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♪ Yeah
♪ I was right, you were wrong
♪ Yeah
♪ Going, going, you're gone
♪ I saw you hesitating, waiting too much
♪ Until it slipped through your hands
♪ And then you stagger to your feet and out the door
♪ 'Cause there's no second chance
♪ That's right 'Cause I have done it before
♪ And I can do it some more
♪ I got my eye on the score
♪ I'm gonna cut to the core
♪ It's too late, it's too soon, or is it?
♪ Tick, tick, tick, tick, boom ♪
USA! USA! USA!
America is on fire.
You'd have to be crazy not to be terrified
by what's happening today.
We think today's divisions and hate won't have consequences.
Don't bet on it.
Parents can feel it in their bones
that their children's future is being jeopardized.
The risks all around us are mind-boggling
and no one's got a game plan.
The situation we're experiencing today
feels like we're on the eve of destruction.
We're feeling vulnerable as a country.
Recent polls show a dramatic drop in American patriotism.
Only 25 years ago, 2/3 of Americans said patriotism
was very important to them.
Today, only a third.
Why do so few Americans believe in America?
Is it the decline of the American Dream?
Is it our loss of sense of community,
our own self-absorption
or obsessive commitment to hyper-partisanship?
Or is it the result
of the relentless criticism on social media?
Some of the drumbeat that America
is somehow a worthless, evil country
is being engineered on the Internet daily
by our adversaries.
After the attack of 9/11, the American people rallied
with a renewed sense of national unity.
How would young people react today
were America attacked by a foreign power?
Would they believe enough in the American idea to fight back?
It's a troubling question.
America was once a bastion of hope and opportunity,
a great paradox of remarkable achievement
and at times, surprising disappointment.
Our story begins in 2004 with the ironic
and remarkable way a young state senator
from Illinois ignited his national political career.
There is not a liberal America and a conservative America.
There is the United States of America.
There is not a Black America and a White America
and Latino America and Asian America.
There's the United States of America.
We are one people.
That was a speech about unity,
and the American people loved it.
The country's future back then still looked promising.
But now, why aren't our leaders talking this way?
Why did they lose their way?
One of the things that I admired
about both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama
was this intuition
that unifying the country was possible.
That doesn't mean that they were successful in doing it all the time,
but what I like is the natural tendency
to wanna bring us together around our high ideals.
That's a really great thing.
The groundwork was laid to unify the country.
Today, everything has changed.
Many of our new leaders actually feed the fires of division.
Then they attack the hate they helped create as reasons
for voting against the other side.
It's a little like the movieCasablanca.
I'm shocked. Shocked to find
that gambling is going on in here.
- Your winnings, sir. - Oh, thank you very much.
Is it any wonder that our democracy is at risk
and could topple into chaos and mayhem?
Both sides are redefining hypocrisy to a new low,
and that's dividing us even further.
Both sides wield power through message control.
Both use the same rallying cry.
"I'm saving our democracy from destruction
"by the other side."
But the line's becoming a tired cliche
because if the parties really wanted to save our democracy,
they would sit down with each other to try
to find common ground.
And in most cases, they're not.
Our problems are enormous and they keep mounting.
In aWashington Post column, three US generals
warned the American military is deeply divided
along partisan lines.
Their fear, a military breakdown could lead to civil war.
"We are chilled to our bones," the generals wrote.
In a February 2023 tweet,
Conservative Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said this,
"We need a national divorce.
"We need to separate by red states and blue states.
"Everyone I talk to says this. We are done."
If we flood the Capitol building, go inside.
These are public buildings, we own them.
The blue states have all the money.
They must starve the red states into submission.
Nearly 40% of Republicans
and Democrats think it's time to split up the country.
A third of Americans believe violence is justified
to punish and defeat people they don't agree with.
So, Pepe's become kind of a symbol.
Trust in the institutions
of government has reached an all-time low.
We're feeling depressed, dysfunctional,
alienated and powerless.
The government did this to us.
We were normal, good, law-abiding citizens.
The crucible of any democratic society
is the peaceful transfer of power.
It is the electoral process,
and that happens to be the singular piece
of the American democracy that is, today, most broken.
Unless we learn how to get along
with a renewed sense of civility and humility,
our democracy could collapse.
And America will topple into destruction.
That's all you ever hear about in this country, is our differences.
It's all they ever talk about.
Politicians in the media,
always pushing the things that separate us,
things that make us different.
That's the way the ruling class operates in any society.
They divide the rest of the people.
They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other
so that they, the rich, can run off
with all the fucking money.
Fairly simple thing.
Happens to work.
Anything that's different about us,
you know that's what they're pushing at you.
Racial differences, religious, ethnic, national backgrounds,
jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality,
and anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other
so that they can keep going to the bank.
George Carlin's observations are 30 years old,
yet they're still relevant today.
Today, people in organizations are making fortunes
and accumulating enormous power, convincing us
to hate each other.
And that's not right.
America has a leadership crisis made much worse
by social media.
Our political system is dysfunctional,
but the problem is more than our leaders.
The problem is us.
We are a society that today spends more on breast implants
and Viagra than we do on curing Alzheimer's.
What does that say about us?
Have we become an angry band of narcissists?
Are we the problem?
So absorbed with self that we ignore the common good?
The United States is the world's oldest democracy.
In only two years, America will celebrate its 250th birthday.
Will we make it to the party?
I was in Munich in Germany
talking about international security and I looked around
and I thought, you know,
"Bad things can happen to good countries."
A terrible thing happened in Germany,
a Germany that was becoming modern, that was increasingly
predominant in the world in the 1920s.
It encountered a populist movement that tapped a deep anger,
resentment in the German population.
It's very easy for our passions, our resentments
to become inflamed by politicians.
And when that happens,
even the best countries aren't immune.
Could America follow in Germany's footsteps?
Not likely.
But then again, a lot depends on whether a civil war brings
the US economy to its knees.
Am I worried about the country?
You'd have to be crazy or a hermit
not to be worried about the country at this point.
It's very hard to look at the division
in the country right now and not be worried.
And if you have this kind of divisiveness
and this kind of anger when times are decent,
what's it gonna be like when we face tougher economic times?
There's no question there'll be a day of reckoning,
and when it finally ends,
it's gonna be really, really bloody.
Our greatest vulnerability
is our financial system.
