then many of the things that russia tries to do now wouldn't really work. but because of the particular situation that many of those countries are in at this particular point, you know, it give russia with its particular system this range of tools and options that it might not have in trying to interact with other -- [inaudible] >> paul, thank you very much. paul is also a former state department official in the bush administration and very insightful and careful, right? [laughter] ..

fact that it established a multilateral processes and was non transparent and appeared to be hammered out in secret for almost a secret and negotiated in a heavy-handed way. it was classic soviet style behavior as opposed to the merits of the document itself. that in the end are aroused the reaction that it did. the third point is i agree with tom the basis of u.s. policy in

the 90s was the threat of the re-emergence of soviet dimensions as you put it. or to put it another way the purpose of the policy was to bolster sovereignty and independence of the states to prevent the emergence of that threat but our point in the paper is there was a time limit on that. we are now at the point where we can say the threat has passed. that is why we argue that containing russia as the motivation for policy is not effective or serve u.s. interests. [inaudible] >> brief comments on the question. i have long worried bulgaria was on the wrong side of yugoslavia but pursuing membership in nato

in particular and the geography was remedied through quality. and soviet pressure, russia has been and always will measure itself sometimes against the united states of america. that is the way of proving strategic geopolitical role and this is my impression over the years. in natal russia would have to talk to the united states of america rather than the nato bodies that were established in the organization. point number three. energy. this is not the topic of today's panel but i would love reaction from the panelists on paul casey

russia's role in energy. when he assumes his new responsibilities language on energy will become more distinct, clear. the next phase on the energy policy. since we have representatives of different administrations i can say for years now america has insisted on justification including with my own country and bulgarian officials and yet nothing much has been done on

the american side. how do you see any american role in energy diversification which is a formal decision by the european union? there should be a partnership of the u.s. on energy diversification. >> there are two energy parts. on diverse suffocation -- divers suffocation --diversification it reminds in the realm of talk and there are a lot of other people here who are qualified to talk about that who have worked for companies in that area and worked for the government in that area but my own view would

be the united states government as an institution doesn't really get that involved in what happens in the energy sector or any other sector of the economy. united states system tends to operate as companies make their own decisions based on what they are interested in or not interested in as they look at the market and the government occasionally tries to encourage particular decisions and in the case of the pipeline, really pressed a great deal. but that happened for a particular reason and amdahl full that something like that will happen again anytime soon. somebody has to pay for these

pipelines and for this idea of diversification because you have to build things and the government won't pay and companies won't pay. it can be done commercially. if you don't have companies or the government pay and when the government pays it means taxpayers pay. you can also try to have consumers pay who happen to be the same as taxpayers but in a lot of cases they are not very excited about that. i don't really see very much happening. >> the ambassador of kazakhstan, the administration was promoting -- [inaudible] >> the clinton administration

and the. administration and diapers in the obama administration talk about energy policy. the energy sector is one that you can't separate from geopolitical consideration. companies in our system make the final decision whether they will invest or not. they talk about strategic consideration and impact on that and companies take into account what the u.s. government -- let me just two quick responses. one on diversification. the u.s. strategic interest has always been in russia or in roading russia's monopoly on the export of energy resources out of central asia to global markets. the big contribution the united

states made -- we did nothing and could do nothing to prevent chinese from building pipelines across southern chinese markets and as energy markets develop across the next few decades you will see tremendous interest in pipelines going south to feed the growing markets in south asia particularly a lot of geopolitical security issues that have to be worked out. are always thought the mistake the u.s. government made was putting this in terms of europe. that the only goal we had was bringing kazakh resources into europe. a couple quick points. first you cancel your energy problems without russia long-term. second you can reduce the role russia plays in the energy

market and this is happening already because the energy equation has changed dramatically over the past decades. this is coupled with shale gas in the united states. it can go into european markets but the alternative energy sources that will radically change not the level of dependence on russia but the geopolitical equation. the russians are aware of that. what is happening in the arab world. north africa has potential to reshape this as you think about what alternative resources are. putin will try to use energy as one of the leaders but it is

weaker than it was a decade ago. [inaudible] >> it is difficult for me to avoid stepping in. of course after all, thank you. the whole topic of this discussion is about us. i am not speaking on behalf of my government. i speak for myself and i've put myself as an observer, outside observer. talk about what they do or what

they should do. the first thing is whether we would matter all if there were not rush of air. >> making that point strongly, very diplomatically. basically if russia were not there, whether the ukraine or uranium resources, we came to the conclusion we would that. the core of the discussion is whether there is rivalry or something which should be managed in the u.s./russia

relationship and these interests. tom said u.s. will reject anyone -- anywhere in the world. we speak about our part of the world or your rejection of this in our part of the world. we talk about perceptions because you have to understand russia has their own understanding and are angry about their perception. it is a rivalry and both spoke about the cultural assassination. what we observed is this culture did not diminish at all. we believe these are the starting points of the

discussion. something i would rather support, three basic thoughts which would lead to a situation where in the end we will not be forced to choose. will we have is who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and in washington and moscow very simple idea that we are not pro russian or pro-american but simply ukrainian or romanian. it does not take the minds of academics or political practitioners. this is something which makes us not very happy. what we saw until recently was transactional by the united states. we mattered when we had to deal with the nuclear arsenal.

even the pipeline was very frustrating because we explained our policy, multiple pipeline policies but when it came to expansion of the traditional largest routes to russia and exxon mobile was happy about that we heard the grumbling here. are you forgetting? when we announced something we heard the same grumbling. we believe what sam formulated in developing a new policy which would be based on very simple things. doing it on the merits of having the relationship, strong engagement and looking for the other situations.

basically the concept of rights or interests, history plays a great role. you cannot place russia in historic terms. and economic market terms. russia will continue to be a large market. much bigger than you. let us be frank. when we talk about this, whether europe is a market for ukraine or kazakhstan or the u.s. is a meaningful market is our immediate space, practical choice to extend all matters and other reasons. we support the concept were you and others and have to take into account china and india and iran and many other countries. very suspicious when i mention

iran in this room but in our part of the world which has its own dynamics and everyone has to have their own edge. russia has demography and transition compared to competitive edge. you have other edges. your declared policy and are part of the world for 20 years is support for our independence and promotion of market forms and democracy and security. you have certain edges in those areas and this should be your interests. russia should not see them as endangering their rights and you should not see their competitive edge as something in danger in

your interest. if this starts to prevail and overcoming the cultural suspicion, we will be able to understand we do have those privileges. the policy of democracy promotion. the implication is there's something intrinsic endangering our sovereignty all this time or when promoting democracy the implication is we are very bad. we do not want to do democracy and this is your task to drag us down the road of democracy. this is absolutely wrong. you come with those edges naturally because you have completely different culture doing these and different

investment, competitive edge. we embrace that. the only thing is we are not forced to choose. there are certain figures we have to react. my point would be -- vice speak for myself -- i participate in those discussions all the time and we go to the russian discussions and participate in the european and american -- it is amazing how we are not an active part of those discussions. we are the subject of the discussion. the great game is not between the u.s. or russia or britain. it is about us. we have to be prepared to be stakeholders in the discussion

and the new culture of relationship. examples are multiple. to illustrate how the u.s. is not engaged and the subject matter of foreign policies and the 20 years relationship. no u.s. president ever visited our part of the world. never. the schedule -- we understand the elections cycles and all other things but you should not demand the russian president visits kazakhstan more than 20 times. so what? they are doing a practical post. doesn't mean we should turn our backs on you because we continue to understand so many important things for us. you should try to get into the shoes of kazakhs or georgia or armenians to understand what we want to achieve and what you could and should achieve in our

part of the world. there are certain signs of change. i came from new york yesterday. new york with the platform for brainstorming by the u.s. government. this is a nice concept which speaks about bridging south asia and central asia. very nice -- difficult to achieve. i don't think there is uniformity in the structure of this government. with russia and eurasia, it is different. a little discord over here. the robust approach in new york as we see it is promising. it can play an important role in

the world. the historic mission of the united states is to balance sometimes dangerous forces from different wings for us and open us to the south because we're in this situation in this part of the world and the u.s. has a historic mission. we are concerned about difficulties in this country which means that again resources should not be devoted to are part of the world. there for many things are spoken but that is where it should come together to the platform, strong proponents and supporters. for that reason obama enjoys great recognition and respect in our country particularly in our political elite.

we hope those things will turn into practical policies and we hope russia, china, can build this approach working together. on transit issues and trade facilitation issues. there are plenty of areas where you will be having no time of thinking about suspicions and concentrate on those areas. >> very insightful and very powerful. i wish we had time to ask each participant but with eight minutes left we give the opportunity to make a brief

comment and ask the panel to respond briefly. >> i am going to make a comment about energy. any u.s. foreign policy -- if we spend 1% a resources on energy as a security issue as we spend on missile defense as a security issue we would have a kind of energy policy that the region deserves so it is a comment on our own priorities. my question is the assumption in all the presentations that u.s./russia policies involve rivalry or cooperation of each country separately and this is something the ambassador just noted but the rivalry between the countries, stick with

central asia, they don't cooperate economically. each one sees itself as leader of the region or subject of another country. this is something russia and the u.s. cannot do. maybe russia doesn't want to. unless the countries strengthen themselves they will continue to use u.s./russia against each other to play and not so great game of one neighbor against another and use the u.s. and russia to gain what is a position of regional dominance. where does this point of view fit in in terms of u.s. policy? not just talking about how great the region is but in terms of getting the countries themselves to recognize their strength will come from inside them and not what the u.s. and russia beside.

decide. >> brief comment and question. china discussing these issues a couple months ago and the chinese said this is russia's sphere of influence. the question, you reject historical determinism. but there is such a thing as geographical determinism because that is the way the world is. russia is a neighbor to those countries and will be forever. it has an enduring interest. we have to be there now because of the war in afghanistan. because of these energy concern's. we can come and go and we probably will. if i was sitting in the kremlin presumably until 2020 for i would understand just be patient because the u.s. is here and it will go again.

my question is do you think in 20 years time the united states will be as involved or concerned about the different parts of the former soviet state as it is today? >> four minutes left. i hate to do it but each of you should make it very brief. >> i will ask a question that won't be answered but i want you to contemplate. is it in the u.s. and europe's interest that it goes to china by russia or europe and does the notion of corroding russian monopoly lead to the point where diminishing european energy security by encouraging baku-tbilisi-ceyhan pipeline.

i challenge the notion that in 2011 a great power needs to control its neighboring areas in the same way great powers did in the nineteenth century because land wars are not happening anytime soon in that part of the world. we are looking at a different range of threats that don't require imperial control of the russian empire had or the soviet union did. certainly russia has more at stake than the united states as a function of geography. i don't think the geography determines policy implementation. russia's policies can involved and have evolve the. >> answer the ambassador's question, the argument i was making is we ought to be working, russia and the united states with the countries of

various subregions on a more general way of working together so the silk road infrastructure ties these together economically and commercially. if you are thinking of security obviously you need to talk about security aspects and i would argue in afghanistan the long term solution for you and for us is regional security architecture that will include russia, china, afghanistan, and so forth. you can only get there by sitting down and having that discussion. this isn't the united states and russia decided on their own to cooperate or compete but much broader and i paint that all the way around russia and finally russia quite frankly is not the neighbor of is pakistan but is separated by kazakhstan and near neighbors are afghanistan and pakistan and i would argue in

the. you can't assume russia will be there forever either. >> on kobe's point we have a tendency -- your point was important. we have a tendency sitting here to view the united states and the american government as the architect of all these different things that are happening when as a practical matter in many cases factions within governments, factions inside countries that are not in government, groups of expatriates' that don't live in the country any more. they are coming here and trying

to influence the united states to do various different things for various different reasons. if you look at a case like iraq it is clear that can be a real problem for the united states in different ways. that is something we are well served to get a handle on. angela, i think i basically agree with what was implicit in your question. i think it is doubtful that the united states is going to be able to sustain this presence on a long-term basis. and i see that as a real reason to be talking to russia and countries in the region, kazakhstan and others in a more serious and honest way.

and not creating by default these expectations and miscalculations and not deceiving ourselves either. that can also be rather costly. last thing, i was in china in august at a conference sponsored by beijing university on u.s./china cooperation in central asia. they seemed to be quite interested in what was happening in the region. i imagine a lot of people in china have different interests and perspectives but the ones that i was around were clearly following things closely. >> thank you very much. an interesting conversation. the two ambassador is --

[laughter] -- thank you to the panelists and a participants and to c-span for covering it. thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> a couple live events to tell you about today on the c-span network. the defense intelligence agency marks its 50th anniversary with comments from director leon panetta and a director of national intelligence james clapper. you can see that at noon on c-span. back here on c-span2 we will be live at 1:00 with the look of the future of human spaceflight. elon musk is the head of spacex

at the washington press club in washington at 1:00 on c-span2. a little later a look at social media's impact on news coverage. one of several panels we're covering from the activism media summit that gets underway at 1:15 eastern live on c-span3. >> this is a confession in front of a large and influential audience. i have never embarked on a book about a subject that i knew all about. >> for the eleventh year a hundred authors and c-span2's booktv return to the national mall for the national book festival. you're about latest releases from the history and biography pavilion from the authors themselves and the c-span video library. all archive and searchable. washington your way.

