available at booktv.org. .. xbox?

>> guest: well, xbox is a video game console that microsoft came out with starting in 2001. they're now on their third version. it competes with playstation and nintendo in what is one of the largest entertainment markets in the world, video games. >> host: has it been successful? >> guest: well, all these consoles have gone through stages and cycles. i would say the first version had some success in the marketplace but was challenged financially. the second version, xbox 360, was a big success both in the market and financially, and now

with the new what they call xbox one, that's just getting started, so we're going to see how successful that is. >> host: what was your role in the development of xbox? >> guest: when we got started, i was put in charge of the project. at the beginning, there was about 20 of us. that soon grew to 2,000 and maybe 3,000 over time. for the first six or seven years, i was the chief xbox officer, i ran it. and be toward the end of my tenure at microsoft in 2008, we brought in somebody to work for me to run xbox, and i ran that and a number of other things, and i left microsoft in 2010. >> host: what was the birthing process like for xbox? >> guest: birthing xbox was actually really challenging. i suspect anybody who's gone through a start-up or trying to create a company from scratch has experienced those birthing pains. you're building a team, we were

trying to build a product very complex technically. only about 12 months or so to work on the hardware and about 18 months on the project overall. clearly, the most difficult thing i've done in my professional career. at one point during the t process i tried to resign from the project and resign from microsoft. it was really challenging for people at an interpersonal level, for sure. >> host: why? >> guest: well, i think the thing you find when you're building a project like that is you dive in to get things done, and you forget to step back and think about things at a strategy level. have we really set up the team for success? are we hiring the right people? are we bringing the team together in a right way? we had such a tight time frame, that we were struggling to fight the next day fires. and we stayed so focused on tasks that we never stepped back and said are we on the right strategy. and as you got further and further along in the project, that lack of planning up front

started to show itself, and it led to conflict and making right decisions at the end of the project. >> host: you write about this in your book, but 15 years or 14 years past, what would you do differently? >> guest: well, the original version of xbox, i mean, i think the obvious thing is to step back and get more specific in our strategy the. i think we had some good core ideas, but we hadn't really melded that into a strategy that everybody on the team was focused on. and everybody agreed that this is how we were going to do things. the other thing i learned was culture and group dynamics are everything. as a leader, it's my job to make sure we have the right people, that we're working in the right culture. and we had what i would call a united nations culture on that first version of x box. and i'd go back and try to be more conscious about the people, about the culture we built so we could work better together earlier in the project.

>> host: you say you want to learn -- or take what you've learned from building xbox and apply that to civic engineering. what specific lessons would you take? >> host: well, i think the biggest thing and the thing i talk about at the most length in my book xbox revisited is the strategy process. what we did with the second version of xbox, the product that people came to know as xbox 360 is we worked through the strategy process that we called the 3p framework. you want to be crisp about a one-sentence about what you're going to do, establish a set of principles for how you're going to work, and you want a maximum of five priorities that you're going to focus on which requires you to decide on a number of things you're just not going to worry about at that point in time. what i then do is i apply that to the civic world. if you think about a local nonprofit, a local government

agency, state or even a federal agency, the issues we face, have we framed those right at a strategic level, or do we dive straight in and say, oh, i know a solution for that or i have an opinion about that, rather than stepping back and talking about first principles first. >> host: can you give an example from the book? >> guest: well, i think a really good example is the work that we did, that i do on the u.s. olympic committee. i'm on the board of the committee, and i talk about this in the book. when scott blackman took over as the new ceo in 2010, he had us step back and say let's do some strategy work, and we worked on actually the mission statement for the board and for the organization. and we only made a few changes to that mission statement, but those few changes reshaped how we thought about the organization. it enabled us to allocate resources in a better way.

it enabled us to think about how we were supporting athletes and supports in a different way. and those small changes built the foundation on which there has been a real resurgence on what the olympic movement is doing in the united states, and i think that'll serve us well in the future. also i've been doing some work with a municipal i.t. department, now, you might think information technology, so what? well, the fact is as they're consolidating, they're figuring out that their purpose is to serve citizens of their community. and ironically, that's a new ideas for them. and that process of now discovering that they're serving their citizens is changing the way they work and will lead to better outcomes in what they do in i.t. >> host: you talk about the rebuilding of a bridge in seattle as an example of planning gone badly. what was that? >> guest: yeah, right. well, seattle has this beautiful but unique challenge of having a

big lake right next to it x that lake is so deep that they can't put a regular bridge in it. so it has to have floating bridges that go across it. the 520, which is a state highway floating bridge, was built in 1965. and it needs to be replaced. and it needed to be replaced in the early 1990s. but because they didn't do a real thoughtful strategic process about how to think through that challenge, how to resolve conflicts in the community early in the process, it took almost 15 years to get an agreed-upon plan, and now they're in the process of building it and, in fact, the plan is incomplete, and the bridge goes across the lake to seattle but doesn't connect up in the correct way with interstate 5 on the other side. so you have, effectively, a bridge that goes somewhere but not as far as it should go, and there's more work still to do. here we're now almost 20 years later. so the bridge is more expensive, there's going to be some cost

overruns, and in the meantime, we've got a bridge that's not safe and serving too many cars. this is a classic example of a community not coming together and thinking about the core elements of what they want first and then building a man from that. >> host: so is it a little bit naive to think about everybody should come together and work for a common purpose? >> guest: no, because i don't think purpose is easy, and i don't think everybody's ever going to agree. the goal here isn't to wordsmith a sentence so that everybody or agrees on one sentence. the goal here is to have the arguments about purpose up front and, ultimately, in any of these projects is somebody who has to be a decision maker. and say, okay, everybody's been heard, we've got varying points of views, this is the direction weaver going. what happens is -- we're going. and what happens is some people will continue to fight be, and that's okay, or they'll say this

project's going ahead without me, and i'm going to do something else. but you've had the arguments and disagreements up front and reached the best possible solution you can at that time. so in the bridge example, in the end, a bridge had to be built. so some decisions had to be made. now the question is, could they have been made 10 or 15 years earlier, and i would contend they could have been, and there could have been the same amount of tension, community discussion, but ultimately a decision would have been made earlier, with less cost and a safer outcome. >> host: robbie bach, is it possible to transfer business knowledge, business expertise into a government sphere? >> guest: well, i think you have to be careful because businesses don't work the same way governments do, and governments don't work the same way businesses do. and i'd also say that nonprofits don't work the way governments or businesses do. so in each case you can't literally say we did it this way, therefore, we should do it exactly the same way many a government or a nonprofit

organization. but there are elements, in this case a framework, that you can, in fact, move. there are elements of accountability, transparency, good decision making process, good strategic framework thinking that can be transferred. how the organizations work with that, how they shape those issues, how they frame them and move them through the process is absolutely going to be different. a legislative process is very different than a decision making process in a company. but the core ideas can still be the same. and likewise, i think there's ways in which businesses can learn from governments and from nonprofits. so there's a hearning process, a translation -- a learning process, a translation process. >> host: in xbox revisited, you talk about the simpson-bowles commission. why do you include that in a week called "xbox revisited"? >> guest: well, one of the things you learn when you build one of these strategy frameworks is suddenly you actually have to implement them.

and so the question then becomes how do you make something happen in an environment where you have a complex set of things and lots of different people involved and engaged? one of the ideas in approaching these problems, establishing the strategy and figuring out how you're going to execute against them is to get a collection of people together, in the simpson-bowles case, the commission, in the case of xbox, something we called the zig which was the integration team, and that xbox integration group really flushed out the details of the plan. so you take your strategy framework ask and flush it out in the details of a plan. in many respects, the simpson-bowles committee was designed to flush out the details of the budget crisis. and, frankly, in my view if we'd had more courage, we could have gone forward with that work n. the case of the xbox integration work, we used that to build xbox

360. in the case of simpson-bowles, it became a footnote and a process that led us to some awkward times in u.s. government. >> host: get the hell out of dodge, you write. i've been on washington, d.c -- to washington, d.c. on many occasions. i've meant with congressional members, senators, legislative aides and lobbyists, consultants and policy wonks. unfortunately, i've had more than my share of bad experiences generally not because people disagreed with me, but because they were downright disagreeable. [laughter] >> guest: yeah. washington, d.c., actually s a place i love to go. and at an individual level, i enjoy many people there, i enjoy the process of government and policy making. but i will tell you, when i go there, it's quite clear that people have an agenda. and, you know, this isn't just unique to washington d.c.

people have an agenda. and my be experience has been -- and it's only my experience -- that those agendas are less about what's good and right for the community of the american people or whatever, but more about what's good and right for the politics of the day. and that's always been the case, but i think it's more so that way now than ever before. and when the politics of the day is the primary principle under which you are governing, the right things don't generally happen. and i always -- most of the time when i leave after those visits, i feel a sense of unease, a sense of distrust that somehow people listened through a lens clouded by their own priorities. it's part of the reason why i think many americans don't trust what's going on in washington d.c. >> host: why do you think that divide is more pronounced today? >> guest: oh, i think there's a lot of reasons for that. some of them are about the

electoral process, some of them about the, literally, the internals of how congress works today. while the former process of things like earmarks led to a lot of bad outcomes, it also gave legislative leaders an opportunity to be able to manage the process in a careful way and to be able to build consensus around certain issues. is so today you have leaders in the house and the senate who i think have a difficult time leading because they don't have the tools to get people to follow them. and it makes it very hard to create consensus because people become very focused on one issue or one ideology as opposed to thinking more broadly about what's right in the longer run. and so we've become very issue-specific, very ideological in our approach, and that makes it difficult to get to a solution. and that's why so much of what we see in washington, d.c. today is more about stalemate hand it is about moving things forward.

>> host: robbie bach is the former president of microsoft, former chief xbox officer. his book is called "xbox revisited." mr. bach, does washington understand the tech community? >> guest: that's a really good question. i think there are leaders in washington who do understand that tech community. i can promise you that the leadership from the state of washington absolutely understands the tech community, some of them actually worked in it. so i think there are elements of people who do understand the tech community. like any other industry, the level of understanding, i think, varies from top to bottom and from heft to right. from left to right. i think the really interesting question, leave aside the tech community, the real question is whether washington understands the innovation process and whether they understand what an incredible asset the united states has s. and i'm not just talking about silicon valley. i would say in this about places

around the country where we have incredibly innovative throughers, and we have schools that produce innovative thinkers. and in many respects at an economic level, i think that distinguishes us from most economies in the world. and i don't know that those that are governing actually understand that completely. some, i'm sure, do but i think there's a little bit of a lack of understanding on what a powerful asset that is for the country as a whole. again, not just for certain parts of the country, but across the country and what we need to do to leverage that going forward. >> host: the tech community today, now you're a stanford business school grad. is it -- >> guest: right. >> host: so you're semi-traditional in that sense, but working in the tech industry, did you find yourself butting up against the new ways of doing things? >> guest: well, the interesting thing, the interesting thing i'd say about microsoft is we were sort of an interesting blend. when i joined there, the company was very technology-oriented,

very new technology thinking and very engineering-oriented. and over time the company began to realize we had to innovate not only in technology, but in our approach to selling products and marketing products. so in some ways i feel like i've had a good training in both sides of that issue. i think in the tech community as a whole companies struggle with engineering innovation and actually productizinging that innovation and bringing it to market in effective ways. there's a lot of good tech, quote-unquote, that never gets to market because the companies aren't able to figure out how to productize it in a way that works for a business or for a consumer. and that's what, when you see some of the things that apple does, microsoft does, google, facebook, companies like that, one of the skills they have is the ability to figure out how to productize technology in a way that actually works for consumers. and that's one of the soft skills in our innovation dna

that i think is very, very important. >> host: how do you define civic engineer? >> guest: to me, civic engineering is the work that any of us can do and that all of us should and must do to make our communities operate more efficiently and more effectively, to make our communities serve citizens in a better way. it's old school civics, and it's super important. >> host: september 11st 2001, where were you -- september 11th, 2001, where were you? >> guest: i flew into jfk at seven in the morning on a red eye and went to the marriott marquee and went to sleep. took a little bit of a nap. i had a press tour or that day, and when i woke up, i got a phone call from the lawyer at our pr agency telling me the tour had been canceled and offering to help me in any way he could, and, of course, i'd been asleep and didn't know why. i turned on the television to the horror of what was 9/11. >> host: was this an

xbox-related press tour? >> guest: it was. it was what we call our long lead tour, so was many september with a launch, we were coming to meet with journalists who do background work for coverage that would have come in november. i subsequently came back a few weeks later, but that day changed me as it changed, i think, many americans. i had a small, you know, i had no part in the tragedy, but was in new york firsthand and then traveled across the country in a car with three other people to get home, and that had a keep impact on me -- a deep impact on me. it brought me back to my american roots, and it's something i think about quite frequently even today. >> host: how did it change you though? how did it change your approach to work? to business? to x blocks? to microsoft -- to xbox? to microsoft? >> guest: well, i think the thing it did, as for many people, is it put a lot of

things in perspective. we were going through a very difficult time at that point. it was unclear the product was going to ship, we were struggling with manufacturing issues, it was a very difficult time. and yet when you put that in the context of 9/11, you sort of say, okay, this is work, it's important, but it has its place. and there are things that are more important, and the things that matter more and are more challenging. and it put me back on the road to paying attention to things beyond my job. and that was a powerful change for me and took me another nine years to get back to it full time, but it certainly reinforced for me the importance of being engaged in the community. >> host: is xbox revisited, who is it written for? >> guest: i really have two audiences that i write for when i write a book or write my blog or give speeches. the first may surprise you a bit, but it's for a younger

audience, high school, college student thes, grad students -- students, grad students. these are the people that are going to have to deal with the civic issues we have created today. they have open minds, and because xbox is a bit part of their culture and part of how they grew up, the content and subject matter appeals in an interesting way. and so the idea is to reach that audience with some messages about strategy and leadership. the second audience would be really anyone who's in a position to work in the community. that might be a corporate ceo, it might be a mid-level manager in a company, might be a small business owner. might be somebody who works in a nonprofit. these are all people who have a role to play in our civic organizations. and the idea is to give them something that's both an interesting read and an interesting story but hopefully gives them a few nuggets they can take away for their civic part of their life and to get them engaged as i often say as

an army of civic engineers. >> host: robbie bach, i think everybody will say, yes, i want to be part of the team and i have a community feel, but at the same time i want this to be included or excluded. in a sense, how do you get to yes with a team, be it a congress, be it a business group, etc. >> guest: well, in the end all decision making and all plans to move forward come down to choices, and they come down to deciding what you think is right and what you think is important. and what i say to people when they say, well, you know, i prefer it not be that way, you have to ask them, okay, is that one of the two, three or four things that's most important to you? if it is, we're going to have a bit of an arm wrestle about that. if it's not, let's both agree we disagree on that and let it go. and when you get things to boil things could be to what -- down to what really these to happen

in our community, what are the four or five most important things, the first two or three end up being noncontroversial because people generally agree on those things. they may have some differences on the solution. and then you end up having real hard arguments about four and five. and those arguments are value and in the end, you know, a city council a mayor, a legislator, a community leader, somebody who's running a nonprofit has to make the final call, but people have to have the decisions. and what i ask for people to do is to stay engaged. even if you disagree with some subsets of the decisions made, keep the big picture in mind, the long-term purpose in mind and focus on that and know that you're trying to navigate to that long-term purpose. and if you do that, you'll get there, and the right things can happen. >> host: why did you leave microsoft? what have you been doing since? >> guest: i left microsoft, i reached a point in my career there where i either had to sign up for another five years of

what would have been, i'm sure, really interesting work or decide that after the 22-plus years i wanted to do something different. and i decided along with my wife that it was time for me to have more social impact and to shift my gears from a business and professional impact to social impact. so i spend a significant amount of my time now writing, speaking, my blog work and nonprofit board work which i think of as my civic engineering work. i also work on a couple of for-profit boards and with a partner of mine, i'm a very small business owner in a gluten-free pasta company in seattle. so that's how i keep my hands in the business space. but meaningful percentage of my time, the majority of my time is spent on the civic engineering work. >> host: it doesn't sound like you're involved in tech anymore. >> guest: not directly. one of the boards i'm on is sonos which is a technology company, for sure. they make the leading wireless

hi-fi systems for your home. it's a fabulous company and also a consumer company. so i'm still involved through my board work but not actually doing high-tech work myself. >> host: one of the big public policy issues we've been discussing out here in washington is the net neutrality issue. do you approve of how the fcc has has approached that? >> guest: that's a broad statement. i think the general idea that the network needs to be open is the right idea. i think the idea that you would allow people to put tolls up or charge differentially for different types of content, i think, is challenging on a number of different levels. and be i know if you're a network provider, that's frustrating. but in the end, the network and connectivity is such a fundamental part of how information flows and how people work that the idea that you could have some kind of tolls

involved, to me s a difficult con especially for me to get -- concept for me to get past. i think there's ways in which those network operators can manage their business so that it's more effective for them and they don't get buried in data, so to speak. but in the end, if you think of this as a public policy question as opposed to a network provider question, the idea that there should be more open access, i think, is a positive for the public and for the citizens as a whole. >> host: robbie bach, when you were formulating and working on xbox and the other things that you did at microsoft, how much time did you spend thinking about regulations in washington? >> guest: i would say -- well, in certain areas, actually quite a bit. so in the area of content regulation, i spent a lot of time work on that issue. xbox was the first video game console to have parental controls. we were major supporters of the industry rating system. we pushed very hard for every game to be rated and every game to be rated appropriately and

effectively and for retailers to enforce those ratings. and that really was a very deep legislative process. i spent a lot of time in washington d.c. the entertainment software association which is our trade organization spent a lot of time both in dietz and in courts -- in d.c. and in courts working that issue. and finding the right balance between first amendment rights and parents' right toss manage the content their kids were seeing was a personal issue for me, very important. and i think we did a good job of giving parents the tools they need. >> host: robbie bach writes: i am con vicinitiesed what we learned in the rough and tumble video game entertainment business is translatable to the complex civic problems we face at all levels of our nation. here's the book jacket, "xbox revisited." thank you, sir, for being on "the communicators." >> guest: really enjoyed it. thanks very much. there are. >> c-span, created by america's

cable companies 35 years ago and brought grow as a public service by your local cable or saturday lite provider -- satellite provider. >> oklahoma senator james lankford is releasing a report today on wasteful spending with by the federal government. it's a yearly report that was started by former oklahoma senator tom coburn to highlight duplicate or excessive expenditures. that'll be live at noon eastern on c-span. and later, a look at the global energy outlook with the executive director of the international energy agency. he'll discuss a recent report with projections from now until the year 2040. the center for strategic and international studies is hosting the event. it will be live at 1 p.m. eastern on c-span3. >> all persons having business before the honorable, the supreme court of the united states, are admonished to draw near and give their attention.

>> coming up on c-span's landmark cases -- >> this lieutenant came and showed a piece of paper, and -- [inaudible] demanded to see what it was, which they refused to do, so she grabbed it out of his hand to look at it, and then a scuffle started, and she put peels of paper -- put this piece of paper into her bosom. and very readily, the police officer put his hands into her bosom and removed the paper. and thereafter, thereafter handcuffed her. while the police officers started to search the house. >> in 1957 the cleveland police went to a home where they believed a suspected bomber was being harbored. they returned with a document

claiming was a warrant, they forced themselves into the home and searched the premises. police con the first candidated a trunk. she was arrested and sentenced to certain years -- to seven years for the contraband. we'll examine the case of mapp v. ohio and explore the evidence obtained through illegal searches and seizures and see how this transformed police practices nationwide. live tonight at nine eastern on c-span, c-span3 and c-span radio. and for background on each case while you watch, order your copy of the landmark cases companion book available for $8.95 plus shipping at c-span.org/landmarkcases. >> on thursday british prime minister david cameron unveiled his plan to conduct airstrikes against isis in syria to members of the house of commons.

he also took questions on the role of rebel ground forces and efforts to find a political solution to the syrian civil war. from london, this is an hour and a half. >> order. statement, the prime minister. >> thank you. thank you, mr. speaker. mr. speaker, i said i would respond personally to the foreign affairs select committee report on extending british military operations to syria. i've done so today, and copies of my response have been made available to every member of the house. the committee produced a comprehensive report which asked a series of important questions. i've also tried to listen very carefully to the questions and views expressed by members on all sides of the house. and i want to try and answer all of the relevant questions today. there are different ways of putting them, but they boil down to this: why, why us, why now,

is what we're contemplating legal, where are the ground troops to help us meet our objectives, what is the strategy that brings together everything that we're doing particularly in syria, is there an end to this conflict, and is this a plan for what follows? so let me deal with each of these questions as directly as i can. first, why. mr. speaker, the reason for acting is the very direct threat that isil poses to our country and to our way of life. isil have attacks ankara, beirut is and, of course, paris as well as the likely blowing up of a russian plane with 224 people onboard. they've already taken the lives of british hostages and inspired the worst terrorist attack against british people suns 7/7 on the beaches of yes news ya. and crucially, they have tried to attack us right here in

britain. our police and security services have disrupted no fewer than seven terrorist notes to attack the u.k. -- plots to attack the u.k. every one of which linked to isil or inspired by their propaganda. it is in our national interest for action to be taken to stop them, and that means taking action in syria because it is raqqa that is the headquarters. but why us? mr. speaker, my first responsibility as prime minister and our first job in this house is to keep the british people safe. we have of the assets to do that, and we can significantly extend the capabilities of the international coalition forces. that is one reason why members of the international coalition, including president obama and president hollande, have made it clear to me that they want britain to stand with them in joining airstrikes in syria as well as iraq. these are our closest allies, and they want our help.

partly, this is about our capabilities. as we're showing in iraq, the raf can carry out what is called dynamic targeting where our pilots can strike the most difficult targets at rapid pace and with extraordinary precision and provide vital, battle-winning close air support to local forces on the ground. we have the brimstone precision missile system which allows us to strike with minimum collateral damage, something even the americans do not have. the tornado aircraft has no rival, currently gathering 60% of the coalition's entire tactical reconnaissance in iraq while also being equipped for strikes. in addition, our reaper drones are providing up to 30% of the intelligence in syria but not currently able to use their high precision missile systems. and we also have the proven ability to sustain our operations not just for weeks, but if necessary, for months into the future.

so, mr. speaker, of course we have these capabilities, but the most important answer to the question why us is, i believe, even more fundamental, and it's this. we shouldn't be content with outsourcing our security to our allies. if we believe that action can help protect us, then with our allies we should be part of that action, not standing aside from it. and from this moral point comes a fundamental question. if we won't act now when our friend and ally france has been struck in this way, then our allies in the world can be forgiven for asking if not now, when? and that leads to the next question, why now? the first answer to that, of course, is because of the grave danger that isil poses to our security, a danger that is clearly intensified in recent weeks. but there are additional reasons why action now is so important. just look at what has changed.

not just the attack in paris, but the world has come together and agreed a u.n. security council resolution. and there is a real political process underway. this could lead to a new government in syria with whom we can work to defeat isil for good. but as i explained to the house yesterday, we can't wait for that to be complete before we begin acting to degrade isil and reducing their capability to attack us. so let's be clear about the military objectives that we are pursuing. yes, we want to defeat the terrorists birdies mantling their networks, stopping their if funding, targeting their training camps and taking out those plotting against the u.k., but there is a broader objective. for as long as isil can peddle the myth of a so-called caliphate in iraq and syria, it will be a rallying call for islamist extremists all around the world, and that makes us less safe. just as we reduce the scale and

size of the so-called caliphate in iraq, increasingly pushing out out of iraq, so we need to do the same thing in syria. indeed, mr. speaker, another reason for action now is that the success in iraq in squeezing the so-called caliphate is put at risk by our failure to act in syria. this border is not recognized by isil, and we seriously hamper our efforts be we stop acting when we -- if we stop acting when we reach the syrian border. so when we come to the question why now, we have to ask ask ourselves whether the risks of inaction are greater than the risks of taking action. every day we fail to act is a day when isil can go stronger and more plots can be undertaken. mr. speaker, that is why all the advice i've receive serviced -- the military advice, the diplomatic and the security advice -- all says, yes, that the risks of inaction are greater. some have asked specifically

whether taking action coughed make the u.k -- could make the u.k. more of a target for isil. the chairman of the joint intelligence committee says the u.k. already in the top tier of countries that isil is targeting. so i'm cheer that the only way to deal -- i'm clear that the only way to deal with that reality is to address the threat we face and to do so now. mr. speaker, let me turn to the question of legality. it's a longstanding, constitutional convention that we don't publish our formal legal advice. but the document i've published today shows in some detail the clear legal basis for military action against isil in syria. it's founded on the right of self-defense as recognized in article 51 of the united nations charter. the right of self-defense may be exercised individually where it is in mess to the u.k.'s own -- necessary to the u.k.'s own defense and, of course, correctively in the --

collectively in the defense of our friends and allies. the main basis of the coalition's actions against isil in syria is the collective self-defense of iraq. iraq has a legitimate government, one that we support and help. there's a solid basis of evidence on which to conclude, firstly, that there's a direct link between the presence and activities of isil in syria and their ongoing attacks in iraq. and secondly, that the assad regime is unwilling and/or unable to take action necessary to prevent isil's continuing attack on iraq or, indeed, attacks on us. it's also clear that isil's campaign against the u.k. and our allies has reached the lem of an arm -- the level of an armed attack such that force may lawfully be used in self-defense to prevent further be atrocities being committed by isil. and this is further underscored by the unanimous adoption of u.n. security council resolution 2249. we should be clear about what this resolution means and what

it says. be the whole world came together, including all five members of the security council, to agree this resolution unanimously. the resolution states that isil, and i quote: constitutes a global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security. it calls for member states to take -- and again i quote -- all necessary measures to prevent and suppress recordist acts committed specifically by isil. and crucially, it says that we should -- and again i quote -- eradicate the safe haven they've established over significant parts of iraq and syria. now, turning to the question of which ground forces will assist us, in iraq the answer is clear. we have the iraqi security forces and the kurdish peshmerga. in syria the situation is more complex, but as the report i'm publishing today shows, we believe there are around 70,000 syrian opposition fighters, principally the free syrian

army, who do not belong to extremist groups and with whom we can coordinate attacks on isil. in addition, there are the kurdish armed groups who have also shown themselves capable of taking territory, holding territory and administering it. and crouchly, relieve -- crucially, relieving the suffering that the population had endured. the syrian kurds have successfully defended areas in northern syria and retaken territory around the city of kobani. sunni arabs have proved capable of defending territory north of aleppo, and they stopped isil in the border crossing from turkey. in the south of syria, the southern front of the free syrian army has consolidated its control and has worked to prevent terrorists from operating. these people i've talked about, they are ground troops. they need our help. when they get it, they succeed.

so in my view, we should do more to help them from the air. but those who ask questions about ground troops are absolutely right to do so. the full answer can't with be achieved until there's a new syrian government that represents all of the syrian people. not just sunni, shia and allah white, but christians, jews and others. and this is this new government who will be the natural partners in defeating isil for good. mr. speaker, we can't defeat isil simply from the air or purely with military action alone. it requires a full political settlement. but the question is, can we wait for that settlement before we take action? and again, my answer is, no, we can't. on the question about whether this is part of an overall strategy, the answer is, yes. our approach has four pillars. first, our counterextremism strategy means we have a comprehensive plan to prevent

and foil plots at home and also to address the poison now extremist ideology that is the root cause of the threat that we face. second, our support for the diplomatic and political process. and we should be clear about this process. many across this house, rightly said, how vital it is to have all the key regional players around the table including iran and russia. and we're now seeing iran and saudi arabia sitting down around the same table with america and russia as well as, of course, france, turkey and britain. and all of us working towards the transition to a new government in syria. now, the third pillar is the military action i'm describing to degrade isil and reduce the net t they pose. it is working in iraq, and i believe it can work in syria. now, the fourth pillar is immediate humanitarian support, but even more crucially, longer-term stable. of course, this house has heard many times that britain has so

far given over 3.1 billion -- 1.1 billion pounds, by far the largest contribution to any european be country, and this is helping to reduce the need for syrians to attempt the perilous journey to europe. and the donor conference i'm hosting in february, i believe that will help further. but the house is rightly also asking more questions about whether there'll be be a proper post-conflict reconstruction effort to support a new syrian government, and britain's answer to that question is, absolutely yes. i can tell the house britain will be prepared to contribute at least another billion pounds for this task. so all these elements -- counterterrorism, political and diplomatic, military and humanitarian -- they need to happen together to achieve a long-term solution in syria. we know that peace is a process, not an event. and i'm clear that it can't be achieved through a military assault on isil alone.

