Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Charlie Rose 20240622

Baltimore. About family, influences about shaping identity. Coates i was very fortunate. I have six brothers and sisters total. I lived in a household in west baltimore, right across the street where the disturbances in baltimore started earlier this year. You know, the world you grew up in, what you know in terms of what you are going to go out and see, and then theres the world thats on tv, and the world i knew was one in which there was a great deal of violence in the neighborhoods, where violence shaped the social customs of folks, and where a larger violence that was not as obvious, not necessarily somebody pulling out a gun or five boys jumping you, but a larger aspect of violence shaped the community. The thing i think of, i live in a household where i had a mother and a father. This was not the typical profile for most of my friends. I had a mother and father who both worked, who by that point were both very educated people. I have the basics covered in terms of my food, clothing, etc. Yet, despite all that, when i went out into the world, when i left school left for school every day, i confronted all the sort of things that all the other boys in my neighborhood and girls in my neighborhood confronted. Rose which was the risk of violence . Coates all the time. Constant. The little things, as a child, i took it as normal, but now i look back and its insane. For instance, how many people am i walking with when i go to school . I think about that all the time. I remember when alan iversen came into the nba and it was all this hubbub about why he was with a posse, but i understood exactly why he needed a posse. He had come from a place where it was quite clear you needed security because you never knew what somebody might do to you. Rose is it true today in baltimore . Coates i dont know. I suspect it. I want to be very clear though i have not lived in baltimore in 20 years, but from what i can tell and what ive seen when i go back to visit family, i strongly suspect so. For instance, i just want to highlight this, the video of the woman beating on her son. Rose everybody praising her saying we need more discipline. Coates right, but that is fear. We need to be very clear. She said, i dont want him to end up like another freddy gray. That is fear from that woman. Rose fear that her son might be next. Coates very much so. She wants him to go home and be someplace where she feels he can be protected. That was very familiar to me. Rose that is commonly called the talk parents give to the children in which they say you got to stay away from where violence may happen. Coates right, and rose more though. Coates yes, and africanamerican parents understand the consequences. The idea is that you have to educate your children on how to basically deal with violence. While of the past year, weve seen that violence focus on the police and what police do and i was a child, and i suspect its the same for other folks. I know its the same with my son and my child, it does not just concern the violence of the police, but of the neighborhood. Africanamerican neighborhoods are on balance much more violent than other neighborhoods. Rose why is that . Coates that goes back to what i was trying to write about in the case for reparations. Africanamericans did not walk out of the cotton fields and chains and immediately walk into america. They suffered 100 years of segregation. What i focused on was housing segregation. This was important because housing segregation says where you can live, it also restricts what you can do with your money because housing is so central to wealth in this country. It also restricts what you are exposed to because your kids can only live in certain areas. On top of that, the other discrimination africanamericans suffered from, in terms of federal programs, discrimination in schools, Higher Education all of that piled into ones single geographic region, and the inability to escape that. It creates a sense of deprivation, a kind of frustration. We have people with obvious economic needs. So it is no surprise that those neighborhoods tend to be more violent than other neighborhoods where people have more opportunities. Rose you escaped to harvard. Coates not quite harvard. Rose but for you, it was better than harvard. Coates thats right. The long history that howard has for attracting people like Toni Morrison, for instance. It was an awakening for me. Rose how . Coates that was probably the first place where i saw black people who were doing a variety of things. Again, i had been aware of that. I was not deprived at all, but this was, like, the first place where you met black people, and someone might Say Something like they are going to take a year off and study in spain. What . Really . You can do that . That actually happens . The world is not as restricted as you think it is. Little things like that. Having professors from other places. I had a professor i think about this now from trinidad. The very thing i was talking about when i talk about housing segregation and what it deprives you of. I had so much exposure at Howard University to other ways of living, quite frankly. Rose you also talk thought about being a poet. Coates i did. I wrote quite a bit probably the first two or three years after i left my parents home. Even though i did not enough being a poet, i think that really marked my journalism, that study. Rose you think it was about command of language . Coates yes, and ultimately i think it was about the economy of language. Command, too, but economy, and that is so crucial in journalism , you know, the ability to Say Something with as much power as you can in the briefest amount of space. Rose you met a friend of mine and a friend of yours, david carr, sort of first job as a reporter. You