>> we don't know you. [laughter] >> but we remember the name of that poet. we will remember 700 years from

now, and people ask you sitting right in here when the struggle was there, when you're right there in the battle, what did you do? did you do anything, grandma and grandpa? what did you do? did you stand up? was it scary? i want you to be able to say yes. i stood up and i said i am somebody. this little light of mind, i'm going to let it shine. let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, lieutenant choi. at this time, at this time would

like to open the floor for questions or if you have any questions or lieutenant choi please make your way to the microphone to the center of the idols. -- center of the idols. >> hello. i'm a poly some major and i'm thinking of things in public polls. i was running even with repeal of don't ask, don't tell, do you expect the annual still discriminate, numbers of the lb gt q. committee, and if you expect them to, what policy should the army or the state department or whatever, what should they put in place to prevent harassment and distribution? >> thank you, wonderful question. it's obvious with an air today would even though i wear this uniform, we have an have an equal opportunity protections. that was stripped out of the compromise bill.

no nondiscrimination quality. that was stripped out of the compromise bill. no partner recognition and no family support. there are religious provisions in the military so that military chaplains can get up on a federally funded pulpit, your taxpayer money paying for this abridgment of freedom of religion, some people who say that gay people shouldn't be in this world, they just preach against their fellow comrades. so the error is defined thusly, people can die for america but they cannot live free and equal in america. and so i believe we have a lot more work to do. we didn't even do the hamstring stretch yet. we did a couple jumping jacks and we're doing the warm-up lap. river long way to go, and i believe that it will be very difficult in the years to come for anybody to stand up against a person in uniform to say you

do not deserve love, you do not deserve commitment and you do not deserve the award of merit. >> i have read some of the sermons and had the urge to bang my head against the wall. >> and that's what you're a poly site major. [laughter] [applause] >> go ahead. >> hi. i was wondering, hearing your speech, do you still talk to your family? do they still love you? what was the struggle? i come from a very religious background. my parents disowned me about six, seven years ago. i don't talk to anymore. i eventually got out of active duty because of the policy. i'm in the guard not that i love my country. we were talking about love. i love my country. i've been deployed six times, six years of my life. i can't let go of my country, serving my country, but it's a

struggle not having my family there. and my friends are my family. do you have the support system? how did getting kicked out effect you? >> thank you. i thank you for your service. thank you for wearing your uniform. [applause] and i will forgive the fact that you were in the air force. [laughter] my family has not taking it very easily. probably because i was a little bit demanding. i cannot stand before you can be demanding of my full equality and slow walk my parents business. i will tell you very much, my sister can attest the main reason why my parents are not talking to me right now, and has been the case for almost two years, is because last conversation that i had, if you're not going to come to my

gay wedding, and i'm not going to go to your street funeral. and after living at home for that long, and told my parents and ending blame for my dad's heart attacks, and trying to walk them through why it's so difficult for me to compromise in any way, how to explain that. all i know is that if a parent leisure, parent loves child, then they will not put conditions on it. and that word love, i've learned in church, there are many definitions of it. and our many homophobes out there, and the lesson is very clear. there are three kinds of love. the intimate love, the brotherly love, and the unconditional love. well, i'm not saying that you should go and date the

homophobe. i'm not saying that you should try to be faithful friends with the homophobe. what i'm saying is if you love somebody, you put them through that, test of unconditional love. and it requires you sometimes to be parent. so we began our own support network because of that. and our community that we've built out on the streets, criticized and told that we are way too and compromising, we are way too impetuous, that we are way to naïve and experience and all of those words that they called us throughout this year because we demanded. it was a wakeup call. i recognize that if it was not for the people who stood up uncompromisingly, and the timeline wouldn't start and the

parents acceptance. they wouldn't understand it. the parents acceptance doesn't start when they are comfortable. it might take 10 years. it might take 20 years but it doesn't get any better because you keep a secret from them. and also when you tell your parents, when you come out, and today is coming out day, when you do that, you recognize the truth that until you come out to the person that judges you the most, like right now we're judging whoever the hell that is. [laughter] when you come back to the person that judges you the most, and that's when you're liberated. and every conversation after that is easy. rachel matta was a cakewalk compared to my dad. so i recognize that many people are not out to the penchant. many people are afraid to do that because it's too hostile or sounds like maybe you will be the bad guy. was a good day. you're the one that is helping

your parents because through this tough time that actually is your support network. it's hard. it's not easy. and just making it better video doesn't do. well know jayme roden meyer made. it gets better video. and then committed suicide. when you make your it gets better video don't make it personal. don't make it so that you can feel like a celebrity or you can feel like you're on the famous. i haven't made one yet. it's hard for me to say that it gets better because i've been to jail so many times. look, people don't -- the president hates me. i've been on trial. it gets worse. [laughter] will but i recognize that when you make those it gets better video card reaching out to somebody and to the pain you feel the comedic you don't always agree on everything but that doesn't make a movement.

the disagreement makes a movement even better. we take a look at the commute is being built right here at occupy l.a., they don't agree on all things all the time but that's the beauty of it because through that today, the that convention, do that fighting, through that, come out with what they know the committee is. and i will tell you we don't know each other yet. and that's what we have to work on. [applause] >> hi. first things first. civilian, thank you for your service. my cousin served them anytime i see like some, really, thank you, fighting for me to be her cash were talking. my question to you is, the message of like politics, i've been following your career and i recall an interview where you stated you are looking to republican candidates since you are not happy with like obama's progress on lgbt right.

would you stand with that now? t. feel like you are choosing to vote with the right, t. feel like you'll be fragmenting the movement? >> thank you. i think should recognize politics is again. our world depends on certain values. and most of the time political parties do not fit within those values. i see political parties and that's just a vehicle. and if your vehicle is breaking down, then you go and threaten that you go get a rental car. [laughter] and so i condemn the republicans dare to do a gay soldier. i condemn all of the people who did not stand up and did not show leadership, but i also condemn the democrats who stayed silent and took how long? how long the president obama have to wait to condemn that? why is it that in the mind of gay people today, the manipulated gay people, we see our rights as just a political

football instead of the moral question that it is for all people, gay or straight. and so i ask you, whether you're a republican or a democrat, gay people fit in both, would you ever subordinate the quality to politics? politics is not an end in and of itself and every politician simply wants to retain power. no matter what their political party is. and so when you threaten that power from them, then they listen to if you think you're going to any war with president obama on his marriage stance simply by giving them more money and hoping and crossing your fingers, you have a lot more problems than republican or democrats. you have a lot more problems than that. i recognize there's a lot at stake in this explanation. the supreme court justices, theoretically, some of them look really old. [laughter] and i recognize that even in my own case which might go up

another level, my federal trial, it's been made very clear this president and the administration vindictively prosecute me and we just found out today that a higher court is allowing for prosecutor to tie our hands behind our back and not use that defense. i recognize that our journey does not always depend on the things that politicians promised, but on the promise of each and every one of us to threaten the politicians when they don't do the right thing. the word marriage, the word, when you say that and when you hear that, from any democrat or any republican, and they say well, i support gay people but i'm evolving because i don't think the word marriage is for all people. that kind of hypocrisy we did not homophobia because i don't think president obama here's gay people, homophobia is probably the wrong word. why would you fear gay people?

