MSNBC "Hardball with Chris Matthews" - Transcript: Dick Cheney and Income Inequality
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Joining us right now, U.S. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver. He`s a Democrat from Missouri. Joy Reid is my colleague and host of MSNBC`s "THE REID REPORT." And Clarence Page is the opinion writer for "The Chicago Tribune" and author of the new book "Culture Worrier."
Let me go to the congressman on this.
It seems to me that he`s passing the buck back and it seems to me that Congress ought to be asserting its constitutional right to declare war here, or at least approve a war. Your thoughts?
REP. EMANUEL CLEAVER (D), MISSOURI: I think the speaker of the House has the responsibility to protect the institutionality of the United States Congress.
And that means that we cannot continue to give authority to the president that Section -- that Article 1, Section 8 clearly gave to the House of Representatives. We have the power to make war. And for the last six decades, we have completely given away authority after authority to the president of the United States.
And I think it`s very dangerous, if not for us, for our progeny. And I think that the speaker of the House needs to take the responsibility and call us back into session. He`s the only one who can do that.
MATTHEWS: What are they hiding from, Clarence?
CLARENCE PAGE, COLUMNIST, "THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE": Well, that`s a good question.
Now, I think it`s interesting to me how many of the war hawks in Congress can suddenly start -- their wings begin to chill when the time comes to actually cast a vote on an enormous project like this. Maybe Congressman Cleaver can give me some insight into this, frankly, because Speaker Boehner wants to push it off now until next year -- or after the 1st of the year, with the next Congress, which makes you wonder, what`s it all about?
Certainly, there should be some gesture of legitimacy by Congress behind the president on this action, when you have got Americans so deeply committed, even if we haven`t got boots on the ground.
MATTHEWS: Well, that`s a great question. Why is the left and the right united here? You got Harry Reid and -- and McConnell, Mitch McConnell, whose name I`m trying to forget, Mitch McConnell, they both agree not to vote, Congressman.
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: What`s that deal, in bed together, so they`re protecting each other as incumbents? What are they up to? Why don`t they vote?
CLEAVER: Look, look, to be sure, a vote on war is something that creates some discomfort.
But the only way you find out whether a person is courageous is what they do after they feel scared. And so I think we have to do this and quit thinking about protecting people for a vote. Look what we`re doing. We`re saying we`re going to send some soldiers into harm`s way, pilots, and maybe even people on the ground in harm`s way, but the people in Congress, who are allowing it to happen, are too afraid to vote?
I think there`s something wrong with that.
JOY REID, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: And, Chris...
MATTHEWS: Is voting scarier than getting shot at?
Your thoughts, anyway, Joy?
REID: No, Chris, I think that you just pointed your finger at something that is really important here.
I think there are different considerations in the House vs. the Senate. I think if you talk to House members, every Democrat I have talked to wants to vote, wants to go on the floor and be on record. Whether they`re for this or against it, they want to vote.
Republicans, it seems, going -- starting from John Boehner on down don`t want to put members in the position of having to either, A, affirm something positively that President Obama is doing. He`s the boogeyman. They can`t go back into their districts and say they agree with anything he did, even if they fundamentally do agree with it.
Or if it goes wrong, they don`t want anything to do with it. They want Obama holding the bag by himself. On the Senate side, you then have Harry Reid attempting to protect vulnerable red state Democrats who are in exactly the same position. They are in these tight races where they don`t want to have to affirm something that President Obama did, when they`re nervous that anything tied to the president will hurt their reelection.
This is all about the reelect. I do agree that it`s an abdication of the responsibilities of Congress. Emanuel Cleaver is here today that wants to vote. I think there are a few members. I have talked to Democrats who want to vote. They`re all in the House of Representatives.
No Democrats in the Senate have said that they want to vote.
(CROSSTALK)
REID: Well, actually, maybe a couple, but not any that are up for
reelection.
MATTHEWS: Well, here`s a guy I would like to see abdicate
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: I want to talk about a guy -- I`m sorry, Joy.
I would like to see this guy Dick Cheney abdicate.
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: He`s been out of office, Congressman, for what, how many years now, six or seven years now. He`s still talking like he`s still been right, when he`s been wrong on everything.
He broke apart -- to use the potter house -- pottery house rule, he broke it, he bought it. It`s his Iraq. It`s the Iraq he wanted. They got rid of the Shia -- the Sunni in the government. They de-Baathicized it, everything he wanted to do. And we have chaos and ISIS.
