 Ladies and gentlemen, the panel is going to start in a few minutes. I'm not the moderator. I am not the panel. My name is Patrick Chappatt. I am an editorial cartoonist for the New York Times and for European media, Le Tain and NZZ, Amazon Time. And we thought it would be interesting to introduce the topic tonight as a warm-up by showing a few cartoons. What do you think? OK, so listen, it's really good to be having this conversation about the people left behind here at the World Economic Forum because that is the right place to be talking about income inequalities. It is. An American carnage happened in 2008. You know what I'm talking about, right? The subprime implosion, the financial crisis. And that caused a lot of pain. A lot of destruction. Let us remember who saved the day back then. Who came to the rescue of big banks? Well, the little taxpayer did. So soon, the financial economy was back on track. The stock market recovered. For the real economy, it took more time. You can look at that differently, as seen from the little guy. So on the ruins of the old economy, a new one is emerging, of course, driven by technology and digital giants like Amazon, which started by turning upside down the book industry. They're now coming to a brick and mortar place next to you. In this economic transformation, jobs were lost. People seem to lose hope in the future. They started to wonder, is upwards mobility still working in America? So at that point came a political revolution. A populist was elected to the White House, the stablest of all geniuses. He appealed to the forgotten men and women of the United States. He said he would bring back coal jobs. His promise was America first, while he didn't specify first in what. Donald Trump said the problem is immigration and Muslims and people coming from, you know, shithole countries, excuse his French. He says he wants a new immigration. He wants prime quality migrants. But hey, Trump had a huge success, the tax cut. OK, it's a tax cut that mostly favors the richest Americans. But that's fair. Why would you pay for roads and bridges when you hardly use them? So ladies and gentlemen, here we are at the start of a new year, the start of a new era that will be profitable, hopefully, at least for the 1%. As for the others, the left behind, they are left wondering, will trickle down economics work? And that is my question for the panel. And I now leave the stage to Donna of USA Today. Thank you. All right, how can we top that? That was fantastic. Thank you, Patrick. So we've got a pretty serious topic to discuss after that. We're going to be talking about left behind in the United States. But before we get started on our panel, I wanted to show you a little video. Last year, after the very hard fought presidential election, the country was feeling terribly divided. And USA Today embarked on a project to introduce our readers to extraordinary Americans. These were Americans who sought to make a difference in their communities, big ways, little ways. They were of every race, every religion, every political persuasion. They were from red states and blue states. And we didn't ask them. We didn't ask them what their politics are. So we just wanted to present them to our readers. And the project was called I Am An American. So a few weeks ago, when I found out I was doing this panel, we went back to some of those people who we had written about. And we asked them what they felt about the state of the United States a year later. And so here is what they had to say. Five words when I think about America Today. Broken. Dialogue. Uncertain. Powerful. And challenged. I think for America, we're heading for a crisis. There's a philosophy right now in our country that we should be more local, more America first. We need to get back to the reality that we're part of a global reality, a global community. I think fear separates us from one another. I think the idea that those who aren't like us are out to get us, I think that's a very dangerous idea. I think we're scared of things that we don't know, things that are new, and that we are exacerbating situations by focusing on all the differences and everything that divides us. In my lifetime, I don't remember America ever being as divided as it is now. The lines of communication are gonna have to open up because if we continue down this path, I don't see anything necessarily good being accomplished. Some of the issues that lay upon the surface are easy to diagnose. They're like political, religious, how we feel about gender issues. But I think it's a lot easier to hate than the love. And it takes a long time to just go in and learn someone's story rather than just hating them for one of their ideologies. I think that we really need to look at the political party system in this country and really decide whether it is actually meeting the needs of our democracy. I think the majority of Americans want to be a part of the world and they want the world to be a part of them. What worries me about the future of our country is that we're not learning from our mistakes. We've seen things that have divided us and we're not doing anything to work towards change. Whatever your desires are, whatever your wishes and dreams are for you and your family, it's the same. For immigrant and refugees, it's the same. We all have the same dreams and the same goals. And then you think, well, how am I gonna get there? You really just have to sit down and see the humanness of your neighbor. That your neighbor is more than what he or she thinks about gender fluidity, religion, or political stances. A lot of the times I just don't see people really wanting to put in that hard word. This kind of tunnel vision thinking, this ideological approach to reality. Reality's always more complex. Reality's always messy. You can't control life. You can try to understand life and try to help other people, but it's a journey. Americans need compromise. They need someone to stand up and say, although I may take the political hit for this, I am going to stand up for what is right. I think we need another person of quality, like George Washington, to actually say no to power, to actually put that power back in the hands of the people. After all, the Constitution