of course he was quite interested in the two richest universities in the country mit and harvard which are there the city is about one hundred thousand people forty seven percent of the adults have an advanced or professional degree which is pretty astonishing all of the politics all the local political look political class or democratic so there's no republicans really to blame for anything that goes wrong and right now there's really zero interest in traditional democratic liberal constituencies of the middle class people or especially workers nothing on the agenda i got interested in the story i have moved to cambridge in two thousand and  to teach after i became a certifiably failed academics i decided i would stick around anyway because it's a pretty nice place to live but i didn't really get interested in the city as such until shameful late and my really my interest was piqued when i got something called scout cambridge which is a monthly magazine a kind of tip sheet that was mailed for free to all homes and businesses in cambridge so i got one and in a cover story there was a was about central square which is the civic center of cambridge and a lot of people who i thought had progressive or liberal politics or and like politics were in the story talking very contemptuously about homeless people and about workers and about the necessity of cleaning up central square for something called that i hadn't really heard of before or assumed in on called the of got drawn in and what i found was you know a whole ideology of economic development was long behind disparate innovation economy so i went to central square business owners and i went and talked to people and interviewed people and i wrote a piece about it and roughly here's what i discovered the formula is if you take several thousand a corporate professionals which with advanced degrees in science and technology any mix in a bunch of imported hipsters ideally from new york both demographics will be young male white and for the most part childless then you build lots of horrible looking architecture mostly office parks and laboratories and you use these gigantic buildings which are set back off the street to establish ersatz neighborhoods and you invariably describe these places in the process as vibrant now you drop in a couple of hundred million dollars of over accumulating investment capital ideally filtered through non profits and you shake loose as many government grants and subsidies and tax abatements as you can for your projects now pick out the media now then of the alternative media the boston phoenix which is one of the oldest alternative newspapers in the country is gone but all the media despite what i said earlier about can be just high level of educational achievement and it's residents and the rich universities we have not one single reporter covering cambridge at all there's sort of nobody covering anything however we do have the nation's first literary district just opened in boston you're probably getting one to  well literature is important train writers are not so important but literature is important boston has a literary district and central square where it's the focus of my piece has what's called a cultural district so the important thing about that is you have to be conceived culture as something that from the kind of thing that we're doing to something that supports economic development so all cultural striving has to be filtered and justified through the market and now you just sit back and watch the real estate prices go up and that's an innovation economy so infer you know in fairness you do we don't really know what kind of actual innovations are going to crawl from between the toes of the clusters within which america's future is going to be restarted so fair enough maybe it will cure cancer that hasn't happened yet but maybe it will mean time we think about in addition economy long enough as a model for  economic development and urban development you could really with me begin to wonder you know how new is this conception of the future actually the whole concept of an edition economy feels a bit recycled because in fact it's that is to say post workers and the basic idea is very simple of course the it's a mix of big corporations and investor back to start up enterprises gather gathers around a shared strategic value of innovation operating always in an bringing with the old cowboy grit pressing along into the computerized crime tear and everything the hero of the story is the one who creates as they often say something from nothing we're the nothing resolving the eternal pundit riddles of american life can we keep our edge and are we still number one but the real question i think is and which i tried to address in the piece at some length is you know what are the political and the cultural and the social conditions within which this investor class fantasy operates and i try to lay those out of the piece the ground work and factor innovating cambridge  was stirred by something called question nine which was a referendum that repealed rent control in one thousand nine hundred five and began the unsettling of nearly everyone was not able to compete in the housing market and developers had tried for those places to voluntarily per higher rents so the small property owners association in the massachusetts homeowners coalition got together and sponsored a state wide referendum and then sat back and watched the voters in western massachusetts to work conservative ones teach the eastern liberals a thing or two about fairness ever since then the market has been driving the poor and the working class out of these cities and the innovation economy is now thinnish in the cleaning house you might say for the new guests the cost of housing in cambridge in greater boston has zoomed with rising rents taking a growing share of dwindling low and middle incomes partly by design and partly by accident the corporate