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2,000 pounds, and i also heard from the commissioner of licenses and inspections, he says that they shut the business down, the rita's water ice down, after this accident happened, while they investigated with philadelphia police, they say the owner of the property is cooperating with the investigation, in the meantime, there are still some very heavy hearts this weekend. >> philadelphia police identify three year old winter larkin of yeadon as the girl killed by this 2,000-pound steel security door at the rita's water ice at 29th and girard in brewerytown. it somehow detached from the wall and struck the girl in the head when it came down in the middle of a scholarship fundraiser saturday afternoon. >> i'm numb. i was numb then and i'm numb now. >> a shattered ron waters lives next-door to the victim's parents. >> a wonderful family, just to have them next-door to me, okay, i hope they can get through this. >> police say the girl was with her mom cheryle at the fundraiser for the sorority and fraternity, witnesses say she screamed once she realized what happened with dozens of owe mega frat members trying to help the girl. >> with 30 men trying to get the awning off of the baby, you have never seen anything like it ever. >> meanwhile, the victim's neighbors say this really makes them think about their own mortality. >> you can leave out in the morning and not come back. you know? because life isn't a promise to nobody. >> reporter: still a lot of questions as far as the investigation is concerned including questions about the lent of the screws that bolted this door into place. l & i could not get into any of those details at this point. police did interview about ten witnesses as of yesterday. joyce? >> thank you, dave. in lindenwald, new jersey, police are searching for the driver involved in a hit-and-run accident that left a man in critical condition. police say a dark colored pick-up truck was headed west on the white horse pike. that will was around 10:30 last night. when it slammed into the man and kept on driving. the victim has head injuries, the truck appeared to be older model ford pick-up. if you saw anything, please call police. a teenager riding his bicycle is hit and critically injured in northeast philadelphia, the 17 year old peddling across the intersection of levick street and the boulevard when he was hit by a car. now the driver did stop here. it happened around 11:30 last night. the teen is being treated at st. christopher's hospital for multiple injuries. dozens of catholic churches around the delaware valley celebrated their last sunday mass. beginning tuesday, many parishes will be merging as part of a cost-cutting plan by the archdioces of philadelphia. fox 29's drew dickman liver outside the basilica of saint peter and paul with reaction, sad day for many, drew. >> yes, very sad day, joyce. archdioces says sagging attendance, lack of staffing is two of the biggest reasons why they are making these mergers, as you can imagine, as you said, very disappointing for people that have been going to the same parish for decades. (bells told). >> the bell told on saint ann church in bristol. >> i can't take it, i'm very sad, very heart broken. >> this has been my church all my life. >> long time parishioners, fought back tears, while joining the crowded congregation in song on its final sunday of services, the popular church that's been around for more than a century will merge with saint mark's, disappointed members are now left with only memories. >> when i was younger i would come in and try to get a seat in the pew that my grandfather donated back in when they built the church. >> the doors of saint matthew church in conshohocken aren't closing, instead, opening up wider, welcoming three nearby parishes. >> i think this is great. but i feel sad that a lot of them are closing because i just don't think that god would want that. >> the merge churches will continue to be worship sites, a host for beddings, funerals, important dates, on the church calendar. it is a transition theresa is trying to stay open minded about coming from saint cosmos and damian. >> we work so hard to get that church built. i remember as a little girl father vincent going around, collecting for that church. >> like the flowers outside this house of god, clint gates hopes these moves will help the arch tie cyst stay in bloom. >> like father her end said in his 11:30 mass, we want to reunite into one building, one alter, and that's what the goal is. >> when the mergers are official on tuesday, there will be 219 parishes in the five counties that make up the archdioces of philadelphia. the archdioces says this there also could be plans to explore more mergers in the future, joyce? >> thank you, drew. well, firefighters move quickly to put out the flames at a row home in south philadelphia. fire broke out on the 1500 block of 20th street, this was around 5:30 this morning. it was under control almost a half hour later. firefighters say one woman was taken to the hospital, the cause is under investigation. happening now, new information released in the case of justin harris. he is the man charged in the death of his 22 year old son, cooper. after the toddler was left inside his car, unattended for seven hours. as fox's leland individual adder reports, the father spoke at his son's funeral. >> just this morning reports from georgia indicate not only did the father admit to searching the internet for how hot it needs to be for a child left in a car to die, but the mother did as well. justin harris pleaded not guilty to killing his son by leaving him in a car for seven hours when it was 09 degrees out earlier this month. harris told police he drove to work with his son cooper, in the back of his suv around 9:00 a.m. came back to his car midday to put something inside, finally around 4:00 p.m., he left the offers only to stop at a shopping center and frantically begin cpr on his son, yelling, what have i done. by that point, it was too late. cooper harris, 22 months, died of heat exposure while in his carseat in the back every his father's suv. family members held his funeral while his dad sat in jail calling in on a speaker phone to the service. a search warrant released hours before the funeral revealed his father admitted to police he searched the internet for child death inside vehicles and what temperature it needed to be for that to happen. he explained his internet searches to police saying he was fearful something like this could happen. harris has been charged with second agree cruelty to child and felony murder. the police have said they have evidence that this is more than just negligence, but what exactly that evidence is, be it the internet searches, something related to him walking out to the car in the middling of the day and not notices his son, or other information, they've not said. in new york, leland, fox news. onto your fox 29 weather authority, and wow what another gorgeous weekend. as we take a look outside our old city studios here, we still got some daylight left out there, meteorologist, dominica davis is here now, dominica, what can we expect for the rest of the evening? >> for the rest of the evening, stays quiet. so as we rounds out the weekends, doing so pretty nice way. eight a degrees our high temperature here at the airport, weaver pretty much low to mid 80s in a few stray 70s, there showing up, through mount pocono, 77, and down in wildwood, coming in at 79 for this evening. temperatures are still in the low 80s, and most spots, few upper 70s, will cool down into the mid 60s, for tonight. it is going to be a fairly quiet evening, as you can see hoo to here on the radar, showers are signature out to our west, along with the humidity, but that does all start to change as we head into the work week and get closer to the fourth of july. we'll have a look at that forecast coming up in just a little bit. joyce? >> all right, thank you, dominica. in iraq government forces are fighting to re-take the hometown of saddam hussein for rebels. aircraft have been hitting rebble positions and fighting broken out in different parts of the city. reports report iraq's army continues massive operation to take the key city city from isis militants, but progress has been slowed by booby traps and stiff resistance. saddam hussein's hometown just outside of baghdad. controlling it is key to protecting the capitol. battle has been one of the bloodiest during the conflict. iraqi military using helicopters, tanks, commandos, to force out insurgents. iraqi soldiers reportedly now control the roads in and out of the ticrit. militants hold most of the city. as more than 200us special forces troops in iraq try to help slow the isis push, iraqi officials announced to the delivery russian made fighter jets from moscow. us has long promise add shipment of f16's, but dag dad reportedly turned to russia after it continued delays with the american delivery. congress has been re luck and the to aid the mal key led government. with iraq parliament scheduled to meet on tuesday to select new prime minister, if fallkey is pushed out, the pentagon may just up its military support for the country. in jerusalem, fox news. bizarre burglary in washington state. two women break into the governor's office. what police say they stole and how they were caught. this bucks county woman says she watched her daughter almost die after she overdosed on heroin. but her life was saved by a nasal spray. coming up why she fears others may not be as lucky. howard? >> reporter: oh, the phillies, they have another day of struggles with their offense. and after the game the phillies make a trade. that's coming up in >> bullets fly on burbon street, new orleans say one of the victims is in critical condition. the gunfire broke out around 2:00 a.m. a witness says a man shot at another man, and then opened fire on the crowd in the streets. well, police are going over the surveillance footage in the area hoping to identify the shooter who still is on the loose tonight. this is the third major shooting on burbon street in the last three years. more drama for the irs. congress is now calling for the agency to turn over the hard drive that set the center at the missing emails controversy. fox's peter deuce i has the very latest on that. >> here's how lois learner's lawyer says all of those emails the congressional investigators went went missing. learner walks into her offers, finds the monitor is blue, and that the compute is her kapt. >> hard drives not deliberately destroyed those creating suspicion are doing so because it is an election year telling cnn, quote, she was as upset as anybody else was about the loss of the emails and the other documents which were on there, which were quite important to her. but, the truth is, this, this was one of those things that happened, at the time she did everything she could to retrieve it, she reported it right away. >> a.m. that's the story. doesn't think his client will be prosecuted for wrong dong, and she is just trying to put all of this behind her. but, lawmakers saying, not so fast. and there is a new push on capitol hill to think outside the box for new ways to scour cyber space to find files the irs says are gone for good. >> we bring in the geeks and the nerds who actually know how this things works and put them up on the stand, bring them in for a deposition, i think we'll get whole different answer about thousand this works. bring in the good people at microsoft. i doubt they built a product that made billions of dollars over the fact that you could just suddenly lose all of these emails. >> over site committee chairman isis said he has hard time believing learner didn't make paper copies of her emails, and that he thinks she broke some laws by revving 1.1 million tax records to the doj trying to get conservative gripes in trouble. in washington, peter deuce i, fox news. >> two women under arrest for burglarizing the governor's offers in washington state. surveillance video caught them in the act, shows them walking around the legislative building. one of the robbers is even wearing a state patrol hat taken, native american mask, jewelry, framed photos and bottle of wine were also stolen. one of the suspects is pulled over after caught speeding when the state trooper noticed that the hat and an empty bottle of wine was inside the car, now, investigators don't think the women even new they had broken into the governor's office. a cruise ship is back out at sea tonight, after catching fire holland america ship found safe, and set sale to alaska. fire broke out yesterday afternoon inside the boiler room, there were 3,000 people on board, nobody was hurt, so to make up for the delay, passengers got a $250 credit to use during their trip. >> while drug overdoses are rising, number of lives in our area being saved to narcan. being used to rescue some people experiencing an overdose. and as fox 29's shawnette wilson shows us, it can really provide a second chance. >> it was the most traumatic thing i've ever experienced in my life. >> this bucks county mother, recalls the late night in april. >> i was in a panic. she wasn't in the house. i didn't know where she was. >> her 20 year old daughter overdosed on heroin zoo. was snorting it. that night she used, she injected it. that was the first time. >> but first time injecting heroin nearly cost the young girl her life. we're concealing her identity to protect her daughter who also has a young child. >> society is not educated very well on addiction. >> susan shoemaker works with steps to recovery, a treatment and substance abuse facility. >> i felt that she was definitely in a life or death situation and that she didn't want to die. >> she had been somewhat of a counselor for the girl who reached out to her the night she overdosed. >> i received a text message from this young woman who state that she did inject heroin for the first time and felt that she was going to overdose. i immediately had to pick up the phone and call her line. she couldn't see straight. >> susan discovered the girl walking home, but stud endly stopped responding so she called 911, then the girl's mother who found her unconscious in the driveway. >> there were screams that i heard and witness from the her mother that i never want to hear again. >> paramedics arrived shortly after police and saved the girl's life using this, commonly referred to acinar can. in pennsylvania, only paramedics can carry and administer the drug, which reverses the overdose and sends the use near accelerated withdraw. >> you do not know if she would be here today. it is the only reason that she is still alive and in treatment. >> narcan has been around for decades, injection form, but recently drawn criticism because of the newest form t can now be administered as a mist through the nose, and there is a push in the state to have all first responders armed with it. >> it is in a pre loaded syringe. >> doctor barry burton the assistant medical director for bucks county rescue. >> we're having a significant public health problem right now with the supply of heroin. our goal is to save those that can be saved, and hopefully give them the opportunity to make the critical decision to make better choices. >> he feels narcan helps provide that. a proponent of the drug, yes, but he under stands why it is so controversial. >> the concern that we have about someone deciding they take more of the drug because they have an immediate rescue available to them. >> he says narcan is not the solution, but a bridge to treatment for the drug user. >> they are still going to want the fix if you haven't gotten to the root cause. again, the point is this, is to give those individuals who have made bad choices the opportunity to change their opinion, to recognize that they have a problem. >> while some may still oppose narcan, this mother says it gave her daughter a second chance. >> it saved her life. because if they didn't administer the narcan, she wouldn't be here. >> if you would like to help get a bill pass today allow awe hall enforcement, first responds nerves pennsylvania to carry and administer narcan go, to myfoxphilly.com. click on seen on tv. in the news room, shawnette wilson, "fox 29 news". now, who can administer narcan varies from state to state, but supporters around the country fight to go get it into the hands of recovery counselors, and family members of people dealing with drug abuse. festivities for gay pride week kicking off in new york it -- city. rainbow flags lining the streets, along fifth avenue here, mayor bill diblasio and governor and due cuomo were among those walking the parade route today which passed right by those stone wall in. the place where riots broke out back in 1969 at the start of the gay rights movement. retailers are making your shopping experience quick and easy. some stores will even e-mail your receipt. but, that may not be such a good idea. what the convenience could cost you, that's coming up. plus, remembering our heroes, how an arizona community is remembering the lives of a team of firefighters who died a year ago today hundreds, every firefighters battling hot conditions building more con danement lines, among the raging wild fire in arizona, officials say about 8 miles are now charred along the state's white mountains, since the fire broke out about two weeks ago. residents are still evacuate from the dozens of homes tonight, now, none of the fire has been contained yet. and it has been one year since a team of arizona firefighters were trapped in the middle of a wild fire in the dessert hills. dominick dentinal owe how they are representing the brave men who died fighting the yarnell fire. >> nineteen brave lines taken by un tame recall fire that ambushed them in the high desert hills of central arizona, also destroyed half of hometown of yarn it. and memorial fence went up as community grieved for the hot shots, that fence eventually came down, urging those touched by the tragedy to create a lasting tribute. >> the day that we took the fence down, in the rain, and it took 90 minutes to take it down after all of the items being up for 72 days, and during those 90 minutes, the sky turned blue. all of the rain stopped. and allowed us to take all of the wet items down. >> locals painstakenly made aver youth museum of the fence, it is on line now, and includes scams of the thousands of letters and mo men toast. >> if this part of the history of our community, and i hated to see it left and destroyed, because the fire department could not handle all that they were facing at that time. the grief, and it was very overwhelming. >> the second memorial is temporarily on display to mark monday's anniversaries, as families still fight the pain drawn out now in a lawsuit against the state alleging the authorities didn't do enough to protect the firefighters. there has been no less in wild fire since the hot shots died. today, crews are dealing with a growing fire in vernon, where strong winds are driving the flames over containment lines. the community there praying their own fire crews stay safe n los angeles, dominick did didi natale, fox news. >> once a crown jewel, now, it is an eyesore. but, there are big plans for the devine lorraine. how it could spatter spark a [ male announcer ] ortho crime files. illegal hosta-taking. voluntary plantslaughter. evidence submitted. ♪ homeowner draws the line. ortho deer b gon. long-lasting. effective. safely keeps thieving deer and rabbits away from your plants. guaranteed. smells good to you, but to them it smells like justice. deer b gon, part of the ortho family. get order. get ortho®. the art museum stems, the start after 17-mile walk overnight in philadelphia. it is hosted by the american foundation for suicide prevention to raise money and awareness, mental illness, and suicide. now, the tenth leading cause of death in the u.s. those walking for loved ones decorated bags, creating createa pathway of light outside the museum. at the bottom of the hour now, let's get another check of the weather, here's meteorologist, dominica davis, a butte. >> i awesome this weekend, humidity nice and low, but will start creeping up over the next couple of days. >> big changes coming in the temperature department, but still nice right now, humidity pretty low, when you are below 60, that's when it kind of feels good. >> it starts to get sticky so everybody in that comfortable zone right now, but big changes, dew point temperatures close to 70, so here's what is to expect as we all head into this important holiday week. >> tomorrow it is dry, but the humidity starts to climb up. not terribly humid, but start to feel the difference. tuesday, through thursday, this looks to be the problem part of the week. >> could go as high as 103 specially by wednesday, scattered storms back to the picture, then for the fourth of july still uncertain, but we could see a lingering shower, i'm tell you the best bet for that coming up in a little bit. joyce? >> dom cane, thank you. all about beautifying the community, as part of the wawa welcome america festivities. volunteers with paint brushes in hand, took part in the mural arts paint day. the event was held on north 41st street, that's in west philadelphia, in one of the areas designated as a promise zone by president obama. and it was a fun day sunday in the park for participant in the big brothers-big sisters program. some 800 people came out to franklin square in center city, for all of that food and fun. there was an opportunity for meant ores and mentees to meet and spends more time together. >> at one time it was the crown jewel of the philadelphia skyline bye over the years it has turned into one of the city's ugliest eyesores, but new life is coming to the historic deline lorraine hotel in for the philadelphia. as our chris o'connell tells us it, may be just the spark north broad street is looking for. >> has anyone told you you were crazy to invest in north broad street? >> pretty much everybody told me i was craze. >> you might thinker i can bloom end felled is crazy, too. after all, would you dump $31 million into an abandoned ten story graffiti-filled shell of a building in north philadelphia? >> when i first came here over ten years ago nobody had an interest in this corridor. now, i mean, i heard people call it god forsaken. >> well, no one is laughing these days. he has started a long awaited major renovation to the old lady of north broad street, the divine lorraine hotel. >> this is probably the most iconic building in philadelphia. >> he took us on a tour of the historic hotel built back in 1894. >> these stairs are original. these are all al bass err. >> look beneath the spray paint and decades of dirt you can see philadelphia history, like the marble lobby, once home to some of the cities wealthiest residents, or the ten story ballroom where many spent their saturday nights dancing. all now a distant memory. >> there was actually a statue here of father devine. >> hotel was made famous by civil rights icon, father major jealous devine, who bought the property back in 1948 for his church he made it into the first fully racially integrated hotel in the country. eventually closing its doors in 1999. it has been home to many homeless, vague grants, and graffiti artists, ever since. >> the dream is that it is to become hotels room. >> but things are looking up at the devine lorraine, plans for upscale hotel, several restaurants on the grounds floor, and an event send ooh, just like the old days, on the tenth floor, says ants were in the original plan, but something changed in the way the building spoke to him. >> and it would be inapropriate for us to have a design in our minds and then fit it, fit that into a building. the proper way is for the building to kind of leave that conversation, and this building is saying make me a hotel. >> but this project is a lot more than just old memories and bricks. the development of the deaf even lorraine just may be the beginning of the rebirth of north broad street. >> north broad street has an opportunity to really become a study in urban development. >> banking on the rebirth of broad street, bloomen-felled has invested other nearby properties, but he said this will be the cornerstone in revitalizing this area. >> things are happening on north broad. the next year and a half/think more activity than anywhere else in philly. >> preliminary work has already started, mainly, graffiti removal and replacing the iconic neon signs. >> the plan to have the fall of next year to start another chapter in the life of a philly landmark. >> what we did, and i think actually will be the best the devine lorraine ever had, and farther devine will look down and be proud of her, that's my goal. >> in north philadelphia, chris o'connell, "fox 29 news". beautiful building. he worked on his parents farm and he served in worlds war two. and now, he's finally has his high school diploma. but that's not even the best part. the bonus that made the graduation ceremony even more special for this 100 year old gentleman. plus: shopping security, more and more companies are opt to go save paper and sends you e receipts. but what you need to know to keep your have you unless add lot of stores are now giving you the option to have a receipt electronically sent to your inbox? but if you opt for an e receipt, are you compromising your privacy? fox 29's iain page takes a look at that. >> shopping is a favorite american pasttime. >> yes, i like to shop. >> a trip downtown walking around looking for clothes, electronics, or that perfect gift, it is part of who we r and it has been going on for years. but what is new is how we get our receipts. paper or e-mail. >> i prefer to have a paper receipt. maybe i'm old-fashioned. >> i like the e-mail. i like to have a record of it. and i don't have to file it away physically, i can put it on my compute near file. >> national retail chains now offer e-receipts, convenient, get sent to your in box, save paper. i can go into cvs and buy toothpaste and i get 4-foot long receipt. i just don't see the point in that. >> what about your privacy? once a business has your e-mail address, your in box can fill one junk mail. anthony, president of pro computer services, and says there are privacy concerns with e receipts, and he wants people to think before giving out their personal information. >> anything that you have e-mail, you have to understand, is not secure. it could con tan information such as your home address, purchase history f that e-mail goes to the wrong place, it could get publicized. >> once retailer has your e address they could send you coupons. >> coupons in my e-mail is casino of nice. >> coupons, i love coupons. >> i might get some more span for them if they try to e-mail me coupons, but i am not bore i had. >> but coupons also a way for retail tow keep tabs on you. >> company when they sends you that, they could have personal identification right on there. so, remember, any type of discount that you are get something never a discount. it is always an exchange for something. >> that social security is usually information a retailer wants to build its data base. >> another concern, when a retailer has your e-mail address and gets hacked, like target last year, your personal information is at risk. >> people use the same passwords, so if you're compromise in the one location and you register that e-mail address for say your bank, other on line shopping sites, you might be breached everywhere. >> many shoppers don't realize how dangerous it is to give a retailer their e-mail address. >> they could have my social security, telephone number, anything. >> but he says the safest way to protect your personal information, in today's digital world; to opt out of the e-receipts. >> ultimately safe is plane old paper. just doesn't lose a piece of paper. >> iain page reporting for us tonight. so, how should you deal with these e-receipts? consumer experts recommends setting up a separate e-mail e-l account that you use only for e-receipts. that way, you can track them easily and you won't get them mixed up with your other e-mail. a viet nam veteran fired from his job. he says he was just trying to help somebody in need. coming up: what the employee did that angered his managers. dominica? >> i hope you had a chance to enjoy the nice wet they are weekends, because it turns hazy, hot and humid with the week ahead with dangerous heat inin in up-state new york a 100 year old world war ii vet finally gets his chance to gradual high school. george polka picked up his diploma last night, and what made it even more special, he received an agree alongside his great grandson, who also attend the school. the war veteran says he dropped out of school after eighth grade to work on his family farm, before being drafted in 1941. congratulations to him. and the entertainment worlds is mourning the death of actor nishak taylor died last night as hirst home of cancer. best known for his role as the lovable anthony, hit citcom designing women, and his role in the movie manaquine. pretty flamboyant in that. taylor was 67 years old. and, what was meant to be a small act of kindness ended up costing a war veteran his job. the 73 year old viet nam vet was working at cracker barrel in florida when he gave corn muffin to a man he thought was homeless. man had come in to ask for condiments, but the worker gave him the packets along with the muffin. now, shortly after that, he was fired. >> the general manager said to me, i have bad news for you, joe, we're going to have to let you go. it is the rule. they legally can do this, because i did break the rule. >> well, when the community heard that joe was fired, they took to the internet and started an on line campaign against cracker barrel. it was patriots versus loyalists at the freedom 5k in old city this morning, runners chose a side and then ran 3.1-mile, hoping their team would win of course. and the race winner, gab re he will peers. he was on team patriots, as was our own chris o'connell. he finished 33rd overall, not bad, chris. the race raised money for the friends of the independence national historic park. >> dom cane, great day to go out there and race? >> yes, it was real nice, and our producer, aaron, he left himself out. but he ran, too, he was on that other team. >> he didn't win. sorry. >> yes, gorgeous weekends, absolutely beautiful, i know a loft people are looking forward to this work week, because a lot of people have vacations with the upcoming holidays, so next couple of weeks are going to be important, as this vacation time for many of folks, but if you are going to take a swim, certainly the pool, wait until you see this forecast, you will want the poop after you see this for sure. so, let's go ahead and get to it, 82 in the city. made it to the mid 80s, eight a the high here in the city so come down little bit the temperature, but pretty uniform, little cooler on the coast, courtesy of nice sea breeze, so gorgeous day at the beach. and the next couple of days will continue to be nice at the beach. certainly with the heat coming in. want to show you the temperatures, winding it out, we have heat that's building, a lot of tropical moisture is coming up. notice, the 90s, sitting down in new orleans, where it starts to get to the bright pink and red, those are 100 agree temperatures, that is all headed our way. so we are looking at the potential for a heatwave coming in here tuesday, wednesday, and thursday, and heatwave the criteria for that is three consecutive days with temperatures either at or above 09. and i think we'll do it. >> so here is a look at the satellite and radar. storms sitting out to the west, quiet for us, clear skies, turn partly cloud think evening, but no worries for rain. that's sitting out to the west. still pretty dry around here. so it will take some time for that moisture to work its way down. i want to show you future cast. we start it out tomorrow morning. the clouds are around. so tomorrow, calling for mainly a partly to mostly cloudy day this model is aggressive showing showers sitting out to the extreme north wells. that's a chance, i think for the most part, we stay dry from start to finish, on monday. tuesday, is a different story, we start out with the clouds, and then chances for scattered showers, and thunderstorms come in to play, by afternoon thon that scenario will continue wednesday and even into thursday. right now, thursday looks like our best chance to see some strong to severe storms. tonight, though, it is nice and quiet, just nice night to enjoy, the rest of the this weekend, 64 degrees, partly cloudy, comfortable, because the humidity is still going to be low. tomorrow, the humidity starts to climb. so i think it is really the best of the next couple every days, but it will be a hot one. in the city 88 degrees, certainly hot, and then in the mountains, along the shore, poconos, looking good, it will be about 78, still dealing with little sea breeze there. so nice beach day tomorrow. and i even think nice beach day for actuals, as well, wednesday and thursday i think will be the worse of this in terms of scattered showers, thunderstorms, but a look at the five day, rating about a eight for tomorrow. i don't see it thank bad, just touch more humid, tuesday, wednesday, thursday a run at the heatwave, then the all-important fourth of july forecast. right now it looks like the timing of this front is a little if-ee, so we may have a learning shower in the morning, but, if we do have that, it will be out of here by afternoon, so i think as far as barbeques go, or any fireworks not in any jeopardy, we'll bring you the update at 10:00 o'clock. howard is next, with some phillies? >> oh, yes, those phillies, they had another bad day at the offers. off at citizens bank park. and they make a trade after the game. and the 76ers coach breath brown is unbelievable honest, with how bad the sixers season may be. that's all knows baseball teams play better at home. in the case of the phillies not close to the case. phillies lost all four games against the atlanta braves. last time the phillies lost four game series against the braves at home was 1964. then the phillies made a trade after the game. this is a beauty. sending infielder ronnie to arizona for catcher ray willie gomez, that's going to change things. the team can't hit, with men in scoring position, are now ten games under 500, let's go to the ballpark and take a look. all right, early in the game, second inning, two-nothing, bj upton, that's ben revere in sent here can't play centerfield a little bit. there is men on first and second, i mean, bad track to the ball, terrible, so it is two-nothing braves, looks like he might need life support in the dugout after injuring his rib against the padded centerfield wall. all right, let's go to the bottom that far inning in the second inning, marilyn bird, first of two homeruns today, for marilyn bird. so the phillies now trail only by one, two to one. all right, third inning. now the phillies have a man on first, chase utley, by the way, is hitting 240 in the month of june, not good. but that is an out. so the phillies fail to score there. all right, with the score three-two, in the fifth, marilyn bird, man on third, and first, and he grounds out, so again, the phillies zero for seven, with men in scoring position. let's go to the ninth inning. men have second and third, chase utley is up, no, again, they fail to score men in scoring position. chase utley the fly ball. not happy the phillies lose three-two, two and six on his home stands. after the game ryan sandberg states the obvious. >> offensively, 13 hits, two walks, scored two runs on two solo homeruns. so, had our chances, men on base, couldn't come up with a hit with multiple guys on base right down to the end. >> i would agree. that's the obvious. the nba draft is his from time to time sixers used third and tenth pick in the draft thursday night, draft two players that won't play for the team this coming season. another season, of tanking games. and by the way, i get what the sixers have to do, but team benefit from not trying to win, so i talked to the head coach, breath brown afterward. how bad will this season be? >> you guarantee fans won't be 26 game losing streak next year? >> i can't guarantee them anything. i can guarantee them to really take a deep breath and, you know, really look at -- understand what goes on. just take a deep breath, and bear with us, show some level of patience, i get it, but i do think that we had to make these types of moves in order to build something that is of a championship caliber. >> so guarantee you won't lose 26 straight. many tough questions for the head coach. you will hear that conversation, and lots of it, with breath brown, 10:30, great finish to the world cup games between netherlands and mexico, let's go to brazil. now it is one-nothing mexico, late in the game, 88 minutes, netherlands in orange, so down one-nothing, and off the corner kick, they score. so it is 101. now, that is penalty, a weak penalty, the yellow card, that sets up a penalty kick in the 93rd minute for the netherlands, what do they do with that? they score, they beat mexico, the score there two to one. all right, tonight, i think the people will be interested to hear what brett brown says. >> yes, all right, can't wait for. that will here stories we're working on for you for the "fox 29 news" at 10:00. lightning strikes a soccer fan in the head. he is clinic to go life tonight. the unusual place where he was standing when he was hit. those stories and much more standing when he was hit. those stories and much more coming up tonight (upbeat march plays) ♪ good morning, usa! ♪ i got a feeling that it's gonna be a wonderful day ♪ ♪ the sun in the sky has a smile on his face ♪ ♪ and he's shining a salute to the american race ♪ ♪ oh, boy, it's swell to say ♪ good... ♪ good morning, usa aah! ♪ good morning, usa! (brakes squeak) (door opens) stan, what are you doing home? it's only 4:00. they all went bowling. who did? bullock and his inner circle. well, why don't you ask to be in the inner circle? i did. sir? (wind whistling) smith, what are you doing here?
