know, i went, i'm a proud product of public education until college. it was probably a very eccentric little establishment by most standards. but i was taught very optimistically in the sense that people always conveyed the idea that they were giving me something really of value, something that would make me richer no matter what i did, you know, in life. that, you know, giving me my mind, you know? and i think that this is a spectacularly efficient model of education. i think that these assumptions that, you know, making everybody teach to a test, and so on, is valuable in some way. we're just destroying what's the best impulse, the most successful impulse in our educational system. >> so what's happened to that old impulse you once described, that lay behind, and i'm quoting you, "the dissemination of information and learning, the will to ensure that the public will be competent to make the weightiest decisions and to conform society to its best sense of the possible." what's happened to that impulse? >> i don't know. i think that people, you know, it was, it's always been a human temptation. but it has been an ethics and an ideology among us lately to say all that matters is money, basically, you know? i don't think people believe that instinctively, or that they live their lives in those terms. but i think a lot of people who find their way into prominent places in the culture are happy to proceed on that assumption. i mean, if you have a cable program that scares every little old lady in america by the standard of public support, maybe, you know, you can say you've accomplished something. they send you their social security checks, you know? it's terrible to suggest that people proceed on such vulgar motives, but i frankly have to assume it's true. >> you write a lot about fear lately. >> yes. >> about not your fear, but fear abroad in the land. >> exactly. >> what's the source of it? >> i think that, i mean, it's exciting to people. >> fear? >> fear. yes. i mean, look at the ways in which fear manifests itself. you know, this sort of anti-immigration feelings, you know, that people with these crazy weapons, people, you know, buying apocalyptic money, or freeze-dried apocalypse dinners and things like that. you know, i think that it makes a little narrative that makes you the hero in an imagined drama. it makes anybody else a potential threat. it's like late-night tv or something, you know? and i think that it has been pushed on people, it's used as a stimulus to make people watch cable network "a" rather than "b" and so on. and it's become a kind of addiction, i think. there's been this amazing reversal that the nra is probably disproportionately responsible for. >> national rifle association? >> yes, exactly, that makes fear look like courage to so many people. you can't drive your car if you don't have a gun in the glove compartment? well, what nonsense is that? you know, it's not bold and brave to go around acting like you think everybody's going to be some kind of threat to you. it's psychotic really. >> what do you fear? >> what do i fear? i mean, i fear for, there are things that i, you know, obviously i fear for democracy, for example. i don't know. you know, the oddest thing happened. i became 70. and i realized that in order to be 70, you have to have had basically 69 years of really good fortune and that, you know, what i mean? i don't feel as though i can lose much. i don't think i can lose much at this point. i've had a good life and a long life by world standards, you know. and this neutralizes many kinds of anxiety for me. if i can fail now, it will be a minor, minor event because i have such a short time to experience the fact of failure. >> marilynne robinson, thank you very much for being with me. >> great pleasure. >> that's it for this week. i'm bill moyers. i'll see you here next time. don't wait a week to get more moyers. visit billmoyers.com for exclusive blogs, essays, and visit billmoyers.com for exclusive blogs, essays, and video features. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com funding a provided by -- ann gumowitz, carnegie corporation of new york. the ford foundation, work ing 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. that's why we're your retirement company. >> garrison keillor: martín espada was born in brooklyn, new york. he moved to massachusetts; worked as a tenement lawyer in boston, teaches at the university of massachusetts, amherst-- creative writing, latino poetry, and the work of pablo neruda. he's published 16 books, and his collection of poems, the republic of poetry, was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. >> at 16, i worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads-- yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as i slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue up and down the stack. no gloves-- fingertips required for the perfection of paper, smoothing the exact rectangle. sluggish by 9:00 p.m., the hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper, and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin; hidden. then the glue would sting, hands oozing till both palms burned at the punch clock. ten years later, in law school, i knew that every legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts; that every open law book was a pair of hands upturned and burning. ( applause ) ♪ this week on "moyers & company" -- >> the right to vote was sacrosanct because it was the thing that came with your citizenship. it was the great equalizer. and we're seeing a different philosophy about the meaning of that exercise of citizenship. >> we have a supreme court that wants to make it easier for millionaires to buy an election, but harder for everyday people to vote in one. and that's a very, very disturbing reality right now. >> announcer: funding is anne gumowitz, encouraging the renewal of democracy. carnegie corporation of new york, supporting innovations in education, democratic engagement and the advancement of international peace and security at carnegie.org. the ford foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide.

Transcripts For KCSM Journal 20141203

in the middle ages they were bred from wild horses, to be used in war or bull-fighting. today the breed is highly sought after - and expensive. but in portugal, after yearsrs f economic crisis, that high cost is proving a problem for the horses themselves. >> manuel jorge martins de oliveira is one of portugal's most famous horsemen. a legendary former bullfighter, he now teaches dressage clinics, and he's a very successful breeder of the country's own breed, the lusitano. his stud stallion sabio is worth 60 thousand euros. >> we portuguese are very proud of our lusitano horses. they're the calling cards of a culture that goes back thousands of years. they're very important culturally as well as economically. >> but portuguese breeders are changing the lusitano's type. it was traditionally bred for bullfighting, driving, and classical dressage, but to compete in modern dressage sports, breeders have altered the size and gait of the horses. oliveira is not pleased with this development. >> i think it's a shame. the traditional lusitano is a very nimble, graceful horse. but the dressage competitions demand a bigger horse. that's to the detriment of this breed, in my opinion. >> the ribatejo region in the hinterlands of lisbon is largely agricultural. ground for the lusitano, which is an important traditional element of the area. once a year, the otherwise sleepy village of golega is transformed as horse breeders from across the country gather here. this national horse fair also attracts interested onlookers. traditions are proudly displayed here, although most of the lusitanos on show represent the more modern breeding standards. golega briefly becomes the center of the portuguese horse world. >> people from all around the world come to see the lusitano horse, and that's why we are here every year. >> but what many visitors don't see is that people here are breeding too many horses. those that aren't sold are often left to fend for themselves. this foal was abandonded, so sharon clarke took it in. the british horse-lover looks after neglected horses and tries to find new homes for them in portugal as well as britain, germany, or france. she cares or 150 horses, with the help of donations. >> there's many abandonded horses. the economy in portugal right now isn't so good. a horse is a luxury item. it costs you money. so many people now just can't afford to keep them. they can't afford the food, or the hay, or the vets, so many are just left abandonded to die. >> and some end up at the slaughterhouse. sharon knows the spot where horses get left before they go to slaughter -- this field here. this mare, around seven years old, is very friendly, so sharon believes she must once have been well cared for. >> it's very difficult. she's a beautiful horse. it's a waste, it's a big waste. it shouldn't be allowed to happen, but it does. and there's thousands like this that i'd like to save, but i can't. i'm one person. >> within one year, nearly 3000 lusitanos went to slaughter, the breeding industry's surplus. belarmino figueiredo makes his living selling on these unwanted animals. he can earn up to 100 euros per horse. >> people are breeding horses that they can no longer care for. so they call me, to sell them, to get rid of them. i go there, we discuss a price, and the papers. that's very important. the horses need to be microchipped or the slaughterhouse won't take them. >> traders are now asking astronomical prices for the dressage horses sold at the market in golega. breeder manuel jorge martins de oliveira takes a critical view. >> it used to be about passion. you went to the golega horse fair to teach the people how well-schooled your horse was. today, the focus is just on money. it's more about selling. the mentality has changed. >> but oliveira is sticking with his breeding program focusing on the original lusitano type. he still believes in the old portuguese traditions -- and he knows what an important role the horse has played in the country's long history. >> it's now a year since the beginning of the crisis in