good morning, everybody. good afternoon to the rest of you. thanks for
attending. i am a blogger for ""mother jones"" magazine. i will be
moderating this session. the topic of today's session is the economy
in the twenty first century. what i want to start out with is a couple
of minutes setting the stage about the economy. we get to talk about
how to fix this mess that we are in. i think we all have a pretty good
idea of how we got here. we had the biggest housing bubble in american
history. when the bubble burst, homeowners lost trillions of dollars.
they were accustomed to using their homes as atm machines. because of
that, spending stopped. their wages have been stagnating for the past
30 years. this peaked during the bush administration, and we were
stagnating during an economic boom. that had never happened before.
regulation in the financial industry because -- caused things like
banks to over leverage and capital ratios went skyrocketing. the
collapse of the housing bubble led to the collapse on wall street. in
addition, the stock market crashed at the same time. it was a few
trillion dollars more of lost wealth. when all of this happened, the
global financial system turned out to be a lot more fragile than a lot
of us thought it was. we were only able to avoid a replay of the great
depression through monetary and fiscal policy from the federal
government. it looks like our economy might be turning around. we are
not out of the woods yet. in the 1981 recession, which until now was
the worst recession since world war two, it took about seven months as
the share of people employed was as large as it had been before the
recession. in 1990, it took 29 months before we recovered from that.
before employment recovered. in the 2001 recession, it took 55 months,
over four years before jobs recovered. today, it looks like we are
maybe getting out of our slump. we are facing our third jobless
recovery in the past two decades. the jobless recovery is our getting
longer and more jobless every time. we are still stagnating. what we
have come into was the american dream that used to be a house in the
suburb with a white, picket fence. it is looking pretty rickety right
now. that is what our panelists are going to be talking about today.
with that let me introduce our panelists. anna burger is the chair of
change to win, a coalition of unions representing 6 million workers.
and she is a member of the president's economic recovery advisory
board. [applause] dean baker is an economist. if he is the co-director
of the center for economic and policy research. he blogs at the
american prospect. he was probably on top of the housing bubble before
any other economist in america. he is one of the guys that got it
right. he is also the author of a founder and plunder, the rise and
fall of the american economy. [applause] and finally, john corzine to
spend his time in the 90's as the ceo of goldman sacks. he is
currently the governor of new jersey. gov. john corzine. [applause]
let me start off with a quick question. maybe you can give us a little
bit of an overview at things. given where we have been for the past 10
years and where we are now, what are the two or three biggest risks,
challenges that we face going for the next couple of decades?

let me start with the immediate future. you were saying this in the
introduction, we're going to have a long period of very high
unemployment. i used to be a big pessimist. i was on a panel the other
day with mccain's chief economist. we were all agreeing that we were
looking at 10% unemployment next year, continuing the high end of
2011, and backing down in 2013 or 2014. it is an unusually high. of
unemployment. beyond that, are we going to be back in this pattern of
bubble and burst growth? a lot of people talk about this period of
healthy growth for the economy was growing very rapidly. wages grew at
the rate of 1.5% or 2% a year. profitability was very high, and
everybody was gaining. then we had this period in the 80's where most
of the gains went to those at the top end of the income distribution,
which led to this institution -- there is a gap. the biggest risk to
me is whether we get back into that story, where once we get the
economy back on track, as it of having this pattern of healthy growth,
we get another sort of unsustainable troue -- unsustainable bubble
driven growth. then we're facing another horrible situation.

what might keep us from getting there?

the unions are a big part of the picture, and if you look to the post
war period, unions were a big factor to make sure that wage gains were
broadly spread. over 30% of the private sector was unionized. that
makes a very big difference. our trade policy has also made a very big
difference. it has been deliberately tilted towards hurting working
people. we can have open trade that leads 3 distributing, -- that
leads to redistributing, and those are really big parts. we have to
fix health care. president obama is exactly on the mark. it is not
just providing health care, but it is an economic meter. if we had the
same per person health care costs as canada, gm would of had more than
$20 billion of additional profits in the last decade. consider that as
a start.

what keeps you up at night, anna?

