Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you. This is not my mic im not used to it so i kopght hear if you could hear me. Thank you for joining us for ow program with author amy gold sustain who will discuss her book janesville an american story im renee here at the public library. At this time, i would look to ask that you turn off or silence all of your electronic devices. Also, at the end of todays program ms. Goldstein will have time for question and answer and then be available under the skylight to autograph books. We do still have a few available i think if youre interested in purchasing a book and you didnt get a yellow post it with a number see phil in the back. Also with the q and a, i just want to make sure that were all going to be on our best behavior. [laughter] ms. Goldstein is here to talk about her book. Shes not a politician. [laughter] and you will get to ask questions like i said youll raise your hand. Ill bring you the mic, and you dont need please dont Start Talking until i have the mic right in front of your face. As i said there are a number of limited books and 27 and theyll be available to purchase after the program it is theyre 27 and that can be cash or check made out to book world. If we run out of books ms. Goldstein has book plates that shell be happy to autothe graph, and you can purchase the book from book world or the bookstore on madison mystery to me. Lets see okay. According to ms. Goldstein bio washington potion website, she has been a staff writer at the Washington Post for more than a quarter century. Over the years, she has written widely about social policy issues including medicare and medicaid, social security, welfare, housing, and the strains placed on social safety net by the Great Recession. She also has been a White House Correspondent and covered notable news events ranging from Monica Lewinsky scandal to the columbine shootings and gold steeb was a part of Washington Post reporters awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for the newspapers coverage of 9 11. And the governments response to the attacks she was also a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting for an investigative series she wrote with her cohost on treat of immigrants betakenned by the federal government. From the amazon summary of her book janesville an american story is amy goldsteins intimate account of the followed of the closing of the General MotorsAssembly Plant in janesville and a larger story of the hallowing the american middleclass. Ms. Goldstein has spent years immersed in janesville including lots of time right here at headburg where the nations oldest operating General Motors plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession two days before christmas, 2008. Her book takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians, and job reare trainers to show why its so hard in 21st centuro recreate healthy prosperous working class. This is the story of what happens to an Industrial Town in the american heartland when its factory stills but its not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shot of vanished jobs but few stay around long u enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can do spirit tries to pick itself up. Which i think janesville is that can do community. Please join me in giving a janesville welcome to amy goldstein. [applause] thank you renee for that lovely introduction, and im blown away by how many of you are here. And the first thing i want to say is standing here it feeling presump to talk about your story which youve been generous enough to share with me. I really say thank you. This has been the biggest work of my career, and thank you for helping me to do it. You know being here today is pretty emotional actually i wanted to make clear that i wasnt going start crying in front of Television Camera here today because i arrived here as a complete stranger in 2011. And there are people in this room today who are my friends now who have welcomed me into your living rooms, welcomed me into your classroom to welcome me into your offices. Who have is showed me the file it is in the janesville room here at the public library. People who have really helped me understand this community. And im so grateful and i cant tell you how touched and humbled imby the size of the crowd in this room. It means a lot to me. And im also interested to hear your questions and to hear your take on what ive learned and what ive written. Because this is everall how i see your story and it may not be exactly how you see your story. So im looking forward to hearing your thoughtses after i speak for a few minutes. And i thought i would just read you a little bit from the first page of the book. Which starts in a day that will be very familiar to many of you. 7 07 a. M. , the last reaches end of the Assembly Line. Outside it is sill dark. 15 degrees with 33 into the snow nearly a december record piled up and drifting as a stinging wind across the acre of parking lots. Inside the janesville Assembly Plant the lights are blazing. And the crowd is thick. Workers who are about to walk out of the plant and into uncertain futures stand along side pension retirees who have walked back in, and chest height with nostalgia. All of these jammers have followed tahoe snakes town the line and cheering, hug about, weeping. The final tahoe is a beauty, is a black ltz fully loaded with heated seats and Aluminum Wheels and audio system and a Sticker Price of 57 745 and going to be for sale in this economy in which almost no one anymore wants to buy a fancy General Motors suv. Five men including