New-yorkUnited-statesFranklin-squareMoscowMoskvaRussiaJerusalemIsrael-general-IsraelConshohockenPennsylvaniaSaint-ann-church >> rajiv has the rare gift of being able to folk coast on shop palm details. he paints a broad pictures. he listens more than he takes. he speaks to generals frankly, but so do the grunts and the other minor characters who drive the plot of any major story. this month marks the tenth anniversary of george w. bush's invasion of iraq. nothing written or said better explains the resulting folly than rajiv's book, life in the emrad city, the green zone. and yesterday again, rajiv, gives us detail, the new book, "little america." right now these days, a short-term sequester to find $80 billion, but over the next decade we have to scrape up three to five trillion, which is just about what we managed to squander on an iraq war that left so many dead and so many more people who hate us. so let's start there. in the front piece of imperial city, he quotes t.e. lawrence who advised his british superiors in 1917, do not try to do too much with your own hands. better the arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. its their war and you're there to help them. under the very odd conditions of arabia, your practical work will not be as good as perhaps you think it is. and among the flood of -- from the much lamented molly eye vans who says it's like reading a horror novel. you want to put your face down and moen, -- moan, how could we have been so stupid? we had this invasion, and a few of the reporters in the region were drowned out by the washington juggernaut. some of us reported from vietnam, recalled how thousand-year-old societies are a little suspicious of saviors with a shopping list. but it happens. so, what's wrong with us? >> good question. it's great to be here, thank you all for coming out so early on a sunday morning, and, mort, thank you for sitting here with me. we -- we're a great nation. we like to think we can good out and fix other societies. we have a lot o to offer but every spending two plus years observing our nation-building efforts in iraq, and now more recently three years traveling back and forth to afghanistan, to observe what we're doing the there and actually spending more money in afghanistan than iraq and it's the longest war our nation has ever been engaged in longer than the revolutionary war. i come away with mixed opinions about this. on one hand you look at both of these and say, what are we doing in the business of trying to build, in some case rebuild, in the case of afghanistan, build from scratch, shattered societies where there's little human capacity, very little infrastructure to speak of, and we're sort of building it up from theground. and its really -- what were we thinking? we could do this? at the same time, i'm not one of these people who is inherently a defeatess. though i've written two very critical books of our engage independent these two wars. i like to think in a nation of 300 million plus people, we possess those who have the relevant and necessary subject matter expertise to provide that sort of modest but essential help to serve in some ways as modern day lawrences in these societies. the problem is we don't select those people in the case of the area years of the iraq war, we chose people from the local political fidelity, and then nation building, and i write about how many of the higher -- many of the individuals who wanted to go out and work for the coalition provisional authority in 2003 and 2004 were asked by officials at the pentagon questions about things like their view on roe v. wade and capital punishment. that brought us people like the 24-year-old kid with no background in finances to re-open the baghdad stock exchange, a 21-year-old kid who was an ice cream truck driver elm was assigned to the team of americans, asked to help rehabilitate iraq's interior ministry. its different in afghanistan under the obama administration. this is where the supposedly pros were going to be put in summary judgment the state department and usaid were supposed to bring in the experts from our nation's civil service and foreign service. the problem was many of our best people has already burnt out in iraq by then, and so they simply kind of put out a notice for jobs to be filled and waited for resumes to come in. instead of going out and scouring universities like this, ngos and nonprofits, the private sector. if i were obama, i would have called up the human resources heads at apple and microsoft and google and said, give me one of your people for a year and go out and find people who are willing to live in these obscure conditions, fine people who are willing -- who possess these skills. we never did that. and so i'm not sure that when you look back at iraq anda, it really represents the best of what our nation can do if we really put our mind to it. >> host: thankses a lot. i think it's important that -- reporters in situations like this, military situations, are no less important than medics. it's kind of society's money, it's their blood, and people have to know what's going on. there's a line in emerald city, a wonderful device dropping real vignettes through an have gone narrative, there's one in the green zone where you say, -- at a party at the end and at the end a coalition press officer notices two journalist in the crowd and pulls them aside and says, who invited you here? no press is allowed here. this is sort of a social occasion. the general said they'd been invited bay coalition staffer. the press officer told the journalists to stay put while she consulted with a superior. she returned later with hand-held video camera. kicking them out might cause a scene and would result in a story. the journalists could stay but they would have to promise on tape they wouldn't write what they saw. so, quote, we never came to a cpa barbecue with a camera. these people behind us aren't cpa people drinking beer. we were never here. another, we will not report the fact that everyone here is celebrating the end of the cpa, the others said. a short while later bremer -- jerry bremer, we remember him -- every wanted a picture with these two men and some asked for an autograph. as one has been sent a bunch of times, trying to stay out of pools and imbeds and every other damn thing people have come up to control reporters, and having covered vietnam where we could go anywhere we were dumb enough to go, how much did we suffer in iraq and then afghanistan by not by americans reporters and other reporters not getting a chance to see what was happening? >> guest: i think it very much circumscribed our knowledge of what was happening. i sort of bucked the community of fellow journalists by spend as much time as i do in the green zone. early on, probably back april of 2003. so, almost ten years ago. u.s. troops arrived in baghdad. a couple weeks into the american presence there. there was already some -- looting going on, shiite clergy was rising up. there were questions about security in parts of baghdad, and american troops were posing the question, when do we get to go home? and i remember being on a scratchy satellite foreign call with the then-foreign editor for the "washington post," bill bennett, and i was telling him about all this. he listened patiently and waited for me to finish and then said to me, rajiv, think back to the best journalism, the bet literature to come out of the vietnam war. it wasn't about vietnam as much as it was about the americans who went there to change this country and how they themselves were changed. focus on the american experience. and i thought at that point he was just full of it. there was writing going on. what was i going to worry about that? but over time, those words would echo in my head, and when many of my fellow reporters wanted to go out with the military out to anbar province and get in fire fights which i did but i chose to spend more time in the bubble. i felt a little guilty. you'd have a hot meal, bacon cheeseburger, the remark able thing is the amount of pork products we fed in a facility with a lot of muslim staff. but small matter. so, i felt like, wow, i'm not really being a war correspondent here, i'm sitting in air conditioned rooms listening to people diagram on white boards the plan to bring in "no child left behind" standard in iraqi education. so inge it took awhile to sink in and then realize this is a bizarre world. and i was able to do that early on in part because it was an organization -- the american presence was put together on the fly, and there really wasn't as much of an established structure to corral journeyses. there was if you were with the military and the imbedding program. you have to have approvals and you were assigned to a unit. but with the civilian presence it was much for flee-flowing. over time that started to change. that theme you read from was in the summer of 2004. and they tried those ham-handed tactics then but they would in some ways get better in terms of trying to restrict access, and for instance, with regard to photographs today -- with regard to afghanistan today, you can't just go on the embassy compound. you have to be escorted. they set clear ground rules. your able to rub elbows with people is very limited. they see this as controlling the message, which it is, but it also means we all understand much less of what's going on, in some cases for the good and some cases for the bad. if was easily able to have a beer at the embassy bar in kabul, which i have to sort of sneak into now, as a -- not registering as a journalist, if i could go there regularly, you know, i'd probably hear as many shocking details of dysfunction as i might here interesting stories of things going on that actually would turn out to be what the government might consider to be a good news story. but because that interaction is so limited, we don't get much of either one. and i think we're all the poorer for it. the fewer journalist out there covering these wars today, and we can talk about that -- it's a real unfortunate development that has a lot to do with not just american fatigue about the war in afghanistan, but the real economic constraints faced by particularly the newspaper industry and by the media as a whole. but fewer journalists out there. you have -- but you have a story that is still vitally important, but it's much, much more difficult to really convey the substance of what is going on to the american people. >> host: a good point. everytime i hear the term "citizen journalist" i think of citizen orthopedic surgeon. this is not a job for amateurs. people don't understand the context, they will mislead us, and also likely get themselves killed, and it's -- and you've got to see this as a different layer. in your paper, really funny -- not incident but situation. there was the great military specialist, tom wisconsin, who is imbedded and riding on the tanks into baghdad with the soldiers and the cheering iraqis are yelling, we're so happy you have come. and then anthony, who speaks very good arabic -- >> guest: this is one of this mo intv d instructive stories of the american presence in baghdad. tom and the late anthony, perhaps the preeminent journalist covering the middle east of this generation. went on a patrol with the military in baghdad. tom was with the patrol, and they would go and -- the soldiers would introduce themselves to the individuals along the way, shopkeepers and such and say we're here for your protection, and they would hear back via -- through the translator that, we are were we support you thank you for coming here and liberating us, and then the patrols go on, and then anthony, who speaks fluent arabic, would pop into those places and say, so, what do you think of the americans? we oppose them a thousand percent, you know. they're here to kidnap or women. we will fight them at the first opportunity. and it was -- it wasn't a problem of poor translation. it was that they were saying one thing to the uniformed military and another thing to somebody who spoke their language and they were sharing what they felt. that was just such an important story. ran on the front page of the "washington post" but still sticks in any memory. one of those -- if the journalism we saw in the united states in the runup to the war left a lot of citizens wanting to credit ulouse, too quick to accept claims of weapons of mass destruction and it would be a cakewalk to rebuild iraqi society there was a lot of really good reportage in the immediate months that followed. and i don't think it -- it was internalized enough. all of the warning signs were out there for what we would then come, as a nation, have to live through for the following few years. >> host: you know, it's changing, the atmosphere. i've covered wars for a long time. the only time i've been a prisoner of war is at the hands of my own guys. but what is interesting is some of the best -- i agree, some of the best reportage were people who were able to avoid it. like during the invasion, gary knight, very good british photographer, shooting for "news week" and got vehicles and got them muddy and markings on the top and came in from kuwait, as unilaterals, which meant they were fair game. then we had this incident, these cameramen were shot down in baghdad by helicopters and nobody could get anything out of the military or the american government until suddenly the gun camera footage showed up on wikileaks. what about that? the wikileaks think and the first bit of the gun camera footage in baghdad? >> guest: it's gut-churning. and i still think there are unanswered questions out there about what they potentially suspected, what the pilots were thinking. they seemed pretty clear to me to be -- to look like journalists and operating as journalists. the real peril here, quite frankly, is -- has been less to u.s. citizens, americans, correspondents going over there, yes? several have been killed. but the real danger, day in and day out danger, has been faced by iraqi and afghan journalists who are many cases working for western news organizations like the reuters team. and if not iraqi and afghanistan, arab and people from neighboring nations. the guys who put their lives on the line, guys who have been arrested and detained in many cases by coalition forces, reasoning there's going to be less of an outcry to get them out. "associated press" photographer, part of a pulitzer winning team, was detained for many months by the u.s. military. there's a double standard out there. that is appalling. and these are the individuals who, without them, i wouldn't have these books, i wouldn't have the reporting in the "washington post." we wouldn't have these stories. we rely on them to translate, to drive, to provide security for us, and more important, actually go out and do their own journalism. in many cases in iraq and afghanistan, places are quite simply too dangerous for u.s. nationals to get to. so you rely on brave local journalist, and they're the ones who are paying a much, much higher price for all this. but they believe in the freedom of information, and they believe that their citizenry should be informed and ours should be, too. >> host: it's stunning how we don't realize. these guys normally earn a pittance, not only under pressure 0 from what might happen on the battlefield where there's gunfire but pressure on them from before. it's been for a long time kind of the undersung and the unknown part of reporting. another thing you touch on, just briefly, but importantly, in little america, we tend to -- we think of military action in the army and we look at these great terms, like smart bombs, you think, dumb pilots, or at least -- not so much the pilots but the drones, surgical precision. you hear surgical president in wartime situations, and kind of an eye roll here. and it's the nature of the situation. there's an exchange here where you were saying nickels -- using a precised guided missile or bomb was safer for civilians than relying on group-fired weapons. have you seen a 19-year-old lance corporal behind a 50 cal, he said referring to a powerful machine gun? you're going to kill people three times away. so these things happen. a., you have protection, b., you have scared kids, c., you have a few -- certainly not all -- who get off on and it actually like it. and i remember writing in choppers in vietnam with these door gunners, who you see water buffaloes buffaloes and have great fun shooting at the water buffaloes and they're essentially putting peasant families out of work for generations for doing that. now -- sorry. it's your show. >> guest: no. no. those become far more disciplined. and i've ridden on a lot of helicopters in afghanistan, and nice chance for target practice. they don't do it. in part because the overall ethos of counterinsurgency has taken root in the military. they understand their mission is to protect the local population, if they don't do that, they're not going to have a chance of success. we can put aside questions of who counter- incentury generals sis is the right strategy in afghanistan or not, is a big -- the associated question is whether, despite the military's embrace or counterinsurgency, almost with a messianic fervor, their defining ideology, whether our military is set up to implement that strategy. when you have 19-year-olds with powerful machine guns and, yes, they need to take steps to protect themselves, but the inherent tension here is that if you want to build -- if you want to protect the population, you have to live among them. you have to get out of your vehicles with inch-thick armoring and walk around with them. now need to show you're willing to take some risks with them. and that involves, though, real force protection issues. and so there's been this balancing act, and this is one of the things general mcchrystal was trying to punch and got a lot of resistance in the ranks. he ordered that exchange you're reading about with general nickelson and the marines, a result of general mcchrystal when he was in command of the war in 2009, putting strict restrictions on they of air strikes, saying, even if you see a bunch of taliban running into a building, you can't call in an airstrike there because you don't know if there are women and children in that building. he recognized too many civilians were being killed through these actions. now, imagine if you're one of those guys on the patrol and you're getting shot at by the talibans who just fled over there. you want to do them in, and so it was real cultural shift and one that uses military in some cases grudgely, some case unevenly accepted. but even so, it's really hard to do what we need to do with the sort of military that we have and with a desire to really minimize casualties. i say all of this not tackling the bigger issue of whether we should have been in there in that scope and scale in the first place. >> host: what should we think about predator drones? >> guest: i was asked this question yesterday, and i am not going to have the sort of reflexive drones are evil answer here. particularly after seeing when you bring in a large conventional force, what you potentially risk from civilian casualties. drones are far more precise. now, that doesn't mean civilians are killed. it seems pretty clear a number of civilian casualties from the drone strikes that have occurred in pakistan that are operated by the cia. i don't mean to condone that at all. but those drone strikes have taken a lot of senior level and other important leaders of al qaeda out of business. now, yes, it does cause a degree of blowback in pakistan, but some of these strikes are being done with the admission and acknowledgment of the pakistani government. war is awningly -- ugly business and we don't have a lot of great options. one option, we're not going to confront them. and that poses a real risk to the united states and our interests. sending in conventional troops isn't really an option. wouldn't good down well with the pakistanis and if you were to mount more raids like we did with osama, puts a lot of mental lives at potential risk. we should think we can regularly be sneaking into pakistani air space. so the drones, in my view, are the least worst option in all of this. i recognize that they're controversial, and i'm not -- what i'm not addressing here is the legal framework here. i think there are very legitimate questions by the legal framework as well as the issue of the use of drones against u.s. citizens, which there's a fascinating piece on at the front page of the "new york times" about that very subject. >> host: one of the things you bring out so well in "little america" which comes from an early effort to try to -- in the 50s to try to develop afghanistan so this stuff might not happen. but one thing that comes out strongly in the book is there is -- seems almost not so much between u.s. forces and the tall bab but more between the state department and the pentagon. and we have a series of examples and pick it up anywhere you want -- how guys have come in and for example figured out that cotton would be the perfect crop in a situation like thats' somebody in the washington gang doesn't like cotton, where inputs would be easily available and cheaply locally but got to come from either u.s. source0s are or the u.s. itself. talk about that stuff. >> guest: that how i got the subtitle of the book, the war within the war for afghanistan. i discovered as i traveled back and forth between d.c. and afghanistan, that i was really observing two fights. one was sort of the americans at large against the insurgents in afghanistan, and the other one was this internal conflict at multiple levels. there was a conflict between the state department, the pentagon. there was infighting between the statement department -- state department and the white house, the clash between richard holebrook and the national security council. fights even within various u.s. agencies, the cotton one was a galling example. in the farm lands of southern afghanistan, in the 60s and 0s, afghanistans largely grew cotton. they do things like stitch carpets and sew clothes. a lot of the land turned to poppy cultivation during the soviet -- they needed to feed their families and poppy was the best alternative. fast forward to the opportunity -- the current american presence. a well-founded desire to get them away from growing poppy, for all the obvious reasons, not the least of which that money helps to sustain the insurgency. afghans said, help us grow cot top again, and a very couple smart u.s. experts thought that was a good idea. wasn't be the most efficient crop but something they knew how to grow and wanted to grow. well, the u.s. agency for international development put roadblocks at every stain of -- step of the way. they said cotton is not to afghanistan's advantage. us a beck stan and pakistan grow more efficiently. afghanistans just need this as a way to get farmers to feed their families. 'and then finally, aid cited a 1986 act of congress, a the bumpers amendment, sponsored by senator dale bumpers of arkansas, that is a protectionist act that bars u.s. taxpayer money from helping another country's cotton industry. the white house could have got an waiver to help afghanistan but nobody wanted to pick the fight. so here you have the most, in my view, most effective competitor -- to poppy out there that a team of agriculture experts thought was the right thing, the afghans wanted, and we just didn't do it. it was simply galling to me. >> host: you know, i think it -- there will be a mic floating around, but toward the end of "little america" one line stands out, and i think looking ahead: for years we talked below the limitations of the afghans we should have focused on ours. so are there any questions? >> guest: there are two microphones on the side. if you can go to the microphones so they can pick it up on tv. >> host: why am i not surprises there are questions. >> went to a lecture one evening by allison mccoy that traced the heroin interdiction of southeast asia and then the heroin went to afghanistan and we were -- our hands were in that. do you know about that? >> guest: there's so much poppy grown in afghanistan,en and that's the -- poppy -- the paste and the poppy gives you opium that gets refined into heroin. nobody is bringing heroin into afghanistan. helmund province, one province of afghanistan, just to the west of kandahar, where we sent our marines starting in 2009. i write about this in the book. just that one province, in 2007 and 2008, produced more opium then processed into heroin, than the entire world population of junkies could consume in a year. nobody is bringing it in. there hasn't been any evidence, i've seen, that the united states has been -- or u.s. jim,0 interests have been profiting. if you turn the clock back to the 80s, there's some people who have argued -- and i haven't seen come -- compelling evidence -- the cia encouraged cultivation to help fund the resistance. we do know that poppy funds back then were used to help fight the soviets. and like with the overall growth of the antisoviet jihad, some of then was helpful a generation ago comes back to bite the afghan people and u.s. interests in the current environment. >> i'd like to know a little bit about president obama's feelings towards the military? has it evolved? what was his relationship earlier and what is it now? >> guest: that's a great question. and i think the president's relationship with the military operates on two different levels. there's sort of the -- the relationship with the southeastern-most commanders and the relationship with the grunts, the men and women really doing the fighting. i'll take the latter one first. the president and the vice president and their spouses have a real genuine commitment to helping active duty military, their families, and those who were wounded. you look at what they're doing, not just with wounded warriors but with veterans employment issues. they're devoting an awful lot of resources to that issue, and i think it stems from a real sort of -- i think a real genuine sense of, we need to help those people and their families who have been fighting in these long wars, many cases individuals who have done repeated tours there, individuals who have come back with, if not physical injuries, suffering with post traumatic stress. with regard to the senior leadership of the military, i think there's been an evolution there. i write a bit in the book about the 2009 debates that were taking place inside the white house.whether to surge in afghanistan, whether to grant general mcchrystal the 40,000 troops he was asking for in the late summer of 2009. and then something very curious happened. mcchrystal, general petraeus. and admiral mike mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, essentially all lined up in support of the troop surge, and they became the principle advocates for the surge. generally in our system the military provides the best advice to civilian leadership, then step back and let the civilians hash it out. in this case, however, bob gates, then the secretary of defense, a consummate washington player, decided he would hang back and let the military do the lobbying for the surge, and that pushed civil military relations into a sort of new place in our republic. putting the uniformed military in a very different position than it's been in, and there's some who argue the president felt boxed in by this. that he didn't necessarily feel like sending that many more troops was the optimal decision, yet he had all his generals lined up saying this is the only option that will work, and gave him very little maneuver room, which is why i believe when you saw the -- when president announced the surge, giving mcchrystal much of what he wanted but not all, he put a deadline on it, saying the surge troops would come home by ju 2011. reflecting his deep skepticism about the arguments made be the military. now, one other quick point. as we look and see how the president has allowed and embraced the use of drone warfare in pakistan and beyond, and the use of u.s. special operations forces in places like yemen and north africa. this is sort of light footprint, lower cost, more targeted, can have more control from the white house, you know, john brennan, now going to the cia. had far more control over how elements of that war were played out, as opposed to afghanistan, which was you give the troops and then the generals good off and do their thing. i think the president's relationship with the military is has sort of evolved a little bit, but it got off to a bit of a rocky start in the first year of his first term. >> host: you want to take a senator rubio water break? >> guest: i'm good. go by the mic and i'll take that guy. >> your focus is on iraq and afghanistan, and you certainly pointed out the ineptness and incompetencety that has taken place, which makes me wonder if it's possible for us in the future to ever go into a war without making a total mess of it, and if so, what do we need to do differently, we need to change, or just continue to screw these things up. >> guest: well, a couple different things to say about that. we shouldn't forget bob gate's parting comments right before he retired. where he noted the cadets at west point that any future president that wants to stand a land war in asia needs to have his head examined. that said, i don't think we all, despite the enormous costs of the iraq and afghanistan wars, given the -- this will be a vast understatement but the unsatisfactory outcome of both of these wars, and i think probably a great desire among many americans not to engage in wars like this ever again. i don't think we can simply assume that we will never be called upon to do something like this or some elements of this. let's say the assad regime falls tomorrow. and there's an international coalition that tries to go in not just to safe garrett chemical and biological weapons there but to help with some initial aspects of transition in syria. there's going to be certain skills and certain elements of what we have done in iraq, or tried to do in iraq and afghanistan, that we're going to need too be able to transfer to other environments potentially. and in that means we need to have an honest assessment of our efforts. this is happening. if this -- the book, "little america" was, in my view, equally critical of the military and civilian agencies of our government. but they responded very differently. at the state department i'm persona non grata. how below the military? i was instant sited to lecture to the entire student body at the naval post graduate school in monterrey, the national war college in d.c. the book was on the fall reading program at the army war college, had a book club discussion at the commandant's house. the uniformed military in our country, which has a lessons learned culture, wants to embrace a thoughtful critique. they might not agree but they want to learn. there's a danger if other components of our government simply, for political reasons, other reasons, want to say, hey, we did a great job, and that becomes the narrative, as opposed to honestly looking at what worked and what didn't. the special inspector general for tree -- the reconstruction of iraq passed on the $60 billion effort to rebuild the country, in which he noted $8 billion is unaccounted for. more importantly, that to me is a lesser issue in some cases because these are a butch of auditors saying, do we have proper receipts? my biggest question, how many bills of dollars didn't go to helping secure the iraqis, helping to promote our interests there, helping to protect our troops, helping to actually create sustainable projects for the iraqs. and so we mucked that one up, and we're spending more money in afghanistan, and arguably may well get even fewer results out of that. there needs to be a really honest, intensive effort to look at what worked and what didn't, and there are nascent efforts -- for instance at the state department -- to build out an office for reconstruction and stabilization operations. but to date, bureaucratic antibiotics have conspired to restrict the size of that. other parts of the bureaucracy don't want to contribute people to it because it takes away from their power. others say with build this capacity will just be an encouragement for another president to invade another country. and, yeah, there's some truth to all that. but if you don't honestly prepare for that sort of stuff now, if you're called upon to do some of this later, boy, i really hope that we don't sort of, once again -- we're seeing bad mistakes from iraq playing out in afghanistan. we can't afford to now see this play out somewhere else. we can't. >> i have a related question about whether there's been any genuine reflection from the, quote, lessons we could learn from iraq and afghanistan, and can you talk about what you would do internally within government, in the various agencies, and externally in the foreign policy establishment, and in the citizenry. >> guest: well, you know, i think there's still a shocking kind of lack of knowledge of both of these countries. iraq, obviously, less important now that we don't have troops there. we're getting out of afghanistan, but there really -- the start of these conflicts, at the height of them, there really wasn't the sort of rich nuanced knowledge of these countries, they're societies, their traditions, cultures, that we need to be able to engage in these things with some prospect of a meaningful outcome. and that exists -- the fault here is within the academy? within the think tank world ask the outside of government world, and then inside government, inside the intelligence community, inside the worlds of dip diploma si and foreign aide. shockingly few people with the necessary language skills, the necessary regional expertise. we just haven't built that talent, nor did we -- once the war started, nor did we mobilize people quickly enough. did we really have no to have an army of pashtun speakers in 2000? no once got into afghanistan, where was the approach to build that knowledge base? didn't happen. >> host: excuse me. let me ask a bakeup question. i'm still trying to understand how we ended up trying to remake a country that has eluded remaking since alexander. we went in because that's where bin laden was after 9/11, and omar and his kandaharrys and stuff were sheltering him and somewhat reluctantly. and it was pretty focused in the early days, and then after tora bora, we shifted to iraq, and then after iraq, we went back to afghanistan, but the taliban really -- how is the taliban a threat to america and why go back to afghanistan in that way and not continue with al qaeda and all terrorist. >> guest: the taliban aren't really a threat to the united states. they are a threat -- this is where you have to make these logical leaps -- if the taliban were to come back into power in afghanistan, would they invite al qaeda back in? some argue yes, some argue no. i don't think the evidence is clear on that. yes, did provide sanctuary to osama and senior al qaeda leaders. would they still do that today? or the taliban changed in some way? b., how much of al qaeda is left to actually come back into there? and, would afghanistan be the same sort of hospitable place from which to plan transnational terrorist activities that it was back in 2001. now, there are a lot of question marks around that. but the u.s. strategy for the past several years has been predicated on the notion that, yes, all this will happen and that's why you have to build up an afghan government that is strong and stable enough to beat back the taliban, control its territory so you don't have ungoverned spaces in afghanistan, and by extension, that promotes u.s. national security interests. but doing so is incredibly costly. it's incredibly time-consuming, and in the case of afghanistan, i think has a real questionable chance of success, in part because the very government we're trying to empower there is seen by its people as being hopelessly corrupt and inefficient. why do villagers at the local level support the taliban? afghanistan? it's not because they're big fans of the taliban's religious sell lott tri. far from it. most afghans have no love for that. but the taliban privilegeds not just the basic order and security, the taliban in some cases provide basic things the people want and can't get from their government, such as, my neighbor stole my goats go to the government and they'll say, pay me a bribe for me to deal with your case. go to the taliban, mullah, he'll deliver swift justice. your neighbor's arm may get chopped off but it's swift justice and in deeply rural areas that's not a bad thing. then the taliban say to the people, we're not going to demand bribes prom you, whereas the local policemen and the local leadership are all about shaking down the population, and so part of the grand u.s. effort has been to try to reform afghanistan's government. but karzai has been an incredibly unwilling partner. why? he was supposed to have a press conference with chuck hagel today. that's been cancelled. karzai in a speech earlier today accused the united states of conspiring with the taliban to convince the afghan people to allow u.s. troops to stay there longer. i mean, do we really want to be in afghanistan longer? but what's going on there? well, what karzai -- karzai was never a partner in our efforts there because, to him, everything we were trying to do was promoting good governance, was by extension going to be pushing out the war lords, the power brokers, the cronies who he depends upon for political support so he worried all this would help erode his power base. so, his government was not just not only -- multibell double negatives -- not only not a willing partner in these efforts; actively south to sabotage a lot of what we were trying to do. with friends like that, how do you implement course insurgence. >> host: the echos of vietnam in my ear, i can barely here. >> guest: not to mention the president and his corrupt brother precisely. >> host: what we have done to go after this nonenemy to try to remake it, created so many more enemies and now we're fight al qaeda and mali and sumatra and other place wes don't know about. another question. >> i have a family member deployed to iraq twice and afghanistan three times. he was an officer and is no longer in the military. he left. and i'm just wondering, this is pretty typical of -- we asked so much of our national guard men and women, as well as our fulltime military, and especially the medical personnel have been deployed time after time after time. if, god forbid, we should have a major conflict erupt, are we going to have to institute a draft in order to have enough military force? >> guest: that's a good question. first i should note, thank your family member for his service in both countries. and to note that those -- you're mentioning those who in the medical corps. their work has been heroic. there are literally thousands and thousands of american men and women who served there who are alive today because of the work that the mill corp -- medical corps had done who in previous wars would have come home in caskets but are going to live out lives, some badly wound it but will live because of the medical care they received on the battlefield. you know, about one percent of our country has served or is serving, and that's a really small slice of our society. and we have left the fighting to a small cadre of professional officers, volunteer grunts. now, i think our all-volunteer force has done great things for our country. this isn't the days of vietnam where you have issues of real morale and discipline within the ranks. our military is more competent than it's ever been. but it comes with a cost. when that burden is shared by only a small fraction of our overall society, the rest of the country can sort of go on and live normal lives and not think anything of it. i was in suburban virginia, northern virginia, just two weeks ago, and while you're on that base, the war in afghanistan is sort of a -- something people think and talk about every day. you go two miles away to a subdivision in fairfax county, virginia, people could go months without think organize talking about the war. it doesn't hit home in the same way. i think -- if we had a draft we wouldn't be fighting there. but i'm not sure that we as a country want to be -- to have all of the other problems that are associated with a draft army. the question is, how do you, with an all-volunteer force -- at least in my view -- ensure that you use that force for only the most important of mission's, and not just using it because it's sort of there and you can use it. because it comes with a cost in terms of lives, in terms of limbs, and in terms of taxpayer dollars. >> can you sketch out what you think syria will look like over the next five years? >> guest: oh, boy. i wish i had a good crystal ball on that one. at it an incredibly murky situation in syria. i think there are very real chances over the next many months that the assad regime will crumble because of continued pressure from the free syrian army and other rebel movements. to me the big question is, what happens after? what happens to