we'll have a call-in program, and watch civil war programs throughout the weekend. we look at the social, political, and military factors that led to the on set of war and a panel discusses the challenges that faced both the north and south as they prepared for battle. get the complete schedule at c-span.org/history. next a discussion on job growth in america, then highlights from nasa's final shuttle flight. after that, details on nasa's unmanned mission to mars. following the morning meeting with president obama, house speaker john boehner met with senate and house leadership from both parties. no remarks were made following the meeting but the speaker said he hopes to have a deficit reduction proposal ready on monday.

iowa representative harkin said he wished president obama was bolder in his approach. this new america event is an hour and 25 minutes long. >> introducing one of the authors of the report, representative john garamendi of california. he serves on the natural resources committee and in four decades of public service has served as a member of the california legislature, as lieutenant govern quor of california, california insurance commissioner, chair of the commission for economic

development as well as having been a former peace corps volunteer serving abroad, indeed, helping to negotiate a peace treaty in the ethyopian every traya war -- in the ethee yopean -- ethiopia and eri trmbings ean war. >> it is wonderful to be here and share with my colleagues here at the table an extraordinarily important piece of work they have done and an issue of profound importance to this nation. as you were doing the introduction, i was thinking back on those years. it was mid -- early 1980's, about 1981, that california became very, very concerned about competition from japan and we set out, i was given a committee, we set out to look

at what was going on, how we could be competitive. we said there were five things california needed to do to stay competitive. one, have the best education system in the world, two do the best research in the world, make the things that come from research, pay attention to infrastructure and don't forget about the international. here we are, 1979, just as we were doing that, we had 19.4 million manufacturing jobs in the united states. it was ability 26.3% of the american economy. fast forward, all those years in california where we neglected education, didn't pay much attention to research, never bothered to manufacture anything because we were going to be a service economy. time runs on. 2010, america, 11.5 million manufacturing jobs, somewhere just over 10% of the economy. whoa, whoa, whoa.

something has gone wrong here. and it's not getting any better. yesterday, one of those groups that tend to want to see what congress is up to stopped by. this is solar world's little pamphlet they left with me yesterday. but they also left -- what they also left was something scary. the president of it was there and he said, energy security. we've been worried about energy security, oil security, we know that our future is in the hands of the petro dictators in unstable places in the world. energy security he said, dune that the green technologies that we are so dependent upon for our energy in the future are going to be controlled by countries in asia? what are you talking about? he said, you need to know that there's one, one company manufacturing solar cells in the united states. all of the other solar cells are manufactured in asia.

and he said, how about wind and wind turbines and on and on it goes. the report that you're going to see today is of utmost importance to this nation because it calls to our attention once again a profoundly important fact. that we're losing it. we're losing our ability to make things in america and as we lose that ability, we are going to lose our leadership in the world, our national security will be at risk, and we will not have the kind of wealth we need to maintain the middle class in america. now, fortunately, there are people that are thinking about this. i have the great honor of introducing one of them, leo hendry jr. is at the new america foundation. he's a member of the council on foreign relations and he's an investor in things that are supposed to make a lot of money and a lot of jobs, he hopes.

and we hope he does too. he's the former c.e.o. of telecommunications inc., t.c.i., and their successor at&t broadband. he knows what it is to be in the business world. he's also a blogger. for those of white house occasionally read blogs, he is a blogger. let me introduce to you leo hendry, jr. >> senator tom harkin, we just had a vote on the floor and turned down the deficit cap bill that came over from the house, senator harkin tabled that sucker. so i'm actually going to turn it over to senator harkin. let me just say one of the reasons it's such a privilege for all of us associated with this project, i had the privilege of most of my early career being in the state of

california, representative garamendi was my legislator for me, he was my insurance commissioner, he obviously is now a representative from the state that defines my career. at no point did anyone speak more eloquently about creating jobs and preserving jobs of quality for the american worker than representative garamendi. later i became a transplant to iowa, i was part of the harkin for president, and on the senate side, it's tom harkin who has carried the mantle for so many years. a privilege for all of us to have representative garamendi and our dear friend tom harkin with us. tom, some comments from you and then i'll be a little more precise about the task force report.

>> i apomjies for being late, we had that vote, how did you get here so quickly? you don't do anything. we did just turn down that cut, cap, and kill medicare, i referred to it the other day, it's not really a cut, it's an amp nation and it's not really a cap, it's a decapitation of our federal responsibilities. but let me, first of all, thank you for mentioning my presidential race, some of you may have missed it, i appreciate you mentioning that. but let me sum it up this way. the debate going on right now is like deciding which train to take and you're on the wrong track. do we take the $4 there will cut or the $2.5 trillion cut or

this cut, which is the wrong track to be on. the right track to be on is what should we be doing right now to stimulate job creation in our society? [applause] and that's why this task force is so important and so important at this point in time. there are go ways of creating these jobs, it seems to me. the private sector could invest the $1 trillion to $2 trillion it's sitting on right now to create those jobs, but it's obviously not doing it. or the federal government needs to get the wheels going, to stimulate demand to -- i say to use the word -- i hate to use the word massive stimulus, but an infrastructure program. where is the federal government going to get that money? you either borrow it or raise the revenues.

well, i'd say let's raise the revenues. if the private sector is sitting on $1 trillion to $2 trillion and they don't want to invest it, then we should invest it. and that's why we've got to raise the revenues to do so. this task force has come up with ideas on that. i have ideas of my own. but there's plenty of revenues to be raised up there. you raise the revenues and stimulate the economy by putting it into human infrastructure and the physical infrastructure in the company. to me, if we did that in a big manner a bold manner, then you create demand, demand comes up you put people back to work, that would tell the markets out there we are moving ahead aggressively and boldly, not shrinking, not retracting, but we're going to expand and grow and that then would stimulate

further private investment system of that's why i say, we're on the wrong track. we're argue -- on the wrong track when we're arguing about these things. it's demeaning to me to see a president of the united states -- it's encouraging to me that the president realizes we're on the wrong track. i thought he'd be more bold. ron white gave a great speech on the senate floor the other day, and we need more people talking about it. that's why leo, you and your task force, are so important. we have to focus on putting people back to work. not reducing the deficit. that can come later. but to cut spending now is like putting leeches on a sick person. you're going to bleed them more

