i want to just start with a story edward mentioned the great grandson of the meat packer oscar meyer so my dad used to say bringing home the bacon has a different meaning in our family and  i did make this fateful decision i wanted to give you a little bit of a story that explain that and just so you and fix this at that at the age of twenty six my first real job out of college was i had a sort of a business training and i was working with tenants in mobile home parks around new england to buy their parks as resident on cooperatives i also work with community land trusts for fordable housing and to the most successful ones i work with or are in orcus and lopez island where that was the tough assignment let me tell you because i used to go to east st louis and north camden and then i was like oh the san juan islands but in the sa islands land values are rising and police and firefighters and teachers had nowhere to live and so we created these community lancers for housing and i think on orcas island the opal community interest me is two hundred twenty units of housing now permanently affordable resident on housing same on lopez but in new england i work with these tenants and there was one particular mobile home park bernard stood in massachusetts in western mass thirty units i really enjoyed working with the people the the the couple that sort of hosted a lot of the meetings harlan and mary pair o harlan was the retired shop steward at greenfield tap and die a retired union guy who knew how to get people together and he was really the leader of this effort and through him i had really come to understand just how vulnerable they were the land under their park their park was up for sale if it sold it would have been lost you know could have you know the develop the new owner could could have raised their rents dramatically or just decided they were going to build housing or some other use for that land and and these thirty residents and their mobile homes would be displaced and what i came to realize is there mobile homes were not so mobile if they were forced to move they probably would the homes would be damaged it was very very hard to find another place to go so these folks really felt like they were being held hostage and the one way out of that was for them to be able to buy the park himself so i was the twenty six year old consultant kind of doing the feasibility study and one thing you should know at that time i had very painful skin acne that maybe look like i was much younger than even twenty six so i'm at this meeting with the nine leaders of the park and they're looking at this you know nineteen year old with bad skin who's supposedly going to be the one that's going to help them save their homes and  personally just sitting there in agony because i know how much this means to them i've seen now you know they've built additions to their homes they've put skirts around them they've built carports they've planted gardens and most of important they've really built this amazing neighborhood and i'm in agony because i have surveyed every one of the residents of the park i know how much money they have i know what their incomes are i know of what they can afford toward to purchase you know and toward new toward their mortgage etc i know what they know all their financial secrets and i know that they a third of them have like zero or negative net worth a third of them have their retirees who have a little bit of a nest egg but these are not wealthy people and and i have figured out that they are about thirty five thousand dollars short of what they need to be able to have enough to set aside for a down payment and so i'm feeling awful because i'm going to have to kind of bear the bad news to them but the other reason i'm i'm in agony is because i have a secret that they don't know which is i have a lot of money you know i have i have a trust fund that paid for my education and now is is sort of seems to be doubling every three or four years and i am actually thinking well i could write a check this they have a gap of thirty five thousand dollars i could personally write a check and close that gap and they would be able to stay there and i'm actually thinking that i might do that  so that's my situation the moment i'm in and so i break the news to the mobile home park leaders these nine leaders and there's a little bit of a pall in the room and then something kind of remarkable happens which is this guy reggie says you know i have enough for my share and i have another six thousand dollars that i can put in to the purchase now i may be actually the only one who knows that reggie has six thousand dollars and  twelve six thousand and twelve dollars in his bank account so he is putting everything he has on the table and then another couple the dunder of say you know we have enough to purchase our share and we can put in seven thousand and i happen to know that's all of their money and around the room the group goes each of them basically pledging to empty out their entire bank accounts toward the purchase of this home finally comes around to harlan and mary and harlan says mary and i have talked about this we have enough to purchase our share and we would like to purchase mrs share for ten thousand dollars on the condition that she must never know in order to protect her dignity and with that they're about four thousand dollars short and marion harlan's daughters kind of come in late and she's works at a bank and she says i'll write the check for the remaining four thousand and they cheer they've they've closed the gap and they literally pull out their check books and start writing checks out to me that i can take and deposit in the bank to open up an account for their down payment and they've essentially they empty out their bank accounts and hand them to me so i take that money to the bank and they succeed they buy their park at the closing all the men show up with like cigars like they're proud grandparents and parents and they're getting a little silly and