Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Bill Tabb - The Jobs Crisis (VIDEO)

Presented to the Left Labor Forum on January 18, 2011 in New York City.

PART 1


PART 2


PART 3


[video of discussion, and incomplete transcript after the break]





Ok, it's good to be with this group - it's the kind of group that comes out on a night like this, which means we're all very committed and hard-working, or a little nuts. But it's good to see you all here.

I want to begin with two things, two recent pieces. One - Paul Krugman, who I must say is about all we have in the mainstream media - beginning to get us half-way there. And I want to begin with the half-way he gets us and then I want to say a bit more.

Last week you maybe saw the column he did on the division in American politics, in which he said something. You know, I liked the column. My wife said: "Everybody knows that, stupid."

[laughter]

So you all may know it! But, I think it's a crucial place to start, and that is:
"One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state a private enterprise economy, but one in which society's winners are taxed to pay for the social safety net morally superior to the capitalism red of tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It's only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.”
-your basic social democratic, New Deal, progressive program -
"The other side believes people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That's what lies behind the modern right's fondness for violent rhetoric. Many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as...tyrannical impositions on their liberty."
[full article @ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14krugman.html ]

-and there's no middle ground between this progressive, social democratic position, and sort of Margaret Thatcher "there is no such thing as society, only individuals" - and that the Republican Party is now basically a Tea Party, where Nixon - who, you know, I grew up thinking he was the worst possible thing that could happen to America, I'm not sure that that wasn't right up to then.

But, you know [under Nixon] OSHA got passed, EPA got passed. Nixon proposed a negative income tax to help give people a basic standard of living. It was low, we didn't like it, it wasn't enough, but the thinking was of the kind Krugman is talking about. It was a bi-partisan, centerist. You do what you need to do to foster capital accumulation, but legitimation is important. You have to sort of keep the suckers happy and in the system, and all that.

And within that, basic progress was made, important working class victories were won, and so on.

Now the question is: what changed? Because this didn't happen by itself. What happened were a number of things, globalization being - in my view - the most important, because it meant the working classes of France, of Italy, of Germany, of the United States were now thrown into a single labor market, where the lessons we learned in the 1930s, where you had to organize the whole industry, you had to organize all the workers of a trade, and then all could come up together in that form of solidarity or unity there was class power and class strength for the trade union movement.

With globalization, we're now faced with a vast increase in the size of the global labor force. The former Communist countries - which are now part of the capitalist world market - India opening up. The global labor force, minimum estimates are that it doubled, the higher estimates are that it tripled. Where in many ways we are now in a single labor market, with some exceptions which I'll get to. But the point is: for most workers, they're competing against workers in very distant places, who speak different languages, but who work basically for the same trans-national corporations, or sub-contractors for those.

Well that was a tremendous difference. And what you had coming out of the New Deal was an alliance between trans-national capital and labor - the progressive New Deal elements of the capitalist class and the trade union movement, against national capital - those capitalists who just did business in the United States, who were not willing to accept unions under any circumstances, and the trans-national corporations that wanted, they were highly capital intensive. Labor was able to organize the huge factories of Detroit and Chicago and so on, and steel and auto led the way, and you all know that.

Alright. Now we have plants in Brazil, in Korea, all over the place, producing basically the same basic things, tremendously weakening the power of labor.

Second, which we tend to underestimate, is technology, that if you go into a steel mill, there are no people any more. Uh, you know, anyone who has a 1930s view of a steel mill should visit. You go in and you're on this catwalk and there are like three football stadiums and way at the end there there's this guy and that guy. Nobody goes near the blast furnace - because they're huge and you'd be burnt to a cinder - even three football fields away the heat is just incredible. But nobody's there. There are no steelworkers. And all of this - there are people, but the efficiency of a modern auto plant or a modern steel plant, has changed the dynamic so that fewer workers are now producing more things. This is true of washing machines and everything else.

Ok, so the weakness of labor from technological change and the failure to re-employ workers who've had good jobs, in other good jobs, or good-paying jobs. I mean there's nothing good about working in an auto plant or a...these are really terribly hard jobs. If you know people who've worked there or if you've toured the plants. Um, you know, jumping in and out of a car every 40 seconds, to install something and jump out, all day long, is not fun. So it's not a good job, but it's a good-paying job. A paying job with security, with health care, and so on.