the chemical and biological weapons? what happens to the shape of the government to what degree this muslim brotherhood and other sort of more extremist forces going to be run that country? what happens to the minority white population, do they flee as refugees? are they persecuted retribution killings? there arlet 0 huge unanswered questions, and it feels like there are echos of iraq just in terms of the failure to really -- well, failure may not be the right word but the lack of more robust kind of preparations for a follow-on government, and part of this is -- it's easy to criticize, i know, but in part it's because, yes, you have figures in exile but other people part of a regime like that are still in the country so it's hard to pull this all together. but it feels like we could see sort of a repeat of baghdad 2003 over there. >> host: we have time just for one real quick question. >> just wonder evidence if you could comment on the taliban in terms of women? it's naive to think of them in such kind terms when he had a young woman who was shot in pakistan for demanding to be educated and 2700 women a year who suffer from gunfire to get out of terrible marriages and difficult situations. thank you. >> guest: yes, i was not trying to describe them in kind terms. i mean, make no mistake about it, there's there, they have an incredibly extremist ideology bought trying to explain why they have appeal, and they do have appeal -- in rural more traditional parts of afghanistan. but i think one of the many very distressing likely outcomes of our continued withdrawal from that country is that the status of women, which has marginally improved in some parts of the country, and more than marginally in big cities, places like kabul, women -- the rights women enjoy today, their ability to be educated, to work, to serve in government, it's a world of difference than what it was under the taliban rule in the 1990s. it's been less -- progress has been less significant in the deemly conservative southern and eastern parts of the country, and i think there will be an erosion of women's rights in afghanistan over the coming years, despite continued u.s. efforts there in terms of money, in terms of making it a priority and diplomatic engagements. and that's going to be a sad thing. my hope is that over time, the women of afghanistan will start to gain rights. it's going to be an evolutionary process. it's not going to something that changes overnight. and i do think in the pig cities, -- big cities, particularly in kabul the gains wimp have made won't go away overnight and they will continue to fight for that. ... [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> you've been watching rajiv chandrasekaran, national book award finalist senior correspondent talking about his book, "little america." live coverage of the tucson festival of books continues in half an hour. up next is eric laursen talking about social security. we'll be back live in tucson in about 30 minutes. >> we have allowed a human rights night are to occur on our watch. in the years since dr. king's death, a vast new system of control has emerged from slavery and jim crow. massive cursor ration no doubt has dr. king turning in his grave today. the mass incarceration of poor people of color in the united states is tantamount to a new caste like system, when the shuttles are young people from decrepit underfunded schools to bring a high-tech prisons. it is a system that locks for people, overwhelmingly poor people of color into a permanent second-class status have been nearly as effectively as earlier systems of racial and social control wednesday. it is in my view the moral equivalent of jim crow. >> when i started to write it, there is one thing i wanted to accomplish. when you write a memoir, and i read many of them through my life, you sometimes, where you asking yourself that question, did i learn anything new about this public verse and? regrettably, often i have read books and memoirs of my biographies and patch myself, there isn't much hated nerdy know from the news. i didn't want to write that kind of book. i wanted to write something different. something or at beyond, a reader can come away and say to themselves, i think that halt. so what my beloved world has tended in part to do was to let you into my heart and soul and it do not, i hope to show you who i was, but also show you a little bit of hand. there is a per this for doing that and the purposes captured in one part of my book. it's probably my favorite passage. so i read it to you because it summarizes one of the very important reasons i read this book. it's on page 178 and it reads, when a young person, even a gifted line, grows up without living examples of what she may aspire to become, whether the lawyer, scientists, artists or leader and a round, proposed remain abstract. such models in the book certainly is, however inspiring or revered are ultimately too remote to be true, let alone influential. but a role model of the flesh provides more than duration his or her very existence is confirmation of possibilities one might have every reason to doubt say yes, someone like me. and so, it was my hope that every child and never dull to read this book at the end would say what i said during my confirmation yet that my confirmation that my nomination speech, yes, she's an ordinary person, just like me and a stout ordinary person can do it, so can i. [applause] to do in the stories of this book, to tell you my experiences and my feelings as i perceived them at the time. and you'll find me talking in the child of this little sonya and then give you the reflections of the adult sonya. wasn't so easy to do to put myself back in time and to tie you what i was feeling. but i did it for a purpose and that purpose was to tell you what i learned from those experiences. and in the process, to have the hope that every single person in this room who has experienced even one of the difficulties i faced in life and the difficulties are as diverse as growing up in poverty, having a chronic disease and its surprising how many people suffer from chronic disease and live their lives never talking about it to be in a child raised by a single parent, to facing discrimination and whether it's about ethnicity or her or my background, we each feel the sting of it in some way. to simply being afraid, which most people experience some real creative bravado that yet we are okay, we can do this. it's easy to say, hard to do. so i talk about those things and as ordinary a way i can in order i hope to give people courage to talk about and rethink their own experiences. there is a second purpose of this book because you see the books that i love are the books that i've read and make me think on different levels, that deliver more than one percentage because there is a beauty and reading books and discovering new things and you'll learn about how i use books after my father's death to escape the unhappiness in my home and they became a rocket ship out of that unhappiness, but a rocket ship that landed me on fire universes of the world when i found science fiction to understanding places i thought it never get to visit. i know gratefully have the wherewithal to do it, but i found india and africa and places that i have heard about on television, but never imagine knowing that i learned about them through books. i hope every child in this audience, and a child who who hears me speaking understands television is wonderful, but words paint pictures in a way that nothing else can. >> you're looking at the gallagher theater at university of arizona. more live coverage of the 23rd team festival of books. >> the best state to be a planner and america was july 9, 2004, wednesday jackson, holly from ken lawrence frank came out with a book called urban sprawl and public health. with that book finally did this but some epidemiological meet on the bones three players have been arguing about and said in no uncertain terms the suburbs are killing us in here is why in cities can save us in here is why. by far the greatest aspect of the epidemic rubber health challenges as the obesity epidemic. all the illnesses that obesity leads to. the principal diabetes. now consumes 2% of our gross national product. a child or an after 2000 has a one in three chance of becoming a diabetic. we are now looking at the first generation of americans who are going to live shorter lives than their parents. that's probably not a huge surprise to you. with banal talking for a long with banal talking for a long time about the wonders of the american corn syrup-based diet and the 40-ounce sodas people are drinking. but only recently have studies been done comparing diet and physical inactivity. when a new england was called caught neighbors syslog. another doctor at the mayo clinic put patients and electronic underwear and measured every motion, said a diabetic regime, studied their weight, started pumping calories than some people got fat and didn't expect the same metabolic fat or outwork where genetic dna fact year, the only thing that changed was the amount of daily activity. then you go a step further look at books like the blues songs. i forget his first name. were in the world do people live the longest? you see what they do including drink red wine and you put in a book and sell millions. the number one rule, move naturally. don't become a weekend warrior. thomas people who exercise. find a way to build normal motion into everyday life is part of a work routine. who's going to change it to go from being an accountant to be a lumberjack. that's not going to happen. they say biked to work or walk to the store. the one thing the book forgets to mention his than half of america you can't biked to work and you can't want to disturb because you live in a cul-de-sac off of a highly. so it's fundamentally how we build our communities in the long run. in the short run is where you choose to live in that teachers who can make and that's no more obvious in the other big discussion, which is car crashes. car crashes are funny because on one hand we naturalize it. really that's a part of living. if they wanted 200 chance i will die in a car crash or be seriously injured. nothing i can do about it. or alternately, we feel like we are in charge of our feet on the road. 85% of people in a hospital recovering from accidents they themselves had caused great themselves as better than average drivers. so all that's going on. the fact is it's not the same all over the world and not the same all over america. we have a report 14 americans out of 100,000 die every year in car crashes. no one has had the crashes we do. in london, it's five out of 100,000. in new york city new york city history out of 100,000. new york city has saved more lives in traffic than were lost on september 11 that lost on september 11. if our entire country were to share new york city's accident rate, we would say 24,000 lives a year. a big difference between urban living in suburban or rural living in terms of that aspect of our lives. again on the short-term -- we can just decide to live in more urban environments. a wonderful study, jackson famously asked the question, and was circuit city are you most likely to die in a pool of blood. that's how we put it to his audiences. they compared murdered by strangers, crime to car crashes and added the two together. and all three places you your 15% safer in the inner city than in the wealthy suburbs because the combination of those two. we moved to the suburbs for safety of our children. finally, who talked about asthma? were 10 americans die every day. that doesn't sound like a huge amount. is three times the rate of the 90s and is entirely due to automotive exhaust. 90%. pollution is not what it used to be. the sickest places in america are those that are the most car dependent. in phoenix you've got performance out of fear that healthy people are not supposed to leave their houses because of the amount of driving going on. so what's the solution? finally, the most interesting discussion is the environmental discussion, which has turned 180 degrees in the last 10 years. even within the global warming discussion come a talk about carbon footprint. red is bad, green is good. look at the united states and it looks like the satellite sky around the cities, cooler in the summers, coolest in the country. that measure per square mile. in 2001, scott bernstein said what happens is that instead of measuring co2 per mile we start measuring co2 per person per co2 per household. we can choose to live in places where we pollute more or less. the red and green just flip, change places and by far the healthiest place you can live within the city. manhattanites are in a third the fossil fuels water heating and cooling neighbors, but even more importantly is the last driving. transportation is the single contributor to civilians greenhouse gas. when i built my house i made sure to clean the show some sustainability. i got the solar panera, installation, bamboo flooring. either would or amster this supposedly a lock of my wood burning stove contributes less co2 than a filibuster decompose in the forest naturally. but of course i have the energy saver light bulbs. the energy saver lightbulbs save as much electricity -- i should say saved as much carbon in a year is moving to a neighborhood season a week. so the whole green gadget discussion, what can i buy to make myself more sustainable is the wrong discussion. the answer is the city. this is fundamentally the opposite of the america need this from jefferson on. the moral, health and freedom of man. if we piled upon ourselves as a doing cities in europe, we should take to beating one another they do there. and it made sense back in the 1700s to read the whole country to spread out in the biggest by so it's a longer discussion. all three of these are longer discussions, but they are all crises. we have a national economic crisis commercial to get tougher. a national health crisis is bankrupting us in the city proved all too clear couple weeks ago, global warming is beginning to affect astronomically. now were talking about indicating that, but the less we have, the better we are and the more we can become an urban society, the more we can do to solve these problems at the center of our challenges is the nation. >> the look of books being published this week. >> good morning, good morning. thank you. i moved out my flight and i'm going to -- to be a port would really right i spend about 10 minutes here reading. i'm going to read something quite short on the theory that less is more, which is what i try to tell my writing students at u. penn. speaking of them, one of the reasons i am hurtling back to cold philadelphia's because they have to hold officers tomorrow with a lovely little baby brats. so best to get home and sleep well, or try to sleep well, although my wife and i say we haven't slept well since the jimmy carter administration. [laughter] thank you so much. as arlo said, you holding us up is the key and i bet i won't even have time to formally say thank you and good night two miles, so i will just say two miles how eloquent his little set for introduction have been and tell him goodbye and arlo when all the of you for coming. i am supposed to refund thing. i was fretting about what that would be because i wanted to make it very sure. i'm going to read from the end of the prologue. one of the things that i was trying to stress and the talk that i gave yesterday and indeed the panel that i appeared on the day before is that for all of the undeniable, appalling, dark side of ernest hemingway, there was also delayed. there was this bout of generosity. and sometimes it came out fast when a child was involved and not his own child necessarily come and especially adult child. well, who wouldn't respond to that. but he seemed to respond in a special way. and so, i was thinking of reading something in the key west passage i said no, that would be like a piece of coal offering something in newcastle. so i'm not going to read that. i'm just going to read this little moment in the end of the prologue and indeed it's the end of ernest hemingway's life when everything is lost. but there is still some demand. book backwards 17 days from his dad teaching 15, 1961 at rochester, minnesota, the psychiatric ward at mayo clinic is writing a letter to a 9-year-old boy. the man writes on two small sheets of no paper in his eighth round legible hand with a straight heart downhill slant and irreversibly damaged ernest hemingway, his inner landscape now, a paranoid nightmare has found within himself at the end of his life the kindness and courage in momentary lucidity, not to say literary grace, to write 210 beautiful words to a kiddie lakes area match. whenever i begin to feel the the ripple should not hemingway's ego and boorish behavior towards other human beings, i like to take out a copy of this letter. 210 words with so much emotion tucked below the surface of the pros, the sentence pile driven by contained feeling and acute observation of the natural world would've been a half decent output for your work day, even in a masters prime. the boy, his name is frederick g saviors, although everyone including phrase is a congenital heart decision. he is the son of george saviors, hemingway small-town doctor who was also one of hemingway's favorite duck hunting companion. in these last weeks, hemingway has been out once more from idaho for treatment to mail. not long after this note to first, hemingway will fool his foolish doctors at the world-famous clinic into believing he is well enough to go home to idaho and almost immediately, the boss shotgun will go off in the quiet of the house that fits a couple hundred yards up the steep slope in the west bank of the river. the patient unlocked word at st. mary's on june 15, 1961, has just learned that doc or save your son is in a denver hospital. in idaho, hemingway and infers that chris's father of blake talking about the yankees and rainbow trout, but none of that will ever be the same again. st. mary's hospital, rochester, minnesota. june 15, 1961. dear fritz, i was terribly sorry to hear this morning in a note from your father that you or they don't denver for a few days more and speed off this note to tell you how much i hope you'll be feeling better. it's been very hot and muggy here in rochester, but the last two days has turned cool and lovely with a nice wonderful for sleeping. the country is beautiful around here and i've had a chance to see some wonderful country along the mississippi, where they used to drive the blogs in the old lumbering days in the trails were the pioneers came north. saw some good bass jumping in the river. i never knew anything about the upper mississippi before and it's really very beautiful country and there's plenty of thousands and ducks in the fall, but not as many as in idaho. i hope we will both be back here shortly and can joke about our hospital experiences together. best always to you old-timer, from your good friend who misses you very much. mr., ps, best to all the family and feeling fine and cheerful about things in general and hope to see you all soon. no one knows for sure, but these seem to be the last real sentences are ernest hemingway said, paper. amid so much room in stilted beauty. thank you area match. [applause] >> and welcome back to booktv on c-span 2's live coverage of the tucson festival of books. now, erik larson presents his thoughts on the sustainability of social security from his book, "the people's pension." the panel begins in just a moment. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome to the fifth annual -- sorry, folks. welcome to the fifth in a tucson festival of books. and the senior writer for the tucson weekly and hosted easy illustrated politics airing each friday here in tucson. it's my great honor to be here today with eric larson -- eric laursen, author of "the people's pension: the struggle to defend social security." through the use of television magic, we are here with c-span on booktv, so hello from tucson, arizona. i would like to thank the city of tucson for sponsoring the station a big thanks to everyone who helped the tucson festival of books come together. we'll be talking for about an hour here in the first 40 minutes will be q&a with mr. larsen and myself and then questions from the audience. hang on to your questions until then. when they get wrapped up, because southwest of the student union so he can autographed copies of this book. if you turn off your cell phones now, that would be great. let's get introductions out of the way. eric laursen is an independent financial literal activists and in addition to writing "the people's pension," he has cowritten understand the crash and is written for a wide variety of publications, the village voice and the "huffington post." please welcome eric laursen to the festival of books. [applause] >> very glad to be here again. let's start with the question raised by the title of our session here and that is the social security manufactured crisis? the short answer is yes. there is not existential crisis for social security faces in the sense it will not exist in x number of your system and drastic is done. but there's two crises only talk about a social security crisis. number one is a fiscal crisis. what have enough income and revenues from whatever source to support itself in future years on the second crisis is a political crisis and i do find that as a crisis in terms of whether, for lack of a better term, the governing class in this country wants to support social security anymore and the degree to which there is sufficient popular support, mobilize popular support that it has to continue. so i'll address the fiscal crisis for us because that is the one in the media all the time. to do find this a little more closely, social security depends on two sources of income. payroll taxes and interest income on the trust fund is built. i can go into that and a little more detail, but i'm not sure you'd want me to. the point is the current projections by the social security administration and the congressional budget office and what you see in the media all the time that in 2033, the latest estimate they have come a social security will run a run in the trust fund. that means i will have to pay benefits as the current payroll tax revenue coming in. what that means that projections are correct and remember these are only projections for social security would only have enough money to pay 75% of benefits in 2033. what that means is that congress would either have to -- how was it has to be sent in to balance the books because social security is not legally able to draw from other sources. it has to use the income it gets from those two sources i mentioned. congress would have to cut benefits, to match the money coming in or have to raise payroll taxes or figure out some other source of income to adding to make up the difference. so that is what we are talking about when we talk about a fiscal crisis. a few things to keep in mind to put this in context. first of all, some of you may have heard me explain this on a panel i was on so i hope i'm not repeating myself too much is that social security, with the congress could do is raise the cap on income subject to payroll tax. it is the idea some of you may have heard. what that really means is currently, only the first $113,000 of a person's income is subject to payroll tax. what we could do is raise the cap to 200,000 or 250,000 or this is an idea senator bernie sanders has put out. we could have a doughnut hole amalie subject over 250,000 payroll tax. there's a number of ways to do it. but the point is people making that kind of money, more income should be exposed to payroll tax. by some estimates at the cap was completely eliminated, that would eliminate the problem altogether for the year 2033. we have 75 years at least of healthy social security. if it was simply raised to 200, $250,000, we could eliminate close to half the shortfall. there's other things that could be done, too. when i didn't come forward is to raise the estate tax back to where it was an without that revenue to social security. another idea that is, to simply to raise payroll tax across the board a little bit gradually over 20 years. it can be done slowly enough so wouldn't affect anybody's purchasing power and that would do the trick. we would be talking about a dollar 50 a week or something like that. so the key point in this gets into the political crisis problem is there's three solutions to social security being discussed all the time in washington by the economic and political elite i guess you'd say. what paul krugman caused a very serious people. i called the solutions the three headed monster. one of them is to raise the retirement age, which would effectively be a cut in benefits, especially for people who live a very long life span. number two is to means test social security, essentially reduce or eliminate benefits for upper income people. these two problems with that. first of all, you would have to means test of a pretty low-level, by some estimates to the point of cutting and if it's for people whose lifetime or that fit their highest income in their working years is about $62,000. those aren't exactly affluent people. also, you wouldn't really be of a race that much money. the other thing is that would undermine social security, which i think is the most important element of social security, which is social solidarity aspect, the fact that people of all income levels could send and from that, participate in africa the sense of loyalty or ownership. the third idea they come up with this repeated over and over again in the national media is the chained cpi, which is to be quick and dirty about it means adjusting the formula used to compute benefits so they would go down. it's sort of a technical correction, but it actually be a serious change. it would start to affect people pretty materially within the next decade and more and more after that. the common denominator of these three ideas for fixing show so security is they would all of them strangely enough exam the most affluent people. they would see a little bit of reduction of benefits, but that is not a big deal to them. if they live longer, david the reduction in benefits. but they've got plenty of other money. it really would be a very, very small hate saddam. now if the cap is raised as one of the more progressive ideas, it would be fairly significant cut in their annual in town. so what we have is a political crisis, number one. it is a crisis in terms of what adjustments do we make? social security is not threatened in any existential way. the question is which way do we go in terms of fixing problems if we do need to fix them. there's an argument that maybe we should wait until we are closer to the time it that theoretically projections would start to take hold. if are going to put that aside for a second, the question is do we want to do this in a progressive way or nonprogressive weight? the problem is there is a bit of a disconnect between the public and is a loosely call them, the governing class, economic and political governing class, consistently the public supports raising the cap, raising payroll taxes modestly across the board if they would preserve social security. these people value social security. in washington that's not the case. it's more a question of which constituency are we harming them is going to happen to her ability to raise funds for ourselves. so that explains the dynamic. >> okay. how important is social security of the people who do depend on it? >> social security, i'll throw out a couple of figures. about 45% of people who receive social security depend on it for 75% -- 90% of their income. beginning two thirds of the people who receive social security depend on for perhaps 90% of their income. is that right? okay, thank you. what you need to keep in mind is social security sound overly generous system. it's the least generous national at retirement system in the industrialized world. people on social security are not getting rich off it. the largest benefit you get per month is around $2000. the average is more like $1300. so it is not getting anybody rich. as a result, an awful lot of people come to keeps every year out of poverty, 20 million people. that's like 7% of the u.s. population. if you start making changes, if you implement the cpi, for example, an awful lot of people that just besides the poverty line. the result is literally unique what advertisers small technical corrections to social security worship may keep working longer, you're actually going to throw a lot of people into poverty. there's a material human cost of doing that, which i don't think the public wants to pay. >> you do take a deep dive into the origins of the debate over social security. what led you into this project? >> i started researching in the mid-90s when i was editing a magazine called plan sponsor, a magazine for people who went public and private pension funds still going strong. i got an interest because around the time i was running sponsor was the privatization of social security became a hot topic. suddenly that's what everyone was talking about as the solution to the social security problem. so privatization intrigues me that people would entertain ideas like that about a system that was so popular and was underpinning for private pensions all across the country that just seemed staggering to me. so i got interested in the issue. i started looking around for isn't there some book i can read that gives me the history of this debate, this ideological tug-of-war over social security and i couldn't find one. i kind of knuckle under and under and senate guesstimate how to write it myself. so that is what i began to do. a couple of other things here. as i started delving into the history of social security, it goes beyond the framework of the book, which really begins in 1980, but he began to look in the history and i wanted to understand, why is it different from other government programs? i traced its origins back to a number of things, but mutual aid societies set up in the mid-19th century by working people come in the early days of the industrial revolution who had social protection at all and created everything from the masons to the elks, to all kinds of groups, which some of them are still around today. back then the purpose was to contribute membership fees, which go to pay for health care, survivors benefits, all kinds of things. there is a social solidarity element. i realize with a social insurance like social security began to be instituted in the early 20th, they were taking this idea of mutual aid and institutionalizing it. i thought that's very powerful. that's different from some unlike welfare. this is not something you are given because congress feels like they want to be nice to you. this is a u.k. because he paid for it, because it belongs to you and that is something that could bust in the debate sometime. i have an interesting anecdote, that the other thing that got me going and were committed was because i began to realize i was very directly affected by this. i am a freelance writer in the doing this for about eight days in years. i have an ira. it took a hit with the.com bust and the financial crash in 2008. i don't even want to think about my home-equity at this point. it's very hard to say. it's a tough racket, freelance writing. i realized when i received a statement used to censure on paper, but she now have to look at online to tell you what your social security would be, which you accumulate enough you look at 65, 70, i realize that's incredibly important to me. thank god or whatever that there is going to be at least that. so this is a very vital piece of history and a very vital issue for me as an individual. now that the anecdote from the 2000 election. there was an exchange that happened between bush and gore. bush said at one point, al gore wants you to think that social security is a government program. it's not. it belongs to you and al gore had fun. he doesn't understand that the government program. the shows are ignorant he is. bush was right. social security is not like any other government program. sunday we paid for, blocks to us, and managed as a trust, that really is ours in a legal sense. bush's intentions are quite different. he wanted to encourage people to think of payroll tax is something they should put into a private account instead of letting it be managed by the social security administration. i think there is a profound truth that got turned around and cheesy people on the progressive side as well as the conservative site can get confused about this and the reality, the more fundamental reality of social security as a form of mutual aid gets lost sometimes. >> you've talked about the three stages in this effort to undermine social security. who do you see as people behind the? what was the first stage during the reagan administration? >> to be really quick because it's on the book, so read the book. as for status to the history told in this book. social security did face a serious funding crisis. they have to do with a lot of things, including rampant inflation, which cost benefits to boost more than they should. but that was an actual crisis solved an 83 by the greenspan commission, which you may have heard of. there were some adjustments made. right after that where group of influential and wealthy people. one was peterson, an investment banker who were furious that more fundamental drastic changes were made to social security and 83, said they launched a multipronged movement to cut social security and they were able to poland center-right democrats as well as republicans on this. there is a group called americans for generational equity they began putting out research in pulling together influential people behind the idea that we have to cut social security. a little known fact, every president from jimmy carter on as attempted at some point or another to cut social security. that includes barack obama, bill clinton, republicans as well as democrats in these groups in the 80s managed to -- they didn't manage to sell the public on the idea of cutting social security, but they've built up a strong constituency among the washington and financial elites that this has to be done. in the mid-90s, stage three b. can't come at a privatization. the stock market was going great. wall street got behind a movement to privatize social security and suddenly all the proposals you heard for 10 years after that included carving private accounts out of social security for creating them on the site in reducing benefits to the same thing. stage three ended in 2005 when george w. bush got on the campaign trail again and attempted to sell the idea to the public. it is such a disaster that it became political poison. as a result, the movement against social security shifted back to the state still right now, which is the stage of saying that it's going to cut it. it has to be cut. the politics has been a mating dance between the republican right in democratic center-right as to how to do this. how can we make this politically acceptable enough to cut social security? so that is the arc of the story of this evolution in the movement. i have to ask you to repeat the first half of your questi3 movement. i have to ask you to repeat the first half of your question. >> as you were talking, i was thinking about the bush at first. i remember attending one of those town hall swinney came through tucson and really seemed more like an infomercial down the hall. you had people from the community, that they had scripted lines and it was all focus on the idea of how wonderful private accounts would be. i didn't go as well as he pointed out in your book. >> is an interesting incident that happened during the whole rigmarole. that was the one time in the hole. i covered that the national media turned against cutting social security. generally the national media has been very center-right as a general sayed. their studies about this. they turned against because he presented them in such an inept way. it was so skewed in such a dog and pony show that they got tired of it and started editorializing against them. one interesting thing happened during that campaign apace. i went to highlight in denver a group of three college students who attempted to get into one of those town halls. they had tickets and they wanted to get an m.a. had t-shirts that say don't cut social security and they were stopped at the door, turned away and they went to court and said the race had been violated. turn side of the secret service people did it. secret service people used on the tour of italy. as a congressional investigation about it in those three inevitably became known as the denver three. the interesting thing is they were not retirees. they were not older workers. they were not union members. they were college students. they were people you didn't have typically is being concerned about social security and that's one thing i want to digress about a little bit as most of the proposals i outlined to cut social security means testing, change cpi, most of them would affect retirees considerably in the next couple decades. the people most affected are people that 20th, 30s and 40s today. the people most at risk from cutting social security and the retirement crisis that i think we've got coming quickly in the united states is not people retire today. people over 55 are facing that, the younger people now come to younger workers are the ones who are going to behave. the reason is because other sources of income are disappearing. home equity, ability to save privately. consumer debt, employer-based pensions disappearing. people in the 20s, 30s and 40s today will rely more than ever as social security and this is why there is a certain man of craziness and washing and they would consider cutting this thing, which is only going to become more vital. one of the things i want to stress here is the need for younger workers and younger people to become more aware of what's going on the social security because they are the ones most at risk here. >> and we've heard the famous ufo factoid. more people believe they will be visited by ufos and will collect social security. i think that is something definitely up there in the media. you're skeptical of that and that's part of the basis of people saying we should use some money in private accounts. >> outplayed the story really quick. it was in a pool that frank luntz a republican pollster put together for a group called the millennia, which is an astroturf young people passionate about cutting the deficit group put out in the mid-90s. what they did is they ask, do you believe in ufos? five minutes later, do you think social security will be there? there was a direct comparison made to do you think one is more likely to happen any other? but he was treated like that in their press release. a couple years ago and the responsible group did a poll did put those two together and overwhelmingly, people said they think social security will be there better than a ufo land. the ufo factoid was endlessly in the press. in the late 90s and early part of the next decade to the point where it became in green sap mull over the place and you still hear it occasionally. >> i'm sure there's other panels that would take deep into the ufo phenomenon. let's get back to the private accounts question. the whole idea of diverting social security money into private accounts. the winners and the losers in that scenario. >> there some people who read the panel panel on yesterday specifically about that, but i'll give a quick answer to