consolidation of our local housing stock will wind up leeching diversity from the neighbors in the neighborhoods simply by pricing residents and installing corporate professionals in their place innovation and innovation economy means the price of existing goes up and not only is there no master plan for got from government officials to address what many think of as the housing emergency it was of course their master plan that caused it between two thousand and  ten and two thousand and thirteen roughly when the story takes place the state's leading democratic politicians went around the country selling off our neighborhoods to corporate partners in the innovation economy the number of homeless people during this period ro in massachusetts by fourteen percent significant gains in jobs outside commercial science and tech have simply not materialized indeed the jobless rate for those who don't have a college credential is twice that of degree holders so we can expect the innovation economy to send more of the region's poorest and most vulnerable people scrambling with their children into temporary shelter shelters and motels which is in fact happening housing is t formation so take all this acceptable of course that the new republic the republic of of zucker stand needs to have the cultural environment totally reengineered for all the market winnings are frame of acceptance which i tried to detail in my piece has to be created to justify the community's losses in an environment where normally they would be considered a horrible irony of course must erode so that corporate entrepreneur can be presented as non conformists nonprofits must absorb surplus profit so that hundreds of millions of dollars of government programs grants and contracts along with tax incentives subsidies and exemptions can be banked for subsequent transfer even the old method which they call clustering must sound futuristic so that it's actual origins in socialist areas like new york's greenwich village today an innovation of course can be forgotten the innovation economy necessitates sweeping cultural changes but it offers no independent argument at least not in cambridge for freely choosing them instead the manifest destiny  business tell its innovation as if it were synonymous with progress rather than one among its many necessary qualities and leaves it at that so you can be sure cambridge at least the next time a wealthy college dropout like idea from a couple of a couple of wealthier classmates and wants to beat them to market does it need to ride the golden carpet to silicon valley or let stanford or cow tech gather all the credit and cash in cambridge all square where this model is taking hold teams of elites will regulate the general production from start up to corporate behavior and make it easy to optimize the same thing that he optimized yesterday the new man of the innovation ideology will be free to code in the morning head to the laboratory in the afternoon brag after dinner without ever having to be books in addition for what else not for art literature music history dance sculpture painting philosophy or religion poetry or drama not in cambridge at least these are the traditional means by which a community can grow conscious of it and formulate its standards of value in turn times of social change the governor of massachusetts won't stop by our office to encourage us in our efforts at moral reasoning and philanthropy although he stops by other innovation hubs encourages them the state legislature hasn't given the bar for millions of dollars that's for sure and matching grants for a new issue and the websites that have replaced the newspapers in cambridge don't really report on our new work and there is no good reason for this and not just for for our work of course except this is how business wants it so that's what i'm going to stop here for now and i have some ideas about what can be done and what sort of ideas may we can maybe propose and talk about to remedy what is really a dangerous and balance in cambridge and we can talk about the possibility of the model to other cities but now i'm going to i'm going to invite all frank thank you very much you know what john is talking about is not just something in massachusetts is everywhere you know that i mean right seattle and where we're going tomorrow portland you know  well so i want to do what i want to tell you about and by the way thank you for coming out again it's always great to be here i love this town and i just discovered i'm always wearing the same jacket when i'm here so i finally took took the damn thing off jacket from the forty's so what i want to start with by talking about is this flash of creative insight that i had last year and it started with a problem as these things often do and the  books that i read and people that i respected had been warning me and the nation and maybe you know well they had been warning us that mankind itself had wandered into a sort of creativity doldrums in fact we had that's the lead office in this book right david graber thing about flying cars and the whole thesis is you know everybody thinks we're in this period of wonderful you know you know amazing innovations but in fact if you look at it it's not happening at all economic growth slackening the internet revolution is not quite as awesome as everyone thought and the you know forward march of innovation has slowed to a crawl so one of the fields in which we had generated genuine novelties and lots of the financial engineering had come by to bite us in the ass and in other sort of fields of creative endeavor we actually seem to be going backwards you know you can no longer take a supersonic jet liner across the atlantic and sending astronauts to the moon just passe we don't do it anymore and yet i knew that wall these things were happening while actual real world innovation is slowing down in the same historical period there was fantastic amazing growth