'Up w/Chris Hayes' for Saturday, October 6th, 2012

UP WITH CHRIS HAYES
October 6, 2012

Guests: Joy Reid, Karen Hunter, Joseph Stiglitz, Avik Roy, Alexis Goldstein, Detrick Muhammad, Maxine Waters

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC ANCHOR: Good morning from New York. I`m Chris
Hayes.

Five suspects arrived in the United States early this morning to face
terrorism-related charges after being extradited from the U.K.

And in his weekly address, President Obama hit Republicans this
morning for fighting to delay and defund Wall Street regulations. Well,
look at what Mitt Romney had to say about the debate about regulating Wall
Street later on the show.

Right now, it`s my great pleasure to be joined by Nobel Prize winning
economist, Joseph Stiglitz, author of the fantastic book, "The Price of
Inequality: How Today`s Divided Society Endangers Our Future" and a
professor at Columbia University.

MSNBC contributor, Joy Reid, also managing editor at the TheGrio.com,
a division of NBC News, Dedrick Muhammad, senior economic director at the
NAACP and MSNBC contributor, Karen Hunter, formerly of the Pulitzer Prize
winning New York and "Daily News" editorial board, now a distinguished
lecturer at the film and media department at Hunter College. Great to have
you all here.

(CROSSTALK)

Mitt Romney delivered what appeared to be a pretty stunning victory
over President Obama in the first presidential debate Wednesday night. He
did this by using a time tested tactic that came as a surprise, because it
usually happens during the conventions, moving to the middle. At times,
Romney even got to the left of the president simply by denying, disowning,
or apparently, abandoning many of the policies he has spent many the last
years campaigning at.

But if President Obama was caught off guard by Romney`s performance on
Wednesday, by Thursday, he and his campaign had adjusted to the new entrant
in the race, Romney 2.0. At a rally in Denver, a newly energized President
Obama marveled at the new software upgrade.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: When I got on the
stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claims to be Mitt Romney. But I
know it couldn`t have been Mitt Romney, because the real Mitt Romney has
been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in
tax cuts that favor the wealthy, and yet, the fellow on the stage last
night looked like Mitt Romney said he did not know anything about that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Also on Thursday, Mitt Romney took another huge step in his
unfolding journey of self-discovery. Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News,
he repudiated the infamous now 47 percent comments he made at a fundraiser
in May.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MITT ROMNEY, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: In this case, I said
something that was just completely wrong. And, I absolutely believe,
however, that my life has shown that I care about 100 percent. And that`s
been demonstrated throughout my life, and this whole campaign is about the
100 percent. When I become president, it will be about helping the 100
percent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: All right. One hundred percent.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: We`re all in on the 100 percent. Well, first, let me throw it
up to you guys. I mean, we`ve been chewing over the debate performance. I
think my own take, that the president did not perform well in the debate.
That`s a real novel take on my part.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: That`s what you tuned in for at home. But, I don`t think he
performed as catastrophically poorly as other people seem to think he did.
That`s more or less where I`m at. Maybe that`s not great incitement for
real hot talk, but --

JOY REID, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: No, I agree with you. And I think that
you and I might be the only two people who feel that way. That I thought
like it was a goldilocks debate, right? I thought Mitt Romney was too hot,
Barack Obama was too cold, but I don`t think Barack Obama sort of
splattered on the canvass.

I mean, I think he did OK, and he was very sort of methodical and
purposesorial which is the way he actually is. So, he came across the way
people understand him to be without the sense of humor that he tends to
show, sometimes, in public. But I thought Mitt Romney was too aggressive
with the moderator.

I thought he came across a little bit of like a bully. And the only
take away that most people got from the whole debate was Big Bird who
usually in marketing, that is a fail.

DEDRICK MUHAMMAD, NAACP: I would disagree. I don`t think Mitt Romney
was too aggressive. I think Mitt Romney played it very well for himself.
There was space to the moderator to really just let the people on stage
talk.

And he was willing at every opportunity to get in that extra comment
and to almost always even explaining his own policy attack Obama the entire
time. I don`t think Obama did anything catastrophic. He didn`t mean (ph)
big mistakes. He just wasn`t as on and Romney really was.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ, NOBEL LAUREATE IN ECONOMICS: Yes. And I think, you
know, as a professor, I sort of thought it was sort of nice that we have
this wonkish debate with numbers and all that.

HAYES: Yes.

STIGLITZ: I only wish the numbers were a little bit more accurate.

HAYES: That`s sort of problem, right. Well, I even found myself. I
mean, as someone who -- this is my job is to moderate conversations, and
also, I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. There were several
points in the debate where like I`m lost. Like I am lost. I am right now
lost, and this is all I do for a living day in and day out is look at these
numbers. I`m like, where are we in the --

KAREN HUNTER, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: I actually thought it was very
strategic on the part of the president. We have two more of these, right?
And we know we`re a very microwave society. We only remember what the last
thing that`s said.

HAYES: Yes.

HUNTER: So, he played it out, I think, perfectly. He did the art of
war. What does this say? All war is based on deception where we`re able
to attack, we must seem unable. So, I think he was -

(LAUGHTER)

HUNTER: No, I`m serious.

HAYES: No, I know. I know. I`m glad you`re -- this is -- no, I --

STIGLITZ: I think I`ve encountered a little bit of the same --

HUNTER: Thank you.

STIGLITZ: -- what we`ll see in the next two debates.

HUNTER: Right.

STIGLITZ: But certainly, having Romney commit himself to be in favor
of regulation, not to --

HAYES: Want to cut taxes?

STIGLITZ: -- cut taxes for the top. You know, these are steps in the
right direction if he actually lives by them.

HUNTER: Not just that, but the president was able to capitalize the
very next day. There were ads the very next day using those lies that were
told in that debate. And it`s just like a transcript. We read these
things, so when we`re reading them we think lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. We`re
not looking at --

HAYES: But there were a few moments. I mean, there are some people
who say this is strategic. And actually, one of the thing I think that`s
interesting in understanding the debate is the continuity of it. I mean,
we keep being surprised by who Barack Obama is when he`s just been the same
the whole time, which is that every time he doesn`t fight hard enough.

People are like, why isn`t he fighting? It`s like -- well, here`s --
let me -- watch this tape that our producers put together of critiques of
Barack Obama`s debate performance in the past. This was not last night`s
debate. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A lot of the pundits are saying this was not a
very strong performance last night for Barack Obama.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hillary Clinton is running as the tough fighter,
and if Obama doesn`t show Democrats that he can be a tough fighter against
the Republican attack machine so called, but in fact it is, then, you know,
Democrats are going to pull back from him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Subpar performance in the debate by Senator Obama
and a great performance by Senator Clinton.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think they saw that John McCain is the tough guy
and that Barack Obama is the cerebral guy.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He seemed to lose control the economic topic.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: John McCain clearly won this battle on points.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HAYES: So, this is it every time. And I actually thought that he
was, during the primary, he a subpar debater. In fact, that -- there were
debate after debate in which he wouldn`t throw the punch and this was the
big --

MUHAMMAD: I think part of the issue, too, is Romney has been making
so many big mistakes and has been so underperforming. I mean, a lot of us
just forgot that he actually can stay say coherent things and he actually
can be good at debates and forgot that President Obama`s campaign has been
on, because assume (ph) that everything President Obama is going to do is
(ph) to be at absolute professional level.

STIGLITZ: But this is where the kind of film clips that you have can
be very useful, because we can have pictures of Romney saying the 47
percent and now the 100 percent.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: That I`m against regulation and I`m for regulation.

HUNTER: Right.

STIGLITZ: And when you put those clips together like you just did, it
really comes out very powerful. You know, you can`t control the
environment in the way that you could before.

HUNTER: No. And we remember with Hillary Clinton, they were saying
that Obama didn`t look up, President Obama didn`t look up. But he didn`t
look up in that debate against Hillary Clinton.

HAYES: Right.

(CROSSTALK)

(LAUGHTER)

STIGLITZ: I mean, again, that is who he is. And I think we are
totally forgetting that.

REID: And not only that, but I think that we`re also for getting that
both of these men, to your point, they were who they always have been, even
in governing. Barack Obama has infuriated his own base because of this
perception that he never fight hard enough.

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: It`s a recurring theme.

REID: It`s a recurring theme. But also, with Mitt Romney the
recurring theme among Republicans and the reason he doesn`t have a lot of
friends in that party is this idea that he`s a vicious debater. I mean,
Newt Gingrich called him a liar after those debates in which he really
demolished supposedly the best debater in the Republican Party and he is
known to be a flip-flopper.

HAYES: Yes.

REID: What did he do in that debate, he flip-flopped. So, everyone
played the type.

HAYES: That certainly. And Dedrick`s point, I think, is really smart
about just -- Mitt Romney, in some ways, was the beneficiary of lowered
expectations and the beneficiary of the success of the Obama campaign as
painting him as a caricature of a buffoonish budocrat.

And it was very similar, I think to John Kerry in 2004 which was that
by the time John Kerry took that debate stage, the bush Campaign had done
such a good job of making this guy seemed like a ridiculous figure, this
wind-surfing --

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: --flip-flopping fancy boy who`s got five houses. And then, he
came out and it was like, oh, right, this is a smart, competent individual
who spent his life in the United States Senate. And it was the same thing
with Mitt Romney.

It was like reminder that like, you know, for all of the caricature
and for all the reasons, I think, he`d make a terrible president, but the
guy is not an idiot and buffoon. He is confident enough to show up at a
debate, prep himself, attack, do all the kind of basic (INAUDIBLE).