they're like hey what should we buy next you know maybe we should buy the pine cone diner and and harlan tells the greenfield quarter recorded newspaper he says we have been wandering in the desert but we just bought the land from faro we are hostage no more and mary kind of comes up to me and she says you're a smart young man you know you could probably get a job on wall street you don't have to be hanging around with a bunch of old fogies like us and i said well she's a i can't think of anywhere i'd rather be actually just thinking what i learned from them and then she sort of leans over in a maternal way and she says have you ever tried noxzema for your skin and i said yeah i've tried everything and and so i left there kind of learning something rather extraordinary about human solidarity of people being all in for each other and it set off a process in me which was well i almost wrote that check maybe i should you know maybe i should give this money away maybe i don't really need it maybe i i you know maybe this money is sort of a barrier for me making my own way and you know one of the things i watched was i thought i realized that i had personally in my name at the age of twenty six three or four times more money than all of this pee all the people in this mobile home park including people who had worked their whole lives and put aside their nest eggs and so there was nothing that could justify that in my mind even if you know having just been a than just being born on third base so i wrote my parents a letter i said you know i've been thinking about this and i would like to thinking i'm going to give this money away and here are several foundations that i'm thinking of giving it to and i put a stamp on an envelope and sent the letter off to michigan a couple days later my father called you haven't given away the money yet have you said no no he said well i can i come talk to you about this and so like any caring and loving parent who is worried that this child might make an irreversible decision he came out and sort of pushed me on my thinking and he said you know look look you're twenty six years old you you you probably think you're going to live forever  bad things happen in life you know bad things will happen what if you you're single but what if you have a partner and that partner gets ill wouldn't you wish you had that money or what if you have a child some day and that child has a special need wouldn't you want to have that cushion of having that extra money and i said well i have thought about that and then i would basically would be in the same boat as ninety nine percent of all the people i know he said well then you would have to you know i would have to get help dad and he said will  ely you'd have to end up falling back on the government and that's a that's a tattered safety net i said well maybe i would have a stake in making that a better safety net he said so idealistic you know but i think he was somewhat reassured that i had not been possessed by an alien or marxist cult and and so he basically said no strings attached you know i understand i understand where you're coming from and so a couple  months later i went to the national bank of detroit and i signed over the papers for these stocks and trust the trust and the trust fund officers a woman i really didn't know well but she's african american woman i knew she had grown up in detroit and she sort of looked at me she said are you going to be ok and i said i think so because it did seem like somewhat of a leap of faith i had no idea just how big a mountain of privilege i still had that was almost like hardwired into me i had to give away the money to realize just how much other four generations of stability of family wealth of social networks of education opportunity just all kinds of white skin growing up mail in the united states irish german immigrant there was so much other privilege but at the time at that moment i didn't really fully understand that so i signed the paper the you know gave the money to foundations and then i you know what about my work working with these mobile home park tenants and other groups and then one day something bad happen which is the house i lived in burned burned down and no one was hurt but it was very disorienting i lost pretty much everything i owned and my one housemate and i the next morning are out kind of sifting through the rubble if you will and i look up and i see four cars pull up and out of the cars come ten of these burned it's ten mobile home park tenants and they have casseroles and garbage bags and shovels and they've come to help us and that was the moment when i realized that i was going to be ok so that's my own personal story but poor and the book born on third base that i've written though is it's not so much my story it's not at all a memoir but it is stories more stories you know i've written a number of books about economics and inequality but it i've come to appreciate the power of the narratives that we the stories we tell ourselves about inequality and how powerful they are and there are some really amazing stories of people defying those narratives and that's what i really want to lift but you know i grew up in the well a wealthy suburb bloomfield hills michigan i actually thought i confess i thought i was middle class growing up because my high school mike elementary school classmates included kathy iacocca whose dad was lee iacocca and bill tubman whose father alfred tubman was you know huge shopping center developer and he came to school in his in a chauffeur driven car and my dad drove us to school in his own mercedes benz so i thought you know in the relative me but i knew who he was he his dad was the governor of michigan incidentally daniel ellsberg also went to our high school but at the school motto was aim high which is depicted by an archer shooting an arrow straight up into the air which if you really think about it not a good idea the girls school incidentally the motto was go forth and serve so the but you