tv Key Capitol Hill Hearings CSPAN May 29, 2014 1:00am-3:01am EDT
1:00 am
pointed out that it has gone down steadily after rising andts it's very hard to associate that in any cause and effect away with gun control laws and they k can take a sample, such as my, n hometown in new york where the e laws have remained essentially the same. ye and for the last 30 years, gun violence has decreased th radically. .. emily, let's come to you now and give you a chance to expand on something in your book. the subtitle, the main title of your book is "emily gets her gun," and you gave a very eloquent and poignant description of what prompted you to obtain a firearm. the subtitle of your book is
1:01 am
"but obama wants to take yours," as in obama wants to take your gun. maybe you could elaborate on that subtitle and tell us what you mean and what evidence there is to show that obama wants to take my gun or the gun owned by someone in the audience? >> request well, in 1996 president obama said that in a questionnaire when he was first running for office if he wanted to ban >> in 1996 president obama said in a questionnaire when he was first running for office if you want to ban all handguns and he said yes. he expanded on that four years ago four years later when he was running for statewide office and said although it might not feasible with the principle still support banning all handguns then as recently as 2012 after the horrendous tragedy in newtown president obama and mike bloomberg who funds the bloomberg school which daniel works for came out within the solemn -- same day and said we should start banning rifles.
1:02 am
so when they start talking about banning rifles and banning handguns that's taking people's guns away. now they're not talking about taking the criminals guns away because it's already illegal for criminals to have guns. it's already illegals for the bad guys to have guns. the reason any of us get guns is to defend ourselves. it's not to hurt anyone. we are not homicidal maniacs. we are the good guys so we want to get guns to defend ourselves and when a obama the president of the united states and at the time now he is being funded by new york city mayor limburg. >> you mention michael limburg over and over. think your point about bloomberg has been established. >> by pointed out bloomberg is to change the dynamic of this debate because there's never been so much money poured into it. mike bloomberg is spending last year alone $30 million a half million dollars to the gun policy institute you have one in
1:03 am
the last two years. it seems he's running as people in the house. on politics. i don't think president obama's agenda because it's not supported overwhelming majority of americans is up 9% in the past eight months do not support more gun control laws. his successes and passing laws to all the money in politics by mike bloomberg. he has said he's going to spend $25 million in the 2014 races. he is outspending the nra 10 or 20 fold. that is why this is an important factor because it's not the will of the people. if you look in any poll you will never find a poll that shows the majority of people favor more restrictions on their 2nd amendment rights. >> that's a really interesting way to frame it in.
1:04 am
>> i asked you to make a statement you just made in extended statements now the other two members of the panel will make shorter statements responding to yours which all can be done in a very civil way. >> there has been a whole lot of money on this gun issue for a very long time. far more than the gun lobby side than on the other side. let's make that point. i think it's very misleading to ask a poll question do you think we should have more restrictions on fill in the blank in anything that might be restricted. again that's not really the question. the question is what policies to people favor to make us safer?
1:05 am
i'm not about banning guns. i'm about again looking for what craig mentioned about a lot of common ground. there are certain people it shouldn't have guns in their basic commonsense ways to address that. we ought to do it. you characterize the situation in a very simplistic way as this there's one category of individuals. we know they are all and they will never obey any law. there's another set of individuals who will never do anything wrong with a gun and the world doesn't look that way. sorry. and the final point i will make is this notion that is hoped will -- hopeless to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. i will grant you sure there are some people for that probably is the case that because of their make up and the resources they
1:06 am
might have they will probably successfully be able to get a gun and do bad things with it. again the world is not so clean. there are a lot of people with a sufficient barriers where a gun is not readily available to them and it means the difference between life and death. it's not going to solve all gun violence nothing will. as far as the big reductions we have seen in new york city know there were no new gun laws passed by the did new york use and take advantage of the gun laws to reduce homicides substantially? most definitely. >> the nra which i'm a member of of -- >> me too either way. >> has certainly outspent mayor bloomberg and it's been more effective than mayor bloomberg
1:07 am
syed hasan look what happened in the senate in washington just a year ago. all those gun control measures that various senators propose not obama but senators that he supported, they failed to overcome the 60 vote hurdle that they faced with a filibuster. some of them got a majority of senators in favor but not 60. but i think the basic thrust and the most powerful of the measures that were proposed is wrong. it was to ban new sales of the so-called assault rifles because an assault rifle had and used in newtown. if you look at the mass shootings we have had in our country in recent years the common thread among them is not assault rifles so much as mental illness. it it wasn't diagnosed and treated and i think we have a
1:08 am
dismal mental health system treatment system in the united states. we basic dismantled it because of the excesses and abuses of mental hospitals in the 60s. we didn't replace it with anything and that improving diagnosis and treatment of mental illness would do more to reduce mass shootings i think that any gun control measure would. >> the problem of mass shootings certainly is a very distinct one and i think indisputably is linked to mental health issues and does not lend itself to being addressed by a society wide issue about the sale of guns demonstrated in the most direct way in almost all of these mass shooters are able to obtain the weapons they use legally and so further enforcement of those laws wouldn't stop those issues.