STIGLITZ: But as Joanne mentioned, the big take away from this was
Big Bird. Big Bird has a Twitter account that, you know, feeds probably
not Joanne`s, definitely mine, not yours, have twitter account and that`s
what we`ve been talking about that has been the take away.

MUHAMMAD: I would say the take away. I mean, I think the take away
has been that Romney`s back in this. I mean, that was the take away for
the 24 hours. I mean, I saw all of the like Oscar the Grouch --

(LAUGHTER)

MUHAMMAD: -- that was all great, but I think the main take away was
that Romney`s back in this. But then, we have the jobs numbers. And then,
that`s kind of -- I think the bad thing for Romney campaign is they only
had 24 hours to really run with their new positive narrative.

HAYES: And I want to talk about the jobs numbers because they have
provoked a really interesting reaction. I also want to talk a little more
about this idea of the president`s brand and his likability and how central
and important that`s been throughout his career and in politics right after
were take a break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

We`re talking, of course, about Wednesday night`s debate between Mitt
Romney and President Barack Obama and the performance of both men
respectively. And I think my take on the president`s performance that it
was a combination of strategic choices that they make time and time again
to above all else, the Hippocratic Oath of the Barack Obama campaign from
the first day is first do no harm to the president`s likability.

HUNTER: Exactly.

HAYES: Do no harm to the -- that`s everything is subordinate to that.
So, any attack he might launch, anything aggressive has to be calculated in
relation to the possible downside risk of imperiling the president`s
personal brand as the adult in the room, as the agreeable one, as the
rational one, as the never angry person which has a whole intense racial
subtext.

Just so people know, the positive/negative feelings towards President
Obama and Mitt Romney going into the debate, which I think is -- those are
the gains they have consolidated. They don`t want to lose. President 52
percent likability, 42 percent negative, and Mitt Romney was underwater in
that respect.

So, that is a key number for them. That is their watch number. And I
think that strategic choice. I think the president also performed poorly
in a number of moments, but that`s late atop the strategic choices.

One of the strategic choices I found frustrating but it`s the same
strategic choice I`ve found frustrating since day one with Barack Obama was
the strategic choice to -- as opposed to highlighting differences, talk
about similarities, put his arm around -- just take a quick look at some of
the moments he did that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: When it comes to our tax code, Governor Romney and I both
agree that our corporate tax rate is too high. I suspect that on Social
Security, we`ve got a somewhat similar position. On energy, Governor
Romney and I, we both agree that we`ve got to boost American energy
production.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Those are big issues. Social Security, can I just say it for
the record, the dude that Mitt Romney put on his ticket wrote the
privatization plan to get rid of Social Security back during the Bush
years. So, when you`re asked about Social Security, you would think you
would heighten that contradiction.

REID: Well, that was the point at which my head probably exploded
thee most during -- I was like, what? What are you saying (ph) to this
president? Yes. No, but I think you`re right. I think if you go back to
particularly David Axlerod had a lot of experience running African-American
candidates in Illinois, and he ran Barack Obama`s campaign for statewide
office.

And I think that you have to realize that when you`re running an
African-American candidate in a non-district situation, right?

HAYES: Yes.

REID: There is always this modulation that occurs, and that`s the way
Plouffe and Axlerod had always run Barack Obama. He`s always, as you said,
never angry. He`s always calm. He`s no drama Obama. And that`s part of,
I think, his personality. But I think --

HAYES: Right. The two go together. I don`t think it completely
comes from --

STIGLITZ: But he could have done exactly what you said. You know, I
think this is great that you`re agreeing that we should have regulation. I
think that`s great, but now, let`s talk about where there`s differences.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: I think --

HAYES: You`re right.

STIGLITZ: -- it`s great that you`re agreeing that we ought to keep
Social Security, but let`s ask the question, we want to keep it in the
public sector. We`re efficient and make sure that we have protection
against inflation, protection against stock market volatility. You want to
privatize it.

(LAUGHTER)

HUNTER: I thought it was brilliant, actually, because what it did was
for the people in his party, in Mitt Romney`s party who absolutely are
uncomfortable with him, it brought -- Barack Obama brought him closer to
him and let them know that he`s really over here.

So, he`s sending a message, I think, to another audience that we
weren`t paying attention to. Maybe I`m just looking too much into it, but
I just think that it was very strategic on his part.

MUHAMMAD: I know. I don`t really buy into the whole kind of, like, I
strategically lost this. My friends have talked about this rope a dope.
But I was like, well, how that live (ph) a rope a dope? He knocked the guy
out at the end.

(LAUGHTER)

(CROSSTALK)

MUHAMMAD: And Muhammad Ali was like, in the next fight, he`s going to
think I suck.

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: Right.

MUHAMMAD: Again, just because you lose the debate doesn`t mean you
lost the election, doesn`t mean your campaign can`t take the debate you
lost and make it look like you won afterwards and --

HAYES: Which is what George W. Bush did against Al Gore in 2000.
That`s when all the dial numbers in the InstaPoll said that Bush had lost,
and then, the whole day next day, the Bush campaign talked about how Al
Gore lied inside, right? And this whole montage of Gore rolling his eyes.

And then, actually, the perception of the debate after the debate was
that Al Gore had lost even though the people who watched it during the
debate --

HUNTER: And who won the election?

HAYES: Right.

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: Let`s not get ahead of ourselves.

MUHAMMAD: I doubt the undecided voter is the main population watching
the debate. The undecided voter, I think, is really hearing the spin of
the debates.

HAYES: That`s an interesting idea. I would love numbers on that.

REID: -- about Big Bird, and that`s the other thing. I think that we
will (ph) follow this a lot. We tend to watch these debates in a different
way. And one of the points that I`ve made with people that have, you know,
called to complain about the president`s performance is I`d be interested
in --

(CROSSTALK)

(LAUGHTER)

REID: Right. What happened? Why? Why? And one of the things I
said is, you know, you have to sit in the room full of, let`s say women,
who don`t follow this every day and see how they perceived it, because I
have had a few people say one of the things we`re missing is that the soft
performance probably played differently with men than with women and that
president -- the president veered off who they know.

HAYES: That`s very interesting.

(CROSSTALK)

REID: --essentially to them whereas the sort of aggressiveness of
Mitt Romney probably played better with men. And so, I think that we have
to always look behind what they`re doing. I don`t think that, as you know,
that strategically, let`s lose this debate on purpose. I think there were
choices that were made to haven`t be above the fray.

STIGLITZ: But I think going back to what we`re saying before, I think
this reflects his personality. And I think over the long run, it`s better
to play honestly and play to who you are. And --

HAYES: Right. Than to be someone you aren`t which is he is not
dispositionally a populist slugger. He`s not --

MUHAMMAD: But on the campaign trail, you do see flashes of that. And
you didn`t see flashes of that during the debate. I`m not saying to fake
who he is.

HAYES: Right.

MUHAMMAD: But he does have --

(CROSSTALK)

REID: And you`re not confronting anyone when you`re on stage --

HAYES: The other point I make just to piggyback off of what you were
saying, Karen, about sort of embracing Romney and that might turning off --
maybe turning off the right. I mean, I think what`s so fascinating about
the reception to this on the right is that Romney substantively moved to
the left. No question. And it`s also the moment that he`s been most
embraced by the right.

HUNTER: Exactly.

HAYES: And the reason is this, the thing conservatives care the most
about is pissing off liberals. The thing that makes them happiest is when
liberals are angry at you. So, if you infuriate liberals by moving to the
left and confounding their beloved president, they`re going to love you.
They don`t care about --

STIGLITZ: One more thing, they don`t really worry that he would
actually do what he says.

HAYES: That`s the other thing. That is the big question.

STIGLITZ: They know that once he gets elected, he`ll move back to the
right but not as far right as he was during the primaries.

HUNTER: At least they think so.

STIGLITZ: They think so.

HUNTER: The larger question, is anyone going to change their opinion
based on this quote/unquote, "lackluster performance" by the president? If
you supported the president, you might be disappointed or calling Joy and
then wanting to know what happened. But at the end of the day, you`re
still going to vote for the president.

STIGLITZ: It`s the undecided, which is very --

HUNTER: Who`s undecided in this country?

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: Wait. The list of the vast left-wing conspiracy that Mitt
Romney is doing battle against include not just climate scientists and
pollsters, but a new set of villains, the gray suited bureaucrats at the
Bureau of Labor Statistics. We`re going to talk about that right after
this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: All right. So, there were new jobs numbers yesterday as
happens in the first Friday of every month. The previous month`s job
numbers are reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and some
interesting things happened. So, the jobs report, they -- (INAUDIBLE) was
not that good of jobs report at all. 114,000, not at all.

But it was not some amazing jobs report. 114,000 new jobs. The big
headline number was that unemployment, which is drawn off -- there`s two
different data sets that they are using, drawn off the household survey.
The household survey is the Bureau of Labor Statistics goes out and just
does a survey of individuals and said, are you working?

Have you found work? Were you not working before? And they compute a
percentage. The unemployment rate had gone down below eight percent which
is in some ways is manageable number precisely because Mitt Romney has been
saying on the stump the whole time the president promised that it would go
below eight percent and hasn`t been.

So, now, he has to take that out of his stump. So, in response to
this, conservatives, and not just, you know, fringe figures in the common
threads at red state started spinning this tale of a conspiracy to cook the
books in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jack Welch tweeted -- Jack Welch
former CEO of GE, who knows a thing or two about hitting his earnings
targets.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: He said, "This is unbelievable. These Chicago days will do
anything. You can`t debate and so they`re messing with the numbers."
Steve Forbes, former GOP presidential candidate, wealthy man himself,
retweeted it and said, Jack is right. And then, there was this entire
universe.