For most of our lives, we've been taught
that our financial system is located in America,
but really, we are part
of an interconnected global financial system.
Think of it like a generous
but occasionally suspicious great uncle
who regularly gives you money,
but every once in a while, his mistrust overwhelms him.
He thinks you're not a stable investment.
You're at war.
He becomes mean and stingy.
The money dries up.
There are two words that describe when this happens.
Financial crisis.
That's the ultimate risk for America,
of an economic civil war.
Our financial markets collapse.
The world sells our currency, the dollar,
so interest rates soar.
Our economy goes into paralysis and we lose everything.
Our future, both red and blue, goes poof.
Some chance we could have real economic collapse.
And when that happens, you know,
a lot of things can go wrong.
America's division involves more than political parties,
ethnicity, and race.
We are separating from each other
in so many different ways.
It's urban versus rural.
University-educated and technology-proficient
versus the high school-educated,
people who work with their hands.
At the same time, we live in each other's backyards.
We're geographically, socially, and financially intertwined.
Look at how close red and blue America
live to each other in these major cities.
We could easily destroy each other,
which makes a modern civil war particularly dangerous.
The image of civil war is of bloody hand-to-hand battles
and dramatic cavalry charges.
Instead, it would more likely be an economic war
between governors that would risk sending both sides
into an economic depression
with tens of millions of jobs lost.
Families have already been hit hard
by the rising cost of living.
To fill my tank up is $80.
When I first bought my truck, a fill-up was $43.
Everything is going straight to bills,
and like everything is a bill, bill, bill, bill.
Sometimes, I have to not do one thing
or not pay something in a full amount
just to make sure something else is covered.
Bread, milk, meat,
and vegetable prices have soared.
A gallon of gasoline, sky high.
Typical rent used to be $600 a month.
Now it's going on twice that.
And here's the kicker.
Under civil war and its shortages,
working families would be forced
to pay double those prices or more.
You gotta make a decision whether or not you're gonna
pay your rent or go buy some food.
I don't even know how people
are surviving in some situations.
So let's imagine a civil war unfolding.
It's pretty scary.
The news reports you're about to see are not real.
Not yet.
They represent what could happen
if we don't come to our senses.
Some are highly probable, all are possible.
This is CBS News.
A water crisis in California has arrived in full force.
Red states bordering the Golden State
have been slowly diverting water supplies.
California's lucrative fruit
and vegetable industry is literally drying up.
In a related development,
red state treasurers are withdrawing money
and deals from Wall Street firms
if they push climate change.
This is CNN.
The New York State Senate leader today
called upon the New York Federal Reserve to shut down
half of red state banks based on security concerns.
This is CBS News.
In major blue American cities,
riots and burnings have become a nightly occurrence,
stoked initially by Red America militant groups.
But FBI officials also suspect Russian
and Iranian dark money is being deployed
to fund professional agitators.
This is breaking news.
The White House today announced plans to send federal troops
to every American city to restore order,
but the Florida and Texas governors have called up
their own National Guards.
As of tonight, National Guard troops
and tanks are deployed
around the state capitol buildings in Austin
and Tallahassee, but they themselves are surrounded
by federal troops and tanks.
America faces a loyalty nightmare.
This just in.
Early this evening,
two dozen converted commercial drones destroyed
New York's Brooklyn and 59th Street bridges
and seriously damaged the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.
Five drones also took out New York City's
major utility, Con Edison.
This is CNBC.
Blue America today placed a 100% tariff
on all Red America goods and services.
And this afternoon, 23 red states announced plans
to secede from the union.
The second American Civil War has officially begun.
This is a special report from CBS News.
America's civil war has its victims.
In the last week alone,
50 people died in northern Minnesota from hypothermia
as a result of red state oil and gas cutoffs.
Blue states are experiencing severe shortages
of meat and vegetables.
In Manhattan, a New York strip sirloin steak
on the black market runs $400.
Red America is finding it impossible
to import pharmaceutical products.
This is ABC News.
In a stunning development, the power center
of the world is suddenly shifting.
America's strongest allies, Germany, France, Canada,
Australia, Japan, and Great Britain today announced
the broad outlines of an extensive alliance with China.
Washington is in shock.
Just moments ago, Great Britain issued this statement.
Quote, "We are grateful for America's friendship,
"but under civil war, you are not the same."
Despite all its problems, China has won the contest
for global leadership.
Said Great Britain's prime minister, "God bless America,
"God help America."
This is an extraordinarily dangerous time.
There have never been so many uncertainties, so many messes.
How do we manage this chaos?
The world economy is weakening,
global trade's collapsing, the world's debt is soaring.
The interest rate markets look shaky.
There's a fear of even deadlier viruses than COVID.
Will we be able to gradually stop using fossil fuels
like oil and gas without producing global political chaos?
With populist parties rising everywhere?
American power is still very great.
You see that in the dollar right now.
You see it in the role of American energy production
and food production and its advanced education, you name it.
But America's willingness and ability to effectively project
that power over time has been eroded dramatically
by the dysfunction of the US political system.
And every American ally sees that
and is worried about it.
Every American adversary sees that
and views it as an opportunity
to do what they want with impunity.
This is scary stuff
because united we stand, divided we fall.
...disown our leadership who have...
And all of this is for what?
So some selfish, power-hungry leaders
can expand their fan club of social media haters?
The thing about the United States that gives me hope
is it has a remarkable capacity to reinvent itself.
America's destiny is still in our hands.
The good news
is that America historically is self-correcting.
We survived McCarthyism, the civil rights battles,
and King's assassination.
Vietnam, Watergate.
Seven defendants in the case.
It took a while, but our spirit of optimism
came back after 9/11.
We survived, then thrived.
We learn from our mistakes,
and our greatest mistake lately has been our loss
of civility and empathy
and the blind devotion by some to political extremism.
Democracies are fragile.
They fail when people stop believing
in their common destiny.
Not the American way.
These damn bills that come out here all the damn time.
When our leaders promote division and hate,
they're playing with fire.
So stick it up your ass.
We can lose control of our future,
and whose hopes and dreams will get crushed the process?
Ours will.
The American idea is not that we become identical robots.
It's that we try to bridge our differences to try
to find common ground.
Collaboration among those with diverse views
and experience can be a powerful tool of reform.
The most satisfying kind of connections
are not bonds, they're bridges.
