Woo we are here to talk with bob herbert about this new book losing our way an intimate portrait of a troubled america. We are on cspan as well so all of the questions are lived and taped. Bob herbert was a longtime columnist for the New York Times. I am jay booker. A write for the atlantic constitution. We were just discussing the challenges. I miss your column. I miss that you reported and went out to talk to people and harder american voices and i think that is missing in a lot of american journalism. A lot of leg work. It shows in your book here. Ordinary someone in my position is supposed to say how much i liked reading your book and frankly i did not enjoy reading your book. Your book made me angry, frustrated frustrated, frightened but i kind of sensed that is okay by you. That is fine by me. That is the point. Exactly maybe you can walk us through. Guest sure. I left the times in 2011 and a lot of people asked if i miss writing for them and the short answer is no. I tell people 41 years on deadline is enough. That is how long i was in the business. I was a columnist at the daily news and then at the new york city times. So i dont miss it. But one of the things i wanted to do was spend a little more time getting more indepth on some of the issues i cared about and things i wrote about in the column and i was interested in those things that had to do with standard of living in the United States and how difficulty it was for many to make ends meet. That was one big issue with me. Another as i looked at the issue of employment which as we all know has been difficult, was to look at the state of americas infrastructure which is abysmal in many cases. And i thought this would be a great way to put people to work; repairing our infrastructure. But i was thinking infrastructure is the least sexy word in the american language and thought if i talked about it no one would buy it. So i tried to tell stories to make it interesting to people and i hope i have succeeded in doing that. Education was a big issue for me. And however anyone comes down on education, and i take a strong stand in this book but whatever your political leanings are i think people should understand that poverty is such a big issue when it comes to Educational Achievement in this country. So children who grow up in families that dont have much money, where there is difficulty putting food on the table i have talked to so many teachers where children come to school hungry in the morning. There are children with illnesss taken care of. And there are children with poor eye sight who havent been diagnosed yet and cant see the board. There are children who have problems in the home. It might be Domestic Violence drug and alcohol abuse or something else. All of these things are brought with them into the classroom and it makes it difficult for them to learn. For those who have looked at the data, it has been clear the children from affluent families in the United States are doing just fine in school. If you compare their scores to young ones around the world they are at the very top. It is because a large percentage of our Public School students who are poor or near poor with the struggles i am talking about who bring the scores down. So we need to address poverty. And the final issue i look at is the issue of the wars we keep fighting. I was in the army drafted in the buildup to vietnam. I wasnt sent to vietnam but sent to korea for 14 months which wasnt a walk in the park but wasnt vietnam. I am a realist. I understand we need to defend our country. When september 11 2011 happened my wife and i live on the upper side of manhattan so it was like an attack in our neighborhood. I was in favor in going into afghanistan and going after the folks who attacked america. I was not in favor of the war in iraq. That was in 2001. We are in 2014 almost 2015, still in afghanistan, we are reengaging in iraq airstrikes in syria and my argument in the book is we will never get our act together here at home if we keep fighting these continuous debilitating wars overseas. Constant warfare cant be the answer. These are the issues i tried to cover in the book. Host you travelled the country to report the book as you did in your column. You can see it clearly in the book. You spent a good amount of time it appears in the atlantaarea. Guest in georgia. Host and you talk about the struggles of the middle class in that area. Is there a reason why you chose that area . Guest i was reading the wall street journal and they had a front page story about conditions in roswell, georgia, an upscale community. This wasnt long after the recession. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the impact of joblessness and housing foreclosure and that sort of thing on an affluent, upscale community. It wasnt just the poor who were having a hard time as a result of the Great Recession. So i wanted to come down spend a little time there, and in surrounding communities and wondered if the mayor would even talk to me like who is this guy calling from new york. It turned out he would, he was very kind and quoted extensively in the book. It was really helpful to spend some time there and see the challenges that middleclass and upper middleclass families were facing. One of the problems i think in this country is not that people dont get it. People certainly do get it. I think the media has fallen down on a lot of these stories. We have what i think of as kneejerk coverage and everybody covers the same thing or angle or that sort of thing. You never get to the heart of a lot of the issues that are so important. So that is one of the reasons why i was in roswell and other suburbs of atlanta. Host atlanta plays a role in what you were talking about the role of education and the crux of your argument there is poverty, you mentioned the atlanta situation, with the School District and testing and the super intendant whose model was poverty is never an excuse for poor performance among the students staff or within the burrocracy. And your point is poverty is what drives