it also requires the removal ofs assad for a political transition. but i'm also clear about the sequencing that needs to take place. mr. speaker, this is an isil-first strategy. one of the end goals, so, mr. speaker, the initial objective is to damage isil and reduce its capacity to do us harm. and i believe this can, in time, lead to its eradication. no one predicted isil's rise, and we should not accept that it's somehow impossible to bring them on to an end. they are not what the people of iraq and syria want, they don't represent the true religion of islam, and they're losing ground in iraq following losses in sinjar and raqqa. we are not naive to the complexity of the task. it will require patience and persistence, and our work won't be complete until we've reached our true end goal which is having governments in both iraq and syria which can command the confidence of all their peoples. and in syria, ultimately, that

means the government without assad. as ban ki-moon has said, a missile can kill a terrorist, but only good governance can kill terrorism. this applies to clearly to both iraq and syria. mr. speaker, people also want to know that we've learned the lessons of previous conflicts. whatever anyone thought of the iraq war, terrible mistakes were made in the aftermath in dismantling the state and the institutions of that country. and we must never make those mistakes again. the political process in syria will, in time, deliver new leadership, and that is the transition we must support. we are not in the business of dismantling the syrian state or its institutions. in libya the state and its institutions have been hollowed out after 40 years of dictatorship. when the dictatorship went, the institutions rapidly collapsed. but the big different between libya and syria is that in syria this time we have firm

international commitment from all the backers of a future syrian government around the table at the vienna talks. the commitment is clear; to preserve and develop the state in syria and allow a new representative government to govern for all its people. so, mr. speaker, i have attempted to answer the main questions; why, why now, why us, is it legal, what are the ground forces, is there a strategy, what is the end point, and what is the plan for reconstruction. but i know this is a highly complex situation, and i know members on all sides will have other questions which i look forward to trying to answer this morning. one will be about the confused and confusing situation in syria with regard to russia's intervention. mr. speaker, let me reassure the house that the american-led combined air operations center has a memorandum of understanding with the russians. this enables daily conduct and pragmatic military planning to insure the safety of all coalition forces, and this will

include our brave raf pilots. another question will be about whether we are taking sides this a sunni versus shia conflict. this simply is not the case. yes, isil is a predominantly sunni organization, but it is killing sunnis and shia alike. our vision for the future of syria, as with iraq, is not a sectarian entity, but one governed in the interests of all its people. so we wholeheartedly welcome the presence of states with both sunni and shia majority at the vienna talks and their support both against isil and towards a diplomatic solution in syria. the house will also want to know what we're doing about financing of isil. the document includes intercepting smugglers, sealing borders and enforcing sanctions to stop people trading with isil. ultimately, isil generates income through its control of territory. so while we're working with international partners to squeeze the finances wherever we

can, it's the rolling back of isil territory which will ultimately cut off its finances. now, two of those complex questions in an undoubtedly complex situation are these. first, we're acting against isil in syria -- will acting against isil in syria help to bring about transition? i believe the answer is yes, not least because there can't be genuine transition without maintaining the territorial integrity of syria. and isil completely deny, with their current actions, this integrity. crucially, destroying isil helps the moderate forces, and these moderate forces will be crucial to syria's future. second, it's our view that assad must do, does it -- must go, does this confuse the picture? the expert advice i have could not be more clear. we will not beat isil if we waver in our view that ultimately assad must go. we cannot win over majority sunni opinion which is vital for the long-term future of syria if

we were to change our position. mr. speaker, in the end it comes back to this one main question, should we take action. all those who say that ultimate hi we need a diplomatic solution and a transition to a new government in syria, they are right. working with a new representative government is the way to eradicate isil in syria in the long term. but can we wait for that to happen before we take military action? i say we can't. mr. speaker, let me be clear, there will not be a vote in this house unless there's a cheer majority for action -- clear majority for action because we will not hand a publicity coup to isil. i'm also clear that any motion we bring before this house will explicitly recognize that military action is not the whole answer. proud as i am of our incredible servicemen and women, i will not pretend or overstate the significance of our potential contribution. i will not understate the complexity of in this issue, nor

the risks that are inevitably involved in any military action. but, mr. speaker, we do face a fundamental threat to our security. we can't wait for a political transition. we have to hit these terrorists in their heartlands right now. and we must not shirk our responsibility for security or hand it to others. mr. speaker, throughout our history the united kingdom has stood up to defend our values and our way of life. we can and we must do so again. and i commend this statement to the house. >> jeremy cover bin. corbin. >> thank you mr. chairman, mr. speaker, and i'd like to thank the prime minister for providing an advanced copy of his statement which i got earlier today. after the despicable and horrific attacks in paris a fortnight ago, the whole house will, i'm sure, agree that our first priority has to be the security of people in this country in the future. so when we consider the prime

minister's case for military action, the issue of whether what he proposes strengthens or undermines our security must be front and center stage of our minds. there's no doubt that the so-called islamic state group has imposed a reign of terror on millions in iraq and is syria and now in libya. all isil stands for is and does is contrary to everything those of us on these benches have struggled for over many generations. there is no doubt that it poses a threat to our own people. the question must now be whether extending a u.k. bombing from iraq to syria is likely to reduce or increase that threat and whether it will counter or spread the terror campaign isil is waging in the middle east. with that in mind, mr. speaker, i would like to put seven questions to the prime minister. first, does the prime minister believe that extending airstrikes to syria -- which is already being bombed by the united states, france and russia and other powers -- will make a

significant military impact on the ground which has so far seen isil gain as well as lose territory? does he expect it will be a war-winning strategy, or does he think other members of the original coalition, including the gulf states, canada and australia, have halted their participation? second, is the prime minister's view that the air campaign against isil-held areas can be successful without ground forces? if not, does he believe that the kurdish forces or the relatively marginal, remote tree syrian army would be in the position to back up isil-held territory to take back isil-held territory if the air campaign were successful? is it not more likely that other stronger jihadist and radical forces would take over? third, without credible or acceptable ground forces, isn't the logic of an intensified air campaign, mission creep and

western boots on the ground? can he today rule out the deployment of the british ground forces to syria? fourth, does the prime minister believe that the united nations security resolution 2249 gives clear and unambiguous authorization for u.k. airstrikes? and what coordinated action with other united nations member states has there been under the terms of the resolution to cut off funding, ole revenues and -- oil revenues and spries from isil -- supplies from isil in the territory it currently holds? and in the absence of any coordinated u.n. military or diplomatic strategy, does he believe more military forces over syria could increase the dangerous incidences such as shooting down of a russian aircraft by turkish forces this week?

fifth, how does the prime minister think an extension of becoming would contribute to a comprehensive, negotiated settlement of the syrian civil war which is widely believed to be the only way to defeat isil in the country? the vienna conference last weekend was a good step forward, but it has some way to go. sixth, what assessment has the prime minister been given about the likely impact of british airstrikes in syria on the threat of terrorist attacks in britain? and what impact does he believe an intensified air campaign will have on civilian casualties, civilian casualties in the isis-held territory and the wider syrian refugee crisis which is so enormous and so appalling? finally, mr. speaker, in the light of the record of western military intervention in recent years including iraq, afghanistan and libya, does the prime minister accept the u.k. bombing of syria could risk more

of what president obama called unintended consequences? and lasting defeat of isil can only be secured syrians and their forces within the region? >> well, can i thank the right honorable gentleman for his questions, and let me say that i very much, you know, respect his long-held views about these issues and his quite correct caution before committing to any of these actions. but i do believe there is a good answer to the seven absolutely legitimate questions he asks. first of all, in terms of extending airstrikes, would there be a significant military impact, what i tried to give in me statement a flavor of the specific things we think we would be able to do. but in many ways, it's worth listening to the americans and the french who want us to take part not just for the cover that provides, but because of the capabilities that we bring. and i think it's worth listening

very closely to what they say, so my answer to that question is, yes, we would make a military difference. second, he's absolutely right to raise in this issue of ground forces, and i tried to tackle it as fully as i could in my statement. i would just guide the house that there are obviously many who want to play down the existence in the role of the free syrian army. our information is there are at least 70,000 moderate sunni forces that are able to help, and we can see the help that they've been giving, including the examples i gave in my statement. let me give an assurance, we are not deploying british combat forces, we're not going to deploy british combat force. we think actually the presence of western boots on the ground in that way would be counterproductive. that is one of the things i think we have all, collectively across the house, learned from previous conflicts, and we don't want to make that mistake again. fourth question is whether the u.n. resolution is unam wiggous.

-- unambiguous. i believe the language in that resolution is very clear, that's why i quoted it in some detail. he rightly asked what is the u.n. doing on sanctions and embargoes and squeezing the finances of isil. there was a resolution back in february, and we should continue to support all those measures. he asked under that question about dangerous incidents and the potential for those. as i explained in the statement, there is a deconfliction between what russia is doing and what the coalition is doing. obviously what happened in turkey, as i said yesterday, we have to get to the bottom of that, but, obviously, we have permission to overfly turkish air space, and turkey is our ally in this conflict. he asked a crucial question, question five, about whether what we're planning will help with transition, and i think the answer to that is a very strong yes. the existence of isil or dash as many call it with their

so-called caliphate is to deny the territorial integrity of both iraq and syria. so we can't have a future syria with the existence of this caliphate taking over such a large amount of its territory. i'd also make the point that when we look to the future of syria, it's going to need the involvement of moderate sunnis in the future of that country. and so the more we can help them, the better the chance of transition is. he asked the very important question about the impact of action on the threat level to this country, and that's why i quoted and i have their permission to do so, i cleared my statement with hem the chairman of the joint intelligence committee and the head of mi5. their view is we're already at the very highest level we could be in terms of threats from isil. and again, you know, this is about learning the lessons of iraq. we have now this architecture of a joint intelligence committee chaired by a very senior official who has that independent view, and i cleared every word of my statement very

clearly with them. .. >> we see it in nigeria. we see it in somalia. frankly, weakens it sometimes in our own country.

combating with everything we've got which is not just military, combating it with argument, combating it, taking away grievances come all those things together. i believe we saw through the consequences. encoding president obama, i think it is worth remembering that this american president who saw that part of his role was withdrawn america from some of these foreign entanglements and trying to take a different approach to these actions, he is not only firmly behind american action in syria committee is asking america's oldest friend and partner and ally to help out in this vital work. >> mr. crispin blunt. >> i thank my right honorable friend for responding so comprehensively to the board affairs committee report. while he's there tonight thank the chancellor to responding positively to our first foreign budget yesterday. part of the committee has returned early from the region around i saw for this statement.

other colleagues are completing visit to 10 capitals in the region over this week, and acquiring that regional perspective is part of our priority into the coalition against isil as well as our initial report which addressed the near-ish of british airstrikes over syria. behind the near issue is the bigger questions of britain's whole involved in the coalition and what the coalition has a strategy to achieve the aim of defeating isil in syria and iraq. does he agree with the senior leaders we met in the region that getting the politics right in both iraq and syria is of immediate and overriding priority? and we must not lose focus on baghdad. the committee will discuss its collective you early next week and we will also want to report to the house on the prospects of success for the coalition

strategy in the new year. will my right honorable friend come before the committee in about two months time to give evidence to us on implementation of the strategy laid out today? but is he unaware that an light of the in and his response to the committee it is now my personal view that on balance the country would be best served-itis how supporting his judgment that the united kingdom play, should play a full role in the coalition to better support and shape the politics, thus enabling the earliest military and eventual ideological defeat of isil? >> can i think my honorable friend. first of all for coming back to be with us in the house today. thank him for the report, but above all thank him for what he said today about the decision is reached with this difficult decision we all have to make her i think he's right that any

action we take must be nested in an overall strategy which i will try to set up today. he's absolutely right that the politics of the region are crucial in understanding of this. most important of all trying to make sure that iraq makes progress to being a more pluralistic and solid country. that doesn't face the risk of isil but as i said the politics and the action in my view, go together. he asked what i will come back to this committee entity to the house within two months. i'm very happy to come back in any way that people what we do whether it's making if we decide to go ahead with this action, whether to make a regular update to the house of commons or indeed if there in front of this committee to go to detailed questions. i am in all things the house as a servant. >> mr. angus robertson. >> cannot begin by thanking the prime minister for a state and a briefing by special security

advisor and colleagues last night. given th the seriousness of the issues we're all grappling with it was valuable to the briefing and express our thanks to those working hard to keep us all safe. mr. speaker, we in the scottish national party share the concerns of the but in the south and in the country about the terrorist threat by daesh. would a poor the assad regime and we raise the issue of refugees both in the region and in europe -- we deplore -- to secure a cease-fire, the transition and countering terrorist groups including daesh. we believe these aims will be secured through agreement and a serious long-term commitment to syria. may i ask the prime minister how is the uk's supporting the international initiative and other diplomatic efforts to secure that cease-fire and syria from the political transition and combating terrorists like

daesh and planning for the long-term reconstruction and stability and support? yesterday in prime minister's questions i ask you questions about syria which the prime minister did not answer that like to repeat that again today. how will the uk plan to secure piece on the ground in syria? as a house of commons foreign affairs committee asked and i quote, which ground forces will take hold and administered territories captured from isil, not canned, but will? the treacherous talked about 70,000 free syrian army troops. how many of those are in the northeast of syria and i felt like against daesh as opposed to countering series regime forces. how will the uk plan secure long-term stability and reconstruction in syria with the uk spent 13 times more on libya bennis post-conflict reconstruction. how much as i asked yesterday does the prime minister estimate the total cost of reconstruction

will be and does he think the amount in a statement today will be sufficient? two years ago the prime minister urged us to bomb the opponents of daesh in syria. that would probably have strengthened this terrorist organization. today, the prime minister wants us to launch a bombing campaign without effective ground support in place or a fully costed reconstruction and stability plan. the prime minister has asked us to consider his plan. we have listened closely. however, key question posed by before it affairs select committee remain unanswered. and less of the prime minister answer these questions satisfactorily the scottish national party will not vote for airstrikes in syria. >> here, here. >> can i first of all thank him for paying to do by national security advisor, martin who has been working hard to go provide factual briefings to parties across the house of commons.

look, i think it's right that what is required is a little agreement and the long-term reconstruction of syria. my argument is not to disagree. my argument is that as well as about we need to take action now and to will protect us against the terrorism that we've seen on the streets of paris and elsewhere. he asked a technical question about how we are supporting the negotiation initiative in vienna. playing a full part to the foreign secretary, also helping to fund a work of united nations envoys are trying to bring the parties together. in terms of is to specific questions, who are the troops on the ground? the are the free syrian army's, the kurdish forces and that makes it a more complicated picture in iraq we have the iraq security forces these forces we can help them to take and hold ground and to relieve suffering. and you have seen that with what has happened around kobani or what has happened with the

ucd's. important progress can be made that i was forgive my stay there. of course, the to a rival of ground forces awaits the arrival of the new government industry but that is the best way long-term to eradicate entirely isil, to have a partner. but again the question comes up can we wait for that to happen before we take action that will degrade isil and degrade its capability to do us on what he asked about the long-term reconstruction of syria because we debated yesterday with the autumn see the we have one of the largest developer just innuendo world. i said we would be prepared to commit 1 billion pounds to that sort of reconstruction. i think the whole world would come together when there's a new government in syria, and the syrian people who currently aren't many of them outside the country desperate to go home. they would not be left wanting for support. they would get the support of britain but i believe they get the support of the whole develop

the world. >> the prime minister has made a compelling case for playing a proper part with our allies on both sides of the meaningless international border at the moment, and also for the political process that we can have a voice in bringing the americans closer to the russians and the saudis and the turks closer to the iranians. but does he accept that in the medium term we have to look for whatever agreement can produce stability and a more peaceful situation? and we may have to prepare ourselves for something that falls far short of what a liberal western democracy would look like. is not the experience of the arab spring data going straight to a democratic elections does not produce a resolution, that any agreement is going to have to involve some rather unpleasant people being involved and not just people who would naturally be our allies.

and assad and other people may have to be installed, because of the enemy is isil which is daesh and which is not possible to engage in any political negotiation. >> here, here. >> i think but right honorable friend speaks with great wisdom and it's important to have his support for he's never been an unquestioning supporter of military action and he thinks these things through very carefully. what he says about closer future government of syria from the transition that needs to take place, falling short of some of the democratic norms we would want to see. yes, of course that is likely. when i say that i believe assad cannot be part of a long-term government of syria, in many ways that is not a political preference, a statement of that. there will be a government of syria that commands the support of the syrian people if he is in charge of it because of the blood has been shed and what's

happened. at dubai believe a transition in syria will produce some perfect swiss style democracy? of course it won't but it might give us a partner with which we can complete the obliteration of isil and, therefore, it makes us safer. >> mr. david winnick. >> two years ago he was equally eloquent in telling us how essential it was to bomb the assad regime. i believe that the decision taken by the house in july 2013 was the correct one, an and outd we thought it is vice the situation in syria would be even worse than it is now. with the prime minister agree that the cracks in the issue that every member of the sounds with it, with military action help the situation to defeat isis? i happen to believe the answer is no, and i wonder how many members of the house with the believe that it would make any real difference at all in

defeating this hated death cult? >> i don't didn't want to reenter all the arguments about chemical weapons use. all i will say it is of course i listen to his abuse but i also think of the thousands of people, including children, who been killed by assad's barrel bombs using chemical weapons since we held that the. he asked the right question. will this make us safer or not? will this help to degrade isil or not? its use of our closest allies, the use of our military, the views of our intelligence experts come its use of those responsible for our domestic security, all of those people are saying to us that we should take this action is part of the coalition to help make us safer. that is why i bring forward his statement and with the support of house i will bring forward a boat. >> sir andrew mitchell. >> following the limited but important progress on the political track in vienna and the unanimous adoption by the

united nations resolution 2249 on isil, is it not clear, mr. speaker, that the prime minister is considered response to the is absolutely compelling? is this not the way we discharge our responsibility protect innocent civilians, both here in the united kingdom and in syria? >> i'm grateful for his support. i think this is about discharging our responsibilities chiefly to our own citizens. it is my considered view that this action will help overtime to make us safer. we will never be safe while isil exists, while the so-called caliphate exists. we have demonstrated in iraq that we can take its territory. we can destroy so much of its infrastructure. we can make real progress but we are hampered by not being able to do the same in syria. if we agreed that the eradication of isil is essential

for our national security we shouldn't put off the decision. >> george how worth spent the prime minister is unsure correct to say that the continued existence of the so-called caliphate is an inspiration of extreme is not only in middle east but even in our own country. could you perhaps give some indication, i know these things are so subject to negotiation, however, about what the characteristics of a legitimate transitional government might be? >> first albany agree with him about the so-called caliphate. as to try to set out in my statement to all the military objectives in terms of trying to break up the terrorist training camps infrastructure and the terrace of themselves but there is a bigger picture which is while the so-called caliphate exists i don't believe that we are safe and so we should be part of its dismantling. the question he asks about the

characteristics of transition, this is what's been discussed in vienna but it should start with cease-fire. they should then proceed to the political work of drawing up what a transitional government and institutions would look like, and then to be followed probably by elections at some stage the transition away from ththe current leadership it as d in reply to the right member, this will not be a perfect our scientific process, but to me it is essential because in the end it is political transition that will help us to complete the final destruction of isil. military force cannot do it on its own. i'm not come into this dispatch box saying there is purely a military solution. there isn't. we need to do all the bits of it. >> doctor juliette lewis spirit many honorable and right honorable members including be personally entirely agree with the prime minister isil/daesh must be crushed militarily in

syria and the crushing will indeed have to be military. but as acknowledge that pmqs yesterday airstrikes alone will not be effective. that's got to be in coordination with credible ground forces. the suggestion that there are 70,000 non-islamist moderates tribal ground forces, i this is a revelation to me, and i suspect most of the members in this house. >> here, here. >> as a ground force in my view, depends on the participation of the syrian army. so if the dictator assad refuses to resign, which is the greatest danger to our national interest is syria under him, or the continued existence and expansion of isil/daesh wrecks because you made to choose between one and the other? >> i have great respect for my honorable friend who thinks up

these things very carefully and there's a lot of grounds of agreement between us. we agreed in the dangers of isil. we agree it needs to be crushed. we agree that one need the involvement of ground forces and we also agreed as i put in my response to the fourth affairs select committee we need to isil first strategy, the isil is the greater threat to the united kingdom. i think the only area of disagreement is want on a tactical point, and one slightly more profound but i think not unbridgeable. the technical point is what i said about 70,000 moderate forces in syria is not my figure do it is the considered opinion of the joint intelligence committee, a committee to set up and giving independence independence to avoid any of the mistakes that we are had in the past of the potential misuse of intelligence and other information to it is very considered view, that document has been entirely cleared by them as has my statement.

the other issue we have to come to is that, of course, he and i agree that in time the best ground troops should be the syrian army. my view is that would be more likely to happen after a political transition has taken place in syria. my contention is the problem of believing it can be done with assad is that you never get the cease-fires, never get the participation of the sunni majority while assad is still the. i think the disagreement is narrowing as is the area of disagreement between britain, america and france and the russians. we know all see the need for there to be both a military and a political solution. >> yvette cooper. >> the prime minister has made a strong moral and legal case for defeating what is a new totalitarianism in both syria and iraq. the real question is the

practical one, that is what the house will want to consider. given that different russian objectives in syria how will he avoid giving the support or appearing to give support to 13 -- assad force on become dependent on the assad force and how will he avoid that giving recruitment in the region is because i think this is the important issue. that we've been very clear, or target is isil, not the regime. but we will be helped as i said in my statement we will be helped in our came by adding isil if the sunni majority industry continue to believe rightly that we believe syria requires a transition away from assad to a kennedy and a long-term running that country. on the russian objectives as i said i think the gap between us

has narrowed. russia sees the danger of isil and is attacking it. we see the dangers of isil and are attacking it. the difference is that russia is still attacking the modern syrian forces that we believe in time could be part of a genuine transition in syria that would have the support of all the syrian people. but we do have ways of the conflicting. we having discussions. i met with president putin at the g20, everything that ever the attack on the russian airliner will bring home to everyone in russia again that this needs an isil first strategy. as with the greatest threat comes from and that is where we should focus. >> dr. liam fox. >> can i congratulate my right honorable friend for study of such a comprehensive approach but for stressing that it is an isil first strategy? test except that for the united kingdom not to act is in itself a policy decision which will consequences? because the jihadists hate is

not for what we do but who we are and what we stand for. is the greek we do not have the luxury of not confronting isil because they have chosen to confront us but the question is whether we confronted over there or take the risk of having to confront them over here spent i think my friend brings a greater clarity to this you can not taking action is itself a choice and that choice has consequences. it's my judgment and the judgment of those independent, impartial, highly trained advisors on security and military issues who take the same view, who believe that inaction is the greater risk. >> mr. speaker, i think the prime minister for his statement. there are understandable knee-jerk reactions on both sides to the horror of paris and the beirut. there will be those who say intervening. there will be those who say intervening at all costs.

and there will be those who say do not intervene, no matter what the evidence points at. as the prime minister knows the level cuts have set out -- in which we can judge this day. and on that basis can i press him on two particular points. so the prime minister recognizes that airstrikes alone will not be the isil. he has already heard he wanted to give much more evidence is have to convince it that the ground operations that are there are sufficient, have the capability and the credibility to deliver on the ground which is what he needs to know needs to be delivered. what role could ask with saudi arabia, uae, qatar and other gulf states play in delivering this a victory if that is the direction in which we choose to go as a country, as a house? also there is a reference to humanitarian aid but he will know that no amount of aid can help an innocent family dodged a bomb. there is no reference in this

statement to for examples how does you know bomb zones or safe havens to protect innocent civilians. with the answer that question? >> with that i think the honorable gentleman for his response and for the fact that his party is clearly wanted to engage with the argument, think very carefully and consider taking national secure the arguments before making judgment and i know that a national study of isil was pleased to brief them last night and stands ready to bury them an edge in a detailed questions they might have. i determine there should be no read and -- there should be no knee-jerk reaction. i take this was what happened in paris. under that could just as will happen in the uk as it could just as will happen or elsewhere in europe. the threat we face is very, very severe but i want us to consider this. i want us to take a true. true. i don't want anyone to give that a good process has not been followed so that people agree with the case being put they can vote to support it.

in terms of the two specific questions he asked, on humanitarian aid we will continue to deliver that. on know bomb zones the danger, the difficulties of no bombing zones and six of his they have to be enforced and that can require that taking out of air defenses which would spread the conflict wider and also it does in many cases require the presence of ground troops. we are not going to put in ground troops for those purposes but i don't want declared a state of in those it is safe. but, of course, what is a growing part of iraq and a growing part of syria to be no bomb zones because there will be no bombing taking place because we will have an agreement that will deliver the cease-fires ane need and we would've taken action to reduce isil get on the question of ground troops and the role of saudis and other gulf countries, they have been helping to fund the modern syrian opposition which in my view, need to play a part in the future of this country if they

saw to support the action that britain is proposing to take. >> mr. peter lilley. >> my right honorable friend is absolute the right data boots on the ground are ultimately essential if bombing is to be relevant. i do like him to convince me that what he refers to as the free syrian army actually exists rather than as a label that we apply to iraq bag group of clients and tribal forces with no coherent force but i'd like him to convince me that there is a moderate group weekend back, whereas in times of constitutional dissolution, it's almost the law of human nature that people rally to the most extreme and forceful advocate of their group. there are no moderates. and i would like him to believe that these forces, it exists, get i be persuaded to act against the islamists were as last time he wanted and expected them to act against assad. >> what i would say to my friend

and a very much respect the point that he takes because he's absolutely asking the right question about what troops there are underground to help us. the truth is there are moderate forces. the are the forces of the free syrian army. they have a particular role in the south of the country abiding the jordan border. they have taken the fight to isil and they have as i said in my statement prevented isil from taking vital ground. we can see the effect when we work either with them or with kurdish forces, we can see the effect of them taking ground, holding ground at indeed administering territory as i set out in my reply to the foreign affairs select committee. let me at this point. there is one sure way to make sure that there is only one choice for syrians who don't back assad to join isil i would be if we don't support the moderate forces. most people in syria are not either massive fans of assad or

psychopathic islamist extremists killed. most people in syria want to the pluralistic country where they can get on with their lives. that is who the free syrian army and other moderate groups are fighting for, and that is why they deserve our support. >> thank you. the prime minister makes a strong case to the house today, but he will be aware that members on both sides of the house will want reassuring that he and his government will indeed show the persistence and patience required over many months to get agreement on both political strategy and reconstruction in syria and iraq. what reassurance can he give that his government will provide that commitment today? >> the commitment i can give to the honorable lady is that this is the number one, not only national security issue that we face, but also the migration crisis in europe, is a massive question for all european countries, written included, and

it deserves the maximum amount of attention and resources we can give it. i believe will have to be patient and persistent not just on the diplomatic and humanitarian angles. where i think we have a good track record of doing so we didn't sub respond to the syrian refugee crisis. we have been giving that billions of pounds over the last you. we will require processes in terms of the military action we take. just as we have in iraq with the persistent action has led to a 30% reduction in isil held territory. but these will not be won quickly. the strategy we are pursuing is one that does take time because you are working with the government on the ground in iraq and illegitimate forces on the ground in syria. you cannot expect immediate results but over time it will make us safer. >> thank you, mr. speaker. if the attack god forbid that happened in london and not in paris, i believe that today the british people would be

outraged, dismayed at upset that our allies did not have our back and that our politicians were taking so long to procrastinate about whether to come to the. prime minister, i know that we know that you need a vote in the south to give you support. giving us david today, what the head of the joint intelligence committee and head of mi5, and opinion have stated. would you ask our chief whip to gain entrance an opposite chief whip that equipment and women in the opposition benches will come to the aid of our allies sooner rather than later? >> here, here. >> i think including the question of what we would be doing if there was an attack on london rather than paris i think my honorable friend makes a good point. let's be frank. this attack could just as living in london as it was in paris. and we should recognize what a close alliance we have with branscum what they close allies

we have with the united states and how together we can make our world safer. as for this vote which i hope will be held, i simply can't hold it if there's a danger of losing it. it's not because of government pride or anything like that. all politicians are ultimately dispensable. it's about the importance of our national security and the message it would send to our enemies. i am trying to make sure that we draw together the biggest possible coalition of members of parliament from all sides of the house to support what i promise will be a motion that stretches the import of this tragic and every element of that strategy, the important post-conflict reconstruction. i think there are many points in a motion those passed in the labour party conference on this issue that i'd have been address such as the need for u.n. resolution or can be addressed for the actions that we are taking. and so of course a good has to come to a decision i don't want

to give anyone a way out of making that decision through some mistake overprocessed. that wouldn't be right. >> khartoum at thank the prime minister for his statement, for the briefings that we have received at the national street level and for the discussions we've had in recent days, and at times like this it is right again to thank our brave and precious servicemen and women who stand ready to do their duty. >> here, here. >> can i say that we in these benches know from long experience the consequences of appeasing and indulging terrorism for too long. and will the prime minister confirmed today that unlike last time the action foreshadowed debate is against isil terrorists and nobody else? i would like to confirm that for us the importance issues are an effective overall strategy, the targeting of terrorists and that there is an endpoint.