one in a santa hat stand in front of the signmy black suv holding a wide banner. It is white face is crammed with worker signatures. Last vehicle off the Janesville Assembly line, banner says with a date, december rd, 2008. It is destined for county historic society. Television crews far away as netherlands and japan have come to film this moment when oldest plant of the nations largest automotor turns out. So closing of the Assembly Plant two day before christmas is well recorded. This is the story of what happens next. So i thought some of you might be interested in hearing a little bit about why a journalist who works and livers in washington, d. C. Was suddenly stop . Janesville, wisconsin and keep coming back for years. Well, there are a couple of reasons, in a big picture way and my career ive been drawn for a long time the stories that it lie at the intersection of politics and Public Policy and help explain how ordinary people are efnghted efnghted by both so it is very much in that tradition. I just got a little carried away this time. [laughter] more specific region is when Great Recession arrived at the end of 2007 i was covering a broad policy beat for the Washington Post and renee mentioned i finished cowriting about foreign centers the government had locked away immigration detention facility while it was trying to report them with bad medical care they were getting and i looked up after series was over and thought what was interesting now and i became very interested in how this bad, economic time was changing peoples lives. So i started to write a few stories to the Washington Post about this. Im just going to read you a couple of paragraphs from one that that i wrote out of swees, florida, about people signing up for well pair for the first time l. Here in florida, is elsewhere the new face of welfare includes people who have tumbled from the middleclass and higher after losing jobs savings and selfreliance and some really returning to welfare years after they thought they found permanent work and independence and the county that includes fort myers, nearly 40 of the 812 people who applied for welfare in october had never before asked for help. I got to do what i got to do to get by. Tony robyn at 23 and five months pregnant as she sat fluent a black computer terminal in room one typing an application for cash assistance. She and her husband jason opened tiptop tile, and cape karl, florida, in 1996, and most years they earn about 50,000. But this business sale years ago in southwestern florida, building boom collapsed. Now i wrote that story in december, 2008. Turns out to be the same month that your Assembly Plant closed but i didnt know it at the time. So if you remember back then, all of the job losses were not happening just in janesville, there were so many kinds of jobs going away all over the country that i got pretty focused on this. And over the next couple of years i really kept an eye on how other journalists were writing about this bad economic time. And there were two main kinds of writing that was going on back then. There were stories that were about the economy and the governments response to the bad Economic Times and whether the background that barack obama pushed through congress doing anied go or not. So these were kind of economic and political stories about the fighting that was going on in congress over that administrations policies. And then more political stories in the Midterm Election for congress in 2010. When i saw a lot of writers focused on the anxiety of voters about about voter anger and voter apathy and i started to think i didnt really see anyone putting those two things together. And i had this idea that you couldnt really understand why americans were angry or were anxious unless you really understood the personal economic experiences or their fear that their neighbor had lost a job and maybe they would be next. And i found a study that Pugh Foundation did in 2009 that looked at 10,000 new stories about Great Recession the first half of 2009. They found that most of those stories were about government bailout and banks and the autoindustry. And of those 10 thorks thousand stories how much about average americans . 5 . Well this struck me as a really huge and important gap. It seemed that we all knew the unemployment statistics but we didnt understand what it was like to have work go our way. And i can only say that i became obsessed with this idea of trying to do something about this. Because i had this impression that something fundamental was changing in this country about peoples faith in their work that they had always expected to be around. And i became really on saysed with with the idea of finding one community that had lost a lot of its best work to do a closeup of what really really happened to people to workers, to families, with to the community itself when all of this work vanished. And i have the idea that if i could focus on one community, it could be a microcosm or metaphor that could help people by looking at what experience was close why and in one place to think about what was going on all around them. Now, i became so obsessed about this, i did something that i had never done in my long career i arranged to take a leave from my job to try to write longest piece of work ive never done in my life. If you think about it if youre going to write in a microcosm you better choose prate well. So u how you might wonder did i end up in janesville when there were all of these other communities losing work too. And i didnt know this community. I didnt have any family l here. I had never been here and i didnt