in our creativity promoting sector right we talk about it all the time and there's these ted talks right on how to be a more creative person there's innovation jams where i b m employees brainstorm collectively over this global hook up you can buy that will thinking outside the box desktop sculptures at wal mart and i'm serious if you listen to certain people you know creativity and that's the story of our time from the halls of mit to the incubators of silicon valley or was issaquah right ok just kidding about that it's a good literature on this subject is vast i mean it is enormous and the authors include management gurus urban theorists pop psychologists you know always telling us giving us the step by step instructions on how to unleash the inner miles davis so so what i do is i went out and got one of these books at the thrift store and tried to figure it all out i got the book i got was called it was by a guy called jonah lehrer and it was called imagine how creativity works and it had been a bestseller in tw until it had to be it was i think it was withdrawn because he had made up quotes or something like this but you know i was not going to worry about that i was just going to you know skip those parts and take the book seriously and so i drew a hot bath well known for triggering outside the box thoughts i opened my mind to the young master and it read the book right and anecdotal after heroic anecdote unfolded as creative minds did their non linear thing and came to a pitch finney's and found solutions and i read about the invention of the swiffer i learned how bob dylan achieved his great breakthrough and wrote that one song of his that they still play on the radio from time to time i learned that there is a company called three m that invented masking tape post it note and other useful items i read about the cellist yo yo ma and the glories of a company called pixar and about then is when it hit me i had heard all of this stuff before many times before each story seemed to unfold in this completely predictable pattern and for example i suspected when he got to talking about bob dylan that lehrer would talk about his song like a rolling stone and sure enough that's what he did and when it came to the three am section i waited for lehrer to dwell on the invention of the post it note and sure enough there was what's going on here had i sitting in that hot bath developed the miraculous gift of force no i really haven't heard these stories before and if you just spend a few minutes on google you'll find talking about this story of how procter and gamble invented the swifter is actually a staple of marketing literature you can find it anywhere bob dylan is endlessly cited in discussions of innovation and you can read about the struggles surrounding that one particular song in books like the fundamentals of marketing as for three am you know the decades long standing o for that company's creativity goes all the way back to tom peters first book in search of excellence probably goes back even farther than that but you know in search of excellence probably one of the most influential business books of our time i mean this story of three m in the post it note is in fact such a chestnut well known story that the ignorance of people who don't know what the don't know the right but what i also understood instantly sitting there in my bathtub was that the literature of creativity was of surpassing banality every book of every one of these books that i read had the same shopworn anecdotes and the same canonical heroes right einstein gandi picasso dylan warhol of course the beatles what i'm getting at here is that those who urged us to think different never do so themselves maybe year after year after year the new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed  cares right why is this worth noticing well for one thing because you know we're talking about the literature of creativity for pete's sake i mean if there is a non fiction genre from which you have a right to expect clever prose and uncanny insight is this one right so why is it so utterly consumed by formula and repetition i'm not going to answer that instead i'm going to tell you or you have to guess the answer it'll come up at the end of the talk about that so instead i'm going to tell you about another way that our society uses creativity and i'm going to tell the story by going back to my hometown of kansas city and there's somebody here is from k c were talking about it earlier you know when i was a kid in the eighty's my friends and i all had a very sort of predictable way of criticizing our hometown and we'd say you know what's what's wrong with kansas city well we knew right it was it was bland it was orderly it was predictable and we would laugh at the you know harmless theater productions that they would put on and it's pretentious suburbs and it's poised country clubs you know and it's this eternal taste for classic rock that never goes away and we used to call it cupcake land after this favorite essay that we read back in the eighty's it was in harper's magazine a long time ago and we thought you know th city knows nothing of the strong ideas of our robust generation you know it had no it unlike seattle it had no musical subculture it was deaf to irony it was at war with its own past all that kind of thing and i realized after a while that that's the sort of criticism that everybody in those days made of their midwestern hometown well let me tell you folks those midwestern home towns have turned the tables on us today i mean kansas city fairly quivers with vitality now i mean it is swarming with artists it's you know traffic islands are filled with art cranked out by these artists studios it has this spectacular new performing arts center designed by one of the spectacular new celebrity architects it has even has today has an indie rock festival to call its own and i mean there was no in iraq when i was a kid