HAYES: I even joked about it, and I was getting responses on Twitter
all day from conservatives who are like you`re out of your mind if you
don`t think that these numbers were cooked. Yesterday, Jack Welch went on
my colleague, "Chris Matthews Show," and this is what transpired.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS MATTHEWS, "CHRIS MATTHEWS SHOW": You put out the word here,
"unbelievable jobs numbers, fair enough. These Chicago guys will do
anything so they change the numbers." What evidence do you have that they
got to the BOS? The Chicago guys got to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and
jimmied these numbers by .3 percent as you put it?

JACK WELCH, FORMER CEO OF GE: I have no evidence to prove that. I
just raised the question.

MATTHEWS: You came out and asserted not a question mark or a question
or concern about a coincidence. You say these Chicago guys will do
anything so they change the numbers. Do you want to take that back? This
is an assertion that there was jimmying with these numbers.
There was corruption here, an infiltration, getting to the --

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: It`s not funny, jack. You`re talking about the president
of the United States playing with the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers.
This is Nixon stuff. This is Nixon back in the old days (Inaudible) doing
this.

WELCH: Chris, don`t lose it now.

MATTHEWS: I`m not losing it. Look at my face, I`m not losing it.

WELCH: I can`t see your face.

MATTHEWS: Do you want to take back the charge that there was
corruption here?

WELCH: I don`t want to take back one word in that tweet.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HAYES: I want to make a joke about. Thank you to ComCast for buying
us to make that (ph) possible.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: That was a great exchange. And I just -- I am sort of amazed
by this spectacle. I mean, you know, it`s just an implausible idea that
the -- and you worked in the government. you worked in the White House
under Clinton. You know --

STIGLITZ: It`s absurd.

HAYES: Yes. Explain to us -- walk us through. I mean, we shouldn`t
have to debunk this, but walk us through why it`s not credible, or
possible, or plausible if these numbers were jimmed.

STIGLITZ: Let me give you a story that sort of illustrates why it`s
so implausible. Back when President Clinton was running for his second
term, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Affairs that
comes up with the GDP number were changing the way we measure GDP growth,
ok? And, they were going to something that is a technical term called
chain weighted GDP.

HAYES: Yes.

STIGLITZ: And the result of going to chain weighted GDP was that the
GDP number would be lower than in the old methodology. The president was
furious because every who wanted good growth --

HAYES: Sure.

STIGLITZ: -- they were coming up with a number that was lower. He
said, can`t you stop this? Can`t you -- can`t you wait until after the
election? We said, no. They`re an independent agency. We can`t touch
them. What we can do is try to explain what the numbers are.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: How they`re derived, what does chain weighted do. And, the
president then went on a campaign to try to explain --

HAYES: Oh, the infamous chain weighted explanation tour.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: That`s the high point of the presidency.

STIGLITZ: But the point is no president maybe except Nixon would
actually try to change what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does or the BEA
does. These are really independent statistical agencies. And, the idea
that they would do that is -- it`s, I say, literally absurd.

HAYES: In fact, BOS is headed by a political appointee, but there is
no political appointee in that position. It`s actually vacant. And it`s,
right now, headed up by an interim head who is, himself, a career BOS
person. So, there`s not even a political appointee heading up BOS.

STIGLITZ: But the history and culture of these independent agencies
is extraordinarily strong.

HAYES: Yes.

STIGLITZ: and it goes throughout -- I`m saying goes through the
council of economic advisors which is politically appointed in a sense.
You know, Senate confirmed. We felt absolutely, you know, very strongly.
And I think this is bipartisan, that you don`t monkey with the numbers
because that would destroy your credibility.

HUNTER: Right.

STIGLITZ: And the one thing, you know, that we still have is
credibility in the numbers. I mean, the one thing under President Reagan,
they couldn`t jimmy with the poverty numbers so they wanted to stop
collecting the numbers. That`s one thing. You stop collecting the
numbers, but you don`t monkey with the numbers.

HUNTER: Right

HAYES: I want to talk about the implications of this, because to me,
this gets at the real core of issue about the way our politics are waged
and just the way the our citizen re-heal about the pillar of institutions,
which is that this fundamental link of trust is being torn a thunder.

The question is whether you can engage in just Democratic political
debates when that is the ubiquitous feeling of so many in the country right
after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: We`re talking about the conspiracy theory that has been
floating around yesterday in response to the jobs numbers that the Obama
campaign has, somehow, manipulated these jobs numbers to get the president
elected. I joked yesterday that this was classic Barack Obama not even
jimmying the numbers aggressively.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: He does sort of half measure, but he finally gets tough and
does the Chicago way and he comes up with 114,000 new jobs.

HUNTER: That will be too obvious.

HAYES: Yes. That`s right. But tell me about how does this affect
the way that we conduct policy in this country? If people do lose trust,
if we do get to a point where you don`t think the numbers are trustable,
right, that you -- I can imagine -- I`ve got to say here, I think the
incentives are very different on the left and right.

I think that there`s much -- there`s -- everybody has that impulse to
distrust the other party, right? I mean, if the Bush administration said
something was so, I learned to not think that it was necessarily so and to
exercise skepticism, but institutionally on the right, there`s a lot of
incentive for people to stoke that.

And people can make money and have careers doing that. And I think
there`s less of that on the left, but you end up in a situation where we
don`t have anything independent, anything that we feel like we can sort of
all come around and trust and say these are what the numbers are, let`s
have a debate on this.

STIGLITZ: I mean, there`s this whole debate about, you know, we can`t
choose our facts. We can choose our interpretation of the facts. And what
they`re trying to move is doing where we get to choose our facts.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: There are other countries where this has become a problem.

HAYES: It`s a huge problem.

STIGLITZ: In Argentina where there`s been a big debate about what the
--

HAYES: Actual inflation rate is, yes.

STIGLITZ: And that really has been (INAUDIBLE), because businesses
have to make decisions. Workers when they`re trying to decide what is a
reasonable wage increase, they have to know what is the adjustment for
inflation. So, it is very corrosive, you might say, to driving the
economy, the stirring economy.

HAYES: If you don`t -- if you can`t actually trust in the numbers.

STIGLITZ: If you can`t trust the numbers.

HAYES: And let me make this point as a sort of devil`s advocate for
people expressing skepticism on the right about these numbers. The number
of new jobs found in the household survey, not the headline number of
114,000, which over 800,000 new jobs, which is very high. It`s an
anomalous number, but the point here is that these monthly job numbers are
estimates that it`s a massive economy.

They`re trying to find using these statistical methods changes in a
very large economy. And every month, we see afterwards the numbers get
revised.

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: -- numbers is all over the place.

STIGLITZ: In this case, they revised the earlier numbers up by some
85,000, 86,000.

HUNTER: Right.
STIGLITZ: Which means that we actually have created more jobs in the
previous months that have not been added on. So, you talk about
manipulation. They should have increased that number by that amount and
that would have even been more accurate, but they didn`t do that. I think
that`s the best estimate that they had at the moment.

REID: Right. And also to the ADP survey that comes out a little bit
before the jobs numbers usually come out. It`s almost always more jobs
than what you end up getting in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So,
there`s always questions about the different methodologies of figuring this
out.

But I think what`s actually more sort of pressing for what you were
talking about in terms of our politics, you know, back when Bush was in
office, when the left wanted to escape from the Bush administration, they
watched "The West Wing" right? They didn`t actually stop believing that
Bush was actually president or stop believing that any numbers were true or
create their own polls in which John Kerry was up by 15 points. Well, you
actually had --

HAYES: There was a little bit of that.

(LAUGHTER)

HAYES: There`s a little bit of that if we`re honest.

REID: Right. But, I mean, the point is that the right I think has
retreated into their own universe. They`ve created their own metrics of
polling. They`ve retreated into a feel good universe in which they are
winning, they are the majority. Nothing is -- I mean, Barack Obama never
was elected president. Acorn put him in there. I really think that that
is --

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: I think that`s the universal impulse, though. The question is
whether it`s being cultivated or not.

STIGLITZ: Yes, but I just want to say one thing about the
difficulties of figuring out how many jobs are really being created. I
mean, it`s not an easy thing as you were saying. One of the problems is
that when you turn the economy from, you know, sort of normal growth to
either a turning point going up or down, the statistics have a real
difficulty. One of the reasons is that the surveys go to typically
establish enterprises.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: But when you have the turning point you`re creating new
enterprises. Obviously, you`re not going to survey those because you don`t
know where they are. And that`s where the household survey picks up things
that are not in the establishment survey.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: On the other hand, one of the real problems is that we have
what you call seasonal adjustments, because there`s a pattern over the
year. Before Christmas, we create normally more jobs. As we go into the
summer, college kids in school go into the labor force and --

(CROSSTALK)

STIGLITZ: -- then come out. And, when you go into a business cycle,
this is little (ph) adjustments get --

HAYES: And in fact, Catherine Rampell has been a guest on the show, a
"New York Times" reporter, has a great piece that we`ll put up on our
website and our Tumblt that people should read about the fact that these
numbers, the 800,000 number, which is high and seems somewhat anomalous, it
might be partly the result of kind of error in the statistical modeling of
seasonal adjustment that actually people are leaving for college earlier
than they used to -- Karen.

HUNTER: Well, we have a larger problem here when facts aren`t facts
anymore. And unfortunately, we have a culture that has fostered that. You
know, we saw in Florida with the election between Bush and Gore, that there
was something a little funny going on in 9/11, a yellow cake.

