going forward. simic have i got that right? >> you did. let me say first i am a strong believer in the idea that every election and certainly this one is an election about whether we would have more spending or lower tax rates. that's always true, and to pat myself on the fact the most widely cited peter i rode in the paper so, what the column says for the benefits who don't read "the wall street journal" -- thank you. with the column said is it shows a picture of seven countries to risk countries, the united states, britain, france and canada, australia, those are

among the seven. for 100 years shows the share of the income going to the top 1%.

>> united states britain, canada turnout the most france, why do they turn up after 1980? is a defect 6,700,000,000 workers added to the labor force? holding down the in comes of those low income group? that is the case. why the top 5% doing so well? this is not my data but taken from two swedish firms.

what economists named sure wouldn't rose 10 roach papers on the super encumber growth betty contributed to was responsible idea these are people with very high skills. athletes rocks stars. nobody complains about them but people think it is wrong for alex rodriquez but he gets it because he is a superstar. trial lawyers, surgeons, a few college professors. [laughter] and businessmen. most of them have extreme skills. what does it take to run a company with bridges and 100 different companies?

in a bank 50,000 people every day making commitments. that is a big management job. are there disparities? injustices'? of course. life is full of injustices. fad is not the main point*. but what happens here is everywhere. it is not the bush tax cuts or the obama expenditures. that could have the effect, but it is international like the chinese and that indians adding people to the workforce. >> okay. say who you are. >> i am a columnist and senior editor from kiplinger and datuk class is from dr.

dr. allan meltzer in 1978. >> i am sure he remembers you. [laughter] >> describing the banks and the recent efforts that are starting to buy back stock stock, to they go back to paying at the s&p 500 and phoenix run for their shareholders? it is one thing to say it is appalling and another to say why? >> your interview is a competent. that has to be the last question. make the answer brief. >> to doubt the banks then congress should vote to lend them the money. >> baidu think the banks

want to do this if it is contrary to good public policy? [laughter] >> it is not contrary to private policy. [applause] and we will finish here. thank you.

another member of con another member of congress announced his retirement, completing his 15th term before stepping down becomes the 15th democrat to announce his retirement. nine republicans have also announced affairs. >> i was quite a radical as a young person. thinking we should overcome was not very effective way to gain civil-rights. i thought more confrontation was needed. >> walter williams on being a radical. >> aaa's radical is anybody who believes in personal liberty and individual freedom and limited government. i have always been a person that people should not interfere with me.

as long as i don't violate rights of other people. more on 8 p.m. eastern and pacific. >> a summit on consumer fraud hosted by the justice department, federal and state law officials talk about scams targeting the elderly, tax return and the elderly. of focusing on what has been designated national consumer protection week. this is 90 minutes. >> the next panel is on business opportunity scams. we have the deputy director consumer protection committee and we have the associate director of the division of marketing practices at ftc, and united states attorney from the central district of

california and the assistant director of the consumer branch of the department of justice and consumer program director the united states public-interest group and a senior examiner that the office of the maryland attorney general. by turnover to chalk. [applause] >> i will let my panelist take their seats and begin with an observation. who among us thought would it be great to start my own job? i suspect if we took a poll many thinks they have the ability to make it on their own to start their own business. maybe not the next bank but something to make them extra money.

in many instances it stops right there. they think it would be nice but they stopped at that point*. in times of financial anxiety aspect when people think the job is at stake, if they need extra and come, they same education accost, kids in college, medical bills or that the retirement does not go is far. feeling financial anxiety. in that situation it makes them more likely to take the next up or sign up for a business opportunity or from the work at home scheme. they find out there are many

companies that are happy to help them start that opportunity that is what we will talk about. business opportunity and work at home. there are legitimate opportunities but instances where consumers find themselves scammed. bible start with low was from the federal trade commission. value talk about business opportunity fraud schemes? >> it is a real problem that is not going away. with the economic downturn people are underemployed or unemployed and need to supplement. what is a business opportunity? it is a commercial arrangement you'll pay me i

will help provide do something that may or may not be real. securing an outlet, location assistance. or i will buy back the merchandise which is the touchdown of the work at home scheme. building pieces of kraft or staff faint envelopes. that is a complaint together we received 1.8 million complaints of business opportunities were in the top 20. >> net stirred is rich from the department of justice. talk about one of the scheme is an the investigation what you found. >> those business opportunity firms if sales of vending machines, coffee

machines, internet and dvd kiosk. self-contained unit to we placed in the retail outlets and locations are promised by the opportunity firm as high profit locations where the buyer of the machine will earn a large profit. frequently the salespeople use turning claims saying they make the money back within one year. send them to false references. they are the cousins are brothers or other sales people who oppose israel customers but they are paid to lie also referred to locators who promises the higher profit and high traffic locations.

they are part to the conspiracy. one thing we have uncovered is a nefarious type of skin in conjunction with the postal inspection service. it appeared to be out of the west, a different cities where this scam artists purported to be in the u.s. and sell coffee machines or greeting card display racks. in reality they bring in costa rica. all signs indicated they were in the cities. they used drop boxes and voip to disguise the fact that the salespeople salespeople, locators and references all sitting in a boiler room and san jose costa rica.

behalf various phones indicating the phone numbers come with the u.s. once that they were from. saying with the script i am unsuccessful buyer so the telemarketer knew what to say to the prospective buyer. working closely we could execute a search warrants and also able to do a number of our best to extradite these people back to the distaste for prosecution and abc tye sentence is as a result. the scams we have prosecuted come it is not true they should have been aware. this is not the circumstance if it looks too good to be true, but it probably is.

they are doing due diligence preferences, locators, better business bureau, are they highly rated? but the scams open under one name running at nine or 10 months and then close down and resurface with a new name or location. there is no way anybody can no this is a fraud going on for years. in some context it is good for consumers with those in the industry, they don't know. look at the advice of the federal trade commission or they will fall for the scammed -- scam. >> next from the attorney general's office from the state of maryland can you talk about these opportunities? >> first, anything i say may

not be opinion of the attorney general this is from my own knowledge education ended formation. having said that. [laughter] many rely on technology from the internet but this telemarketing and cold call is alive and well. recently got four cases one involving an elderly woman. pretty much a typical. that there is a business opportunity to purchase the internet web site for the on-line mall to sell travel packages and will earn commissions. then later another account calls her to the account manager. if you buy three packages you can earn $9,600.

also the discount coupons and vouchers. she gives them $300. on the same day they say it may need national advertising to increase your sales. give us a credit card number to pay $1,500. the next day you could earn $1,000 from bet director package and pays an additional $2,000. two weeks later they call her to upgrade now this time she gets the lead and the oblast with 6500 targeted visitors. she was concerned of high-interest credit-card. she put $4,000 down. then they call to ask to upgrade again. now she says i am sorry.

all i have left is a savings bond. he said you will make so much you'll pay with the money will earn. she writes a check another 7900. then a couple months later calls back to say for additional $600 she could get the auto responder. months past and she never received any progress she invested $18,300 and made $0. this state commissioner does not order money paid back but if so, there was nine. the arizona company filed bankruptcy. now she thinks she will get her money back. that is not true.

we have responded in order and they have not responded but it alleges violation of fraud and misrepresentation we are seeking for a permanent bar against the company. and the president from offering business opportunities in maryland. but the problem, is the at -- they resurface as a new company or the spouses are at the helm of the new company. >> thank you. to my immediate left is denied a state's attorney from los angeles. we just heard from rich and peggy shanks, she talks about a consumer losing $18,000. can you talk about what your office has prosecuted? and what kind of relief or conviction you could obtain?

>> i'd mentioned some earlier. the advantages it is we try to devote to our resources to get the biggest impact. i be blunt that we will typically take cases the of all high dollar amount i hate to say the dwindling resources but fraud schemes anywhere between two or $5 million at a minimum. we have 200 federal criminal prosecutors to represent 80 million people. we have to pick and choose. we have sentencing guidelines to the court and oftentimes they are tied to the loss amount. we need to make sure we get

a sentence to let the public know you will go to prison for a significant amount of time. so those that were defrauded 87,000 victims he went to present six years. others went 12 years for schemes in the $39 billion. we talk about high volume of mts with high sentences. we want to the press and the public to know if you commit the schemes the government will be watching to hold accountable to the harshest sentence that we can. >> let me turn to lois. the prosecution efforts have been made but what other activities can we protect

consumers from the scams? are there rules in place? >> actually the ftc has a wonderful tool at its disposal as a regulatory requirement to to prevent a one-page -- one-page disclosure who was the seller, the nature of the business opportunity, prior litigation if any year earnings claims are made you will recoup your investment. anything like that they have to provide written substantiation. also requires a list of preference is. said they have the ability to find out what was their experience.

disclosures took effect march 1st. i can assure you we will vigorously enforce it. >> at the state level level, peggy, what source of resources for those who want to learn at opportunities that the state level? >> we have them maryland business opportunities sales act for about i like the new rule that has expanded to cover the first of all, only make the payment before the threshold was 500 now it is over $300 over the first six months. it now covers work at home schemes. that is a good thing. our law does not cover that but it follows a stoically been covered vote still register and we required to file on moller in depth

disclosure document to give greater protection and more disclosure relating to the business opportunity. for example, the first thing to do is to describe what the seller promises. to talk about the location assistance. one of the most important is whether or not they get exclusive territory. they will disclose the arrangement. they will include of copy of the audited and financial statement. they include risk factors. the most important thing is they get the disclosure document on federal and state before they pay money. then they have to have seven

cat -- calendar. maryland is 10 business day mcdade to review the disclosure to check it out before they invest. >> it looks like we have enough time for me to ask a question that occurred to me. there is a lot of tools dealing with the opportunity of fraud problem but what is your experience tupolev those tools together for a coordinated effort? >> we have federal-state civil criminal track record in each of the last several years have coordinated, we call them sweeps, fraud initiatives, to talk called business opportunities. most recently in the last 12 months called empty

promises. no less than 90 actions filed by the ftc and its partners. this gives the ability to have a maximum of visual impact with press coverage with the whole consumer education peace. >> i know you have worked at this level. >> we have limited resources however be worked with the ftc, inspector general, and the inspector general even in the fbi. but maryland had initiated an investigation may needed additional assistance some of the fbi eight executed search and seizure resulting in a federal prosecution and conviction of the 32 year-old more been sentenced 30 months of the federal

penitentiary. >> ed, you are being patient but first. [laughter] a real success all been working together with the states and the ftc. >> the department of justice has participated in the sweeps and the state counterparts. we have upped prosecutions at 140 over the last several years. including defendants sentenced to a couple years, 10 years coming 15 years, over 20 years in jail. some defendants are criminal of prosecution if we have bent successful at arresting those who have fled like costa rica and the

philippines they have been cooperative to extradite back to the united states broke both the civil and criminal. >> this is nationwide. in a world of dwindling resources the task model works well were everywhere. most big cases we get from partners from the federal level or regulatory agency. that case peggy described is the tip of the iceberg. building on those rings getting to the guideline level with a big impact on the community's demand shifting gears hearing about this scam said injury but who are the victims? and do they think they can make money overnight?

. . >> we read recently had a press conference in the relative and distressed teams that were mentioned earlier but we were able to

the get seven folks to come forward and when you looked at them, one of the persons i actually worked with in the city of los angeles in my prior job as management analyst. college educated and fell for it. the challenge is getting people to come forward, to not feel, look it can happen to anyone. we try to let people know that. >> i'm assuming in addition to law enforcement there is educational component to all this. ed, do you want to talk about what kind of educational efforts you know of that are being made to try to teach consumers? >> well, briefly i would tell you first of all i think the federal trade commission website is the place i recommend consumers start. look on their website, ftc.gov at at business opportunity fraud. check with the state attorney general. we have the maryland attorney general's office. all the attorney generals are at naag.org. and find all the addresses and their web sites.

national consumer league, they have a website that is very helpful to consumers and i would really advise people to not pay attention to the information from the, from the people that are working possibly in fraud with the fraudster but consider talking to their friends, talking to local consumer groups and saying i'm thinking of giving somebody i don't know, 10 or $20,000 to make a lot of money. what do you think? and, consider hiring an attorney for one hour of consultation. but there are a lot of places that i would start but i would go first to the ftc. >> thanks, ed. >> lois i assume you encourage people to look at disclosure document? >> absolutely. we streamlined it to one page to make it as readable and accessible as possible and also to serve as a warning, if you don't get that the one-page document, ask for it and if you get

the runaround, leave. but i want to just echo something that rich and others, andrea have said, often times the victims are sophisticated people and there is just no quick fix here. that is one. reasons we've got to remain as vigilant as we've been in enforcement in this area. >> thank you, lois. >> finally, if the worst happens and they have been victimized what thud she do? they discovered they will not get their money back, they lost it? what do you suggest, lois. >> file a complaint, with ftc.gov. we use them. law enforcement partners use them. they all two into centralized database. at one point eight million such complaints went into the database. they are a absolute treasure trove. it is a resource we can use to either develop a case in the first instance or when we know there is a crook operating out there to find

victims and build up the evidence we need to shut them down. and i would also urge people, obviously to file complaints with the better business bureau and also their state attorney general. >> peggy? >> i would echo that but your federal and state regulators, attorney general's office, also has a website or you can call us. you're in the right church, might be the wrong pew. they will forward that call to consumer or to securities or even tell their state agencies. we network. we network with other state agencies across the country. we constantly send e-mails. a lot of the fraud we see comes out of arizona and nevada and utah. and sometimes it's necessary to contact those agencies out there. but the main thing is to report it, come forward. i know the first question everybody asks, how did i get myself in this? i ask myself all stuff all the time. there is no big deal. a lot of people fall victim to business opportunity fraud. nothing to be ashamed of. the real question, what can

i do about it? in maryland there is private right of action to sue not just for not reg something registering but for certain violation. still doesn't mean they will get their money back. it is important to report it if you know someone that is victim because it may prevent more rick is timms. on a final note i would like to say there is a new kid on the block. we've seen a new company that now contacts the victims and says they can help them get their money back. >> of course for a fee. >> so now they become victimized a second time. >> good cautionary notes. you want anything else? >> briefly. the key thing is to report it and that has been quite frankly the challenge. many of these folks after it has happened, how can i let myself do this? they're too scared to tell their friends about it that is what allows the cycle to go on. the other then i thought, the whole purpose of this roundtable, town hall if you will, is to develop those relationships and those

partnerships. look i'm coming out here from los angeles. and i'm sort, i will take this on the road, los angeles convene a meeting like this because quite frankly you are the vehicle by which we can get the word out to the streets, to the churches, to the different communities groups, et cetera, let them know. these are great web sites and tools but, if no one even knows to go to ftc.gov we won't know to file a complaint. take the message out to the community groups, here are things going on and ask us to come to you and give a presentation, i mean, we have a community relations specialist in our office. that is her purpose. their team's purpose is to get out there and spread the message what our agencies do to provide that service. at end of the day we're about protecting communities. as i said earlier we're only as good as information we get and so, it's a two-way street. i would strongly encourage you to take us up on that offer. the attorney general, and the tony and lanny brewer

are serious about engaging in that continuing dialogue. this is not a one-time meeting. >> great. i think on that note, that very forceful and powerful note i should say and i think we'll stop here and turn it back over to our hosts. thank you. [applause] >> well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. that ends our panel of sessions. i think what you saw here today with this summit of the three panelists and the remarks by the attorney general and the other cochairs of the consumer protection working group really best exemplify what this financial fraud enforcement task force is all about. it's a mechanism to allow all the different federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and offices, inspectors general, state attorneys general and others involved in this area to get together and share information, share best practices and talk about how we can do better.

how we can help prevent fraud from occurring in the first place and when it does occur how we increase our inforcement efforts. what you saw is a good example of that in action. as many people have said, this is, this is not an end but a beginning. we're going to on coin it to work together. as the attorney general has said on a few occasions in the past, the schemes of particular consumer fraud schemes and other financial fraud schemes are as diverse as the imaginations as those who perpetrate them and as sophisticated as modern technology will allow. well, we're on to those schools and we'll continue to pursue them and protect the american consumers and others from being victims of financial fraud. we thank you all for your attention here today. thank you. [applause]

>> all right. thank you. andre, david. tony, lanny. and, now, if other than david, if you don't mind, allow our panelists to come up to the stage and we can begin with the next portion of our summit. ladies and gentlemen, the next portion of the summit will be a panel on fraud on the elderly. the moderator will be michael bloom, the director of the consumer branch of the civil division. the panelists will be david blatick who you just heard from. elizabeth. c kassel. director of consumer affairs of aarp. naomi carp, office of older americans consumer financial protection bureau. jonathan rush, deputy chief for strategy and policy, fraud section of the criminal division,

department of justice. jeffrey steiger, the senior litigation counsel from the consumer protection branch, civil division, the department of justice and abby kuzma. director of consumer protection in the office of the indiana attorney general. with that, i give you michael bloom, our moderator. thank you. [applause] >> well, thanks, folks and good afternoon. this panel i suspect will be very interesting and informative and let's just get right to it. we are going to talk about fraud directed at the elderly. seems to be a natural question. why do we have a special panel on fraud on the elderly? there is research that concerns particular vulnerabilities, that older folks may have to make them more susceptible than others to certain kinds of frauds. i would like to start then with betsy about some of the

research that the aarp may have done concerning those kind of vulnerabilities. if you could give us some of those, those factors that make older folks more vulnerable perhaps to the frauds you're talking about here today? >> it's on. okay. i want to first put it in perspective. there are not a great many of statistics how many elderly are victimized but we know elderly financial abuse is dramatically underreported. maybe 24 people are victimized for any one reported to any kind of a criminal or social service agency. and it's probably the most invasive form of elderly abuse and mistreatment. new york did a survey of people who were 60 and older,

