Fourth Night Added For This Week's Rebroadcast of "Vision for a New America" on PBS' "Tavis Smiley"

During last week's powerful conversation, former Speaker Newt Gingrich proposes to work with the Congressional Black Caucus' Marcia L. Fudge

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 22, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Due to the most powerful conversation with the most bipartisan dream team of panelists Tavis Smiley Presents has ever hosted, a fourth night of the Vision for a New America: A Future Without Poverty symposium, which originally aired LIVE on C-SPAN last Thursday, January 17, 2013, has been added to this week's rebroadcast lineup on the late-night talk show "Tavis Smiley" on PBS. 

During the engaging conversation that discussed how to cut poverty in half in 10 years and eradicate it in 25, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich proposed an idea to the newly elected chair of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Representative Marcia L. Fudge, to pair one Republican member of Congress with one Congressional member of the CBC and spend a few days in each respective district.

"I believe that…those six days will lead to a conversation that will both help us move back to a little healthy bipartisanship," said Gingrich. "Each side may have a slightly different understanding and maybe start to create some friendships from which we can actually begin to rebuild the ability to rebuild this country."

Also, the panelists deliberated on what solutions are working in the war on poverty and which are not. Proposed solutions included: indexing the minimum federal wage to inflation, restructuring Medicaid reimbursement, targeting program recipients more precisely, allocating funds in concert with the business cycle, creating a system to provide subsidized and employment job training, putting in place poverty impact analysis to identify new and low-cost avenues for poverty reduction, and using testing corporations' money to invest in an intense three-year preschool education. Each panelist agreed that there is a bipartisan consensus that the poor don't matter in Washington and that now is the time to push the president to make a major public policy address on the eradication of poverty in America and then call for the national White House Conference on the Eradication of Poverty in America. 

"Any president is going to address an issue that we make him address," said CBC chair Fudge.  "Whoever he is, whether Republican or Democrat. No matter what."

In addition to Gingrich and Fudge, last week's panelists included: Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University; John D. Graham, dean, Indiana University School of Public & Environmental Affairs and author of America's Poor and the Great Recession; Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United; Jonathan Kozol, author of Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America; Mariana Chilton, director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities and associate professor of Drexel University School of Public Health; and Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary professor and author.

This entire conversation will be rebroadcast on four consecutive nights starting tonight, Tuesday, January 22 through Friday, January 25, 2013 on Tavis Smiley on PBS. For additional information, including where to sign the online petition for the call of a national White House Conference on the Eradication of Poverty in America, visit www.afuturewithoutpoverty.com.

SOURCE Tavis Smiley Presents