we stand ready to do what is in the best interest of our national security. if it protects our people here and abroad, then we must act. i commend the prime minister on his statement. >> here, here. >> can i say he speaks to the whole country and thank the armed forces for the work you already doing to combat isil. i can give them the assurance that what we're talking about is action against isil, action against anybody else. i can also say i completely agree that being clever strategy, about targeting and as i was today clear about the input of what we're trying to achieve, they are very much a part of our approach. >> mr. john baron. >> regional powers and allies believe that in the absence of a realistic long-term strategy and proper local knowledge, we risk repeating the errors we made in our interventions in iraq, afghanistan post-2006, in libya.

key questions remain unanswered. how best to combat a sec terrorism and extremism and the ideology that all extremist groups feed off go natchez trace compile best to disrupt the business those with and talk about this with the car today is over a year now. there has been no effect. and also i'm asking to look again at his feet of 70,000 free syrian army. we have been told directly the recent contact although they were very few moderates remain on either side of the civil war. so prime minister can ask him without these answers, airstrikes will only reinforce the west's failure in the region generally at a time when already that are too many aircraft chasing too few targets. >> i believe what there is too many others too many terrorists who are threatening our country and that should be -- i would agree that we have to combat the ideology and that is a very big part of our strategy.

that is a big part of our domestic strategy. what we'r we are saying to our schools and universities must do, what our communities must do together. something i think we're taking more action and discussion of the many others in europe or around the world. i think this issue of starving isil of money and resources, i couldn't agree more. if there are more u.n. resolutions, more action, i would be the first to push for it. let's be frank about what they get their money from. they got their money out of the banks in most love. they get money from selling oil to assad. -- mosul. on a 70,000 figure this is not my figur figured i have not prod any of these figures. they come directly from the security and intelligence experts who advised me. now filtered through a proper joint intelligence committee process set up under the butler inquiry after the iraq war for i determined that would learn the lessons of that conflict, but

surely it cannot be a lesson that when we are threatened and we can make a difference, we should somehow stand back. >> here, here. >> mr. paul flint. >> the prime minister was committed to rightly or not lashing out militarily after the publication of the atrocity of -- but he's wrong now to ignore the real threat, the isil plan which is to excavate a regional war into a world war between christians and muslims. and wooden action now repeat what we did in 2003 where we deepened the conflict, we deepened the divide between muslims and christians. that is their strategy. and won't this action now lead to more books the great threat is homegrown terrorism, and isn't this action likely to increase recruits to terrorism and jihadism, care, here and

elsewhere in the world? >> i know the honorable gentleman deeply wants to have the peaceful world that we all dream of protecting that we have something in common. what i would say is isil have taken action against us already. they were behind the murder of the people on the beach in tunisia. they are behind the plots in our country. they butchered our friends and allies and our citizens in paris. and in terms of this battle between muslims and christians, that is what want to avoid. it is by working with muslim allies to stop his radicalization, stop this extremism in some isil that we prevent this clash and taking place. as for isil themselves they butcher muslims in vast numbers. that's what have to be stopped. and in the and we can't subcontract the work out of everybody else. we should be part of it.

>> mr. speaker, for those of us that were in this house and saw another prime minister at the dispatch box and who felt that we voted at that time to take military action on a false premise, can i think the prime minister for coming to this house and his approach and openness over what i believe is a very real and present threat to citizens in the uk? there can be no doubt that we would bring a very specific military capability to our precision guided missiles to pave way for. if and when i believe when we joint end of military action in syria is the prime minister satisfied that we have sufficient stocks in manufacturing capability to sustain and fulfill our military objective in syria? >> i can confirm that we did sufficient stocks o of the respd to our right honorable friend

wider point. it is a true at what happened in 2003 over iraq did poison the well in many ways about the debate about these issues. i've tried to go about -- about this and is different away as possible. no rush clear legal advice. the publication as much as possible. the widest possible international coalition, strong arab and muslim partners, trying to take the house do this every step of the way. one thing i would say to colleagues, that we mustn't let 2003 and decisions about iraq hold us back from taking correct decisions after proper consideration. to do so, it's not just the leading down our allies or anything like that. we would be leading to ourselves and the people we are here to represent. >> mr. dennis skinner spent isn't it essential in any prelude to the war to be sure

other allies and to be sure of the objectives? isn't that the fact that turkey has been buying oil from isil? they use turkey's trucks to story. they have been bombing the kurds and the kurds are fighting isil. they shot down a russian jet, even though russia is wanting to fight isil. he has got and objected to get rid of assad. russian ally has an opposite objected to what a crazy world. enemies to the right of us. enemies to the left of us. keep out. >> the one thing i do agree with the honorable gentleman about is we should be clear about our allies and our objectives. our allies include not just the united states of america and france that they also include gulf states and others in the

region who are all about coming together in an alliance to get rid of isil. we also need to be clear about our objectives, that is the military targets i spoke about but also a deflated and destruction of this caliphate that is such a risk to our world. as for turkey and oil smuggling, they have taken action to try to stop the smuggling across the border. confiscating the oil, taking for prosecutions and try to seal their border. should they do more? yes, of course they should do more and that is very much part of our strategy. >> thank you, mr. speaker. last night to senior french military officers told me how much the country would really appreciate it if we joined them fully in taking the fight in syria. pin point accurate bombing by the raf would demonstrate our

determination, destroy the scourge of daesh. i applaud the prime minister for trying to get parliamentary approval for coordinated offensive action in syria. and ask that we bring this highly potent gesture to a vote of this house as soon as next week, because our allies really want us to prove that we are fully with them. >> let me pay tribute to my honorable friend. he has served in conflict zones. he knows the importance of making these decisions after careful consideration and he knows the importance of standing by our allies. >> thank you, mr. speaker. i think the prime minister for the statement. i was on this bench in 2002 when tony blair presented the case for war in iraq with its customary sincerity. it was a matter of integrity.

whether i would ask the prime minister before he comes to this house again to put the case to the votes, that he should examine his conscience, that he should examine all choices shorter bombing as we all must come and consider the case of life and death eventually for all of us this is a matter of integrity. >> i agree this is a matter of integrity, and there's no part of me that wants to take part in any military action that i don't believe is 100% necessary for our own safety and security. that's what this is about. he refers back to the iraq vote, and i know that was a time of great difficulty for the house and the country, and it has become hugely controversial. as i said we must not let that hold us back from making direct and thought through decisions when we are under such threats.

and we are. that bomb in paris, decorative in london. if they had their way it would be london. i can't stand and say we are safe for all these threats. we are not i can't stand eyes there and say we were removed a threat to actually take. to extend you with advice behind it taking action will degrade and reduce the threat overtime? absolutely that i've examined my conscious and that is what it is telling me -- conscience. >> given britain's historic convictions with the region may i strongly endorse my right honorable friends view expressed in his memorandum to the foreign affairs committee this morning that now is the time to scale up diplomatic defensive imagine efforts to resolve the ensuing conflict entity the isil. may i urge them to intensify his discussion with president putin who has the air of president assad penalty key to any resolution of the conflict? may i also remind them that it was thanks to the intervention

of the royal air force and other air forces that iraq was prevented from falling into the hands of isil completely, it would've been catastrophic for the region and it makes no sense to stop at the iraqis borders today. >> i'm grateful for his support. the point he makes about the right is particularly poland because there was a danger of isil overrunning iraq, and that would stop through this combination of action from the sky including by us and the legitimate ground forces. he's also writing a great importance of discussing the issues with president putin, as i have been and will continue to do. there is a gap between us but i believe it is a gap that is reducing. >> mr. speaker, i agree with the prime minister that the diplomatic and political process must play key part in our approach to need a conflict situation syria and credit should be given to the party. will be directly address the vital concerns that come through

very strong and the evidence that the select committee report that our ability to continue in that role of a compromise fundamental if we join the bombing? >> i think this is a very important question in the honorable lady asks, which is does taking action against isil in syria make a political agreement more likely or less likely? in my view, it makes it more likely. first of all because you need to have a syria with territorial integrity. and unless we deal with isil and the caliphate we will not have a syria to the transition in. secondly, i think while she and i may disagree about many things, shirley moderate sunni forces in syria need to put a part in the future of that country -- surely. should be helping them including to what we do with isil rather than see them of being wasted away. >> james gray. >> the comprehensive yet a moderate and cautious and wise

way, will have led a pain in the house and throughout the country in favor of taking the right move which are striking against isis wherever it may be. the big decision we took in this house last september we decided to attack isis, that decision remains today. some of these decision must be taken by him, the generals, by the cheese and the necessary taking account of twists and turns of political fortune in this house. >> let me thank my honorable friend for his supporter i think the point he makes about looking back at the decision we made with respect to isil in iraq in reaching a judgment about it is an important one because the judge was the right one and isil have been pushed back in quite a large way since that decision. as forthcoming in front of this house, i have been very clear that i reserve the right to take action in britain's national interest when i need to immediately as i did over the terrace in syria but i think

more premeditated action, we had this convention, which there should be a house before premeditated action. >> i find it rather anxious that we seem to be responding on a something must be done. that's not always the basis for the best decision. i wonder whether the prime minister has received information about the strikes in raqqa that is it silly areas. the fact that there is an increase in refugees because they do not know which way to run. i think we do need to be conscious of the risk of recruitment. the people who bombed london in 2005 at the people who bombed perez lived here. we will not bomb them out of existence. we know that this may will increase recruitment of extremist here. >> what i would say to the honorable lady is this athlete is not a something must be done strategy. it is about careful

consideration renew together all the parts of the plan, diplomatic, political, humanitarian, reconstruction and military action. the opposite of what she would say is doing nothing on this front also has consequences, and it's those consequences went to consider very carefully. entrance of the dangers recruitment of islamist extremists in our own country has long as that caliphate exists we are at a greater risk. >> may i commend my right honorable friend's approach as set out in the statement, particularly that he is working with our allies? but could i urge him to talk to president obama to ask him when the united states is going to show more resolve? isn't it strange that during conflict they mounted press 130 sorties a day and every aircraft

was cleared to drop or shoot. were asked in syria their perhaps to an average of seven sorties a day and only one or two aircraft are cleared to drop or shoot. should we expect more from the united states if this alliance is going to be successful? >> i'm very grateful for my honorable friend support and is always right how important is to have a clear strategy, toby set of goals and clear means to achieve those goals which is what i believe i have set out today. in terms of what the americans are doing, they are bearing a lot of the burden of attacking isil in syria but with other allies, including moderate arab states. obviously, the greater part that we put in response to the request, the greater influence we can have on the course of the campaign and, indeed, the greater accuracy we can insist of in terms of targeting. >> mr. speaker, the prime

minister has made a very powerful case this morning. and on tuesday of this week the head of counterterrorism at home slept committee said the threat of daesh in this country was very real. can i press him on just two points. first of all an inevitable consequence of our intervention will be that the migration crisis will get much worse. is what the rest of the eu ready for this? i know we are but as the rest of the eu ready? and secondly he says that he is a servant of the house. we are all servants of the people. could i invite him to invite leaders of the muslim community to meet with him at downing street so he can put the case to them as eloquently as he has put it to us? >> first of all can thank the honorable gentleman for his support and also what he says about his select committee of the evidence of a received from counterterrorism experts. i do believe they're all speaking with the same voice about the risks we face from this so-called caliphate.

he is right to raise the issue of migration. the way to stop the migration crisis is a political solution in at six. this action goes together with the political solution that we need. i think he's right is an important is to discuss all of these issues with the members of the muslim community. i've set up a new engagement forum and i will look closely at the idea he puts. >> mr. speaker, i support and isil first strategy but can my right honorable friend explain how we're going to succeed without charge if it is not shared i turkey which seems to be more interested in bombing kurds that actually bombing isil? >> i'm grateful for my honorable friend support and i think it's right to have an isil first strategy. i think what we are seeing from others involved in this process is a growing understanding that the true enemy is isil. i think if you look at what happened with haiti is a bombing in ankara that has now been laid

-- ankara tasha at the door of isil i do think you see a growing understanding from turkey's leaders that isil is an enormous threat to the country, as it is. >> mr. derek twigg. [inaudible] my question relates to a key issue of ou underground forces which have been raised but other honorable members. a key witness in a statement today. could he say because of as this twice before what assets into debate to persuade iraqi government to do more to our medicines and about and support because they will be crucial to defeating isil? >> he's right about this. i think that prime minister abadi is a great improvement on its predecessor in wanting a genuinely plural society in

iraq, but we need more progress on hiring sunnis and, indeed, kurds into the iraqis agree forces so that the our troops that will be trusted by local people when they clear and hold territory that is occupied by sunni tribes. is right about this. we are doing everything we can. we have forces training the iraqis agree forces on counter-ied at their request to us. i'm sure they would like us to do more. we will look at the request and see what more we can do but he's right about that. on the robustness of the intelligence case about the free syrian army, this is all cleared for the authorities in a way that never existed properly before the iraq war. does change will put in place. if the house wants to its select committees to invite somebody senior officials to give detailed evidence, i am very happy for that to happen. in no way don't want to be in any way accused of inventing intelligence information or

overstating intelligence. i'm trying to understate everything. the only thing i'm absolutely clear about his we face a threat and we should deal with it. >> the prime minister has made a compelling and considere conside to date picks him to vote against action last time this came to the house, i'd like to say i will be joining him in standing not only with our allies but with the countless of thousands of muslims who have been enslaved, massacred and tortured across the region. and i have just one question for him. and that is, could you tell us what reassurance he can give to our forces who are supporting kurds and other local forces on the ground that they will not be bombed by russia? >> first of all that i thank her for her support. i think this is a different question that the house is considering a don't want to go back over past gram. this isn't a question that i would appeal to college right across the house to respond in a way shiastan.

this is the remaining disagreement between us and russia. russia so far has done more to inflict damage on the moderate forces that isil. there are some signs of the changing, and whe we need to encourage that to change more because not least because in the process is we've had in the past including the geneva process, the russians have accepted that people like the free syrian army and the civilian representatives should play a part in the future of syria. >> mr. speaker, as a member of the foreign affairs committee i would like to thank the prime minister for coming to the house today to do with some of the issues raised in our report. this house up and asked to commit military action in the past in areas such as libya and iraq as prime minister said, and that has ended badly. i don't believe he has yet answered our questions adequately on issues like ground

troops or a long-term strategy. further comments by the chairman of foreign affairs committee, will he give a commitment to every before the committee to give evidence before a motion comes before this house to approve military action speak was very happy to appear in front of the select committee. i can promise to do that before a vote in this house, but i will be appearing were there to be a vote in this house. i would appear in this house that this dispatch box -- >> here, here. >> for a debate and i will sit and listen to the contributions. i will take questions, take as many as i possibly can. what i would say is i think the select committee did ask good questions and i would urge him to read our response in full. it's incredibly detailed. the chairman of the foreign affairs select committee i think is indicated the answers are satisfactory. i would ask him as a member of that committee to look carefully editor of the points he wants to raise that right about i'm happy to enter correspondence with

them. >> british prime minister david cameron is among the 150 heads of state in paris this week for a u.n. climate change conference. president obama is also attending the event which officially begins today. the goal is to produce an international agreement to reduce carbon emissions by 2020 before the conference comes to a close on december 11. >> tonight on "the communicators," from new york, xbox revisited. he also discusses technology, tech competition and microsoft and the boards of civics in american life. >> civic engine is work to any

of us can do and all of us should and must do to make our communities operate more efficiently, more effectively, to make our communities serve citizens in a better way. it's old school civics and it's super important. >> watch became indicators tonight at eight eastern on c-span2. ..

you are the one that was the driving force behind this. take us back to the beginning. why was this something that mattered to you? we know you come from a family background but there were other things going on in your family. [laughter] [inaudible] other than that, not much. i had a had a mother that spent her entire life to dig deep to -- dedicated to helping people. we grew up in a household where we were really expected to give back to the community and of course we had every opportunity in our lives to do what we wanted to do in many ways, and i think that when he talks about the lottery he says you can be

born in bangladesh or yemen or malawi or parents that are divorced or criminals or handicap with the challenges of providing a living. you can have all sorts of scenarios that could develop but you were born in my case a white male in the united states and that gave you every opportunity to excel in life that you could ever ask for. and hopefully boost in the graphics are changing over time. but when i came into the world, that was the best situation you could probably find yourself in the world, so i think we knew that and we appreciated that and my parents had high expectations that we would go out in the world and do some things that are productive and positive comes with a big driver of how i grew up and what my parents expected of me.

>> what was it about the security and the continent that attracted? >> when we finally got money to spend, i was just a immediately attracted to try to figure out where the most impoverished populations were in those areas, where the resources were very scarce or limited and those are the places i was attracted to. so we do a lot of work in central america, some in mexico. but africa has some of the biggest challenges. that's how we ended up doing a lot in africa. >> there's a lot to talk about in the interest of what we've seen and what we've learned. but i do want to bring in the prime minister.

something else grew out also grew out of that. tell me how this got started. what's the one thing i should do in my life. i had had taken my son and other people and it's really something she kept wanting to have dinner with me and i noticed she had a phd behind her name. so i kept putting it off and putting it off and i realized

what an amazing job she was doing and what she was committed to so that got me hooked in the region. so it doesn't work in a lot of countries in the aggregate countries for a reason. when i met a man you will, in the 2009 we went up to the park in january of 2009 and i think it was maybe the chief for a year and i realized the challenges that he had brought everything together. across the conservation piece, the conflict peace and the agricultural peace because people have a lot of trouble with productivity around the park and people were encroaching on the park so it brought all these pieces together and he has an impossible job that's the kind of challenge i love.

we are doing a lot with him now because he's there he is there and when i met tony it was funny because kate who worked with tony for a long time kept saying why do i want to be the prime ministers? what am i going to do with this guy? [laughter] said he said you know what i did see in october of this year, sorry. then i was on on this plane somewhere in i picked up the article and it was a long article you may read the article and i said god, this guy is doing exactly what has to happen in africa. what's the one thing we don't have, we don't have rule of law or governance and so everything could be undermined just like that. i thought i've got to e-mail kate and apologize for everything i said.

we were walk enough to get the combine and i think it was kate but said he hasn't driven anything for 12 years. so you're going to put him in this vein and the truth is it is rare to have someone with his experience that they can go to other leaders. he's run a country in a certain sense. so to have someone that can show up at the doorstep and share the same experience and talk about what's needed they are special people to me and my foundation. >> i can't wait to ask about the combine and the rest of it. >> to do this in chronological order, i'm going to come to you on this what did you think when you were approached?

>> it was a very difficult time for us. i should start by saying that my function and my position in the middle ranking in the administration i got stretched into the situation which is management and national power that is at the epicenter of the war that's been happening for 20 years but has turned out to be the most brutal and the greatest expression of human suffering since the second world war and every one of those and they were centered around the park that we managed.

and i haven't fully gathered the difficulty. >> then i realized my problems were just beginning. >> pulled at the last check. [laughter] it has a long history with trying to address the great lakes region which is enormous. about what it offered us was for the first time not just the possibility of someone coming with a certain generosity but also got time to think through the problems in even given the

insecurity in the times of the conflict to work through these problems with us so that's been the story. >> i want to hear the beginning of the story from the payment is respond. you said you were trying to set up an important part that wasn't working until this article appeared. >> i shouldn't have told that story. [laughter] i didn't eventually get to see him. [laughter] and i got to drive the system which was an interesting experience and it's the only time ever they kept telling me

it costs a lot of money this machinery. >> the essence was that for me the issue of governance in africa is absolutely fundamental when i was feminist or and it was a big part of the agenda in 2005 at the summit we actually put africa on the agenda and we got the commitments to give debt relief to the african countries. we give the commitment of federal aid and it followed suit they uplifted their substantial aid but i was aware that it wasn't going to be enough on its own and you had enough to build the capacity to govern so they came together with my own passion which is the whole process of the governance.

if you're going to start i guess you might as well start at the top. [laughter] but so here's the thing that i discovered about the government. when i was feminist or i sat at the table. i thought if i took a decision around the cabinet table, something happened. this is a big mistake. [laughter] and then i started to realize how the process of the government worked and i realized you run for office as a great campaign and get into office and you have to become the chief executive idiot you have to run the organization. so i became obsessed with the governance and when i saw with the the african presidents and prime ministers were struggling with in the enormous challenges and problems, you know, they

didn't have the infrastructure of the decision-making and organization around them to enable them to do it properly. so the purpose of the government was that we put people who live in work in the country work alongside the team and i worked with the president in a week go for prioritization and the execution capability to get things done which is a bigger challenge. and nothing is he was prepared to help us with it and support it and the result is today we are at eight different countries and i think that we make a real difference for the way they function. >> talk a little bit about what you and the prime ministers are doing together. give us something to some kind of an example. >> one of the things that is our strength in the foundation is we have flexibility. so we have given some money that is committed elsewhere and when

the crisis came up in liberia, one of the first people he went to was agi for help. it was a disaster for the population. it was a challenging messaging communication situation. so, one of the things -- we don't get involved in health or anything else. we were not very focused on what we do about when we talk to the staff it was a simple decision to say yes we will move some of that money. you move some of that money and use it where you need to use it and because we can't judge that the biggest thing for us is to have the flexibility and to have partners that we trust. emmanuelle can tell you the story about the situation that is funny looking back on how we got it done but it's really important for us to trust our

partners. and i realized the governance is such a critical issue for one of the things we did is we were on a conference call talking about different options and they brought up this idea of the rapid action fund and it sounded great to me. i thought tony needs to do what he needs to do. he doesn't need people like me or anybody else telling him how to do it, so i had a great confidence in what he is going to do in the decisions he's going to make so we made a commitment, a reasonable commitment to fund that and try to leverage that for additional funding so the rapid action fund is something you don't have to go ask for something. you can react and he will never

tell us how to use the money because that's not important. >> we were in all three countries and they refused to leave. they helped organize all that was coming in because the crisis like this hits a country and it comes pouring in but if you're not careful you don't organize it effectively and make sure people are going to the right places to set up the systems that are necessary for the thing to function effectively. we will hope people with agriculture programs, we will do things like mick sure if it's a big infrastructure projects out electricity for examples of its bite over the country that we help deliver the program. >> but think about this for a second. when i flew in, it was at night time and you don't know that you are landing in monrovia.

you couldn't see the light. the city didn't have electricity so you're talking about the situation where you cannot imagine how you setup a process set up a process in an emergency of that scale. you don't have the people or the infrastructure, you don't even have the power. and so it's a little bit like what we do sometimes with the manual at condo. you are trying to solve 20 problems at once, not just deal with the crisis but to deal with a whole bunch of crisis at the same time. so you know, the thing i love about that fund is it gives them the ability to react and go in and do it and i think that we need much more of that kind of philanthropy.

our there are many in the private foundation should be the absolute first risk money and we shouldn't worry about bragging about what we got right. we should tell people how we failed and that is the truth and too many people feel good about what they did. they want to feel in the telegraph deals that everybody else about how good they did something and that's fine if certain places it's the wrong thing to worry about with the kind of flexibility and money that we have waged absolutely be to risk capital. >> i would imagine not every philanthropist, every potential source of funding that we go to get this in the same way that we hear. >> in the end it is a very interesting way of doing it because essentially how it does it is he says okay we understand what you're trying to do and we are going to support it and then frankly you got the freedom to get on and do it and there's not a huge amount of bureaucracy

sticking around if that's what it does mean for us it's been to work really fast to help change the way the countries are run. one of the things that's really important to realize is that despite all the challenges, it is a confidence on the move and there is real progress. so, life expectancy is coming up. many of the fastest economies in the world in the last ten years have been in africa. the next few years the middle class is set to double but you still have a situation where for example you can only do it if the government is operating effectively. so, that is what it's all about and whether it is doing what we do with the government or what emmanuelle does in conservation for the part it really allows us

to operate effectively to react to the need in a far more depth way than we otherwise would. >> help us understand because of the surface it sounds like you are doing very different things. tony blair is describing tony blair is describing the governance initiative. you are the chief warden of the park, the national park so help us understand what that means and why and how it's evolved. >> he's got all kinds of royal -- [laughter] i think there are enormous parallels the practice which is what we are trying to do and

there are many ways of doing it but there are underlying principles and essentially it comes down to three things. you have to have a deep sensitivity and respect for the rights and needs. you have to have a sensitivity for the rights of the future generations that captures the protections of the environment and the governance issues in relation to natural resources and so on and then you have to have a respect for the rule of law because that is what holds society together. if you can maintain the principles and there is a range of activities as long as as you they maintain basic principles that is a question of how quickly and effectively you can deal with view with the dramatic challenges that were faced with

particular places like the great lakes region. i upgraded a very small world that's extremely intense in terms of the deep challenges that our generation has to deal with to deal with violence and to deal with the destruction of the world's resources and to deal with how badly we treat each other. >> you talked about it a few minutes ago but how do you see what emmanuelle and is devoting himself to sitting in your overall -- you have to be an vicious goals as the layout to do something tangible about food insecurity and about a part of a body part of the world but really has been neglected for generations after generation. >> one of the things i have some important partners in crime.

i felt that walking into condo at the time that we did with a lot of conflict when we would go see a manual to we would go through five checkpoints in the first or the government and the next were the rebels. and it was that way for a long time. you could see we went back four or five times a year and you could see sometimes 10 kilometers was a ghost town and sometimes it looked normal. a lot of things were changing. think about the stress on people. so, as we got into it, we realized that the conflict part of it and the lack of the rule of law is what had to be addressed so one of the things that has never worked well in that part of the world is the demobilization and reintegration of rebels so we had this kind of

crazy idea that if we start doing things now. so the products are available but we can put four or five or six, 700 to work when they are ready to be reintegrated instead of taking some of the framework that has been used in the past that hasn't turned out very well they had no jobs, no guarantees and income.