Alright, so the context of people saying "we need jobs" is a context in which capital's view of the United States has changed, and that is the second point I want to make.

I want to read to you from an equity guy, and this is from an article that was in the Atlantic - and I'm blocking on her name, uh, Freeland...she's a woman who works for the, she's the U.S. editor for the Financial Times - has an article in the current issue of the Atlantic, and she quotes this hedge fund guy:
"‘A person in Africa who runs a big African bank and went to Harvard, might have more in common with me than he does with his neighbors, and I could well share more overlapping concerns and experiences with him than with my neighbors.’ The circle we move in, he explained, are defined by 'interests’ and ‘activities,’ rather than ‘geography’: ‘Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people. You eat in the same restaurants. You stay in the same hotels. But most important, we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.’"
[full article @ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/ ]

That is, we're seeing a global capitalist class formation - in place of isolated national capitalist class - where the billionaire in Mumbai has more in common with the billionaire in Beijing than he does with his neighbor on the street in Mumbai. So as the global capitalist class…

[Bill

- uh Bill, they said you had to sit next to me -

Bill: Oh good. [Laughter] Is that guaranteeing I'm staying awake, is that the idea? [more laughter]

- they said...well, anyway...[laughter]...I shouldn't tell him, right? [to Bill] They love you, don't worry...

Bill: What's not to love?

[voice from off camera]: And so much to love.

Bill: Then there's that.

OK, so the globalization of production, and the transformation from national classes to global classes, changes the terrain in ways that are not good for us, obviously.

We have Mr. Obama - and I'm going to say very little about him, only to say that the anti-Obama angst on the part of those capitalists, those Wall Street folks, who were saved by Obama, right? Who trillions of dollars were given to, to put their banks back in shape. Bought their toxic assets, lent them all the money they wanted at zero interest. Now, Obama is "anti-business" when he tries to pass any kind of modest regulation of banks, any kind of - they might pay taxes, for a change...that they might think about creating jobs for American workers - he is "anti-business."

So, we have a situation where, to go back to the quote from, or the passage I read you from Krugman, it's a three-way struggle. It is a struggle between the Republicans, the Tea Party, the hard right, and then not *a* Democratic Party, but - of course - the democratic wing of the Democratic Party, and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, that when William Daley [sp?] was appointed last week to be Mr. Obama's Chief of Staff - the guy who is the gatekeeper for anybody who wants to give any ideas or...Mr. Daley, you know, who is from a great working-class family - I met some of them in '68 when I was in Chicago…

[laughter]

...at the Convention. He was the vice-chairman of JPMorgan Chase just before taking the job with Obama. He was against the financial regulation bill. He was against healthcare, uh, reform bill. This is who Obama put in there. Because Obama cannot win re-election without the money he had in 2008. And we have now seen huge amounts of money turning against Obama. Not because he was a socialist, as the Tea Party says, but because he wanted to re-build America - his infrastructure projects, his job construction, the kind of stuff that during the campaign sounded good to a lot of us. His awareness of the environmental is real, all this. You don't hear that any more. Because, realistically, none of that is possible.

It's not possible for a lot of reasons, one is the Democrats themselves in the Senate refused to change the rules that allow a minority Republican to prevent anything from happening. They could change that the first day of the new Senate if they wanted to. They don't. Because their strategy for a long time was to get money out of the rest of us so they could get 61 votes and pass legislation. They were not interested in changing the rules because it was a great money-making thing.

Nor were they interested in changing the tax system. I just finished a book on financialization, which is an academic book, but people here might find it - I'm not trying to push the book - but one of the things is Schumer, and, of course, Hillary Clinton when she was our senator, and now our new senator, represent Wall Street. That's what they do - they get more money from Wall Street than other senators, because they have a job to do.

Schumer, every season, talks about taxing the hedge fund people. They get their income in what's called "carried interest" - anybody know carried interest? It's 15 percent tax rate. And they take their income, as what they made up, calling it "carried interest." It's regular income. It should be taxed as regular income. But since they're hedge funds, and private equity groups, they say "Well, yeah, but we're making it in capital gains," so it should be - it's not "carried interest." It's not interest, it's not carried, but they have paid off and gotten this.