>> food borne illness and 120,000 americans to the hospital each year. the department of agriculture wants to prevent these with better food safety precautions. up next dr. elizabeth hagan, undersecretary for food safety explains these precautions. this is just over an hour. >> good morning. thank you for coming. as the name implies it is an exchange of ideas. we will hear from dr. hagen today and we will hear your questions. please identify yourself and your organization. we are honored that dr. hagen is here. she is undersecretary of food safety of the u. s department of agriculture and was sworn in as undersecretary in august of 2010. she oversees the policies and programs of the health

regulatory part of usda. she has advanced public health agenda which is really important and has directed outbreak and consumer complaint investigations and agency risk assessments and regulatory programs. sadie -- food safety is in the news of a time. 13 people have died from contaminated cantaloupes and they were traced to a farm in colorado eaten by people around the country. kerri agency does not deal specifically with that. we had some neat issues unfortunately and recently usda recalled 40,000 pounds of ground beef intended for georgia school lunches and there is the massive recall over turkey over the summer. is his is that -- this issue has been ongoing and we had an exchange on this topic was dr. michael taylor of the fda. we have a lot of interest and you do as well.

thank you for coming. if you have questions please identify yourself and your organization. if you are tweeting our tag is ogilvieexchange. we would love you too week. i will turn it over to dr. hagen. >> thank you and good morning to everybody. it is nice to see you in the front row, tony. am i supposed to talk into this mike or step back? we will do some slides this morning which is fun because i don't normally do slides but when we looked at the attendee list it was a mixed group in terms of perspective and food safety regulation. i hope this isn't too simplistic for all of you or any of you but i thought we would walk through the basics and see where the conversation takes us.

since i don't normally do slides i do this at the same time. the first question is why do we care about this? why do we have a number of agencies in the regulation of food in this country? this is serious business. we estimated last year that forty-eight million americans get sick from food borne illness. forty-eight million people. one in every six americans. quite a few people in this room will get sick from the food that they eat. it causes 128,000 hospitalizations and kills 3,000 people every year. for all food borne ellises those are the most vulnerable among us and the most tolerable to severe food borne illness so young children, the elderly, people with chronic medical conditions. this is a big deal and something

we need to do better on and we are striving to do better on. cost estimates range. some are as high as $150 billion. some other estimates are lower but regardless the costs are in the billions in terms of health care costs, lost wages and societal costs. this deserves our attention and best efforts. most importantly it is preventable. these are preventable illnesses. we need to do something about this. people often ask what is the most challenging thing about making food safer. i don't know there's a single challenge. this is very complex when we look at what is in front of us in 2011. i want to list a couple things here. these supply to all the products that are under regulation by the government but particularly what

we regulate at the food safety inspection service. there's a risk to the product particularly that we regulate and the same could be said for fresh produce but these are raw agricultural products by and large. when you look what happens in the meat and poultry system live animals on one side of the system and hamburgers and chicken nuggets and soup on the other side. that is a significant challenge to reduce the risks on those live animals and come up with safe products in the end. there's a markedly increased demand. lot of people we have to feed in this country and we feed people all over the world. people want things in different varieties year round and want them to be cheap and safe. to markedly increased demand for food products that we regulate. changes in production supply chain distribution. there was a time that only crossed state lines or county lines. now they cross the oceans and

confidence. this is a significant change over the last 30 or 50 years. it is more complex when things go wrong to trace things back and make it more complex to be controlled over what is going on in those products. there is changing epidemiology for humans and animals. some organisms that we now see being greater threats or different when they were some years ago. we see emerging pathogens we have to be on the alert for and paying more attention to chemical hazards and we have an awful vehicles. in the last couple years we have seen the coli in quote the dough. that was not on anybody's radar. the salmonella problems in peanut butter. there has been awareness of risks in those foods but that surprised most people to see so many illnesses related to peanut butter. we live in a post 9/11 world so

we have to think of intentional contamination. a lot of work on that front in terms of our food cents programs. as i alluded to earlier changing expectations and demands. when looking at our products people want to have ground beef but they wanted to be 90% lean. some wanted to be 85%. all these formulations. consumers expect and deserve that these products are all safe. they want access to them year round. we want strawberries in january. there have to be supplied change that allow them to be red and delicious and sweet and save so we have different expectations and demands that we did in years past. finally an increasing at risk population. young children. i wouldn't say that is an increasing population but we

have an aging population and more people living longer because of medical intervention and people receiving transplants and living their lives with hiv aids and they are at most risk so we need to pay attention to that. what are we doing about it? specifically at usda? the past 15 years or so our agency has been evolving from inspection agency started in 1906 when this was written to a public health agency. understanding the reason we inspect these products is to keep people safe from harm. we have been on that path for some time. under this administration our efforts have been strengthened. a couple words about food safety and inspection service and i will give you a quick comparison with fda. food safety inspection service

is the agency that falls under my mission which is office of food safety at usda. we protect public health by insuring safety and proper labeling of the commercial meet the leaders will poultry and egg products supplied. we are a lot of people. inspectors and scientists and veterinarians, policymakers and administrative professionals. the majority of our workforce is in inspections and front line work. our inspectors are in 6200 food establishments every day. we ensure safe food processing of fifty million head of livestock every year and nine billion birds. that is a lot of product passing through our hands in the inspection system. in addition to our implant presence and inspection work we have functioned like outbreak responds. we don't do that. we work with state and local

public health authorities and the centers for disease control and fda when something crosses our jurisdiction. we have a big enforcement role with the laboratory testing. we have three service laboratories that test thousands of samples per year. we do a lot of work in food defense and food safety is a big priority. i am not from the food and drug administration's july won't say too much about this except to remind people the food and drug administration is responsible for the safety of produce, dairy and many other foods. in terms of food safety to comes and along the way, the food and drug administration are responsible for regulation of animal drugs and feed. a few words about the food safety modernization act, historic piece of legislation you are aware of. even though it is not something

that applies to usda this is a huge step forward for the food safety community and everyone who cares about a safer food supply if you want to keep moving forward. some key pieces of the act gives the mandate for prevention and greater oversight and mandatory recall and requires they enhanced collaboration with public health agencies. we are not directly impacted by it but there are many components which require consultation with our secretary and with some of our programs and we had a good working relationship with fda about this and they use this heavily in a consultation of role. the side-by-side of meat and poultry emphasized who will take on regulation of catfish thanks to a provision in the 2008 farm bill we propose a rule on that

the end of last year and still analyzing comments on that. there's a split in a jurisdiction. i already mentioned we are in every plant every day so by law in any establishment that slaughters meat and poultry has to be present during the entire operation. if it is one shift it is eight hours. two shifts it is 16 hours and processing establishments we need to be there once during every shift. we do not have on farm jurisdiction but other agencies in the fda such as animal plant and inspection service that do a lot of work on the farm. both our organizations deal with consumer safety organization and partner on terrific efforts in the last couple years. hy want to talk a little bit about how we currently collaborate with other key players in the food safety system and those who track food borne disease. what is obvious is the food

safety working group. the president form this in the first three months coming into office in 2009. the charge to all of us with a big one. you need to improve the food safety system. there were no predetermined outcome is when that was made. i was not in the position i am in right now. at the time i was at the agency and had the opportunity to be part of the food safety working group from the beginning so i can speak about what happened at the beginning and where we are now. we worked hard in the first couple months and in july of 2009 we presented an initial report with our core principle that key findings and what was going to guide all agencies over the next couple years. the first priority is prevention. that is first and foremost. may seem argument -- obvious the articulating it matters a lot. we have to enhance surveillance and enforcement and we need to improve response and recovery. not just the response in the

case of outbreaks or negative events. we need to recover as well and give consumers good information about what products are implicated and what products are not and when they can get back to their normal consuming patterns. another example -- this project has been around since the 1990s. this is an important collaboration for anyone who works in the prevention of food borne disease. it gives our annual report card. when we look at where we take our trends from or how we know what we are doing we look at the food net results every year. it is a collaboration between the usda and the fda and center for disease control and all the other parts. th net includes ten state health departments, and local city and covers 15% of the u.s.

population and it is a representative area. we look to foodnet whisky borne pathogens to talk about trends from year to year. usda was one of the original founding partners of foodnet and we are engaged in all of it. in 2020 we are in the 2020 phase of this is important to collaborate. we set national health objectives. there's a section on food borne disease objectives and we along with the food and drug administration cone those objectives. we are accountable for those objectives. outbreak response is of place where we collaborate heavily. we can stand to improve and looking for ways to improve. finally attribution is one of the biggest challenges with food borne disease and food safety

and prevention. figuring out what proportion of which illnesses are attributable to which food products is important for policymakers when we think of where our resources need to go. it sounds easy. it sounds like we should just count up the number of people who get sick and ask what made them sick. it is extremely challenging and one of the biggest challenges we have in recognizing how important it is and what a challenge it is. we have engaged in a collaboration called the interagency analytic collaboration and the first half dozen projects have to do with attribution. this is what we are doing with our partners. as we look at how we do this at usda the lens in which we do this, how we approach this?

we kept these priorities in mind for ourselves. we talk about prevention all the time. prevention is what we need to focus on. everything we do, anything new from the agency has to keep people from getting sick or in the case of labeling allow people to make their best informed choices when buying food for their families. we look at the schools. to prevent illness what tools do we need? what tools to our people need in their hands? what tools do we need in the agency in terms of our ability to evaluate and utilize data? what does the industry need to make sure new technology and innovations are moving forward at the pace they should be? what tools do consumers need and information they need to take additional steps to keep themselves as safe as possible? we're looking at prevention and tools necessary to get there. most importantly we are thinking and talking about engaging

people all the time. sounds like something that should be obvious. this is one of our utmost priorities. folks don't always understand or believe it. the people parties twofold. remembering there are real people behind the statistics. families whose lives are destroyed forever because of single cell organisms. remembering these are not just numbers but real people who are impacted every day and connecting those stories with our people. our people believe in what they do. a lot of our inspectors live in these communities and live in rural communities and they are invested in what they do. getting 10,000 people engaged and completely invested takes work. that is what we have been doing. talking about real people who are impacted by our work and how important is and trying to connect our people with the

people we protect. we believe we are an agency whose policies are based in science and always execute them through inspection and we remain an agency that executes through inspection. excuse me. we are not just talking about all the steps we can take but actually putting these steps into action. these are the things we are doing. prevention is where it all starts. the question we asked over and over again. are the things we're doing going to keep people from getting sick? we emphasize our ability to collect data and analyze it and use it. we have to look at having a true forum to support efforts. we know where our jurisdiction begin that ends. we are not looking for new jurisdiction but feel strongly if we talk about how to make food safer we have to talk about how to make food safer from

start to finish. pathogens and chemical hazards that make people sick. they don't pay attention to jurisdiction and operate in silos and we shouldn't either. i want to tell you some specific things we have been up to in the past few years. in case you are aware and provide starting places for questions. we look at implementing prevention based policy. i would say our jurisdiction starts here at the slaughterhouse door and ends with food distribution. we want to look up and down stream. what are we doing with in that box where most of the activity occurs where our employees are work -- where we are appropriated to do our work? to break it into beef, pulled free and ready to ease, a simple way to do it. some things we're doing right now is looking at changes.