we know how to grow the economy, but you cannot grow our economy on
low-wage jobs with no benefits and having people being buried in debt.
[applause] we have to grow our way out of the economy. let me say i am
so glad to be here, i am glad to be part of an organization where we
can sponsor a nation and the advertisers with you. we work together in
the future -- is even more important. making change that works happen
does not happen before elections, it happens afterwards. we can make
things happen. we need to figure out how to clean up the financial
industry we also have to shake the country on its head because
everything has been going up to the top. we need financial regulatory
reform and consumer protection. we have to turn those jobs in to good
jobs. we can do it by investing in low carbon economies, we can do it
by creating all kinds of jobs and the health-care crisis. we have to
make sure they're not just low-wage jobs, but good jobs. we need to
make sure that when workers want a voice, they can have it and share
in the prosperity. what keeps me up at night is that every single day
in america, workers want to have a voice and there is an employer that
is threatening them, intimidating them, and violating the law so they
do not have a voice. i want to see a day when workers can share the
prosperity, and we can go back to a time where we shared prosperity
across all levels, not just give it to the top 1%.

what might keep us from recovering?

i am not going to repeat everything said, but the distribution of
income is completely skewed in the country. it is shrinking our
middleclass. when that happens, we do not have an economy that
functions well. we have seen huge disparities brought on by a lot of
the things that have already been talked about. tax policy is
completely biased towards capital as opposed to labor. we need to have
a change in our fundamental structure and our tax folks. the idea that
you are paying 15% on dividends and capital gains verses marginal
rates for middle-class tax people is 25 or 30%. it is unacceptable.
there is a lot of work to do there. i believe we have to change our
educational policy so that we have skills that are actually matching
the world that we live in. we're giving up our competitive edge. we
don't have the skill sets actually compete in the world today. i think
that is a huge mistake. it does not mean you have the good of
vouchers, it means he had to change your curriculum's and have things
to make you competitive. we do not put any money on the making sure
that we are leading the world and a lot of these efforts. i believe
there are a lot of structural issues. the trade policy is completely
screwed up. we do not have free trade in regard currency trading, but
we do in regard to production. i believed that there are a lot of
fundamental, pivotal changes, all the things that come in on the
collective bargaining. there are a lot of things we ght to do if we
want to make sure that america's middle-class succeeds. . they have to
say that they tried to hire a u.s. a decision. wal-mart doesn't have
to do that when they get shoes from china. intellectual property, what
an incredibly back word way of financing research and innovation. the
biggest downside is in pharmaceuticals. we spend over $250 billion a
year on pharmaceuticals. if you had a competitive market, it would be
1/10 as much. this is a really backward way to find innovation. the
vast majority of drugs on the market are copycats, they don't offer
new cures. it gives an incentive for drug companies to withhold data.
if i do a study and someone calls me up and can i have your data,
expected to share this with them. in metal or research, it is never
shared. this really impedes research. -- in medical research, it is
never shared. this leads to very high prices for drugs and bad
medicine. i say we have this very backward in terms of our trade
policy and an intellectual property. we go around the world and tell
country that we have to have u.s. copyrhts for disney but not fair
labor laws. that is backwards.

we have selectively how we deal with currency challenges across the
globe. we leave ourselves in a position that undermines working people
in this country because we will allow fixed exchange rates to work
against our manufacturing sector and our families. all of these issues
are totally disconnected from the rubric of so-called free trade. we
don't have free trade on anything other than what situates the bottom
line for large corporations. this has to be seriously reform who for
receip -- before we see the opening up of the manufacturing sector.

we don't have a long-term economic plan for our country. if we want to
move to a low carbon environment and economy, we need to have a plan.
we need to think about the innovation, the technology, the job
creation. we need to figure out the transition to. around the world,
countries are thinking about what would this do to have a fair and
just transition. there would be different jobs, a loss of jobs. how do
you deal with all of these things at the same time so you can actually
move forward. you can take care people who might be losing jobs. you
can do this anyway that creates the best job possible.

how do we do this? the last half of the century, we lost half of our
manufacturing base. where do we go from here? can america exist as a
largely service economy?