41 out of 1,000 had suffered this type of abuse. and this isn't people who were cognantly impaired. protection survey trust surveyed older people and their children, found, 20% over 65 had been taken advantage of financially through inappropriate investment, unreasonably high fees or out right fraud. lawyers community for civil rights shows that 45% of scam victims were over50. and they included, incurred 41% of the losses with those foreclosure rescue scams. we try, one thing we would like to, which we have not been able to research it, it just hasn't been out there, is better statistics on this. metlife had a report where they estimated at least almost $3 million had been, billion, excuse me, had been

lost, and that 51% of it was embezzled by strangers. 34% by family, friends and, people in the same church or neighbors. people they knew. and, i'm, looking forward to the business opportunity fraud because a lot of older people have lost their jobs and they have been unemployed longer than they have ever been before. so we have done research and i'm, my friend, naomi carp, is going to talk about one of the reports. all they they stole her she did work at aarp and she basically wrote the report but it is called protecting older investors, the challenge of diminished capacity. it is out there in the hall. both the whole report and if i just want a short version of it that is also there. and it surveyed and summarized some of the, some of the data and tried to find out what financial advisors, together dealing

with clients directly, and the compliance officers, and how they tried to handle the problem on the investment side. and i'm, i know that naomi will carry this further. i don't always have good news to bring you. we had at, a very well-designed project that came out of the west virgina office where they bought these sucker lists. these are the same, i don't know where they come from. that is certainly something that should be investigated. i know there used to be the new widows list but at this think they're much broader now. so these aarp volunteers were given these sucker lists. they called the people and one-to-one, and spent time trying to train them to resist telephone fraud, stranger fraud. and, they tried various messages. they found the one that seemed to work the best was giving them a strategy to respond at each step of the

fraud and they did try, this is a very, you know, took a lot of people to do this. this was an expensive thing to do, even though we were using volunteers. and they wanted to see if they could teach those on the phone to resist scammers. they did find that compared to a control group, more, two weeks later when there was a pretend scammer calling them up, they were more resistent. unfortunately six months later they weren't. there was no longer a difference between these groups. so we clearly have to keep educating people. we have to educate the families and the communities in addition, but we also have to try, as, all these people are doing to stop the frauds before they get there. because, many of these people just do not know how to resist it and i think

that, you know, one, and you know, one of the issues that we've had is that it's not only that people, when they have diminished capacity the first thing that tend to go is their ability to handle their financial affairs. at least, people with, sort of prealzheimer's disease. there seems to be something, and hasn't been much research about being more trusting. but it's, it is hard to, because there is some people that seem very resistant to this. i was reading "the washington post" yesterday, and i think, john kelly said this best. he is talking about a green dot scam but green does not mean go for it. he starts out, he does the usual, if it sound too good to be true it is. i've been doing that for 30 years. doesn't always work. says when a stranger calls

to say you have won something, you haven't. tamp down the little flutter of excitement listen to the voice says why would somebody call you out of the blue you won a sweepstakes you didn't even remember entering? sadly enough people listen to the other voice the one that says, why shouldn't dumb luck smile upon me once in a while? do i not deserve the universe's love and the scammers make a decent living. so we have a real issue in terms of trying to prevent this other than through the great work of law enforcement. >> and that raises the question. why would it be, and i'm, give this to you, naomi. why would it be that older folks say why doesn't dumb luck shine on me? something about them perhaps you looked into, that you talked about some of the research that you've done? why would older folks think that the perhaps more so than others? >> thanks. and it's a pleasure to be

here. i guess i want to talk a little bit generally about the question, why are older people targeted and why are they particularly vulnerable and zero in a little more on what betsy mentioned about diminished capacity and the research that we've done. so the research really shows there are quite a number of reasons elder people are targets of financial fraud and exploitation. they include, this is pretty basic, these are the people that hold the largest portion of wealth in our country. although individually many of them would be poorer and that is where the money is and where the scammers go. may be they are more trusting and they are more unsophisticated about financial matters. there is often a presumption that they are more vulnerable and thus, they are targeted because they're perceived as being more vulnerable. and they may in fact be more vulnerable. due to cognitive impairments that i will go into in a second. also many older people are

more isolated and thus, they are more dependent on helpers of a whole variety of and those helpers have great access to their money and to their documents. so, you know, these are crimes of opportunity. so just to zero in for a minute on diminished capacity because i think, with the age boom, and with people living longer, more and more people are having cognitive impairments and diminished ability to make decisions including financial decisions and, we have family members, the financial services industry, all kind of industries and professions saying, oh, my god, we have this coming. we don't really understand it and what are we going to do about it? so capacity, decision-making capacity is not really all or nothing thing. it is made up of a number of types of capacity. we have capacity to make personal decisions about your everyday life. capacity to make health care

decisions and then capacity to make decisions about financial transactions. and what we've learned as betsy said, is that financial capacity, it's been called the canary in the coal mine of capacity. it is really the first to go. and it's made up of a number of skills. it includes your basic monetary abilities. the identifying and counting money. understanding debt and loans. conducting cash transactions. paying bills, and then i want to underline this last one, this neuroschool gifts have done research and identify this one component of financial capacity is, maintaining judgment to act prudently and avoid financial exploitation. so you can see when financial capacity starts to go, people become more vulnerable. and the population numbers, not to throw a lot of numbers at you but they're pretty astounding. declining financial skills start to happen when people

have mild cognitive impairment, not even full-blown alzheimer's disease. 20 2% of americans age 71 or older have mild cognitive impairment. so that's a lot of people. one out of eight people 65 and older has full-blown alzheimer's disease. so we can see where this is going. so let's bring it closer to home with an example. dad seems fine. he is still handling his bank account, his brokerage accounts. and then the bank teller sees him perhaps making sudden and uncharacteric large withdrawals or having multiple overdrafts, or the broker is getting calls to cash in his conservative investments and to buy shares in a risky startup that he just heard about from his new best friend. so, we all know and many of us have had personal experience that it's really hard to take away the car keys when dad's reflexes are

getting slow or his vision declines. but one day we fear that dad's car will hit a child crossing the street and so we do something about it. similarly, we don't want to take away mom's financial driver's license and then we see mom being taken by a lottery scheme, buying an inappropriate annuity after attending a free lunch seminar, or getting ripped off by her home care aide. you can see we have a huge challenge. i will talk really quickly about the research at aarp public policy institute. betsy talked about it was in the investors sphere. but we surveyed front-line financial advisors, broker-dealers and also their compliance officers about do they understand diminished capacity? do they see it as a problem? do they have protocols in their firms to deal with it? are they worried about

financial exploitation? what do they need? and the message was loud and clear. yes, they see it as a problem. almost all of them recognized it. some of them had procalls but their protocols were all over the map. they overwhelmingly said, we need training on diminished capacity. it should be mandatory but our firms don't require it. so i think it is interesting that there's a recognition, but yet we don't have the tools yet and we're all going to the have to start working together to create them. >> one of the points, one of the scams you mentioned, naomi, was the lottery scams. jeff steiger who is actually in my office has done work on lottery scams and others. can you talk a little bit what a lottery scam is with a focus how the scammers use some of the vulnerabilities that both betsy and naomi talk about with older folks, how they use that to their advantage to steal money.

>> sure. as a prosecutor with the consumer protection branch we're currently participating in a number about investigations involving lottery scams that are eminating from jamaica and preying on citizens in the u.s., mainly derly people. essentially scammers will call potential victims in the u.s. including many elderly people, and inform the potential victims they have won cash and prizes. sometimes cash and a mercedes. typically a car but mostly money. we're talking about millions of dollars that these people are told they won. and indicate that the winnings will only be delivered once the i had individuals pay up front fees, taxes, or insurance. victims end up sending the money through wire traps percent through entities that david had mentioned earlier, through western union.

threw money gram. through, stored value cards. green dot card that betsy mentioned and, that money ultimately will be sent down to jamaica. our office is currently in the middle, as i mentioned, involved in a number about investigations. i just want to give a profile of, profiles of five victims that we have talked to, meaning within the last couple weeks. and i'm going to be very generic because these are obviously ongoing criminal investigations. one is a female, early 70s. she was working at the time. she was living alone. received a call that she had won a sweepstakes prize of 3 to $5 million. during the conversation the initial conversation, the fraudster was most interested in knowing from her what it felt like to win the lottery. that was essentially to gain her trust. over time they had many

conversations, many e-mails. he was able to get her trust, and she ended up sending tens of thousands of dollars and wiring tens of thousands of dollars which ultimately we believe, ended up in jamaica. second victim, female in her late 80s. living at home alone in a small town. she acknowledged that she entered sweepstakes at times. she was called at least 12 times in a 2 1/2 week period. she ended up wiring money to them. a third victim, a male in his late 70s, early 80s. he was a widower. lived alone in a small town. he was, an owner of a small business during his career and, you know he was a victim of this type of lottery scam. fourth victim, female, in her 70s lived in a small

town. lived alone. acknowledged she entered sweepstakes such as publishers clearinghouse. she was victimized by multiple groups over a period of several months. she wired money to them. she got suspicious after she didn't get her winnings, but they offered her an excuse saying that, because her fees were not coming in as quickly as they had anticipated, that they her winnings were being debade -- delayed. that is how she continued to keep getting caught up in this scam. finally a fifth victim, female in her early 70s. lived in a small town. sent her a check to purportedly pay the fees. this was going to be an advance. she debossed the check and immediately shortly thereafter with drew money from the check and sent it out. the check bounced so she was out that money. to put a little bit more

meat on this profile, these people that we've been talking to, most recently, they are elderly but they're not in their 90s. they're not in nursing homes. they're typically people who are living alone. they're ipt independent. they have some disposable income but not a huge amount. after a couple weeks when their disposable income is gone, it is not unusual they would take out a loan on their house or, more typically, or typically they would take a cash advance on credit cards. to talk about their profile, a little bit more, these, the scammers, who at least in these investigations are from jamaica, they will, they will call these individuals more than perhaps their family members will call them. >> jeff, let me stop there.

i think that goes right to something we'll ask jonathan about. what is striking about or what is common to me these individuals were living alone. part of what the draw is to these folks they have somebody to talk to. that goes to the something called imposter frauds that i know you may have heard of this, different flavors of it. john, talk a little bit about imposter frauds what they are. and also talk a little bit about your work internationally. as jeff said all this money is being wired internationally and sounds like perhaps there are frauds around the world that are similar to ours that can inform what we do. >> thanks, mike. let me talk first about the imposter frauds and then, as mike suggested talk about some of the broader ramifications of type of mass marketing fraud that jeff's office our section and several u.s. attorneys offices and several investigative agency partners have been working on. . . depending on whether they

know that they're calling an older person, obviously, it won't work in every single instance but oftentimes the person will say if it happens let's say to someone in the united states, johnny, is that you? and that's all they need. they'll say, yes, grandma, it's me. i'm so glad i got you. i've been arrested. i'm here in, fill in the

country -- i'm here in france. i'm here in the netherlands. i need bail money. can you possibly wire me some bail money? or i've been in an accident. i need money. i have to pay the hospital. can you just send some money to me right away. naomi and beth both touch on the issue of different kinds of vulnerabilities that may stem more from neurobiology. these are the types of scams that you could understand would readily play on the heart strings on anybody who simply makes a mistake and never anticipates a possibility that someone would be calling them up with the specific purpose from lying from the very first word of the conversation to get money from them. so they respond in the way they think they need to help out their loved one, grandson, whoever. and only later on do they find out that the 1,000 or $1500 they just wired somewhere didn't go

to their grandson it went into the pockets of fraudsters. as for other types of imposter scams, the grandparent scam is sort of a variation on things we've seen increasingly not just in the united states but from other venues around the world. about 10 days ago, the royal canadian mounted police made arrests in the montreal area of several individuals who were engaged full time in the grandparent scam specifically targeting older americans. now, why is it that they would be doing this? well, first of all, for a long time, u.s. law enforcement has recognized that there's been a two-way trade you might say in fraud between the u.s. and canada. going back as far as 1998, a series of regional task forces

were set up with u.s. and canadian participation would work, telemarketing and other types of mass marketing fraud on a collective basis and all of our major partners in consumer fraud ranging from the federal trade commission to the fbi, the postal inspection service, the secret service have all participated in different ways in these types of task forces. well, the frame of reference has changed. now, when jeff talks about lottery fraud, no, he didn't say as we might have a number of years back south florida or southern california. now it's costa rica. jamaica, the dominican republic and farther afield, spain and other parts of the world. now, in part because we have seen and assistant attorney general brewer's remarks highlighted this as well. as we have seen the globalization of crime in general, we've seen the globalization of fraud, including the globalization of techniques. when we first started to compare

notes with our law enforcement colleagues going back probably four or five years ago, in australia, canada, the united kingdom and even nigeria, we started to find that we were talking about the same kinds of scams with the same kinds of techniques targeted against the same kinds of in many instances of senior populations often as well by the same groups of people. so part of what we've sought to do and i think it's fair to say that mike's office, fraud section and mostly the u.s. attorneys have focused on this particularly. what we're trying to do is take our ability to respond to these type of frauds directed at older americans to the next level, where we share information with each other about who from our respective investigations and intelligence we figured out are the main players behind these schemes, where they are launching these schemes from, where are they getting their lead lists from, how are they recruiting? how do they organize? where are they moving their

money? more and more, what we focus on within the justice department and the rest of the federal law enforcement community has to do with sharing information better, faster, coordinating more effectively as i think the department and the ftc, for example, have done very successfully over a number of years. but recognizing that fraud has become globalized and particularly when you're talking about targeting of seniors with so many different types of scams, whether it's lottery scams, inheritance scams, grandparent scams, ultimately we have to move faster, share information faster and collaborate faster. and the arrest i mentioned is one example of what we can do but it takes that kind of active and sustained cooperation between law enforcement here and in other countries. >> and that's -- that's coordination among law enforcement. there's also the international component of these will affect the kind of messages we will send to consumers. and that's something i think david would like to talk about,

about how the ftc is recognizing the international component of much of their work and how it affects the messaging or the messages that they give out to the consumers -- well, to consumers generally. >> well, let me put this in context. i think this has been a terrific summary of the kind of scams that are plaguing older people in the united states. but they pose a real -- a real problem, a real challenge both for law enforcement and for consumer education. so let me just sort of run through some of the reasons why that is so. these are retail rather than wholesale scams. one of the keys to the scam typically is getting someone on the phone and having a conversation with them. it may be initiated through the internet. they may be initiated through the receipt of a fake check but generally there is one-on-one intersection between the scammer and the victim. second, as jonathan has pointed out a lot of these boiler rooms are not in the united states. they're in canada, they're in

jamaica, they're in ghana, you know, we get -- we get these complaints, you know -- now even peru and spain show up on our list in terms of where these kinds of calls originate from. so these are not the boiler rooms in tampa that we can shut down easily. third, there are multiplicity of scams. if you want to just educate people about grandparent scams, that's one thing. but these scams take multiple forms. they're grandparent scams, there's lottery scams, there's sweepstake scams, there's fake check scams, there's mystery shopper scams as you multiply the form the scam takes you increase the difficulties of doing consumer ad. so one of the -- so we really have a three pronged approach to going after these scams at the ftc. first and foremost, of course, we want to stop these scams and we want to close down the boiler rooms, we work very closely with the canadian authorities, the

jamaican authorities and others to try to find these guys and to stop them. we also are trying to go after what we think is the pivo st. point is and they need to send money to the scam artist we can go after them wholesale not retail so we have money gram which is the second largest money transfer company under order. we have western union agreeing to abide by essentially the terms we have in our money gram order. one of the things that we have done and is starting to really yield results is we've insisted on really clear consumer ad. so if you walk into many wal-marts today, hopefully within a year -- if you walk into any wal-mart, money gram's principal outlets are in wal-mart stores. they are under our order. you will see facing you as a

consumer a miranda warning. if you think you've won a lottery, guess again. if you're sending money to a relative, call them and make sure. if you think that check that you've just cashed is a real check, wait a month 'cause it probably isn't. if you've been hired as a mystery shopper, again, sorry, you're out of luck. and they're training the personnel who actually man the desks there to talk to an elderly person who's about to wire money to jamaica or montreal or began -- guana, why are you sending money and one of the sad parts -- and this gets to naomi and beth were talking about before, is sometimes they have to fight with the person, you know, you didn't win. oh, but it says right here i've won a million dollars and there are tragic stories in which ultimately they leave the money gram outlet which won't let them

wire the money and go somewhere else to send it which sort of underscores the difficulty of succeeding on the consumer ed front. >> i wanted to mention -- well, just to echo what david was saying, in order to assure the victim that they have won they may very well receive documents on ftc letterhead, on doj letterhead, on irs letterhead, on federal reserve letterhead saying that they've won the lottery or saying that this amount and one of the attatac t the government can use impersonating a federal employer. >> let me just finish. so one of the things we're doing is not only going after the wire transfer companies but, for

example, green dot has agreed not to allow basically refunds, getting money in jamaica. we're working now with the store value card companies in order to try to combat this fraud because as important as stopping -- you know, going after the scammers as important as consumer ed is we'll ultimately get real traction here is by going after the money and stopping and interdickiinte interdicting the flow of the money. >> that's an important conceptual law enforcement tactic where we call it the choke where can we stop a legitimate business to stop the flow of money. we've been talking -- what seemed to be sophisticated fraud, overseas using phones and wires. but the tried and true door to door fraud still exists. i mean, king men are still around even though they are not selling aluminum siding anymore

and that's what abby accuseman and indiana has been doing. can you talk about the door to door fraud that still happens. >> it it's very common. we have seen all of these scams within -- among the consumers that we are representing. one of the scams that's very common in our area partly because every year we face overstorms which you've all been reading about in southern indiana and tennessee and illinois. we always get tornadoes, we always get very severe storms with hail, et cetera. there are a group of scammers that go door to door and from state to state following the storms. we typically call them storm chasers. we have a different group of scammers called travelers that come seasonally depending on what the issues are. in terms of the storm chasers what will happen is they will follow a disaster and they will go door to door and say things

like, i just repaired your neighbor's roof and i have some materials left over. i'd be happy to give you a discount on your repair for your house 'cause i've got, you know, one more day that i'm going to be here. if you can decide right now so there's always this high pressure sales, the concern, you know, for you're going to make a deal right now. we did it for your neighbor so they're trying to give a number of areas of comfort with respect to -- i've already been in your neighborhood, et cetera. and, of course, we've even seen people get up on the roofs and make damage so that they can, you know, ostensibly repair it. a lot of times a lot of the insurance company get involved where they talk the person into signing over their ability to take the money et cetera. so it's a very pervasive thing. we see it every single year and seasonally as well and it's a really big problem. we also see many of the things that you all have been talking

about in terms of persons helpers coming into people's homes and taking advantage of elderly persons. >> i think that's -- if you could expand on that next -- we've been talking a lot about strangers calling up. >> yeah. >> and talking about folks who know -- >> yeah. this is the opposite of strangers. these -- it can be a family member as we've been discussing and it could be someone who takes advantage of the situation of being in the home of the individual. we've also seen persons who are committing identity theft and this is something we warn people about all the time, where you've got a repair individual who's come into the home to fix the toilet or fix something in the home and especially elderly people but really any of us don't think about what kinds of personal information might be lying around the house while the individual is wandering around affecting the repair. one of the educate people before you have a stranger in your home

be sure to walk around your home especially where they might be and cover up everything -- make sure that anything that is -- that has your personal identification information is taken and put away someplace safe. we find that -- and i really appreciated all the research that aarp has done because we find education one-on-one to be much more effective than elderly than anything else. so what we do is we go all around the state and i would encourage ftc and all of the federal partners to use the state ag's offices -- a lot of us do have very extensive outreach departments where we go around the state and specifically educate groups of elderly and other vulnerable populations. they listen to us because they think of us as being -- you know we have a certain amount of authority, and they have a good bit of trust and, frankly, it's just harder to reach people with

paper and this is a group of population where, you know, you all have awesome materials on the internet but they don't use the internet and they don't look on the internet for information. they don't even know they need the information until you tell them that this is what's going on. so -- and we do it annually if not more often. >> i think in the interest of time -- >> oh, sorry. >> no, it's okay. we'll wrap up and leave with one question which is a natural outgrowth of what you're saying and i'll direct it at david. some folks don't know to ask or don't know what's out there one of the things that you could comment on very briefly how you -- how do law enforcement learn about fraud? how can folks be more willing to report them and then how can we turn around and tell people about things that are happening. >> we want the courage of people to step forward and one of the things that we've been doing is we've been doing common ground conferences. we've been going all over the

country meeting with consumer groups, legal services, local law enforcement to try to encourage people to reach out. and that effort has yielded enormous dividends because we are getting people who are in the nursing homes and who do reach out for services for the elderly. >> we'll stop on that 'cause that's a really fascinating point as opposed to waiting for people to come to us and the people in the room here, i suppose, can take that as a last message. and get out of dc. thank you, folks, thank you for the information. [applause] >> good work. >> [inaudible conversations.) >> and the panelists to my immediate left sally cooper the director of operations from the

internal revenue service criminal criminal investigation and to her left is carol, the civil criminal coordinator and the tax division of the department of justice and they're going to talk about again common tax scams that consumers and individuals should watch out for as they're preparing to file their tax refunds. >> sally, carol, thank you very much. >> good afternoon. thank you for having me on the panel this afternoon. as mike said i'm sally cooper. i'm the acting director of policy and support for irs criminal investigation and one thing we were talking about as we were listening to all the panels is that there is a permutation of scams or commonalities between the scams in every panel that it seems to be presenting today. as far as criminal investigation's mission, c.i. is the investigative arm of the internal revenue service. we support the overall mission

of irs but we enforce the statute statutes and the relative crimes in order to encourage and achieve voluntary compliance with the internal revenue code. once the investigation is complete, we forward a recommendation for prosecution to our partners at the department of justice, specifically, we start with the tax division who reviews our work and hopefully horizons us to go forward with prosecution and they then in turn refer it over to the respective u.s. attorney's office. and carol was going to give a little bit about her mission. >> the tax division at the justice department does review all criminal referrals from the internal revenue service criminal investigative division. our attorneys do a lot of the prosecutions but we rely on the local state attorneys to carry

the bulk of that water in the criminal prosecutions. we also have a civil arm actually more our civil attorneys because as you know there's a lot of affirmative tax litigation which actually may be seen as kind of anticonsumer. i've been doing foreclosures for over 23 years so there are a number of people who probably don't like a big part of our mission. but we also combat on the civil side a lot of the kind of scams that we'll be talking about today, that sallie will be talking about today, for example, getting injunctions against bad tax return preparers and abusive tax shelter promoters, things like that. so we're working and in accordance with the attorney general's recent memorandum really pushing parallel investigations and parallel proceedings where we civilly shut down a scam, collect any --

as much delinquent tax and penalties as possible but also investigate and prosecute criminally wherever possible so we're really pushing those parallel proceedings. each year, irs has been putting out what we call the dirty dozen. and what that is a list of 12 of the top 12 scams that are perpetrated against innocent taxpayers. i'm just going to cover a few of them today, but topping the list this year identity theft. and, again, you've heard that mentioned through several presentations. and it is becoming so critical to protect your personal information. as was just mentioned on the previous panel, even having someone in your home, you have to be careful when you have a laying around. the irs is taking a very proactive look at identity theft.