that question. the quick answer is very simple. private accounts carved out of social security would be a modest boost for people affluent were already able to save. for people who are not affluent they can't afford to save, they wouldn't do very much could. they would put money at risk which shouldn't be at risk. if you're a person as increasing numbers in our economy who spend their entire careers working in low-wage or close to minimum wage jobs will not be out to save enough. the only way to help them save enough for us to actually for the government to contribute money physically to that account to the reset account by giving them money money and that is some that's not in the cards politically and even that wouldn't work very well. it is very difficult. anyone who has a 401(k) or ira knows that it's difficult to time and investment pool like that so you gradually reduce the riskiness of your positions to the point where when you reach retirement age, you are in a safer set of investments. people in the late 50s, early 60s right now find themselves in a position where their 401(k)s and iras have tanked and we have stories over and over again about people in that age group who have resorted to riskier investment in order to quickly boost retirement nest egg. it backfires and they find their lower down than where they needed to be and we have crises. this is what would have been on a larger scale if social security were privatized. social security privatization on practical proposals are put together for doing that, it always includes reducing the core benefit, the current benefits that you get less they are. they don't make a fortune on your private account. so we are talking about people who would be an even worse position because social security would be reduced. so this is a very bad idea. the only way to make it palatable would be to guarantee somebody minimum said every time you met. that again turn social security into a welfare type system. that's the kind of thing in the political dynamic we have today gets cut. i do not see -- i see private accounts to a further decreases than even the one we are facing now. >> i suppose there would be the folks on wall street money managers of such a thing were to occur? >> this is the other thing is that it would be what i call a form of welfare for wall street. private accounts, the one thing they would do is guarantee a steady stream of income from management fees to wall street, which i think was a pernicious thing and that it would encourage wall street firms and give them a cushion on which they could continue to make sort of reckless investments in pursuing our trading strategies that got them into trouble over the last 25 to 35 years. .. the reason the bubble in mortgage-backed security invested existed to begin with is because wealthy investors hedge funds, wall street had so much money floating around, so much money, a lot of it due to tax breaks and other things that they needed someplace to put it and so you have serial bubbles developing around the globe and this has been happening for 30 years. you think back to latin-american bonds in the early 80's this has been going on over and over a reputedly privatized social security and the funds flowing into wall street as a result would aggravate the problem. >> one of the things you talk about in your book is a complexity house social security works to the average person is not aware of and that also complicates the effort to reform it or make it work in the future. >> that is an issue. social security is little like wall street. it is arcane to some extent. the formula that is used as complicated. the way it's funded through the trust fund through treasury bond is and how that accumulates is a somewhat complicated economic concept that people are not educated on. there is no civics course that teaches you how this works or teaches you what the federal reserve is for that matter. and so social security seems like something that we don't understand. the average working person doesn't understand and so you hear somebody like alice rivlin, the former head of the budget office of the white house who is funded by pete peterson and she comes out and says social security is going bankrupt we need to stop it or capsize and they don't always get the message about what is really going on. so the sort of an element of complexity and lack of good information out there about social security is a real issue. >> it has political support among the voters in general. >> i did the polling going back 35 years and i found it consistently if people were presented with the option of paying a little bit more in payroll tax in order to secure social security, they all say yes this is the earliest poll i found that was in 1977, and it's consistent. what's changed is the view of the elite in this country, not of working people. >> talk about what needs to be done politically to strengthen the social security system. >> there's three things that need to be done. we are talking about the political crisis, not the suppose of fiscal crisis. number one is, and this may sound a little out of left field we need to revise the movement in this country. the movement has been consistently a very strong supporter of social security. maybe the strongest supporter in the political realm and the really disturbing moves against the union movement, the right to work law and a number of states these directly impact social security. another is that much more activism needs to spring up among younger people. they are the ones that face the biggest risk and they are the ones that are not part of the equation publicly because it's not something they think about as a general habitual things of that needs to change. we need to have more awareness on the part of younger people. finally this is something that is a much bigger problem, social security depends on payroll taxes for the bulk of its income. payroll taxes depend on wages. wages going up, high wages, good paying jobs. it is a prerequisite for a healthy social security system over time. people look at the economic landscape we have now where the wages are stagnating, good jobs are few and far between, and the impulse among social security is to say that's always the way it's going to be so let's cut social security because we can't afford it anymore because we will never, ever again have a prosperous work force in this country. well, if we don't have -- to back up the second, wages in this country, real wages have stagnated the better part of 40 years and we've seen what has happened to jobs. sooner or later we need to address the problem in the country of giving people decent jobs starting to boost the minimum wage again is one small step in that direction. the best thing we can do to keep social security healthy is to give american workers a raise. now what we need to do politically to give them a raise? we need a strong labor movement, we need workers who are prepared to organize in their workplace and push their politicians for high year wages for better jobs for an industrial policy that would achieve this. so, those are the things i think we need to get social security on track. >> the skepticism about the reliability of the treasury bonds that social security has invested in. >> all they are is iou's you hear this over and over again to a brief summary, social security is based on payroll taxes. payroll taxes come in every year and most of that is to pay current benefits. the rest of it goes into this trust fund set up to make sure that social security house the money to pay benefits of the payroll taxes fall below a certain level. the treasury bond is invested, the trust fund is invested in u.s. treasury bonds just the same kind of treasury bond that he would buy on the open market that federal reserve owns the bank of china wones, goldman sachs and anybody else. they are covered by the full faith and credit of the u.s. government. but in order to purchase those bonds, the social security trust fund uses the money coming in from payroll taxes so that money is then available to the federal government to use for whatever other purposes to use them for fighting the war in the middle east that's the origin of the trust fund has been rated. i see it a little differently. i think that social security to the extent that it's a secure and safe retirement system is based on the united states economy, the health of the united states economy. it means good wages, good wages means plenty of money coming into social security. those treasury bonds are in essentially a bet that investors take making a bet that the united states can run an economy that is good enough to generate high wages so essentially goes treasury bonds and the trust fund or a wager that we, the people of the into social security are making on the united states economy. that sounds a little complicated, but i think that is the fundamental thing about any retirement system anywhere that if you have a healthy economy can have a healthy retirement system. you don't necessarily have to have a trust fund. countries in europe have social security systems. they don't have a separate trust fund for the payroll tax generally. but it's the same thing is true. they are betting that the economy and the country will be successful in tax revenue will be raised and will cover these costs so that gets me back again to this point about wages, the need to give americans a raise. if we don't give them a raise we have problems in social security, we have big problems about anything else and i don't have to even tell you what those are. that's what we ought to be concentrating on right now instead of worrying about projections 20, 30, 40 years into the future. what can we do for american workers today that will determine how prosperous american workers are able to be tomorrow in terms of how where they start out. >> we are going to go to questions from the audience here in just a moment so if the folks on to line up at either the microphone or ask a few questions that would be great. while they are doing that, why don't you talk just a little bit about -- life is intrigued with use of the mutual aid society. if you to speak briefly to that as folks lie not here. >> i became fascinated by this. there is actually a very good book that talks about it called a welfare state that talks about the origins of social insurance as an idea. related to that first of all, the mutual aid societies are something that at one point in the early 20th century two-thirds of american males pilon to some kind of a mutual aid in fact that number was higher among black population and the white population because they got even less in terms of social benefits. there were mutual aid societies all over the place. the odd fellows, the mutual aid society, the elks or a mutual aid societies. so when you watch the flintstones and see the water buffaloes or the honeymooners and see the raccoons, those are the origins of these kind of organizations was the need to provide for people at the time when there were no social benefits. one of the little less known benefits and the social security gives you actually is a burial benefit. a small terri hail benefit. and that goes back to 19th century when that is one of the things the workers most demanded from the mutual aid societies was the workers wanted to be able to have a decent burial, it was very important for families that were what he called to work but respectable to be able to do things like that. so that benefit is really kind of an artifact of social security's origins in a way. this strikes me as very interesting. and of course what's really important about the concept of mutual aid is that that's where the loyalty of the public to social security comes from is this idea that we are all in it together. the social solidarity element. that is what would disappear specifically if he were to start to cut and means test social security. i will stop babbling. >> over year, the microphone. >> i wonder if you would speak for just a moment about why the income cap on social security was implemented in the first place. >> was implemented for a good reason i think. the idea is that social security is not supposed to be something that means you rich putative was supposed to be a base income than you could build on. other countries had national retirement systems where people didn't have an employer base pensions or people were not as likely to be homeowners and so there was an assumption in the united states and over roosevelt that what was needed was and a system the would basically pay your whole way but provide you a base you could build on. so the cap came in in the early 80's when the basic idea is you don't want to tax beyond a certain point because people shouldn't expect benefits beyond a certain point. you wouldn't want somebody that is a millionaire to be getting a percentage of $1 million a year as their social security benefit. that person you had to cut it off somewhere and say if you make $113,000 a year you will get x and to make to under $50,000 a year you will get the same as the person that made 113,000. there is some sense in that but when the system was set up, they set it up so that there the formula is used to boost it a little bit every year when they set it up they set up such that 90% of income over all on average would be taxed, applied to payroll taxes. now what's happened in the last 30 years is that the income of the top 1 percent or 2 percent of the population in this country has shot up words, has been way out of proportion shot up words and so right now is down to about 80% of income being subject to payroll tax. the idea would be to increase it such that we could get it up to about 90% which would -- we could assume what sort of be the fare cut off because if you do raise it you have to pay people more in benefits, too. the idea is to keep it as a sort of base but raise a back to that 90 present levels of that is what happened there. >> over on this side. >> one is the trillion dollar plus in the social security trust fund and treasury debt i think that's backed by the full faith and credit of the united states like your dollar bills or savings bonds. the second question are you aware of any data, any economic projections of where the country would be economically or how deep the recession after the economic collapse in 2008 would have descended had there not been the demand created by the tens of millions of dollars of people not able to receive retirement benefits because the social security system exists? >> social security there's a reason why they call with a safety net. it was actually we play a very strong role after the recession hit. and in keeping it from getting worse because you have at least one part of the population namely three parts of the population, the elderly, survivors and the disabled who have a cushion for their income and so there was a certain amount of consumer spending, a normal consumer spending, it wasn't interrupted because of this. there aren't any release all the figures on how significant it was. i have not -- i have seen various numbers, some of which are larger than others. but i think that the overall answer is that the safety net essentially worked the way it was supposed to. survivors' benefits, social security disability come to some extent tanif and unemployment benefits for a really solid cushion. now contrast to social security with unemployment insurance, which we have had a fight after a fight in congress to extend for another year, another two years while employment continues to not an approved and not recover and in contrast to that is the fact social security continues to pay out and hasn't been controversial at least and the benefits are being paid and think about what would happen if social security was more like a welfare system and it wasn't able to operate the way that it does. it would have been -- things would have been quite different over the last several years. >> over on this side? >> you answered my first question and that's when you raised the income cap you have to pay out more benefits. would that be self-defeating you are just getting more money in that you have to pay more money out of the the the second question is why do they want to weaken social security? i don't see where the social security system benefits anybody. >> the first question, the benefits -- the numbers have been wrong on this. benefits wouldn't go out so much that they would impact -- that they would stunt the positive impact of the high year cab. the second point is why does the elite want to do this? i can give you a fairly simple in answer to this question but i think it's very important and this is something i was trying to puzzle out riding "the people's pension" is why was there a point of view changing so much. >> if you want to call them that they've created a very favorable tax situation for themselves in this country. capital gains taxes have been lowered drastically cut income taxes top margins, corporate taxes are so full of holes to say we have a corporate tax isn't even reality anymore for a lot of large companies. this is something that started in the carter administration, not the reagan administration. its continued off and on for 35 years and the 1% had been a very accustomed to this favorable tax situation they have for themselves and the overriding concerns and everything else is to maintain and extend it the best they can. there's been some hiccups in january when the fiscal quiff deal eliminated some of the bush tax cuts. only some of them. but for the most part, this sort of favorable tax situation for the wealthy has been kept in place. the the reality is the we do have an aging population in this country. we will have to pay more to support them. there's figures on this. social security amounts to about 4.5% of gdp the will go up to about 6%. we will have to pay more. the overriding concern of the elite is to make sure that that extra burden doesn't fall on them. the way to do that is to cut social security so that the burden is shifted from this collective system that we have, social security, medicare on to the individual household. it's not funded by raising taxes anymore on the wealthy. that's why the solutions that we see on the right in the means testing and the changed cpni etc that's why they support efforts like that. it's the desire to keep the tax system in place. i wonder if we are not at the beginning of a paradigm shift where our stock market is as high as it has ever been and our economy is improving, the wages aren't come of the recessions of people moving from permanent jobs to part-time work, dropping wages, robotics, picking up outsourcing, all those things tend to indicate that we may be dealing gang that improving economy from improving wages co to estimate i would suggest it goes back much further. the first thomas of high unemployment and the stock market boom happening at the same time. if we can trace this pergola in the history right back to that point that is the first time that we saw something like that happen in this society. that's where the stock market really kind of and the investment world sort of dealing to themselves from what's happening to the working public. one thing that is worth mentioning is the idea and used to be what henry ford said. i want to have reasonably high paid workers so they can buy cars that is in the case anymore. many factors in this country the extent we have manufacturers are those that invest in manufacturing will simply say we've got a rising middle class in east asia. they can buy our products. americans can work either in quote on quote knowledge based businesses or at 7/11. we have middle class people over there that buy our product and we are making those over there anyway so there is a lot less concern about nurturing the prosperous american working-class. what to do about it, again, i think if we want to do something about it within the present system we have, we have to do the things i was discussing earlier. we need to change the law that prevent them from organizing any reasonable way. we need to have an industrial policy that led begin to create or merger industries and create good paying jobs. we need a reasonable trade policy that doesn't simply give away everything to the big business in the form of the multilateral trade agreements. revival of the seattle agreement would be a good thing. if we can't -- if we don't see these things happen, if working people in this country have really lost control of the state and of the governing class, and this is a serious possibility we need to start thinking about drastic things i could even see this is looking ahead of it obviously going back to the sort of cooperative movement and mutual aid movement to say we have to do this ourselves as working people to set up institutions outside of government that they are not subject to these kind of pressures. that's the kind of thing we have to see because the pressures on social security are enormous, but the reality is as a society that complex industrial or post industrial society we can't do without social security. we need something like this. the social solidarity institution if the governing class is sending a clear message that the state will no longer do this for us and it's only a matter of time before they implement the kind of changes they want, i am hoping they don't but to then they have to start thinking about a different way to think about ourselves as a community. that's maybe the long term reality we are facing. >> over here? >> can you comment on whether contributors to social security even though lower earners or higher earners get more back than they contributed taking into account inflation and passage of time or cost of money? >> there's been a lot of attempts to study this. do you get a good or fair benefit return on the money that you pay into social security and payroll taxes? there is a number of ways to look at this. one is if you are -- i like to think of economics as the sort of part of manipulating statistics to tell a story and there's a number of ways you can analyze this and i've seen people run numbers that say know you are getting a terrible return on your social security but you're getting a good return. but the reality is this. the social security is indexed to the cost of living. it to the growth of the wages rather than the growth of crisis and that is the key. a means that social security little the allows you to maintain a middle class standard of living as you had as a working person. now if you try to buy an annuity that is indexed to inflation even just a price inflation you have to pay a fortune for it coming you couldn't do that as a working person in this country, are very, very wealthy. it's at the very reasonable price. so there's something about the social security in the price list for working person's. the other aspect is that the social security is on just retirement benefits. if you're a working person dies at the jet 50 and you have a spouse and a couple of kids, social security pays the survivor benefits for them, paul ryan, representative paul ryan, she admitted a couple of years ago one of his parents died when he was 16, she received reza wires benefits from social security ought and allow them to go to college, so you have all kind of ways in which social security is a pervasive benefit and something that is absolutely essentials and all kind of facets' the middle class live in a and it's impossible to replicate that in a private market based setting i would submit any reasonable price. over here? >> i would like to thank you for addressing the long-term prognosis that we are facing and at addressing that there seems to be a lot of hysteria about against the government and how easily this -- evil it is. i would like to hear the distinction when you said it is not a government program, but yet there is a payroll tax people are required to pay so they perceive it as it is taken by the government. and so how do i address that argument? >> we are getting the two-minute warnings and you will have to make that quick. >> i will take that one quickly. that is the kind of notion that we keep hearing about, glad you brought it up. the argument is why should the government get your payroll tax rather than you being able to invest it any way you want for your retirement clacks the answer is that we all the diomede because it goes into something they're belongs to us collectively. it's a government program run by the government, but two things, number one again it's a trust fund and there's a reason why it's called a trust fund because it's not something the government can do as it pleases its required to invest in the treasury bonds rather than putting into hedge funds or mortgage-backed securities or something because it suppose to be saved money. so that's the fang -- the thing. i think that is a strong indication that the public regards it as something different and wanted to be -- wants it to be treated as something different. >> okay. i think we are at a time where we need to start wrapping up the session. [applause] >> you wanted to mention your book is available at revolutionary ground here in tucson and you had some internet url you wanted to mention? >> i was asked earlier what are good sources of information on social security that's not disinformation that's useful? there's a wonderful organization called social security works. they have a web site, you can google that come and they have terrific material that is brief and to the plight and addresses a lot of issues. i would urge you to go to the social security works web site and check them out to get a couple of the organizations in the policy research and the center for budget and policy priorities put out great research that counters a lot of the myths about it and there's -- you can also get some of that from the national academy of social and insurance and i was just going to say i would be happy to talk further and signed copies of my book. if they run out at the tent going to deceive the people what revolutionary grounds, 313, the of copies as welcome and support them. they are your local and anarchist workshop and they are by an adorable 7-year-old girl. >> and terrific coffee as well. thanks to eric larusen and all of you for attending the session. >> thanks very much. the author will be autographing books in the media tent b of located south and west of the theater here and the books are available on the signing area. if you are enjoying the festival and interested in being a friend of the festival you concur to the information booth or online on the web site and thanks again for all of your support. >> you are watching live coverage of the tucson festival of books on book tv on c-span2. doubles author eric laursen talking about his book "the people's pension." in about half an hour the next panel will start. authors kristen iversen and bill carter who's written about the role copper plays in the economy. we will be on that panel and that begins in about 40 minutes. but this is book tv on c-span2. here's a look at the upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. you are watching book tv on c-span2 and we are on location in las vegas at the annual freedom fest conference. one of the speakers here is senator rand paul of kentucky and author of this book "the tea party goes to washington." this cannot and reelected in 2010, came out in 2011. how would you assess the tea party today and its influence in washington? >> when we start to i think we were equal parts to both parties we were unhappy with republicans that voted for the bank bailout and we were also unhappy with obamacare and those are the two big issues and we had the supreme court ruling on obamacare. it would be somewhat rejuvenated by its opposition. he would see the resurgence of the tea party trying to have an influence on who wins the election. >> when that team party first started in 2006 or 2007 or you even thinking of running for office at that point? >> i went to a first party in december 16th, 2007 in boston and they called it a re-enactment of the boston tea party and there was also the time my dad's campaign was starting to hit the national waves and then it kind of grew and i went to some other key parties and the first 1i went to in kentucky was in 2009 and the senator was talking about not running or other people were talking about him not running so i shall devotee party at my son's little league baseball game and i said i will take 20 minutes off and go to the square and there will be people like me that are mad about the big government and i showed up and there were nearly a thousand people there and that's when i knew something big was going on. >> at that point did you start thinking about the office? >> i was torian with the fact they're talking about the senator not running and he said if he doesn't run, i might. but showing up and seeing that a big rally said there were enough people out there like myself i tell people i sit at home watching tv come and get on have become throw things at my tv and then go about my daily business but everybody else is doing this and is becoming unhappy and the debt was exploding and republicans weren't doing the right thing either so that's when i started thinking about it. >> a lot of this book "the tea party goes to washington is about the 2010 campaign and some of the misrepresentations of who you are. but for some of those examples that you point out in here? >> the tea party, for one, a lot of people characterize us as not really being a movement. some rich guys in new york for funding the tea party and that's all what was. i never met any rich guys from new york. when i was part of the tea party i never -- the tea party boss of a decentralized that was city by city. there are sometimes two key parties in one town and they don't communicate with one another so there is no sort of top-down. this was a bottom-up movement, and a movement that really chastised both parties. we were unhappy. a lot of us were unhappy with republicans. when president bush said to save the free-market i had to give up on the free market and of capitalism that disturb a lot of fuss and we were unhappy with republicans and democrats and felt like we needed something different. >> host: >> you write in addition to being called a tea party or constitutional conservatives i've also been called a goldwater conservative by supporters and critics. it's accurate and in honor to be described as such. >> when i got started i read the conscience of the conservative and was first published in shepard's adel kentucky which is right outside of louisville and i went and met the publisher and he gave me an original copy printed in shepard's velte and i reread it and i've also been fascinated by goldwater. >> when you think of goldwater and the conservatives and libertarians is very different between the conservatives and libertarians and where do you see yourself? >> guest: the word conservative has been brought down the enough people don't know what it means. george w. bush ran as a conservative but he double the debt and he was too many of us a spender himself and we were upset with president obama making it even worse but week or not that unhappy with the republican george bush. many people call themselves libertarian to designate themselves more constitutional conservative with a true believe in limited government. >> you wrote that before you spend any time in the u.s. senator now after a couple of years being in the senate what would you change if anything and has your mind you're thinking changed all? >> i would say i and understand more how there is an impasse we are getting trouble getting things done. what i don't understand even though i am in washington is i tried to take ideas that many democrats have put forward and say we have to do but i can't get any democrats to talk to me to read the media narrative is we won't talk to them. i've had appointments with several democratic senators trying to get them to work on social security reform. social security can be saved for several years or even in perpetuity how we raise the agent ne tester the benefit. i can't get any democrats to discuss the possibility of entitlement reform. >> what about your own part of the republican party? >> half and half, some don't want to talk about it either and i equally critical of my party in the sense all 47 u.s. senators on the republican side are for the balanced budget amendment but when we go to cut 7 million from the subsidies with the fifer ten republicans who got sugar in their state it would be 7 million a year and compare that to our annual deficit. the annual deficit is over a trillion so if you want to cut 7 million at a time, that is 140,000, 7 million we can do it once. that discourages me and that is part of the problem in washington is we can't cut pennies much less the billions the would have to be cut. >> you have a new book coming out. estimates called government bullies and we look at the way people are being imprisoned from the regulatory cost. we are not talking about murder, rape, stealing, we are talking about people who put dirt on their own properties are wetland violations. they came out of the first george bush unfortunately come in and really we think that you shouldn't be telling people in jail for regulatory crime. when you put people in jail there is a difference between the criminal law and toward and you're supposed to have these immense array of intent. if you hit someone on your bicycle that wasn't murder, the same as murder. we are not putting people on the regulatory crime there is a man in jail southern mississippi for ten years without parole putting people on the queen filter on a low area of his land to the extent we've gone crazy on this stuff and was well intended. the clean water act says you can't dump pollutants. i agree with that. no chemical company should be allowed to dump chemicals in the river but putting dirt on your own land isn't the same as dumping chemicals into the river. >> ortiz some of the issues you've dealt with in the senate in the last couple of years? >> i brought the family from idaho they were assessed as $75,000 at a fine and told they can't build on their land and they had to make it like it used to be and there is no water touching their land there is a wetland, so the government says look at our web site. so they say our website is and perfect. we brought to the dollar family. they were raising money finding $90,000 for raising bunnies with a long license. but it was a long way since and they said you can pay as within 30 days of your credit card, 90,000, this is a middle class family. those are the stories that make americans that and say no more this is a good government is run amok. >> what is your biggest frustration and the senate right now? >> people haven't come to grips. we are borrowing $50,000 a second. we have to cut spending and there is so much waste and it's not just domestic welfare spending. it's in the military as well. and i tell conservatives the compromise is conservatives like myself and believe in a strong national defense we have to compromise the other side and say you know what we have wasted the military has always domestically. the pentagon says that they are too big to be audited. they spent $700 billion a year the need to be audited and we need to find out how we can save money in the military as well as domestically. there's $124 billion in the budget and accounted for. we have to do something about that. >> how do you see this sequestration debate? >> i didn't rose for the last rays and only if we have a balanced budget amendment and people say that's too hard core we will never raise the ceiling. you need to be hardcore because last year when we raised it we had the statutory caps it we've exceeded those a dozen times and you know what they do? they bring a bill to the floor that it precedes the caps that say you are not supposed to spend more than x dollars and we raise a point of order and they deem it to be okay. 80 of them canadian out of 100 say we don't care what the rules are even though we passed them last year so they ignore their own rules. you have to have a bill on line for 48 hours. it's not enough to read the bill for this limit, just last week they put one up for 12 hours and i made a point of order i haven't been out for 48 hours. we don't care what our rules are. that's why the american people are unhappy with taxes. >> book tv on c-span2. we are talking with senator rand paul and his first book "the tea party vose to washington." he has a new one coming out in august of 2012, "government belize," correct? one of the issues that you address in this is where the name rand came from. we are here this libertarian conference. are you named after ayn rand? >> i get that question. my wife -- there is no intention to be named after ayn rand although i am a big fan. i read the novels, was 17. my dad is a fan and gave me the books for christmas when i was 17. i never thought i'd get so many questions but my wife said you need to be rand and not just randall or randy anymore i wasn't running for office and so i didn't know that would be such a big deal with the first reporter i talked to asked me that and since then i've got the question quite often. >> you are an ophthalmologist. where did you go to school? >> i went to duke medical school in mali in touch and then i came back for my residency and ophthalmology. >> do you practice any more? >> de senate bald let me do it. i did it for charity and so i go around the state and i do charitable surgery. as one of those crazy rules so if you are a millionaire and you are a senator there is no limit to what passive income you can make but you can make zero earned income. i'm not allowed to do any work outside of the senate but i still do some charity work and i do miss medicine. when i ran after liberals were different because the house of representatives my dad's position did let him practice some and there were limits he was allowed but in the senate line on the practice and i've asked them to change the rules but they are not interested. >> who is on the back of the book? >> that is my wife and one of my favorite pictures because it's a sort of animated pos and i like being there and we did it as a joint project she helped with the book and also helped quiet of it with allowing me to do the campaign and to run for office. >> what does she think about being the senator's wife? >> she wasn't excited about me running that there were times when, you know, you are attacked by your opponent, your character assassination and during the campaign one of the things we talk about and was on our anniversary, october 20 at, they have accused me of something about my religion or something about college, this and that she came out and said don't mess with my man and the rest is history. >> what is your enthusiasm level for the mitt romney campaign? >> - endorsed him and i said i would endorse a republican nominee. it doesn't mean i will sit in the not be critical. not everybody agrees. i don't agree on everything. i tried to be polite about it about a week or two after my endorsement i did mention that i was concerned without any congressional authority that bothers me because that is a big issue for me at the issue of the war is important that separates me from other republicans but i don't think we should go to the war with one person's authority the constitution intended it that be separated and they said specifically revested that power in the legislature because executives are prone we wanted to divide the power up and so i am very concerned about beginning a new war we've been through a decade i will do whatever possible to make sure there's a debate