Was that funny? Should we have gone to Iraq? You know, it`s always
things that have happened that have eroded public trust that allowed for
Jack Welch and all this to say, hey, maybe there`s something --

HAYES: Yes. I have more sympathy to the distrust, I think, than some
others in that institutions have performed very poorly and that`s produced
some of that distrust. Joy Reid of TheGrio.com, and MSNBC contributor,
Karen Hunter, thanks for being here this morning.

REID: Thank you.

HUNTER: Thank you.

HAYES: Mitt Romney finds his inner George W. Bush when we get back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: My story of the week. The return of fuzzy math. The
contemporary Republican Party faces a fundamental political problem, and it
is this. The policy position to which the party is most committed also
happens to be very unpopular. Over the last decade, the single most urgent
durable domestic policy priority of the Republican Party is reducing taxes
on wealthy Americans.

If there is one thing you can bank on when the republicans are in
power, it is that. Happened twice during George W. Bush`s term in which he
pushed through tax cuts that totaled a combined $2.7 trillion. When those
tax cuts were set to expire in 2010, Republicans announced they would
happily let taxes rise for everyone and let unemployment benefits expire
which would be unprecedented under such dire conditions rather than raise
taxes for the top one percent.

They won that standoff and got their way, leading to at least $225
billion in tax cuts for the top one percent just over the last two years.
Once the Republicans took the House, they moved quickly to vote for the
Ryan budget which passed the House the first time on a vote of 235-193, all
but four Republicans voted for it.

And it would have cut taxes for those at the top even further. The
Ryan budget died in the Senate. But undeterred earlier this year, Ryan
unveiled a second version of his budget, this one would have cut more than
$1.76 trillion from the taxes of the top one-half of the top one percent
over ten years, which brings us to the current campaign.

During the Republican primary, every candidate in the field offered
tax cuts that it turned out would most benefit the wealthy. A number of
the plans proposed, Herman Cain`s, Newt Gingrich`s came right out and said
explicitly they lowered taxes for the wealthiest and some even raised taxes
at the bottom also quite explicitly. I suppose it is to Mitt Romney`s
credit that he did not have the most cruelly aggressive tax plan in the
primary.

But it`s underappreciated that he is currently proposing at least
three major separate tax cuts all of which would disproportionately benefit
the rich. First, he`s proposing that all of the Bush tax cuts be made
permanent, which would mean the tax cut of $3 trillion for the wealthiest
over just the next ten years.

Second, he`s proposing to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent
to 25 percent. the Tax Policy Center estimates that just over half of the
corporate tax burden ultimately falls on the top one percent. So, Romney`s
plan amounts to a cut off9 $43,000 for each household in the top one
percent. And then, there`s the now famous $5 trillion tax cut Mitt Romney
is or at least was proposing, which he says isn`t a tax cut because he`ll
close unspecified loopholes and deductions.

We all know inequality is growing. The one percent have pulled away
from everyone else, and perversely, the recovery has only made that trend
worse. So, it violates` voters basic and appropriate sense of fairness to
further skew the tax code towards those who are doing the best. In fact,
some doing much better than year after year than anyone else.

Why they ask should Mitt Romney, who makes more than $20 million a
year and sits on a fortune of $230 million only pay 14 percent in taxes?
The polling on this is remarkably robust and incredibly consistent. Heck,
even a majority of Republicans support higher taxes for the wealthy as
several polls have found.

So, if you`re a Republican seeking the highest office in the land,
you`ve got a real problem. On the one hand, you absolutely must advocate
for and push through tax cuts for the wealthy, knowing full well the
electorate as a whole does not like or want them. So, what do you do?

Well, up until this point, Mitt Romney has floundered a bit, but
Wednesday at the debate, he fully embraced the very effective strategy used
by the last man to successfully pull off this particular bait and switch,
George W. Bush. The center piece of Bush`s campaign was a large tax cut
skewed heavily to the wealthy, but rather than defend this principle of tax
cut to the wealthy, he simply obfuscated and handwaived and misled about
his tax cuts effects.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Everybody who
pays taxes ought to get tax relief. After my plan is in place, the
wealthiest Americans will pay a higher percentage of taxes than they do
today, and the poorest of Americans, six million families, seven million
people won`t pay any tax at all.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Notice the slight of hand. The wealthiest Americans will pay
a higher percentage of taxes than they do today. Not a higher percentage
of their income in taxes since that would be an outright lie. It`s a very
common bit of conservative misdirection used to hide the distributional and
fairness of the tax cuts they`re proposing.

For instance, even in Herman Cain`s explicitly regressive world of a
9-9-9 flat tax, you can imagine that with enough concentration of income of
the top, the wealthiest households would still pay a majority of total
income tax revenue. That doesn`t reflect how progressive or fair the
taxation system is. It reflects just how unequal incomes are. Bush did it
again in the next debate, too.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: Under my plan, if you make the top -- the wealthy people pay 62
percent of the taxes today after which they pay 64 percent. This is a fair
plan. You know why? Because the tax code is unfair for people at the
bottom end of the economic ladder.

If you`re a single mother making $22,000 a year today and you`re
trying to raise two children, and for every additional dollar you earn, you
pay a higher marginal rate on that dollar than someone making $200,000 and
that`s not right.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: At the time, this drove observers to distraction. Bush was
running on a huge tax cut for the wealthy and refusing to admit he was
running on a huge tax cut for the wealthy. Paul Krugman nearly broke his
keyboard, writing column after column, pointing this simple fact out.

The big lesson of this year`s campaign, he wrote, a lesson that we can
be sure politicians will take to heart is that a candidate can get away
with saying things that are demonstrably untrue as long as the untruths
involve big numbers.

Romney has already embraced much of the substance of Bush`s domestic
policy. And now, he`s come around to embracing Bush`s style to sell it.
Confronted with his $5 trillion tax cut which would skew towards the
wealthy, Romney simply refused to own the consequences of his own proposal.
And he used exactly the same share of taxes slight of hand Bush got away
with.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROMNEY: I`m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high
income people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: But Romney has an even more sophisticated game of three-card
monkey (ph) than Bush had with three principles that are impossible to
satisfy together, lower tax rates for everyone, revenue neutrality, and
taxes won`t -- not being lowered on high income people. But if you point
to one of those cards, he waives at the other two.

We`ve seen this before, and a lot of good folks got fooled the first
time. So, it`s all the more true that those reporting on this campaign
have a duty to make sure voters are not fooled again. We can start by
listening to Romney, himself.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROMNEY: We`re going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by 20
percent, including the top one percent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: That was Mitt Romney before he found his inner Bush. But hear
me now. If Mitt Romney is elected president, taxes for the top one percent
will be reduced. If I had Mitt Romney`s money, I`d even bet $10,000 on it.
We`ll see whether Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz or Romney
advisor, Avik Roy want to take that bet when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Some great Ked Leo (ph) who`s watching right now blasting on
this wonderful Saturday morning. Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph
Stiglitz is back with us.

And I want to bring in Avik Roy, a member of Mitt Romney`s healthcare
policy advisory group, senior fellow from "Manhattan Institute, and author
of "The Apothecary," the Forbes blog on healthcare and social insurance
reform, which I suggest you check out for, I think, one of the best takes
on conservatives on that set of issues.

So, do you want to take a bet? Anyone want to take the bet? My bet
here is that taxes for the one percent, the wealthiest one percent of
households in a Mitt Romney administration will go down.

AVIK ROY, ROMNEY ADVISOR: I`m not sure of that. So, I mean, I think
some of the things that we`ve talked about and some of the things you
talked about in your segment before, it`s all about deductions eliminating
or limiting the deductions versus what should (ph) income tax rates. So,
there is a lot you can do with deductions, and the Tax Policy Center Study
which gets a lot of play on this network and elsewhere missed a few things.

So, there are other deductions that the TPC and Gayle and other co-
authors of that study will even admit. You can get revenue neutrality with
the system that Romney` s proposing and that`s what he insisted (ph) on the
debate.

HAYES: You can get there though with get with some real political
costs which is going after deductions that people really care about, right?
I mean, you can do things to charitable deductions. And, in fact, the
president in his first budget proposed capping charitable deductions.

And what happened was the entire world of universities, not
(INAUDIBLE), catholic charities, everyone else freaked the heck out and it
got killed, right? You can go after the mortgage deduction. Good luck.
Go around America and tell everyone that.

STIGLITZ: It`s worse than that because, in fact, right now, with the
property market as bad as it is, the real estate market as bad as it is, if
you announce that you`re going to get rid of the real estate deduction, the
mortgage deductions, the real estate market will go down further.

HAYES: Yes.

STIGLITZ: I think most economists would think in the long run we
ought to do it.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: But we`re not in the long run. We are where we are in an
economic downturn. We would take a few bet, the question is, you have
three things that we`ve been talking about, raising enough revenue,
maintaining a degree of progressivity in the tax structure, and trying to
shape the tax system to promote growth, promote other things that we think
are really necessities.

I don`t think that we`ve heard any proposal from the Romney
administration that would square these circles. You might do one or two of
these, but not all three. In fact, I have been raising that what we`ll
really do the kinds of things that he says that we`ll do. And if I were to
take up a bet, you look at where the Republican Party has been --

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: I would really, if I had the money Romney had, I would be
willing to take the bet that, in fact, we will see lower taxes for the top.
Let me just take one example that I think -- you know, I wish Romney would
come out on this issue. Warren Buffet has said --

HAYES: I want you to hold the Warren Buffet for just a second because
I want to get dive deeper into this right after we take a quick break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CHRIS HAYES, HOST: Good morning from New York. I`m Chris Hayes,
here with Joe Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, and Avik
Roy, a member of Mitt Romney`s health care advisory group. And we`re
talking about tax policy.