know this growing up outside detroit both seeing the riots at age seven and then later was very you know kind of planted the seed that there's something you know something there's an end of innocence for me living outside detroit seeing those inequalities trends versus reversing the racial and and class divide and that kind of years later really got me interested in well how how you know how how is it we've become more unequal because i had this front row seat in the eighty's and ninety's working with low income tenets i saw how they were real wages were starting to flatten out and people were surviving taking on more jobs working more incomes in a household taking on debt borrowing to just survive so i saw how inequality was starting to kick in and how stagnant wages were affecting people at the same time i had this other front row seat as you know being part of a wealthy family being part of a family that an extended network and high school friends whose whose wealth was like doubling who whose you know  were getting wealthier and wealthier by the year so i i sort of lived that in a very personal way and then so when i started to read the statistics and started understanding these inequalities it became quite real and personal to me so you know i did for the last twenty five years that's the work i've done i've done you know research and writing about inequality campaigning to defend the estate tax with bill gates's dad and others trying to draw attention to these inequalities more recently in the last ten years looking sort of at the racial dimensions of the of the racial wealth divide and you know the bottom line is we are living in a time of extraordinary inequality and i think it's very much i think the undercurrent of the results of yesterday's election i think that it was an inequality election a polarized unequal economy gives rise to a polarized politics as insecurity rises people respond different ways and historically we have a history of both progressive populism kind of the bernie sanders let's look at you know the impact of the rules being rigged by multimillionaires billionaires large corporations and we have a tradition of regressive populism i'm feeling economic economically and secure let's focus on scapegoats people of color new immigrants and if you go back and even look at the gilded age one hundred years ago the last time we were in a period of great inequality we had both this sort of rural prairie fire progressive populism combining with earth been reformers to win fundamental reforms in the economy but we also had regressive populism nativism and and the rise of the klan and that that's sort of the that is the terrain and so what we talk a little bit more about that but one of the things that i've become particularly alarmed about is not just the current level of inequality but where are we going here what's the trajectory if you think about that arrow going straight up in the air what's the trajectory of our inequalities i mean you know you know most of the income and wealth gains of the last decade have gotten not just to the one percent but the top one tenth of one percent the forbes four hundred today has more wealth as much wealth as the bottom sixty two percent of the population the wealthiest one hundred people have as much wealth as the entire african american population of the united united states one hundred people have as much wealth as fourteen percent of the population the richest twenty who could fit on one gulfstream luxury six fifty jet have as much wealth as the bottom half of the population and the number of households with zero or negative net worth keeps climbing so that's our current picture but if you look at where is that this is going this is where the french economist thomas piketty is very very helpful because he's basically saying we are becoming a we if without intervening in these cycles of inequality we are going to become a her read it hereditary aristocracy of wealth where the sons and daughters of today's billionaires will will essentially dominate our poll politics our culture philanthropy will become this huge huge sector of private power throwing its money on to whatever it may be sometimes doing good but sometimes advancing the agenda of the privilege you know that this is where we're heading without any intervention if you put a racial wealth divide lens on it we're centrally moving toward you know if the racial wealth divide which has narrowed ever so slightly would still take two hundred twenty eight years for the average black household to come get to the point where the current average white house hold is today at the at the current level of progress two hundred twenty eight years by twenty forty three  the racial wealth divide will have doubled to the point where the average wealth will be about a million dollar gap between average white and average black households so we're not only becoming a hereditary aristocracy of wealth we're becoming a racial and economic apartheid to society at precisely the point where we become a majority people of color country in terms of adults so that's where we're heading if you put an ecological overlay on that you have to say you know are there is this really good for anybody i mean what is wealth on a degraded earth what is wealth without clean water and fertile soil that these extreme inequalities and the ecological crisis are in my estimation really actually bad for everybody they're going to undermine the quality of life for everyone including the very wealthy and there's a whole body now of research showing how these inequalities really matter and undercut everything that we care about so but here's my experience some people hear this information and are motivated it or moved and troubled by it but other people hear it and and it just confirms a powerful story i call it the story of deservedness which is basically the distribution of income and wealth is a reflection of deservedness the people who have the most work the hardest gotten up early cetera and