we have nice hair. shiny shoes. [laughter] we wear nice pants all the time. we smell like raspberries. [laughter] whenever says they don't believe in our equality, we make your shoes and we make your purchase. [laughter] i recognize that being gay and fighting for gay rights is not about popularity. it's not about being liked. it's not about fitting into a democratic party tells you, it is about standing up regards and sank i have the nerve and i have the gall to say that if you're not doing your job, if you're straight, supremists, and that's the word i'm searching for, then you do not deserve our full support. because we're not fighting homophobia. we're not fighting the fear. we're fighting for supremacy. very similar to racial supremacy. but when we talk about straight

supremacy, it's prevalent in all of the political party. even when someone says they are an ally, i'm not a homophobe, i don't hate gay people, i don't fear gay people, but the issue is whether you think you are superior simply because of their orientation. and nobody is going to admit that. nobody will say that, i'm a racist, i'm a hater, those gay people, nobody will say that. mostly because supremacists exist and i'm going to go on a tangent here, white supremacist and straight supremacists alike. supremacy exists in close quarters. and for thanksgiving dinner table, and when you do with a gay person has come out in your family at a thanksgiving dinner table or at any place, where you're normally less polite, see, because people can hide their supremacy out in public. and it's the same thing as white supremacy because when you add a thanksgiving table with only one race, and i was not just white supremacy but my parents are

probably korean supremacy, not probably, they are korean supremacy. we taller than the chinese aircraf.[laughter] they say we good at math. we don't drive much but we make the cars. [laughter] so i grew up as korean supremacist environment. we never had another person of different race come to the close quarters. until my cousin married somebody who was not korean. and we had to deal with our korean supremacy. we had to deal with a racist supremacy. so why is this an important topic? why do i bring it up? because coming out to your parents is a functional and moral equivalent of interracial marriage when it comes to breaking down all the supremacy, and the political, to have a

product of an interracial marriage, not believe that gay people are equal in every respect, including the word marriage is an insult that reeks of that same supremacy. that's what i say, that's not what my politicians on notice, and a c-span issue right now so i would like to say that all of the people who are hearing this, it's not homophobia anymore. it's straight supremacy. we will battle it and we will win. [applause] >> i hope i answered your question. go ahead. >> first of all before anything, i am so touched, i've been crying in line. because i'm queer and i know how

hard that can be. and i say this even though -- c-span here and that scares me because i'm not out to everybody. i grew up in korean church, and you know, if god, my korean church was so korean supremacist in jesus supremacist, and straight supremacists, that you know, they convinced me to vote yes on prop a. and a year and half later, i'm gay. i think i'm kind of day. so it's been kind of ridiculous. and i just want to ask you if you have gotten a lot of hate from the korean community, or if they're just trying to ignore you, or, and what do you think that progressive korean people, like myself, can do for our community? because for a while i just want to distance myself from

everybody. and i didn't want to talk to anybody from my former church or, you know, anyone. i don't think that's the best thing to do, but i don't really know how to reach out and say hey, this is who we are. >> i'm trying to think what to respond. i just want to give you a hug. [applause] [inaudible] [laughter] >> yeah, koreans are rough. [laughter] and i think it was very easy to

feel sad because of the situation that we are men and i've had many times when, you know, i don't want to admit as a soldier, especially some of his time to show that gay people are just as strong, you know? i don't want to admit that i cried but i tried many times. and i've had two nervous breakdowns in this journey, and i think it's amazingly powerful, amazingly strong that you stood up there and you said this is who i am, and this with all of my tears and my emotional, my spiritual being, this is what him. so i salute you for standing up. [applause] >> sometimes it's harder to get doing it, especially when you become an activist. and it's very difficult because you hear a lot of the advice

from white people who pretend as if korean people are just like white people, and there's so much that we don't understand. and it sometimes so lonely and individual journey, but i found that when you do things like stand up, the more and more the just ended, even in a group of people who do respect you and do love you, it's still difficult. and we feel like victims by the only antidote for victimization is confrontation. you cannot let somebody else confront the operation for you. you have to do it yourself. and i've really only found that with all, yes, i've had many facebook messages from korean people who are supportive, but some hit home the hardest because they were not supportive, there were people i knew, people i've taught bible school, bible study every sunday. and they said god does not forget this, and my roommate at

west point, and i've never had a role model in a lot of times in my life. somebody who was just like me. very hard to find somebody who was korean and southern baptist and gay and arabic speaker and going to west point and going to war. [laughter] but you have to do that. you have to do that for you and you have to do that for somebody else, and you teach them that when you are bullied, even by the passive bullying, because it doesn't take much to boldly somebody. when you have the entire traditional culture on your si site. and so you feel bullied even when there's nobody who is a visible hate crime in you. and our community is unique to all of the communities on this issue of hate crimes and bullying and the isolation, because the perpetrator of the hate crimes in our community are by and large are ourselves. we hate crime ourselves. we tell ourselves that we are

not worthwhile. we think that we will never amount to other people, and especially when you are born to think that your only value is how many grandchildren you make your korea mama. 12 of them. i realize that it's not easy, but the worst hate crime that anybody can inflict upon themselves is the hate crime of suicide, because they were not told by their parents and not told by their entirety community those words. my sister showed me his song, hold on when you feel like letting go, hold on, it gets better than you know. we all go through the pain, and we've been through it and we're here, we're going through it with you. you know, and so i know.

your question was specific to be in korean, but your power and your strength to come here and share that with the tears streaming down your cheeks is a message to all people, no matter what they're going through. it's going to be a tough year. nobody ever said that this is going to be easy in college. you made it to a good school, and maybe sometimes you think am i going to give up? and that's when you need to do yourself hold on. and somebody might be sitting next to you smiling, never think that they're going through the toughest day of their lives but that's when you tell them, hold on when you feel like letting go, hold on. you can't be ashamed to say that because we are really good at hiding our emotion, korean people are. and i think when they help each other, sometimes the best way is to stand up for ourselves.

thank you for your question and thank you. [applause] >> hi. first off i want to thank you so much once again for serving and forgetting your very kind words. i really appreciate that a lot. my question is, this is a two-part question, what do you consider the activist, and do you consider yourself one? >> queer activism i believe have so made different ideas, many people don't like, especially because, there's this one guy who always e-mailed me as if you are the stupidest person or because you use the word queer. queer is not the word to use. and i recognize that many people don't understand the idea of queer, and we never say queer in the military either. because queer encompasses so

many things. and although i did start off saying that this is the uniform of all americans, we still are struggling with transgender people in the military. [applause] naand i believe it is high timeo educate ourselves and to abolish the discrimination against transgender people in the u.s. military just like in 10 other countries, some of them our best allies. did you know that prince william when he got married, he invited his flight buddy in the royal air force? his flight buddy is transgender and is having gender reassignment surgery date for either british military. and so, along with the top 10

countries leading that charge, i put it is time for our military to realize the same. transgender have been serving for 235 years now, and simply because we did know the definition of transgendered does not mean that we have any excuse so the idea of queer and comes in more than just transgender, i would say that we would never say queer in the military because if queer means everything from same-sex marriage and relationships to people who dye their hair green, military does not believe that people should just dye their hair green or fit into the idea of that. queer construct as it is. however, i think that the word queer been inclusive and making a place for all people is exactly what the military fights

for, and what we do as americans not just for certain kinds of people who have gender privilege, who have the privilege of getting into their certain gender binary roles, i believe that we have a long way to go to realize what it is that we're actually fighting for, and i believe anybody who wears this reform fight for two things, freedom and justice. and i don't see anybody who wears this uniform fit to say that they don't fight for those things. if they don't buy for those things they don't deserve to wear the uniform. so yes, i am a queer activist. i don't think that our community is well served by a bisexual man who does not believe in marriage equality. so i was a first off that the shame of that incident was that there are people in our own committee who hate themselves so much that they're willing to put that on display and i can the behavior needs to be eradicated. and some people will not understand simply by my

explaining for an hour on and. you have to realize something also about the media, in that within the soundbites that we can provide, people have add in this country, and so the idea of making it an issue sometimes does not offer us the entire hour or two, to have such an audience. were you there at netroots? so should only the small part of it? >> we will go with that. >> right. so i would advise any of dash that anybody who has to figures -- you can't do it. so you have to realize that something should do have to capture people's attention, and they do have to dramatize the situation. as a military person i recognize that it's hard to be an activist, you know, tell you the truth, in iraq we were called activists by different names. we were called terrorists, insurgents, detainees.

