Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

U.S. Economy Finally Recovers All Jobs Lost in Recession; Man Storms Courthouse With Weapons; Colbert Talks Uncle Who Served in WWII; Rice Warns Not To Judge Bergdahl; CNN Hero Helps Holocaust Survivors

Aired June 06, 2014 - 15:30   ET

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

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Now he's the pope, all right? He's pro- family. Doesn't it make sense that he would come out and say something like this?

AMANDA MARCOTTE, CONTRIBUTOR, THE DAILY BEAST: Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

And obviously there is no big surprise here, but it doesn't mean that he is not expressing the sentiment that a lot of people who aren't conservative Catholic pontiffs also agree with.

And I think that it was a perfect opportunity to push back and talk about the value of being childless.

It's not for everybody, obviously, but those of us who choose to go throughout life without having children, we are making this decision for a good reason, for many good reasons.

PHILLIPS: There were a number of other things I was thinking about, right?

The reality of loveless marriages, there's people that can't have kids, the fact that the animals -- you know, look, I know a lot of people where their animals bring them so much love and comfort and balance in their lives.

So do you think they would like to see him come back and many address some of these realities of how that might have made people feel?

MARCOTTE: You know, I would love it if he would really sit and think about the arguments from the other side -- why people don't want children, why they might use birth control to delay having children, all of those things.

I don't think that's going to happen. I do think it would be nice if he acknowledged how hurtful his statements are to infertile couples at least. I think that's within the realm of possibility.

PHILLIPS: Yeah, I'm one of those lucky people. Because of fertility, I have twins, and let me tell you, I am glad to know -- I hope to know they will be by my bedside at the end.

Finally, I've just got to get your response. There is a lot of criticism out there on the blogs about what you wrote, even saying that you're spewing anti-Catholic vomit. It's pretty intense.

How do you respond to that?

MARCOTTE: A lot of Catholics, believing Catholics, choose not to have children. Almost all believing Catholics choose to use contraception, despite the pope forbidding it.

The very notion that I'm anti-Catholic is completely ridiculous. I'm supporting a decision that many Catholics make, and more generally, I'm supporting a belief that most Catholics agree with, which is that people should have a right and ability to decide for themselves if they have children and how many that they want have.

PHILLIPS: Amanda, thanks for being with me. Appreciate it.

MARCOTTE: Thank you.

PHILLIPS: Just ahead, developing right now, he was prepared for war. A man drives up to the courthouse. He throws out these spike strips. He's got gas grenades. He's firing shots.

And police say his home may be booby trapped. We're going to actually take you there, live.

Plus, the jobs are back. We've essentially replaced the number of jobs lost during the recession, and we're going to tell you where the jobs are and are not.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: We learned today that the U.S. economy added 217,000 jobs in May. The unemployment rate held steady at 6.3 percent.

But the real headline, the total number of jobs finally tops where we were before the recession. It took two years to lose 8.7 million jobs, but it's four years to gain that number back.

All right, Rana Foroohar's CNN global economic analyst and assistant managing editor for "Time" magazine. So, Rana, this sounds good, but give us the reality check.

RANA FOROOHAR, CNN GLOBAL ECONOMIC ANALYST: All right. The good news is this is now the fourth month of really strong jobs report, so that's good. Three's a trend in economics, and we are on the upswing.

The other bit of good news is that the growth is broad-based, so we're not just talking retail or health care but also manufacturing, construction, all kinds of other things. So it's really happening now across the economy.

The bad news issues are that wage growth is still really slow. It's only about two percent a month. It should be up around four percent to reach the pre-crisis levels and for us to really begin to feel like we all have more money in our pockets.

PHILLIPS: So people can tell that the economy isn't all the way back yet, I think. And there's this new CNN/ORC poll, also, that shows most people only believe that things have stabilized or a recovery has started.

A good chunk, 27 percent, say that we're still in a downturn, and most people believe that it will take years for the economy to recover.

So what's it going to take to get Americans to feel like they're actually back on solid ground.

FOROOHOAR: You know, this is an economy that is made of up 70 percent consumer spending, so that goes to this point about wage growth.