in the senate and in the congress should that be something people want to do again. >> did your endorsement cause any strikes? >> nope. some of my dad's supporters were not too happy that we've always gotten along. he was informed it was coming and we waited until their campaign acknowledged that they didn't have the delegates. there are still some people who love my dad so much and still want him to win, but the numbers are done because they are not ready to admit the numbers are sufficient. >> you're father's political philosophy is well known. what percentage would you say that you share with him? >> we believe in limited government and in a very original and interpretation of the constitution. but there will be issues even when you think you are coming from the same basis and foundation you will disagree on so we do disagree on occasion but always very politely they let me come home for thanksgiving and i get to sit at the adel table those of the time. islamic what is your standing in the republican party in washington? >> i think you located i try not to insult people and i try to work both sides of the of and both sides of the republican party or the different sides of the republican party. and there are times i you will agree and disagree with people. even in the senate i worked with many people on the democrats' site on issues of internet freedom. ron wyden is an open and die and in that sense we may not agree on the issues of civil libertarian issues we see eye to eye on issues of trying to win the war iraq and afghanistan. i think that we have signed letters with many democrats encouraging the president to end of the war in afghanistan i think the public is coming around library say 60 to 70% is ready for the war to be over even republicans it is 50/50. we've been through ten years of this. we have won the war. we killed bin laden, disrupted the terrorist space but we don't have enough money to keep creating, trying to create nation's. >> one more question. what do you think about the fact sometimes democrats use you as the evil bogyman in their campaign? >> that means you are being effective in the sense that you make a target for you but i think i am not easily identifiable as being partisan. i don't believe in empty partisanship to that i've written on air force one with the president to find money for building bridges, suggested we bring home some foreign-aid and the four and welfare overseas could be used for bridges. i suggested they built a patriot capital from overseas let it come home at a reduced tax rate and take money to build bridges and i've worked with or tried to work with democrats and work to the pipeline regulation bill where they are going to exempt the pipeline and i've made them take out the walls because the ones that were exploding. i think sometimes i am not as easily pigeonholed as a partisan republican. some are probably still criticizing me that i am proud of the fact i actually do work with the other side not in the way i give up on principles but i find like-minded people that have been to the democrats to respect this is booktv on c-span2 we are talking with senator rand paul author of the book "the tea party garst washington." he has a new book coming out and it's called "the government bullies." this is c-span2. in a few minutes we will be back in the gallagher theater with more from the tucson festival of books. >> we have allowed and human rights nightmare to occur on our watch. in the years since dr. king's def, a vast new system of racial and social control has emerged from the ashes of slavery and jim crow. a system of mass incarceration that no doubt has dr. king turning in his grave today. the mass incarceration of poor people of color in the united states as tantamount to a new cast like system one that shuttles people from the underfunded schools to brand new high-tech prisons. it's a system that blocks poor people, overwhelmingly poor people of color into a permanent second-class status nearly as effectively as earlier systems of racial and social control. it is in my view the moral equivalent of jim crow. >> i have never seen a report in the u.s. or any news has been the story that live with the constant sirens that go off everyday a rocket is close by and they have 15 seconds to get into a bomb shelter. i went to visit some elderly people they were actually some of the founders, and they were probably 65 plus, many of them in their seventies. they haven't slept through the night. this was in 2009 and do this during the operation. but in the months preceding that come and part of what triggered it was a constant bombardment and people hear about this in a way that is backwards. did they hear that israel has made a strategic strike on a particular person or a particular target, and that that was responded to with the rockets. that's the way that its reported most of the time when in fact the rockets have been over 12,000 rockets in the last ten years to reach some of them are longer small, they are i iranian or larger and they are not just what they call rockets which are small. these people have to get up and run every time there is a siren and the they do it because they know they can be killed and people are killed whether they are killed in great numbers of depends on where it strikes, but these people were taking anti-depressant. the children in the area were all bedwetters. the people i went to see what sleep in a hotel where there was no disturbance. these are old people. they don't want to leave but one said to me how can you come here my children will come to visit aren't you afraid to be here? there were explosions nearby. i didn't even hear sirens i just heard explosions. we were less than a mile from gaza. there are mothers that have to get their babies into the shelter. there's a little piece i quote in the book written by a mother to assess which child should i grabbed? she has five children. which one do i take first? every time she's making these decisions. so bad state is ongoing. it's quiet right now because of this recent so-called truths with hamas. everyone knows a will start up again. i went to the north after the lebanon war. janet and i, and move them north was bombarded and these were larger rockets and we went and saw some of the places they had struck and i hope -- half of the house was gone. most of them are not living there but some were in shelters for a month living in the shelter. the state of the war in israel is such that it is such a little country, people here it's the size of new jersey so even if it's the south and everybody has a relative, everybody has kids in the army. it's not like america where you hear of this. this is everybody's problem and the phone starts ringing when these things she'd up, even my phone, and particularly recently when we actually had assignments in jerusalem for the first time in 30 years the was an interesting experience because you find yourself saying okay should i take a shower or not take a shower? [laughter] if i could sleep in my normal pajamas because i'm going to have to see my neighbors and the bomb shelter and i don't think i want them to see my pajamas. these are stupid things to think the consciousness of it is what happens, it pervades everything so the state of war and israel is an ongoing danger in threat and it's also a consciousness. but it's also a way of going on with life no matter what and that is let the israelis are best at is that they just go on and they celebrate life. they don't just sit around and worry. they have dinner and a bar mitzvahs, and it's a culture that celebrates life as a face of danger. that is what i would say sums up the culture. >> so shifting from the misconceptions of what life is about since you mentioned the north, in the document and that when you were in a city north of israel that he met with the mayor and he was standing in the rubble of cahal. what was his -- >> the people who had been in the shelters were upset the war ended when did. they wanted it finished and they said we will live in shelters for three months of this will be the end of it. but his fear was the burnt trees, we plan to 100 trees. we rebuilt and plan for the next time because some way we are going to be the gateway to israel and we will have dinner together. we want to be the gateway to the north. and he was all about building and rebuilding and planting. trees are a very big deal with israel. it's the only country in the world that has more trees at the turn of the 20th century than it had at the beginning of the 20th century. .. this is our coverage of the tucson has developed works 2013. started in just a mama, two authors on a panel. kristin iversen and bill carter. kristen iris and greg to the rocky mountains flat nuclear weaponry facility in colorado and though carter writes extensively on the role copper place in the world economy. here is our next panel. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> so hello and thank you. welcome, everybody. thank you for joining us today for the panel discussion, poisoned: hometown texan tragedies. the name is terry gord brock. as with the tucson library until i became an activist in 2001 after my 2-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia. we met other families in the shot of the kenya cluster and we were active and not investigation and the controversy around that issue. i left the field of librarianship and nonexecutive director of the national disease clusters lands and we are a nonprofit working to prevent environmental tragedies like the ones you hear about today. discovery links between environmental exposure and disease is challenging. however, it can be done and it must be done and if we have the proper tools, communication, respect for communities and sites about we can do it. it is an honor to serve today as the panel for this discussion. so thank you all for coming. so first up, it is my pleasure to introduce kristin iversen, author of "full body burdon: growing up in the nuclear shadow of rocky flats". kristin's memoir reveals family secret and government secrets in the fact we are not safe from industrial pollution. her book is a finalist for the andrew carnegie medal of excellence. it's the best group of 2012 from the american library association it's the best book about just as chosen by the atlantic magazine. it's my pleasure to welcome kristen. my favorite thing about your book is that it is such a page turner. thank you are telling the story in such an accessible way. would you take 10 minutes to tell us that you're both. >> thank you. i'm going to go to the podium on the other side. did everyone hear me? thank you all for coming. the rocky flats nuclear weapons facility is the biggest secret of my childhood. i grew up in colorado just outside of denver, between boulder and denver and when i was a kid, we swam in l.a., rubber horses run the field and were outside all the time that we never knew what was going on at rocky flats. when i was a kid, it is separated by dow chemical and the river and our neighbor had his favor making household cleaning supplies. in fact, my mother was convinced they are making scrubbing bubbles. over the course of 38 years, rocky flats produced more than 70,000 plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons. each button or trigger contains enough readable articles of plutonium to kill every person on earth. there is extensive decontamination in our neighborhood and we never know. later, like a lot of kids in my neighborhood, i went to work at rocky flats myself. today i quit this today with some day write a book about it. 10 years of research and writing women into this boat and i read it to discover what happened to learn everything i could about plutonium and nuclear weapons and the crucial role to play a play during and after the cold war. but it's also a family story and ultimately i wanted to put a human face on what i felt was a very inhumane story. so what i'm going to do today to show you things he wants in the book. i'll play the story rocky flats through photographs and contamination maps and nicer day. try to keep it to 10 minutes and hopefully will have questioned that dn. one thing i might point out on the cover here that's kind of neat as i did know about this until they selected this photo for the book, my mother is sitting right behind me and my father shadowless rate here. he's the one taken the photo. my family has been incredibly supportive of this book in so many ways, so it was neat to see their pictures there. i want to just touch briefly on the title, "full body burden." i wanted to work and of the drill a as close metaphorical way. the radioactive material and it body which acts as an ongoing internal and ongoing source of radiation. i was born in des moines, iowa. i come from a scandinavian family and this is a photo of me with my dad before we moved to colorado and i might mention briefly my father is a danish descent. my mother is norwegian. when they married, the families considered a mixed marriage. this is a photo taken on our first house, which was about seven house from the rocky flats nuclear weapons facility. of course at that time we did know anything about rocky flats. we didn't even know was there. that's me right in the middle between my two sisters. and here's a photo from my backyard. then when my brother was born, we move to a house in a subdivision called rachel dale, which is about three miles from the rocky flats plant. one difference between los alamos, which was to bring their nuclear weapons program at rocky flats, which we were the ones who were really producing all the paid, the people who worked at los alamos led to los alamos. people who worked at rocky flats lived in the surrounding area in the plant was dependent on local population for workers. it was also located in the wrong place, earliest engineering report noted the plant should not be located near large metropolitan area because of the potential danger to the surrounding population. however, the wind patterns are based on wind patterns at stapleton airport on the other side of denver and where they eventually located the plant here. when that was discovered by a worker named gemstone, he was eventually fired as a whistleblower. you can see from the photo one of the problems with this plan being so close to a metropolitan area is that the winds come up the mountains and foothills very, very quickly in kerry contamination into the local neighborhood and on and to the metric denver area. the atomic energy act of 1946 created a complete wall of secrecy between the public and these nuclear facilities. secret operations at rocky flats began in 1952. it was somebody atomic energy commission, now the department of energy and operated by chemical. from 1952 to 1989, rocky flats produced more than 70,000 plutonium pits. the space providing atomic bombs chain reaction essentially produced in the heart of every nuclear weapon in america. supplies of plutonium at oak ridge supplied the uranium. here's an aerial view of rocky flats. it grew to have more than 800 buildings. many of those buildings were partially underground and you couldn't see anything from the road. companies that operated rocky flats like rockwell and e.g. cheaper indemnified for many catastrophe reliability. workers at rocky flats worked on what were called lines of boxes. it would put their hands into the outside class to manipulate the plutonium buttons to become trigger. and here's a photo of a quote rockslide looks like. plutonium is highly flammable and catches fire easily and it's difficult to put out a hotel empire. if you use water, you risk causing a criticality, which is a nuclear chain reaction. rocky flats produced plutonium triggers, but its biggest output was toxic and waste. like many i went to work at rocky flats myself when i was working at rocky flats, there is far than 14 times the plutonium stored at the facility, much of it unsafely stored. some was stored inside and here's a photo of workers checking barrels and i've another photo photo in a moment that will show you. the department of energy and companies that operated rocky flats repeatedly denied they were involved in activities were posed any danger at all to the public. however, the public was in danger. over the course of 38 years, there were more than 200 fires at rocky flats. the biggest in 1957 and 1969. there was no warning, no evacuation and no information available to the public. this is from the 1957 fire, which was so intense they bring a 640 filters and also burned out all of the measuring equipment so we'll never know exactly how much material -- radioactive material escaped into the environment. the second-biggest buyer was in 1969 right after we moved out to our new house. on mothers day, may 11, 1969, we are out having mother's day brunch is a family and we had no idea a radioactive cloud was traveling over our heads. this is the plume from the 1957 fire in the 1969 fire followed a similar path. this is my family and about the 1969 fire. this is a photo every family house. what i wanted to do is tell the tory of rocky flats and also tell it through the eyes of the people who live the story. my family, fellow workers, residents had to put a human face on a very inhumane story. this is the first love of my life, talk. if you read my book company he's featured in the first chat here. there's a lot of animals in my story and it's in the animals we first began to see some of the effects of the radioactive contamination. unknown to the public more than 5000-barrel stood out in the open for more than 11 years. if you're looking at the screen from where you are, my house is about two and a half else to the left. what happened to the sparrows? they rusted out and radioactive and toxic material leaked into the soil and was carried off site. public was not informed. there is contamination in the water. this is a photo -- vicious contaminated residential areas surround rocky flats. my house is right near stanley lake. you can see it with the pointer they are. we began to see health effects and some of the local farms and ranches. this is local farmer lloyd nixon and scooter who doesn't have any back legs. at his farm, he saucers to things and pigs and chickens. should i plutonium level. in the 1970s, we began to see some protests at rocky flats. in the neighborhood where he lived, my father used to say, all those activists don't know what they're talking about. hippies and housewives and then who knows what they're really talking about. was the general attitude at the time and it turns out the activists were right. you might recognize this person here. that's allen ginsberg. so there were a number of protests, which eventually led to 1989 sba rate, the only time in the history of the country to government agencies, the fbi and epa have raided another agency, department of energy. it's a very dramatic chapter in my book. i'll have to tell you the short version for now. i'm almost out of time, but i want to finish up here. i went to work at the plant in 1994 when i was a single parent of two little boys the mass of the planet look like at the time. i prepared a report sent to washington and there a lot of acronyms in this reports that i didn't understand at the time. one of them was not. missing unaccounted for plutonium and over the course of 40 years, rocky flats lost or misplaced within 3050 pounds of plutonium, which is remarkable when you think 1 millionth of a program can cause they help effect. workers have been good. i'll show a couple photos of people on the boat. this is charlie wilkes, a manager when i worked out there. marshall stewart on the production line. tamra smith who lived right down the street from me and she comes from a mourning family and they have an organic garden and they grew their own vegetables in raised rock article and look entirely off the land mx 70 other people people, my neighborhood has a number of brain tumors. so rocky flats eventually close, but the story is not over. the legacy of rocky flats is the 6000 acres that remain, 1300 acres or so without my contaminated they can never be open to the public. the rest decided to open as a national wildlife refuge open for public hiking, biking and recreation come even though levels of plutonium and other contaminates a very high and there is no limit below six feet, which is remarkable when you think how many buildings were underground. we are busy building new homes on contaminated land, but i'm happy to say that citizen activism has played a big part of the story in the past and is once again as people learn, were working hard in colorado and around the country to forget rocky flats ever happened in the race as much as possible. yes people become aware, they are protests and talking about it with again. i think i'll stop there. [applause] that's wonderful and will have a chance to hear from kristin again was an interview question and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the microphone in the aisle at the end of the hour. so now it is my pleasure to introduce bill carter, the second author on our panel and he wrote the book, "boom, bust, boom: a story about cooper the metal that runs the world." so bill's astonishing tale of began when he posted himself by eating vegetables grown in his own yard in arizona. before that, he is more well known during the war in bosnia. he actually entered syria vote during the 15 month ossetian was an american aid worker and escaped the city, traveled to italy, snuck backstage to a u2 concert and commenced by much of the citizens of sarajevo. together they brought cast live interviews during the two were in this remarkable tale is told in his first book, fools rush in in his documentary film, and this theory though produced by bono, who wrote the theme song for the film. after surviving all this, bill moved to arizona where things are supposed to be safer and more calm only to face danger in his own peaceful home. so this option expiration of copper that is this tremendously interesting understanding of copper and how essential it is for the world and how harmful as well. synergy takes some time to tell us about your book? >> yacht, the festival is fantastic. just a little correction. first of all this for years. the 15 month is when i started to reach out. this book began like all my books, which is me finding myself in the middle of something i don't understand. in this case, by the way i love bisbee and have a lot of friends there and it's a wonderful town. i met my wife there, but third 2000 from tucson. went down to write my first book, fools rush in an ever did. i met my wife and eventually bought a house of matter first came in around 2007, is a bit of a shift in arizona. it is still shreveport back around. at that point it a better job of reclaiming land. but the process of reclaiming is this soil. i submitted my yard to be tested, but they were taken a very long time. in the meantime we started having our second child when my wife was pregnant and i started to break occurred in and put the systems in a very excited and into my garden. very proud. my first daughter was helping me. when i started to have my first fruit of the card in my wife would refuse to eat it because she was paid at a time not touching anything from the dirt, even though i love our time, i'm not going to touch the dirt. turns out she was very smart. i started eating it and initially got very sick. we were very worried. at that time the soil samples came back with high levels of arsenic and lead. they moved us into another house, quickly spent two weeks -- quickly dug all the soil out. a lot of people have extended their homes. half their home tested and change the soil. and that is the class. you have to give them the credit they done that. if you ever ask for whether taking dirt, i've no idea where they took the dirt or with a new came from. i just assumed it's okay, but i don't know why i'm assuming not. mining companies are not inherently evil. they are corporations. they make money. but they do things than on a day-to-day basis at 240 years of contamination. and make no mistake, every single contaminates. there's no example example of a compromise that doesn't heavily produce a toxin. it doesn't exist. i said this before in these panels. it isn't because they're bad people. it's because no one understands how to stop contamination that comes from such a large-scale open pit. so this led me, this contamination, poison, worried about my kids and wife led me to investigate copper and understand where i live. i wanted to know what is going on around the world. but would it mean if they open the mind? there was a lot of talk and i wanted to know what that meant, so i started traveling to understand order. the result of that is the book. it was an absolutely fascinating journey. fascinating to learn how credible coffee is. how we are very complicated equation. so we can protest -- we have to have very solid ground to try to stop them because they won't stop because u.s. that's never going to happen. when you start dealing with the epa in science can be certainly much bigger issues. you can't somehow affect, so anyways, this book is an exploration of love that. it's very personal because i'm trying to figure this out for my kid. i also loved the speed. it's a dear place to be. i've been all over the world. it's been a crazy life. this view is the place i found absolutely called for mps because you could walk, interestingly people. you don't your neighbor is. it's a fascinating place. but it is a very hard decision to leave, very difficult. i didn't want to be in a tom that might be of my monday and i didn't want to sit in protest because it was mining town. there'd be no town america was that my name. so i chose says an activist where philosophy way to say i'm going to leave. i have a choice. so i left. that doesn't mean i won't go back one day. that's human nature, right? but that is what the book is about an ego. i'm sure we'll get them tomorrow. >> thank you. one question for both of you is in regards to the response to your books when this happens to books came out, do you meet people who disagree with your conclusions and have you learned about their community facing similar issues? kristen, do you want to go to first? >> a lot of typing since i book has come out. my life is turned upside down. for one thing i've received hundreds of e-mails from people who live around rocky flats and other facilities like that. can you hear me all right on this? because there is never bad and a public-health monitoring available for people who live around rocky flats or other areas, and difficult for me to know. there's nowhere for me to send these people for help. that part has been overwhelming. i was nervous of the department of energy might respond, even though the book was heavily fact chad by lawyers and a different scientific and technical experts. i received some very interesting e-mails from people who work for the department of energy actually thanking me for telling the story because no one else has told this story and it's a really important story. the biggest change such as happened last week is that i got an e-mail from a jefferson county commissioner and jefferson county is the county in denver and the whole western part of the state they are. i can't talk about it without tearing up. since last thursday night. everyone at the county commissioners meeting had read the book, partly because they were aware of it and people had sent it to them and as a result they passed a new water quality requirements for all of those housing development in the neighborhood going in. you ask why are we building houses next to a contaminated site is a show you a photo? that's the next question will tackle. have a heartfelt message. the word is out in the most important way to tell the stories is through storytelling is to reset the people who are living in these areas and that so people understand the story, but in all the technical aspects and how they respond to it. >> thank you, kristin. before you move on, i want to mention what you said about the hundreds of people who report problems system aimed that have been to her nonprofit as well. there is a good answer to tell people facing dramatic exposure or disease and we were at the senate supporting a new piece of legislation proposed and erin popovich was there. she did thousands of people contacting her with their own problems, trying to report it so someone somewhere will take action. right now are societies not doing a good job with that. so what is that the response your book? >> i was very nervous about this be because my friends still live there and have homes there. it's been very positive. i was scared, but at the same time people want to know. they want to know what they're dealing with. i found that refreshing but i wasn't quite sure. they were glad to know more about where they live and that's a good thing. it had a lot of minors, people from the mining this is. not on the top level, the people thankful and how much they love their mining town. because of baghdad or other mining towns in arizona, there's people they raise their families and put their kids through college and that is very respected in this book. there's no part of this book that outlines that. that is a choice to have them as totally honorable. my issue is some kind of a bigger scale of what were doing to ourselves as we keep consuming these medals and how that's going to become a problem when you put it up against food and water adventure that will be more and more of a problem in our world. so the response has been part of it. i bet a few people angry with me, but that's okay i'm used to that. >> so both of your books look up forces that a lot of these problems to develop and exist. some of them is the silencing effect of a company town. it might be greed or monetary issues. it might be a bit of buzz. will you talk about some major reason we have the environmental problems you face in your home click >> in terms of arizona -- about two weeks ago with an epa report for the most polluted counties and towns. can you guess what that is? hayden. hayden is the home of large-scale copyright arizona. we'd taken on the small taste across the country for a very good reason. they kill people. they're very toxic. they are now in china and china is dying for obvious reasons. so most of the pollution honestly came 100 years ago. the tom and the small service 500 feet. that pushes kate could not top of this heavy toxins. the thing about heavy metal as they don't go away come at least in your lifetime or three lifetimes. another came from this very interesting. as these on a hill. it's very uneven, very hard to build a home, sunni 32 which accommodations. so they brought that and, leveled some nations all over the town. at that time no one thought anything was said that that would poison you in knots with our yard, isn't something that happened. it's old activity. but if i was living in the red sea at february. i was living in baghdad endured i was in tucson i'd be concerned about rosemont because it is going to affect that water. there's no way not to affect that water. 20% of the book on this way. so terry talked about laws. the biggest issue facing us today with copper, gold. it does not allow us to thought. it is not in the law. you can't stop of mine. the epa was created the clean water act. it's really the only thing she's up to mine. a county has no power unless it's on a link. if it's on federal land you can't stop it. there's only been 13 cases in the history of the epa were they use the 404 c. it's very hard can make them stop. so we have to change the 1872 law act to change how things are done in our yard or this country and we should change it. if i asked how much you think they're charged to run a mine on the united states federal land, do you know the answer? five dollars an acre. so they're using our federal land for $5 an acre in 1872. gas and oil pay 12% and we have no real superbomb that really holds them. they can go bankrupt, walk away with after the $200 billion fund will pay for. so it needs to be addressed in a big way. so that's the law that needs to be addressed. >> i would say with respect to rocky flats coming up to look at the law in the beginning as well. if they mention in my presentation, companies that produce nuclear weapons are identified from any damage to the surrounding area. for the secrecy surrounding rocky flats in the beginning was the cold war and cold war secrecy, but then it became a complicated as time went on. it's a beautiful part of the country between denver and boulder. it's always been a desirable area in terms of business and home developments in colorado has always had a big push in terms of development. so when environmental regulations came in at the clean water act said earlier environmental regulations, companies that operated nuclear facilities were successful in not having to conform to environmental regulation. they fought it tooth and nail because it turns out we cannot make nuclear weapons. no one would go into the nuclear business, including nuclear power plant if they didn't have the indemnification because it's a very risky and dangerous thing to do. up to the present time, the amount of secrecy that continues to exist around rocky flats, we are all complicit to a certain degree because it has to do with business and development. though a very briefly say something someone said to me last week that came up after present patient and said what am i supposed to do? i moved here from california, colorado, but a brand-new house of butter savings on this house. they were not required to tell me anything about contamination in the land. this house is on contaminated land. what should i do? we don't want to live here, but out we saw this house? should we tell the next number that comes along to look at the house, that this area is contaminated and it's next to a highly contaminated by a? will sell our house. we've painted ourselves into a corner in the situation and it's very scary stuff. >> it is, i agree. it is frightening. this one is looking towards the future. if you unlimited power, what changes would you make to avoid the kind of problems we are facing? what can we do? what should we do next? >> go ahead. [laughter] we need to tell her stories. we need to pay attention. we cannot trust the private corporations who operate these nuclear facilities. i'm sure to speak to that. we have to demand the truth in what is our air and water and soil and we have to demand the government and companies be transparent with us. i particular interest is nuclear issues and was happy with our power plants, for example from people around those facilities as well. so i think we have to pay attention, demand truth and transparency in and do something about it. with social media, facebook and twitter, we can make a difference. it's much easier to treat. i can't believe i missed and not as a verb, get in touch with representatives who can make a difference with these issues. i think we need to wake up and pay attention and do something about it. >> i want to congratulate you for the success you've had in your hometown. that's really an amazing tour you shared with us. it is speaking to the power of citizen voice and citizen action. what could you do if you could run the world? what changes would you make that >> addressing the solemnly, i'm going to take a moment to talk about an issue very near and dear to me and argue on the basis of this question should be near and dear to you. in this room. you're concerned about rose. they be near your home or wherever it is. wyoming or nevada or wherever you are. sometimes the backyard issue, not in my backyard is in a good enough argument to change policy because it only affects you. so you have to think in a broader way about something that affects another community, that maybe makes a difference to you. i will argue right now. there's some particular spot on this earth that i'm trying desperately to save. a lot of people are. it's an alaska, bristol bay called pebble mine. it's a plan to build one of the most enormous minds on earth. no one is arguing how rich the deposit is. 14 miles which is the home of the biggest natural hatchery sockeye salmon on the planet. 40 million fish come in every year. if you eat wild salmon, that's where you get it. it is the biggest fishery. 