Schumer shakes them down, and has raised more money for the Democratic Party, than anybody else ever has out of Wall Street. By just saying "we're going to have to tax it, but maybe I can keep it off a year or two. And he keeps doing this.

All this stuff...yeah [laughter]

So, we have the corporate Democrats, we have us, and then we have the right wing. And the problem is, I don't know [inaudible] in a sense I have to tell people in this room about class and class struggle. The political system does not accept there is such a thing as class or class struggle. And the Democratic Party looks to win elections, which means labor will knock on doors, but get nothing when they're elected.

So, when we talk about jobs, when we talk about job creation, it is in this larger context.

[end part 1]

Financialization, which is to the next piece of this, is the change in the American economy from our post-war system - which was based on production of real goods and services - to a system of maximizing shareholder return. Shareholder return is profits to those who own capital.

What this meant was ceasing investment in the United States - although American corporations continued to be very, very profitable, the stock market has come up remarkably again, the bonuses are back, actually they're at record height on Wall Street now, higher than they were before the crash.

Financialization is a package. It involves corporations...

Let me start this way: in the post-war period, in economics class, you learned that households saved money, they put it in banks, the banks lent the money to businesses, the businesses build plant and equipment, created jobs, invested, paid back the bank, and, you know, there was your money.

This is familiar to us, and many people think that this is what banks still do. No. The corporate sector does not borrow money, it contributes money back. The amount of stock - it doesn't sell stock. On net, it buys it's own stock back. It does not raise money this way.

It raises money short-term, in what's called the commercial paper market. That is, one big company that has more money than it needs - there are a lot of them - and a big company that wants to borrow, make the deal outside of the bank.

Very little of this goes to real investment in anything that's going to create jobs.

The other part of financialization has to do with the stagnation of working-class incomes. That, as you know, for the last 30 - now I think I have to say last 40 - years, the real income, real income means your income adjusted for taxes and the rate of inflation. You know: my income went up, but I'm buying less. When I was a kid, you know, you got on the subway for a nickel, a quart of milk is 20 cents, some of you...[looks around]

[laughter]

It ain't like that anymore!

So, money income went up, but real income has stagnated or gone down for the average American. This has meant that the only way to keep up our living standard has been to go deeper in debt.

Credit card debt, and, for a long time, home equity - people who had equity in their home would, as they say, "use it as an ATM machine," borrow money against the value of thier home. And as values were going up, they could do that. Of course, when housing values collapsed, they were screwed, and since the banks planned a little ahead and changed the bankruptcy laws so people can't declare bankruptcy, and a whole generation of students who took out student loans, can't find jobs, and are paying - they can't declare bankruptcy either, because we have returned to a system of debtor prisons. I mean, this is the extent of this.

So financialization has created growth based on the creation of debt and leverage. Debt, we understand: you borrow money, you go in debt. Leverage means you borrow more and more and more compared to your actual capital. So, the banks don't get their money from depositors. It's true people deposit money in banks - and they get half of one percent interest or something - um, but that's not where banks get most of thier money.

Banks now get most of their money from, for instance, money market, you know, because money markets still pays higher, people with real amounts of money put it in a money market fund. The money market pays them interest because they lend it to the bank, the banks then lend it to hedge funds and other speculators, who then borrow huge amounts based on...then they promise the securities they have bought. So let's say they bought some collateralized debt obligations. These are terms people never heard of a few years ago, and now we may not understand what they mean, but we've heard 'em, right?

The collateralized debt obligations - take an example of Macy's credit card debt. I have a Macy's credit card, I pay it every month, right? Macy's knows it's going to collect a certain amount on its credit card. It can go to a bank and borrow money, pledging next month's credit card receipts, because they have to order the spring stuff now.

So, it's a securitizing - it's taking this income that's going to come in in the future - and, uh, get money now, and pay it back later. New York City, in the '70s, did this like crazy. The city had no money, so they promised the banks next year's real estate taxes, if they lend them money now. So we were borrowing against the future, and then when those taxes turned down, you know, you're in a bit of trouble.

