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They were protesting the price that they could not afford because they did not have a job. it seems on the surface, having not been on the streets of tehran, that they face a similar reality. >> well, there's a lot of economic turmoil in iran, and has been for some time. you know, the mullahs have mismanaged the economy for 30 years, and it didn't get reported in the western media, but periodically, you'd see strikes of transit workers in one iranian city or another, so there's a lot of discontent there, the regime, i think, overall is on pretty thin ice, and that's why i think the extent of t...

Got to look at this like green jobs, which is what the president wants to promote and expand. how are transit jobs green jobs? >> well, in this one, 60 people on the bus as opposed to 60 cars. far less of a toxic footprint is so to speak. we're laying off urban transit workers and cutting back on buses and trains. in 1994, up to 10% can be used for buses and trains but not operating services. that means you in fact can have buses and trains but nobody to drive them. if we were to take a new look at urban/suburban transit, this is the time to invest in trains, which we can make in detroit, by t...

Jobs, jobs, jobs, green jobs revolution. >> let me go back to what you were saying about the way transit funds are distributed. the way the law stands now, is that if your city population is less than 200,000, you can use federal dollars for operating costs. but if your population is bigger than 200,000, you can only use those federal funds for capital projects. in other words, building subways, expanding rail lines and things like that. you can't use it to pay transit workers. look at a city like chicago. let me explain the situation facing many large urban areas. the bus service is down 18%....

Despairity between the unemployment rate for african-americans and white earns, it's almost double. you were describing civil jobs. transit workers, post office workers and the like. when you get local and state budgets squeezed and those people get laid off, it most affects people of minority groups, adding to the disparity gap. >> historically, we were locked out of the private sector. civil service jobs or working in some sense for buses and trains and working in public housing, the public sector. so when you squeeze the citizen this way, you squeeze the middle class in a disproportionate w...

Creation. we've invested over $50 billion in helping iraq reconstruct. the urban league is proposing $168 billion. why can't we at least put $100 billion in a massive jobs creation effort? that's going to help us reduce the deficit and it's going to help create jobs. >> it's interesting, because reverend jesse jackson was pointing out to me earlier this week that the big cities across this nation are getting squeezed so badly for transit money. the mta in new york is cutting, just slashing bus routes, laying off transit workers. and the reverend pointed out, look, those are green jobs. and tho...