we're sending notices to taxpayers which is sometimes their first notice that their identity has been compromised when we see more than one return being filed and/or we see that a w2 has been filed in that person's name, that it has an unknown employer. in january, the irs announced where we did a coordinated sweeps week trying to attack this identity theft issue. now, anyone that believes that their identity has been compromised, there is an irs identity protection specialized unit and that information can be accessed on irs.gov and look for identity theft. mr. barat out of the u.s. attorney's office out of los angeles he mentioned identity theft and he also mentioned phisching as well. and phisching is where someone

uses email or some other electronic media to try and solicit someone to respond either giving personal identification, giving account information and for irs, it can appear that it is coming from either a legitimate irs inquiry or some related entity. irs will generally not send an initial solicitation or request for personal information to a taxpayer. so that should be a warning sign right away. if you get an email from someone that it appears that its irs or it appears that it's related to irs, concerned and don't respond either call the irs or go to the irs.gov and look for steps to take, but that's one way that -- once they get your information, again, they can use that for all types of scams. they can use it to file false

tax returns. they can use it to obtain mortgage loans. they can use it for all types of things and it's very catch once it happens. >> let me add, with the phisching the attacks to get personal information from consumers and then what happens is generally these scammers turn around and file some sort of false refund claimed as sallie mentioned the first notification a victim will have that somebody else has stolen their identity, has gotten their personal information and has filed a bogus refund claim is when they go to file their own tax return and it gets bounced because the irs has already received what appears to be a legitimate tax return under that individual's social security number. these scammers file tax returns very, very early in the tax season. in fact, most of them are on

vacation by now. and if you're like me, you're thinking, oh, yeah, i need to file my tax return, so the legitimate folks tend to get really surprised by this late date. we prosecute -- at justice the irs has been referring a lot of these refund crimes that are facilitated through identity theft through the justice department. and we participated in the january push that sallie mentioned. even since november when our deputy assistant attorney general testified before a house committee since november we've had a ton of very, very strong sentences for refund crimes that include an aggravated identity theft count. and a lot of these were able to get as part of sentencing a restitution component so it's restitution hopefully to victims and sometimes they are not --

not everybody that is involved in a refund crime is necessarily a victim. but there's restitution for innocent victims as well as to the u.s. treasury. collecting that, that's another story but the courts have been pretty receptive to giving restitution to both categories of victims, both the individuals and the united states. >> thanks, carol, and you made a good point that all taxpayers who are subject to a scam may or may not be victims. in the first two, the phisching and the id theft probably they are more victims than part of the scheme when you're talking about questionable return preparers and you go to a return preparer and you give them your information you're ultimately still responsible for what's on that return. and so in 2012, every paid return preparer needs to have a preparer tax identification number and when they sign that

return, they need to enter that return -- or that number on the return. and let me just say we're focused here today on consumer fraud but most of the return preparers out there are honest and decent. we're focusing, though, on those ones that are taking advantage of individuals. and some of the things that you need to watch out for -- or consumers need to watch out for when they are choosing a return preparer is one does a signed preparer enter their tax preparer tax identification number? do they give you a copy of the return because you should always see what has been filed with irs before it is filed. and you should get a copy to sign. are they promising you a larger refund than you thought you would get? and it goes back to the old adage and somebody mentioned it earlier, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. do they base your refund -- their fee on a percentage of

your refund? that's also a clue because that probably means they're inflating your refund in order to increase their fee. do they require to you split the refund with them? and do not ever sign a blank return and then let them fill it in and then mail it in because again, remember, if you're going to a return preparer to have your return prepared, you're ultimately responsible for what's on that return. and this too comes as carol mentions some -- an injunction earlier and that's one of the mechanisms that are used against fraud lend return preparers. >> right, one of the things we have to keep in mind is that something like 60% of u.s. taxpayers use a paid return preparer. and as sallie mentioned, most of them are good. they've gone through continue education and they have their prepper tax id preparer and they

do a decent job but it's the one that perpetuating fraud for consumers that is a real problem. and we can deal with that in the federal government two ways. number 1 is prosecuting them because it is a crime to file a false return. it's a crime to assist people in filing a false statement, with the united states. but the other thing we do and can often do much more quickly is get a civil injunction against a bad return preparer to stop them from preparing bad returns. that can also -- that can frequently be done much more quickly than a criminal prosecution. typically what we will do is we'll get a referral from the internal revenue service on a bad return preparer. we will talk to several clients, maybe that have worked with the return preparer, get a preliminary injunction, issue a press release right away and

then the community knows we have a bad return preparer or at least a potentially bad return preparer in the community and then seek a permanent injunction. a number of these bad return preparers very quickly say we give up. we will stop preparing returns and we get a lot of injunctions by consent. in fact, the u.s. attorney's office in los angeles is doing a fabulous job getting consent injunctions from bad tax return preparers, often as part of a plea agreement in a criminal prosecution. so they're sort of killing two birds with one stone and what you do with that is you have an incredible deterrent effect. you clean your area out of bad return preparers and and that really is the power of both the criminal and the civil injunctions. one of the typical provisions in

a civil injunction against a tax return preparer is that, that return preparer notify all their clients that they have been prohibited from preparing returns and that perhaps tax returns they did prepare were false or fraudulent. and also provide the internal revenue service with a list of all the clients for whom they prepared bad returns. now, what that means frequently is that the internal revenue service less than go out and fly the clients and try to make up the tax loss from the individual clients. a lot of them are very upset by that but remember the goal is to collect the right amount of tax for everyone and a lot of these -- a lot of these people are either victims of a bad return preparer or as sallie mentioned a lot of them actually participate in the filing of a bogus return through a bad return preparer so it is kind of a delicate balance there but we do try to collect the right amount of tax through the civil

and the criminal proceedings. >> the last one i'll touch on today is the term free money where people put up fliers and they advertise, hey, come in and you can get free money from us and this typically targets some of the lower-incomed individuals and the elderly as we just heard about. they charge people for filing their returns and sometimes the returns don't go through but they already have their fees and they're gone with that money. and we have a number of tools and criminal investigation that we use to go out, a, identify these taxpayers, b, to do investigations and our goal is to enforce those laws and ultimately put people in jail that are committing this fraud against the taxpayers and the government to deter that from happening in the future. but just like we're meeting here today and the people have been

working all day, one of the best preventive measurements is awareness so that we do outreach and we go and we talk to people so that they are aware that these scam are going on and hopefully when someone approaches them with something appears too good to be true they do something about it before they turn over money or turn over their identifying information even when you're going out to do your own personal health care or other items. a lot of times a form will ask you for your social security number and other identifying things and i found that because generally my husband is the primary and i never have it, they never come back and ask me for it. they are always able to process that without that information. so as much as we can get out as little information as you put out in a public venue, the better because any personal information that gets out, is vulnerable for somewhat of a bad purpose to get it and use it for

misdeeds whether it's filing a tax return or some of the other scams that you've heard about ultimately they're all to make money for somebody who's getting that it doesn't belong to. as far as irs, if you have any questions or any doubts of any information that you receive especially that is unsolicited please go to www.irs.gov website and they have all the official information that has been put out and that would be used by irs for official business. >> and also just a little reminder on the table outside, sallie has put down the press release of this year's dirty dozen, so if you want a little light reading you can read about all the other scams that we deal with if you can't get access to the internet this year.

thank you very much. [applause] >> well, the start of the supreme court oral arguments on health care are just 10 days away and the court announced this afternoon that they will not allow tv coverage of the three days of oral arguments. they will, however, provide same day audio of those arguments set to happen march 26th through the 28th, at least 170 briefs including 120 friend of the court briefs have been filed with the court. we'll provide you same day audio arguments on c-span3, c-span.org and on c-span radio. well, primaries coming up this weekend. the missouri caucuses, first of all, on saturday. and the -- on sunday the puerto rico primary and the illinois primary tuesday. the candidates in illinois, both rick santorum and mitt romney and president obama as a matter of fact.

he's speaking now in chicago and that's live on our companion network, c-span. rounding out the month, louisiana on the 24th and then into april with primaries in the district of columbia, maryland and wisconsin. and a reminder, too, that you can make c-span.org your clearinghouse for all sorts of video and campaign speeches, the candidate positions and social media as well, all of that at c-span.org/campaign2012. >> our system is fundamentally undemocratic in a number of ways. one of the ways is closed primaries. so in half the states in the country, 40% of all the voters can't participate in the primaries. and so they had no say in who get nominated. and as a result, we get more and more extreme candidates on both ends of the spectrum. >> saturday night at 10:00 eastern on "after words," linda killian writes in the swing vote that the most powerful electorate bloc in the u.s. are

independent voters and they decided every election since world war ii. also this weekend on booktv, saturday at 8:00 pm, david brock on how fox news president roger ales turned the network as an extension of the republican party and sunday night at 10:00, syndicated talk show host mark levine and the current state of post in ameritopia, the unmakes of america. >> the influence of super pacs of elections was a forum on capitol hill recently. the supreme court's ruling in citizens united was a focal point of the discussions. roll call lobbying writer who served as one of the panelists argued that super pacs won't determine who will become president but they can play a major role in the senate and house races. it's the sunlight foundation hosting the event and it's just under an hour and 40 minutes. >> well, thank you for coming. welcome to this conversation about super pacs. as everyone from comedians to

federal candidates know, super pacs have changed the relationship between money and politics. this year alone they spent over $33.2 million as of noon today. and raised a currently unknown alt of money some of it from original donors that we'll never be able to identify. so the focus of today's event is on what the public knows and should know about super pac activities. we're going to look into the legal and policy implications of dark money flowing in unlimited amounts and to presidential conditions and whether more transparency is needed. today's event is hosted by the committee of the transparency which is provided by the sunlight foundation. i'd also like to thank representatives darrell issa, and mike quigley the cochairs of the congressional transparent caucus for giving us this room and helping us hold this event today. i'd also like to thank c-span for coming and broadcasting this live and if you'd like to join in from the conversation if you're not in this room but

watching on tv you can go to twitter hash tag super pac act. and just before we move on to the panelists i should disclose the sunlight foundation has released a draft bill called the super pac act which is unrelated to the twitter hash tag that happens to be the same which would have disclosure requirements. the public has been invited to comment on the legislation by visiting public markup.org and along the same lines you can see the sunlight foundation reporting on super pacs at sunlight foundation.com/super pacs. so moving onto our panel of experts, so the first one all the way to my right who has been stuck in today's horrible traffic but will be here shortly is mimi she's the counselor for the democracy program at the brennan center for justice at new york university school of law. and to my immediate right is eliza, who's a staff prior for cq roll call and she covers the issues of lobbying and influence and i have it on good authority and you can correct me if i'm wrong but you also coined the term super pac? >> that's correct. >> to my immediate left --

that's pretty cool by the way. >> thank you. [laughter] >> to my immediate left is paul ryan the program director and associate legal counsel at the program legal center and finally all the way to my left is alan dickerson who's the legal director and interim executive director at the center for competitive politics. more information about our panelists is available at transparency caucus.org in case you want to learn their full biographies. and, of course, i'm dabble, policy counsel with the sunlight foundation and er doctor of the advisory committee on transparency. so i asked each panelist to speak about different aspects of super pacs and i'm going to turn first to eliza to talk about a little bit what's available on the public record, what's absent and how it affects the stories reporters can tell. in the movie in all the president's deep throat says them to follow the money and even though that was not a line

from the book that was something that a screenwriter wrote, it became kind of a rallying cry for generations of people who care about transparency and accountability. but i think it's fair to say it's more difficult now to follow the money than it once might have been and there are a you been in of reasons for that. the truth is transparency has been eroding for some time now. it's not just because of the citizens united ruling. my own view is that the greatest threat to transparency if you could call it a threat, is the increased activism and political engagement of nonprofit groups as i'm sure you guys know, the internal revenue service doesn't require nonprofits to disclose the source of their spending. there are really minimal disclosure requirements and that's probably for very good reason. and it dates all the way back to the civil rights era when the irs wanted to protect groups that were active in issues like civil rights and protect the anonymity of their donors but

nonetheless, beginning with the 527 organizations in 2004, we've seen really millions and millions of dollars flow through nonprofit groups of different types, to be spent in arguably campaign oriented fashion. the 527 groups did disclose everything to the irs so eventually you saw the money and where it had come from. with the advent of super pac i would argue there are a number of new transparency challenges that have been presented. and super pac present special transparency problems in my view for three reasons. one is that the sec disclosure regulations are arguably incomplete. to some degree the sec has basically said that unless a donor earmarks a contribution for a particular campaign expenditure, the organization, the super pac doesn't have an obligation to report that. so you could theoretically have

a donor give money to a group for overhead and say well, it wasn't really for a specific ad and so we the members of the public wouldn't necessarily know who funded that group even if a lot of the money went to a particular campaign ad and the latest crop of super pac have found ways at least of deleting reports of receipts in key junctures and a great number of them -- excuse me, i want to say hi to mimi. hi, mimih >> hi. >> welcome. >> we jumped in so i'm going to keep talking. >> no, i think that's good. >> as a civil rights attorney i had a little first amendment slow me down a little bit today. >> there you go. [laughter] >> so these super pacs many of them have decided instead of reporting on a quarterly basis they're going to go to a monthly reporting. having formed themselves which counter-intuively have meant less disclosure right on the eve of these important early gop

primaries because when you disclose-quarterly you have to do a preprimary report. but if you disclose monthly you don't have to do that. so by going to monthly, they now will disclose on the 31st of january and lo and behold a great matter primaries will be done by then so that's been a challenge. the third is the use of nonprofits as i alluded to earlier. a number of super pacs have established affiliated nonprofits. the leading example right now is the crossroads operation. there's a super pac known as american crossroads which has an affiliated nonprofit of 501c4 social welfare group called crossroads gps. these two groups together have predicted that they plan to raise and spend on the order of $240 million in this election which is actually twice as much as they predicted they would be spending originally. and my guess is that a pretty good chunk of that, maybe half of it, maybe more is going to go through the nonprofit which means that we'll never know where the money came from.

i shouldn't say never because journalists have been pretty good finding out a source of a lot of these donors and donations but nonetheless it's a lot more challenging and it's not immediately evident. and there's another trend that has to do with nonprofits and super pac. some super pac have been accepting donations from nonprofits so, you know, even - -- super pac is nondoners you don't know who funded the nonprofit. that is one of the third -- that's really the third transparent challenge attendant with super pacs. it's not following the money is impossible but it's a lot more challenging than it used to be and i do want to slightly rebut some of the election lawyers i talked to on the eve of citizens united because i would raise questions around transparency and i would frequently told super pacs disclose everything and i'm here to say a

conventional political action committee, every dollar in and every dollar out if you're a journalist you can go and look at. and that's just not the case with super pacs at least right now. with that i'll pass it on to mimi. >> and obviously most of our conversation today is forward looking as we craple with the very important questions that super pacs have raised about how -- weather they should be regulated, how they should be regulated and, in fact, whether basic assumptions underlying our campaign finance system make any sense. but before we can fully grapple with these questions, i'm here to push us back a little bit and look behind us and make sure that we all understand where this super pacs come from and

the legal theories and assumptions underlying them. and so i'm going to give you a little bit of a creation tale. it won't be too long, i promise. although things actually started in 1976 with the supreme court's decision in buckley v vallejo. and even though this decision is now somewhat dated, its main pillars remain the law today and there are three points that are particularly important for the instant discussion. first, the buckley court found that because money is needed for most forms of mass communication, restrictions on political spending should be heavily scrutinized just like restrictions on pure speech. and it's important to note this is not actually the same thing as saying that money is speech, although that's the shorthand that has come from the decision. but it has the same practical

effect, meaning that the government must have a very, very, very good reason to regulate political spending. the court in buckley then went on to decide that preventing corruption is basically the only very, very, very good reason the government can put forward to limit political spending and then finally the court decided without citing to any evidence or really, really talking much about the realities of political campaigns, the buckley court decided that direct contributions to candidates pose a much greater risk of political corruption than independent spending that is meant to benefit the candidate. and the court specifically said -- and i'm going to quote the buckley decision for a second, that the absence of prearrangement and coordination of an expenditure with the candidate not only undermines the value of the expenditure to

the candidate but it also alleviates the danger that expenditures will be given as a quid pro quo for improper commitment from the candidate. and so with that reasoning, the buckley court upheld contribution limits, limits on direct contributions of candidates but struck down limits on how much an individual could spend to benefit a candidate. so fast forward to 2010, and the citizens united decision. so this decision as everybody in this room surely knows is best known for its holding namely that it is unconstitutional to prohibit corporations from using general treasure funds for electioneering the court also discussed independent spending and an aspect of the decision that is more frequently overlooked. in the citizens united court, in fact, expanded the logic of

buckley significantly. and it proclaimed, again, without looking at any factual evidence, that truly noncoordinated expenditures, quote-unquote, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. and so in other words, to give a concrete example, this is the same as saying that a million -- multimillion dollar campaign ad blitz funded by say, bp oil to benefit members of the energy and commerce committee does not pose any sort of threat of political corruption. so long as bp decides to spend that money without consulting with the candidates. with this, however, the court assumed that there was robust transparency that would also act as a mechanism to prevent corruption. three months after citizens united -- excuse me, two months after citizens united was

decided, the dc court of appeals decided a case called speech now and i promise i'm getting to the point. here the big question was presented. the plaintiff in that case said, i'm an independent -- or i'm a pac, i'm a political action committee, i only want to spend money on independent expenditures, i'm not going to coordinate under the campaign finance rules with any particular candidate. therefore, it is unconstitutional for the government to still restrict the money coming into my organization there's absolutely no -- so the argument goes there's no anticorruption benefit to restrict the money coming in if the money coming out is per se noncorrupting. the court agreed and tossed the limits on contributions to these types of pacs aside. and so from this decision the

sec created a new category of entity and you might have heard this term already but i kind of love to say it. the independent expenditure only multicandidate nonconnected pac which, obviously, is a mouthful and i believe was recoined by our friend here as the super pac. now, you know why i came up with that term. [laughter] >> the other name is so catchy. and so as we -- i'll let us move on to our other panelists but from that creation story as it is, i just want to underscore three particularly troubling assumptions that super pacs are based upon. one is this idea that independent expenditures are noncorrupting. i mean, this notion is quite ludicrous to anybody who has ever dealt with the realities of, you know, our political

system. i mean, i think it belies all logic that, for instance, that an individual could give $5 million to my closely affiliated super pac. i know all about it, that infusion of money is let's say given to me at a critical moment in my campaign and necessary for me to achieve a key win. it's crazy to think that i will not feel indebted to that individual in some way. the second fallacy is this notion that the coordination rules are sufficient to prevent true coordination the way we understand coordination and we're going to talk about that a ton but just that they are not sufficient. and then finally as eliza highlighted, the third fallacy is this idea that the current disclosure regime is sufficient that captured this new influx of

political money and i'm going to end illustrating that i think the best is steven colbert. have you guys talked about him. >> not yet. >> as many of you probably know comedian and genius steven colbert has been illustrating some of the -- in kind of ridiculous aspects of the current regime by creating a super pac and he created an affiliated 501c4 named the cobert super pac for the purpose, of course, of accepting donations that never have to be disclosed and then can be shifted to the supercross pac. so with that rather sad tale i'll turn it to somebody else to hopefully offer a ray of hope. so paul, hopefully you can offer a ray of hope but certainly hope explain some of the concerns here and maybe we should note cobert no longer has the super

pac. >> that's right. >> it's just his good buddy jon stewart. >> so paul? >> i'm going to talk a little bit about the broader legal concerns at play when you talk about disclosure. as mimi explains one of the major things coming out of the supreme court decision of citizens united was a declaration by the supreme court by five justices that independent expenditures don't corrupt or can't corrupt. but one of the promises made by the court, promise might be too strong of a word but one of the suggestions strongly made by 8 of the court's 9 members that disclosure and transparency would be an anecdote to any potential corruption from this flood of corporate and by extension union money that would be coming into our election system. so 8 of the courts 9 justices signed onto a section of the opinion that stated, for example, a campaign finance system that pairs corporate

expenditures with an effective disclosure has not and i say today. later on in the same paragraph they went on to write with the advent of the internet disclosures can provide shareholders and citizens with information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters and skipping ahead to the end of that same paragraph the court concluded the first amendment protects political speech and disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way. this transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages. so 8 of the court's 9 justices strongly stood behind the disclosure and it wasn't the first time, in fact, 8 of the court's 9 justices have been strongly behind disclosure in all of the court's recent disclosure-related decisions, 8 of the court's 9 justices in 2003 in the mcconnell decision that upheld the bipartisan campaign reform act also stood firmly behind disclosure. the only justice on the court who has not supported disclosure

is justice thomas. and also very recently in a case out of the state of washington, called d.o.e. v. reed which was not money in elections it was pertaining to disclosure of the identities of those who sign petitions to get measures on the ballot. in that case 8 of the court's 9 justices again stood behind disclosure and upheld the law and i want to read you a very short package from justice scalia's concurring opinion in that decision because it's perhaps the most strongly worded endorsement that i've heard coming from a supreme court justice. there are laws against threats and intimidation and harsh criticism short of unlawful action as a price or people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage without which our democracy is doomed. for my part i do not look forward to society which thanks to the supreme court campaigns anonymously and even exercise

the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from account bitch which has not resemble the home of the brave. so that's the backdrop here, the legal backdrop. we have a very consistent 8-justice majority on the supreme court behind transparency and disclosure in our elections but as it's explained very accurately we have a major deficit of disclosure in this year's election. why is that the case? well, lieliza has touched on th main points while they have to explain all the money coming into the super pacs and legal donors changed with citizens united and speech now that came a couple months later so for the first time in decades it became legal for entities, for groups, for corporations to make unlimited contributions to these super pacs. what we may see at the end of this month when most of the super pacs that have been

created for this election cycle have to file their first comprehensive reports is filing reports that state that a particular super pac received a million dollars for americans from apple pie and because -- and that is made possible by citizens united combined with speech now. prior to these cases, prior to these decisions corporate entities like say americans for apple pie 503c4 would be illegal to contribute to any political entity and now they can contribute and that's all that has to be disclosed by super pacs because as eliza explained themselves do not have to disclose where they get their money, unless the donor is foolish enough to specifically designate their contribution to that c4 for the purpose of making lectionary ads or independent expenditures or electionary communications. this particular deficit and disclosure, the fact that c4's only have to disclose when they make electionary communications -- they only have

to disclose their donors if their donors designate their men for electary communications. this is our dysfunctional and friday lock federal election commission so there are a couple of players in this game that have gotten us to this point the sec has played a big role and the supreme court despite its promises that we will have disclosure and that will prevent corruption and that will allow voters to make informed decisions in the voting booth and allow voters to hold corporations accountable, i don't think we're going to have that much information in this coming election about the true sources of money going to these super pacs even though they no, ma'amally disclose all the money they raise and spend. ..