ukraine - but, despite an official ceasefire, the situation is going from bad to worse. more than 4,300 people have now been killed in fighting between pro-european ukrainian forces and pro-russian rebels. but the question is, who exactly is doing the fighting? many in the west accuse the kremlin of sending russian troops into ukraine to support the separatists - something which vladimir putin denies. he says any russian soldiers there have gone under their own steam. what is clear though, is that russian civilians are heading to ukraine to fight. to find out why, our reporters braved the front line to meet some of them. >> this is the coach from moscow that runs south to rostov-on-don. valentin is heading to the front. his wife elina is accompanying him. they are ethnic russians and lived in latvia, where they say they suffered discrimination. that is why they want to help the russians in eastern ukraine. >> it is a dream come true. at last i am doing the right thing. >> the ukrainians just started bombing peaceful cities -- donetsk, lugansk. i chose which side to be on. >> the two call that side "russki mir," the "russian world" -- and say it is locked in a war with ukraine and the united states. they cross into ukraine at a border crossing controlled by separatists. from the taxi they're taking to their destination, they can see the debris of war all around. elina is to stay in luhansk and help organise humanitarian aid. russian volunteer fighters have gathered in abandoned apartments here. their residents, presumably ukrainians opposed to the pro-russian separatists, have long since fled. the men set off for the front, which is just half an hour away. the volunteer batallion "dawn" comprises about 500 fighters. one unit of about fifty men has set up camp in a derelict factory compound. all the tanks but one are out of commission. yura arrived yesterday, with valentin. it is his first time on the frontline. he is shown how to use a kalashnikov assault rifle. as a youngster he had military training, but that was many years ago. yura says he does not know how long he will stay here. yura is not a good shot. but professionalism is secondary to commitment here. >> i came because i could not bear stand by and watch what is going on. i came as fast as i could. >> where did you watch it? >> on tv. there are people living here, and they are just killing them, for no good reason. >> that night yura gets ready to go out on a mission. valentin has hurt his hand and stays behind at base. their forward posts have come under attack from ukrainian units. now the entire unit is set to join the fight to repel the attack. almost all these men are about to be killed. their one tank heads out of base. valentin stays behind on guard duty. the next morning, a small group sets off to deliver ammunition and mines to the front. the last two kilometers are in the range of ukrainian artillery. the driver floors the gas pedal. all last night ukrainian forces shelled this abandoned village on the frontline. the men are nervous. perhaps the heavy shelling means an all-out attack is imminent. andrey is 21. he has been here for six weeks. he plans to go home for new year's, and see his girlfriend. they have only occasional contact via the internet. the russian fighters are all convinced they are doing the right thing. >> i watched reports on tv. they need our help. >> do your parents know you're here? >> no, i only told one friend i was coming. >> the shells are landing closer now. >> without us volunteers, the ukrainians would have taken the donets basin long ago. >> a couple of the russian fighters are sheltering behind a house. they want to find a safer position when the shelling finally dies down. the unit's commander, sergey from kazan, wants to get us to safety. he calls on his own people to stop firing. he now thinks they are shelling the village, by mistake. and then the car's engine dies. >> this is how we have to fight, damn it. they are always saying russia helps us. if it did, we would have taken kyiv long ago. >> their one tank is heading back from the front. the surviving fighters say they came under attack from two ukrainian tanks. they are bandaged up at the next checkpoint. meanwhile, yura has made it back to base. he has shrapnel in his left arm. the young russian volunteers appear not to stand much of a chance against the professional ukrainian forces. how did you get away? >> what do you mean, get away? our men are all dead. >> all of them? >> yes, all but five. >> yura is taken to hospital. he won't be fighting again soon. he spent all of one day on the front line. thousands more volunteers are likely to show up -- they have been watching russian television, too. >> when it comes to ukraine, here in germany opinion is increasingly divided between those who say the west should get tougher with mr. putin, and those who say the west is partly to blame for the ukraine crisis in the first place. let me know what you think by getting in touch on twitter. but now to another tragic conflict, the fight against the self-declared islamic state, a militant jihadist group which is accused of grave human rights abuses. the extremists now control large swathes of northern iraq and syria. the question is, where are they getting the supplies to carry on fighting? our reporters have been to the turkish-syrian border, and uncovered evidence that supplies are being smuggled in from turkey, and that the turkish authorities appear to be turning a blind eye. >> when one of his trucks drives off, mustafa tohumcu feels a bit hopeful again. the trucking company owner used to do good business in neighboring syria. but it's been quite some time since he's been able to send goods over the border into the war-torn country. he says conditions are nightmarish. >> our trucks wait an average 12 days at the border. then they're allowed to proceed to a transshipment point, where the freight is loaded on to a syrian truck. we don't know where it goes then. we get paid in cash at the border, and that's it. >> turkish authorities don't seem to care who ends up getting the freight. officially, ankara denies that here at oncupinar, one of the few turkish-syrian border crossings that are still open, shipments intended for the islamic state militants are pssing through. syrian traders transfer bales of cloth from one truck to another in front of the gates of the border crossing. they don't want to be filmed or answer questions. they say that might upset their employers. but nearby, the recipient of the goods is written in big letters on the sacks -- a certain ahmad in raqqa, the center of the i.s.-controlled area. and a syrian truck driver tells us that most of the freight here does go to the regions under i.s. control. he says he took cement to raqqa. it was ordered and picked up by middlemen. he never saw the client. the turkish government doesn't consider itself responsible. officially, the shipments of food, steel, and cement are considered humanitarian aid for reconstruction. and the western-supported syrian opposition allows the shipments to pass, presumably in exchange for bribes. according to the turkish government, goods worth some one billion euros were shipped to syria in the first nine months of this year. the cities close to the border make little profit from that. the cement, steel, and textiles are brought from western turkey. local entrepreneurs say that regional products are not in demand. >> we lived from tourism and a bit of border trading with syria. but that's stopped completely. then there are the 130,000 syrian refugees in our little town alone. that's as many as the entire european union has taken in. >> 150 kilometers to the east lies the syrian kurdish border city of kobane. it's been under siege by i.s. militias for weeks. the kurds say not only is turkey turning a blind eye when goods reach the terrorists, they're also able to get additional weapons and fighters. a kurdish-affiliated television station managed to shoot footage of a group of armed men crossing the border without being stopped. shortly afterwards, they were shot and killed, presumably by kurdish units. to prevent more fighters from illegally crossing the border, kurdish volunteers have secured the area near kobane. for weeks, hundreds of self-appointed guards have been holed up in border villages. they go out on patrols each night, according to these kurds from istanbul. >> when we catch someone crossing the border, we hand them over to the authorities. but the police here are not to be trusted. >> they try everything to drive us out. but i.s. is able to organize resupplies of weapons and additional fighters without a problem. and they go the other way. if they get cornered, they flee over here. >> on this night there's not much activity. the border guards say their patrols are a deterrent. but even they can't stop extremists from crossing the border. nor can they prevent hundreds of trucks from crossing over each day. it seems islamic state doesn't have to worry about its supply lines. >> finally to london, one of the most crowded cities in europe. but also, it seems, one of the loneliest -- and online social networking appears to be making things worse, often meaning we spend more time with our screens than with our friends. but now some young people in london have decided to do less online chatting, and more offline talking -- with possibly even a bit of cuddling thrown in on the side. >> the british capital draws people from around the globe. yet a third of the city's residents say they feel isolated and alone. so did david blackwell when he moved here four years ago. >> when i arrived in london, i felt isolated. i came with a couple of friends from uni, but they lived on the other side of town. i found it very hard to meet people and actually develop a friendship, because people did live so far away, and working seven day weeks, nobody has any time. you are tired in the evenings. it's not an easy thing to do to build a social sphere here. >> so, together with others, blackwell has started a campaign called "talk to me." the idea is to get londoners to socialize more -- not just live side by side in silence. people are supposed to strike up a conversation with total