i recognize that if i did some of the things that i do, and this was iraq, then i were probably be in abu ghraib or guantánamo. so i recognize that making that leap from being a military person becoming an activist, sometimes doesn't work in people's heads. but in my mind to do this work right now it is an honor that does vindicate my and higher education and my entire experience in serving this country, because i learned as an activist why i thought. and i learned as a soldier, continue to be in the military as an activist, as a gay activist, as a queer activists, that all of the discipline, to continue on and to put yourself on the front line, those skills are transferable to activism. so i would say i wouldn't do anything different, and my being

an activist has made me a better soldier, and my being a soldier has made me a better activist. [applause] >> i just want to thank you for giving me a perspective. i do study god's word, but not only words that you give me a perspective of the first commandment. and i believe that there is a god of love. i feel the love in this room and i love being in this room. when i say thank you but sharing about you and your sister, also came out to me and i was the first person after going two christian camp. and the first thing i wrote on my paper was i am somebody and may have found his calling to be

pastor now. i'm just glad that he has found his somebody. >> sure. >> and i just want to say how is that process with you and your sister? and i would love to meet her. because it's tough being can he is the man of the family. how do i say this? for, let's say, income we grew we grew up in a christian family, where do you find that love when you constantly get rejected? or what do you say over what, besides the love, what is the consistent love? where is it that? >> thank you for that question, and also thank you for being an ally, especially enough that your brother will come out to you. i will give my sister that opportunity and the question if she wants. i know she's already embarrassed

because you brought her up. maybe she will meet you at the reception afterwards. on the spot one more time, i'm going to disown you. [laughter] but being a christian and being gay is also a dichotomy, a seemingly dichotomy, seemingly turned against itself, a double identity. i believe that we do gods work, especially when you look at jesus story, as was many of the profits of the bible and all the religious traditions and saints throughout the history of the world. jesus was very discriminate against for him that in the roman empire when his people were subjugated and told that they were not, that they did not have full access to the resources that the country, that empire was saying was available, and why the roman empire was so great, because it's only for those citizens, and so subjugation is nothing new. and in the bible when you

realize that jesus plot against many of the traditional religious jurists and scholars, the elites, when he talked to nicodemus, so when he was questioned so many people as to his tactics, when he overturned tables and said, many people said that jesus was violent because he did that and it was property destruction, and he would don't use and he said, and after he did that he said i will tear down this temple and build it up in three days. but what did people focus on? i will tear down this temple. and after, what do you think? wow. this guy is a troublemaker. and i believe that jesus and the stories and the lessons that pot of disobedience -- the lessons that top of disobedience, those lessons make him the bulwark of civil disobedience theory, and

and the hallmark of what it means to be nonviolent and nonlethal in your civil resistance and civil disobedience through all of history inspired gandhi, inspired dr. martin luther king, inspired people all over the world who have fought and use the same tactics. but sometimes you must put yourself into that lions den, or into that tough situation. and put yourself out there on behalf of everybody else. and when you teach those lessons, when you teach all of the lessons of jesus in its totality you will realize that even with all the discrimination and all of the religious stigma, jesus wasn't treated very well at the end of the day. but i believe that the legacy that he leaves not only for christians, but for people all over the world, no matter what

their religious tradition, is priceless. and it did come with sacrifice. so we would talk about bearing the cross, gay people library that cross today more than anyone. especially because of the church trying to disown them. [inaudible] >> thank you. [applause] >> high, lieutenant choi. i just want to say it's a pleasure to ask to get to hear you talk. you have been an inspiration to me in stepping up and being much more of a vocal ally of the gay and lesbian bisexual transgender movement. i grew up with a very conservative family when any support that i might have shown for this movement had to be stifled, otherwise, and so i just want to say that anybody, anybody here who has been facing any of that, i for one, i send you guys all the love and all the support, everything i can, i will work as hard as i can to make sure that you guys can have

the same rights and the same privileges that i've got. [applause] >> so i had kind of a two-part question for you, lieutenant choi. firstar, i tweeted and i thought about it and i had two questions about it of common aspect of first or, as somebody who is a straight ally, how else can i help the movement speakers as a straight ally communing other than making more gay babies? >> yes. [laughter] >> and it's something we must say again. there's something we learn from the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s when black students, young people were sitting in lunch counters that were segregated. many people were frustrated because they never got the media attention that they deserve. and even before greensboro and the woolworth lunch counter, the once made famous, many people were angry because it was only

when white people joined them that they got the mass media attention that they did but, in fact, there were many situations where a white person was murdered, or beaten or killed that if i started to understand the civil rights movement. and i recognize that in our movement we cannot ourselves do it all on our own, but nobody else can do this work for us. nobody else can write the repeal of the don't ask, don't tell in our hearts. some people can sign a piece of legislation. so people can make a declaration, but it is up to gay people to do that ourselves, and repeal and abolished the don't ask, don't tell and their homes, in our churches by simply violating the cultural don't ask, don't tell that we still have. and so we still need allies in the fight, and the more that you're able to educate people

the better. and i think that our movement is so unique to all the other movements because it's exponentially grows in momentum, because the power of coming out is really the only weapon that we have in this fight. the money and the media and all of the other things, we don't control. we don't control but we know that by coming out and not giving up, that's the one thing that only gay people can do. other than that, as a straight person, to continue coming out in the same way that we do as a straight ally, and to tell people why it is important to you. because you probably get more pointed questions that i do. between the people that are afraid to ask about gay issues and the people that simply want to attack you for being a straight ally. i realize that it's a very difficult journey and the need

for people who can translate the message to other communities is absolute. and the lessons that we learned something that world war ii taught us. a chaplain, lutheran minister by the name of martin, pointed out most eloquently why somebody should stand up for somebody else. he wrote first they came for the jews. i didn't speak up because i was not a jew. then they came for the homosexuals. i didn't speak up because i was not homosexual. then they came for the trade unionists. i didn't speak up. i didn't belong to a trade union. then they came for me. by that time there was nobody left to speak up for me. and when you recognize that the oppression and the oppressor

that we face as gay people are the same people that want to take away the rights and turn back the clock on every movement, all forms of justice, then you understand the idea of intersection of oppression, if that was too heavy for you, then i will quote the profit and so on dotson to hide your kids, hide your wife. [applause] because of their outing everybody out here. i don't mean to make a light issue of rape, but i was sick for profit and juan dotson was right on that would. that are coming for you, homeboy. [laughter] >> my other question was, i have a major and public health education. i'm not sure how familiar you would be in terms of health care are in that sort of a field, but can you give any sort of advice to me as i'm going through and, coupled with being the ally, being a feminist, and being able to work with the public.

can you give any advice to me for that? >> well, i think part of the progressive problem today is that our messaging sucks. >> yes, it does. we have to simple by. the problem is one of tradition on our site. and so we have to come up with new ideas come and so we need a longer sound bite in or to explain what it is we're doing. but we have to realize that we own those values just as much as people who want to keep their form of those values. and when we use those words on her, when we talk about that, readily understandable, i'm kind of make up new words they're going to compete with the people are trying to roll back our equality or rollback our health care or rollback all of our human and civil rights, you take claim to those guys and don't be ashamed of that. >> thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> i actually have a question from my friend who is currently in school in houston, texas.

and he first wants to thank you for allowing to serve his country round as a gay person, and he has come out to everyone that he's basic of saying yes, i am gay and yes, i can serve my country. but his question to you is, what do you do when people tell you that you don't deserve to serve your country, that you don't deserve to wear the uniform and protected because you're gay? and what advice do you have him to kind of keep his spirit of the? >> well, the arguments that many people have given as to what i don't deserve, i know that we've already talked about straight supremacy. we poverty talk about stereotypes and difficulties in certain cultures. all of that applies, but i ask what are you so afraid of? and i always point back to the fact that if you're willing to go and serve your country and take a bullet for your country

and for your team, then to assume that you would be uncomfortable or that you would be afraid is an indictment of you. and let me be frank here. many people said it was the showers, or was, you know, seeing people naked. and there was a lot of discussion about whether we are going to have segregated showers or whether we're going to have segregated bunks it what you think happened when went back to the military when i was openly gay and just came out on tv and went to the military the next day? nothing happened. nothing happened to everybody turned gay, that's what happened. [laughter] with all linked the cancan. we were marching all uppity. we were switching all iran. we shine our shoes of, or tight pants and had a lot of feathers.