spoke eloquently about him. What did he do that made you feel so thankful . Coates david saved my life. I think i met david two years after i had gone to college. I am two years out of baltimore at that point. It was not clear to me that i would make anything of myself. I came from a very, very positive home where folks really encouraged me. Rose but your dad had also been a former black panther . Coates he wasnt also present with very High Expectations for his children. It was not clear to me i had the ability to live up to those expectations. It was not clear to me i had it within me. When i went to david when i went to work for david, 20 years old, very young, right out of boyhood, he made it clear that i could do this and i could write and that that was possible. I could not believe that the essence of the job was find it interesting question, call some people, meet with people to investigate it, and then write it down. And they give you a check for it. Rose and he taught you coates oh my god, i remember the story i think about most with davids i had caught wind of a story in washington to perform the act of fictions when evictions when people would not pay their rent. There was a service and they were going around hiring Homeless People to do these. Homeless people making other people homeless effectively. David, brilliant journalist, but knew he had to sell a paper. That headline just got him right away. He said, go find that story. I had no hint of who was doing it or where it was. I went to a homeless shelter a few days after he sent me, and i just went up to the first person, scared out of my mind and said, do you do evictions . And the guys said, no, but that guy over there does. That was the story. And he demanded that. He demanded you face your fear. I stopped working with david like, in 1999. I worked a series of really not fun jobs. I think i lost three straight jobs, and i came to the atlantic in 2008. It was david who got me that job. Rose because he knew james bennett. Coates he knew james bennett. I think they had overlapped at the times together. Im sorry david is not here to see all of this. Rose me too. He was such an often guest on this program and had something unique about the ability to go right to the core. Even if everybody else was somewhere else, he knew where it was. Why is what you are doing resonating so much and so deeply with people like Toni Morrison . Coates that i cannot answer. I dont know. What i can tell you is i think certain aspects of africanamerican humanity, anger is one of those aspects, are not allowed to be aired in public the same way with other people. I think there is great fear when black to talk about their anger, black people talk about their anger, their negative emotions, their hatred of certain things. I think that makes people very very uncomfortable. Rose you also think, though help me understand. In a sense that there is builtin to the establishment of america and understanding that building on slavery, that what we have is people who feel empowered to do violence to the body of other people. I select those terms violence and body directly from reading you. Coates i do think that. And i think that rose you think it is power and control . Coates yes, and i think we have ways of covering that. One of the things i try to make clear repeatedly is any sort of term you think as innocuous or a euphemism that relates to race and policy in terms of race and black people ultimately comes back to violence and doing violence to africanamerican bodies. For instance, take something that seems abstract and disconnected like affirmative action. How is that related to physical violence . I assure you there are africanamericans in this country that want their kids and leave aside what you think of the policy, but those africanamericans trying to get advantages for their kids are trying to get them in the hopes that they approve their station and grow up somewhere not like where they grew up. Behind that is not just not growing up poor, workingclass or whatever. Its almost always i dont want you to have to walk out the door and look and watch your back the way i did. It is everywhere. Rose that brings me to an essential point. It is still very much with us, this act of violence against the body your terms. You have a basic difference in terms of how you see that from the president. Coates probably. Rose probably . You have had debates with him in the white house. Coates that is true. I think the president reflects in his Public Comment a kind of optimism that is very much rooted to the africanamerican experience. I think the notion of hope, the notion that it will be better tomorrow is almost maybe not even almost religious within the africanamerican community. A lot of that comes out of the church and the aspect or belief that good ultimately does triumph and justice ultimately does win out in the end. This comes out of my beliefs about the world in the natural world. If you were, say, an africanamerican who was in slaved in this country and died during the period of slavery that is the end of your arc as an individual human being. You lived and died as an enslaved person. Black folks who lived and died during the red summer thats the end of their arc. There is no date, broader sort of justice. There is no big sort of justice. Rose what about People Killed by acts of violence today . Coates that is the end of their arc. It ended right there. Eric garner, when he was choked out in staten island, that is the end of his body. Whatever great thing is going to come of it, he will not get to see it. Even assuming some great reform comes out of it. That is just my belief about the world. I do not believe there is an afterlife in which he will look down and see rose you are an atheist, to . Coates yes, i am, and that informs my belief on this. Sort