they are the most virtuous and the deserve the wealth they have and if you don't have that wealth and that that's a powerful story and it's kind of like a rorschach people can hear doubt about inequality but they hear it through the lens of that story of deservedness or meritocracy and are therefore untroubled by it and i think there's a fair amount of challenge just to dislodge that idea that these extreme inequalities which are really based on system deep systemic rule changes and drivers in the economy is not a reflection of individual effort i have to sort of work on that with people so i've come to preach it how you can publish a lot of data you can talk about the facts but we also need to change the narratives around wealth and how do we do that and this is where your seattle resident bill gates sr comes and into my life because he you know responded to this call to you know going to stop the repeal of the estate tax when george w bush was campaigning for president he campaigned that in his first hundred days this may sound familiar talking about first hundred days he was going to abolish the death tax same thing with our current incoming president and at that point i got a call from from bill gates's office somebody in my office that bill gates is on the phone and i'm like right you know but it was bill gates sr and he said i think the estate tax is a fundamentally american tax it's just appalling to me that it would be repealed i didn't fully understand that that came from his own experience of getting the g i bill which enabled him to go to  to law school without any debt that that was for him the formative experience but he said you know having also done a lot of a state live see how the estate tax works i see how it is paid by some of the most wealthy people in the country and it's a good thing and once we were called to a press conference to defend the estate tax and one of the people who we brought to that press conference is not a well known person his name was martin rottenberg but he basically got up and said here's why i think as a wealthy person i should pay the estate tax and think about this in the context you know i've been now you know working i was working on the estate tax campaign for a couple years and i was doing all these telephone interviews with people who were saying you know i shouldn't have to pay this tax i started this company nobody helped me and i don't owe anything to anybody the i did it alone stories and so martin rothenberg got up at this press conference and he said listen this is why i think i should pay an estate tax i grew up in syracuse new york in a poor family my parents had no extra money we never they never went on vacation but i went to a really good elementary school and i went to a library that was open on weekends and in that library there was this librarian who took a shining to me and every time i came in she said martin i have a book for you and she knew i was interested in the science and technology and she would set aside books she thought i would be interested in so i grew up in a low income family somebody else paid entirely for my education and then i went to college i got a complete free ride through it went to a debt free college in the new york system and then i went into the field of these emerging technologies largely built through public investments in science research and an infrastructure of investments that built the modern internet and then i started a company martin says and i started to develop you know voice recognition software where did i hire my employees i hired them from the public university right down the road i mean they somebody else trained my workers in these new technologies and then a foreign corporation came and stole my intellectual property and my business was about to be destroyed but the s went to world court and defended and won my intellectual property rights somebody else paid for this infrastructure to protect my private property and he says you know and then i sold my company for thirty million dollars and i have several other companies still and don't i have some kind of responsibility at the end of my life to pay back the society  fact don't i have an obligation martin says don't have an obligation to pay back so some other kid that's not born wealthy like me can have the same opportunities i have this is a state taxes an economic opportunity program if you are so fortunate that you have over ten million dollars you should pay back to society a portion of that so some other low income kid can have the same shot that i did so you know i'm sitting there thinking that's right wow how often do you hear that story well now i can tell you i've heard hundreds of those stories i've heard from the responsible wealth and the wealth for the common good in the patriotic millionaires networks i've heard people stand up and say i started a company here's why i should pay my employees a living wage this is why i should pay taxes this is why i don't have any special talent there just because i'm a big donor doesn't mean congress should listen more to me we should have fundamental campaign finance reform so i find that those stories are very powerful and disruptive and i've collected lots and lots and lots of them and actually one of my frivolous but stories is about  bill gates and i talk about access we're meeting with fourteen u s senators in a little luncheon with george soros me and bill gates and bill gates sr says he's kind of giving the wrap says we believe we should keep the estate tax because it generates it raises a lot of revenue from those most able to pay it provides an incentive for people to give to charity and its historic reason is because it puts a brake on the build up of hereditary wealth and power which undermines a democratic society and at that point senator ted kennedy the late senator ted kennedy raises his hand and sort of in a says i understand about the revenue and the charity thing but i don't know what you mean by how read it terri wealth and power