starts with we the people. It doesn't say we the CEOs or we the elected representatives. It's we the people, it's all of us. So we'll get this discussion started. Let me welcome up our panelists. Okay, everybody's here, settled in, excellent. All right, so during our session today, it's called Left Behind in the United States. We're gonna take a look at the issues that seem to be fueling that deep divide and the sense of dissatisfaction in the United States. There are actually some troubling indicators. Life expectancy in the US is down for the second year in a row, and those declines are actually quite out of sync with the rest of developing, the rest of developed nations and even some developing nations where lives are actually getting longer and healthier. And also, we have a growing economy right now, but wages are by and large stagnant. And that is the sort of thing that really sort of cuts at the middle class. You heard some of their voices today, now we're gonna try and drill into why it is that folks feel left behind, disenfranchised and sort of not part of the American dream. And so I'm gonna start by introducing Arlie Russell Hochschild. She spent five years at the kitchen tables and the crawfish boils of the people of Southwest Louisiana researching for her books, Strangers in Their Own Land, Anger and Morning on the American Right, and she is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Next we have Congressman Mark Meadows of North Carolina. He is chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. It's a group of roughly 40 conservative members of Congress, and he is, and the group, and he is, are dedicated to giving voice to those who feel forgotten by their government. And next we have Mary Kay Henry. In 2010, she became the first woman elected international president of the Service Employees International Union. You probably know that as the SEIU. She has 30 years of experience organizing healthcare workers to fight for a higher minimum wage, affordable healthcare, and in general improving the lot of working families. Next we have Mike McGavick. He is the CEO of XL Group, which is a global insurance group. He's been active in Republican politics and was a key strategist in an effort to change U.S. Superfunds environmental laws. And finally, we have Dr. David Skorton. He is the 13th secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. You might know him for the Museum of Air and Space, but he oversees 19 museums and galleries, 20 libraries, I think, the National Zoo research by the Smithsonian. And what's very interesting is his strategic plan for the Smithsonian, which calls for a focus on convening critical conversations about topics of public interest. So, now I'm gonna ask you all a question. So how many people here think that in the future for the next generations, life for Americans will be better? Please raise your hands. Okay, five. Okay, and how many think the future for the next generation will be worse? I'd like to see that optimism. Awesome. Okay, well, so the Pew Charitable Trust, Pew Surveys did a survey in July and they asked that question of Americans from both parties. More people say the future for the next generation will be worse, 48%, but they are actually more optimistic than you are. So, all right. On that note, we will... We're, let's go to Arlie. So your book, he's been five years researching this. Tell us why you embarked on this journey and what you found. Already in 2011, I could feel the split going Congress was at a standstill and I realized that I was in a bubble in Berkeley, California and it was a geographic bubble. It was a media bubble. Every The New York Times, it was a electronic bubble. You know, I'd opened my laptop and it gave me back to myself. Then I realized that we're all in bubbles and if I was gonna really understand what was going on, I had to get out of my bubble and find an equal and opposite bubble that's as far right as Berkeley, California was left. Take my moral and political alarm system off and permit myself a great deal of interest and curiosity to get to know the people close up that I thought I'd probably have differences with and it's the most extraordinary experience of my academic life. It was amazing, wonderful people who seem to live in a different truth in certain ways. I went in with the red state paradox question. How could it be that across the nation, it's the poorest states, the states with the worst healthcare, the worst museums or lowest wages, lowest life expectancy, most pollution are also the states that receive more money from the federal government in aid than they give to it in taxes and also fear and revile the federal government. If you have a problem, you want some help. Louisiana, where I ended up in around Lake Charles, mainly, turned out to be an exaggerated version of that. Second poorest state, 44% of the state budget came from federal government and overwhelmingly Republican Tea Party. I was interested in the people who were most enthusiastic. I was interested in people like you, actually. I'm trying to get you out of the real life there. And so when I got there and went fishing, I'd ask people, could you show me where you were born? Where did you go to school? What road did you sit in? You know what church do? Could we go to the church? Where are your parents buried? And the course of things and going fishing, especially fishing, that was the best. You're in this boat, you know. They threw that question away. Like one guy that begins the book, his name is Mike, and he was born at Sugar Plantation as a child and works in oil oil as adulthood, sort of the old south, the new south, and loved the Tea Party, real, he's your guy. And I said, great, thank you so much for letting me get to know you. And I'm writing a book on this, is it okay? I'll tell you, I'm a completely open, I'm a professor of sociology, you know. Scar number one, Berkeley, California, so. And we had some wonderful conversations and actually quite a lot of common ground came out. But about my question, he threw it away. He said, you know what, we're ashamed of being the second poorest. We don't want to be the poorest, you know, those bad rates. Yeah, yeah. And as Cajuns, they almost made fun of