we understand and agree we cannot test our way into food safety. is not the only thing we do but it is important. testing is the way to know for the industry to know and program policies they have in place for food safety are working to make food safer and the way for us to know. we have been looking at whether our testing programs. not only the methodology but algorithms behalf are designed to do what we need them to do particularly with e coli 45787 which is a success. contamination rates have been driven so low almost cut in half since we made this in ground beef. we have to detect it and protect people even though the contamination rates are so low. we are looking at how to improve our testing programs. we are looking at how to improve trade policies. this is a challenge for anyone

in food safety. certainly during an outbreak when people are getting sick we want to trace back as quickly as possible to stop any more illnesses from occurring but we need to be good at tracing back when people are not sick so we have regulatory testing programs in place and multiple hurdles. if we find a problem down the line if we can -- the closer we get to the source of the problem of the more people we prevent from getting sick and the first place. it is challenging when you look at ground beef which is made from multiple sources with multiple sources and there are a lot of challenges associated with this but it is something we need to be better at and something secretary vilsack charges to be good at. all of that is very important but the better we get at preventing contamination in the first place farther upstream the better off we will be.

we took a huge step forward on september 13th. a couple weeks ago we announced a new policy. stpec is in the same family as he coli 5787. they make people very sick and kill people. they have a predilection for very young children in terms of severity. 113,000 people year get sick with these organisms. also we think the policies we have in place for 0157 are effective in controlling these organisms we have not had an explicit policy about their control in supply. we announced a proactive approach designed to keep people from getting sick. we begin a testing program in march of 2012 and the test

results are important. what people do with those test results are more important. this is a major step forward in the safety of beef supply and we look forward to implementing it at the beginning of the new year. next up i have pulled free safety. a couple things are important to talk about. in march of this year we published new performance standards for broilers. young chickens, hold birds and turkeys. the performance of salmonella is not abated and the run-up performance standards for campbell vector. when we set an expectation we set a standard and the industry strive to achieve that standard people are safer. performance standards matter and putting out tough performance standards is extremely

important. our tabulations are once they're implemented we will reduce salmonella illnesses by 25,000 per year just from implementation of these performance standards. .. best. another thing we're very engaged in, and i'd say the entire food safety community including folks who are more involved on the tracking and surveillance and really trying to understand this continued rise in human salmonella. despite all good efforts made, and when you look at the numbers in terms of boiler contamination rates, the numbers we track, the volume adjusted amount positive, there's a tremendous improvement in numbers. we've gone from 16% five years ago to less than 5%. again, this is not a true prevalence. it's important i say it's not a prevalence study skinned to determine pref -- prevalence, but it's the data we track. there's the new egg roll. there's a lot of new efforts made in driving down

contamination of food products in the production environment, but we have salmonella and human illness rates going in the wrong direction and everybody is trying to figure that out. is 1 that we're not -- is it not poultry and something else? something that we're missing? are we sampling in the wrong place to determine what's really going on? this is something food net is interested in as a group trying to really dig into the salmonella data, figure out what's driving that, what are the things we do now with a chicken parts baseline knowing that people don't buy whole birds to the extent they used to and they buy chicken parts, so we're veryings very interested to see what that data tells us if there's a higher rate of contamination in the chicken parts and whole birds, might that, you know, incentivize us to do something differently. in the wake of the recent large outbreak and recall of poultry

and sometime before that, we need to look at the ground poultry segment of the industry specifically and what to do that. i think we're going to see significance in the steps forward and this recall shook people up and got the attention of people and the industry is looking now at the steps it can be taking, best practices to be established, or if they are already established, how can they be shared? you'll see steps forward from the agency on ground poultry as well. just on ready to eat, one thing up here. this has been a success story too in terms of contamination rates from lis tear ya to ready to eat products. it's been a steady state of decline when you look at the curve and it goes like this after the list dlisteria rule

was implemented. there's meats sliced and packaged in the production environment and sealed up there and those that are purchased at the grocery store in terms of ability to cause illness and to cause harm, so we worked clog closely with the fda and academia, and we're engaged in a study looking at what happens in the retail environment, what are the factors that drive recontamination or continued growth of the retail environment and what's done to mitigate them? i mean, does everybody wear safety boots in the deli? different things to be done? that's one of the things we have been working on for some time, and very answer, to see the results of i mentioned strengthening our data collection analysis and use. excuse me. for somewhere about six months now we have been in the process of implementing a new data management and decision-making tool. so one of the things we started to do was just

simply streamline the hundreds of data streams and systems that we have at fsis into a more comprehensive data system. they're not all part of the system but it has been a significant streamlining. what it is designed to do it is designed to give us more real time or near real time ability to look at the data we collect in the 6200 plus establishments every day, feed it back to the front line workforce, feed it to our analysts at headquarters and actually identify trends an anomalies before they put the public at risk. this is something we're very excited about. taken us a little longer to implement this than we originally planned but we're very envotesed getting it right than invested getting implemented quickly. finally leading the true farm effort. as i mentioned before we look food safety all the way through. we're not looking to go on the farm. we're not looking to regulate producers at fsis but everything happens on

the farm impacts what we do. it impacts the amount of risk to be handled throughout the system. we know we have a huge stake in improving or finding avenues to improve preharvest food safety. we've done a couple things already. in 2010 you think we released the e.coli 0157:h7. they may want to consider from the producers that they're buying from. we have charged the national prevention committee. poultry inspection to look at this issue as well. what we've really been engaged in this, i guess sort of grassroots type of discussions with producers, with packers, with scientists. we have a huge research portfolio at the usd an preharvest food safety how can we be helpful? how do we bring those people together? we're not looking to to out on the farm to start making regulations or really doing

anything there but we have to sponsor the discussion. we have to make people realize that they have a stake in this. i would say that most of the producers we talked to are more than willing to participate in some type of preharvest food safety initiative. there are constraints. we want to make sure that the technologies that we're encouraging or asking them to employ are actually going to make food safer. we want to make sure they're feasible in the various producer environments and we want to make sure that you know, that the costs are manageable as well. so, we have a very good idealogue i would say over the last year on this issue. we're looking forward to public summit. i think we're allowed to have data up there. my chief of staff leading the effort, nodding her head, we have the registered notice about the published any day on this. this will be november 9th. we want to bring people together. people that raise animals. the meatpackers, consumers, retail, everybody to talk about how can we be useful? how can government be useful on this? how can we move this

forward? what type of things would be helpful? we have this really significant one health effort going on at the department. i'm the co-chair of this group. just really looking how does animal health, human health and the environment all come together. obviously preharvest food safety is something we would pay a lot of attention to in that setting. so we talked about what happens before. that box that we live in. and want to talk a little bit what happens afterwards. so i just want to say again we're always working. our primary responsibility to make food as safe as possible before it ever reaches consumers. that is what we're doing every day, all 10,000 of us. no question about it. that is what industry i believe is striving for as well. but we know that the system isn't perfect. we know that there is inherent risk. we know that there are still additional steps that can be taken in the hands of food preparers to increase the safety of the products that they're putting on their tables. we've been dedicated to this

effort for a long time. we have an entire food safety education staff at usda that does really terrific work. there are some resources available. encourage you to check out the information on our web site or the foodsafety.gov website. we have information sheets for every circumstance you can imagine. cooking for groups. tailgating. what happens when a power outage. we put things out proactively when we know a big storm is coming. we do them in english, we do them in spanish. we podcast. how many twitter followers do we have now? hundreds of thousands. that is pretty awesome. i don't tweet because i don't even know how but my agency tweets. do any of you follow us on twitter? yeah. so we're doing everything we can. we introduce ad mobile app this year. ask karen. karen has been on the website a long time. she is a lovely avator that answers the food safety

questions. we recognize people don't often have food safety questions when they're sitting in front of their computers. they're at barbecue, at a grocery store, somewhere else. you can ask her, can i eat pizza left out overnight last night? she will answer you. we have the database populated with over 1500 responses. responses to real questions people actually asked. we don't confine to just the products we regulate. we try to answer the questions we can or give people a place to go when we can't answer them. we're doing all these things. we're doing better to push information out. like all government agencies we rely people know exactly what we regulate and where the website is and where they have to go to. there is a complete change. we want to get the information out in a modern 21st century way. one of the biggest commitments we made this year to full-on public service advertising campaign. the food safe families campaign was done in participation with the ad council.

this is your brain on drugs. friend don't let friends drive drunk. we partnered with the ad council this year. we have terrific stakeholders from the industry, consumer advocacy, academia. we wanted to break through the appa think. we know people heard this all before. we know they say they do these things. they wash their hands. they use a meat thermometer. we also know in practice people don't necessarily really do these things. is it because they don't get it? they don't get one in six americans get sick from food poisoning? they don't get their child could have their lives impacted forever if they get sick? is it that? is it about raising awareness? is it about practicality? what is it? we wanted to do something different and catch people's attention. we decided to go with the four messages that have traditionally been used. which is to clean. we have them all laid out here. to clean, to separate, to

cook and to chill. we wanted to do something different. we wanted to grab people's attention. so i brought, we were hoping this is going to work. eric tells me that it will work. david said it will work. i don't know if any seen the ads on tv. we released them at end of june. we're trying to do radio and print. we brought a couple of them along today. every time we see one in my office, yeah. we have the tv in the waiting room during the day and everyone always gets excited. [laughter] [inaudible]

>> that is our separate ad. david will share one more with us. >> [inaudible]. >> must be lobster sitting next to the guy on the couch. >> one in six americans will get sick from food poisoning this year. keep your family safer. check your steps at foo foodsafety.governor. >> this is a sampling what we've been doing. we're obviously trying to drive a lot of traffic to the foodsafety.gov website. it is terrific website. it has every piece of consumer information you could want when it comes to

food safety. we reached a lot of people already. we know more people, for instance, we had 700% increase in traffic to the website in the first week of the launch. we had a 400% increase in dwell time, the amount of time people spend looking through the information on the website. we know those kind of numbers are important. we think we reached 20 million people with the launch campaign. we know the numbers are important but whether people actually change their behavior is what's most important. so we have to measure what we're doing. we have baseline data we're compiling and we'll be tracking. very helpful to have groups that they do an annual food and health survey to give the information about how many people are using meat thermometers. if they're not using them, why don't they use them? we need to track how we're doing. we need to impact people's behavior with this type of campaign. we're very excited what we're doing. i think we wanted and needed this kind of national level exposure and attention to food safety for a very long time. so finally what would a

presentation be without a strategic plan. i'm not going to talk about the strategic plan in any kind of detail but i do want to let you know we recently released this. i put it up here only because it's important that people understand weir not just talking about these things and we're not just kind of pulling miscellaneous policy ideas out of the air because they seem like a good idea. it's all part of a strategy. we know where we're going. we know what we want achieve and we'll hold ourselves accountable for getting there. this particular strategic plan was written for us in a very different kind of way because strategic plans tend to be very dry, boring lengthy documents sit at least in the documents in binders on shelves and people don't look at them after they initially see them. we wanted our people to understand what it was we were saying. coming back to the idea, we're 10,000 people, we need to be fully invested fully engaged in doing this incredibly important work for american consumers. this is what it means in your job every day. this is what we're trying to accomplish. you should have a direct

line of sight between the work you do every single day and the on vecktives this agency is trying to achieve. let's just put it up there. it is available, it is on the website now i think? yeah? yeah. anybody wants to take a look at it. so i did want to mention that's where we are right now. we are a public health regulatory agency. it is our sole responsibility to protect consumers from harm in everything that we're doing every day moves us a little bit closer to achieving that bowl. so i think i will leave it there. >> anyone have any questions? could you wait for the microphone. c-span is taping this. could you also give your name and affiliation. >> hi, i'm from editor the flavor magazine. you said labeling al louse people to make the best, most informed choices.