so he had a sense of humor he used to say i got my money the old fashioned way i i picked wealthy parents but i think that that work on the estate tax was a real clue that we need to both sort of do the  campaigning and make the case in terms of the math but we also need to change the stories and narratives and not just necessarily among wealthy people my experience the sort of  individual deservedness also i was speaking at the retired men's club of norwood massachusetts one hundred fifty world war two and korean war veterans all european heritage and i was talking about these issues of inequality and i just said i'm just curious how many of you after world war two got a debt free college education and three fourths of the men in the room raise their hand and they said how many of you got a first time homebuyer subsidize  loan you know farmer's home f h a you know veterans administration mortgage three fourths of the men in the room raise their hand said wow anybody here think that was a waste of taxpayer money and everybody laughed no it was great one guy says that was the magic carpet to the middle class i said i'm curious how many of you are helping your kids or and grandchildren the next generation everybody raise their hand we're all helping our kids we're all you know one guy says you know i'm the parental down payment assistance program you know i help everybody buy their house by lending the money and it really came back to that v a mortgage i got in one nine hundred forty seven forty year one percent fixed rate mortgage that was how i bought my house because what that that was the farmer's home loan all over northern new england forty year one percent fixed rate mortgage imagine what kind of housing people houses that's that which launched a generation of first time home buyers or home ownership rate went up by twenty percent twenty percent more of the population became homeowners thanks to a very excellent subsidized housing and first time home buyer you know first time home buyer programs that launched a generation of first time home buyers it but the problem was it was unfortunately racially discriminatory so one generation of white veterans not all tied to military service though got on the express train to wealth building and blacks and latinos were left at the station and that's why today white homeownership rates seventy one percent african american forty one percent the past shows up in the present because of that but i say that because i remember having that conversation with the veterans and and some of them saying you know our children have no idea where this where their opportunities came from they came from these government investments these public investments one veteran came up to me and said you know everybody calls us the greatest generation but we're really the greatest subsidized generation and the other guy says subsidy that's a dirty word you know you could sort of see the but i think i see that because i think there's something about it getting help which is one of the challenges you know that particularly for men to say you know yeah i got government help to be where i am today or i got family help or i was born on third base that there's a stigma and a shame attached to that that i'm trying to and i think part of the work is to try to get people to tell true stories not just the very wealthy but and white you know that eavis who have any kind of white skin advantage or any advantage just to sort of just talk about it just tell it as part of the story don't leave it out of the details of how we got to where we are so let me let me close with a couple of just thoughts on in the book born on third base part of the reason i wrote this book is because i am out talking to white audiences people but i'm also talking to philanthropic networks is this fabulous network called resource generation  young people under thirty five who are sort of trying to figure out what to do with having wealth both entrepreneurial wealth and and heritage wealth and having conversations about this moment that we're in the trajectory that we're in and my belief that we don't have a lot of time before we need to bring every tool to our disposal to intervene to change the trajectory both the economic and ecological trajectory that we're on so part of my message to my own people people in the one percent or five percent who are or who are affluent is to come home to to to fully reengage back into a community of place not a gated community but a wider community so seattle tacoma to bring your wealth home which in this case i believe is to take it out from the shadows of the offshore tax havens take it out of the global financial casino take it out of the fossil fuel sector which is hell bent on destroying habitability on earth and bring it home to the real economy of goods and services bring it to the new energy economy into building resilient and healthy communities bring your wealth home tell true stories about the sources of wealth and success demythologize the stories of success yes give to charity and give particularly to charity that funds social change organizing not just traditional charity but also realizing that philanthropy is not a substitute for an adequate revenue system and paying your taxes and i have a study actually coming out next week called gilded giving top heavy philanthropy in an age of extreme inequality but we're now seeing the rise of huge mega foundations and increased role of wealthy givers and a decline more a large a company by and a declining alarming decline in in giving by lower and middle income people as their insecurities raw economic insecurities rise so again the trajectory there is twenty years from now we'll have huge large mega philanthropy huge foundations  at the same time that we're the public purse is facing more and more austerity and we have a stake in that discussion because for every dollar given away by a billionaire to charity through a foundation about fifty cents of that gift is matched by offset essentially