strangers -- who'll possibly become friends. >> mind if i join you, man? >> blackwell has made around 20 friends this way. what he talks about depends on his conversation partner and the situation. here, for instance, they're discussing the importance of authenticity in art. blackwell also distributes the buttons that show the wearer is willing to meet new people and engage in conversation. but not everyone's sold on the concept. >> i think it might be on a short-term basis rather than long-term, unless you have to do it all your life going on badges you know. but i mean, do people really need a badge to be able to talk to people? >> blackwell certainly doesn't need any more incentives to strike up a conversation with strangers. for him, the results have been highly rewarding. >> as soon as you start having sincere conversations and memories and stories to tell from conversations and interactions that did not need to happen, chance encounters, it feels good. your day feels full. you feel like you are living. >> but what if you are more the strong and silent type? you might want to check out cuddlr. the social media app hooks you up with a stranger for a platonic snuggle. it was designed to produce a sense of closeness, something hard to come by in london. >> in a big city like this, you are very close to people a lot. you are on the tube right next to people, but it is not voluntary and you do not communicate about it. you do not have a chance to say, here is how i would like to be close to you. you are jammed in there, and i think because of that, people push other people away as much as possible. everybody wants to get their own space, and it is hard to let people in. >> charlie williams is meeting with a german living in london for a cuddle. the app shows their current locations and the quickest way for them to get together. and then, they cuddle. >> that is nice. >> it is nice. >> it was exciting because it was the first time i had done it. somehow, it was nice and relaxing and pleasant. it is something different, another way of getting to know people. >> can't hugging combat loneliness? cuddlr has 26,000 registered users, even though the app has only been available since september. the average cuddle last nine minutes and 54 seconds. >> there is a lot of scientific and medical research that shows having physical touch helps you live longer. it helps to heal actual physical wounds faster. it helps heal psychological wounds. and so all of these things are reasons why we should make sure that we get a lot of this touch. >> but for now, david blackwell is content with a bit of stimulating conversation. you get londoners wearing the "talk to me" buttons, he is giving them away for free in cafés, that without much success. the boxer mains untouched. the direct approach works better. -- the box remains untouched. once again, blackwell is deep in conversation, talking to an italian who has lived in london for three years. we do not need to tell people it is a good idea, because they feel it is a good idea. people want to connect. the tendency is they are. nobody wants an isolated city. right on cue, the italian begins talking to a stranger at a neighboring table. >> you never know who is around you. that is the thing. you might be sitting around, and you might have beside you the best filmmaker of the world, or a great businessman, or maybe just your next girlfriend. >> for now, he is just conversing with a student from germany, and he is pleased -- and so is david blackwell. the people of london are getting to know one another, and soon maybe a few of them won't feel quite so lonely. >> well that is all for today. do feel free to get in touch with me on twitter. you cannot promise a cuddle, but we do read and take note of all your comments. lisa keeps them coming. many viewers, including a2burns got in touch to say they were particularly moved by last week's item about the holocaust survivor saved by a polish farmer. you can also contact us by e-mail, using the address europa@dw.de. for now, it is goodbye from me and all of us here. do join us again next week, same time, same place. [captioned by the national captioning institute which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] óxóoóx >> garrison keillor: martín espada was born in brooklyn, new york. he moved to massachusetts; worked as a tenement lawyer in boston, teaches at the university of massachusetts, amherst-- creative writing, latino poetry, and the work of pablo neruda. he's published 16 books, and his collection of poems, the republic of poetry, was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. >> at 16, i worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads-- yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as i slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue up and down the stack. no gloves-- fingertips required for the perfection of paper, smoothing the exact rectangle. sluggish by 9:00 p.m., the hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper, and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin; hidden. then the glue would sting, hands oozing till both palms burned at the punch clock. ten years later, in law school, i knew that every legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts; that every open law book was a pair of hands upturned and burning. ( applause ) >> november 9, 1989, the night the berlin well fell. welcome to our "euromaxx highlights," the biggest highlight being a very special anniversary for germany. it's been 25 years since the event that shook the world back in 1989, and for the occasion we decided to bring this program to the scene of the action. we're going to leave our studio behind and hit the streets of berlin to remember this historic event. here's what's coming up -- memorable moments. we look back at some of the most iconic images from the fall of 1989. border of lights. what 8,000 balloons have to do with the berlin wall. and turning point. how the end of east germany rocked people's worlds.

Transcripts For KCSM Moyers Company 20141025

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 hehting publ awareness of the kohlberg foundation. barbara g. fleischman. and by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's whye're your retirement company. welcome. as you've heard, eric holder has announced that he's resigning as attorney general. he will leave behind a mixed scorecard -- "a" for civil rights, "c" for civil liberties and "f" for failing to prosecute the banking executives who brought about the financial calamity of 2008. holder let the bankers off the hook individually as he negotiated civil settlements with their institutions for issuing mortgage-backed securities tied to faulty where a federal jury acquitted four mortgage holders charged with fraud after hearing testimony that bank executives had pulled out all the stops to seduce them into taking out those toxic loans. one of the key expert witnesses in that case is with me now. bill black's testimony helped blow up the prosecution's contention that the little guy was the culprit, when in fact it was the bank executives who had deliberately created the fraudulent loans to enrich themselves. they pulled off the classic shell game. bait and switch. take the money and run. let ordinary people suffer the consequences. it's a story bill black knows well. a scholar, litigator, and regulator, he helped prosecutors convict more than 1000 crooked bankers during the horrific savings and loan scandals back in the 1980s and '90s. he exposed five united states senators, the so-called keating five, who took big campaign contributions from bank executive charles h. keating, jr., and then tried to help him hide his crimes from bank examiners. his classic book "the best way to rob a bank is to own one" is now available in an updated edition. he holds two academic appointments, one at the university of missouri-kansas city and also at the university of minnesota school of law. and welcome back. >> thank you. >> in a nutshell, what did the jury decide in sacramento? and why should we care? >> well, this is the first time that a jury has ever got to hear what actually caused the crisis. and the jury was horrified. because it was the lenders who deliberately made massive amounts of fraudulent loans and then sold these massive amounts of fraudulent loans through additional frauds to the secondary market and eventually brought down the global financial system. and the testimony that came out in the case is that the agents, the fbi agents and the irs agents simply assumed that the banks were the victims and the bankers were the victims and simply assumed that the little people, the mice, were the problem in all of this. so they never even investigated the banks and the bankers. >> the mice? >> yeah, the saying in the savings and loan debacle is you never wanted to be the guy that was chasing mice while lions roamed the campsite. so the mice are these alleged tiny frauds type of thing, where they ignore the lions, who are the ceos of the banks and such. >> and the jury said, no, it's the lions. >> it's -- >> not the mice. >> yes. so this is a crisis created by the lenders. and the reaction of the u.s. attorney, who's benjamin wagner there was, well, we're not going to be deterred in prosecuting mortgage fraud. well, we don't want them to be deterred. we want them to prosecute but prosecute the lions and stop this nonsense. >> even eric holder never seemed in doubt about who was responsible. i mean, his own words indicate that he knew that guilt lay at the feet of those who run the banks. here he is being interviewed by nbc's pete williams. >> mr. attorney general, what does jp morgan admit that it did wrong in the settlement? >> well, it packaged loans that it knew did not pass its own stated due diligence test. we have a whistleblower who indicated that she expressed concerns about what the strength of these mortgage-backed securities were. and they put them out there to the market and said that they were perfectly fine when in fact they were not. >> so to be clear, you're saying that jp morgan's conduct here contributed to the housing collapse? >> not only the conduct of jp morgan. it was the conduct of other