is because seeing service doesn't mean it has to be low wage. -- just
because it is service doesn't mean it has to be low wage. truck
drivers, warehouse workers, we came together to raise our voice and
have a decent standard of living. a person on the assembly line 20
years ago did not have an inherently valuable job, the job is valued
because they had a union that got them health care and better job for
the fifth children. we can get good wages for service workers or they
can raise their kids and support their family. we can do this through
organizing and giving workers a voice. at the same time, we need to
build a manufacturing base in this country. a green economy is
sustainable and this gives us the potential. we can create the
technology and the jobs and build things here and change our country.
if you think about the need for wethers asians in public and private
buildings, there is a huge amount of work that needs to be done. -- if
you think about the need for weatherization.

governor corzine, you are a governor. what do you think about the greek economy?

there is a huge effort going on to prepare and train people for
restructuring those buildings, bringing water weatherization to the
buildings. -- bringing weatherization to the buildings. we have
installed more solar panels than any other states besides california.
we are going to have more offshore wind. the escalation will produce
jobs. we need to make sure that we are producing the turbines and all
the equipme associated and we will put money against that. when we do
this, we are creating a hole in the industry. this will not solve the
problems in the total holistic way. -- when we do this, we are
creating a whole new industry. we have to ensure we are investing
technologically and giving the kind of financial support that the
people who want to make those investments will do it. we need to train
the workers which we are doing. we need to set up separate unions that
are focused on green jobs. we need to use a change to the
technological field that we're working.

it has become fashionable to say that the u.s. is never a
manufacturing country. the arithmetic doesn't hold up. if you say that
we're not point to have a deficit as manufactured goods the 6%. 10%,
how will we pay for this? one of the main service exports is the fees
that are charged in the ports when people offload ships. we will not
pay for manufacturing ports on those fees. one of the major exports is
tourism. that is fine except we are sophisticated people and we clean
tables and toilets. there's nothing wrong with that but what about
working in a factory? we do have a future manufacturing, there's no
way around that. we have a lot of immigrant workers in meat-packing
and construction and those are sectors that i often see referred to as
low-paid jobs that are unpleasant. they may or may not be an
unpleasant but they did not used to be low paying jobs. if you went
back in the future, meat-packing was a good job. -- if you go back to
the past. whether a job is good or bad depends on what the social
situation is and whether it is a union job.

one of the big reasons for this is, as we know, union densities in the
u.s. collapsed. private-sector union intensities are down below 10%.
how does that change? there is a whole constellation of regulations
and appointments to regulatory bodies that has made the economy more
and more imaginative. how does that all come together and what do we
need to do?

if you think about history, from 1935 until 1937, workers could have
the union if they wanted to. this led to the greatest economic growth
in our country. then they had to go through a terrible election
process after new changes. then there was an announcement on class
wars on unions. then the employer started to harass unions. right now,
most feeble have a union but they might lose their job. one in three
workers would be fired. workers would be threatened that places would
be close, they left a cuts, all things that happen very very often.
this has made it harder for workers to have a union. we have been able
to hold the standards for workers that have it. the stand as for other
people is slipping away. -- the standards for other people is slipping
away. if you look at the private sector rate of 7%-50% density, that
would mean instead of having blue dog democrats, we would have a true
blue democrats. it is not just about what is good for the workers, it
is good for our country. we actually are a political army that can be
out there supporting families. when workers want to have a union, they
can have one. it says that when employers violate the law, there will
be strong penalties so they don't do it. the third thing is that if
they want to have a union, they can and there's a mechanism. right
now, there are two wars. one about keeping people from having a union
and the second from ever getting a contract. you can solve those
problems, you can do it when you and pass the employee free choice
act. workers can have a choice in their job, they can share in the
prosperity of the mpany. that is what is going to happen with all of
our support. we will make this happen this fall. we'll get 60 votes in
the senate. we will give workers a chance to have a decent life.

what does hire union density mean?

i think that this is a big factor. in the early postwar years, you had
shared prosperity. we had very rapid productivity growth. this was
widely shared throughout the economy. is is a big factor. it is the
only factor insuring that the gains in productivity growth are shared
more broadly. this is not just to the union's organizing, also is the
indirect effect, the political effect. every piece of progressive
legislation would not have gone through without the backing of the
unions. the minimum wage would not have passed without the strong
support of the union movement will get the direct effect that will
have workers in a position to snd for their rights, we will get a much
more friendly political structure.