by taxpayers subsidizing those gifts so that's why there's a public interest there and it's time to fundamentally reform philanthropy it hasn't been up really the rules haven't been updated since  so we're seeing huge warehousing of wealth in the philanthropic sector so we need to sort of push them along my message to everyone else who is not does not think of themself and that is  we need to organize our communities we need to organize and defend ourselves against the most dangerous aspects of extract of capitalism we need to do the work and the organizing around the fight for fifteen around expanding wealth and opportunity around defending our now and now we'll have a defensive agenda around future additional tax cuts for the wealthy that will be the congress will be pushing through  what i say though is remember that in the context of that organizing that the wealthy the one percent however we think about him are not monolithic by any means that there is a segment of the wealthy that use their wealth and power to rig the rules to get more wealth and power and there's another segment that are aligned with groups like the patriotic millionaires and who are actually using their their wealth and power to create a more equal  and then there's a huge number of people who are just not engaged who are kind of waiting to be called to something bigger than consumption who are in a sense i think feeling disconnected from humanity and are waiting to be invited to the table to be part of fixing the future and just don't know how to do that and so i want you to keep that in mind as you go through the organizing work in the campaigning that yes there are wealthy people who are who are using their power in a destructive way but that there's a huge potential there and i think we're going to need those allies this allies are in the room they're in the room here they're in the room in many of the rooms that you're in we just haven't figured out how to engage in conversation and bring bring people to the table so part of the messages to to find ways to invite people out from the gated hearts gated communities realizing and i would say from my own experience but also from talking to hundreds of people that privilege is a disconnection drug it takes us away from each other michael jordan who is not raised wealthy but in his memoir writes about how as he became more wealthy his world became smaller and the universe of people he felt he could trust became smaller and he lived more with more fear than he a young man and that's not an uncommon experience not everyone's experience but it is there is that disconnection and people want to be engaged i want to give a shout out to one of hanauer who's here who's a good example of somebody who is been leading the fight for fifteen who's told his own story who's been part of organizing you know the fight for fifteen the work against gun violence in the state of washington is a great example of like how is it that i leverage who i am fully to make change and you know i spent the day as edward said in new hampshire but i was working with the next general coalition there are all these expiring totally inspiring young people in their twenty's working on climate change working to turn out the vote that was all funded by tom styer we need about one hundred more tom stars to step up and say look we've got five years to train the trajectory of where we're heading here and let's invest in this next generation and give them the tools and the resources to take their powerful and youthful energy to become forces for change so that's that's the my my my alter call if you will as part of this book maybe let me stop there and let's and let's have a let's hear what's on your mind we can talk more about the election or whatever but i think come on come on up and introduce yourself and and offer up a question and i'm very glad you brought up the whole social sociopath trend in the very very well they're completely isolated they don't even know what they support and that's engaging with those people is very very important i'm glad you brought that up as hard as this whacked out thing that happened yesterday is concerned it's a tragedy that bernie sanders was not the nominee because his one and only message was get big money i have politics and the problem with liberals these days and they have all these warm fuzzy things that they're worried about what bathroom can i go to or the green party or  you say it's about unity and that's what it's all about but first we get the money out of politics here and because he had only one message he was rejected by the liberal media because he was a news word he wasn't good looking and he wasn't i believe that there you know the distribution of sociopath's in the society are no greater in the top wealthy they just have we have a lot more wealth and power to implement an agenda we are thin skinned when poked we believe the people i am i'm really struck by how you know people see so thin skinned people who they feel the effects of class antagonism i have this friend who's a wall street banker who's a totally open hearted great guy but ken does not feel like he can relate to a bernie sanders movement because he feels that edge of of anger and rage class rage coming at him you you know he's a realist but that's the human condition people just it actually is a barrier the i and i started an organization called united for a fair con to me and my coworker and i used to say you know our mission is to make the world safe for class war because aren't we our theory of change was let's deflect the cesspool of resentment you know that's being targeted down the economic ladder up the economic ladder well my message  that isn't going to get us the transformation we need that actually we have to you know i understand people's anger and when you read some somebody buys a prescription drug and jacks up the price five thousand percent you know i'm kind of like thinking you know we should sharpen up the pitchforks vary but if if we want to win