i'm relatively new. what i understand on labeling of poultry and eggs, free range, there is very little free or ranging about that label. could you talk about your view of that label in particular and whether you think it gives consumers the information they need to know? i think it creates in their mind an idea of chickens running around on a greenhillside and that is not the case. >> i will without skirting the issue too much i will say that the a lot of labeling programs like that are do not happen through our agency. those are certifications or determinations that are made elsewhere through agricultural marketing service. i believe free range falls under that category. our focus has been on, do exactly what you raised, do labels really tell consumers what they need to know? in the places where we're able to make those differences at the food safety and inspection service we are taking steps forward. for example one of the things we did the end of last year was to revive a

very old rule that had been stagnating for some time about the labeling of single ingreedent products. whole cuts of meat, chicken breast, steak, roast, chops. people are conscientious what they're buying and putting meals together. starting january of next year they will know the same nutrition fact content in these products than they do every product they buy at a grocery store. we think it is important when products have been enhanced, i shouldn't say enhanced or injected with sodium or other solutions like that will alter nutritional content and value and certainly sodium content we think people mead to know that to make good choices. but we're really focused trying to make sure people have as much information as possible. >> ellen ferguson, congressional quarterly.

i have two questions. one i understand that the new rules you proposed on the six new adulter rants won't take effect for a year. >> march 2012, six months from now. >> why is that and two how has your agency been affected by budget, 2011 budget and how do you think you will be affected by 2012 and will you be able to carry out and take care of the additional adulterants. >> to your first question the reason for the delay, the industry, portion of the industry that will want to adopt testing themselves, i should make clear this is requirement of the agency. the industry may or may not choose to adopt the testing programs themselves. they need to get things in place and get things up to speed. the test kits for these organisms have been in development i believe for some time since test kit manufacturers were aware that the agency might move

in this direction but we have to make sure that the technology exists for companies to be able to take the steps that they need to take. the other issue is our international partners. there are, there are always issues that come up in terms of. so we operate through equivalency at fsis in terms of food safety. countries export their products to the united states have to meet equivalent requirements to those here in the united states. there are products that could be, for instance, produced before these requirements were put in place and could be on the water at the time when things get implemented. we allow for some transitional time there to make sure that this is actually going to make food safer. if we want the industry to consider what steps they can take in implementing this program we want to make sure they have the time to do that. to your question about the budget, i would say, you know, i don't have a crystal ball and i don't know what is going to happen to our budget. i don't think anybody in this room is certain what's going to happen to anybody's

budget for that matter. but what i have told the agency over and over again, we need to keep our values and our priorities up front. and our priority and our responsibility is to protect consumers from harm. and we need to figure out how to do that. in whatever budget climate we are in. but there is no question there are going to be challenges. at fsis, as i mentioned once or twice in my presentation we have to be present in every meat and poultry plant for those plants to be able to operate. so that's a significant piece of information. i have heard and i have read people speculate about whether we'll have enough inspectors to keep food safe. we have to have enough inspectors to keep food safe. so, i don't, i can't say for sure how we'll be impacted. we have certainly been taking steps for the last year or more. the administrator, administrator and i to make

sure that we are reducing duplication where it may exist. we're taking a look at lots of positions at headquarters. we've done a lot of things in terms of process improvement, to make sure we are as lean as possible with you our but our absolute priority to continue to protect american consumers regardless what circumstances we find ourselves in. >> hi, i'm monica coleman with capitol hill news and commentary, prw power talk network. i first want to thank you and oglivy providing this forum. its's terrific. i have two questions for you. you mentioned post 9/11 i implemented a food defense system. i wonder if you could elaborate on that. you also mentioned you've been strengthened by the current administration and i would like you to tell us how. >> sure. i would say, there are a couple things about the food defense. first of all we have entire office that handles food defense. it has undergone a number of name changes over the years

but we have emergency preparedness and response professionals who now lead all of our efforts. so we're always thinking about, where are the vulnerabilities are? we work very closely with homeland security and we work very closely with law enforcement to make sure we are anticipating things we're prepared for. events that may occur. we have encouraged establishments to adopt food defense plans not just food safety plans but food defense plans as well. we actually have a strategic objective in our strategic plan about food defense plans. so just, it is a combination of awareness, being on the alert. looking at what products are the most vulnerable and putting, you know putting steps in place to make sure we're reducing that risk as much as possible. being ready to move, if we have, if we ever experience that type of event. food emergency response network is a laboratory network that is comanaged, coled by the food and drug administration and food

safety inspection service. this is a network of state laboratories that worked very closely with us through the years and through cooperative agreements to become equipped. become ready to go. have all their personnel trained to be able to provide surge capacity and look for particular threat agents that we might not be able to look for in, sort of normal public health labs or in regular food testing labs. we've taken a lot of steps there. something we have to be vigilant about all the time. i would say, we just, to your second question, how have we been strengthened by this administration. well we have a president who said to us very early on this is important. this is really important. and, as i said, no predetermined outcome but there need to be some steps taken to improve the safety of the food supply and improve the confidence that consumers have in the safety of the food supply. so i think it starts at the top. it always starts at the top. tone starts at the top. obviously you're given your marching orders by the president to do things differently.

to come together and figure out, you know, to bring ourselves to a place where we have parity. we don't have one half of the system with a set of authorities that the other half of the system doesn't have. so i would say the administration starting at the white house has been extremely supportive of us. i'm fortunate to also work for a secretary who has been out in front about this from the very beginning. he could he chairs the food safety working group. he takes this very seriously. he has been a real supporter of the things we want to do. so i think there's, there's a tone and there's an attitude this matters. this is one of the most basic things we should be and doing for the american people is improving the safety of the food supply. >> good morning, dr. hage again. thank you so much for this talk. i'm with the humane society of the united states. probably even in better economic times there weren't a sufficient number of inspectors out there. i'm wondering if you can talk about any sort of technology or technological initiative that you're exploring to try to use

technology to augment the capacity for inspection? >> let me try to understand your question. you're saying there were not a sufficient number of food inspectors out there? >> i'm saying perhaps situation akin to border control or people who are involved in inspecting the ports at, for homeland security. it's a staggering challenge and i'm just, wondering if there are ways that you're exploring technology perhaps such as video surveillance to try to improve -- >> yeah. thanks for your question. let me say a few things. we are actually at a historicly low vacancy rate for inspection personnel. that includes veterinarians. that is in part of efforts we made. there is recognition governmentwide the fact we needed to have more public health veterinarians in particular in the federal workforce. we really stepped up our recruitment and retention efforts on that front. filling inspector vacancies is a huge challenge.

again we are, we are in a little bit different situation than fda in that we're required by law to have people in plants every single day. we have to staff those plants so they operate and we can perform our statutorily mandated functions. so we're always looking, you know, looking for ways to keep those vacancy rates down because we have to and base it is also the right thing to do for our employees. but your question about video monitoring, excuse me, we released earlier this year some guidelines about the use of video surveillance equipment and so this does not replace inspection in any way shape or form particularly when it comes to humane handling of animals. we put out the guide lines so industry understood how we expect them to use video monitoring but also, to make that clear, this was not going to, having a camera in the pens is not going to replace having inspections

and having a veterinarian out there. the guidelines spells out that we can use the videotape, we can use information we get from the videotape in terms of looking at records and thinks like that. so, yeah, we're always exploring new technologies but it is pretty clear in our statutes that we need to have people there, people on the line. we think the model works. there is lot of questions over the years about carcass by carcass inspections. the laws were written a very long time ago and we realize that but we think it works. we think our system works. if nothing else having people in the plant every single day holds industry accountable in a way that is very important. so the people are never going to get replaced. >> good morning. i'm from russian television international. thank you very much for your presentation. i have a question based on my personal experience. before my work in the united states i lived and worked in the united kingdom. model is the same situation.

maybe more often topics food safety are in the headline news. but things i couldn't see in this country and i wonder for years that i live here, it's gmf. again net i canly modified food which is big talk in the united kingdom. i'm wondering maybe you in the united states have another system, another attitude, more ease to the problem. more food in the united states, more clean, from genes than in the united kingdom. i can't see this as topic at all in your press. maybe i'm wrong. but huge topic in the united kingdom but absolutely no news here in this country. is it because of clean food or different criteria system? >> i think because the newspapers you're reading. i think there is a lot of attention to the issue of genetically modified foods here in the united states.

the main focus really i think is on whether they should be labeled in all cases or not. that seems it be the significant consumer concern. so i think that debate continues on. there are folks who feel very strongly they should be labeled. people are more interested than ever in what goes into their food. what is not in their food. how it was raised. what conditions the animals were raised under. so i think there is quite a debate about that and i don't think that the issue has been settled. >> hi, my name is maria halas i'm with the american observer. thank you very much for your presentation today. my question is sort of a follow-up. with respect to the debt situation and certainly you do not have a crystal ball. i don't think anyone has. . . of us quite nervous, but be that as it may and because you are so very organized in your strategic

planning, what plan do you have in effect should there be market reductions in the budget? i heard you say that, you know, you need inspectors on site, but beyond that, do you have a plan? if so, what is -- what -- in that plan, what are the important matters in a very small brief statement, and what are some of the things that might go? >> well, it's an important question, and as i said before, we still have a job to do, and i believe that regardless of the state of the economy whether we're in a terrific place or in a terrible place, people need their food to be safe. it does not change. it's a constant. i think congress recognized that. we certainly, you know, we certainly have received less in their budgets and anticipate we'll receive less in the budgets in the coming year than we have before, but i think there is widespread reck

necessary of the fact that people -- recognition of the fact that people still need safe food regardless of what state that we're in. i think like everybody out there, we have to ask ourselves what are the things that we absolutely need to be doing, and what are our core functions, core mission, and are their -- that's the process we are involved in now at fsis and the department of agriculture, and i, you know, i speak -- i guess speaking for the government, that's what we're looking at. what is our core function? what are the most important things? what are the nice to-haves? that's the process we're engaged in now. we are certainly looking at, you know, the number of positions we have. we are not looking at reducing positions in the field because we simply can't. we're certainly looking at our headquarters' functions, where we can find efficiencies there.

we're looking at every single aspect of the operations. we're looking at what to do in the laboratories. one of the things that we're doing is trying too find ways to make sure that every single sample we take at the expense of the american taxpayers gives us as much nchtion as humanly -- information as humanly possible about the safety of that food. the system, where we align, for example, sample scheduling what people inspect in the labs from what's coming in from the field. we're looking at every single opportunity to find efficiencies, anticipating that budget times will be difficult going forward, and we're going to have to see what happens from there. >> we have time for two more questions. >> tony from food and water. good morning. >> good morning, tony. >> i like to sit up front also in church. [laughter] >> glad to hear you go to church, tony. >> the question i have is last night, the agency released an

advised press release, the second recall. with the editor's note that had confirm story information in terms of the specific type of salmonella. along with the anti by october ticks is that an ongoing situation with the agency, and did that press get out to the medical community? >> whether it's ongoing precedent, i don't know. whatever we have a public health alert with additional information after that goes out, we do generally update them, but i wouldn't say it's a new policy. ..