and make them more sick. we have 500,000 people in the public sector lost their jobs in the last two years. do they have demand for goods and services? no. yet somehow we think we can continue to get rid of people and shed people working in the public sector. that's just a formula for a downward spiral. so again, leo, thank you for your great leadership. i thank the task force on job creation. you are on the right track. >> thank you, tom. >> let me, if i might, add some quick historical perspective and what will be fun, michael is such a friend to this initiative, we're going to sort of go after this as a panel and then ask for your support in questions as well. this actually began in 2006. it began with tom harkin. we were running up to the iowa caucuses of january of 2008 and we saw in 2006 that the

uncounted, unemployed women and men in this country for the first time were breaching a 30% cap that had been on every prior recession. in the worst of recessions, the nine prior recessions as we were running up to them, the uncounted unemployed was never more than 1/3 of the counted. we breached that early in 2006. so we knew by iowa that something dramatic was happening. and that dramatic outcome is we now have one man or woman uncounted who is unemployed for every man or woman who is counted. we have 29 ppt 5 million women and men who aspire to full employment with wages, not the 14 million that's cited. we started the first task force, the horizon project, the men and women named on the

press release in this task force, many were involved in that initial effort. it was tom and others' suggestion that we have legislative prescriptions that were quite precise to create jobs. as a principal matter, we knew we were committed to the party and as progressives to pay-go. we knew we couldn't always impose on the government to cause these initiatives to be undertaken so there's always been in the back of our mind, for the senator and congressman ways to pay for all of these initiatives. but let me follow up on one comment the senator just made. if hypothetically the senate and house tomorrow were to pass $3.2 trillion of cuts, we have -- we can prove that 1.8 million additional jobs would be lost almost instantly. we would be digging the hole just infinitely deeper. those 29.5 million women and men we're concerned about would jump to 31.3 million that fast.

so what the senator and congressman are saying to us, is sure, we as a party are committed to thoughtful cuts and responsible revenue raising. we have worked with our leaders on that aspect as well. when the task force was coming together, it almost instantly migrated, it instantly migrated to the reality, as tom has commented and representative garamendi, we have to have at least 25% to 20% of men and women in this country making something. we can only survive from bubble to bubble otherwise and the bubbles kill us. we know that. we cannot persist with the unfair trade balance we have with china. $206 billion in manufactured goods, they have roughly $2.5 trillion accumulated in china. we know what they're doing with

it and with some work we've done through the congress on both the house and senate, we now know that 90% of the cost differential between a manufactured good from china and its counterpart here in the united states is accomplished through subsidy. we have pointed way too many fingers at the workers in america and said, it's your fault. you're unelingted sufficiently, it is your wages causing these problems and we know that's not the case. it is unfair trade destroying this country. we know that the business community is sittingen on its hand. what the senate is describing and the congressman is they need a framework. a framework of policies that produce the behaviors and outcomes that restore this economy. we are at a tipping point here. we are on the edge of no senator, no member of congress being able to fix the problems on our behalf soon. there are 15 prescriptions in the task force report.

we're not naive in thinking they'll be instantly enacted. they were written by a colleague -- by our colleagues in a way they could be if we had the wherewithal in the senate and house together but they are now going to be out there. the one that is of most moment to me and we'll spend quite a bit of time on it, in one speaks of it more abeably than our two members here is the national infrastructure bank. it needs to be a leveraged institution, it needs to attack the roughly $ 3 trillion of decrepit infrastructure that we have that has fore stalled us from full employment and is making us increasingly uncompetitive in the global economy. we're fully prepared and anxious to secrets come that are thoughtful and responsible to the business community. we are partners in the green economy initiative, as you'll read in the report. we're particularly sensitive to the women and men who are 50 and older who are part of the

29.5 million. i think something on the order of 13 million women and men now have been unemployed for more than a year. again these numbers you don't see publicly. we think there are at least eight million or nine million of them 50 years or older. five million of the 29.5 million are young people, half of them have a b.a. or b.s., the other half have a diploma, can't find their first job. you'll see quite a bit of attention paid in both of our initiatives to both, in our initiatives, to both. a manufacturing renaissance would be the best thing to happen@older worker and youth employment initiatives for the younger worker. finally, it's china. china is the dragon in the room, it's not the gorilla. it cheats around cheats every day. we have to have the back bone we thought we had heard about in the iowa caucuses of 2008 that representative garamendi and senator harkin speak to more ably than i. to my immediate left is pat

maloy, one of the genuine experts in this country on china trade policies, owen hernstadt was supposed to be up here, he spokes more ably than i do to manufacturing and then there's sheryl who ties it all together from a -- an economist's point of view. pat is with machinists, sheryl is here. thank you for listening to us, michael, thank you for introducing it and certainly it's a privilege, john, and tom, for being here. thank god you got out of that floor, tom. >> thanks. this does have the feel of being an alterntive reality here in this room. discussing what, as far as i

know as a journalist most economists consider to be the critical problem in the american economy. while on capitol hill, they're discussing how to further hurt the jobs picture and there is no real vibrant discussion, as far as i can tell, of these issues. the new america foundation wants to inject this coo into the conversation. we have now had, you know, a generation, i would say, a generation and a half, perhaps, since the reagan years, of a set of policies that has pretended in effect to support the american middle class, working class, indeed to rely on it and to allow the rest of the world to rely on it as a consumer of last resort for the

world economy, including china. while the same -- at the same time a whole series of policies were sort of in termite fashion not being seen undermining the middle class in so many ways. and of course the real lesson of the giant crisis of 2008 and its aftermath was that it was all an illusion. the american middle class was sustained by enormous amounts of debt. debt that was promoted and encouraged in many ways by government policies as well as by wall street. what we're seeing now in this long aftermath, two years after the recession supposedly ended but it still feels like one is basically an inversion of that giant bubble that was doing on -- going on in 2008 and we're in the midst of what some people are saying is perhaps the worst recovery on record. leo alluded to this but an even