have any friends here. But i had heard about janesville which i had nef heard about before in 2009 when i was looking for a setting for one of the stories i did about recession efnghts effects for Washington Post and there was a community in wisconsin that had lost a big General Motors plant and i thought that was interesting but i didnt come here at the time because this had just happened as you know a lot of people worked for General Motors itself were sill getting sub pay so economic paying for some peengt had begun to seep in. So i didnt come and it lingered in my mind and after taking off from my job i kept thinking about various places i could go. Something inside me just kept telling me that janesville might be the place. So why was that . One reason was that i immediated to find a place that had lost a lot of jobs and you definitely qualified. I dont have to tell you thousands of jobs left from around here, there are different figures that you can see. But looking at the bureau of labor statistic figures, in 2008 and in 2009, about 9,000 jobs left this county. A lot of jobs and if you look at what happened to the Unemployment Rate here at this time, in june of 2008 when the announcement was made that General Motors was going to shut down production here Unemployment Rate was 5. 4 . In march of 2009, a few months after the last of these jobs disappeared, unemployment has shot up to over 13 . So on the job loss front, you were a winner. Or a loser [laughter] beyond that, i had this sense that i wanted to tell the story of what this big recession had done. So it was important to me that i find a place that had not previously been part of the belt because i didnt want to find myself writing about accumulation of neck decay but show what one bad economic time l did. So flynt, gn was an old story is and i wanted to find a place where economic trouble was new. And, obviously, the General MotorsAssembly Manhattan had been shrinking more and a little bit more over a couple of decades. But it always got a new product. So this clothing was a different thing that nobody in town had ever experienced and that was appealing to me not that i was happy for you but appealing to me as a place to potentially do this writing, do this, this talking to people about what was happening in their community. You know, i had this sense that their place is exactly like every place. But as much as potential i thought it would be interesting to find a community to write about where the pattern of job is losses matched pretty well, the National Pattern of jobs that went away in this Great Recession. So if you think about what happened nationally, the largest proportion of jobs that disappeared were Manufacturing Sector that was two of janesville. A lot of jobs that were lost were jobs that had paid pretty well but had not required a lot of Higher Education to get. That was to janesville. More men than women lost jobs in this recession. That was two janesville so i thought that this was a community what that had had a number of the qualities in lost jobs that other people around the country would understand and could identify with. I also had this sense that janesville might fit nicely into the sweep of history. I remember the first time i found a Youtube Video for a speech that then senator barack obama gave at the Assembly Plant in february of 2008. I dont know if any of you remember are him coming. And i remember the first time i listened to the videos saying, the the promise of janesville is a promise of america. And that line gave me goose bumps because i heard that Youtube Video couple of years after a the Assembly Plant closed that there was irony by then to what this president ial candidate who became president was saying. And, of course, janesville had been part of the sitdown strike of the 1930s. And the Assembly Plant part of the domestic war effort in world war ii and plant started turning out artillery shells, and a, of course, parker pen had been from here and own moments in 20th century history so i just is like that sweep of history. And, of course, before i knew anything about this community or have met anybody here, i had the sense that i might find some interesting politics. I just thought there might be Something Interesting about an old uaw town that was represented by scott walker in State Government represented and congress by paul ryan in the the state that was led by scott walker. So you know it was a journalist i tried to bring all of my reporting instincts to bare to think about what might be a get setting and i decided that i was going to make exploratory visit to janesville. And i first came here in july of 2011. And i had arrange ad to meet some people there are a couple of people in the room here who were part of that first visit who i met on this couple days that i was here and very first person i met in town i had set up a meeting with him was stan myland who was, obviously, an old time. Biz et reporter who had left the newspaper and was on a different radio show than one hes on now and was working as an education consultant. He had an office in what used to be parker world penn headquarters and renovated into offices. And stan and i talked and talked and talked for a couple of hours we talked about about the history of this community. We talked about what it was leak when he was growing up a boy and talked about what Assembly Plant meant and what was happen nog, and we just talked for probably two or three hours nonstop. And finally he said to me, about would you like to see the plant . I said of course i would. So i got in the car of this man i had never kn