themselves, very self-deprecatory sense of humor about it. But he said, that's your question, that's not mine. We don't want to be reliant on the federal government or the state government, and they had, I don't know if you want my whole rap of the book, but that there was a deep story underlying his political beliefs and I think left and right, all, both of us, you know, have a deep story and the book is about that, deep story. So what would you say is, Congressman, is the fundamental thing that folks in the Tea Party reach for politically? What do they want? What do they feel about their state of life? You know, I don't know if it's as much, the Tea Party is people in general. I mean, with you going down to Louisiana to talk to people, I mean, generally speaking, I serve the mountainous area of North Carolina and there is a distrust of the government. In fact, there's a distrust of engaging globally. The very fact that I'm here does not get me points. And you know, and so when you look back, you have to realize, well, no, I think the interesting thing, I look out, I've got a colleague, a Democrat colleague that is on the front row. We have a lot more in common than the R or D would suggest. And what happens is, is, you know, his wife has actually reached out to my wife and they've been, I mean, truly could not have been more gracious. And sometimes we want to put people in a box, in a Tea Party box or a liberal box or this box. And really everybody just wants to live the American dream if you're from America or you want to have your kids, you go to work, not because necessarily that it's gratifying for you, that is one part of it, but really to provide for your children or your grandchildren so that they have a better way of life. Now, what happens is, is that comes into conflict, many times in areas outside of the urban areas, it comes into conflict with they distrust the government, they distrust party politics, a lot of them. And so they're looking for someone to help make sure that they can rise out of poverty. And a lot of times it's very difficult. So you have these labels. We started a caucus that, you know, we said we're for the millions of Americans who felt like Washington DC had forgotten them. Now we didn't have a party associated with that. In fact, if anything, you know, my party many times wished we would go away. And so when you look at that, it's all about trying to make sure somebody has a voice. I probably have, you know, we've got somebody here with the union. I probably have more union support that would be typically a Democrat voter who said, all right, this guy is willing to hear what concerns me, the fact that I'm more concerned about what happens with my family than anything else. And so you take a typical Democrat voter who says, listen, I don't care about parties. And I think that honestly, that's what Donald Trump tapped into. He felt like wages were stagnant. So you got union workers voting for him, perhaps the first time I had people coming up and saying, I've never voted for a Republican ever. And this billionaire is going to represent me even though there's a huge disparity. So I think it's living the American dream. I've been blessed enough to do that. I mean, my wife and I started a small business with the $25,000 credit line. We came from nothing in very humble beginnings. And you know, and I've been in the Oval Office more in the last, you know, year than I ever imagined I would be, you know. So, but it's about meeting that fundamental needs. So whether it's in the United States or in Switzerland or in Africa or anywhere else, everybody wants to make sure that they can provide for their family. So let me turn to you, Mary Kay. So you do represent the unions. Where do you think they started to feel the disconnect or if they felt a disconnect at all with the government? Well, I think of myself as representing home care providers and childcare providers and registered nurses and corrections officers, two million people working hard every day who think they're left behind because the basic promise of America where when you work hard, you ought to be able to get ahead and your children ought to be doing better than you've done has been broken. And it seems like the audience in general feels with that. And I think for our members and for the 64 million people that are living in our country and working two and three jobs and can't find their way out of poverty like Mark did, I think they feel like the systems rigged against them on many levels. For African Americans in our country, the system's been rigged since slavery and we haven't unrigged the rules. For immigrants in our country, the system's rigged because we can't figure out a public policy that gives a path to citizenship. And for all working people, CEOs and corporations are incentivized to not put money back into the pockets of workers so that wages are rising as our productivity rises. And so I think why we think it's really important for working people to be able to join together is it's a way for working people to join with government and with business leaders to rewrite the rules in a way that will allow us all to do better. And I believe I'm optimistic in spite of thinking that my members generally feel their future is not gonna be better. I'm optimistic that together in our incredible country that our government can come together if working people have a larger organization and say in being able to raise wages and allow our democracy to include everybody. So Mike, let me tap your expertise as a CEO, as an employer of workers. Do you feel like corporate America has disconnected with the American middle class? You know, it's an interesting challenge to think about America where we worked a little harder not to label each other and worked a little harder to solve problems. So I look at what's going on and this demonization of corporate America. And I find it very much at odds with the people I work with, that appears ideal within the company I lead. What we fundamentally exist, particularly in the company I lead, for a very important social purpose, to try and make the ill things that befall people corrected and to do that in a way that can be done rapidly and fairly. That's a pretty useful thing