of routing this in the body. If you can get that, you can get to the pain of what is actually happening. Martin luther king was shot and killed, and that is it. That is it. The wisdom rose and your hero, malcolm x. He was shot and killed. However, if i would say to you malcolm was killed by black people, if i would say to you the case that so stung you, so resonated within you, the story of a very accomplished young man, a family friend, if i remember coates my friend who was killed by an africanamerican police officer. Rose but that does not matter to you. Coates no. Rose you are saying what is relevant is he was a black man not who shot the gun. Coates yes, and he was living in a system that cast him a certain way. Rose and you dont want to hear about black on black violence. Coates i can hear it. Take the example of malcolm x. He should have never been in that fight to begin with. He should have been a senator somewhere or governor. Rose because of skills and talent. Coates right. He never should have been there. But he never should have been in a conversation. The very fact he had to be out there cannot be taken away from the context of White Supremacy the very fact that my friends my friend jones was gunned down cannot be subtracted from the fact that he was mistaken for another black person who was a suspected criminal. It does not matter at the end of the day who the actual agent is. There is a broad, systemic thing. Rose you believe and write eloquently that this is simply the forward projection of history from slavery. Coates i do. Very much so. There is some sort of serious direct reckoning with this. Were just going to keep going over and over and over again. I dont mean to harp on this but this question of who the killer is and what race i think is one of the distractions that takes us away from rose what is also a distraction, tell me when you watch the eulogy that the president gave in charleston. You were being interviewed somewhere . Coates i was sitting there, but the sound was off. We watched later. Rose it now is enshrined as one of the great president ial moments. Coates i thought it was a great speech. In my lifetime, i thought it was one of the greatest president ial addresses ive seen. Rose but . Coates i dont have a but. Rose yes you do. Coates i have to judge it within the context of who he is. President of the United States rose he had to speak that way . Coates yes, but anyone else who has been president or could have been president , anybody else potentially in that spot, i want barack obama in that spot, and i thought the address he gave was better than anything anyone else had done. Rose he did do a bow to the fact that we are all responsible. He has always said that. And you quarrel with that, dont you . Coates no, i dont. Because i think as americans, we all are responsible. Rose he quarrels with the fact that not only are some people responsible, but we have to be accountable with our self. Coates he actually did not do that in that speech. I quarrel with the notion that individual virtue is somehow a match for the forces and resources of a society angled in a particular direction in this case, towards White Supremacy. I dont think individual virtue, which some people call personal responsibility, is enough. Rose it will not get you there. Coates my parents were very morally and personally responsible. This did not change the fact that they lived in a community that was shaped by housing segregation. My grandmother raised three kids in the projects, sent all three of her young daughters off to college. She scrubbed white peoples floors and went to school at night. When it was time for her to buy a home, she had to buy a home on contract in a way that white people did not. That decreased the ability of my family to accumulate wealth. No amount of personal virtue on behalf of my grandmother would have stopped that. That goes to the issue of the state and society. That is structural. Rose what about baldwin . Coates i was deeply inspired by james baldwin. That is at the core of it. Rose what was it that inspired you . Coates he was a beautiful writer. Rose of course he is. Coates no, that is what inspired me. Rose it was not what he wrote about, but the way he wrote it. Coates the literary ability the form, how he begins as a letter and then slips into memoir and then the whole way drawing a theme through the entire book is an amazing act of literature. Rose what do you aspire to do . Coates to continue to write for the rest of my natural days and to continue to i hope one cannot really aspire to this but i hope that allows me to continue to care for my family and if i can do that, i would have a very happy life. Rose i do want to try to understand the message, beyond the eloquence, beyond the command of words, beyond the poetry. It seems to me those inks are those things are tools and skills in the exercise of presenting beliefs, ideas, convictions, experience. Coates right. Thats true. Im not trying to be difficult. You are exactly right. Its not that i dont im a writer, and its not if not for my interest in the tools, i would not care i would care about the message, but i would probably be home thinking about it. I would not be writing it. The tools are very, very important to me. There may come a day when i use the rose are the tools more important than the content . Coates thats a great question. Personally, probably, yeah. Rose i hear that from you. But you are being championed. Coates right. I appreciate that. Rose yes, the skill, but the content. Maybe you have given the content more fire because of your coates my hope someday very very soon is to use those same tools to do something else. Rose you mean write the Great American novel . Coates who knows . When i think about the rest of my life, i do not necessarily see myself using those tools