KATIE COURIC: Good evening. We start tonight's broadcast with a story on how people are coping with the never-ending Great Recession. There are two Americas today, the haves and the have-nots. The haves have all they want and more. The have-nots often struggle just to survive. The have-nots outnumber the haves by a factor of 100 to 1.
In a frightening parallel to what happened in Argentina in 2001-2002, people are commuting to major cities looking for recyclables for money. In New York City, there are even a few special, cheap trains that run into the city in the morning and out of the city in the evening for people collecting anything of value from trash left by Wall Street workers. These trains have been configured with no seats to pack in the most people. These trains often carry entire families, homeless nomads who sleep in a different location each night.
None of these people would talk to us on camera. Our reporter believed that many of the people are embarrassed by their predicament. All we have is a short video with street sounds.
VIDEO: Scene of a family going through garbage cans looking for anything of value.
VIDEO: Scene of young, well-dressed Wall Street bankers throwing aluminum cans near the family and laughing at their situation.
KATIE COURIC: Continuing on the theme of the poor economy, our Alexis Christoforous is outside a Walmart in the Chicago area. With the economy continuing to decline, more people are shopping at Walmart because that is all they can afford. Here's Alexis.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Hi Katie, I'm standing outside a Walmart store in Schaumburg, Illinois. I've asked questions of a number of people shopping at Walmart today. Here's the video.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Why are you shopping at Walmart today?
SHOPPER 1: I bought me some pork chops, potatoes, and canned oranges for dessert.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: I can see the canned mandarin oranges in your bag. They're packaged by Dole. Do you know that the contents actually come from China?
SHOPPER 1: Yer nuts. Everything I buy is made in the USA. Everyone knows Dole is an American company. Yer one of them socialists, ain't ya? Why don't you report fair and balanced?
SHOPPER 2: Is this CBS News? I have an old CBS News joke for you. What do you get when you mix a computer with an gorilla?
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: I don't know, what?
SHOPPER 2: Harry Reasoner.
SHOPPER 3: Why don't you liberal news media people report the truth? Obama's deficits ruined the country. I really miss Reagan and Bush's budget surpluses. As soon as Rand Paul becomes president next week, thing will be much better.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: George W. Bush did not have a budget surplus, not in any year of his terms. Neither Reagan nor H.W. Bush had a surplus. The last budget surplus we had was at the end of Clinton's terms. Before that, we had one year of a surplus in 1969 and before that Eisenhower had a few years of budget surpluses.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: I see your shopping bags are full of products for leftovers. Are you still eating leftover Christmas meat?
SHOPPER 4: Money's real tight right now. For both Thanksgiving and Christmas, we bought the biggest turkey we could find. We froze the meat we knew would spoil before we ate it. So we've had nothing but turkey and fixings since Thanksgiving. I told my husband that I was going to have a tattoo of a turkey put on the inside of my left thigh and a a tattoo of a Christmas tree on the inside of my right thigh because of his complaints that there was nothing to eat between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: That's the situation outside this Walmart. Back to you, Katie.
KATIE COURIC: Changing subjects completely, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, is visiting the USA this week. Today she is near Carlsbad Caverns. Let's take a look at the video from a short time ago.
VIDEO: Scene of Carla Bruni speaking to reporters in front of a cave entrance.
CARLA BRUNI: My new book has just been released. The title of it is The widely traveled Carla Bruni.
VIDEO: Scene of park ranger yelling into cave opening.
PARK RANGER: That's the largest hole I've ever seen! That's the largest hole I've ever seen! That's the largest hole I've ever seen!
CARLA BRUNI: That is amusing. That is exactly what happened -- same words, same echo effect -- when I had my medical examination with my gynecologist last week.
KATIE COURIC: Next we have a short conversation with a legend in the television news business, Tom Brokaw.
Tom, you recently said on CNN that students should learn a second language and plan on leaving the country to find work.
TOM BROKAW: Yes, I believe that students should learn Chinese and other languages and work overseas, because there are just no jobs being created here. They have a choice: stay here and take the risk of becoming part of a lost generation or leave the country and look for work in one of the growing parts of the world.