the context of the socialist workers party, naacp, and we are talking about extreme violence being, people being victims of extreme violence and also discrimination and threats and harassment and reprisals of the hand of the government itself. so we will probably hear more about that. but a brief mention of some of the ways that the new disclosure act some in the foundation have just announced last week very similar to the provisions the window disclosure act that passed the house but failed to close the cloture vote in the senate in 2010. one of the ways they would get at what we might refer to as devotional problem that is to say the super peck is disposing

but they're getting money from another group and we don't know who the money came from that went into that group. in this new model, super pac and the act that fairly passed an act and there were new concept that would have been or could be in the near future and if your losses do what i would love to do and pass on of these disclosure bills embedded into the law and that is to say buildings and presumptions that if someone gives money to this vendor and either of the spender solicited the money specifically telling them they would use it to make independent expenditures in the communication that donors should be disclosed. if there was substantial discussion between the spender and the donor the true source of the fund about the fact that the money would be used for the election that donor would be and should be disclosed. if the donor had acknowledged the money was going to be used by this vendor for political ads, that donors should be

disclosed. and finally, if the recipient of the money that's making these expenditures, if they have made substantial expenditures in the past election cycles that would put the donor on notice their money would be used again for expenditures, political expenditures and that donors should be disclosed. that some of the concept that are not in law but are worth taking a look at and considering putting into our disclosure and i will stop there. >> thank you so much coming and i think it certainly different perspective. >> this is why i went to law school. i will use this one. i will be playing the role of the loyal opposition today and social work is of my favorite cases, and i feel what sort of bares mentioning that neither the majority of the supreme court nor those of us on the broadly defined white want a corrupt government more than anyone else does, and we don't have a particular problem in this culture as the nine justices agreed disclosure is

good for what ails you. the difference is that we think there's already so much of it and i also know that's the case but thankfully my kill panelists have demonstrated that super pacs has the same reporting requirements as to normal pacs which is substantial. i want to discuss off the bat that is the direction this conversation is going i want to briefly pushed back. we haven't yet seen motion will problem and you're right it might be the end of this month we find out there's hundreds of millions of dollars of money to sort of a swelling out there. i find it extremely unlikely for a few reasons. mostly economic. they can spend money on political advocacy but it can't be a major purpose which means at a minimum they can't spend more than 50% of what they are actually taking in on ads and donations that pass and things of that nature. as anyone that wants anonymity badly enough to take a 50% cut right off the top of the contribution, i just don't see

that happening. second of all, any of that money that has been spent, actually is taxed. so generally the money that goes handled by the sea for is the non-taxable income the contribution might be under a tax but that is a separate question but if you are spending 49% in the worst-case scenario of the donations as the political advocacy money all of that is taxable, and again, another hair cut that's coming off the top of your contribution to this id is an extraordinarily inefficient way of influencing politics that what you're trying to do. i shall also point out that a lot of the c4s or shadows like american apple pie who are terrible people, let me tell you, but it's a lot of groups, the nra, the sierra club, most of the people you would think so of major efficacy as c4s and they are obviously interested in politics.

a lot of them then you have heard of don't make fortunes off of the billionaire contributions. they take in large amounts of small donations from large numbers of people and they reflect a reasonable sort of grass-roots approach on particular issues. so i think painting c4s as the enemy in the election is a mistake. i may be proven wrong as i said because there is so much disclosure, but sitting here today i think is unlikely we are going to see all of this funneling of money through the c4s. that is my spiel on that. so, let me just give you my sort of overall view of how disclosure should work and i think this is a lot of the supreme court had in mind. i tend to take issue with the fact the supreme court said shares our her ruling on a major first amendment case but we don't really know what we are talking about. citizens united had amicus briefs from just about everybody and their mother. roughly one-tenth of american

borders were engaged in this case. it was ridiculous. i don't think the supreme court was uninformed when was talking about disclosure in that case and they didn't suggest particular changes or the future cases would turn on and i'm not sure that necessarily impacts the constitutionality of any sort of legislation. i would tend to think and if you all would agree with me that most of the disclosed suggestions brought to congress would pass muster. that doesn't make them a good idea and i don't think we should read the supreme court opinion saying you know what you need to do is pass me along disclosure. i read the case is basically saying there is a lot of disclosure and that is the way the democracy deals with first amendment problems. so an alternative view. in my view it's a question of who should be disclosing the contributions and that should be the person that's cudgeling their content. this idea that whoever at any point during an entire chain of funding might have given the dollar i think is dangerous.

a lot of people will see the chamber of commerce was at $30 million in the 2010 election and we want to know precisely who the membership is and who gives them that money. if you're going to go that direction i think you have to be consistent and say that nra also spend money. we should get their membership list and i think that that sort of approach would pose great constitutional problems, and i think that i would look forward to litigating it at this table. as far as what should be disclosed this is a related issue. a colleague of mine had a very good idea on this which is to take the standard of evidence in federal court and use that as a sort of starting point. what that says broadly coming and trust me you don't want to get in the details, is that information is broadening as expert testimony. if it is in some way enlightening to the jury and i think there's a reasonable standard here there is a danger of the disclosure we are getting out all sorts of information that's clogging up the tubes which no one is ever going to

look up which isn't relevant to anybody's vote and which is just a burden on the people that have to deutsch the disclosing. for instance right now the super pac disclosures $200. i simply don't understand how to hundred dollars can be considered a corrupting amount of money given the scale of politics in this country and i am not sure who has ever benefited from being able to look up the name and address and employer of someone to get $200. i think that is just frankly junk that's out there in the world and people can only look at it and it doesn't change any votes. it's not relevant to any standards the supreme court has put out there. as for when, this is the toughest one in my view for my side, and that's the -- i do see the point to have an election in iowa and funding the ads after the primary or after the straw poll or whatever. that's a fair point.

i wonder how many people who say we need to have by the minute disclosure actually work for the political mud your campaign. i'm in a room of politician types who work on a campaign. how many of you did the filing work? okay, none of you. that's not helpful for me. it really is an extremely difficult and burdensome process and i think that a reasonableness of the 24, 48 hour window is what we do on expenditures in the country is the manifests and i am not clear on how you go about getting around the problem if you are looking to stand in money before the election and a turnaround in five minutes that doesn't strike me the way you run a business or an organization and a similarly this is almost as important you are not only disclosing your donors you're disclosing your spending and the disclosures the minimum it becomes an obligation so if you buy an ad in the ad is

going to air before you don't disclose it the day before the election. the likelihood is that will end up on the report and if someone happens to give money to your organization the day before an election, that money didn't go for the ad, those being aired that day. that's going to go into another election and be continuing. so in practice that is less of a concerned and people think it is. more of that spending is picked up the and the rhetoric. finally the question of where you disclosed. on the all for online disclosure. i think of having searchable databases and having these terrible pds is worded and there is no excuse for that and the amounts of money we spend on all sorts of ridiculous things. so i definitely think that that is common ground. where we tend not to agree and

this came up in the act and also in the building is currently being considered by the sunlight condition is the idea of the disclaimer that you put in the advertisement itself. the language is where i am allen dickerson running for dogcatcher d.c. and i approve this message. maybe that has a certain rule. i think in the area of independent expenditure its less helpful. for a few reasons. one is saying i'm the candidate and i approve this would ever that has some content. saying i'm crossroads gps and i approve this doesn't tell anyone anything which is the next step to refine it doesn't tell you anything so you include that and this is an example from massachusetts. here's the organization who approved it. i'm the general counsel or chief executive officer or president and this is my name and i approved it and here are the top five donors. i don't know how you are supposed to get that into a 152nd radio ad or a tv spot or anything else. how you get the guy to show up

and say it really fast or none of that information is actually conveyed. when you are doing is taking york air time that you paid for that is protected in the first amendment activity and taking it right off the top because you're going to put in all this information that is inclined to change a single vote in the commonwealth of massachusetts, and i mean, i very much look forward to the constitutional challenge both there and in other localities and the idea of making that the federal standard i think what -- linwood due to things to read it immediately make isn't a case before the d.c. circuit, which i think we would wind; and number two, it would tie up a lot of people's hard-earned money. so i am sure -- i have an entire page of commons on all your stuff but i will wait. 64 so much. all four of you have raised really interesting and important issues and we will play through the mess and as we can and get questions from the audience and a bit as well but first i want to sort of pick up on one thing that allan was saying which is

with the information that is not being disclosed does anybody look at it as valuable? at least from i think it is from the reporter's perspective. you are going through all this information looking for stories. would it be useful to have more -- >> i probably spend a lot more time than i should looking through finance documents. i do want to acknowledge allan's point about nonprofits, and would be wrong to say that at least i think nonprofits are the enemy. it's fitting effect there is a disclosure on the nonprofits to talk about disclosure we have to acknowledge that. and i also think allan touched on an important point which is that when you go into requiring disclosure from the nonprofits, you are in a difficult and controversial area. and, you know, there may be an argument what we really need to do is get the irs to be a little bit more aggressive about saying to the nonprofits, you know, if you spend all of your money on campaigns, you are really not a

tax-exempt group anymore. so to go to the question of disclosure and why it's useful to people like me, i really don't think that it is junk disclosure. you'd be amazed how useful it is to be able to get these reports and see who the treasurer is, to call the treasurer. you could call the donors. even at that, the disclosure that there isn't that country inns of to read a lot of times the place of employment has it listed is an amazing number of campaign finance reports that have 0000 that to file the report but there's no money in there and there's a letter in the public record from the fec saying we request more information. so there's an amazing amount of kind of junk disclosure in the sense that it's not actual disclosure. but i think in the internet age i am a little hard pressed to see why it is so hard and what i would say from the legislative point of view and i want to state quite clearly that it's not the roll call job to endorse

legislation it is just to report upon it so we are not here to take positions but to the extent i have any kind of argument on the legislative front, if it isn't broken, don't try to fix it, don't try to fix what's not broken. but i think is not broken is the current disclosure regime for political committees. you know, we're sitting here talking to all these people who knock themselves out to avoid disclosure and there are always going to be people like that out there but there's an amazing number of players who really want to just play by the rules. their whole thing is just tell me with the rules are and let me follow them. and so if you are going to write legislation i think there's a strong argument for keeping it pretty simple. and i think that one of the reasons that last year's disclosure act ran into trouble is that it wasn't a pretty complicated bill secure it simple and provide a simple vehicle for people who don't feel like using nonprofits or any other kind of vehicle when we want to spend campaign money the old-fashioned way for the

political action committees that's one thing i wouldn't get rid of and i don't think it is junk disclosure. >> i think an additional point is one question that was raised is what's coming on with the state level. you kentucky law but in the disclosure. >> sure. i mean, that is actually an incredible question to answer because the states are all over the map. and to tell you the truth, it can be wildly difficult. and i am sitting as an attorney from the state advocates around the country, and from state lawmakers asking questions about policy, and for me it is extremely complicated actually to get through the various web of the laws and all of the different states, and i understand it is extremely complicated for liquor store on the ground and trying to comply. i guess i would say the transfer

that we are seeing on the recommendation trends many states i think john themselves flat footed after citizens united, and not everywhere but there's been a perception among many state lawmakers that the rules of the game were changed. there's a lot more money coming in and new ways and the disclosure regime is not equipped at all and some of that is the correct perception that citizens united deutsch changed to read some of it is just i think evolutions and political campaigning as a natural course. but regardless, they're has -- there is a sense of urgency in many states to enact the new disclosure regimes and strengthening the existing law. there's also been a push and a lot of places to bring things online with jul agree with everybody at that table that that is a great goal and in the

situation of campaign finance and voting in many other areas of the law, all the meeting posses, getting things online tends to be most efficient and there's all sorts of benefits. a recommendation though, and this goes to eliza's point, you know, i struggle a lot of lawmakers of the state level who have these campaign finance disclosure rules that are quite frankly complicated and usually they are cobbled together because of existing state law and some federal law and some from the neighboring states, and it's difficult to know what to do about that, because they understand that many of these people are working with a very thin stuff and they are not experts in the field and then there's a lot of barriers and i do completely agree with what many people have said, one of the best things we can do as a policymaker is to think about ways to achieve your policy goal

and then also have some sort of robust enforcement mechanism people tend to overlook. >> i would like to ask the two gentlemen one of the issues that's been raised a couple of times particularly in the opening remarks had to do with coordination and the actual the of corruption. as a expert was quoted as saying the greatest danger of the super pakistan may skew the next congress and the interest of the large super pac contributors and argued that the spending can corrupt because of the contributions to create the actual value or the appearance of corruption they may feel indebted to the people and at

the same time we see from the super pac side many are being run by close associates of current candidates, and i will give two examples. one is there's a major super pac affiliated with net from even by the aids from the 2008 campaign and looking at mr. gingrich spokesman is hoping to run and he said, quote, we take our marching orders through to new gingrich and i deutsch he tells me to do through the media and it's in the conference of lot. certainly on its face it looks like we have coordination going on. there's information going back and forth but it's giving money to whom it seems like there are certainly the appearance of a quid pro quo and if you could address that whether the coordination rules are real, corruption or appearance of corruption israel, and the

answers to the questions are yes, what is the appropriate response. would you like to take a swing of that? >> sure to read if you go back and read citizens united which is a good thing to do if you have about 12 extra hours on your hands, one of the things the court is concerned above is the fact that if you want of a breitling rule and say these people get to speak and these people don't with these people use this vehicle and these people don't come to things happen. one is everyone goes around been scared to death of a federal investigation they have to hire one of us in a reasonable amount of money. >> you can speak for yourself, one. >> and the sort of ernst freakin' i am pro bono, but a lawyer at an unreasonable amount of money and have to worry about these very fact intensive inquiries and this isn't a question of nice buying everything we're right now the rule is did you contribute to a

super pac and did it to get independent expenditure? if the answer is yes which is relatively straightforward under the current law at least in my view, that's it, the fed goes home. if the standard is something like how close is too close, as huntsman father to close, is gingrich campaign manager to close, obama former secretary to close? where is the line? at that point you are not having an ice pick in and out. they are taking your e-mails, interview and associates, subpoena documents and $7 million of legal fees leader turns out you didn't actually brick wall. that shows in the enormous amount of speech and something the citizens united majority was really worried about. so i guess part of what i am saying is i don't know because there is a nice bright line under the current law that says as long as it isn't coordinated and the term fort meaning that in advance of the actual spending of money you didn't expos x and y then you're fine.

there's a supreme court decision in the sec which upheld the government's power to the political contributions party tax and others from the nonresident aliens come and brad smith said that the decision essentially, that decision was signed but you can distinguish between people who are domestic but then you have the foreign corporations and the domestic corporations and this breitling rule that you are talking about as being helpful gets smeared all over the table. so, you know, get -- as you discuss it is it a question that congress should be dealing with where they say the breitling rule is this is where it is and no further and it's that kind of a determination as opposed to saying maybe this is too much, maybe this is close. that's why you have the regulatory process to make the decisions know what they are supposed to do. >> i don't disagree and that is one of the reasons i think the rule making is so broken.

but when you are specifically talking about corporations, the pcs e debate is an interesting one and probably ten people are going to get tenure on it but i do see a difference. i agree with brad and not only because i work with him, but you know, there is this idea that -- and citizens united everyone points to citizens united and says one of the big interests is american citizens have the right to be informed by the broader range of views including the core regions which are a big part of the economy and implore a lot of us. but a lot of people say find but what is the difference if the right is held by the american people as voters and why shouldn't they be interested in the opinions of the chinese government? because the tax code out of context. what they say, what cu actually says is you have the right to have the view of the community heard, the right to hear from everyone else the three sides in the community that is the language that you use and this is a very old not to quote a

frenchman but the idea we all sit there and talk among ourselves and come to the opinions of the community. in that sense i don't find the concept weird that we are excluding the views of the chinese or the russian government or the princes to use an example raised several times with me. on the corporate governance, that's tricky but all issues and corporate governance are tricky. it's not the idea is a corporation are subsidiary controlled from abroad is not in a question in the corporate law we do this all the time for whether you have to file. we do it for tax purposes, customs purposes, whether or not your ip address falls under the jurisdiction of a particular federal agency. these are questions that very smart people who generally make more than lawyers have been fighting over for decades and i think if you went to any law firm and said look we need to know whether or not we are controlled from abroad your guinn to get a pretty solid the

answer. so why take your point certainly on we need a bright line will but what about this? i think at that point you are not asking about the election you're asking about the corporate law and there's an answer for the corporate law. >> do you want to go at this as well? >> one of the things that i have found to be infinitely first reading since the birth of the super pac business reporting, consistent misreporting in the press of some notion that creating the impression that the super pac has to be separate. the law doesn't require that and allen delude to this in his remarks. there is no law that says they have to have the candidates. there are some restrictions that say for example super pac cannot have discreet specific expenditures of candidates come and that rule is in my view and riddled with some pretty sizable holes and there's another area in the law that says super packs cannot solicit unlimited contribution, i'm sorry,

candidates cannot solicit unlimited contributions from the super pac and for reasons i will get into in the second very weekend of modest provision of the are the only provisions i know what in the federal law that can strain the relationship between the super pac and the cannot courtenay the specific expenditures as the term is defined weekly and they cannot solicit unlimited contributions under the rule that is pretty weak. so if it's week because they ruled last year that a candidate attending and speaking at a super pac fund-raising event does not itself constitute a solicitation. it's perfectly legal and we have for example mitt romney showing up at the events for restore our future. so this is baked into the citizens united. don't worry this will be spent independently with candidates so it can correct those candidates and then you have mitt romney appearing at a fund-raising events and a super pac that is raising a million-dollar contribution or larger and of

making comments to the press that he receives those contributions as being made to him which is another act that gets to the notion that we don't have a russian problem yet but before i tell you that very brief anecdote i want to talk about the rules for a second come so to ban the solicitation of the unlimited contribution is weak because they can still go in the fund raisers the coordination rules are weak because for example while there is a blackout period of 120 days for a former employee who goes to work for a super pac from being involved in the creation of independent expenditures, that provision does not apply before on less that individual conveys the super pac information that is material to the creation of the specific ad, and that information is not all obtained from the publicly available source like the website commesso and some degree there is a revolving door

provision but at the very modest in its application. allen need a the comment we don't have the problem yet that romney has made to the press about a million-dollar donor from one of his friends. there a few super pac in existence when the last comprehensive reports were due to be filed at july 31st 2011. but restore the future was one of them and what the journalists find when they began coming for the reports were three separate 1 million of the contributions from corporations that no one had ever heard of cities are doing a little digging and one of them was called w spawn llc treated last spring that made a million-dollar car division to the restore the future in the spring and then was dissolved in july before the report was even filed a comes of a dog and a little bit and found out that it was say to the to associated or the reporter couldn't find any information other than the man had an address that was shared with the same building at the capitol office.