to be doing. And when I hear broad swaths of American and Americans set aside because they're this or that, usually because they're different than the particular niche I occupy, I tend to shut down a little bit and say, let's really work on what's going on. Ironically, as I listen to this conversation, I would have been one of those hands up at the first side of it. I am more optimistic. That's because I believe fundamentally that these questions are a trailing indicator of people's experience. What they have been experiencing still is the slowest recovery from an economic dislocation in American history. And they are deeply embittered by that because when that happens over a long period of time, you will lose your faith in upward mobility because it isn't happening around you. And in fact, what is happening around you is despair. Why is life span declining in America? Opioids is the simplest answer of all and why is it so prevalent? Despair. So I think about what is the conversation we should be having that would unlock growth, unlock despair because fracturing is a function of anger and jealousy then happens when opportunity is denied. You create opportunity again, which I actually believe is starting to happen. And I believe what comes from that will be a coming together and a focus on how to accelerate that progress. That's the conversation I'm here to engage in. And I believe it's a hand. So one of the things, David, that is I think very much tied to opportunity is education. We're here talking about industry 4.0, a lot of technology displacing manufacturing jobs, which were very key part of the middle class experience in the United States. Where do you think we are failing in our educational system to provide people with opportunity and where are we succeeding? So there's a lot of wisdom on the panel and I wanna thank you for making me a part of it. I have to admit that I start out life. I'm gonna burden you with a little personal information. My dad and his family came over from Russia 100 years ago next year. And I was in that group of people who were very optimistic about the United States because my dad said, don't tell me about your troubles. We have things that we can do in this country. My dad barely finished high school and one generation later, me, his son was able to go to college and medical school and do all these unbelievable things that grace has allowed me to do. But I have to admit, I vote with a 48% unless we make a few changes. And education I think could be one of them. I wanna point out one thing that I know USA Today is well aware of because I've seen the coverage before. This is not the first time that people have been pessimistic. In polling data several times over the last 30 years or so, there have been dips in optimism like this. But I honestly think there's a couple of things a little bit different about this. I spent some of my research career working on ways to take medical images and automatically analyze them so that you could have a machine assess how narrow your coronary artery was rather than have a cardiologist estimate by eyeball. And we had some success with it. I never thought that a few years later I'd be sitting here at Davos reminding everybody that we have 1.8 million truck drivers in the United States. 1.8 million truck drivers, why do we have so many? That's one of the last occupations where you can make a middle class wage without a college education. It's not gonna be outsourced from overseas. You can't have someone in another country drive your truck in this country. And right now those jobs are not automated. But I'm here to tell you there will be. And when they are automated, we're gonna have a lot of people out of work all over the country. And so I'm finally gonna answer your question. I'm known for my long winding answer. And I appreciate your patience. I appreciate you not leaving during this answer. But I will say that we have a way to turn this around and move me back into the 23%. If we can think about education again as broader than the vocationally obsessed educational aspirations, a lot of families, a lot of parents and a lot of kids have right now. We're gonna have several different careers over a lifetime as quickly as technology is changing, not just several jobs. And so in order to get ready for that wild, wild change that can give you a whipsaw, we're gonna have to go back to old time education. Albert Einstein had, who should have been on this panel instead of me, had a saying that arts, religions and science are branches from the same tree. I think we need to go back to where we are failing and that is being too narrowly cast in having vocationally oriented education, even if it's at a research university, and reintegrate the social sciences, the humanities, the arts with the STEM disciplines because we're gonna need not only to have an understanding of phenomena, like why does a star look like that or what's dark matter, but we're gonna have to understand society and people to know how to apply that knowledge. So I think we need to watch our tuition. We need to make sure that everybody has a way to get educated and not just people going through the normal sequence, but those 1.8 million truck drivers, we're gonna have to come together as a country and find ways to retrain them, re-educate them in different disciplines. And what keeps me up at night on not being melodramatic is how do we help those people put food on their table while they're being retrained? So that's what I'm concerned about. Okay, well I wanna note that we tried to get Albert Einstein and he didn't return my calls. Yeah. So let me turn back to you, congressman. So what do you think about how we close this gap between the folks who are starting to feel their jobs slip away and they don't see a way forward? Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is the opportunity where they can actually see a path out and so many times, people that end up in despair as was mentioned earlier is because they don't see a way out. They feel like, well, I'm just, this is the way it's going to be and whether it was in Louisiana or anything else, they just come to that point where they can't see it. Now the interesting thing is that my belief is that those paths out have to be opportunities and equal opportunities, but not necessarily that we put this person with this job and you allow them to use their God-given abilities that you find that there are some people, I would hate to be a truck driver. I mean, and yet at the same time, I love numbers and I love to calculate and see that and that would drive somebody else crazy. And so it's trying to find that, but the opportunity that we're talking about is really making sure that we don't stand in the way of allowing great creativity. Let's look at the nation of Israel in terms of startup companies, more startup companies per capita in that one tiny little nation. And why is that? Where they're given the ability to fail. We sometimes have this perfectionist mentality is don't fail at anything. And if you do, don't admit it. And yet they are applauded for their failures because it brings them that much closer to success. So I think one, you have an expectation that you can fail. And the other is, is when we're talking about opportunities is that you listen to everyone. So you've got a very diverse panel. You put together a good group hoping to get a good USA Today conflict. And so in doing that though, my philosophy, my son was a national champion debater. And so he would argue both sides of the same resolution. So you had to be prepared to argue. But my philosophy is, is there's an element of truth in everything that is said. Now, the question for us is to find out how much of it is true. How much of what she is saying, do I perceive to be truthful? And then ultimately, how much of it is truthful? And so when you do that, that exploration of not having a box and finding out the differences, it creates opportunities that I think many times we sometimes miss in the bigger inner cities. We have this program that's going to help with this group and this program is going to help with that group instead of allowing forward that mind to explore the possibilities of and creativity. So let me ask you a little pushback in that USA Today fighting spirit. I would be disappointed if you didn't. So while we're allowing that creativity to develop, while we're allowing people to form their own opportunities, how do they put food on their table? How do they survive day to day and find housing? And what role should the government be playing in that? You know, in terms of a helping hand, really what happens is, as I see two different things that are happening, the American people in general are very generous people and even the government wants to provide that helping hand. At the same time, there's an interesting phenomenon that's going on even in my district where unemployment's at 4%. And yet we had some of the highest unemployment in 2008 of anywhere in the country. I mean, I had two counties that were above 20%. And so, I mean, and when you look at those numbers, they're staggering. However, what I've found is that we have to also put a value back in work. And what I'm seeing many times is that you have people that are going out and you say, well, we have two standards. We have probably 2000 jobs that could be filled today in my district and there's two standards. You pass a drug test and show up to work. Now, those are pretty low bar. I mean, when you come to a work standard and yet it gets back to what was said earlier, if you provide that support when they fall on hard times and yet not so much so that it becomes a trap. So a safety net, but a net can be used for two things. It can be to catch you or it can be to contain you. And sometimes we have a difficulty in the containment part that becomes really, we say, well, this is the way it's going to be and gets back to where I started with this where, well, I get this, I can't break out of it. So we've got to balance those two. Mary Kay, I see you're champing at the bit there. You got something to say? Well, I don't think it's so individualistic. I think that we have to take responsibility in a way that the cartoons showed us at the very beginning, that there are policy decisions and systems and structures that don't allow for individual creativity or initiative to flourish in a system where for the last 40 years, there's been this widening inequality in our nation. And when you look around the globe, other countries are dealing with that inequality in very different ways. So I was just in a conversation with the Nordic countries about the social dialogue between government, business, and civil society in Norway and Sweden. And they're dealing with inequality and they make a different decision as a nation that childcare ought to be universal so that women have equal access to the workforce and that elder care is a municipal function so that I can go to work and not worry about my mom falling because she has access to a middle-class worker who can feed her family and not do what home care providers in the US do, which is work 100 hours a week and our impoverty excluded from social security, used to be excluded from Fair Labor Standards Act, all because we've structured into the US economy an exclusion of people who are never gonna make it to the middle class and for the people that have held middle-class jobs have no hope of holding onto it because we don't have an economic policy that deals with the 1.8 million truck drivers. And the 1.8 million truck drivers, that's no longer a middle-class standard of living. It was deregulated 40 years ago. There's 200,000 truck drivers left that have a middle-class standard of living. The rest of them are living in poverty and they're called independent contractors because the employment relationship has been severed. And so that's not gonna be solved through an individual deciding to have more initiative. There's a structural problem that's keeping truck drivers from leading a middle-class life in our nation and it shouldn't just be truck drivers, like home care providers and childcare providers are care work in an economy that has never been valued in our nation. The Canadians value it, the Swedes value it. That is a really important job that our country needs as our population. As I age, as a 60-year-old, somebody's gonna need to take care of me and there's a million more of those jobs that are gonna be needed