scarier figure in some ways than the fish unemployment rate, which is 9.2%, though the actual unemployment rate is much higher, is the number of americans who have entered the ranks of the long-term or permanent unemployed. if you look at bureau of labor statistics data, it's scary. even in some of the worst recessionnary periods, you don't see anything like the figures we're seeing now. something like 43% of the unemployed in 2010 were unemployed for more than 27 weeks and many of them for more than a year now. and we don't have policies in place to try to bring them back, to give them training and skills to give them the work. so this jobs report, this task force report on job creation could not come at a more

important time. as it notes, there probably has not been since the great depression that so many americans have been unemployed for so long. in a supposed recovery period. and -- more than 20 months, i think it says. with that, let's begin the discussion, not only of the specific proposals that are laid out here, but of their political viability because i think that's very much a question at hand here because of what's going on, because of the debate and discussion going on on capitol hill, seemingly divorced from the reality of the economic crisis we're facing. what can the president do? what can the congress do in terms of these kinds of proposals? so you've already had partial introductions, leo, senator harkin, as well as the congressman, sheryl swinninger,

another key author of the report is director of the new america foundation economic programs, he's one of the founders of the group and founder of the world policy journal. patrick maloy has served four two-year terms on the u.s.-china economic security commission, a former foreign service officer and he's observed the evolution of the u.s.-china relationship from close-up and we'll want to hear from him a lot about the china trade issue. so with that, why don't we start up the discussion and i think i first would like to start off by saying, what do you think? perhaps we can start with senator harkin and congressman gare mengke, of these kinds of proposals being laid out in this report are politically

feasible at this point. >> let's turn to the experts. >> what do you think is politically feasible in this environment. >> politically feasible? >> next question. >> i kind of alluded to it in my opening statement. political feasibility depends upon political leadership. political leadership comes about from individuals who i think have a deep feeling for and intellectual concept of what is happening to our society writ large. if a political leader says to you our unemployment is 9%, and doesn't mention the 18%, they don't have a firm grasp of what's happening in our

society. if a political leader says, gee, we just -- we've got to have more of these so-called free trade agreements because it will help our country and help employment, then they don't have a firm grasp of what's happened in the past with these free trade agreements. so what's politically feasible depends on political leadership. i'm not in the mode of bashing president obama or anything like that, but i think the times call for bold, innovative leadership on the part of the president of the united states. if we don't have that, then it sort of comes back down on our side in the congress and we take our cues from our constituents in many ways and that -- then we just lack that kind of cohesiveness we need for political leadership.

i think we need a strict examination, this is getting a little bit off, but i think we need a good examination of how we went in the short span of a little over two years from a president elected with a huge mandate, huge mandate. with a progressive mandate. and a congress that was run by good progressives in the house and in the senate where we had 61-58 or 59 votes to a congress yanked around by the tea party on the house side and 53 votes on the democrat side in the senate and out of that you have four or five that are wobbly in the knees on a lot of issues, how did that happen in two and a half years? i think we need to look at that and examine that and find out why we have gone this far in the other direction in two and

a half years. i believe, and i will shut up on this, i believe it's because we haven't paid attention to the underlying real problems in america which as leo and this task force point out is the jobs issue. especially among young people. read the part in the report where, when young people can't find a job, they've been educated, can't find a job, that hangs around them not just for a couple of years but the rest of their lives. that's one of the most debilitating things happening in our society today, the lack of jobs for young people. >> i think it's important to understand that politics is not static and the economic realities will reach a -- will reshape politics in the next six months. those economic realities are pushing us closer and closer to an echo recession, a major -- an additional major downdraft

in the economy that we see showing up in all the data currently and all the underlying factors are moving us toward retesting of and potentially pushing us toward new financial crisis as welch given the ongoing exposure, both the government and the banks to a double dip in the housing crisis, now caused as much by unemployment as the original bubble. edge it would be a mistake to assume that the static picture we're seeing in the lead up to the debt ceiling is going to be the politics that dominates the discussion in six to nine months. now of course we have to play a role in redefining that but when -- after the initial ewe foriar may take place, the realities of the debt deflation

taking place throughout the american economy, that's going to grip large parts of europe, think slowdown in asia, will be the dominant reality. you can't disinvent the economic realities but you can interpret them in a way that i think will give us another opportunity and i think what's important, what leo has done with his leadership, is to give us a platform when that opening re-eerges in the next six to nine months. let's not assume we're in a stat tick political environment. we'll be in a dynamic political environment because we're in a very serious economic situation that is going to impose realities on the political leadership in a new way that you haven't seen in the last six months. >> congressman?

>> the american public wants a job. that's what this is about. they want a job. they want to go back to work. they want to support their family and they want a job. it's incumbent upon all of us who think we're in politics and want to be political leaders to develop a jobs agenda, a program to create the jobs necessary in america. i agree when you talk about it's going to switch. it's going to switch from this deficit which is really important but is not the central issue. the central issue is the putting people to work. we tried to develop in the house make it in america agenda and it's a piece of the puzzle. there are many different bills involved in it. some of them are part of what's in this proposal. but what we need is an overarching program which is in this, at least partly, where did my little book go here, here it is. it's this kind of thing. it's that we need a comprehensive jobs agenda.

something that speaks to all of the pieces of the puzzle and then for us, the senate and the house, to put together the pieces of legislation to cause it to happen. senator harkin, you couldn't be more correct. there's something about this that is missing, which is the leadership. there has to be a voice that makes this a reality. so as we go through the rest of this, we can talk about the individual pieces, as we should. in this report, are the elements of a successful program. there are some that could be added and some maybe will be subtracted along the way. but we have to have that overarching message to the american public and programs beneath it that can actually create the opportunity for this economy to turn. i like this. i really like what you guys have done here. hopefully we can grasp and say, let's run with this. i'd love to put this in the

president's hand. he's over in maryland talking to a bunch of students and it was here and there and everywhere but not one mention about a job. how are we going to do that? you've given us an answer. >> more for you to guide us through it, if i might, from what we can tell, tom and john, in your congress, john, and tom, your senate, three places where there seems to be inordinate sentiment to do something, the national infrastructure bank, buy domestic, which the congressman referred to, buy american, and there's certainly, pat you would have an insight to this as well but the currency bill aimed at china is certainly the biggest of the several subsidies that are killing us. the 90% subsidy rule i just described, roughly a third of the 90 is currency. the rest we know to be taxes, environmental citing, financing

and things. tom and john, i detect within your members almost in a bipartisan fashion a lot of support for china currency, national infrastructure bank and it seems to me hard to go home to iowa and say buy american doesn't make sense. >> you know the defense bill. >> and did it well. >> but in the stimulus bill, with the high speed rail and the international rail companies, high speed rail companies, none of them, not one company in america, but when that bill was passed and $12 billion put up there, they all rushed to establish manufacturing facilities in the united states. i'm carrying two pieces of legislation that say if you're going to use our tax dollars to go green and put up solar or wind, you're going to buy american. why use our tax dollars to buy chinese stow lar panels.