s, the medical organizations and also the public health departments at the state and local level. i don't know that we have found a way to kind of access each and every physician in the united states to make sure he or she gets that information, but we certainly haved ad all those groups to our list of recall notifications over recent yearsn to make sure the public health community gets that as well asah practicing physicians. >> i'm marie claire with associated press. i'm going to try to get two in here under the wire.e >> go for it, marie claire.e >> you mentioned there might be some upcoming regulations, ifg you could elaborate on that. and second, um, as you know, there's a big outbreak in

cantaloupe right now which isn't you guys, but just because theu issue of listeria is in the news and a lost of people don't knowp much about listeria, if you could talk about what you've done on listeria over the last dlyade? the last most deadly outbreakho was possibly deli meat. >> thanks for your question,o marie claire, it's good to see you in person.key about the ground turkey, i will tell you that the agency has come up with an action plan oft short term a plan of short-term, medium-term and sort of long-term items that we need to be looking at. the first thing that we did, the very first thing that we do is a recall. we make sure no more product is going out and products coming back that's the first step we take in these situations to prevent more people from getting sick. we have what we call an incident investigation team for several weeks, all tied disciplinary team that included policymakers and enforcement people, a field

officer people looking at every single thing, every single piece of data and every component of the operation to find out what we can learn about what happened in that particular plan and the next steps are to look at whether any of the practices that we might have found their might be generalized and whether there are steps we need to take in order to improve the safety across the industry. you'll see more from us on this issue but there are some short term and a very long term things we need to engage in. you're second question about listeria, forgive me i don't know of the year the final rule was published, but the agency took a different approach to the control of listeria and products with the publication of the final rule in the 2003 is that right? i don't even know. we basically tiered sampling set up the kind of risk-based

sampling and risk-based approach to things depending what type of intervention companies we are putting in place. so, some companies do what we call just sanitation's adjust the operations they have in place and try to demonstrate listeria control. some companies go and number of steps further and a couple of steps in the production environment and then the entire microbial that gets added before the product is packaged up. so this is just a different approach and basically we sample the company's according to the type of risk group we feel the fall into and we have a lot of collaboration with industry on dhaka rule we had a lot of collaboration with stakeholders from elsewhere, consumer groups and people on the hill, and i think that that was a success because the agency -- this is before i got there but i will go ahead and say we -- i think we involved of the people who were going to be impacted by this and really build a rule that was

headed for success. as i said, we have seen a tremendous decrease in the contamination rate of products that we regulate over the years. we are now at well over half of a percentage in terms of contamination rate and that's pretty significant. the issue with listeria is not so much that there are so many illnesses from it, and most people who get it will never even know they get it. most people who get listeria have a mild gastrointestinal illness that people who are particularly susceptible such as pregnant women, and the elderly can get really sick and the mortality rate is very, very significant. so that's why people often ask us why you have these policies focus on something that causes 15 or 1600 illnesses a year? because if you get it to have a good chance of becoming very ill or even dying if you are in a certain risk of a group so as a policy we have remained very important and we continue to look at these other factors, too. so when we learn about the difference between the prepackaged items and those that

we see at retail, okay, what can we do? lubber the next steps we can to get retail? what are the practices we can encouraged by that sector of the industry? >> thank you for coming. we appreciate you coming here and we will welcome you to the exchange. thank you. [applause] >> and we do have a couple of live events to tell you about coming up on the c-span networks today. the defense intelligence agency marks its 50th anniversary today. you'll hear remarking from defense secretary leon pa net that and the director of national intelligence, james clapper. that will begin lye at noon eastern. and right here on c-span2 we will be live at 1:00 eastern with a look at the future of

human space flight. elan miss success the ceo of space exploration technologies, he'll also be at the national press club here in washington. that, again, will be live at 1:00 eastern here on c-span2. coming up a little bit later, a look at social media's impact on news coverage. this is one of several panels we are covering today from the activism media policy summit. that starts at 1:15 eastern, it'll be live on c-span3. >> which part of the u.s. constitution is important to you? that's our question in this year's student cam competition open to middle and high school students. make a video documentary 5-8 minutes long and tell us the part of the constitution that's important to you and why. be sure to include more than one point of view and video of c-span programming. entries are due by january 20,2012. there's $50,000 in total prizes and grand prize of $5,000. for all the details go to studentcam.org.

[inaudible conversations] >> okay, if everybody could take their seats, we're going to get started in just a moment. >> discussion, now, on focusing u.s. debt and deficit reduction. this forum focuses on the way forward for the joint deficit reduction committee and urges i can't congress to go big and seek deficit reductions of $4 trillion or more compared to the proposed $1.5 trillion. this hourlong panel hosted by the new america foundation and the committee for a responsible federal budget. >> thank yous to everybody on c-span. this is quite a panel, following, boy, the first two panels were excellent. so if you all with respect here -- some of you were, but you have great, great acts to follow. let me just briefly go over the people who we have with us today and, peter, i'm going to turn it over to you for the first question. thanks to all of you for joining us. we're lucky to have jane harman who is now president and ceo of

the woodrow wilson institute for scholars. alan green spank, governor engler -- greenspan, governor engler, david stockman, former director of omb and senator warner who is the sitting senator and also one of the gang of six and heavily, heavily involved in this issue. so we are going to talk pretty much about anything you want. i keep saying this is one of these washington policy forums when you're willing to ask whatever question, and we want to have a rich discussion. but what we do want to focus on is where the politics and economics of this issue are right now and where they're headed, and to continue the theme that we've had in the past two panels of going big. i just have to observe it's been pretty remarkable, because i did say if people disagreed with go big, they were allowed to, but it has been a pretty powerful argument for both the political and economic arguments of why urging and supporting the supercommittee to come up with a full fix is a useful and almost necessary endeavor. so, peter, over to you.

>> let me start, first of all, with chairman greenspan, if i could. the economic argument here, we've had a lot of discussion about going big, what the right figure might be. a lot of people have thrown out the $4 trillion figure. from an economic standpoint, what is the right number, and how quickly do we have to get there? >> it's north of $4 trillion. the reason, basically, is that as i think everyone on this panel is acutely aware having the experience of been involved in these things, that there is a tendency in government to underestimate the size of the problem. and, indeed, if you look at the upside -- underlying economic assumptions that are being made with respect to forecasts that are made, it's pretty clear at this stage that we are running under and are likely to continue to do so. and that if you fit those data to either the ceos' base or anybody's base, you end up with

significantly larger deficits. because, remember, when you're dealing with a deficit which is, remember, very sensitive to changes in receipts on the one hand and outlays on the other and small changes give you very substantial changes in the deficit. all the biases that i can see work this direction of, essentially, increasing the size of what we are dealing with. on top of that, we have a very serious problem in that we are not, we don't have a large deficit which can be collapsed very quickly by discretionary outlays or the end of a war. i remember when the deficit at the end of world war ii collapsed, and it collapsed largely because the war was over, spending went down. what's driving this deficit is very substantially entitlements. and when entitlements are

pushing the deficit, they are very difficult to bring down. once the country grants an entitlement, it is very difficult to rescind. and i would suspect if i just look at the raw figures, not look at cwo but just look at what i would internally expect, my judgment is that we are dealing with an issue in which the actual growth in the gross domestic product or any of the other measures of potential revenues are, is essentially running into a problem which i don't think we've confronted before, namely a significant slowing in the rate of growth largely because we are taking the most productive people in the economy and retiring them. and they will be around for quite a substantial period of time. receiving benefits. and the people who, and the

cohort that's coming in to support, to replace them, these are the students who did so poorly in 1995 and since on those international exams. so the combination of a significant slowing in the working-age population and, therefore, in the civilian labor force, and even putting in reasonably optimistic productivity numbers adjusted for the fact that the cohorts are changing within the labor force gives us a set of data which gives me a figure that is possibly 5, $6 trillion to close. and this is a pretty substantial margin that i just think we have to work. >> dave stockman, former budget director, someone who's weigh inside on these issues. the chairman just told us 5-6 trillion should be the target for this supercommittee deficit

reduction over ten years. how do you get there? >> i'll see his six and raise him four. [laughter] i think this is a huge problem that is really being underestimated, and i want to say why, but before i do that -- is this on? not on? okay. before i do that, i want to thank charlie coe for recommending my book, "triumph of politics" that i wrote in 1986. i don't know if it's any good, but when i was run out of town on a rail, i did write a book. my publisher gave me 800 copies to distribute to my friends. i still have 795 copies left. [laughter] so if anybody needs one, i have a lot of books and very few friends. [laughter] i think this ten-year thing is really causing us to play a numbers game, to get lost in a miasma of numbers that is

resulting and we're losing track of how serious this problem is. because we talk about go bigger. i agree, go bigger, go sooner. but whether you're doing one and a half trillion or four trillion, remember, that's against a ten-year baseline if you can see that far in the future which is $200 billion. so we're asking should we cut the deficit by 1% of that ten-year baseline of gdp, or should we cut it by 2%? when the fact is weave been locked -- we've been locked this to 8-10% of g,dp deficits for te last four years, our gdp has been growing at 44 billion a quarter since '09, or a month. we've been borrowing 100 billion a month, and there's no letup to an equation in which we're borrowing at twice the rate at which gdp is growing. so if you look at a realistic view going forward, the gdp has

only grown 1.5% annually in the last 11 years. the non-farm payroll number today, 131 million s the same number we had in january 2000. that the manufacturing/industrial index today in august is the same as it was in 2000. that our economy hasn't grown for 10 or 11 years at a time when the fed still had money to print, which it doesn't now, when we still had a lot we could run and borrow deficits that we can't now. we had a housing market that was booming that is busted now. if you put all those things together, then the outlook going forward is far worse than what's in the cbo baseline. the underlying problem is at least 10-15 trillion if we do nothing, and yet we have one party saying no taxes, the other party saying don't touch social security, and both parties saying the military industrial complex, we need a defense budget in this world that's 80% bigger than eisenhower left when

he warned about the military industrial complex in 961. -- 1961. so i would say, alan's right, five billion, but it's really ten billion. >> on that note, senator warner, as a sitting member of congress, i don't know if you want to run for the virginia hills after hearing all that or not. the political reality of trying to get anything done in this environment. i know you've been working both democrats and republicans, talking about going big. the reality of trying to get there. >> first of all, i mean, great panel. great panel. thanks for maya and all her work. these numbers can become so overwhelm that -- overwhelming that you get moved moved into paralysis. we should at least admit that the process we set up whichs has got some very good things in it in terms of the so-called supercommittee, you know, let's

not set the bar so high that if we do actually hit that four trillion, that we, you know, once again say it's not a, some level of success, number one. number two, there are people up here, a ever-growing -- matter of fact, we had 38 of them last week, 26 of them standing up together publicly. maybe the only voluntary group of bipartisan folks in the whole town willing to say, yes, tax reform that generates revenues, entitlement reform that maintains the sustainability of these programs, building on great work that a lot of folks in this room have already done. we're all in in terms of supporting the supercommittee. and as a new guy up here, i think the process, the process ability of the supercommittee to forge a grand bargain and kind

of do this not in a sequential basis, but do it in that kind of one mother of all votes is something that we would be really remiss if we didn't give it our all over the next few months. and we do need, you know, i can give, i've got my own powerpoint in terms of how deep the hole and what we've got to do. but we kind of know the frame of the problem. we're going to have to deal with revenues, we're going to have to deal with entitlements, we're going to have to deal with the defense. we're going to a growth agenda because we can't cut and tax entirely out of this as well. we ought to be able to demand demonstrate that we can walk and chew guns and that means some short-term stimulative effort of growing the economy because as both the chairman and mr. stockman just mentioned, i've looked at all those numbers in terms of where gkp is -- gdp

is, but say short-term growth with medium and longer-term real deficit reduction. and one of the things that we built upon, for example, the very good work of the simpson-bowles was good enforcement mechanisms because one of the things that happens is nobody believes when congress acts that they're going to actually enforce what they say. we better put some real hooks into that. but i would argue that, well, we need everybody's ores in the water at this point -- oars in the water at this point. this will not happen unless the business community, the political community, the budget thinkers all kind of agree that we're going to help this supercommittee get to this bigger number. and candidly, at this point -- one last quick comment, i'm sure we'll get back around -- the margin's 10% on either side to my mind, and i feel very strongly about some things, but

i'd be willing to move on those margins to get an agreement. i think one of the biggest single things, one of the things that was so self-inflicted in what we did to our economy at the end of july, beginning of august is both on the business side and from the individual consumer side people who are uncertain we just put an extra dose of uncertainty. oh, my gosh, if our political leadership can't even put together a plan to long-term balance our books, then i'm going to cut back whether i'm a business person or consumer in terms of spending. i think one of the best things we can do for job growth right now is get this at least $4 trillion real, enforceable plan in place. but if everybody says, well, it's got to be my way or the highway approach, we're not going to get there. and i'm actually -- i'm much more optimistic today than i was at the beginning of august. >> congresswoman harman, you're a few months removed from your time in congress. your arm's length view, now, of what's taking place here. are you as optimistic as senator

warner, or are you more kept signal -- >> um, i want to be optimistic. i'm impressed that mark is optimistic since he's been hitting his head against the wall for the last six months while i've been luxury your rating at the wilson center. i'm just a recovering politician, so i'll start with a quick story which is that some of you will remember andy stern anyway, that i ran for governor of the california in the '90s, and someone came up to me and said how big are you? and i said big enough to run for governor of california. i think the question is, how big is congress and the president in terms of this issue of going big? and i want to point out that congress and the president were big enough in the '90s to do these things. i was there, so was john spratt, so was dave mccreedty, we were

there, and i made the tough vote -- i don't know how dave voted or john did -- for the clinton budget in 1993, my first term, which was a career-threatening move. i came back to congress by a margin of 800 votes out of 225,000 cast, and most of the women elected with me in '92 to open seats lost their elections, march jolie mar goal lis was the poster woman for this. i also was one of the hearty little band of 40 in the penny kasich conspiracy. twenty democrats and twenty republicans where we proposed to cut $100 billion from the budget, and we came within four votes of getting that past. in today's term it would be substantially larger. against the objections of the white house and most moving parts of the then-clinton administration. and i also, of course, was part of a large bipartisan group to vote to balance the budget in