1:09 am
we have been talking for about 30 minutes now and i would bet that there are people in the audience who would like to ask questions so i would like to move to that portion of the program and ask anyone who has a question. i guess there's a microphone set up there to stand up and ask a question in the way we will do this is we will let each of the panelists concisely address whatever question is raised. audience? here, couple of people. >> hi. first of all i would like to thank each of you for coming out today. this is a really valuable discussion. i had a similar awakening. anyway my mother were shot in a robbery when i was 16 years old
1:10 am
and then what opened my eyes was when the supreme court said we are not duty bound to protect me in their ruling in the warren case so that was actually and i discovered all the hurdles i had to go through to make a purchase as well. i got involved last year and so what i would like to talk about are the assault weapons bans and the magazine size limitations because i really don't think they do anything. specifically if you look at what happened in the shooting just this week he had to do a magazine reload so how did that actually helped? in these mass shootings they have to do a mad reload so i don't think there's any substantial evidence that those actually help. >> thank you very much. maybe framing that is a question i would put it this way. would a ban on military style semiautomatic rifles that can be
1:11 am
equipped with large capacity magazines have a significant effect and why don't we go down the line and you can ease into douce.. >> you would not have a significant effect on crime. assault walkers -- assault rifles don't figure in street shootings and assaults. it arguably could have more of an effect on mass shootings but as i said i think other measures would have more effect than the ban on assault rise -- assault rifles. >> i agree with craig that in terms of thinking about assault weapon ban or restrictions on magazine capacity in terms of a broader approach to reduce violent crimes and gun violence, you are probably not going to see that because again they
1:12 am
principally are relevant for and a mass shooting context. you can look at a variety of mass shootings and in some cases like the recent one that you pointed out there was an ability to reload. you can also look at mass shooting context in which when a person was reloading was when people escaped or the person was incapacitated. when it comes to mind is the one in tucson when jared loughner was tackled when he was going to reload but he already had a large capacity magazines and was able to kill and injure a very large number of people. there is a direct correlation between the ammunition capacity that the shooters have and how many people get shot in these incidents. so i think the capacity is relevant en masse shootings not
1:13 am
and whether they occur are not but how many people are shot. that's my own view. >> maybe we can give emily a chance. >> i'm sorry about your mother. that's horrible and i'm so sorry about that. look, of the 9000 or so gun murders a year about rifles of any sort dying feinstein is the one who backed the weapons assault last year and to clarify for those who aren't familiar with them what we in the media or others called assault weapon is a rifle that has ergonomic type characteristics. it's just for style. it's not the caliber. it's not the speed. that's the only thing that defines assault weapon versus rifle but again dianne feinstein
1:14 am
this was for bill. law enforcement does not characterize styles. just ask the cops. the police department in a survey last year 50,000 current and retired law enforcement and 96% said assault weapons ban will not affect prime. 92% said changing the magazine capacity will not affect crime. these are the guys who are on the streets dealing with a crime and we asked them how they deal with it. >> emily said bad guys with guns have stolen them or stolen them but wouldn't those guns have come from households of people that got them illegally so wouldn't reducing the amount of legally owned guns reduce the amount of illegal guns on the streets? >> there's an interesting question. let's just boil it down to that last sentence and put it
1:15 am
question mark at the end. wouldn't reducing the overall supply of guns which society is generally estimated at 300 million firearms in private hands in the united states. that's not including the police, not including the military. would reducing the overall supply 300 million, but that reduce the number of guns being used in crime? >> i think clearly yes barter we ever going to reduce the number significantly below where it is now? not all stolen or all illegal guns are stolen. a lot of them are acquired illegally in the first place through the black market. >> just pick up on what craig just said, i think it's not in line with the facts that the overwhelming majority of guns on the illicit market are stolen. prisoners surveys when you ask
1:16 am
them how they got there down 10% said they stole it. there are others who got it on the black market. we don't know exactly again the path of those guns took. we know also that some firearms are purchased illegally in straw purchases from legitimate retail outlets so there are write it past the guns take from the factory into the hand of the buyer. >> precisely and i have published several studies that show the proper regulations on gun shows prevent the illicit market were criminals get guns but the to the very specific point more gun ownership means more guns get funneled to the illicit market. there is a positive correlation that you can see in a number of studies that back up your general point. i agree with craig but that's probably not how we are going to make a big impact on crime. we are generally going to reduce
1:17 am
gun ownership. that's not likely possible. it's not the way to go. i would love it if there were more efforts to focus on securing firearms within homes to reduce death. i think there's a lot to be gained from popper and safe storage of firearms. >> emily your thoughts. >> i don't like to talk about hypotheticals. violent crime is such a complicated issue. generally there are 12 factors related to violent crime everything from the environment employment drugs density of population so hypotheticals are tough. though if we just look at current rates civilian gun ownership in this country is the highest it has ever been. almost 50% of households in this country have a gun in their home so gun owners have grown like
1:18 am
this. at the same time as i said earlier, did i say something funny? >> you said something blatantly false but go ahead. >> false or funny? >> no, false. >> that i will ignore. if you look at the fbi numbers gun murders have gone down 50% as i said earlier so gun ownership is on the ricin has been significantly. gun crime is at the lowest rate it's been in 20 years so it's the opposite of what you asked before if less guns would equal less gun crime there is no reason to believe that is the case. >> a lot of these things are subject to dispute that lets get a few more questions on the table. >> my background i'm retired and i was a thirty-year federal enforcement officer 13 years as a firearms instructor and i'm a gun owner. i know this is an emotional issue but i do not see where when we talk about gun registration or background
1:19 am
checks but that is as some people say an attempt to take my gun away. i think it's a very logical as you said there are 300 million guns in this country and there are more being bought every day. we are never going to get rid of them so we have to take steps to try to control and background checks and registration seems to me to be good steps. the other problem i have is a former -- formal federal law enforcement enforcer are the laws on concealed weapons. as a law enforcement officer i would not have wanted to go in that booth in colorado and saw 40 or 50 people pulling a gun and not knowing who is the bad guy and who's the good guy. i think the problem is and is a firearms instructor i know even federal law enforcement agents, local law enforcement agents aren't the bad shots. we go out quarterly and get -- work hard to get them up to
1:20 am
speed. a given individual handgun and there's no requirement to know how to use it properly there's a lot of danger in not in their are a lot of accidents of shootings and a lot of suicides in unnecessary homicides. >> you should probably be on this panel and we should probably be asking you questions because you probably know more about firearms in their use and anybody else in this room. mitt let me plug out of that series of helpful observations one topic and turn it into a question which is what do we think about the advisability of the so-called "stand your ground" law's? craig. >> i think in any law that makes it easier to kill people is a bad one and i will leave it at that. >> very concisely put it i love that. >> i would agree with craig's point. there are at least two studies now showing that "stand your ground" law's that lead to increased rates of homicide in the study that i mentioned