And one of the most central things I think to come out of the debate
was debate over Mitt Romney`s proposal for tax policy, which is a 20
percent rate cut across the board. But he also says there`s these other
conditions, right, that it will be revenue neutral and that he`s not going
to lower taxes on people in the high income. And the question is: can you
get all three of those principles to work together?

Joe, you were talking about the broad principles you want out of a
tax system, raising revenue, right? We want to raise enough revenue to
fund the government, which I don`t think we`re doing. We have taxes that
are a percentage of GDP essentially at a 50 or 60-year low. You want
fairness, which is very important, as an outspoken egalitarian. And you
want to promote growth.

You were making a point about Warren Buffet just before I cut you off
into break.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ, NOBEL LAUREATE IN ECONOMICS: Yes, Warren Buffet has
edicts that are wrong for somebody like him to pay a lower tax rate than a
secretary. And we have to understand the main reason for that is that we
tax speculators, we tax capital gains in a lower rate than we tax people
for living (ph) --

HAYES: Right, wages.

STIGLITZ: And I would feel a lot more comfortable if Romney came out
and said, I agree with that principle. As a matter of fair taxes, let me -
- the Buffet principle is correct. It`s not just a question of fairness.
It`s a question of efficiency and growth.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: Because if you tax speculation at a lower rate than people
who work for a living, you`re encouraging speculation, resources into
speculation. One of the main point I make in my book, "The Price of
Inequality," we`re paying a high price for this inequality that`s been
generated by a tax code that is distorted towards the rich, because a vast
majority of these capital gains go to the rich, particularly the taxes on
speculation.

HAYES: You -- I want to ask you about this because this strikes me
as something that liberals worry a lot about, think a lot about, about
capital gains. One loophole called carried interest, right? Carried
interest is a way in which particularly fund managers can declare the
income they derive from managing the funds which looks to all of us like
essentially their income, their wages, as a capital gains benefit and pay
out a 15 percent rate.

That`s a loophole that`s been preserved, I should note, by Democrats
and Republicans. Chuck Schumer has seemed to do some work behind the
scenes to make that`s carried through. It`s also been criticized by both
sides. Rupert Murdoch, I remember tweeting this year, he was criticizing
carried interest.

Is that the kind of thing that you -- or the brain trust around
Romney would like to see that kind of loophole closed?

AVIK ROY, ROMNEY ADVISOR: So, the carried interest -- I can`t
remember the exact numbers but I think what it raises for the government is
$15 billion or $4 billion, some tiny number that really doesn`t do much. I
can understand that there`s a lot of equity or egalitarianism issues with
it. But fiscally, it`s not that consequential.

STIGLITZ: But the capital gains task overall is very significant.

ROY: What`s interesting is that the Wall Street Journal editorial
page is constantly complaining that Mitt Romney isn`t aggressive enough
about cutting capital gains tax. They want him to cut capital gains tax,
hasn`t --

HAYES: Paul Ryan gets rid of capital gains in his first budget.

ROY: Mitt Romney doesn`t. His focus is on lowering income tax rates
which a lot of small businesses pay and lowering the deductions or limiting
the itemized deductions that create a lot of problems in the tax code.

HAYES: Let me grant -- let me grant you the maximal amount of good
faith to Mitt Romney for a second, OK? Let me say that he really is
committed to revenue neutrality. He is committed to not reducing taxes on
the highest income. Now, I don`t believe that but let`s grant it for the
moment.

He said this thing at the debate which I thought was right. He said,
look, none of this is passed by the president himself. You have a dialogue
with the legislature. You just cannot credibly tell me sitting at this
table that a tax bill that comes out of this House Republican Caucus,
they`re going to let a bill get out of that House without cuts for the top,
elimination of the estate tax which is actually explicitly advocated by the
Romney campaign, all sorts of other ways in which taxes can be reduced at
the top.

That is in their DNA to ideologically. It`s what their record is
doing. I just can`t see it be the case.

ROY: I completely disagree with that. So I think the real -- the
orthodoxy of the conservative movement on taxes is simplification. So,
lower the rate but also get rid of the Swiss cheese.

STIGLITZ: All of that.

ROY: Make the code simpler.

HAYES: Let`s talk about what`s the orthodoxy and what`s the reality?
There`s an actual governing record of the Republican Party over the last 10
years which has not been, I`m sorry to tell you, simplification. In fact
it has been punching Swiss cheese loopholes in the code and reducing things
at the top. In fact, the only consistent theme of the actual Republican
Party record is reducing the burden of high income earners and taxes. It
has not been simplification.

(CROSSTALK)

STIGLITZ: There are lots of other distortions that need to be
addressed. You know, one of the things that is a real source of weakening
of the economy is the fact that you can move money to the Cayman Islands or
these other tax agents and once you create a trust there, as long as you
don`t bring the money back to the United States, it`s not taxed. And so,
that encourages jobs, the investment to stay abroad, not to bring the money
back to create jobs in the United States.

Now, I`d like to hear candidate Romney to say I`m against those kinds
of foreign tax loopholes. I`d like to hear him say go back to the estate
tax. The United States has become the country with the least equality of
opportunity of all the advanced industrial countries. More --

HAYES: Less social mobility?

STIGLITZ: Less social mobility.

A proposal to take away the estate tax would increase the plutocracy,
the inherent of our society. People like Warren Buffet has said that`s
wrong.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: I`d like to hear Romney say I think it`s wrong.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: In fact, he`s doing everything to avoid paying the taxes
to create a new plutocracy.

ROY: There`s a fairness argument in the other direction. So, an
immigrant who comes to this country and builds a small business all on his
own with the hard work of his own --

STIGLITZ: Nobody creates anything on their own.

(CROSSTALK)

ROY: The roads and the post office and all of that.

STIGLITZ: And they take advantage of an educated population that
comes from our public schools. Nobody does it on their own. That rhetoric
is really destructive one.

ROY: Wait a minute. If they build that business on their own,
whatever you want to call it --

HAYES: In concert -- flourishing that is American society.

ROY: -- infrastructure and flourishing of the American society and
the community and all the great things that we all love, once that -- once
that person dies, oftentimes because of the estate tax he has to sell that
business instead of passing it on.

HAYES: Often times, though, this is a tiny, tiny incident.

STIGLITZ: The percentage of these people is negligible and we`ve
actually put provisions in our tax code to allow people to spread that
over, say in the case of farms, over 14, 15 years. And we can do more. I
can understand for that very small number for which that`s a problem, we
have ways of handling that that does not force the sale.

HAYES: But Joe actually brings up a question which I`d like to hear,
which is to say, OK, let`s -- so I`m a skeptical, I`m a liberal or I`m a
skeptical egalitarian. Let`s I`m one of the people I mentioned in the
polls in the story of the week in the last hour who doesn`t have a big
ideological commitment. But I do think the equality -- the equity argument
makes sense to me. I think the rich are paying too little in taxes. I`d
like to see that go up.

ROY: OK.

HAYES: You could choose an issue if you were Mitt Romney, you can
choose one, say carried interest, right, which isn`t a lot of money, but
you can say, you know what, there are some real inequalities in our tax
code. I`m going to go after carried interest, or I`m going to go after tax
havens, or I`m going to go after -- I`m going to preserve the estate tax.
You could choose some kind of egalitarian issue but there`s nothing on the
table that he`s chosen.

ROY: But, Chris, you`re saying two different things that are
contradicting each other. So, you`re saying that when he wants to limit
the deductions, well, he`s not going to do that because Congress will never
pass it. But then you`re saying, well, he`s not advocating anything that
increases taxes or increases revenues on the rich. That`s precisely what
limiting these deductions do but they`re regressive deductions.

HAYES: Well, but also, let`s say he hasn`t explicitly -- look, if
the thing that was on the table was explicitly limiting deductions, we had
a plan that proposes deduction, we could debate that. He`s sort of hand
waived in the direction of limiting deduction as one possible way he might
be able to get the math to work.

But, of course, what`s convenient about that is that no one can, it`s
like nailing jell-o to the wall. We can`t actually debate the plan because
we don`t know what it looks like.

ROY: So a number of people in the think tank world have, again,
assessed this tax policy center report which claims that there`s an $85
billion shortfall. If you use Romney`s plan for $85 billion left over that
he can`t make up with, with the deductions or whatever the tax policy
center accounts for and that the middle class will have to pay a higher tax
as a result.

First of all, Romney has said the middle class will not pay higher
taxes. That`s the core pledge of his plan. But secondly, there are a
number of other things that the Tax Policy Center didn`t consider, that
amount to about $150 billion to $200 billion of extra revenue that would
fall on people with incomes over $200 billion a year.

HAYES: One of the things that is happening, I think, interesting to
pay the George W. Bush clip, right, because one of the ways that George W.
Bush got away with the tax cuts was pushing people off the rolls in income
taxes. He says there`s 7 million people who aren`t going to pay income
tax, which of course -- that`s exactly what has produced the 47 -- infamous
47 percent who don`t pay income taxes.

And one of the other things that I have seen develop over time in the
think tank world or the thinking of the right which is articulated in
Romney`s 47 percent comment is the idea that not only -- you know,
everyone`s always wanted to cut taxes, Republican Party, Governor Norquist
pledge.

But, actually, you need to raise taxes at the bottom and middle
class. The Tax Policy Center says that`s what the Romney plan does.
Romney says absolutely not. But we saw in the Republican Party, the
Gingrich plan will do that, I think. The Cain plan would do that. I think
the Rick Perry plan.