in the next five years in the US. But they're poverty jobs. They aren't valued by us. And so when you think about what can be done, I just feel like it's a combination of working people being able to join together like we've been doing in supporting the fast food workers in their fight for 15 in a union. Imagine if the fast food companies did in the US what they've decided to do in other countries and allow those jobs to be middle-class jobs in the US. There's advertising that it's an entry-level job, but people are consigned to those jobs because they're structured in a way that doesn't allow them to do what Mark is saying. And I think there are individuals that miraculously make it through, but it can't be that 4 million people want to do a minimum wage job that has no guaranteed hours and no benefits. That job should be financed by multinational corporations that decide to do that in Australia, Denmark, South Africa. Those jobs are $18 and $20 an hour jobs with a social security system where people have retirement and universal healthcare coverage and can actually provide for their families. So I just think it's more than individual choice. I think it's, as a nation, we have to make a decision that we aren't gonna leave people behind. And I think what I have to do as a union leader is organize out of love. I think that the one video where he ends by saying it's harder to organize out of love than, hey, that's not my experience. I think most working people in this country would fight to the death for their kids. And my experience is that happens out of love for each other. And I think that we want to continue to mobilize and unite people to make a demand on our government for values that I believe Mark and I share. That's the craziness of this situation in the US. That Mark and I both believe that we want a country where our children can do better than we've done. That's the promise of our nation. And that means that we have to decide as a nation that everybody's included. And we haven't done that. I see a bilat coming together right there. Let me quickly ask Mike a question here. So the structures that Mary Kaye is talking about, would if those kinds of things were in place, would it help you get the workforce that you absolutely would love to have? Would it help your workers? Do you see it as something corporate America would buy into? I think the one common thread that this pattern would, this panel would automatically agree on is the broken nature of the education system. If I was to think of one thing, I'm highly confident this group would agree on. And there are several elements to that that I want to focus on as part of the answer to your question, because if we get this right, I'm not so sure Mary Kaye will need to do all the organizing that she will have so much to do. I'd like to decline your workload by creating that workforce in another way. And let me start with two things. Number one, and this is the one I feel most passionately about, I've worked on this for a long time. Early childhood education is profoundly important, profoundly underfunded, and if I could invest $1 in one single thing, that would be it. It attacks intergenerational poverty, it provides new opportunities in populations that have had none, and it does it in an astonishing low price point with remarkable dividends over time. So I would leave you with one thought. And when I say that phrase early childhood, we tend to get it wrong. We think of expanding a head start in the US and that. No, this is from minus nine months to three years old. The brain, every bit of science says that's when we win them or lose them. And once we lose them, we lock them in and then the upper mobility statistics are atrocious. The odds of a kid being broken by the time they're three and recovering are nil. Number two, our current education system, this belief that we should still trundle off to school to be babysat by someone not very well paid and often not very well interested is a phenomenal decision of risk for our children. Is this really in a world? Do we really think it modernizes the education system? That there's an iPad in the room? We have lost our minds. And think about where the world is going today. It's such a great point. The real underlying anxiety, I believe, is nativist fear brought on by globalization and technology. And they believe those are gonna wipe out all the jobs. I don't believe that. I believe we'll create a whole new category of work where empathy and a whole bunch of human skills that cannot be displaced will rise and be more important. But sure as heck, the changes are gonna be really messy. And we better have a society that cares and helps people change. We better teach lifelong learning which our classroom does and not. We gotta get these minds on a whole different path that they're gonna be useful contributors in the future. And that will create the workforce I'm looking for. All right, all right. I'd like to see this kind of passion. All right, David. Don't you just hate when you go to one of these panels and somebody says, you know, I agree with all the earlier points that were made. Well, damn it. I agree with all the earlier points that were made. But there's something missing from the panel with respect to my co-panelist. It's what you had in the little clip in the beginning. It's the voice of the people affected. Now, I wanna be presumptuous. The congressman goes back to his district. He probably gives this many speeches and this much listening. And when you go back to the union, you do this much speeches and this much listening. And so I think it's important that we find ways to bring the voice of people back into the conversation because that's what America was really based on. In order to do that, I think we have to create and it's terrible that we have to do this in a sort of an artificial way in 2018. We have to recreate sort of spaces where people feel comfortable disagreeing with each other and working their way through things, which is a great, great American tradition. Short commercial coming from museums. It'll be over soon. Yeah. If you look at a lot of the trust polls of what people trust, the military, museums and libraries tend to flow a little higher in trust than