to write the same thing, to convey the same message. Rose do you go back to all that malcolm x did and said and say you are most amazed by the eloquence he brought to it rather than what he did and said . Coates i am pretty amazed by his eloquence. I really am. The reason im differentiating as there were a lot of people who certainly a lot of black people who felt like malcolm felt, but the ability to articulate it in that way is incredible. Rose you know much more about this than i do. What happens is what artists do is give expression with their talent, their skill, to what we feel, and i suspect you are giving, i seem to think that you are on the raw edge to what they feel. Coates i cant say. Rose you go to aspen, and you write about that. Coates theres no guarantee they will experience the way i do. The obvious case of that is charleston. What i just was talking about, the idea of forgiveness and the way folks interacted with that the optimistic notion of there being some sort of great justice that will triumph at the end of the day i dont share that. A large number of africanamericans do. It is all through the tradition. It is dominant. Even in malcolm x, but i dont have that. It was deeper than his nation of islam idea because the idea was that through nationalism, one will triumph in the end. I do not necessarily know that i have that. Thats why its hard for me to say that i am necessarily connected with a large mass of people because its a very internal thing. Its very, very internal. Charlie rose on bloomberg televisions brought to you by boeing, where the drive to build Something Better inspires us every day. Rose all that you had done and said here to your son, who is 14, do you believe there is something that could change the way things are . Coates in that book . In my writing . Rose no, in your head, in your heart. Coates i think the ideas presented in the case for reparations helpful. Rose reparations is one thing. Why would that be so important because it would say that you have been wronged . Coates yes, i think at the center of the vast majority of race discussions in this country is the inability to acknowledge the debt. If we acknowledge the debt and acknowledge what we have done to folks with economic and financial debt, our policies would look very different. Rose what has happened to the confederate flag, you find what . Coates i find progress. Its a very, very good thing, built on nearly a halfcentury of work historians and activists by historians and activists in this country. Rose so there is, as the president wanted to take note, progress . Coates yeah. Rose but progress that came as a result of activism, of struggle. Coates if you asked me if there have been progress over the last 150 years as a result of struggle, i would agree with you. What i disagree with is the idea of inevitable progress. I do not think that anything is predetermined. Rose you think it needed some sort of precipitating agent . Coates or even with the agent that you will win. I just dont know that it is inevitable. Rose do you believe things can change with struggle, as they have . Coates yes, they can. I do believe that. Rose do you go to france in part to see if there is a different system, a different approach, somehow a different point of view about these issues that you have been writing about here and here and here . Coates not really. Rose you are just going over to have a good time . Coates im going over because of my love of the french language, to expose my son to other things. We always wanted our child to be bilingual. That is part of it. I do just because you are not completely off i do go to see how france deals with their problems. It is not my expectation that i will find rose in some places like immigration, they do not deal very well. Coates i think that is very much correct. Rose if you were writing your own epitaph today, i assume the nicest thing you would like is if the first word were writer. Coates yes, decent human being. Maybe decent human, then writer. Rose tell me about your father today. Coates my dad worked as an independent publisher and printer. I talked with him before i came on today. The conversation was about the contract i should ask for that book because he knows publishing. Rose what does he say when he reads this and knows it is his son addressed to his grandson . Coates he is proud. Theres a degree of necessary distance i think he affords me to allow me to tell my story. If he were writing a book, he would probably have a different perspective in a different way but he has given me that space to write, which im very much appreciative of. Rose the book is called between the world and me. Toni morrison says this is required reading, and so have so many other people. My friend says this is an important book and we ought to read it, in part for what he says, in part for what he observes, in part for the way he says it all. Tanehisi coates, thank you for being here. Coates thanks for having me. Rose back in a moment. Stay with us. Rose Peter Kiernan is here. He is an advisor to businesses and government. He previously spent two decade that Goldman Sachs where he was a senior partner. His new book is called american mojo. It considers the growing threat to the middle class in america. Welcome. This grew out of the conversation you had with a young businessman in china. Kiernan it did. I was walking along saying hi. I just missed a book that had something to do with china i had just finished a book that had something to do with china. We had become good friends, and he said he had studied america thoroughly. He said, i think i get you, but theres one thing that baffles me we are trying so hard to create a middle class. It is so difficult to do, and you have one of the great middle classes in history, and you are systematically dismantling that. Why . What is the strategy behind that . Why are you doing that . I fumbled through what im sure was a terrible answer at the time, but the whole flight back i was thinking, why are we doing that . That doesnt make sense. That is how one book led it to another. That is what led to the birth of this book. Rose whats the answer to the question . Kiernan the answer is we have to look at the middle class differently because theres a totally different construct than what we once experienced. Any time you try to solve a problem by looking through the rearview mirror, we are going to screw things up. We have a middle class today that is so different in so many ways, and add to that, when we created our middle class after world war ii, it was an extraordinary thing because the entire country worked together business, government, law all came together, reaching out of a sense of unity and loyalty. That is not the fact pattern today. Nothing close to it. We have to realize theres a whole new playing field, and its a global laying field. Playing field. Rose and its very competitive. Kiernan right. Rose oecd says there will be a billion more members of the middle class outside our borders. If you look at the emerging economy, the reason those emerging economies, per countries concluded, was the idea that they created a middle class, which created some buying power, which enabled our economy to grow and enabled them to become an export economy in some cases, but it was a middle class that fueled the growth of their economy. Kiernan absolutely, and when you talk to the leadership in those countries, they say they believe the key to driving this is having a strong middle class, and they are doing things much like we did after world war ii. They are doing things to support, nurture, develop, grow their middle class at a time when we are being casual and sort of letting our middle class go by the wayside. Rose are you saying the reason our middle class is in trouble is because we no longer have the impetus of being alone as we were after world war ii . That competition has simply done things that are necessarily not to the benefit of our middle class . Kiernan there is a home game and away game answer to that question. The home game answer is, we have failed to recognize we have an extraordinarily talented group of people in our country, but we are not managing that talent appropriately. For example, in the next 10 years, we will create in this majestic economy, we will create 1. 2 5 million computer jobs. Thats a fantastic element because every one of those jobs as a multiplier job, so it means more people get hired. Lets look how we are doing at the Talent Management side. We are graduating about 40 ,000 students a year in computer sciences. Over 10 years, thats 400,000. Thats 800,000 or 900,000 jobs short. Everywhere you go, if you talk to the people who are running the big corporations, they say we have thousands and thousands of jobs and probably 4 million skillbased jobs that do not need to be created. They are there. They need to be filled. Rose the key is skillbased jobs. Kiernan it is. One thing that we need to do, we have to do is recognize it and let go of one trapeze bar and float in midair, there is another trapeze bar coming our way, and we have to train ourselves and spend the money. The question is can we do it . I believe there is a homegrown opportunity to do that, but it means we will have to change a lot of things. Rose what do we mean by middleclass . Kiernan middle class has gone through a big change. Once upon a time, you could define it by what people earned. Today, our face of america is so dramatically changed that you cannot use the old measurements. I will give you one example today in the United States there are about 45 million poor people, which is entirely too many, but just above that team seam of the poverty line are another 50 Million People who are what i call in the book hovering poor, one twist of the knife away from poverty. One of the leading causes of bankruptcy in the lower middle class is a cancer diagnosis. A car accident. What happens is suddenly you have 40 of the kids in this country who will spend some of their childhood on food stamps. What we have to realize is that the middle class has a holy dynamism, a whole new energy, so we have about 15 million latina and hispanic people in the United States, and they would qualify as middle class by any definition. Rose the president ial candidates all know that this is americas crisis, what is happening to the middle class, but you do not see that many so far really unique and creative and innovative ideas. They know, for example, that the middle class is not as well off as it was. They know that the children of the middle class their expectations are not the same as theirs might have been. They understand all this, but they are searching for a kind of narrative and a strategy. Kiernan one of my greater frustrations and one of the reasons i wrote the book my publisher told me not to come out in the middle of an election, and i deliberately wanted to. There are a lot of people claiming to be champions of the middle class. There are 20 people now running and all of them want to be champion. Rose because they know thats where the votes are. Kiernan the problem is you can increase the minimum wage. Weve done is seven times since reagan, so do it eight. You can as the president says pay people working overtime time and a half. Those begin to solve the problem. But they are nowhere near sufficient. If you think of every person in the city of los angeles and add to that every single soul in the city of philadelphia, thats how many people in our country between the ages of 16 and 25 who are not in employment, education, or training. If you go just a few miles down from here, you will see a dozen young people sitting