SUMMARY: Studying more than 50,000 homicides over the course of a decade in 50 of the largest cities, a team of reporters at the Washington Post have pinpointed the places where murders are common but arrests are rare. Amna Nawaz talks with Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post about why some cities may have lower arrest rates.
SUMMARY: The hottest curve in economics right now helps explain the rise of China, the rise of populism in Europe, and the rise of Donald Trump. From a global perspective, income inequality has gone down. But if you're middle class in the U.S. or Europe, you see the rich getting richer and inequality growing. Economics correspondent Paul Solman examines the widening gap.
SUMMARY: Why have middle aged, white Americans experienced a stunning rise in premature deaths due to alcoholism, suicide and drug abuse? Economists who have documented the dramatic decrease in life expectancy say an obvious place to look is the loss of work and economic status for the working class. But economics correspondent Paul Solman finds that's not the whole story.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): But first, the second of a two-part look at the declining life expectancy for some middle-aged white Americans.
Last week, economics correspondent Paul Solman examined the role prescription painkillers and alcohol may play in the trend.
Tonight, he explores how the economy and the job market may be involved.
Its part of our weekly series Making Sen$e, which airs Thursdays.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): The Hardee's in Maysville, Kentucky, a popular hangout for the senior set.
Martin Sauer used to work for the sheriff's department, where he says he saw his share of Saturday night drunks, but nothing like the current opioid drug epidemic.
MARTIN SAUER, Kentucky: People get hooked on it and can't get off of it, or don't want to, causing a lot of younger generation to lose their lives.
PAUL SOLMAN: And by younger generation, Sauer means his middle-aged neighbors, who, as we reported last week, are experiencing a stunning rise in premature deaths due to alcoholism, suicide and drug abuse. But why?
ANGUS DEATON, Economist: The health crisis here is particularly among white working-class or white people with a high school and no more. For those people, the economy's been very hard for a very long time.
PAUL SOLMAN: Predictably, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, economists who have documented the dramatic decrease in life expectancy, say an obvious place to look for a cause is the economy.
ANNE CASE, Economist: It used to be, with a high school degree, you could get a job, that actually could provide for your family. And the disappearance of those may lead people to feel a lot more stressed.
SUMMARY: Chicago’s Independent Police Review Board today released scores of video and audio recordings from police-involved shootings and some of them are pretty shocking. The release is part of sweeping police reforms instituted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel after the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, a young black man, by a white officer. Jeffrey Brown talks to Chicago Police Board chair Lori Lightfoot.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): It’s a stunning release for its sheer size and scope. Today, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Board released scores of recordings related to 101 cases involving officer-related shootings and other incidents in which civilians were injured or killed.
The videos came from dashboard cameras and other sources. They involve alleged misconduct in cases that remain under investigation. In one video, an unarmed man was shot by police after he allegedly caused a disturbance on a bus and struck a driver.
Another, shot on a cell phone, shows police hitting someone after arriving at a scene where there was open alcohol.
Today, Sharon Fairley, chief administrator of the review authority, said the release is part of an effort to make the department more open.
SHARON FAIRLEY, Independent Police Review Authority: These past few months, as the city has struggled with so many questions about policing and about police accountability, it has been clear that we all agree that there’s a lack of trust and that increased transparency is essential to rebuilding that trust.
JEFFREY BROWN: Fairley added, though, that the videos only show so much.
SHARON FAIRLEY: It’s really important for you to keep in mind that these materials may not convey all of the facts and considerations that are relevant to an investigation of an officer’s conduct.
JEFFREY BROWN: For its part, the police union called today’s release of the videos irresponsible.
Anger and frustration with the police department came to a head last year after a video was released showing a white officer killing black teenager Laquan McDonald. The event occurred in 2014.
Facing a firestorm, Mayor Rahm Emanuel sacked the police superintendent, replacing him with a new chief, veteran Eddie Johnson.