>> how about your big bridge? >> oh. >> it does seem that anything in politics, as dynamic as they might be, i keep going in the opposite direction, i'm talking about presidential politics, going by what was said at the bloomberg breakfast, in which it seems the political strategy of the administration is to avoid a discussion of jobs or the unemployment rate at all. let's talk about some specifics, if we can. maybe, patrick, you can talk in a little more detail about the china trade issue, the environment for getting tougher with china. >> i'm a member of the u.s.-china economic and security review commission. this is like a bipartisan congressional think tank. we've issued a numb of reports, almost all of them have been unanimous, 12-0, republicans and democrats. i'm a member of the commission,

i'm not speaking for the commission at this meeting. our website is www.uscc.gov. everything we do is up there. let me go through this. in the last 10 years, the united states has run $6 trillion worth of trade deficits. we've run $2 trillion worth of trade deficits with china. when you are running these kinds of trade deficits, you are outsourcing manufacturing and bringing it back. most of our imports from china are manufactured goods. 60% of china's exports are made by foreign invested companies. when you are shipping your manufacturing abroad, that's tied to your budget deficit because revenue that used to be produced here, goods here that produced well, are now being produced abroad and imported into the country. people who used to have good jobs in this country and pay taxes are now no longer paying taxes. we're putting money into

keeping them going through unemployment and other things. but they -- i've heard, i watched the debate going on in the congress and i have not heard anyone tying the budget deficit to the trade deficit. the american people know something bad is happening. they always talk about the fact that you go to a store and can't even buy anything made in america. now, china, china was a great civilization. they fell apart. the communists took control. they tried to build a centralized economy. the real genius came along in 1979, and he said, we need foreign investment, foreign technology, foreign markets. and that's the way we're going to build what he calls china's comprehensive national power. they don't just talk about their economic power, they use a term called comprehensive power, meaning political, military and economic. it's all based on the economic.

if you watch, their military is growing rapidly. so i don't mean to be a china basher, i'm not, i went to china in 1981 and saw a poor country, if you go now you see a prosperous and booming country for at least most of the 1.2 billion people. they are incentivizing our companies to outsource production to china. instead of contributing to job growth in this country, our companies are contributing to job growth in china. now, there are various things that we can do and we talk about that in the report. our guys get a tax break for building jobs abroad. they don't have to pay taxes on that money that they earn. now is that a crazy policy or what? we talk about that in the report. china underprices its currency and the impt m. -- i.m.f. just yesterday said the chinese currency is substantially undervalued. what does that mean?

it means when we ship a good to china it's more expensive than it should be. it incentivizes american companies instead of building production here to build it in china and ship it back here. that's all part and parcel ost what's happening here. there's something called indigenous innovation. when china joined the w.t.o., they used to say to american companies, if you want access to the china market, you have to make stuff in china. but when they joined the w.t.o., we said no more of that forced technology transfer. that's in their w.t.o. agreement they don't do that. but here's how they do it. they tell an american company, if you want to sell to the chinese government, you have to be on this list of companies or if you want access to our market, be a friend to china and do r&d in china. our technology, our brainpower what we did well, is now, the

chinese are getting that technology and know-how in china through what they call indigenous innovation. that's contrary to the w.t.o. agreement. what do they say to defend it? they said we're not forcing the companies. we're just telling them if they want to be a friend of china and make money in china, they have to transfer their r&d and technologies. we could re-incentivize this game. maybe we should have lower taxes on companies that produce g.a.p. in this country and hire tax -- higher taxes on companies that produce in china. we should not let this go on because our children's future is being sacrificed. >> the challenge does seem to be to try to package this as a national competitiveness strategy that doesn't run afoul of biases and views on free

trade. certainly a lot of proposals like this run agroud because they're perceived as protectionist. the tease seems to be selling it, getting back to your point about the right kind of leder shape -- leadership, what do you think about that? are we able to move beyond some of the sort of adoration of the free trade gods, if you will, that's persisted really for the last couple of decades? >> i hope so. i hope that we -- a number of us for years have been saying fair trade, not free trade, fair trade. this goes back to nafta and everything else. i remember the debates i had with bill clinton on nafta. don't get me started. but it is time to in some sense replay those debates. >> when did it become wrong to protect america? what's wrong with protecting

america? i don't get it. i really don't. particularly when the policies that have been in place for the last, i don't know, 20 to 30 years, are exactly the opposite, they don't protect america and in fact they harm america. you look at tax policies discussed here at least in part. why do we reward american companies with a lower tax if they offshore jobs? not one republican voted to repeal that tax. it did as, we thank the senate, we thank the house for doing it last december. but there's still more in the tax policy that rewards the offshoring of american jobs. what's wrong with a little bit of protecting american jobs? we ought to adopt the policies the chinese have adopted. if it's good for the chinese and they're able to get away with it, we ought to be able to adopt similar policies and get away with it here. use our tax dollars to buy american-made equipment.