around right now. That is not an Afterschool Program that is going to achieve anything. We have to do something. We cannot allow someone to be 22 years old who is not reading or writing up to skill base, who may have been incarcerated with no options, no job prospects, no future. That is a very expensive anchor on the middle class. But there are some Creative Things you can do. I will give you one example i talk about in the book. Everyone agrees we have a major problem with our infrastructure. That is not a contested debate. The big debate is how you pay for it, and i think we can pay for it right now, and i will go back to world war ii as an example. In 1941, we made 3 million cars in this country. From 1941 until the end of the war, we did not make 150 cars because we had to basically move our economy to where the need was. We have to do the same sort of thing today. I have a way without raising a penny of taxes that will help, which is create a bank that will not do subprime loans, they will not be derivatives, it will only spend money on infrastructure. Lets commit right here to raise 1 trillion. I believe to do that, the Development Bank would need 300 billion of equity. I believe before it would to every Corporate Pension fund every Union Pension fund and said were going to put people to work and invest in this bank, and we went to every onepercenter, we could get the money. And how would we get the loans on top of that . I think we would do that by doing a war bond. If we went to the American People and said now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of our country, and we raised 1 trillion that will go to fund not just roads and bridges and the obvious infrastructure, but the more subtle, more powerful kinds of infrastructure. Im involved in a school, and we had a problem that the kids were hanging out on the steps at night, even on the cold, fall nights. We sent some of to ask what was going on, and the reason the kids were there it was the only place they could get wifi. We have a digital divide. There are other keystones we other kinds of pipelines other than keystone we need to build. We need to build the kind of infrastructure that young people will be able to get access to what they need. Rose previously, there was a 800 billion Stimulus Program. What happened yet but kiernan i would never confuse with spending or a Stimulus Program. This was an orgy of spending. New uniforms for the tsa. Is that really a stimulus matter . Libraries getting money where they have one or two employees. A Stimulus Program is where you engage people in the recreate and of the economy. You uplift them by giving them jobs, and you basically build american momentum. That is not what happened. Rose who is responsible . Kiernan i think its a shared responsibility that everyone owns but no one really does. What i would do if i were king is to say i think every state, every municipality ought to have a department of regulatory sanity, somebody who sits down and says, how we can get rings shovel ready. A lot of people i talked to in washington when i was researching books said that really would have worked, but we just did not have enough that was shovel ready. Rose so it would start immediately . Kiernan immediately. We have had a history of figuring out how to solve the shovel ready program. The problem with our infrastructure is we do not have things that are shovel ready. That is a problem that manpower and woman power and brains can resolve. Those two things starved what i would say is a unique almost churchillian opportunity to rebuild our infrastructure. To rebuild jobs we are talking about. But that is just one example. The same way that fdr somehow persuaded ford motor to not make cars anymore and to make airplanes, the government is cloaked in immense power, and leadership means you have to go and solve the dire problems. Rose i interview a National Security person after another, and at least half of them will say the biggest problem they see to our National Security is not overseas. Its domestic. It is sort of gridlock in washington. You talk about domestic ostriches in your book. Kiernan one of the things we done is weve allowed ourselves to create not just the democrat and republican divide we are used to that. We have an architecture of divide we have created now which means things like lobbyists, which used to be a cottage industry, is now a multibillion dollar industry with millions of professionals practicing it. There are think tanks out there with acre with bigger endowments than some small colleges. You and i know no great problem ever got solved by one sector alone. Philanthropy, government, have to Work Together on rebuilding the middle class. Rose candidate says that they come to washington to create the bipartisanship that built this country and then they run into one problem after another. Kiernan i would say i felt i fault business. I think business brand is broken. Acknowledge that whatever happened in 2008 is an aberration and something we will protect against, but it should not block us. One of the things weve done many times in our history is have a government that spoke with business fluency. We had it leaders from business working in government, that is the kind of energy we need to create. Some of it is being done in the country. You go to places like houston, houston has something called the greater houston partnership. They are bringing in the academic leaders, the religious leaders, the government leaders. Rose the ngo leaders. Kiernan exactly and asking how do we build our economy here . One example that shows this working the number three city in the country for foreign consulates is houston, texas. Washington, new york, houston. Thats not because of proximity to the state department. Something is happening here. Rose i would have assumed San Francisco because of proximity to Silicon Valley. Kiernan Silicon Valley is where the energy of the new jobs we are creating. I would attribute that to new york as well. Remember, we are mckenzie just did a study that said we are going to wind up with in 10 years, 1. 