we filed a complaint with the federal election commission early august on a friday afternoon saying we don't really know what's going on here but this looks shaky and like it might violate another provision that prohibits making a contribution in the name of another. and what we speculated was that there was a human out there probably several humans behind this corporate shell and they made up a million-dollar contribution in the name of this corporate shell. classic russian problems may or may not be prosecuted as a violation of law and the fcc has very weak track record of enforcing the federal law as does the justice department when it comes to campaign finance law. so we filed the claim friday afternoon and i would wake up on saturday morning and sometimes either friday night or saturday morning a human being at knard said sorry, that was me. that was me. and i believe it was the next day mitt romney was on the campaign trail and was asked about this and said no harm no foul, he is an old friend of mine and he gave me a million dollars, no problem, moving on.

will he hadn't given million dollars to mitt romney he had given it to restore the future and it wasn't for his name it was through a company he set ups. that's a rational problem and even bigger if the fcc doesn't crack down on that money laundering through the corporate entities so that demonstrates there is a russian problem in my view or these candidates who are supposed to be living and existing independently receive these suepr pacs as throwing pots of money. he gave me a million bucks, no harm, no foul. that's a big problem that was is just as much a threat of corruption to democracy as if it were legal for not only in the knard but in actual business corporation to cut a million-dollar check directly to an individual who may be the next president of the country. >> i just wanted to dovetail on that to go back to something allen said on the force.

it is undoubtedly true that they are not the enemy and there are many fabulous 501c4. many of them are funded by lots of smaller nations. that isn't necessarily the problem coming and i don't think that many of us at this table would claim that to be the problem of the bigger problem is when c4s are used to shield the corporate entities or other rich individuals and i think the chamber of commerce and brought up was a 501 essey six is a problem because they are spending a huge amount to influence elections coming and we understand, we as a community understand that they represent, quote on quote, business interests, but we have no way to know in any given circumstance if they are getting a 5 million-dollar donation from

wal-mart to target a very small election to blow out of water some person who is against changing a law we to allow wal-mart in. that is a huge problem as is the problem. >> that goes back to the earmark of the arrested enough to say that it's your marks there's lots of ways to convey you can convey we want to do without actually running the legal rules. and there's also the problem of people using the c4s as the pure shell organizations and fit that's been more of an enforcement problem but unfortunately we haven't seen any enforcement from the fec come from the irs or the justice department. i can't think of other entities that have would have

jurisdiction. but the result is there is a very real ability to create a 501 c4 for the purpose of funneling money to a super pak or other sort of political entity and we don't know what hit us so we wanted to underscore that. i would say very briefly about the 501c4 group or any other non-profit and absolutely mimi is ray the vast majority of the groups are the kind of salt of the dearth group's you might contribute money to and again this is one of the reasons it's challenging to regulate in the area but it's worth saying that the irs has a reputation for not having the necessary resources to make sure the group's character earlier serving a prison and social welfare as opposed campaign and i think it is fair to say i don't really think we are going to have the abuses by nonprofits in this

area that seems a little naive to me. if you look at the groups like veterans for troops, very influential in the 2004 election when that group hit the airwaves is nobody knew what they were about. groups like watched of organizations and "the new york times" dug around and found that information but especially at a time we have an economic downturn and the news of the street is going through great change tightening its belt i don't think we can count on investigative reporters like what works and bernstein to go out and get the story the way they did in the watergate era. >> i would like to make one more point about the c4s because allen pointed to the deficiency by the close to paraphrase but if you give money to a c4 you are giving your efficiency because they cannot have as their primary activity to get involved in the elections. i don't agree that you are cutting efficiency in half.

i agree there is a rule saying that elections, can the influence and cannot be the primary activity to read how do they get around this? go to the website of crossroads gps, groups of by karl rhodes and this is going on on both sides of the aisle democratic and republican groups. he said that american crossroads in the super super pac he said to the press and the donors if you are willing to be disclosed, give to my super pac because as we are all in agreement here with in an individual to get as close to you don't want to be disclosed majeure check out to my c4 come across roads gps. is it a 50% reduction in effectiveness, however, when crossroads' gps is using 49% of the budget to say vote for the candidate x or y and they spend the other 51% of the budget running ads saying the candidate is going to raise your taxes and wants to tax you and your grave, called him and tell him what you think. they are running issue ads

injury close proximity to the election and battleground states using broadcast media. it certainly appears as though there are the principal goal to effect the election even with the 51% of the money that they are spending on the so-called issue ads, particularly when you get the battleground state targeting. they are very good lawyers. they know what the rules are and they know the weak track record enforcement, and they know how to write from the hard hitting issues. go to cross roads gps website and check out the ads their lawyers or cds our issue as a test result is this really major 50% reduction of efficiency of the electoral influence and dollars? i don't think so. >> you look like you are about to burst out of your chair. estimates usually get to reserve time for the rebuttal in court. so, where to start. i take your point of issuance. of course every wed the table and probably many here know there's been a long debate about

what exactly an issue that is and we are down to the problem. yes, people can definitely look at this stuff and say this looks like an electoral come indication, it looks like, you know, the function of the efficacy or any of these other phrases the supreme court has come up with, but you have to understand why they have those phrases because it goes back to the issue you have to be able to differentiate between the six media don't which is a different question but if you are going to regulate campaign speech from other amendment speech you have to be able to distinguish between the nra saying my god we need are done right for the sierra club saying don't put in this land fill, and, you know, vote to deceit senator so and so and every single time the court has tried to do this over the last 30 years they've ended up in this enormous - because people are smart, and the nice thing about the rules is you don't get to be smart with them and as a result, we have jurisprudence that says this is an electrical communication, this isn't. i understand people may not be comfortable with that, but we

are a nation of law and there has to the amount of predictability and this is where i think the supreme court has more flak than we deserve. this is a tough question and they had to draw the line somewhere and in a way that protects the maximum amount of speech and in the first amendment that is laudable but i don't think it is fair to call it a sham issue which as a phrase has been overturned. >> the congress did address the problem and the mccain-feingold with the communications definition it was precisely tailored to get at this issue and is it if you are going to run a broad with a satellite of within 30 days of the primary and the general targeted to the relevant electorate and spend more than 10 grams have to file a disclosure report saying that he spent the money. welcome the c4s are filing that report that they spend x dollars but with the congress also said in that statute and the bipartisan campaign reform act and the feingold all is anyone that spends including the organization that spent more

than $10,000 on that type of ad, a bright line had an easy to know whether you are inside or outside of that line has to disclose all contributors contributed more than a thousand dollars to the organization and it is after that call was held up by the justices in the supreme court they passed a regulation with very little notice of 2007 so the only time the spender actually has to tell us where you got your money we are not going to meet you require the names of all contributors a thousand dollars or more we will need to disclose the names of a contributor to give a thousand dollars or more for the purpose of furthering that specific ad who gave you that money specifically designated for running the ad. it's the sec that gutted the statute passed by congress, as effectively dealt with the bright line issue. we will open up questions to the audience, so be thinking of something you'd like us to

address everything from the president eminem eddy which can be 2% or nothing, questions around the naacp which had to do with why associations are protected in terms of having to disclose the membership and lack of safety in the south or the russian all question, so the one i would like to ask me as a number of different attempts people are addressing these issues. we've heard about the fcc and the disclosure act, the fcc has a piece of this as well as the sec. we have alphabet soup going on. if anyone has an effort to deal with it that's worth bringing to the attention of the folks here we can go straight across. >> sure. i will highlight one effort that i don't think has been raised yet and that is the sec, the

securities and exchange commission. there has been a petition and much new talk of a new rule will require publicly held companies to disclose the money they spent on political advertising and this would have to be disclosed to the sec public record and also there's kind of variations of it but one variation would have to be disclosed to the shareholders, one variation you could actually told the companies they had to get obviously the shareholders are the owners of the company and the would have to give approval to the corporation before they would be able to spend money in that manner so that is something else to keep them on. >> there is really only one bill i'm willing to say a proposal and that i like right now and that's the one that has to do with the federal communications commission because of the fcc

already to some degree tells us what's being spent and that is a great way for them such as myself to know what is being spent and one of the reasons why we can say 30 plus million dollars has been spent by super super pac because there are the groups that try the spending and that is a pretty simple and not a dirty i think intrusive way there's a number of ads for what and here's who bought them. that would be easy and helpful in getting the grid line is being spent and by whom. i'm going to be provocative and i'm going to say that i actually think this is such a difficult area to legislate for constitutional and free speech reasons that i advocate a correction by the culture change. i think that profit organizations should voluntarily disclose the donors and i think they should be growing public pressure on the arabs to voluntarily disclose the donors

and i don't think they should be understand that is the only way that we are ever going to fully correct this problem. i do want to say that to the degree that disclosure rules are challenging or perceived to be impossible or ineffective or joint disclosure there is is a prize in monologue there which is the lobbying disclosure lally. a lot of people say those are in complete and not enough lobbyists are captured and a lot of lobbyists say they need to be fixed but interestingly enough they don't seem to be that burdensome, they're very illustrative, they shed a lot of light on the industry and there's been a self correction within the lobbying industry due in parts of the jack abramoff scandal which by the way i don't think would have come to light without the lobbying disclosure law that we have in place. so i just really think simple basic disclosure that require the reporting in a way that is not hard to understand the jewels bright lines and doesn't burden people unnecessarily.

and if it's not broken, don't fix it. those things work for pacs and lobbyists. let's keep that model and if we want to give the irs a little extra money to kind of designed who is a nonprofit, that probably wouldn't hurt either. >> i have to say three things, one because the conditions director will beat me if i don't which is of course the sunlight foundation has its own draft, excuse me, work on lobbying disclosure, it has its own draft disclosure rule called the super pac act open for the market. the second is the committee on transparency held an even cluster lobbying reform. it's worth looking at. you can watch the transparency caucus and third is the sunlight foundation discloses all of its contributions and also our expenditures to other entities

that we fund are available at sunlightfounation.com and it's something we encourage organizations to do all the line not been to put anybody on the spot at the table, but we look at lobbying disclosure or disclosure of suepr pacs along these lines there are a lot of holes in the way the rules are formulated and they are definitely worth looking more deeply into. >> in terms of legislation there is good content in super pac but daniel mengin and similar to disclose act but it's very much strict down without many of the bells and whistles that got hung on to the act. i would love to see some legislation introduced this year that is a much more streamlined version of the act without a lot of the bells and whistles. the sec is really what i spent much of my professional time on entering and participating or

engaging with. i don't have a lot of hope for the federal election commission. tree times in 2011 debt locked on a document would begin eight rulemaking to undo the loophole that the commission created in 2007 that i was explaining a couple of minutes ago, the one that says no you don't have to disclose your contributors were the ones that give you money for the purpose of furthering. yet three times in 2011 the deadlock on the party lines yet three democratic commissioners, one of whom was there in 2007 voted for the rule and the colleagues saying let's at least open this up for public comment and revisit it through the democratic commissioners that voted against giving so in 2011 and five of our current commissioners are surging in expired terms, five of them could be read placed by the president whenever he wants to and he has completely failed on this. he's failed to exercise the initiative necessary to overhaul and turn it back into a

functioning and a campaign finance wriggle free agency if. one other hope on this fund is the lawsuit that the campaign center is involved in and part of the legal team representing van hollen who has sued to the election commission precisely about this rule passed in 2007. there are arguments about two weeks ago in the federal district court. we are going to wait and see and hopefully the best case scenario which unfortunately isn't a super strong posture with the best case scenario is the court orders the federal election commission to revisit this world to conduct the rulemaking to consider once again whether the loophole created in 07 was a good thing hopefully be in a good decision and is in hollen case. let's start with the things we address in the rest of the panel. i completely agree on the culture shift. i think a lot of us on my side of the spectrum don't have a problem of disclosures as long as voluntary and your back to the whole federal investigations and $7 million in treaties and

to the extent any group that finds itself so uncontroversial that it can do that, sure. but obviously that is the first amendment is for the other groups. and i also agree i don't have a lot of hope for the sec and we are going to now encapsulate the problem for you. go to the website and look, you know, super pac forms. there aren't any and unless i'm wrong i've looked. there isn't a single regulation that notice is the fact that they exist because the sec hasn't been able to get together and write up a nice regulation that says by the way we notice the supreme court of the united states in federal district court sitting in the district of columbia said certain things about the constitution. that is nowhere. we take a regular form and steven colbert did this regularly. you felt and write a nice letter on the letterhead that is by the way we are a super pak and established.

until they can handle these questions i don't have a lot of faith in their ability to handle the hard ones. i'm a corporate litigator by training which reminds permanently but i disagree with you on the fec initiative there hasn't been any rulemaking on it yet as i assure you are aware i'm sure you'll see on that. it's true the shareholders, there's a lot of questions on this but they are the residual value of it or however you want to characterize it. but citizens united talks about shareholder democracy as a way of handling these things come and there has been shareholder democracy. there have been i think something like 25 elections last year where shareholders were asked what you like us to disclose our political spending in every single one of those elections false. that's the problem with the fcc coming in saying the shareholders can't take care of

their own interest so we are going to force this disclosure. they don't want this side of disclosure, they don't want it for a couple of obvious reasons, one is every single meeting turns into a referendum on the sort of political role being taken by the corporate world generally and obviously that is a bit of a distraction. it's not the shareholder value and shareholders probably don't want it. secondly to the extent this creates transaction costs for the spending of political money by the corporations whether directly or through the pacs or whatever. it essentially is a sort of unilateral political disarmament by the business community i'm not taking a position on this plan saying to the extent shareholders themselves don't of disinformation and don't want to turn their annual meetings into a circus i do think the responsibility to respect that come and. it is an actual shareholder

issue. >> wanton i think that it's extremely disingenuous to say the shareholders are not interested. the fact of the matter is most of us don't know where all of our shares are in the mutual-fund, not a corporate the litigator causing you understand the structure of these investment vehicles much better than i do, but i do know a penchant investing investing on your behalf, there's all sorts of ways that money could be was invested in the corporations, and you don't actually know. i'm not saying that a change to the sec rules would be the silver bullet. nor do i think that that is the only change that should come about. i do think that that strikes me as extremely low hanging fruit. publicly owned corporations are transparent in many ways, and you know, i can understand the

debate about -- i can understand a debate about having to vote on specific expenditures, but making these corporations disclose their political spending and giving shareholders at least the ability once a year to say, you know, i'm comfortable with my money being used for political purposes or no, i'm not comfortable with my money being used for political purposes, i think that the baseline is hard not to support in my opinion more deutsch think that is a silver bullet. >> 40 seconds. islamic i'm not going to use the word disingenuous, but i do think that -- i think it is difficult to draw the line on exactly what is political when you talk about a corporate budget made the fact that $10,000 in the direct political spending somehow should be disclosed to shareholders and a multimillion-dollar, a unit of negotiation with the union or the plant in a particular place isn't.

i just think that is kind of a weird wind. corporations all the time they're hugely politically risky and what sort of political risks are the shareholders willing to take on i think you also have to have those for everything else that is no way to run a corporation which is why we don't do it that way. stan axson, deacons -- so, open to questions. one of my colleagues is running around with a microphone perhaps or will be running around with a microphone in just a moment. sometimes you need i is in the back of your head. we will start over there with the gentleman in the sweater. it makes it tough to tell. if we could move beyond the theory for a second we have a prairie in florida in eight days. how do you crack that when you move beyond restored our future, how do you find out this one?

>> i wanted to comment briefly because the topic of the forum is called the suepr pacs determined that election and that is the one question we haven't really answer and i'm going to give you money answer which is i do not think that suepr pacs will determine the presidential outcome provided to the degree that they played the role in accelerating the trends that are not going to be definitive i do think where the suepr pacs could play an important role is in the above plus senate races and i think if you talk to any number of the house or senate candidates who lost in 2010, quite a number of them will point to the super pac expenditures in large amounts that had the effect of swamping their own expenditures. sometimes at the last minute. many of them are very shocked, so i think that they are important, but i would say keep an eye out for other vehicles that will be utilized shortly. >> rediker eisel -- here it is. in the 2010 elections, eda spent

$90 million in the 2010 elections but with 60 million went to the federal candidates soprano although there are a large number only a handful of them were particularly active where they were putting in the millions of dollars. is their anyone else that of the question or we will move on to the next one? >> i want to comment briefly wishes she can go to the website and see the disclosure reports for the discreet expenditures but again, the rule there for whether or not they have to tell who gave them the money and make the expenditure whether the donor gave them the money for the purpose of furthering the ad that is the subject of the disclosure report so you get dollar amounts for how much each super pac is spending you are not meant to get information on the donor until at best at the end of this month when the file the first report this calendar year. >> they leave with the date of the primary. >> so, no information on where the money is coming from prior to the florida primary. better information hopefully going forward. >> i will jump in briefly to it

again, taking all these claims and this is just more of a whimsical observation. i think that when information does cannot no one is going to be particularly surprised and i think that's part of what is funny about the debate is everyone is my god who put a ton of money into rick santorum's super pac said that he could suddenly be competitive? it's going to be supporters of santorum i hate to break it to you come and people -- i saw an exchange on tv media week ago when someone said welcome you know, what is in there that is going to change anyone's vote, and he actually said what its big oil gave a bunch of money to send your i don't know how to tell you this no one voting for santorum is bothered by big oil so i'm not saying that necessarily to eva's read anything that's been said here but i just think that at the end of the day it's not going to be that surprising. stat i just want to say if that is the case it may be that it will not be controversial it sort of begs the question one of these different groups of the last minute change the reporting so they wouldn't have to report

it if it isn't a big deal when it comes out and see where the money came from? >> the gentleman in the blue shirt. >> thanks. sam garrison, congressional research service, thanks to the panel. i hope you didn't address this earlier but i am wondering about 527 as most people understand the term of course suepr pacs ar 527 for tax purposes the there has been some speculation that may be suepr pacs ar yesterday's 527's and i'm wondering if now that the suepr pacs are available as an option for the unlimited contributions to the panel have any thoughts about whether 527's as most people understand them, groups like slip votes or america coming together will those now essentially go away or be less prominent in favor of groups like super pac? >> thanks for the question by the we thank you for the sierra reporters. it's been incredibly helpful having part of your chief sheet in front of me to help keep all these entities st. pierre stifel, the one to take this?

>> sure p will have paul giunta and if i start getting my roles confused. the very odd answer to your question is 527's and suepr pacs are one of the same. suepr pacs and actually pacs and general refers to an sec legal and essentially sticks that label on you if your primary purpose, and you'll know the exact purpose, it's been used to influence the election results. ..