Where we find a common story between us
despite our differences.
Bonding can actually lead to ingroups and outgroups.
The bridging commonalities
are so much more satisfying on a deep human level,
and leads to an enduringly good and healthy
and strong society.
Psychologists have long understood
that humans are extremely social creatures.
Without social connections, we develop anxiety.
That clearly happened during the pandemic.
In recent studies,
social connections were found in most cases
to make us happier, even healthier.
When humans experience feelings of anxiety, inadequacy,
and insignificance, they sometimes try to compensate
with an insatiable hunger for power.
Today, many of our leaders would risk the survival
of democracy itself in exchange for power.
What we really need is an interior revolution,
a revolution of the heart.
We need individuals
who understand the greatness within themselves
and therefore have more confidence
and love coming from themselves.
When you become afraid, you imitate the cult of the self
rather than what we might call the spiritual democracy.
The spiritual democracy depends upon something
other than money and material goods being the essence
of your satisfaction, your dignity,
how you're received by society.
We need a spiritual democracy
where the architecture, the implementation,
and the enforcement is for the common good.
Sometimes, the answer is quite simple.
People always think that they act
on the basis of their feeling.
In other words, you feel something first and then you do something.
The truth of the matter is that you'll tend
to feel something after you act in a particular way.
There's a huge body of psychological literature
that shows if you wanna be happier,
the first thing you need to do is to act happier.
If you wanna feel more gratitude,
you need to say thank you to somebody.
The Dalai Lama told me this, it was really shocking.
I was asking him, "What do I do when I feel contempt for somebody else?"
He said, "Stop and choose warmheartedness."
He said, "Pretend you feel warmhearted."
And he's got psychology on his side.
This is really consistent with how the structure
of the brain works.
So in dealing with hate,
often the answer is simply to sit down
and talk to the other side.
Show the world that numbers don't matter, but passion does.
Hawk Newsome had a transformative experience
that brought him face-to-face with his political enemies.
He expected bloody violence.
He detested everything his adversaries stood for.
Real Americans, everyday hardworking Americans,
regardless of socioeconomic status, are people
with love in their hearts.
And I believe in that America.
I believe in that idealistic America.
I'm happy that we have the ability
to voice our opinions in this country.
There have been a number of demonstrations in recent months that turned deadly.
Now a group is planning what it calls
the mother of all rallies.
We went to Washington D.C.
So we're like, "Okay,
"we're gonna go to the mother of all rallies."
We gotta give it to these politicians in D.C.
If we wanna do that in Portland,
it's gonna take some real courage.
We get out of the car, we suit up, we get our signs
and our flags ready.
We start to march over to the Mall.
Security.
Security, get them...
As we are walking up,
the closer we got to the actual rally,
we heard people were calling us, you know, the "N" word...
There was one fella who was standing in front of us,
he said, "Would you like to go on stage?"
And I kinda look around, survey the group,
and folks nodded like, "Yeah,
"let's go up there and let's give it to them."
CROWD: USA! USA! USA!
USA! USA!
I'm standing here and letting our presence be felt
and letting them know that we are in direct opposition
to everything that they're promoting.
I was going to go up there,
and there's terms we use in the streets
called "read them to filth."
It means tell them exactly who they are
and how we feel about them.
But it was like the skies opened up
and God spoke to me directly.
I know it sounds crazy, but God spoke to me
and said, "Let them know who you are."
After months of divisive rhetoric,
a moment of unity in an unexpected place...
The first thing outta my mouth was, "I'm an American."
I am an American.
They all went crazy.
Like, "What do you mean?
"You're a protestor, you're a civil rights activist.
"You're a self-proclaimed liberator.
"You love America?"
"Yes, I love America."
And the beauty of America
is that when you see something broke in your country,
you can mobilize to fix it.
And now they're clapping, they're going...
So when you see a man murdered, choked to death
after he calls for his life 11 times
and nothing happens, you have to do something about that.
And then there was like this awkward,
"I can't believe I'm clapping for the guy."
We say, if a cop is bad, he needs to get fired
like a bad lawyer, like a bad politician.
"You know, this is not what I believe in,
"but he's kind of right."
Secondly, I said, "I'm a Christian."
Everybody's going crazy.
I don't think my Bible is any different from yours
when it says, "Love thy neighbor."
What I really wanted
was to show these folks there are two guiding principles
that we both have in common, which are the Bible
and the Constitution.
I think we made progress.
I don't think that activists received the message well.
I don't think that politicians received the message well,
but Americans, they saw that as a coming together
to find common ground and they appreciated that.
At some point, we're going
to have to talk to the other side.
I think that I represent the Black folk
that most white people will never hear.
Black people sitting at their kitchen tables
discussing politics, discussing their days at work.
Everyday Black people,
not the Boule or the political elite,
because they have agendas.
They're tied into these political machines.
I think that Black folk
are at a really interesting place right now
because they're all paying attention.
They all know that leaders
are not really there for their benefit.
I don't think that they're hopeless.
I think they're more hopeful now
than they have been in the past.
We need to start teaching Black people about money ASAP.
They need to understand how money works.
I think Black people understand what's on the horizon,
what it's going to take to get there.
We need to change our whole culture.
The way we view each other, the way we live.
And that comes from being in the trenches with the people.
Let's talk about the bridges of our common story.
Let me try to understand you.
You know, Americans, they don't want to hate each other.
Studies show that when people can interact
at a human level, they can like each other.
Like Hawk Newsome, Derek Black found the value
of coming together and finding common ground.
He was the heir apparent of the white supremacist movement,
but he broke away from the racist, anti-Semitic thinking
of his childhood.
How?
It wasn't a vigorous intellectual exercise.
He didn't listen to a podcast.
It wasn't because he was barred
from some social media outlet.
He saw the light when his community changed.
He sat at a dinner in a college dorm room
every Friday night face-to-face
with his adversaries, who would also become
his best friends.
America needs to rediscover the power of community
and personal connection to help end our division.
Derek was the most prominent
young white supremacist in the United States.
He grew up with David Duke,
one of America's most well-known white supremacist
and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists
and a neo-Nazi clan leader
and Holocaust denier who frequently visited his home.
White nationalism is rooted in antisemitism.
If you actually break apart their ideology,
they want separation of people.
They want mass deportation.
We believe we have the right to maintain our countries
as white nations.
