so this is a unique process, and i think it gives us some hope that the problems that we have been reading about and problems that w have observed will be dealt with. and we hope that's the case. finally, i think there is -- there's two things i want to say. the first is that this was not simply a presidential eltm

challenges. on one hand, the highly centralized government that has been reluctant to divulge authority beyond the governors, provincial reconstruction teams that are dispensing a good deal of -- of development funds, local war lords, and, therore, because of these conditions, you have provincial councils that don't have budget authity. that begin to get marginalized because of all of these conditions. and i believe that it behooved the international community -- it's a little bit self-serving. ndi has worked with 20 of the provincial councils across the country. but it behooves us to build up the capacity of the councils so they can fulfill their responsibilies in the country. and finally, let me make the point about the election. there are those before this election and there are those

that now make the case tt the best outcome in afghanistan is for a first-round declaration of a victor. and that perhaps a power sharing agreement that could avoid the -- the epic tensions that may emerge in the run-up to a second round. i would argue, however, that the most important goal for both the afghan people and particularly those who courageously turned out at the polls and defied the violence and the threat of violence and for the international community is, first, the integrity of the process, wherever that leads us. and secondly, to the iue of legitimacy of the government that emerges from this election, both at the national and the local level. and i doubt whether the afghan people would have gone intohis election feeling that the best

outcome would have been some behindhe scenes deal between a handful of leaders to avoid a process that was to reflect the hopes and aspirations and the will of the people. >> thank you very much. over to you, christine. >> so as you heard, my task was to go around and meet with several of the other long-term observer teams. i met with our poor teams and i spent time in kabul. my task was to try to understand how the security environment shaped the credibility, the multiple elections that ken discussed. and i think in many places, security was an overdetermining factor in the sense that it sort of set a feeling as to how credible some of those elections could be. prior to the election itself, the security environmenthaped

the availability of updating the registration list some folks were simply unable to update the registration list. in some cases, folks were very able to register because you could actually buy the registration cards in the open moment and you would have the outcome of having enormous numbers of women registered. i'm not sure it's because the liberated ladies were out there clming their franchise. so even going into the election, the security environment shaped or put a limit in terms of how credible that exercise would eventually be. the security arrangements that were inplace, you -- the actual security -- the actual polling station itself, the first perimeter of security was the police. the outer perimeter was the ana. and then in actual -- isap was supposed to be the provider of securi. there were set up these things called operationaloordination

centers, both at the -- at the regional level, the regional commands, the regional commandsd the provincial level. we had a chance to go to one of those in handu and to say it was set at the last minute, i think, would be flattering for the organization that was in place. so the standing up of the occs were very uneven across the country. and some of them were literally constituted only the week before the election. and yet the occs were supposed to be gathering information throughout the province and trying to coming up with an appropriate security response. interestingy enough there was supposed to be in place a undp elect -- it was a police training program. a train the trainer program. in theory, theolice were trained in this sort of cascading fashion but the reality s that under the best assumptions, the police that were used on election day got three hours or so of training and issue isly one has to wonder

what the outcomes were of that training given that the police capacity in afghanistan is really -- leavesomething to be desired. that, i think, is a larger concern about the afghan elections is that police are so important, yet police have ally lagged behind the training of the afghan national army, which i tnk everye would agree is a success. i think most people would say the afghan national police training has not been a success. so you'd have areas where you had maybe 50 police officers. it's not a surprise in those areas you had taliban running roughshod which seriously affected the ability of people to turn out. another interesting thing we stumbled across was that the afghans had really delayed recruiting female security agents. the women that will pat you down before you go down to vote. and is should have been anticipated to be a problem because outside of the capital it's difficult to recruit women period for security jobs. even more so once you leave the

capital. in some cases, this task was left to about two weeks before election day. so that seems to have been a fairly large but ultimately preventable oversight. anotr interesting thing that we heard a lot about before the election, but it was definitely the dog that didn't bark. and that was what could be a humorously called the norbaki. some of you know about the militias. president karzai's brother-in-law put together a circa sometime in june or july somewh national militia plan that aimed to deploy between 10,000 and 13,000 militias. th were largely planned to be deployed mostly in the south. it was never clear what these guys were supposed to do. would they be armed. would they bring their own guns? w would they be unified? how would the police know they were legitimate militias, not illegitimate militias. no one i've spoken to on election day saw a heavy presence of these militias. reason f this have ranged from a fellow colleague of mine down

in logar. i think the governor ran off with the money. so who knows why we didn't see thos militias. there was a lot of apprehension about them before election day. now about violence itself, before the election, we all know there was considerable violence targeting candidates, party workers, campan managers. and while we don't have the complete universe of victims of violence or threats of violence, it does look as if women were more vulnerable. candidates routinely complained they had inadequate security. the ministry of interior told them they could go out and hire their own folks. they said they'd pay them. wasn't clear how they would get paid, how they would be armed. so there was a fairly consistent concern among candidates they were not getting the security that they needed. and, obviously, leading into the election, voters themselves were intimidated. in taliban-controlled areas, there were reports that the talibs were taking advantage of the mosque to issue sermons,

making i very clear there would be repriseals. we've all heard if your finger had ink, we'd cut your finger off. it escalated up to, your head being cut off. the talib did not honor their pledge for violence in the fullest. another thing that came up quite often was that afghans themselves were uncertain about the security arrangements that the government put into place. now afghans are very controversial about this. their assessment was it behooves the inmbent to base ache 7ly have an environment of insecurity to discourage voter turnout. the logic beingess voter turnout, greater opportunities for fraud. whether or not that's true, that's how it was interpreted. ing forward for future ections, the government might want to invest some effort trying to explain to the citizenry this is the security operations that were to be here. therefore, you should feel secure in casting your vote.

there were a numr of really interesting reports. and we've actually seen some of this in the press yesterday with the -- in the new york sometimes. there were a sorts of stories that karzai had actually cut deals with tal ib commanders, by which no one would cast a vote. that would keep the taliban happy. but the taliban also would not stop ballot boxes being returned, you know, full of votes. ad i think you saw the press reporting yesterday in kandahar there was a -- what was it, 23,947 votes returned for karzai when, in fact, no one had the opportunity to cast a vote. so i think perhaps another area that might merit thinking about is that we sort of thought about security as chafing the electoral expireicize. many said security wassed as an excuse to disenfranchise a number of voters. we heard concerns that areas were deemed to be insecure because they were not areas expected to support the

incumbent. there were considerable disagreements between the iec and security forces about which polling cenrs could be open and in kandus, it wasn't clear which were going to be open until the last minute. we had a team up there. the problem with that is that in some cases, they decided to co-locate polling centers. so if you actually lookeda the polling centers that were opened, you'd have polling centers moved out from the outside into the district center. you could say we had polling centers open in the district. the problem is afghanistan has very poor logistics. the roads are really not practicable. women, in particular if they had to move lar distances to polling centers, it would be tantamount to being disenfranchised. while at first blush it looks as co-locating them to a district center for security reasons might have some advantages it did have the effect of making it impossible for many people to actually cast their vote. so moving forward, especially if the's a run-off, i think there

are a number of things that really need to be thought out today. not the day before the run-off. and certainly if there is not a run-off, thinking about the next set of elections. the parliamentary elections. police training has to remain a focus. the international community, as much as the afghan government is culpable for the lack of police on election day. we've known about these elections for some me. the police training still remain understaffed at 30%. to quote a u.s. government official, that's great unless you actually want to win. so it's incomprehensible why police training has remained a low priority amongst the international priority. the americans are paying the bills. we're largely doing the training. it would be great if our nato isef partners would step up. and similarly, greater effort needs to be done to get female search agents. whatever the security arrangements are in place, the government really needs to communicate that because it makes no difference whether they have the best security arrangement in place if afghans

don't actually believe that they are going to be secure in casting theirvote. and then finally, we really do need some accountability about what these militias were doing, if anything. we've had a lot of difficulty tracking down what the militias were actually up to. but i think the very fact that karzai's brother-in-law put this plan into place and the way in which they were deployed looked really dubious. there needso be an accounting of what those guys were up to. and going forward, when we look at the norzai plan, the international community kind of signed off on it. if people couldn't get out to register, couldn't get out to vote, the credibility would be in peril. i think the message need to be from the international community that militias are no excuse for police. so if you are gng to go out of your way to have a competent mill yairb force, you probably are better served taking those efforts and trying to get them into actual police training.

>> over to you, peter, for trends and compariss. >> thank you very ch karen. while the news reports, i think that we're receiving every day now, present an unrelentingly negative picture of what's going on in afghanistan, in fact, i think it's reflected in our statement that our delegation found that election was really difficult to characterize in a single phrase. violence and fraud clearly rred the electoral process. and now threaten the legitimacy of a n government. but, unfortunatel those repos overshadow some aspect of the election period, i think, that were pretty positive. and an improvement over the elections in 2004 and '05. unlike the election campaigns of the past, these elections, in fact, involved issues. the candidates campaigned

throughout the country. abdullah was able to go into the remote districts in the pashtun south. barsadost had a van traveling throughout the country communicate his populist message and president karzai, of course, could travel almost everywhere trying to make a deal. asid abdullah, in @@#á@ rr'",@ g

been, so far, totally absent. there were more women participating in this campaign. there were more -- well, women candidates for provincial councils than there had ever been in the past, and millions of afghans voted, despite the threat of violence. all those, i think, were important things that, in discussing the election, we don't want to entirely overlook. unfortunately, there was really little that was done over the past five years to sort of improve the process and address a lot of the defects in the system that were very apparent back in 2004 and '0 5.

perhs foremost among them is the millions of duplicate and counterfeit registration cards that have just flooded the country. months before the election you can buy such a card for about $10. as the election approached, the price had inflated quite considerably. what people were doing with the cards, of course, was not entire a mystery. they were being sold to pple that wanted to commit some sort of electoral fraud. they are used in schemes both for ballot stuffing and for proxy voting. and they really threaten to delegitimize the entire process if something is not done about it. local election officials have not been well trained. they are quite well trained at the national level, for the most part. the local level, we saw in '04 and '05, they were not caple of fully sort of understanng the process.

they implemented the inking poorly back then and we saw the same problems emerge at the local level now. in addition to that, they are recruited locally so they are subject to political pressures at the village level. and which, of course, leads into the proxy voting and ballot stuffing. e absence of a functioning judicial system really involved -- the results in widespread immunity for anybody that engages in electoral misconduct. you know, all these thing had been out there. everybody knew about them. very little was done. i think about five or six months before the election there was a renewed effort to pour resources into this system and fill all the observable gaps that people saw in the electoral administration. but it was too late. you can't deal with problems of

millions of voter registration cards in the system just a few months out. we have another election coming up in about, what in october, i guess? if these problems aren't addressed now, they really threaten the entire legitimacy of the process. there's not much time. i would ask to reconstitute theers lech toral complaints commission. it expires sort of automatically, about 30 days or so after the certification of the results. and it has to be re-established. they should do so immediately. because the ecc didn't really have time to prepare for this current election. there's a lot of other things. just planning for security, something that really requires several months. and that was done very late in this process as well. as karen mentioned, the results are still coming in.

this process is not over. we're watching it play out day by day. 60% of the votes have been counted. as karen said. a lot of the votes that haven't been counted for the pashtun south. there have been -- those are presumably karzai votes, but there's also fewer votes down there. so how that plays out in the end is kind of ybody's guess. the question of course is that if 51%. there are going to situations that it's not a sort of legitimate result. a lot of talk about a deal. you know, when we were there, we're talking to both afghans and people in the international community about brokering some sort of arrangement. all that's going to be playing out over the next several weeks.

