thank you tim and i knew tim in boston when he helped start a newspaper there called spare change that still exists and was the model for real change here in seattle so i knew him from  fifteen twenty years ago when i worked on affordable housing issues so thank you for bringing me out for real change which is a you know a truly transformative organization in terms of the work that it does and also to pastor  hosting this this coffee house and it's just in the ne i live in a neighborhood of boston jamaica plain and we've about three years ago started something called the jamaica plain forum and i was looking at your list of speakers you know we've had some of the speakers too so i think there's something about the face to face chip talk or tradition you know the the lyceum is the people getting together to talk about the great issues of the day that you just don't you know i think is key to a healthy democratic society so thank you for coming out and missing whatever was on t v tonight to be with your neighbors to have this conversation and i want to lift up i saw that on a cobra eleventh david korten and marjorie kelley are speaking here and all of the three the two of them and myself we all are part of an effort called the new economy working group which is to sort of say look as richard lange said we're we're all part we're in a transition w ecological and economic transition the next ten years ain't going to look anything like the last thirty years and how do we prepare ourselves personally in our communities and our nation and our world for these  economy so to lift that up and invite you to come back in here particularly marjorie who is from boston so she doesn't come out that often as talks about the cooperative economy but let me let me start by just  saying that some of you probably when you saw the title of the book ninety nine to one i'm probably thinking oh if this is another kind of book that's about you know the the the the crimes of the one percent and it's sort of  attack on the one percent however people think about that which i've heard a lot and i kind of want to start off by just saying biographically i grew up in the one percent my great grandfather was the meat packer oscar  meyer who started a business in chicago hundred years ago hundred twenty years ago now and so my father used to say bringing home the bacon has a different meaning in our family which is very very true i also went to a very  kind of elite private prep school in bloomfield hills michigan outside detroit and it was one of the schools that was modeled after the old british tradition we had headmasters and forms and and all that and one of my classmates was a guy named mitt romney probably heard about him and and he was several years older than me and i have some i could tell you some other stories about sort of the environment of cranbrook and bullying and those sort of things but he and i basically both grew up in this same community same imprint kind of in the one percent steeped in the sort of beliefs about how we are we're more deserving and worthy and there's a lot about our schooling which was about preparing us to lead in fact the school motto was aim high and it was in a depicted by a logo of an archer shooting an arrow straight into the air which if you think about it is a really foolish thing to do so i like to think that but you can as you know you can tell candidate romney is aiming high and perhaps shooting the arrow straight movement and other movements that i think sort of streams of education and organizing efforts the conversation about inequality took a huge leap forward and one of the things that i was struck by by a year ago there was a tumbler site where people called we are the ninety nine percent where people posted their picture with a statement any of you ever looked at that or seen a number of you've seen it it's a it's still there and they're stories it's basically people stories and some of the memorable stories i remember are of a young woman who says you know i used to dream about being the first woman president now i dream about having a job with health insurance and another young man said another woman said i'm i'm working bussing tables for eight dollars an hour so i can help my father pay off twenty three thousand dollars in medical debt i have to hope to get married i'm saving up money but it looks to me like my entire future will be ruled by debt some twenty two years old and all i can see down the line is paying interest says i am the ninety nine percent and another fellow wrote in and said you know i served a tour of duty in iraq where i work to help politically connected private contractors can make a lot of money i came back to the united states to a neck and after economic meltdown were the greed of bankers and excess destroyed our economy and he said i've joined the occupy efforts you know this is the second time i've been fighting for my country but now the first time i understood who my enemy is and on and on and i encourage you to go on and read these stories because i could tell you statistics about inequality that you probably  are rooted in a xi'an the fact that you know one percent of the population now has more wealth than the bottom ninety five percent that the share of wealth over the last thirty years going to the one percent and the share of national income continues to grow but these stories actually i think break through and when i read them i realize there are there there are stories of people who are trapped in poverty who are surviving trying to survive i don't see any way forward there are stories of what i would call the collapsing middle class experience people who bill you know were pursuing the american dream and then saw had the rug pulled out from under them their their hope to have to retire to hold onto a home and pay off a