if the government wants to do something about it we can put it back and put them to work. that is the big challenge. but one of the reasons they did to try to answer the questions one of the reasons we were doing what we had done was to be in a position to change that. one of those issues is how you reintegrate the combatants and how you keep them from picking arms up against that is a big part of what we are trying to do. it is a huge experiment. we have no idea what will happen. we spent 200 million felt like we got nothing done but we could spend which we are on track to do and we could change the course of how some things happen and it won't be us but it will

be our investment that changes it. >> do you look at this as a gamble or a sure bet, was it -- estimate i call it an entrepreneurial threats which obviously involves an element of risk about it but if it works by the way that it provides the model for future engagements in a similar kind. they would work in a bureaucratic way. many parts of africa but the advantage of how the foundation can act with the flexibility and the agility that comes from the

nature of the organization leadership and this doesn't make a big difference because one of the things we need to do in the development today is experiment. how to develop agriculture is a huge problem. we have electricity and basic infrastructure is the biggest problem in the continent that it faces. if we were able to through the process of trial and experimentation if he was able to show what would work in this field, it would have a dramatic impact on the weight way to these countries develop in the coming years. the whole question about the countries is how fast can they accelerate the development? take the country like the condo. killing with a particular problem in the park this is the country that is fast with massive problems. if we were able to show how we could ask of a great part of the

development to have an extra debris impact -- >> and it's a reminder that the government doesn't have the answers always. it would be partnerships between the public and private sector. >> there is no doubt at all they made a massive difference in these ideas. >> but you can't have any success won't run or long term if the government doesn't buy into the way that you're doing it and doesn't eventually support -- we have a huge initiative in rwanda on the agricultural development and we are trying to do something that we think will be unique to how we go about it and that is what tony is referring to. if we didn't think that there was an environment or the government of rwanda would buy

into what we are doing and make it so that in ten years or 15 years they don't need us anymore and they now have a facility in training and extension and productivity in all things that come with it that are important and they are doing it on their own, the aid is aided and that just means you are trying to assist someone in a difficult set of circumstances which can come from a number of different ways. a doesn't solve anything. we talk about poverty like it's a difficult thing to figure out. it's not very difficult to figure out. you need to get give people economic opportunities. if you want to take someone who is in poverty they have to earn a living and they have to make more than they do today. and so one of the things we are doing with the hydro plant's to

bring electricity we are not doing it really -- it's a great byproduct but what it really does is it says you can now develop processing plants and an industry so that your farmers have a market and can produce more and get paid better so electricity is completely identified with agriculture and if you work backwards people don't think about it that way but we have already done a small facility and we have a plan to bring in and we have had an enzyme plant coming in and so electricity is what god is this important thing to households and everything household and everything else. it's critical to agriculture. >> i want to ask each of you before we take audience questions what is your journey into, what would you love to see come from what you're doing but

i would also like you to begin on the challenges and i want to come to emmanuelle writes now and tell everybody if they didn't already know that you were shot and you almost died last year when there was a documentary being done about the port. how are you, you look fine. [laughter] >> i lost my brain. [laughter] i'm very well, thank you. we go through phases and last year was an intense period because we were in conversation with a british oil company -- it's not over. they were trying to install for oil for the international part which is on the site into illegal activity but in terms of

the international law for us it is a very major problem. but you have to understand also that this whole issue of the illegal exploitation of natural resources that the natural resources that ties in with all the governance problems that we are trying to address across the continent into the issue with the natural resources where there is a profoundly poor governance over how africa's resources are being used it leads to conflict and in eastern congo that is left to death of 6 million people so these are very serious issues that we are dealing with and it just kind of happens to be a british company whether it is an armed militia. we were dealing with this issue and around that a whole series of conflicts.

i was not sufficiently prevent. i was coming back to the park after having submitted the report on the oil company and some people are waiting were waiting for me by the side of the road and i got a bullet in my chest and in my stomach. i was able to get out of the car and some local farmers picked me up and company out of that area so i was very lucky. i ended up in a local hospital. remarkably good surgeons said that was my lucky day. >> very much so wouldn't you say

we are all kind of silent hearing the story. i want each one of the -- i don't know, sort of how you move on from that because it's just such a horrendous thing to have happen. >> public servants, law enforcement officers all over the world have this kind of problem and sadly it's a sign of our times there is so much violence around us so when you sign up to be a law-enforcement officer that is what the job and people continue their work. it would be wrong not to. so i work in a team of about 500 ranges protect the park. 140 of my colleagues have been

killed since the war started and we lost three in that way. or so a person that happens to a leadership position can't run away from their responsibilities and what effect does that have on the rest of the team it's just natural to commit to a job and keep going. it's not something you question. >> but it's a condition that is worse today than it was a year ago i think and purposely a week ago there were two attacks and the civilians were killed. it's a constant thing that the manual operates under and he doesn't have resources or the support that he should have and it's really frustrating because it's something where the united states with the same type of

advisory group that they put together on the activity there's a couple people here who've worked on that historically that got us involved and they could make a difference in eastern congo. you have an active military, a un force that basically is collecting checks so they can keep somebody in the military for bangladesh or guatemala. that's what it is and people don't want to see that or talk about it and the truth is we've got to do something different and this is the perfect place and time for the united states leadership. it doesn't take a lot and that's the amazing thing. think about for a minute the islamic group operating that would love to overthrow uganda. you have the first radical

islamic state in eastern africa and that would undermine everything. now people can say that might not happen. it might not happen but it could have been. all they want to do is undermine rwanda and then you have all these groups that are really operating almost freely in certain places. imagine what it's like to try to send your kid off to school in that environment and imagine what it's like to move to a field if you talk to the farmers in sierra leone as most people refer to blood diamonds they tell you stories about how they went up to work on the cross and all of a sudden here's this group of guys chopping off arms. it's not an environment that we can relate to or understand or really even begin to imagine. so if we can't take our principles and values and apply them in situations where we really can make a difference

with minimal risk to ourselves to be honest then what are we doing and i find it really frustrating that we will pick these big fights and nowhere to lose or pick other sites that don't make any sense but there are places in the world we could go in and adjust under the advisory capacity incest to try to make some change and i think we could really do that. it's frustrating to watch it's not happen. >> you mean we the united states. >> yes. >> before we go to questions what is your dream what would you love to see happen, we are talking about huge challenges that you all are laying out here. >> he had in education and wonderful sense of the understatement. [laughter] is very brave and very remarkable. [laughter] mine is very simple. i would like to see a new generation of african leaders

who are smart enough to know what should be done in their country and honest and decent enough to go and do it and where we are able to work alongside of them and help them accelerate process and the good news is that it is happening. not in all quarters or places but if you take it from the 30 years after 1991 i think democratic power switched hands about once in the 20 years since have and it's happened 30 times. even in nigeria they had the election was free and fair so that's what i want to see. and the frustration as i think a lot of what we do is international community if it is devoted to actually improving the infrastructure of the decision-making at the quality capacity then we would roar

ahead quickly. one of the interesting things we worked to make a learned in the work we've done is when we first went in, we were working with the local people and that they were learning some of the basic things to be done. today when i go back, the quality of the young public servants around every level of government is so strong there are people you would be delighted to have here were in the uk. it happened because people were there to show them how it's done i know we think our bureaucracy doesn't function but to realize the difference happens and it's partly that and it's also partly the will of the country at the leadership so right across africa now despite the problems, you do have an new generation of new generation of the political business and civic leaders who

are prepared to take responsibility and once more to take the countries in their own hands. all we can ever do is help but be excited thing is they are capable of doing it more than ever before and my dream is this is just expanded and extended and what it used to be abnormal becomes normal and conventional. >> so the prime minister, only about ten more minutes, i want to go ahead if any of you have questions raised your hand. i'm going to try to see you in the darkness out. we will have a little more time so i'm going to start there is a hand right there that shot up as soon as i said questions. i'm sorry, we have microphones. go to the microphone. >> my question is for the minister blair. a woman says she's getting on the train because there is no

money and central in central banking has come to dominate the world of the money in the existence might it be time for the new brentwood's kind of agreement where we restore the honest unit so that money circulates in areas and people actually produce things and we reach reach a point we gamble with options whether whether there's a perception of the value of production instead of just producing things so do we need a new brand towards agreement to bring prosperity everywhere in the world? [laughter] >> did you hear anything? [laughter] one of the things he's good about being no longer in office you can't be asked a question and say you don't know. [laughter] i did all the time.

[laughter] what would you actually think of that question, seriously, that he asked you? [laughter] >> i honestly don't know. i'm sorry. >> if you want to rephrase the question and then come back we will give you a chance but in the meantime we are going to keep moving. >> i would like to ask a question of all of you. thank you all for your good work. it's obviously now a very challenging environment and i would like to look ahead. the population is going to double, you get the problem to global warming and the question is how does that affect agriculture conservation and governance and really how does that affect the likelihood that we could achieve success as it is to find? >> i think as africa develops obviously the need for electricity is going to be vast

but there is a possibility of developing sustainably. there's an armistice of the these for environmental responsible production and generation of power. i will be honest with you when you come to a country like liberia it's hard for me to say to them is the easiest thing to do, don't do it. but the opportunities and things like hydro and solar in the future are enormous and it can obviously be developed and we should as the countries develop there will be more and more opportunities to use that. if we don't give agriculture right you won't have to worry about conservation. >> a guy who told me in 1992 when all i did is focus on conservation he said no one will starve to save h. reid. i didn't quite get it at the time but then when i started

traveling to africa and the only going to look for cheetahs or leopards or whatever it was, i took time to go look at a village off to the side or whoever it was, wherever it was and realized here we are coming over thinking it's just great to see a cheetah making a killing at serengeti or whatever but that's not helping these people and so when you talk to somebody that has kids in need or has had children die because they can't feed them, it becomes a very serious thing. and so, they will use the resources that are at their disposal to survive. they are trying to go from day-to-day and week to week. if that's your situation, then you will have no conservation to worry about in 50 years on the

continent of africa if you don't do something about taking care of people first and that is the lesson that i have learned and it is a hard lesson sometimes because if you really want to learn if you see some very desperate people and hear some very sad stories. >> my question isn't completely unrelated and it's for howard buffett and the prime ministers tony blair all the way do want to add how much i admire you, emmanuelle and how grateful i am that you are there. we are 7 billion today and in 2050 we are at 10 billion. it's estimated we need about 1.3 million kilometers squares of additional agricultural land to feed those additional people and most of that is going to come from the amazon basin because northern countries are reducing the agricultural output and most of it is going to come from southern countries and so my question is how do you

integrate it in the need of local communities and governance in this increasing need for land for food for the world but with an agenda that is largely driven by industry or agriculture from northern countries and how do we reconcile that very different agenda? >> prime minister blair did you want to go first? i think as countries develop dave got huge opportunities to develop and form the right partnerships in the most sustainable way including with respect to agriculture and the population of the world will grow enormously.

we have the quality of the governance to make sure the economy and the country grows in a way that is sustainable and balanced where agriculture production is increasing in a way that pays attention to the needs of the local people. it is absent that quality of government being there's.

i think one of the opportunities africa has is the source of agricultural production that it depends on the state of the country as a whole as to whether that the vector cultural production is developed in the right way and if what is produced and used in the best way for the world. i think it is a problem that we can solve. i would also say that i think we have an opportunity not very hopeful to do it right. but we have an opportunity to do something in africa. which is to embrace the reform as a solution rather than look at it as a problem, not to impose western thinking and western mentality and

agricultural practices at a place where diversity is critical to putting. our model cropping systems are the biggest thing we can bring to the continent like africa. but you're fighting a really strong tide. and the one thing about agriculture is -- and this is true everywhere in the world if you want to get results fast. i can quadruple that in 30 years you won't have what you need to have or 50 or whatever timeframe is. and it depends on where you're starting in all the different ingredients that go into that. but if i try to teach you a way to form that will help you maintain your soil and build your slightly and give you a biological activity that is critical for production, very few of us think about it that

way and if you want to do that it is a long road in its more complicated and more difficult, but the results are long-term. so if i look at africa today and i look at what we call the headwind comforted with the population is in 20 years. if we don't change the headwind said one of the biggest ones is corporate governance and rule of law, africa won't build itself with the complications it's got two days of people have this idea that -- my wife calls me the most pessimistic optimist that she knows because you know, i don't think that it helps people to tell a story that makes things sound really good when they are not really good or you have to really make some serious changes and sacrifices to get where really good would be. so to talk about how africa has

plenty of land, not unless you want to plow through the serengeti and not unless you want to cut down the forests that are growing a national park africa doesn't have a lot of land. they are limited on land. they are limited on water. productivity is going to have to come from the building soil, sustaining soil, being efficient with their water resources, and you don't do that by showing up at a saying this is how we do it in america let's do it here today that the biggest mistake that can happen. >> great question. let's think the prime ministers tony blair. [applause] now we can talk about tony. [applause] [laughter] we want to take a couple more questions. right here. >> thank you. once again i want to express how

appreciative i am to see people that are really trying to do as much as they can in a region boast people tend to kind of forget. you speak quite openly about initiatives, agricultural technology, economic development. what about education and what kind of commitment to education do you think you will take in order for these initiatives to actually be processed in the economic involvement of the regions to actually be able to sustain a quality of life for a majority of their people? >> that's a great question. my dad always told me stay in your circle of confidence which is very small. but i don't know much about education. what i can tell you come and emmanuelle might have a comment on this but what i can tell you is the initiatives that we start in rwanda, the first thing that we've done this year is write a check for $22 million to one university to make sure we get

200 million undergraduates in agriculture because we are going to go back and try to build the research facility. so we have an agreement with another school for 25 to 50 were actually 50 masters and phd. so education in terms of trying to build agriculture is absolutely critical. but it has to be the most important thing is that it is a practical application. you don't need a whole bunch of people that can sit and terrorize or do research plots that don't have any application so our goal is to include a different kind. we have some kids down at the adversity and coaster rica who will look for opportunities to have more kids and poor places

so they get a more diverse education. but without research, education and extension, those three pieces come agriculture fails. right now you can find an african country -- we worked on 44 of them. you cannot find a country that has the strength in all three of those and so until we get that right and those countries get it right, my biggest fear is you don't have governments that really understand leaders in don't understand that importance when you have 70 or 80% of your population in a rural area and they depend on agriculture and you are spending two or three or 4% of your national budget on agriculture, you are missing something really big bear and so, you know, you can talk about health, education, all those things but if you can't pursue

her child properly it doesn't matter where they are going to school and i've seen that, to back. it's very difficult to pick one or the other editor is a great foundation and the government working on health and education. i am not saying that's not also very critical but from the perspective that we do come education is just as important as all the other pieces but it's a piece by itself that will get you where you need to get. in a quick question. how much education do the the word instead work with you have and what is the situation about the question overall right? >> to me that education is a very particular place. the british politicians -- when he was first elected his painting was education from education. and i think that it's

transversal. it covers everything. with respect to the earlier question i don't think that we can overstate the challenges of our generation. those are going to be compounded tenfold because mary robinson said we are the first generation to understand what is ahead of us and we are the last generation to be able to do anything about it. it's a very poignant moments now. and really the solutions -- iem no one to say what the solutions are but they do seem to line three areas. one is technology. the other is behavioral change and the third is government

organizations. the only way that we can have radical shifts and that is to prepare ourselves and prepare our children and that can only be through education. >> there's one other piece i would add. i hear people say all the time taken any country that has the productivity. i hear people say all the time ask the farmers what they want. and i think there's a lot of truth to that. if you ask a farmer that doesn't know what it is, that doesn't know but doesn't know what a hybrid is, i mean how can he tell you what he wants? she has to be educated to understand what those tools are, but what they mean to him, how he can change his productivity. so, you know, education can come in different ways. but an extension is an education and extension in a culture is absolutely the key to success. you have to have it.

so, we realized that and that's what we work on two the degree that we can but it's difficult. >> first of all thanks to the hazy on forgetting this program. it's been great. thank you for the conversation. my organization works in africa for security and nutrition and something like 80% 60 >> what is your organization? >> the national cooperative organization. [laughter] >> you can get where my question is going to do something like a p.% of the food in africa is being produced by farmers and over 50% of them are women. so the idea of how to link the farmers into the national and global economy is a big thing that we focus on and find out

cooperatives and farmers associations are hugely important not only to do that but also aggregating, training and functional literacy into those kind of things as well. so what i wanted to ask you is what kind of an investment are you putting into the cooperative and a farmer associations as a way to really bring small farmers into the economy, and are you willing to do even more out of that area to strengthen the local economy's? and increased productivity and food production? >> the first thing i did when i started figuring out how big and complicated the problem was with agriculture in the world was i tried to figure out -- i learned all farmers aren't the same command come and all farmers in situations aren't the same.

.. that have some storage, they fit in the commercial world. then you can drop down and this

kind of market ready, call it anything you want, we just had to make something up that made sense. market ready. that's a group of sometimes 10%. drop down and there's a group that, i can exactly what we call them but that's another 10%. what you end up is the bottom 50% are subsistence farmers, farmers living day-to-day, week to week, crop to crop. diversity is important. they have no credit. they have very little, if any, access to fertilize the fertilis the government program gives them some. a lot of them are planting. i started thinking the problem is everyone talks a small older forms but there's this different group of farmers. everyone takes a different approach. so i hate to say this because it sounds really bad, but the bottom 50% i really don't know what you do. it's really difficult.

we have a hard time thinking about our money as charity. we want to make investments, and people don't need us anymore when we been successful and they go on and do their own thing without us. that bottom part is really difficult part. and we don't need help the commercial guys. we focus on these other two areas. we've found a couple of early success a waste to go about it, which would be similar to what you work on. the co-ops have been, in central america we had huge success because of the co-ops in a lot of things in terms of co-ops learning, in one case we get the co-ops support for lawyers so that they could get through their own bureaucracy in the country, and they begin exporting at that changed their lives. but they couldn't get through the legal part of it to be able to succeed.

in other cases, purchased for progress, it was because of co-ops we're successful but you have to train people what they contracted, how do you on a contract? how do you deliver when you say you're going to deliver? what kind of quality do you have? i think co-ops are really important aspect of having success, but there's a lot of places in the country, or in the world in certain countries were co-ops are forward and not trusted and difficult to put together. but i do think they are an important tool. >> were you going to say something? >> i think it's this whole notion of trying to promise collective action. together we tried to develop this nation of overreliance where you've got a synergy between people who were otherwise vulnerable, otherwise

disempowered and work on the organization as opposed to working with farmers sold as individuals. there's certainly a lot that can be achieved at that level. >> we've got only about one minute left. i thought i would like each one of you ask your question in abbreviated form, let emanuel and howard tackle them. >> my question is how you ensuring that th the poorest ofe poor who actually need the assistance benefit are receiving it, rather than just those with the biggest guns or the most many? >> and what is your question? >> a little information, my name is joseph, i am from ghana. i grew up in that region. i know very well that partner i just came here for school. i'd like to thank you very much for what you're doing.

i know how it's very difficult, very difficult. and most importantly if i can't i would like to apologize for what happened. because quite frankly imagine some who comes to help the country and the people shoot at him. doesn't make any sense. see if i can play sort of -- [applause] >> beyond that i had a question for prime minister but he left. [laughter] >> that's okay. think is so much for doing it and i'm returning as soon as i can. thank you very much. [applause] >> please come and spend some time with us. i would enjoy it. thank you. >> we are glad that you stayed. all right, the poorest of the poor. that will be the last speak what

was the context i can? >> how are you sure the poorest of the poor receive the assistance speak with you start and i will finish. but you may talked long enough i don't have time. >> well, you are quite right. it's the hardest of questions. parts of the reason why they are poor is because they are difficult to access in terms of ensuring that they're able to access the benefits of the wealth of the country. for me it's very important to try to work out the simplest way of reaching them, because partly the problem is, by virtue of being poor, there are many, many of them. and where i live, but national

park, we have 4 million people living within a day's walk of the park boundary. 98% of them live on the poverty line, live in extreme poverty. and to reach 4 million people is not a simple thing. so which have to do is look at the most parsimonious, most cost effective way of delivering services to every come and that's i have to think about it, every single one of those 4 million people. and it really changes your perspective completely. a lot of the problems in transitional aid level is that we are so riddled with failure, any success this wonderful so we tended to small token projects just to go to demonstrate success. really succes successes only achievement when you reach everybody and in particular the poorest. so that makes it pretty tough. but we found, and it may or may

not be the right solution, we feel it is, is we should concentrate on certain sectors that have a higher chance of success. what we feel to be the most important is a first step is rural electrification. it may not seem obvious, but what you find in eastern congo as in many other parts of the world is that the country and society is still stuck in what you would call a colonial economic model. the congo gained its political independence in 1960. [laughter] >> i'm good. >> they are laughing at you. >> don't worry. >> again, it's political independence in 1960 but it never gain economic independence. and the reason for that is that it only exports raw material's

and that's what keeps people in poverty. one of the main reason for that is the houston industry. it's only through electrification that you can do it in that you can start to reach many, many more people. what we find is for every megawatt of electricity you provide to rural communities to create 1000 jobs. that's a lot. the national park from the rivers flowing out of it can create 100 megawatts. that's 100,000 jobs, that's when many people who benefit from that. you beginning to have an impact at that level. that's how we would do it. is very straightforward, very simple if it does require a lot of investment, $160 million of investment to get 100 megawatts. but when you think about it, the international committee has spent $90 billion in eastern congo since 2000.

and so it's all relative. i think i would be the most cost effective way of reaching the poorest of the poor. >> if i can just add before turned to howard for the final comment. yesterday, the world bank issued a statement they called the best store in the world. today they said the number of people living in extreme poverty in the world is likely to fall for the first time below 10% of the worlds population is you. they say, howard, i know you're for me with this, saying using the new benchmark the world bank projects 702 million people, or 9.6% of the world's population, will be living in extreme poverty this year, down from 902 million people. >> that's somebody sitting in a of the world bank i'm going to add to the fml answer the question. i wrote your answers down. okay, i sat in a little dirty

place, i do not what you'd call it, in congo one time, and we look at this tactile project and i have this farmer talking to me and needed and a cover for most of it. a little broken english and he says, you know, they tell me i used to live in poverty. and i said, okay. and he said yes, they told that i was living on a dollar 25 a day. he says, i don't know what that means. i don't know what $1.25 a day is, but i couldn't send my kids to school. i can do anything for my wife. sometimes we couldn't the during the day or an entire day, sometimes more. he says now they tell me i am not in poverty. and they said i making $7 a day. he said i don't know if i make $7 a day. he says i can't measure that way i can feed my family. my kids are going to school.

i bought my wife address. so my point is that all these people who love to create numbers, i don't believe them. i don't believe in because i don't think, it's no different than the immigration issue and i want to go down the track. i don't know if there's 11 million illegals, 20 million. make a number of. the truth is that if you look at the world population today and you look at who has access to clean water, who has access to good, well, based on international standards, 2100 calories a day, three meals a day, you start basing it on the kind of way you think about what's the bare minimum, you've got four or 5 billion people. you've got 4 billion people for sure. i don't care what the world bank says, they are not living the way they should live. so to me -- [applause] it's almost been meaning to say this is a good news story.

go to eastern congo. that's not a good news story. you can go all over the world and find it. so to me it's a very demeaning to the people who live the way they live in this world that think that somebody in some office can say, i calculate that number, here it is, folks. i think it's bull shit. ideal. [applause] and so, yeah, i'm glad i don't work at the world bank. i to be fired. [laughter] but it's true. i think these are people who need to go spend a little time in the field. i'm going to be two entries because they are very different. i was sitting in 2003 i think, in south sudan, outside, i can't think of the doubt i went to visit these farmers, well, this

group, and i was sitting with the elders. it's kind of funny. because something came out of this much later. i asked what the biggest problem was unexpected a couple different answers but it didn't expect this. they said the lra. i didn't know who that was. they said what he neglects they come in, burnt our crops and to steal some of our kids. i thought, while mike, okay. 10 years later my good friend shannon who is here got us involved in counter our activity, which was really a great extremes in learning -- counter dollar a. the point is i want to shut i would awake think about that, not so much about the lra but about burning their crosstown. a great friend of mine who's an amazing guy, ed price and texas a&m, i was talking to them about

that. they went and studies in different areas of different conflict zones, and actually, you can kind of laugh at this but they came up with conflict crops. so if you go or sweet potatoes, you can't burn them down and i guarantee they're not taking time to pull them out of the ground. there are innovative ways of thinking about how people in conflict areas and try to protect themselves. they might not think about that, but the truth is a lot of them will figure it out. so that was one little story i wanted to tell you. the other story is a city in south sudan, it was a different trip but back around the time, and i wrote this in my book. i learned if you get a couple of beers and somebody you get a lot better information. and i don't drink so it works great. i can make somebody think i drank. putt anyway, i'm talking to this

commander, spla, one is --.net knows. anyway, one is a political party, one was a military. i get in confuse. spla. he was a colonel and lost his leg, and i was talking to them and he started kind of going off on the whole paid thing and what a joke it was and everything else. -- the whole paid thing. as he talked about it, i realized there is nothing but black and white in this world. there is nothing black and white in conflict or poverty or anything else. he went on to tell us how they would have groups who would orchestrate so that they would take a village, and they would land mine it on the outside. and then they would make sure the world food program, the international committee, whoever it was the only, people can't walk out of the village. they can get food. they can't get tender. they can't get water.

and then just sit back and wait. pretty soon, here come the airdrops. if you are making that decision, and he said, he said he's guys are clever. they will take 30%, 35% but they will never take more than that because if they take more than that they know they won't get it. they won't come, they won't drop the food. i don't have precise that it but the concept is probably pretty right. so you know, there are all sorts of, food is power. when you're in a situation where you cannot eat, food is power and people use it that way. it's more important than currency. so when you think about it that way, there are all sorts of tricks you can use in war and conflict and i was just one of them. this guy just talk like that was no big deal. and the reason i remember that ithatis i get asked a different question once, and it was about

aid. i was trying to express, what if you're the person who has to make that decision? what if you know the rebels are going to get 30 or 35% of what you drop? but if you don't drop it you going to 600 people die. that's not an easy decision but somebody has to make that. eventually they figure out what's going on. when you look at agriculture and you look at food, when you look at the people and try to figure out solutions to this, there is nothing that you can do that you know will work for sure. there's no guarantees, nothing you can do that is just black and white you can feel really good, this is going to happen, this is going to work and solve the problem. it's a constant battle and you just have to try to be smarter. the last thing i want to kill you is when i was in, shannon and and and i went to somalia and we sat there and listened to this warlord basically tell us how clever he was because they

had these different little refugee camps. they would deliver the aid to the refugee camp, move everybody to the other camp and get the aid movie that came, move everybodeverybody to another cat the aid to for that camp. people are clever. they are going to outsmart you. and so i think when it comes to your question, you are never going to get it right but you just have to do the best you can to help as many people as you can. [applause] >> i think what i consider everybody here is that we are in awe of your dedication and your commitment to this amazing cause. i think everybody here is coming away having learned a whole lot more that we knew when the sydney begin. >> talking about you, emanuel. >> "40 chances." please thank howard buffett and

emanuel. thank you. that was great. [applause] >> coming up in about 40 minutes senator james lankford will release a report on government waste, highlighting duplications in spending and burdensome regulations. live coverage on c-span at noon eastern. live at 1:00 on c-span3 that are the international energy agency will get a world energy outlook projection for 2040. the center for strategic and international studies hosts that event. >> tonight on "the communicators" author robbie bach joins us from new york to talk about his book xbox revisited. he worked for microsoft for 22 years including four years as president of its entertainment division and as chief xbox officer guiding its creation and development. he also discusses technology,

tech competition and microsoft and the importance of civics in american life spirit civic engine is work to any of us can do and all of us should and must do to make our communities operate more efficiently and more effectively, to make our communities serve citizens in a better way. it's old school civics that it's super important. >> watch the community is tonight at eight eastern on c-span2. >> all persons having business before the honorable the supreme court of the united states draw near and give their attention span coming up on c-span landmark cases -- >> this showed a piece of paper and she demanded to see the paper and she wanted to what was come which they refuse to do so she grabbed it out of his answer look at it an and in a scuffle started and she put this piece

of paper into her bosom. and very readily the police officer put his hands into her bosom and remove the paper. and thereafter, thereafter handcuffed her. why the police officers started to search that. >> in 1957 particularly the police went to the home and demanded entry. she refused them access without a word. later returned with a document they claimed was a warrant they forced themselves into them and searched the premises. not find a suspect, police instead confiscated a trunk containing obscene pictures. she was arrested and sentenced to seven years for the contraband. she sued and a case made all the way to the supreme court. we will examine the case of mac versus ohio and a quarter amount

of evidence and how this and other supreme court rulings transformed police practices nationwide. that's coming up on the next landmark cases live tonight at nine eastern on c-span, c-span3 and c-span radio. for background on each case while you watch order your copy of the "landmark cases" companion book available for $8.95 plus shipping at c-span.org/landmarkcases. >> nextel cup economic policy was developed during the presidency of george w. bush. farm administration advisers from the national economic council, the treasury department the council of economic advisers discussed the former president's response to the economic crisis and his approach to immigration, trade, tax policy and the national debt. that's followed by discussion of president bush's legacy.