actually, it wasn't that different from a normal military parade. [laughter] so i would tell people that when you are faced with that kind of difficult confrontation, i was homophobic when i was growing up. i said some of the most straight supremacist things. i called people bag. i said no homo. i said that's so gay. because the best way to hide is to pretend that your enemy is what you are on the inside. don't just take that as a theory. it was in 1996 study at university of georgia, just a method of, a scientific method where they would basically put a rubber band on a wiener and they

would show these aggressive males, aggressive homophobes, aggressive anti-gay guys pornography. they would show them straight pornography and then gay pornography. and they showed news in between, right? and it wasn't anderson cooper. [laughter] ..

and we all know that is true because st. men or the real straight men don't really care about gay porn. don't really care about gay sex. the only people who really do care about gay sex are gay men or gay people. so what you are confronted with, people who are so aggressively that we must ask them what do you have to hide? for gay people when somebody confront you with that kind of bigotry or that kind of ignorance, it is most important to come out to those people because they are the ones that need the most help. >> thank you and thank you again not just for the military but in the community. >> thank you. [applause] >> all right. thank you bridge lending us today and nissan and giving us

your -- get to have. my question to you is given the opportunity to rejoin your team and be active would you take that opportunity? or take the opportunity of being the face of the next phase of the equality? what would you choose given those options? >> it is a false choice actually. i was going to continue to be an activist because that is what our country needs. i have an application to reenlist in the united states army. [applause] when you fight for justice it never dies in a vacuum. it spreads to all sorts of people who need to hear that message. fighting for justice is not fighting for just a loss. when you talk about freedom and justice, when you talk about the reasons for this uniform you put

everybody on notice and you say if you are struggling with anything, be inspired by those who choose both, who choose not just to see a dichotomy, not to choose that kind of false logic because serving your country comes in many forms. you serve your country by wary that legalized gay shirt or educating yourself because our country needs people who solve the problems, not just military, not just discrimination but all people who are struggling, who are suffering and that is the reason any of us take that oath to protect america. thank you for your questions and thank you for coming. [applause] >> please join me once again in thanking mr. choi.

thank you. [applause] >> more road to the white house coverage on the c-span network. presidential candidate john huntsman will give remarks and take questions at the new england college. live coverage from concord and beleaguered in new hampshire at 9:00 eastern on c-span2. later newt gingrich participate in a live call-in program at the dartmouth medical school in lebanon, new hampshire at 10:20 eastern on c-span. >> because i didn't speak and i didn't give a window into my life i have become kind of an evil cartoon. i didn't help myself by wearing a hat coming out in court but i have become a villain and i wanted to show people i am not an evil person. i am a regular person. i did things that were wrong but i don't have a tail and warns. i grew up like everybody else. >> this weekend on after word on

c-span2's booktv power and corruption on capitol hill. one of the most influential lobbyists in washington, jack abrams of was convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy in 2006. his story saturday night. juan gonzalez and joseph tour as on the world's segregation played the way news was reported sunday at 2:00 p.m.. and marty nemerov on what it takes to be a successful female publisher and author at 11:15 p.m.. booktv every weekend on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] >> thank you so much. >> thanks for coming.

thank you. >> c-span's road to the white house coverage of politics taking on the campaign trail with the candidates. >> thanks for being here. appreciate that. watch c-span's coverage of the new hampshire primary on c-span television and on our web site c-span.org. ♪ >> now look at the tenth anniversary of the collapse of enron. hear from journalists and former enron vice president. the school for communication and journalism posted this 1-hour forum which took place at u.s. c in los angeles. [inaudible conversations]

>> thanks for coming to this event. we have two distinguished panelists here. of course 2011 is an incredible opportunity to talk about corporate america and corporate collapse and we have an important lesson which we could look at here which is in fact exactly ten years old. it is stunning to some of us. two year since enron's collapse. a lot of lessons for us to learn from that collapse and to apply it today. we have got two people here who were front row protagonists in enron's collapse from two perspective is. john emshwiller is an investigative reporter rock wall street journal who documented a lot of the issues that lead to some of the investigations around enron and did a lot of

the reporting that brought to light some of the practices, accounting practices. karen denne is former adjunct professor and vice president of public relations at enron and saw this transpire from a completely different perspective. we are here today to contrast these two viewpoints to look at the same event from two angle. i want to quickly review some of the details of enron because i realize ten years might seem like a blink of an eye for some of view, it isn't as prominent in your memory. enron with a corporate darling for so long. it got tremendous press coverage and this amazing growth. it was formed in 1985 by a merger of two other companies and by 2000 it had 22,000 employees. five years in a row fortune magazine ranked it the most innovative company in america.

acclaimed revenue of $100 billion in 2000. its largest value went from $10 billion in 1995 to $70 billion in 2000 and that ended very quickly. john will tell you about it and its stock went from $90 very briefly, to essentially nothing in one year. many of the major executive are doing time and completed their sentences now. one of them cheated jail by dying. it also led to the dissolution of arthur andersen among other things. it lead to legislation. and some of the reporting on enron quickly turned. john was one of the people who wrote some of the early stories

that questions the accounting at enron and of course this was some of the final chapters the press wrote about enron. we have time for questions. about 45 minutes after the hour but i just want to ask and 11. you worked -- karen. it must've been a wonderful place to work for so many years. it had wonderful news stories one after the other. what was it like to work there in the beginning? >> it was a great place to work. i absolutely loved it. even knowing how things turned out i would do the entire experience again in a heartbeat. there was incredible energy at the company. there were the smartest people i ever had the good fortune of working with. incredibly dedicated bleacher the hard-working, talented -- it was amazing. it was a lot of fun.

when i started i was at enron from 1997 to 2004. when i started the company knowingly -- no one had heard of enron. i was some from southern california. i was a newspaper reporter who moved into public relations and i was recruited to enron as a corporate journalists -- generalist. my friends that enron was -- no one knew what the energy company was. the media coverage was really contained to industry stories. it was in megawatt daily and electricity daily. it really wasn't a company that was covered in the mainstream press. as the company took off, as revenue increased, as the stock price grew, as we expanded into internet trading and broadband and derivatives and freight train the media coverage and media interest increased.

because the media department and the public relations department and the company was so metrics driven and results oriented we had to quantify the work that we did. buy 2,000 we had generated some positive stories about enron. the goal was cover stories. it wasn't enough to generate a positive story. we wanted cover stories and to deliver on that too. in 2000-2001 -- >> tell us the first moment it occurred to you something was going wrong? >> to be honest it was when we filed for bankruptcy. hy was in such denial. you have to realize the enron crisis happened ten years ago, long before any of the wall street since that have since permeated the news pages. this was really at the time absolutely unheard of that the seventh largest company in america could virtually evaporates. the stock price could fall so

precipitously. that the company would just go out of business. it was unheard of. for the internal perception we were trying to save the company. we were trying to turn the company around. we were trying to put together a merger with a rival energy company down the street. until we finally filed for bankruptcy we thought we could still save the company. >> i do want to mention that while john and karen worked at cross purposes they emerged with a lot of respect. karen even listed john as a reference when she was applying for her current job. despite that, she got the job. john, can you tell us -- this was not your primary piece at a time. you got sucked into this story because of a number of sort of strange coincidences. can you tell us you're first interaction with enron and the story that later led to its

bankruptcy? >> i did not cover enron and i had few experiences at enron in the middle of 2001. i was dragoned into covering the california energy crisis you might remember. we had dealings with enron calling them up about various controversies dealing with that because enron and other giant energy traders particularly enron being blamed by many of the state's for either causing or contributing to the electricity shortages that were ravaging large parts of california. that was my basic experience with enron. they were very friendly and open to talking at that point about this. i had positive views of enron to the degree that they were at least a talkative corporation. zen as you mentioned i got fooled in in august of 2001 when

an event happened that essentially change the future of enron. jeff dillinger was president and executive officer and architect in many ways of enron-karen was talking about suddenly up and quit after just six months as chief executive. he was in his late 40s. people thought he would be the head of enron for the next decade or more. suddenly he quit and gave the region as family reasons which of course no reporter ever believe when a chief executive resigned for family reasons. but we didn't have a good alternative explanation. i was out of town that day. the regular enron reporter was on vacation for the week so when i got to town the next day, the day after the announcement i sort of got ordered to do a follow-up story which you hate to do follow-up stories when there's nothing to say.