And let’s go to Chicago for reactions to these videos from Lori Lightfoot, former chair of the city’s Police Accountability Task Force. It was formed by the mayor after criticism of the department and his office. She’s now president of the Chicago Police Board, an independent civilian group appointed by the mayor.
SUMMARY: Despite a historic Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregated schools, today huge numbers of students remain in separate and unequal schools, most in inner cities. Special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks with Pedro Noguera of the University of California, Los Angeles, about the consequences of such inequality and what can be done.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT (NewsHour): Despite an historic Supreme Court ruling some 61 years ago outlawing segregated schools, today, huge numbers of students remain in separate and unequal schools, most in inner cities.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Pedro Noguera, director of the Center for Study of School Transformation at UCLA. I met him in New York, where he was about to speak with a group of educators.
Professor Noguera, thank you so much for joining us.
Sixty-one years after separate and unequal was ruled illegal, you say it’s still happening. Why?
PEDRO NOGUERA, University of California, Los Angeles: Well, it’s happening because the courts have basically made it very difficult to continue to pursue integration.
And that’s after we made quite a bit of progress in this country, especially in the South, but now we know that schools in the North and the West are more segregated now than they were 30 years ago. So, we now find ourselves in a situation where not only are schools increasingly racially separate, but we’re also concentrating the poorest children in schools that have the fewest resources.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Why?
PEDRO NOGUERA: I would say it’s a combination of lack of investment in schools that serve poor children and the fact that we have no longer the political will.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: But you have argued that separate schools play a role in perpetuating inequality, not just in the schools, but in general.
PEDRO NOGUERA: They do.
They do, because separate has still been unequal in education. The racially separate schools, even when the schools do a good job, the learning opportunities you have a child will influence the kind of college you go into, the kind of profession you have access to, the kind of income you earn.
And so if we really are interested in creating a society that’s more equal and less characterized by racial divisions, then we need to put more investment in education and leveling the playing field and integrating our schools.
SUMMARY: An online game asks players to share some of their wealth on faith that the others will reciprocate. But each player has the option of choosing not to share, amassing more and more wealth. In designing a game to test human behaviors that fuel economic inequality, Yale University researchers are finding that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): So how does this game work?
AKIHIRO NISHI, Yale University: So in front of you now, you have a tablet.
PAUL SOLMAN: Right.
Akihiro Nishi is prepping me to play an economic inequality game at Yale University’s Human Nature Lab. In the game, each player is at the center of a small group within the larger community. And in each round of the game, without knowing what the others are doing, we choose either to cooperate, that is donate 50 units, which automatically double, to each of the others in our group, or to defect and not donate to anyone, just take from those who cooperate.
The game is designed to explore the human behaviors that fuel economic inequality, a hot political issue for several years now, which Senator Bernie Sanders has made the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.
As he told Judy Woodruff in May:
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS, Democratic Presidential Candidate: Ninety-nine percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent. The top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. That is immoral and unsustainable.
PAUL SOLMAN: Back in the Human Nature Lab, it was time to recruit players online.
AKIHIRO NISHI: If you will look behind you for a moment, you will see now the job is actually posted, and all these people are joining from all over the world.
PAUL SOLMAN: And so here I have 200.
AKIHIRO NISHI: Right.
PAUL SOLMAN: In the game.
We’d each been assigned a certain amount of wealth. The distribution mimicked the degree of inequality in the U.S.
And I have four other players with 200, and I have one player with 1,150. Where did this guy come from, Silicon Valley?
SUMMARY: For more than half a century, Barney Frank was one of America's loudest voices for progressive policies, both financial and social. Economics correspondent Paul Solman spends a day in Boston with the famous former lawmaker and financial reformer to discuss his new memoir, “Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage.”
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Next, a profile of a crusading voice on financial reform who also became a public figure in the debate over gay rights.
It’s the story of former Congressman Barney Frank, son of a mob-connected New Jersey father. He went on to Harvard and to volunteer as a Freedom Rider in Mississippi. His public and private story, including his long tenure as a lawmaker, is the subject of his new autobiography.