>> good afternoon. i'm patrick socha, dean of the school of business here at hofstra. welcome to foster university and the plenary session on economic policy in the bush administration. working with me today at this session is our provost who will be asking some questions. and we're happy to have three presenters although one is still at the airport and hopefully will get in time but if that we will still have two magnificent speakers here who can give us some real insight on economic policy developed within the bush administration and you can probably been extrapolate how it may happen in other administrations. our first speaker today is vice president and senior economist at the federal reserve bank in dallas.

she is a labor economist were the original economic growth and demographic change. she manages the regional group in the dallas federal research department and is executive editor of the quarterly publication southwest economy. or academic research focuses on the labor market impacts of immigration, unauthorized immigration, and u.s. immigration policy. she is a co-author on policy. she is a co-author of the book beside the golden door. she is the philly with several academic institutions. she's a research fellow at the towers and for political science at southern methodist university and at the institute of labor in bonn, germany, as well as a visiting scholar at the american enterprise institute. she is also an adjunct professor at baylor university where she teaches executive and executive

mba program. she was senior economist on the council of economic advisers in the executive office of the president in washington, d.c. in 2004 and 2005 where she advised the bush administration on labor, health and immigration issues. she holds a ph.d degree in economics and university of california at los angeles and a bachelor's degree in economics and spanish from the university of illinois at urbana champaign. our second speaker is philip's michael. he is an advisor to the diplomatic record trips to the firm's economic and political policy analysis. he is a professor at the international economic policy at the university of maryland school of public policy. he was assistant secretary for economic policy at the treasury department from december 2006 until january 2009 serving as

chief economist for secretary henry paulson. he was previously chief of staff at the white house council of economic advisers from 2002-2005 and an economist at the imf protest international monetary fund, and the board of governors at the federal reserve. he was involved with a range of policies including t.a.r.p., housing, energy and environment, pensions and macro analysis. he spent a special involved lately in the policy efforts concerning housing, finance reform and broader financial regulatory reform. mr. swagel received a ph.d in economics from harvard and a bachelor of arts in economics from princeton. our third speaker hopefully we'll get there in time is mark summerlin. evenflo was founded by mark previously. he spent 10 years as managing

director of the lindsey group, global economic consulting firm that during that time he traveled extensively to japan, china, raby, germany, great britain, france, italy and switzerland. from 2001-2002 he served as deputy assistant to the president for economic policy and deputy director of the national economic council. in that capacity he helped the president o of the united states develop and to put his economic agenda. he also worked as an economic policy advisor for the george w. bush president after starting his career at the u.s. senate budget committee. he holds a master of arts of applied economics from johns hopkins and a master of public policy from duke university where he was a senator and jacob javits felt that he graduated magna cum laude from georgetown university. eagerly serves as a board member about arabia, a hunt

consolidated affiliate based in kuwait city and is on the board of the virginia hospital center medical brigade. so thank you and i will now, no mr. swagel will start with his remarks but he also has other remarks in the desiccated in time. and the doctor will present her remarks and then we'll have questioning. thank you. >> rate, thanks very much. so i'll start with mine and mark should be here in the next couple of minutes and if not i have is that i can talk about his role as well. so i was at the end of the administration i was assistant secretary economic policy at the treasury department. essentially chief economist for secretary hank paulson. i was confirmed by a voice vote of the senate just before the senate flipped in december 2006, such as when it changed from

then later frisk to leader reid and offices instead of slipped back. backbend noncontroversial nominees got approved routinely. that is obviously different. i paid to serve as a council of economic advisers where we were colleagues and also that was when mark was a deputy. first in a nonpolitical position the last six months after clinton administration and the first six months of the bush administration working on trade policy, doing

typical immediate early in the bush administration to your discussions about how proposals, whatever was being considered, how did that light up with what was discussed during the campaign. i suspect quite different than some other administrations. treasury i worked on a range of a sugary financial crisis dominated much of my time. i worked on social security, immigration, health care, they don't energy and environment. i think all of these areas i want to which the bush administration have serious policy proposals that would address the series of challenges facing our nation and deserve consideration on their marriage. my sense is that especially after 2006 that is starting with a new congress in 2007 they

didn't exactly receive serious consideration. that's just a fact and its a fact of our polarized political system. so that's the way congress works didn't and that's what congress worked over the last couple of years. so let me talk a little bit about the financial crisis in the last couple minutes or do i want to talk. which is the center of what i worked on while at the treasury department it out to use that to our state more broadly to what economic policymaking work in the bush administration at least as i saw it. and so treasured throughout the administration at the white house, housing and urban development and other parts of the executive branch, we were well aware of the building imbalances and the problems in the housing sector and becoming more broadly. i have written on this topic at length. if you google phillip swagel

financial crisis you will see that. maybe it's my fault but anyway he will see what i've written. so policy across the administration responded at the white house and hud a special effort for me to come up with policies to lean against the contraction of credit availability in a responsible way. there were discussions on what is the role of government and what are the barriers to the spread of credit? what is it that credit would be people were getting credit, were getting mortgages before, maybe too easily but now they can't. and what was the role of government in addressing the? to our proposals from the fha and the housing administration and hud and other parts of the government to address this. in some sense not assuming that markets are perfect and not assuming like is a positively

come and sing there is a role for the government but i would say with a high mark for action to avoid the possibility of unintended consequences. obviously committed other administrations, there is less government involvement but not by far not the sort of caricature of none of fair. so the crisis manifests in august 2007 -- fair. the focus was how to help the market edge aspects of the treasury and their proposals on what to do about illiquid assets and proposals about how to avoid preventable foreclosures. it wasn't, the government, the bush administration did not propose taking taxpayer money and saving people from foreclosures but the focus was on saint a foreclosur foreclosus costly. it costs the bank money, it costs them in bold. it's very costly personally and

financially. so this should b be a way for te two parties to work things out. it wasn't working very well and so the administration and the treasury secretary personally were very engaged in getting that process to work better. was interesting in my mind is these efforts within later used as the basis for housing would efforts from the obama administration. they put taxpayer money into it to lock the criticism. why am i paying taxes so she can buy her third house and had a couple big screen tvs. i think those policies are more effective than people think for the obama administration official take a lot of criticism. there's a book about the crisis that makes this connection that calls the obama approach to housing this waco plan which is meant as a pejorative but i was gone on january 20 of 2009 so

the plant had nothing to do with me -- the swagel plan. so very briefly the way i think of the crisis is in three phases, from august 2072 august 2000 it was the normal policy response. the fed was doing its normal policy response of lowering interest rates. and, of course, bear stearns collapse. the collapse of bear stearns and its acquisition by g. people can signaled this is no longer a normal slowdown. and the motive of work within the administration change. the work was being driven out of the treasury department so it's appropriate i speak about it but it was very well coordinated within the administration. again the way the policy process worked is that the national economic council is courtney a policy process and bring in the other parts of the administration that were national involved with this.

so that the financial crisis response was typical and unusual. typical in that the process worked and to continue to be the sort of nec process that mark before here will talk about at the beginning. but by the end of the administration the process, the work was being heavily driven out of the treasury department. it was natural given the nature of -- so the second phase is coming up with plans and again if he did a google search i told you will come up with some memos that were written about potential government plans to address the crisis. the second phase, the third phase was from september on with the feeling of fannie and freddie, lehman brothers, aig and more. -- the feeling. the way i think of it is

actually my boss hank paulson had a sink that i think is instructed to you would say it must be tough to do this, to bail out this company or take action to invest $350 billion of taxpayer money and banks, 250 billion. his response was it's not a hard decision but it's just an unpleasant one. so it wasn't, he said look, it's the right thing to do. i know it has to be done. i don't like doing it at it has to be done. that was the approach. i suspect that sort of approach would apply to president bush as well, right? where he had a set of core beliefs, i think mark will talk more about, but addressing the crisis is very pragmatic man and a very pragmatic administration. i would look at the work that was done during the financial crisis as following the script

exactly. to be what's fascinating is sort of the new administration starting in january 2009 will be continued to work. t.a.r.p. continue with essentially superficial changes to the people work on the t.a.r.p. continue to come including tim geithner, head of the secretary was one of the architects of the opening of the crisis response. this is a great deal of continuity in the financial crisis response. between the two administrations. the president, or none of us were happy about getting to this point but i think the administration's record can be comfortable or clear that the response was appropriate and ultimately effective. one last thought, which was the economic policy at the end of the administration was dominated by housing by the financial crisis response which, of course, meant there were things

left undone. president bush started on a climate change agenda gathering 5020 nation for the first time on this i because work on financial regulatory reform, social security reform, tax reform, a whole post about the issues that sometimes got crowded out why the financial crisis but that's just the way it would have to be. why don't i stop there? >> you our next. >> thank you, guys very much for having me as hard to come in late be given to help how long i've been away from working for president bush because being 15 minutes late would've been grounds for termination act when i was for them. i started working for then governor bush in june 1999 during the campaign and i worked until a year after 9/11. when the time that i was in the white house the bush administration, president bush averaged 71% approval rating in the polls.

so my perspective is a different. there's a cycle to the presidency and work at the beginning of the administration is often very different from working at the end. those are probably the good old years but when you run if when you run for your life on 9/11 ne 9/11 they don't feel like the good old years. if you look at the heads of hair they present we have every single day as hard as you can see the constant craving that goes on whether it's good times or bad times. i want to start off with the campaign. i feel strongly that the policymaking in the bush campaign was much more serious than in most campaigns. president bush had announced a rule that everything we propose had not a chance of becoming law. there's nothing that has to, no flat taxes or gold standard or dynamic scoring for universal health care. they were all very pragmatic that's not so universally popular but they're all things

with a bit of effort could actually become law. we over the course of the campaign produced to full policy books. these are things you have not seen in more recent campaigns. we have been actual cdo scored budget and all of our proposals on taxes we had scored by the official scores in congress so at the point of the election in 2000, everyone knew how much the bush tax plan would cost. they knew the distribution of weather was how much going to the rich, how much going to the poor. you knew about problems like the amt and that is is a like the tax bite about what he was in honest way of saying it. things were out of there. so when we started, governor bush when he was in texas had run on four things and it kind of had for accomplishments. one of the biggest ones was cutting taxes. that was something he believed in and was going to be a core

part of the campaign. and so what he did is he assembled a team of 10 very prominent outside economists, these included to pass chairman, former federal reserve governors, two former top omb officials, and charged them with developing a tax plan that was both something that could eventually become law but also something that would be bold enough to survive a challenge from the right during the campaign season. it seems a little bit crazy here in 2015 to imagine people in 1999 being scared of steve forbes but you come off a 1996 campaign as being one of the folders on the right. we started a process that went on for about six months and within those 10 groups of economists that were very different reasons that they wanted to be embedded within the

tax plan. the more philosophical conservatives started with the fundamental premise that the government was in surplus, that the surplus is inherently, goes, gloucester the people who earn the money and, therefore, part of it should be returned. that was a philosophical point. we also had, and people don't often realize this, we had a number of neo-keynesians integral. for then the focus was that the expansion was starting to get pretty long winded and that we were your age or nine in an expansion and the idea that we were going to make it another four years without a recession seemed not to be consistent with history. this was something that then governor bush was very sympathetic to, having starred often the oil patch in the '80s. any texan is sensitive fact there's a pronounced businesslike a. we had a group that were very big supporters reforming social

security and they wanted to use most of the money for causes like that. and, therefore, wanted a smaller tax plan. that was attention that operated in the end. present bush as a plan that we face in marginal rate reductions over five years. internally we have discussions about how that would be available to speed up to provide more depend support. and so then we get past the election we come into office and there's always a little bit of tension at the beginning of the administrations and there's a particular one with the treasury secretary and some of the new members of the economic team to want to start cleaning and say okay, the campaign is over, and now have a new set of bigger group of people and let's start from scratch. governor bush had a different mindset, which is that elections matter and he was planning to govern on what he campaigned on and continue the theme fully

developing things in the campaign that could become law. so we stuck with a tax plan. i was part of a three-person negotiating team on the hill that negotiated over five months. it became law in may 2001. one of the lessons i learned with those negotiations is that and this applies to all presidents past and present, members of congress are not going to take political risk that the president himself is not going to take. so i could talk about any economic argument for tax policy argument. but at the end of the day what a member work here was everything about the tax plan was out in public at point of election and the president ha have survived india taken political risks on that point. after that point it was not that hard to get the votes. wendy doolan before the senate, it got 63 votes. people in history rimmer it being very partisan but that was

a democrat controlled senate, including future of the finance committee supported the plan. and i think another lesson from history is that things have got some amount of bipartisanship or they will be relitigating time and time again, that's been a problem with the affordable care act when there wasn't a single republican person who voted for it, it's going to keep coming up and up and up and up. we then go on the economy as we approach the 2000 election was clearly weakening. the first quarter with the economy contracted 1%, contracted another 1% in the third quarter of 2001. after the events of september 11. it was apparent in november we put the vice president on "meet the press" and had a similar on the front edge of a recession. you can see these things before economists will declare them. the data starts to move pretty decisively.

we then started to work on accelerating the tax cut. the only part we could politically get accelerated was the low income partner in august of 2001 checks went out across the nation for $600 per person. it's hard to tell if his work at all because they literally went out about three weeks before 9/11 and that they -- the data got so bad it didn't help little bit or didn't help at all. it's hard to decipher that. the economy been continue to be what we would call sluggish through 2002 and into 2003 in part of back by the debate about going back to work. so the president made the decision to accelerate the marginal rate cuts, and was able to get that through congress. in may 2003 the full tax plan hit for the first time. the third quarter of 2003, the

economy accelerated by 6.9% in real terms. over the two years after the tax plan took effect get accelerated by 3.8% it is with the past couple of years of the presidency and i think it, it was a historical lesson from president kennedy and president reagan, the tax cuts that are permanent in nature have more powerful economic effects than those that are temporary. they have a much bigger cost but you have to decide whether it's worth it or not for the effect on the economy. i will probably go ahead and stopped and turned it over but i just want to keep a look at a flavor of what the tax code was like doing the frustration, and with a dock or how the national economic council worked during questions or other things like that. >> so i was not a political appointee in the administration. i was a staff economist on the council of economic advisers. it was a great year. it was the most exciting are certainly in my career so far. i had three chairman in my one

year of which may be a record. i came in under greg, amazing guy, backward economist, professor at harvard. and then after that it was harvey rosenberg at a time at the end ben bernanke i just had an amazing chairmen, amazing economic thinkers and i had such a rewarding year surrounded some of the brightest economists that i've ever met really. so the reason i think i was hired was because in january 2004 as marc described, we are coming out of recession in 2001 and the jobless recovery for two years or a little over two years. and so immigration which is my field had been taken off the table. i don't know if you remember when bush won the election and very soon in his first term he began talking with president fox

of mexico on immigration reform and immigrant plan with mexico. we got the sense although mark, you've i know this is true, an immigration agreement with mexico's imminent but that was the week before 9/11. and then, of course, after 9/11 immigration again it wasn't mentioned for two and half years for obvious reasons. but those of us who work on immigration and urine for immigration reform, we are sad about 9/11 for many reasons but, of course, that's another reason because of that reform was squashed and then abort opportunity was lost. i had high hopes maybe this would be the year for immigration reform. and, of course, once the president's new term began we started immigration talks in earnest within the white house and i felt we made a lot of progress. we worked mostly on what a temporary worker program would look like, which is going to be

sort of the hardest part of immigration reform eric and something that congress not really hammered out yet. worked a lot on that. it was nice to work in a field on a topic where president bush really had very strong guiding principles for us. felt very strongly can understood very well being from a border state, you know, having huge hispanic support in the election i think the republicans. he had done very well and so is close to this electric, very close to the issue and provide as great guidance. i felt very strong working on a. i felt like we knew what we needed to come up with. of course immigration reform never did work out. the mccain bill did eventually pass the senate but not the house of course. ever was taken up i believe. the house in 2007 would respond with border security and lots of

enforcement, more border enforcement, more interior enforcement and from there on the situations where immigration reforms deteriorated from my point of view anyway. iif you see president bush i think you openly say his big regret was after being elected in the beginning of the second term focusing on privatization of social security instead of immigration reform. he will take that and i think he really means it because it's an issue close to his heart. that concludes my prepared remarks. i'm happy to take questions. >> so we'll ask a number of questions and we welcome the audience asking questions. i guess the question to start with to all three is, what would be a long lasting effects of the bush administration economic policy? what has did the text -- the test of time best?

>> i can think of two things. first is the tax policy and i delight in saying this. the bush obama tax cuts are now permanent. i delight in saying that because there's so many people who for a certain period would sort of wake up in the morning to be proportionately to think how terrible the bush tax cuts were. of course, president obama for a year or two extended all of them, including the top rates, state tax, everything in sort of acknowledging the positive impacts on the economy, the negative ones reversing them in a permanent the vast majority of them. including the overall guiding structure. i think that's a permanent change as far as our republic goes, and relatively permanent change. the importance of tax policy. number two though, that's the good i say with a bit of little

smile, but that, of course, is polarization. we can't replace a decade, the current time but i think of proposals on social security and health care and other things that this never got consideration in sort of the debate was symbolic and political and not substantive. fastballs for everywhere all around but i think that continues. that's also i think a long lasting impact of the administration. >> i think from my time when i was there i think that history doesn't give him enough credit for how shallow and breathe the 2001 recession is. it was a time we have a massive collapse of the massive this talk market bubble. the confidence was very low for a month or so after 9/11, and that that was the good with the economy could have really seized

up and it didn't for a number of reasons how and if you go back and look at the data it was extremely, extremely small. as i think economic performance over the first term was actually pretty good given that we came in with massive stock market over evaluation and huge corporate indebtedness that had to be adjusted. i think oddly i think the economic policy, i am a little more optimistic on immigration. and so i think we may look back 15 years from now and find when president bush was on the right side of immigration and that we are in a temporary working out period for the party, but hopefully it'll go back to a more welcoming stance. one of the things i tell politicians to make a very simple with an immigration policy is there's really one measure of a country economically over time and that is able to get into it or they try to get out of it?

if each held kashmir becoming the biggest, the united states is facing is that people try to get in from all of the world i'm going to go worry about something else but i think this debate hopefully, it depends a lot on who the candidates, the republicans pick next year, but people might look more kindly back on president bush for having been on the right side of that debate. >> i think a piece of the bush legacy will be bringing education policy into the federal government. i think that no child left behind, although i'm not sure where states find itself at the moment but maybe one of policies that has occurred over to the obama administration but i think this idea that president bush had even in texas he was an education reform and he took this with into washington and yet very high commodity is a lot about him. first in terms of political poll

philosophy, which argument is order in a session earlier today. i think it suggests he was not a fair president. user president believes that government can be very purposeful. it had a purpose in education and the role in education and i think the conversations i get to sit in on what i've that cia on education policy i found fascinating because just the high standards they were said which i thought were unrealistic, it was great. it was a great. the foundations upon which no child left behind all the very controversial i still think those foundations of ken spence and accountability are really important and think will never go back spirit you have touched on this. you indicate a president bush have strong guiding principles on immigration. where else did have strong guiding principles when it came to the economics of the country? >> i mean, he had his believes in the principle that taxpayer

money first and foremost goes to the person who earns it. ..

is the moment for immigration reform gone whether it is just that brief moment of hope in the administration and is it in our future? >> that is a tough one. the moment is gone. it will not get addressed in the next administration because obviously we thought it was bad a year ago but it's gotten worse with the executive action for the obama administration for something that was controversial already became even more

controversial and now it's a whole other set of issues again in the controversial topic and so now it's about the presidential overstep and so forth and what are the limits of executive action and everything so that is now thrown into the debate on top of everything else. but i think that we know how to do immigration reform. when i was in the white house nobody would have ever suggested that undocumented immigrants might get a temporary status and not a pathway to citizenship along the lines of the 1986 immigration reform and control act of 1986 amnesty. i think it was after i left it was karl rove who brought up the blue card and that's for the first time somebody raised the

possibility to be able to bridge the divide thinking on immigration reform we might offer these people temporary status so although that was unfortunate that you can't get your everything that you want perhaps but still bridging the divide and moving the debate forward. we know how to do it. we know how to do immigration reform if we know how to do it right now it's getting the politics to work. from 2007 at the treasury. it doesn't mean the entire discussion was really about

members of congress did the right of john mccain. there's a number of things seen in border security and people here illegally politically it seems skewed in one direction and of course one could look at that and say at the time before the surge was working and really needed the support against the critics in iraq and things like that. so again before the surge the policy worked in iraq so in 2014 it fascinated me as president obama paused the executive action to allow the endangered democratic senators to have a chance but it didn't work out

well. and it didn't wait long for the new congress to have a chance. i understand politically why from the white house perspective he might have controlled and there's no point in waiting but it's fascinating to me he didn't give the speaker a chance to fail and i think that is too bad. but i agree that it's going to happen. it's just that we are in the timeout and we will just have to wait until it ends. >> the tax cut has been the subject of much debate as far as the long-term effects into the short-term effects were very

strong. the two issues that i was wondering you raised the tax. the wealth gap is the question of equality in the united states and the question of whether the tax cuts have less money for the government when it came to wage the war in iraq so the tax cuts meant more money for american families, less money for some of the foreign-policy needs and infrastructure question so if you can speak to those questions >> the 2001 tax cut cost 1.3 chilean dollars over ten years.

so it is about the cost in the one year or so sometimes so sometimes the rhetoric doesn't always match the reality. also the biggest by far differences in what happened to the surplus more and more based on changing economic performance and as you throw in the recession or two that just blows out of the budget more than anything else and you see the huge declines in the bonus income and so i don't think that the tax plan in any way striking the spending on the cost of the war seems to go on on its own trajectory. but if there is a choice between the government finance infrastructure spending and tax cuts just like there's a choice between the taxes and government spending so that is a budget decision. >> i would just point out that we have actual data on what happened after the tax cuts

happened to pay a decent argument for why they should have occurred. i forgot what the second one was. one thing on the wealth gap that's important is the growing wealth inequality and at what point the tax cuts play in that. the biggest contributor to the wealth gap is federal reserve policy which is designed intentionally to drive up prices so if you want to mention the wealth inequality the last five years it is done mainly by the federal reserve has a different standard for judging the monetary policy for some reason than the tax policy when the facts came in the trickle-down economic arguments. so a lot of times all policy that gets the economy going tends to have that effect.

>> it made me think of a funny story so in the fall of 2003. there is a situation at the head of the cea that there are two dining rooms at the white house. there's a bigger one and a smaller one and a smaller one is to hire the staff and for reasons i don't understand the head didn't have the smaller one and it didn't make sense and it was simple i didn't even tell my boss i just asked the head of the administration can we fix this and it was tough getting the decision. it's not that big of a deal.

in the fall of 2003, we had a massive positive gdp number into the times it has been plus eight something so it showed that it was working and the economy was back and the request was approved. so it just is the way that it happened. i would say on the second half of the question about this i think it is a good question and in my mind, the administration in 2005 made a good effort at social security reform. it started just as i was leaving and so there is a focus on the private account in safeguarding people's assets in a conversation about whether that makes sense and why. it's about fiscal responsibly in

the long run future for our children and things like that and that is a debate that we haven't yet had. in some ways we are going the opposite direction with people saying there is wide agreement on increasing social security benefits for people who depend on social security for their retirement. there is less agreement on the time of the benefits and the highlights of income is not depending on social security for the retirement and you can imagine saying to that person paid more in taxes and of course as any business student will tell you those are the same over the lifetime and there is a sort

of polarized debate that is played similar cutting benefits for the rich and it's that kind of debate we haven't really engaged in for the society and hopefully the next president will do that. >> we heard a little bit about the trade policy yesterday so i would like your thoughts about president bush you could argue he was the most free-trade president president that we ever had. and what are the implications going forward in terms of the trade policy? that is one of the principles that comes from being a border state he definitely did it and trade policy. from the time that i was there the big piece on the agenda was getting the trade promotion

authority which has lasted and that is a power that is easier for the president to conduct trade deals. and even in 2002, trying to get the bill through the republican house, we have to hold of the vote open for four extra hours taking into pass by one single vote so that is always very hard to get through to congress. and that was even before the rise of china and other things that maybe put more downward pressure on things here so he certainly that's something he felt in his bones. politics are always difficult on trade. >> i agree i worked on the beginnings of a steel protection

and i think it was very clear that even that action which goes in the other direction was meant to enable the agenda as a campaign promise first of all and then walk i look i will be tough when it is needed and you can debate whether it was needed and all that but you can trust me on the broad trade agenda. i would expect president obama feels the same way that it's good for the american people. the economy and individual americans. not every american that the united states has a whole. and then in a great paper describing the low retail prices and the welfare gains of wal-mart and it shows the prices at wal-mart provide a huge benefit to the individual american families, low income families especially. so it's just as marx had the politics are tough.

yes please. >> i was wondering to what degree deficit reduction was a concern for the administration and if there was ever a moment when it became a greater concern and people in the administration started to wonder if this kind of national debt was becoming more of a potential crisis of its own. >> my time we started with during the campaign there were productions of large surpluses, so that wasn't a huge issue and it was much more a focus on the long-term demographic problems as you could see back then 15 years out social security, medicaid, medicare spending was going to be problematic and trying to think more about the

long-term and then as soon as you go into recession, your policy is going to be focusing on expanding and in the short-term deficit and so that's not going to be an area of emphasis, so i went from one extreme in my tenure to the other extreme and then it was i knew after i left and the economy stabilized that it was a but it was a priority to get the deficit back down to a sustainable level and it has to be something below 3% of gdp deficit and not necessarily exactly zero. but a lot of it is dependent on figuring out whether the growth is going to be and where the next recession will knock you off target more than you ever realized. >> i remember in early 2008 after the fiscal stimulus of 2008 was passed there was $100 billion which at the time it seemed like a huge amount of money.

and the staff and the treasury were excellent selling the debt and funding the government worried about what they found $100 million over to play quickly and obviously they were able to end the treasury has continued to be staffed by experts and has done a wonderful job of funding the government. in this sense we have entered the market pressure that would make us and i think that long-run problems are still there with entitlements. one last thought as an illustration i think that medicare part d. which adds to the drug benefit in having pharmaceuticals made sense to practice medicine and changed substantially since the 60s. but the debate at the time was not to have part d. but the opponents to president bush thought that it wasn't generous enough. there was a doughnut hole. you ask yourself why does someone well-to-do get any benefit on till they went

through a couple thousand dollars of prescription? why do you even have the first dollar coverage for someone to someone that is quite well-to-do but that was the debate. it wasn't costly enough and the affordable care act made the drug benefits were costly and made it so rich people got first coverage anyway. other changes to make it more generous and costly so in some ways and went in it went in the opposite direction in terms of that. >> was the fat helpful or not helpful in the economic policy? >> i would say not helpful because i'm of the belief that starting at around 1995, 1997, monetary policies were too easy and we allowed the massive corporate credit boom in the 1990s and a massive rise in

the stock prices that are then pops and those were repeated in the 2004, 2005, 2006 period when the monetary policy was too easy and a lot of the home prices rise dramatically. so they were i think inappropriate monetary policy was a fundamental source of the sort of instability that we had in asset prices and it's probably one of the biggest sources of the debate in the community for the post financial crisis about whether or not monetary policy should be broader than just looking at the level of inflation and the goods and services is the mexicana fast-forward. -- [laughter] >> lets fast forward. it's not the bush administration

i think the fed policy should be right now the exiting of the policy that the prices are again high and that the economy is approaching and that the proper monetary policy would cost the economy into the full employment rather than try to run it below for employment for period which always had some recession. >> i'm just wondering internationally was there ever any influence or suggestions from the state department affecting economic policy.

you're always trying to get the best information you can on what's going on. so the undersecretary for economics has the information on how the economy was doing and whether there was a recession building or somewhere else in the world that was always something that was incorporated as information thinking about the future is kind of went in as a data point. i don't know that during my time it seemed pretty centric because we were in the recession and that was the dominance that seemed to be in the tenure that i was there it seemed to be happening domestically. >> i can add a little bit. al larson was one of the

secretaries mark mentioned was in the same position under president clinton and i forget what they call it, the foreign affairs officer, for an officer, that's it. and so he is superb and people listen to come as a that's one example. i do look at the trained policies are there for the state department was incredibly influential and rightly so. so for example, early in the administration there was a dispute between the u.s. and canada over softwood lumber which has been an ongoing trade dispute. and they were very involved in finding a solution along with the department upon earth and the undersecretary in charge of this in finding a resolution that works well for the industry and works well for them in the environmental concerns, so that was an instance in which the relationship really meant

something for our policy. >> i thought the meetings on the immigration policy at the state department staff were just up and came with a completely different perspective than the white house staff and it was important in terms of bringing in a different view and again whether they were listened to or not but i thought they were really important just because they were coming with a different perspective. >> what about the dynamic in the treasury department. because certainly, i would imagine it could very based on who the secretary of secretary of treasury is in relationship to the president come and of course they have a significant impact as well so when it came to formalizing the economic policy, how did that dynamic work between the white house and the council of economic advisers into the department asked