many other institutions, types of it. Members of Congress are way up there. Oh yeah, well, I mean, you all are so high you're, you can't even talk about it. Yeah. Did I do okay, Mark? Yeah. But I do really, really believe that whether it's a museum or a library or whether we just decide to have dinners around our table and bring some people in who we don't usually agree with and just talk it around a little bit, people are gonna feel a little bit more empowered. And I wanna have one little minor disagreement. It's not really a strong disagreement, but part of the reason that many people feel that school teachers are not getting the job done, it's sort of a careful seesaw result or chicken in the egg thing. Is it because the skills aren't there? Because we're not paying him enough for giving benefits enough to attract the right kind of people? Or because the education isn't right? Or because the feedback isn't right? It's a complex calculus to figure that out. But I think we need to listen to the voice of the people perhaps a little bit more than we do and find some clever ways of doing it. Well, let me let Arlie take that question because you have been spending a lot of time with the voice of the people. How would you suggest that we go about connecting with these folks, that the people in power, the people who have the ability to access Congress, the president, big money, jobs, connect? The people I came to know felt very unheard and unrecognized and felt anxious that their deep story was then, they were anxious because they felt like they were waiting in line for the American dreams, kind of like, this is a deep story, like a pilgrimage and their feet were faced forward, they were hard working, they played by the rules and their feet hadn't moved, 20 years hadn't got a raise. And in the right wing deep story, people seemed at the second moment be cutting in line. Who was that? Well, would be blacks who, through federally mandated affirmative action, are finally given access to jobs reserved for whites. Even worse, women through federally mandated affirmative action, in their view, were finally given jobs formally reserved for men and then refugees and illegal immigrants, even animals, they thought, at least environmentalists are putting animals over people. So it's waddling ahead and cutting in line. So it felt unfair to them. And they blamed Obama, they're really very alarmed by him because he seemed to be a line cutter too, waving to the line cutters and oh, the federal government isn't doing for me, it's forgotten me and I'm going backwards and the fear of that, the feeling of feeling estranged from the government and push back culturally, not their culture anymore, they felt seen as racist and homophobic and sexist and fat, just how they felt that liberals saw them and ill-educated and so on. So they were insulted and how you now connect them. I'm now part of a movement that's, you won't hear about newspaper, I hope you hear about it in USA Today eventually, but it's called the bridge alliance. There is a umbrella group, some 80 different civic kind of grassroots organizations with funny names like hi from the other side or living room conversation and actually started by moderate Republican and Democrat. And some of my Louisiana people have been up to visit me in Berkeley and we've done a number of these living room conversations left and right together. And you in a way help restore what's natural and what both sides really want. And so I see something happening. I have to say that I don't think we're getting national leadership from the top in this, but there is nonetheless a people to people movement. And I have a vision of what, if you want that, of what we really need. If you can make it brief, we didn't leave enough time for questions from the audience. So we'll give you a one minute sum up. Okay, unions used to pull people from different sectors of society, different classes and regions, rural, urban, black, white together. And the military used to pull us together, compulsory military for men or public schools when everybody went to them, pull people together. Now we need to make it up. And I'd like to see a high school program for high school seniors spend a month outside their region and class. So you get coast to go inland and inland to go coast. You get south to go north, you get north to go south for a month of, and you train students ahead in active listening and in the importance of civic engagement. So you prep them for it. And then they work together on building homes for the homeless or installing solar panels, something. I think we need to make that up. And I'd love Congress to actually fund it. Okay, well, we have very little time left. So I'm gonna ask if anyone here has any questions, but I would ask that you make your question brief. Yes. My name is Anjara Jackson. I'm from the United States. I'm a physician there. I do appreciate all of your comments. I think it's been some great insight, but I think a number of you touched upon bringing different people together. I have to say, when the panel walked up, I was extremely struck by the fact that there's not one person of color on that panel. How can you begin a dialogue talking about addressing the needs of people who are left behind when they are not included? I'm very disappointed about that. It's more of a comment than a question. Okay, no other questions? All right, well, then we'll go back to the panel. So who would like to weigh in with a, oh, there are questions. Oh, sorry. Thank you. This is a question perhaps to the congressman, perhaps to someone else. You know, one of the things that I'm hearing is that a large number of folks who feel left behind, who've voted for this administration, resent labels that other people are using labels and they don't like that. But I've heard you talk about those people living in the cities. And I think that labels have been used by everybody. And so I'm not sure if you'd like to address that or not. Sure, I'll be glad to. I think really demographically, I think is what I was referring to because you can have Tea Party members in the middle of Washington, D.C., both of them, but... So your point is well taken. I think the real interesting dynamic is that you see