over this other group of allies who are right there were ready to be engaged to see how these inequalities actually undermine the things that they deeply care about but don't know how to relate to the movements that we're part of that that's just all that's one of the colonels i have to offer here so yeah my name's patricia roberts and i'm a former public school teacher here in seattle retired about eight years ago and and now i substitute teach so i'm still teaching and enjoying it a lot but i'm very concerned about the state of public education as most people know we haven't co case that the legislature is supposed to pay full for the for the cost of public education they haven't come around to it yet our problem is our regressive tax system we work with bill gates a number of years ago on a initiative to try to change that but it went down in flames because everybody was so afraid of income tax how in the heck do we engage these people who really can't afford to pay more if there is a more progressive tax system to get them to convince everybody else that it would be in their interests yeah i think i mean i think it is them among the most important work we could be doing which is the initiatives that you were part of and they have been successful i  mean washington is a complex tax environment as you know but other states have you know even even in the face of this recent election there's a number of you know progressive funding mechanisms that were passed in some states i think though it is about campaigns that that get at these underlying stories that justify you know or and the talk about how public investments have helped previous generations and getting people to kind of getting lots and lots of messengers out there telling that story and i know that is part of the work that you've done but i think that is and i also think we're in a as inequality grows  i think we're we're going to find greater receptive ity you know even in even in states that voted for donald trump there were a couple of states like maine that also are you know passing progressive in massachusetts where i live where we're about to pass put on the ballot for the next cycle a millionaire tax that is overwhelmingly going to i think pass so i think part of it is what you did in washington state with the estate tax linking it to something that comes with a constituency that can defend it in about ten other states there are they don't have state a state taxes like washington state and i'm lifting up the washington state model of linking it to an education legacy trust fund that then comes with a constituency to defend it as you all did in two thousand and six and i think that that's that's part of it is helping reconnect you  know the meaning of tax expenditures for public goods that everyone needs and wants but there's not you know it's it is among the hardest work so i honor of the folks who are out there sort of really engaging on the front lines of proposed tax cuts on the rich do you think that's really serious and if so how should we approach it i mean this is you know if you actually were to go through with this catastrophic and all kinds of ways what your take we should start doing right now yeah i mean i think one of that kind of odd little surveys that came out yesterday was that seventy five percent of voters want a strong president who will be able to stand up to the rich and powerful and that those that a lot of those people were voted for donald trump and i think it is it does come to this interesting paradox  we know from polls that seventy five percent of the population believes that the wealthy should pay more taxes and that there that the shift in the tax obligations has has been off so i don't think that people voted for donald trump so that he would cut taxes on the wealthy so i think there's a there is an opportunity there to push back if people really understood i have a a little bit of a  if any of you seen our only hope shields book strangers in their own land a couple of you she's a here's a here's a little window into i think some of what happened yesterday as i said this is this election is really about inequality and if it's really about how thirty years of wage stagnation and the collapsing middle class standard of living has affected everybody but particularly white and rural communities who overwhelmingly came out for trump what she's a sociologist she lives in berkeley she's you know veteran excellent listener she spent five years in louisiana interviewing members of the tea party and she was there as the trump movement took off and she just sort of followed the she went to the you know the cajun cook off some church and she hung out and did kind of a deep listening and really and one of things she said is she created a deep story to try to explain to the rest of us what's the world of you what is it that people are feeling in tears what's motivating them and here's the deep story she asks or she she offers imagine you are standing a line a single file line that is heading up over a hill and over that hill is the american dream and you're standing in line waiting to get there but the line has stopped moving now you are somebody who actually works hard you're faithful you are patient some of you have made sacrifices you've served in the military some of you work in dangerous jobs and chemical industry and things like that but you're you're here waiting patiently but the line stop moving and actually starting to move backwards and then you look up ahead and people are cutting in line in front of you and they are black or brown or muslim and at the head of the line is barack obama and he is helping people cut in front in line in front of you but at the same time he and the liberal establishment who live on the coasts are mocking you are calling you racists and rednecks and an educated and and and you're not a racist because and actually you work more closely with people of color day by day than a lot of these northern liberals you just don't like it when people