so that's where we are. the complaint process continues. as i mentioned, 2,000 complaints have been filed. 200 are considered serious. by serious i mean can affect the outcome of the election. so we wait as you do for the final tallies. >> thank you very much. now talk aboutwomen's roles in the election. >> thanks, karen. as karen mentions earlier, i was in afghanistan for five weeks monitoring women's participation in the lead-up to the elections. and i had a very unique experience in that i was able to spend quite a bit of time speak with many of the female provincial candidates during that time. and so what i thought i'd do today, mean, some of the challenges that women had in the electionave been mentioned all right. security, proxy voting. but what i thought would be interesting is if i sort of gave you a glimpse of what i heard

from these candidates and give you a littl bit more of a sense of what we heard on the ground from their perspective. prior to the elections, they trained women who ran for provincial council. for most of these women it was the only training they'd had in their lives. this is particularly important because for 122 of them, they'll automatically get seats on the provincial council due to the 25% quota. of these 200 women, ndi selected 18 women from nine of the provinces. and we interviewed those candidates threetimes. two times prior to the election and once after. and through these interviews, we were really able to sort of glean information that we weren't able to get through our short term and long-term observers, partly because some of them were in provinces where we didn't have a presence due to security concerns. and so we were able to sort of track their experiences as candidates throughout the election, but also hear from

them what they saw in female polling stations on election day. so, unsurprisingly, you've heard security was the number one concern that all of them expressed. and christine mentioned the co-location of polling sites which really prevented many women from traveling to -- to be able to vote. and while this is definitely true in the south and the southeast, this is actually true once you really got out in many provinces out of the urban areas. just out of the city. one woman said to us, i rented a car with my personal money to take some women to the polling station, but they refused riding in my vehicle and told me they're not permitted by their families to get in those cars. that's really what we heard. although the 18 women that we interviewed all went out and cast their votes for themselves, they kne from friends and families that the male members of the family were not permitting women to go out and vote. and it was interesting because

we saw on election day that women came out later in the day. men were out. the lines were lonr earlier, and then it looks like women swelled in the afternoon, which may have been a result of the security concerns. women also told us that, as christine mentioned, the challenge of recruiting female staff was very high. and they saw women who were unprepared. it was sort of a mix. there were some women who were prepared and really following everything to a "t" and other women uneducated, unprared. and these candidates we spoke with really had a concern that would create an enabling environment for fraud. one of the challenges, of course, is security and recruiting female staff. both to check i.d.s and as security guards. but also the lack of literacy, especially in the rural areas is another major challenge that women cited to being able to recruit staff. as far as the voter i.d.'ing

goes, we heard from many women that women in burqas would go to vote and actually weren't -- their faces weren't checked against their pictures on their voter card, and the photos on the voter card were actually optional. so in many cases where there weren't photos, women still weren't asked to give the name of their father and wer just allowed to vote without any sort of screening. ase also heard a great deal from the women candidates that we spoke with about proxy voting. and we heard more about young females voting than we did actually male members of families going. we heard both, but we heard quite a number of instances where women -- young women in burqas under the age of 18 went in and voted and they had voter registration cards. so they were actually permitted to vote. so that speaks to really the flaws in the registration process. one woman said i was informed by the brother who was an agent in a male polling station that he observed some cases of proxy voting. in a specific case, a man wanted

to vote behalf of his wife and daughters. the reasoning is they were not allowed to get out of the house on election day. he was arguing thathis is his right to vote instead of his female family members. women also requested that their fingers not be inked. and actually their requested were granted for fear of retribution from the taliban. female -- just on the issue of female candidates in particular, we heard a number of instances reallyhroughout the couny, including in kabul, of women being warned of a land mine on their way to a campaign event, night letters, anonymous phone calls. one woman gave us the number of the man in pakistan who called and threaten her in case we wanted to follow up with him. but also, you know, a lot of these things actually took place in kabul. so you can imagine the extent to which some of these threats took place in the south and southeast where there were gun fights in front of some female candidates'

houses. we had one woman in kandahar who said she left her province, went to live with residents and had been there three weeks to the lead-up to the election, not allowing her to campaign because of major threats she had and men sort of coming around her house with -- armed men coming around her house. so you can really see. i was struck by really how brave these women were and after being in 50 countries, i actually think these are some of the bravest women that i've ever met in my life. also just briefly on the candidates. because women had limited access to public space,s they do in daily life in afghanistan, you really saw women campaigning indoors. they talked about how they actually lit up when they talked about going door to door. they were really pleased with the reception they had when they went into friends' homes and family's homes. but the thing was they were often really campaigning to women because it sounded like these gatherings were very much

gatherings of women. and then you had women to large degree disenfranchised. so i think it was interesting that that was -- they were campaigning really just to women. in large part. there was exception for some of the incumbents. they had access to some large gatherings. but, in large part, we heard from the women that really, from the time that they get acceptance from their family to run, which is absolutely critical, they are really reliant on men for every aspect of their campaign. most o them really talked about how they got rmission from elders and tribal leaders and religious leaders torun, and then, you know, in very lucky cases, those men were able to, you know, provide opportunities for them to speak in mosques. but really you saw it was the elders and the leaders who opened the door and asked people to open the door for women to go into people's homes to campaign, which was done in a private way.

across the world, you hear this, but in particular, in afghanistan, the fund-raising and the ability to have any sort of small money to campaign was really a challenge. and you saw women posters. but a lot of times they were black and white instead of colored ones. and they, you know, women felt make they weren't able to compete on the same level as men because they weren't able to have this sort of visibility. and unifam actually had a women's resource center. they allowed for women to come in and print 1,000 posters for free of their campaign posters. and you saw that 36 women came from various provinces, travelled to kabul just to print 1,000 posters to hang up in their districts. just finally, we'll have the nclusions and recommendations in our final report, but i think, you know, as you've already heard, many of the challenges that women faced really could have been addressed

with more preparation, particularly the staffing in the polling stations and the security guards which was really a sort of rushed effort at the last minute to try to prepare for. we already included in our statement a recommendationor increased civic outreach t@@@@@r

call attention to some larger points here and use that as our concluding comment before we go to questions and answers. i wld like to start with what kristin had to say. now i'm looking at our report we did. i trust that you have seen that, paicularly the overview we have and the recommendations. i want to start where she left off. we say in the report that the rights of women in the process require ecial attention. we had an opportunity to meet with three male and three female candidatesor the provincial counl in kabul. we had a good discussion with them. the women that were there were

extraordinary. they were the most animated and motivated and articulate. they clearly see the stakes in this election for them and what is important here. kristin said when she was in kabul, these are the bravest women she has seen in covering many elections and seeing the role of women. i would have to underscore that. the women there also know that if the darkness descends again on afghanistan, they will pay the greatest price. while we're looking at large issues of al qaeda and all of the security issues, we cannot forget fundamental principles and values at stake and what goes on there. >> i want to call attention to the reference in the report to the security situation. obviously, violence and the threat of violence shaped this election. and we say in the report that it is critical for the growth and survival of the nation's

democratic process that the continuing insurgency is brought to an end. obvious point, but it needs to be restated here, and we've all seen that general mcchrystal has now forwarded his recommendations. this is a big issue. but we can't get afghanistan right unless we get the security part of this right. so we want -- i wanted to call attention to that. we've already heard from peter and others about where the international community fell down in the run-up to this edeclaration. we heard from grant kippen who is president of the ecc saying that the international community took its eye off the ball after the 2005 election for the next several years. a undp official called the years of 2006 through '07, '08, a funding graveyard in terms of the assistance that we were providing there. it did, obviously, pick up in the last year. we have a recommendation here

about the international community in partnership with the afghan government should immediatey begin preparing for the next election cycle and not allow that funding graveyard to continue. the elections in 2010 for parliamentary elections inside then, obviously, the next round of the presidential elections five years later. this is all hopeful. we have to get through this current election before we can go into the next, obviously. but we do need to not step away from the plate again in terms of funding. now a broader issue, i'd like just to mention this. we saw in "the washington post" today the editorial setback in afghanistan. i don't think any of us cannot say this was a setback. of course it was a setback. the security threats. the allegations of fraud, misconduct and the rest. but i do think that we need to also step back for a moment and place this election in a broader

context. if you look at where afghanistan has beennd where it is today and where we hope it goes, it's important. afghanistan's road to self-government ifou will, it was 2001 when the -- we started the u.s. bombing campaign in afghanistan and routed the taliban. we had the bomb process in november of 2001, bringing together all of these groups there. and interim authority was established in december of 2001 and 2002, the emergency loyal jurga was convened to meet on a transitional authority. in 2003, the constitutional loya jirga took place. 20004 a constitution was adopted. also in 2004, president karzai won the presidential election. in 2005, elections for the rliament. in december of 2005, the convening of the national assembly. now we have this election. nobody is going to suggest that

it was a major step forward in this democratic process. but it is a step. and we do need to place this in context. democracy, self-government is not going to come overnight to afghanistan. there will be setbacks along the way. and what we need to do in terms of the international community o work with the afghans to see they make it through this difficult time. i want to call attention to one final part of our report. the last paragraph in our overview section. ides like to read this to you as a concluding comment before we go to the discussion. it reads, this election has demonstrated that millions of afghans want to participate directly in the country's evolving political democratic system. the august 2009 elexss were the latest step in afghanistan's long road toward constructing a democratic political system. this delegation strongly believes that the international community must continue to assist them in this journey.

democratic and peaceful afghanistan is in the interest of thefghan people and the international community. so with that concluding comment, karen? >> thank you very much. and i think everyone can see that this is an extraordinarily complex challenge. the observing, as well as, you know, the participation that ndi and other groups did, along with their afghan counterparts. i am noticing a lot of serious expertise in this room, and i am sure we'll have a lot of questions. what i'd like to do is take about three or four questions at a time and then go back to the panel. so everyone here will take good notes and please introce yourself. please try to keep your questions short so that we have time f many. i've got alex, then ck, then harden. alex, over there.

>> thanks, guys. fantastic panel and insight. >> alex, please introduce yourself. >> i'm alex from the american institute for peace. one a more technical question and then a broader question. one of the innovations of this election was that the ballots were to be counted at the polling station. as opposed to having them eggregated and that can have good implications or bad implications. one of the disappointing things about the results that have come in so far, together with the work that ndi and others did to train and deploy candidate agents and other monitors is that one of the things we'd hoped for is that there would be counting that was observed at the polling stations and that those figures would be posted at a polling station, which would allow for some kind of parallel check on the process that -- of counting that the iec was doing. that seems to have failed completely in the sense that from what i've heard from

anecdotal accounts, the results haven't been recorded. people were often not allowed to view the counts. and so i'm wondering if you could explain why that hasn't succeeded or if we're not hearing about why that has been valuable, but the information hasn't come out. and the broader thing that i think ken said but i'm not sure, but really to all of you. i think that the oy way out of this election crisis is a run-off. i think the legitimacy is so tainted that any number that karzai gets, 51, 52, 53% is simply not going to be tolerated by the opposition or by the afghan people when you look on youtube and see these fantastic videos of guys sitting there with the ballot books checking vote after vote after vote. the level of evidence of fraud, in my mind, suggests the only way you get out of this with a legitimate outcome is for a run-off. if i'm right or if that is what happened, what can we do in the next six weeks to deal with some

of the problems? can we actually do a better job of rede tecting the fraud or threatening to detect the fraud in advance so that it will be a fair election. is there something on security that can be done better? what can we do to avoid a run-off that gets us in the same place. >> thanks. rick? thank you. it seems -- rick from csis. it seems as if there's going to be -- the only institutional solution is if the complaints commission really works well. so i'd like to hear your thoughts on how it's working? do they have the capacity to adjudicate 500 serious complaints? have the most valuable complaints come from the campaigns as opposed to independent sources? are the members of the commission safe or do they have offshore homes already? i mean, there's just a whole series of how were they selected?

there's an awful lot of weight that's falling upon a handful of individuals who have never probably had this kind of responsibility before in their lives inside of a system that isn't going to guarantee them their safety. so the insights into that commission would really be helpful. thanks. >> just a comment about harden. he was in kandahar with democracy international group. >> my name is harden lang here at the center for strategic international studies. ken you made an excellent point about a number of delegations captured by the prts as we attempted to carry out long-term observation. in kandahar, my particular delegation managed to set up an operation outside the wire which allowed us to move around on polling day and at least observe inside of the city limits a bit of what was going on. and, to me, the biggest -- the point of greatest concern in my mind at this point, we made our

way to about maybe one-third of the polling centers in kandahar city where we saw turnout rates pretty -- ralther low compared o 2004. your average for your polling station was 51 to 52. the iec are now releasing results from cand har that show results of 200 and then today there were some of up to 400 per polling station in kandahar. i'm wondering how this information gets filtered up and at what point the credibility becomes very difficulto sort of adjudicate and what mechanisms are in place to deal with that. and the second point to christine, just sort of a play off of the point you made about the preparations for security. we spoke to a number of -- one, a presidential candidate and then a couple of candidates for provincial council in kandahar

who said frankly they were waiting to speak to their voters and supporters about turning out, not so much based on where the afghan national police were that day but based on the disposition of forces o the taliban the day before and what they had picked up. so that's what they were really concerned about. and that's what they called in to us to tell whether it was safe or not to go out that day based on where t taliban were. thanks. >> thank you very much. jeff from penn state university and the carnegie council. again, terrific panel. very short, very blunt question. i realize that -- only 6% of the resultsave been returned. but the blunt question i have is if there was a systematic attempt by president karzai and/or his supporters to rig this election. that seems to be the summary i'm getting from all your comments in terms of precluding women om voting, how the security forces were positioned, et cetera, et cetera. but is that really, at this

stage, the panel's conclusion based on 6% of returns? there was a systematic attempt to rig these elections by the ruling party. >> just one more in this round. gentman over there. thank you. >> john rotherburg, independent consultant. this is sort of in addition to alex's question. i think the only other solution is some kind of a negotiated deal between karzai and abdullah. do you think that the people of afghanistan wotld accept that, and what kind of format would that take? >> okay. great. thank you very much. let's start. rick, do you want to make a few comments? we can come down this way. >> this panel has not reached that conclusn that there was a systematic attempt by the ruling party and president karzai to rig the election. i never said that. i didn't hear anyone say that.