People have to have more money in their pockets to spend on goods and services, to get companies really adding many, many more jobs across the economy.

The other point that's important, though, is our economy is very bifurcated. There are plenty of jobs at the top, plenty of jobs for PhDs and engineers. There's also a lot of jobs at the bottom. So, 50 percent of the new jobs created in May were actually lower-income jobs, retail clerks, fast food clerks, people who work in travel in tourism.

What we need is more jobs in the middle, and that's going to requite some big picture fixes, improving education. You know, a lot of the job destruction in our economy right now is because of technology.

Software can do jobs higher and higher up the food chain. Not just blue collar factory jobs are being lost, but white collar jobs, a lot of the things like reading medical charts can be done in India now via software.

So there is a lot of work to be done on reforming education and really getting that 21st century job worker and job market trained up.

PHILLIPS: Yeah. Technology sure has changed a lot for the good, and in some cases, many cases, not so good.

Rana, thank you so much.

FOROOHAR: Thank you.

PHILLIPS: Well, a man with homemade explosives strapped to his body launched a full-frontal assault on a Georgia courthouse. He actually tossed gas grenades as he tried to run over a sheriff's deputy, and cops say that his car was filled with buckets of bombs.

Here's what the chaos actually sounded like on the police scanners we were listening to.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Radio, I don't have any visual. We have pepper gas going off at the entrance of (inaudible)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (Inaudible) pepper gas going off (inaudible). UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Tear gas is going to blow! Take cover!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He's down. He's down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIPS: He's down. He's down. You heard it right there. After a long gunfight, cops did take the suspect down.

His name is Dennis Marx. His home may still be rigged, we're told, also, with deadly explosives.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHERIFF DUANE PIPER, FORSYTH COUNTY, GEORGIA: The house is going to take hours, in itself, because we're quite certain that it's booby- trapped for the purpose of killing law enforcement.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIPS: Joining me now, national reporter Nick Valencia, he's right there near the scene, actually.

Nick, what are you learning about the suspect, Dennis Marx?

NICK VALENCIA, CNN NATIONAL REPORTER: Kyra, we got here just a little while ago, and you can see behind me that this intersection has been blocked off.

The scene is just over my shoulder, right behind that building. Police and sheriff's deputies are not letting anyone in.

What we do know about the shooter is that Dennis Marx was 48-years- old. He had a court hearing earlier today, this morning, where he was expected to enter a plea on a drug charge. In fact, Kyra, he was facing a litany of drug and weapons charges.

Sheriff's deputies tell us that he had every intention of taking the courthouse over. He was armed with heavy ammunition and supplies, as you mentioned, those spike strips to keep first responders from being able to get to him, as well as smoke grenades, and he was armed with that semiautomatic gun.

They believe he was prepared to take hostages had it not been for that deputy standing outside the courthouse doing his rounds and the SWAT team that coincidentally was in the area that responded with within the first 30 seconds of the shooting. Mr. Marx may well have taken hostages, and as I mentioned, may well have take over that courthouse.

Kyra?

PHILLIPS: As far as you know, the suspect acted alone?

MARX: We do know that the suspect acted alone. That's according to the sheriff's office. They do believe, as you mentioned, his house may be booby-trapped with explosives in an attempt to kill more responding officers.

Right now, this situation is under control, but the scene is still ongoing. as a matter of fact, when we were on our way here, our crew and I saw two Georgia Bureau of Investigation bomb squad trucks on their way in there to assess the situation.

We attempted to get into that scene here, but they are just not letting anyone in here. But as I mentioned, the suspect is believed to have acted alone, and we are still learning more details about Dennis Marx as this situation develops.

Kyra?

PHILLIPS: All right. Stay in close touch. Nick Valencia, thanks so much.

Coming up, she has been at the center of controversy since saying Bowe Bergdahl served with, quote, "honor and distinction." Now Susan Rice is defending her statement exclusively to CNN.

And Stephen Colbert sheds his alter-comedic-ego and gets all emotional, talking about his uncle who served in World War II on D- Day. His interview with our Jake Tapper is next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: Many of you know that TV talk show host, Stephen Colbert is a comedian with a pretty sharp tongue, and he never holds back with his jokes. That's for sure. But if you ask him about D-Day, you're going to see a very different side to him.