>> that is a great question. we had different experiences and when i was there, economic policy was anchored pretty firmly in the white house and when bill was there it was much more in the treasury department. and again a part of that is dependent on personalities and mr. paulson was a very strong personality. i think when i came in at the beginning of any presidency there is going to be a concentration in the white house just because you have a group that has been up and running for two years that has been doing policy and there's going to be some attenuation of that into that over time the other departments and agencies will grow. one of the rules about power that i think applies to almost everything in life is being physically close is important

and so it is an advantage to be sitting in the west wing with the president versus even if you are the treasury secretary in another building because you know it's easier for you to knock on the door of someone next to you then to summon someone with all of the formal proceedings that have been. so that is important. you can if you can see the president's schedule, you can almost see power based on who has the oval office time and who's in there. the nec's advantage come and this is all but it's important, the nec is one of the super committees along with the nsc, homeland security domestic policy councils will be only what that means is the chairman is president of the united states where the chairman of the cea is the chairman of the cea so that makes it the

decision-making forum for the policy decisions and the super committees get a regular amount of oval office time so pretty and easy we would have three economic briefings a week. at that time is when the power came from and we were attempting to run a process that is fair and inclusive as possible. important cabinet secretaries often get their own separate kinds so they might have their own separate time. but seeing who was in a meeting is really important. it's no secret that when i was there there was a -- it wasn't the closest relationship between my boss and the treasury secretary paul o'neill. secretary o'neill was coming from being the ceo of a company some time from the justice period for all going into the cabinet position in realizing

that they are no longer the top person, and sometimes equally there's a transition to cover academics who are used to throwing spears at each other to be in a way that seems normal to them that it doesn't seem normal to people that are in academics. [laughter] >> so apologies to academics. and so sometimes you take those two together and it cannot work. mainly at the deputies but also for fisher was and is a a good domestic and the exceptional and ten atoms has been the undersecretary for international coordinated everything worked very closely. it's also the case that there's

a personality role where you're supposed to run in on the process. today mr. president, you know come at the treasury and the post in the policy is to say why he was opposed to it or the labor secretary. but also to shift tasks and if you ask me for my own personal advice most people preferred the personal advice to so you'll see the nec power should sometimes when you have someone like larry

who is a third time in the white house harvard professor governor and all this stuff, we had a lot of capabilities and how to do things and former opinions and other times you will have the head have the head of the nec that is more process running. and that is what the emphasis will be rested on the agencies like the treasury and again it goes back to be in the job. >> did the vice president have a of a major role in economic policy? >> the vice president is first of all the public idea that he was running everything and the president and anyone that knows president bush personally, he kind of runs everything that he gets his hands around.

and he was the type that would ask one substantive question and he would be deferential to the people that like vice presidents they do have a separate channel and so sometimes they are influencing when other people are not around. >> are there any other questions from the audience? >> one concern i have is the bush personnel make the point of

the $1.3 trillion over ten years i think i can accept that about the federal revenue grows on an annual basis tremendously over $3 trillion a year and that seems like arguably the tax cuts increase what you be willing to defend that and then the other question that i would like to ask if it's not fair it not fair to say that the bush administration didn't urge the congress repeatedly. >> on the tax cuts to $1.3 trillion that i used was the official budget score before they were passed. so if you belief like i do that part of the 3.830% growth after they were passed was due to the marginal rate reduction than the cost estimate would be a lot lower and so larry lindsey did a book on the ronald reagan tax cuts and it had a 41% recovery

rate. so you know, that estimates for the dynamic scoring would be somewhere between ten to 40%. more academics or in ten that i think to me i look at the numbers and as you know the growth was higher so i use that as a just god is with the no growth assumption you would know what you would get. when i was there in 2001 we were holding meetings and we raised the capital standards and you could just see that the capital level was way too low. phil is the expert and he would know would no more widthwise. know more what it was. i don't render anything coming of it at the time. but it was something even before we got into the housing units we were concerned that they were about to have as much

lower-level compensation than they would ever have. >> of the administration took a run at the regulation twice a candidate and go anywhere but it increased the capital standard and the power so the companies had much more power than the regulators. then again in 2006 and 2007 it's one of those things that secretary paulson focus on early in his tenure and he had has really good relationships with the senate leader of the house chairman barney frank and others and really pushed hard on the deal for the deputy mayor of new york after his time in treasury. they worked on a lot of this. it didn't happen until june of 08 so the wall didn't get done until the crisis became an

unfortunate part of the policymaking. but i think that they tried really hard in the right direction. >> i just would like to thank all of you for coming today as the professor philip and of course the provost is always a good friend of mine for years. another point i would like to make, i thought they gave tremendous insight into how the economic policy was developed in the bush administration and the next conference in a few years will be on the obama administration and a really interesting to see how economic policy was formed and it varies from administration to administration. the other plate and i point and i don't mean to embarrass the panelists cannot remember their names. i guarantee you they will be big cards in future administrations because that's how it works.

they have had very central roles in the white house and federal reserve and so on and i think you will hear their names again and again and i think they are tremendous assets to the country and i feel good that people in this caliber are at the point of decision making at the policymaking. and it makes me feel good and sleep well at night. so thank you all for coming. [applause] quickly before the end of the discussion a statement jim wrote in his opinion piece in the "los angeles times." and you can certainly look up february 25. bush presidency is likely to be

the number for his lack of caution and three straight. in the midst of the discussion with his military advisers he made an observation. someone has to be risk adverse in this process and it better be you because i'm not. george w. bush wasn't risk adverse. he took gambles. sometimes they paid off but overall the country paid heavily for the risks he took. history isn't likely to revise that judgment. and the professor discusses and the book discusses the tax cut from iraq, counterterrorism policies, to short and analysis of the issues. we have a perspective there. the legacy has been defined. when i started this discussion i said i think that the legacy is still unfolding and if you were in the previous session, the professor product the tax cut at one of the achievements of the administration and i asked about that. some people say that these are not. we are actually detrimental to

the economy. the complexity of the connie and of questions about economic choices that it may be too simple. this is my infringement on what they said. i think that these are some of the issue is how we address that in single choices and consequences for other the consequences for other areas in american politics as we look at foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, political leadership and campaigning. and with those topics discussed with the again by turning over the floor to the professor. >> thank you everyone. it is a joy to be here. it's the most magnificent conference and i'm pleased.

thank you, doctor. on the wonderful panel ic and the audience as he says you have about 20 or 25 minutes before you lose everybody. tv shows, presidential speeches, whatever. so i'm going to be far less than that. so i hope to completely capture your attention in the ten or 12 minutes i have. she asked the panel to talk about the political ideologies of george bush in the way to reframe or rethink everything we've heard of in the last three days. grandma is going to talk to you about -- -- gram is going to

talk to you about whether he was a pragmatist and i love the way he and his papers he says it was just any political ideology. i want to offer a new framework on that because what i think is that in fact he does have a very clear ideology and his poetical ideology is framed within his own personal moral code. the political ideology of george w. bush is extremely conservative when you think of it in terms of pro-business, pro- government, political ideology. but that isn't committed to dick cheney is. "-end-quotes i've written extensively on both george bush and dick cheney and you will hear a little bit about this throughout my talk. what george bush was both a moral pragmatist. what he wanted to do was build a

simple and civil and a moral society and i take those words from his own constant references to building of the society and i quote the charge to keep which everybody i'm sure here knows about and i quote the role for the government is to build a single moral community. whenever president george w. bush had his own moral awakening in 1985 he had some long-term drinking problems. he actually quit cold turkey when he goes cold turkey he becomes a born-again christian. about is what frames his life and that is what became the presidency of george w. bush and what becomes the governorship in 1994 in the sense that the government should have a moral compass. he argues they welcome the people that are following a religious imperative.

he argued throughout both during his terms as governor and in the white house for the religious organizations to play the key role in partnership with the federal government. his religiosity drove who he was through his entire political career. he became so involved and this is important in religion, during this religious awakening. in 1988 and in 1992 his father was running for president and he's successful but he asked george w. had this religious conversion to reach out to these religious coalitions in support of george h. w. bush's candidacy. when karl rove becomes his political mentor in 1994 when he runs for governor, is that very sense i can reach out to these

religious conservatives to become the keystone of the bush governorship and then of course the bush presidency. so what then is the political ideology but questioned why is it very simply the government builds a moral society. always remember that it's who george bush is. how can the government use the compass of religion to build the society? he never advocated smaller government. too many times -- and i spent a lot of time with the people they wanted george bush to continue the mantra of smaller government they saw the federal government as a tool to build social programs that advanced a moral and civil society. i would suggest the ideology is stated in the charge to keep which he argued for the vision for the proper role of

government that it would expand the religious programs. his vision for the proper role of government was evident in his 1999 gubernatorial speech and this was telling about who george bush was. remember in 1999 he won a second term as the texas governor. standing on the promenade in austin to the capitol in austin bush called upon texas and i quote from the speech to become a moral and spiritual center for the nation. it repeatedly referred to god and i quote again we must swallow the armies of compassion his presidential address when he was inaugurated in 2001 was peppered with religious phrases. let me just give you one.

when we see that traveler on the road to jericho we will not pass to the other side of the road today he argues americans hold beliefs beyond ourselves. we believe in god. for building a mortal and a civil society was his political ideology. while dick cheney of course focused on the pro-business agenda bush focused on the faith-based agenda. in other words the presidency of bush and cheney is a wonderful division of labor that allowed george w. bush to pursue compassionate conservatism at a moral compass of government coming into dick cheney to focus on the pro-business agenda. bush only had really three domestic agendas as everyone knows, tax cuts, immigration reform, standardized learning. he didn't support the

pro-business agenda committee and tight regulatory agenda that cheney eventually moved forward in the administration. he reluctantly accepted it. it was a political necessity and he was after all somewhat of a conservative, but it was the moral compass that he wanted to pursue. bush's relationship with god guided his faith-based presidency. i bet you didn't know he held a prayer meetings in the white house most mornings. i bet you didn't know that every cabinet meeting held for eight years began with a prayer. and every cabinet officer was told when they came to the cabinet meeting each one was given a day they had to have a prayer to begin the cabinet meeting. for bush or the world was seen through the lens of good and evil, right and wrong focused within evangelical theology. his world was built around the state. i think you may remember -- i

see some older faces in the audience. i don't know if the students remember this, but in the 2,000 iowa presidential debate with other republican primary debate, the moderator in iowa asked the various people on the stage who is your favorite philosopher? george bush answered jesus christ. but the faith-based presidency -- and i want to mention that quickly because i want to talk about halfway through after they got the faith-based program but they were spending $2.1 billion a year in faith-based programs including programs in prisons that ensured that if you talk to jesus he would be cured. as david friendly education and i could go on and on and on. nothing facilitated cheney's dramatic rise to power more than

the role god played in george w. bush's life because for george bush, building a moral and civil society about dick cheney to focus on everything else. he was in charge of hiring everybody in the administration. so the pro-business agenda, george w. bush, was enabled by dick cheney. then came 9/11. while the faith-based presidency was never abandoned, it was overtaken by the war presidency. and this is important because what happens now is actually very interesting. the presidency became the center of the faith-based presidency. right versus wrong. for george bush, winning the war on terror would be done with religious fervor. if you remember, and i think some of the panelists talked about this on the panel, why

after 9/11 happened what does george bush do blacks see a media that has a religious service at the national cathedral and then he declares a national day of prayer. relating from osama bin laden to evil became the focus of the faith-based core. the biblical term at evil doer comes from the book as many of you may know the book of solemn. bush declared god is not neutral and supports the righteous and he identifies the righteous in the war that god said was the united states. he suggested the blessings of liberty a phrase he often used to describe the war in iraq were all part of god's plan. and again you may remember the speech in which he talked about the axis to hatred. another speech in the office came in and he changed those words from acts of hatred to

actions at evil because evil doers is a biblical term and at what george bush wanted to do is frame the war on terror and a biblical sense to ensure that we were right. theology became a large part of not only everything george bush did, but it focused the war in iraq. we can say this and i could go on for years but the number you have to separate george bush was into dick cheney and donald rumsfeld and paul wolfowitz coming have to separate the war in iraq from who george w. bush was. bush called for a free iraq to protect freedom of religion. the christian conservative theology and influence everything about this war. u.s. soldiers painted a mural in baghdad that says, and i quote, thank god for the coalition

forces and freedom fighters at home and abroad. on the entrance to the palace soon after we took down baghdad u.s. soldiers had a huge sign that said bible studies wednesday at 7 p.m.. the military was being transformed from a secular military into a faith-based military in line with bush's presidency. >> so, going back to the original question, what was the political ideology of george w. bush. the answer is simple. george w. bush was actually a fiscal conservative. who welcomed the contribution of his president dick cheney to molding his administration into a strong pro-business administration. without cheney's vision for how to control the federal

bureaucracy coming to shape the bureaucracy with the right personnel bush would have been far less successful shifting the governmental priorities to the right. but i should also note that bush never articulated a strong and tight regulatory often very pro-business position that became the hallmark of his presidency. that was all cheney. so when we assess the political ideology of george w. bush, who's not conservative, not really, not in ronald reagan's great where you want smaller government government can no come he actually argued for small government nothing george bush did argued for smaller government in fact the federal budget increased more in the george w. bush than any other president in history. and bush wasn't a neoconservative. there were a lot of neoconservatives in his administration that he was not one of them.

the only real connection george bush had with ronald reagan was on taxation. bush championed tax reductions. he got them. bush had no problem with an activist government that worked with faith-based groups to build a moral and civil society. it was cheney that wanted to cut the programs that reduce bigotry oversight. what was the political ideology is exactly what you saw. a man that sought to improve citizens lives using the compass of his born-again christianity combined with the resources of the federal government. his outlook on life is most visible to the painting in the oval office a charge to keep and you heard me mention that before. he named his book of course after the painting. whose message he be needed was to serve god. that was the message he wanted to bring to the presidency and that was his political ideology.

he had a charge to keep. he says faith changes lives, and i know because it's changed mine. he wanted to do the values of his faith to change lives as president. his political ideology was simple and straightforward. government can and provides especially if faith-based values are woven into the governmental action. it does this lesson the definition of bush as a conservative? probably. conservatives want to reduce government programs. certainly he had only a limited relationship to the ronald reagan revolution. he accepted a small government with regular programs but not with regards to social services. he expanded social service programming and infused many with christian values.

it was cheney's p. with fewer regulations and mandates that start his alliance with conservatives. in in the summary, he was a hybrid conservative whose personal value structure governs his faith-based presidency. with that i will sit down and let martha talk. [applause] good afternoon. it's been an. did he do things correctly, did he not come and when you look at the presidential transition that

was inexorable transition only 37 days to do it and they had a very well organized so that when they came into office, he had his agenda down. the first week they discuss education, the second week they discuss faith-based, then they went into strengthening the military. then weeks after that, budget cuts and tax reform. so they are able to stick to their agenda and not spend time discussing the election but rather getting right into their agenda and that is what a good transition is. and a good transition now i think was important for all of us in the quality they have their hand over power.

the incoming president comes to the white house at about ten times the authority and they have coffee with the upcoming president and vice president and the incoming vice president comes in as well. what they were having but they were having in the situation room there was a meeting where all of the intelligence committee top intelligence and the national security people were convened for the incoming and the outgoing department has to discuss the inauguration. in the last few days before the inauguration, a threat came up and it was from a -- out

al-shabab into the habit at the same time that the two presidents were about to go up to the hill. and then a fight of all of the work that they have done leading up to that kind of inauguration was that the incoming head of the outgoing secretary knew one another and they met during the crisis training and exercising in mid-january when they went through for the day how things would work in a crisis. and so they have talked to one another and felt comfortable with one another. which was important when here they are discussing something that is going to be crucial in how it should be handled. and in their discussions/the alternatives were, steve hadley

was the national security adviser for president bush says that in that meeting hillary clinton asked about the question that she had experience as a candidate and she said with the specter of the secret service coming in the polling president obama off of the podium so she said how should that be done and she said i don't think so. the optics of that would have been terrible for us is the message that it would have sent. ultimately, the thread fizzled but it was there in an important way for several days. but i think it shows the importance that the kind of work you do during the transition

has. looking at the transition would work these elements of success and the first one president bush himself got involved with the early says that in late 2007 he talked to his chief of staff and told him that with two wars they had to have a good transition and he wanted it to be the best transition ever so he deputized him to run the operation and come to him with issues that he thought needed his judgment. but he also reserves some things to himself that he wanted to do. he decided that there were three issues he didn't want the staff to transition with the president elect obama.

he wanted to do that himself and he wanted to tell him how important they were for he thought the whole battle in the war of terror, the war on terrorism and so he decided to dig himself would send that message. so the three issues were the grounds in pakistan and what the status was of our operation of programs that we had in iran which could have been the stocks that project where we were through the computer attacking the centrifuges. ..

>> what the, how the issue stood oe programs with the country when they came in, what they had done during their, during their time in office, what had happened on the issues and what the us was at the end. -- the status was at the end. so there were four things. and so they had a template for their 40 issues, and those were

passed around not just the national security council staff -- and steve hadley said that everybody in the staff, ultimately, was involved in them -- but they were passed around in, throughout government the intelligence community, defense and foreign policy. and so they had those ready when they came in as well as not quite as well developed in the sense of sending it around government contingency plans that dealt with i think there was 17 of the contingency plans in josh bolton's case, he too began early -- or late in 2007. and so he wanted to do was something that had not happened before. president truman actually had wanted to do the same thing, but eisenhower wouldn't go along with it. what he wanted, bolton wanted,

was to bring representatives -- not the candidates themselves, but bring in representatives of the candidates -- to discuss issues that he thought were going to be important and ones that, if they could solve the issue early on, the person would indeed be able to hit the ground running. and so one of the issues was presidential appointments. he thought presidential appointments, they needed to know how important they were and to get started early. and to do that, they took a very relaxed view of the, old legislation that would allow -- of legislation that would allow for early national security checks and wait before they came into office. and they wanted them to be ready for the transition itself. and so bolton told, you know,

the reps of both candidates that what they would do is however many names they wanted to send up they could do, and they wouldn't be involved in it. they would send it right to the fbi for the fbi to do background checks. and they never went through the white house. and that was important so that the candidates didn't think that there were going to be leaks. and there were no leaks. and the obama people took advantage of it and put in the names of 150-200 people, to son -- at the time that president obama was elected, then they had their operation ready. and so when he had his first national security briefing as a president-elect and rahm emanuel was there with him. and the reason he was was

because they had, he had already done his background check. so they did their appointments early, got ahead there. and then another aspect of it was they knew that they were going to be a lot of -- the white house knew there were going to be, based on their experience, a lot of people who were going to send in resumés to be considered for appointments. and they thought that the software they had was not, was not capable of handling the pressure that possibly was going to be put on the incoming president. so what they did was bringing in the representatives. and these people came in in the end of june and early july; will ball for mccain, chris lou for obama. and they worked on a software package, what did they want in the software package.

and bolton told them that the white house would pay for it. if they could agree on what they wanted, they would pay. and so they did. then the memorandum of understanding which is so important to the beginning of an administration, because you can't send in people to do reviews of the agencies' programs and people, so what you need is you need a memorandum of understanding that sets out what the rules are between the white house and the incoming team. and they came up with one. both sides agreed on it with the white house, and that was signed the saturday after the election. they also had clay johnson working as a deputy for managementing at office of -- management at office of management and budget.

he handled the executive branch departments and agencies, what information they would collect and how they would do it. he brought together the president's management council, and then in july sent out a memorandum telling all the departments and agencies what they were to collect and how were they to do it. but none of this would have made any difference if the obama people had not used it. but they did use it, and it was very important to them. so my timer has gone off. [laughter] so i will leave it with that. it was very useful for the obama people, and i think useful for bush's legging city as well. legacy as well. [applause]

>> okay, well, thanks very much. i very much enjoyed being a part of the conference here, and i'm pleased to be able to talk to you about some of my research. so in the paper that i submitted for the conference, i've tried to come to terms with the political ideology of george w. bush, both how best to characterize it and what sense to make of its broader impact and, indeed, its legacy. i think this is an important question, a central, fundamental question, but like much else about mr. bush's eight years, a controversial question. in other words, was he a hard-right conservative, a traditional doctrinaire, orthodox conservative, a compassionate conservative, a neoconservative, a paleo-conservative, a pragmatic conservative, an inauthentic conservative or even a closet moderate? who knows.

but i think it's important to try to figure this out. mr. be bush himself said i don't do nuance, and these are nuanced questions, but they're important questions. so i try to, i take a stab at trying to figure it out. now, i don't sort of try to reinvent the wheel here; rather, i take it that the best path is perhaps to survey the scholarly landscape to see what others have had to say about this, and that's essentially what i do in the aper. i categorize these views in my own inimitable fashion, i seek to render them as comprehensible as possible. and while i do weigh in in terms of what i perceive to be the pros and cons, at the end of the day i think some are better than others, but i think that on balance some version of political scientists' well known gives us the most be information.

that's where i'm going. let me walk you through some of the ways i've tried to see how others have made sense of bush's ideology. so this is sort of a subfield in political science, as you may know. a lot of political scientists devote their careers to the issue of political ideology. i don't, but i review of what they've done, and one of the most popular accounts is rosenthal's nominating scores, well known to scholars and others. but on this account, bush comes out as the single most conservative president by far. so i think that's a good place to start. i take it as a starting point. i don't think it's unproblematic. i think it does have some issues. i think it, perhaps, conflates self-serving or strategic political pronouncements with what might be in the candidate's, the president's heart of hearts, within his mind. but it's highly regarded in my field, and i do take it as a good place to start. i look at some other similar ones, the database on ideology,

money in politics and elections, d.i.m.e., great acronym, in which bush emerges as more conservative than his father but slightly less conservative than ronald reagan. i looked at the online on the issues scheme of ranking presidents and others, and here b again bush emerges as a conservative, a more centrist conservative than the relatively populist reagan, for what that is worth. and i also try to see how one could balance these different accounts. nate silver of 538 did this a few months back in the course of trying to figure out where to place jeb bush. so averaging these three accounts in a very interesting way, i think. here again bush does emerge as a true doctrinaire conservative. so i think this is a good place to start but only a place to start. bush said he would not be defined by others, he would define himself, and i take him at his word.

and i start with his de facto 1999 campaign text, a charge to keep in which he explains why he self-identifies as a conservative. and this is also, i think, the fist place where he really -- the first place where he really gives an account of what compassionate conservativism is about. you could say this is self-serving, this is a campaign text, it's not a piece of political philosophy. fair enough, but i think it's a good place to start. i also consider other aspects of bush's 2000 campaign be, his repeated invocations of his background in the entrepreneurial heaven that is west texas in contra distinction to the more moderate connecticut bushes with all the political culture that that compares and entails. his promise to enshrine a culture of life and ownership society. professor warshaw has talked about his overt religiousity in this 2000 campaign debate, the gop primary he says his favorite philosopher is christ.

he's criticized by his opponent, john mccain, for pandering to the religious right. but we all know who won the south carolina primary, and the rest is history. i also look at bush's concern with the gop base be which is something that comes out in his post-presidency writing. apparently lessons learned from dad, don't anger the base. there's this well known joke -- it's not serious, it is a joke, but bush made a joke at an $800-a-plate dinner in new york, this is an impressive crowd, the haves and the have mores. some people call you elite, i call you my base. he's joking around, but there's an element of truth in there perhaps. i look beyond bush's words to his deeds. his appointments, for example, that of john ashcroft as attorney general which placated pat robertson and other members of the religious right. his two supreme court justices, 42 judges on courts of i peel,

148 -- appeal, 148 circuit court judges and i look at his policy. there's no better indication of what you think than what you do, and bush's policies are very telling. the white house office of faith-based community initiatives, demanding regulatory review standards, two rounds of tax cuts, the second of which he evidently initially resisted himself but was later brought around, controversial environmental policies and regulations. most of that, i think, fits pretty squarely with conservativism, right? there's no -- not too much wiggle room there. but other aspects of his policy agenda and record do not squarely fit with doctrinaire conservativism. i'm not the first to notice these. others have commented on it. but these include things like no child left behind, certainly. also his immigration reform proposals, controversial then and especially today. the 2003 pepfar aids program, others have talked about that at this conference.

certainly, the t.a.r.p. program of '08 in which bush explicitly said he was doing what he thought had to be done and perhaps also medicare expansion. now, i think in total these constitute a number of outliers. this is sort of in social science terms deviations from the mean, bits that can't be explained by bush as a doctrinaire conservative. so i think this is a red flag for those who would adopt the facile label of bush as a doctrinaire conservative. i quickly review what other politicians, pundits and journalists have had to say about mr. bush, of course, his democratic opponents tended to see him as a hard-right extremist. some of his republican officials from time to time agreed, senator jim jeffords of vermont and others. and in terms of pundits, "the new york times" originally said bush was a reagan-lite, a reagan

poser but later became convinced that mr. bush was the reagan real deal. and i review what conservative media have had to say about the president. frankly, a lot of conservative journals that are not often among my own media diet. but bush came in for a lot of conservative criticism, an awful lot. places like cato, the weekly standard, mesh conservative, "forbes" -- american conservative, "forbes." professor christopher hickman spoke about in this earlier in a great paper that i would recommend, but the volume and tone directed at mr. bush from the right i think is surprising and something to consider. some of those complaints might be dismissed as not being representative, as being narrow or idiosyncratic. i think in the later parts of mr. bush's second term some could say, look, these are conservative rats fleeing the sinking ship or trying to prevent the good name of conservativism from going down on the bush titanic. so there's something to that, but still on balance i don't think you can dismiss them out of hand.

i think they constitute another red flag towards the facile labeling of bush as a doctrinaire conservative. so is there some way of making sense of all of this? of coming up with an account that would explain the pieces that seem to fit the dominant conservative labeling, some of the pieces that don't fit, some of the conservative creatism, and i think there -- criticism, and i think there might be. i end up endorsing the account of -- articulated first on the eve of the clinton presidency and the politics presidents make in which he describes these four recurring contexts of presidential leadership such that you can study presidents across the ages who end up in remarkably similar situations. and in that tie polling, he discussions bush would be labeled an orthodox innovator. the idea that bush is elected, affiliated with the dominant conservative norms that have been more or less in place since 1980, bill clinton notwithstanding, but the idea is

that it's grown old, a little stale, so it's bush's job to innovate within that orthodoxy, to extent tend -- extend the shelf life and the reach. and by some accounts, to entrench it further electorally, to expand beyond what it had already achieved and to try to get new members of the to electorate into the republican column for ages to come. i think there's an awful lot to this, i really do. it's complicated, it's complex, it uses bizarre terminology. but i think once you can get past all that, it really does confer remarkable intellectual leverage on a very complicated question. i think it explains bush's place in history, it explains the pieces that don't fit. this is bush trying to reach out beyond what had been done to bring in new pieces to the republican conservative fold. i help that does explain a lot of these pieces that don't fit. it also, i think, helps to explain some of mr. bush's manifold political problems. orthodox innovators tend to be

perceived as arrogant and overreaching. they tend to run up against the increasingly thick institutional milieu of politics. it's harder and harder to make the tweaks, the innovations because government becomes a thing of itself, it is hard to change. and then there's this idea that for orthodox innovators they are especially susceptible to the vagaries of events, right? the famous quote from prime minister harold mcmillan when asked what might alter the well-laid plans of a policymaker. events, my dear boy, events. people many this are -- in this are especially vulnerable to events, and i think it's fair to say there were events that would disrupt a dominant narrative that was carefully cultivated and put in place. so, again, i think that that account is the best way to make sense of mr. bush's ideology. i would caution, though, that there are two potential wrinkles to this.

