lege now have to have remedial courses in literacy and in math. We have a big boom going on in community colleges, which is a good thing, because they can teach job skills for the modern manufacturing place, and they’re also good bargains. But we really have to fix education across the board – and that means, from the bottom up. For too long we let the lower socioeconomic classes to their own devices. Those of us who could would move to the suburbs or send their kids to private schools and leave everybody else behind. That no longer is acceptable. What is encouraging is that this issue now is on the agenda. The people are paying attention, and they’re trying a variety of ways of addressing it: charter schools, taking on the teachers’ unions, trying to find a common ground, mayors becoming responsible for the school systems, so you know whom to hold accountable for at election time if it doesn’t work. More and more public-private partnerships [are] going on, private corporations are moving into cities and [are] getting involved with the school systems because they need workers, and they need educated consumers who can make enough money to afford their goods. ASHLEY: From the audience: What are your views on the increasing income disparity between the middle class and the rich? I’ll dovetail onto that some questions about the Occupy movement that’s going on currently. BROKAW: Well, it’s a big issue and it is a sobering view at the moment, because you can’t have a society that has such gaps. You know, David Brooks has written about this. I think he said 25 years ago it was very little difference between those who are in the upper middle class and the middle class in terms of divorce and objectives and dreams that they have in their lives. That’s all changed enormously. I saw some numbers today in which the top 1 percent of the population between 1979 and 1997 gained 225-percent income growth. Well, the middle class gained 40 percent. People are aware of that. There’s a lot of discussion about, “We don’t want to have class warfare.” Well, we’ve got class warfare. Because we’ve got a class that’s making a lot of money, and I happen to be one of them. I kind of won what I call the Lottery of American Life. I’m utterly conscious of that. I also have a brother who retired as a crew chief on a telephone company. He’s
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THE COMMO N WE AL TH
living in a different place than I am. We talk about this a lot in our family. Then I have a daughter who is a doctor in San Francisco, married to a doctor in San Francisco. She said, “I’m the first generation that’s moving down, not up.” Because of the cost of
“There’s a lot of discussion, ‘We
don’t want
to have class warfare.’ Well, we’ve got class
warfare.”
housing and the cost of education and all the other things, which is true. So there are a lot of tectonic plates that are in play here, and what we don’t want them to do is reach a critical mass in which we have real class warfare. Occupy Wall Street. I’ve looked at Chicago, I was just in San Francisco, been in New York, obviously, and looked at it. It’s absence of theme, at the moment – what is that you want here? A lot of people kind of gravitated to the tent cities because, frankly, a lot of them are just adrift in our society. I would have thought that they would have strengthened the leadership earlier and sharpened up the message about what they wanted and how they wanted to achieve it. That has not happened yet, so I don’t know
f e br ua ry/mar ch 2012
quite where it goes. We had this conversation this morning in San Francisco. There are a lot of good people on Wall Street. We need Wall Street, and we need a financial services industry that can help provide bonds for communities and help provide capital for entrepreneurs to come online. I think that the responsible, credible senior statesmen of Wall Street should start now [addressing this]. ASHLEY: You mentioned David Brooks. He said that the United States will be Greece in 10 years. Do you agree with that? BROKAW: I don’t think we’ll get as far as Greece, but Greece is a perfect example of the conditions that we’re living. Greece got the flu and we’re in danger of getting pneumonia. That had never happened to us before. There’s so much connectivity in the world now and it all happens at warp speed. Here’s a little country where most people don’t pay their taxes and they don’t really produce anything, and they got into a lot of trouble, because they were along for the ride as well and we found out that – bang! – a lot of our financial institutions were invested in their bonds and a lot of their instruments of debt, and we were in debt. That will continue. Just today, in the Financial Times, the Chinese were saying that they’re very, very worried about another global recession. I’ve been talking in the past week or so with economist in New York, and we’re not out of this yet. We’ve got work to do. But there’s no sense of urgency in Washington about it. You don’t have this in Northern California, but in Southern California they have the Santa Ana winds. I think we need Santa Ana winds blowing across the state of California that have an odor to them, and they’re very hot, as a reminder of what the budget deficit is here. It’s $14 billion. That is going to have enormous consequences, short- and long-term, on this state: for the next generation, for the costs of education, for the services that will be cut. Just as we got in trouble not managing well the expansion of both public and private debt, we can get in equal trouble by not managing well the reduction in services and the skillful way that we manage our way out of this. This program was made possible by the generous support of Chevron.