today there's not only an indie rock festival the mayor himself comes and speaks at it so all of these things were engineered by the very same class of you know civic leaders that my friends and i used to make fun of for being you know fools and the word people use to describe what's going on in kansas city is the word vibrant vibrant ok and i'm sure your hometown is vibrant as well i mean every city i know seattle is man every city is vibrant these days or it's working on a plan to become vibrant pretty damn soon and the reason for that is simple because vibrant is what everyone wants in a city its desirability is so universal and so you know completely beyond question that even though we aren't really sure what the word means  we know it has to be cultivated the vibrant we believe is what makes certain cities succeed the absence of vibrancy by contrast is what allow those deep population and blight to set in and the first time i heard this theory proposed or expounded or whatever you want to say i was like no no that's completely backwards right that's the no is the other way around it went to city it first the city has you know some something going on economically or whatever and then it develops this culture but no you know that's that's the idea of vibrancy comes first so this is like i thought like hearing someone reason that when you know because sidewalks get wet when it rains you encourage rainfall by dumping a bucket of water on the sidewalk or it makes sense so i make fun of it but to most people it is profoundly persuasive pursuit of the vibrant is like the universal job description of our nation city planners nowadays it's even in the federal government part of the obama administrat economic recovery strategy for the nation the national endowment for the arts and that presumably is why every place you visit is so goddamn fine print these days i mean think about it akron ohio was recently the subject of a conference bearing the name greater akron this is what vibrant looks like boise idaho whose citizens according to the city department of arts and history are fortunate to live in a vibrant community in which creativity flourishes in every sea or cincinnati which is the home of a nonprofit called vibrant as well as the greater cincinnati foundation which hands out cultural vibrancy grants guided by the the quad cities you bet pittsburgh pennsylvania need you ask pittsburgh is a kind of athens of the vibrant a city a city where dance parties and rock concerts enjoy the vigorous boosting of an outfit called vibrant pittsburgh a place that draws young people from across the nation in order frolic in its i'm quoting from it doesn't matter but numerous hip and vibrant neighborhoods according to a blog maintained by the pittsburgh  business groups like the chamber of commerce it's like you know if you know hell i'm not going to make that analogy i just i spent a lot of time in this city when i was young you know days right and the idea of that kind of scene being like you know instead of like rising up organically being forced it on you by the chamber of commerce this is it's almost too funny and it's happening folks it's really happening so what does it mean right what does vibrant mean it's actually fairly easy to figure out what the foundations mean by it is just our old friend creativity only on a much larger scale so vibrant is supposed to be a quality that you find in cities or neighborhoods where there's an art or music scene they always use the word seen lots of restaurants and food markets of a kind of you know high brow type lots of frank gehry architecture or like is similar to frank gehry you know but always something like frank gehry to memorialize the scenes otherwise transiently life by the way that's what the experience music project explicitly does frank gehry memorializing well i just was there this afternoon memorializing you know they have an exhibit on nirvana i mean the whole it's only goes into like itself ok and this is supposed to be so simple that you know everyone everyone gets it's something this must be so obvious we all agree on and here's a quote from a story in atlantic magazine about kansas city corporations see a vibrant cultural landscape as a magnet for talent almost as vital for drawing good workers as more traditional benefits like retirement plans and health insurance i love that right so the art you know you don't you don't need a health care plan but if you've got like  hipsters so that when the cincinnati foundation known as arts wave informs the world that the arts create vibrant neighborhoods and contribute to a thriving economy there you know this is a sentiment that is so commonplace in foundation land that it's often it's basically not worth remarking on so how does art do this how does art pull this off how does our achieve this amazing effect well one way is you know straight up gentrification you send the artists in is kind of you know real estate shock troops to raise real estate prices and then after that you have other vibrancy multipliers that kick in right the presence of hipsters is supposed to be inspirational to businesses their doings are supposed to make cities interesting and attractive to the class of professionals that everybody wants and their colorful antics are supposed to help companies to hire quality employees and so on right so all that a city really needs to prosper is a bunch of art school grads and some laughs for them to live in and a couple of thrift stores to supply them with the ironic clothes they crave and then you just step back and watch them work their magic now so this is sort of the official art philosophy of our time public art philosophy i should say and so naturally when you compare it with well you compare it with the thirty's with the w p a which is in a sort of a different public art philosophy that you know subsidizing art for a different reason back then and both then and now you hear the