We believe we're being subject to genocide.
I was 19 years old
and I totally believed the entire ideology.
I ran for a local county seat and won it,
and I made national news.
Really seemed like I was going to take over this movement.
When I showed up to this little liberal arts college, at first,
no one knew my background.
I was still doing a radio show in the morning with my dad.
Nobody happened to google me.
It was only in the second semester where it came out
and it became an enormous controversy on this little campus.
People who I'd made friends with felt really betrayed.
But the next thing I did was start attending
a Shabbat dinner from a practicing Orthodox Jewish student
who lived next to me.
I went just because there weren't
that many social invitations.
And what was unexpected is that I kept coming back.
His dinners were very diverse
and that was a space where we were able to talk.
In my ideology, it said that they didn't belong in the country.
Having to reconcile that was extremely difficult for them.
And also keep in mind, this wasn't a couple of weeks,
it was years of engagement.
From the very beginning, you were taught
to think a certain way.
How do you even begin the journey of starting
to think differently?
Leaving a community and a whole ideology
that felt very central to my life
was extremely difficult.
Condemning it meant condemning everybody
who was in my life.
It was not changing my mind that was so hard.
It was changing community.
It was not clear whether there was any sort of family relationship
beyond the ideology for a long time.
David Duke was committed to the idea
that it was Stockholm syndrome because I had been among lefty anti-racists for too long.
I think over time, my family came to recognize
that I could be the same person
and have realized how we were wrong.
I think community is the essential element.
People don't change their minds because you throw facts at them.
People change their minds because their community changes,
because the people that are important to them change.
So now, not only are you not racist,
your last name is Black, which...
...is like an added part of the story.
Americans with courage
are starting to step forward.
One gave a speech at the Academy Awards
that blew the roof off of LA's Union Station.
My mother taught me to refuse hate.
She taught me to refuse blanket judgment.
And in this time, and with all of the Internet
and social media and algorithms
and everything that wants us to think a certain way,
the 24-hour news cycle, it is my hope
that all of us would teach our kids,
and not only to remember, just refuse hate,
don't hate anybody.
I refuse to hate someone because they are Mexican
or because they are Black or white...
...or LBGTQ.
I refuse to hate someone because they're a police officer.
I refuse to hate someone because they are Asian.
So anyone who wants to meet me in the middle to refuse hate,
to refuse blanket judgment,
and to help lift someone's feet off the ground,
this one is for you too.
Look, and this is the Pollyanna in me.
People are fundamentally good.
People hurt for each other.
America is a good example.
There's no country on this earth
more philanthropic than America.
I believe in the American people.
We all have our politics.
We all have our hates and our fears.
But deep down, there is a love of country
that I think prevails.
Every time I hear that the American Dream is fading,
I look at the Latino community. We're making progress,
maybe not as fast as we want, maybe not as good as we want,
but we're making progress.
Latino values are creating a social tissue
that is necessary in a country that's divided, in a country
where individualistic values are gaining over
cultural values and social values.
What Latinos are united by
is not language, it's not religion.
It's our desire to make it.
We are fighters.
We are optimistic about the future.
We love this country.
We have to keep taking steps to get to a place
where we can heal as a country.
When we are dancing with the angels,
the question will be asked, what did we do
to make sure we kept our democracy intact?
We're not born haters.
Hate is something we learn and it can be unlearned.
The opposite of hatred and anger is not love.
The opposite of hatred is empathy.
You know, we have to come together as a country
by breaking the habit of contempt.
I have this phrase that I chant in the streets.
It's like I... "I..."
- I believe. - I believe...
I believe that we will win.
In my heart, with my faith,
and what I'm seeing in this country.
I believe that we will win.
I believe that we'll find a way to love
and respect one another.
As Assata Shakur said,
"We have nothing to lose but our chains."
The first step in our journey
is to ask, "Why are humans so tempted to hate?"
Hate has always been part of the human experience.
It's a favorite theme in the movies.
I hate you.
And I especially hate you.
I hate you, Joker.
I hate you too.
I hate you.
How can you say something so mean?
I hate you!
Hate comes from feelings of humiliation.
When people feel humiliated, particularly in the economy,
the humiliation turns to anger
and then quickly, the anger becomes hate.
If the hate is fueled by feelings of alienation,
it lingers seemingly forever.
What's behind today's hate and division?
Is it culture, religion, race?
Even when we make advances on race, deep pockets
of discrimination by race seem to rear their ugly heads.
Discrimination by race of any kind needs to be stamped out.
But we also need to focus on inequities
as a result of differences in social class.
It's getting much harder in America to move from one class
to a higher class.
What's driving this is a sense of a loss of status.
Most American families will have years
where they'll be poor or near poor.
The root cause of a lot of today's division is economic.
Our economic system has been failing
for many Americans for decades.
Is it economic or is it cultural?
And the answer is you can't separate the cultural
and the economic because economics
winds up becoming an expression of our culture.
There is a very intimate relationship
between economics and identity.
If you have a job,
it's not just a source of resources,
it's also a source of your identity
or your dignity, your self-esteem.
Where is the dignity in poverty?
In going home and looking at your family
and realizing that there's no food in the refrigerator,
your light's about to get cut off
and you're about a payment away from being evicted.
How can you hold your head up?
This is not what the American Dream is supposed to be.
So one of the big problems is simply
of people that thought they were middle class
or working class that have lost status.
If you lose that job,
it means society has somehow devalued you.
It's that loss of value
that actually creates the greatest anger.
And recent statistics show that the ultra-poor
and ultra-rich in America in recent decades
have both seen their incomes increase.
The ultra-poor mostly with government assistance
through welfare benefits and help buying food.
And by contrast, the middle class has not seen
their paychecks grow in any meaningful way.
Manufacturing employment has collapsed.
The worker who once earned 30 bucks an hour
at a fabricating plant now earns half that at a coffee shop.
No wonder blue-collar workers are so angry.
And while in financial terms,
the ultra-poor have benefited some in recent decades,
that's not enough.
They live in a culture that robs them of their dignity.
With no job skills in a largely service economy,
no one wants to hire them.
Let me tell you a story about the American economy.
It's been a glorious but ugly paradox.
Good and bad.
We often succeed magnificently.
Look at us.
We weren't around 300 years ago.
You go to Italy, there's nothing younger than 500 years.