so that was not our conclusion at all. you'll need -- it's@ j'zzú;azzgs we see the polls. we see the statements being made in european capitals. for this to work, it is going to require the afghans themselves

to, if you will, reboot. they need themselves to say how do we do what we can do and only we can do, which is governance, which is the corruption issue, which is tackling these internal problems. the international community can't do that. so whether it be some bridging of abdullah and karzai and afghani, they need to pull together because if they are divided, if there's weak civilian leadership, if there's divisiveness, we can't do this. so, however they work it out, i hope they do as soon as thi election perio is resolved. >> two points. first alex, in regard to where the ballots were being counted. obviously, that's was a huge controversy. after the last election, then candidate kanuni had objected to the ballots being count at the

provincial level thinking that lends itself to greater abuse. i think in retrpect, the ballots should have been count at the provincial level. there's still a couple of checks on the system, but whether they'll work or not remains to be seen. at the polling station level, everybody has to -- all the observers that are there, if there are any, political party agents have to sign ofon the final tally which is then supposed to be posted. if, in fact, on review, if the iec or ecc finds that the party agents haven't signed off on the tally that's being reported, then that could trigger additional scrutiny and presumably those vopes would be quarantined. wel have to see whether that process actually works. in regard to the ecc, there was a question about security. it was interesting because i actually asked grant kippen that question. and he said that he had been

provided armored vehicle and personal security detail. as were the other international -- there are five members. three of them of whom are international. two are afghan. the three international ones are appointed by the secretary-general. the u.n. -- the special representative of the security general. the other two are afghans one comes from the human rights -- one is appointed by the human rights commission. one by the afghanistan supreme court. the afghan members weren't provided any security for some reason. he was quite concerned about it because he thought there was a real security threat. the ecc is a staff of 200 people. they got their funding quite late in the process. when i aived for the election in afghanistan justice a couple of weeks before the election, they were still doing their last training of their provincial

stf. he was very critical of the funding agencies in regard to the movement of money to support the ecc process. nevertheless, i think they are doing a good job. they face an enormous challenge. they have 2,000 complaints. i think they've already kind of thrown out about 1,000 of them. but they still have 500 that they consider to be very serious. whether they can process those by september 17th when the election is supposed to be certified remains to be seen. i mean, i think they are working very hard. and they are doing what they can. >> thank you. >> yeah, i would just say one thing to add to that. you know, grant kippen, who was the chairman, used to be i's director in afghanistan for a number of years. and so he knows the environment. he's deeply committed to this process. and i think that they take a position. i think it's in the electoral law that the iec, the electoral commission, is unable to ctify

the elections until the ecc completes its work. and i think that he raised the possibility, grant did, yesterday, in their press conference that they may not complete their work by september 17th so i think they are driven by the process, not driven by dates. and i think that is reassuring. there are a lot of, i think, safeguards built in. some of these safeguards, by the way in the software in the iec is not known because they want to keep some of those safeguards secret. so there could somebody people that could figure out ways to hack the system. and i think also that there are provisions within the ecc to enable them to carry on their work. and they have investigators that they are sending out. and that process has already begun. so it's not just them sitting in a room looking at issues. they are actually sending people out to certain places. with rard to this notion of a

deal, you know, this is -- we saw the issues in kenya. we saw these issues that have been raised in zimbabwe. where, in the end, the notion of a power sharing agreement was the last best hope to avoid bloodshed. i think it is way too early to talk about those issues now. i thk that the afghan people went to the polls wanting a process that was going to reflect their will. if you look at every poll that's been conducted in the country, this was not an artificial that represented the hopes and aspirations of the afghan people. and if people now talk about this, some type of power sharing agreement as a substitute to a legitimate election process, i think that the repercussions

both short term but long term, i think, would be rlly quite damaging. i think first we have to deal with the issue of the integrity of the election process. that's where much falls on the shoulders of the iec and the ecc. and second, we have to talk about the legitimacy f the institutns that emerge. and again, i will say, it is not only the issue of the president. it's also the issue of 34 provincial councils around the country as well. and those are thenstitutions that the afghans will -- this is t a spectator sport at that level. and these are individuals and institutions the afghans will have to interact with over the course of the next four or five year years. on the issue of cand har, i'm t sure what the icc has quarantined in kandahar. i'm not sure what they are looking at in kandahar.

they sent a team down to investigate kandahar, in particular, reports have been coming out of kandahar about problems. so these conceivably the numbers that we're seeing could change. depending on what t iec does and what the ecc does. so, you know, i think there are going to be a number of places where we're going to see some numbers and then the question, then the responsibility falls with these two institutions. finally, on alex raised the issue about a parallel vote tabulation and the posting of, i think, lots of people would have wanted to see a system where fifa, the domestic monitoring organization, could have carried out a parallel vote tabulation nationwide. i think it would have been extremely difficult under the -- under the circumstances. now unlike the international observers, fifa said they were in all 34 provinces. but they were hampered by the security situation as well. when we trained the candidate

agents, we insisted on two things. when the first was that they were literate and the second that they would have already been accredited by the electoral commission to be candidate agents. and what this did was it spurred the candidates to register their agents before the training began. and so what we tried to do was to help create a critical mass of party agents. but i think it would have been very difficult for party agents to be in all the places because of that political -- because of that security challenge. and i imagine it still would have been difficult for any organization to develop a wide enough sample, and a statistically randomsample, significant sample, to develop a parallel vote tabulation. i think it's unfortunate. and i hope that in future

elections that that will be a component. and now that the votes are bng counted at the polling site level, there is at least the possibility of doing some verification that wl -- that will be seen as being an actual, you know, an accurate reflection of what happened in the -- in the voting. >> let me just add an additional point of pressure on the ecc and the iec is to try to complete their work in time that if there is a run-off it happens before winter sets in. of course, there are more donkeys and mules transporting ballots than vehicles. and it would be too difficult to do it once winter setin. so they really have a lot of pressure to finish this early on. kristen? >> it's not so important where the police and ana, but rather where the taliban are. that's actually the -- there are two sides of the same coin.

the taliban are where there are no government security forces. at the end of the day we've known this election was coming around for a while and the fact that police production has been such a challenge for the international community. i it's really inexcusable. and you don't have to have 100 t talibs with rpgs. you just need one guy out of a polling station. he doesn't even need arms. just everybody needs to know what he's doing. this should have been a priority. police training is absolutely fundamental. by the way, armies don't win insurgenceez. police win insurgencies. there are multiple reasons why the oversight of the police is egregio egregious. >> i am not an election person by profession. i really look at internal security issues. one of my biggest concerns about a karzai victory is this comes back to the issue of governance and credibility. and again, when we think aut

the -- yes, a run-off may be expensive. it may be tactically very difficult to do, particularly with weather. it may be violent. but the long-term consequences of not having a run-off and not having a president which is seen to be credible will have much -- much more significant long-term consequences than trying to deal with the insurgen. and this came out in some of the comments that mcchrystal said. this is not just about security. this is about goveance. if we don't have in there a president that is seen as credible, being able to resolve this insurgency in any fashion, be it negotiations with the taliban, be it -- try to provide government services it is going to be really difficult if you don't have a guy in kabul that is seen to be legitimate. >> let's do a second round. i saw ed. thanks, chris. and then this gentleman here. you also. >> thank you, karen. edward joseph, helsinki commission. let me first congratulate ndi for great work out there, not

only on this observation, but ken as well, on training polling agents and also the domestic monitors. that's to be quite commended. and let me if i could, take another run at alex's question about a potential second round because i think it's quite important. i believe ambassador mentioned that your views -- or the views of your team are somewhat nuanced, but the narrative is not neanced. the narrative would be something like it was a sham. i understand that there were positive things about the campaigning and discussion of the issues and so forth. but the question of the second round goes this overarching issue which is inescapable about the perception of afghans themselves, about whether this is legitimate and alex asked a very interesting question. can anything be done in the limited time that would be there until the second round to make

sure, if there is a second round that it is better and more legitimate in the eyes of the afghans than the first round. i think it's quite important. some think the answer is no, and they think that the second round will just give the taliban another shot. and you'll end up with the same mess. so it's quite a dilemma and an important question. just very briefly in terms of context. there is also a larger context not mentioned here, and that is that afghanistan's neighbor, iran, also had elections this summer. quite disputed, and so the notion of legitimacy has a larger context. does the panel believehat if we simply say, well, it was a step, you know. you can't expect too much, does that constrain what we might be able to say about the challenges raised about the iranian election. hank you very >> i don't think it's our place to say that there should be a second round. i mean, before the iec and the

ec completes its work, i think it would be rather premature to say this was what was the result of the election. there's no doubt that should there be a second round, the problems that existed in the first round would take on less significance and you will have people that will look at it and sy, despite all of these flaws and all of these problems, the system worked in the sense that there is another shot at this. so politically, i think, from even the notion of a perception issue, it is no doubt, if you look at our own election here when elections are very, very close and you have a winner and there have been significant irregularities, those irregularities take on added significance in tse types of close elections and so a second round allows those issues to be addressed. in terms of what happens in a second round let them just say some issues are out of

everybody's hands. the question is what the taliban is going to do in certain areas. but i think in terms of what the afghan police and the military do, i think, there could be beefed-up security perhaps to expand areas that are less secure. and i think that there's going to have to be a concerted effort on the part of all three to see if there is going to be a greater presence to expand the areas of security. and so that is one thing that can be done. the other issue in terms of irregularities, misconduct, fraud -- those are issues of political will. and those are the issue that the candidates themselves are going to have to impose on their supporters around the country. and what pressure could be brought to bear to ensure that there is that political will is a short period and the question

is, that falls on the leadership of these movements to be able to impose some discipline on their supporters to eure thatome of the more egregious problems that we all saw and are emerging right now are not repeated in a second round. >> okay. let's try to take the questions -- she's over here, please. there's a microphone. yep. i see you. i'm not going to be able to get everybody. >> thank you. i'm sir john from the atlantic council. i have two related questions. one is about the relatiohip between the levels of violence in the provinces preceding the elections. there's an excellent "wall street journal" map that showed this was largely in the sort of the pastun belt. are you going to be able to analyze and help us understand what that effect had on voting partners in those provinces?

and related question is, according to that map there was relatively less violence or almost none. what did you hear, if anything, about the role in all of this? was there some kind of a secret deal made with mr. karzai that may have accounted for this? or was this something that was unexpected? >> can i have the gentleman in the back who's been waiting patiently. thank you. >> thank you. fred tipson with a program here in washington. could we yawn pack the notion of the international community a ttle bit and get to the queson as to how the u.n. itself performed in supporting these elections? i think it's helpful to kind of break down the notion of international community support.