word scene all the time you know scenes right and in the in the thirty's the art was very famously concerned of what they called the american scene right the style of art known as regionalism right so a john stewart curry would paint cans as scenes of thomas hart benton would paint missouri scenes and you'd have these unemployed authors who would rate tour guides to all the different states but in today's version in the vibe in vibrancy the artist himself is the spectacle he is the subject of the tour guide and his primary job isn't really to produce art but to participate in this scene in this act that we are supposed to be putting on for well heeled spectators indeed this act is essential to the vibrant in order to bring the economic effects that art is being counted on to bring remember what they are attracting and retaining top talent for cities corporations in order to do that the artist has to be highly visible he has to run a gallery patronize cool coffee shops and restaurants or rehab rundown buildings has to be highly visible so vibrancy is a kind of performance that people like us are supposed to put on either directly or indirectly for the corporate class and these are the ones right the corporate class that's who we have to reassure of our city's vibrancy so that they will never choose to move their operations to some more vibrant burg like chicago and you know that's why they boeing went there you know that's because because we that's where we used to be next stuff i'm just kidding about that would be that would be evil but but think about it so an artist who keeps to herself who works in a room all day who wears unremarkable clothes and goes without tattoos by definition brings nothing to this project adds nothing to the economic chances of a given area she inspires no she offers no lessons in creativity she is not vibrant she's not investment grade so on its surface vibrancy theory reveres the artist but in reality it has nothing to say to people who take artistic production seriously i mean the public art you think again about the thirty's the public art of the thirty's heavy handed almost a form of propaganda but it was also intensely concerned with the lives of ordinary people the vibrant on the other hand would separate the artist from such boring souls i mean the creative ones are supposed to be right segregated in their scene which it is their job to make vibrant and pump up real estate prices and inspire creative class on lookers and all the rest of it attract and retain top talent or whatever the hell it is but what about the people that no one is interested in attracting and retaining i mean there are hundreds of millions of people in this country who go through their lives in places that aren't vibrant and have no hope of ever being so you know in places that don't have a scene in jobs that aren't rewarding in industries that aren't creative and their experiences by definition are basically off limits now for artistic contemplati i keep going ok ok so i want to tell you one more one more flash of insight ok one more flesh of insight that i had different bath tub this was in the in the south side of and while i sat there in the bathtub i was reading a book by richard florida called the rise of the creative class and this book just pissed me off like every turn every page which make me angrier and angrier and angrier that you know the idea of the book that society's new dominant class is the creative he says it's the vibrancy theory basically this is the origins of this is where it comes from and it just like like i said it just annoyed the hell out of me i mean was this author suggesting planned built by governments i mean it seemed crazy to attract business every element of it rubbed me the wrong way and as it happened back in those days i spent pretty much all of my time with the kind of people that fit richard florida is definition of the creative class right writers musicians intellectuals i was at the university of chicago i was living in that neighborhood anyway and florida seemed to be suggesting that these people the kind of people that were my friends were valuable mainly for their contribution to this kind of countercultural pantomime that was supposed to lure or inspire business executives and what irritated me even more was this notion that these people were this class that was now dominant which is what he says right the rise of the creative class i mean when i considered my creative friends as a group they were obviously as a class on their way down not up you terrified of crossing their superiors as are my friends who are artists the institutions that made their lives possible back then are in a state of disastrous decline newspapers magazines record labels that you know i hated the music industry but what they got now is just inconceivably worse i mean the creative industry the creative world as i knew it was not flowering at all it was dying ok i'm not even to tell you the answer because i do come to the answer none of this stuff is addressed to those people we exist strictly in in theory you know like like like like those you know mike is met macintosh as i think different and they have like rick's picture or something like that that's that's what we exist to be you know where we're the figurehead on this economy but it's not for us it's for the people who buy those books in the airports right the business travelers that's the answer anyhow read the book you'll see thank you so much i was just a little punk in college the university of chicago about bad hundred ninety and i had written an article in one of the underground newspapers and i was at a party also underground i think and mr frank button tom's out there with a station wagon and it's full of boxes  and we've printed five thousand copies of the bachelor tour but they are willing to piss off their donors i guarantee you rip off those checks yes exactly i always say the only reason to go