18.5 cents of every gallon of gas, 25.5% crens for diesel, out of every gallon you buy goes out there to buy what? yes, i had nothing to do with the bay bridge. it was a horrible mistake. to save 10% they went off and bought chinese steel and thousands of jobs, thousands of jobs are in china and they're not in california. they're not in america. at the end of the day, turned out to be more expensive. >> one of the things that the congressman is driving to and again more abeably than i, if you take -- ably than i, if you take the proposals we have, you can find counterparts in 19 of the g-20. what the senator and congressman are saying and we're trying to say is we're not being protectionist, we're being resip oro call. 19 nations have domestic policies, buy domestic policies

that are multiples of what we have today and what little we have today is only because of people like john garamendi and tom harkin. we're saying if they can do it, let us do it. tom harkin was the architect of the phrase fair not free on trade. it's just fair. the tread agreements, we've had 11 of them. these two gentlemen, these two members know that 11 of them failed to deliver their promises by large amounts. they've not created jobs. they have not improved our trade balance. they've gone the other way and at the same time we look ahead to the ones on the table and find them similarly faulty. it's not fair trade -- i'm sorry, it's not free trade, michael, it's fair trade. >> no question about it. as a journalist, i've been covering this for the better part of the last couple of decades and have watched these proposals, these ideas, founder, getting back to this

idea of the sort of gods of free trade and i guess my question is, isn't it about time? isn't this really the moment when ideas like this we have seen a near disastrous failure of this sort of absolutist idea of free trade and how it was supposed to raise all votes and particularly american votes. it was supposed to be good for america. the results are kind of in. i guess i'm just wondering why the political environment hasn't changed more than it has. even accounting for the distractions caused by the rise of the tea party and the all-embracing focus we're seeing now on cutting the budget, i'm not sure why sort of some of the underlying economic thinking hasn't changed. these proposals, versions of them, of course, have been out there for a while. it seems like now more than ever is their moment. >> there's one sector of the

american economy that has not suffered. because of this so-called free trade and the huge trade imbalances we have. what secor am i talking about? the financial sector. they have not suffered a bit. in fact, they have made quite a bit on this. >> certainly have. >> you look at that and say, why do we still genuflect at the altar of free trade when the data and facts are in, well, you've got a huge sector with a lot of influence in congress that likes things like they are. they are doing quite well, thank you, in the financial sector. and that's what's happened, i think, in our society, in a broader perspective. we have moved from manufacturing to being a financial based economy. read kevin phillips' book "wealth and democracy," it came

out about 10 years ago, he lays it all out, how we moved from making things in this country to just spinning a lot of money around. >> indeed. and the underlying balance of power if you will, between labor and capital, which has been at equilibrium for a long time is changing, which is why it's only a shadow of its former self. capital goes anywhere it pleases, labor can't. you have an unequal amount. >> if i could take some of the recommendations in this report and use them, sun will, they

manufacture solar panels. the president wants to talk to me. he says, we've got problems. we've got about 18 months and we're going to have to make a decision to go out of business in america? i ask why. he says, a, china currency. it happens in your report here you speak to china currency. you speak to that issue. you taj about it a little bit, we can come back to it. he said, b, you need to understand the way in which china is financing the business in china. the chinese government finances their business with loans not available anywhere else, at least in america. super cheap loans, loan rates and obligations that are unavailable. free money available to those countries -- companies. then you've got the issue of make it in china policy. he said, we can't compete with

that. we're going to have to make a decision to shut down our manufacturing in america. so what does that mean? let's see, california, 86.$86.8 million. massachusetts, arizona, texas, oregon, on and on and on. gone. jobs gone because of the international -- or the lack of american policies. you speak to each of these things in this report. so apply this. how would we apply it? what would we do? >> i think there's only, if i'm not mistaken, i think there are really only two, maybe three manufactures soft -- manufacturers of solar panels left in america. >> one. >> that's the last one? >> last one. >> we are the ones who developed silicon chips and did research. i was on the science and tech committee back in the 1970's and 1980's, we were putting a lot of your money, taxpayerest' money into the development of

this technology, the basic research, getting it developed, and it's all gone offshore now. >> this is the only company that does all of it in america. other company mace assemble pieces in america, but this is the only company that does all of it from making the crystal to the wafer to the cell and then the panel. >> i think it starts and stops with, do we want to have a national manufacturing policy or not? the other 19 members of the g-20 have such a policy, china's is the most specific, by far, but it would not tolerate a circumstance where only eight or -- 8% of 9% of american workers are in the sector. it would not tolerate a world where small and medium sized enterprises can't get loans. it would not tolerate a world where china, on that plant the

congressman referred to, it gets sites for free, gets its factory for free, and dumps prosecution into the air. it starts and stops with, can we as a nation survive much longer with only 8% or 9% of women and men making something. you can't. then you have to go to, where would we most immediately see a manufacturing renaissance? that is in that $3 trillion of decrepit infrastructure. if it had a buy domestic aspect to it, you would have the policy first, michael, then the kick in the pants and the opportunity would be in our own infrastructure until we got this thing balanced. >> which is your number one recommendation in the task force report. i wonder whether you would talk a little bit about that, some of the other recommendations. are these in order of reports

or feasibility? >> they're not. i do think the group felt very, very strongly about two issues. one is the bank, i'm sorry, free bank with buy domestic and a more harsh position on china trade. let me di gress a minute, tom -- digress a minute, tom, if i can, on the bank. it must be a bank. it must have an equity capitalization and other capitalization. the white house talks about money just dribbling out in grants. we know from the wonderful treasurer of the state of california that calpers, would love to have an investment opportunity in a national infrastructure bank to be leverage for that bank. the members of the senate and house that are focused on this

issue appreciate the opportunity, michael, yet we can't get past a fellow named tim geithner who wants no banks except his banks. and the wonderful congressman leonard boswell just walked in. i can't find for a small or medium-sized manufacturer in iowa a $50 million loan today if my life depended on it. i just watched j.p. morgan give a $20 billion loan commitment to at&t to buy t-mobile which is a problematic deal. what the congressman is trying to do in iowa is an absence of a manufacturing policy for this nation. >> one of the things that this report recommends on page 33 is that we move to balance our

trade in five years. now maybe the five years isn't -- but we need to balance our trade. the administration has set a goal of doubling exports. but if you look at what's happening, imports are increasing faster than exports. so when you have a negative net export figure, meaning your imports are less than your exports, that's a drag on your economy. we have massive net export figures year after year. warren buffett in a famous article in "fortune" magazine in 2003 advocated that the united states needs to adopt policies to balance its trade. now people always hear you hear in a debate now, china owns so much of our treasuries. we're dependent on them. where did china get the money to own so much of our treasuries? we give it to them by running these massive trade deficits year after year. so here's the way the chinese

do it. the dollars come into china, the chinese government buys the dollars and give them to people they want, then they and gives them yuan and then they pie our treasuries. therefore they get income from the treasuries. they also get leverage over us. now is this a crazy thing for this country to be let going on and the hole is getting deeper. as tennessee ernie ford used to say, we're another day older and deeper in debt. we have to change the trends here. this is very important, the recommendation to balance our trade. when kennedy said, we'll get to the moon in this decade, nobody knew how to get to the moon but he set the goal and we figured it out. we need to set goals for ourselves. >> i wanted to stand a little bit on neil's comments about

infrastructure and the infrastructure bank investment. i think this is the linchpin between the micro goal of rebuilding our manufacturing sector and the macroeconomic goals relating to jobs capital and insufficient demand. it's just not calpers that is looking. there is paradoxcally, as we're debating reducing and doing a deficit deal, which will actually cut the amount of fixed income debt available, there's a shortage of fixed income debt that is occurring because of the collapse of the mortgage market. one. two, as baby boomers approach retirement, fixed income investments become much more important to them. three, as emerging markets' population enter their prime savings period, there's going to be an additional flood of capital.