Economics correspondent Paul Solman caught up with him in Boston for tonight’s installment of Making Sense, which airs every Thursday on the NewsHour.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): For 32 years, perhaps the country’s most controversial, quick-witted congressman, Barney Frank, now improbably lolling in semi-retirement.
But for almost half-a-century, his was one of the America’s loudest voices for progressive policies, both economic and social, a devotee of using government to help redress inequality.
His new autobiography sums up his half-a-century of effort, and the two stunning surprises of his long career, the revolution in attitudes toward government and sexuality.
So, you start out, government in high repute, homosexuality…
FORMER REP. BARNEY FRANK (D), Massachusetts: In low repute.
PAUL SOLMAN: Contemptible.
BARNEY FRANK: Yes.
PAUL SOLMAN: And now it’s the other way around.
BARNEY FRANK: Well, as I have said, by the time I retired in 2012, my marriage to my husband, Jim, got a much better public response than my chairmanship of the committee that wrote the financial reform bill.
PAUL SOLMAN: When Frank began his political career here at Boston City Hall, it was unheard of to be openly gay. So, he remained in the closet, a bright-eyed Harvard-schooled reformist assistant to Boston Mayor Kevin White in 1968. His government goals?
SUMMARY: Journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have exposed widespread problems of abuse, sex trafficking and violence against women in Africa and Asia. Now they also bring their focus home, shining a light on the ways American women are commonly hurt, deprived and exploited. Jeffrey Brown talks to them about their new book and documentary series on PBS, “A Path Appears.”
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): In a new report out today, the United Nations documents how girls simply trying to go to school face threats and violent attack in 70 countries.
That tracks with the stories on display in a PBS documentary series that ends tonight. “A Path Appears” expands that scope to explore violence against women more broadly and what can be done about it.
Jeffrey Brown has our conversation.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are well-known for their work on these subjects. Their prior collaboration, “Half the Sky,” first a book and then a series, took viewers around Africa and Asia.
This time, they have co-authored the book “A Path Appears,” which focuses on problems such as sex trafficking and abuse, including in this country. It’s also led to a series that’s been shown on PBS’ “Independent Lens.” The latest episode airs tonight.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn join me now from New York.
And, Nick Kristof, let me start with you.
One thing you have done in this series is put a spotlight on abuses here at home. Was that a particular concern, to bring it home, so to speak?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF, Co-Author, “A Path Appears”: Yes, it was.
“Half the Sky” focused on women’s rights abroad. And people kept asking us, well, what about the U.S.? And that seemed a fair question. The atrocities in many ways are worse in Afghanistan or Yemen, but we have real problems right here.
And it seemed to us that while the discussion about gender inequity in this country is often about pay equity or about representation of women in Congress or on boards, that really the two massive issues are sex trafficking — 100,000 underaged girls trafficked a year into the sex trade — and likewise domestic violence, three women every day killed by their domestic partners.
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NICHOLAS KRISTOF: I think that it’s very easy for those who have made it to construct a narrative in which those who are suffering are to blame for their own problems, and, you know, this notion of personal irresponsibility as being the all and end-all of poverty and disadvantage.
And we hope that by putting a human face on some these challenges, by humanizing them, we can help push back at that and underscore that, sure, there is a certain amount of personal irresponsibility there, but there also is an awful lot of kids who desperately need help, who didn’t do anything wrong.
And it’s a certain amount of social irresponsibility on the part of all of us if we don’t use the evidence-based solutions to try to give them a chance to get to the starting line.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): By many measures, the U.S. economy seems to have picked up steam this year. And the most recent jobs report saw the best results since January 2012.
But many Americans say they are still doubtful about economic opportunity and the ability to move up the ladder. In fact, a new poll by The New York Times found the public is more pessimistic than it was right after the financial collapse. Just 64 percent of those surveyed said they still believed it was possible to become wealthy if they started out poor.