mortgage to  have a chance to have leisure in their older years and travel or enjoy their grandchildren their dreams have been wrecked by foreclosure and unemployment and and the changing  and then there's a group of young people who are part of those stories who have followed the advice of their elders and some of them have gone to college and they've taken on tens of thousands of dollars in debt and have absolutely no concept of our idea of how they're going to pay off that debt and feel completely be traded and when you read those stories you realize yes we may have political events and presidential elections will come and go but that those underlying conditions people trapped in poverty the collapsing middle class young people with no way forward those underlying conditions are not going away in fact our current political system capture it as it is by a couple thousand global corporations and segments of the one percent our current political system is incapable of actually addressing those problems and so that's why the pressure will continue to build in different forms the occupy movement was one expression of that there are other streams of these movements flowing that will continue to pop up we might get distracted or deflected into various things but the underlying grievances are not going away and so i believe the pressure will continue to build in various ways and that ultimately there will be some pressure and some realignment politically and socially that will that will force some kinds of change but i want to talk to you about that and a couple of just things i want to say though that having i've you know worked on these issues of inequality of wealth for about twenty five years about fifteen years ago when we started united for a fair khana me there was still a debate over whether these statistics about inequality were accurate meaning there was a contested debate over are we becoming more unequal and yad you know some people arguing no these inequalities this is just if you look at the data this way we're not unequal and that's there is a no contest now in the in the realm of rational data just discussion the what you can read about income inequality and wealth disparities in the wall street journal you can see it in very independent research there is a recognition that we have entered into a new phase of extreme inequality of both income and we where there's still a little bit a contest politically is do these inequalities matter so some people still argue that poverty is a problem but we should not really be concerned about how concentrations of wealth how much how rich the rich are that's not really you know let's look at the problems over here let's look at it and even with a lot of faith communities and religious congregations the debate is is divided let's let's talk about what we can all agree on here which is these these the poverty is a problem that we as christians or people of faith whatever your tradition is should address the issues of poverty but let's not talk about how much wealth is gushing up to the top that's a little divisive that's class warfare that's envy so there's still a contest a little bit of debate about that but what i want to say is that now after about several decades there is now incredible evidence in every discipline that these disparities of income and wealth are trashing everything we care about so if you care about think about what you you know what is it that that moves you that you care about about children and their opportunities grandchildren you care about the health of the ecological environment you care about the city that you live in and the quality of life and transportation and what are people's lives in the city you care about democracy and whether we have real participation you care about mobility the not the american dream that if you work hard maybe you can actually climb the economic ladder you care about the stability of the economy you care about sports whatever you care about i can show you know the evidence that these extreme inequalities are trashing each of these areas that for instance if you care about your health if you care about the health of your body and your community then these inequalities are destroying the social fabric people here at the university washington have the privilege of having dr steven  who has done some of the most important research in the planet on these issues and across in england richard wilkinson and kate pickett wrote this book called spirit level how inequality how equal societies do better on every indicator inequality is making a sick if you could you're better off living in a society with a lower median income of more equality than a society with higher income a greater disparities of income and wealth because  here is the important underlying reason when you have extreme inequalities of wealth when a society pulls apart to that level the rich and poor gap there is a breakdown that happens a breakdown and solidarity that sense that we're all in the same boat a breakdown in empathy an injury to you does it still matter to me there's a breakdown in order and continuity and community and people become polarized and in place of that they become fearful or they begin to believe caricature is about the other and again this is why an organization like real change is so important because a thousand times a day the vendors who sell you spare change are reaching across economic and racial divides to say here i am i mean human being i want to have it i want to connect with you and at least want to sell you terrific newspaper that that's revolutionary in a society where people live in different class and race bubbles and the more polarized the more those bubbles exist so any quality matters i won't even go down the list of every way it matters you could have an interdisciplinary