new jersey has the highest density of unions per-capita. we have the
widest share of benefit programs. my opponent tells me that this is
bad. in fact, that is what people come to new jersey. we actually have
a social contract to make sure that we educate our kids, try to
provide, make sure that the work conditions are in forced. --
enforced. without the union movement, that would not happen. those
kinds of commitments would not be made throughout the years. that is
why we have quality retirement benefits, quality health benefits. we
had brought to dissemination of a prevailing wage and maintaining
quality earnings for people in the building. there is no question that
the association of the union movement with shared wealth is a reality.

does the union movement -- how does the union movement need to change?
our unions of the 21st century going to be different? -- are unions of
the 21st century. if we did not change for a long time. we were
looking at the angus that were only -- we were looking at things that
were only involving our current members. we needed to launch their
campaigns. we had to do it globally. if our employees for global, we
needed to figure of how to partner with them to put pressure. the
teamsters, their school bus campaign was a good example partnering
with unions in the u.k. to be able to collaborate across the ocean so
we can actually win organizing rights for our workers here. we have
had organization of workers all over the world. the labor movement
understands that we need to deal with all industries and all sectors
and support each other and also a partner in the community. think
about what the teamsters are doing. whether they're parting with the
sierra club or the communities, about how to have clean jobs. better
jobs for the workers and the committee. -- and the community. people
are being recruited to be able to do energy-efficient jobs. we know
that there are hundreds of thousands of workers across this country
who are taking this stuff off the ships and moving it. we need to
organize them and we will never be able to do it unless we deal with t
employers who are in other countries. we will begin to change. this is
a global environment and if we don't plan it, we want people to deal
with the issues here at home.

europe is generally more progressive. they have less income and
equality and a seed to be recovering from the recession better than we
are. -- and they seem to be recovering from the recession better than
we are.

i think that they have more quality, that is clear. -- equality, that
is clear. scandinavian countries, unionization rates are 80%. they
have much more equality. in terms of the current recovery, i am
hesitant. i was very disappointed. most european countries did not
have as much stimulus as the u.s.. one of the reasons why you could
get by with less was because it was not the same crisis in the sense
that an unemployed worker in germany, france, denmark, they are not in
poverty. if you are unemployed in the u.s., you are worried about how
to pay for your health care for your rent. unemployment benefits help
of course. in europe, they had generous benefits. if you are sitting
there in germany with nine percent unemployment, they can probably
have that for a time and not have a disaster. i would talk to people
in europe and they were not forced to miss because things were not so
bad.

-- they were not for stimulus because things were not so bad.

the loss of jobs was last at some countries. i was talking to some
unions and they said that in some places where they have strong
protections, they did not have layoffs. the global banks had to lay
people off in places where they did not have strong protections. in
the u.k., there is a lot of layoffs but there was not in other parts
of europe. in times, we can stabilize the economy if workers actually
have a voice. the reason that they have stronger unions is the custom
-- because they have laws to protect making unions. we need to
organize workers said that we can bargain and bring value back. what
you do at your other job determines yourn dream. you either win or
lose on what kind of job you have. we can give workers a chance to
have prosperity and create good jobs, they have better jobs and better
paying jobs.

how does health care fit into this? what are the things that kept them
from feeling quite as bad as what we did? they're spending in europe
that happens automatically when in the economy goes into recession and
this is more than we have the u.s.. one of those things is health
care. everyone is still gettg health care. that is not the case here.
how does health care reform fit into the economy going forward?

certainly, it gives people much more security in their jobs. any job
will be much more secure if you know that even if you lose it you will
have health care for your family. it would be a very different
universe if we could count on this. what will this look at at the end
of the day? even if you look at the most minimalist to change which
would be reforming health insurance so they can no longer discriminate
based on pre-existing conditions, that would be a huge thing because
you have people who might have a health problem and they're scared
that if they lose their jobs, they will never be able to get
insurance. that makes a huge difference. in terms of the economy, we
pay more than twice as much as the average for other wealthy
countries. it is the same thing as though the government imposed a 1.2
trillion dollar tax on the economy and threw it in the garbage. as an
economist, that is logically the same thing. it is a matter if it is
the government has bureaucrats shuffling paper or the insurance
companies, that is the same thing to the economy. if we can get our
health care system under control, it opens up more resources for
having a better economy and improving living standards?