>> thanks. i'd like to thank the panel, distinguished panel, for excellent insights. my name is steve gail. i'm on the house subcommittee on foreign security, foreign affairs and national security. and i guess i have two questions that span a number of issues, but one is you talkedbout the shortcomings and training, shortcomings in the police, shortcomings in security and the number of issues which i think you've done an excellent job in highlighting. so i have two questions on this. one, given all these shortcomings, who do you see as the real winner in this election process in terms of institutions? and secondly, what does this say about the u.s. engagements in the last five years, and i would guess about $37 billion have been spent in afghanistan? what does this say about the actual process in terms of

supporting elections and i'll just leave it at that. thanks. >> thank you. kumar from amnesty international. i have two quick questions. the first is about independent election condition. there were concerns that it's not independent at all. thermembers were hand-picked. what's your observation of that and how does that affect the credibility of the results and the second is about the media. there were some journalists who were investigating corruption of the administration who were harassed and abused. how has that played into independence of elections? >> thanks. >> al milliken, ammedia. are there any other nations or international organizations you would single out positively or negatively for the role they have played in the 2009 elections and any contributions

that stood out in a special way from your observation? >> ken, why don't you start so you can tackle -- >> in terms of the iec, our statement refers to the independence and perceived lack of independence of the iec. there was n doubt that the -- there was some controversial statements made by the iec early on. there were also decisions that were made by the iec that demonstrated independence from the government. howaver, we said in this statement that if an organization is going to be -- call itself independent and be seen as independent, there has to be a structure that ensures that independence and economy and so we recommended that they go back to the drawing boards and have some checks that are appointed by the president. the legislation has been passed to that effect but president karzai has not signed it and so

we recommended for future elections that there will be a different system for choosing and confirming members of the election commission. i ink in terms of organizations and groups that performed well, i don't think i'm in a position and, fred, to begin, we had enoh of a challenge looking at this election process to spend time sort of analyzing and grading international actors and what they did and what they didn't do i think would be very difficult. i think everyone, as peter said, were performing in the eleventh hour, and i think that was very difficult. and i was just going to say, a.i.d. seemed to have a more sustained presence during that period between 2005 and 2009. and i should add that usaid had supported this observation missio a lot of other groups, because

of that, quote-unquote, funding grave yard, had a very, very difficult time ramping up in the eleventh hour, and i think that's a lesson tha is to be learned from all of this. in terms of the media, i think from the observation and all the studies that were done, that the private media was relatively fair and balanced, relatively fair and balanced in the process but there was no doubt that the media commission issued report after report highlighting the bias in state-run media. and it was unfortunate and we talked about this in our statementhat actions were not taken by the iec to impose sanctions on the media. to force the media, the state-run media to abide by the media code of conduct that was passed by the ecc and the icc, which should have been done and should be done in the future.

in terms of the violence, we are going to be doing some mapping for some final report and look at areas of violence, but there is also an element in this, too, that affected the campaign. peter is right. the campaign surprised lots of people because it focused on issues. 10 million people watched the debates. candidates crossed ethnic lines to campaign. there was very little interethic violence that took place. the presidential candidates were able to operate -- even again, the silver lining in this story that appeared in the "post" yesterday that you had in a pastun area dr. abdullah working out a deal with a pastun tribe for its support. so you did have this notion of what appeared to be people willing to cross ethnic lines to vote in this election.

but there was also the threat of violence and not only the violence that had an impact. for example, the province, radio stations were begging candidates and women candidates to appear on radio. and yet they wouldn't appear on radio, so the campaign in those areas where there was the greatest threat of violence, during the campaign period people would rather campaign in their homes and not in a very visible way and so a lot of the media and it didn't take place and it affected the campaign environment. ye there was lot of active campaigning in these homes and i think these were some of the main issues. >>kay. >> i'll just briefly mention. one positive thing that i

thought undp had done was play a role in establishing a gender unit within the iec. now, the gender unit was set up very late due to a variety of constraints. and there was a role in supporting to support the afghans in the iec but there was one woman who actually sat within the iec and i thought this was actually, you know, i think looking at a potential runoff, you know, we may not be able to adequately address many of the challenges women face but i do see this gender unit as an opportunity to go forward to really focus on specific education that's required and they did play a role to make sure it was gender disaggregated and, you know, were definitely a voice and will be a stronger

voice going forward. >> just one additional question about the united nations. keep in mind this election was afghan-run. it was their decision. they wanted to move to have responsibility for the election. after 2004/2005, when the u.n. was the primary agent. not only did they want to have responsibility for the electoral process but in terms of the security provided, they continually talked about the three rings of security on election day. first the afghan police, then the ana, the army, and isaf would be there if needed. so in terms of that road to self-government that i mentioned, this plays into that. however, there was funding graveyard that took place from 2005, '6 and '7 and in 2008 i think they had $100 million to start that voter registration process. 2009, i think a quarter million

dollars, $225 m-undp had. they set aside, i think, $20 million for the runoff. they set aside some of that funding if needed for a runoff but clearly more will be needed. and the real issue here is the sustainability of the electoral process for afghanistan over the long term. they cannot pay for these. they do not have the funding, the budget to do that. so in terms of the international commitment we do need to know what occurs next after this is resolved hopefully successfully and legitimately and credibility. but we do need to be looking at the electoral mechanisms as well as the sustainability of funding for these down the road. >> one concluding comment. i think what we've seen over the

past five or six years -- the international comnity having very low expectations about what could be accomplished in afghanistan and perhaps much lower than the afghans themselves -- when we would ask people, why didn't you prepare better for the '09 elections, we were told by some donors that, well, we weren't even sure the elections would really take place. they didn't put money into a process that would occur. although i don't think the afghans would have any doubt that the elections would take place. but, you know, it's the legacy of the soft footprint that mr. brahimi first talked about back in 2002. i think that's really formed sort of a mental framework for the international community in approaching afghanistan and i

think it's been much to the detriment of the country. >> all right. thank you, peter. i'd also like before closing to thank my colleague over in the corner there who really took us all together and the other volunteers for helping us out today. thanks to our very extraordinary panel. [applause] >> and anybody who's not on our mailing list and wants to hear about future events, our project willontinue to work on afghanistan and pakistan, please sign up outside the door. so thank you again for coming. >> i just wanted to add one name to this mix, and that has jamie metzel who is vice president of the asia society who was part of the leadership team who was left off the list. >> sorry, i forgot. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations]

>> next, vice president joe biden talks about the $787 billion economic stimulus package. from the brookings institution, this is an hour. [applause]

>> mr. vice president is standing ovations are not standing operating procedure even after a speech so i think that sayst all. i'm the president of the brookings institution and it is my pleasure to welcome all of you here today. to join me in the honor of welcoming vice president joe biden back to brookings where he has been on a number of occasions over his long and distinguished career. he is one of many americans who is hard at work today on the eve of labor day weekend, and he's working hard on behalf of all of us. the same is true of adolfo carrion the director of the white house office of foreign affairs, who is also with us today. the vice president is going to speak to us on the economy and the status of the recovery plan.

among thinks several tough and important assignments, on behalf of the president, is his leadership othe administration's middle class task force. which looks for ways to help american families cope with the stresses of home foreclures, household debt, loss of jobs and the burdens of school tuitions. the vice president also overseas the implementation of the $787 billion stimulus plan. and in that connection, he is infrequent and constantontact governors, mayors, county executives from both parties all around the country. a number of his efforts coincide with what's going on here on these premises. as just one example our metro program has worked with federal agencies and local and regional leaders to brainstorm on how stimulus programs can support

innovative ways of creating quality jobs and thereby developing greener, healthier, better-educated communities. like all americans, we at brookings are looking for ways to track performance of the economy as it makes its way toward recovery. we're now going to hear how that performance looks from the very highest levels of our government. after his speech, the vice president has agreed to take a few questions on the economy. and i stress that that is the topic for today. so, mr. vice president, you've got our attention and you also have our gratitude for being here today. >> thank you very much, strobe. [applause] >> thank you. it's a pleasure to be back, and i told strobe in the anteroom that the many times i've been here almost always the subject is foreign policy and i hope i have an opportunity to come back

and discuss some of those areas at a later date but today i want to talk about the economy specifically, the recovery act. president obama and i, when we entered office -- we were in the midst of what i refer to as the great recession. it seemed that every day that we woke up from the day we were sworn in, there was a new revelation to be added to the economic parades of horribles that some of which we had anticipated. americans were seeing their savings decimated by the losses in the stock market, housing values were collapsing, people were losing their savings as well as their homes. major banks -- it's hard to remember this even though it's been eight months ago. major banks were on the verge of failure, closure. people were talking about shuttering the doors. the was actually a serious discussion from the economists we brought from outside from the

interim period and the election period and being sworn in, there was some discussion maybe a bank holiday being necessary. we were on the verge of failure, credits were frozen and businesses couldn't borrow for credit. and even to keep the employment force they had credible economists were capping the possibility of a true deposition. paul krugman wrote in january of 2009, he said let's not mince words. this looks like an awful beginning of the second great deprsion. a look of the times is just a remind jury of how precarious our situation was. the financial sector can't be held -- no one home record 1 in 9 housing units vacant. headline, economy strains on their way to unsold items, headline, automakers,

bankruptcies looms. headline credit freeze leaves houses of student borrowers stuck in default. headline, government brace for hard times, some have frozing and postpone major projects. headline, new poor swell lines at food banks. in the face of this mounting disaster we along with everyone in this room knew action had to be taken and we took action in three areas. first, we had to stabilize the financial system. we took the very unpopular but necessary step of rescuing the banks. and now, although there's a long way to go, 8 out of the 10 of the larst financial institutions including goldman, morgan stanley, american express as well as 16 smaller banks have repaid the government in full and i might add at a $4 billion profit for the taxpayer. second, along with the fed we took action to stabilizing the housing market allowing responsible homeowners to stay in their homes.

we just learned new housing rose in 10%. are we there yet? no. but we're moving. 200 days ago, president obama signed into law the third piece of our economic plan. the american recovery and reinvestment act. and today, there's a growing consensus. the recovery act is, in fact, working. don't just taje my word for it, analysts from moody's and others all estimate the recovery act has created oraved between 500,000, 7050,000 jobs and some economists note up to a million. a economists at goldman sachs the package added 2.2 percentage points to real g.d.p. growth in the second quarter of 2009. and estimate that it will add 3.3 percentage pnts to the

current quarter. mark zandi a highly respected economist wrote, the financial stimulus providing the fodder for better sales, lower payroll tax withholding, checks to social security recipients and more financial help to unemployed workers are buoying the sales. the recession is ending just when the stimulus is providing maximum economic benefit, end of quote. as australia's prime minister said a couple of weeks ago and i quote, this is a case study in bringing the world back from the brink and it was the american leadership from president obama that was the key, end of quote. you know, it all adds up to this. if my view at least. the recovery act has played a significant role in changing the trajectory of our economy and

changing the conversation about the economy in this country. instead of talking about the beginning of a depression, we're talking about the end of a recession eight months after taking office. but the recovery act still has its critics and one of the criticisms is that it's a grab bag of too many different programs. but the fact is the recovery act is a multifacete piece of legislation. it doesn't reflect a lack of design. that was the design, that was its intended design. our economy is so complex and so wounded that reinvigorating one segment alone or using one tool alone would never -- would never do all that needed to be done. the recovery act is not a single silver bullet. i think if it has silver buckshot as opposed to a single bullet, in 200 days, the president's recovery and

reinvestment act isn't just working toward something -- excuse me, it isn't just working, it's working toward something. it's working toward a more resilient and more transformative economy. folks, this act -- this act was designed to do three things. one, and it's never -- most people when we talk about it and the criticism comes, they think it was $787 billion for highway projects. this was $787 billion for highway projects. my republican friends as my mother wou say, god love them, forget they insisted $288 billion in tax cuts in this, which is part of it. and is a significant factor as well as benefit. people think it to be $787 billion of public works projects. but it's made up of three parts. one, to bring relief to those hardest hit by the recession. now, i know my republican critics think maybe which shouldn't do that. maybe that's the difference between being a democrat and a

republican. i'm not being a facetious. it's a legitimate disagreement. but the first part is bring relief to those who were falling into the abyss. the second was to jumpstart the economy by giving assistance to states, all of which were in desperate economic circumstances. and the third was to reinvest and lay a economic future for the growth and future in education and healthcare. that was what it was intended to do. in broad terms let them explain how it breaks down. approximately one-third of the money in the recovery act, $288 billion is in the form of tax cuts or tax incentives. and thus far, we've delivered more than $62 billion in tax relief to businesses and to 95% of the wage earners in america. and by design, that will unfold over 18 months. it is not all paid out at once.