department at the university of washington now on inequality studies that would bring together biologists psychologists you know doctors pulp political scientists that would sort of can tell you can document why these inequalities matter so i won't go on and on but it does undercut what we care about it a second point i want to make is is that ninety nine to one as a framework has really obvious limitations not everybody in the ninety nine has comparable experiences right i mean it's obvious it if you're in the ninety fifth percentile your experience of and you have savings in a second home is very different than somebody who's in the bottom fifth of the bottom ten percent or as is destitute similarly if you're a person of color in the ninety nine percent your experience of say of trying to build assets save build businesses is entirely different so that ninety nine to one frame shouldn't be kind of an excuse to lump together or render invisible the experience of poverty or the racial wealth abide which is so persistent but it is a kind of interesting framework i think to understand what's going on for instance we have had an economy the rules of the economy have been changed to benefit the one percent at the expense of the ninety nine percent sure if you're in the top fifth you've benefited from some of those rule changes but it's a very important analytical point the rules of the economy have been tilted to benefit a very small group what do we want we want an economy that works for everybody and i think that ninety nine to one lens if people look through that who see that their interests they actually have common cause with a large majority of people is a powerful thing actually on monday institute for policy studies where i work we're releasing a inequality voter scoring card where we look we'll look at thirty eight let pieces of legislation with the simple lens of did this legislation benefit the one percent or was it good for the ninety nine percent and we have a bipartisan list of voter voters and elected officials and what their records are in relation to these inequality issues so it's like an inequality sports car isn't my phone ringing god is calling take a break so it's a useful framework that said the one percent it's not doesn't make sense to lump together the ninety nine percent nor does it necessarily make sense to lump together in my opinion the one percent having grown up in the one percent actually had a front row seat to a the fact that there are a huge percentage of people in the one percent actually have devoted themselves are concerned about having a fair economy having a society works for everybody so there's the segment of allies and people who have who have worked philanthropic lee behind the scenes many of them quite humbly to work for a good society the problem is within the one percent there is a segment that i characterize as the rule riggers the game fixers they use their considerable wealth and power to influence the political system to change the rules to benefit themselves so that more wealth and power funnels to the top and that is a hyper organized segment in the one percent and they have a whole mythology that they subscribe to which is kind of like this i mean rand view of the world which is there are the virtuous prime movers there are those of us who you know are the engines of the economic train the pull the rest of the train along and we are the virtuous ones and we should you know be free of government regulation and even taxation and we should all just bow down and and exult their efforts and and and they so they believe that it's really in the best interests of the old economy to just have policies that benefit themselves more and more you know you think of the koch brothers who are massive you know this one these two brothers who have this huge today the forbes four hundred released their list of their annual sort of september once a year tally of the billionaires the koch brothers their net worth from last year increased twenty four percent from fifty billion to sixty two billion that's twelve billion more than they had last year so their strategy is working it's a very good investment invest the you know one hundred million in changing the political system in your net worth but you can't do better in the market right i mean that's  so they are rule riggers we should not think of that we should understand that's their wealth building strategies to tip the rules tip the game in their favor and those are the folks that we should understandably focus on in terms of taking back our democracy taking back our economy and addressing that the other point that i try to make in this book having worked with business leaders like bill gates we we organize you know three thousand five hundred multi millionaires and billionaires to publicly preserve the inheritance tax or the estate tax and it was a really powerful campaign and one of the things i learned in in that is that there are two types of businesses at least but if i could be you know kind of group them together there's the majority of businesses in this country are what the journalist jim collins calls built to last businesses they're anchored in the locality they are accountable to a look community not always the case but they tend but they're more rooted they pay taxes  locality they are philanthropic lee engaged in the can community but there is this small segment couple thousand global corporations that operate across state lines and across international borders and their entire business model is what i would call built to loot so there's built to last and built to lieut and they will tell you that they're job creators but in fact their business model is about shedding jobs is about getting you to pay their bills so many of these companies have figured out how to game the system so they