banks doing similar kinds of things that led directly to the collapse of our economy in 2008 and in 2009. >> yet eric holder didn't bring one criminal case against any executives in charge of the banks' lending. you've called this the greatest strategic failure in the history of the department of justice. >> yeah, in baseball terms they're batting 0.000. but they're not just batting 0.000, they took called strikes. they never got the bat off their shoulder and even swung. they didn't even try. >> do you remember when znjú president obama told "60 minutes," i think it was late december of 2011 that, "some of the most damaging behavior on wall street wasn't illegal?" >> i do. >> what did you think? >> i thought that he was wrong. that in fact if he listened to what the united states of america has demonstrated in court and through investigations, the activity was clearly illegal, it was a violation of a whole series of laws that make it felonies. and these are just the frauds that caused the crisis. in addition to the frauds that caused the crisis, which are massive and we could talk about, we have the largest cartel in world history. this was the bid rigging of libor, which is an international standard that sets the prices on over $300 trillion in contracts. a trillion is a thousand billion, right? and then we have the foreclosure frauds where we have false affidavits. over 100,000 felonies in that context. and then we have the bid rigging on bond prices where all the major banks, according to the justice department, were involved. and then we had the federal housing finance administration, a federal agency suing virtually every largest, of the largest 20 banks in the united states of america, saying they defrauded fannie and freddie through false sales. and it goes on and on. the savings and loan debacle, we made over 30,000 criminal referrals. here, zero criminal referrals as far as we can get any public information. so the first thing holder should've done is reestablish the criminal referral process. because, you know, banks don't make criminal referrals against their own ceos. >> do you tell yourself, well, there is a justifiable and understandable reason why they don't prosecute? >> no, there is no justifiable reason. apparently modern financial regulators are vastly more sophisticated than we were as financial regulators 25 years ago. because we had never figured out that the key to financial stability was leaving felons in charge of the largest financial institutions in the world. >> but they do claim with a straight face that they can't prosecute. >> they make it sound like the only choice we have is to prosecute banks as opposed to bankers. and that's nuts, right? we've always prosecuted bankers. we prosecuted successfully over 1,000 bankers in the savings and loan and bank crises. and those are just the major cases and such. and it -- of course, it greatly enhanced financial stability instead of the other way around. indeed, none of the people in that era came back in this crisis and were able to lead frauds. and they couldn't because they had criminal records. but in the next crisis, these folks have no criminal records. they'll easily be able to come back. in fact, if you want to create the next crisis and make it vastly worse, leave the people in charge who led the frauds in the senior ranks at the banks in charge of those banks. so now they have all the postgraduate education in how to run a fraud. and they learned that there are no consequences other than good consequences. >> how does it feel to be right? because when you said that this is the greatest strategic failure in the history of the department of justice, it was before the justice department inspector general himself issued a report that determined the fbi criminal investigative division "ranked mortgage fraud as the lowest ranked criminal threat in its lowest crime category." the number of fbi agents assigned, that the number of investigations and cases was falling still, that they were misleading the public by claiming that they were making it a higher priority, and that they had lied about the number of criminal cases they had brought against the mice, and that they persisted in using the false statistics when they knew that they were false. all of those things were found by the inspector general. it feels terrible to be right about those things. >> there's clearly been a culture of deference toward the banks in the obama administration. you would agree with that? >> absolutely. again, i blame holder. i blame timothy geithner. but they are fulfilling administration policies. the problem definitely comes from the top. and remember, obama wouldn't have been president but for the financial contribution of bankers. and it's an extraordinary political story. because the clintons, of course, have been close to banking for decades and very supportive of it. but a junior senator from illinois was able to outraise by a substantial margin political contributions from the banking industry to win that nomination. and then outraise his opponent, who was, of course, famously or infamous for his support of banking, john mccain, by more than two to one. and a person who led that effort to take big finance money and get it to then senator obama was, of course, jamie dimon, the ceo and chairman of the board of jp morgan. >> whom the "times" has referred to as president obama's "favorite banker." >> as his favorite banker even though, as holder now admits, jp morgan was one of the leading, what we call criminology, accounting control frauds in the world. it takes "the new york times" six pages to list the violations on its website of jp morgan chase. so these are serial fraudsters. and jamie dimon has even said out loud to his own shareholders what we call the accounting control fraud recipe. his phrase is, it's easy to produce low quality revenue. bad underwriting means income today and losses tomorrow. now, of course, it doesn't mean real income today. it means fictional income through accounting fraud. so he gets it. if you have terrible, terrible underwriting, you will be mathematically guaranteed to report record profits that will make the executives wealthy through modern executive compensation. and if there's a problem, well, the government will bail you out and give you massive subsidies if you're too big of fail. and, of course, jp morgan is the quintessential example of too big to fail, too big to jail. >> do you remember when obama was elected president he called the bankers to the white house and he said, i'm all that's standing between you and the pitchforks, meaning between you and a wronged and indignant public. >> i thought that was an obscene statement, slanderous about the american people. the american people don't want pitchforks. they want justice. they want these senior officers to be prosecuted. if they're found guilty, they want them to be sent to prison. and they want their fraudulent proceeds, the bonuses and compensation to be recovered. and that is a very good thing about the american people. >> to man that wall between the bankers and the public he chose eric holder as everyone knows who at the time was at the elite law firm of covington and burling which represents some of the very banks he would later exonerate from criminal prosecution. within that justice were three other top lawyers from covington and burling, including the firm's star lawyer defending against white collar crime who became holder's right hand man running the criminal division of the justice department. what are we to make of that coincidence? >> well, first, you should avoid it. but i want to caution that it isn't just the conflict, and indeed that in some ways takes one away from where the primary focus should be. so in the savings and loan crisis, president bush, the first, brought in a covington and burling lawyer when they represented banks and such. and he promptly, his name is harris weinstein, increased enforcement actions by fivefold. and we went after the biggest folks and we had by far our greatest victories. because harris weinstein was picked because he was tough and competent and because he was given a mission which was you will go after the worst folks and you will demonstrate the rule of law exists in the united states. and that there was a political subtext of, i inherit, i, president bush, inherited this crisis and i'll be seen as fixing it. show the american people that there is no exception to the rule of law. whereas holder had exactly the opposite instructions which are, you know, don't rock finance. and that was reinforced by timothy geithner. but again obama picked timothy geithner who was notorious as the worst failed regulator in the united states of america in the field. >> why do you think on any evidence you have that they didn't want to fix the problem? >> because two things. one, they were wrapped into this insanity that timothy geithner and ben bernanke were pushing that said, we must not do anything negative about the banks. we must instead "foam the runways," is the infamous phrase of timothy geithner. >> to make a soft, safe landing. >> for the banks. >> for the banks. >> not for the people. we will use the people as the excuse to get these programs. but the programs we all know are really for the banks. >> you do acknowledge that there have been some big settlements, i mean, and not all of them by holder, but there've been settlements of over, you know, 125 or more billion dollars so far. >> most of the money is actually deals they would've cut anyway. and it's window dressing, but it's in the interests of both the bank and the justice department to claim very large dollar amounts. step back from what we've just been saying though and think, you know, put my lawyer hat on, of negotiating deals like this. i'm representing the banks, you're eric holder. i know that you believe that i'm too big to fail and that there'll be a disaster if i have any risk of failure. are you going to ever assess a fine on me that matters to my institution? of course not, because it was violate all of those conditions. so what do i want as ceo? of course i don't want to go to jail and i'm happy to trade off some dollars in a fine to make sure