There is a lot of intellectual energy right now in the Republican
Party echoed in the candidates` own statements in that infamous moment for
actually raising taxes at the bottom, not just cutting.

STIGLITZ: The basic economics is very simple. If you`re committed
to reducing the deficit and if you are going to say that we`re going to
reduce the deficit at least significantly by more tax revenue, you`re in a
pickle because you cannot say we`re going to get more tax revenue at the
same time and we`re going to lower everybody`s taxes.

I mean, that`s an inconsistency. Unless you do what the first Bush
always talked about doing is we`re going to grow the economy enough to make
for it. We know what happened in the first Bush administration. They
didn`t grow the economy enough.

HAYES: The truth about one of Mitt Romney`s most galling lines in
Wednesday`s debate, after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: As we`ve been discussing, Mitt Romney consistently charges
taxes to the president`s left on issues like health care, housing and
entitlements in this week`s debate.

But Romney`s conversion was especially disingenuous on the subject of
Wall Street reform. Romney complained that nearly two years after the
passage of Dodd-Frank, key federal agencies have yet to promulgate some of
the bedrock legislation that`s at the heart of the president`s signature
financial reform.

He highlighted mortgage regulation in particular.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MITT ROMNEY (R), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Dodd-Frank correctly says we
need to have qualified mortgages and if you give a mortgage that`s not
qualified, there are big penalties -- except they didn`t ever go on and
define what a qualified mortgage was. It`s been two years, we don`t know
what a qualified mortgage is yet. So banks are reluctant to make loans,
mortgages. Try and get a mortgage these days.

It`s hurt the housing market because Dodd-Frank didn`t anticipate
putting in place the kinds of regulations you have to have. It`s not that
Dodd-Frank always was wrong with too much regulation. Sometimes they
didn`t come out with the clear regulation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Mitt Romney, the private equity titan whose top contributors
include some of the top financial institutions in the world effectively
capped himself as a financial crusader of reform.

Now, Romney is right that the federal agencies in charge of writing
some of the rules at the heart of Dodd-Frank have yet to complete their
work. That`s been due almost entirely to Republican destruction in
Congress and fierce opposition from some of the very same financial
institutions that area bankrolling Romney`s campaign.

Take the very rule Romney championed in the debate, the qualified
mortgage rule. The agency charged with writing that rule is none other
than the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that has been
relentlessly besieged by Republicans seeking to neuter or eliminate since
it was created by Dodd-Frank back in 2010. In an unprecedented move,
Senate Republicans wrote to President Obama in April of last year,
promising to block the appointment of any director for the agency writing,
quote, "We will not support the consideration of any nominee regardless of
the party affiliation to the CFPB director until the structure of the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is reformed."

And in April of this year, Republicans proposed slashing more than
half the agency`s budget. The next month, they voted to curtail most of
its powers.

When President Obama appointed finally Richard Cordray to lead the
CFPB during a congressional recess in January, Mitt Romney himself slammed
the agency he now says needs to write its rules faster, saying in a
statement, quote, "President Obama`s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
is perhaps the most powerful and unaccountable bureaucracy in the history
of our nation" -- I think the Pentagon is more powerful -- "headed by a
powerful and unaccountable bureaucrat with unprecedented authority over the
economy. Instead of focusing on economic growth, President Obama is once
again focused on creating more regulation, more government and more
Washington gridlock.

Joining us now at the table is Alexis Goldstein, a former vice
president at Merrill Lynch and now an Occupy Wall Street activist; and
Dedrick Muhammad returns, senior economic advisor at the NAACP.

I found this moment really frustrating as you can maybe tell, because
what`s really interesting to me is there are real critiques to be leveled
at Dodd-Frank, critiques that didn`t go far enough, but Republicans have
tried to pull off this thing and Mitt Romney was doing it in the debate
where he`s kind of appropriating the left critique of Dodd-Frank as not
going far enough in service of essentially defending deregulation and the
status quo.

Here`s one example of this -- this is Mitt Romney claiming that Dodd-
Frank enshrines the principle of too big to fail. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROMNEY: Dodd-Frank was passed and it includes within it a number of
provisions that I think has some unintended consequences that are harmful
to the economy. One is it designates some banks too big to fail, and
they`re effectively guaranteed by the federal government. This is the
biggest kiss given to New York banks that I`ve ever seen. This is an
enormous boon for them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: He`s talking about specifically the designation of a bank as
a systemically important financial institution, or SIFI. And the fact of
the matter is, if it`s a big (INAUDIBLE), the banks have not been told that
because they have been spending unbelievable amounts of money fighting
tooth, nail and claw and lobbying behind the scenes not to be designated as
a systemically important financial institution, precisely because it comes
with additional regulations. What they would prefer is to just exist as
too big to fail banks as they did in 2007, 2008, right, and then be able to
just do their thing and get bailed out on the taxpayers` dime.

ALEXIS GOLDSTEIN, OCCUPY WALL STREET: I mean, I think you make a
really good point.

HAYES: I do too.

GOLDSTEIN: I think if you would talk the Wall Street thing, they
wouldn`t characterize it as a kiss. They would characterize this as a knee
to the groin.

Enhanced prudential standards in section 155 of Dodd-Frank and it`s
just one of the parts of regulations that SIFIs have to adhere to. It`s
enhanced capital requirements, it`s leveraged limits. It`s a whole bunch
of things that Mitt Romney mentioned actually in the debate. So, if it`s
such a boon, why would the banks be fighting it as you mentioned tooth or
nail?

STIGLITZ: I mean, the real point is it`s recognizing reality that
these banks are too big to fail. We just can`t deny that. And --

HAYES: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both supported TARP, we should
note, right, because precisely on that logic.

STIGLITZ: But the real point is, it is the Republicans especially
that resisted doing what really need to be done about the too big to fail
banks which is to break them up. And so to now say, you know, if you --
what he should have said, and I would have welcomed that, is to say let`s
break up these banks.

HAYES: Yes.

STIGLITZ: That would have been a real turn to the left of Mitt
Romney.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: That would be a move in the right direction, but to say
and to pretend that they are not too big to fail, you`re not going to have
the kind of regulation and we`re just going to let them be is putting us
back in the state where we were in 2007 where we know what we will do.

HAYES: Avik, would you like to see the breakup of the big --

ROY: I don`t speak for the Romney campaign on any issue, certainly
not on banking regulation. But personally, yes. I think that the real
problem here is the banks are too big. That`s why they`re too big to fail.

So, there are certain things you can do. The capital requirements
are toothless. Capital requirements actually constrain banks and they
don`t -- they`re very hard for regulators to see what banks own.

HAYES: Mitt Romney endorsed capital requirements in the debate, I
should note.

ROY: Capital requirements -- it`s important to have them, but they
have to be soft. Not like Basel III is a complete disaster.

HAYES: Wait, before we get into Basel III, let me just explain very
quickly what capital requirements are, because that seems like a necessary
part of this. The question is, you know, banks obviously -- the nature of
being a bank is that you lend more money than you have sitting around at
any one moment. That is how a bank works, right?

So, the question is what is that -- how much money do you have to
have sitting around? That`s essentially what a capital requirement is.
How much has to be sitting there so if something terrible happens and
someone comes to you and says, you owe us $7 billion, you need to write us
$7 billion check, you can go into the capital that you have on hand, you
can write that check and not suddenly be insolvent. That`s what capital
requirements are.

I want to talk to someone who is one of the architects behind Dodd-
Frank, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, right after we take this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: We were discussing financial regulatory reform, Dodd-Frank,
the role it played in the campaign.

Alexis, we had a brief excursus before we went to break about what
capital requirements are, just so we`re all on the same page as we debate
this and stuff. I mean, this is part of the problem, right?

It`s a problem we face on the program all the time, which is Dodd-
Frank sounds obscure. It`s very technical. But we just all saw what
happened with the crash, right? If we don`t get this stuff right, it`s
massively, massively destructive, and yet it seems that after it all
happens, we passed some laws, some stuff happens in the background and
that`s when the lobbyists come in and that`s when all the people who can
wield their supposed expertise has this powerful tool to destroy attempts
to rein in the banks.

So, if you`re home watching and feel like we`re throwing around terms
around, I`m going to make sure that we`re explaining them in every moment
because this stuff is understandable. It really is. It`s really, really
vitally important.

Alexis, a point you --

GOLDSTEIN: So, I just wanted to mention -- Mitt Romney says he wants
more transparency. He wants leverage limits. I was really excited to hear
that, but I was a little bit confused.

So, here`s when people talk about transparency in relationship to the
Dodd-Frank, it`s about swaps rules. Swaps execution facilities which are
kind of like exchanges where swaps are kind of derivatives are supposed to
get more transparency, more like an exchange.

The Republicans in the House and the Senate have been making
themselves very busy trying to gut those rules. This is something I
debated with (INAUDIBLE) on the show.

HAYES: Yes.

GOLDSTEIN: There`s a couple of different bills. But what Mitt
Romney said that he wants transparency isn`t consistent with what he sees
from his peers in the Republican Party.

HAYES: And this is one of the big questions, which is: is there room
between Mitt Romney -- and I know you don`t speak for the campaign on these
issues -- is there room between Mitt Romney on financial reform and what,
again, what is the actual record of the actual Republican Party which has
actually been governing during this period of time which has really been
fighting all of this stuff?

STIGLITZ: This is really important. Let me say that you mentioned
before that we don`t know exactly the financial positions of banks.

