All-American Presidential Forums on PBS" Moderated by Tavis Smiley

FORUM RESPONSES

"The answer to your question, it is still the defining issue. In the decision today, look at the minority views. The minority stated had the rationale that was applied by the majority been applied the last fifty years, we would have never overcome the state's effort to ignore Brown vs. the Board. But we can do something about it and the place to start is with the next president, with the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

As some of you know, some of the people on this stage and the press criticized me for being awful tough on Justice Roberts and awful tough on Alito. The problem was, the rest of us weren't tough enough on them. They have turned the court upside down and the next president of the United States will be able to determine whether or not we go forward or continue this slide. It's the single most imperative generational decision the next president will make and you'd better pick the right person to make it."

"You know, DeWayne, one of the things that we all talk about is this achievement gap. We should remind everybody that the day before a Black child, a minority child, steps into a classroom, half the achievement gap already exists. That is, they already start behind. So the moment they walk into that school, they are already behind. That gap widens and it widens because we do not start school earlier.

We do not give single mothers in disadvantaged homes the opportunities that they need in order to know what to do to prepare their children. A mother who talks to her child on a regular basis from infancy to being a toddler, that child when it's two years old will have a vocabulary three hundred words more than a child not talked to.

So it's simple. You've got to start off and focus on the nurturing education of children when they're very young, particularly children from disadvantaged families. You've got to invest in starting kids in preschool at age four. They have a twenty percent better chance of graduating when they're there, and you've got to make sure as you go through the system that you have smaller classrooms, better teachers in the disadvantaged schools."

"I will try to answer your question directly. You said how do we prevent the seventeen-year-olds from getting HIV-AIDS? How do you prevent that? All the things that were said here are good ideas. They don't prevent that. What's happened is there's a policy of neglect, denial and lack of honesty out there.

The fact of the matter is, as Hillary points out, there's neglect on the part of the medical and the white community focusing on educating the minority community out there. I spent last summer going through the Black sections of my town holding rallies in parks, trying to get Black men to understand that it's not unmanly to wear a condom, getting women to understand they can say no, getting people in the position where testing matters.

I got tested for AIDS. I know Barack got tested for AIDS. There's no shame in being tested for AIDS. It's an important thing because the fact of the matter is, in the communities engaged in denial, no one wants to talk about it in the community and we do not have enough leaders in the community and outside the community demanding we face the reality, confront the men in the community as well as the women, letting them know there are alternatives."

"Warren Buffett is right. I would eliminate the tax cut for the wealthy. They didn't ask for it, as someone earlier said. They don't need it. They're as patriotic as anyone else if you ask them. We've asked nothing of them. The second point is, understand what happened this last election in 2000. The first time in our history since we had the federal income tax, there was a fundamental shift of the burden from people who were wage earners away from people who were investors.

For the first time in our history, we are in a position where those who are the wage earners are paying a bigger chunk than they should. It's got to shift back and the basis for them doing that is they really believe the wealthy know better. They think we don't know how. Average folks don't know how to make the economy work. It's all about their ideology. It's got to fundamentally change. You have to tax investment and you've got to give a break to wage earners."

"As you well know, the bulk of the inequities at the state level, not at the federal number, number one. Number two, we need diversion out of the system. I'm the guy that wrote the drug court legislation that is in the law right now. Number three, you have to eliminate the disparity between crack and powdered cocaine. I've introduced legislation to do that, one to one, no difference.

And number four, you have to find a way in which you insist from a federal level the states in fact apply the law equally. They don't through the speedy trial act. The state's 650,000 people come out of the jail and the state prisons and 300,000 will come out addicted from the prison this year."

"The U.S. Constitution should be sufficient. We don't need to go to the United Nations. All we got to do is step up. We got to step up and pay to rebuild those fire houses, pay to bring those cops back, pay to rebuild those hospitals. It is a nation's problem. It is not the problem merely of the people of Louisiana or New Orleans. This is an American city incapable on its own of doing this. It's an American problem. We should guarantee the reconstruction."

"I agree with everything that was said here, but the bottom line here is that eliminating the tax breaks is not going to keep jobs here in America. We've got to make it more attractive to have jobs here in America and for corporations to be here. You've got to take the burden off the corporations with a health care system that's universal so we're not at a competitive disadvantage.

You've got to have a better education system to provide for the highest tech jobs that we educate our folks for so we're not importing 400,000 computer engineers to work in Silicon Valley, and you've got to deal with the innovation and infrastructure needs in this country, tunnels, bridges, etc., which we haven't done to make us more competitive."

"I have been calling for three years to stop talking and start acting. We don't have to wait to get out of Iraq to regain our moral authority. We've lost part of our moral authority because we stood by and watched this carnage. If need be, if the rest of the world will not act, we should and should have already, two years, imposed a no-fly zone and we should have, two years ago, absent the willingness of the rest of the world to act, put American troops on the ground to stop the carnage."