Go to France, go to... wherever you want.
They had multiple centuries jump on us.
Look what we did,
and we're all a bunch of mutts.
Incredibly, in 1930,
we built the Empire State Building,
then the tallest in the world, in a year and 45 days.
Today, we can't build a four-bedroom house that fast.
In the 1980s and '90s, the world economies globalized.
♪ I want my MTV, MTV, MTV ♪
Trade with other countries exploded.
We experienced a technological revolution.
America won big.
In January 1980,
the Dow Jones' Industrial Average Stock Index
was only 8.75.
By 2022, that stock market had jumped an amazing 3,700%
and two billion people
around the world had been brought out of poverty.
Yeah, too much is never enough.
The bad news?
In America, we saw a tale of two cities.
Wall Street got rich, Main Street didn't.
Why?
Only those with enough money saved could invest in stocks,
and that's less than half of us.
So only half could ride the market escalator up
and grow more affluent.
The rest merely earned wages.
For this and other reasons,
income inequality soared, a slow-burning resentment set in.
And when interest rates were dropped for many years to 0%
to save Wall Street from crisis in 2008
and our savings accounts earned nothing
while the stock market boomed,
we saw the greatest wealth transfer from the working class
to the upper class in the history of mankind.
Is that fair?
Meanwhile, the performance
of the US economy itself, that is, its ability to do more with less,
has become less impressive.
In the 1960s, we had a Ferrari economy.
In the 1980s and '90s, a Porsche economy.
Today, we have a Segway economy.
Here's what I want you to do.
Our economy is becoming less productive
and unless we do something,
the shrinking of America's middle class is likely to intensify.
People are tired, and I don't think people
or the government or anybody is really all that worried
about how people are getting by anymore.
It's not that capitalism is bad.
It's not that we're bad people, it's just that
as we've been focused on this staggering
and extraordinary growth engine that continues to exist today,
an awful lot of people
have been left out of the equation.
Lots of people that are set to become very, very angry.
Economies don't create prosperity
just because central banks print money
or developers, as they did in China,
build hundreds of impressive but empty apartment high-rises
in hundreds of cities using dubious credit schemes.
Prosperity comes when one thing happens.
Daring people create new firms
that replace firms built on less effective ideas.
In other words, they innovate, they take a risk.
Startups are at the core of America's economy.
The economy propels forward
and creates new opportunities and new jobs.
All this happens in a climate of wide-open competition.
Look at firms like General Motors, Control Data,
Pan Am, Kodak, they all stumbled.
Why?
They failed to innovate, they became lazy.
Most got replaced by more daring and innovative firms.
But mass innovation doesn't work in a culture
of the inside deal.
The culture that's taken over Washington D.C.
And does it make sense that 75% of America's wealth
used to create new companies today is controlled
by less than a dozen big banks?
In entrepreneurial capitalism,
the winners have one thing in common.
They work incredibly hard and never give up.
They want to achieve success so badly, their teeth hurt.
Consider the life and times
of Warren Buffett's famous Mrs. B.
She wrote the book on not giving up,
and she definitely was not an insider.
This woman, Rose Blumkin, who landed in Seattle in 1917,
couldn't speak a word of English, had a tag around her neck.
The tag said, "Fort Dodge, Iowa."
The Red Cross got her to Fort Dodge,
where she was reunited with her husband, who had come
to the country a couple of years earlier.
And she lived in Fort Dodge for two years.
And as she put it, she felt like a dummy.
She couldn't pick up the language,
she couldn't learn a word.
And so she decided, she and her husband
decided to move to Omaha.
So they came to Omaha in 1919.
And then as her oldest daughter went to school,
she would come home, this daughter, Frances,
and she would teach her mother the words
she'd learned in school that day.
And this woman, Rose Blumkin, spent 20 years saving money.
She sold used clothing to do it.
And after 20 years, she'd saved $2,500.
She went to Chicago
and she bought what she could of furniture.
Her dream had always been to open a furniture store.
And this woman who had never gone
to school one day in her life, with $2,500,
she built a business which she sold to me
in 1983 for $60 million, approximately.
This woman, she could not read or write,
but she brought a determination to succeed.
She knew she could outwork anyone else.
She knew that she cared about her customers.
She worked at very low gross margins,
but she built this incredible business.
Mrs. B's life defines capitalism at its best.
No insider deals, no government manipulation of markets,
no risky financing schemes based on free money.
Just thousands of lives transformed through a combination
of one person's daring guts and hard work.
We often talk of the American Dream.
Mrs. B is the American Dream.
The United States used to have
some of the greatest class mobility
economically in the world.
It today has less class mobility
than any other OECD economy.
The best way to predict the wealth
of your children in the United States
compared to any other advanced industrial democracy
is the wealth of the parents.
That is more true in the US than it is in the UK or Canada
or Japan or France or Germany or Italy.
It's astonishing.
Thirty years ago, a person born into the bottom 25%
of the country economically, who studied hard
and worked hard, had about a 25% chance of rising
to the top 25%.
Today, only a 5% chance.
It's called the American Dream
'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.
And if you know you'll never be part
of that special 5% with a chance of rising to the top,
why shouldn't you be resentful towards those who made it?
The answer is to give more people more opportunity.
To encourage risk-takers to awaken a wave
of daring activity that results in an innovation revolution.
This was supposed to be the land of opportunity.
In other words, you're a kid like me
that grows up in housing projects outside of Boston,
you can make it.
Doesn't matter if you don't have money,
if your parents don't have education,
you can make a difference.
Xi Jinping talks about the Chinese Dream,
and economically, more Chinese believe
in the China Dream today,
even though their political system is incredibly repressive,
than Americans believe in the American Dream.
Obviously, that reality weaponized
by social media is going to drive an unwind
of the values that our political system is based on.
People are not gonna fight for American democracy
they don't even know what it stands for,
if they believe that opportunity no longer
comes to them from it.
We should do whatever we can
to mitigate the income inequality.
But you just make damn sure
that everybody has equal opportunity
to achieve income gains.
With economic opportunity in decline,
we resort to silly status competition.
So we have one of the most powerful emotions known to man,
which is envy, taking place.
It's the new Kardashian era.
In past times, the old WASPS,
the old-money type were clever.
They downplayed their wealth and privilege.
They understood the dangerous power of envy,
particularly during periods when the ladder
of opportunity was missing a lot of rungs.