1:21 am
before in missouri's law we did examine "stand your ground" law we showed increases associated with the loss but not statistically significant. generally doesn't seem to be wise public policy. >> before i get to emily i probably should have described exactly what "stand your ground" law czar. they are a variation on the traditional notion that one is allowed to defend oneself and traditionally there is also a concept in the law that if you are in your own home you can use deadly force to defend yourself in the face of the threat of deadly force. the "stand your ground" law's expand on that concept and say that if you reasonably perceive a deadly threat anywhere outside your home you are within your rights to use deadly force in response to that. these laws have been passed in a number of states and in several
1:22 am
particular instances have led to highly controversial cases. i don't want to get in to the details of those now but emily i suspect you might have a contrasting view of the "stand your ground" law's. >> i just think we need to add two important facts. if you're going to use "stand your ground" law as a defense you have to have not initiated the crime. you have to be on the defense and number two you can't reasonably get away so you have to be under attack. the other person has to have attacked you and you can't get away and then you can use deadly force. the castle doctrine first. >> that's not right. >> yes it is. >> the whole point is you don't have to retreat. the traditional understanding of self-defense as you have an obligation to retreat first-hand what the "stand your ground" law's do what they codified is you do not have to retreat great if you are innocently standing at the gas station around the corner downtown and someone approaches you and presents what could reasonably and be
1:23 am
interpretinterpret ed as a deadly threat rather than turn around and run away you can take your legally owned handgun out and shoot that person and try to kill them. that is what standard ground is. thus its title stand your ground. >> i know you are the moderator but let me also clarify again it's a legal term that means when you are then -- after-the-fact when it goes to court so it goes to the police station if you could not get away without extreme bodily harm or killed then you have the right to shoot back. if you are in your car and the windows are closed and you can hit the gas pedal or if you can slam the door and get away that's a different story because nobody wants to shoot someone just for the heck of it. this is about -- what this is there is nothing new in the law castle doctrine was inside your
1:24 am
home. it's the same doctrine that's been around. the reason these laws has spread through the country in the last 10 years or so is because people assume that they were allowed to shoot back in situations when they were attacked and they couldn't get away. there's a case of a man who's in jail in georgia who was on his property. the man ran up with a gun aimed at him. he shot him back and he's in jail because they don't have "stand your ground" law are. that's what the differences. but the next person. >> i have a question directed for mr. webster but there are a couple of things that have come up that i would like to address. i am an advocate for adequate training which is what our former federal friend broad up. i don't like the idea of anyone carrying without training.
1:25 am
so the scenario of 30 or 40 people in the theater not knowing who is the good guy and who's the bad guy if a solid training programs are followed that's not an issue. i would also like to point out that every one of these mass shootings have happened in gun free zones so there was no opportunity for anyone to end the threat early. guess it's unfortunate that someone goes off and someone else dies but if we have the opportunity through relax carry laws these threats can be stopped quicker. >> can i just aged clarify it on the one hand you say you're uncomfortable with the movie theater scenario with lots of people shooting. >> untrained people. >> i see. >> there are numerous training venues out there whether it's through nra or other organizations many of whom are here locally.
1:26 am
>> so what question would you like to ask? >> mr. webster seems to be relying a lot on polls and surveys and studies. you have contradicted yourself several times a day and i would just like you to answer you saying you're pulling it purposefully were questions in order to get a supportive response. >> i did not say that. >> i would like to finish please. >> when you're addressing emily shortly thereafter you said that when polls are done in support of gun rights it's not stating the questions in a particular way and i'd like you to answer that these. >> he's basically saying. >> okay so i did not word any of our survey items to get a particular response. they were worded to address the policy. with the policy did and what its purpose was so i will and it at
1:27 am
that. >> next question? >> i believe in training as well and my big question to all of the politicians, all the people in the venue for up there is really for emily because i know she knows but really, do we really think that criminals are going to obey the laws? laws are good and lost to help that criminals do not obey laws so my question is simple and i know you have all heard it a million times do criminals obey laws? they do not. >> i would love to take that one. >> we have three minutes left so we left egypt is the question one minute apiece. here we go. >> i have heard that speeders don't obey the speed limit so i think we should do away with the speed limits. that logic of why have a lock because someone is going to
1:28 am
break it i just don't buy. that's precisely what you said. you said criminals don't obey gun laws so why should we have them? know, let me just finish my sentence. >> two more sentences from daniel and then we will move on. >> the policies are designed to hold people accountable so they don't put guns in the hands of dangerous people. if there is no accountability it would be very easy for them to get a gun. >> we only have a couple of minutes. emily went out you go ahead. >> i think what you're saying is because daniel advocates for more gun control more gun laws aren't going to reduce the 9000 deaths. they are not like me and in a police station registering. bad guys if they want to shoot you they are not going to go and register a gun. you give up your fingerprint and
1:29 am
give your home home address they do a background check on you and just to clarify the earlier person talking about background checks we have a federal system. the fbi runs it. if you go to a dealer and buy a gun and happen to me when i bought my gun and they do a background check to see if you are a felon or dangers many mentally ill. you have a system in place for the problem is you have straw trafficking. the bad guys know how to avoid those systems. >> craig will wrap it up for us. >> criminals don't obey laws and the nra has vigorously supported prosecuting them to the maximum extent of said ally. >> there you go. how about a good round of applause for the panel. [applause] >> the the authors will be very grateful if you follow us down
1:30 am
1:31 am
hero and his tax rate was a gold standard tax rate that we saw in the video 25% was what he got the top rate down to. he fought like crazy. starter remember with wilson in the 70s so that was an epic battle. when you look at what the socialite said about coolidge in washington and how cold he was and wouldn't meet with them you want to remember they were probably from families that endorse different policies especially alice roosevelt longworth whose father had a different model of presidency. he was a collective bully pulpit presidency and here was coolidge and cold and not getting out favors. she said he looked as though he had been weaned on a pickle. coolidge's silence was cultural. he was from new england. farmers don't wave their arms about because a cow might kick them. you know if you have lifted and it was temperamental. he was a shy person but also had
1:32 am
1:33 am
next on booktv a discussion about charity. kern stern author of with charity for all and michael weinstein co-author of the robin hood rules for smart giving talk about charitable thing in the u.s. in place to give that do the most good. they are by tucson mayor jonathan rothschild. this is an hour. >> my name is jonathan rothschild sometimes known as the mayor of tucson and we are here today to discuss the private sector dollars alleviating poverty. i'm happy to have with us to folks who know a little bit about this. the first is the co-founder and director of programs for the robin hood foundation. he has a ph.d. in economics from m.i.t.. he was director of the greenbergreenber g center for geoeconomic studies for the council on foreign relations.