it. Guest exactly. We can get hung up on the phases. A lot of the corporate formers, michele ray was another one, who would say we should not use poverty as an excuse. If you talk about the kids being poor they will say any child can learn. Are you saying that these youngsters are incapable of learning and certainly not. I am saying the opposite. I am saying they are fully capable of learning but the obstacles to learning they are facing we as adults have an obligation to take the obstacles away so these Young Children are flourish. What happens when these testing regimes came in and it isnt i am opposed of testing, i had midterm exams, final exams, test along the way and they would be graded and almost everyone who went to School Public or otherwise is used to the idea of taking test. The problem is we have gone crazy with testing. We are testing three and four year olds before they come to preschool. And with the obsession with testing there there is so much at stake and the teachers and principals feel their jobs or reputations or careers are at stake than the result of these test become the be all and end all. And then it drives everything so teachers teach to the test. All we want to do is get the test scores up when in fact what you should want to do is provide a broad, wellrounded education to the young kids in your charge. That is how you end up with the kind of scandal you had here in atlanta but it certainly was not limited to atlanta. In doing the research i found there were test score and cheating scandals all across the country, in big towns, in washington, d. C. Where michele reed was, we had problems in new york, but suburban and rural areas as well. We have gone bizerk with the testing. Host you talk about the debates we are having and issues ewe are having. And very often is congress mentioned, democrats and republicans mentioned and the debate at that level doesnt interest you. I am guessing but you dont think it matters a lot. Am i wrong . Guest no you are not wrong. I have covered politics and government at every level, so for long decades. I have become disenchanted with our Political Leadership and that includes the left and the right. We have employment problems whether it is democratic or republican. A storm comes off the east coast or the gulf and the result is devastation, no matter which party is in control of congress and it seems to me that we have been our Political Leadership has been unwilling to seriously engage the Biggest Challenges facing the country. There are some issues that were so big i didnt even get into them. The whole issue of Climate Change you could write an entire book about that. I talk about poverty in the book but that is just one part of the book. But you could you know there is so much you could say about poverty and the difficulties people have getting hit. So i have lost faith in the idea that some new policy change is going to come along in washington and turn things around for us. I just dont believe it is going to happen. There is going to be a Congressional Election soon and a president ial election in 2016 and i am not trying to say it doesnt matter who gets elected. And i think it is important for people to vote. But i think that who you elect is not going to make a major change in the circumstances of most people in this country. So that is the reason i didnt spend a lot of time talking about our political leaders. What i say in the book is that there is more of a burden that is falling on our own shoulders, ordinary men and women, voting is important, but voting is not enough. So i make a strong call in the book for more Civic Engagement. We need more ordinary men and women to become engaged with the important issues of our time so that if education is important to you you have to open the front door and go out there and volunteer your time and become engaged and maybe it will be your local School District or employment is the issue you care about or something else. But if you had more people engaged you would begin to get a kind of momentum from which new leadership emerges, from the bottom up, as opposed from the top down. What i would hope is we could get a movement going. I wish it could be centered on the issue of employment but it might be centered on anything. But i would like to see some movement going that addresses the challenges facing virginia virginia individuals and families in this country. A movement so strong our political leaders have no chance but to respond. Host the last two lines in the book say if our nation is to be change forked the better ordinary citizens have to intervene aggressively in their own fate. The power in the money hands would knelt be let go voluntarily. Guest i believe that is true. Host you talk about income in inequality. Walk through the consciousequenceconsequences of it and the this historic rise of income inequality comes at a time to make it beneficial even. Do you think there is a cause and effect there . Guest i would say. You know if you go back and again, you cannot blame this on one party or the other democrats like to say well you know, this terrible turn started when Ronald Reagan was president. I do think there was a lot that was unfortunate about the reagan administration, but if you are talking for example about the resending of important regulations that protected ordinary americans and working people and that sort of thing, well take a good hard look at the bill clinton administration. You know . If you look at our economic policies, the economic policies have favored under democratic and republican president s the interest of the corporate sector and our financial leaders. And that has been the case going back at least to the 1970s and moving forward. So you have this alliance of the big money interest corporations banks and they are the folks who finance the campaigns and our political process has been flooded with money and the politicians are behold beholden to them. There is nothing surprising about that. When i was a young reporter in new jersey in the 1970s this