Today, many of the affluent
seem to use their wealth precisely for the purpose
of creating envy and enhancing status.
It's as if they want everyone else to feel inferior.
All right, let's do it.
Their new status gives them a sense
of power over the less fortunate.
It's exactly the way it's supposed to be.
And Instagram has become an out-and-out
factory for producing hate-inducing envy.
People who are thriving don't have time
for these silly games of status competition.
The problem is not enough Americans are thriving.
We can't afford to be two countries,
where one country is cities and coast
and the other is the heartland.
I grew up in the Middle West, so I relate to this,
where small towns and small cities are not doing well.
Wonder why working people today
are so resentful and angry?
Our leaders have consistently failed to look out for them.
The velvet rope economy has enabled a new aristocracy
of brains and money to cut itself off
from the rest of America.
They give their leaders hefty campaign contributions,
then sneer at the working class
for things like their religion or even the way they dress.
The giant multinational corporations
sent American blue-collar jobs abroad.
At the same time,
the opioid outbreak hit the American heartland hard.
And for a long time,
many in Washington seemed not to pay attention.
Working-class folks are not without their faults.
Politicians feed them nonsense.
They often believe it no matter how absurd and destructive.
Watch this recent campaign ad run by a reckless candidate
who appears to suggest it's okay
to shoot his fellow politicians
if he doesn't agree with them.
I'm Eric Greitens, Navy SEAL,
and today, we're going RINO hunting.
The RINO feeds on corruption
and is marked by the stripes of cowardice.
But ask yourself, do working-class
and middle-class families deserve to be ridiculed
by so many elites the way they often are today?
Good enough to fix your toilet,
but not good enough to stay for coffee
or meet your friends or merit some level of respect.
Our leaders failed to understand
how global capitalism made working families
take the worst hits.
These families lost jobs and earned less money.
Our industrial supply chains
for things like life-saving medicines were based in brutal
and unstable parts of the world.
What fool made that decision?
I think we need a return to the idea of government
as a protector of the middle class.
Capitalism needs to be measured
not just by the bottom line, but by the people it serves.
It's really the Good Shepherd model.
We must all move ahead,
but we can't afford to leave anyone behind.
Capitalism has also become a lot more top-down than bottom-up.
It's a system more and more centrally controlled.
Large corporations overwhelm the small businesses.
They lobby for special corporate welfare
and use patent laws to hurt other businesses.
They get special tax breaks, they change the rules
to stifle competitors.
Anything to avoid a level playing field.
In the grand battle of David versus Goliath,
David doesn't have a chance.
And that makes the economy more rigid
and less open to new opportunities.
Both parties had walked away from capitalism.
A ruthless corporate elite in America
is picking winners and losers.
The big drug companies are allowed to hire lobbyists
and lawyers to extend a drug patent's termination date.
Why?
Why do that?
To keep drug prices high.
The cost to American families each year
for the medicines they need is about a third
of a trillion dollars, right out of your pocket.
Now ask yourself, how damaging is it to have so many
of our universities, politicians, news channels, musicians,
and artists so dependent on corporate support,
so heavily influenced behind the scenes
by multinational corporations?
It means America is becoming increasingly ungovernable
as a democracy.
Trust in our major institutions is collapsing.
Many are infatuated with socialism,
but less than one in five are aware
of what socialism actually is.
Why would these young people have any great affection
for American capitalism?
They watched American capitalism literally destroy
the economy in 2008.
They watched their parents go through literal hell.
They've watched college become beyond expensive.
They've watched the healthcare system
become beyond expensive.
They've looked at the job market,
they've looked at wage growth
and like, "What the shit is this producing for me?"
You know, I could tell you a lot of reasons
that you should try to work to make capitalism better,
because the alternatives never work.
The biggest problem, I think,
is American capitalism buys Washington.
They're just for sale, and everybody fricking knows it.
Sam Bankman-Fried has been the second-biggest
individual donor in the 2021 to 2022 election cycle.
Bankman-Fried had made donations
worth 39.8 million US dollars.
In today's Washington D.C.,
wealthy special interest groups
have wrapped their tentacles around the city,
threatening to kill our economy's dynamism.
I don't think capitalism is the problem.
I think the problem is the governance system.
If you have a level playing field
where the government acts as an impartial regulator,
you want capitalists to make money to grow businesses.
But if they are able to call the balls
and strikes in addition to that,
then people are going to get screwed.
And the United States has, in addition
to having the most staggering entrepreneurship
and corporate innovation,
also has the system
where those same individuals can write the rules.
That's not capitalism at all.
That's a subversion
of what the US system is supposed to be about.
The average American doesn't realize
how much the laws are written by lobbyists.
And it's shocking now, having spent a fair amount of time
inside the system, how the system actually works.
And it's obvious that if the system is organized
around incumbencies writing the laws, the incumbencies
will benefit from the laws that are written.
So a guy named Eric Hoffer,
a longshoreman philosopher, said, in my opinion,
the smartest thing I've ever heard in my life. He said...
Welcome to the United States.
Capitalism has become an insider's club.
Winners too often are the subsidized, privileged,
or insiders who take advantage
of their political connections.
The outsiders like Mrs. B wouldn't have a chance today.
How times have changed.
Would Bill Gates, with his tiny young Seattle firm Microsoft
have been able to do what he did with giant IBM
in today's climate?
Not a chance.
The bottom line, one reason our economy isn't performing
with prosperity for all
is the policy corruption in Washington.
It is a system that values campaign fundraising above people,
and a system that's killing the American Dream.
As Jack Nicholson so aptly said...
This town needs an enema.
We need to allow for new outside voices,
but that requires reform of our political system
and how we fund it.
Politics isn't broken, it's fixed.
Our political system essentially puts the voter
at the bottom.
We need to elevate the power of the voter
as the premier customer, and make the currency of votes
more important than the currency of money.
Politicians around money
are like drug addicts around cocaine.
It really takes a reinvention
of the core structures of that system.
We can't expect incremental improvements to get us out
of the state that we're in.
Until you get at the problem of money in politics,
people are not gonna feel like they have a place
in the system.
I'd say, "Oh, no, you know, when you get older you'll,
"you'll get better perspective
"and you'll see things in a different way."
No.
It's really bad.
The system is rigged
in favor of the two parties.