1:34 am
probably the reason i wanted to be a moderator here today was recently at a summit of 18 economists on the subject of how the private sector could help address the issue of poverty the nobel prize winning economist james heckman introduced himself on the panel as indicating the reason he was here was to listen to michael weinstein. he knows more about this on all of us. the author of rules for giving, michael weinstein. our other panelists is former chief executive officer of "national public radio" a former litigator with wilmer and hailed in washington d.c.. he served as deputy general counsel for the clinton-gore 1996 campaign. he has been a senior adviser to the director of the international broadcasting bureau and in his 8.5 year
1:35 am
tenure at npr and tara was known to have strengthened its business management and financial stability in part from the receipt of a 200 million-dollar gift from mcdonald's heir joan kroc. he was there recent author of charity for all, why charities are failing and a better way to give. kern stern. gentleman let me get this started. i indicated to you tucson a year and a half ago was in a study concerning the sixth poorest metropolitan area in united states. not city, want to get that clear with people but metropolitan area. we are now eighth and i would like to take credit for that but i'm not sure that it couple of other cities haven't -- but the good thing about it is the community has begun to focus on out is to address the issue of poverty systematically. we live in a time when we know
1:36 am
that government either cannot or will not do it all. d.c. in my experience which is only been a couple of years is i would say parsimonious ab dust and as you know you are here in the state of arizona. so what happens is this issue of poverty falls to localities the cities and counties to deal with and as i'm sure you know the cities around the country are doing their best to try to continue maintaining their presence services. i think with the recognition from all that the there must -- and i know your books have expressed concerns about how the best way is to make this happen. gentleman we are here to listen and learn. michael.
1:37 am
>> i am an economist and don't hold too much against these to start off with the one thing that economists preach and preach correctly is that issues of poverty any issue of redistribution is best handled at the highest level of government not the locality. a town is it going to be in rough shape as it if it tries to redistribute income to less mouth -- less wealthy members. people will leave the state if its tax structure and government policies favor the people above the median income. or tax people to favor people below it. these kind of thing should be happening at the national level. people would be less of likely to lead the united states to leave for minor tax reasons to leave the particular city. having said that i'm mindful of the constraints you are thinking about i think i would be satisfied today if i convince
1:38 am
you to adopt one conversation and drop another. the conversation i urge you to drop is a conversation that says eliminate poverty we are going to find a game-changer and radically alter the circumstances of low income. residents of arizona in the middle of tucson all these large global promises and assume a different language and a different notion which is a rate-of-return the kind of corporate business normal corporate rate-of-return. if the private sector is going to do something that's going to because dollars and spends them in a way that is the maximal good if they are a philanthropic or the business of fighting poverty you want to spend your dollars where they will have the biggest impact and raising the
1:39 am
living centers of the poor citizens they are trying to help. that doesn't mean that to be the biggest game in town. they don't have to have a replicablreplicabl e project in order to have a silver bullet. they bullet. a donor to the game-changer but what they have to do is spend their dollars smartly. then i will say a few more words in the bible read what we have done that robin hood, robin hood henderson organization that gives away about $150 million a year fighting poverty in new york city. to put that in context the rockefeller foundation will give away two or two and half times that next year but they operate around the world. we operate in one city. it's a very different model having an effect. the way we set ourselves up as we promise our donors many of them who are on it or that we promise our donors that we have put in sophisticated systems of accountability be that as a relentless application of benefit cost analysis as any economic student learns as an undergraduate.
1:40 am
no matter what ways we use them so whether we are putting dollars into microlending program into a charter school into a prekindergarten program into an after-school program emergency food whatever we are doing we measure the effect of that grant on the low income residents of new york city and we spend their money accordingly. ringing these conversations together i leave you with the following thought. we spend $150 million a year, a year. if you look at our web site and the materials we put out i would like to believe we could convince you that for every dollar we spend on average we raise the living standards of poor new york ers by 10 to $12. that is what we can do. that is what the private sector can do. we can spend money and put people in a better situation
1:41 am
than they were without us. that brings these two conversations together. we leave it for public policy. we leave it for the political entity to adopt the policies that will trench in if you will more sweeping more accountable i more citywide impacts. that is not what a private charity can do and that is not in our case what we have attempted to do. >> thank you. first off let me say it's a great pleasure to be here. i want to tell you a couple of stories but i will start up the story from this morning. i was on the phone with my wife back in washington and she asked what is going to do today. i said i was going to be on a panel about whether private dollars can't alleviate poverty. she thinks about these issues. i said what you think i should say? she said they haven't yet and
1:42 am
hand the microphone over and walk out. i'm tempted to do that because i think it's a good formulation of the situation we face. i think the challenge we face is the scale of the problem. the problem of poverty is not just a problem of income or not just a problem of education or health, not just a problem of job training or just to falmouth housing. the it's all of the above. i frequently write about charity and people often come to me and say private solutions private giving is a better solution than government programs. i think that reflects on people's dissolutidissoluti on of government often for good reason. the challenge of poverty in this country are enormous. just think about the problem of education.