there are almost 320,000 new homeowners who took advantage of the first time tax credit breathing life into the housing market. in addition, we've encraged banks to loan to small businesses. by putting upfront $200 million in loan guarantees, we've been able to leverage for small businesses capital loans, private capital, of $9.5 billion. from many banks who hadn't made a single loan in 2 1/2 years. helping small businesses ay and some expand. roughly another third of the municipal in the recovery act went to relief for workers -- for working americans who were most badly hit by the recession. whether it was through the state governments to keep cops, firefighters and teachers on the job or allowing those to provide

food assistance to people who were in danger of going hungry or medicaid four the swell rolls of people desperately need in healthcare. to pell grants for families to keep their kids in colleges, they fell below that $50,000 rk to extend unemployment benefits and cobra benefits and 154 million veteran or seniors have received a one time check for $250. not only does this give relief to the vulnerable, americans who are in danger of falling into the abyss, it also -- it also has had the economic effect of injecting nearly $90 billion in the first 200 days into the blood stream of the american economy stimulating owth. i believe this was the right thing to do morally. but that's not what we're about today. it was also the smart thing t do economically. roughly, the last third of the recovery act is about rebuilding our communities and infrastructure while laying a

platform for growth in the 21st century. we've made major investments in modernizing our infrastructure, highways, brges, water and sewer systems. this has increased the productivity of the nation's capital stocknd improved the safety of our highways and the quality of our drinking water for millions of americans. we're also investing what everybody knows is necessary to build the 21st century economy. i have people saying aren't you guys doing too much? you know, presidents in the past have been able -- and i've been here for eight of them. they've been able to take the problems that they have and segregate them, say we're going to take these two first. we'll put these other four, six or five aside and we'll get to them next. because they know the status quo will have pertain. but name me one problem that landed under the president's desk that allowed him to say, no, we're going to focus on this and then in three years we'll get to this.

i say to my friends, does think we can lead to the 21st century without a radical energy policy? does anybody think we can sustain our position in the world without a radically altered education system where we're -- we're no longer 17th in the world in the number of college graduates we graduate? does anybody think we can sustain our fiscal house without radical change in the cost of healthcare in this country in bending that curve? look, we knew we had to begin to lay the platform. while we were generating economic growth, why not begin to lay a platform for the 21st century? we know we needed a totally smart new grid. health information technology will modernize the delivery of healthcare saving lives and saving money. expanding broadband to parts of the country that were left behind bringing the benefits of technology to anyone and

everywhere snf in the meantime having a significant impact on productivity. high speed rail diminishing congestion and increasing efficiency. when all is said and done, we want to erge in an economy that isn't built on a bubble. but to rest on a firm foundation of innovative businesses, green economics, green energy. and a modernized healthcare system providing good jobs in each of those sectors on the way. that's our vision. an that's a vision we're determined to fulfill. we don't think as my grand pop would say the recovery is the horse that can carry that sleigh alone but in a sense is the down payment. that's why from the beginning, i've held a cabinet meeting every single week that we'd been in session. the joke is, you know, it is my job to hold cabinet meetings. but i've had the great benefit -- by the way, the added

benefit of getting them all together once a week and watching the synergy among them, watching them work off one another. i really mean it. there's bee ancillary benefits and with notable exception i hold a cabinet meeting and most of the cabinet secretaries attend and/or their deputies. for the first 100 days i was very clear with them. the president by the way never write a memo to the president suggesting that the job be undertaken that you don't want taken [laughter] >> we had lunch and i said boss, i think you should do this. and he said good, do it. i did not volunteer for this josh. -- job. but all kidding aside when he announced biden was going to be sheriff, well, the truth of the matter was, for the first 100 days dealing with the cabinet

members on a weekly basis, i made it clear that our focus had to be in the first 100 days accountability, transparency, and responsiveness. i wanted each of those can't secretaries to set up systems where they would have a high degree of confidence that as they implemented, implemented what they were in charge of, it would be done effectively and efficiently. i'm going to get e.j. in trouble but he happened to be in the room a day a number when i was interviewed when you plant ten dead trees in sparkle. i said we'll have to plant 100 good mysteries in fairmount park. what could have derailed this in the beginning was -- were those stories, millions of dollars wasted on, you know, polar bear tanks and all the things -- what everybody was predicting. but in the first 100 days, this was the dog that didn't bite.

so i wanted to make sure as well that the governors, mayors and county executives knew this wasn't business as usual. i have now spoken to every single governor except one who's now a former governor -- [laughter] >> and it wasn't by design. she was going to be on a couple of times and couldn't for a couple of reasons. i've spoken to most of the governors twice. once a week i call and speak with five to seven governors and seven to twelve mayors. i'm now well over 100 in the number of mayors i've talked to and i answer their specific questions and i drove ed who's the ceo in this operation who has been involved in the federal govement crazy, i want every question i want answered in 24 hours. pick up the phone and call any of the governors or mayors've spoken to. you will find i've given them an answer in 24 hours and when we don't have an answer we call

them in 24 hours and tell them we don't have the answer when they'll get the answer. agai this was all about establishing credibility at the front end of this. that this was going to be done well and differently with accountability and transparency. otherwise, it had no chance. in the process, the criticism was legitimate of me. that we were moving too slowly to distribute taxpayers funds in those first 100 days but i thought we had to set up a system to ensure those taxpayers funds weren't wasted undercutting what i tru believe then and believe now and think we are beginning to improve is the incredibly important element for recovery in this economy over the next 18 months. and, quite frankly, i am very proud of the job the agencies have done and the responsivens of the secretaries in each of the departments. for the second 100 days, i gathered the cabinet together and i instructed them that i wanted to be much more aggressive in implementing the

program. now that they had systems in place. and i take responsibility for mistakes that were made. but i want them to put more pace on the ball. this was also the season, the season of building. this is the time you make -- you're able to go out there and build highways and you're able to go out there and put sewer systems in the ground and lay broadband because of the season in a sense it was the planting season. and it was time to get these programs out, up and running and be on the backs of governors and mayors to make sure that they get the contracts and that they had an accounting procedure in place where they'd be able to let us know exactly what happened. so i asked them to set goals. i remember in the meeting -- i will not meeting a noncabinet member's name who was involved in the government a long time and he said you're going to announce these goals? you're going to actually ask every cabinet member to tell you precisely what they will do in the next 100 days and you're

going to announce it? and just said, yes. and the reason wasn't any noblity. itas the only way to get credibility. and accountability. so we publicly announced the goals putting ourselves on the line to deliver meaningful results in the second 100 days. and i'm here today to report on the progress of achieving those goals. we set a goals of 1,100 health centers to provide an additional 100,000 patients. we met that goal and we exceeded it by 200,000 patients. 500,000 new patients are being treated. we set a goal of funding 135,000 education jobs because i heard from every governor, every mayor, every county executive about the fear of closing down schools, increasing class sizes, laying off tens of thousands of teachers. you may remember the celebrated case in new york or somewhere around 15,000 roughly got their

pink slips. they weren't going to be able to teach. so i understand to make sure this whichccurred so we set a go for 135,000 teachers and support staffs whose jobs were otherwise at risk. we met that goal. we set a goal of hiring or keeping 500,000 law enforcement officers on the job in places hard hit and hard-pressed to maintain their forestructure as crime rates begin to go up. we met that goal. we set a goal of having construction crews working on 98 airport projects and 1,500 highway projects. we exceeded that goal in the second 100 days by 94 airports and 700 highway projects. and we set a goals of starting to build 200 water sanitary systems and wastewater treatment facilities. in rural america. we've met that goals and now approximately 4,500,000 people in the next several months will

have clean drinking water that they didn't have before. we set a goal of starting or speeding up the cleanup work at 20 superfund sites. how many speakers have you heard over the years talk about the superfund sites that exist in america? well, we met that goal. and in some cases we're taking years off the expected completion date of cleaning up these superfund sites. we met our goals through the military construction projects, the national parks, the summer youth jobs and veteran facilities and not only have we met and achieved these goals but contrary to what many have heard and contrary to usual practice, we've achieved then ahead of schedule and underbudget. but look, let them give you an example. the faa initially committed $1.1 billion to about 300 airport improvement projects. now we're going to finis those

projects for $200 million less than originally estimated and that means the faa is in the process of being able to fund an additional 60 airport improvements. we're seeing the same thing in the department of defense where construction contracts are coming into 12% under budget on average representing hundreds of millions of dollars in savings. the same can be said of many of our highway projects. the reason why i don't have a number for you, we have so many projects out there, i initially in the first 150ays had numbers as to what average they were coming in at but now -- we don't have the accounting for all of them. the gsa has also seen projects come inhead of schedule and underbudget. most bids i'm told with the gsa are coming 8 to 10% below the timated costs. recovery dollars are going further and working harder than the vast majority of people have anticipated. they're the facts. 100 days ago in june the 8th i stated that we had -- i believed that we had saved or created 150,000 jobs in the first 100 days.

and i went on to say, again, over the objection of some of my more cautious advisors -- i went on to say that we will create another 600,000 jobs in the second 100 days. on september the 10th, the council of economic advisors plans to report to the nation their projection of jobs or saved is relative to the recovery act. i'm optimisticnd as a matter of fact i'm confident that that report will show that we met or exceeded our goal -- that goal as well. to state the obvious, we will emerge from this great recession and i believe that is only -- that's necessary but not sufficient. we have to emerge better positioned to lead the world in the 21st century as we did in the 20th century. where the last cycle generated billions of dollars, billions from investments made via high speed trades, this cycle needs to make real investments in high speed rail.

in the last cycle, innovation meant bundling selling subprime mortgages. in this one, o innovations will bundle and sell technologies to produce clean, efficient renewable energy. for the befits of productivity have not flown in the past, from 2000 to 2007, productivity grew 20% yet the middle income households fell 3%, their income. in this cycle we're determined to make sure that productivity doesn't allude the poor and the middle class and this cycle must be one which once again american workers get his or her fair share of the wealth they helped produce. if you look at the recovery act, as a two-year marathon, we're at the 9-mile mark. we're just approaching the 9-mile mark. 200 days in the recovery act is doing more faster, and more efficiently and more effectively than most people expected. some of of the most exciting and transformative initiatives are now just about to get underway.

throughout the fall, we'll be going -- we're going to be ramping up the loan guarantees that will help us generate solar, wind and geothermal energy. we're ramping them up in a significant way. and as a matter of fact, i have an announcement tomorrow on this score. and just 30 days since the department of energy opened the renewable grants program for applications we received applications for projects that can produce over a gigawatt of wind energy, enough power to power half a million homes. and by the way, buried in all of this is what i think is not going to be able to be measured. what is the leveraging effect of what we are doing? that will remain to be seen. but i believe it will be consequential. this will be energy that's clean, renewable, doesn't pollute and begins to wean us off the incredible dependence on foreign oil.

next month, wre going to release our initial payments, down payments, on the new smart grid, a new super highway of connectivity that will allow reliable transmission of renewable energy, allow consumers to have real information and real time about how they're consuming their energy, allow them to adjust the ability to decide to turn their dishwasher on at 11:00 automatically because what is generating also is new manufacturing initiatives to people building smart toasters, smart washers, smart dryers. this is real stuff. that's what i mean by the leveraging effect that's out there. i don't know how to measure that. that's above my pay grade. but i know it's real. i know it's real. investment in broadband will ramp up on november collecting large parts of the country that have been underserved or unserved by the internet. we already have nearly $30 billion in front applications. over $30 billion in requests, seven times the amount of money

we have to distribute. the result will be that rural hospitals can practice telemedicine and get consatellites from special lists who are hundreds of millions away. adults can go to virtual classroom and get their college and graduate degrees. ranchers can in real time -- get real time pricing information and sell their cattle online on online auctions earning them more money with less consequence to them. it's real. these are tangible real things that thus far have been denied significant segments of the population. and then our broadband initiative was $7 million isn't going to answer it all. there ain't enough there to finish it. but once this begins, i believe, as the recovery increases, and get stronger over the next several years, you will see a national commitment that didn't exist before.

we're going to connect people from the inner cities in rural america to worlds of opportunity that have been previously worlds away from them. later this winter we're going to investing in newer, faster and better rail travel. i know i'm a bit of a hobby horse on that. the joke on the administration, we pushed for high speed rail there goes biden again, cops and railroads. by the way, we finally got cops on railroads now. [laughter] >> but all kidding aside, it can be again transformative over time. we've already received preapplications for thousands of miles of new rail for train corridors that will routinely exceed 150 miles an hour and for two that are well planned that would allow travel for new train sets over 240 miles an hour. mr. secretary, i don't have to tell you about transportation. we're going to make additional

investments in battery and electric -- excuse me, batteries and electric drive train technologies, which we've already made some that will allow detroit to produce vehicles so you can get the equivalent over 200 miles a gallon. and we're beginning to fund the network needed. you need gas stations. you needplug-in stations to charge up these vehicles. we're already beginning to fund them. hopefully, again, having the leveraging effect, making people realize that this is the future. this fall we're going to continue to invest in modernizing our healthcare system so that doctors and hospitals will be able to have secured access to hospitals preventing hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical errors and unnecessary readmissions and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary tests. i'll give you an example of my colleague tom carper's drir having chest pains taking him to an event.

