--- title: Bill Clinton on Unemployment and Occupy Wall Street | TIME description: At Chicago Ideas Week, TIME managing editor Richard Stengel spoke with former President Bill Clinton about jobs and the Occupy Wall Street movement canonical: https://time.com/video/SlPlNHT5/ og:title: Bill Clinton on Unemployment and Occupy Wall Street og:description: At Chicago Ideas Week, TIME managing editor Richard Stengel spoke with former President Bill Clinton about jobs and the Occupy Wall Street movement og:url: https://time.com/video/SlPlNHT5/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/SlPlNHT5/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Bill Clinton on Unemployment and Occupy Wall Street twitter:description: At Chicago Ideas Week, TIME managing editor Richard Stengel spoke with former President Bill Clinton about jobs and the Occupy Wall Street movement twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/SlPlNHT5/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Bill Clinton on Unemployment and Occupy Wall Street > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Bill Clinton on Unemployment and Occupy Wall Street [Watch (HLS stream): Bill Clinton on Unemployment and Occupy Wall Street](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/SlPlNHT5.m3u8) (6:09)  _Published 2011-10-21. At Chicago Ideas Week, TIME managing editor Richard Stengel spoke with former President Bill Clinton about jobs and the Occupy Wall Street movement_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:18 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Sights and Sounds of Occupy Wall Street's "Action Day"](/video/O4QkwXRj/) ### Sights and Sounds of Occupy Wall Street's "Action Day" [Occupy Wall Street's Live Streamer Tim Pool](/video/7iqOut7N/) ### Occupy Wall Street's Live Streamer Tim Pool [Re-entering Occupy Wall Street After Eviction](/video/yJzXMHfS/) ### Re-entering Occupy Wall Street After Eviction --- ## Transcript I know unemployment can't be separated out as something, that is different from all of the economic ailments that we have. But, economists talk about we're going through, whether we're going through cyclical or secular changes. Whether it's a long term change, a permanent change versus something temporary. Why can we really even envision a full employment society. Don't we have to learn to live with? A higher level of unemployment than, than we've gotten used to in the past. No. But we will if we're not prepared to do what it takes to generate more jobs. The problem America's having now is, some of it's cyclical. It's part of this horrible crash. And could be a very long cycle. And some of it is structural. At a minimum, what you have to have, is a source of new employment that is significant, every five to eight years. If you want to have, four five percent unemployment again, you got to have much broader job generating strategy, and I think being competitive in green energy is important. Green energy jobs have grown more than eight percent in the last several years, more than twice the average growth of jobs in the overall economy. That's what you have to do, and you have to do it with a lot of different things. This country is so, culturally, wedded to the work ethic. And it's about way more than money, it's about your ability to provide for your family, and also how you feel, when you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror. It's a huge deal. So I do not think we should become accustomed to nine or ten percent unemployment. What do you make mister president of occupy Wall street movement? Do you see it as a, as a counter to the tea party? Do you see it as, as a real grass roots movement? Or We're, we're not and, and how do you see that the Democrats kind of playing into that during this election year? Well, it, first of all the Occupy Wall Street movement. It has a lot in common with the early Tea Party. You go back and read what those Working women in suburban Atlanta who got this whole thing started. What they said in the beginning, they were against unaccountable power from top to bottom, so they were for a lot of policies that I didn't support. They didn't want the banks bailed out because they said the banks caused this by. You know, becoming over leveraged. They were absolutely right, but we'd have been in terrible funk if we had allow the banking system collapse. They didn't want people with bad mortgages to get mortgage relief, because they said they were stupid to take them out in the first place. Well, that might be right, but now it's hurting everybody. Look, if you live on a block where somebody else's house has been foreclosed on, the value of your house just went down. This is hurting everybody. So I didn't agree with their policies, but their impulses were good. So the Occupy Wall Street crowd basically said, I'm unemployed and the people that caused this, they have their jobs again, and they're getting their bonuses again, and their incomes are high again There's something wrong with this country. The political's system's not working for me. So I think it can be a good positive debate. Because you and I were talking about it, backstage. It's kinda like the Arab Spring, which was profoundly moving to me. Seeing all those young people interviewed in Egypt, and in. Tunis. They knew what they were against, but they weren't sure exactly what they were for. They had a vision, they had no program, and they had no organized political party. That's the problem the Occupy Wall Street People have. What would you do structurally to, try to bring the country closer together, and, and not be so polarized. I mean, as you know, the, the political ( no period ). You know? Scientists who say that we're not. Particularly on social issues, we're not deeply divided. We're narrowly divided. But so much in the system makes those divisions seem bigger than they are. Yeah, you can get 65 %, agreement on a lot of the things that we need to do as a country. But that 65 % doesn't show up and vote that way on election day. Part of it, I think, is, it would be good if the congressional districts were less gerrymandered to be politically favorable to incumbents, whether they're Republicans or Democrats. But. We gotta somehow reconnect people to their political leaders. Somehow we have to get comfortable with being people we disagree with, and working through these things again. This is a time for thinking, and all this hyperventilating and name calling and everything, it's highly destructive. So, the senate could change some of it's rules. They're trying to work through that now. There are lots of things that can be done, that would give us a more represented democracy, but the American people have gotta own some of this, too. We always have a debate with each other about government. We don't want too much government, but we want enough And where the dividing line is typically divides liberals and conservatives. And we're all over the map on that now. As our politics have gotten more polarized, what that's done is leaked a paralysis. And if you wanna change, you're gonna all have to change it. You're going to have to demand it. You're gonna have to work for it, and you're gonna have to reach out to people to try to create a climate in which you don't get beat. We've got to get off our high horse here and start thinking again and we gotta be willing to do this together. 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