on t v is to risk not being invited back so that's   document how the powers that be have turned this very human urge to rebel the standout for the crap from the crowd and turned it into a vector for hustling people right that's always been ways that are absolutely drench in this idea that we're going to allow you to achieve this sort of nietzschean demonic individual whirlwind of creative individuals i'm this piece i wrote which we called the long run starts out with me writing about the minutes mendacity and he had it was a thirty eight volume series volume thirty eight posted in early august of two thousand and twelve twenty eight separate lies and since i've been studying the right since you know for a long time and going back to the neck and fifty's i kind of put this accomplishment into context in the essay and explained that this was not incidental to his appeal on the right but actually central to it so that's the first section i talk about that and then i plop it straight down in two thousand and seven when i signed on to the mailing list of several influential magazines on the right among them town hall which operates under the auspices of evangelical christians salem communications newsmax the oregon org and more and more responsible than any other for drumming up the hysteria that commie they did in the impeachment of bill clinton and human events one of ronald reagan's favorite publications the exercise turned out to be far more revealing than i expected via the battery of emotional appeals that overran my e mail inbox i mean mind a right wing ed that was invisible to readers who encounter conservative opinion at face value subscriber lists to ideological organs are pure gold the third party interests to rent them as catch ments for potential customers who better suits a marketing strategy than a group that voluntarily organizes itself according to their most passionately shared beliefs that's why for instance the other day and probably you got an advertisement by way of the liberal magazine the american prospect seeking donations for the mercy corps a charity that helps starving children in the third world but back when i was getting e mails every day from newsmax and t were a little bit different dear reader and i'm going to tell you something but you must promise to keep it quiet you have to understand that the elite would not be at all happy with me if they knew what i was about to tell you that's why we have to tread carefully you see while most people are paying attention to the stock market the banks brokerages and big institutions have their money somewhere else  the boat i'm sorry most people are paying attention to the stock market the banks brokerages and big institutions have their money somewhere else in what i call the hidden money all you have to the insiders code which i'll tell you and you can make an extra six thousand dollars every month not to lie after that i received a message about the twenty three  cent miracle the one in washington the medical industry and drug companies refuse to tell you about why would they just be leaving money on the table quote i was scheduled for open heart surgery when i read about your product of the testimonials i started taking it and now six months have passed and i haven't had open heart surgery it was then that i received news of the oilfield in the placent dear newsmax reader this appeal began leaving no doubt that whatever trust the publication of built with its followers was being rented out wholesale please find below a special message from our sponsor james davidson editor of  outside the box rhymes he has some information important information to share with you here is the information in question if you have shied away from profiting from the immense promise of stem cell stem cells the street diseases because of the moral concerns over extracting stem cells from fetal tissue pay close attention you recall that was a big fear on the right that stem cells violated the right to life you can now invest with a clear conscience it is really an entrepreneur zombie abramson has discovered an oil field in the placent obey and explain that one to the east coast folks davidson concluded by proposing the lucky investor purchase a position of eighty three thousand shares appeal r s for the low low price of twelve cents each if you act now davidson explained your ten thousand dollar outlay could bring your profit aboard than a quarter of a million dollars now long after i let the magic of the placenta based on oil fields sink and i got another pitch just courtesy of the webmaster is handling the human events mailing list and headed the trouble with get quick get rich quick schemes now perhaps i'm a little gullible myself for a couple of seconds i believe the esteemed reagan marry up arrow policy handbook might be sending out a useful consumer advisory to its readers investigative guide to the phony get rich quick schemes corroding around the right leaning opinions fear but that hasty assumption proved sadly mistaken presuming as it did that the proprietors of outfits like human events respect their readers instead this was a common for something called instant internet income that's all caps the chance to last put an end to your financial worries permanently erase your debts pay cash for the things you want create a sea secure enjoyable retirement for yourself give your family the abundant lifestyle they so rich door knocking padres of soaring the nation finally posed to realize its rendezvous with destiny search high and low though when there's no mention in the textbooks of oil fields in the placenta nor anything about to say the intersection between the culture of network or multi level marketing where ordinary folks try to get rich quick pyramid schemes that leave their neighbors holding the bag and the institutions of both evangelical christianity and mitt romney's church of jesus christ of latter day saints and yet this