That’s a pronounced drop from 2009 and the lowest level in two decades. The poll also sampled opinions with some surprising answers on a range of economic issues.
Andrew Ross Sorkin, a columnist for The New York Times and editor at large of its DealBook section, joins us now. He also co-hosts Squawk Box on CNBC.
Welcome back to the NewsHour.
You know, we have been seeing, I guess, coming off the midterm elections that Americans don’t feel good about the economy, despite the statistics that say otherwise. But this poll that The Times has done suggests a much deeper, long-term kind of pessimism.
How do you explain it?
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, The New York Times: Well, you know, we wanted to try to look at this concept of the American dream, this concept of mobility, of starting poor and really becoming rich.
We also asked people what they thought rich meant, and I would tell you we thought some of those answers were quite surprising. You don’t need to be a millionaire in this country to be considered rich. About 25 percent, 26 percent of the respondents said, if you can make $100,000 or $200,000, that was very wealthy in this country.
But we wanted to look into that mobility issue, and so many people repeatedly said they didn’t think that mobility existed in the same way that they thought it might have existed before. And, frankly, what was most surprising about it was that people thought that they had a better shot even three years ago, after the financial crisis.
And I think that it’s really a demonstration of the tale of two countries, if you will, when it comes to the economy that we have seen over the past years, which really goes to this larger issue of inequality.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Next, a conversation about the scope of growing inequality, not only in the U.S., but in other countries around the world.
It’s the focus of new research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.
Among its findings: Income inequality has been rising over the past three decades, in the U.S. most of all, but also in other countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and France. The OECD also said the share of income going to the richest citizens grew in many countries, with the wealthiest 1 percent of the population in the U.S. more than doubling their share since 1980 to nearly 20 percent of all income.
Secretary-General Angel Gurria is the head of the OECD. He was in Washington today for a speech on the subject.
And he joins me now.
Welcome to the NewsHour.
ANGEL GURRIA, Secretary-General, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, the first thing I have to ask you is, this OECD, an organization founded in Europe, principally around European countries, interested in inequality in the U.S. Why?
ANGEL GURRIA: Well, first of all, the organization was founded by the United States because it’s a successor to the Marshall Plan. The United States are heavily invested in the organization and heavily invested in Europe, of course.
And, second, it happens to be based in Paris, but it has 34 members, 20 of which are European. The rest are non-Europeans. They’re from all over the world, and of course the United States is a very important member.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now; a conversation with former President Bill Clinton about economic growth, inequality, health care, and foreign policy.
I sat down with him earlier today in Washington as part of a fiscal summit run by the Peterson Foundation. And the economy was naturally the place to start.
Here is a portion of our nearly hour-long conversation.
I’m going to plunge right in, because one of the interesting conversations we have been having lately in Washington and around the world is about inequality. It’s back again.
I went back and looked at a conversation we had on this stage three years ago, and we were talking about it then. Why do you think now? Why is Thomas Piketty (see post on book) suddenly such a big deal?
FMR. PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Well, first of all, it is severe constraint on growth for the country.
And it is evidence of a loss of social mobility. The median real middle income, adjusted for inflation, is still slightly lower than it was the day I left office. And the cost of education and health care and other things has gone up.
The average walking-around person is having a pretty tough time. And it’s also really put a crimp in the whole idea of the American dream, that, if you work hard, you can do better than your parents did.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Questions about the scope and causes of income inequality have resonated loudly in the U.S. in recent years. Now a new economics book about these issues is making a big, and surprising, splash of its own among experts and the public.
We’re going to spend the next couple of nights looking at it, and the debate around it.
Tonight, our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, has a look at what’s in the book that’s capturing so much attention. It’s part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): Perhaps the most unlikely bestseller in America; the English translation of French economist Thomas Piketty’s 577-page tome, “Capital.”