1:43 am
public spending on k-12 spending each year is about 1.3 gillian dollars. all charitable country -- giving in this country is $250 billion. if the gates foundation the nations largest foundation decided tomorrow they would do this empty their entire coffers and put it into a dish it would add up to i think less than one tenth of 1%, one tenth of one 10% of all education spending in this country. the scale of money that the private sector currently puts into alleviating poverty is a drop in the bucket compared to spending that the government does. i think mike was alluding to that and the distribution. it doesn't mean though -- i'm a
1:44 am
guy that tells stories. it doesn't mean that smart private investment can make a difference because in some ways private dollars due and even much smaller private dollars have an opportunity to make a difference and do things with flexibility and speed and innovation that is difficult for government to do. i'm going to tell you the story of one guy, a rich guy. i think it's a story that despite the scale of problems speaks to some of the opportunities for private dollars. if it's the story of a guy named tom. probably a lot of you had never heard of tom cousins. in his heyday in the 60s or 70's was one of the two developers responsible for building downtown atlanta. in 1981 tom wrote an article in
1:45 am
"the new york times" reviews a storied article and even to this day i find it hard to believe. the article said this tom will tell you the article said 80% of the prisoners in the state of new york come from six neighborhoods in new york city. tom read that and said that can't possibly be true. tom wanted to know if that was true. he called up the people and to find out if that's true. "the new york times" can actually report accurately. that's an amazing thing. that can't be true so he called the chief of police. he said i read the story in "the new york times." it can be true in georgia. the chief laughs and says that horse is true. if an nose that is true. in fact it's for neighborhoods
1:46 am
in the state of georgia. all these for neighborhoods are terribly impoverished depressed neighborhoods and the worst one was the city named eastlake. eastlake was a terrible neighborhood. i have seen pictures. the employment rate there was 13%. not the unemployment rate. the employment rate was 13%. this is where hope when to die. the tom cousins foundation made a commitment. there were many donors. previously they characterized -- spread the money around. we are going to change her giving and make investments much
1:47 am
more like robin hood takes about it and create a new model in turn eastlake around. a lot of money to most people but not a lot of money relative to what government has and the amount of government invests in a place like eastlake. over 15 years through a lot of hook and crook the mayor then shirley franklin heads to the department of urban housing developmedevelopme nt to do something they have never done before. literally blow it up which meant letting everyone out. some could come back because he was going to replace it with mixed-income household. he was able to persuade the powers that be but the residents themselves not through his own
1:48 am
dollars. tom didn't have enough dollars to do that but through incentive programs and leveraging his relatively small dollars bringing in cheshire tatian services and job training services part of the ymca. he made a lot of mistakes along the way but over at period of 15 or 20 years helped create what is known as the eastlake model to reinvent eastlake. a poorly functioning school and the cousin foundations placed it with drew charter schools. i went there last year. i will end my long-winded story soon not promised. to visit eastlake. they are proud of the eastlake story and what tom and his daughter had done over the years. because it's not the picture of cabrini green in chicago which i
1:49 am
saw shot through razor wire. it's a lovely neighborhood still low income still 80% subsidized program. you cannot walk through it without inspiring what they helped create largely with federal dollars but hinged on their private investments. it's a beautiful place. i sat in a first-grade engineering class. it was quite amazing. then they brought us back into the conference room. for those of you who have read my book i will tell you it's a skeptical book. it's about why stories don't improve things for charities and the return on investment you need a measurement improve. so i said to them this is a
1:50 am
beautiful tour and thank you for your time but how do we really know that charter is really meeting the profits they set out for them in 23 years ago. they went to the white oregon opened it up. they had charged that showed the test results of drew charter school. i was there with the gentleman colleague of mine who went to a school called sarah smith elementary. she was a local from atlanta. a lot of you have trouble he never heard of sarah smith elementary but you know sarah smith elementary. it's a largely white upper-middle-class area worth all the upper-middle-class people move to bring their children to school. every grade on every test drew charter school now outperforms sarah smith and actually outperformed every school in the city of atlanta.
1:51 am
this would not have happened. it's not because the cousins foundation. for the state government or city government. it's a drop in the bucket. they were able to buy up incentives and by leveraging what they had create something that was very different then before. i actually said shirley franklin is the president of the cousins foundation. she is excellent now. she is the president of an organization that tom funds. those are the types of projects that show the potential of private investments from public dollars have failed by themselves. >> i might ask each of you the same question open up for anyone in the audience and whoever else wants to ask questions. i think we all have a fundamental sense that we can do more together than alone.