>> the limits on prohibited from taking money from corporations, whereas they don't except anymore, and the disclosure. >> i we just -- i think the simple answer is yes to your question. super pacs take the place of 527 groups, referred to the small subset they did not show up at the fec register as pacs. they declined to register as pacs and source restrictions on using money and that's now

all legal. there's no more incentive. and those 527 groups, some of them got a pretty big trouble. most of the big players in 2004 violated campaign laws. they just didn't announce that it took 2006-2007. but now all that activity is legal. there's no more incentive to stay away from the fec. >> if anything, maybe have seen a shift to the fight will see one force. this group, was their primary purpose and they can hold onto the sea for designation the plan to dissolve before the iris whatever get together to investigate, you know, they can can do the same thing but avoid disclosure on top of it. >> the fading of 527's is interesting. that was a term of art to refer to certain types of group that were political organizations as defined by the internal revenue service but not political action committees as defined by the fec. the way they got to do that is they didn't use terms like vote for and vote against.

and as i said earlier in the 527 organizations were different from super pacs in the sense that they didn't engage in exquisite campaign messages. they did disclose their expenditures eventually to the internal revenue service. i actually think there are a great example when you talk about x. closure -- disclosure because initially they didn't disclose and members of congress like john mccain said he want these groups to disclose, you're going to do it through the iris. at the time a lot of reporters like myself said oh, no. because the fec for all his problems has a reputation for making public records available to journalists and helping them go through them. the iris does not. the iris does not have a tradition of disclosure, probably for good reason because they don't want people clawing around in your personal tax records. but having said that, after the funds that were imposed against a lot of leading 527 organization including america coming together, a lot of donors

said we're not going to play this game anymore. they were spooked. they didn't think it was effective. they moved away from 527 anyway, now that there's a super pac option, i don't think you're going to see people spending their money in a way. as mimi said, there's an alternative to the super pac, it's probably going to be a social worker or trade association. organization. >> there was a question over on the side. and as she is walking over, i'm getting an oppression they don't seem to be all that likely, whether deadlock but i don't know, is that accurate or are they still going to investigate ms. behavior? >> the first step in launching an investigation is getting for both amongst the six commissioners to find reason to believe that the law was broken. you file the complaint, or the fec staff -- the commissioners themselves and say what afford

you please say yes to start an investigation, and that is happened with less and less frequency and last two or three or four years. >> so actually in the respected summer to the lobbying rules were basically nobody ever gets prosecuted, although not as extreme. >> my question is mainly about what mr. dickerson was saying about 50% efficiency cuts and local contributions. even if that were potentially the case, at least from my perspective it seems that there is still quite a great investment in political contributions. number one, potential high rate of return given the fact that the federal government as a whole controls, can influence your profit margin potentially by hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars. and other two, the fact that because of the enormous wealth concentration, there's really not that much -- i believe in the dough to newt gingrich is a

billionaire, and even $5 million he gave was kind of in some ways a drop in the bucket for them. so guess i was countries as to your perspectives as to how good of an investment, you know, donating to the independent expenditures would be? >> trying to figure which way to address that. it's an excellent question. i think i am going to zoom out of it in answering it. feel free to draw me back in if i'm being unfair. i think a lot of the confusion is about this concept of corruption. when the supreme court talks about corruption their talk about something very specific. this is basically by a vote on the panel, which is we're talking specifically about a quid pro quo agreement where i'm getting a contribution or doing something for you and you are doing something in return. a lot of that is covered by bribery statutes. but the reason that they're sort of a prophylactic rule around, the supreme court has recognized probably fairly, that there are ways to hide this.

and so we decide to draw line at contributions. now, where i sort of run into trouble, more of a philosophy similar discussion than it probably should be common is that it's not about whether someone feels they oh you their election, or whether someone feels a certain amount of gratitude for your support. it's about whether or not there was an actual corrupt bargain. and i know that that sounds like i'm splitting hairs, but think about it. at the end of the day all democratic politics involves a certain amount of trading of support, you know, it's i think unquestionable that when george pataki was elected governor of new york three times, with the support of major unions that it never supported republicans before, that he felt a lot of sort of obligation or support or gratitude towards the genius. i'm sure it's true that, you know, internally when speaker

boehner was elected speaker that he felt certain, you know, gratitude towards people who helped fund the majority. that's just politics, and we're trying, and if you try to make that illegal, you destroy the ability of people to i to have a functioning democracy. maybe that's too far out. maybe if you dig down you can find a farewell the distinctions between actual corruption in the sense of our to be $59 you approve my wal-mart in your hometown, which i think we all agree is massively illegal and people should go to jail for. and you know this bigger question of attack was probably -- the republican party was used to. i don't know how to drop a line. i don't know if that answered your question. >> can i push a little bit on that? you guys know better than i do but isn't the phrase corruption or the appearance of corruption, so it isn't just about doing wrong, it's about giving people a reason not to trust in the democratic system. >> i think that is an extremely

fair point. this is a bit of a hobbyhorse for me but i think a lot of the problem in this area of the law is that all this stuff goes up on preliminary injunction or sometimes in ways an affidavit with three pages long as is my constitutional rights, blah, blah, blah. so the supreme court has never to my knowledge been asked to pass liquid of what constitutes the appearance of corruption. and there's been, you know, what academic work has been done, which i mean, i'm be the last person to suggest a ten-year peace should define constitution force, but what has been done is suggested that there is this worry about corruption. when you drill down, the amounts of money people talk about agenda that the 200, $500. >> let me push again on that. so these decisions, you know, it's not made by academics but congress does the reviewing process and makes a number of findings. they make a determination about the law and pass the law and the courts will get some kind of difference. so this is really the role of

congress to do the investigation. do you find where the lines are to draw the rules but they're the ones most subject to these pressures in what. >> and you notice oftentimes, this is basically the debate over part of the challenge to, well, all of these laws has been, going back to buckley, is this question of, you, is the contribution limit to the? is $1000 in $1976 corrupting? and you know, the court has occasionally hinted that it might not be. it's probably true that $1000 doesn't buy anyone, thank god. but we don't have a scalpel to prove him to use the phrase, to prove whether $1000 or $5000 or $10,000 is appropriate. i think there is deference to that idea but i also think that the phrase the appearance of corruption we're talking about, fickle and unmeasured public opinion is a very dangerous way to to constitutional law.

>> i think it's undoubtedly the case. that might be a touch too strong, but borderline undoubtedly the case that five justices on this supreme court would agree with allen's definition of corruption. but that wasn't the case as recent as 2003 when in the mcconnell decision the court did not only to find corruption as a little more expansively giving corruption, the appearance of corruption. they also said that under access and influence the results of the making of big contributions creates corruption. that is correct. and they refer to the definition of corruption that allen just articulated as a code crap few of corruption close will. what changed was justice o'connor retired, justice toledo -- justice alito joined the corps. is a narrowing of in 2003 been defined as corruption, meeting under access and influence as well as actual quid pro quo. that's been narrowed as allen is indicated but it's a really

pretty -- pretty recent development. >> i completely agree that our democratic system is premised on individuals trying to influence other individuals to push policy in some direction. and it clear, we will always be probably more willing to listen to our friends that our enemies. i do think that there's a huge difference when you're talking about particularly a for-profit corporation spending money to influence election results. because the for-profit corporation is extremely different than you and i. you and i very complex creatures. with all sorts of motivation. we also have kind of larger senses wanting to make our community and the country a better place. a for-profit corporation, i mean, by law it has one goal, and that is to make money. that's not a bad thing, making money is a great thing and it's

also a huge part of our country, but i don't think that that goal should be confused with making policy. i think that is an extremely dangerous situation to be an. >> just two brief comments. one is the country should limit is actually now $2500, not 1000. it's been indexed for inflation which i actually think is one of the very good things that happen with the mccain-feingold law because had the effect of bring more regulated money into the system. i think it should be noted that the same lawyers and advocates who endorsed and champion of citizens united are now pushing for a whole new set of changes in the law. and they are killing the existing contribution limits to candidates and party. mitt romney have been very candid about this. he said the super pacs of all this power and money. i want to have the power and money, too. that would be the solution is to level the playing field. so that really will put it to the high court whether they want to go against what the buckley court said in 1976 after the

watergate scandal and buckley versus of vallejo, the supreme court said we believe that there is sufficient public argument in favor of limiting contributions to candidates and parties that we're going to let these laws stand. and i am not sure whether from a constitutional perspective this court would approve or disprove or even should approve or disapprove contribution limits being eliminate candidates the party but based on the reactions to citizens united, i would be very surprised if this nation accepted that. i think that there is a limit to how much voters will swallow. i don't think voters want to see us go quite pepfar. i see a lot of this asking with citizens united already and i think if you try to get rid of the contribution limits to candidates and parties, edmonds of congress would hear such an earful from constituents that they just wouldn't accept that. >> on that exact point, there is a server they just cannot by the pew research center on

january 17 that said that 54% of registered voters are aware of the supreme court's decision on unlimited independent spending on political ads. and of those voters, 65% think that the changes in rules are having a negative effect on the 20 oh presidential campaign. and with that, unfortunately, we're out of time. i'd like to thank all four of our panelists for doing a fantastic job today. i probably should think stephen colbert for help bringing attention to this issue but i'd like to say that the next event is scheduled for march 12 and will focus on legislative data, more information about the event would be built on c-span's website. thank you all so much. [inaudible conversations]

here's a look at what's ahead today on c-span2. next, former national security advisers talk about events in the middle east.

>> next, former national security advisers zbigniew brzezinski and stephen hadley discuss how u.s. policy in the middle east has changed since they serve in the white house. the two former adviser spoke about what the role of you should be in response to the violence and political unrest in syria. democratic transition in egypt would be like, and any actions the u.s. should take against

iran. this is about 90 minutes. >> good afternoon. my name is john townshend. it is my great pleasure as dean of the college of behavioral and social sciences to welcome you to another forum. it's a special honor to host our campus two giants of american foreign policy. doctor zbigniew brzezinski, former national visor to present jimmy carter, and stephen hadley. thank you, jim for joining us today. we can really do appreciate it. [applause] >> this forum could not be more timely. the united states is facing

enormous challenges in the middle east as the arab awakening continues to change politics in the region. the violence in syria, can i say the butchery in syria, has led many to wonder what america and the international community should do to end the bloodshed. at the challenges posed by iran's nuclear program have many talking about the prospects of war. let us all hope that does not happen. our guests today are especially suited for shedding light on america's policies choices in the rapidly changing environment of the middle east. the forum which is sponsored by the college of behavior social sciences is organized by, its holder, supplementing these events is deep and cutting edge academic research that includes use of public opinion polls in the arab world and israel has one of the one in united states. today, the program is releasing

results of a new public opinion poll about american public actions towards possible war with iran, results of which are available for you outside this hall. to introduce our esteemed guests, i would like to present our own fellow and friend, doctor sadat. doctor sadat -- [applause] a time as avid a piece of women's rights throughout her life and especially since her late husband, president anwar sadat, gave his life for the cause in peace. she's well known to many of you for she's been a member of the university of maryland community for two decades, and help the university to establish the anwar sadat chair for peace and development. and the egyptian revolution continues to unfold, hers has been steady and insightful voice which will continue to hear, including here at the university last spring.

the universe of maryland brought in the college of behavioral and social sciences particularly have been really honored to count mrs. about as one of those. it is my pleasure to present mrs. sadat to you. [applause] >> thank you. i have to put my glasses on. thank you, dean, for your kind words, for your kind words and for your support of the sadat chair and international studies. ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce our

honorable panelists of this event. but before i do so, i would like to say a few words about the air of awakening that been sweeping much of the arab world. especially my great country, egypt. [inaudible] egypt is of course going through challenges. both economically and politically, as it transitions to democracy. i know that our panelists will discuss some of these challenges, but i want to make a few comments. besides the enormous difficulty, i am being optimistic about the future of egypt. and in the greatness of our peoples. as i witnessed the remarkable changes that have already taken place in just over one year, i

think much of been accomplished. though much more needs to be done. from the outside, the inevitable transition seems frustrating. but what egypt needs his patients, understanding, and go through its inevitable transformation. our people and leaders will of course need to do this part. one of the most difficult challenges of revolution is how to assess and come to terms with the past. for sure, there must be an accounting of previous injustices of the suffering of the many of what happened to innocent people. healing starts only with such accounting. but to move forward, to build a better future, to come together

as a great nation we need to find it in our hearts, to forgive, to invite all egyptians to be part of our brighter future. my late husband, president sadat, found this in his heart to overcome the war and destruction. and forgiveness and reconciliation and what needs cash that what made our friend nelson mandela great. egypt has many great men and women who will surely find advice to help more of our nation forward. allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to introduce our outstanding panelists. i will not review their extra to bash the extraordinary biography as that would take all afternoon. and i know that they are well

known to all of you. i would you say a few words. zbigniew brzezinski is a dear friend who i met as national security advisor to president carter as he visited egypt. he was a social architect of the campaign of the accords between egypt and israel. and i know that president sadat admired his brilliance and dedication. since the day dr. brzezinski served as a professor at harvard and columbia universities, he has served his country in much capacity. he is currently a counselor and trustee of the center for strategic and international studies. and professor of american foreign policy at the school of

advanced international studies, johns hopkins university. he has, thankfully, never stopped writing and lamenting on international and national affairs. and his newest book, strategic vision, just released in the past few weeks, and available for purchase outside this hall, has been deserve the bestseller. he is without a doubt one of the greatest strategic thinkers on global affairs of our time. it is an honor to have you here. [applause] >> the honorable stephen hadley has never stopped serving the united states.

it is hard to find anyone in washington, republican or democrat, who does not respect mr. hadley. he's known for his thoughtfulness, his openness of differing views, his consensus, and his deep knowledge. that's why american leaders trusted him with some of their highest positions of the land, including as national security advisor to president george w. bush. he has served in multiple administrations, both republican and democrat, including with dr. brzezinski in carter white house. currently, mr. hadley is a founding partner of the hadley group. he continues to serve his country and co-chairs a

bipartisan working group of the united states institute of peace, addressing an american policy in the middle east. he is an extraordinary american. steve, thank you for the taking the time to join us today. [applause] >> finally, the panel will be moderated by our own professor, the holder of the anwar sadat chair for peace and development. ladies and gentlemen, i think you're in for it intellectual treat. thank you for attending. [applause] >> well, thank you very much, mrs. sadat. thank you, dean townshend, for

your leadership and support. dr. brzezinski, mr. hadley, it's my pleasure to host you in my home institution but i know i see you in washington and all these other places, and i know that for some of you this may be actually the first place, first time to come to maryland. so welcome, and would really appreciate you taking the time to join us. i'm going to go ahead and start asking questions, but before, i wanted to explain why you're surrounded such beautiful art. if you notice, and dr. brzezinski being married to a wonderful artist yourself, you appreciate that a little bit, if you see, we have a sculptor and we have a painting. these are products of an annual competition we have which is called the sadat art for peace program. it is in conjunction with our outstanding our department. and usually the best painting of the best sculpture, these are the winners from 2011.

let me tell you, the best way for sculpture is jesse barrows, for that your horn, giving the people of the voices in the arab awakening. and the painting is for a piece called one into. congratulations to them. i don't know they're with us. i want to congratulate them. [applause] >> i'm going to go right to the substantive question, and i'm going to start with you, dr. brzezinski, and not surprisingly i will start with egypt. and i start with egypt, obviously this is the sadat for them. mrs. sadat issue, but egypt is not only an important country in the middle east but really a lot of central issues pertaining to an american choices in relation to egypt. and before i ask you about what

we should be doing now, particularly with a crisis that came out of the ngo issue when egyptian judiciary took action against international ngos including americans, that created a political crisis. i want to look a little further. i know that you have been a key player in mediating the camp david accords between egypt and israel at camp david maryland. and we look at american foreign policy over the last several decades, it really has been anchored around a particular relationship with egypt and israel, call it a triangular relationship. and that is clearly guided a lot of what the u.s. does in the middle east in, relationship that was so taken for granted some could say in ordering american political choice in the middle east.

there were people even before the revolution who were saying that that really triangular relationship has run its course before mubarak. take its own path to become independent, to regain its leadership role in the arab world. it succeeded that particularly in the 1990s but in the past decade, there was less benefit, more marginalized. egyptians at least were uncomfortable with a narrow set of choices that were having even before the revolution. and this is now coming to the forefront in part because the country has unraveled as we have known it. so i wonder, with your thoughts on this, you know, knowing that you have considered the strategic picture during the cold war in which the peace treaty between egypt and israel in march and the new relationship between the mistakes and egypt was defined.

how gc that? is this an accurate picture that this relationship was running its course even before the revolution? >> well, thank you very much. thank you for having me here, and i'm delighted to be here. and i want to begin simply by reiterating my highest respect, both for the late president sadat and for mrs. sadat, knowing the many decades ago was a source of inspiration and confidence, because in president sadat we had a partner for peace, a partner for peace who was endowed with remarkable intelligence, great strategic boldness. and i have to say i particularly admired his boldness. and it manifested itself in relationship to the two greatest issues that are involved in

great strategic choices. it pertained to war, and it pertained to peace. and in both of these it took enormously difficult decisions, and he gained strategic benefits from them, from himself but more importantly for his country. so it was a privilege to know him, and i know that mrs. sadat was a close partner, a confidant, a person who partook of these decisions. and in that respect, she represents today also the great message that president sadat gave to us. namely, the boldness. now, turning to your question, this stage, if you ask me about the american egyptian relationship, i would not be

advocating strategic boldness at this point is giving us to come in its right moment. i think mrs. sadat earlier in her brief comment used to words which come in my judgment, capsule it's what is needed. these two words were patients and space. we have to give egypt space to define itself. at a time of considerable political turmoil, and uncertainty. and, therefore, also patients. we have to wait until that works itself out. but having said that, i think it is absolutely essential that we do a we can to preserve a close, strategic relationship with egypt because egypt is the major player in the region. and a good american-egyptian relationship is one of the key foundations of a meaningful and

relevant american policy towards egypt. if we have that relationship, we can also move on other issues. and, of course, one of the issues in which we tried to move forward together with egypt, and we didn't get as far as one had hoped, and subsequently we even stole, is the question of the israeli egypt reconciliation and peace. is not going to be peace in the middle east. real peace, without that. and worse than that, in the absence of that, other issues tend to become increasingly dangerous. and right now our relationship with egypt is additionally important, because we could be on the brink if we make mistakes, if we are overly cautious, if we're not prepared to assert american national interests openly. we could be facing a conjunction

of several significant conflicts in the area. in addition to the one i have already mentioned, which cries for revolution, and which will never be resolved with direct american involvement. there is the risk of some conflict with iran. if that should take place, it's almost inevitable that our current difficulties in afghanistan will get greater, that iraq will become more unstable, and that these unstable conditions can merge and intensify the on growing difficult is your. we could have a situation in which we would confront this series of interacting crises. so that cumulatively emphasizes the need for a broadly conceived and energetically undertaken american strategy, in which among the key players, with a we have to be engaged, in addition

to american israeli connection is of course american egypt, america turkey, america and saudi arabia. >> now, when you endorse what mrs. sadat said about patience and space, does our political system really ever have patients? can it allow space? you know, you have the ngo crisis, which on the big scale of things doesn't seem to be huge crisis, although obviously important for those who were involved. and you have people calling for cutting off economic aid to egypt. you have, you know, and the muslim brotherhood do well in the elections. made a lot of people uncomfortable. do we have the patients? what does it take to have that patient's? >> well, we better have the patience, first of all. if we don't have and we are going to be faced with other things, in which we will not be very countable force. and i mentioned some of them.