have subsidiaries around the world and they move their profits around and they pay very little or low taxes in the united states so that you and i pick up the slack and they try to shift jobs and they try to squeeze their employees and they try to get our communities to pay the health care costs of their employees and they dump their pluck pollutants into the stream and we have to pick it up so their model is to shift costs off of their balance sheet onto you and me and on to nature and that's their way that they boost their profits and boost their net worth and i think going forward it's under it's important to realize there's huge allies in the business community in that bill to loot built to last routed business effort and that's where some of these business associations like the business alliance for local living economies or some you know here you know washington first seattle first these are the rooted businesses that we should be lifting up and we should be trying to dealing as much from as possible from the bill to the loot economy and the bill to loot corporations so that's a little bit of context but i think what you're probably wondering is sort of what's the way forward how do we reverse these inequalities and is it too late right have we crossed some lines have we become so deeply rooted in these patterns of inequality and i think we have some huge challenges in that but i think that there are some interesting rumblings out there that i just want to observe and then i'd love to we'll take a break and hear your questions write your questions and hear some music and then come back and discuss what are our prospects but one thing is that the most european countries canada and the european social democracies have much lower levels of inequality than we in the united states now why is that well one reason is they have a higher floor meaning people there's a higher income floor there's a floor through which people cannot fall into complete destitution and poverty can't fall through the health care floor there's minimum standards of health income access to opportunity and so many societies are not as extremely unequal as the united states because they do things like raise the minimum wage or have universal health insurance or have established paid vacation time or benefits that raise the floor high so there are things that we can do that just raise the floor to create at least minimal standards of dignity and opportunity so there's a set of policies there there's also a set of public policies  interventions that reduce inequality that i call leveling the playing field how about you know campaign finance reform where you try to break the nexus between money and influence you pass campaign finance reform laws and those of things or you say instead of having to tax to tax rules one for global corporations in the one percent and another set of tax laws and rules for everybody else why don't we operate with one set of tax rules why don't we why do we stop privileging a small segment of taxpayers so the things that i think to sort of level the playing field but here's the problem we can raise the floor and we can attempt to level the playing field but as long as the concentration of wealth as long as there's so much wealth concentrated in few hands that will continue to undermine anything and everything we try to do campaign finance reform i'm a huge backer of what lawrence lessig and others have been talking about how do we address that but the problem is money is like water running down a hill trying to influence politics you can put up a barrier you can put up a dam you can try to dig a hole and keep the money from flowing this fast but the money is just going to keep flowing into the influence business and so we actually have to sort of in tandem while we're trying to arrest our democracy back from big money we need and also put forward bold proposals that address the concentration of wealth directly and sort of inch our way forward to push for those changes so i like to think from like a  like an actual puncture asst what are the pressure points maybe if you had the experience worse you know your back has gone out and somebody goes and they things kind of pop and that's you know there's a lot of things that we need to do but where are there  particular spots that if we focused our energies and built movements and built a ninety nine percent movement what is it we would pressure for and clearly there's a whole area of what i would call taxing the wealthy taxes on the wealthiest one percent have really gone down not just the last thirty years but steadily been going down since president eisenhower since the fifty's that even under president kennedy and really since one nine hundred sixty since b you probably paid in income taxes was about half of your income today it's about twenty three percent and then the more richer you are and the more your income can be moved offshore or can be considered capital income the smaller percentage of you pay so that's how you end up having a warren buffett who says how is it that i pay you know fourteen percent of my income in taxes and my secretary and my office staff pay twenty eight percent of their income in taxes how could that happen it's because the rules on taxing the wealthy have been so altered so we have to reverse that not just by letting the bush tax cuts expire but through a robust inheritance tax  progressive income tax and the like so there's a whole bunch of interventions there they're not popular in washington but they're becoming very popular to the wider public polls are showing that people now support taxing the wealthy at much progressive levels seventy five percent of the population eighty percent of voters now are support that so we're in a situation now where washington the politics of our national society is completely