this left behind side of things with people of color, people in rural areas that many times feel like that they're just not being pulled into that American dream. And you're right, there's people who feel like they're getting in line, that somebody's getting in line in front of them. But I also think you've got a very relatively diverse, excluding the well taken point from an ideological point of view right here in the way that maybe we see the world. So the critical thing is to have dialogue without making a certain assumption. The very fact that I talk a little slower than most people from New York automatically conjures up the fact that they think I think as slow as I talk. We have these bias that automatically get hit with all of us. And I think one of the interesting things in Congress is that I probably have just as many very dear Democrat friends that can't be public with that because if they are public with it, all of a sudden they're seen on the house floor with a camera picture of the vast right wing conspiracy being right there beside someone who's progressive. And we've got to do away with that. I can tell you for me in my office, we've gone out and I said, I want you to find every Democrat piece of legislation that I could possibly cosponsor to try to start to break that down. Some of my dear Elijah Cummings is an African American congressman from Maryland. Dear friend, I would do anything for him. In fact, he has a piece of legislation was signed into law under this president that I co-sponsored. He was the lead person. And when we look at that, we're combining on different things like prescription drug prices and why they should be so high because that didn't just affect his district, which is Baltimore, an urban area. It affects mine, which is a rural area where a big city is 900 people. And so we've got to find ways to do that. But so many times we put this special label on and it's our way of describing who they may or may not be. And you have a certain perception. I mean, you've Googled, you all have done your Google research on all of us up here. And so you have a certain perception of what we're going to be like. And what I love to do is go into a conversation with somebody and just blow their mind and say, well, you know, I'm for this or I'm for that. And so if we can do that, regardless of where somebody lives, and it gets back to the point you were making, we want everybody to have an opportunity, regardless of who they are, what color they are, what race they are, where they live. And yet many of them, the reason why we think that our kids are not going to have it is because it's for the well connected or it's for the person that might have to be in this particular location. I still believe in an America that says that that type of opportunity is there. And yet I'm fine when I walk a mile in their moccasin. I have a very different perspective, so we need to do more of that. So speaking of legislation, and this panel seemed to be a lot in agreement on education. What do you think about Mike's idea of early childhood education, zero to three? Would that be something you would bring to your colleagues in Congress on both sides of the aisle? Yeah, the real question, and certainly, he's right from a physiological standpoint. I mean, we know the brain development is there, and yet what we've got to make sure of is that those types of things actually produce a result. And so as we look at that, providing that opportunity there, when we look at government being the answer, I've been involved with that enough to see where they really make huge mistakes. And yet I've probably been in more schools in my district than any other candidate in the last two decades. So looking at how do we best do that and how do we best fund that is certainly something that honestly, Ivanka Trump has been bringing up a number of times and trying to soften that. Okay, all right, I think we have time for one last question. Is there anything from the audience? Okay, somebody over here? Conversation around the gutted social contract, right? That we feel that we're unbelievably missing in the US. And in some ways, and I don't want to point at you, Congressman, but I feel like you're creating an opportunity for us to do so. I do that quite often, but boy, yeah. It's not a bias or a perception, anything. It's a question as to what would you just articulate as fundamental to the social contract of the United States because it doesn't feel like in a party sense that we're getting it in healthcare or investment in education or the fundamental things that actually support workers and regulation around making the world safe and growing. So I just want to hear your thoughts. Okay, so this is going to be the rapid round. So you got 30 seconds. Rapid round. Government normally does not provide equality, it provides inequality, and that goes, that will be like nails on a chalkboard to many of you. But generally speaking, if government is the one who's deciding the winners and losers, it typically will enter into a contract that is not fair or equal. Mary Kaye, respond. 30 seconds. I just think that we are in a global forum where we're trying to encourage social dialogue between many different parts of civil society, employers, academics, elected officials, and if government is not a lever for equality in this world, I don't know what is. And so, especially in the United States where the people speak through how we participate in our democracy, I think we have to, while we share values, we clearly have a very different opinion of how we get things done. And I do think it requires a new social contract where we reach agreement on the basic things that we as taxpayers want to have for everyone in our nation, and that we want everyone included. We want every immigrant on a path to citizenship. We want every returning citizen from prison to be able to also exercise their vote. We want to enfranchise our people to participate in our democracy. And I think it happens by expanding the ability of unions because people can have disagreements when they trust each other and can speak across difference. Okay, well that is it for us. Please give a warm round of thanks to our panelists. Thank you all for joining us today.