so we have to be patient, but we have to have patience for the region. i'm afraid we no longer have a strategic vision for the region, and worse, we are gradually being pushed out of the region. or maybe we're drifting out of the region. i remember when i was in the u.s. government. we had good relations with the four most important countries in the region. iran, saudi arabia, egypt and turkey. look at those four today. want is still pretty good but one is terribly bad, one false some disappointments, and one involves a great deal of uncertainty. you can all make the connection as to which one is which. it's not a very promising picture. i want. >> i want to come back to the strategic picture later. i want to go to mr. hadley, and the question i want to ask you is, really a given set of choices for american policy in

general. in a place like egypt. you are part of an administration that advocated democracy, particularly after the iraq war. and certainly highlighted it and made it a priority in talking to an egyptian government and other governments in the arab world. and yet really until the arab awakening, not much genuine change in the air world. and i always wondered whether in some ways america is a, the best agent to create change and be with, whether we are capable of doing it given that we have the strategic conflict always. thinking fan in thinking out about the role of the military, the role of intelligence. we are engaged in the war in iran where we had military forces in the go. we had the arab-israeli issue that is central to politics and to us in terms of national interest. and every time we would push in one direction, orally or with ngos, we still have to

consolidate all these relationships with the very institutions that we are angry the regime that was not democratic. so if that's something that is inherent in american foreign policy that is difficult, how did you manage it when you in the white house, and the set of choices that we now face, you know, parallel in some ways? >> the point is what is happening i think strategically in this region is, it is in transition. and it is in transition from authoritarian hopefully through democratic and freer societies. some societies are going through the transition post-revolution. hopefully some of those societies are going to go to the transition without a revolution in terms of some of the monarchies and the like. you said can america make free and democracy? no. you know, can america impose it

militarily? no, of course not. can we impose on other countries? no. should we try to? no. freedom and democracy is always going to reflect the particular cultural and historical character of the societies. but what we can do is make it clear that we stand on the side of those who want greater freedom and democracy, and to want to take control of the future of their country. we were in the middle east. that was a difficult role for us, because for decades we were perceived, rightly, as being on the side and supporting authoritarian regimes, the very regimes that people in the name of freedom are rising up against. and it makes us an odd messenger for freedom and democracy, but it is what we have historically stood for as a country for 200 years. every war we've ever fought has been in the name of freedom and

democracy. and so i think not withstanding that history, something that president bush talked about and talked about as a historical mistake. we have been on the side of freedom and democracy. and i think it still matters. i talked to a couple young people who were part of the tunisian revolution. and they told a very interesting story. they said, you know, our revolution stalled because the middle-classes on the side and would not join in demonstrations against. and then they said all change with wikileaks. i am person not a great fan of wikileaks so i was taken aback. i said what gene wikileaks? they said wikileaks leaked a whole series of cables from the american ambassador in tunis that made it clear that the americans, ben ali, as an aging and effective autocrat, just like we did. and once it became public then

it became okay for the middle class to shift to join the people in the streets of the revolution was over in days. my point is, by standing for freedom and democracy, and standing back and let people fight and win their own freedom, because at the end of the day they have to. we can, nonetheless, encourage that process and help empower the process. and that's i think what we need to do. >> it's interesting. you said this about wikileaks. that story was actually resident about the wikileaks and its role but i always thought that wikileaks actually did a disservice to the state department. the state department comes across as knowing a lot more than people assume and user professional. people in the region after they sought, americans were not lying to us at times about the people they're dealing with. and it was more positive than negative, in my opinion. but i want to put you on the spot, on the current situation. and that is, related primarily

to the role of military. i mean, i was talking about the choices that we face when you in the white house. you know, advocating democracy, having to take pashtun having to stick to relationship. when you are look at what happens now, obviously the muslim brotherhood did very well in the parliamentary elections. we don't know who's going to be the next president of egypt, but i would submit to that's probably going to be the candidate that will be backed by the muslim brotherhood, even if it's not going to be one of them. so those are uncomfortable things for americans to hear, even if they are elected democratically. on the other hand, you have the military which is seeming to want to exert itself and maintain power. when you look at what they are doing, a, they are essential because we cooperate with him on strategic issues day by day. b. can you see what happened just yesterday in brokering a cease-fire between the palestinians and israeli, so

they could of gotten out of control. we couldn't do that. they did. they're covering the the service actually mostly the military is edition that has the close relationship. that's tough. those are tough choices for america to do. on the one hand, increase the existing institution that we're accountable working with. on the other hand, let go and allow results that we don't like to take place. at me, how do we deal with it? >> part of that is the patience and space. i think, you know, there's a lot of apprehension about what's happening in places like egypt. but as mrs. sadat was saying when we're talking before, there's some very positive things. look, other than the first day in this revolution where unfortunately some real courageous people died, largely advance of the military, this has been a largely peaceful revolution. secondly, they did conduct a free and for election, the first

really free and fair election and mulling it in that country. that's an important thing to say. yes, the muslim brotherhood won more votes than any other party, and is that a surprise? since president mubarak had this very shortsighted policy of consciously oppressing any centrist democratic secular parties. he made war on them all, and created a situation where it was either the mubarak party or it was the brotherhood, which was the only vehicle for expressing dissent. and so it is not a surprise that they in some sense emerged as the champion of the revolution, even though that revolution was made a lot i a lot of the younger men and women on the streets. so, there is i think a lot to be said for this revolution, for

what it has done. i think we have to understand that is because the party has muslim or islamist in its name, you're not going to do with a, then we're going to take ourselves out of the game. and most of these middle eastern countries. and the issue is, can we work with these parties and can we encourage them to be, which i think is the most important thing, which is can we encourage them to be pluralistic and inclusive parties that are committed over the long term to democracy. and i think that's the challenge. a number of you know, a former deputy prime minister and prime minister of jordan and i, i was on a panel with about three weeks ago. and he said something very interesting. he said the challenge in the middle east is that neither in political islam or in arab nationalism was there a tradition pluralism. and that's really what's missing and that's really what needs to be built.

across sectarian pluralism and inclusiveness. and that's really what we need to try to help the countries as they make these revolutions, or make these transitions, which is the word i would like you. we need to try to help them find a way to pluralism and inclusiveness, because that is the way you tend to be stable over the long-term. >> as you reminded us, with all the challenges egypt is relatively gone well in the sense that has not been as violent as many of the others, and it had an election and it's only been a year. so i think we have to wait and see. but let me move to a country where there is a lot of violence, and i'll start with you, dr. brzezinski, on syria. and that's because, i mean, i know that when you look at the airport waiting, particularly the first starting in tunis and then going to egypt, they were relatively peaceful, one went

relatively well. inspired a lot of and people, including american. a public opinion poll i did in the u.s. found that americans for the first time, majority, have a positive view of the air people. tahrir square painted sort of a positive picture, we can call it the post-9/11, getting over the 9/11 paradigm. and now we're going into the phase in some countries where there is a lot of violence. syria clearly very bloody place. very tragic. and yet, it is very hard to know what to do for a american foreign policy. we have not been able to get the security council to act electively. there is death and killing every day and we don't seem to know what to do. i know that you supported, reluctantly i would say, the intervention in libya. >> foley. from the very beginning. >> from the beginning. as did i.

i wonder, why is it so different from libya? >> because syria is not libya. it's as basic as that. and assad is not gadhafi. and there are other differences as well. for example, there was significant military and political opposition at a high level to gadhafi in libya, which surfaced immediately. when the unrest erupted in damascus. gaddafi regime was not as fully institutionalized regime, it was a highly personalized regime, in which special arrangements, with particular tribes also contributed to political stability. once the special arrangements began to break down, the whole thing started breaking down. it was also more easily accessible, because essentially the real sort of center of life of egypt is close to shores. so naval forces could be very decisive. all of these differences, i

think, underlying the greater complexity of the syrian problem, and the limitations of what can be done from the outside. and particularly by really out of the region party. i do not favor, to be perfectly blunt, an american military initiative within syria. i don't think that right now it is very clear as to how that could unfold. the notion of undertaking airstrikes against a regime, which is really not dependent on airpower, would exercise of the authority as with violence against society, is not going to be very effective. and the real risk that if america became more directly involved, the conflict could assume increasingly anti-american characteristics,

not only in terms of syrian resistance to it, but even more generally in terms of islamic perception of america. we have been involved in the war with iraq, not such a long time ago, and i was against that were. we have had to be involved in afghanistan. but we have been involved for too long and with overly ambitious objectives come with consequences which were beginning to see now surfacing. and i would not want to add to that list yet another conflict which america plays a preeminent role and relies on the military for its solution. because in the general concept of what i see as a decline in americans influence in the middle east, that would further aggravate the trend. so what do i favor? i favor something that you may view it as an evasion of responsibility, but i don't think it's an invasion of responsible to it is taking a stand, based in which more

realistically addresses the problematics of the region. that is to say, syria is bordered by two countries, one direct, one somewhat intimately. turkey and saudi arabia. these are important countries. they have resources, economic and financial. they have military resources, and the turks and the sounds but i would favor taken a very clear position with the turks and the saudis that if they decide a course of action that they think is needed for resolving the syrian problem, and particularly if the arab community more generally supports it, we will support it fully. and in that context, a little of the way we acted in libya. support from the back. if we decide to let the issue faster, and that's a cruel decision, circumstances in which may be they will, then i think

unfortunately we don't have much choice. the conflict within syria is still sporadic. it's not a comprehensive conflict. it is not a conflict which has visible united, and the clear platform. so i think at this stage, america plunging ahead with military action by air or with some other notion of how to resolve this problem by force, i think would be counterproductive, premature, and probably even regionally, perhaps destabilizing. >> your thoughts and? >> i think i agree on the description of the problem, the analysis problem. i think i emphasize a couple other factors that lead me to maybe a little different description. then their kids you want out of this and the syrian people want is the syrian people throw out

the dictator and free themselves. the narrative you don't want if you can about it is the western powers came in and overthrew another arab leader. and not the right narrative. secondly, peter ackerman has done a lot of work on civil resistance. one of the problems is the longer this goes, the more militarized it becomes, the less likely it is to get a democratic outcome. because the future will be get a did not buy who has the most votes, but who has the most guns. third, i worry that the sectarianism that is beginning to show itself in the syrian conflict, and my worry about sort of championing a turkish saudi intervention is that this quickly becomes sunnis versus shia. and almost a proxy war between saudis and iran and syria.

and i don't think that bodes well for what we need in syria, which is a democratic out, in which all groups can view themselves as part of syria. but the dilemmas are very difficult. i think what i've talked about is two things. one, we have got to help syrian national congress, counsel, as weak and divided as it is, we've got to help the opposition formed into a unified political group that can send a message to all elements of syrian society that there is a part of them, there is a role for them in a post aside history. widely say that? because the only reason i thought is still there is because the military still supports them. the sunni business class still support him, and the minority groups, of which christians and kurds and others are worried

about what life would be like under sunni led government. and so what has to happen is these groups need to be broken away and they need to be convinced to turn their back on a side. a lot of political work that is done here, and if we need to go for more coercive measures, my instinct is to say, try to arm. these are people, you know, the courage of the syrian people, they kept us up for over 11 months. they go out and demonstrate on fridays, leaving the mosque, knowing that on any friday several dozen of them will be killed. this is enormous courage. and the moral claim to arm them i think is becoming strong. we've got to arm them in a smart way. does not encourage sectarianism and can hopefully build a political base for a cross sectarian solution. but it is very, very difficult.

>> let me ask you a question. how do you arm them? they are all in turkey. you can do it without the turks. and the turks are not going to be applying the tools of american policy. so the only way we can do it is if the turks are prepared to take the lead, but still with the saudis will have to pay for some of it. >> i think that's the way then perhaps to respond. >> i agree with it. and i think turkey is key, and they are not, i think they need to be our partner. >> and they cannot be alone. >> and it's been very interesting. turkey's role over the last six months has changed dramatically. they are, after all, allowing thousands of refugees and his syria and free army, free syrian army, to be in their territory. so i think that's exactly right. i think steve is absolutely right. it has to be a regional

passionate a regional approach. we need to be talking not only to the saudis, but to the turks, and also wrote example the iraqis have had a real interest in how this comes out and it does not become a sectarian struggle in syria because that risk opening a sectarian struggle in iran. so we need to do this in conjunction with the neighbors, and in a smart way within all agreement that this is not going to be sunni versus shia. this is going to be helping the syrian people, all the syrian people, try to throw off a tyrant and establish a different kind of syria. ..

arming of the other side. talking about iran arms and syria but what about russia? and again, how have we in some ways mismanages the relationship with russia on syria? is russia -- they seem to be working directly with the arab league. they have reached an agreement with the states. is there room for us to work with russia on syria? >> you've raised an interesting point in the context might the russians then decide arming the other side. my guess is if they would only do so if their judgment was that in their support it would prevail if. if they are not sure that we will or think that we will lose, they won't. i don't know what the judgment

is, but my guess is from what they are observing they are not convinced yet and that raises a further question manly it's not only the russians, the chinese are supporting it. we have to be very careful not to manage or mismanaged this issue by thrusting ourselves too far ahead to create an effect in opposition to us which normally proves surprisingly effective within syria but becomes part of your larger context of much of a sudden we of the chinese and the russians on the same side. that's certainly not in our interest. that would be a major reversal of the changes of the last two decades, three decades. >> i'm not foolish enough to talk russia policy with brzezinski. [laughter] i will say this, i think that he's right about russia and their calculus. i think also now that putin has

won his election, i think there may be more freedom and scope on cerium policy. and second, why we should work with china and russia in a u.n. we shouldn't be found by the u.n.. we are talking about with turkey and iraq and saudi if you can do without a evin resolution and we should come and if we do, and have a policy that is showing some success so that he looks like he's not going to win i think the russians local lawmen and once the russians come along i think the chinese will come along because on this issue i don't think the chinese want to be isolated, so i think we can accommodate in the way that we've talked about. >> i'm going to move to the iran issue. it is the hard issue of the day and i'm going to ask a lot of questions but one question about syria, not because it's syria but because i think everybody in

the american public, the international public, the arab public is much more moved by the humanitarian disasters and we have seen in the past and the media to evolution as it did a lot of killing back in 1982, and it was not a -- we only knew about the scope of it afterwards and it certainly wasn't a burning issue of the day at that time and. now an information revolution that is not only leading to everybody knowing almost instantly, but a certain kind of expectation is almost immoral the expectation on across-the-board and it's not even have national on the scale that we haven't seen before. and i wonder, especially we called this the air of a weakening as a functioning of the information revolution to a large extent whether in fact the information revolution is also creating expectations of different international behavior and that the institutions of international politics have not relieve changed enough to

accommodate them, that the choices that we have are more visual maybe that's just them imaginary picture that and painting. you both had many it was as in the past in which there were tough choices but is there a sense that there is this gap between public expectations globally and the failure of international institutions to deal with them? and ulin obviously the -- >> it's very interesting some of you probably saw there was a video about 20, 25 minutes the was put out on facebook about a week ago about this guy, kony and the resistance army which was a truly gruesome some group that is operating in the congo and ugonda terri hail with child soldiers and all the rest coming and they had liked millions of kids in the first few hours, and

it's a capacity to bring the intention of the world and a government to humanitarian crises enormous and that will prod government action. it will make dr. brzezinski's job as a national security adviser a lot harder, and it will because these are difficult to respond to. but on balance i think it's possible. i think you've also seen that the social media is an enormously and coloring, enormously democratic in the sense that people can network and organize and have a valise, and it can bring down authoritarian structures but it then becomes a tool for in some sense the democratization of bringing down the structures. what we saw in each of those is the tool by itself is not sufficient to organize people in ways that can systematically replace those structures and

that is in some sense the promise of the social media with the limitation from the social media. and in the end of the day in terms of the parliamentary elections it was about organizations and that is the muslim brotherhood and the kids that made the revolution in the square do not yet have. hopefully they will have to do not yet have. >> i'm going to move to the iran issue, and obviously, you know, there is talk of soft more relaxed and they're in a lot of people are worried. some even similarities with the lead up to the iraq war. we had just a little over a week ago to president obama met with the israeli prime minister netanyahu who seems to be alluding to the fact that israel is contemplating a unilateral strike on iran's nuclear facilities that they think what said its program back.

the u.s. has made it clear that it doesn't really want to see that happen, that the u.s. believes diplomacy must be given a chance, and i want to ask you questions about that, but i want to report to you a poll that we just released simultaneously with this event as many of you may have found this, some of the press releases and the poll conducted and my colleague, stephen and the program international policy attitudes we just released here in the u.s. which is about american attitudes towards the iran nuclear issue but also the prospect of israel striking iran. two weeks ago we released a poll from israel itself where we found only 19% of the israelis supported an israeli strike on iran without american support, and most of the more pessimistic about the consequences. that poll has been confirmed by another sense of that was just

released a few days ago in israel. in this poll, interestingly american public opinion seems to be similar to the israeli public opinion whereas we have one quarter, only one-quarter of the u.s., 24% of the american public supports an israeli strike on iran and seven out of ten americans want the u.s. to give diplomacy more of a chance. when you ask them what should the u.s. do if israel does strike iran anyway, only about a quarter say the u.s. should intervene militarily. most americans don't want to see the u.s. intervene militarily. half want the u.s. to remain neutral on this issue. when you ask about the prospect of what might happen if in fact iran is struck militarily they believe it was finton deily them by more than money to five years, and they believe that only a minority believe that it would actually hurt the government, and they believe

that the conflict with last for months or years not days or weeks which is almost parallel to the findings we had in israel. so pessimistic about the consequences line of americans think that iran will ultimately end up with nuclear weapons and the puzzle in all of this is that 62% of americans think if iran actually acquires nuclear weapons it will use them against israel. >> which is very paradoxical given all the findings the we have, so clearly if israel strikes iran it is consequential not only for israel but for the u.s.. can the u.s. avoid being drawn and regardless -- by the way, one of the american public doesn't want the u.s. to intervene if israel strikes iran, if the majority thinks the u.s. winter in any way, support at least diplomatically, so there is a difference between

what they prescribe and what the expect american behavior to actually be at least diplomatically, so how much leverage to we have first call on israel in terms of persuading it or dissuading it from attacking iran, and what are our options year, dr. brzezinski? >> we have tremendous influence potentially on israel. the question is whether we are prepared to apply it. let's be realistic here come israel is a good friend of the united states. we have, and i think legitimately so, a moral obligation towards israel in view of what transpired during world war ii, and that is i think the truth morally imperative and we cannot dismiss that. but at the same time, it is also a fact that we are the principal source of israel's military

capability, and we are a very significant source of financial support for israel. we talked earlier about egypt and the question on whether we should apply financial pressure on egypt because of some things that were being done which we didn't like it i think it is legitimate to ask the same question about israel. but the fact of the matter is that right now, particularly in the course of the international campaign i think it is highly unlikely that will apply the maximum pressure. the israelis apparently have indicated to us that they will not give us advanced warning if they decide to strike. i emphasize the word if. they may not have decided to undertake a strike. but if they do, they said they will not give us morning. so we will not be in the sense involved in their decision. nonetheless, if they do strike, the fact is that first key sirenians really do not have the

military capability to retaliate against israel. second, if they do strike they may very well go over iraq which still our responsibility in terms of aerospace. that will make us the factor composite. third, because they cannot respond effectively and retaliate against israel but well view us as having denied or maybe even given it the green light, it is highly likely that they will retaliate against and they have several. one, they can make the situation in mostar afghanistan increasingly difficult for us and thereby complicate the entire year strategy. second, they can destabilize iraq relatively quickly. third, they can already received

and affect the price of oil and could attempt to strike us on the saudi oilfields or interfere with the shipment of energy through the strait of hormuz, which we could keep open after they try to do so but there's no doubt that the price of energy will escalate dramatically and that direction is already evident in the increase in the cost of insurance for the shipment of oil from the st. thomas. that is why americans are paying $4 a gallon. then they will be paying five or $6 a gallon because of the israeli strike on iran. so the fact is we will be drawn and if they do and the consequences would be at first for us. and this makes it more important until president obama persists in the course in which i think he has embarked which is to try

and dissuade from doing anything unilaterally and to give what has been described as give peace a chance. serious negotiations with iran but then in the serious negotiations with iran mean? what they do mean is, you do not give a young iranians a choice of either humiliating capitulation social and economic strangulation, that is to say for example the right to have a nuclear program which under npt did they do have more to compare another accommodating we really shut down their economy which would then have the effect of unifying the extremists with nationalists and probably even precipitate some historical crazy reactions militarily, so we do have to be very deliberate

in our conduct in trying to use the alliances that we have complice china and russia and others to create a situation in which it the process is given a chance, and i last point is why we have time to do it because on the highest authority has been stated by our president, by our military intelligence leaders and confirmed by people that are really informed and following this that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by iran is not something eminent but clear. we don't know how many, but years away. the israelis have predicted since 1994 every single year that next year iran will have a nuclear weapon since 1994. it's now 2012. senate any thoughts on that one? >> tener 15 minutes?