So the whole system, the whole economic system, is based on financialization, the creation of debt and leverage. This huge amount of borrowing, on this small base of assets. And most recently hte crisis - what's called the Great Recession - which, supposedly, was from 2007 to 2009 - that was from, again supposedly, those sub-prime mortgages, right? Because what the banks did was they bundled all those sub-prime mortgages, sold them to people, and then, when the value of those mortgages went down, everybody in the whole game got screwed. The banks needed money, everybody needed money, and so you, the taxpayer, and the Federal Reserve, came and helped them all out. Uh. To bring them back to where they are.

But, this is the point: the change in the way our economy worked, from the post-war system, where we produced goods and services, where you had a traditional working class that would save for college and would save to put a down-payment on a house and all that. In the period from roughly Ronald Regan 1980 - he had nothing to do with any of this, of course, the magic of the marketplace - de-regulated the banks, allowed them to do all this stuff. De-regulated everything. And in doing it, created this monster, dependent on asset bubbles - on the value of stock going up, uh, Clinton got all this credit because 1997, '98, '99, 2000, the market went up, the economy was growing great guns. And then, it collapsed, because a lot of these companies weren't worth what they said they were. These internet start-ups, and all the...we could talk about that if anybody wants.

But the point was, there was an asset bubble. The prosperity was based on people thinking they were richer, because the paper value of the stock they owned - and this was true of working-class people and their pension funds, you know, in those days the pension funds were doing better, and it seemed like your retirement was OK, you could spend a little bit more. People had money in other things, some people actually owned stock on their own, whatever. when that collapsed, then the real estate bubble. We've already had three bubbles in a row, each one worse than the last, and each one ending with a "jobless recovery," a jobless recovery.

So in 2010, no net jobs had been created since 2000. Jobs had been created, but jobs had been lost. No increase in income. Harry was talking about people have jobs, he knows people who have a lot of jobs - two, three jobs!

[laughter]

Uh, because, that's the reality. To survive, people have got to put things together, because the traditional job - that was a career, was protected, that had a union, was...

So it is in this context of a change in the way capitalism has been globalized, financialized, and, of course, the politics that has gone with that, and the money politics that has gone with that, it puts us in this situation.

So, it is easy to talk about the kind of jobs we need - I suspect everybody at this table can do it. Anybody have any trouble thinking about, uh, how to create jobs? Day care, neighborhood health clinics, uh, re-build all the schools where the kids are in the gymnasium in five groups, split up, because there are no classrooms. Maybe fix the roof because it leaks, or take the asbestos or, whatever, the PCBs out in Staten Island? I mean, there's a lot of stuff we can think of, to make our society, our lives, working people's lives better, and give the people the jobs they need.

So, it is not a question, in my view, of simply coming up with these proposals. I think these proposals are good, but the answer is always: "Ah, but there's no money!" And so, we have to move to why there is no money.

[end part 2]

I have a little graph here – I’ll pass it around, because I know you can’t see it, it’s little – but it’s taxes on the top 1% of Americans, and just to save the suspense…[laughter]…it begins with Kennedy in ’61, you know, where they’re paying up here [holds hand up high]. And the graph goes sort of like that [sweeps hand to the right and down], so that when we get to George W Bush in 2008, they’re paying less than 40%, where the marginal rate was 90% under Kennedy.
Now, things were a lot better in the ‘60s – there was more employment, the growth was faster.

The taxes were higher – our economy was growing much better. Every tax cut has been a slower rate of growth for our economy. That’s because people don’t have money to buy things. You could lend it to them, but after a while people couldn’t borrow and more, and that collapsed.

The graph under it is the percentage of American income going to the top 1% of American households. Again – to save the suspense – you know, they’re doing alright under Kennedy, but MAN are they doing alright under George W. Bush and on into Obama. I’ll pass it around for those of you who like to see graphs.

Where the money is to pay for all of this should be very clear to us. But, there has been the biggest snow job in the history – well, not in the history of the world, we don’t want to claim too much for this thing – but it is truly amazing. Here we’ve got a situation where the reason the government doesn’t have money is that rich people don’t pay taxes – and those are just individual taxes.

Do you know how many corporations are incorporated in the Grand Cayman Islands? There are these three little Grand Cayman Islands that – they’re not very grand, you know? I don’t know how many people live down there, it’s not very much, but there are corporations headquartered there. And when you go to this place, you wonder – where are the headquarters? And if you’re really that naïve, and you ask somebody – I did – they point out this sort of three-story office building, and inside are these little mail boxes. In there is the corporation!