1:52 am
the government by collecting taxes and using them appropriately does things like police fire water environmental services and transit. in our community we took $18 per taxpayer and created $100 million to start. i don't have anybody in the community who's going to fork over $100 million for a project for a given that is the case i think in your book you said taking large gifts and smaller gifts and people having $2000 a year on average how does a community like this in a group like this figure out what to do best and how to do it and how to measure it? michael i know you have done a lot of work in this area. >> we do tens of millions of dollars of partnerships with the city of new york and one of the things we can do is our private
1:53 am
philanthropy is to exact way it impose standards of the kind you are referring to so that when a city knows that they are doing a partnership with us they know two things. they know we can take risks that mayors often can't because the mayor is playing with taxpayer money and we are playing with their own money so we can take the risk that the public authority is relatively generally reluctant to take. we can also set standards among higher much more easily than government agencies. there was the famous comment years ago that the supreme court made it media for justices because most of us are mediocre. you don't have to take that too seriously but it is true that a public authority has a lot of times that a standards so high that most of the taxpayers in
1:54 am
office could have failed them. private philanthropy when partnering with a government agency can do things that neither can do by themselves. let me give you an example in something very concrete about how we fight poverty in new york robin hood runs 90 sites around the city and runs a program called single stop. single stop rings to bear a free lawyer and free financial counselor and social worker tax preparer and brings this team of people together and anybody who comes and we sit down and figure out what the problem is and help them. one of the things we do is was to complete the tax forms. 60,000 low income low-paid new yorkers and on their behalf would cover $120 million in tax refunds. my point about raising this as follows. when you put $5000 in tax
1:55 am
refunds on the table of the low-paid new york family you have added something like somewhere between half to a third of their incomes that they earned in the private sector and added to that. that's the amount of money they need that now has covered their rent and now they can buy clothing, books, schooling materials whatever it is that they want for their kids. this has an enormous difference. if you put it in the context of the total amount of poverty that exists in new york even the difference in how much income you must add to the family over and above their tax refund to bring them up to a nonpoor level of income that is small but to the 110,000 new yorkers and the 60,000 tax filers it would help these differences are huge. again i urge you to change your focus from from thinking out to be talking about something that solves the whole problem to something that takes whatever resources going to be made available private and public and squeezes the most impact out of
1:56 am
those dollars. for that you need a framework and i don't think that's it in the of people sitting here. i can't tell stories. i calculate that is the story. >> there was actually, an extraordinary facts you alluded to. the average american household gives $2500 per year to charitable giving. it's by far and away the most giving person household in the world. i think there's a question about that which i will raise. it's so large in the developed world because the tax rates are higher elsewhere and there is different sociology with respect to investments in public goods. in fact the u.s. there's a lot of charitable giving. in a city like tucson there will
1:57 am
be hundreds of millions of dollars given every year. there are 1.1 million charities in the united states. it's an amazing number. what i have observed in my time is the power of small amounts of money to leverage cooperation and to create incentives for people to work together in different ways and i will tell you a story. it's oddly enough a story about a british pharmaceutical company which a couple of years ago i was an advisor to a project decided as a big american operation decided wanted to make investments in public health in the united states in a couple of key markets. they wanted to give back to the community.
1:58 am
they didn't really know how but they knew the right answers for community health. they have a series of listening sessions run the country and brought together new government leavings -- leaders from the public health field a lot of non-profits in each of these communities and sat down and said what can a company like gfk do for you? i would have thought the community leaders would have said gray's a big honking check but they didn't. they said help us work together. i thought that was an extraordinary thing for community leaders to tell a british pharmaceutical company that they wanted help in learning how to work together. would gfk has done and that very question they set up a pool of money a modest amount of money
1:59 am
with incentive grants tied entirely to having a nonprofit organizations and government organizations in cities work together on community health programs. i have always found it very and just hang that an outside organization coming with a little bit of money create incentives for people working together on what those communities want and help them brief think i do make a difference. that's the targeted nature of private investments that police hopefully in those committees will make a difference in health success. >> ken i'm going to open it up to the audience and if anyone has any questions they want to ask these gentlemen about the work we have two mics and if not i'm just going to ask questions. >> i will start it off. back to the atlanta story. it sounds wonderful.
2:00 am
create education and great education standards race. but how about jobs? do you guys think about creating jobs where people can escape the cycle of poverty and sustain those jobs? >> we do about 30 or $40 million a year in funding job training programs. by the way the social science literature on the success of job training programs done off the job that were paid for by an employer is pretty discouraging. so job training as a concept is a hard task to pull off. we nonetheless do a lot of it because we try to be very opportunistic. for instance inside the city of new york there is another city and is called new york city public housing.
2:01 am
2:38 am
companion network, c-span. ladies and gentlemen, the president of the george washington university, dr. stephen knapp. >> ladies and gentlemen, good morning. i'm steve knapp, president of george washington university. it's a pleasure to welcome you to this very important symposium this morning. at george washington we
2:39 am
frequently have the opportunity to bring global leaders to campus to discuss the important issues of our day. that's one of the ways in which we provide our community with a front row seat in the theater of history. i'd like to take a moment to recognize among the many distinguished guests we have with us today, the four ambassadors who are in attendance this morning. their excellencies marina callurand of estonia. ambassador andres lason of lot via, am mass dor richard schnepp of poeland and finally ambassador jean-louis voltsfeld of lex umburg. i'll mention one other member of the audience, a former governor
2:40 am
of minnesota, tim pawlenty, is here with us today. of course i'd like to welcome especially all of today's distinguished speakers, congressman mike rogers, congressman dutch ruppersberger and paula dobriansky, former undersecretary of state for democracy and global issues. i'm especially honored to welcome toomas hendrik ilves who will be addressing us in just a moment. estonia has been an extraordinarily viable partner of george washington's world executive mba in cyber security. that program i think is having an important impact in training leaders who can help us address this very important challenge. our students have worked with members of the estonian parliament's cyber security and national defense committees and with the minister of education. the ambassador has visited our campus on a number of occasions to participate in discussions of
2:41 am
cyber issues. for the past two years president ilves has met with students as part of their international residency. we're honored today to host this forum as part of our broader cyber security initiative. it was established in 2012 under the chairmanship of former secretary of homeland security michael chertoff and this brings together university's expertise, research, policy and education to address the wide range of issues that are relevant to the cyber challenge, including national and international security and economic competitiveness as well as concerns about privacy and civil liberties. i'm sure you join me in looking forward to the program and to president ilves' address. please join me in welcoming frank salufo and director of gw's homeland security policy institute.