one is that, you know, other academics have written about this account and sought to become orthodox innovators of his orthodox innovateor tie polling, if you will, and there are several that say, look, it does good -- orthodox keyism is in retreat, so that his place in political context of his troubled presidency in the last couple years. i think there's a hot to that. i think -- a lott to that. i think it seemed plausible to say the conservative era was over, conservativism was in retreat, we were on the edge of a new obama january era. i think past 2010 it's hard to make that argument, i really do. i'm intrigued by this orthodox innovator, but in 2015 it

doesn't seem plausible to me. it explains the pieces that don't fit on the conservative republican label. there is an alternative possibility. a number of people mentioned this in bush's presidency. i think that the best articulation comes from the journalist cokie roberts who said the president is copying his strategy right out of bill clinton's political playbook. when in doubt, steal your opponent's best ideas. clinton filched welfare reform and a balanced budget from the gop, bush robbed education reform and prescription drugs from the democrats. now, you've probably heard something like that before, but the idea there is that -- rather, bush was not being so much a good innovator of conservative orthodoxy, he was being an overly flexible opportunist. i don't think it's altogether a fair one, but i think it's worth

considering were these pieces that don't fit in the service of expanding conservativism or bits of machiavellian strategy and convenience? i think this, as many things, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. so, look, in conclusion, beyond the suggestion that that's perhaps the best way to make sense of mr. bush, there's the broader question of not just how to characterize it, but what its legacy is, the legacy of george w. bush's political ideology. and, you know, the record since the presidency, i think, is muddy. as has been remarked before, he did not have a prominent role in the '08 of '12 gop convexes. i would -- conventions. i would suggest the rise of the tea party muddies the water. i'll close with a vignette here. at the beginning of the last hofstra conference on bill clinton ten years ago, i was sitting here between -- behind two older gentlemen, and we were

sort of reviewing the program and not paying much attention to what the person on stage was saying. but then the person on stage said it's too early. five years out it was too early to say what his place in history would be. and the couple of guys in front of me got all too enthusiastic and said, that's right. and i was struck by that, but i thought at the time, gee, five years out, that's not too short a time. we can surely say something about clinton. in ten years' hindsight, i think i was wrong, i think they were right. i think it's too early now to say what the legacy will be, and that's because the context is not just figuring out what happened before bush, it's what happens after. and, i mean, this point is itself a facile one. but, look, if we're on the verge of eight years of jeb bush, necessarily that will color the way we perceive josh bush's id lodge -- george bush's ideological legacy. if, on the other hand, we're talking eight years of hillary

followed by eight years of chelsea, that will change things. [laughter] i find myself in perfect agreement with george bush in his first year of office. he reflected, there's a legacy, but i will never see it. and he said you're never going to know what your legacy's going to be like until long after you're gone. thank you. [applause] >> those are three wonderful papers, and i think most of us are probably sitting here recalling a line -- the communist revolution who when asked what the long-term consequences were replied in the 1970s, it's too soon to tell. but before i begin discussing and posing some questions to our panelists, i do want to take a moment to discuss this conference in general, because it's been a truly fascinating conference. certainly, no easy thing to put together something which is so recent as graham mentioned and

something which brings up so many issues and so many contentious debates that for many people are, in effect, sensitive nerves that are reanimated, retouched and that brick up difficult feelings -- bring up difficult feelings and bitterness of debates. but as a student myself of the presidency, i come to frit the point of view of -- from the point of view of u.s. foreign policy and, therefore, i look at diplomacy writ large. and when you think back on the difficult -- or think right now of the difficult diplomatic negotiations ongoing in the world today, of course, you have ongoing discussions with north korea, and you have, of course, very, very complex negotiations with iran over their nuclear program, this makes me want to thank anew professor bose, because those are nothing compared to the complex negotiations between a presidential administration and a university faculty. [laughter] so thank you for putting this all together. >> it's all politics. >> it is. it truly is.

so i'm going to ask a variety of questions about the historical legacy and the long-term consequences of the bush administration of our panelists before opening up to discussion. but since so much of their focus was, of course, on ideology, i want to begin with this question which was raised in some of the previous panels, and that is that all of you discuss both the beginning and the end points of the bush administration and focusing in large part upon his great statement of his ideology and the charge to keep from 1999. i was wondering if you could say some more about evolution of bush's thinking. is the ideological thinking of the president the same in 2008 as it was in 2001 when he took office? >> when george bush took office in 2001, as we said earlier, a very limited agenda; immigration reform, tax cuts, no child left behind and the faith-based presidency. 9/11 changed everything, in

essence, many of those programs as you though, essentially no child left behind was done, immigration reform, social security reform, none of those got done. graham talked about medicare reform, for instance, and what was the other thing you talked about? medicare and what else? >> the pieces that don't fit. >> pepfar. >> yeah. but particularly the medicare part d reform. these are actually have nothing to do with conservative ideology, they have completely to do with his use of federal resources to build a moral and civil society. they are essential to who george w. bush was. you can't confuse the political ideology of smaller government and a pro-business,less regulatory affairs with who george bush was. 9/11 changed everything. he became war president. dick cheney, essentially, took over the presidency. all -- many of the programs that have been thought of, social security reform, immigration reform, they did get tax cuts

through, were reduced. at the beginning of the second term, as you all know, george bush nearly lost the 2004 election because americans did not support that war. when he won, he realized he needed to refrain some things. one of the things he needed to refrain was his reliance on a department of defense led by don rumsfeld and paul wolfowitz. he did that, eventually forced rumsfeld and wolfowitz out. cheney ends up with a significantly lesser role in the second term x. what you see is a new george bush. and we talked about, graham talked about the bailout, the t.a.r.p. ballout of 2008. that's who george bush was. what you see is george bush saying, yes, the federal government can do good things the same way we said about that with medicare reform and immigration reform, social security reform to a lesser extent. but the t.a.r.p. bailout is saying we can use the resources of the federal government to benefit people in need, whoever

that was. turned out to be a lot of corporations. but it was for good. it was not scaling back government, it was not seeking legislation to cut programs. that's not who george bush was. so what you see in the second part, the second term of the bush administration was, actually, a george bush who gained control of his own presidency. by 2005, really in 2006 he was a far different president than he was in 2001, and i think he would say that. >> yeah, you know, i construct this conference by what i see as an emerging theme especially from people who worked in administration of trying to make this claim of a distinction across george bush's eight years. and, you know, people have pointed to, what is it, is it after katrina, is it the 2004 election, is it, you know, the war in iraq? it's unclear exactly what causes this change, but it's been

remarkable, at least to my perception, how many people have described only sort of change across the eight years of bush's presidency as if he were, well, as obama would say, he's evolving, right? his views were evolving and changing. and i think that's striking. i mean, if i were of a conspiratorial slant of mind, i would say, gee, there were talking points among the old bushees here about we've got to make the point of the difference in the second term. it's really remarkable how many people have said that. and it is of a peace with perhaps as his record as texas governor. someone who could reach across the aisle to make deals in a bipartisan fashion. the critics said, well, texas democrats are a pretty conservative lot. you don't have to reach too far across that aisle, but i do perceive a change certainly from his time as governor through to the end of his presidency. and, yeah, the t.a.r.p. bailout's probably the best -- >> change. >> -- end point. yeah, the exclamation mark.

because he devoutly said in his autobiography, look, i had to set aside ideology. i could adhere to the principles i'd had my whole life, but then this system would collapse. which, i think, makes a number of pointings. it sort of suggests that he had a streak of pragmatism that his critics would be reluctant to concede was there. it might also say something about the limits of conservativism as a governing ideology. >> right. >> so i'll leave that out this too. >> i think also if you look at from beginning to end, he was interested in management when you're looking at both parts of the transition. and at the end we hi of just -- we think of just having one president at a time. but they were very careful to involve the obama people because they had run out of juice, out of political juice. and so if they wanted to have an extension of t.a.r.p. and if

they wanted to do a bailout, they were going to have to do it. but bush was willing to help as far as he could. so on sunday after thanksgiving, there was a meeting at the treasure -- treasury department between the obama team, their financial team. and in that meeting they discussed the auto bailout. and what bolton and the others brought to it was that they would be willing to name a auto czar if they, if they could go along with it, but they assumed they would take anybody that they wanted, that the obama people wanted to name so that they could get started on the auto bailout early. this was not something in the end that the obama people wanted

to do. i think looking back at the roosevelt -- hoover to roosevelt transition, roosevelt didn't want to get get involved in hoover's actions, and they decided against it because it would become their problem as well. but the bush people were willing to make the effort. >> if i can just follow up on, actually, that point i think martha illustrates well. i think it seems to me implicit in your paper, your book and what you said today was this was a very organized -- bush's management style for the transition 2008-2009 was indicative of his management style in his presidency can and that that is consequential for his legacy. i think that's what i took from part of what you were saying. and for shirley ann and graham, i think the two of you disagree on bush's political ideology.

was he an of the docks conservative, was he a hybrid conservative, but you're both saying rather than looking at his policies, we have to understand his ideology, and then over time as how you view that ideology will shape how you view his legacy, right? how consistent -- would that be about fair? >> okay. >> a different approach from what we've been doing, i think, in our individual panels. yes, go ahead. >> well, let's focus in on the keyword that you brought up, i think, which is the question of legacy. and that is, only, it's not too soon to tell because we're here. so what do you perceive to be bush's long-term legacy? let me just set the context here for everyone. as you know, president bush left office with a remarkably low approval rating. and during that time there was a lot of dug of the revived -- discussion of the revived historical legacy of another man who left with a remarkably low approval rating and that's harry truman who left, of course,

quite unpopular and subsequently was thought of as perhaps one of the greatest presidents, largely to revision and largely due to david mccullough. consequently, there was some discussion within bush circles that, well, long-term history will prove us out. look at truman as an example. and i'm curious what the panel thinks of not only the thought that bush's lek city will e -- legacy will evolve over time, but what do you think, ultimately, it will land upon? >> i think that bush's legacy will evolve. i think that -- what did he leave at, 19% approval rating? it's gone up now a little bit. that what -- time heals all wounds, to some extent. and the bush legacy really is the war in iraq. so the question is, and i don't see that changing right now, has the war in iraq, have we as a society moved past the war in

iraq. and i don't think we have. and i think the bush legacy, as much as i talk about the faith-based initiatives and we talk about some of the other things that happened in the bush administration, george w. bush, the only thing that people remember about george w. bush is the war in iraq. so if that, if the middle east and the crises in the middle east remain tied to american actions in 2001 and 2002 and the years further, i don't think that the george bush legacy will be rehabilitated. because that's who george w. bush is, the war in iraq. >> yeah. this is, obviously, the big question. i guess i'd make three points here. a big part of george w. bush be's legacy is barack obama. had bush's presidency not ended

so terribly, i don't think the united states would have ever have elected a black liberal as president. so really i think obama has bush to thank for his job. >> do you think they would have elected mccain? >> not sure. second point i'd make more narrowly the. -- [laughter] i think after vietnam the gop really owned the issue of national security. certainly from the '80s onward. i think bush changed that, and that issue no longer helps the gop. and that's a big issue. whenever national security is prominent, that no longer feeds into the gop's electoral prospects necessarily. and then, look, at the end of the day the last point i would make is for mr. bush there's nowhere to go but up, so necessarily his standing will increase as the years go by. it couldn't get much worse, could it? >> good point. >> i think it's been going up. and the middle east is just such

a volatile area, and in part it will depend, his legacy will depend in ways of how do people see what's happening in the middle east as a direct result of actions that we took. but i think that people remember george bush as september 11th and how he handled that and the response in afghanistan. so i think that is going to be a big part of it. but for my piece of this puzzle on legacy, his legacy is on transition. hopefully, it's going to be a standard that he set more how you leave office. the kind of information you gather, how long it takes to do it, how broad you cast the net to gather the information and the way that you work with the incoming team.

because not only does it help the incoming team, but it helps the outgoing president as well because of the goodwill it builds, but also the materials that he gathered like the 40 memoranda that hadley produced. those become documents about the administration and what they did and how they saw things as working through their time. so i think a good legacy, a good transition out benefits everybody. >> you know, if i could make an observation about your responses, that one of the fascinating things i think about legacy is and why we think of bush as so contentious six years, seven years of after his presidency, i think it's because in large part the answers one gives to the questions of what is bush's long-term legacy are interpreted or coded good or bad

depending on where you are, but the answer doesn't change. so, for example, professor, you mentioned that bush's long-term legacy is the iraq war. and by extension, i think we could say it's the iraq war and the fight against global terror. >> i didn't say that. >> okay. let me -- my apologies. [laughter] you ruined my point though. >> but it's an important distinction. >> well, okay. so even -- the point which i would make is that bush's war on iraq is interpreted in different parts of country as part of the war on terror to a different, to different degrees. so if one were to be in, let's say, i don't know, new york city and one were to talk about the war in iraq, people immediately say largely that was a mistake. in other places in the country, people look at the war in iraq and say it may have not been run particularly well, but it was done for the right reasons. and i think it's fascinating to

me that we can look at 9/11 or look at so many of the other issues and say that the reason people give for liking this president are the same reason people give for disliking this president. but it's the same reason. if you have no comment, i'll accept that you believe what i said. [laughter] i think it's also important to note that this question depends on where you are in the world. if we go to africa and ask what bush's legacy is, he's an extremely popular president for what he did for pepfar and cervical cancer and aids. it's remarkable how presidents can have different legacies not only throughout the country, but throughout the world as well. and, again, i think that's something that will change. if i could ask one more question because one of the names that has come up numerous times in this conference and the panels i attended was not george w. bush, but jeb bush and the legacy or looming prospect of another bush presidency. and to that effect, one of the

things i've been surprised by is how little we've heard of george h.w. bush. >> good point. >> his is not a name that has come up frequently. i was wondering since you're all experts on ideology, if you could give us your sense of where george w. bush fits within his ideology vis-a-vis his father, vis-a-vis his brother, and then can we say anything about a bush ideology writ large? >> that's a good question. >> well, you didn't like the last one, so -- [laughter] >> i thought the last one was good. >> that's a great question. george h.w. bush, i thought, was one of most qualified people we've had for the president given his tremendous background in government. i mean, one of the problems with being president is there's no training ground. being in the senate, somewhat of a training ground. i actually think being governor of a major state, which is one of the strengths of ronald reagan, was a huge benefit

because they deal with legislatures. california had a strong executive. i think one of the panels this morning howard dean was talking about george w. bush was in a state which, essentially, the governor had zero power. lieutenant governor, actually, has more power. so he didn't really have the strength of running for government -- for president. what makes george h.w. bush -- let me take that back. george h.w. bush was, as you remember, he runs in 1979 against ronald reagan in the primaries, and it's a very bitter primary because he's really the moderate republican. george -- ronald reagan is far, not far, but to the right of george h.w. bush. there's no sense that george h.w. bush is ever really a deep conservative. he's a business person who has business interests.

remember, his father was a very moderate republican senator from connecticut. connecticut is not known for their deep conservative political roots. certainly, they have republican conservatives, but george h.w. bush was never really a conservative republican. but he did have some in his administration as we later saw, particularly a fella named dick chain who becomes his secretary of -- cheney who becomes his secretary of defense. george w. bush, as i've said, really a hybrid. his political ideology is so deeply invested in his personal born-again christianity, and he caroled, interestingly enough, some of his dad's moderate republican roots, but he lived in texas. and when you live in texas, and what karl rove did in 1994, he moved him to the right of who he

had been before that. jeb bush is an interesting guy. jeb bush is, i would say, had been the most moderate of the three of them. he's married, of course, his wife is hispanic. it makes a big difference in who you are in understanding diverse cultures and understanding whether it be prejudice. he lived in a very different world than either his father or his brother. he has, however, moved to the right to capture, as we've talked about, you know, you move to the right to capture iowa, new hampshire, south carolina. whether he can find his own political ideology, i'm not sure i know what jeb bush's political ideology is. in the same way he didn't know what george w. bush's political iewdology was. clearly he's more moderate than some of the other candidates running, but can we find, i think, our question was can we find a thread between them? i would say that theyúxñ?ñ?ñ?

>> i think he thought of the press as a group that he needed to deal with and have a good relationship with, and he often thought of those in personal terms. you think of his relationship with -- [inaudible] of "time" magazine that was a very close one. in fact, at the memorial service, bush delivered a eulogy which he couldn't finish because he was crying. and so his sister read the rest of it. and he used to encourage reporters when they came to

kenney bunk port in the summer o bring their families. george w. did that, but not in the same way because he was more distant from them in crawford. but i think so h.w. bush thinking of the press as a group he needed to satisfy, he would say to his press secretary, well, what are they saying? is the pressure building? because he understood that the pressure builds in that briefing room, and it's hard on a press secretary. and so when it built too high, he would say let's do a press conference. when george w. bush came in, he wanted to make news on his terms, and he only had a press conference, dealt with the press when you had something that you wanted to say.

>> we're not having our presenters forced off the stage, but let's give her a big hand. [laughter] [applause] i know we've run out of time, and i did want to take a couple of audience questions. if we could do go for maybe ten minutes, is that okay? >> i'm fine. >> graham, did you want to respond? >> just a couple quick points. one of the ways in which a lot of people try to make sense of george w. bush is read his psychology as sort of hard-wired with the directive don't do what dad did. and you can see this in terms of his writing in his book about his father. he learned the lesson of don't alienate the race, or else pat buchanan will say see you in a primary campaign. don't be overly deliberative, rather be decisive. and talk about how you're fromgm

. >> george w. was not his favorite son. george w. was his oldest son, never viewed as the politician in the family. jeb was the politician x they both ran for governor at the same time. obviously, if jeb would have won, he'd have a tougher opponent, george w. may not have ended up being the president. george w., i think, examined very closely the failure of his father. his father got 37% of the vote and had the most, largest defection among republicans of any president other than william howard taft in 1904 when teddy roosevelt ran against him. so i think to a certain extent

he wasn't his father's favorite political son. he loved his father dearly. i don't think he saw his father as the governing model, and i think he thought that ronald reagan, basically, had been sort of dismissed by his father as not being as significant as he may be. i think he saw reagan as kind of a model. and i think to a certain extent the george h.w./george w. bush relationship developed over time. but i think that karl rove and george w. himself realized that to be a conservative, the party had changed. it was no longer a northeast republican party. you could not lose 29% of the republicans and be successful. you had to reinforce that base. and i think that's what drove a lot of it, and i think you started to touch on that at the end here. i also thought katrina -- even though the war was very, very important -- katrina was the breaking point. people may have disagreed on the war, but katrina was the point where people all of a sudden were saying this is not a competent administration.

you let an american city drown. you can't do that and be competent. and i think the complication of brownie and all the rest of it really was a very significant breaking point. that's the only thing i would say just from my own knowledge. >> thank you, ed. >> do you mind if i say something on that? >> oh, please. >> i think one thing that's crucial to remember about george w. bush especially in comparison to his father, and this is something that he has said, that his father has said, that his mother has said, so it's not me saying it, i'm just channeling their memoirs. that during his early and significant childhood -- i'm talking about george w. bush -- during his truly formative years, his father was largely absent because his father was on the road as a salesman and also trying to build his career. so consequently, he really thinks of himself in many ways as, you know, obviously idolizing his father and wanting to live up to his father as any son would, but he also thinks of himself in many ways as his mother's son in how he relates to people. >> do we have a question from a

student, can i ask? i see a student right back -- yeah. right in the middle there. no, sorry, to the student here. sorry. we'll -- oh, are you both? [laughter] okay. go ahead, that's find. that's find. we'll take -- that's fine. we'll take both of them. we'll come right back to you, sorry about that. i was pointing -- okay, go ahead. >> [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] >> professor kumar, you talked a lot about transitions and how important they are. and with that being said, do you think there will be a different model of transition planning

depending on whether jeb or hillary, you know, winsesome assuming both of those are going to be running, obviously, do you think there'll be a different transition model based on who wins come 2017 inauguration? and also do you think that the country depending on who wins will be willing to have, might -- like, what do you think the country's attitude will be if it turns out like expected where we have another bush or clinton? >> well, i think that obama has a stake in preparing the kind of transition that bush did because i do think it's important for his legacy as well as for whoever comes in. and i think in hillary clinton's case, i think she'll start early. she did in 2008.

she had robert altman working on transition issues, and she has john podesta's going to be managing the campaign. and he certainly knew how to run a transition. he -- one of the ideas in the past was that you can't have large agency review teams, you can't manage, you know, several hundred people. between the policy and agency review teams, there were 517 people. and it all worked very smoothly. so he knows how to run a transition. and i think that one of the things that's happened in the last but presidencies is that people who have worked in transitions have built up an institutional memory that's passed along. for democrats after carter, when carter left office, harrison

wellford who was doing the white house piece gathered materials which were used for mondale. they then were developed more for, went along with kerry. kerry used that. jim johnson was running that transition effort, and jim johnson took papers that they had developed and gave them to the obama team. and mike lovett did a very good job, and his information too will be brought over to whoever the republican candidate is. so i think now there's just simply a lot more information out there. so i think that we won't go through having a president-elect who doesn't know much coming into presidency. they will prepare well no matter who they are. but i think both of them, as a

governor jeb bush is going to be interested in management, and i think hillary clinton as a department secretary also will be interested in management because the stakes in getting off well at the beginning are huge because you have a goodwill both by the people, the people not only want you to succeed, i mean, if you look at the difference between what somebody's vote percentage was and then look at their gallup polls as they began office, you know, you can see a 20% rise in some of them. so the public wants to give a new president a chance, and they're listening and watching. they will tire of a president after a while and not tune into his state of the union messages and that sort of thing. but he has their attention. but the difficulty is that he has the attention of the public, but he's least able -- or she --

is least able to take advantage of it because they haven't governed, and they're just coming in, and they're an inexperienced team. so that is the difficulty. but i think preparation, everybody recognizes it's essential. it's not a matter of hubris or arrogance, it's something that needs to be done. >> thank you, martha. great question. last question. >> thank you all. i would like to point out or just kind of throw out there speaking as a student and as someone who is, like, who's grown up in a different generation, my world view's a lot different than almost everybody who's been on every panel. that's not an insult to anybody, but we -- i guess all the students here, we're the 9/11 generation. we grew up with the tsa and the people with submachine guns in

penn station and everything, and i'd just like to get your guys' reaction to the statement that george w. bush's legacy will be how he first started the war on terror and how he basically changed the world in the way we live. so our world is totally different now than it was 20 years ago because of the steps he and his administration took to fight author after september 11th -- terror after september 11th s and i think that would be his biggest overall legacy, and the iraq war will get lumped in with the afghanistan war and all the other foreign policy, and i'd like -- i think that's how he'll be remembered. >> i think he's asking in response to the attacks on the united states. it's not as if we just went into afghanistan. he's responding to attacks. so people are going to remember the attacks as well. >> graham? >> yeah, you know, i have to confess i'm not one of these people who keeps saying 9/11

changed everything. giuliani said that so much that he almost got elected to higher office. i think that it's important, of course, god knows. but i think that in the broader stretch of time it can be seen more as accelerating and exacerbating pre-existing trends than t utterly -- than utterly introducing things that were new. only time will tell. >> yeah, let me pick up on that point because i think it's a really key one. one question we always have to ask ourself when thinking about the legacy of any leader, but a president in particular with so much power and influence around the world is how much their policies actually matter for the long-term trajectory of the nation. you know, they get blamed for everything, and they get credit for everything, but how much do they really matter? one way to think about the legacy of bush, it strikes me, is to remember that after the invasion of afghanistan in particular, there was a renewed excitement for the united states as being at the height of its unipolar moment, that the united states really might actually achieve the hegemony that had

been promised during the clinton is years and at the end of cold war, there was simply no power that was going to be able to stand up to the united states. no one was asking that question in 2008. ..

we are moving into the 50th anniversary of the voting rights act and you look at johnson, great society in vietnam and how he came to office, the transfer of power. the decision not to run for reelection. i think you see the major challenges, crises, tragedy and then you also look at a series of reactions. we talked about katrina, economic policy. social security, immigration, medicare. so i think the answer is it will be a large part of the presidency but i think the full it violation and the transition and everything about the order in this -- orderliness, how many aspects the archway presidency. i think while this is a source for some debate about whether the legacy is decided now i think that the many parts of the legacy mean we can't, i will say

that there' there is no single r that will define the legacy. and as we look at ideology and how a president's place in politics provides opportunity for action, that will shape how we come a president bush responded to the challenges of his time. so i think with that we are living on a note of continued reflection and gratitude for engaging in this is the discussions over the last three days. to be continued. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] tonight on "the communicators," author robbie bach joins us from new york to talk about his book xbox revisited. he worked for microsoft for 22 years including four years as president of its entertainment

division and as chief xbox officeofficer guiding its creatd development. it also discusses technology, tech competition and microsoft anin the importance of civics in america life. >> today civic engine is work that any of us do to make arguments operate more efficiently and effectively. to make our communities serve citizens in a better way. it's old school civics and it's super important. >> watch the committee is tonight at eight eastern on c-span2. >> all persons having business before the honorable the supreme court of the united states draw near and give their attention. >> coming up on c-span's landmark cases -- >> they showed a piece of paper and mrs. mapp demanded to see the paper and read it, see what it was.

which he refused to do so she grabbed it out of his hands to look at it and then a scuffle started and she put this piece of paper into her bosom. and very readily, the police officer put his hands into her bosom and removed the paper, and thereafter, thereafter handcuffed her while the police officers started to search the house. >> in 1957 beckley the boys went to her home and they believed the harboring suspected bomber it demanded entry. she refused access without a warrant. later returning to the document they claimed was a warrant they forced themselves into the home and searched the premises. not funny this is the, the police confiscate a trunk containing obscene pictures in the basement pictures arrested and sentenced to seven years for the contraband. she sued and it is made all the

way to the supreme court. we will examine the case of mapp v ohio and explore the amount of evidence obtained through illegal searches and seizures and how this and other supreme court rulings transformed police practices nationwide. that's coming up on the next "landmark cases" live tonight at nine eastern on c-span, c-span3 and c-span radio. for background on each case while you watch order your copy of the landmark cases companion book. it is available for $8.95 for shipping at c-span.org/landmarkcases. >> next a discussion about the increasing use of heroin and painkillers and how to do with rising addiction problem around the country. the chicago ideas festival hosted this event last month. will. >> good evening, everybody. thanks for being here. we are here to talk about of course as we just discussed our

countries have an epidemic. you may for some of the numbers or stories about this but over the past decade, a number of heroin users and americans reportedly more than doubled, while the count of overdose deaths have soared in even faster rates. in this state alone nearly 700 people died from heroin overdoses last year. just two weeks ago a few minutes from where we sit more than 80 people overdose as result of tainted heroin. at sites in my own reporting from heroin in chicago is a business. perhaps the biggest employer in some neighborhoods and are no signs of a slowdown. it is particularly this one parts of chicago and other cities, it's far from unusual in a country facing the popularity of heroin spread to areas never seen before. today's speakers are working to change that. we ought to have governor peter

shumlin of vermont. is much of the coverage but his entire 34 minute state of the state address to the heroin epidemic in his home state. on the far end, i suppose to keep my mic like this, on the policing site chief leonard campanello have started a revolutionary program in his boston committee that offers addicts immediate treatment instead of an arrest and prison sentence. next to the governor, catherine kane willis is cofounder of illegal consortium on drug policy. and to her right, doctor carl hart studies the effect of the drug on the brain look at just what it is that happens to addicts end-users. we want to keep this conversation moving and pretty light, not light, not exactly a light topic, keep it moving and

keep it fairly casual so we are having a conversation among all of us instead people out there speaking at you guys. so i really want to start off, i just gave the twitter version of who you guys all our advanced ejb to sort of give facebook version or slightly longer version of what you hear talk about heroin but keep in mind the clock is running and so keep it fairly tight. governor, would you start off? we heard about the state of the state. what brought this, what brought you to this issue or how did you end up making this a major part of your policy agenda? >> by mistake, probably like a lot of people here. i as a governor in vermont, one of the smallest state in the country i spent a lot of time talking to vermonters and i would find when they went to chamber of commerce meetings, when i went to county meetings, not the tofu growers but all sectors of our state come

afterwards i've had people talk on my jacket and look sheepishly down and say, governor, i lost my son, i've lost my daughter, lost my mom, lost my dad or my store has been ripped off. we never used to get ripped off. my car has been lift off. -- ripped off. i use usually the key and my ca. i as a government in dealing with real problems we're facing in any government that claims that this challenge is not one of the main contributors to the decrease in quality of life to the death of innocent folks are suffering from terrible disease isn't facing the facts. so that's how i got in to it. it's an honor to be. >> kathy, i know you well enough to know you come at this right now as a social scientist, but come at it through your own personal journey. >> yeah. i started using heroin in

college in new york city back in the '80s. and i was able to get treatment that worked for me. it turned out to the methadone treatment. i also, since 2004 have been trending the increase in heroin use from the central city outside. and so that's been a longtime. it's been a decade ago that kind of work. so that's where come at a. i come at this from a public health perspective, and you know, 10 years ago we couldn't say the word syringe exchange we couldn't say the word methadone. we couldn't say many, many words like naloxone, the overdose prevention drug without people wanted to throw things at my head. and so i do feel, okay now out of facebook version and i'm in a get off my soapbox version, but i feel like we're in a change,

the state of change in the country. >> i didn't have my boat out but i was getting ready spirit i felt it. >> dr. park, you'l you of low ie of your own story into your research and trying to explain what you do. can you tell us more about that? >> i'm going to answer the question you asked about how, why am i here. i'm here because i came last year to chicago ideas and i love chicago. so hello chicago. [applause] that's why i am really here. but i'm also here because i get interested in heroin in part because i really like opioids myself personally. but i also do research and i also am really concerned about major distraction at the political level, particularly as it relates to drugs.

i've seen how drug use is used as a political football in order to distract us from what the real issues are. and i see this situation with heroin in the same way. i think we have to be careful in the country in that we talk about heroin being an epidemic, and then when you start to look at heroin use compared to other drugs, it pales in comparison to cocaine, in comparison to marijuana. and then when we start talking about heroin overdose deaths, 75% of the heroin overdose deaths occur in combination with another sedative like alcohol. so i start to see all of this misinformation which distracts us from really dealing with what the real issues are. i get concerned, as i want to havtohave my voice in that discn and that's why i am here.