KATIE COURIC: Wow, Tom, that is really depressing. Previous generations could look forward to working just about anywhere in this country, but now they must become vagabonds and seek their fortune elsewhere.
I'd like to contrast that with something that most Americans don't realize. Hundreds of thousands of foreigners, mainly Indians, are imported here every year on H-1B and L-1 visas. These people work for substantially less than what a native-born American would earn, so they depress wages for everyone. The original idea was to import only people with doctorate degrees, but now companies like Microsoft do it to save money on low-level employees. Isn't this merely internal outsourcing, in other words, insourcing?
TOM BROKAW: That's right, Katie. Neither political party cares about the middle class anymore. Pretty much all politicians push these visas for companies like Wipro, an Indian-owned company dedicated to bringing in Indian high-tech workers. Then Wipro returns the favor by making campaign contributions, directly or indirectly, to the politicians. It is scandalous. There were a few politicians who fought it, like Senator Byron Dorgan, but the vast majority are in favor of it.
KATIE COURIC: Thanks, Tom, as always.
Now we'll have a conversation with Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan.
Mr. Greenspan, you were always in favor of deregulating markets, believing that they would police themselves. The poster girl for total laissez-faire markets was Ayn Rand. Is it true that in your younger days you slept with Ayn Rand, a woman more than 20 years older than you?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Yes, it was an irrational protuberance.
KATIE COURIC: I believe you know how Rand's most famous book, Atlas Shrugged, was named.
ALAN GREENSPAN: Atlas Shrugged was named for one of Ayn's many young lovers. Her pet name for him was Atlas because he had a huge, uh, fountainhead. He was not circumcised; when he cleaned it, Ayn thought it was shrugging.
KATIE COURIC: Ayn Rand was much worse than most people realize. She waxed poetic regarding a man, William Edward Hickman, who viciously killed a 12-year-old girl, Marion Parker, in December 1927. He kidnapped, raped, and dismembered her, leaving her torso on the side of the road where her father found her. He left other parts of her body in a park.
Hickman stated in 1928, "I am like the state: what is good for me is right." Rand wrote in her journal regarding his statement "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard. Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." She started to write a book based on Hickman titled The Little Street.
ALAN GREENSPAN: You cannot make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
KATIE COURIC: Don't you find it ironic that conservatives hated Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy for moral indiscretions, yet they admire Ayn Rand who had much worse morals?
ALAN GREENSPAN: What she did...was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.
KATIE COURIC: Thanks for your time, Mr. Greenspan
On this last business day of the Obama administration, I talked to the outgoing Secretary of the Navy, Mark Foley.
Secretary Foley, you were forced to leave the Congress after allegations that you sent suggestive emails and sexually explicit instant messages to Pages working in the House. Yet President Obama chose you to be Secretary of the Navy for the second half of his term.
MARK FOLEY: I'd like to thank President Obama for allowing me to open a new chapter in my career, to, uh, turn a page, if you catch my drift.
I have really loved working to allow gays to serve on submarines. How can you not love long, hard tubes filled with seamen?
Some people say that President Obama's commitment to gay rights contributed greatly to his election loss in 2012. I think it was worth it.
Do you know what gays call condoms? Seal-a-meal.
And thanks to the ACLU, the Boy Scouts can no longer deny me to be a troop leader. That's my next job. I cannot wait.
KATIE COURIC: Okay, thanks Mr. Secretary.
Steve Hartman will host an hour-long Assignment America later tonight. Here's Steve with a preview.
STEVE HARTMAN: We put microphones on two teenaged girls, Adriana and Brigitte, and followed them around on their bikes as they rode around Huntley, Illinois.
VIDEO: Scene of two girls riding their bikes down a lonely cobblestone street as day turns to dusk. Brigitte looks a little nervous.
BRIGITTE: You know, I've never come this way before.
ADRIANA: It's the cobblestones.
KATIE COURIC: We'll be right back.
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