1997. that was only 14 years ago, folks. and look what happened. it's a question of are we big enough or are our elected leaders big enough to do this? they used to be bigger. and something happened. and i think at risk is, you know, shot just our short-term future, but whether america remains a superpower, whether america is in the top tier of countries in the world. these stakes are huge. so what do i think is possible? i don't know if i'm as optimistic as mark, but i did write an op-ed piece with vin weber a month ago. we were in the same place talking about this problem and said exactly the same thing, is so we decided that between us we had 15 terms of service this congress, and we would write a joint op-ed which says politics aside, debt solution clear. and our point was that the president could request congress to introduce on a separate track from the budget committee -- no

offense -- bowles-simpson or something close enough to that, plus an infrastructure bank or some short-term jobs funding mechanism. but infrastructure bank, which has been a very popular idea with both parties, seemed to fit the bill because it would generate jobs fastest. and that could proceed using the regular order through the committees of congress, hopefully, putting pressure on the budget committee and involving more members to help them get to the right result. so am i optimistic that this could happen? i'm disappointed that it isn't happening. i'm disappointed that the president didn't ask for this in january after his commission heroically came up with a brand bargain that is at least the bones of where we ought to go. and i'm disappointed it couldn't be done by the president and john boehner in the summer, and i'm disappointed that it isn't being done now. and i just would close with i hope everyone, it's probably been mentioned in prior panels,

everyone's read the tom friedman piece today, but he says we can either have a hard decade or a bad century. and so i'd like to vote for the hard decade. >> governor learning, you have a unique -- engler, you have a unique perspective of someone who represents business interests here, the ceos that you represent, are there oars in the water, to quote from senator warner, on this issue? >> i think there's no question that they are, and they used the example earlier today, we just concluded a business round table meeting, and maya was kind enough to come down, spend a fair amount of time just walking through some of the options that are in front of the congress and in front of the nation. and there's a lot of interest. and you had ceos saying, oh, and by the way, this isn't a short period of time because when you have 20% 30rbgs % drops in revenues in companies, they had to act, and they didn't take it over a few months or a couple of years, you had to start making decisions tomorrow morning, and you had to make some by the end of that day and the next day,

and you got at it. the other interesting point around the country today there are examples in both parties, governors democrat or republican, with legislative bodies in some cases split control, some cases the opposite party, some cases their own party, and they've all been making decisions to balance their budget. and some of the magnitude, the guts are on the order of what governor warner faced when he first took office in virginia or what i had waiting for me way back in the old days of 1991 in michigan. so they've had to step up. i mean, as a proportion, and i think dave stockman captured it, is it 1% or 2%, you know, over a period of time, a decade? it seems to me that this isal in going very big here an opportunity for a great deal of creativity. i mean, this has got to be a legislator's dream to get one up or down vote. no amendments? that just never happens in this

world in washington. you couldn't get really that to happen in a state legislature very easily. so the idea that you could put one thing, and that argues, just screams for a very large package because the bigger it is, the tougher it is to vote against if it's the solution. you don't want to go small. you want to go humongous because it's just impossible to vote against at that point. and, yes, there'll be lots of things that people won't like, but there'll be much more they will like, and the beneficial effect of acting is what carries the day. and i actually think we ought to probably be thinking about since we haven't passed budgets on an annual basis, maybe part of the work of the supercommittee would be give us an annual budget for each of the next ten years at some baseline amount, and they know for ten years it's going to decline, so the good managers that we've got, the

professionals in the bureaucracy can manage that over time. they can do it through attrition, consolidation. i probablial as a special committee give the president unlimited reorganizational authority to get the 19th century structure into the 21st century so that you could use the technology and capture that as another way to drive what at least the chairman of ibm said could be as much as a trillion dollars out of costs when you take, say, 5,000 data centers and take that down to maybe the 50 you really need. i mean, you just, i mean, there is so much opportunity here. it's like a target-rich environment. but nobody's in charge, and the special committee has an opportunity to tee it all up. now, somebody's still got to execute, and that's what elections are for. but, you know, once the responsibility is fixed, the direction is set either somebody will step up, or there'll be somebody new to step up. sort of the way it'll work. and i think there are models at state levels, i think there are

models in some companies. so washington can do it. >> so let me pick up on the sort of theme of going big in the way that some of you are talking about. before we start making go big from four trillion in savings to ten and twenty in savings, i also think there's the real benefit of thinking about going big and bringing other pieces into this, right? this is a chance to make debt reduction and economic -- an economic growth strategy, and that means the space jobs component, there's a space for regulatory reform, there's a space for a whole lot of things that contribute to economic growth along with debt reduction. and one of the things we know now, the work of roe, goth and reinhart, and there was a paper presented about the fact that where we are at debt levels right now is probably already a drag on the economic growth. right? so if you put in place a multi-year, sensible debt reduction plan that can be part of a pro-growth strategy, and we talked about this a bit in the first panel, if you do the tax reform and entitlement reform

right so you scale back on consumption, you do it in this a way that creates certainty -- and i think this point about putting in place a budget that people can count on for a number of years can really help a business-led recovery which i think is the key to getting out of the downturn where we are right now. and if you put in place a plan that leaves the fess call space up -- fiscal space up front so we can continue the recovery, that all has something to gain. so i guess i would like the panelists to weigh in on how debt consolidation can feed into an economic growth strategy. but also separately because if we're going big, we can put other policies into this, what is the most important pro-growth policy, hopefully, that doesn't make the deficit worse that you think should be part of the package? whoever wants to jump in. of certainly, chairman greenspan. >> the one thing which we know is that the number of endeavors

on the part of various countries to rein in deficits of this type of problem, that almost everybody in every study that i've seen indicates that the endeavors that are essentially implemented by sharp reductions in spending have been far more successful in solving the problem without maximum problems with respect to the economy. the imf, for example, which did the largest study indicated that to be sure both tax increases and expendture cuts will tend to cut the level of economic activity. but the difference between the two is very large. and the more interesting issue which we don't know the answer to is, and this is where the bowles-simpson initiative, i thought, was really very clever, going to tax expenditures. the issue is what will a very large reduction in tax

expenditures do to economic activity. if it behaves more like outlays which i suspect it would be, then the impact of that trillion dollars, little over a trillion dollars that we had there annually is potentially a very important beginning to get at this particular problem. and i think the governor is raising a very important issue when he says that when you do it big, there are more ways in which people can agree with it than if you have a very specific, single issue in which there are imnumerable people who are against it. but there's another factor out here which we can't disregard. it's called the bond market. when i was originally asked when simpson and bowles as chairmen before the committee's report came out, i was asked what i

thought the possibilities of simpson-bowles essentially setting the framework for deficit reduction, and i said something like the simpson-bowles initiative will pass the congress. the only question is whether it is before or after a bond market crisis. and we can stand here or sit here and argue whether or not we're dealing with a large number or small number, but we have to ask ourselves what would we do if all of a sudden the markets began to erupt negatively thinking that the congress in this country is incapable of coming to grips with a problem of this size? and i hesitate to think what the consequences could be, and i hate to think what the politics would be.

>> yes. >> well, um, in i think it was 2008 los angeles passed a ballot measure by a vote of about at least two-thirds to raise taxes, to raise sales taxes by half a percent to fund infrastructure buildout in los angeles for mass transit, light rail and, um, maybe -- i think that was essentially what it was. and that measure has been generating revenues for the last three years. los angeles has proposed that it be able to front load that buildout by borrowing money in an infrastructure bank or in some other mechanism to build out in ten years what that tax measure would fund in 30 years. and by doing that, ld build, it would generate hundreds of thousands of jobs in the short term. i'm telling this story because

people, including republicans, voted to tax themselves to deal with the transportation meltdown in los angeles in a way that would, one, solve that problem and, two, solve the huge unemployment problem at the same time. and, therefore, if there were some form of infrastructure bank not necessarily funded with new revenue, alan, but funded with repatriated earnings or, you know, pick a flavor, funded somehow, that could help a city like los angeles get in the game of building transportation jobs fast and solving its problem. i think that would be a huge win. and the other point about the story i just told is the government or somebody would be paid back because this sales tax is generating the revenue to pay the government back. so this isn't a handout, this is a way to accelerate something

that voters in a large metropolitan city have decided they need. >> i'll just and, jane, i agree with the infrastructure bank. matter of fact, it's the original three co-sponsors of the not-grant version, but the one that the chamber and labor agreed on, i think john has been supportive as well, was aless about grants, more about loan guarantees. it was gary hutchinson and i. so i do think it's one of the tools. although i do think we've used our big bullets. we've used monetary policy, we've used fiscal stimulus, stio what can we do around the edges? i get a little concerned on these kind of panels that we, we can spiral into a pretty dark place pretty quickly. and, jane, your comments earlier about there have been times of bashing my head against a wall, but what is the choice? you know, is our rallying cry going to be in many america at

least we're better than the e.u.? >> greece. >> reporter: no, i think -- >> more generic. >> i'm thinking about in terms of political stepping up, and this is where i've got to make, you know, the appeal. you know, john and i were governors, and we both struggled with challenges. you know, we made a lot of hard cuts, and i agree with john, governor engler completely. but also in virginia with a two to one public legislature we raised revenues, and we got named the best state in the whole country for business. so i do hope we need to go big, but before we layer on this supercommittee which has got a bogey at this point of 1.2 to 1.5, and i would like to see as many additional things added on as possible. but if they only get five of the twenty that we want to add recognizing that if they're going to get a score, they've got to be done almost in five or six weeks, you know, let's, let's do what is the $4 trillion number everybody said is at

least a minimum. i would agree with the speaker we need to do more. but if we take that step, do it in an enforceable way. do it in a way that shows the political leadership and class in this country can actually work together on something. and the point i would say as a relative still newbie up here, it won't get done unless the governors, the state legislators, the business leaders, the thought leaders all are willing to kind of give a little and say with this supercommittee if you step out, we got your back. >> dave stockman? >> well, i think the reason we're not going big we all agree, and i don't mean to say four billion isn't enough. that would be a godsend if we did it. >> trillion. >> trillion, excuse me. billion in hours. [laughter] you know, we spend a half a billion an hour. the point is, there are too many people in this town who don't believe that it's real or necessary or urgent. and it's evident in their

behavior. and art of the reason for that -- part of the reason for ha is they believe things that aren't true. one is a great statesman who sat in this room for many years who is pat moynihan who says everyone has a right to believe what they want to, but they don't have the right to believe in the wrong facts. and one of them on the republican side is you can't raise taxes in a weak economy. well, i'm sorry, we're going to have a weak economy for years and years, and if we don't raise taxes, we're going to stay in this hole. in 1982 the unemployment rate was 10.5%, we were in a very bad recession, there wasn't necessarily light at the end of the tunnel. and ronald grain signed the -- ronald reagan signed the act of 1982. that was worth 1.1% of gdp of tax increases in the next two years. that's the equivalent of $150 billion a year in today's size of economy. so the fact is the history shows

that you have to pay your bills. and be if you don't like the economy because it's a little too weak to suit your fancy or because it hasn't been going anywhere for ten years which is true, that doesn't give you the right to keep hitting the credit card until some economist tells you it's okay, we've had a business cycle recovery, now we can start getting real about the deficit. the recovery's already happened. we are now in the permanent state of our economy. it's growing at 1% if we're lucky. and so we have to deal with that fact, and if we keep doing stimulus after stimulus after stimulus, we're just creating a cliff. you know, right now there's 500 billion worth of tax reductions that will exfire 201-'14. right now the baseline says the safety net's going to go from 400 to 300 billion a year in a year or two. so the fact is we've got 3.5% of gdp cliff that we're going to smack right into year after year unless we get started on it now.