we actually need to generate fixed income investments that a national infrastructure bank would curb in order to have a working banking and finance system in the world. that's one thing. so you put together, what infrastructure and the infrastructure bank does, it leverages and puts to work all this idle capital. it's not just $1 trillion or $2 trillion, it's $3 trillion to $4 trillion. add in the excess liquidity that is floating out in global economy. you crowd in like minded amount of not just putting private capital work in debt markets but you put crowded private investment into, because of the multiplier effect of that infrastructure investment has. moreover, then you also

facilitate not just directly the manufacturing sector but more importantly, some other key sectors of the economy upon which america's future rests, in particular the energy and transportation systems. we have an enormous abundance, representative garamendi talks about solar, let me talk about natural gas. we have an enormous abundance of natural gas and shale oil located in all parts of the country. we don't have the infrastructure to move that or put it into use. there'll be $1 trillion of investment, an enormous amount of jobs needed other the next five to 10 years to build out that infrastructure to make us to actually balance our energy. we have an enormous potential if we rebuild the manufacturing

base to move goods and services around the countries. one of the principal ways of doing that is our enormous inland water ways, not just the mississippi but the great lakes. we've allowed them to deteriorate so enormously that they're not as energy efficient. these are the most energy efficient ways of moving goods and services around the world. we need $5 billion or $10 billion investment over the next five or 10 years to move the goods and services in a much more efficient and attractive way which makes it very attractive to manufacture things in the center of the country and move them around new population centers that are located in -- whether it's in the great lakes or texas. so infrastructure investment and a bank in particular where you could leverage a small amount of public capital, as leo has described, into a much larger, take $1 trillion to $2

trillion off the sidelines, put it to work both in the debt and equity markets, has an enormous appeal as the centerpiece of an economic recovery and jobs program. >> before we turn it over to the audience for questions, i wanted to know if any of the panelists have other thoughts on the specific proposals here and professor owen hernstat who is supposed to be a member of the panel, is here. i wanted to know if you have any thoughts of your own? professor hernstat is director of the department of international affairs at the international association of machinists and aerospace workers and an adjunct professor at georgetown.

>> i'm going to hide back in the corner here. i must confess when you said professor hernstat, i was looking around the room for my father. just a couple of very quick things, one, i really do want to thank leo and the new america foundation for all their work on this. not only is it timely but it's critical. i think it goes without saying that we're in a crisis. it's urgent. and we can ill afford to spend all of our time getting more studies done and kind of sifting and winnowing. the answers are here. and we just have to act and act as the senator mentioned by showing true leadership. in and out of government. a couple of quick points. one is on one of the

recommendations that has been discussed and one-on-one of them that hasn't. the one on my america is obviously a critical one. i think we were all shocked and pushed back that many of us received when we were trying to get buy america locked into the recovery act. i think we were shocked by the pushback on that because it was seen as being protectionist and representative garamendi, i couldn't agree with you more, we would like to call it industrial policy, we like to call it national and economic security. on that. i don't think there's anything to hide behind that. but when we're talking about buy america, we're not talking about buying goods that are produced here in america, using u.s. supplies and raw material, but we also have to ask ourselves that the taxpayer would be shocked to learn some things we consider to be domestically made only have 51%

domestic content in them. if you were to ask most folks down the street or even folks, maybe some folks at the federal trade commission, what does made in the u.s.a. made, it would mean a different thing, really made here in the u.s. the second part is, there's no really uniform guidelines throughout government on defining what is domestic content. some would be shocked to learn that intangible items like the value of intellectual property rights and so forth are figured in, in some cases, to determining what domestic content is. and those things should be low-hanging fruit and it would be interesting to see those who actually oppose that, particularly when we see unemployment as high as it is. it should be a low-hanging fruit to make sure that our government procurement employees people here. the second related recommendation goes to the issue of employment impact statement. we've got environmental impact

statement, they've been around, been tested for a long time. it doesn't appear that many government agencies have incorporated a simple question when letting out a contract, an award, whether it's for a huge military issue like the tanker deal or smaller ones to simply ask the question, how many direct jobs is this going to create in the u.s.? what kind of jobs will be created? and how long will those jobs last? these are simple questions that should be factored into all of it. and if they were, at least it would give policymakers and our fine political leaders up on the panel much more information that they can consider when they fund government programs, when they fund procurement and so forth. thanks. >> thank you very much. now i'd like to open it up to the audience. >> can i just, before we do

that, i wanted to mention, when we're thinking about two things on the infrastructure. it -- it's got to be an investment that is in addition to but not a substitute for the level of federal government grant levels we have right now. i still think we need some pay-go as we go along, gasoline taxes and other things, you can't say, we're going to do that and now we're not going to spend any federal money on the infrastructure. that's one thing. to really invest in long-term infrastructure projects, you need what others an i have referred to as patient capital. capital is not looking to spin over in a hurry. here's a place where we can get really a two-for. my committee has been having a series of hearings, i started a little over a year and a half ago, on what's happening to

pensions in america. and the fact that people are losing their pensions at an alarping rate. we started in the -- alarming rate. we started when we shifted from defined benefits to defined contributions, 401k's, so people could have their 401 kmbing's and take it with them and it sounded nice and good but it has decimated any kind of a pension system. in other words, something you can rely on until you die. 40 -- 401k's, about two out of three people who have 401 kmbing's who are approach regular tirmente within the next 20 years do not have sufficient money to last them their lifetimes. a lot of people are taking out lump sums of $100,000 thinking i'm now rich but they don't have any kind of retime. one out of every four persons in america today of working age have absolutely zero money in a