locked down or not entirely locked down but partially lockdown and yet public opinion the pressure is building for some of these progressive policies another set of interventions would actually eliminate the incentive for excessive c e o pay within companies and every year the institute for policy studies we do an annual survey on executive pay and we look at different aspects of the gap between highest paid workers and average workers in a company you know basically c e o s paid more in a day than their average workers are paid in a year it sounds like maybe this is symbolic but actually if we can address that and there number of rules i won't go and bore you with but there's a number of ways to address that we actually get at the root of the incentive system that promotes that short term bill to loot mentality among top managers and so if we can intervene there we actually to rock choir in a sense companies to think about longer term horizons and not just taking the money and run we actually slow a piece of the machinery that's been generating these inequalities a third area is to shut down what i call the offshore system which is the way in which global corporations and the wealthy are able to move their money out of the united states and not just avoid taxation but avoid accountability in any form  last year we did the study this year we looked again there twenty five of the hundred largest companies pay their c e o more than they pay in u s taxes they pay one person more than they pay their entire bill to uncle sam twenty five one hundred biggest companies in the united states that's because largely they use subsidiaries in singapore the cayman islands or  move their profits move their property move their intellectual property apple computer does this the big drug companies do it they pretend that they're shifting their profits offshore and they reduce their tax bill i used to think this offshore system was kind of annoying element of our tax system i used to think wow you know wealthy people move their money to switzerland or that you know people have a subconscious in the cayman islands now i actually believe that the offshore system is at the center of what's broken that it's not just about avoiding taxes ai g the subsidiary of the insurance company that  tanked and brought down was a contributing factor of the economic meltdown was a subsidiary based in a secrecy jurisdiction in england if you care about africa and poverty in africa the offshore system is the way in which corporations and global elites around the world move their money out of out of countries and extract wealth before it's subject to taxation and there's a terrific book by a guy named nicholas shaxson called treasure island he's a british journalist really interesting if you care about global poverty tax policy and corporate accountability we need to intervene well there are things that can be done the united states could be a leader in shutting down the offshore system barack obama has actually done a bunch of things that have reg in in the administrative level to shut down pieces of the offshore system  there's now a global movement led by groups like oxfam concerned about global poverty that are exposing in a new film called we're not broke which premiered at sundance that i commend to you to look at how that offshore system works a couple of other quick intervention areas we need to break up the mega banks the six big banks that drove our economy off the cliff have their share of the market has increased by like fifteen percent since two thousand and eight these are the banks that would not exist without our taxpayer subsidies we're subsidizing them to grow and and and gobble up other banks so we need to move to make prepare for the next time one of these banks starts to wobble there's not a government bailout there's a government breakup of those banks there too they're not only now too big to fail they're getting to be too big to say and so and there's a there's a david korten has written a terrific paper about sort of how is it that we move from the wall street sort of casino economy and these and these six big money out of the big mega banks and and proactively depositing funds in local and regional banks final areas that i would point to is the sort of how do we reach charter corporations  and we've been working with a task force of members of congress that are looking at a federal corporate charter where corporations above a certain size and then operate across state borders would be subject to a federal charter so they can't just be incorporated in delaware with no accountability but that they actually have to support subscribe to a higher level of transparency so things like that a federal charter that redefines corporations redefines their rights if use and their and their disclosure so those are a couple of examples of interventions that i think would make a difference on the question of is it too late does wall street does is one percent have so much clout are they you know when you think about the super pacs and the citizens united decision that's unleashed even more private money the koch brothers now have thirteen more billion dollars than they had last year certainly going to use that to pertain to protect the old order and system what do we do where do we go and i guess that the first thing i would just note is there is actually a waking an awakening you know a year ago i think there was a sense of optimism because there was sort of another young people in the occupy movement in the whole discussion about inequality burst forward and and and i think were there some sort of disappointment that maybe that didn't lead to you know the parallel to sort of a tea party politics but that was never going to be the case the occupy movement is was is what it is which is a swarm which is which is