Our Jake Tapper, anchor of "THE LEAD," recently sat down with Colbert. He saw the other side.

So, Jake, talk about his connection to the invasion of Normandy.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR, "THE LEAD": It's really interesting. His uncle, First Lieutenant Andrew Edward Tuck III, his mother's brother -- his mother, he was very close with his mother. She died last year.

He participated in the invasion of Normandy. He was part of the 101st Airborne. He dropped in behind enemy lines in France, eight hours before D-Day. He survived.

And he didn't know his Uncle Eddie, but his mother kept him alive with stories and with a huge volume of letters that Uncle Eddie wrote home. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHEN COLBERT, COMEDY CENTRAL'S "THE COLBERT REPORT": A lot of these letters start when he is 19, and he's dead by 23. And you see his maturation process in the letters. You see the experience.

He starts off as someone who is very proud to be serving his country, want to get the job done. And by the end of it he is someone who has seen terrible things, but is absolutely steel in his conviction that it was the right thing to have done and wants to keep going, because he lives all the way through the war in Europe, and then wants to go over to Japan, but unfortunately, dies before he gets there.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: This is a side of Stephen Colbert that most people have not seen. He gets very emotional, talking about these letters. And I have to say, they are just fascinating.

He was a member -- Uncle Eddie was a member of the 101st Airborne. That's the group memorialized by "Band of Brothers," which was Easy Company. His uncle was in Fox Company, which did everything with Easy Company.

And there's a part where he's trying to educate his children about "Band of Brothers" and about Uncle Eddie, and they're watching "Band of Brothers," and there's a letter from his Uncle Eddie mentioning the main character in the film and the book, "Band of Brothers," Dick Winters. And it's really interesting and very, very moving story.

So I hope people will tune in. That's coming up in the hour.

PHILLIPS: Oh, I think they will.

And I remember when his mom did pass away, and you probably saw it, too. He honored his mom. He had a huge tribute on his show, and everybody was like, wow, there is really a soft side to this guy.

Now, you have a special tonight on Bowe Bergdahl, right?

TAPPER: That's right. We're trying to take it out of the political arena, as it is -- it's become such a football -- and just look at who is Bowe Bergdahl? We talk to friends of his. We talk to people who were in his platoon, in his squad in Afghanistan.

We did a lot of reporting about his experiences, both before and during his captivity.

That is coming up, "The Bowe Bergdahl Story," not about the politics, not about trying to score points against Democrats or Republicans, about this situation in Afghanistan. Who was this young soldier?

PHILLIPS: "THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper starts in just a few minutes.

Thanks, Jake.

TAPPER: Thanks, Kyra.

PHILLIPS: Speaking of the U.S. soldier, don't prejudge Bergdahl. That's the message the White House is trying to get out today.

The Obama administration is being criticized for trading five Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay for Bergdahl, a soldier that some of his comrades say, by the way, deserted his post in Afghanistan.

But in an exclusive interview with CNN's Jim Acosta, national security adviser Rice warns don't rush to judgment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SUSAN RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Let's remember, this is a young man who volunteered to serve his country. He was taken as a prisoner of war. He suffered in captivity.

He is now trying to begin the process of recovery. Let's let that happen. And then let's know the facts, including his side of the story, and then we can make a judgment.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIPS: Well, I want to bring in retired Air Force Colonel Lee Ellis, once again. He was held by the North Vietnamese for more than five years. He has told us his story, and we'd like to bring him in to talk about this controversy surrounding Bergdahl.

I guess, first of all, what do you think about what Susan Rice had to say?

COLONEL LEE ELLIS, U.S. AIR FORCE (RETIRED), FORMER VIETNAM POW: I think it's always good to get the facts. I think there's wisdom in that. We have some of the facts on both sides I think right now. I've been advocating that all along.

We just need to wait for more information before we jump to judgment. I think we can have preliminary judgment. I've tried to hold mine back, for the most part.

PHILLIPS: What are you trying to hold back?