His recent U.S. press tour was likened to Beatlemania, with standing-room-only events. Nobel laureates on stage with him piled on the praise…
JOSEPH STIGLITZ, Columbia University: This is — it’s a fantastic book.
PAUL SOLMAN: … especially ones tilting left who share concern for the global trend the 42-year-old Parisian has definitively documented: growing economic inequality.
SUMMARY: In "Capital," French economist Thomas Piketty explores how wealth and the income derived from it magnifies the problems of inequality. Gwen Ifill gets debate on his data and conclusions from Heather Boushey of Washington Center for Equitable Growth and Kevin Hassett of American Enterprise Institute.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The national battle over inequality, the rich vs. the rest of the population, has taken a curious turn in the San Francisco Bay Area, where buses carrying high-tech workers have become a symbol of the divide.
NewsHour special correspondent Spencer Michels has our story.
SPENCER MICHELS (NewsHour): Every weekday morning, between 7:30 and 10:00, dozens of big, sleek buses roll down Valencia Street in the heart of San Francisco’s traditionally Latino Mission District and other city thoroughfares.
Using bus stops created for city buses, the private coaches pick up a cargo of workers who for the most part have moved into the city and work 30 or 40 miles south of it at places like Google, Facebook, Apple, eBay and Yahoo! The free buses, generally referred to as Google Buses, are one of the perks for high-tech workers in high demand in Silicon Valley.
When they began rolling six or seven years ago, they were generally praised as an alternative to crowded highways and carbon emissions from cars. But that’s not the issue, says writer Rebecca Solnit, one of the first to charge that the buses were more than a way to get to work.
REBECCA SOLNIT, Writer: They’re unmarked, and with tinted windows, so you don’t know who’s inside. They’re like a cross between a limousine and an armored personnel carrier, cruising around the central city.
SPENCER MICHELS: Critics say the buses are clogging city bus stops. And while the tech companies have recently agreed to pay the city a dollar per bus per stop for their use, the critics say it isn’t enough to make up for the congestion they cause. So feelings are raw.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week's news, including the income inequality and consequences of money in American politics, the federal corruption charges against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and some early super PAC support for Hillary Clinton.
SUMMARY: It's been said that money is the root of all evil. Does money make people more likely to lie, cheat and steal? Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on new research from the University of California, Berkeley about how wealth and inequality affects us psychologically.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Why are some of the top achievers missing out on a shot to go to some of the best universities?
Jeffrey Brown explores that question, part of our continuing coverage on inequality in America.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): For years, colleges and universities have been trying to diversify their student body, not just by ethnicity, but by income as well.
But despite high-profile moves at some schools to do so, including big boosts in financial assistance and even full tuition, the numbers are still falling short of the goal. A recent study is shedding new light on the problem and what's behind it. The analysis found just 34 percent of high-achieving seniors from the lower end of the income ladder attend one of the 238 most select schools.
By comparison, nearly 80 percent of high-achieving students from the upper end of the income ladder attend an elite school. The study also found there are many more high-achieving students from lower-income backgrounds than schools now know of or are recruiting.
Long before the Occupy movement sparked renewed protest of growing inequality, another global movement was quietly engaged in building a more democratic economy. From coffee growers in Kenya seeking a fair market price to worker-owned green businesses reviving the American Rust Belt, cooperatives are helping to spur a reinvention of work in a period of worldwide recession.
In the current economic crisis, cooperatives have often proven more resilient than traditional businesses, and many believe that the scope of worker- and member-owned enterprises across the world represents a revolution in the making. Globally, an estimated 1 billion people are members of cooperatives. With combined earnings rivaling Canada’s GDP, co-ops could be the fastest-growing business model by the end of the decade. To promote awareness of their potential, the United Nations has declared 2012 the “International Year of Cooperatives.” In response, cooperative organizers are calling for protest movements to support building “an economy worth occupying.”