stuff is important to understand in the conservative ascendency as are the internees seen organizational and ideological structures that make up its official history if gnat indeed more so the strategic alliance of snake oil vendors and conservative true believers points of the evidence of another successful long march of tactics designed to corral all in one place in the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money began so in order to find out how that works you're going to have to patronize the fine folks  our fanny bucks and now i'm going to open the discussion up to the audience we have the two big universities for one which are supposed to be nonprofits and we did make some effort to analyze the tax returns which are supposed to be available to everyone in fact they are but they're just impossible to understand and the university structures are now so rife with conflicts of interest where you have people on the boards who wore business interests pending and this is just considered a kind of  conflicts of interest are now woven into the very model of the public private partnership you also have another whole sector though of nonprofits that are founded in devoted toward helping private business that i thought that was sort of strange because the we were nonprofit that offers a nonprofit and we've been through the process and we sort of see the we're supposed to be doing is serving the public interest doing things that are outside the market but the market will support that's the whole idea i mean we are sort of not nonprofit we're going to end the profit but that's that's another question so i think you know it's not a very sexy subject to study nonprofits but there's a lot of work i think investigative work that ought to be done about the uses of them so it's a whole area that this isn't going to be much noticed maybe i can speak a little about that in chicago of course these universities receive massive massive massive government what he makes one point seven million dollars a year much more than any other university president and the number of administrators and general universities have doubled in about twenty years so this is kind of basically this self reinforcing cobol of one percenters reading each other's checks or running the universities completely with no transparency now when the university is supposed to operate the public interest there should at least be some sort of check or balance against these kind of could find no accountability whatsoever no it just so turns out that the food service provider for the university of chicago is called aramark and one of the members of the board of trustees for the university chicago is the chairman of the board of to talk about this conflict of interests they charge twenty two dollars a day for the meal plan and one of the dorms they found raffy sees in the food that they were serving these kids were paying exorbitant amounts for tuition yeah one of the chairman she's the chairperson of hotels and receive all sorts of public money from the university of cairo to open a high hotel in the university of chicago campus that was bad enough she she left bec replaced by a woman who should be a cop household name chicago but isn't her name is deborah quite so she's on the school board of chicago right she's one of the eight or nine people who who govern this massive outlie of public funds the chicago public schools she is also the principal investment company that does all their work investigate investing in companies that make money by privatizing the functions of public education and there's been no mention of any kind of conflict of interest in the chicago media no mention of any kind of refusal of any kind of decisions even though she has an enormous million dollar positions in all kinds of companies that stand to profit from the decisions she's going to be making behalf of chicago school children i live in washington d c that's the way the the way the world works they're the revolving door that's what it's all about you want to hear funny story totally different subject so i was out here last week we took the ferry went to victoria you know and i was walking along the street by the ferry dock and we were passing by the houses of parliament there and there was a door you know looked like kind of an official door and above it said office of the what was it the inspector general for conflicts of interest i love that so canadians i mean there's a there's a there's another example in two thousand and eleven  david koch is the name that probably many of you heard of before the oil baron and industrialist gave one hundred million dollars to mit to establish the david cancer research center and it was a really interesting transaction because at the very same time koch industries lobbying the big u s health and human services to not the chemical formaldehyde to its list of formaldehyde which is of course the major producer is a outfit called georgia pacific which is part of koch industries have been going on for some time and it actually a new yorker article had come out pointing this out and it caused david  to resign his board seat at the national institutes health where he had been on the cancer research board so that was not acceptable anymore once it became known what koch industries was actually doing so instead david koch came to cambridge and he gave a hundred million dollars to why don't his companies stop producing the chemicals that are known to cause it thank you but it's a very it's not a question that was ever formulated in any public record that i was able to find during this entire period in this highly educated city of liberals it just says out of balance it just doesn't occur to people nobody ask chicago there's a kind of suppression of public discussion of these sorts of things simply by omission so that's a good example of the obvious conflict of interest that is not even that's not recognized as such thank