2:42 am
>> thank you, president knapp, and let me echo the president's comments and welcome everyone to george washington university today. let me also welcome our viewers on c-span, those watching at home. it is a real treat and i've got the distinct privilege of very, very briefly introducing our speakers. to give you a sense of the state of play, we're going to start with some prepared remarks by president ilves. then we'll turn right into a moderated question and answer period with congressman rogers, congressman ruppersberger and ambassador dobriansky. let me first introduce our keynote speaker, president ilves. i think it's a real treat to have someone who is not only articulate on cyber issues but in addition to understanding the strategic initiatives, he is a
2:43 am
technologist at heart himself. it's pretty amazing when you see what estonia has done since it regained independence. quite honestly it's one of the most innovative countries you will see. it's synonymous with cyber. it's done so much in such a short period of time, and i think it's fair to say that they punched way above their weight. and it's a bit of a combination of technology, policy and entrepreneurialism. and i think that's synonymous with their head of state. i think it's fair to say that estonia is in large part where it is today because of president ilves. president ilves was born in sweden. he was the son of refugees during the cold war. he grew up in the united states, went to high school in new jersey. i won't ask him what exit. and was educated in the united
2:44 am
states. he went to two small schools, columbia and u-penn. he was ambassador, the estonian ambassador to the united states. he's in his second term as elected president of estonia and i think you can't have a conversation about cyber security without estonia coming up. so i think that's quite amazing. and it's this combination of grit and technology. he came in immediately following the cold war and started hooking up and networking all the schools to computers. rather than looking to legacy systems, he was looking ahead. many countries were looking at the past, concerned about what they saw for good reason, but i think estonia put the grit and the entrepreneurialism to try to propel forward. in addition to that, as many may know, he's invested very heavily in education. how many people can say they
2:45 am
have first graders coding? well, that's precisely what they're doing in estonia. they're coding at a very young age and they're doing so. i had the opportunity to visit a number of the schools and it's pretty amazing in terms of what you see in terms of coding and robotics. and obviously president ilves is also a leader in the e.u. he's leading a lot of the ehealth initiatives. he's leading the cloud environment and is a true champion not only of cyber. and i might note whereas he's a technologist, at the end of the day it's also the marrying up of culture. they have invested so aggressively in technology, which is neat, they didn't look to legacy systems, but they have also done so with the dna or the ethos that is striving for freedom. so if you think about it, they had to live in an environment where they didn't have any of
2:46 am
that. so in addition to technology, you have the opportunity, and i can tell you they will continue to remain the most transparent country. i'm going to quickly introduce our other speakers so we can go right into the conversation. we have following president ilves, congressman mike rogers. mike rogers is no stranger to gw, no stranger to anyone in the united states or at least anyone who has a tv or the internet. he's been a relentless champion on national security issues. he chairs the house permanent select committee on intelligence and i just want to note he has announced that he will be stepping down from the hill. i might say this is a huge loss for our national security community. so all of us owe him a huge debt of gratitude for thinking country first. his partner in crime, and i say that in a good way, is dutch ruppersberger who's the ranking member of the house select committee on intelligence.
2:47 am
if there's any committee that's b bipartisan, that's the one. i think it's all the more important that our intelligence issues and national security issues are treated in a nonpartisan way. and last but certainly not least, we have ambassador paula dobriansky who had a must-read op-ed in the "washington post" this weekend. if you haven't read it, read it. she is no stranger to diplomacy and national security issues. i had the privilege of working with her in the burn white house. she's headed up the council on foreign relations in d.c. she's at harvard. she got her undergraduate at the other george across town. i won't hold that against you. but got her master's and ph.d. in harvard in soviet military and political studies. dare i say those -- that dissertation is probably as relevant today as it was then. so president ilves, the floor is yours. thank you so much for joining us and thank you from everyone.
2:48 am
well, thank you very much. it's great to be here. i'll try to speak quickly because 10, 15 minutes to cover cyber from its various aspects is quite a task. we're very late in actually coming to realize the importance of cyber. it was only in 2011, that's three years ago, that the munich security conference, the premiere security conference in the transatlantic area actually had its first session on cyber. before that, they didn't have it. at the same time, this awareness has increased dramatically. just last year when u.s. experts were rated on what are the threats, cyber went beyond terrorism by 20 percentage points as the biggest threat. and that should be understandable because in fact the capability of cyber is
2:49 am
immense. when you think about how dependent we are on the digital world, the internet of things where basically we have machines already just talking to one another, more important supervisory control and data acquisition systems that run everything from power plants to the milk deliveries in your supermarket, all of those things are vulnerable. and we've gotten to the point where in fact you don't really need to physically attack a country to debill at a ti tadeb. and that was with a very primitive attack. we had d-dos attacks flooding our servers and that was seven years ago. it seems prehistoric looking at what the capabilities are. when you think also the number of cyber attacks and between
2:50 am
2000 and 2011, there was a 17-fold increase in cyber attacks on u.s. infrastructure. we can assume that it's more or less the same everywhere else in the free world. so we, of course, got -- we were the first ones who were subjected to something -- to an attack that was explicitly political, and it was the first time it would sort of meet the category of policy by other means. before that clearly there were all kinds of cyber attacks, but it was never clear that it was a policy by other means. and what makes it all much more difficult, of course, this is all the obvious, it's very hard to tell who did it. forensics are really difficult. this leads to major problems in figuring, for example, from the point of view what is an article 5 attack. if someone shoots a missile at
2:51 am
your -- at a power plant, you know where it came from, you have an appropriate response. if you take out the power plant with a cyber attack, you don't know who did it, you don't know what's at fault. these are the kinds of things that we have to start thinking about. we have to start thinking about defending the entirety of our societies from attack. i think it's wrong to only think about cyber in a strictly military-to-military domain because in fact they don't have -- whoever is attacking you, doesn't have to attack your military. they can just attack your infrastructure. we have, i think, moved considerably at least -- nato has finally figured out cyber is an issue so the nato center of excellence for cyber is in estonia. we do regular exercises, most recently i think with 17
2:52 am
countries participating in an annual exercise called lock shields, which is a cyber defense exercise. and those things are moving along. and we ourselves are very proud that we are the only country so far to have a memorandum of understanding of cyber security with the united states. now, of course all of this is complicated by some of the developments that we find -- we have to deal with politically because of various revelations from people who used to work at nsa. and i think that we have to understand that this makes it all politically much more difficult to do a lot of the things that we want to do. and i think that we have some major intellectual tasks ahead of us. basically what we're dealing with is overall in cyber is the modern equivalent of hobbs' -- thomas hobbs' war of wall against all. it is a state of nature.