was they're not going to allow all these -- because they're not going to allow all these tax cuts to expire, they're not going to allow all these programs to expire, and when you get back into the heat of trying to put that stuff into some kind of reasonable order, you're going to not get very much deficit reduction done. that's the problem, this cliff. it is huge. it is 600 billion a year ready to hit us in 2013-2014. so if they don't do it now, we're going to be, we're going to be a fly on the windshield of that cliff when we get to 2013. >> well, you asked about the growth agenda was somewhere wrap inside there, too, and maybe i'll come back to that just for a moment because mark touched on it and jane touched on it a little bit. and both of my other colleagues sort of mentioned this. i look at this, and i clearly from a different place because i think of all the what i think is

low-hanging fruit and understand, you know, from, i guess, growing up on a michigan farm the way dave stockman did, that's the first place you start picking up stuff. you go after the low-hanging stuff. the energy speech not given is kind of right at the top of my list because we used to kind of shy away, be a little nervous about saying energy independence for america. today it's actually within our grasp if we think about it with what's happened with shale discoveries, the improvements in the geology and the ability to find resources off our shores. so you'd, you'd want to as part of this remake of the government under our budget balancing and cutting have a true energy department. but that'd be an energy exploration and production department, and you'd get serious about exploration. and i'm very happy this past week they finalized the air quality permits for shell off alaska. there's tremendous resources there, we believe. i think we're going to have to redo our nuclear base.

we've got 20% of our electricity today comes from nuclear. those plants can start aging out, so we need to get that sorted out. and then while we're making decisions, you know, i'll just run through a couple things on the list. you would have ferc and figure out on transition lines today just the kilowatts we generate we lose anywhere from 5-8% of those in transmission. there's a wonderful business plan in roi if we just upgrade all the existing transmission, we these to build new, and that's a different story and you need permits for that. but for heaven sakes, where you've got line, you ought to be able to upgrade. a lot of jobs, and you can't do those offshore. that's all work here. the other thing you'd probably do if you're doing energy efficiency at the same time is in every public build anything america where it's owned by the federal or the state governments or local governments or schools since we're going to probably keep those in the public sector for a lot of years, you would actually complete all of that. that's something bill clinton

talked a little bit about, but it makes perfect sense. thousands of jobs there. if we were doing the oil and gas explorations since those royalties aren't in the budget because they've never been scored, i'd probably do some reservation of some of that, and i'd do the mississippi river basin and get some of those locks and dams updated, i'd get that big pipeline built from alaska, i'd probably open a million or two of federal land, upgrade all of our national parks so that we've got tens of millions of people go there, and they all need work. you know, and so that's just, that's my energy speech. i'd also one other $30, $40 billion product for the next generation air traffic control system. that is a, you know, quadruple win or more. it's energy efficient, it's less polluting, it's less hassle, and it's an export potential for us, and it's a high-tech to boot.

i'd probably fix the export controls because our says $60 billion of stuff we can sell to other places in the world, the british, the german, the japanese, our allies sell it. so, i mean, that's just to get us warmed up. all of these are administration-intrusioned ideas, but they've gone nowhere in three years. this is the time if you want to deal with the 9% unemployment rate. and as i said, i didn't get into dodd-frank. i didn't talk about education, i didn't talk about health care, and i didn't get into, really, regulatory reform. >> and millions of jobs here. >> you suggested that's all low-hanging fruit. >> it is low-happening fruit. >> i've got to make one quote because -- i've got to go make sure we have to get some of these trade agreements through too right now which is another piece of this and a lot of what john's talked about, one of the only democrats looking at offshore off virginia. i take on the conservation piece on the public buildings and say if you've been on unemployment beyond x period of time, you

know, you can finance that retrofitting of those buildings, and you could train up and use the revenue stream from unemployment in that youth category. there's a whole series of things that we can do, but i've got to -- but we also have to acknowledge, and i'm one of the ones that try with the the faa bill. when every bill bams an all or -- becomes an all or nothing for one side or the other and every operation of government in terms of continuing becomes a potential shutdown nightmare, we do an enormous disservice to this country. and while we can go through the litany of all our proposed -- none of them, many of them are bipartisan. i've got a reg reform that i'm working on with senator portman that i think -- which is an act of copying some of the things the brits have done, they call it one in, one out, but until we can deal with this debt overhang, until we can show that the political leadership in the country can actually get something done, we have got to restore some level of

confidence. as everybody has said. and we can go dark, we can talk about the old days, we can talk about how big the problem is, or we can take this next three months two, and a half months and say we're going to be all in helping the supercommittee and have a plan b if they're not successful. but first thing is we've got this opportunity. and let's not have another one of these sessions, you know, in january talking about what we didn't do when we had this opportunity. as john said, to have that one major vote where at the end of the day if this vote isn't, you know, you're either for the country moving forward, or you're for more paralysis. cannot be, one, democrat versus republican. and the only way we'll get to that kind of vote is if everybody here gets their oars in the water and, frankly, more than they did in the last debate. thank you all, go vote, and let you guys solve the rest of the problem. thank you, peter. [applause]

>> mark is right, but, um, if campaign of 2012 has started, then b what comes with that is that you get more bang for the buck if you blame the other guy for solving, for not solving soe problem than if you work with the other guy to solve the problem. both parties do this. they play the blame game. and what's wrong with that picture is we don't solve problems. and congress has shrunk in its ability to solve problems. in the '90s we solved this problem, now it's unsolved or back, and i, you know, it's the incredible shrinking congress. so how does that turn around? the way it turns around is with a few people who have the guts to say doing this right, going big is more important than getting reelected. and i think if one person would do that, and i certainly salute mark for his courage and his message, but if a few people

would do this -- let's pick some from each party -- maybe that could start turning around this terribly broken and destructive paradigm. i actually thought john's list was good, the growth agenda. i'd just like to put out there my thought not in terms of static versus dynamic exploring, again, i'm the non-economist here, but in terms of the dynamic nature of the economy, if we had a growth agenda that might need some, some, you know, a little jump-start here at the same time as we're trying to do a responsible deficit reduction plan, then we end up with faster deficit reduction, more confidence, and we retain our leadership. so it seems to me we ought to have that. i just wanted to add a couple things on john's list that i think are important. maybe this is as a democrat. i'm not against resource exlo ration, but i think clean energy is a way underused idea here. not just clean energy in the united states, and there are lots of ways we could develop

clean energy including switch grass and solar and a lot of things that won't fill our energy picture. i'm one who does believe in nuclear energy, so i'm not saying this is the only answer. but clean energy exports are something we could really be doing this. why are we letting china do this and sitting on our hands? is we know a lot about this, and if we could ramp up the industry and, for example, take our largest consumers of -- largest federal purchasers of automobiles, i think dod, and make their fleets cleaner, we would drive a market in developing mass producing cars and other things cheaper that could generate import. so that's one. the second thing we haven't mentioned is immigration reform. it has absolutely no sense to have cal tech graduates, you know, geniuses in science and engineering leave because our immigration laws won't let them stay in this country.

50 %, i think, of the graduates from cal tech -- and there are other schools in this boat -- have to leave our country immediately upon getting the best education on the planet. and, yes, we do have to pass fair trade agreements. it makes no sense to deny ourselves access to other market s and deny their access to us. it also is a good national security agenda to have trade rather than war. >> chairman greenspan f i could pick um on the economics here. and, again, the supercommittee comes to you and asks your advice for the ultimate plan they must consider, if they ask you about the mix, what's the appropriate mix? you've got in mind what the target should be for them. how do they get there -- what would your advice to them be? >> well, i first would say what i think probably where mark warner's views of people converging is going to occur is not where i would start if i had my choices.

i know my view of what ought to be done will get maybe one vote, which would be mine, and i'm not sure i'd vote for it myself. [laughter] but i do think that, i think the president is indirectly acknowledged that he made a mistake in not addressing bowles-simpson when it came out. it was an ideal time, and in my judgment where we ought to go is, basically, to take bowles-simpson which is, i think, a very cleverly constructed bipartisan approach to coming to grips with this problem. and as i said before, it has one extraordinarily clever part which none of us for reasons i do not understand have really approached which is the tax expenditure part of this issue. i mean, tax expenditures are a trillion dollars a year.

and i would do, basically, what they do which is you start off with the assumption that all tax expenditures are gone. and then you have to negotiate a few items that would come into place, and i don't think unless you do this that you're going to get anywhere near to a solution. first of all, there is no way to solve this problem without significant economic and political pain. if we're going to try to do this on the cheap, mean nothing pain -- meaning no pain, it'll fail. or it'll be a whole series of budget gimmicks which we've all seen over the years. so i would say at this stage that the quickest way to come to grips with this problem is to take bowles-simpson. they've got a very detailed document. i was very impressed with how much that commission did in such

a short period of time. and you could take that and put it with a little work at om, and cbo and a variety of other places, you can get every little item -- i don't think they did a full line item in bowles simpson, but they're close to it. so there's a bunch out there which, as the governor says, you can vote up or down. we ought to find out if bowles-simpson has got the votes. bowles-simpson doesn't have the votes, then i despair at where this country is going. and i despair, incidentally, because what's at stake here -- and jane would know far more about this than i -- is the status of the united states in the world. i mean, there are a few little things that are going on. studies which take a look at the military, for example, find that our whole infrastructure is deteriorating. the average life that i think

the committee that norm augustine headed indicated that a very significant part of our military infrastructure is very old, and i think he gave me a number which i couldn't believe, i still can't believe. the average age of equipment of the american military is 50 years. now, i find that noncredible until i looked there are b-52c bombers still in operation. >> right. >> and so the question then gets into budget terms, is what does it require -- let's assume for the moment, and i grant you this is not a valid assumption, of restoring the existing military. we have a military which was built up during the cold war to fight the soviet union. and that's not what we would need going forward. but just to build up to where we

were would require hundreds of billions of dollars to bring the technology up to something which, in my judgment, represents where this country should be and is. .. there.

you talked earlier about all the sacred cows out and how can that play out. >> it's a huge cattle farm is what it is. it's not going to happen as a way to get revenue in the coffers. it might be a good idea for economic policy for the long run but for what we need in the middle term it is just going to be a massive sort of conflagration will do no good. and the second thing i want to say is economic growth is a wonderful thing. just like art said it was. but it has little to do with budget discipline and hard choices and the sacrifices and the pain that has to be distributed. and growth is going to be what it's going to be. it ain't much and there's not much washington can do about it and what washington has been trying to do about it is pathetic. a $200 billion payroll tax holiday for one year so people can buy more happy meals that they shouldn't have in coach bags that they don't need.

please, give me a break. more money for green energy so we can get another half billion dollar loss in one company like clindra that we saw go down the tubes. >> this is how we got in the mess we're in. we got to swear off stimulus and growth management because there's no agreement on how to get it. take the facts that are dealt by the economy, take the real numbers that are out there and figure out how to distribute the pain. that's really what the job is. and everybody wants growth today and pain in the by and by and as a result we'll have a huge bond market upset as allen said. one of these days when they finally wake up that our government system is paralyzed. >> how much time do we have? >> how much time? >> till the bond market makes it. >> it's totally artificial, it's

medicated, manipulated. i can't tell you enough words by the central banks of the world. half of the 10 trillion is in central banks. it's sequestered. they're roach motels. the bonds go in. they never come out. that's the way we've never been able to do it. the people's printing press is not buying any more bonds. the people printing press of america is out of business. and as a result with that we're going to have a test one of these days of the real bond market of real free market investors and how silly can they be to buy a 3-year bond for 30 bases points when the acknowledged inflation rate as the fed makes it which is totally phony by the way alt 2% and you're buying a 3-year bond for 30 bases points. there's going to be hell to pay and i don't know when but when it comes this town isn't going to be ready to deal with it.