“It was really serendipitous that the ‘Year of Cooperatives’ happened at the same time as the Occupy movement,” says Cheyenna Weber of SolidarityNYC, a group that links social movements with “solidarity economy” initiatives. “There’s so much attention to this because people are intimately aware that the economic crisis is not going away on its own … they’re starting to get serious about doing it themselves.”
But do the swelling numbers of cooperative businesses amount to a force capable of transforming the broader economy? Governmental support for co-ops, though increasing at the behest of the U.N., is based on the principle that co-ops can create employment as part of a mixed economy, most often in sectors where capital has retreated. And though most co-ops follow a set of seven principles – among them open membership, autonomy and concern for community – there are significant differences in how directly members or workers participate in decision-making and how explicitly they engage with broader economic justice movements.
Moreover, because growth-oriented cooperatives must continue to compete in a capitalist market (though the Evergreen cooperatives in Cleveland have been able to make use of a quasi-public market that draws on the purchasing power of local hospitals and universities), contradictions often emerge between the enterprise’s business practices and the values it espouses. While the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain’s Basque region – often considered the most successful example of worker-owned enterprise – have been hailed for their collaborative handling of economic downturn, protecting jobs at home has necessitated an expansion of their operations overseas. Today, the group has more subsidiaries abroad than actual cooperatives, and uses a two-tier system of membership in which nonmembers are not eligible to vote or share in other benefits enjoyed by members. In January 2011, one of Mondragon’s appliance factories in Poland became the target of a go-slow strike from workers fighting stagnant wages and the use of temporary workers.
Elsewhere in the world, worker-owned enterprises have also struggled with identity crises: Argentina’s famous occupied factory movement has suffered divisions between those factories that seek legal recognition from the state and viability within a market economy and those that have maintained an anti-capitalist stance and attempt to further the spread of occupations.
Though cooperatives represent a promising means of building new economic models, many activists are quick to point out that the old ones aren’t going to disappear without a fight. For this reason, Weber says, her group’s early efforts to engage with Occupy Wall Street (OWS) were sometimes marked by distrust. “Certain people are really attached to the idea that cooperatives aren’t radical enough,” she says. “But there’s a tension: You have to build something, and you also have to create space for it to be built. We’re looking for a way to push our vision as far as we can within existing economic models.”
Within OWS, New York activists have started two co-ops – a screen-printing guild and “OccuCopy,” which provides printing and designs for progressive groups – and are in the process of starting two more.
Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism, notes that activists could also play a greater role in organizing within existing cooperatives and supporting workers’ efforts to become owners. After winning a reprieve of their plant’s closing with support from local labor groups and Occupy Chicago in February, the United Electrical workers who famously occupied the Republic Windows and Doors plant in 2008 are now considering purchasing the plant and running it as a worker co-op. And in March, the United Steelworkers and Mondragon announced details of a plan to develop manufacturing cooperatives using a “union co-op model.” Both developments represent promising models of how traditional progressive institutions can foster initiatives for democratic ownership.
“Any serious political movement has historically walked on two legs,” says Alperovitz. “It had to involve protests, elections and demonstrations … [and]building a new direction institutionally… . We’ve got to do both.”
PAUL SOLMAN (Newshour): The super committee doomed in part by a deadlock over taxing the rich. Same for the bill to extend the payroll tax and unemployment benefits, held up by the issue of taxing millionaires.
And so the question: Do higher taxes on the rich retard economic growth, or don't they? We thought we'd look to history for an answer, visiting landmarks of New York with nonpartisan tax professor Alex Raskolnikov -- first stop, a memorial to World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, soon after the federal income tax began, with rates from 1 percent on a net income of up to $20,000 -- today's half-a-million or so -- en route to 7 percent on all earnings above $500,000, today's $11 million or more, higher rates on the extra or marginal income -- thus the term marginal tax rates.
PAUL SOLMAN: At the end of the day, then, high inequality and a sluggish economy.
Unfortunately, if history is any guide, there's no conclusive evidence that economic growth is stimulated by lowering marginal tax rates on the rich, or, for that matter, raising them.