[laughter]

Legally, it’s in that box! And somebody does come around and check the mail. But it’s all done electronically from New York, and Chicago, and Los Angeles, and these guys have never been down there, you know. On vacation, maybe. But – they don’t pay taxes, because they’re incorporated there. And there’s no public disclosure. And the government does not cooperate when foreign governments – namely ours – asks them questions about these people.

Well, that’s one tax haven, but it’s the fifth largest money center in the world. So we have a situation that’s not just…

[to the person next to him, regarding the graphs] Stop slobbering over it and pass it along!

[laughter]

It’s not just the very rich, and among these very rich are more and more Wall Street people, hedge fund people. There are 25 hedge fund people who made over a billion dollars last year. A billion. You know, and a lot made hundreds of millions. And the ones that are paying – the hedge funds, of course, are a little box in the Bahamas – they don’t pay income taxes, they pay “carried interest” to the United States, paying a fraction of what we pay in our income tax. You may think you’re cheating the government like crazy, but you have no idea about tax avoidance ‘til you’ve seen transfer payments by corporations.

So that Apple, Apple has a postage box somewhere – I’m not sure it’s in the Grand Cayman Islands – that owns all its intellectual property. It buys it from them, and pays them money. But it doesn’t have much money left over after paying for the intellectual property. And of course, the little subsidiary that owns the intellectual property, they don’t pay taxes to anybody!

So we have a situation where trans-national corporations have just – we could go all night on the various ways they don’t pay taxes – and, of course, the rich individuals don’t pay taxes. That leaves [gestures] Bill, and, of course, the rest of us.

So we have a situation where the government supposedly has no money. First, because it bailed out the banks and all that, but – and here I want to be careful, because the banks have all paid back the money they’ve borrowed. They paid it back because government would lend them as much money as they wanted, to buy and sell on the market, make lots of money – their trading profits are huge, as the market’s come up they’ve made out like bandits – and they paid nothing to borrow the money. Interest rates are just about zero.

Retired folks – who were counting on the money they saved, a lot of which is in, you know, IRAs and stuff because they don’t trust the stock market any more – are getting nothing. So in their retirement, when they thought they could count on their 4%, and they could get by – they’re really in a bad way. Anybody who is trying to save now is crazy, right, because you don’t earn anything.

We have this situation where the money is there, we just can’t get at it under the current rules.
The other things, of course, Barry was talking about war, and I don’t think we want to forget that, that the military expenditures have gone up 50% since 2001. The vast increase in military spending of wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan, um, cost an incredible amount of money.

They cost in lives, and they cost in dollars. Every time one of those plains drops a quote smart bomb and wipes out a wedding party somewhere, um, that is a huge amount of money, as well as making enemies for us all over the Middle East, insuring that there will be an eternal war on those folks. Obama has the grace not to call it the “war on terrorism” any more, but it has created terrorists all over the place. And if you thought for 5 minutes, if you lived over there and watched what was happening, then you, of course, would be fighting the United States, too. And for Americans not to understand that…

But, we have – and I don’t want to do too much on that – we cannot forget the drain of the military, as well as – Barry also pointed out – on environmental grounds, the military, uh, one of those guys flying around for twenty minutes undoes the good that all those of us who try to think about the environment, you know, in our personal lives, uh, try and change what we all do. So, that’s one thing.

And, of course, the tax cuts, under Bush, to the rich, that Obama’s anti-recession, uh, big stimulus, is really a drop in the bucket. Government spending to counter the recession is tiny compared to what is needed, and is tiny compared to the other things that are taking money from us.

I want to say just a few other things about Medicare, Social Security, and then I’ll stop and we can get into discussion and questions.

The attack on Social Security is the same attack we’ve had since it was introduced in the ‘30s. Social Security is not a problem. With very small changes, it’s good for the next 75 years. We could talk about raising – you know you only pay up to, now, $106 thousand in income – raise that a bit, the problem goes away. You don’t want to have to make people work longer, cut their programs. It’s basically a very sound system. Social Security is not in trouble, and I brought some numbers if you want.