2:53 am
all things are allowed, there are no rules. we see that some countries in fact are taking hobbsian solutions and imposing a sovereign -- that is to say a dictator on top saying what is to be done. we who are in the freedom online coalition with the united states, we are number two in the world in internet freedom, we were for a number of years number one but then iceland crept ahead of us. number three now is the u.s. but if you want to maintain a free internet, we have to come up with a new solution or new understanding, i think, between society and government on what -- how we deal with the hobbsian nature of the world and the internet where all is allowed up to now. so we need our jeffersons, we need our voltaires in this area and i hope people work on that.
2:54 am
especially when we think about all of the things that relate to cyber -- rather to privacy, not only are we talking about what governments do, but it's all your google searches, your swipe car cards. if you read the wonderful book by shinberger on big data, you see everyone is using big data to follow everything and oftentimes they know more about you than you know yourself, even to the point that you're pregnant, as one example was in that book. so this is where we're dealing with something very big that we're only now beginning to grasp. a few words about what we do shall because it's very different from other countries. we have come to the conclusion that you cannot have any genuine security without a secure online identity. most of you may recall the old
2:55 am
new yorker cartoon of two dogs and one of them says to the other on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. well, that is the dilemma of all internet relations. you don't know who's who. and until you can do that, you cannot really be sure of anything. and so our solution has been to create a very secure online identity to factor public key infrastructure and rsa 2048, if that means anything to anybody, but in fact we know who's who. you can be sure that whoever has an online identity is that person. and so we've built the legal infrastructure based on that, so we allow digital signatures. we've given 160 million digital signatures in estonia since we started this. we have built up an architecture on top of that which allows us to offer about 400 services,
2:56 am
both public and private, ranging from banking to online prescriptions. that is to say if you get a prescription in estonia, you can take it out anywhere in the country by just sticking your card in. we think that's the way of the future. other countries don't want to have secure online identities. there is this sort of odd paradox that the u.k., canada, u.s., new zealand and australia are also the five countries most opposed to having any secure online identities. why that is, i don't know. but in any case we don't fear it and we in fact find that it's far more secure and our citizens love it. they fill out their taxes. all taxes get done virtually online. in about three minutes. we have online medical records. all these things are possible if and only if you have a secure
2:57 am
online identity, because whoever has the data knows it's you and not anyone else. we also -- we also have a few laws that also are crucial, i think. one is that you own your own data. i just read the big data report that was put out here in the u.s. one thing that you could do is actually give the right to own your own data to people. if you own your own data then whoever owns it is obligated to tell you they have been looking at it. that's difficult, i know, but you can do it. so those are the kinds of things that are alternative ways to give you cyber security. i don't know where -- how things are going to go, but certainly in europe i think that that will be the way we will go because the level of fear about cyber,
2:58 am
often ignorant fear, is so great that we will have to take measures to guarantee the security of data. and i think that the way things are going in the world with cyber attacks and with fear of privacy, we haven't even gotten to the big issues because everyone is concerned about privacy. i think the real issue in cyber will not be privacy, but rather integrity of data. people -- to take an example, you might be worried about someone knowing your blood type. i'm much more worried about someone changing the record on my blood type and that's what data integrity is. so far all the discussion posts has been about privacy, but the real issue and the real fear and issue that instills fear in me is that data can be changed. and that will require a solution
2:59 am
of the sort that we have beca e because -- things can get pretty batted, i say basically. but we're glad that we're working closely with the united states on these issues and the u.s. does do a lot of work with us. when you say we punch above our weight, it's actually the digital world has no weight. and that's why i would say in this world digital is like the old colt .45, the great equalizer. you don't have to be big, you don't have to be rich, you just have to be smart. if you're smart, you can do things in digital which are very good. unfortunately, some people who are smart do things that are very bad. anyway, i won't take any more time. just wanted to give that brief overview, thank you very much. [ applause ] >> let's jump right into the questions. let's start with our
3:00 am
congressman. congressman rogers, congressman ruppersberger, if you had to rack and stack the threat environment we see today, we've heard a little bit about what estonia is doing to defend not only their country from a national security perspective but also their citizens from misuse and breaches and the like. if you were to rack and stack the threat environment today, where would you put the various actors? because i mean we tend to speak of these issues loosely. computer network exploit, for example, is not the same as computer network attack. countries that may have intentions to steal secrets may not necessarily at this point have the same intent to attack. but if you were to look at the threat environment, i'd love to hear from the two of you where you see that. and then you guys have both passed bipartisan legislation on the house side. i think it's fair to y
96 Views
IN COLLECTIONS
CSPAN2 Television Archive Television Archive News Search ServiceUploaded by TV Archive on