5 million fewer college graduates. We are creating phenomenal jobs. If you go out to the Silicon Valley and spend time, people are sparkling with ideas. The energy to create new businesses, to disrupt and to serve those middleclass people that are going in all these rose interesting thing. I was just with the secretary of defense, and he was speaking to a group of people essentially from Silicon Valley, and he basically was saying we have to have a partnership because in a lot of areas where government used to do the research and development the internet came from the department of defense , an outgrowth of that in coordination with business. He basically was saying we have to have a partnership because a lot of research and development, you people are so far out ahead of the world and government here , we have to figure out a way to have you there a significant part of the burden of innovation and creating new approaches. Were starting to see that in biotechnology and other areas. Kiernan we are seeing that with nih, being less the funder and more the instigator, but once the commercialization opportunity begins to break over the horizon one of the things that troubles me is i dont ink we have enough support in legislation for venture capital. Venture capital and 2000 was over 1 billion a year over 100 billion a year. The last year, it was 25 billion or 26 billion dollars. We have to ignore Small Businesses are the cradle of job creation. Whatever we do, lets do have an or to create jobs. If someone was to invest in a start a business, you can cut out the 1 i dont care but if you have a start a business that employs people and that business prospers, and you sell some of it or all of it you should get a tax break because that is how the great jobs get created. And great jobs are momentum creators. It is a pebble in the water. They are multipliers on jobs. Rose when you look at the discussion of the middle class you also have to address income inequality. Kiernan there is an orgy of evidence that shows we got concentration at the top not just here but around the world. There are 85 people, we could fit them in this room, who own more than most everybody else. We have two massive forces and our economy in my opinion, one that creates a very small group of people who are very, very rich and another that is creating new record highs in hunger, and homelessness, in poverty, and we have to acknowledge that somehow, those two factoids, those newtonian certainties like gravity have to be relegated. How did you do it . I think, by taking money from one giving it to another is only a beginning. I actually do not think personally, this notion that you work your life and then you spend and you die and after you die the government takes a chunk of what you have is a terrible way to redistribute wealth. So there is going to be the greatest transference of wealth ever coming with this generation when this generation passes on. Google says that you cannot tax twice, i dont know where it is written. I would like to see this. I do think one of the tests we should have for Anyone Running for office or says theyre going to tax more is what are you going to do with the money. Are you going to have something for those 6 million kids who are literally doing nothing between the ages of 25 and 16 years old . Are you going to help them . Are you going to go, here is another one, people say that education is the answer. Are you going to Fund Education . How great does a teacher have to be. We have 4 million teachers in our k12 system. That is an army of excellence for us. That is a unique selling proposition, but the trouble is if you think of everyone in the city of dallas, thats how many kids today are going to go out of the building with the school when the School Bell Rings and have no home to go home to. 1. 3 million kids are going to leave school today with no place to go but the shelter or a tent or wherever they can sleep. How good does that teacher have to be for the eight hours that that student is in class if they are hungry, if they are homeless . We have survival issues that we have been in denial about. We have to. Theres no Stimulus Program, no race to the top good enough or Strong Enough if your stomach is gurgling and you have not slept because you are fearful. Rose and malnutrition affects cognitive learning. Kiernan it does. And i was just with somebody at a hospital, they told me that the biggest condition of poor health by far, not your dna just poverty. These things all run together so whomever is going to lead us after the president steps down and we have a new one has got to address these things in an engaged and interconnected way not in silos. Rose the book is called american mojo. Thank you, Peter Kiernan. Kiernan thank you. Rose see you next time. Rishaad it is wednesday, and this is trending business. In sydney, singapore mumbai renewed optimism across asia with the regional benchmarks wrapping up a fiveday losing streak. Chinas economy is on the up. A gloomy forecast in some industrial areas. Order slowing rapidly, especially in china. A mixed message from twitter yesterday. Executives say that growth will improve soon. They say it is unacceptable, and he is not happy. You can follow me on twitter there is my handle. You can use that as well. Lets find a what equity positions are up. Chinas up by 4. 3 . Juliet . Juliette the sentiment in asia is a positive one today. Markets rise for the first time in six sessions. It kicked up his today policy meeting. It has been a volatile day in china. We did see china rise slightly. A