20% of our budget is health or health-related efforts in the state of
new jersey. if we were where you were in a european country, 9% or so,
think what we could do on 8 $2- $3 billion pay down. -- a $2-$3
billion pay down. states across the country are choking on the ability
to be able to stay up with these growing health-care costs whether it
is for retirees or for providing the help to people. we are providing
universal health insurance in the emergency room. this is the craziest
place to try to provide health care. this is a point of crisis as
opposed to preventive care or wellness. we need a public auction. what
actually, i thinke need an aggressive option now to be able to capture
those kinds of dollars and we direct them into things that will help
our overall economy. we could pay so much more if we are not dealing
with the administrative fees and the commissions in the system that
are absolutely choking what is going on.

how big a deal is it to the labor unions to negotiate health care? er
year they go and bargain about health care costs because people i have
held car, some of the premium will cover those that don't have health
care. -- because some people have health care and some of the premium
will cover those that don't have health care. we will be able to
bargain for better wages. that would be incredibly important.

i will be taking questions in a moment. keep this in mind. i want to
cycle back to the beginning of the crisis and that was wall street.
governor corzine, you have a unique perspective. you were the ceo of
goldman sachs. you have been on the other side as a politician. to
what extent do you think wall street was responsible for what happened
over the past decade? what needs to be done to deal with wall street
in the future?

first of all, when there's no one watching the hen house, people who
are charged with generating rates of return on capital, making money,
will go to extremes. that is exactly what happened over a very long
time. people were stepping away from the regulatory supervisory
responsibilities. people who were regulators did not believe in
regulation. as opposed to supervising, they loosened the rules. if
there were innovations, they were excluded from the regulation. this
allowed people to build up on risks. a lot people who work that failed
institutions went to work at other institutions. i put most of the
problem from the standpoint of not a properly structured predatory set
of institutions but more importantly the people that were in charge
did not believe and regulations. there were no checks and balances and
then risks to was not monitored properly. you have deaf people in
charge of the insu do have -- you have to have people in charge of the
institutions that you have that are responsible to the public. if you
are reading and ran for your philosophical format, you would get a
different outcome than those that look at things more realistically.
we need new elements of regulation that take into account the
advances. we are 20 years into the development of derivatives and
there is no effective regulation of those. that is impossible
understand. -- that is impossible to understand. i was scared because
i saw people using things like this that would impact us. . there are
no consumer protections and how these instruments were used. the
initiatives that have some kind of consumer oversight of how financial
institutions interface with the consumer market is essential. if we
don't do it, we will not have learned a single thing in this process.
[applause]

i don't want to pick on wall street but the whole financial industry.
lack of oversight was a problem but also how it was about greed. they
wanted to take risks that would take people's lives and jobs. i do
think that we need regulation but we also need to think about how we
were structure of the nancial industry. when it is too big to fail, it
is too big. we need to figure out how to figure out safe banking to
make sure that the ones that are guaranteed for a people are what they
said they would be. we need to figure out real structure and real
refuse of hedge funds. -- the structure of hedge funds. hedge funds
for purchasing companies, taking out the wealth, taking workers and
they lost pay. we saw this. it also saw what was happening to our
members as consumers. when they were trying to figure out dealing with
finance and they were being sold bad products and things they cannot
afford or need, they found themselves losing everything. we approach
it from both perspectives, how do you deal it w equity hedge funds and
the leveraging of debt that is bad for our workers but how do you do
with the banking system at the same time? we need real transparency,
clean banking systems, also how we are going to deal with
compensation. we should not have compensation that is tied to a
rational risk. we need to take risk and leverage out of this system so
we are not saddled with it. we have ceo's who made huge amounts of
money by making bad decisions. in the front line, you have workers who
are getting paid low wages and have a compensation system paid on
bonuses. they only get paid if they push that products. we need a
comprehensive compensation system that looks at the whole picture so
we can take some of that out as well. we need a consumer protection
plan, the one that will be debated in congress is really important. i
guess this will not surprise anybody but guess who is against all of
the regulatory reforms and all of the consumer protection reforms, the
financial industry. wall street and the banks. they have come out
thinking that they can own our country and get away with it. we are
contacted go to the mat and pushed them back so that we can turn our
economy around again and clean it up. [applause]