pension. zero. so we need to rejuvenate the pension system so that we have more of a defined benefit program, we can build a hybrid system so that it's portable, so you can move around no matter where you go, you have a system like that, but that then provides you with patient capital. capital that can be invested for long periods of time. and that's where the infrastructure bank and others can go to get that kind of capital and guess what, now you have a pension system that will pay back the people later on in life. so i hope we can keep that in mind about the benefit of a defined benefit pension plan. >> we'll fake some questions. >> -- take some questions. >> my name is martin apple. i want to commend you first on

being able to integrate a whole number of separate realms and ideas. everybody who is describing the solutions, they like to -- one little lever they like to push to solve everyone but you have shown us you have to i want grate a lot of parts of the system to make it work. among the partses of the system we seem to always get to no matter how we follow the trails seems to be our trade balance with china. i mean, this has, in all your sets of data seems to be a bigger lever than most. if you look at how that came about, we have a mechanism that was supposed to solve this by preventing it from happening. it doesn't work. why don't we recreate it immediately in a form that will. i don't care whose name it has and how it works but set it up so it can function and solve the problem of fair trade balances between countries based on currency exchange.

if we do this properly, set a time limit of a couple of years, have it completely done, there may be a lot of things that will happen between us and china. there'll be some frictions. the middle kingdom has itsdz own view of what the world looks like and so do we. but somewhere in that exchange rate, whether their currency goes up 40% or ours devalues in some way, we have to make an exchange that can help generate the necessary stay at home kind of thing. and about patient capital, i love the idea but there's another way to look at it. our financial system is the tail that's driving the dog. it makes the -- all of the large companies in the country look at short-term profits. in order to do that, they can't invest in long-term potential opportunities. that driving force, that impatient capital, has been

pushing one of the drivers that moves a lot of our jobs offshore. we have a lot of invention in this country. it's not being able to be kept here because as soon as it becomes valuable enough it has an opportunity to go offshore and make a higher profit. so these are the things we have to attack together. i think you've got a good set of steps to begin and the last component is education. i appreciate your looking at colleges and how to integrate but we have to have a university system in which the people who graduate are effectively able to work. >> can we confine -- let's confine this to questions and not speeches. thank you. >> let me give you three quick answers to that. in terms of trade, we spent a -- spend a lot of time in the document on enforcement, enforcement of existing agreements, which the senator spoke to.

we mention the word tariffs as inducement to proper behavior if we don't see the sort of behavior we're entitle to, we advocate tariffs. in the area of the corporations, i'm very, very strongly opposed to a lot of multinational practices but as the representative and the senator will tell you, we don't have in place a tax structure that incents them to do the right thing so we have to put that in place. foonlly on education, with all respect, it is one of the greatest insults to the american people with those roughly 30 million american women and men unemployed today to suggest they're insufficiently educated and overpaid. everybody wants to fix the education system. i promise you there are millions and millions and millions of sufficiently educated and sufficiently motivated and sufficiently unemployed americans to fill any gap we have to fill in the near term. so we didn't see education as

our prerogative. that's left -- we left that mostly to the members. >> let's take some more questions. please do keep them short and make sure they are questions. identify yourself at the outset this gentleman here in the yellow shirt. >> paul gal behr, e.i.r. news service. i wanted to bring up that in creating jobs, it's best to take thed orer that franklin roosevelt did it, first deal with a completely out of whack banking system that is exhausting the credit of the nation. >> is there a question in there? >> we can see in europe yesterday this bailout of the -- spirals on and on until it destroys the economy or we stop it. i wanted to bring up that glass-steagall is introduceded in the congress, gone beyond 35 republican and democrat sponsors, both democrats and

republicans are pushing for that bill. if i -- i invite anyone in the panel to comment on the relevance of that. >> it's extremely relevant. i was insurance commissioner for eight years of my life and understand what happened when a bad mistake was made in 1998 and glass-steagall was repealed. it should be resfuted for many reasons, some of which you described. >> let me add, the other part of the roosevelt agenda was to create a banking system my colleague has written a very important study on how you cre re-create a public purpose finance system that's been eroded over the last 10 to 15 or 20 years. it seems like the first missing piece is to, with the infrastructure bank in particular, is to put in place where ways to be able to

channel excess idle capital into productive public investment and public and private investment. and indeed, one of the true legacies of the new deal, all these loan, lending and quasi-banking systems put in place in the 1930's and 1940's. >> those of us who have been here as long as i have, we all have votes we wish we could change and others we are proud of, i was one of eight senators in 1998 to vote against repeal of glass-steagall. i gave a speech -- i didn't mean to do that. [applause] . >> i'm just saying that -- i remember the pressure that was put on us by the white house, by bob rubin, harry somers and others that this was the way to

go, the thing to do and also what is his name, the head of the fed, greenspan. >> how soon we forget. >> we'd like to forget. >> i just wanted to mention, your floor speech at the time was quite pressure yent in warning of -- preshent in warning of what might happen. let's take some questions from the back of the room. the lady there. >> i'm a freelance writer, i've been to a number of job creation panels and one thing that always seems to be left out are how to remove impediments even to existing jobs. the thing that concerns me is the growing practice of use of credit reports by employers. there's been a bill sitting in congress forever that's not getting any traction, six states have passed similar

legislation, and i want to know from the panel if this is an area of work they would consider bringing into the task force? there's almost nobody in this country doing any serious work on reining in this practice and it's creating an underclass of millions of unemployable people, people like me who have degrees from oxford and georgetown and am cut out completely from federal work, federal contracting and many, many private sector jobs because of the requirement to have sterling credit even though we know credit reports are often filled with errors. >> i think what we really -- there are many, many issues involved in getting the american economy back on track. you just raised one, there are probably another several dozen. employment discrimination problems that exist. credit reporting can be useful.