>> garate. chief, i read that you started your initiative with a post on facebook. tell us a little bit about how you were here and how this got started for you. >> it was started out of a committee formed in gloucester in which we decided we needed to do more about the epidemic that affects so many communities. the police could definitely be doing more. my officers came to me and said, we are arresting the same people over and over again, they are not getting treatment or to our five days in a jail cell, back on the street, hurting themselves, hurting others. we decided to take a very provocative step of refusing to arrest any addict to walk into a police station and asked for help. instead we facilitate critical for them and that is apparently blown up and that's why i'm in chicago. [applause] i guess the bottom line is what

was gloucester's responsibility for gloucester has become lost is responsibly for perhaps the region, and maybe larger, and that's to bring the cavalry into the conversation that started a long time ago, to bring a new voice, a powerful voice saying we are just not going to do this anymore. we are not going to arrest our way out of this situation. it's a public health crisis not a public safety crisis. >> a lot to unpack here. so there are basically, i might count, five people of you who all think that the previous approaches have not worked. so how can we are still where we are? kathy, you may be argument things are starting to change. are they? i will start with you, governor. everybody, let's keep this free flowing. please feel free to jump in. >> can you tell us where we are first put you said how come we are where we are. tell the governor -- >> why don't you. get out of this back to you.

you said we're playing political football and some of the numbers by the other you're basically saying the context is lost to explain what you mean. >> for example, to talk about the epidemic. we need to get something nationwide, when you look at things like to have used heroin and the last month? that's like an indication of recent heroin users. when you actually look at that number, there's about 300,000 americans who report heroin use in the last month. that number is down from 2006 or so. but if you look at the past year, someone who has used the drug in the last year? that number is up. it all depends what your indicators are. we have to be careful. so when i say where we are, i ain't concerned that we tend to think about heroin use when we talk about her and -- it when we go to the fame of the heroin

addict. the vast majority people who use heroin are not addicts. and so if we are saying obviously, think with the chief is doing is created. i mean this is integrated at a think it's a great approach. excellent approach. the thing we have to be careful about is that just remember, there are a number of people who don't need treatment. they need education at the what the real dangers are. >> let me take a shot at your question. i think that what we have to remember is that we are not just talking about heroin. we are doctor opioids and painkillers. i can tell you in my little real state of vermont, which is one of the best qualities of life in the country, that -- >> better than chicago? >> better than chicago. [laughter] i'm not getting votes year, you know that. [laughter] here's the point. when the fda approved oxycontin and we started handing it out

with exuberance, think about this. in 2010 we prescribed enough oxycontin in america to keep every single american adult high for a month. that's what we did. now, the companies that sell it made $11 billion in that year. the last few weeks ago fda just approved oxyconti oxycontin for. a year and a half ago they approved as a hydro which is oxycontin steroids even though the fda own advisory panel of 13 folks voted not to do that because it would be the opiate addiction problem we have in america. this is not a huge puzzle. when we started passing out oxycontin and other painkillers like candy we create an opiate addiction problem in america back in vermont and in illinois and other states across the country is now transforming into heroin addiction because it's cheaper, stronger and it is easy

to get as we tightened up a prescription drug bills. sso we should have evolved to figure what the problem is. the problem is what got way too many people addicted to opiates because of fda approved legal drugs and in this nation if we do not quickly have a conversation about how we treat pain we will not only have many more people dying, minibar peoples lies being destroyed, minibar states and governors spending in this resources trying to build up treatment centers, treat it like a disease instead of a crime, although things were doing, but we will continue to lose the core of the fabric of our quality of life. >> okay, but to dr. hart point, the average drug user of a drug including opiates is not an addict and not necessary an abuser, right speak what can i say something but i think there's a tension that we may feel that may be different from everybody else on the panel.

and that's the moral panic associate with drug scares. we know there's going to be another drug that's going to come along that's going to create the same kind of concern among people. that's not going to change. but what is changing is the way we are treating people with opiate use disorders. and battery framing of the season people -- that we framing, people who need help and need care to meet influences the entire drug discussion. we can debate whether or not it is an epidemic, about the household data, there's a lot of little things in there but obviously it's clear that there is an increase in deaths your they are income and with a lot of drugs, but what i see, this

is the big pole to me, is the way we are coming at it is fundamentally different than the way we were coming at it the chief is doing, what the government is doing, what states are doing is different than it was 15 years ago. hugely, hugely different, more effective and more targeted. >> so i just met you. [laughter] spent this ain't good, i know. [laughter] >> i love you. [laughter] but the statement that most heroin users are not addicts is the most irresponsible what -- >> no, it's not as david. it's databased. >> it's not databased. every single person, so then if -- is addiction a disease the? >> of course. >> why isn't every single person with addiction to heroin getting treatment out if there are so few that are addicted speak with i don't know. that has nothing to do with the

number i just said. >> irresponsible and not corrected every single person that presents to law enforcement, the governor is addicted without choice, and deserve the treatment. and by you saying that the people are not addicted is the numbers -- >> i did not say that. i did not say that. please, i'm right here. please don't misconstrue my words but i didn't say that. what i said was the vast majority of people who use heroin are not addicts. not the vast majority who present to you. the vast majority of people who use heroin are not addicts us. speed i think it's an irresponsible answer. >> is a reality. i mean, what it makes you uncomfortable or not, it's the facts. the facts are the facts. >> it's difficult to untangle because there's something called selection bias. the folks that we run into, the people who cause problems, right, in our communities that are using heroin are addicted to

heroin. so those are the past winter of the people that we see. that doesn't mean every person who is using heroin or opiates is addicted. i think that's important. >> what are we talking about by addiction? >> what i'm talking about is what we talk about in medicine. what we define as addiction according to the diagnostics statistical manual of the psychiatrics, american psychiatric association. there's a set of furniture in which we go by in which we determine people are addicts. it's clear that people can become addicted to heroin and prescription opiates because they do. at the point is when we have these extreme terms, labeling everyone who uses these things, like the vast majority people use prescription opioids do so safely and do so according to their physician. prescription opioids are an important medication in medici

medicine. and so if we say that everyone who is using these things are addicts, what we do is we run the risk of restricting or maybe eliminating this important tool in medicine and that's my concern. >> let me just respectfully disagree with your statement. listen, i'll just say what the real-life is for a governor. i have constituent after constituent comes up to me and says i went in for this medical treatment, i had an accident, whatever, and i am handed a box of oxycontin by my doctor, or painkillers, and i can get as much of it as a want until i get cut off because they recognize i'm abusing it. athletes me to heroin addiction. that's just the reality of what i do with. we can talk about the new watches. the question for this bill is what the heck are we going to do about it because first of all, we have to define the issues so we can didn't say speed for me

the issue is i, too, many vermonters die, too many within our stores, too many ripping off the family, too many fighting for those difficult, awful disease that i government about, which is opiate addiction because they are addicted. that's my problem. >> if we are saying they are dying, what we have to do is figure out why they are dying. if 75% of them are dying because they are using heroin or prescription opioid with alcohol or benzodiazepine, did you educate those people not to do that a combination. >> we'll talk about several different things at once. there is an issue, a health issue of people abusing drugs mainly right now heroin and other opiates which the at least anecdotally appears to be connected. were talking about criminal justice issues, people who for various reasons may be committing auxiliary crimes apart from possession participation of drugs because

they want to use drugs so that accessing this. we are talking about the drug markets that are created i think by the demand but also neighborhoods that into doubt or whatever this is an economic opportunity for people. we are talking about all these different things at once and also the political response to all of these things which right now is heightened because i would throw out there and please disagree if i'm wrong, because the visible signs of heroin abuse, namely overdoses, have moved into areas that have not traditionally seen them, okay? >> yes. >> dr. hart speedy can i say one thing? i think there's something really important to remember. i had someone ask me, do you become addicted what should i tell my daughter is uses as a drug once she's automatically and added? i said no because that's not accurate. i think it's important when we're talking about drugs, this

is not to minimize the problem with opioid and heroin addiction at the demand and need for treatment, which is huge, okay? but we need to be having on his conversations. drugs are not magical. we think that this causes us to become addicted, but what's probably underlying that substance use disorder is some other co-occurring disorder, some other thing that some is self-medicating for. and that is an important thing for us to acknowledge as people, and we don't want to give the wrong message so that a kid goes and uses heroin and their like i didn't get addicted. because they think that is tremendously dangerous. so the idea about being real about what we are saying to kids and what we're saying to the public about the effects of substances needs to be grounded in science.

>> one of the reasons we are here is because, if not the rise in overdoses, and the coverage of the rise in overdoses. maybe we can agree on that. if not, i'm still the moderate for five more minutes. there are other places that have tried different approaches to drug use and drug enforcement i will throw a portugal. i'm sure you've heard us talk about what i'm going to grossly generalize but basically drugs have been decriminalized and if someone, they are not legal but it didn't decriminalized. if someone is essentially can't in certain circumstances with drugs including heroin they are steered toward treatment. correct me if that does not write what is wrong? >> that's not entirely right. what they do in portugal is that you get assessed to see if you need treatment, but the vast majority of people don't need treatment.

they make it a fine or they may just get a warning, but the vast majority of them don't need treatment. this industry in the czech republic. they are doing the same sort of thing. for our discussion since we're talking opiates and heroin we should think about the swiss. the swiss, i spent the last three months in geneva stenting heroin in heroin clinics where they administer heroin to heroin addicts as part of their treatment. a large percentages of those people, the complexity for the heroin and they go to work. they take care of the families. they do all of these things spirit this is something that happened in this country until -- >> of course. they are in treatment, right. >> chief, what would you do with someone -- >> wait, just to clarify. >> i don't know why we are here it is not an addiction problem. why am i in chicago there's a vast majority of people who are addicted to this drug and the vast majority of people who are

addicted to pharmaceuticals, either legally prescribed or illicitly gotten from the street. i think to underplay that is a very, very dangerous path to take. just because no one has presented to a police department who is not addicted, i understand what you're saying, i've never met any ancillary people who sent my kid is on heroin but they are not addicted. i just, i think that clarifying message here is that whether you're right, whether someone else is right, whether the data is right, there are people, there are vast numbers of people who are not getting treatment for addiction, and that has to change for the number of reasons that we are all here. >> absolutely. >> how does that change? >> i want to go to the chief. i can say what we're doing in

vermont. more power to portugal, switzerland all i know is we are in chicago and think we should ask the question what am i going to do about this in united states? this is what i found. in vermont we would do everything wrong. everything. we discriminate against the disease. we treat it like it is not cancer or kidney disease or diabetes. we just do. we say to folks who treatment, go to jail. we safety folks who need treatment, you're in a different class of people than everybody else that is sick. so what i found we were doing wrong it's just about everything by going out on talking to folks. what do i mean by that? the criminal justice system with all the good intentions and all the hard work come at a chief has come to the right conclusion and more folks should, could not fight this battle alone. we are saying to them this is your problem, prosecute, lock them up and shoved him away.

forget the numbers go forgets its our sons and daughters. in vermont i spent $1135 a week putting people in prison. addicts, people are suffering from this disease. >> you have -- >> one reason is we are changing the way we deal with addiction to it cost me one the $27 to we could put some and a great treatment program. this is what we were doing. with any addiction private all that with addiction with friends and family, there's a huge denial factor. with opiate addiction with that denial on steroids. so i found that would make the arrest, all the research suggests that's the best chance to get to a summit in treatment, they are ready for change. their life has come to a really tough spot. then we take for five months between the charge and a conviction to wind themselves way to a court system. by the time to get to the judge they were back using.

what do we do in vermont? we pay for third party assessors, objective folks who know what they're doing who come in and say this is what is suffering from disease, they will not kill you or harm you. they should be offered treatment, wraparound services, they should be back in the workforce and get back into productive life. that's 80-90% of the folks were dealing with. with. we go about our treatment centers because we were telling folks to wait in line. we've moved it from being treated as a criminal prosecution to being treated as a disease that it is. >> which exactly -- >> we are out of time. i would just throw out that what you talk about is in some ways decriminalization moving toward treatment model. spent i don't disagree with that. >> there is just not enough time to do with some of the statements that been made. this is a fraud, this conversation. >> you are wrong spent thanks for offering that. we will have some questions.

please stand and wait for the mic to come to you. >> i'm sorry but this is a fraud. i didn't like the thousand of to come down to an sense of what makes an essay that the people walking into my station asking for help can't get it. it's a fraud spit nobody and please don't point your finger at me. cannot point your finger at me. >> please, gentlemen, gentlemen. wwe're going to have some questions from the audience. we all have different views of this rooted in different, yeah, from different positions. we come at it from different angles, and so please be respectful. >> i have to say, you are so disrespectful to the folks here. [applause] speak excuse me, please your thank you. >> you know what? we want to hear from all of the panelists. it gets of a passionate a. no, i think that's a good thing.

let's continue the questions the actual i think this is a great discussion. >> it is good. good afternoon, almost evening. i'm jake from illinois. my question is doctor carl hart, what else would you like to tell us? thank you. >> thank you. number one, no one is saying that addiction is not a serious problem. the point that i was making is that the majority of people who use these drugs are not addicts. but if you treat everyone it needs extreme anecdotal cases, you're going to go down the wrong path. you're going to miss an opportunity to actually help people. if we are worried about deaths, for example, we were developed can't get heroin in some cases, if we are worried about tainted heroin, why don't police forces, for example, publish what heroin is tainted for local communities to no? because heroin itself is not as

dangerous -- this a is the me people should go and get heroin. it's not as dangerous or it's not as likely to cause an overdose, particularly and people who have been using heroin for a while. so the thing we worry about is tainted heroin. we worry about heroin being used in combination with other sedatives. that's the message that we should be getting out. >> quick response quick first of all, i would like to apologize. >> apology accepted spent dr. hart deserts and has earned his opinion for anybody listening, so please come it's no disrespect for you, dr. hart. the reason why we don't publish what's in the air when because we don't think there's any good era when. so what are we supposed to say? this heroin is bad but we think that's okay? so that's our feeling behind in policing, not publishing what it is laced with any particular bad

batch. >> my question is, from my perspective, is heroin addict if, like i mean, i don't know much about it. but everything i've read about or viewed it seems like you can't really use it recreationally. i give you do it once, twice, i mean, it's like a slippery slope. >> yes, you can use it right racially. this is not an endorsement for you to use it recreationally. >> some people can use -- is much more severe than someone drinking or somebody smoking pot. it seems like the repercussions of it are way bigger and more severe, and people's lives seem to spiral out of control. >> once you have the habit, once you have dependents, i think you

can't understate that your but once you have theological dependents, if you don't have access to opiates come you don't have access to their win, you're going to be sick, okay? that is a point at which you are physiologically dependent. you may not even have substantive disorder behavior to end that there. but i'll tell you from my experience, that's a pretty strong, and it happens pretty quickly. that's obviously different for every person. but have i know people who have recreationally use care when? i have known people. i have known more people who did not get addicted in the circle of people that i knew who did get addicted. that's not to say that we don't have a problem, okay? that we don't have a problem with how we've been treating this that we don't have a problem with our treatment capacity and we don't have a problem with the way we've been

approaching this. and that is what i think we can probably agree that the way that we are learning to approach this in a different way is a much better way to deal with it. >> can't i just quickly take a shot at that one? opioids are highly addictive drugs. if you start to take oxycontin or any of these painkillers on a continual basis, you will be addicted. if you start to take heroin and any kind of routine way, you will be addicted. that's just what i get from the folks that i talk to. i am a little surprised we are sitting here suggesting that this is not a terrible, terrible disease to get, and the way to avoid it is not to take it in the first place. >> i'm not sure anyone has suggested that but i think there is a line of thinking that if you basically put out the word that every time you use care

when you are automatically going to get addicted, that that is misinformation. that makes the situation worse because some people think that everything they have erred is wrong, and that can bring, draw people deeper into use and abuse. >> and that there is no withdrawal syndrome, that it only happens to other people. they can be tremendously seductive and that way if you send that message that this leads immediately to addiction and it doesn't. but for the people who are going to develop substance abuse disorders there's a honeymoon period of. they don't see this coming and it happens, and usually when you dig deeper into what's going on in their life, it's not just the use of drugs. why are they using the drugs in the first place if there's something underlying. listen, you're not taking a huge, a tremendously potent painkiller if you're not in

pain. you could maybe be doing it recreationally but you're not doing it everyday unless you're doing some physical, psychic, emotional pain. and i think that when you do that a lot we have to recognize that that is indicative of another issue. i just want us to not think about heroin as magic, or opiates as magic. it's about the underlying conditions that person is living in. it's their environment. it's their individual nature pickets what they're bringing with them. if you are prescribed oxycontin, for example, and you're working but get laid off the next day, well, that oxycontin use the might of absolutely perfectly prescribed now might give you a different feeling. it might make you feel less sad about your job. you may take more. it's not just about the drugs,

it's about the environment and the individual at all of these other things. >> we all agree on that i think. >> i feel, i'm a physician, researcher. i've got to get in like a surgeon and just go to the heart of this. whether or not we're talking addiction, whether or not we're talking casual use, the amount that our profession has done in terms of pain is a factor. you get a room of doctors, physicians, clinicians, and we were told to treat pain. we could start, dr. hart, with the semantics on what is pain, and you get a wonderful example. it is the social disruption, it is the environment, it is so many factors that to tease them out right now, we can't do it. but clearly win as a pathologist i look at 80 people in my city, i'm not going to sit on the head of a pin and wonder whether or

not that person wasn't addict. it is at a moment in history, whether it is the social fracture, founder of cycle pharmacology, there is a disruption. and what dr. hart, which again, is an antidote to what is going on in these communities? thank you. >> that's a question to me. [inaudible] >> yeah, right on. [inaudible] >> dna and what happens, but the bottom line what these people are attempting to do is change the paradigm of how we wake up every morning, whether or not it's a real pain, heroin pain. >> thank you. [inaudible] >> thank you. so you asked what i would do. when i look at this issue, the people who are most likely to be addicted to heroin are white

men, typically young white men in their 20s, unemployed, uninsured. poor white men are the ones who are the primary sort of people we are concerned about. so when i think those sorts of things can we talk about the psychosocial issues you raise. i think about making sure they were employed, make sure they had something to do, activities. but they are not the most likely people to die from heroin. the people who are most likely to die from heroin and other opiates are individuals who are 45-54 years old. those are the people who are taking also other medications. so that would require another solution. so that's all i'm trying to do. ask people to specifically look at what group we are talking about as opposed to lumping this whole thing into one problem. [inaudible] >> what are the things -- what

is it that you would put in everyone's mind whether you are a police sergeant, whether you're the government? what are the tools? what should we be doing a? should we go on twitter to support someone? can we use logistics? let's get creative. >> i just want to say, can i answer that would because we're trying at all in vermont. our most successful example is in what we call, it's happening in rutland vermont and the police chief, mayor, everyone came together and said we have to deal with this. we put everybody on one floor, law enforcement, prosecutors, social service, everybody is there, community workers. we monitored with the police department. i'm sure, we find with hotspots are and they go into those houses, go knock on doors and we sick of was going on with your life? how can we help?

how can we prevent the disaster before it ends up in a death of course that's the most effective thing in terms of prevention. i just want to add, that the conversation is what do we do to get this thing off in the first place? it baffles me that as all talk about the things we're trying to do and the crises we're facing every one of them hillary clinton to jeb bush, republican, democrat, pocket what do we do but this crisis. we still refuse as a nation to talk about what you brought up in the first place, which is the way we deal with pain and pain medication has changed drastically since the approval of oxycontin. if we don't get a hold on that, now have oxycontin for kids, we will be having this conversation for years and years and losing more and more lives and used -- losing more and more battles. [inaudible] >> i'm michelle. i totally love the conversation. thank you, dr. hart, for your

points of view. i think we are circling around something, definite education and want to pose a question to everybody. my stance is i think all drugs should be legalized and we should be monitoring these on a full scale with every drug. i think people should be able to use them recreationally. i would lik like you what your thoughts are on that. >> i think drugs should be decriminalized and i think way e need to implement something like a portable model. i don't know what, i can't think of any country in the world that is legalized all drugs. i'm a pragmatic person in that sense. i like to see what a model looks like before i understand. how that could be implemented. i do think that there's a lot that can be done in the public health front but i don't see what that would look like. i don't understand how the regulation or the education, you know, what does that mean? when people say let's legalize all drugs.

isa what does it make what does that mean i can buy in a 7-11? cannot buy at cbs? you know, open market sales? what does that mean? i'm just going to dice on that one thing and say that the really complicated question. you need to operationalize legalization means to you. >> let's hear briefly from the other three panelists as well. spent on the cover, not a federal guy so i deal with what i have with the tools i have the and in effect that's what both gloucester and we are doing by saying this is a disease. we were treated as a disease. in vermont if you are busted for heroin or for opiate addiction or for other drugs, and you are not deemed to be a threat to the community, only to yourself, which is true with most addicts, you will never see a judge, never see a court, a criminal record and you will never see a criminal process if you join up

and deal with the disease as what is. that in effect is what we are doing is saying, listen, the past has not worked, we don't know what the future will bring, we've got to figure out to shut off the supply. but meanwhile, we're going to treat this as a disease that is, the different than kidney disease or heart disease or other diseases. >> so in terms of operationalizing, what the question was, this isn't that complicated. we put people on the mode select when you sit operationalize it, when you think about regulating marijuana or regulating drugs, you can regulate it in the same way we regulate things like alcohol. so that's not that complicated. but in terms of the calvinist responds, in terms of us treating this like a disease, that's great, particularly for people who have the problem of drug addiction. that's absolutely great.

but then you still have those people who are not addicted and who are using these drugs recreationally. so what do you do about those people? they are adults. do adults have the right to use psychoactive substances to alter themselves in the same way that some of you all will go tonight, particularly after this conversation, and have alcohol? [laughter] do adults have the right to go in alter themselves with an opiate, with cocaine, in the same way? >> so from alone versus tampa, you're going to get a semi-law enforcement into. but i think you'll like it actually. [laughter] so marijuana would be legal whether we like it or not in law enforcement. i really don't care. so as to want what are you going to do? i'm going to go smoke a fatty on my front porch, right?

[laughter] [applause] as far as marijuana does we have to make it so that people who cannot make choices for themselves under 21, it can be regulated we have to make is that someone doesn't get in a car and drive. we have to make it so someone doesn't go to the workplace and effect of the people adversely. as far as legalizing all drugs, i am not for decriminalization of any drug. if alcohol and tobacco were invented today with all the destruction they have caused over the last 100 years, the billions and billions and billions upon billions of dollars that it is cost in health care for those two drugs, they would be illegal before they hit the market. i think that there is -- [applause] i think there's a voice above what is decriminalized and what is not. nothing to do with these illicit drugs that cause so much chaos and destruction. >> all right. thank you. i will say one quick thing. i write about politics. i don't think this is simple at all.

marijuana is clearly going the way of legalization around the country. but here in illinois, element is screwed up in so many ways, but see if you can get them medical marijuana program off the ground. there's a lot of money involved. i think that we should have more panels and political debates at the highest levels about what to do about all drugs, including alcohol, tobacco, which are legalized drugs known. anyway, i'm reading from my script and a. thanks for taking part in today's conversation on heroin epidemic. make sure to check out chicago ideas, it is weak, many more events this week and tell us what you thought about today's event. i'i'm sure you and the opinions whatsoever, just like the panelists. [laughter] text ideas to 6-3 661 to fill out a two minute survey. thank you all for being here and thanks again for all the

panelists. [applause] ♪ ♪ >> the house and senate are back into the after last week's thanksgiving break and lawmakers faced several deadlines. highway and transportation funding expires at the end of this week and short-term government funding runs out to some 11th. the house do with fossil fuels and climate change and the senate take up a bill repealing the health care law. more now from a capitol hill reporter. >> congress is back after their thanksgiving break and here to tell us what is expected of force activity on the hill is niels lesniewski of cq roll call. good morning. >> guest: good morning. give us a sense of what is the breakdown between the house and a set of activity. one of the things that have to get accomplished? >> guest: really the first

item up for business in both the house and the senate are things that do not necessarily need to be accomplished. but in the house they are going to be addressing a couple of disapproval resolutions regarding environmental protection agency regulations that have been put out by the obama administration. that's a special legislative process that allowed for these resolution of disapproval which have or to pass through the center effectively into president obama's desk, although of course with it is the obama administration epa they came up with the regulations regarding power plant emissions, that are certain to face the veto pen get over on the senate side we are looking at the budget reconciliation process, probably assuming all goes well for republicans a big conference meeting monday evening.

sometimes the second half of the week could be the sort of extended voting that goes along with a filter budget reconciliation act that would be a measure that would repeal as much of the affordable care act or obamacare as they can but that's all before the actual business of the day in the deadlines that arriving in december. >> host: before the thanksgiving break we heard a lot on the house side over the topic of the syrian refugees. is the on the senate agenda at all? >> guest: the discussion about the series and refugees as well as the question of what to do about the visa waiver program and the ability of european citizens and others to intervene in the dash to enter the trip without a this is a short-term business meeting or the like. that will be on the agenda but

there's nothing that's sort of been bubbling up yet in terms of exactly how the senate is going to address that. what it would save the is that this is where we get into the discussion about whether or not that issue has to be tied in to the government funding measure, the omnibus appropriations bill will needed to be a riot by the second week of the month and so that's what the big test will be is whether anyone besides go be a standoff over syrian refugees as part of the government funding proposal. >> host: part of that discussion about the funding was whether there would be a potential for another government shutdown. we heard some talk leading up to the. what is the outlook that as far as the potential of that happening? >> guest: since has been a budget agreement setting the topline numbers, there's been

less likely i think that there will be a shutdown, showdown approaching december 11 or actually going into a shutdown past december 11. but that's not to say there are not any sort of, lots of negotiations to be done including over things like policy writers that pertain for everything from epa to labor department regulations to all sorts of things. there's also i would add even before we get to that point there's a more immediate deadline facing lawmakers who once again either extend or actually finish the conference report on surface transportation. so there's no shortage of things that have to be done within the next two weeks. everything they've got to be careful about is making sure they don't accidentally take too