And now he`s out there giving this Yoda-like information to the little Republicans. I don`t know why they`re listening to him. He ain`t Henry Kissinger. I don`t know what they`re thinking.
CLEAVER: Well, he thinks that if he keeps telling the story about Iraq, that eventually, it will be true. That there are weapons of mass destruction. And the other thing, I think he just doesn`t want to go away. And I think that, you know, he would do a great deal of service to the United States and to the planet if he would just go away.
PAGE: Well, there are a lot of Republicans who like Dick Cheney.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: I only have two minutes, Congressman, and it`s great having you on, by the way. Eric Holder, I sort of like him. I think a lot of people think he`s an honest, good guy, an aggressive guy, a progressive, and he`s leaving.
What do you make of that -- this decision to leave and his legacy?
CLEAVER: He told me before the last election that he didn`t know whether or not he would be able to go into the second term with the president. I don`t think he ever intended to stay for the entire term.
He will go down as one of the great attorney generals. He is courageous. The man has stood up to all kinds of things, including becoming the victim of some of the worst kinds of actions of Congress in history. To censure a member of the cabinet over foolishness, something that didn`t even -- was not even true. And so, I think he is a major figure for this era in the history of the United States.
MATTHEWS: What were they censuring him for? I forgot it.
CLEAVER: Well, it had to do with Fast and Furious.
MATTHEWS: Oh, Fast and Furious, that started under the previous administration.
JOY REID, "THE REID REPORT": Exactly.
CLEAVER: That`s the point.
MATTHEWS: Clarence, it started before him. How do they blame him for it? Your thoughts?
PAGE: They blame him for everything. Even, well, his first big controversy was a black history month speech in which he said Americans are cowards about race. He wasn`t saying white Americans. He said Americans, he was including black folks in that too. But the right pounced on that as one more reason to bash Eric Holder. And, you know, one thing about Eric Holder, he gets bashed by the right and the left. There were a lot of people on the left who wish he was more aggressive in going after Wall Street bankers, after the financial crash in 2008.
But, you know, he`s got that New York sensibility, I guess, where, you know, he just keeps on his own path and just doesn`t let these other folks get under his skin. But he`s not made it a secret for quite sometime that he probably wasn`t going to finish out the term.
REID: Yes.
MATTHEWS: OK. We`ll be right back with the roundtable.
Up next, American workers have no idea how huge the gap is between them and the rich and how it`s grown. The numbers, American CEOs make more than 350 times, this is an average CEO, more than 350 times an average worker`s wages.
This is HARDBALL, the place for politics.
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MATTHEWS: Well, we`re 40 days away from election day and there are new numbers in key races across the country.
So, let`s check the HARDBALL scoreboard tonight.
"USA Today"/Suffolk University in the Arkansas Senate race has Democrat Senator Mark Pryor with a slight edge over Republican Tom Cotton, 45-43. Not much there.
In Virginia, the Quinnipiac poll among likely voters shows Senator Mark Warner, however, with a nine-point lead on Republican challenger Ed Gillespie. That`s 50-41.
It`s not even close in Pennsylvania. According to the latest Franklin & Marshall poll, Democrat Tom Wolf, a businessman, has a 20-point lead over Republican Governor Tom Corbett, following their first debate this week. It`s Wolf, 57, Corbett, 37.
We`ll be right back.
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MATTHEWS: We`re back.
Just about everybody know this is country has a problem with income and equality. But new data shows Americans have an exceptionally difficult time understanding how vast that gap really is. A new Harvard Business School study reveals the degree to which Americans underestimate how much more a corporate CEO makes compared to the average worker. They found that Americans believe that a CEO makes about 30 times more than the wager earner, 30 times.
In actuality, however, CEOs make more than 350 times what an average wage earner makes. That`s a hell of a difference.
The study also reveals the no other country in the world has a larger pay gap, the United States, where the salary of an average worker is just $35,000 a year, and CEO make an average of $12 million a year in this country.
We`re back now with our roundtable. U.S. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, Clarence Page, columnist with the Chicago and Joy Reid is the host, obviously, of "THE REID REPORT".
Joy, I want to start with you because I did the math. You know, Roger Goodell with all his troubles, is making more in two weeks than the average worker makes in a lifetime. Two weeks, he makes in a lifetime, a lifetime. So, you got to work and you make your good salary at 25, you work until your 65, you`re making an average of 35K a year, it takes you that lifetime to make what he makes in two weeks.