14 miles of the hatchery fish will not survive a large-scale coppermine. they're going to train the entire basin because they have to get the water going into the mind. this would be a catastrophe. you're going to lose one of the world's greatest food resources. the reason i'm arguing as i ask where they go in my response to you is if you can't stop pebble, which is actually really good argument is next to one of the world's greatest food resources, you can't type anything. so i'm going to do my little page. at the end of april, it's about to release this to us, all of us. you have one month to make public, and on that site about why you want to save your soul day. but you have to say some thing because what kristin was just saying, all this stuff is new. this stuff has been going on and now they can't. the example i can give you, sandy hook. before sandy hook, if the conversation. i'm not trying to get into that. but the numbers have changed. it allows politicians to have cover to actually do something possibly. it's a national issue that when it comes out, forget the numbers of public comment session, i will make a huge difference. it also will set precedents for rosemont because there are no examples of stock in something for that. we need to help them how courage. that's my point. >> thank you. let's go ahead and give a big round of applause. i would like to second not to please, and during the time. >> save bristol bay.com. go there and find everything at the organization that helps. >> just one quick thing. there is now a petition to stop development on and around the flat a petition that charted a couple weeks ago. we've got a ton of signatures that would be great if you could find that as well. you can find them if they spoke author page. >> in the next portion were going of questions for the audience to come inet to have the microphones. let me also mention a few minutes at the top of the hour we will go to a book signing opportunity. you can purchase books out by adobe to book signing on the mall. our pitching for a proposed bus, one called trevor spot takes concerned communities that requires the epa to address the concerns and not someone were to rocker mitch was sharing the different there and she gets around the country. that's another one. go to trevor struck.org and sign a petition. let's start on this side. what's your first question? >> my question is for kristin. i want to thank you for writing your book and telling a family story from growing up in the metro denver area as well because my nieces and great-nieces are also suffering health effects. after reading the book again, didn't inhabit either have deformed animals collected in her freezer tested? i was left hanging in the narrative and i know there is this value in citizens collecting evidence. >> that's a great question. vinnie abbott is a woman who lived down the road from us and resources in childress verses in my sisters and i often competed against her. she began to see over the years a number of performing these are animals and horses in the book, or comes from outside the body and that sort of thing. she started to see these things and keep them in her freezer. she had been tested it couple times. i don't have the latest final information. i haven't been noticeably quicker, but i will say i want to emphasize plutonium has been found in the bodies of animals. a number of different tests. what does that mean for us, for people? there is a study at the university of colorado and epa and he did a study -- autopsies on 450 bodies of people who live around rocky flats and from the tone in the long liver tissues. so it is in our bodies. at the risk of sounding glib, rocky flats is where we all have such glowing personalities. >> on this site. >> this question is for bill. i grew up in a southern arizona mining town and that was all too small and i can recall my mother hanging out laundry with her mask on because she had asthma. my father coming nearing his retirement said i would be dead within two years or i will be really sick because all of my friends that retired, something happens to them in the first two years. my question is, are there any studies on minors or people who worked in a small tear or even residents looking longitudinally in the health issues over generations that you're aware of. >> is not very many studies on this. the story you told me as almost every time a small tear. people don't live very old or if they do they have complications. the best seven and, also today is the candidate, south of the border about 45 minutes, 40 minutes and it's a very contaminated spot. it has people that die all the time from what we think of black lung disease for coal miners. a basilica in the lungs, which is really what comes from the extraction from copper and kills a lot of people. the long-term studies i don't know why they're not doing it. probably because it is an important industry and not a lot of support -- a lot of communities as you may know support that town. they love that town until the mind leaves has a quite often do. that's why the book is "boom, bust, boom." they spent the money in everybody's doing well and when the bus they when they find copper 15 years later they come back and they're all next generation. they don't go away and the copper deposit doesn't go away. there's not a lot of studies even though there is evidence everywhere. >> thank you, panel for these very important issues. the issues you are speaking about arafat and a half of all humanity within the larger issue of global warming that is going to impact the health of our planet to a state where not familiar with. as the speech, in washington on the nuclear issue, about a thousand gallons has been leaking and the state administration has no idea how to address it, which brings me to the question i want to address the nuclear question. with global warming being such an enormously important issue, there have peep peep hole, including a sky or who is favoring nuclear energy for the simple reason that it is at least until you get rid of the waste of not polluting the earth in terms of co2. so many environmentalists have windup and what is your opinion? should we look at nuclear energy in order to prevent the incredible pollution by call and petroleum? or should we get the imagery that is off the books? >> that's a great question. take that for that it aired the situation is critical so i'm glad you brought that up as well. contact your colorado, rocky flats, what happened in my backyard. but i'm really talking about everyone's backyard. the accident fukushima reminded us all in a terrible way to affect all of us. this is not just a regional or local or national issues. what i want to say about nuclear power plants and the emphasis and push has a great deal of push in this country that i nuclear power are your power plants. licensing has been suspended because we haven't figured out how to build a plan to keep it safe and prevent problems. in the last year since i've been on tour, i visited almost every nuclear power plant in the country and i have learned a lot. i could go on and on, but will answer briefly on sales at the university of chicago where he did a lecture and there were a number of scientists and engineers in germany there. germany has turned away from nuclear weapons in germany has turned away from nuclear power. these people put on an hour-long presentation at the end that we are relying entirely on alternative energy so much so we are producing enough to exploit other countries. it used to live in germany, so i can relate to what he said next. then he said this on doesn't shine etch in germany. here we are sunny day in chicago. he says we can do it in germany, why can't we do it here? i think that's a question and that's where we need to go. [applause] another question. >> question for bill. have you had any feedback from anyone that's read your book? >> shreveport is a company that owns a lot of mines in arizona. you may have heard for minors, but i'm always shocked. but i think the lawyers had to bet looks like this, trust me. the lawyers were concerned, but when i asked has to be said i just did a book on oil. i just read a book on big oil, which was incredibly hard on oil, maize. for the most part if you do a book that raises the attention or gives attention to the history, the first thing they're going to do is not get in touch with you. they're not going to put an editorial in the paper. they're going to act like they said creates more attention from you, so they generally try to ignore you until you become fishermen this problem. they tend not to get in touch with me. >> first i want to acknowledge both of you for taking a stand for humanity. kristin, a richer book. [applause] for taking the miscue both due to the truth about these issues is important and dangerous at times. the indemnity question chris and to clarify comes from our government. our government protects these private companies and says to them, we will let you do this will protect you 100%. one thing we could do is change the indemnification provisions so private companies who engage in dangerous activities are no longer protected. would you agree with? i have a follow-up question. >> i would agree with that i want to emphasize briefly what the act does this leave citizen to depend upon the chords. one thing i didn't have a chance to talk about in the presentation to get into the book is a class-action lawsuit filed in 1990 on behalf of 15,000 in colorado who live around rocky flats. it took 20 years to wind its way through the court. a jury eventually decided in our favor in 2006. i'll never forget that the. two years later was overturned by the 10th circuit court of appeals by three federal judges and a few months ago the supreme court refused to hear it. so the kind of change you are talking about is essential for one of the things we have to do. >> is a perfect segue to my next question. identical scenario happened with the vatican northern arizona as a result of the nuclear testing. there is a class-action. he wanted on the merits and lost is the federal government was protect it. congress to it and provided a benefit for uranium miners announced i participated to have been in 1890. in 2000, they added a new program that includes the workers have rocky flats. it's not a big stretch to say if you are going to compensate downwinders in utah and northern arizona and nevada, you should come see the downwinders and folks other than close proximity to rocky flats to him for it to oak ridge to all these other nuclear facilities. so that can be done. it's not a big stretch. i'm curious about your comments to that. the >> you mention the workers. one thing a lot to say is in some ways its first appearance is easier to purvey protection approved if your worker. however, more than two thirds of the people who've applied for some sort of compensation from the government, less than a third have been compensated and it's very, very difficult. there's a lot of red tape. you have to be able to prove you are exposed to a particular thing in a particular in time of the government has denied a lot of things we find in the environment picture of young, strong hands, they say they never with them. now with respect to tritium, which i mentioned earlier a couple to go they admitted it turns out we did have tritium. we did have workers out there, saw those workers who'd been claiming exposure now can finally apply for compensation. but many of those people are dead. so it's a very big problem in terms of how we deal with this. it seems the logical thing to make that connection, but what the government about these corporations are saying is the level of contamination by the level we cannot deny the contamination. it thayer. but they squabble about is how much is fake and how much is okay? of course there's no safe level it's hard to prove a direct link. that's always been the problem. >> we're almost at the top of the hour. neither of you have a question for bill? will take the question for bill, our last question today in other questions you cannot skip the book signing. >> i am born and raised third-generation. my grandma died of pancreatic cancer. my mom died six years ago but pancreatic cancer and my dad died in january of colon cancer. i covered that good. i live in tucson, but we always said there is arsenic. .. let's have a big show of applause. [applause] [inaudible conversations] we are watching book tv on c-span2 this is live coverage tucson festival of books. that was kristen iversen and author bill carter talking about their books on the environment the copper industry and the rocky mountain flax nuclear weapons facility. we will be back in 30 minutes at the gallagher theater on the campus of the university of arizona with the co-authors of last water on the devils highway. this is book tv on c-span2. was almost two years ago that i decided it was time to write a fact based primer on the rights specifically targeted at the center voters and the subtitle of the book. to do two things come to challenge the religious right on its own turf and to show much of what is called the gay agenda is actually consistent with fundamental republican and libertarian principles. number two, to show the center right voters who believe in social tolerance that not only are they not a voice in the wilderness, they represent a majority of rank-and-file republican voters. the book has three major things. the first 1i just alluded to many simply don't understand that properly understood the rights are in fact perfect cui compatible with fundamental republican principles of the limited government, individual rights and equal protection of the law. the essence of the classical liberal or libertarian philosophy is simply will not live and let live. all people are created with certain any legal rights. the government doesn't dole out the rights depending on what religion you are, what economics class you are in, what your gender is or theoretically at least what your sexual orientation is. that's the way it's supposed to be. i think that's why they have a special obligation to teach fellow conservatives and right of center voters why gay and lesbian americans deserve the same rights as everybody else. the second theme of my book is that because of this constant over the top rhetoric that we often hear from the religious right most people have a little understanding of what rank-and-file republicans believe about the issues. the conventional wisdom is all republicans hate gays, opposed to gays rights. they couldn't be further from the truth. you can watch this online at booktv.org. >> in 2006i was a reporter in the case involving seven men and at first it seemed the team to announce the case and say they declared a ground war and are going to bomb the tower in north miami beach on the united states of america i realized early on was clear the connection was posing an al qaeda operative. i did my story in miami and over time i realized they had a similar pattern that was people targeted the terrorism involving the subway stations, the office building but they never had the means of their own how the ability to acquire weapons and they were provided by an fbi informant posing an al qaeda operative organization of some sort and so right around 2010i began to question how can we to get out how many of these have existed since nine the levin, how many since 9/11 were involving the terrorists of imminent danger and those involving people that have no capacity on their own but for an informant undercover agent providing them with the means. so every year free journalists are who pursued a project that could take a year or more and doing something with a holistic look in the u.s. court and finalized to find out how many of them and vaulted the terrorists and how many involved that had no capacity for terrorism on their own and so they produced the story that looked at that entirely and we found one of every two involved and four men sometimes the informant provided information but in the case of more than 150 defendant's they even played a part in the plot or more than 50 played a provocateur who provided the means and opportunities for people who on their own never had that capacity. she came close to bombing the times square and you can count on one hand the people that pose a serious threat. and then the other people going to trial right now they never had the ability to acquire weapons but the fbi provided them with all the means the needed to become essentially did delete to dangerous terrorists overnight. >> one of my favorite cases to tell about a man and a delay we don't know exactly why they targeted him that they decided that he was a terrorist threat and they found an informant to target him and he had converted to islam and had been ostracized by the family for it and was working on video games and had no -- the day before his car had broken down and the informant conversation during the conversation he tells us you could come and live with me and he said this must be the work of godly and over the course of several months they talk about islam, get involved to take action and he then says he wouldn't know the name of many judges and the informants said what about the shopping law and he said yes and so they were getting very excited about it. they had the major problem they had in this is that he didn't have any money in an overt action they needed him to acquire weapons and the informant said to him i know an arms dealer who can tell you grenades. i think if you took the speakers he would say trade here's the grenade. she goes to the shopping mall and in the he brings over the speakers and hands them over and the agent that hands of for the grenades the other agents rush in and arrest him and the weapon of mass destruction with 25 years in prison. this was a man that was not a danger to him sell for other people but during the dusting operation, he said to the informant at one point you know, if it wasn't for you that illustrates the capacity. but yes through this elaborate sting operation the government was able another what broke. >> you are a journalist not a historian and you were able to talk to people and find out what they were thinking in the process and to get a sense of why the fbi would be doing this and with the rationale is on the point of view. >> there are a few people that work in the fbi that are critical of this but you find among the agents it is a program with the believe al qaeda has existed on 9/11 there is in the capacity for a terrorist organization the jarvik of crime they are concerned with the terms alone wolf have bad feelings about the united states, wanting to do something and they will then watch the video and they would launch an attack of some sort and what the fbi refers to is averitt at al qaeda they would carry out this attack. people who are on the turn is one side operational and a sympathizer. what they want to do is find someone on that line on the advisor site to cross over to become a terrorist and touch him before he becomes a terrorist and the sting operation is intended to draw them out and and arrested them and the only means they have which is the criminal-justice system. they identified and first and to make it to the fbi field and i talked about this in the book. i want to bomb the building. i want to bomb the subway system you don't want to say six months later he actually does make an act of terrorism to understand why the fbi would pursue. but on the book, they're has yet to be an example of someone who on their own is incapable of terrorism and to meet the al qaeda operatives and say here is a bomb, and the only people providing the capacity is the fbi comes to these operations are an evolution of a drug stings in the movies it has been glamorized and people believe there's cocaine inside and they hand over money and the person opens it, it's empty and the rush in and a bust of a person. in a sense data shows the fbi and the sting operation drugs are not difficult to obtain in the united states but the weapons people would use in a terrorist operation, a large bomb for example and it is the case you have someone on his own as a sympathizer operator a and somebody actually gives the means as it happens today. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. you are looking at the galibier theater at the campus of the university of arizona. in a few minutes book tv will be back with live coverage of the 2013 tucson festival of books. we had this incredible in devotee to digest information and process it and operate. we started to get rid be a little bit faster but we did look a system called f3ea for fine finnish export and analyze. you fix them in the location anytime now coming to finish what, you analyze it and learn from it. it's basically a learning cycle, and we would do that. we would go through that process that would be painfully slow because we were operating with different organizations, not all organic to mind coming in different agencies, intelligence agencies. this may surprise you but not all of the u.s. government worked together seamlessly. [laughter] so here we are as this cycle and we have these things we call blanks between the parts and so one element would find its target, but by the time the information got to the people who were going to fix it with a predator or something like that to make sure they, are there, time would have passed an ek to receive information and then it would be passed over to the rate force again you have a loss. it's like the game telephone you've robust for a round the room and by the fifth person we are trying -- we said this is madness so we started the -- we went on a campaign to fix that process, bringing in different parts of the organization, building our intelligence capacity, giving a mind set that was different before. and before i was if each element did its part of the process to make it take great pride we succeeded and we did what we were told and we wiped that queen and said nobody is successful unless the whole process works. the definition of winning is the same for all of us even if we win this fight and there was quite a bit different than what we had. by the summer things got really bad starting in late march of 2000 and iraq and that is when the country basically melted down and we started operating as hard as we could be operational tempo it is how fast you can operate. we realized the size of the network we were going to have to hit it a lot and we were not going to be able to read it once a month crude by august 2004 we got to the team a month or about one every other night. we thought we were moving at warp speed we thought this was the most amazing thing we've ever done. we are the most efficient and effective special operations task force on the face of the earth. we weren't, but we were still losing, so we can to the conclusion that we have got to speed up more. there had been a fixation on just going after the senior leaders of an organization they call a high value targeting decapitation. we can to the conclusion that wasn't going to work. we started the war with the idea of the whole thing would fall apart but think of any organization that you have been in the key person has taken that doesn't really get worse? if i worked in the pentagon would have needed a lot better. laughter irca so we realize you have to go after the people who do the work, logistics communications come test information, build car bombs, community that, you have to take those out. i know philadelphia loved this but it's like rocky ball the we are going to hit them in the midsection so from august of 2004 when we did 18 reads two years later, the san force comes in fight we were doing 300 a month. that is ten each night. now if you stop and say that's impressive, that means every guy on the force is going on a raid at least one every night. every pilot is flying in one or two every night and they are not patrols. these are going in the door somebody is getting shot. extraordinary. to do that though, you can't use previous systems. you have to bring in this intelligence on an industrial scale and on the target we would start to exploit their computers and their phones and take biometric data and would be pumped back to west virginia to see if we ever had that person before and if we ever had any dealings with them. we would move the documents back and scan them into multiple places in the u.s. and theater and everybody would be rising at the same time and we would be trying to turn this to learn as quickly as the cut. we got the point we could hit three targets in light from the initial intelligence. we would find joe smith at 9:00 at night because we had been looking for him. we but find out from what we got on that target about john doe, we might hit that at midnight and we had another at 3:00 in the morning and the reason was important to go faster is because the terrorist networks repair themselves very quickly. as soon as if we were terrorists and if mark is captured, pretty soon i'm going to hear about it and the first thing i do is i move my location and i change all those things and connections that i had and we call the cutouts' because it moves to repair steps and you have to be quicker than they can repair themselves both the hit targets and quicker than they can promote people ought to develop new leaders. we started seeing the relative age of the leaders in iraq go down and the relative effectiveness go down because of that and so the of tempo became the strategy pummel it as fast as you can. and then over time it had a decisive effect on which we actually did along with a number of other factors. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> we have allowed a human rights nightmare to occur on our watch. in the year since dr. kaine's death the fast system has emerged from the ashes of slavery and jim crow. the system of mass incarceration that no doubt has dr. king turning in his grave today. it - incarceration of poor people of color in the united states is tantamount to a new cast like system. one that shuttles our young people from the credit underfunded schools to brand new high-tech prisons. it is a system that blocks poor people overwhelmingly poor people of color into a permanent second-class status nearly as effectively as earlier systems of racial and social control. if is in my view the moral equivalent of jim crow. >> if you want to convert people if their soul is in dire danger of the ultimate fire on the other side of existence. after that, you need to label them followers of the devil, diabolical human beings. so they look to the devil [inaudible] a very complex religion, gary leverett sanibel structured and they found issues. who's initio? i often refer to this as the eminent electrician of the human condition. it is an unpredictable spirit. issue exists to teach humanity. there's always more than one side to an issue, more than one face to reality of to be where of appearances. the plans etc. is the embodiment of less than what. what about their folly to be in dogmatic about the issue it tends to do it in a rather painful way. like a good teacher. if places of the crossroads co which road to you take on the crossroads. in the year of the pentium is not allowed to the house. its place is always on the doorstep because the issue in the house is too temperamental. before you do anything in their region and of worship any deities you make us sure that you set aside a morsel for the issue. it is the messenger from the deity. you can deliver the message strict, truthful and deliver it in the way without lobbying that misinterprets the message on the other part. so, when they looked at this among the other deities, the rivers cut the purity to go to war, the elements etc., etc., that is on certain. that's the duffel when he. so issue became for christians the devil. in the interpretation trusted by what the bible, but it is anything but evil. that is the truth. on the contrary, you will find a symbol because it is he also that helps to interpret the scriptures of the wisdom and bound up in the versus who is the designer of human beings. is anything but the devil. but today it is sort of painful to find ones own contraband referring as the devil. bye contrast, look at what happened when he moved with the slaves to latin america. he arrived with the knowledge that she was feared by the christian missionaries. the slaves adopted it as their patron, the christians that wanted them to convert became a paramount symbol of his instance in latin america and in some parts of brazil for instance you find he hasn't been elevated to the supreme deity because the was a symbol of as their but in certain parts of brazil, for instance. in the country if you go to the heartland in brazil, the hierarchy is quite plain but the issue became the supreme deity. now, consider today this is the history in africa in the world especially in the goals. to be a follower of their religion is virtually what to earn the death sentence in certain parts. christians also earn in certain parts of nigeria and of course respond in kind and set upon the muslim colleagues based on ignorance has reached such that any time in nigeria today we find that a church has been just burned down, a moscow has just been burned down or bombed out of existence because we see even in their religion there are different groups of purity. the one side considers the other side not sufficient, and therefore deserving. in the institution however it is not complicated to be it is in fact in the society and there isn't one single issue that leads to total capitalization of society. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. .. i am director of asu scholarly publishing program and former director of the u. of a press. we would like to thank the city of tucson for this venue and for hosting not. as many feet now, the presentation will last for an hour and after that we will have -- before the hour is over we'll have a q&a session. after the session, you'll have the opportunity to talk one-on-one with authors in the signing area. it would greatly appreciate at this time it's harrowing to take out their cell phones and doublecheck sure they are turned off. the clerk power memorial lecture celebrates the southwest whose works reflect the values, landscape, history and culture of this unique part of the world. it honors the memory of lawrence clark powell, library and, prolific author and tucson resident for more than 30 years. also a supporter at the u. of a library science graduate program. after his death in 2001, library and dan rivers spearheaded at first to establish this lecture series. over the past decade in the spirit of lawrence clark powell, authors have shared reflections of the landscape culture and essence of what we call our desert home. today we have three remarkable authors. build broyles, gayle, hartmann will do the same. they wrote the book last "last water on the devil's "last water on the devil's highway: a cultural and natural history of tinajas atlas" published another directorship of katherine conrad and supported by the ua southwest center under the directorship of joe wilder. this beautifully written and illustrated book -- beautiful illustration, drawings, photographs and a southwest book of the year will take you into the world and this is an area also called high tanks in southwestern arizona that has been described as 30 miles from nowhere and one of the hottest, driest part of north america. they have lived, worked this area intensely. rc speaker will be tom sheridan, and anthropologists who holds joint appointments in the south the center and school of anthropology at the university of arizona. he has written, edited and collated 13 books on history and anthropology at the southwest including arizona history the revised edition. gayle harrison hartmann was a degree in anthropology and a m.a. in anthropology from the university of arizona. sheets are as an archaeological editor and historian for the past 35 years. she maintains special interest and a spanish entrada into the southwest in southwestern poker. she's the editor, author or co-author numerous publications and has served as the editor of the journal of southwestern anthropology and history. currently she is a research associate at arizona state. build broyles came to tucson as a child and he never left. he attended the university of arizona, todd english mpg and discover the joy of walking in what some call the desert and what he calls have been. is a research associate with the southwest center and spends most of his waking hours either reading or writing about the southwest. he's worked with numerous scholars and books such as tri-border is orders, desert duty and gunshot. but that i would like us all to welcome our panelists and tom sheridan will start. [applause] >> tonight very much. as far as i know we have members local drug, so i guess we want that to be clear at the outset. at least not that i know. last "last water on the devil's highway" all fell in love with the sonoran desert a long time ago. mayfield would've to arizona when i was three years old in 1955. i grew up in phoenix, a city that does its best to deny the desert, but that doesn't insinuate it is so into my soul long before i was never aware sonoran desert was where i had to live and work and with any luck, die. for me, driving the devil's highway el camino till diablo was a poker match a secret in its own way as the pilgrimage that thousands of desert colors, and that he can't know mexicano americano make every a covert. it is in the nature artery pumping people into and out of the sonoran desert for thousands of years. there is nothing so precious, so secretive so beautiful as water in the desert. there are reasons to hold water the longest unwanted double sideway share a bond with all the other pilgrims had stopped there to drink our millennium. to better express that bond, let me read a few paragraphs from my introduction to "last water on the devil's highway." i share my campfire with the white votes about this canyon wrapped around us in the moonlight. the desert is silent and seems to stretch on forever and is easy to pretend we are the only two souls on earth. but it is an accomplished baker. it is haunted many campfires before nine. i hunger for places like many of my generation, i want to believe in wilderness, that people have been drinking from the staircase as schools about me for thousands of years. people whose names and link which is how been forgotten. the echoes of their present are frozen in stone points. in a network of trails that later came to be called el camino del diablo. how many thousands of generation have hovered in the shadows of campfires here begging for scott. the oversized ears heard them all coming. spaniard and a babble of other nationalities trudging to the california gold piece. tinajas atlas was a note and not at work. perhaps the most important one to the colorado river. the trails leading to an fro speak to the overpowering need for for water in a land that makes he wonders and the word is there as a metaphysical level. those trails also whispery pilgrimage, onerous visions and blood vengeance for silver and gold and fear until the last century, the trails to follow depend whether you are friend or foe, of powerful peoples living along the colorado river. one of the major research is the paths that european and euro-american stalinist desert depended on the native geopolitics of the region. europeans like the great jesuit evangelize their the country were not explorers blazing their trials. on the contrary, they were follows plodding along behind a desk i. those were thousands of years old. if those guys are allies of the mohave scum of the powerful alliance who controlled the lower colorado river may have visited all tests. but as their enemies, they probably followed more eastern and until the california gold rush in 1849, tinajas atlas in the camino del diablo was a frontier in the most basic sense of the term, where no tribe, and higher or nationstate held a monopoly on violence. i would now like to turn our lecture to my colleague, gayle hartmann who will talk about native peoples as well as their own pilgrimage. >> thank you overcoming this afternoon. i suggest you keep one eye up there on the lovely side that would give you some sense of what tinajas atlas is like and with one ear you can listen to us. my first visit took place in october of 1971. my husband and i had been varied a little over a year, drove from tucson to wilted where i had friends. it's a tiny farming town that our inside of you members the ied. you might ask how i would've known someone in welton. the reason is that when in all central california, the center of the universe. and my best friends father was the manager at imperial value irrigation to. it is the name paper so along the portion of the colorado desert one in the early 1900s are working to get a canal built to bring in river water. by 1971, my friend's father had change jobs and he was the manager. regard his dune buggy. we drove south to the dump. visit the directions we been given. on this site is a narrow to track road and we took and the gallant to the south. my strongest encounter was a quite wonderful connection i suppose with a very small rattlesnake. when stopped for some reason and i say cut out and looked at the side of the road, i thought a tiny rattlesnake curled up in the sand. he was maybe the size of a 50-cent piece in diameter. i looked at him and he let me and that was the end of that. reread tinajas atlas at 30 miles a couple hours. there is no one was there. it had been widened and graded by the military. military vehicles and quiet blakely snowbirds from yuma. we visited the lowest pool, no trails, photographs the grave and i have to confess we did some target shooting with a pistol he brought along. those were different times. there were no prohibitions against the gun of a product only for fun. i think our thought process was something like we'll be way out in the desert. reminds will bring her old for entertainment. i found tinajas atlas to be an intriguing place, but we do about it could've fit in a thimble. i didn't learn much about the place until years later. so why on earth did we want to go there? is relatively easy to answer, the second and at her drink to the crux of why i'm here today. so why have we heard about tinajas atlas? as many of you know, my husband is a planetary scientist is especially interested in the origin of the moon and history of mars. as a graduate student, he adventures in florida friends had figured out how to drive to the amazing volcanic field in northwest sonora. the reason for going there was to find out more about the craters on the moon. after bill and i met, i started going on the trips. i was immediately captivated by the mystique of the place of special importance for the natural waterholes. these are the focus of life, animal and human life. one thing led to another. i began to learn about others bless all tests is the most important waterhole of the region. now they are separated by a modern border, but the border is new in the overall scheme of humanist terry. to the clever and reselling of people who for many generations have called this one notable desert home, the tinajas made life possible as they undertook their journey throughout the region. as my friend says referring to the fact there are communities on both sides of the border, he says we didn't cross border. the border crossed us. why did i want to go there? although export in washington state, i spent most of my life living in deserts of one kind or another and i come to be very fond of it. but puget sound and the pacific ocean to smaller parties such as the gulf of california to the smaller bodies like swimming pools. the first is cisco highlight the fact you could see long distances. the air is clear, sky is blue. if the rocky mountains far away. you can walk for miles with relative ease and you don't have to struggle over logs in a pine forest is due at the oregon where it was last weekend and there are interesting plants. perhaps most important, you can see evidence of our collective past. i see now, a backwardness archaeology anthropology. it is not with making a name come, but i discovered long ago i was fascinated with the history of all types. history dinosaurs, history of nations and especially history of people. whether it be a projectile point drop 5000 years ago or you can can drop 100 years ago. so if you combine a love of water because their places on a fascination with human history, tinajas atlas is high in the list of places worth visiting in knowing about. let me turn to a few things we learned while we were working there. some of you know, one of the primary event that led to the writing of "last water on the devil's highway" was an archaeological survey of 5000 plus acres of surrounding desert land. it took place between january and april 1998 of us fortunate to be a participant. before saying something about the survey have just think of a good friend and co-author who is no longer with us. she is pictured on one of the sides on the screen and a seated wearing a hat contemplating the lowest pool of tinajas atlas. to clarify her unusual last name when someone matter for the first time, she was a her last famous turtle within each. i didn't know until the survey began nfl fortunate she was the archaeologist in charge. my experience is to be charitable to me skimpy and she was the person who made the survey work. what is essential in making an archaeological survey successful if somebody knows how to control method for data and she could do that with these. she was an unusual person, quiet, extremely confident and easy to work with. some of you know, she was diagnosed with cancer last year indicted last august left onto stage one. i was able to take her a copy of the book a week or so before she died. she was very pleased. i'm sorry she can't be here this afternoon. i miss her greatly. during the three months we were can't come over a small group, usually five or six. each cooked over a two burner stove and used a portable toilet downwind, heat in the evenings came from a time-honored source, large camp or leasing trucks from tucson. we worked hard, not a good time and in spite of impacts of the many people who visited tinajas atlas, we learned a lot. what did we learn? the basic lesson was that people who had taken advantage of the water i "last water on the devil's tinajas atlas were a lot tougher than we were. i would say to read a few lines from the book. amazingly, one trips across the region utilizing trails and taken advantage were still recalled in the 1980s by a few elderly are done. the excerpt refuse to attract in the early 1900 from the of yuma now in a national monument by way of the santiago. the elderly speaker says we follow the old trail that drops to sonoita mexico. here he stayed because we're afraid of being close. we drank water all the way from yuma. in other words race she went from yuma to the border with mexico than the tiniest of what is now a distance of about 120 