cut in line so that was the story that she developed and she tested that i with people who basically said that's exactly the emotional experience i'm having so that in her words part of scaling the empathy wall in understanding where people are coming from not always justifying it but explaining it is to understand it so what are the implications of that well one we have to get the line moving again meaning if wages are flat and falling and the standard and then then that part of the resentment is coming from the fact that the line is stalled out but part of it you know so things that late lift wages and create decent jobs and create opportunities and get the line moving again and if the line is moving people are less worried about what's happening up front of them as long as the line is moving but the other part of it is to engage directly i mean there are clearly racial issues race race divisions people not comfortable with the changing flip you know immigration in a community where they live is to say look tea party folks there are a lot of other people waiting in line there are brown people and black people who are waiting in line and have been waiting longer than you some for centuries and that this is a system where the gains it's the reason the line isn't moving it's not moving for most people in the bottom seventy percent of the population and that the economy has been rigged and the rules have been shifted to funnel wealth to the top and i think  so and i think part of it is then for those of us who are trying to understand this that is to i don't know if any of you have the you know i often my ask the question why is it people who vote against their own economic self interest and i think wrote this book called deer hunting with jesus which is about the white working class as a lot of liberals are clueless about who you know they don't like people's religiosity they don't like the fact that they hunt do you know there's sort of all these sort of cultural barriers to help people and that people know if you call them a deplorable that they know that's what liberals are saying behind closed doors and i think what donald trump and what to some extent the tea party is done effectively is  say i see you now we know that fundamentally donald trump's program is not going to reverse reduce the systemic drivers of inequality so there is an interesting realignment moment happening here which is this pressure is building all in lots of different sectors for an economy that works for everybody and yet it's not go delivered and donald trump is not going to deliver it either so the pressure is going to keep building and that's where the the opportunity for a progressive populism can come back and this is where you know the bernie supporters and the trump supporters if you say the commies really rules the economy are rigged people people everyone's nodding you know i mean i think there's an understanding that so i think there's a potential and i think a sanders would have may have done that certainly would have done better in certain states certainly in the in the midwest where i grew up the michigan ohio wisconsin access there that if you had a progressive populist campaign and effective  messenger you would you would you could put together a very very different coalition so i think we're we're in this very volatile time but there's also this tremendous potential for a realignment but i think you know stopping the the the worst aspects of the trump program that will worsen inequality could be a unifying thing across a number of different groups maybe here in the yeah do you think that global capitalism can deliver their economy get the line moving for everyone is that possible i don't not entirely i mean i think that a part of our challenge is to really localize as much of this global economy as possible anchoring it back to local livelihoods look some of the stuff that's being done in the new food system and with energy should be done picking you know nailing down different sectors of the economy and real localizing as much as possible i think that's where there's a chance for a more equitable livelihood but because part of the global capitalism is part of that vast extraction you know machines so the more we can hold down anchor the commonwealth of our communities and the real wealth the less will be subject to that extraction so are you saying that local capitalism might deliver economic equality i think it and i'm not being sarcastic you know or yeah i think you really want you to do a better job i mean i think of it i mean i think the model that i would look to is the nordic model basically you know which is  you know scandinavian sweden you have a high social floor through which people cannot fall you have very progressive taxation and investment in public goods you have public support  for taxation of the wealthy even the wealthy are like look look at the public goods we get my kids get to go to school free i don't have to worry about you know becoming deficit destitute you know so i think that i would you know and there's there's a terrific new called viking economics by george lakey that looks at what we can learn from the nordic models and even the rates of entrepreneurship are much higher in the nordic countries start up businesses and entrepreneurship because people aren't they're not going to like they want to start a business they know they're not going to fall if they fail and are going to fall away to destitution there's a there's a safety net so i think and then i think there's just other things to rewire capitalism to the point where maybe we don't call it capitalism anymore but it's a kind of stakeholder where you broaden ownership where you encourage broader ownership of enterprises so there's there's i think of and we don't have to wait for congress to act on a lot of these things to make them happen so i think that's part of this evolving new economy that's evolving in the shell of the old and that has a much greater potential to be a quotable