pulls into the delaware hospital down there. he happened to have a particular ailment that had they known this they would have gone right to deal with his hypertension that was there. instead, he had several thousand dollars worth of unnecessary tests done. the doctor i met with in chicago at a forum pointed out that he ordered a cat scan but because he had electronic record-keeping in this particular office that he had set up and the hospital he was dling with, a big orange marker came up saying are you sure you need this? pointing out that a cat scan had been done at the request of another doctor just two weeks earlier. this is real. this is not fiction. this is not make-believe stuff. this is real. it's consequential. are we going to do it all? no. but we are. we are while priming the economy, we're investing in new

platforms that i believe other people are going to build off of. in the first 200 days we were about nessity. the next 200 days will be about possibilities. at the end of the day, these investments are more about creating jobs, they're about crting strong communities and stronger economy. they're about renewing a sen of hope and possibilities. you know, it's often easy to sit in washington as we do today and opine what is or isn't happening beyond the capital beltway. well, like many of you, over the past two years, i've had the opportunity to travel the buy ways and the highuays of this entire country. i've crisscrossed it on rural highways and interstate highways. in large cities and small towns. i've met with local officials, business people, union workers, community leaders, farmers, and the most oft-heard remark and i mean i literally when i would go

by their homes and towns, they would say, well, that used to be. that used to be. this used to be a steel mill. this town used to be the ceramic capital of america. this factory used to employ 1200 people. this company used to have their headquarters here. the "used to" was the most oft-heard phrase in the past two years when i was speaking to local officials. but because the investments we're beginning to make and investments that's generated and some confidence that's beginning to build, i'm now hearing a different refrain. literay, not figuratively. not everywhere but i begin to hear the refrain. this is going to be. this is going to be a factory that makes super efficient windows. this is going to be a place where we make batteries in drive trains for electric cars and get 220 miles equivalent to a gallon. this is going to be the hub of a new smart grid harvesting energy fromhe great plains to light up the cities in the midwest.

this abandon factory as they just didn cincinnati, ohio, this abandon factory is going to house hundreds of families in adequate, low cost housing this factory is expanding, not closing because we're building transformers for a new wind form in central missouri. this school won't shut down. we're going to be adding two classrooms and they're going to be leading the race to the top by taking advantage of the innovative money that's available to us. these are real stories. the recovery act is helping to write. not totally responsible but helping to write. it's not nearly enough yet. but there will be a lot more of them to come in the days to come. remember, we're at the 9-mile mark of this marathon. 200 days in, we know there's a great deal more to do. and then to use my grand pop's metaphor, the recovery act isn't the horse that's carrying the whole sleigh.

but it's pulling its way. we also know that thanks to the recovery act, we're where we are today is a much better place than we could have possibly been without it. and even more exciting is where i think we're headed. the road ahead is going to remain very, very bumpy. there's going to be positive economic news and there's going to be negative economic news. but i believe it's going to be the three steps forward, the one step back. that's the way recoveries work. particularly, in the last four decades. but we know -- we are absolutely confident we are on the right road to recovery. we're on a road to recover in a way that we'll be able to sustain growth longer and more reliable and based on having created the circumstances where real jobs that pay real wages, allow people to live middle class lives are growing and not diminishing. i thank you all for listening and i yield the floor to the

president as iuly. -- as i always do. [applause] [applause] >> thanks very much, mr. vice president. we've got about 15 minutes to spend in conversation with the vice president. he's already, in effect, called on e.j. in advance. so i'm sure e.j. will rise to the occasion. antoine, did i see your hand up? antoine? >> try mine. [laughter] >> thank you very much. mr. vice president, thank you for an extremely interesting and inspiring and optimistic speech.

my question is this, when the administration started things looked very dire. you talked about the great recession and even about the great depression. things are clearly better. would you say it is just the economic recovery act or was there perhaps an assessment at the time that was perhaps worse than it should have been on what the situation was? and the second question, if i may is, you talked about the dependence of oil. but your department of energy has way upped the estimates for gas because of the shale gas. how dependent are we really on foreign energy? >> well, let them take the first question. do i think the recovery act is responsible for the recovery to the extent we're seeing it? that it has been -- it has generated the recovery seen so far? no. i think it's part of it. i think everything from what the

feds intervention to what we did with regard to the banks as well as we did with regard to the housing markets and a whole range of other things are combined to generate this impact. what i will say is i will go back and reference the -- and i believe they're right. you'd expect me to say they're right, the economists of goldmans. roughly you can argue it's 2% or 3%, they say 2.2% of the growth in g.d.p. in the second quarter was the consequence of the act. and roughly 3.3% is estimated responsible for the growth, economicrowth -- the growth in the g.d.p. in the third quarter. i think that's got it about right. is it responsible for all of it? absolutely not. had we done just this and not done the incredibly unpopular thing of bailing out the banks, had we not done this and tried to deal with stabilizing the housing market, had we done only this we would not be where we are but conversely, had we done the other thing and not done

this, one thing is certain, millions of americans would be in much more dire straits now even if you just think as simply of umployment and cobra and f map and all the things that provide the immediate, necessary desperate help needed for people in extremis. that's for sure. the other piece is i believe we would not we have we would not be in position -- you would see absolute catastrophe occurring in the all butwo states in america. who had no possibility, no -- ask them, ask the governors, republican and democrat. without the billions of dollars in recovery act stabilization funds coming in, could they have maintained essential services in their states? in the state of pennsylvania alone, it's estimated they would have had t lay off 10,000 additional teachers and cops.

it not like you're laying off, you know, the local elevator operator, which is not insignificant but it's a lost job, but these are essential jobs. all you have to do is talk to them. pick up the phone. i know you reporters will. pick up the phone and call any governor, ask them. about the impact on their ability to balance their budget without decimating essential services. in t third piece that i'm confident of is that the infrastructure which has been neglected -- we have been devoting eight tenth of our g.d.p. to maintaining our infrastructure where china h gotten as high as 8% of their g.d.p. now, granted they start from a different platform than we do. but the point is, this was necessary anyway. i mean, those of us who were running for public office were talking about investment in infrastructure before we had a recession.

so partf what we're doing here is not only economically sound, it is worthwhile in and itself. it is worthwhile to take some of those 5,000 bridges out there that are ready to collapse, although what happened in the upper midwest and fix them but it has the added benefit that giving people good and decent jobs, paying a decent wage and stimulating economic growth so the barber shop can stay open and the deli doesn't close. i know you economists know all this. but i don't think we usually translate it that way for average hard-working americans. this is in the economic bloodseam. there's $90 billion in there now. in terms of tax cuts. are people spending at all? no. they're saving all. do we wish they'd spend more in

one sense yes but in the other sense, people aren't stupid. they're spending a lot of it through the recovery act but they're also trying to get straight. they're trying to get right. so anyway, i think it's been very helpful. with regard to oil, i'm not sure i understood your question. you said our dependence on foreign oil and now you're saying -- [inaudle] >> foreign energy. well, we are going to continue to need foreign energy. i'm not one up here making the argument to you that there is -- that it's in our near future or en in our overall interest to be energy independent. .. energy independent. we have to be secure enough that we do not need any one source of energy. if tomorrow someone decided they're not sending any more oil, we would be ok. there is a second reason, moving away from fossil fuels. it is the environment. there are multiple benefits that

flow here. the other aspect is there has been studies done here and others think tanks that shows show that these green jobs,d f when created, pay more to the same kind of effort, are more notainable looking down the road, and many are not exportable. there are a number of benefits that flow from some of the things we are doing. i am not making the case that this is the be all end all, that the recovery act contains the answer to all our economic problems. what i am saying is without it, ll would be in much deeper trouble. with it, we are doing some heally good things, and i believe we are changing the attitude of the country about a number of areas of concern, education, energy, and health care, modernization of the

lealth care system, and i think iat has long term leveraging impact on what is going to happen over the next ten years. >> i know you like and held mics and you already get yours away, we can give one back. darrell west, head of the government study program. >> he mentioned 10% of the recovery projects were about costs. how is the federal government achieving those types of things, and secondly, is it time for the american public to provide a cott view that the public is waiting for? >> on the last point is too early to make that type of decision. running the risk of setting myself up for a test i might not be able to pass 1months from now, i have attached for cabinet istrers to do a number of things

beyond transparently and unaccountably, distribute the moneys under their jurisdiction. at the end of the day i asked for us to put together literally a handbook on how from this point on to responsibly, in the future, for every government program that is administered from washington, be more accountable, be more peansparent, and done more efficiently. the end results of what we are doing, we are actually compiling the changes we are making, up until now, you could not find, you know this better than i do, if you were to try to determine whether or not the toilet built in yellowstone park and a rest maea, had actually been built and how much it costs and how many people were employed, you go to the department, you e nldn't find any of it, you can

this you can now. we had never done this before. we never followed the dollar's like we are following them now. my view is this should be the start of a new way of doing business rather than the implementation of a single program. with regard to the first part of your question, which i forget what it was -- >> 52%. >> 8% to 10%, contracts are coming in, 8% to 10% below. there's a reason for that, multiple reasons. everybody knows that i am looking to hang somebody. not a joke. the guy who heads up the staff kingen igs, he is independent, i asked what he is looking for, you would be doing me a great

favor if you detect something wrong, tell me. t said i would do that. because i want to announce it. he looked at me, that is novel. literally, to gain credibility, be able to do this kind of work, we have to demonstrate and acknowledge when we screw up. when we have made a mistake. folks don't have a lot of confidence in washington. there is a second reason we are coming under budget, people salue work. you have contractors who come in and say i am going to bid $1,000 to do this job. i am really hurting, they are going to bid $920, it is both. it is both. ere question is, are we gathering it up? are we accounting for it and what we doing with it and are we making it work for leveraging

those dollars to do more to employ people and to generate a new infrastructure? >> we are going to give one last question to the floor but if i could, i would like to up and whatever she is going to ask, request that you say a word about health care reform since you did touch on health care a number of times in your remarks and what you see is the prospects for a bill emerging and reaching the president's desk that coincides with his objectives. [laughter] >> amy, make it a long question. >> good morning, mr. vice president. congratulations to you and your team for all of the achievements. we have been working with a number of local elected officials, business leaders, nonprofit leaders, citie and metropolitan areas who are really invested in making sure

the stimulus dollars are used in catalytic ways. just like you, they don't want to waste a crisis, they really want to not just focus on short-term job growth but really make sure we achieve the third goal of transforming the outcomes and laying the groundwork for a long-term opportunity, not just short-term job growth. but they are, from your conference calls, running into some challenges, linking up broadband and investments togeer, the desire to do neighborhood stabilization with mass-transit investments, we stabilized those neighborhoods for the long haul, they want to do this across jurisdictional lines, in partnership. they are running into some challeng. /math correctly, there are 17.2

miles left in this marathon, so on behalf of many of these folks who are your partners in recovery, what are the tools or flexibility is you thinking about to make sure the next 18 months bring the outcome is you want? >> let me make a broad statement. compare the recovery program and how the moneys are being dispensed to a program that i had a hand in, the cops program, we had a big fight when we bring in the cops program, i insisted it not go to the governors or the states, it go directly to --

you could directly apply, syou would put pressure on the mayor or the chief who said we want to apply to get two more cops in town because we need them and the mayor has to decide whether or not he would write the application and city council a get consensus to whether you are going to do this, put pressure, but also direct, you do not -- you get out of jail, you do not have to do anything other than pass, go, go right, you apply at a local level, you apply for the gran that is what we want to do for an awful lot of what was done in this legislation. the fact is, the congress, in its wisdom, decided that the governor's should have a bigger in put. they may be right. i am telling you where i come from, they may be right, the governor has a bigger say, which has caused conflict some place. i have literally found myself in

a place, just like used never volunteer to negotiate in a marriage difficulty, you should never volunteer, as i have had to do, to settle a dispute between a big city mayor and his governor about whether or not the off ramp that is needed in a particular part of town should be funded, verses 140 miles of highway in rural missouri that is needed but is arguably from america's standpoint, not needed as badly. what has happened is the first 1 hundred days, i literally spent, as you probably know, literally negotiating those things. i had no authority. i had no authority to tell the governor or the mayor but i would get them together on the phone, can you work this out? can't you work this thing out? i have done, like i did in the cox bill, the criticism of my staff is i had two hands on it. it reflects the difficulty you

raise, that a lot of it is crossed jurisdiction. in some cities, one of the big problems, governors at the end have a problem. everyone has to account for the money oct. first. open a big website, we have a modern website that will blow you away in terms of how detailed it is. you wl see it in the middle of september. everything has got to go up on that website. governors are calling me and saying i need guidance. you guys gave x thousand dollars to the apartment of education, i don't control that school district. i don't control that. that is controlled by the cy, where the city is saying my school district is not controlled by me, it is controlled by independent board and i have to account for the money going into the school district. it works both ways.