One of the reasons is that they`re engaged in all of these credit
default swaps. You go back to the question people were asking in the great
debt restructuring was coming up. Nobody knew how it would affect American
banks.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: One of the reasons is there are all of these over-the-
counter nontransparent and we didn`t fix it. Why didn`t we fix it?
Because of the bank lobbyists and the Republican congressmen that made it
essentially impossible to get legislation that would make more
transparency.

GOLDSTEIN: And to be fair -- sometimes Democrats.

HAYES: Sometimes Democrats too.

STIGLITZ: Overwhelmingly --

HAYES: Let me just note that there`s a reason that they fought that.
It`s a very lucrative market. We talk about this on the show a lot. The
derivatives market, that`s the thing that credit --

(CROSSTALK)

STIGLITZ: Eight billion dollars a year, and one of the principles of
economics is very simple. When you have open, transparent markets that
become competitive, and the problem with competition is it drives down
profits.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: And, you know, that`s bad if you`re a bank.

DEDRICK MUHAMMAD, NAACP: Highlight for this discussion I think it`s
highlighting the great opportunity that`s missed in the debates. Romney`s
able to throw in real quick and critique President Obama for lack of
regulation, but we never got to hear a defense in the discussion about
what`s really hang around regulation, why we are where we are. That`s what
we`re having here.

But if that`s not held out in presidential debates even if it`s a
complicated subject --

HAYES: Right.

MUHAMMAD: -- indistinct statements, it`s not something American can
jump on, it can be used in appropriate way.

HAYES: I want to bring in Congresswoman Maxine waters, Democrat of
California and a member of the House Committee on Financial Services.

Congresswoman, you were instrumental in developing and writing Dodd-
Frank. I wanted to get your reaction to Mitt Romney`s critique of it
during the debate.

REP. MAXINE WATERS (D), CALIFORNIA: Well, thank you very much. I
was more than surprised listening to Mitt Romney distort Dodd-Frank. As a
matter of fact, he knows better with qualified mortgages.

It`s so important that we have this feature that we passed in Dodd-
Frank because what we`re saying to the banks is this -- they must be
sustainable. They must be safe mortgages. You must verify the income.
You must know about the debt. You cannot have risky features such as
balloon payments and interest only and all of that.

So qualified mortgages and this issue, this item in Dodd-Frank is
extremely important. What Mitt Romney did was he basically said the banks
are not lending money because of this qualified mortgage feature of Dodd-
Frank. That`s not true.

First of all, the regulatory agency submitted its regs way back in
April and now they`re getting public comments. It doesn`t go into effect
until January `13. And so, he led people to believe that somehow we had
put the banks at risk or we were causing them not to make loans and that is
not true.

The average American needs to understand that we all aspire to
homeownership. We know that. But many people were led into these risky
mortgages, these exotic mortgages without having to have their income
verified. They didn`t understand. They didn`t know.

They thought it was a chance to own a home, but lo and behold, when
the devil came due, when they could not make the payments. The payments
increased because these exotic loans sometimes the interest rates increased
by, you know, threefold. Really put them in a position where they could
not afford them.

And so you have all of these foreclosures. That`s where these
foreclosures came from. That`s why we put in qualified mortgages so that
the banks would be responsible for making good, safe, sound, sustainable
mortgages. And Mitt Romney had it all wrong and he was misleading.

HAYES: Congresswoman, I want to talk about what the next fights are
going to be in the next Congress over Dodd-Frank. It`s part of the thing
about Dodd-Frank.

WATERS: I`m sorry, I can`t hear you.

HAYES: I want to talk about what the fight --

WATERS: You`re breaking up.

HAYES: I want to talk about what the fight --

WATERS: Hello.

HAYES: I guess I`m completely losing you.

Let`s see if we can fix that. Let`s take a break and come right
back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROMNEY: Dodd-Frank, it`s an 848 page behemoth that`s going to be
followed by thousands and thousands of pages of new regulations. This
administration`s regulations are even invading the freedom of everyday
Americans -- not just the banks and the corporations, but citizens.

There`s always been something uniquely brilliant about America. I
don`t believe the president understands this fundamental secret of America.
And day by day, job killing regulation by regulation, bureaucrat by
bureaucrat, he`s crushing the dream and the dreamers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Mitt Romney giving a speech at the University of Chicago
where that kind of sentiment goes over very well on March 19th. A very,
very different note he was striking than the kind of very warm words that
he had for regulation in the abstract of the debate the other night.

We have Congressman Maxine Waters on the line and we`re talking about
this point that Mitt Romney had made basically saying it is the delay in
promulgating the rules of an acceptable standard mortgage that is the cause
of the fact that it`s hard to get a mortgage.

Joe, you seem to be skeptical about it.

STIGLITZ: Absolutely wrong. The basic thing is we all knew the
direction in which these new regulations would go. Those directions are we
don`t want the toxic mortgages that we had. We don`t want the liar loans.

You know -- and those were the things that got us into trouble that
required a government bailout. Sure, there`s going to be some fine tuning,
but the banks went back to responsible lending where they give a loan, they
keep skin in the game. We all know that`s the direction we want to go.
That`s the direction the banks should want to go if they were going to rely
on no bailout.

HAYES: Right.

ROY: The biggest problem with Dodd-Frank, the real critique from the
conservative view is really this issue of too big to fail, that it
enshrines too big to fail, because these systematically institutions I
understand there`s regulations around how they manage their businesses
which they don`t like, but at the other end of the spectrum, they have a
competitive advantage around small businesses.

HAYES: But enshrined is such a weird word because too big to fail
was the actual truth of the matter. So, you can`t say it enshrines it
unless there`s an alternative to getting rid of it -- getting rid of it,
which is breaking up the big banks.

There was a Democratic proposal to limit bank sizes. It was called
Brown-Kaufman. It was sponsored by Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman from
Delaware and it was defeated largely by the Republicans in the Senate who
filibustered.

STIGLITZ: Let me make a point. There are a number of ways of
limiting. We shouldn`t get bogged down in the particular way.

The point is if Romney came out and said I want to limit the size,
let`s have a good discussion about the best way of doing it, I would feel a
lot better.

HAYES: Right.

STIGLITZ: He hasn`t said that. What he wants to say is we don`t
want to designate them too big to fail even though they are too big to
fail, and we don`t want to do anything about the too big to fail.

HAYES: Yes.

GOLDSTEIN: I also want to make the point that there`s something
called the Orderly Liquidation Authority --

STIGLITZ: That`s right.

GOLDSTEIN: -- that`s supposed to fix too big to fail is if a bank
goes under. The Orderly Liquidation Authority has a long list of rules.
It basically says we cannot bail you out. What you do is you put it into
receivership, you wipe out the shareholders, you make the credit holders
take a hit, you fire management, you fire the board, you break it up and
you sell everything off.

And if you cannot sell pieces off, the Treasury gives you a loan and
then the banks have to pay in to pay that loan back. And they tried to
make it so that the banks had to put into a fund so that the Treasury
wouldn`t need to provide that credit and that was voted no by every single
Republican in the House.

WATERS: That`s right. Well, this was actually what --

(CROSSTALK)

WATERS: Yes. This is where Mitt Romney was absolutely misleading.
He talked about we had given 5 big banks a pass.

This is absolutely not true. As a matter of fact, these are $50
billion banks and the non-banks such as AIG and what`s so important about
this is this for the American public to understand, if these big banks fail
and we don`t have a way of dissolving them in an orderly fashion, they
could bring this economy down. This is why we had to bail out all of these
big banks and AIG, but now with Dodd-Frank, we have an orderly way of
dismantling them, of dissolving them and as it was just described, not only
do we have all of the rules in place about how you do this, we have the
rules in place about how you pay for it.

These big banks must have capital requirements. They cannot operate
in a risky way without having capital requirements.

And this interconnectedness. This puts us all at risk.

So, Dodd-Frank really does deal with this in a very responsible way.
As a matter of fact, what Mitt Romney was saying was trying to imply that
somehow this was going to imperil small banks and regional banks, not true.
This is too big to fail institutions.

HAYES: Congresswoman, let me just express some skepticism.

WATERS: Yes.

HAYES: If we have -- there`s a thing called a living will in Dodd-
Frank which is what we`re talking about, the resolution --

WATERS: Yes, that`s right. That`s right.

HAYES: OK. You`re a big bank and you`re systemically important
financial institution. You have to say, look, this is how in the event of
a crisis, you break this up. We can go through the normal process of
bankruptcy.

The skepticism I have is if the wolf is at the door again, if there`s
this big panic, and people are saying if you do this which is what happened
at lee man, all of that stuff is going to fly right out the window. I
guess I don`t have trust in the political system to resist the pressure
that will be brought to bear in the actual moment of crisis. So I want you
to respond to that right after we take this break.

WATERS: All right. Thank you.

STIGLITZ: Great point.

So I want you to respond to that right after we take this break. >>
all right. Thank you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Chip Conowden (ph), who worked with Senator Ted Kauffman, the
Delaware senator who is one of the people that propose essentially breaking
up the too big to fail banks, which Sherrod Brown in Brown-Kaufman tweets
me to make the point, which is a big point, which was that the Obama
administration opposed Brown-Kaufman.

GOLDSTEIN: Right.

HAYES: We should be very clear, and a lot of Democratic senators
did. So this wasn`t entirely at all a partisan thing. In fact, it came up
against a lot of resistance in a both parties to break up the big banks.

Congresswoman Waters, talk me down from my concern about the fact
that if we get to a crisis, that basically size is the issue and everything
is subsidiary to that. If we still have these big banks, even if we
designate them, when we make them write living wills, all those stuff, when
the rubber hits the road and the crisis is at the door and everyone`s hair
is on fire, we`re still just going to write them a blank check.