stalin called mark palmer and said can i have an interview if he is still there? i will try to set it up. enron almost always got you on the line with top executives. sometimes almost pushed top executives to talk to you. very different from many corporations. in preparation for this possible interview, i did a quick search of the most recent filings because i knew very little about the corporation and its operation beyond the california electricity. it just so happened the day before, enron filed its quarterly report with the fcc for the second quarter. i had been caught by other older wiser wall street journal reporters -- when you are on a lot of time, one of the places you go is the related party transactions section where they have the list of all the possible dealings corporate

executive had with the company outside of their regular jobs. that is where you get the little conflict of interest like the chairman idiot nephew -- finger painting for $250,000 a year and they have to report that to the public. i was in the enron section ends of these transactions involving hundreds of millions of dollars of dealings between enron and unnamed entities that were being run by some unnamed senior executive which i immediately thought was killing and this is why he quit. i called polar and he told me know. i knew so little about enron at the time i said who is andy hasbow and he said the chief financial officer for the company. made me feel like an idiot but i didn't know. that was the first moment that i started thinking this sounds like an incredible conflict of interest. that is what sort of -- that

discovery set us off on digging deeper into what turned out to be the so-called l.a. partnerships that and he was running on behalf of himself and doing deals with enron which later turned out basically hiding hundred of millions of dollars of losses the company otherwise would have had to report in 2000 into 2001 and that reporting took us up to the crisis and helped trigger the crisis. >> there are many seminal moments in this end story of enron, but one was the night before the earnings release, october 16th. can you tell us a little about what was happening? i don't think the company ever reported a loss of steady growth and on this day they reported a loss of several hundred million dollars which i think shocked

everyone. >> let me explain a little how corporate earnings release took place at enron. when i started at the company the quarterly earnings press release was generated by the pr department and we would get numbers from investor relations. we released before the opening of the market so we would have a core pr team that would stay late. the night before we would get hotel rooms. there is a hotel adjacent to the enron building. we would stay up late into the night. we would lock the earnings release and we would be there's a next morning to go out on the wires. about a year before this happened the earnings release process shifted to investor relations. we were no longer responsible for the content of the press release. all we did was put it out on the wire. was a blessing in disguise because the investor relations executives -- [laughter] -- hopefully not.

before that release went through the regular process. things started closing going back to the office and we were on the 40 ninth floor, actually the 40 seventh floor. the executive for the the 50th 4. word trickled down from the 50th 4 that there was a problem with the numbers so every hour we would check in. where are we on the numbers? we would like to get two or three hours of sleep tonight. so finally word came down that the accountants were having trouble signing off on the numbers. probably around 3:00 in the morning we started talking about what would happen if we didn't have the numbers to release before the market? finally the numbers came down, none of us went to the hotel or got any sleep. we got the release out on the wire and the moment before the 5:00 or 5:3 release. i remember it at the time there were sections in the press

release that didn't make sense. i had questions about it. my background was a newspaper reporter so i knew there were phrased live there were red flags that we would get questions about that didn't make sense. i was told that is nothing. everything is fine. don't worry about that. they were indeed the very quotes and phrases that john and rebecca picked up on. >> the funding is the report of $100 million, what got to be these lousy assets that the partnerships were hiding through various hedging transactions they had done. a huge loss but enron spent it in the sense that they report one operating profit with the classic corporate way of dealing with bad news. you find some part -- the good news and say the other stuff is one time events. and the press basically on the

day they announced earnings bought it. the stock price went up the day they announced $600 million loss. some of the stories even mention a right off and kenneth lay went on all these talk shows and said great quarter, we are set for the future, everything is going to be great, heading toward $200 billion revenue they will report in 2001. everybody was -- seemed to be very happy. the face of it seemed to be terrible news. this as something about the company's position at that time in the sort of corporate firmament and something about the press's view of the world in 2001 still and the fact is people just weren't questioning what this was all about and wall

street wasn't. we call wall street analysts -- the loss triggered us to porche what we discovered about l day and into the paper on the assumption that somebody else in the press, new york times or somebody was going to say we'd better start doing something about enron. we didn't want to get beat and we would be working steadily since august trying to dig into various aspects of the partnership, talking to people, digging up some documents. we got waylaid by 9/11 when everyone in american journalism for two or three weeks was writing about nothing but terrorism. i remember the day after the earnings story, was going to come out the next day we had a front-page story, mine and a couple other people on the possibility of terrorists setting up nuclear-weapons in the united states. kind of a busy day.

we wanted to get in what we could and started getting these conflicting answers from enron from martin polymer about how much of this $600 million loss was due to this right of -- was due to l j m and enron came up -- i think mark was trying to give me a straight answer because i don't think he had the answer but he gave me one sort of number and came back with a much lower number. as it turned out, later we found out that the essentially the entire $600 million write-off was to l j m and the number they gave us on the record, much lower number had to do with the essentially a termination fee that they said this is a classic corporate thing and classic in some ways by enron especially -- they would give you very precise answers that were completely

misleading. but they would say ok, this is precisely -- i remember one guy told me when things were starting to go bad one of the analysts called and said have you hired bankruptcy counsel? and he was told no. we have hired bankruptcy counsel. what they had done was chosen bankruptcy counsel and hadn't yet signed the agreement. they hadn't hired bankruptcy counsel yet but there were going to. >> let me jump in because from the internal perspective we had employees we were trying to communicate with. we were putting together a merger. there were huge confidentiality issues that precluded us from going beyond -- granted had we been asked a question have you met with bankruptcy counsel, we never gave an out -- and answer we knew was not accurate. however we didn't open the

kimono and said we met with them this day and the paperwork is not signed so put that in the paper and we will see how the merger goes through. >> someone probably lied to mark about the white off. >> fulmer and i were had a shouting match at one point. steve cain bigger and with his boss, screaming at each other calling a liar, screening i never lied but i think somebody did lie to mark. somebody wrote the sec filings. enron was buried in their sec filings about the partnership and some of the wording was exquisitely precise and misleading. >> give a brief description of what the l j m partnership is. >> the biggest one was held j.m. 2. l j m was the initial first letter, first name of anti

basso's wife in tucson. basically the idea was while he remained cfo at enron was become a part managing partner of these partnerships which could be treated as separate entities for accounting purposes so that if enron wanted to hedge some assets ahead to protect the value of it, they could go to a third party would take on the risk theoretically of the asset. normally might go to goldman sachs or morgan stanley or someone with real money on their own. instead they went to ljm who had a certain amount of money to the andy basso at a lot of enron vendors. big banks to invest particularly in ljm 2. so they had this pool of capital from their investments. that enron worked out very complicated deals in which enron

was hedging of the value of their assets like a power plants and power deals with their own stock. if enron's value of their assets went down ljm woods for those losses but essentially using enron stock to of the losses which is one of the reasons why enron stock price became so critical for the company. when enron's stock price was $50 or $60 or $70 a share it could absorb a lot more losses than $35 or $36 a share which it was in october of 2001 by the time the crisis started. that started putting enormous pressure on the ljm deal. they were set up -- some entities called the raptors. enron have all kinds of -- andy basto had weird names for things. one of his other partnerships was named after shoebox a.