It's the ultimate racket.
Just follow the money.
A person can give $847,500 annually
to either or both of our political parties.
But someone running as an independent is limited
to receiving only $5,400 every two years.
The parties have colluded to create fundraising rules
that allow their candidates to receive 313 times more money
than an independent candidate.
Is that fair?
It's an insider's club, but only two sides.
Both political parties are experts at reducing nuanced,
complex problems into extremist slogans.
No room for new voices
and little accountability for their own results.
Their fundraising rules reflect the political corruption of our time.
Play to the high-dollar donors. Let the rest of the country
flirt with civil war, then do nothing about it
or actually promote division.
This is the selfish insanity of our times.
The things that matter in this country
have been reduced in choice.
There are two political parties, there are a handful
of insurance companies, but if you want a bagel,
there are 23 flavors 'cause you have the illusion.
You have the illusion of choice.
Politics is also dark money.
Dark money has grabbed the American political system
by the throat.
The 2010 Supreme Court decision
Citizens United allows billionaires
and corporations to spend virtually unlimited amounts
of indirect support of candidates and their causes
and they can do so anonymously.
Is that not the definition of the word crazy?
Politicians constantly say things we know are not true,
or they simplify things of nuance and complexity.
Yet we go along with the lies.
Why?
Because we don't want our side to lose.
Each party's media cheerleaders pass on the lies.
It's not whether the information is true.
It's whether the base believes it.
Talk about a sure way to destroy our democracy.
It's almost as if cable TV networks have become clubs
and that they're in the business
of telling you the people you like are great.
The people you hate are awful.
Somehow, that space where you challenge people's
preconceptions rather than reinforcing them
has to be rebuilt.
But wouldn't it be simpler
if we all told the truth, both sides?
We first need to agree on a common set of facts.
We need less heat and more light.
If we're not careful, America will descend into a chaos,
a moral chaos that could destroy our future.
In 1798, John Adams wrote a famous letter warning
of the weaknesses of our government.
A government he helped create.
Every American should read it.
"If the people's virtue fails, our constitutional
"form of government lacks the power to preserve itself.
"We can't contain the mob."
Maybe it's not the politicians who suck.
Maybe something else sucks around here, like the public.
Because if it's really just the fault of these politicians,
then where are all the other bright people of conscience?
Where are all the bright, honest,
intelligent Americans ready to step in
and save the nation and lead the way?
Look, unfortunately,
the most qualified people in America
don't run for public office.
We need leaders who care less about politics
and themselves and more about the common good.
People in communities,
they don't fight over Republicans or Democrats.
They got a pothole, you deal with the damn pothole.
The whole country's got a fucked-up mentality, man.
Everybody's so busy wanting to be down with a gang.
"I'm a conservative, I'm liberal, I'm conservative."
It's bullshit.
Be a fucking person.
Listen.
Let it swirl around your head.
Then form your opinion.
No normal, decent person is one thing. Okay?
I got some shit I'm conservative about.
I got some shit I'm liberal about.
The problems we're having today,
they pale in comparison to the problems we had
in advance of the Civil War
and they pale in comparison
to other problems we've had throughout history.
We've prevailed over those.
We will prevail over these.
By saying that I see a path to success,
I'm not telling you that there's not an alternative path.
I do see the path.
I think deep down, Secretary Baker is probably right,
but you know, that's like if you go in,
and you got some kind of medical procedure, say, "Look,
"you know, there's a 30% chance this doesn't work out."
Things may all be manifest in a large-scale fiscal crisis,
and current debts-to-GDP ratios
are already remarkably high.
They're like where they were at the end of World War II,
but we haven't started the war yet.
I'd like to award an Oscar to the inventors
of the 20th century.
The people from
Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison,
to the Wright Brothers, I'd like to call them all up here
and they're gonna call back to you.
Your challenge is, can you match what we achieved?
And my prediction is that we're not gonna match them.
That's one view, that we will forever experience
an innovation slowdown.
But others strongly disagree.
I believe we're going through maybe
one of the great productivity booms that we've been through
maybe since the Industrial Revolution,
driven by the tech sector,
artificial intelligence and the cloud,
and now they're doing data analytics on the cloud.
And a lot of this, of course, goes unmeasured.
It's really hard for me to not think that this is one
of those dark periods like the Civil War
or the '70s that America's gonna come out of.
America's best days could still lie ahead.
I think we're onwards and upwards.
I mean, for 50 years, the artificial intelligence revolution
has basically disappointed and stalled
and now it is making explosive gains.
Quantum computing, explosive gains, biotechnology,
CRISPR technology, genetic engineering,
explosive gains, new energies.
Solar is cheaper at scale than coal is today.
That's extraordinary.
Electric vehicles and supply chain,
my God, I mean, fusion technology even may well be breakout now
after disappointments for decades.
I am staggered by the scale
and quickness of innovation in technologies
across the board.
The unlocking of human potential with education
and globalization has been the most extraordinary story
in the history of humanity.
That's the message of this film.
There are significant reasons to be hopeful.
This is the time for the best strategic minds
from both sides to come together on a new American game plan
of empathy, risk-taking, courage, and honesty.
This is the time for a brave, new, talented,
charismatic problem-solver
to throw away the label and embrace America as a flawed
but unique experiment in the history of humanity.
If we could build the tallest building in the world
in a year and 45 days, we can create a new
and better land of opportunity where everyone has a chance
and no one's left behind.
Is that special leader out there listening?
Are the rest of us listening
to the persistent call from folks screaming for a return
of the American Dream?
I am optimistic about America's future.
If you go back through history,
people thought the Russians would surpass us.
We got it together and it didn't happen.
The President of the United States declared a crisis
of the national spirit.
"...confidence in the future."
The malaise lifted.
People felt that the Cold War was over and Japan had won
and we had a period of remarkable economic prosperity.
Patrick Henry declared that the spirit
of the revolution had been lost.
That was in 1792, and he was wrong.
And so it is the great strength of America
that Americans change and shape its future
that makes it very resilient.
There are no facts about the future.
Our future is in our hands, if we come to our senses.
We control our destiny.
This is ABC News.
Yesterday, a different kind of president,
a non-partisan pragmatist,
easily won the White House on the promise to unify America
behind a spirit of humility, empathy, and courage.
Our new president's Common Ground campaign was a big win
for the middle class.