what we have tried to deuce two things, and this is more detail than you want. it is an important question. the example you are familiar with, of dealing with healthier cities, healthier neighbors, that affects everything -- had working with the department of transportation, we are styling the grants that we are awarding based upon whether or not we are impacting the total health of the community. if you have a system where you know there is -- has been a problem, people not able -- they have adequate housing but they do not have access to transportation for jobs, lower, middle-income group of people in for the housing program and

related to weatherization as well as transportation request coming, we are trying to marry these things together. it is imperfect because we don't have an overall peace of legislation that is called urban policyab policyabcd. i am finding when you get all these canet secretaries together, most of them are new, most of them -- we have some superstars, this kid, arne duncan, is a superstar. watch this guy. you have sean at hud, these guys are innovative, they are excited. there is cross colonization going. it is written into the act? no, it is not. we are trying to maximize the dollars. our hands are tied in some cases where we have no ability, no ability to dictate how, in fact,

the governor and county executive and the mayor get together, the last example, broaand. what i am asking the folks is broadband, we have a project and the state has a project -- get your people together, make a single submission to us. we are doing everything we can to encourage -- we have no authority to dictate how this is being done. you will be surprised that a lot of innovative stuff is coming out of this but it is also coming up to the community. community people are saying why

don't we do it this way? we can get x number of dollars, why don't we get together? if we come to you with this program, can we still qualify? i have not bent the law but i have reinterpreted the law to be consistent with the spirit of the law. i should stop there. >> i do foreign policy, i don't do health care. i am often introduced as an expert in foreign policy. an expert is anyone from out of town with a briefcase. i don't have a briefcase and the reason i choose foreign policy is it is a lot easier than health care and lot less complicated and that is not a joke. that is not a joke. the thing i can speak to now is

the part of the health care modernization of the health care system. it has nothing to do with anything from public planso how many people get covered. think of it in broad, simp terms. if you ran your businesses from an i.t. standpoint, hospitals are forced to run their business, you would be out of business. you could not do it, literally. think about what happened 20 years ago in your law firm or your think tank or your business when you were just setting up computers. not a joke. really basic and, really basic stuff. what we are talking about, if we did nothing else, we do a great deal more to health care, you have got to modernize the system that allows for the transfer of information.

it is archaic, it is absolutely archaic. i got in trouble for saying once you have got to spend money to save money. my right wing friends, typical liberal spending money. let me tell you, if we modernize health care records to the keating, we will save tewill sa dollars. -- beyond that, nothing to do with health care other than providing money for health care clinics, expansion of those clinics and increasing service. i am about to go out of my brief, with regard to the

question of whether or not, what the health care system is going to look like that you're going to get, stay tuned for wednesday. one thing i have learned, don't step on your boss's lines. all kidding aside, there will be a major speech laying out, in understandable, clear terms, what our administration wants to happen with regard to health care and what we are going to push for specifically. but i can answer the question, do i think we will get it? what are the prospects of success? i think the prospects of success are high. i think they are very high. they are high for three reasons. most of the stakeholders, with the exception of the insurance companies, have an overwhelming stake in a fundamental way in the way the system works. many of you cover health care and american businesses, how can

they compete? how can american business compete with that ball and chain they are dragging in terms of health care costs, competing in an international economy with companies and countries where they have a fundamentally different health care system and it is not all on top. how can they do that? i never thought i would live to see the day when medical doctors show up at democratic functions. they desperately want health care reform. current american business wants health care reform. hospitals know there's a need for health care reform. here is the point. i have been around this town in a long time as the united states senator. we never had this many stakeholders invested in the need for a fundamental change in the status quo. that is a powerful engine all by itself. not withstanding all the scare

tactic, the vast majority of the american people still know that the system that exists is not serving them very well. those who have it are desperately afraid they're going to lose it, those who have it are having to -- ey know their premiums go up without any rhyme or reason in their minds. small businesses getting clobbered as a consequence of it. so there is a real sense of need. those two unarticulated forms of detail fact is i think are the reason that as bleak as it looks, it is darkest before the dawn, think about every major change in health care. it passed by a couple of folks. there aren't a lot of republicans who are not on medicare. a lot of people fell over

themselves in the 30s when social security came along and it only covered widows and orphans at the front end. we are gng to get something substantial, we are going to get something substantial. it is going to be an awful lot of screaming and hollering before we get there. but i believe we are going to get there. i know the president is going to lay out for you very clearly on wednesday what he thinks those pieces have to be and will be. but that is as much as i should say, and the president will tell you a lot more on wednesday. thank you. [applause] >> can i go now? >> you bent. good luck to all of on the

17.5 miles that remain and thank you for your leadership, mr. vet -- mr vice-president. [applause] >> would everybody stay seated until the vice-president leaves? thank you. thank you, everybody, we will come back. [inaudible conversations] >> tonight, we continue our conversation, talking to educator and vietnam protested william ayres, his book is a race course against white supremacy. we spoke to him along with the

book's co-author in june at the chicago tribune. watch in depth at 8:00 p.m. eastern. >> u.s. chamber of commerce officials gathered for a discussion about the nation's economic recovery, executive compensation and what is ahead in congress. it is about an hour and a half. [inaudible conversations] >> good morning, i am the executive director of communications for the u.s. chamber of commerce. we are here today for our annual labor day briefing. we have the head of our economic

scene, chief economist dr. martin regalia, he is going to do a forecast on the economy and the head of our labour policy division, senior vice president of the chamber randel johnson, he will talk about work force issues facing the business community and employees. with that, welcome, we start with dr. martin regalia. thank you. >> thank you for being here today. i will run through a brief outlook on the economy, talk about what we are seeing specifically, i will turn it over afterwards. as with most economic presentations. the good news is clearly that the economy is coming up again. without hyperbole, it can be described as the worst economic downturn since the depression. it beats the 74-75 downturn, the

82 downturn, in duration, decent and rival the rates of unemployment we have seen in those instances. clearly it was a very severe economic downturn, very trying economic times. we will come out for a number of reasons. we saw price declines, a tendency to help boost incomes and wages and spending and we have seen a marked price decline over last year. we have a stabilization program put into place by the last administration, for all its warts, has worked very well. the financial system was what it was intended to do, it has gone lending back contracts, it has

kept the banking system from following the investment-banking side into oblivion. all of that was needed and it has worked. we are starting to see the funds paid back by the banking system and we are doing so with interest and buying back the warrants so the cost of the government is turning out to be considerably less than what the face value of the program was. we have seen stimulus programs put into place by the monetary and fiscal authority, congress passed the $787 billion fiscal plan that i don't think was necessarily the most concise and the best plan that could have been put together. it was one of their plans that could have been passed. that was what was needed at the time, the stimulus program has helped to get the economy going. we are still feeling the benefits of the stimulus

program. that is probably a good thing as well because this economic recovery is likely to be somewhat lackluster. we have also seen significant changes in fed policy, aggressive monetary policy that not only ran interest rates down to zero, but opened up their balance sheet, expanded the balance sheet dramatically to keep the banking system delinquent. just this morning, there were more reports on the consumer asset backed lending program and how successful that has been in liquefying those markets, so they kept the commercial paper market from imploding with purchases of commercial paper, they have addressed other asset backed markets in the consumer and auto area, very high marks are deserved by those at the fed for the policy. they were presidential, the sessions we had never seen the

fed do before. and i think we were well served to have the fed throw out the old playbook and bring in the new one. i think they deserve a lot of credit for what has been a very trying time in the financial markets, getting us through the worst of those. i was happy to see the president agreed with me and reappointed chairman ben bernanke. onof these press conferences a couple months ago, at the time, i said he deserved to be reappointed sooner rather than later. that was a good thing, a good choice a i certainly hope the congress approved the nomination in short order and keeps him hard at work over there because there are still a number of areas that need his attention. finally, the thing that turn this economy was a bottoming in the housing market. it is clear that t housing

market has bottomed, i will show you a sleuth -- a few slides. what we were hoping we received earlier this year was the bottom, it was the forming of a bottom, it is clear at this point that it has bottomed out. we are seeing -- you will see in the slides pictures of housing prices, housing sales, housing starts, all of which have bottomed and turned up modestly. you can see the affordability numbers, the morage interest rate numbers, all of which are providing credit for creditworthy borrowers. we still have some problems in the sub prime area which have elevated dinquencies and elevated foreclosures and those will remain for quite some time, that i don't think we're going to see significant increases in those categories. there are very high levels. i don't think we will see increases in those categories going forward. even in the commercial mortgage

market where there are a lot of questions still to be swered, i still think we are seeing some improvement there as well and the fed is addressing that in the asset lending program as well. the reasonshat what we are going to see your is a sub par recession, something on the order of a u-shaped rather v than-shaped covery, consumption is week but has picked up in the last couple quarters, it is still relatively weak, we are not going to see the bounce back in consumption, the end of the man, we're going to see a consumer debt is experiencing higher rates of employment going forward, and high rates of job loss that were

greater in this downturn than they had been in prior downturns, and it will take more time to turn these job losses around, generate new jobs and higher income growth. for all those reasons, we are going to see consumption being somewhat weaker than we normally expect coming out of an economic downturn. in addition, investment is virtually nonexistent at this point. investment is always the second leg in the economic recovery. you get consumption, new orders, spending, people coming back to work, new jobs being created, more investment in capital equipment and structures, we are not likely to see that transpire any time in the near-term. consumption, investment is still probably a year away from any kind of significant improvement. we probably will stop declining over the remainder of this year but it is going to be hard to

envision businesses investing in equipment when they have excess capacity and still relatively few customers. the normal course of a recovery, i don't think, will manifest itself this time around. the trading sector which is a blessing to this economy over the last few years as trade deficits have shrunk, sold goods abroad into new markets, is going to continue but it is not going to increase in pace. the best we can hope for is more of a neutral contribution to our gdp growth. growth abroad is still relatively weak and for the most part is lagging our improvement. you see signs of improvement abroad, it will take somewhat longer for them to catch up to where we are. that is what is required before we can start selling abroad in the manner we have in the last couple years. we look at measured components

of this recovery, you see weaker but positive consumption. very soft investment. an economic recovery, less than normal. growth of maybe 3%,-1/2 in the third quarter. and continued positive growth, 21/2% to 3% range, in the first part of next year. the problem is the stimulus program starts to wayne noticeably and unless the economy has reached some balance and reacquired its footing at that time, there is quite likely some backsliding in the second half of next year. we g a little bit of a spurt and softer growth going into the outer quarters.

the reaction that this economy is showing to the economic downturn is just different from what we have come to expect and because of that we are going to see a slightly different modification in growth rates from what would normally be the case. i also think the policies that we are addressing at this time do raise the uncertainty level in the economy. we are looking at some very fundamental issues. in our annual talk about labour supply and health care, energy issues that are going to be vitally important for our long-term growth, we are also, as i will show later, on the downside of a productivity surge that began in the mid 90s and continued into the mid part of this decade but is now starting to slow a bit. those are the kind of advances that give the economy the leg, some lasng power.