that i never go to jail. but i also don't want the little officers to go to jail because they might be flipped by the prosecutors and the prosecution might move up the chain. so i want to negotiate immunity not just for me, but for everybody. >> otherwise they'll rat on me? >> otherwise they might rat on me. and this immunity doesn't have to be formal. it's just no cases will occur, right? right? right. so often there isn't a formal deal of immunity, but you see a practice of no prosecutions. and the other thing that i want in the best of all worlds, i want to make sure that i get to keep all my bonuses and compensation for all the frauds that i've led. and that's the other part of the deal. in all of these cases, they get to keep the fraud proceeds. that has never happened in modern united states. that is why it's the worst strategic failure, but it's also failure of integrity at the justice department and at the obama administration. and the bush administration was no better on this score. >> no, what you're saying is that more than one administration cooperated in maintaining a system that is based upon deference to the banks and disrespect for the public. >> right, and, but it's also a component in the case of obama of we're humans and we are, everything we learn in research about humans is we're reciprocal. and so the finance area is the reason he's president of the united states. when he was in his hour of greatest need, when he had, was written off as a candidate against hillary in the nomination battle the first time around, he had this miraculous survival. and that took money. that took lots and lots of money. and who gave that money? it came overwhelmingly from finance at the critical moment when he needed it most. all of us as human beings, the people that helped us in, a friend in need is a friend indeed is the saying that we have as human beings. >> is that a way to run the government of the united states? >> it's a way to run it into the next disaster. >> you think that's possible? >> oh no, not possible, it's certain. we have created the incentive structures that is going to produce a much larger disaster. and just look at it. again it isn't just the frauds that led to the crisis. it is all the frauds afterwards. hsbc knowingly launders over $1 billion in funds for the sinaloa cartel, one of the most vicious drug cartels in the world that has caused the deaths of thousands of people. we don't prosecute. we have them dead to rights. we don't say that you can't do business anymore. we take no serious sanctions, just one of these silly fines again. standard chartered, one of the, again one of the largest banks in the world, not only evaded sanctions on funding terrorist groups and nations that we say are funding terror, but actually had training manuals on how to deceive the united states regulators. so these are banks doing things that used to be in those really bad novels that you would read at an airport when you had only 10% of your brain functioning, right, about bankers, these awful conspiracies and they're funding terrorists and such. well, they actually are. it's the modern reality. >> what does it say about our financial capitalism? >> well, there's no threat to capitalism like capitalists. they are destroying the underpinnings./$px and when dishonest people gain a competitive advantage in markets, it creates something that in economics and criminology we call a gresham's dynamic. and that means bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace. and so the key is to have a real rule of law, to have real regulation. because that not only protects the consumer, it protects the honest banker. >> but you've just described a situation which has to discourage folks out there, you know that, that they understand what you're saying but you've also described why it can't be fixed, because of the relationship between wall street and washington.wpntñ >> so first citizens united has made this far worse, and that's an atrocious decision and it has to be overturned if we're going to restore our democracy and such. but beyond that, there's never going to be a decisive victory against power and money and finance. we have to fight. every generation has to engage in this struggle. and if it gives up and says it's hopeless, well, it'll give up and it will be hopeless. >> bill black, thank you very much for being with me. >> thank you. ♪ >> at our website billmoyers.com see the top five bank bailouts that you probably have never heard about. that's all at billmoyers.com. i'll see you there and i'll see you here next time. ♪ don't wait a week to get more "moyers". visit billmoyers.com for exclusive blogs, essays and video features. >> announcer: funding is provided by -- anne gumowitz, encouraging the renewal of democracy. carnegie corporation of new york, supporting innovations in education, democratic engagement and the advancement of international peace and security at carnegie.org. 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. that's why we're your retirement company. >> garrison keillor: martín espada was born in brooklyn, new york. he moved to massachusetts; worked as a tenement lawyer in boston, teaches at the university of massachusetts, amherst-- creative writing, latino poetry, and the work of pablo neruda. he's published 16 books, and his collection of poems, the republic of poetry, was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. >> at 16, i worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads-- yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as i slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue up and down the stack. no gloves-- fingertips required for the perfection of paper, smoothing the exact rectangle. sluggish by 9:00 p.m., the hands would slide along suddenly sharp paper, and gather slits thinner than the crevices of the skin; hidden. then the glue would sting, hands oozing till both palms burned at the punch clock. ten years later, in law school, i knew that every legal pad was glued with the sting of hidden cuts; that every open law book was a pair of hands upturned and burning. 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Transcripts For CNNW CNN Newsroom With Brooke Baldwin 20161129 19:00:00

president-elect has nominated ardent obamacare critic tom price, a republican congressman from the state of georgia, congressman price is very tight with paul ryan, this is according to the house speaker himself. here is speaker ryan on local talk radio. >> what i'm excited about is tom price who is a very close friend of mine. tom price is one of the architects of replacing obamacare, of fixing health care. he's a surgeon, he knows how the law works and he's been the most passionate advocate for patient-centered health care reforms that i've seen in congress and i'm really excited he is now going to be the quarterback, the point person in the new administration on reforming health care. so that was speaker ryan and as donald trump is adding to his cabinet, he's also making headlines again for one of his tweets. this is what he wrote "nobody should be allowed to burn the the momentum our campaign got in the last two weeks of the campaign i think was largely due to the fact that those obamacare premium and deductible hikes were going out to millions of americans. i think it frightened them as well as it should have. so i'm glad president trump -- president-elect trump is delivering with his pick to repeal and replace obamacare. it was a job killing monster, we are going to have sensible health reform going forward. >> i'm looking at angela out of the corner of my eye shaking her bed. but before we get to that point it's fair to point out the criticisms because one question is how will this affect women's health specifically. planned parenthood is worried about that because we know he has talked about planned parenthood saying the clinics have been involved in what he calls barbaric abortion practices when the supreme court ruled on gay marriage last year congressman price said "it was not only a sad day for muarriag but a destruction of our checks and balances." as a democrat, how do you feel? >> there's so many places to go with tom price, he's definitely smart. he's been a member of congress for some time. >> six term congressman. >> he's known for knowing the rules really really well. he was the guy that republicans went to for motions to recommit because he knew the floor procedure rules better than anybody else. the challenge is, as a doctor for him to be opposed to children's health insurance program, for him to want to privatize medicare which we know is a baseline conservative princip principle, it's also very, very challenging. he has voted to defund planned parenthood so i talked about the picks donald trump making are scary to me. what do you do with people who have insurance? 