shoot--chewbac shoot--chewbacca. >> what about the relationship between the press office and the executives? you never felt you were purposely misleading reporters but what about your relationship with senior management and the kind of figures and information you were getting from them? >> we worked closely with top management both before crisis and throughout the crisis and when those third quarter earnings were released, that access and flow of information really dried up. in part because there was internal chaos in upper management didn't know what was going on. remember at one point kenneth way did not know what stock company had. no one could answer the question how much debt did enron have and that is a critical moment. the chief financial officer and chief accounting officer didn't know. at one point, this was further

on in the crisis when we had, quote, lawyered up, our chief of staff -- we had tried very hard to have strong media relations. the one thing i will say is it is important have solid relationships and good accessibility before there's a crisis. it will pay off in spades. we had trouble getting information internally and everything -- steve got a lawyer and sit on the 40 seventh floor. we had a trading floor environment and he did nothing but sit there and every statement we were able to release. the guidance we were given is anything you say to the media you have to be able to answer the question what was the basis for that statement? they were incredibly cautious. they had to scrub everything that we were able to tell the media but it was frustrating for us internally because we were so

used to having a lot of accessibility. we pride ourselves on being able to get back to reporters quickly with answers and really helping them to do their job. it was frustrating and we knew there was a lot going on but there was such internal chaos that we were stuck. i will tell you that the one moment that physically made me sick to my stomach was i had really done a lot of -- i did and the company spokesperson for the california energy crisis and we had been assured by our trading team, by top management that we had done nothing wrong at the california electricity market and when we heard the tapes of the traders manipulating the market, it made me sick because i knew -- >> thomas about -- >> with the traders said basically was burn baby burn grandma, you don't need any electricity tonight. they have manipulated power

outages and taken equipment down and caused rolling blackouts which jacked up energy prices. trading megawatt hours and really able to manipulate the process. so that was a sickening to realize we had been on the front lines saying we had done nothing wrong when clearly there was this behavior. >> the senior executives at one point there's a lot of pressure on andy fasto. and kenneth lay works to make a decision about andy fasto and how did that play out. >> kenneth lay held a conference call with analysts. meal was on as well. basically saying i have full confidence and andy fasto. he has done nothing wrong. everything is fine. the next day he was put on leave. again from a company perspective you got to have credibility. you have to have your action match what you are saying.

i think one of the further problems, andy fasto was put on leave and it took the board six months to fire him. >> the company didn't know and partly didn't know because they didn't try to know some of the key things about the ljm partnership. the board of directors and top management approved what was unique in a corporate relationship in the history of american corporations. i once did part of all this, went through the sec filings of fortune 500 companies, all 500 just to see if there was anything like it and he essentially there was nothing comparable to the ljm partnership. incredible conflict of interest. and seemingly sort of ignore for two years until andy fasto is doing what he is doing and sucking in losses and covering them and then this crisis hit

that we start writing about these partnerships and suddenly they are saying got to find out what is going on here and so the board of directors actually requests a meeting with andy fasto which i thought was incredible. when directors have to request a meeting with the cfo who works with them. so he deigned to meet with them and they ask him how much money have you made from these two partnerships in the last few years? supposedly he wasn't going to spend a lot of time on these partnerships. maybe a little ad on money and compensation to add to his paycheck so he tells, made $42 million. that was on the afternoon in that kenneth way gave this bear hug of support to andy fasto in front of the world. he tells the directors i made $42 million. they practically swallowed their tongue. that is probably what pushed him out. they kept finding out these time bombs that they should have

known. any competent responsible board of directors, i don't think in my opinion would have approved the ljm partnerships that if they had they should have found out what you doing and how much you are making and is the enron shareholder getting shafted or not and they let it roll along. one of the most irresponsible things i have ever seen a board of directors do. >> how much of this was apparent to you as it was unfolding? you always felt there would be some future for enron until the very end. when andy fasto was put on leave i don't know what the stock price was. >> started about 46 -- jump to 37 today they announced their earnings. we started running ten straight trading days that fell and what i mean by november 8th was the day they were test. that was when they came out their final eight days and said we can't rely on the last two

years of financial statements. >> they readjusted earnings -- >> basically yes. they renounce their premium and financial statement and write off things like this true gold partnership. >> so as the company has basically then announced the previous five years or six years of earnings information which you helped produce and disseminate can't be relied upon, how did that impact your job and how did you communicate that? >> we were in the eye of the storm. this was long before -- tweeting years ago before any company collapsed in the blink of an eye. we really didn't have any sense of the magnitude of what we were in the midst of. what did happen was the number of media calls escalated. a business crisis takes much longer to catch on publicly.

before anyone. it really took a long time for it to escalate. by the time we filed for bankruptcy we were fielding upwards of 300 media calls a day. there were four of us and two assistants. we couldn't keep up with the onslaught. >> questions of dealing with the media for a company like enron, part of the media openness and i think karen will agree with the large member a reflection of the personality of gillick's approach to corporate affairs. jeff was a very self confident man in many ways and believed almost with religious fervor in the enron story. he was always open much to his credit even after the crisis when things went south for him about talking to reporters. when he left, there was a change at the top. kenneth way was much less open

to talking especially about things that were critical at enron. so when we put a call, we started digging up this stuff that we felt was serious. questions and allegations to have an interview with kenneth way and andy fastow and chief accounting officer and 01 that were made available expecting they would make everybody available like they always did. instead i got a call back from mark fulmer saying send us a list of written questions. in my experience and becky's experience nobody at enron had asked for a list of written questions so that was odd. we put together a very extensive list of written questions. and there was apparently a large debate within enron i later found out about whether -- how to respond. andy fastow with very much against talking at all and lay went along with that. they sent back a one paragraph,

very bland restatement we haven't done anything wrong. in some ways that was my first real sense that we might be on to something big. >> the mapped where the treasury's buried kind of response. >> they wouldn't tell us anything about it but by not talking they suddenly gave me a sense that something is seriously wrong that they don't want to talk about. >> before they came out with earnings -- >> before they announce their loss. >> they basically shut it down. it is interesting. this list of questions came back to haunch kenneth way. when the company collapsed and the federal justice department came in and they basically scooped up every document in enron, one of the documents they scooped up was our list of

questions so kenneth lay when he was on trial basically was trying to claim that i didn't notice until then, didn't know this until then. so that therefore statements that he made publicly which the government says he was lying about because of his knowledgeably delighted even know that then. some of the things he said he didn't know about were being asked by us in late september. and so the prosecution used all the questions they insist on getting to undercut his credibility which helped convict him. >> you remember this episode of the questions? >> mark palmer was on the front lines dealing with upper management on that but i knew there were problems. we were pushing because we had an open relationship with reporters in the past. we were of the belief that any time there's negative news get it all out at once and be as up

front as possible. there was a lot of hesitancy because they didn't know what was going on. they didn't know the extent. >> some of them did. >> also be day after when earnings were restated kenneth lay declared we have a pr problem. this wasn't a pr problem. it went far deeper than that. he probably did believe until his dying day of the collapse of the company was called -- caused by the wall street journal. >> the trial--corporate collapse of the company and nothing wrong with the company. >> have stock price gone up none of this would have been disclosed. >> i always thought they'd too lost about the around contributions to the collapse. >> they are now. >> they're not unhappy places. >> can you just talk again about

managing this shift with media where you had been open and actress you had to your own senior management disappears and what was it like to confront the press with this new face of enron? >> we tried -- we had solid relationships with a lot of reporters so we were honest. i don't know. i can't get straight answers internally. when we did get answers we were able to count them with it is my understanding that or what i am told is but we realize that some point that we couldn't necessarily trust the answers we get in or they would change from day today as mark found out with the amount -- >> what do you think reporters picked up on with the tone of your answers when the tone changed and your certainty also changed? >> they knew something was going on. reporters are reporters for a reason. they ask questions and they know

if something is not right. >> at a certain point you started to get a decent amount of information from outside and the one. people started giving you tips and clues about where to look for things. how did that change your reporting? >> our initial -- we got initial break very early on after we wrote first story mentioning these ljm partnerships briefly. we got a call from a source that was never identified but was very helpful in telling us there was a lot more and pointing to some documents that helped to delineate the ljm relationship and activities. but we were still in the dark a lot. we didn't have a lot of ideas because enron was a complicated company. if you read their sec disclosures they were almost

indecipherable. like somebody got paid to make them as unintelligible as possible especially regarding the ljm partnership. they are almost laughable. i pushed the paper early on to put an entire section from the sec filing in which i would never do because it is boring but just to show that these things made no sense to and outside reader. even analysts. the incredible thing is many analysts who covered enron didn't know about the enron partnerships until we read about and even though they were in the sec filings. it was buried but there for two years. this guy is getting paid half a million dollars a year to do their job and don't even bother to read the entire event sec filing of one of the biggest companies they cover. -was thinking i was getting underpaid. >> you brought up a good point. another one of the frustrations internally was the media had more information than we got.