with those weaker rather than stronger, it is hard to be overly sanguine about the economic growth beyond the immediate horizon. we will flit through these consumptions, the housing charts, you call your attention to, the sales numbers, as well as what we are seeing on the financial side, the affordability, mortgage rates, the fact that the sub prime market is creating a problem. these investment numbers i alluded to, very weak and likely to continue to be weak and they will be weak because when you look at what drives investment, industrial production, demand, is still fairly weak and it is not anticipated to snap back as rongly as it has in other recoveries, a lot of investments are very weak, and while business confidence is picking up and the purchasing manager's indepopped above 50 for the first time in seventeen months,

still relatively weak numbers. the trade side, again, this is what i want to concentrate on as a labor market. when we have an economic downturn, what you feel is the labor market, this was a considerable hit to the american worker. we have lost 6.7, six.six million jobs since the beginning of the recession, we lost 3.6 million jobs since the beginning of this year. we are looking at unemployment rate of 9.4%, more than likely one that will rise closer to ten over the next couple months. the initial claims numbers that come out weekhy came out this morning and didn't show that much improvement. they were downn a weekly average sis, 4,000 from last week's revised number but if you look at the moving average, right on what it had been, 570,000, that is an elevated

number. one of the things to watch for on a weekly basis for improvement is when that number starts improving and a good number is down in the 200s. we have a ways to go before we get to a good economy. we would like to see more sustained improvement in that number going rward. we look at what is happening in the other areas, one of the reasons we think that the unemployment rate will hang up for quite a while is the growth isn't strong enough. unless you have growth well above potential you are not going to drive the unemployment rate down or potentl great of growth is 21/2 to 3%, that is the forecast rate of growth over the nextyear. it doesn't generate enough to push the unemployment rate down. in addition, we have a significant number of large -- largely employed individuals, individuals that are full time and are now working part time, they will have to be reabsorbed. they are counted as working, accounted to the employment

rules. when the economy picks up a little bit, the first thing businesses will do is bring those part-time workers back under full time before they start creating jobs, so you have to reabsorb those workers. we have a category called discouraged workers, workers that are unemployed but have quit looking for a job because they feel there are no jobs available. when that situation prevails those individuals are not encountered in the work force, nor are they counted as unemployed. once the economy starts to pick up a bit and those discouraged workers start to look for work, they will be unemployed, but they will no longer be out of the workforce. they will be counted as unemployed. so you have to employ the marginal worker and the discouraged workers, at 800,000 of those. we have ways to go before we

generate enough growth to get all of these people be employed. the duration of unemployment in this particular downturn has been significantly longer than what we have seen before. that, again, as you can see from the charts, the last couple of peaks in the duration of unemployment, they peaked after the end of the recession, so we still have some bad news to go on the duration of unemployment, and participation rates that they are holding in at 65%, 66%, i expect that they will stay in that range. when we look at the issue of this economic downturn verses prior economic downturns, insofar as the labor market is concerned, you see some fairly drastic differences, we have lost significant more in the number of workers, so it is deeper than what we have seen in the past. we are a bigger economy, but

proportionally this is deeper. the thing i would call your attention in the lower panel is those bars, the blue bars indicate the length of time that it took from the beginning of a recession until enough jobs were created to surpass the prior peak in unemployment. how long did it take not only before we got out of the recession but before we created enough new jobs to match the prior peak? the red bars are how long it took from the bottom of the recession, from the end of the recession, the difference between the two is the length of the recession. the last couple of recessions took significantly longer to reach the prior peak, even those two recessions were only eight months in duration, and relatively mild in terms of gdp drop. it took two years in the '91 recession and it took three

years in the 2001 recession before we generated enough jobs. we are going to have to deal with a much steeper decline in employment this time around. i have seen projections that it is going to be five years before we generate enough jobs. just for arithmetic purposes, we had about 1 million people to the labour force each year, more in some years, less than others, but roughly a million year. over the next five years, you have got to make up five million new entrants, and you have got to make a seven million lost jobs. in the best of all possible worlds, to get to where wewere, to our prior peak, you have to create 12, probably more, the addition is higher than a million in the near-term, you have to creatsummeretween 12, and fifteen million new jobs

in the next five years just to get back to where we were. this is a daunting task. you are going to need the economy to grow at significantly greater than its long-term potential in order to generate long-term jobs. when the economy is performing just about at its potential rate,-1/2% to 3%, you create 150 to 180,000 new jobs. what you need is something greater than that to reach your prior peaks, so we can grow at our potential rate of 150 to 180,000 jobs, and we wouldn't reach the old peak within five years. so this is where the labor markets have changed over the last few downturns. we have seen the duration of

unemployment, we have seen the time it takes to rever, fully recover and get back to prior peaks being stretched out. that is quite likely t happen again. that, to go along with some other shifts we have seen in the labour force, i will jump through this slide, what we see in terms of se of the distribution impact on the labour force, if you look that the lower right hand panel, that is a measure of how disparate the income distribution is, the market goes up, the dtribution gets more uneven as the number comes down, it gets more even. we have seen in the last few years since 2007, we have seen some improvement in the ginnie coefficient, but there is a very significant upward trend, very significant trend in the

direction of left quality in the income distribution. if tt is going to be addressed in a policy, it is going to have to require long-term fundamental policy chanes, they are going to have to be in the education and skill accumulation areas because the economy has become much more technically complicated and complex and the works that can address that complexity are rewarded and the one that cannot are not. we are seeing a hollowing out of some of the jobs they few decades ago paid significantly higher wages for doing relatively wrote, menial tasks. if you were running an assembly line and screwing the same not on the same bolt again and again and again, you sti made a pretty good living and you still have a pretty good in come from that activity. with the robotics and deficiencies and competitions that have driven these efficiencies over the last couple of decades, those jobs

really don't exist anymore and they are not going to exist in the future. tryi to reconstitute those jobs in a competitive world economy is a full's errant. what we have to do is get our work force prepared to meet the next challenge, pductivity challenge, that requires greater education and greater skill accumulation. that takes time, you don't do that overnight. tax policy to try to address the income distribution is a full's errant. if you look at the gini coefficient, you can see during the clinton administration when we had significant tax increases in terms of marginal rates, we saw the rich get richer, we had a big productivity surge, and a big technology surge, the people who have the education and skill level to take advantage of that benefited quite nicely. during the bush administration, where we see them villified for

having given tax cuts to the rich, we see the gini coefficient come down. those tax cuts were not just for the rich, they were tax courts across the board. on the lower income, they actually declined by more than the effective tax rate on the upper-income. when we look at those income groups, we see that over time, look at the bottom two, those are your top of the income distribution. those have become -- those were getting a larger share of total income in the united states. in the middle and two lower groups you're getting a lower share. what is interesting is the tax shares of those upper groups has actually gone up more than their income shares and the ratio of the two, the affected tax rates, the fact of the matter is we have had lower affected tax

rates on the lower income groups, higher affected tax rates on the upper group, and it hasn't done a whole lot to affect the income distribution. it is a much more fundamental problem. we have seen a little bit of the capping off with the bush tax cuts but the tax increases that were designed in the mid 90s to achieve this balance and achieve a better income distribution or more even income distribution were woefully unsuccessful. to some of, when i look at the economy thing the getting better. we are out of this economic downturn. a year from now i think the recession will have ended in the third quarter of this year but it will be a slow recovery.

as a result the place where the recession really meets the road, when you really feel the recession in the labor markets, the unemployed and wage growth, those things are likely to be subpar for quite some period of time, that will be the political challenge, to create economic policies that provide significant economic growth because in turn, the significant economic growth will provide job growth, wage growth, and it will also provide revenue growth for the federal government so that we can address the absolutely huge deficits that have been projected over the next ten years, deficits that are clearly unsustainable and defits that will recall kinds of havoc if they actually manifest themselves over the next week 10 years. we will see a dollar decline in value, we will see inflation come back, we will see a real tug of war between the fed and the administration over whether to inflate this economy or not.

thank you very much. randy? >> thanks. i want to ask is that mean i get a raise next year or not? our challenges ahead, one of the questions as we go forward from labor day to next year is whether or not the unions will work with the chamber, the business groups to create an agenda on capitol hill that helps create jobs, or whether or not we go down the usual path of the union's demonizing the employer community, saying that basically nothing has changed since the 1930s, employers do notake care of their eloyees and we need more regulations in order to protect those employees from those employers. obviously as i talk about later in the context of health care, other issues, more costs on

employers, much of that will eventually be passed on to workers who are consumers. that is not a recipe in this environment for job growth. it is ironic for me look back on some of the pieces of legislation on capitol hill and seeing much of the same old, same old, that the party in power was pushing a decade ago without much creativity or recognition of the environment we are in. in that regard, would ask that you take a look at the folder in front of you that is full of a lot of the information. we did not have time to break it down in sound bites, but as you write feature stories on employer free choice acts or the state of the economy, the opinion on capitol hill, you will find a lot of that information hopefully very valuable. in a recent speech called employers, trump used the word

demons, sometimes criticize the unions for overly criticizing the employer community, his response to that, when the employer community stops acting like demons, we will stop calling them demons. that is, in fact, not what the employer community is. on labor day we celebrate the contributions of workers. it is worth noting that what the workplace is is a pack of sorts between employers and employees. to gather, there is an environment created where the worker hopefully get a decent wage and t employer creates a product from which he or she earns a profit. sometimes the employer has to go to the bank and borrow money to dig out of a hole and sometimes the workers not entirely happy with his or her wages. but eventually things are worked out. there are ups and downs, there's a satisfaction in the work face between employers and employees.

sometimes the union represents 7.5% of the work force, argue much to their discredithat that is not true, it undermines their credibility generally. it doesn't mean there aren't bad employers, there are some, the exception to the rule. if you take a second to look at the benefit sheet in your packet, we point out employers provide $7.8 trillion of compensation for their employees, $1.5 trillion in employee benefits, employers provide, in a world where we talk about health care benefits, still providing $180 million of americans with health care insurance, $60 million of that, private sector employers, what do employers spend on insurance? $500 million, health care insurance, billions still need a lot of money and the employer

community, on capitol hill. in a world where employers are still struggling with health care costs, they are not just cutting co-pays and increasing premiums, they're experimenting with well as programs and consumer driven plans to control costs without increasing co-pays on employees. despite the rhetoric, the coverage with regard to america's employer coverage remains relatively stable. the census bureau will have to have new data next week and perhaps that will change. private-sector employers, close to $200 billion in retirement income. contrary to what was said on capitol hill, a great common benefit provided by employees. even in these dire economic straits, some of which marty reviewed, the survey data with regard to american workers is quite compelling in terms of job satisfaction. the american enterprise institute, this is not an old

survey, it came out on august 26, 2009, americans still display a high degree of satisfaction with their jobs in august 2009, 50% of employed people said they were completely satisfied with their jobs and another 30% were somewhat satisfied. for those with jobs, satisfaction, chances of promotion, job stress, the amount they earn and health benefits were remarkably stable. 68% of those employed in 2009 were satisfied with their chances for promotion, 68% gave the response last year, 71% in 2009 compared to 73% in 2008 were satisfied with the amount of money they earned. 67% in 2009, 68 in 2008 for satisfied with their health insurance benefits. the latter figure is one that the obama administration is up against in health care which we will get to in the sense that most people are seeing what is

going on in capitol hill as an ominous threat to what they already have to distinguish from helping them and they are scared. before we get to health care let's talk about the general labor agenda. the free choice act which presumably by now you are familiar with, is back in the press, there might be room for compromise. three parts of the bill, the union rounds up its percentage of cards, the employer much recognize the union, the second part imposes a binding arbitration on employers with the union and the employer cannot agree to -- to write the terms and contract for the employer. our first objection to card check has traditionally been these cards are subject to coercion on the part of union

organizers, this is not the chamber speaking, the courts have said this, union organizers have said this, and in fact the hill is replete -- i am going to read one quick paragraph from a union organizer because many people think the business community simply brings of these arguments. here's a former union organizer on cards. i realize the number of sign cards had less to do with support for the union had more to do with how effective the organizer was at doing their job. the secret ballot election always did significantly less than the number of cards collected. card tech campaigns have little to do with giving workers information. we are trained to avoid copying dues increases over the spectrum of strike. many workers do actually realize they have been manipulated after the fact and ask for the cards back or ask to have them return. the union strategy was to never return or destroy such cards but include them in the official

count to the majority. that is one union organizer but if you take the time and effort to go through the hearings on capitol hill there is much testimony from people formerly employed by the union to organize workers, they had the courage to come forward and talk about how that system has manipulated union organizers and does not often represent workers in tenth. it is not the chamber i am talking about, it is people where the rubber meets the road. the second part of the bill, by the arbitration, is equally unacceptable to the employer community. the idea that government arbitrator appointed by the government, stepping in and of writing the contract which would govern literally every condition of the workplace, has never been accepted under the national labor relations act and is ludicrous -- it is and the unacceptable to turn over your

workplace to the government arbitrator, written contract. i raise that because there has been some talk about decisionmakers and capital throwing out the card check provisions. not surprisingly -- the arbitration positions, run of the americans recognize those of these ideas are bad ideas and shouldn't be accepted by congress. with regard to compromises, we are not going to compromise, the base of negotiations. wi regard to the national labor relations act which is not been updated since 1937. i am