The extremists, both left and right, lost big.
And this just in.
In a stunning post-election poll taken yesterday,
three out of four Americans
said they are suddenly optimistic about the future.
A month ago, only one in four Americans
felt their country's best days could still lie ahead.
It's a new day in America.
In an acceptance speech,
our new president declared there is a way.
Wall Street firms have, for years,
had their own special tax loophole
for what they call "carried interest."
Wall Street firms should give up some of the tax break
and we should then use that extra revenue
to expand a provision in the tax code
called the Earned Income Tax Credit.
This credit helps financially stressed working families
who are at risk of falling out of the middle class.
Our new president also wants
to make every American an investor.
The commander-in-chief will provide every child at birth
a stock index account with a $10,000 loan paid back
with interest in 60 years.
By then, the account could easily be worth
a million dollars or more.
It's called the Miracle of Financial Compounding.
Young people can add to that account as it grows
and use some of it for education.
"Social media is threatening our way of life,"
says our new president.
"The social media companies should face the same libel laws
"as The New York Times and other media outlets."
Yesterday's remarks concluded with this demand of Congress
by the new president. Quote, "It is time to sit down
"with the other side.
"Today, Congress works two days a week, then they fly home
"to raise money from their heavy-hitter supporters.
"It is time members of Congress work five days a week
"like the rest of America and get stuff done.
"They need to bring their families to Washington
"where they can all get to know each other.
"It is hard to hate the other side when your families
"are close friends."
And from now on, it will be a federal crime
for a corporate lobbyist or a lobbyist for a foreign country
to write their own bills in Congress.
The insider's clubhouse is closed.
Our new president wants to end this ugly American era
of hate and division.
After all, we are all in this together.
For all of our faults, America is an aspirational country.
Our ideals have always far exceeded our reality.
Nevertheless, we're an amazing experiment.
We're completely unique in history.
There'll never be another America.
We're it.
It's an experiment in humanity.
It almost would be impossible to duplicate.
I wish I could live to be 200
'cause I'm sure it's going to even be better
than it is right now.
Absolutely.
We've proven as a nation,
you give us a mountain to climb
and we'll show you how to climb it.
What can help us out of this? There is competition
with a rival superpower.
The ambitions of China
and the external threat that it constitutes may help us
pull ourselves out of this dangerous spiral
of hatred and stagnation.
We can disagree about a whole range of cultural issues,
which seem hugely important to us at this moment,
but if we ask the question, "Would you rather be run
"by the Chinese Communist Party
"or would you rather stick with the rule of law
"and constitutional government?"
I think we might still find some consensus
on sticking with the latter.
When I look at 2100 and I think about a world
that is no longer reliant on fossil fuels,
I think about a world that has incredible abundance
of inexpensive, decentralized energy.
We've never had a world like that.
That's an extraordinary world.
That's a world that unlocks an enormous amount
of human potential.
What I don't know is to get from here to there,
the level of political dysfunction,
technological dysfunction, economic hardship
that will be experienced.
When I think of two Americas, I think of over-45
and under-45, and if somehow or another,
all of us old people just got the hell outta here,
because young America is really not that divided.
All right? If you go look at the numbers,
they're very different than Old America.
And generational, and so if we can just get through
the next, I don't know, 15 years,
we're not gonna be that divided.
America is not a perfect country.
We've made mistakes,
but America's best days could still lie ahead
if we're willing to do the hard work
of understanding each other.
I love America.
America abuses my people,
but I love my country and I believe
that we can make it what it deserves to be.
We can do it together, but we have to
build a solid foundation in our communities.
America is burning.
Burning with a desire
to bring back the American Dream for everyone.
This is a very exciting time.
The tools that we have to develop opportunity for ourselves
and globally are like no tools we have ever had before.
But are we going to rebuild our nation with that?
Are we gonna rebuild our planet with that?
Will we learn from the mistakes of our very recent past?
So it is we, the people, ultimately, that are going to have to
rise up and say, "Wait a minute, this is our democracy.
"We can do better."
I think that our elections are character tests.
Obviously, we're testing the characters of the candidates
and weighing them, but in a broader sense,
they test the character of the electorate.
People have an immediate opportunity
to change what they don't like.
By turning out, voting,
by getting involved in the political process,
by reforming the parties, by having cleaner election laws
that take dirty money out.
We've become, I'll be frank,
a lazy citizenry.
There is, without a doubt,
a road to best days ahead for the country.
But let me be clear, we are not on that road and I...
I don't think that we do ourselves justice
to pretend that that road is just around the corner
and that it's somehow part of America's birthright
or our pre-destiny because it's happened that way before.
This "best days ahead" is both an opportunity
and a responsibility,
but it's also, most importantly, a choice.
But ultimately, America's problem
is more than the economy, our dysfunctional politics
and our broken system of communication.
Our problem is us.
We need to find that revolution of the heart.
We need to break free of the chains of hate and division.
We need to make our way back to unity.
♪ I have climbed highest mountains
♪ I have run through the fields
♪ Only to be with you
♪ I have run
♪ I have crawled
♪ I have scaled... ♪
Ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.
How can we love our country and not love our countrymen?
Bipartisanship was not a four-letter word.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans have a monopoly on wisdom.
The essence of America,
what really unites us, is not nationality
or ethnicity or religion.
It is an idea.
And what an idea it is,
that you can come from humble circumstances
and you can do great things.
I have a dream today.
Martin Luther King isn't a Black hero.
He's an American hero.
I used to be Irish Catholic.
Now I'm an American. You know, you grow.
Only humility will lead us to unity.
Here's the deal.
We're never gonna solve this shit
until we all get on the same page.
You need to know how to solve your problems.
You need to know where your power lies.
You are Americans, so your power lies in each other.
♪ I believe in the kingdom come
♪ Then all the colors will bleed into one
♪ Bleed into one
♪ But yes, I'm still running
♪ You broke the bonds
♪ And you loosed the chains
♪ Carried the cross
♪ Of my shame
♪ You know I believe it
♪ But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
♪ I believe in the kingdom come
♪ Then all the colors will bleed into one
♪ Bleed into one
♪ But yes, I'm still running
♪ You broke the bonds
♪ And you loosed the chains
♪ Carried the cross
♪ Of my shame
♪ You know I believe it
♪ But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
♪ But I still haven't found what I'm looking for ♪