a gathering which is a convergence and it did something very useful which is raise the profile of these inequality issues and the ways in which corporations have captured other movements have flowed out of that and will continue to build power but there's a global awakening on these issues of inequality and concentrated corporate power the pressure of the movement to close down offshore tax havens globally is in a very different place than a year ago the movement for a wall street financial transaction tax a levy on every transaction is a global movement  the european nations are pressing the united states whenever obama gets together with the leaders of france and germany they're all saying president obama why can't you have a wall street transaction tax like we're trying to put in place why can't we globally move in concert to slow down the speculative frenzy of our financial sectors so there's there's a movement building in that area were part of an effort called the other ninety eight percent and i encourage you today to sign up for the other ninety eight percent online and join  and join some of the actions that are coming out of that rebuilding the dream people are forming affinity groups resilient circles preparing to think about creative actions to take so i think there is an awakening it isn't always beard in the mainstream media in a way i think we were i think that the occupy movement might have been a little overhyped and then all the interesting things that have happened have been underreported let us not let that dictate how we understand what's happening in the world the second piece of good news is there are allies in the one percent there are countervailing there's the patriotic millionaires wealth for the common good all these networks of forming of people in the one percent who are using their leverage to retell stories about how wealth is created and to advocate for the policies we're talking about here the third piece of good news is people are not waiting for our political leaders to lead on this issue they are moving forward wherever there is an opportunity so the move to a men movement to repeal the citizens united decision is working all over the country at the local level passing ordinances doing educational forums and listing  city came in was telling me in montana there's statewide pressure to reverse citizens united state legislators are debating this there's sort of a movement that if washington changes blocked in washington we need need to move in other arenas the move your money movement moving money out of the mega banks three fifty dot org the group that's been taking the one of the groups nationally that's been working on climate justice and climate change after the election will be launching a huge campaign to move money out of the fossil fuel sector divest yourself divest your congregation divest your pension fund from the fossil fuel power houses that are blocking reform so they're not going to washington to ask for anything they're talking direct action and doing education along the way so i think that that's a good sign and president obama has campaigned on these issues of inequality but the reality is he's like getting out in front of the parade because public opinion is already shifted to this spot and i think that's the good news but the final thing i would say is that we have working in our favor is that we actually as individuals and communities have huge capacity to change not just in the short term but it or not just over years and years but in the short term people have are making decisions every day to live very differently to make different choices and to push for  change i want to just close with the story which is a couple weeks ago was a couple months ago now i was part of a demonstration in washington d c for a financial transaction tax now how many of you ever joined demonstration in favor of a good tax policy raise your hand ok it tends not to get people out into the streets it's not like it's a little w in fact a year and a half ago the number of people who could talk about a financial transaction tax would have fit into this room with you all this would have been the size of the conversation nationally but a couple months ago i was part of a demonstration seven thousand people marching in the streets of washington to press for a financial transaction tax a wall street tax now it happened that six of the seven thousand people marching were nurses are there any nurses in the room and the nurses have nurses here thank you the net just so happens that the national nurses union has decided that the financial transaction tax is like their intervention the thing that they want to put on the national agenda and they have thrown their leadership and members and rank and file into this effort so here i am marching along in washington with six thousand nurturant nurses i know because they're all wearing red shirts and the rest of us are not why are you here and she says so i got off my shift last night at the city hospital and i got on the bus and we came down all over night and you know we were sort of partying and laughing and we didn't sleep that much but here we are we're on the we're out here marching at nine forty five in the morning and i said wow that's pretty cool but why are you here and just to get it to understand eleanor is probably fifty five she's wearing her shirt her shirt on the front says if you save a life you are a hero if you save a hundred lives you're a nurse and she's holding a placard in fact all six thousand nurses are holding these placards that say heal america attacks wall street and she says you know i am here because i work as an emergency room nurse and i see the impact of this economy coming in the door on the bodies of my patients i see people who are overstressed i see people who have hurt themselves