20 million people. we're not talking about two. and this actually has been a job-creating measure. the affordable care act as has created health i.t. jobs, a substantial number of health i.t. jobs. so you've heard talk about repeal and -- >> angela that's -- >> i'm not done, steve. i'm not done. a lot of talk about repeal and replace and they got stuck at repeal, brooke, you're talking about folks who did that 60 plus times in congress. >> i know and i hear you but he has proposed multiple years in a row the empowering patients first act so at least this is something for republicans. they have someone who has specifics and recommendations as an m.d. but i hear you. steve, go ahead then i want to move on. >> i think regarding -- don't take my word for it that it was a job killing monster, take bill clinton's word for it who told us that on the campaign trail somewhat unwittingly talked about how punitive it was to small business. he called it "crazy." and when you talk about defunding planned parenthood as being scary, what i think is scary is the fact that the taxpayers pay for an organization which a great many americans find reprehensible and that sells baby parts and that was a major part of our -- >> that's been debunked. >> come on, steve. >> we won -- >> come on, steve. >> we won on that message. >> karen, set us straight, please. >> if i could get to what i think is the main point is that many times during the campaign it was unclear whether donald trump himself understood obamacare really worked. this is not the case with tom pris. he very much does understand it. he understands the mechanisms and obviously trump has picked somebody who is going to be willing to do something that it's unclear trump himself has done which is sort of climb inside the machine and look at the gears and see how it's working. >> let me just stay with you, karen, because when you look at tom price and you look at elaine chao, you look at the potential picks for state, today's meeting with senator corker, the dinner with governor romney. do these folks sound like -- how else do i say this? like drain-the-swamp people to you or no? >> well, elaine chao is married to the senate majority leader. >> mitch mcconnell. >> she will be the second wife of a senate majority leader to have been both labor secretary and transportation secretary for your trivia viewers. but it does suggest that in r if donald trump, for instance, does want to proceed on infrastructure spending, there are probably worse picks he could have made in getting this thing through congress than basically having the wife of the senate majority leader being in charge of spearheading it. so she's certainly an insider. but she's an insider who will give him leverage in getting things done he wants done. >> steve, let's move on. we played the sound with manu raju just chasing senator mccain down the hall way on the trump flag burning toss them in jail or lose your citizenship tweet and i have to ask and also senator cruz echoed the same sentiment that no, of course no one likes watching a flag burn but it is protected under the first amendment. is this the future for republican senators to be answering for every little tweet, comment, moment that the president will make? >> no, and it doesn't have of the as senator mccain just explained to us. i rarely disagree with president-elect trump, i happen to disagree here. i don't think we need new laws or amendments to the constitution. i also disagree with hillary clinton who while she was senator voted for jail time for burning the flag. i think people who burn the flag are reprehensible and should be ignored and dismissed. speech is about words, we tell toddlers use your words rather than lash out. i would say that to anyone who wants to protest against either mr. trump, against the united states generally, use your words but i don't think we need new laws. >> angela, what do you think? >> i agree with steve here. secretary of state. can we read into any tea leaves and the fact that mr. trump's wife and governor romney's wife will be part of this dinner. is this maybe a congratulatory situation or "i'm going to buy you dinner on the way out, thanks for playing." >> i'm going to swear off from trying to read tea leaves at all. all you know is it increases the drama, the suspense, maybe at the end of it he'll hand a rose to somebody, i don't know. but he has certainly increased the drama around this particular section. >> thank you for the laugh. karen, angela and steve, thank you all very much. coming up, let's talk about what's happening in tennessee. have you seen these pictures? dangerous wildfires and smoke coming precariously closely to the dollywood theme park, to hundreds of buildings, homes already being damaged or destroyed. at one point flames threatening a popular aquarium with some 1500 animals trapped inside. we'll have an update from someone who works there next. also, a tragic scene in the mountains of colombia. members of this up-and-coming brazilian soccer team among those killed in this plane crash but, incredibly. several people managed to survive. we have their story coming up. if you have medicare all year round. so call today. because now's the perfect time to learn more. go long. 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[ bleep ] these tires. go. >> i can't see. >> just it will the [ bleep ]ing gas, you're on pavement. [ bleep ]. it's on fire. [ bleep ]. >> he could barely see in front of him. nick valencia is there with us. you've been in the thick of it. tell me where you are and how bad it is in that neck of the woods. >> reporter: brooke, we're outside what is effectively the staging area for residents and vacationers in this area that have been evacuated. we're seeing a lot of drained faces, people that have been through the unimaginable, a lot of people are still trying to process what they went through. some haven't slept. you talk about those that barely made it out alive. we're joined by two of those people who were asleep when police started e eed banging on door. you guys are convinced had cops not knocked on your door you might have died last night. how are you doing? >> well, we're doing great now. still pretty emotional. >> shook up. >> we know if they wouldn't have woke us up we would be dead. >> deni >>. >> reporter: denice, what happened when the police knocked on your door? what was going on? >> we started up out of the bed, cops banging on the door telling everyone to evacuate and we was just able to grab just whatever we could and got out. >> reporter: you grabbed what you're wearing right now essentially. >> and got out. >> as soon as i looked out the window to see who it was there was fire rounding us. >> reporter: what are you going through right now? describe to the viewer here, they see the images and flames and what is a vibrant, beautiful area decimated. >> there's just no words. it's hard to comp hence. >> well, the biggest thing i would like to say, we had a friend, her husband passed away a couple months ago and she just made it out but her house is gone. so really i feel more sorry for her than anyone. >> reporter: you have a lot of friends in this area, i know you guys are going through a lot. what are you thinking when you're getting out of there, mark? >> well, when they put us in the back of the patrol car, there was fire out both sides and i mean it was crossing the street and we didn't think we'd make. >> it it was scary when you have flames all around you and everything. >> embers. >> you don't know what ember will fly at you. >> they were landing on the car. everything. it was scary. >> what did you do last night? where did you sleep last night? did you sleep at all. >> i didn't sleep at all. >> i got a 20-minute nap. that's about it. >> i doubt i'll sleep tonight. >> reporter: we're outside here in what is the staging area and two minutes ago we saw a lady coming out of here bawling, crying, holding a dog. she'd just seen her home. are you trying to get back? what did they tell you about going back? >> we've heard a few different stories, we're thinking more like two to three days but we've heard up to five so we're not sure yet. >> we're not sure if our place will be there or not. i don't know. >> reporter: if it isn't, at least you have each other, you're engaged and you have something to look forward to. >> we'll start all over fresh, we might as well say. >> reporter: denice and mark, thank you for taking the time. thank you, brother. just a slice of life here outside of gatlinburg, brooke, just hard to low pressure to what those individuals went through. the worst is other. that's the good news. last night those hurricane-force winds, the low humidity contributed to the intensity of the flames that started in the great smokey national mountain park. now the wind has died down but the smoke is very thick in the air and firefighters are expecting to host a press conference a couple hours from now where hopefully we'll get more details about what happens next in this community terribly hit hard by the wildfires. >> please thank them for us. it happens like this, not even know if you have a home to go home to. i cannot imagine. nick valencia, thank you very much. cnn has also learned 1500 animals tripped at ripley's aquarium are now safe so with me on the phone, ryan desere, he's the regional manager of that aquarium. ryan, i'm an animal lover and we'll get to your animals in just a second but i want to talk about humans like you, your employees do you know how ef-affected you all are or your homes by these fires? >> thank you for asking that question. that means a lot, honestly it does. the answer is we're doing our best, some staff we haven't been able to contact, either they weren't at work or in the area. moirs have left this kind of part of the state for a while. the reason we're having some issues is cell phone communication is very bad in the city right now so it's hard to -- you can't even get on facebook and do anything like that so we were having issues with that however by and large we have an employee page and everybody that's checked in is in good shape. a lot of our employees' houses are in peril. i know at least one did lose her home last night and that just came across there and we're really thinking of her and i would like to say just to point out those folks that are bat blg the fire, the first responders out there, they are amazing, they have done a job i can't even begin to imagine under really horrible circumstances. at one point wind gusts to 93 miles per hour at my home so i can only imagine what they were dealing with. >> thank you for mentioning them. you are 100% correct these men and women are putting themselves in harm's way. looking at these pictures, i'm glad you've been able to be in contact with some folks but as far as the animals, ryan, are they okay? i think we saw video shot from you so you can really see and feel that smoke at the aquarium. >> that was yesterday and nobody really knew what was going on. it was early in the morning and the winds were just starting to pick up. i had just gotten off a phone call and walked upstairs to our plaza and see what was going on and that's when the video was shot. so we weren't sure of any circumstances. but we could feel it, the animals are okay, we're fine. no problems at all. we were worried about them last night i would probably say with certainty that we were the last ones in the city and our half dozen marine biologists we have there and support personnel were forced to leave by police escort and that was -- it was the right thing