miles and drink water. more specific evidence. what did we learn while we were there? projectile points tell us is to focus upon to provide us and our success ago. bedrock mortars and 600 small depressions tellis indigenous peoples take advantage of being concedes that mostly ironwood prominent meals. it's interesting only in the past two years have we in tucson and from other southwestern communities begun to understand the food value. we are still wonders compared to folks who don't have on the food resources. scraps of pottery tell us a cultural groups. jean charest, not to mention my recent european descent that cans, bottles as evidence of their visit. these artifacts are of interest, but they reflect a different lifestyle. finally, some of the canyon walls as they come passive component. the air speaks to the spiritual significance of the locale and at least some of that we believe was made recently. i would like to say a few words about what for lack of better term so-called indigenous worldview compared to the western world view. i looked at indigenous in the dictionary and it said having originated in occurring naturally. in a particular region or environment. it is defined as stemming from the roman tradition. in some sense, were all indigenous and that we will produce somewhere in some region or environment. however, nearly all of us who stemmed from the tradition lost the part about occurring naturally in the environment long ago. my own ancestors that one time but cannot do to the landscape of rock pedophiles in the same way they feel can do to the southwestern desert. now its seems to be one of dominant rather than connect goodness. there's an enormous and inexplicable difference between the world rioux today. partly because of this book have had numerous opportunities to interact and listen to my friend amber rayne marcus eyler. both are thoroughly modern people at home in the 21st century. but don't speak eloquently and from a heart about the connectedness they feel towards the land about the way we human beings need the earth were going to survive. how we need a material and spiritual ways. they point out humans must live with the earth. or to use a monarch catchphrase, nature is last and we human beings cannot hope to be cleverer than mother nature. perhaps fermi the most important job outcome is this provided me with an opportunity to learn about people of the past and present to share an indigenous goods. i gained an increase interpretation of the worldview of the places i'm and the natural world and not above it. i will close by reading a few sentences to the book as well. for much of its known history, tinajas atlas is a place where cultures overlap, where goods are songs were treated, while individuals were out to other settlements. its water seemed to have been a resource for visitors to various communities. the hundreds of bedrock mortars of the rocker at a greater spiritual significance. prehistory blends into history and cultural affiliations are blurred. the significance is clear. perennial water is a profound importance and has attracted humans for millennia. now my friend and co-author, bill broyles. >> thank you, gail. who are all these good looking people out anyway? thank you for coming out today. how many are enjoying the book festival? me too. how many have traveled? that's a much higher number of would've certainly appreciate that and hope you enjoy what we have to say. give special places for your heart beats a little faster in your stride is longer and your imagination races a little fast to so do we. we wrote this book and it's called last water on the devil's highway. one of the grateful experiences of my life is working with people at gaylord palms and gary and mary charlotte to try to pull this book together. it amazes me the five kids come along from all sensual, one from phoenix, a wichita. do you think these folks made me? gary, indiana and me from tucson come together and find this magical place in the desert,, two same history, landscaping areas that we write a book. to me that is pretty darn amazing. dr. laurence clark powell call me larry he said was a librarian by trade. a clever papers. in his obituaries, people called him a librarian with a capital l. and a book man spoke man. he wrote how we feel about this place when he pens, i've taken my place in the southwest. i'd go with their coasts at my side. i never had a chance to drive larry out there. he preferred to train and sleep indoors. but he did love living in the desert north of tucson in the foothills. if many of the earnest lectures and and may have seemed a bit stuffy, a bit proffer a sterile, if it proper. but if you knew had, he was in a reverent and endless always looking for ways to manage you off your game, off-center. surprisingly, kids loved him. once i invited him to talk to in vans class of high school professions of surprise totally. would be received in these rowdy high school class. and i shouldn't have worried. larry told him about his student days, growing up in southern california, the life and times covered in his book an orange group waited. early in his talk, he told them about his friend, malcolm archibald who played piano and larry shafi and. .. who wrote about the travelers and horses that refused to move because the was so hot. how can you beat stuff by and abby or doug peacock stories of hiking in the desert hills in the book the devils highway again featured author at the book festival or the desert hearts and eloquent portrayal of. it includes fiction, too, some you may not have heard of but they pivot around the water holes or blank spots on the map. part of the most intriguing was burning sky, the tail of villages in the granite range by robert monegan. at least that was one of the names, pseudonyms hot, and one of those romantic historical fiction books that are so entertaining. last stand by louis and even in an one called desert gold. they may not have been there but there was enough literature at the time they could pick up and doing enough details. you want poems, we've got them. roberts and jeff who would expect the dead man's child with flames like to track against the desert bronzed big and then more firmly along the mountain a curves into the bay of the cliff where they keep water in the rock. the people call them lost in the high water jars which every second or third summer a thunderstorm. he wrote his dissertation and lyrics from the 2011 album pulled some dust and have some seat. it tells the plight of the mexican refugees coming across the border, and it has lyrics like the old man said to me let me go there with you yes i'm old but i am might be tough. but if he stumbled and he failed. he begged and he pleaded. we had to leave him flying on the diablo trail and has short stories there is a famous mexican movie about the sar time deaths of several engineers working on the railroad to build it south and rocky point has written several novels in the screenplay about the devils highway and even helped him translate one of those. the literature of the area people always ask me i think that david's s.a. parallel and wonder in the desert is probably the best single piece. to be truthful, i read them all because they are so wonderful. if you read you may also walk. i know why do but probably like you i get bored easily. maybe you can, but i can't. i need to walk into the history into the lives. i like the height but i need to know more about the place. what are these and who came here and where did they go, why didn't they stay? the questions that gayle wants to know. someone said a millennia ago when they lie around the outline on the hips and legs where someone made up the points. it was shown to me by an archaeologist and it seems like yesterday in my mind i can see the old one sitting there working, chipping stone, working, singing it, dreaming. at other spots there are small caves where people peck designs and to the walls and made designs i wish i a understood or they painted in white and black pigment different designs. i sat there and wondered what they meant and what they were trying to say. many of you know, remember travis edmondson partner in the duo. they did great renditions but what is less known is that travis also wrote poems and some were published in a book called faults that didn't pass. one of them, purpose of the desert includes these lines, the purpose of the desert is to walk through slowly and think, and that's me. the slower the better and the older i get to the slower ago. but i saw this from every direction from the north, south, east and the west. it's never the same and is always a thrill and it's a place i can say if i am here them all is well. it is a place that gives me strength and props me yet today when i think about it. maybe you can begin to see why it has the long fascinated me because it combines the interest and walking trails in learning about desert border. reading books, taking photographs, talking to old-timers, sleeping under open skies, and sitting on rocks these days i sit on the rocks more than i want but that's okay , too. you have special places i know because i know a number of people in this audience, and on the palm of your hand, metaphorically at least, write the name of a special place you treasured, when you treasure not just for yourself, but for that neighbor kid standing at the school bus stop or the new citizen who wants to understand that thing called america or city folks that want to see the wild west. what did you write, the liberty bell, the washington mall, courthouse rock, after this meeting a couple of and tell me, please. but the list is long and it's very heartfelt. we are kind of worried about things like spray-painted graffiti on the ancient indian art, erosion from vehicles and also people who decide to take things home and leave the letter behind neglect other uses mismanagement can all but against the area. to my mind we should take better care of the public places than our own property. after all it belongs to all of us. it's our patrimony, it is our heritage and there are few things more important than that. but beyond the site itself, and i think i can speak for gail and tom on this and they will correct me if not we tell you the scenery the rugged granite cliffs that blow in the moonlight and the view of distant mountains ringing in the valley especially the son sat there is that classic blow bill hardman has the painting up here and the cover of the book there is that special magic hour of sundown and wild places like that grow fewer each year we also value the experience. when i walk the trails of the ancients walked i get goose bumps. standing by the polls i imagine kids playing while mothers grind the pods and fathers rest from hunting deer. such places are rare to get when i came to arizona as a child, 750,000 people lived here. now the number is 6.5 million. in a few years i would have seen a tenfold increase. they are going to stay. they are not going home. this is home. the newcomers are one reason that we wrote this book. they deserve to know our history, to know our pleases. one of the maxims of publishing is that you can write a book about a place every five years because half of the readers will think it's new. they've never heard of it before. i don't know if you can expect one for less in five years but we will do what we can. and those newcomers and even those oldtimers i talked to people in tucson that never heard of the place either and they have lived here as long as i have that the design to learn that it's known across the two continents and in several dozen languages. for centuries native americans of many tribes at least a couple dozen, spaniards, italians, portuguese, mexicans and americans have known it as an ageless, timeless place. in spanish its english tanks, and it means where the aero fell from the sky making the polls where they hit. it's a lovely metaphor. and you know, i know several in this audience here they talk about the web of life. well, as tom explains, it is a keystone place. it's one linking a web of history. places like the pass on the road to california or the inscription rock on the oregon trail. and if you do research, you become a writer and if you are a writer and believe what you write you become an advocate. in addition to teaching at the adversity and writing premier books on arizona history, also rallies support for the alliance and gayle has been active in a number of community projects and causes everything ranging from downtown history in the green line -- the blue line. i'm sorry. the color faded when i saw it. [laughter] >> we have put proposals on the table to manage this as a natural conservation area, incorporated in a wildlife refuge, me get a biosphere reserve, or better yet part of a borderland national park much like the glacier international peace park that is run smoothly since 1932. and tunnell salt this has a ranger out of their telling its story, and letting people know what it's great legacy out there. as gail and tom and i planned for this panel, i kept imagining larry in this audience. he wasn't one to suffer a dull moment. i keep imagining him here with me. larry, there she is. what's that, larry? no, we don't need more stories about archibald. you want to ask a question, you know how it tasted? i thought you might ask something to feel like that. the title last water is a metaphor for the entire southwest of come and remember in your own book you wrote our people turn faucets and let the water run and waste. let the children be taught from the cradle that water comes beyond the faucet comes from the sky. we might then return to a state of grace i have walked when all of the water in my universe was in those polls. my life depended on it. i didn't care what it tasted like. i had to have it. it smelled like the water in your birdbath in the summer time or the stagnant water down at the pond in the park. but i held my nose and i drank and was light and delicious. was all i had. it reminds us to be grateful, not wasteful. it reminds us of our own heritage and the heritage of those that we have melded with over the years. gail and tom read passages. here is - slightly abridged, and this one is for you. it's the key to understanding early people. the climates in the millennia past and the birth of the desert. it is a hub of life in this region and it stands as a vivid reminder of how precious water is. it's a signature waterhole on a heritage trail that covers millennia of southwest history. it lent spiritual power to more than a dozen of native american groups as well as being a source of inspiration and solitude for the hosts of desert rest many of whom are in this audience today. it speaks to our courage sparks our courage and imagination and speaks of for past perhaps randall henderson speaks for all loveless when he says it is the kind of place that makes poets' want to write poetry and others wish they could. for over 60 years larry powell lived in tucson and in an essay he called the fountain in the well she wandered around and wondered if it would ever have a literary face. and i wish he could sit here and look at yours today. he wondered if it would ever rival of the likes of cfa. he was hopeful the old rascal died too soon he would be ecstatic and jubilant and maybe even speechless for one of the first times in his entire life. i am betting he would stand in the mall and applied the tucson festival of books far into the night. before let's hear a round of applause for the tucson festival of box -- books. [applause] >> thank you it. this is wonderful and a great way to bring us out of thinking of books as well was the landscape. there are two microphones. if you would line up and we will start with some questions and i will start with one myself. you started out a couple decades ago. can you tell us the changes you have seen from the first time he went there to more recent times? you can start. >> it's a different universe then it was. it's hard perhaps to explain but you will remember times when one of walked out into the desert and who owned the land or managed it wasn't very well known, didn't seem to matter very much because there wasn't anybody there any way. that was my first experience, and is certainly haven't visited by many people who. by the u.s. marine corps as part of the range. they could be a little more active, but the big changes have been the result of a lot more military activity at, the road widening, i've been over there on a winter afternoon when a whole covey of snowbirds would come in there with their pennons flying in having a great time it would only take them an hour or so to come over and they would have a little picnic and go home. it was more like a city park. >> the activities had changed remarkably over the years. adel border used to be a very benign and open place one could walk across it and it didn't matter much. that's not the case anymore. i think things have calmed down a little. i hope that some time in the future they will calmed down even more. >> go ahead, bill. >> it's not quite as it used to be in some respects but it's still a beautiful place and the trick is to not be there at the middle of the afternoon when everybody else shows up if they do come that day but try to be there first thing in the morning or at sundown and catch that magic hour. it's a magical place and it's kind of like you go to a party and half of the people say they've been to the pen makati and you go there and nobody is there. it's that kind of place. and i think that you allow it to yourself to take a look. it is a place and i hope that you first of all read the preface to the book by loranne and it's simply asking people to be respectful because for a number of native religions it is a holy spot on the plan at and it certainly is for the three of us. they will appreciate it, and we would appreciate if you would treated with reverence also. a gets me choked up thinking about it. thank you. >> we will take a question over on this side. >> in the diary of the campaign in 1782, he mentions he's very matter-of-fact about it. basically he has 100 guys with him in livestock and he doesn't mention any particular difficulty or lose anybody. he doesn't lose any animals. how do you account for the fact we have so many stories about terrible hardship but this guy in 1782 managers to lead an entire company of men with no difficulty whatsoever. >> what time of year did he travel? >> i don't remember. it may have been the fall. >> how many of you have heard of the california, supposedly california founded. other might call it the freedom fighters to the he used to use it to run a horse is that he liberated in california down so i think the answer to your question is what kind of year if you were there during one of our rainy seasons, if there was spurring annual growth of that your livestock could eat, you could probably do it. other times of the year if you were doing at in late april, early may, i think you may have been really challenged almost any year so it really depended on how much water was there in any particular time, and he either got lucky or they knew that it was doable. >> - phill last sentence is the key to success here. when all of those gentlemen rose, they often didn't make it very obvious that there were other people leading them along the way. if they knew the whole lot more about the area than we did. and then of course, 200 years later when i was the 49ers the didn't have the guides and so they start to the long and i think that was a big distinction >> if you read them carefully, they had a lot of hardship even. you notice they are always getting it to travel the midnight and writing until the sun comes up and they are hoping that there is water in the water hole and even if on that particular trip you are referring to the didn't have the native guide their route was well-traveled by a native son and the it people that had previously been all along the route but for that wasn't a big deal. they were mounted on horses, they were going to save the world, and it was a mission of mercy on their account so those are wonderful diaries you have to read them that they are kind of like tom mentioned. there isn't a sense of discovery of the notations of direction or a tall mountain with a black head peak on it or something because they had all been guided through. but the guy that i want to talk to is the first person that came down from who knows where and went through that valley and saw what it was and discovered the watering hole and said i will never forget where that place is. that's the guy that i want to talk to. >> on another point i think that we would like to make is a lot of times our history is really eurocentric. we think of the native people as the extras in the past they were just waiting around for europeans to make something happen. but, you know, that isn't true. they had their own lives, their own goals, their military alliance and one of the most enduring in the southwest is this alliance between the people that we used to call the of yumas and the mojave on the one hand and the people that we've used to call maricopa and the other. these were military alliances that were formed before the first european never rode into the valley as our friend and mentor. a last-ditch battle between the two from the two alliances occurred in 1857, and this happened for the motives and regardless of what the spaniards or mexicans or anglo-american is arguing. so the so-called explorers they were latecomers in the diablo. people have been traveling those routes to drinking water in the water holes and fighting over the routes for thousands of years before the ancestors ever got their cliff. >> you might take a look at something any on their books it was a fairly well developed set of trade routes in the southwest and people at times were worrying and you had things like seashells from california showing up in kansas, parents from mexico city in the four corners area, you had turquoise from the four corners area distributed all around the west. you have the tenet coffee going all the way of to the colorado river, you had the buffalo robes on the midwest on the colorado river tribes said it is a lot of the interchange of ideas and the one story in their book the stuck with me was when his minn went from the seven cities and send a little expedition to see if the boats had a right to the mouth of the colorado river when those troops got to the colorado river, the indians knew their names and what they were wearing. so the word had already traveled that far among of the supposedly leverett tribes and there was a lesson there for all of us. thank you. >> thank you. let's give our panelists a round of applause. [applause] >> in closing we would like to present the panelists with a special plaque with their name honoring them as the lecturer for this year. [applause] i would like to thank all of you for being in the session and for those of you that would like to continue the conversation, follow the authors to the media assigning area number one tent be and they will be autographing books and have a chance for conversation. one final all of you are supporters and so many ways the festival of the books. so, if you could become a friend of the festival you could do this by going online, going on the web site or just here on the mall there are people that will help you make this a success for the coming generation. thank you very much. [applause] >> thanks for coming out. [applause] >> we are watching book tv on c-span2. live coverage of the 2013 tucson festival of books. you are watching the co-authors of last water on the devils highway. the last panel of the day will begin in about 30 minutes and we will bring a live from the gal looker fielder its a panel on journalism. this is book tv on c-span2. a new way of studying the character for example 12 years ago i wrote a book on the first lady and i thought that it would be important to understand the president's from different angles. why not study the person that new them the best. for example, what possibly could i contribute to the body of knowledge on lincoln or george washington? pretty much everything that could be rich and possibly has been written. the greatest historians have spent years going through the letters and the evidence to produce this book on lincoln or the hundreds of books on washington. so, i thought was why not look at the person that new them the best because historians have largely ignored the role of the first lady as they've ignored the role of mistresses in shaping the man. why come and i suspect because a lot of my colleagues tend to be older men, educated in a certain way that didn't study such matters and most historians say we are not educated in matters of the heart or the hearts, so therefore they ignore that with some crowns is what folks focus on. the first lady for example the first thing thomas jefferson did after spending 17 days cooped up in a outside philadelphia on the declaration of independence the first thing you do is go shopping. he missed her. she was pregnant and had a miscarriage. he begged off from serving the rest of the summer so he could go home to monticello to be with his wife. every winter of the revolutionary war, right there beside george washington suffering through the freezing water of valley forge as martha washington. they talk about the history bill clinton was in the first and bill clinton wasn't the worst when it comes from this behavior and high office there is a long history of that and arnold schwarzenegger, david petraeus had nothing on alexander hamilton and what we find are the letters written by martha washington during those winter camps she was like a soldier come she didn't compare to the period complain about the weather or the harsh conditions but she did complain about one thing. there was a tomcat when winter misbehaving with all of the lady cats and was noisy and kept her awake at night so she named her cat alexander hamilton because of the bills that had come under. i did a book a few weeks ago called life in the white house, and there was about the president's at ease. what do they eat, what hobby is do they have? what are their fears and hopes and what do they like as foster's and husbands how to their kids turn out? as in another way of assessing the presidential character providing us with another lines from the example we are all trying to figure not nixon, for example i said next-gen in his free time like to bowl alone and sometimes wear a black suit to do it. that begins to explain things, right? who does this. so all books and up being a trilogies. so i tried to take a different perspective. the study did at yorktown. we studied washington's courage and crossing of the delaware christmas night which saved their revolution. but who were george washington's's girlfriends and you will find that teenage washington on more than one occasion basically goes back home and tears because he was turned down and put pen to paper and writes roses are red, violets are blue, she once wrote that kube has been shot through my heart when another bill turned him down so this is a different look at washington. during my degrees and doctoral study by professors didn't tell me about the girlfriend, so it's kind of fun and provides us with an important way of understanding. we all know that our country has oftentimes been shaped by the hand of a woman often the mother but i'm here to tell you sometimes that as a mistress as well. as we take this program, the general david petraeus is still dominating the headlines with his alleged affair and ms. behavior related to the book my first thought when this happened was during world war ii, the general eisenhower was having a long-term affair with a british driver named kate summers be. but general hi here's a young female model instead of a major captain and winner. now imagine if eisenhower's affair with kate came out during world war ii and as it happened to petraeus what if they got rid of it before d-day? during the great depression, roosevelt was having affairs. franklin roosevelt had a very long term affairs. one with his personal aide and secretary and dresser and undress or apparently, too. what if we found out about fdr's ms. behavior and what if we flew him out of office and demanded his resignation as the economy was recovered? also backed the french and the indian war and very young george washington was riding very romantic letters to a woman who was not mrs. washington. her name was sally fairfax, a very attractive, older, sophisticated neighbor. what if his letters had become public during the french and indian war or the revolutionary war much as petraeus's e-mails became public and what if we got rid of washington, so bill clinton is in the first or the worst, petraeus is in the first or the worst, been there, done that in fact it pains me to say even abraham lincoln visited a prostitute. say it isn't so, but it happened the details are sketchy. there isn't a lot written about this but here is what we can piece together. the best friend was joshua. he was as dashing in and some and lucky with of the ladies as he was allegedly in romance and they always called one another by the last names and he invited him to work at his general store so they would stay upstairs of the general store. during the friendship, she was abusing the services of a professional woman. he had a pillow over his head trying to mind his own business and lincoln basically says i have to have a woman it's been too long and here is what appears to have happened to the only abraham lincoln would do this. it appears he asked for a letter of introduction. [laughter] with a professional woman and i don't mean agriculture as the oldest profession. there was an occupation agriculture. what we piece together lincoln visited a prostitute and had maybe $3 with him which was a lot of money coming off eliot spitzer money but a pretty fair amount of money and it charges linking $5 which is an enormous amount of money. so lincoln says i have to tell you, honest abe, i can't afford it. i only have three. there is a possibility that he could pay her when he gets the money. he doesn't have the money. we know that because lincoln got embarrassed or his honor got the best of him but once he said you can either pay me later or maybe this one is on the house, she ran out the door. so they say when you visit a prostitute there should always be a happy ending. this isn't a personal experience by the way, it was a good ending. so even abraham lincoln. what i thought i would do for my remarks today is tell you just a couple of my favorite story is not just about mistress's in history, but more importantly about presidential character but don't worry there are some juicy stories here. one of them involves our 22nd and our 24th president, grover cleveland. when grover cleveland was a young man there was a controversy because cleveland fathered the child out of wedlock. she might have been a prostitute given it at the least, she was very casual about her relationships. now, cleveland was a bachelor and of course he's running in the 1880s and again in the 1990's so fathering a child out of wedlock is a big thing to do at the time and so, there was such a big to do for other reasons. the republican opponents of cleveland. they started a campaign that no woman in the country sees. it becomes a huge story because they wouldn't let it go to read one of the things that saves cleveland is it turns out that james like we had more affairs than cleveland and his wife miraculously gave birth about six months after they got married. so he was keeping all this combination and the one thing that we disliked more than a politician that makes a mistake is a hypocritical politicians. so, it drew blackened helped cleveland. the everything that is a bit of a scandal was this. the republicans again or pushing this issue and they would have a little jingle, a little song that they would want to do and they would say maw maw, where's my paw? when the cleveland finally wins the presidency, the democrats complained that little song by saying maw maw, maw maw, where is my paw? what made it a scandal is this grover cleveland's best friend and partner was a guy named oscar and cleveland was born in new jersey and spent most of his career in buffalo to become the mayor and governor of new york but he is a very successful lawyer and they were partners and they practiced law altogether and they went out together, they would go out eating and drinking together and it appears the also enjoyed the services of maria together. so when maria halpen mcnuggets pregnant they have a son and they didn't know who the father was. maria complicates things by naming a child oscar cleveland. oscar had been married and had a daughter, frances. cleveland was a bachelor's of he kind of accepted the responsibility to pay for the child to go to an orphanage but here is where the other part of the scandal comes in. oscar dies a few years later in a carriage accident driving his carriage recklessly he breaks his neck. grover cleveland makes an enormous amount of money and cleveland kind of takes care of the widow and the young girl. he pays for them, sets them up in a home, friend and former partner commission becomes the godfather if you will for the little girl francis. they are very close. she calls him on uncle cleve it. she goes to wells college in the day that women were not really educated. what happens is as francis is growing up, cleveland's relationship changes from uncle cleve the gough father to a romantic interest. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> in a few minutes we'll be back in the gutter theater with more from the tucson festival of books. >> i arrived in spent first night in new york and very kindly came to complain and took to this day. she had a fantastic house and who york and yet flown for 17 hours across the atlantic and we ran out of food and spent the night in this extraordinary house and then they put me on a plane and i wouldn't even look at the map. i had no idea. my father when he put me on the plane had a bottle of brandy and yet he was crying. tears were pouring down his face and they gave a bottle of brandy and of course when i got there there was 6 feet of snow. it was an experience because we had a house that polemic provided and served in the window and they said you can't do that and we got to the holding froze up. we had a wonderful very, very different. people were exchanging to unofficial cap rules but i was doing my best. the friend of mine now in california we were laughing about that but the machine [inaudible] the first night there they took me to the tegla -- pigly wigly to buy food. there was nothing in the shop, you couldn't buy anything. i'd gone into the pigly wigly and i was completely overcome. i couldn't cope with all of the packaged food. i had never seen chicken packed up like that. chickens are running around in england. [laughter] i had no idea what to buy. she told me to get carrots and a great them and i didn't have time to grate carrots. >> i turned to him and i said there is nothing i would rather do. the whole room burst of laughing and had no idea what i had said, but the language was really quite funny. you say are you through and the woman says you are connected. it's a completely different language. sure are some of the latest headlines surrounding the publishing industry over the past week. this system of mass incarceration is deeply rooted in our social, political and economic structure on the downside out of sight without a major upheaval in a fairly radical shift in our public consciousness. now i know that there are many people do today will say there is no hope of ending as incarceration in america. no, no, there is no issue. that's a shame. it's a shame if that is just the way it is. so many people today view the million cycling in and out of our prisons and jails today is an unfortunate but not in alterable fact of american life. i'm quite certain that dr. king would not have been so resigned. i believe that if we are truly to honor dr. king, if we are ever to catch up with king we have got to be willing to continue his work. we would do the hard work of the movement building on behalf of poor people of all colors. in 1968 to dr. kendal advocates the time had come to transition from a civil rights movement to a human rights movement. manning for ecology couldn't be achieved through the civil rights alone. without basic human rights the right to work, the right to shelter, the right to quality education, basic human rights he said several rights are an empty promise. so in honor of dr. king and all of those that labor to end the old jim crow i hope we will commit ourselves to building a human rights movement to end the mass incarceration. a movement for education, not incarceration. the movement for jobs, not jails, a movement to end the forms of legal discrimination against people, discrimination that denies basic human rights to work, shelter and food. what must be due to begin this movement? first i believe we've got to begin by telling the truth. the whole truth. we have to be willing to admit out loud that we as a nation have managed to recreate a system in this country. we have to be willing to tell the truth in our schools, in our churches and places of worship behind bars and in their reentry senator we have to be willing to tell the truth so that a great awakening to the reality of what has occurred can come to pass because the reality is that this new cast like system doesn't come with science. there are no whites-only signs any more, no signs today alerting us to the existing system of mass incarceration. and prisons today are out of sight and out of mind. often hundreds of miles away from communities and families that might otherwise be connected to them. and the people that cycle in and out of the presence typically live in segregated and impoverished communities. community is that middle class folks, upper middle class folks barely come across. so you can live your whole life in america today having no idea that the system of mass incarceration and the harm it reeks even exist. so we have got to be willing to tell the truth about what has occurred to be a pullback occurred in and make visible what is hidden in plain sight so that and a weakening can begin and people can begin to take the kind of creative instruction action this moment in our history surely requires. but of course is a lot of talk and consciousness raising isn't going to be enough we have got to be willing to get to work. in my view that means we have to be willing to build an underground railroad for people released in prison, underground railroad for people that want to make a break for real freedom, people that want to escape the system and find work, find shelter to be able to support their families, find the true freedom in america today. we have got to be willing to open our homes, open our schools, our work places to people returning home from prison and provide spaces of support for the families that have loved ones behind bars today. how do we create these safe places? one thing that we can certainly do, we can begin to add that our own criminality out loud. our own a criminality. because the truth is we have all made mistakes in our lives. we all have. all of us are sinners, all of us have done wrong. all of us have broken fall at some point in our lives. if you are an adult, you have broken a double wall at some point in your life. i find some people will say yeah ims sinner. i've made mistakes but don't call me a criminal. don't call me a criminal and i said okay well maybe you never drink under age. maybe you never experimented with drugs. the worst thing you've done in your entire life is to speed 10 miles over the speed of light on the freeway you put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone's looking marijuana in the privacy of their own living room. but there are people in the united states serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses. life sentences. the supreme court upheld life sentences for first-time drug offenders against a challenge that such sentences were cruel and unusual in violation of the eighth amendment and the supreme court said no, no, it's not cruel and unusual punishment to sentence the young man to life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense. virtually no other country in the world does such a thing. as we have to end this idea that the criminals are them, not us. and instead say there but for the grace of god. all of us have made mistakes in our lives, have taken a wrong turn that some of us have been required to pay for those mistakes for the rest of our lives. in fact, president barack obama himself has admitted to more than a little bit of drug use in his lifetime. he has admitted to using marijuana and cocaine in his years. and if he hadn't been raised by my grandparents and hawaii, if he hadn't done much of his illegal drug use on predominantly white college campuses and universities, if he had been raised in the hood, the odds are good he would have been stopped, she would have been frisked and caught and far from being president of the united states today, she might not even have the right to vote depending on the state he lives in. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. and now lives on your screen is the gallagher theater on the university of arizona. it's the host of the tucson festival of books several different author panels are being held in the auditorium and we are baccalaureate and starting in just a minute is our final program of the day. author journalists talk about the current state of journalism. adam mansbach, jim lynch, ruben martinez and mike sager. you are on c-span2, live coverage from tucson [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] .. i brought smarter and better people to join in the conversation. but i do want to say one thing about our piano. we decided prior to the discussion that were pretty shared the journalism might include women. [laughter] and so, as atom who speaks the hip lingo said, this is the second on a panel. we would just point out, all of those that we will be taking a lot of questions from women to guide these guys in the right way. so let's talk about the future of journalism. it's in pretty dire straits. newspapers are closing across the country and those that remain open but the question of why they didn't close. additionally, television and radio stations are shutting down newsroom and we are constantly told we should believe there's a few chill for journalism online. unfortunately that by and large doesn't pay anybody. so we end up in a situation where we gather to talk about journalism at a point when it is tremendously stress. and yet we have for people doing while at practicing variations on journalism and duties of incredibly exciting ways. alaska couple questions to quickly let you know them a bit and then we'll go to your questions because the fact of the matter is journalism is something that everyone has an opinion about. placebo think journalism they don't like is evil not to shut down the networks or whatever. but if we don't deeper, most of us understand an informed citizenry is the underpinning of a democracy. when we talk about journalism we're not talking about a heard bird digits or television images. were also talking about whether we have a discourse in this country sustaining of a democracy and a functional society. i want to begin with ruben martinez. most of you know a good deal about these folks. some of our viewers on c-span may not. the important thing in addition to every one of his he does everything. i am not kidding. this is a guy who records with major rock acts and was an editor -- a writer for the l.a. weekly. what is the preeminent alternative weekly newspapers in the united states. and he has written a series of incredible books that explore fundamental issues of what america is, particularly as regards of our population. he doesn't affirm the mexican-americans to point. he does it from a salvadoran standpoint. he has explored a host of issues over a very long time, written some incredible books. i want to start by talking about the latest that you've got out, which is a really cool book. folks who haven't read it should check it out. it is "desert america: boom and bust in the new old west." i think i got everywhere been there. but what rubin did and i would argue that the talk of a journalist, there's some issues that can't be dealt with in an article. you have to spend time talking to a lot of people and that's what he did along the border regions in some of the smallest and poorest communities talking to people who have never spoken to a journalist and told their story. tell us why you might not hear a pop career of writing a mighty focus on some of the poorest of the poor and the most neglected places in this country. >> there are certain topics that need the long form and write a lot of words. if the tablet of conversation. you need resources to travel in the people at the. the book were talking about, "desert america" took about five years off and on to write in traveling through the desert borderlands trying to capture the drama on both sides of the border during that time we were ramping up the boom that would today by senator gore and the trauma of integration we do it today. in terms of the topic today, the list of old-school new york a contract that does not exist in the same way in 2005. in 2005 is a relatively innocent madman can the world. he had much of an editor, a martini. >> you ran your finger and said i have an idea. >> of course my particular one, i've never met a deadline. so my book btm before the major layoffs and saw this tremendous transformation of journalism just in the last 10 years. the book wouldn't be written the same way today just because i would have to cobble together a completely different model. but it's harder now. the money is drying up the newspapers and news terms. it's trying up in other places and for these longform projects. so i., like many of my colleagues have had to cobble together an economy. i cannot tell you how many former working journalists were laid off during the worst in the last 10 years i may colleagues. so between the academic job in a couple writing jobs here and there and the other various things they do, i cobble together enough of a personal economy to support writing projects. in terms of scale and research, it's definitely not where it was 10 years ago. i do know however that my students of loyola mock university or busting on the door to get into my journalism class, which would seem totally counterintuitive. how many working journalist you know? the kids tell me we know it's a tough time out there, particularly for your generation, professor. we know there's the future will be the future providers of content. i have a problem with writing has become developed into content in the internet age. but they have the intuition that somehow they're going to provide the content and there'll be an economic model that will pull it together. >> there's not an economic model. >> so you send us kids into the% >> so you send us kids into the wilderness. >> i feel like i'm floating on the numbers of the world and seen here coming on ants, take it and buy the model that will work. >> we need them. we need young people who believe they're going to do journalism. >> they're conversant in the digital realm that others and myself are not and are finding creative ways of presenting stories that have multiple levels to them in the longform means that we're not just living in a world of blog posts that are only a screen's link the longform can survive. the bush hs finished, an entire chapter is extracted in a wonderful new media website comic ect.work come which has all kinds of local journalism alongside foreign staff and makes it to 20 chapter. that used to be the domain of "the new yorker" and it seemed like there wasn't room for that online. increasingly we find room online. >> ruben martinez, find his book. it's very good. nobody can be making a living journalism except mike sager, who writes for "esquire." you know, those of us are going to journalist and usually up working night cops are covering presidential campaigns. to make his studio close to lay hang out with rockers in insect motley crue and hoax about them and write about rock 'n roll and violence in sex and drugs and put them together in some remarkable articles and also to think about new ways to get that content out. i want to ask you two things. first, as much as i want to ask you about the vince neil biography, which i find very cool. as in the book sales area earlier. some crow came and says she likes motley crue. but i am interested. you've got a collection of essays right now. you're going to tell us the title and the sun comes out with a secret group. tell us about that. >> backing up, i've worked professionally as a staffer in all levels of journalism. my first job as was the alternative weekly atlanta. i went home after three weeks to become a copy boy at the "washington post." after 11 months, i broke a story and bob woodward hired me on the battlefield to become a staff writer and i stayed there for six years and learned the whole job of journalism from the ground up. they police, cops, we had computers then. i've seen the post newsroom change overnight from paper and some people of old typewriters to go into computers -- >> we had pneumatic tubes than the whole day. as a copy boy got to learn all that stuff in the top of the change. thereafter i went to "rolling stone" because i wanted to use the schools i had as a journalist and i have pretensions to be more of a literary person. i was a writer who had nothing to say that went into journalism because i was looking for the stories. all throughout is that the post for six years and i like to say since 1984 i haven't hunted job. i've had more than 31 year contracts. at "esquire" they give you shakespeare become one of 12, two of 12, three of 12. every year about june i'm getting 10 of 12. so i've always had to be in the market for marketing myself in my work and notice printed myself before brandon was possible because you need to have a unique style and unique voice. when i got to "washington post," david remnick was the style and terminology used great people. at an early age i figured that you had to be number one in a class of one. you have to do something other people didn't do. the origin of the group, which has now become a publishing company, where he published my own stuff, but others over the years as i was struggling to get my name in different magazines, which they may product so good they couldn't say no to publishing. they want a second story in a third. everybody gets a story somewhere, but learning how to be on time. everything together, facts together. it's a complete job and is something you have to be dedicated to above all else. there are some place as the become an actor. i went to last because it may spare us to take care of me and said you should be a lawyer say something to fall back on. what are my chances of becoming a writer? what are my chances of staying alive in any environment? today's environment is pretty much missing a lot of stuff. this is a venison of longform journalism today. one of the books i company published his next wave, a collection of 19 great young journalist under 40 and summer at newspapers. newspapers are discovering feature stories to keep alive. i will also add 70% of students in school today are women. so this will not last. i just came from the university of missouri. with 500 people over two days. either the writers had a huge lovefest and if your readers and he liked, there's a multiplatform longform, a 25th anniversary thing with them. i wrote the story that became the movie took a nice and wonderland called the devil and john holmes. redoing multiplatform with interviews, video, nc-17 video. crime scene video. a lot of people are doing a lot things. if the prices are coming down in some places, but also atticus, by lehner are doing deals with their going to split 50/50. i have an e-books, six or seven and they pay me 7.5 to 10% a book. as a publisher, i'm giving them 50% a book. amazon takes 30% comes that we are splitting the 5% a book. >> one of my books is here today because the system is that she have to return books. you can't return my print on demand books. you can't buy any of them unless you go to amazon. i can't have them here today unless i want to schlep them myself. the future of journalism is not dead. the group described mentorship of young writers and the places are growing. the screenplay and, on the other places i mentioned. the point is we have to look in different places. just like those old fights at the "washington post." should've seen them when they came in dark paper gone. based upon my paper route, rewrite it and tape it on deadline and editor would be standing over me like i was crazy. i love computers. just 88 tracks come in dvds becoming mpg is, it's all about the content. i'm wrapping up. all we are concerned about laking, take it together, sponsor, but there's got to be a part of old at the end of the rainbow and its content. i can't afford to throw away money advertising. i just got to be there. that's at "esquire" is doing today. "esquire" has increased its circulation. i've got 50,000 eyepatch survey versus 20 bucks a pop. it had diversified into this thing they do for the last seven years, which is huge. that's what we have to do. we can't say if i was going to whine, i wouldn't be here because i got to make it happen. there's journalism not going anywhere. the old fuddy-duddies might be going somewhere, but we are here. the content is needed. >> mike sager. you should tell people, what you didn't do. "the someone you're not" -- >> one thing before you take it off. you start your essays at the line, and i wrote it right here. akin to journalism for the stories. would it be fair to say is going to be journalism? to journalist decided that for a while? >> get to that night, mr. >> as the synergy with tv and cable grew, a lot of people remember current affair. that maury povich show was the first kind of synergy. i was one of the lucky ones to make reset it kind. we will kind of broken off this whole paparazzi headline news, enter to celebrity culture, which feeds upon moment to moment update of the web, which newspapers can't do, which is why they find new things to do. it's an absolutely insidious moment to moment status reported wrong all the time. but it's just that the people want. not to be insulting to people who believe in religion, but i religionists as consumerism and the gods and goddesses are celebrities. we are following them and read them and wanted to know about that in a server and so the products we see. "esquire" frank lee did have one issue of the lack 16 years have been there for a celebrity on the cover and it tanked at the newsstand. as a tourist back cover. we need are celebrities. it's up to us as people to be discriminating readers. when you sit there pretending it's talking about brittany like you know her, take a minute. you don't know what they are reporting or whatever. just please, as long as we stay with an aspect of the culture, this was important. >> aire for the nation magazine and i just learned something incredible. if we put celebrities on the cover -- i got it. in fact, "esquire" put celebrities as you snake and then. as for his launching a campaign on monday, full-page ad in "the new york times" that their new projects in digital effort coming good thing journalism is on the march. >> thank you. if you cannot six of 12. >> jim lynch. you worked for every newspaper in the northwest, literally one after another. >> that's why i'm here. and tom, you then were in seattle and to newspapers. >> eight state coming out. ever for the seattle times, but i also worked on the east coast. >> rope older songs about the region. he gave up on the craft, brother. he went over to the fiction side. >> of journalism in 2004 because i promised myself that i could sell a novel that i would quit and go for it and try to make stuff up for a living, which i've been doing since. my friends to journalist and author in assisting the future because 2004, things turned dramatically faster than was describing. in the last 10 years to spend this dramatic shift and i keep getting e-mails from friends in the business to want me to send them the recipe in how you make novels. so for me, i'm guilty of some of the churches make is making of the dinosaurs scraping about changes as they come. but it feels very personal enter my back but i still get "the new york times" at my house every day and it feels precious because they know it can be evaporating here at any moment. i watch people and i think i'm never going to be a guy getting his new standing at the urinal from some. but i'm that guy. >> i didn't need to know that. >> i thought i would share. >> i'm also at the point remake daughter is 20 years old and i have great potential to be a journalist and i swear her skills all lane and she's very nervous because she's watching her dad describes the freefall. yet i want there to be a journalism for her to go into. what worries me is not all journalists were not many journalists are versatile six-foot five and have it dynamic approach. this journalists who don't have a bone in their body that allows them to adequately present themselves and promote what they could do. so it feels a little bit like my father-in-law working in a steel mill for 40 years and they just sat around the great about the steel mill shutting down. don't buy a two year there's different options for longform journalism and so on. what troubles me is from the industry vintage is there such a shrinking percentage they can go and make a family income of 50 to $100 range. it is to be a great option for smart people and it's not as great now. >> it is and it's great. but you wrote a novel that is essentially about journalism. it's a wonderful book, which janet massillon ranked whenever a top 10. if you have any interest whatsoever in journalism, is one of the best ways to read about journalism now and the struggles and complexities of it. he writes about a seattle times reporter digging into a 50-year-old story and ripping it out. it's a very journalistic book. >> it isn't part of the thrill was almost nostalgic for the competitive newspaper town seattle used to be. it's set in 1962 and 2001 and the reporter is a one and from the east who has been impressed with seattle or the sky was now running for mayor. it was actually thrilling to get back into the shoes of a very ambitious journalist who had a very big target she was talking and the prey allowed me to deal with the difficult ethics of journalism when it comes down to that. how do scare the politician and compact them into 50 column inches and it accurately and fairly for the individual. so this underrated. >> one last question. the fascinating twist to the extent favorite fiction, the thing of the best as you can tell the story that you would like it to turn out. so she's gone after a bad guy and it's a great woodward and ernestine type going after people. >> i just felt that it was fun to have. too often when people write suspense, it is always good versus evil. someone told me a while back a good versus good creates a better trauma and more momentum. they are too flawed adversaries is the way of on it so you could refine a strange way. >> we can get great political coverage if we read fiction. which brings us to train seven. adam didn't come out of journalism. that's not really been so much are please. we were talking before, how are you going to link u.n.? he's a plain speaking man of the people. in fact, your book from 2013 reaches back. it is about a maryland race, just like jim spoke. in fact come they do an incredible thing. the book is very journalistic at utah on this great story again that's something that happened in the past. people gathering to take on the bad guys. i want to take on too pricey but you do. but that is a possible infection, animated story every straight out of reality to tell us a lot about our time and where we live and who we are fictional characters, but a reality not suffer from journalists. >> absolutely. for me, the drive -- you don't? >> the americans are out there listening. >> hello, americans. >> without a doubt, the recent fiction is compelling to me is because it is a window on humanity, on the complexity of people's lives. writing fiction is a very humane endeavor because to do it well, euchre to do your best to understand how people think and live and feel and also really come your best resource for your only resource for that is yourself. but she's effect to develop a certain kind of empathy and human nature or is he don't like. you've got to shave and a complex as you do like. for me, even if it takes place in another time or galaxy, it is so grounded and carried her character is complex and paradox. so this book is tangentially coming to sheerly thought of your race. >> that's a pretty limited synopses. >> it takes place in graffiti in 2005 and use of the group of people who invented and pioneered that form and watched it die before them after an 18 year come $300 million were between the city of new york in graffiti writers suggest that language, this is the biggest city in the country declaring more on a portion over public space, which is now available for purchase. the city never would've come up on his son had a bunch-year-old not thought of it first. but as i sit graffiti writers throughout these fascinating paradox seems. they are balancing of art and vandalism. in the public discourse about graffiti, these were your officers, when discourse prevented by mayor said john lindsay and ed koch about criminals who should be locked underneath the jails and on the other side of folks like richard goldstein fan on the contrary these are the healthiest people in their neighborhoods, originality of what they're doing crusade. absent in that discourse is the perspective that the writers themselves. they understood it to be both. even not the way they talk about relationships to their cds and no one knows cities. said during enhancing corners and how they control. the worst beautifying destroyed almost interchangeably. it is then wrote to write about. the research ath consisted largely who are largely still around. very little of my researchers acted. mostly at conversations for 20 years previous to conceding of writing this book. it is important to be responsible to the communities i whisper train, particularly since in the absence to write on, graffiti writers argue about the one train in 1977 will come to my house and letting off at know if i get something wrong. that responsibility to the community is similar to a journalist should do. she tells stories and irresponsibly actually irresponsibly actually accurately, but a sip religion drop the story.ies and irresponsibly actually accurately, but a sip religion drop the story. >> is interesting because what you did isn't so different from our present day. we started talking about spinning a lot time with a lot of people who don't listen to them tell their stories. you put their real names then. you put their real names then. is it that different? to duke fiction quite often and are geniuses who pulled out of their head. for most folks it involves a great job reporting. >> from you at this book, i'm straddling a number of different worlds because although the book is based in the bedrock of facts, it's got fantastic elements. it features a building with a staircase if you are from the first to the 14th time you travel into the future and you can't go back. and there may or may not be demons fell in the tunnels below the city. for me, writing fiction is a game of accumulating goodwill in the form of fat, in the form of believability and recognizable characters to seem fully human and three-dimensional and that they see the chips to do some crazy like that. i can get away with that because my facts and characters are real. >> before we take your questions, start thinking of them. i wonder crushing for atom. it not only report, usn make news and he did a lot during the presidential race. adam wrote a book, because every c-span audience -- >> you push the limit. but because my daughter might be right now, put asleep. >> a couple my letters. what you did so really, really well said that she did the sequel series to go to sleep. but i just want to take a quick click here because you had an experience with media, journalism because even samuel i'll check them to that in a post-icon set that scare on our political campaign. >> is interesting. >> go where you want to go. i'm just trying to maintain dignity. >> i'm not as concerned with that. yes, the success of go the fuck to sleep giving a platform to immediately push out eat your fucking vegetables. i don't get over it technik early. what this notion of buying and trading and selling capital but not jump in on any of those ideas presented to the radio host of america, all of which a day. i get sequel ideas for you. it doesn't matter if you're toledo anchorage, derelict the jocular chitosan sake this and has a site cake with a comical name. it's like johnny and booker in the morning every time. do they have a female cohost to cosigner chauvinism they being like you boys. they reduce the liquid about sequels. i got some ideas. >> and funnier than you are. >> not doing sequels allowed week the fuck up to be the sequel. it is basically intended to galvanize voters who have been excited about their chick now going on in the streets played a role. so essentially it features a little girl going around her house, trying to convince your family or his better promise accomplishments are significant in a ronnie rain would be terrified. nobody wants to listen to her, since he and jackson popped up in persons everybody out one time after the next. we debuted in late october. got 2 million views within 24 hours. i don't want to say we swung the election or that you should've been at the inaugural. >> my ticket must've gotten lost in the mail. although we did hear news about upon that event, word for word. if you're watching, mr. president, i don't know where my ticket win. >> the last parties who also blew sean hannity's mind as well as a lot of other -- a lot of people were not impressed with your production. >> i didn't know that they blew his mind or even that he had a mind. >> you did get a little blowback is folks didn't think it was the most dignified politics. >> politics in this country dignified the discourse forever. we can never go back now. [laughter] >> i'm not really a point, we've covered a lot of turf and gone different directions for a daughter who might not get a job in journalism to reach out for an inaugural ticket. does anybody here have questions for us? if you do, your job is to go to the microphone. i have to imagine someone does. if not, here comes a young man rushing to the microphone. a justice of the carrier voice. >> how's that? you're somewhat color-coordinated. >> we call each other this morning that we are going to be preferred later at a small bar. >> quivers said black doesn't show steams. >> a quick question. this is mainly aimed at night because of what you're doing, but i'm bringing it up because it's interesting to me this book fairs about five years old seems to be successful and is basically about print. so my question is very quick. the future of journalism. what about the future of journalism? is it all going to be this brave new world things? was print journalism somewhat like we know now how the future? >> is a combination because people have the perception of what is to save and what they wanted paper and that they wanted e-book. i love it because i finish a book it night and i like to read on my side and i can push a button and get something new to sample. also be put out her first books in october another site who bring them out for christmas in paperback. people were insistent. this especially this collection from which they felt some things you want save the "national geographic" titles. i think the thing -- there's the flexibility needed. it's difficult to business right now because there's so many different platform of books. i do for money but for different times. we don't know what is going to be. this whole thing started out with my very first book and i don't think they have the right and they were answering me back. i feel it creeping is it gives us the access to so much stuff. i used to live in d.c. and have to go to the merit that there came to go to the library of congress wait for our for one boat. people would talk trash about google, but there's so much information available. it's a combination that doesn't need to be either or. >> he's become that guy who reads this song for the news in the bathroom. that used to be our line, the pair but never dies that has yet to to go the bathroom. now that's no longer the case. another answer to the question as i think there is an emotional connection to current with those certain age level. the question is whether that exists for people below a certain age level. you're not going to get your answer until we get there. i can tell you we have folks who grow up entirely digitally, but are thrilled when they get a piece in the print edition. so there's still something emotional. i'm not sure what it is. >> i have 6-year-old twin daughters in oakland, california. we try to have -- we try to live on the border between the digital and analog, hardcover books and the ipod. we are constantly back-and-forth i just had a piece in the near times and i have to say what it went live at midnight, it was a little thrill, but when i got the paper in the morning and side and print, i thought it could go to mom and dad and say hey, it's not just virtual. it's factual. so there's something for a certain generation. look around this term. we are here. my students are nigeria. how many undergrads are the audience today? thank you. so there's all kinds of digital divides. but in terms of media, my students, undergrads, the hardcover as squier is not in their hands. >> you're the undergrad. go to the microphone and tell us the answer to the question, will you? >> was certain generation doesn't have an investment is for config. like when the near times was like we are a fate now. >> of the mike down. sorry to single you out. >> bring your microphone to your mouth. >> i'm really interested in this lecture because i really want to know what is the future of journalism? to make doing the right choice by choosing to study journalism big school or whatever? aberrant keeps telling me i did the wrong choice by choosing to be a journalist. it's still feel like there's a future for journalism. however, i do see future for print journalism. especially the younger generation. i don't feel like there's any undergrad who agreed the newspaper from the first page to that. for me coming even from the textbook is hard. it's not for us. maybe for other generations. but there's others that with the social media at the case, this is the future. but with journalism, it's just boring. it's not for us. >> that is a very useful, very honest answer to a question. thank you forget-me-not. i appreciate it. [applause] amoeba to jenin in the picture in front of for a second. >> some of the first decade of decline in journalism in 2000. -- 2003 to 2013 was when publishers did a great trade publications. many exit the business and took money with them. the content went into the toilet. you didn't address the problem of filling publishers and what they've done for the oppression and the future of journalism. >> a long time ago, when i was first standing out in magazines i were worker bees and knowing on a timer to it's one of the and that then, she explained to me they thought of the stories is the stuff that went between the ad. in 2009, vladivostok our salaries as squier cut a 7%, for instance. what happened in the ensuing couple of years as they load all the budgets for all the stuff we do, saying out and doing stories. i went to high school with a good performance. i spent six weeks following workaround before anybody knew she was. i just spent 16 years with an ugly guy about what it's like to be beauty conscious society. all of this staff -- all of these budgets have not been crunched. as the stock market recovered and even writers can see the stock market going up. i think what they saw as we want to do this so that they will do it for less. the businessmen are going to think okay, we'll spend that money. but it's higher putting their money and other things and are reliant on us to do the same thing for the last. i hope because i have lived through other downturns. ended up going to gq because they didn't have enough pages and et cetera, et cetera. things are cyclical and not soviet defeat. some of the magazines are a hundred different magazines. i do hope the businessman will see the content is king and there has to be something, the bucket of content at the end of the radar or they've got nothing to put between the ads. >> in addition to the wise comment here the first newspaper the publisher took a 7% profit. our newspapers to take dirty% profit. if you want an answer to the question how we squeezed these things, that's the reality that you can run a newspaper and make a decent profit in the decent life here you can have a newspaper or magazine and make obscene profits and keep the quality of. it is a huge challenge. >> my first publisher is conrad lacking candidate. he was the first person to request we sign a waiver greeting him all of our electronic rates to other print stories. for which we would never get another cent. >> at that point, i left that chain and went independent. >> ltd. the question for this woman here. >> i am curious whether for those of you teaching and as you are writing, if you find you're using a different vernacular to reach out to readers, whether the level of education you received in our country mandates we change the way they are presenting a written word or in your case you were talking about graffiti. if we had to use alternate means of reaching out to leadership. >> you are teaching art rockers, right? >> cab, i was teaching an mfa program says teaching writing and i was also teaching a hip-hop class for undergraduates. you know, i don't know that i fully understand the question, but i will attempt to answer it anyway. i think that vernacular, the way we speak is always changing. it's always in flux. language is always evolving and i think there's a lot of gatekeeping around that evolution. what i see particularly in the world of friction is a resistance to precisely the kind of instinctive natural ability to coax to match up high and low culture, which is the hallmark of the hip-hop generation speaks in tanks. occasionally a writer will be praised for doing this. occasionally juno diaz will publish a book and there will be this rhapsodic response to the way kafka tommy at "the new york times" cited for not just of calle west as if he was with lightning flashing and a body and was attempting with con a list of the western canon in the way people speak of the street. they were not viable in stacker two steps and collapse, but they want out into the world. it's like now, this is how everybody he knows the niners speaks and is a natural, instead did they and eradicates a lot of traditional notions about the separation in the hierarchy of art for us. it's how my generation gets down and it's important to not for this one over the other, but also to validate forms like hip-hop, which are at the cutting edge in the forefront of how language continues to evolve. >> i was very good. >> folks, okay. you're teaching a lot and i want you to be fast only because we've only got a couple more minutes. >> beautifully put. i can't get the image of juno diaz in his basement of my head screaming life, life. >> i would just add one of things we haven't talked about because they're so concentrated on the form of how will deliver it by is that the content actually is. the hope here is when people talked about the new media revolution, convergence culture, talking about the great democratization receipt and produced, there is tremendous in this and. the economic reality came collapsing down and then people started looking around, have a really democratize the process? have we open up the space? the answer is yes and no. there's all kinds of hyper local projects going on. community speaking to themselves in ways that were not possible before. transnational communities, night chris and olivia and queens in new york was not a nobody before. but a cross-border lines, across the lines of caste, the fact that hip-hop vernacular is part of juno diaz in the mainstream culture, your voice is fair, but the doors barely budged a bit. >> every way kid with oversize jeans is speaking the same vernacular. >> i agree. but that's not on the pages of your times for "esquire" for that fact. >> i give him his first assignment when i went hip-hop scene elementary. there's a 7 million piece and nobody in this unicenter to. it's the guide now controlling how people perceive music in the pages of the record. i see people in positions of power and institutions. jeff cheney by giving willingly to teach their enacting the gatekeeping is being challenged. it's beginning to change. institutions for us to recognize it partly because the posts are good the perception, asses seats. it's partly a bottom-line issue. but these institutions are forced to recognize and change if for no other reason than self-preservation. >> will refer to as the crisis of journalism causes people to look for new ways to communicate. this is for this gentleman. >> i like that phrase, crisis in journalism. when i started in 1964, we had a managing director still complaining about how william randolph hearst had grew in newspapers. >> we always complain. garlic farmers. >> it is an economic issue and content of this advertising in a consumer society. since the feature brand-name sponsorship from independent journalist? >> i want to bring too much in because of our panel here, you came month of the most classic model. get another small paper, getting on the paper. visit horrify you someone asks about training and font to show? >> it doesn't horrify me. it's just symbolic of where a. this interesting things going on with her public a comment is that the name of the? >> public eye as a model where they got their money from wealthy folks and foundations and steer journalism. >> to finance journalism that otherwise would be done. i have a friend who just got a grant from the pulitzer foundation to focus on the acidification going on in the ocean, however poisoning notions. i really think there's opportunities for rehab to get created at how we create journalism. >> also, there's a simple thing at a writers conference. compiling is a brand. a brand is a fancy new word because every writer needs to get a public needs to be known. it's the same thing. >> teaching on people started to think i was a writer? when i started appearing on tv. >> is not a weird thing to appear on tv and suddenly they're like i love your writing? we have a wonderful circumstance here of what i anticipated them in our timing right, our final question.
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