or hurt their loved ones i see people who health has been destroyed in the last couple years by poverty or the collapse of their dreams she says in fact a couple weeks ago i was doing an intake some man came in with chest pains probably having a heart attack and he's sitting on the gurney and i'm doing this paperwork with him and i say sir mr smith what's your address and he starts to cry and he says i just lost my house that i've had for forty years that's why i'm having these chest pains and she looks at me she says you know you hear enough of those stories you think i yam a nurse and i work hard but i gotta do something about this i got a kick i gotta do something to stop the greed that's destroying our country i'm go protests i gotta get on the bus and then she looks at me and she says do you know what a financial transaction tax is said yeah i've heard of it before but i love hearing about it from you she says was how it works attacks wall street she's giving me the rap and she says now we're going to go we are all six thousand of us are going to meet with our members of congress and we're going to just stay on their butts until they co sponsor this legislation and pass it we're just going to be like showing up every month on their doors so here's the good news eleanor got on the bus and there's a lot of other people who are choosing to say ok time to answer the call or even more people who are waiting for the invitation to come from you to join you to get on the bus or whatever that means for you so i think the good news is there is an awakening we may not read about it in the newspaper tomorrow but i can attest to somebody who gets to travel and talk to groups and see what's going on there are some rumblings in the land and i encourage you to be part of that i'm sure many of you are form an affinity group get together with some of your neighbors talk about the events that we're living through and what you're going to do together buck up your spirits help out the people who are struggling for mutual aid group or resilient circle or an affinity group don't take action alone don't leave this talk and say i'm going to go and sign an online petition find five or ten others break bread together talk about what to do take action together that's how much support in congress is there actually for a securities transaction tess tax and other any republicans who have shown any willingness to back such a tax there is so right now the effort defy from oregon it's been sort of the lead sponsor and has put forward some of the bills in the past but i think that there are so that there's a growing number of co sponsors i think he has a conference man there's a little section where obama came into office supporting the idea of a modest financial transaction tax which right the proposal is something like a penny on every four dollars of trant financial transactions  stocks bonds derivatives you know other exotic financial instruments would generate hundred fifty to two hundred billion dollars a year so he came in and he was talked out of it by tim g r and larry summers sort of the representatives of wall street in the administration so there's now i think some within the administration summary thinking hey maybe this would be good politics  caused by transnational globalization how can the offshore economy that you talk about really practically be shut down well it's you know it's we've lived there we have lived in a global economy for centuries you know the what's changed is the movement of capital has really accelerated the military to move capital across borders without you know electronically has accelerated the movement of the global movement of money but it's really in the last really the last fifteen years that the offshore system has moved to this current level of it's like every corporations got to do it you know it's sort of like and there are things that can be done one is through treaties the united states can use its economic clout this is one of the places where you're we are a superpower  can say look we can take the lead in corporate disclosure full disclosure across you can say if you want to do business in the united states you need to disclose all the jurisdictions where you pay taxes a country by country reporting is the name of the reform you can basically outlaw avoid creating subsidiaries for the sole purpose of tax avoidance can do that with individuals you cannot move money offshore soley for the purpose of tax awards there has to be a real business you know it's one thing if your company actually has subsidiaries that do business in other countries it's another thing when you just have a post office box in the cayman islands of a corporation that holds your patents you know so you can outlaw just congress can outlaw certain types of corporations that are existing for the purpose of avoiding and dodging taxes so and the ice age can use its global clout to enforce trees you want to do you want to trade with the united states you want to sell products then you have to meet this global set of standards so a progressive the united states can play a progressive role in that so i think that those are a couple of the ways and there is senator carl levin in the senate has been the champion on this issue for michigan the senator carl levin should look at his stop tax haven abuse legislation and some of the current legislation he's putting forward that actually there's a it's fairly complicated but there's six seventeen different interventions that actually would make a huge difference in shutting down the offshore system and really the secrecy jurisdictions that exist there are sixty five countries that are now officially secrecy jurisdictions and if they want to do business with the united states they have to become more transparent that could that stuff that would really