went on but it was illegal and they got caught. They would pay bribes i will pay you this amount if you support this cause. They put them in jail. And they said we better figure out a way to do this but stay out of jail. Sow they made it legal and figured out ways to get the money to the politicians and the politicians figured out a way to get the policies that the money interest were looking for on the books and that is where we are now. Well the policies that the money interest are looking for are not the same as the best interest of ordinary working americans of american families. So some of the results that are so very clear about what has gone down over these decades is that we know no longer share in productivity gains. And the weirdest thing that happened is we stopped sharing productivity gains at the time of the Great Technology advances that caused astonishing amounts of productivity gains. Companies are far more efficient and turned the efficiency into profits. They didnt turn some into profits and some into wages and benefits. And that has been a pattern for decades. So our corporate and financial leaders get richer and richer. The former mayor of my city left office, he wasnt taking a salary and left office with 35 million. You know michael bloomberg. 35 million. That is insane. You have huge amounts of people in new york that are poverty stricken and homeless with homeless kids. So this wasnt an accident. Policies policies were stabbed that benefited those wealthy and didnt benefit those working and struggling. And once the policy was in place we watched the divide get wider and wider. Host you talk about the important of a glass well of citizen action. But it was remarkable to me that when you had the Great Recession, and the wall street meltdown much of what was driven by the greed you are talking about the lack of regulations regulations. If there was going to be a moment at which that Grassroots Movement began that would seem to have been the inspiration for it. And we saw some with occupy and on the right we saw the tea party that was compromised. Guest if it is Something Like that it doesnt really change anything if that doesnt inspire that movement what will . I misread what happened because i thought it would result in the kind of changes we need in this country. Changes that would benefit the people who were hurt the most by the Great Recession and by the Housing HousingHousing Housing foreclosure. I thought it was a great missed opportunities by president obamas administration. I hoped, i dont know if i expected or not, but i hoped the Obama Administration would pounce on the issue and you would get the regulations reimposed and you would begin to impose restraints on the banks. If you say a bank is too big to fail that says to me that bank is too big to exist. How can a bank be too big to fail . You break it up like you once broke up standard oil. So, you know at the time we were faced with the possibility of going into a new depression. I didnt want that to happen. So i thought the banks needed to be build out. I thought you provided this bailout which was taxpayer money i thought there was supposed to be Strings Attached and requirements placed on the banks for the fact we bailed them out. The big crisis with credit frozen at the time and they were supposed to make credit available to people who were qualified for loans but couldnt get them. That didnt happen. We were sending all of this taxpayer money over to shore up these failing banks but we didnt provide anything like that to the troubled homeowners in this country many people who have been paying mortgages for a long time but found they were underwater or people who were not underwater but couldnt find a suitable buyer for their home or who found a suitable buyer but that suitable buyer couldnt get a mortgage. There were all kind of problems where we could have intervened and helped ordinary people and we didnt do that. So i thought that was a missed opportunity. Then you mentioned, for example, the occupy movement, that was another missed opportunity. And people like to say that the occupy movement sputtered out because they didnt have specific demands or specific policy goals that they wanted to achieve. They didnt have appointed or elected leaders of the movement. So people said how could you expect it to succeed. Well, i think the occupy movement did succeed in getting the country focused on these important issues that we have been unwilling to face for the longest time. So people were talking about the unfairness of the economy. It was a genius idea of the one percent versus the 99 percent. I dont think it was up to the occupiers to provide the policy solutions. I thought the rest of us the elected politicians and i thought the public at large at that point, should have said you know what . This is true. This is not tolerable and these are things we need to do to change the direction we have been going on. Dont leave it up to the occupiers. Say we are talking about this now, what are we going to do about it. Host is it going to have to get worse before it happens . Guest that is what i worry about. In private conversations after i finished to Bookpeople Book people would say do you think a movement can get started or do you think all is lost . No, i dont think all is lost. But i worry it will take another Economic Disaster or catastophee and maybe worse than the great depression. I dont want that but it might take that to open eyes and make changes. Host the working share dont get productivity gain the income inequality and none of those trends seem to be tapering off. This is an ongoing process. Guest i could not agree more. The wall street journal isnt the only paper i read, but it is one of the papers i read and one of the recent stories which it may have been today but it was a frontpage story about the concern that economist around the world have with the economic slowdown in europe especially but in other countries as well including those of the emerging economies that have been doing well for the