to do on their part but certainly their safety was par mount to us and they had to go and then we were the first ones back in the city today and largely thanks to the police efforts to allow us back in. we continue to thank them for that, us being able to get back and forth to that aquarium is primary. >> ryan, thank you for hopping on the phone, you have a lot more to do so i'll let you jump off but just look after yourself and your employees and those animals as well. ryan desear at the ripley's aquarium of the smokies. let me read the statement. this is from dolly parton, this is the neck of the woods where dollywood is right there. she has said this "i've been watching the terrible fires in the great smokey mountains and i'm heartbroken. i'm praying for all the families affected by the fire and the firefighters who are working so hard to keep everyone safe. it's a blessing my dollywood theme park, resort and so many businesses in pigeon forge have been spared." that is tennessee. let's talk about ohio. horror at that campus in columbus at ohio state. the somali immigrant, the 18-year-old who attacked his classmates there reportedly ranted about the treatment of muslims in facebook postings. we have more on him and more on the police officer who stopped him. plus, president-elect trump tweeting this morning he thinks flag burners, american flag burners, should go to jail or lose their citizenship but that's not exactly what the u.s. constitution says. why did he tweet that in the first place? let's discuss coming up. i work 'round the clock. i want my blood sugar to stay in control. so i asked about tresiba®. ♪ tresiba® ready ♪ tresiba® is a once-daily, long-acting insulin that lasts even longer than 24 hours. i want to trim my a1c. ♪ tresiba® ready ♪ tresiba® provides powerful a1c reduction. releases slow and steady. works like your body's insulin. when my schedule changes... i want something that delivers. ♪ tresiba® ready ♪ i can take tresiba® any time of day. so if i miss or delay a dose, i take it when i remember, as long as there's at least 8 hours between doses. once in use, it lasts 8 weeks without refrigeration... twice as long as lantus®, which lasts 4 weeks. tresiba® is used to control high blood sugar in adults with diabetes. don't use tresiba® to treat diabetic ketoacidosis, during episodes of low blood sugar, or if you are allergic to any of its ingredients. don't share needles or insulin pens. don't reuse needles. the most common side effect is low blood sugar, which may cause dizziness, sweating, confusion, and headache. check your blood sugar. low blood sugar can be serious and may be life-threatening. injection site reactions may occur. tell your doctor about all medicines you take and all your medical conditions. taking tzds with insulins, like tresiba®, may cause serious side effects like heart failure. your insulin dose shouldn't be changed without asking your doctor. get medical help right away if you have trouble breathing... fast heartbeat, extreme drowsiness, swelling of your face, tongue, or throat, dizziness, or confusion. ask your doctor if you're tresiba® ready. ♪ tresiba® ready ♪ you tell your inthey made a mistake. the check they sent isn't enough to replace your totaled new car. the guy says they didn't make the mistake. you made the mistake. i beg your pardon? he says, you should have chosen full-car replacement. excuse me? let me be frank, he says. you picked the wrong insurance plan. no. i picked the wrong insurance company. with liberty mutual new car replacement™, we'll replace the full value of your car plus depreciation. call and if you have more than one liberty mutual policy, you qualify for a multi-policy discount, saving you money on your car and home coverage. call liberty mutual for a free quote today. at that's liberty stands with you™ liberty mutual insurance. shot and killed by police. he was an 18-year-old transfer student and somali native who emigrated to the u.s. two years ago. he was a legal permanent u.s. resident but police are investigating comments they believe he posted on facebook right before he did this, comments that detail grievances about targeting muslims, in part it reads "my brothers and sisters, i am sick and tires of seeing my fellow muslim brothers and sisters being killed and tortured everywhere, by allah we will not less you sleep until you give peace to the muslims. rosa flores is live in columbus. this is a piece perhaps of his men cal state going into this. what more have you learned about him and his family? >> brooke, i've been talking to somali community leaders here, one in particular who has been meeting with the family since this event and he tells me that the mother is, of course, very sad and grieving because of her son but is also worried about the somali community and what this could mean for this community. as you were saying, police are trying to figure out the motive so i asked him ant that. what could drive this young man to do this. he said the suspect's mom describes the day yesterday as something very normal. he woke up, helped the family and came here to school, it was a very normal day until there was a door knock on the mother's door and that's how she found out about her son being the attacker. take a listen. >> the mother was very shocked and crying for her son and also crying for the somalis, the backlash. she was saying my son is gone but what i'm worried about is the rest of the somali community because there could be a collective blame where the community has nothing to do with it. >> as we all try to understand the why, why would someone do this, i also asked this community leader about possible inspiration, was he inspired by somebody? did the mother know or have any clue or suspicions and the answer is no, brooke. he says the family is just as confused as everybody else. >> so while the motive is unclear, tell me about the police officer who jumped in and took him down. >> brooke, he is the hero in this case and in this university. he attended this university and he was interviewed by the university newspaper a while back when he joined the force and one of the things that stood out to me is that he was an engineering student and was so inspired by his work at the public safety office at the university that he switched majors, became a police officer and now imagine the blessings for all of the people that were perhaps saved because he intervened. he was at the right place at the right time. two minutes, is what police say, it took him to stop the attacker. two minutes and for the people around him, they hail him a hero. >> two minutes is stunning and also the way the university sent that tweet and a text out to the students. it helped after talking to a couple of them. rosa, thank you very much in columbus. just a quick reminder to you, ohio state is holding a briefing at the victims of the attack. that's at the top of the hour, we want an update on how they're all doing. some of them still in the hospital so we'll bring that to you as it happens. next, donald trump is busy selecting top members of his cabinet, just spotted inside trump tower former vice president dan quayle. this as trump meets tonight with mitt romney. we also just learned who else will be at that dinner. more details coming up next. a leak in the roof. luckily the spider recently had geico help him with homeowners insurance. water completely destroyed his swedish foam mattress. he got full replacement and now owns the sleep number bed. his sleep number setting is 25. call geico and see how much you could save on homeowners insurance. attention homeowners age sixty-two and older. one reverse mortgage has a great way for you to live a better retirement... it's called a reverse mortgage. call right now to receive your free information kit with no obligation. it answers questions like... how a reverse mortgage works, how much you qualify for, the ways to receive your money... and more. plus, when you call now, you'll get this magnifier with led light absolutely free! when you call the experts at one reverse mortgage today, you'll learn the benefits of a government-insured reverse mortgage. it will eliminate your monthly mortgage payments and give you tax-free money from the equity in your home and here's the best part... you still own your home. call now! take control of your retirement - today! dinner. ann romney will be attending as well as melania trump. read into that what you like. meantime, a head-scratching tweet from president-elect trump. it reads "nobody should be allowed to bern the american flag. if they do there must be consequences, perhaps loss of citizenship or a year in jail. yeah, that tweet raising a lot of questions, not the least what is this at all related to? i can tell you that declaration was sparked by an incident at a small college in new hampshire. miguel marquez is cnn national correspondent here with what exactly happened there. miguel, fill us in. >> reporter: well, look, there's two things happening here at hampshire college in amherst, massachusetts. one is that there's a lot of bad information out there as well. there has been reported that all flags across campus have been banned. that's not true. that's a campus building there, the alumni office for ham shire college and there are flags flying there. there is a single flagpole, the main flagpole in the center of campus where they are not allowing the flag to be flown at the moment because the day after the election students at lowered it to half-staff during a protest, unhappy with the rhetoric of the election, unhappy with the election result. the next night which happened to be the very early morning of veterans day student, still unhappy, burned the flag, the president of the college a week later decided no flag on that flagpole until they have a dialogue across this campus to figure it out. this while veterans groups became very upset because the flag had been burned on veterans day, because it wasn't flying at this campus. on sunday they mounted a big protest at the campus and then donald trump's tweet in the middle of this has that has taken what started off as a student protest and turned it into a national conversation. in 1989 and 1990 the