change the dynamic thanks so there were three or four questions that i'm going to collapse into one because they're all of very similar theme which is the when you talk about distribution of wealth and shared prosperity it conjures up images of communism and socialism you never use that terminology but is what you're talking about not some form of communist or socialist wealth redistribution well in the current phase of extreme inequality of wealth and income i are taught to business people have said if you care about capitalism whatever that means to you you need to be very concerned about these this mail distribution of wealth because this is distorting the capitalism that you profess to believe in it's creating monopolies and distortions and power concentrations that are warping and destroying capitalism who care about small business in this country then why is it a small business to compete on an unlevel playing field with these global corporations that have an entirely different set of rules that is a that is wrecking healthy capitalism from there i think we could say look part of the problem is we are destroying nature and squeezing people in an exploitative way that the current our curt form of capitalism is destroying nature and creating these grotesque inequalities and perpetuating poverty that there are other forms of capitalism the scandinavian model or other forms of capitalism where they have a vibrant private market that has private enterprises and flourishing small businesses and there that is a good thing and there's huge amounts of the economy that are tied down that for instance there's prepares the ecological commons is protected and managed for the long term you know survival of a community and the planet that you can't get rich you can't the bill to loot model of capitalism can has to be shut down what happens after that is where lots of people going to have different theories of divergence but i'd rather i'd like to see an economy that has a has a healthy private sector but that doesn't have these grotesque extreme inequalities and that where certain things are socialized or community owned you know certain kinds of natural resources should be community own or nationally own certain parts of the the commons if you will should not be up for grabs for looting for instance if we create knowledge through public investments that knowledge should be commons it should not be enclosed and taken from us and sold back you know google should not miss should not you know every book and then sell them back to us seeds should not be owned by patents on seed should not be owned by multinational companies it should be held in the commons you know yoga postures should not be own by somebody they belong to all of us so there is a way in which protecting the commons the economic and social comments and the infrastructure and knowledge commons if that's protected we have a we have a society i don't know what to call it it's not capitalism as it's currently but it's not socialism it's not state own state ownership of the means of production there it's who's a terrific thinker has what he calls kind of a pluralist cap you know commonwealth municipal ownership nonprofit ownership state ownership federal ownership the more centralized and national owned the the worse it's going to be i mean the more you can decentralize ownership the better so i'm sorry for this rambling answer but i think that basically we should before we kind of get into a debate about socialism versus capitalism i would like to say look if you care about capitalism we've got to reduce these extreme inequalities if you care about the future of the earth and our communities we've got to protect the commonwealth in the commons from from going to shut down the bill to loot elements of capitalism the final question you talked a lot you talked about a lot of different ideas solutions policies suggestions and someone asked this question how coordinated does all of this need to be leveling the field raising the floor changing policies is this sufficient that we're all doing different things using different approaches or is there really a need for more of a centralized strategy it's a good question i don't i don't have an answer that i think that a lot of it can happen without any kind of central cord nation i think that there's no substitute for leadership national regional community leadership to help sort of focus attention i imagine having looked at the history of sort of how social changes happen in other places it's sort of happens in a in patchwork ways but that at certain moments there are leaders and there are kind of campaigns or there are sort of demands that sort of merge together and there is kolisch coalescing around it i see that happening around the response to fossil fuels of power of the fossil fuel industry right now that there's sort of like a you can sort of sense certain convergence is happening and it's they're not necessarily happening in a coordinated national organization way but they're happening in a kind of more organic way but at some point leaders will emerge probably some of them from this room that will help us focus at a particular moment in history on what needs to happen so yes things are look fragmented and not always coronated but you know and i actually i think there are national leaders like van jones and the rebuild the dream movement you know sure i would  follow that you know lead on you know so i think we have to learn how to be jet gen gen gen generous followers even when everything isn't perfect to say i'll follow that and i will put my heart and soul into that so i think that welcoming the new generation of leaders as they emerge and where and how to be good followers at times will be part of how that coronation happens thank you and i want to also say the what an honor it's