WATERS: No. Absolutely not.

First of all, you have to understand that when we experienced this
crisis in this country with the failure of Lehman Brothers, and all of a
sudden, we saw that our economy was at great risk, we were on the road to a
depression, we didn`t know what to do. Nobody -- we had no rules --

HAYES: Right.

WATERS: -- for how to deal with this. So it has been very
complicated and a lot of hard work, but we came up with Dodd-Frank and we
came up with the designation so that we can have the living wills as a part
of how we dissolve these institutions. We have come a long way from where
we were when Lehman Brothers failed.

So you`ve got to give it an opportunity to work. We can`t say that
we can`t do anything or that we simply want to break up the big banks and
because we`ve not been able to do it in the way that some of us would like
to do, that we can`t trust that the living wills and all of that that we
put in place will help to dissolve these institutions. But I think you`ve
got to give it a chance. I think we`ve come a long way.

(CROSSTALK)

HAYES: Yes.

GOLDSTEIN: The one thing that`s interesting (INAUDIBLE), "New New
Deal", "Next New Deal" just wrote about this, the CDS market is actually
starting to price in the resolution authority.

HAYES: Wait, wait --

GOLDSTEIN: Let me break down what I mean by that. The credit
default swap market is insurance on companies or contracts going belly up
and so something --

HAYES: Basically, it`s a lot of two sided bets. Are you going to go
bankrupt or not? Basically Dedrick and I make a bet, is Alexis going to go
bankrupt? You take one side of the bet, I take another side of the bet.

GOLDSTEIN: So, people look to the CDS market to see the overall
health, to see what people are predicting about things.

HAYES: The likelihood of you going bankrupt?

GOLDSTEIN: Exactly. And so, they`re starting to price in this idea
that the resolution authority will make senior bond holders take a hit.

HAYES: OK, what that means is they`re starting -- when we`re making
about bet about the likelihood of big institutions going belly up, we`re
making the bet with the knowledge increasingly, that if it does go belly
up, we`re not going to get protected. The person who`s on the wrong side
of that beat is going to heat some of the costs of that because the
taxpayer won`t come in.

So, this is reflecting the markets when they`re pricing the risk of
bankruptcy of the big institutions are starting to price in the fact that
as the congresswoman said, there actually is going to be a penalty.
They`re not going to get bailed out.

I want to thank Maxine Waters, Democratic congresswoman from
California.

WATERS: You`re welcome.

HAYES: I`m sorry we have to go. But I want to have you back to talk
more about this. Come by our table any time you`re in New York. We`ll
have you on. Congresswoman Maxine Waters from California.

WATERS: Thank you.

HAYES: All right. A follow up to my exchange with Rudy Giuliani
this week, right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: A quick update on a story we did a few weeks ago. Members of
the Chicago Teachers Union voted this week to approve the new three-year
contract that ended their seven-day strike in September. Seventy-nine
percent of the union`s membership ratified the contract, which includes pay
increases and a new teacher evaluation system. The teachers will get a 7
percent raise over the three-year term.

And the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, agreed to reduce the number
of teachers` evaluations that are based on test scores and to have an
appeals process to contest evaluations. Usually we do now we know here.
But today, I just wanted to take a moment to tie up a loose end from this
week`s debate coverage.

On Wednesday night, after the debate, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and
I had a somewhat contentious exchange over, first, the Bush tax cuts
expiration and then at the end, his consulting firm. The mayor was making
a case for smaller government, to stop as he put it feeding the beast. And
I asked whether contracts would save Homeland Security or contracts his
consulting firm secures with government count as feeding the beast.

He said I was engaging in a personal attack and I was flat out wrong,
that his firm had no contracts with DHS and took no federal money. Well,
we checked, and I truth is I vastly overestimated the amount of direct
government business Giuliani`s firm, Giuliani Bracewell, does with the
federal government. The mayor was right that his firm has no contracts
with DHS or the federal government. A Giuliani representative told us
yesterday his firm is also not pursuing any federal contracts either for
itself or any of its clients.

But while he was correct he never had a contract specifically with
DHS, it is true in 2002, his consulting firm received a $1.1 million
contract from the Justice Department. Given how much revenue Mr.
Giuliani`s firm brings in, that hardly represents a major part of its
business but it`s not nothing either.

More broadly, Mr. Giuliani`s consulting business has had clients like
a software company Cysip (ph) who themselves sold products or devices to
the federal government, landing contracts worth millions of dollars.
There`s nothing wrong with that per se.

And the point here really isn`t about Mr. Giuliani. I raise the
issue because Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Romney, and most Republicans draw a sharp
line between the virtuous private sector and the vicious and predatory
public sector, while at the same time advocating for $2 trillion more in
defense spending.

The same party that preaches government is wasteful and bureaucrats
as useless, has also overseen the creation of a vast, largely privately
contracted world of surveillance and security that provides a whole lot of
private sector jobs and healthy paychecks from the taxpayer dime.

We shouldn`t pretend that the public and private sector exist in two
different worlds. The overlap is increasing and there`s a good lot of
private profit to be made by navigating the borders between the two. I can
appreciate Mr. Giuliani was taken aback that I broached this when the
ostensible topic at hand was the debate. So, I would love to have the
former mayor accept our invitation to join us here on UP to explore the
issue further and in depth.

I want to find out what my guests know now that they didn`t know when
the week began.

We will begin with you Alexis Goldstein.

GOLDSTEIN: So, we know there are some incredibly brave people in
Texas that are physically putting their bodies between bulldozers and
clear cuts to prevent the southern part of the construction of the Keystone
XL Pipeline. It`s a really incredible story. You can watch at
tarsandsblockade.org.

But this week, we saw actress Daryl Hannah get arrested. We saw 20-
something named Maggie get arrested for sitting up in a tree and she`s
facing $11,000 in bail and a 78-year-old great grandmother who is charged
with trespassing on her own land for trying to stop construction of the
Keystone XL.

HAYES: That`s a great story. And we followed the Keystone Pipeline,
it was something that I think everyone anticipated which is going to be
built and there`s a tremendous amount of organizing and social movement
energy put behind blocking it.

GOLDSTEIN: Yes.

HAYES: Its fate remains unclear and this is another part of the
direct action strategy to make sure it doesn`t get built so that the tar
sands and all the carbon in there that would continue in the earth don`t
get released into the air.

Detrick Muhammad?

DETRICK MUHAMMAD, NAACP: Right. Well, what we at the NAACP want and
a lot of other advocacy groups want people to know is to understand there
are government programs out there that are designed to help people recover
from this massive foreclosure crisis and Wall Street crisis we`ve been
talking about. One is the independent foreclosure review. I want to get
this out because by December 31st, if people don`t apply for the program,
you`re going to lose your opportunity to get assistance.

And the assistance is for those who went through some type of
foreclosure proceeding in 2009, 2010. People can go to independent
foreclosurereview.com, or to call the phone number 888-952-9105, 888-952-
9105, because a big concern is that these programs will pass and the
average American will never get the opportunity to get some of the damages
they need to help recover and move the economy forward.

MADDOW: This is -- deadline November -- December 31st, the end of
this year. We`ll put that on our blog and our Tumblr and we`ll tweet that
out, 888-952-9105. If you`ve been through foreclosure and are looking for
assistance.

Joe Stiglitz.

STIGLITZ: Well, I think what we learned this week is that both
candidates seem to be concerned about having a fair tax system. The real
challenge is given the fact that America has become the most unequal
society, given the fact that America has become advanced industrial
country, the country with the least equality of opportunity -- it seems to
me really an interesting question to get the two candidates to try to
express how it is that they`re going to achieve this objectives, not only
through the tax code but through expenditure programs.

HAYES: Yes.

STIGLITZ: How are you going to deal with the fact that, you know, in
many ways inequality in our society has gone way up and equality of
opportunity has gone way down.

HAYES: I think that`s really important. Your book, which is called,
"The Price of Inequality" is fantastic. I recommend to everyone watching
it.

Some of the things in my own book, which is not written by a Nobel
laureate, tries to make a sort of -- a less precisely empirical case for
the ways in which inequality isn`t just unfair, but actually destructive,
actually harmful, actually produces systemic risk, actually produces
dysfunction in the institutional crisis, and I think this is a great book
for people to pick up.

Avik Roy?

ROY: This week, we learned that Miguel Cabrera is one of the
greatest hitters in the history of baseball. Triple Crown, the first
player in 45 years to lead a league, one of the two major leagues, in
batting average, home runs and runs batted in, incredible accomplishment.

So, congratulations to Miguel Cabrera and go Tigers.

HAYES: All right. Well, all the saber metric heads are kiss-kissing
(ph) the Triple Crown, his RBI. RBI are no longer seen as quite the hot
statistic that they once were.

My thanks to Alexis Goldstein from Occupy Wall Street, Dedrick
Muhammad of NAACP, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, the book
is "The Price of Inequality," and Avik Roy, always great to have you here,
adviser to Mitt Romney. Thank you for getting UP.

And thank you for joining us today for UP. Join us tomorrow, Sunday
morning at 8:00. I`ll have Congressman Peter Welch, "Daily Show" co-
creator Lizz Winstead and journalist Jose Antonio Vargas.

And coming up next is "MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY". On today`s "MHP," how
the 7.8 percent unemployment rate puts Wednesday night`s debate in
perspective. And an open letter to George Will, the columnist who said
America will re-elect President Obama primarily because we are a nation
unwilling to give up on our first black president. Melissa has a response.

That`s "MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY" coming up next. And we`ll see you
right here tomorrow at 8:00. Thanks for getting UP.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY
BE UPDATED.
END

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