REID: Yes, I mean --
MATTHEWS: He hasn`t been doing a particularly good job. And you have to wonder if the average worker doing that kind of job that Roger Goodell has been doing, he wouldn`t be a worker for a while, your thoughts?
REID: No, and, Chris, think about all the CEOs that run companies into the ground. Thin k about Dell and some of these other CEO that then get bought out and get golden parachutes, and get tens of millions of dollars just to go away. And you look at the average American that`s struggling to get to $10 an hour. And you had the president ask states and ask companies to get people above $7.25 an hour and the average, that it would take the average worker six months of work to earn what the average CEO makes in an hour.
So, we have a situation that is really extreme. But I think what was really interesting in the study is that Americans don`t even see that. They think there`s disparity, but they have no idea the magnitude of it. They assume that it`s left. I think if Americans understood the raw number, 340 times the average worker that CEOs are making, some of them are not quality CEOs, I think a lot more people would be outraged on a lot more exercised on things like minimum wage.
CLEAVER: I hope you`re right, but my thing, Joy, I think a lot of the American public participates in their own economic demise, because I think many of them actually vicariously live through rich folk. I mean, how many of you hear bragging about having somebody poor over for dinner, you know? But if they have the CEO of some major corporation, they want everybody to know. I think that`s one of the things that we`ve got to deal with, and that is people work against themselves, quite often.
PAGE: I think you`re absolutely right. I first discovered back in the `70s in prefecture England, and see the difference in attitudes of working class folks there, compared to here in the U.S., where -- you know, over there, the story was -- you know, if you saw a guy go by in a Rolls Royce, you`d say, you got to do something about reducing this income gap. But over here in the U.S., it was like, I`m going to get me one of those one of these days. Well, most people don`t get that Rolls Royce, but that is the American dream. It`s part of the psychology of this country, where it comes even subversive and scary to talk about the income gap that just gets bigger and bigger in recent years.
I mean, we`re talking post-New Deal. After watching Roosevelt`s documentary last week, it became really apparent how American attitudes have changed.
MATTHEWS: Why do these compensation committees allow people to make this exponential money? Because it seems to me, you can live pretty well in $10 million or $20 million year. You can save a lot of money on $10 million or $20 million a year. Why do you need $45 million, $50 million? These incredible salaries that you see around, Joy?
PAGE: People aren`t paid according to need, Chris. They`re paid according to what somebody else thinks they`re worth.
MATTHEWS: Why do the stockholders give them the money? Why did they do it?
PAGE: Exactly. Ask those stockholders, you know? That`s the issue, because they keep doing it.
REID: And one of the things that the American companies have done is they`ve sort of made this crazy bargain between the stockholders, even at the very small level, people at the 401(k) who don`t even know how many shares of stock we have, probably a fraction of the shares of stock, and this sort of corrupt bargaining with CEOs, who are by and large paid in stocks, so that the prime directive of every corporation is to maximize the value of the stock. And if that means laying off 10,000 workers, that actually boost the stock, that`s what companies are going to do.
I think we`ve created a kind of corrupt bargain where Americans sink in their minds that they`re participating in Wall Street, so that when Wall Street is doing well, they`re doing well. But it doesn`t mean that at all. If you have a 401(k), and your diluted piece of stock is up a tenth of a share, you`re not getting anything. And I think that ethos, though, sort of that we think the rich are better, they are the "job creators", quote- unquote, they`re sort of the superiors of everyone else, it`s part of the reasons so many working class vote for the party of the rich, the party of tax cuts for the rich, do it proudly.
MATTHEWS: So, you`re knocking Mitt Romney now?
REID: He did say 47 percent were moochers. But it didn`t have many election and that`s what hopeful, that people punish him for it, at least in the last election.
MATTHEWS: I think you`re right. Congressman, are the people better off not knowing how worse off they are compared to some people? Does this keep social calm in the country? Just the fact nobody can imagine somebody making 350 times what they make?
CLEAVER: I think that is the design, that I think with great intentionality, that people have helped to structure society so that, you know, people are not getting upset about that because I think Clarence is right, I think they`re going to eventually be there.
But, here, two things quickly. One, people who have a great deal of stock in companies, including CEOs, they can buy their own stock. And that creates a larger and larger company with a smaller and smaller portion of the money being shared.
The other thing is that many of the CEOs are circling in each other`s boards. And they`re on the compensation committees. They are, of course, trying to help each other and they`ve designed a parachute for all of them, for each other rather, so that when they leave, even if they run the company on the ground, they`re going to be wealthy, their children, their grandchildren and their grandchildren`s grandchildren.
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