ELLIS: That he's a young man in a difficult situation. I'm good at making quick, good evaluations but sometimes I'm wrong. I'm a fighter pilot, sometimes wrong but never in doubt. I'm old enough to know that.

I think it's a good idea to get all of the facts. I just think that we should approach it from a factual perspective and not a political perspective.

From that, I would say that the Army is the one that's going to have to dig in and do the research to find out what the facts were, and if he was a deserter, I think they need to hold him accountable.

And I think that's the way things have to be done in the military. So accountability is important. I think we need to let that take the course.

PHILLIPS: Let's talk about this frail person we've seen and someone we're told now has been given the OK to talk to his parents. Why for just a little bit of time -- why the wait? Is that normal? Were you surprised by that? ELLIS: Well, my last operation with that, personally, was 41 years

ago. When we came home, we were able to call home within 24 hours and talk to our families.

The married guys got to talk to their wives. I wasn't married so I talked to my mom and dad and --

PHILLIPS: You were ready to talk and see them and be with them?

ELLIS: Right. We went straight to the hospital and got an immediate check over, a once-over, real quick, and probably met with a shrink, but I don't remember seeing one.

It was reasonably normal. They schedule those calls back home for us. It wasn't easy, so we used to make those calls then.

PHILLIPS: What do you think of this, that they wanted it to be brief if, indeed, they decide to have communication. Does that seem --

ELLIS: It's a little unusual. I don't understand it. In fact, from the press conference with his mom and dad, I almost got the impression that his father made that decision, and he needed to get his feet on the ground before they talked to him.

Maybe they felt it was going to be too emotional of a situation. And it could go either way on the emotions.

In my situation, and many of us, our emotions were as flat as that table. and it was more of a happy but a fairly. almost businesslike conversation with our families. Family is probably --

PHILLIPS: Was the transition hard for you? They were feeling a lot of emotion. What do you think he's going to go through?

ELLIS: I think you have to take one event at a time, one event at a time. And if you do have emotions, go for them.

For us, for myself and many of my friends who have been POWs for a long time, we shut down our emotions and it took us a long time to crack open that can and start to let them out.

And the quicker the better because emotions are real. And you can't have a relationship with your family if you can't access your emotions. It's not going to be full relationships. So I had to work on that over the years.

PHILLIPS: And I know, as a fighter pilot, you had to compartmentalize. That can be a good thing and a bad things.

ELLIS: Big time.

PHILLIPS: Real quickly, because he brought me a copy of it, "Leading With Honor -- Leadership Lessons from Hanoi Hilton," Lee Ellis. Colonel, thank you so much.

ELLIS: Thank you. PHILLIPS: Appreciate you.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: Well, today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, and earlier today, President Obama saluted D-Day veterans at a celebration in Normandy. And there were also celebrations in D.C. and New York City.

And besides the veterans, Holocaust survivors are also remembering this day as the start of the end of Nazi control.

Thousands of people survived the holocaust, and one group is working to still help them.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZANE BUZBY, CNN HERO: As a child, I ran from the killing squads three times. Even now I still dream that I am running.

Our entire little town was burned to nothing. My mother and father were killed in the mass graves. I sometimes think it would have been better if I had died with them.

I cry at night. Your letters are for me like medicine.

These are the last survivors of the Holocaust in eastern Europe. They are out there today, elderly, alone, suffering. They don't have extended family.

Life is so hard in these places. They don't have anything.

I saw it with my own eyes, and I knew that no one was helping them. so I wanted to reach out and help them.

We provide them with direct, continuous financial aid for food, medication, and shelter.

All right, stay healthy and write to me.

And we let them know that they have not been forgotten.

This person I am very worried about. His wife is paralyzed. He himself is so not well.

We get stacks and stacks of letters, every week, mostly in Russian. They're sent out to translators and then we start answering them immediately and sending money.

We're now helping 2,000 people in eight countries.

The money is lifesaving, but the connection, the letters, the communication, equally lifesaving.

I'm going to come back and see you. We can really write a more hopeful, final chapter to the Holocaust, this time, one of kindness compassion, what they finally deserve at the end of their lives.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIPS: Happy Friday, everyone.

Jake Tapper starts right now.