the proem with regulation is that it present tense. one of the things
you cannot argue about is that goldman sachs is now a bank holding
company, they changed their status back at the peak of the crisis in
october. this is not a secret. they're supposed to be governed by the
fed and regulated by the fed. this is supposed to be much more tightly
regulated. it is a commercial bank. they have said that they have not
change the way they're behaving at all. they made very good profits,
the trading turned out good for them. good for them except had they
lost, that was our money. they were betting with our money. they got
$28 billion from the fdic. this is what glass-stiegel was invented to
protect. they did it right in front of our eyes and now they are
handed out millions of dollars in bonuses. this is like you rob the
bank right in front of a police officer. it is incredible. we have
some really big problems. one of my recipes, i see the financial
system as hugely bloated. we need mortgages, we need all of these
things, but if you go back 30 years ago, people got mortgages, the
financial sector to find to the size of the economy which was a
quarter as large a then as it is today. you're very hard pressed to
see what we have gotten for this huge expansion. what have we gotten?
are we more secure? can businesses get better access to capital?
maybe, but i would be hard pressed to make that case. we need a modest
tax like they have been written.

we have created institutions that are too big to fail. we should use
the antrust policy to make sure that you have more security. everyone
that actually has implications for the system should be in to t
regulatory system including hedge funds. furthermore, there should be
a changen the tax structure, which i talked about earlier. capital
should be treated the same as labor as far as tax policy. [applause]
that is how i would go about the issue of transaction tax. we have
undermined the flow of resources to society because we have
differentiated under this claim that somehow or another people are not
going to work at a marginal rate of 30%. that is a ridiculous
argument. that is not consistent with history, the 50's, the 60's, the
70's, the 80's, the 90's. that is a problem going forward.

now i will open it up to the floor for questions.

ok, this question is for governor corzine. to what extent do you hold
hank paulson responsible for the financial meltdown, specifically in
reference to the demise of lehman brothers?

as you probably know, that is an awkward question for me not because
i'm in love with hank paulson but there is some history. the real
problem with the paulson tenure was not the financial crisis itself,
it was the failure to do the damn thing about supervising the system
before hand. the fact is that to these kinds of problems we have been
talking about us so far out of control and there is only talk about
deregulating the system right up to july of 2008. there was a study
going on about how we were going to make our financial system more
competitive and the 21st century that was going to do more
deregulation as opposed to actually enforcing the rules of the road.
the decision to let lehman brothers ago was a mistake and created a
firestorm. the real issue is the consistency. figuring out how to work
out for bear stearns, letting lehman brothers go, to figure out how to
do aig. if there had been a consistency, i would give him better
marks. the real problem was what happened before the crisis struck.

ben bernanke, should he be reappointed?

yes.

to my mind, he is most responsible for the crisis after alan
greenspan. i am not happy about his failure to regulate investment. i
think that he acted outrageously in pushing the tarp. he said that the
commercial paper market was shutting down. he said that he could
directly buy it. if he does not get the job, it would be larry
summers.

he actually said a couple of years ago that part of the problem with
the economic inequality is the dehumanization. he said that having
workers with a voice and a job actually helps.

this is probably four governor corzine. 20% of the spending is through
insurance and benefits, why are you feeding the insurance companies?
why don't you go to the nonprofits?

i am not sure where we would go to the non-profit sector. we have a
state health benefits program which is state-managed but we have to
outsource it unless we were going to build the infrastructure which we
don't have the resources to be able to do in the current environment.
when you get to outsourcing the underline guts of your insurance
program, you still end up paying the fees that the insurance companies
charge for administering the programs. i am a big believer in a
publicly nonprofit focused health-care system, a public auction. i
think that medicare actually works. the ministry of charges are a lot
less and the same thing goes for the va. -- the administrative charges
are lot less.

hello, i am with americans for democratic action in washington, d.c.
how do we make sure that this is not a jobless recovery?

some of the things we've talked about before are really important and
i appreciate the question. we need to reinvest. there are
opportunities that we have in terms of a low carbon economy, investing
in green technology that will be sustainable for our country.
transforming our tax policies and our trade policies to encourage job
development will do that. i think that there are things that we
probably need it. if you think about the impact of the first recovery
package, it kept some of the job hemorrhaging from happening. we had
some job loss, we did not have as much as we would have had. one of
the ways that we can put jobs quickly, not only do we invest in
infrastructure, clean energy, but in our safety net which is
desperately frayed. local governments have dealt with home
foreclosures. they have been cutting off basic services such as home
care, child care, elder care. all kinds of things people need. an
economic recovery program could keep people back to work and create
jobs.