supreme court ruled and affirmed you can burn the flag, that is, in fact, free speech and in the constitution. the only thing that could undo that is a constitutional amendment which the government could possibly do but that's an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. where all this leaves hampshire college is that they are having a series of discussions. i happened to run into the president of the college today who said, look, we're talking about this, we hope to have it settled. other officials at the school say hopefully in the next couple days the flag will go back up, students will get back to work and the college here will get back to the process of learning. brooke? >> miguel, thank you for the setup and the genesis of this. now to the tweet and trump. a number of critics are calling this tweet a bright shiny object. others say it's a red herring suggesting it's a distraction from trump's unfounded allegations of voter fraud or even perhaps a diversion from the cabinet picks he is making right now in his twrransition t become our 45th president. whatever the reasoning, the tweet brings up important constitutional issues about the first amendment and the man to discuss them with is jeff rye to be bin and -- jeffrey toobin. we've heard from senator mccain, senator cruz, no one wants to see the american flag burned. >> of course. >> it's a deplorable act but you are protected within the first amendment. have people challenged that through the years? i imagine it has a checkered past. >> it was a hot issue in the '80s and '90s, flag burning. that was a big social issue people talked about a lot but the court settled the issue in 1989 and '90 with these very clear opinions that said as mump as we find this behavior distasteful, it's protected by the first amendment. there have been occasional discussions of constitutional amendments to overrule the supreme court but they've never gotten very far. and certainly for the last decade this has been a settled issue which is why i think people were surprised by the president-elect's tweets last night. >> so it would take a constitutional amendment. i'm just thinking of -- i know there are people thinking is there any way or anything, he will be the president, that he could do? he's talked about opening up libel laws and tossing people into jail. if he doesn't like flag burning -- >> there's nothing he can do. >> there's nothing he can do. >> there's another legal mistake in that tweet which is -- >> throw the tweet back up again, please. >> here let's look at the tweet itself. "perhaps loss of citizenship." the supreme court has also said that that cannot bt a penalty for any crime. you can't be, you can't lose your citizenship. you can lose your right to vote, you can lose your freedom by going to jail but you cannot be sentenced to loss of your citizenship which is just another aspect of the legal problems with the tweet but i don't think the president-elect is thinking deep legal thoughts about this. this is obviouslien issue people feel emotionally about even though it's sort of antique by this point. >> understand kbli so. >> absolutely and a lot of his supporters i think will be encouraged by this. what affect it has, what meaning it has, why he did it, greater minds than i will have to answer that question. >> i can't imagine that. >> like you. >> even the late supreme courtus antonin scalia who we've heard trump praise said flag burning is protected by the first amendment. here was the late justice in 2012. >> burning the flag is a form of expression. speech doesn't just mean written words or oral words. burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea. >> does this go anywhere from here or riles up supporters and that's about it? >> you have to tell me what he's going to tweet next and then i'll tell you where he goes from here. >> i cannot do that. >> i bet you can't but i think the overwhelming likelihood is this will fade away. and his motivations, was he trying to detract attention away from something? it seems to me his cabinet selections are going as he would like so i don't know why he would be trying to detract attention from them. >> we're talking about it, four minutes worth, he 's the president-elect. jeffrey toobin, thank you very much. no smarter legal minds than you, by the way. coming up, more on this tragedy in the colombian jungle. the plane carrying a brazilian soccer team crashes. more than 70 people killed but miraculously several manage to survive. what we know and this incredible cinderella story of this team. also ahead, we are back at trump tower where major selections for the president-elect's cabinet are being made. we will take you there live. again, dan quayle walking in the building with kellyanne conway. what's going on? you're watching cnn. i'm terrible at golf. he is. but i'd like to keep being terrible at golf for as long as i can. new patented ensure enlive has hmb plus 20 grams of protein to help rebuild muscle. for the strength and energy to do what you love. new ensure enlive. always be you. for the holidays. before his mom earned 1% cash back everywhere, every time. 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[ that's a good thing, eligible for medicare? but it doesn't cover everything. only about 80% of your part b medical expenses. the rest is up to you. so consider an aarp medicare supplement insurance plan, insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company. like all standardized medicare supplement insurance plans, they could save you in out-of-pocket medical costs. call today to request a free decision guide. with these types of plans, you'll be able to visit any doctor or hospital that accepts medicare patients... plus, there are no networks, and virtually no referrals needed. join the millions who have already enrolled in the only medicare supplement insurance plans endorsed by aarp... and provided by unitedhealthcare insurance company, which has over 30 years of experience behind it. with all the good years ahead, look for the experience and commitment to go the distance with you. call now to request your free decision guide. the sports world is mourning after a plane carrying this popular brazilian soccer team crashes in colombia in south america killing nearly everyone on board. this accident brings an end to really the cinderella story of this underdog team that has captured the hearts of soccer fans around the world. cnn's senior latin affairs correspondent rafael romo tells their story. >> reporter: a devastating site. a colombian soccer plane crashed into the town in medellin. the aircraft was carrying 81 passengers and crew, including more than 20 journalists and the brazilian soccer team chapecoense. search efforts have been difficult due to ruggled mountains. chapecoense was on their way to colombia to compete in the first leg of the south american cup finals. the team took a commercial flight from sao paulo, brazil, to santa cruz, bolivia, where they picked up this charter flight. they were headed to the airport in rionegro colombia when it went down. according to officials, the pilot declared an emergency a few minutes before the crash saying he was having an electrical failure on board. satellite images show scattered showers and thunderstorms moving through the area at the time of the crash which would have caused some in-flight turbulence. however it will take some time for investigators to determine the cause of the crash. the colombian air force had to abort their mission to the site due to poor visibility. chapecoense had just celebrated a win last wednesday. the team has been described as a cinderella story, having surprised many with their winning performance in recent years, making it to ninth place in brazil's tier 1 league with. the brazilian national civil aviation agency says they denied the charter request of the low livian la mia corporation from sao paulo, brazil, to medellin, colombia. why? apparently it didn't comply with international regulations. rafael romo, cnn. >> rafael, thank you so much. coming up next, new faces at trump tower including former vice president dan quayle. here he is walking in with kellyanne conway. we're live outside trump tower at the top of the hour where we know cabinet selections are under way right now. we'll have the latest. also ahead, the 18-year-old somali immigrant who attacked his classmates on campus in ohio reportedly ranted about the treatment of muslims on facebook we have new details today on this 18-year-old and about the police officer who stopped him. i work 'round the clock. i want my blood sugar to stay in control. so i asked about tresiba®. ♪ tresiba® ready ♪ tresiba® is a once-daily, long-acting insulin that lasts even longer than 24 hours. i want to trim my a1c. ♪ tresiba® ready ♪ tresiba® provides powerful a1c reduction. releases slow and steady. works like your body's insulin. when my schedule changes... i want something that delivers. ♪ tresiba® ready ♪ i can take tresiba® any time of day. so if i miss or delay a dose, i take it when i remember, as long as there's at least 8 hours between doses. once in use, it lasts 8 weeks without refrigeration... twice as long as lantus®, which lasts 4 weeks. tresiba® is used to control high blood sugar in adults with diabetes. don't use tresiba® to treat diabetic ketoacidosis, during episodes of low blood sugar, or if you are allergic to any of its ingredients. don't share needles or insulin pens. don't reuse needles. the most common side effect is low blood sugar, which may cause dizziness, sweating, confusion, and headache. check your blood sugar. low blood sugar can be serious and may be life-threatening. injection site reactions may occur. tell your doctor about all medicines you take and all your medical conditions. taking tzds with insulins, like tresiba®, may cause serious side effects like heart failure. your insulin dose shouldn't be changed without asking your doctor. get medical help right away if you have trouble breathing... fast heartbeat, extreme drowsiness, swelling of your face, tongue, or throat, dizziness, or confusion. ask your doctor if you're tresiba® ready. ♪ tresiba® ready ♪

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