as more sources came forward and shared information with the journal and with other reporters and they would call us, with the partnership out of left field came all the rest. we look at each other -- [talking over each other] >> early on there was clearly -- >> still believes in the company. it was ten years ago today that the deal from synergy was announced that, was going to by enron and was a much smaller competitor basically. when that happened when that came about, how did that change your perception about the seriousness of the problem. >> that was the saving grace. of going to get us out of the crisis. everything would be fine.

i am sure can lay thought we will split again and head the new enron. so then the focus became we have to save the company and this is how we do it so we focused on internal packages of internal communication. how are we going to m port this and explain this is -- how will be communicated externally? >> you say kenneth way thought he was still going to emerge from this intact and this is an attitude we have seen in 2008-2009 with a lot of wall street titans that still believed they somehow we're going to get by no matter what, lehman brothers, jimmy came at bear stearns. can you tell me a little -- both of you -- about your impression of what kenneth way was thinking and how he was viewing this at this time? >> i worked closely with kenneth way and jeff skilling.

jeff was the father figure of the company. everyone loved him. he was well-respected. he had a tremendous civics identity. it was a traitor mentality. as you got to know both of them, people tended to like jeff more and can if less. he was very concerned with helping -- there were rumors he at one point had been in a cabinet position in the white house. very politically connected. and at one point he tried to get the government to step in and bail out the company. >> ten years too early. >> on a lot of things. >> and alone. it helps when you have the entire wall street coming. i don't think the bush administration -- wasn't worth the political cost to george bush to save a dying company run

by a political crony so they basically -- >> before too big to fail. as a founder he wanted -- this was his identity. he had created this company with the merger of two pipeline companies and he was going to save it. he wasn't going to have his reputation or the company after vacation tarnished. >> let's talk about the very end of enron and we will have an opportunity for questions. the dynergy deal quickly comes to deal and quickly fall apart. what was it like as that was falling apart from inside the company? >> the dynergy on thanksgiving weekend, the dynergy deal was falling apart and we knew we were going to file for bankruptcy. that was it. it was the sunday night of thanksgiving weekend we file for bankruptcy and delaware and suit

basel for the failure of the merger. at that point all hell broke loose inside the company because employees turned on the tv, saw that the company was they crept, traders started partying. a lot of other employees started taking furniture. they wheeled chairs out the front door. took the potted plants, boarded up anything they could and headed out the front door. we had half a dozen or eight satellite trucks out in front filming all of this. it was absolutely surreal. that was really not even the end of the crisis. it continued going long after that. >> do you remember -- do you expect bankruptcy to be the way this story was going to end? >> not initially. we started this story really as a corporate conflict of interest story. back in august be brittle september of 2001 thinking andy fastow found a way to make extra

bucks at the shareholders's expense. you never foresaw the snowballing that this would have. i don't think i figured they were toast until that november 8th sec filing where they renounced what they had been reporting that their financials for the past two years. then it was pretty clear they weren't going to survive as an independent entity. they have to merge with somebody and rumors going around that they're looking for somebody. and the next day they had somebody. or they couldn't get somebody they end up in bankruptcy court because they're trading operation was going into vapor lock. as your stock price collapses your confidence collapses and your trading partners which are the heart of enron were asking for more collateral. more and more cash up front to do a deal and they were sucking cash in like a sponge. putting down their threaded line at $3 billion and used it in a

week. i think i got another $1 billion from dynergy. they used that like nothing. they ran out of cash. without cash there are not many alternatives in a corporation. by early november it was clear they're not going to be enron any more. wasn't clear what they're going to be. >> do you remember your last day at enron? did you were passed a bankruptcy? >> i was part of the restructuring team. times retain 2-1/2 years after the bankruptcy. >> what was that like? working for essentially a carcass? >> a much slower pace. [laughter] our messageing and interests change. we were looking for creditors. our job became preserving value for our creditors. in the midst of the crisis we made a decision not to do any broadcast interviews because we

didn't have confidence in the answers or the information we were given. or anyone on the team -- working in a position to stand in front of a television camera and not have acceptable answers. after rebate pretty -- >> always -- >> the fbi consecrating -- confiscating the shredder. two years after the bankruptcy we were working for the creditors we were going to auction off surplus items. the access computers, the board room furniture. at that time we made the decision it made sense to do a broadcast interview. it was an online auction and we thought we are going to generate as much interest in that. i want to talk about the auction. has soon as it aired the number of auction lines or phone lines they had for the auction block the circuit. it completely exceeded the capacity.

>> it should have been -- all right. you went on to write a book about this please the 24 days which is still taught in school and elsewhere and is a greater count, still available. and you continue to follow the enron story for years after words in court cases and an appeal that went to the supreme court. is there one sort of big lesson you took away from this whole experience? >> i don't know. i suppose it is better to be honest than to lie. it is worse to law and because than to live. i don't know. enron in some ways, jeff skilling used to say that enron was caught in a perfect storm. oddly enough in some degree he was right. when enron collapsed, there were lots of things we didn't know

about the inner workings of enron. that would come out through this gigantic federal investigation which i think was the largest federal investigation ever of a single corporation. they created this path for us that was unprecedented. one question people could have is relatively few indictments out of 2008-2009 of corporate officials. that may be because it is not the evidence that is so widespread. i suspect there was not a single corporation out of that that was investigated the way enron was. they had a dozen federal prosecutors. probably 20 to 25 fbi, irs and sec investigators working full time for two years. you go through every nook and cranny of that company. i suspect if you did that with any other corporation you would

find some things. enron was -- [inaudible] >> but yes. might not be. enron, i think, did some outrageous things. were they more outrageous than the other things that went on? i am not sure. some of those mortgage-backed securities these companies were peddling were just astonishingly bad. so i don't know. not sure what lessons to draw from that but enron got the but end. >> you said that it was certainly an exciting experience that you wouldn't -- looking back on it in ten years what comes to mind? what is the -- what is your take away from this chapter? >> there are a couple lessons. it with a lifetime force of

experience in a short period of time but i would have done it again. it was such an amazing experience. i would have taken notes and written a book. i wouldn't have been -- my 401(k) was 100%. >> one point on this. looking back on it do you see red flags that you ignored? >> there were red flags long before john and rebecca started riding the stories. there were a lot of insider stock sales. >> selling your own shares? >> significantly they had to be reported. when we got questions about them they were always good answers. tax purposes or getting a divorce or buying a new house. there were always explanations. that was one concern. anytime you have odd executive behavior's, jeff skilling called an analyst an expletive on an analyst called.

that was concerning. kenneth way called a pr department and said the music was upbeat. could we change the old music? things like that. >> for a while the old music was tina turner singing simply the best. that was in the better days. >> a lot of executive departures. we had a number of business unit and the ceos were gradually dropping off and weaving the company. >> i would like to open up the opportunity for members of the audience to ask our panelists about this experience and hope there are some questions here. let me look through. bob scheer has the first question. remember it is a question. [talking over each other] >> i am not. what we are talking about is a criminal enterprise defined as such and yet you say you -- they were happy, they were smart, you

would go back and do it again. no remorse. i don't quite get it. if this was a mafia enterprise it would be on a much lower level there would be some soul-searching. what is the damage? people lost their savings. this cheerful, wonderful mood describing the idea of that -- the others may even be worse. describing a system of profound corruption. so my question first of all, you had this great relationship with the media. going back and doing some research was very cozy and when we have all this deregulation including commodity futures modernization effort, the enron group polled pushed through by unfilled gramm, husband of wendy graham who was head of the always committee was very cozy. weather corruption in the media?