do we neea stimulus ogram?

yes, we need something about one trillion llars. the numbers that we
all agree on, we have this enormous gaffe in demand. you cannot
possibly spend too much. you could spend a lot of money and we don't
have to worry that somehow we would overheat the economy. we need a
second stimulus. we have extended unemployment benefits for people can
get them for 52 weeks. what will people do? we don't have welfare
anymore. we have a system of support that is good but if people can
get work, that is a bad story. at the end of the day, but will boost
the economy is trade which means we have to get the dollar exchange
down to the acceptable level.

we are not going to have a jobless recovery if we don't have a second
stimulus package, we will have a resuscitation of growth of
unemployment because the states and local governments will not have
the ability to deal with their budget shortfalls without massive
layoffs. we need one and we need to get planning on it right now.
every state that as a realistic projection of where they will be if
revenues don't grow and there's not a substitution for what is
provided for medicaid and education and civilization under the state
budgets is going to have a shockingly large shortfall in the coming
year. that will mean job losses and enormous shrinkage of the public
sector which is when to end up rolling in to weakness in the coming.

that is correct. if you think about of painful state budgets, 2011
will be even worse. if you took the money that was put into afg and
bankamerica, we would have been able to get rid of all of their
deficits last year.

the administration has not done a good job of pushing a stimulus. the
economy would be in much much worse shape. this is widely shared
between economist. you don't want to brag about the economy and
shrinking 1% but that is better than shrinking four or five.

how can unions utilize the wisdom and the direct experience of union
workers who are now 70, 80, 90-year-old s? how can we get them to
encourage the directions of the unions?

that is a good point. i was o at a health care campus in pennsylvania
where one of the members of mine own local was there and he was well
volunteering. when a moved to other states like florida or other
places, we need to put them into the community. part of the 21st
century is being able to communicate with people. we can do if iphone,
blog, lots of different ways. -- we can do it by phone.

we are talking about a financial bubble but i think we face a much
more serious problem which is the environmental. i don't see how we
can just try to recreate the financial system by tinkering on the
margins. i don't think that mother nature does a bailout package. how
would you see the financial industry against the threat of global
warming?

i would have to agree, we have not made as much progress and there's
not a lot on the horizon. the bill would be something but not very
much. given the threat we are facing from global warming, we will have
to do more. the only thing i can say that that is a foot in the door.
one of the things i would say is that i wish that infirm angeles would
think about the issue more broadly. -- i wish that the
environmentalists would think about the issue more broadly. in europe,
it is buses to% of the u.s.. -- in europe, it is about 60% of the u.s.
you get more of the year in vacation. everyone is given time off. that
is usually not on the list of how we can improve the environment. that
would be a really good way to go because it would get a lot of support
and be good for the environment. that is not the whole story. there
are other things that can help. it would be a lot of things. we will
have to do a lot more.

does it make sense to make new regulation agencies rather than
repairing and auditing the securities and exchange commission.

there are elements of our financial system that did not have the
authorization or the purview to be supervising the derivatives market.
that is the most direct example. the idea that where we have investor
protection but we don't have consumer protection agency in this
country is bizarre. this is 2/3 of our economy and people are exposed
to all kinds of products, all kinds of pricing mechanisms that make no
sense and there is no one really bringing checks and balances. and
consumer protection agency is absolutely essential. it should be
driving consumer education in a way that we don't do in this country
in irresponsible manner. -- in a responsible manner. you have people
who do not understand the general concepts involved and finance. if
you put people in charge of agencies that don't believe in regulation,
you will get the obvious result.

we have to look at the government structure of the reserves and talk
about taking banks. this out of the control of the we need to look at
this.

you have the banks appointing their own regulators. we don't allow
that. i think that we need a consumer protection agency. that was
something that the fed was supposed to do. they did not make a
pretense of it. the fed has given out two trillion dollars in loans
and we have no idea what they did. i don't think they did anything
improper but if you have an agency issuing two trillion dollars in
loans and no one has a clue where the money went, that is a problem.