no. what dr. brzezinski has outlined is why both in the bush administration and under the obama administration we have set look, the place where we do not want to be is where the only two choices are to accept and iran with a clear path to or have to use conventional military option, and we can have a debate about that, but both of them have very negative consequences. so, where are we? well, we are not in a good place. can we live with iran? and i think this is an issue between the united states and israel. president obama has said the red line is iran with nuclear weapon. i'm pretty sure the israelis think none of that is too late the time they will have a nuclear weapon the damage is done. it is iran with a nuclear

capability or as i say a clear path to a nuclear weapon and it's clear that the united states cannot prevent it. there are a lot of -- once iran achieves that point it gets sent to the empowerment and turns its weight around in the regions for terror. other countries are wanting to have their own route to a nuclear weapon, the risks that nuclear capability would be provided. it's not a happy picture in the notion you can be sure all of those responses by threatening retaliation against iran i think is wrong. second, i am pessimistic on the negotiations now that we shouldn't try them, but this has always been now for ten years it's about the enrichment program. the international community has said to iran you can have a truly peaceful nuclear program. we will build it for you for

heaven's sake. but because of the suspicions we have come even though under the npt you have the right to an enrichment program we cannot trust you with it because we do not believe the youth and of nuclear weapons. we believe that is where you are trying to get them and so the problem on the negotiation is this has always been a lot with iran can have an enrichment facility and i don't know how you negotiate that. the irony in sight of think this regime can't give it up. the russell dug into it and i don't think the international community can accept anything less than they have to give up the enrichment program, so maybe i'm wrong. i think we ought to put as much pressure on the regime as we can going into the negotiations. i think it's because of the pressure they have agreed to restart negotiations, and maybe if the regime really feels that

survival is at stake maybe they will accept the deal. i don't know. we ought to try if. i would offer to other things we should think about. one is as we put that pressure in the international way any way i think the obama administration has done quite effectively, if we put pressure on the regime what are the iranian people thinking as they seek bengalee godown, mubarak, get off the tv, ghadafi godown, what do they think going into the elections of 2013 for another president is assuming the supreme leader does not abolish the post of president and where the regime will once again pick in a rigged election will be an iranian people decide maybe they are entitled to something better and try to rise again as they did in 2,009? that's something to watch. and finally, the last thing i

would say is if we need to buy time -- there is a specter of things between near diplomacy, traditional diplomacy and conventional military action if. there are things that can be done to set up programs and disabled programs, and i would be coming and i think the administration is putting all their effort into those kind of activities so that if we need to do it we can set back the program in a way that is not directly attributable to the united states and therefore avoid some of the consequences that dr. brzezinski outlined if you go into the explicit much reactivity. you know, we need options in that space to allow us to buy time. people say -- my friend bob gates said well, you know, those

kind of things might buy two or three years one of the pilots who flew the mission for israel against the reactor in 1982 in iraq recounts that the pilots got together and they had two questions. they said one, is this a one-way missions and the leadership said it may be a one-way missions. they said fine, we get that. and then how long will this set back the iraqi nuclear program and they said a couple or three years, and their reaction was fine, we will take it, a couple three years, and one thing led to another and saddam hussein actually never got a nuclear weapon. so i think by teeing time in this process doesn't bring the kind consequences dr. brzezinski talked about. maybe the best we can do and it's what we ought to be working

towards. >> just a thought a lot to ask only to more questions come a couple more questions before we get some questions from the audience, microphones in the ogle and you can't go up if he would like to ask a question, but i just want to on the iran issue just a comment which is when i look at iran obviously it's probably exaggerated militarily the capacity to retaliate in the conventional sense is probably limited. there's talk of having missiles that could hit israel, obviously the public expect at least the dirty of the israeli public expect hezbollah to come on board but they said that's not automatic. when i watched just over the past few days just a few very rudimentary rockets really cheaply made and very primitive in some ways the five year after

israel assassinated in islamic leader gaza paralyzed israel for a few days, just a few rockets being fired everyday paralyzed as a country for coming in a, a week with people sleeping underground and even though these are rudimentary, and the five weeks with his law it paralyzed the economy. so what we are talking about in the scale of winning the war were losing the war, maybe it's more than that. it's the capacity to inflict enough uncertainty to make life unbearable and that's something that has to be taken into account. >> i think what has to be taken into account is you can have pretty clear ideas as to what i would be doing and what might be happening in the initial phases if you decide to have a war.

you have absolutely no idea how it is going to end and how long it will take and i think that is something we can't lose sight of in talking about this issue. iran could be a threat, it might be a threat. it might not be a threat. but it would take military action to create circumstances which would become increasingly unpredictable, and it's not going to be action, the international community. it will be either by the israelis alone or by us by coming involved somehow. the international community is going to be sitting. our friends will be fee sorry for them. our rivals will be rubbing their hands and benefitting from. as we have to i think strategically in our minds cross the rubicon. are we prepared to go to war, and i prepared to say no that the costs are too high and there's other ways of coping with it, and there are. just consider the following. for the last x number of years,

japan and south korea have been threatened by north korea, which has nuclear weapons and the delivery systems. japan and south has skimming the the the attack on north korea. why? because the have ironclad commitments in the united states that the united states would react the way it did. for 40 years we did that for the european states and then we have waited a war with the soviet union can that could have been a very big enterprise and yet we stand back. my personal view is if the negotiations going to move in a positive direction with an issue an ironclad commitment to all of the states in the middle east that first of the do not proliferate, and number two, if

they're threatened by iran which is seeking or abstaining nuclear weapons, and this applies to all of the states in the middle east and israel specifically we will view it as directed against us, requiring the kind of response we would make if we were attacked ourselves. i frankly think that is far more credible and more of an umbrella for everybody than the notion will perhaps if the iranians have the bomb maybe they will threaten somebody, maybe not come and in the meantime the israelis will do this i wod ve no choice to go. i want to be very clear on this and if we are clear on this, i ink the kind of statisti decided regarding america public opinion or rgarding the israeli public opinion, regarding the majority of the jewish public opinion in america would support such and i think that is a better way of avoiding these sort of the uncertainties involved in this if the

negotiations are to succeed. otherwise i agree with you that have been negotiations what, and if it doesn't work i think we shouldn't leave it open as to what might or might not have been. some things are better than others. i think the deterrence deserves a chance to be tried. it has worked. the other indians are not crazy. they are not going to commit suicide. >> i think this is a very useful discussion to have. the kinds of things that will come out in the discussion is people will say yes but north korea is an ancillary regime. it is not a lesson on a regime. it hasn't really supported terrorism for almost a decade. iran is a very different regime and a very different part of the world and we should have that conversation and the second thing that i worry about is i had no doubt that the

arrangement dr. brzezinski described would deutsch were iran with a nuclear weapon from attacking the united states or one of the neighbors with nuclear weapons. i think that's right. i worry that iran with nuclear capability feeling it had itself therefore cannot be attacked and therefore it is less vulnerable and therefore it will be more ambitious in its support of its disruption of the neighborhood and i am worried that some of the other states will not believe us and will want their own nuclear capability at the same time. i may be wrong. this is a useful conversation to have. but one thing i would end on the command i think this is right, if something needs to be done about a year on my hope is the kind of thing i talked about rather than conventional military activity, but whatever needs to be done i think it's going to have to be done by the

united states. i think we have more capability than the israelis and i think it is not fair to put this on the israelis, and one of the things i liked about president obama's speech before apec on the subject as he said iran is not just israel speak of problems the united states problem, the international community problem as well. i think that is right, and we do after all lead the international community on this most important issue the united states has to lead. >> i agree it has to lead it has to lead responsibly because this business about international community sounds good. but if there is a war. in the business survived 3,000 years and adrienne prez of history is not characterized by

suicidal they are not suicidal. i felt with the very difficult circumstances. they are clever and devious, complicated, manipulated, the keep their promises but they are smart and they're concerned about the result interest. that's not the behavior of the country and suicidal. to believe that and start an act of the war is societal actually. >> that's a really interesting conversation and as you said, it may be another time for that. i want to ask the last substantive question which is on the israeli conflict is in a news and almost got out of hand the last few days. the egyptian military was panicking almost because that is the one thing that the feared there is a is really assaulting in the egypt it could disrupt all of the priorities.

this issue has been muted by the fact that there hasn't been much violence and we have the elections destructive format in the air of a weakening, the iran issue. i want to ask both of you right now in the center of the of the issue both dealt with and dealt with the middle east for decades start with you, dr. brzezinski how important is this issue for american politics? >> it's very important. right now it is overshadowed. syria, iran is uncertain and even in egypt, so on the scale of not on the top of the piles of to speak but it is an enduring problem which in the long run puts at stake not only our influence in the region

which i have emphasized is eroding but often will be a more direct threat to israel because that issue is not result in an equitable fashion the to the israelis and palestinians the chances of israel becoming an interpol part of created and secure part of the middle east declined and the middle east is going to assert itself and see things as it was until recent history, first playground for the ottoman empire, then an area dominated by the british and french. if it becomes self contained in a self assertive the prospects for israel are not very promising so from the moral as well as the political point of view this is an important ibm an optimist in the sense that i think the majority of the israelis and the majority of the

palestinians are prepared for what could be called a fair settlement. the geneva accords are a good example of that. but if you will never have it without determined american initiative. >> to as worked harder trying to come up with ideas to make the negotiating tract work and i think for the near term next year to the negotiations are not on. there's too much stuff about iran. i think what i say is it seems that the prime minister netanyahu once in negotiation without an outcome president abbas once a negotiation and the politics don't permit it. so what do we do? the things that i think is so important is on the west bank the last two years which is to

build a society even under occupation with security forces that are increasingly taking responsibility for security coming in for the governmental institutions of a free palestinian state. there is economic progress on the west bank. people are feeling more secure. life is better to read it is why the west bank has not turned to violence notwithstanding the air of spring. it is very important that that be preserved not just for the benefit of the palestinians who are finally enjoying some prosperity but also to keep it quiet for israel's state, and i think what can be done and i hope that quietly so it is not political the israelis are talking to the palestinians about how that process can continue, house security is maintained by palestinian forces, israelis can step back

and quietly feed more territory for the was deneen security presence and allow the greater palestinian economic activity on the west bank. i think that is a kind of thing that as jesse jackson would have said keeps hope of drawing and allows the palestinian people to preserve the progress they have made and avoids the resort to violence of which israel will ultimately be the second victim after the of the steny and people. i think that's the most the can do right now come but it is important to do. >> we only have time for a couple more questions so please, come to the microphone if you have questions. as a final note, i just want to mention dr. brzezinski's new book come strategic vision instantly a best seller. he actually signed a few copies the are available outside, and i hope someone will ask you about this because i think in your

descriptive to a description of the power to asia and your prescription for an american resurgence and a stable international order that would allow us to deal with common shoes for humanity you interestingly suggest an expansion of the west with russia coming back to russia and turkey, but i always wonder why specifically turkey, but there is not egypt or iran the comfortable countries in size and i think it's something i hope somebody will ask about and get to address. islamic the short answer is part of turkey and europe. >> good answer. >> let's start with a question. >> thank you for the very interesting conversation. i'm curious as there is a growing risk between mahmoud ahmadinejad and the supreme

leader and whether you think that is an obstacle or an opportunity to the negotiations. islamic let me take one other question before this side. ischemic my question is more technical. i'm looking at you but perhaps the question that was not asked is to ask the american public if they believe that the negotiation would mean iran to abandon the positions. >> please go ahead. spry i am pessimistic on the negotiations, but i think that they need to be tried. but, you know, we have been at this for awhile. and it goes to the question naturally have mahmoud on a shot in the supreme leader. interestingly enough, we actually had an agreement negotiated with iran to suspend

its enrichment program, and ultimately dismantle it. was called paris agreement negotiated in 2003 and in 2004. mahmoud ahmadinejad and runs for president in 2005 on a platform that basically says the people what negotiated the agreement were treasured and he wins and restarts the enrichment program and we have been trying to get back to the agreement ever since week with no avail. there are ongoing negotiations that seem to be supported by the supreme leader, and every time they seem to make progress with the negotiator at he would give a public speech about how the people was a traitor he will fall apart. now it appears he may think it's in his interest to see if he can get a negotiated deal, and it seems to be the supreme leader who is reluctant.

the problem is the supreme leader used the one calling the shots and he's increasingly supported as i understand left by the clinics that made the revolution and 79 and more by a new generation of people who are heavily in the first and the guards foerster in the security services. that is now his base of support, and there is a question of whether he is now dug in on this issue that he can give it up. i think the only way to test is to try to have the negotiations, but i think we should not ease off on the international pressure because i think that is the only reason they come to negotiations, and i think that is the only way that you actually get some kind of a deal acceptable to us if they thought the regime was survival let

state, and i am pessimistic but we will see. >> we will take two more rounds. that's all we have time for. please introduce yourself. >> good afternoon to the three of you. you talked about the issue of trust or lack thereof with the iranians and that reminded me of the former u.s. secretary of defense robert mcnamara when he was talking about the format and the negotiations that one way of making our negotiating position today is effective to actually enter the talk to the trustees and brought in this call that turned out to be a brutal dictator and supported another dictator later on in his war against iran they invaded iran

soon after planning iran as part of the axis of evil. do you think that the embassy in this case is a good thing or do you think that it will be played in with fire and i am tempted to put one to dr. brzezinski about israel and egypt if you could go back to the dynamics of negotiating between the egyptians and the israelis at camp david do you think that given the current debate in egypt about the democracy and a space mandate if you had the democratically elected leaders at that time do you think you still would have been able to take the piece to the israelis and the public stance? thank you. >> probably not. because the public motions would have the political process and so it took leaders on both sides to start the field. now you have a plan to think the

fact of the matter is the experience of the iranians in 20th century wasn't all that present for them. the fact of the matter is there were some victims to both british and russian imperialism and then we played a dominant role in the manner in much unfortunately over time alienated a good portion of the politically active iranian public, and this is not a case to justify what then followed. i remember i was engaged in a big debate in the u.s. government of the time how to react to the challenge within iran that was posed by the communists and by how ayatollah khomeini. it may be right, may be wrong. let them impose martial law and then undertook a broad reforms and concessions but in the

revolutionary situation you don't to the every around. well, that wasn't tried. but those who argued with me and the administration made the argument explicitly that ayatollah khomeini is the ghandi of iran, something i don't think has been borne out. [laughter] subsequently so we were locked in the horns of a dilemma. >> [inaudible] >> i don't have much to add to that. you can understand their narrative. the question is where do you go with that when they are still supporting and you still worry about them going for a nuclear weapon and they are threatening the state of israel. so you've got to try to understand that. i've negotiated to have to understand it. it can, but it cannot excuse behaviours or allow you to get a

path to the behavior that threaten their interest and that's the conversation. >> i'm going to take the last two questions because dr. brzezinski's time is tight and we are going to have to make do with that. one from the site and one from this site. >> sick and your government and politics and studies major and i was hoping get your opinion on how optimistic you are of the change in iran within the next ten years and how an american or israeli attack on iran would affect the rising of given the strong sense of nationalism that has existed for 3,000 years in the country. >> and >> mr. hattie's adjusted for the next one or two years there will be no movement by the administration on the palestinian and israeli issue and suggested that perhaps we can preserve the status. what is the united states view to both of you as a matter of

fact what should the united states do to make the status with an outcome of the two-stage solution as powerful and believe this heightened rhetoric on the war with iran is getting netanyahu a free pass on as a nominal process? thank you. >> what ever do it like to answer, take your pick. >> there was a question that pertains to the palestinian and my concern about it still been in time is that it is not a static arrangement. you can have more. to can't take the political freedom and the west bank and you can hundred the level of the palestinian conditioned, but something else is happening at the same time. and what is it? de constructions omans. when the peace process started back in their early 70's, there

is to the dhaka was 6,008,000 settlers in the west bank. there are now close to 500,000. it becomes increasingly difficult to deal with. so the longer there is no progress, the greater the difficulty in achieving peace. there is a compromise. >> two thoughts. one, primm and mr. netanyahu is focused on iran because he believes it is a threat to israel and you can understand that. there is an issue with settlements as dr. brzezinski described i think the bush administration actually had a solution to that and the regrettably did not get adopted by president obama's administration. there's another issue and i'm very supportive of the palestinians and us with the have done on the west bank. you know, there is an issue about whether any palestinian leader can actually accept the

peace agreement. there have been some very good offers made to the chairmen, very good offers made to president abbas both said no. so you're saying is any palestinian able to accept a peace arrangement that is a compromise or is the only piece a palestinian leader can accept as 120% of their opening position. there is a lack of trust in the negotiating process on both sides and there are reasons for that. the ones dr. brzezinski talked about and i tried to express and the are an overhang in the burden on the negotiations. in terms of iran, and the freedom guy i admit but i think that the iranians are a great people. they are a talented people, and the idea is they are going to accept the current regime offers

in the region is crying out for more freedom and democracy and people are taking more responsibility for their own freedom but i think at some point freedom is going to come to an end but it's going to be hard. this regime is very dug-in. you've got a revolutionary guard scott quds force, nina will be very difficult, and i worry that there will be very bloody, and one of the downside says mr. brzezinski would say, the conventional invasion of iran as it will cause people to rally around the regime rather than to say that regime was a promise by the foolish policies which i think is the truth people are nationalistic and regrettably i think in the short run with calls people to rally around the regime. whether at some point people will say, you know, this hasn't

worked out so well. maybe the problems with that i would hope so, so i remain optimistic but it will be a challenge for the people when that day comes. >> before i think my colleagues i want to announce another important conference tomorrow sponsored by the gildenhorn institute here at 8:45 in the morning about the political role of the military in the middle east, talking about something relevant to the student union tomorrow morning at 8:45. i think that when he introduced our panelists she promised you an intellectual treat, and i think we have had an intellectual treat from the to extraordinary experts in american foreign policy. you have both honored us. thank you for coming to the university of maryland. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

our system is fundamentally undemocratic and a number of ways. one of the ways is a closed

primary. so in half the states in the country, 40% of all the voters can't participate in the primary so they had no say in who gets nominated, and as a result, we get more and more extreme candidates on both ends of the spectrum. to talk about the latest news

from afghanistan, iran and syria. this is about 45 minutes. >> host: our first guest is david ignatius who writes and thinks about american foreign policy from his perch of the "washington post" where he's written a number of interesting novels and similar issues so thanks for being here. we've talked with our audience this morning about all the developments in the u.s. policy in afghanistan. you send us a quarter of the nato strategy which is a time withdrawal over the next couple of years. does this change our thinking about that at all? >> guest: we will have to see. for the moment i think we have a timetable that we've worked on and debated with our nato allies going back to a summit meeting in the lisbon portugal a year or so ago and that calls for a phased withdrawal and all the nato troops to go by the end of

2014. for the u.s. and nato troops to end the lead, but turnover the basic security in the country by the middle of next year. it may be that the announcements this week especially by president karzai urging that sometime next year, he wasn't clear when, the u.s. forces and reasonably all nato forces should stay on the bases and pull out of the countryside may allow a quicker reduction in the u.s. forces. the question obviously is whether afghan forces are ready to take over full responsibility. if they are they can keep the countryside stable and nobody would be happier to see that happen then the commander in kabul general john allen. if they are not ready, i have a

feeling that president karzai whose continued tenure as president depends on the degree of the country and within a push that issue but probably refer it to the end of the year. i think that kind of timetable would work in the united states for sure. >> host: when you read through all of the secondary reporting on this, people who are quote even in countries saying that when he faces the reality of what this means, he will be going back from his demand. others are observing that mr. karzai has a history of making a very inflammatory demands and then pulling away from them. so what have we learned about his sensitivity as a leader? >> guest: we've learned that president hamid karzai is a very erratic and emotional leader that you just have to be patient, you have to understand what he says a week from now or a month from now may not be the same as what he's saying today. we find that from the leaders

everywhere. i think the core issue the u.s. should be focusing on and i hope karzai is focusing on and how is this country going to remain stable enough after the withdrawal of most american forces which is coming there's no question about that. we are on our way out. how was the country going to remain stable enough to avoid a civil war? afghanistan has known just a hideous of 30 years of war it's a country that is and pound it in every corner in the travel in afghanistan i have the last few years 16 times. when you see is a terribly poor country that is visibly suffering these wounds of the war. as of the last thing that anybody especially president karzai should want is to set conditions to kind of power vacuum out on the countryside, but a lot of should result in

that civil war quickly. that has been a worry at the core of the u.s. strategy. how do we build up the afghan forces enough, just good enough, not perfect but good enough they can handle and it is what people are struggling to explore, trying to keep talking even with these terrible instances like the burning of the kuran and the massacre last weekend. >> host: there are so many countries to cut dhaka that this was going on in the region in egypt on obviously syria, iran, and iraq, but you're going to focus on our initial conversation here on syria and iran and afghanistan. if you have questions for other countries in the region, davis went instead at those and we welcome your purchase of passion. the phone numbers are on the screen you can also send us a comment by twitter or you can e-mail us and all of those addresses will be demonstrated on the screen as our conversation continues. how many times that you've been to afghanistan?

>> guest: i haven't made an exact count. at least a dozen. >> host: if people let home are asking a question what does the u.s. and nato get for ten years of investment of blood and treasure in that country would produce a? >> guest: i would say in terms of the core goal we set when the u.s. forces first entered in 2001 after the attack on market u.s. world trade center and the pentagon would we got was a basic structure of al qaeda's base in afghanistan. we fought across the borders and in the troubled areas of pakistan. we have been attacking them mostly drone aircraft to slowly ground those al qaeda future this down. as we