Health Care IS [in trouble]. Not Medicare, Medicare actually offers, or Medicaid. Medicare, which is what they’re going after, is expensive only because American health care costs twice as much as anybody else’s healthcare. Medicare itself is much more efficient that private health plans. It is a very efficient program. It is not a costly program on a per-person basis compared to private health care. The problem is the rate at which health care costs go up in this country, because of our free enterprise healthcare system. If we would adopt – take your pick – the French, the German, the Suisse, the Canadian, ANYBODY’s, and there’s no more health-care problem, because you’re now doing a, uh, reasonable level.

So, for them to – here’s the way I want it: These son-of-a-bitches caused this incredible crisis, which everybody says is the worst since the Great Depression, which is now over for corporations and banks, just not for the rest of us. It has bankrupted the government which bailed them out, and their tax revenues went down, because people were out of work and all the rest of it, and because of this tremendous tax evasion.

The government always, ALWAYS, runs a larger financial deficit after a financial crisis. There is a book – a very famous book – written by these two professors. They go back 800 years of financial crisis. The book is called, I think it’s called, It’s Different This Time. [laughter] But it’s always the same! Which is, [laughter] One of the statistics in the book is: in modern financial crises, government debt goes up, on average, 86% after a financial crisis.

There’s nothing unique about this increase in government debt. It always happens! But the change in conversation, from the destruction done by Wall Street and the financial system, to Social Security and Welfare and Big Government spending, has been an amazing snow-job.

Retired people didn’t cause this crisis. Union pension funds didn’t cause it. State officials did, by not putting money away – they’re still saying their pension funds get 8% a year, if anybody knows how to get 8% of my savings, please tell me, right?

And it was collusion between trade union people and the local officials, uh, to hold down labor costs in the current period, to hold down taxes, they gave more generous retirement benefits, and workers understood this that they would be getting it, and now it’s being taken away because, uh , because the money wasn’t put in for it, and the economy collapsed and all the rest of it, bringing the attack on the public sector.

The attack on the public sector is saying: “Hey, we in the private sector, we’ve lost our pensions, we’ve lost our jobs, hey you fuckers still have jobs and pensions! That’s not fair! You should live in the street like the rest of us.” No, you should have jobs and pensions, and we should, and the working class should live decently in the richest country in the world, and not be betrayed by its capitalist class, that has done this to us, and put us in this situation.

So, all of this is important to understand, rather than to talk about – I love the blue-green alliance stuff, you know, and solar panels, and there are very useful ways that would help the environment and would create jobs in America. It’s not happening, because the solar groups we’ve had are moving to China, because the Chinese give them a better deal – they lend them the money to set up the plant, they give them the water, the electricity – the kind of things the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] did in this country. The kind of thing Alexander Hamilton set up.

So that the country – and this is sort of the final point – is, uh, there was a, Fred, uh, UE cartoonist…

[from the audience]: Fred Wright.

Fred Wright, the wonderful cartoonist. “So long, partner” - you know [it]? Where the American jobs are going…he had that, what, 20, 30 years ago. You know, what American capital has done to us. So that until this is seen in class terms – which I know is no surprise to you – but until we are much louder and clearer, on our politics. Because most Americans can see this: you spend 10 minutes with most people, they get it. And this has got to be translated into a political movement. And, of course, disillusionment with Obama doesn’t help anything, but if people understand WHY that took place, and if you were Obama, you’d be doing everything he’s doing.

[from Bill’s left]: Say that again.

[Turning left] If YOU WERE Obama, you would be doing everything he’s doing.

[Towards group] It’s overdetermined. Either, he’s shot, as soon as he does the kind of stuff you would do, the rest of the Democratic Party starts yelling at him “We’re all going to lose the next election, cut this shit out!” Right? And, of course, he doesn’t get re-elected, and all that. And the Republican [unintelligible] would say such horrible stuff, that yes, EVEN YOU would not take the principled stand and see all those things happen. Because there’s not a movement, forcing you to do it, and aware voters supporting you in doing it. So that limits what you could do, or you could do, or you could do, if you were Obama at this point.

But it’s this – and I’ll just maybe stop there – but it’s this larger contest, and how we deal with it, rather than narrow, you know, very good job proposals . Those are important, because they show what we need and what we could do, but we also show why we don’t have it, and what we need to get it.

Thanks very much.

[applause]

[end talk, discussion un-transcribed but part one ins in video above]

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