were you particularly effective at manipulating with nothing to do with campaign contributions? there's a larger story of the enabling of enron -- make things of value. they manipulated. this is not the old industrial american dream of henry ford. my basic question is do you feel that you were essentially part of something that was destroying the best part of america? >> you said a lot of questions in there. but i will tell you -- >> corrupted by the experience? >> was i -- absolutely. despite that, i can say it was a tremendous professional experience. the pr team i worked with were among the best in the industry. they were fantastic. they were great people. as the company was collapsing and they knew they going to lose their jobs they slapped at the office and worked around the clock. to me that is a tremendous

profession. were people hurt by the company? absolutely. i was one of them. my 401(k) was 100% enron stock. i lost all of that. i am not here to defend the company. i am here to tell you about the experience from the inside and what it was like from a pr perspective. from that there were certainly things that we didn't know about. keep in mind i was not the accountant. i was not a finance person. we were as good as the information we were given. often times we had inaccurate information. i am not karen denne, enron representative any more. at the time i was. that was something i live with. it was a strong experience. the people who were involved in the criminal activity are doing time. [inaudible] >> question for john emshwiller.

in the five years that separated a precipitation of the collapse and the criminal findings, the derivatives market grew even bigger and mushroomed even more and it seemed like that development was missed by financial reporters. what explains the identification of those risks posed by derivative instruments with enron, worldcom and others? what created that? people get so captivated by the hubris represented by the ceos like kenneth way and dennis k l kozlowski that they get fixated on the individuals and it really dig into the systemic questions that were being posed by these instruments that ended up leaving in the 2007-2008

collapse. what was going on with the investigative reporting around derivatives during that first half of the decade of the twenty-first century? >> most reporters don't understand derivatives so you tend to shy away from what you don't understand which is not a good excuse for reporters but it happens. it is reality. frankly i think a lot of regulators didn't understand derivatives and tended to shy away. politicians basically didn't care about them because everybody seems happy. to some degree, people convince themselves that enron and worldcom and the others, this company is bad because they did x. worldcom was bad because it did books on accounting. kozlowski spend money like there was no tomorrow and they all went to jail. there's a certain amount of that is fixed. congress passed a lot, sarbanes

oxley which made until they had done something but then you have this other world that was similarly connected in a sense with things like mortgage-backed securities market. in the 2000 time period in the last decade through the collapse there were huge amounts of momentum pushing those kinds of markets forward. president of the united states were behind it. everyone should own a home. republicans and democrats were happily saying let's make it easier to own homes. let's not take a look at how it is happening. can they actually afford it? whether people are lying on their loan applications? the system in that area got almost laughably uncontrolled and nobody seemed to care. there were stories that raise red flags but it was such a huge tidal wave of activity and

optimism. maybe journalists could have stopped it or done more. but there was a certain systemic, large numbers of people involved in it. it didn't stop until they couldn't keep the merry-go-round going anymore. >> other questions? over here? >> thank you for coming in and speaking with us. one of my classmates pointed out that when all this was going on ten years ago lot of u.s. c students were young and we had no idea what was going on. all we saw was the commercials from cnn and what our parents our questions, for the kids in here -- students that are planning to go into corporate america are there any pointers that you can give them when

with a huge corporate company -- enron is no more but any company out there. when they start to feel that something is going wrong in the company at one point do they say i need to leave the personal something doesn't feel right so they can avoid having questions such as these, looking back and say i really should have worked for enron. something is wrong in the company so they can leave? >> the right point to raise. you need to ask why and ask questions. if you don't get satisfactory answers you keep asking. if you have reason to not trust your executive for the people who you work for you have a decision to make. whether to leave or whether to stay. it is a very difficult question. you really do deegan -- particularly post enron where

there the possibility that a company can simply evaporate. you have to have confidence in the people you work for. you want to trust them and believe them. you don't want to come to work can represent a company that you don't believe in. you do have to ask those questions. >> other questions from the audience? >> why did you decide -- when all of the stories of corruption came out you state for two years. wasn't there a point where you were like i can to -- the just said before in your talk that you weren't sure what they were saying was the truth. how can you continue to stay? how can your conscience let you do that? >> once the company filed for bankruptcy it became a different company. it was owned by the creditors and i was one of the creditors. we had a chief restructuring officer. was an entirely new management team brought in. it was under the eye of the

bankruptcy court. it became a completely different company. our job and was to cooperate with investigations. it was to maximize value for creditors. it was to preserve jobs. we had a number for employees working for the company. the pipeline companies were the only asset driven businesses the company had and those employees kept their jobs. they continued working. there was still a viable business that was part of the bankruptcy. >> you were ok with it. >> i was. >> it was a different company. the old enron, the enron everyone wrote about and cared about in some ways was no more. it was the ghost, a corpse. i don't know if this and karen's case but some stayed to get a paycheck. they needed a job. having enron in your resume was not getting you recruiters knocking on your door. so that was another issue for

some people but it really was a different entity. it wasn't going to be bar when more people were selling stock or doing anything--any of the things it did in that incredible run it had for in essentially 15 years. >> is that the other question? >> cote legal team being part of public relations and not getting broadcast interviews. in your view public relations change with something like this? in terms of sarbanes oxley coming in and public companies with media -- anybody can do videos and it is not in your control any more. how do these change? >> and social media -- when this happens it wasn't the social media or facebook or any of

those social media vehicles. the speed with which anything happens is much faster now. >> anything different in terms of companies being more cautious because of legal repercussions and you have things that come back and backfire a lot more quickly? >> there is certainly more legal guidelines. if you look back since 2008 companies have still had questionable practices and losses and that is really continued. >> at some of my colleagues covered corporations on an ongoing basis more than i do, sort of hit by the occasional frank p. r person that they are carrying -- a lot of corporations care less about publications like the wall street journal or the new york

times and focusing more on social media because they feel much easier to get their message out in an unfiltered way and they think it is easier to manipulate the social media picture than it is the press picture given how easy it is to manipulate the press at times. but i do think that is -- those kinds of sources are diminishing the power and importance in a lot of corporations mind of traditional media. >> time for one more question here? yes? >> you bring up the point that you aren't involved -- kind of cheating the numbers. u got a great point. she shouldn't be blamed. because of -- you also blamed -- you are not part of the individuals causing this entire problem but how about the people that caused this current

economic crisis and feeling -- they are not serving jail time. there are no repercussions. i want to hear your opinion on that. >> it is unfortunate. enron was the first. enron really -- to john's point the onslaught of government investigations and scrutiny was unique. i don't think the wall street firms or financial houses have that same scrutiny. i think the government was willing to step in and bail them out. and again, jeff skilling is the one in the jail cell. >> do you have a comment on that, john? >> i agree. jeff stalin is -- and will be for 24 years and four months.

he still has his appeal going. though it is getting grimmer and grimmer as far as chances of getting out. he is not due for release's and the court decision for 10 or 15 years may be. this coming december he will be in five years. >> and andy fastow? >> andy fastow is -- he got very lucky. he cut a deal with the government to cooperate after waiting a while -- long enough to get indicted and put in prison for a year. he cut a deal and took ten year prison sentence that was supposedly not reducible. jenne judge felt sorry for him, felt he had been badly treated. so he gave him six years.

so i think andy fastow is now -- he is in a halfway house or just about out, usually after six months in federal prison they send you to a halfway house to transition back into this community. so andy fastow has never talked to anybody in the press. certainly didn't talk to me. i don't know what his plans are. i think he is still married. his wife has stuck with him. >> a partnership after her? >> and the kid. i think stealing knows the last of the enron people. >> we are out of time. i want to thank our panelists and thank you all for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> you got to run? [inaudible conversations] ..