>> can you send us out on a good note, governor? >> i'm going to go with the earlier stock on the 1%-2% over a decade. it shouldn't be as painful but it really is -- to put it in perspective, yeah, you know, it can be done. and i do think the government has a bit to do with growth in the sense that it controls the permits that determine whether i can go forward and do something or not. and to do that extent until i get them out of that role if they've got the permits in their hands, i've got to get them and so there's that interaction. i don't think we need the public capital. i think there's -- we're awash in capital. and money is almost free today to put to work. let's get that going. i do think the chairman's idea is interesting. it would be -- it would be great -- of great interest to me

to see that put forward. and i think on the tax expenditures i have the privilege of being with the chairman greenspan and marty feldstein and john taylor talked a great deal to the senate finance subcommittee. and i think simps and bowles got an individual rates and everybody could say, well, gee, i'd certainly like -- while we're at it on the business taxation improve territoriality and make it work in a competitive way and if i have to start with a position where i have a much lower rate i sort of want to be in that conversation so i think there's -- and it's that difficulty because if you deal with all the individual rates then all the noncorporate business organizations structures get treated promote.

i mean, they should not have as much to be concerned about. so that's -- that to me would be very interesting. i would like to see them go plus on top of that. but the other thing that's interesting about the committee we haven't said too much about this but it really is a legislative process. but my assumption is that if congress puts it on the desk, no matter what it gets said somewhere else in town, if something passes the congress it's going to be fine. i mean, i think it would be unbelievably reckless, dangerous and i think politically destructive. and jay made a point earlier which in terms of people voting, you know, we always have every election it seems like or every couple of elections we suddenly discover a new truth that we should have seen it coming and i'm not sure that maybe the new truth in the 2012 election it's,

you know, simply retreating to the camps and waging war on the other camp may, in fact, be the old -- that may have been the last election strategy and it may not -- it may not cut it in '12 because i think there's a level of anger and it's reflected in the -- what is often called the tea party but it's really the tea party movement, which is not a party but it is a movement. and i think it includes people who have been republicans who have been democrats who have been independents and they're brought together by the fact they're really irritated. they're really upset and i think they sit in the middle and they hold a lot of sway and it's not -- they're not -- and it's all about -- i think some policy questions more than it is -- it's not -- i don't look at that group and say there's anything socially and unites them. i think it's their irritation that government and so i'm just

throwing arrows at the other guy it's the wrong place to be. >> just to respond to that and say something positive i thought -- i've been thinking about that for an hour there must be something i can check but on the tea party, i would say the tea party is part of the problem. not part of the solution. yes, it does reflect anger but it seems to have an ideological agenda and it imposes litmus tests on politicians if they don't go along with the no tax pledge get a primary opponent and having had a number of primary opponents over the years that ain't fun. and having had very tough elections, you learn. you grow a thicker skin, you know, it's proof that you're in the middle if you get slammed from both sides. i think the people who are really angry in this country are the people in the middle. and i think that's why there's a lot of conversation about a third-party. these are people who think that people -- that neither party -- neither extreme of either party is entitled to its own facts. your point about moynihan and

that's what we seem to be operating for a fact in a universe and they want facts and factually do something. and here's my positive point i think there are a lot of smart people in congress, in both parties who came here for the right reasons. and they may not agree on everything. we on this panel don't agree on everything except we agree to go big but we want to solve this problem and we want to try out various ways to solve this problem. i think this thoughtful group in congress which is fairly large needs to be liberated. and given a chance to engage in legislation here which it's not given a chance to engage. the committee process is bypassed by and large. the leadership drafts the bills. it's a war of press releases rather than a serious thoughtful effort to solve a big huge problem. my idea about simpson bowles yes it should be considered.

i wouldn't do the up and down vote and i think everyone would run away and i would run it through the committee process and try to help the people in congress, in both houses who really have thoughtful things to say understand it and try it out on their own constituents. i actually think we could pass not it necessarily but something like it. the baskets that it contains are the right baskets. whether these precise proscriptions are right and give congress a chance to be good. and so that's my hopeful thought. congress has good people who could be good if given a chance. >> well, with 3.5 hours of fiscal policy and public policy today i'm just going to say one closing word of thanks. i mean, i think we heard so much today about how real the problem is, how large the problem is and one of the things we focus a little bit more on is sort of the dangers of doing nothing. because a lot of times in this town the focus has been well, i don't want to do that, you know, retirement age and means testing and taxes but instead if you

think a little bit about the cost of doing nothing which we heard from so many different voices today, it's an incredibly powerful argument for why we need to act. and i thought what chairman greenspan was incredibly important as well which is if you're not going to get your first choice it's not really an excuse to walk away from the table. we need to find a compromise that's going to get this done. so with all these truly remarkable voices today, talking about this, what i guess i hope is that all these voices will come out of the shadows and that in the coming months we will be hearing over and over again the support for the super committee and the message on this panel particularly was not go big or go really, really big or somewhere along that spectrum i think we can urge them, support them and hopefully come up with a real resolution of this problem and i think it's important to hear about a remarkable piece of work which i think changed the discussion of this country and can serve a really important discussion to go forward.

so thank you so much for all the panelists and thanks to our co-moderator, peter cook. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> now, get regular updates on what's on c-span. get tweets once an hour with quick information including which events are live and links to help you watch. it's easy to sign up. just go to booktv.org/booktv/c-spannow and then hit follow the latest most instant information of what to watch on c-span, c-span2 and c-span3 now on twitter. >> coming up for you on the c-span networks this afternoon,

>> and now a former russia specialist who served in the state department and the national security council under george w. bush talk about that country's relationship with the u.s. and also discuss the conflicts and common interests of both countries across the former soviet regions.

the ambassador of kazakhstan joined this event hosted by the center of national interests it was held following the kremlin's announcement that former russian president vladimir putin will return for a third term. it lasts about an hour and 15 minutes. >> with a distinguished panel. an important topic and hopefully we'll be able to produce light as u.s. russian interaction is difficult and controversial. before i introduce the panel, however, let them conduct some business and introduce a new link at the center of the new editor of the nation. would you please stand up. mra[applause]

>> he's a former editor and publisher of "congressional quarterly." a distinguished author and we're absolutely delighted to have you with us. we're also delighted to have this panel. the panel is based on the book about u.s.-russian rivalry edited by my colleague paul saunders, executive director of the center and we have two american contributors to the book. former senior official in the bug on the policy, senior director for eurasia on the national security council and some director of the dissent of american progress who is increasingly recognized as an

emerging but already major expert on russia. let me say that this is clearly a very difficult issue because if you look at the u.s.-russian relations especially when president obama came to office, there was significant progress in some areas. i'm not sure that there was enough progress to say that with a lasting breakthrough and it is quite clear that a number of issues, most difficult issues serious disagreements remain and that is particularly true regarding u.s.-russian relationships where we have clearly different perspectives. plenty of us believe different interests and it is also quite clear that the russian and

united states hesitation with a number of countries in that region who dare to have their own interests. and increasingly to act on the basis of what they believe the interests and sometimes most in washington are not acting they're also reacting. they're not just creating situations. they're managing situations. it's difficult. it is controversial. and i think it is likely to be more difficult and controversial after this weekend's events in moscow. i'm talking, of course, about president putin deciding that he would be coming back to power. those of us who have watched that remarkable russia come to progress and those like myself without back in moscow during the days of communism and during

the political process it was all very well orchestrated. it looked quite impressive but -- [inaudible] >> because it would last for several days, they at least would proceed with a wall. they would elect their candidates. this time it was i have to say -- i have to give them credit. they were quite efficient and did not want to waste any time. prime minister putin came to the podium and said that president medvedev would be leaving the united russia party. no vote. some applause. clearly, a lot of people in the hall were somewhat surprised because they thought it would be

president putin who would lead the party to the elections and they thought that perhaps he would be leading the party to the elections would become their candidate for presidency. so there was some initial hesitations but then everybody applauded to that and president medvedev went to the podium and he announced that because he would be preoccupied for his elections, that it would be prime minister putin who would run for presidency. even more applause no vote, no discussion, everything was arranged. that is what i would call new efficiency russian style. unfortunately, for russia, they cannot have that type of efficiency in that short of space and not only was countries like georgia which obviously

have a very different foreign policy but then like belarus and ukraine, russia has difficult issues. based on different economic interests but also on different foreign policy perspective. how should we deal with all of that? what does it mean? we have a very distinguished panel. >> i'll start. well, thank you very much, dimitri. thank you all also, tom, and sam for your contributions to the report. and to alex peterson who's not able to be here but co-authored the paper with sam and also to the two russian authors. and finally, and quite importantly, thank you to the united states institute of peace, which supported the project and without whose support it would not have been possible. the project that led to this

report was something that was conceptualized generally in the wake of the august 2008 war between russia and georgia. and grew out of my concern that the former soviet space was a region where there were a number of ongoing conflicts that the so-called frozen conflicts also some others. and really that any of those conflicts at any time could become unfrozen or escalated or turn into a situation like what happened in georgia and that it was important for the united states and russia to talk together about the region and about those kinds of problems

and ways to try to manage problems like that so that they -- a small problem didn't become a big problem. that conflicts didn't expand beyond the region where they start to become wider. so that was conceptually how the project originated. since the two russian authors are not here and since i have two very capable american authors are here, what i might do is just very briefly to talk about some of the russian perspectives that came through in the course of the project, some of the key points of difference between the united states and russia and then at

the end maybe a couple of comments about prime minister putin, president medvedev, the transition that we're all expecting to see over the course of the next few months. the first thing i would say in thinking about russian perspectives on this region and these issues and the american role there, and i don't think it's probably news to anyone is that there is really very clear and lasting frustration on russia's part with the american role in the former soviet region, a resentment of america's real -- almost dominance during the time of the decade of the 1990s when russia was in some very difficult

circumstances. irritation among many about the american presence particularly american bases in central asia, suspicion of u.s. democracy promotion, its methods and also its goals. and a regular complaint about u.s. double standards. i apologize for those of you who are here from the depth because i'm sure you hear about these things all the time. [laughter] >> another, i think, view that came through very frequently is the sense that russia should have special rights in this region of the former soviet union. president medvedev, of course, talked famously a little while

ago about russia's privileged interest in this region and that's clearly a very widespread sentiment based both on geography and on shared history.. course an effort to resolve the dispute between moldova.

former russian officials and russia played a very instrumental role in negotiating an agreement and they kind of thought that there was a deal and putin was on his way to moldova to witness the signing of this and then the united states and the europeans at the last minute kind of intervened and the moldova and decided they didn't want to do it after all. and so a lot of people in washington and i think in the rest of the united states -- it's not an issue people have focused on intensively or think about, but the two russian authors in this volume and certainly a number of other people who i spoke to, really felt that this was something, a development that had a very major impact on particularly

then president putin's thinking about what the united states was trying to do in the former soviet union and really contributed to putin's at that time disillusionment with the united states. and i think the one wider implication of this is, you know, we have a tendency in the united states, when we think about ourselves as the sole superpower, not always to focus on the fact that some of the decisions that we make can really have a disproportionate impact on others compared to the level of priority. and i'm not saying that to

endorse the memorandum or a solution to the problem. but i think something that there is thinking about. another thing that i found a little bit surprising was the relative lack of concern among many of the people who might talk to and certainly the two authors about china's role in the former soviet region which is something that a lot of people in the united states are very focused on. but there was a sense among a number of russian participants in the dialogue a meeting is and also the authors that you know, china has a very important economic role particularly in central asia but has not really attempted to have any kind of political role and that that's fine with us. where i think many people in the

united states might expect that the economic role that china has is not necessarily the end of the role that it will have and may evolves into something else. i don't want to talk too long. so in the interest of time, let me just mention very briefly three points of tension that i see, one very important american priority that i see and then get into the putin business. in terms of points of tension, clearly this issue of russia's special rights collides with an american sense that the united states needs to be very active t