it can also be very discriminatory. you've raised that issue. it has to be looked at in the context of employment discrimination of many, many types and that happens to be one. to get something going in congress, we can't get the big things going. the overarching issues and certainly the discrimination issues are one thing we need to tuck to. i would like to take this opportunity to ask leonard bosswell to take my seat. i would like to get out of town before the f.a.a. shuts down. >> it's not often you have the luxury of a reserve congressman. please, congressman. congressman, we haven't heard from you. >> i know time is short. i want to is a absolute all of

you for having this and the thought process. we are certainly in crisis, you all know this. history is being written, what's it going to say? that's what's driving me and probably all of you. i was somewhat relieved, i even asked for mr. somers to leave town, i wondered what are we going to do. i'm glad he's doing what he does well, he's a wonderful professor. we have got to get to building things with american hands. until we can do this, we're going to continue to go the wrong way. i think -- i'll just say this, i think it's ok we've got a

deficit situation, it's ok to have the debate on it in front of the american people, they'll get it, but we have the capacity to do other things, infrastructure, all these things we're talking about, why aren't we doing that? it's very, very frustrating. the country needs it. the country is in great need, there are some things that we know we have to do. go to any state, any city and you'll find out that we're falling way behind as we think about our asian neighbors, our european neighbors and we think -- we've got to get to doing things. thank you, i'm sorry. >> no, thank you, congressman. we have time for one more question. yes, sir on the end there. >> just two quick things that have to be brought up. my name is rick lopez, lpac tv. a couple of things that i think

are fundament to bring up and mostly they're directed to the representative. one, i think it's pretty obvious that mr. obama has come out publicly and pushed the agenda of brutal austerity and he's talking about putting social security on the table which most citizens in this country means the chopping -- know that means the chopping block. is there going to be serious resistance against this president. and this is a more technical question if we look at the effects of sustainable technologies on third world countries, i mean, it's really murderous and keeps these countries backwards. you can't run a modern day hospital with a windmill, it's not possible. so are you guys willing to reconsider technologies that are efficient and are actually of a large enough scale to deal with the crisis such as nuclear power development? i know the media has been his terical, trying to make people

afraid of nuclear power but i think we need ambitious programs and i'm wondering if you agree we should have programs like the apollo program or the other programs that stimulated the economy. thank you. >> well, yes, first of all there will be resistance to any cuts in medicare or social security. social security is sound. it does not contribute to the debt. you know the data on that. and quite frankly, looking ahead after 2036 when social security is anticipated to be 75% of what it's supposed to pay out, 75%, to make up that additional 25% for the next, oh, for probably the next 50 years, why aren't we talking about raising the cap on payroll taxes? why is it fair, why is it fair that someone who makes $50,000 a year pays payroll taxes on

every blast dollar, someone who makes $500,000 a year only pays 20 cents on the dollar. why is that fair? just by raising the cap you'll have sufficient funds to take care of any problems with social security for at least the next 50 to 75 years. so yes, we're going to resist any of those kinds of things. there's been a move afoot in the republican party to privatize social security for years. i can remember in the 1990's with gingrich, and wall street has always wanted to get its hands on some of that money. boy, talk about free money. social security, they can invest and start to spin around, they wanted to get their hands on something. you hear about partial privatization. so we have to be very careful about any kind of partial types of privatization of social security. on energy, the cheapest barrel

of oil is still the boirl of oil you don't buy. what do i mean by that? the cheapest barrel of oil is the one you save, you don't buy. which means conservation. we -- and here's jobs. infrastructure jobs. just rebuilding is in the the right word. renovation. renovating the buildings we have in america to make them energy efficient. huge, huge savings in energy and there you could lock in american-made goods, doors, windows, new heating and ventilation systems, geothermal systems where practical in buildings. retrofitting the buildings in america, i don't have the data but -- you can get it all. and you employ a lot of people to do that. you can talk about nuclear power and wind and all that and

a lot of that is ok for the future but why aren't we focusing on the things that will create jobs, stimulate manufacturing in america and save energy all at the same time. that is renovation and conservation of energy? >> thank you very much. thanks to the panel. i think we have a lot of agreement here on the need for national mollcies. here's the report, read it, take it home, thanks so much. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011]

>> the debt and deficit reduction talks continue to dominate the debate in washington as congressional leaders met with the president today at the white house. the president urged democrats and republicans to come together and take a balanced approach to strengthening the economy. house republican conference head jeb hensarling gave the republican address and said cut, cap, and balance was the only viable plan to cut spending. folks in washington like to blame one another for this problem but the truth is,

neither party is blameless and both parties have a responsibility to do something about it. every day, families are figuring out how to stretch their paychecks, struggling to cut what they can't afford to pay for what's really important. it's time for washington to do the same thing. but for that to happen, it means democrats and republicans have to work together. it means we need to put aside our differences to do what's right for the country. everyone is going to have to be willing to compromise. otherwise, we'll never get anything done. that's why we need a balanced approach to cutting the deficit. we need an approach that goes after waste from the budget and gets rid of pet projects that cost billions of dollars. we need an approach that takes cuts that i wouldn't make in normal circumstances and we need to ask everybody to do their part. we have to make serious budget cuts but it's not right to ask middle class families to pay more for college before we ask the biggest corporations to pay

their fair share of taxes. it means that before we stop funding clean energy we should ask oil companies and corporate jet owners to give up the tax break other companies don't get. before we give up medical research, we should ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries. before we ask seniors to pay more for medicare, we should ask the wealthiest to give up tax breaks we can't afford under the circumstances. that's the heart of this approach, serious cuts, balanced by revenues. it's been the position of every democratic and republican leader who has worked to reduce the deficit, from bill clinton to ronald reagan. earlier this week, one of the most conservative members of the senate, tom coburn, announced his support from a balanced, bipartisan plan that shows promise. then a funny thing happened. he reeve seved a round of applause from a grup of republican and democratic

senators. that's a rare event in washington. there will be plenty of haggling in the days ahead but this boils down to a simple choice. we can come together for the good of the country and reach a compromise, we can strengthen our economy and leave our children a more secure future. or we can hurl insults at each other and demands and return to our corners and accomplish nothing. >> hello, i'm jeb hensarling, a republican representative from texas. every day we hear about a friend or neighbor who got laid off or still can't find a job. our administration promised its stimulus plan would help keep unemployment below 83k9. instead, unemployment has been above 8% for 29 straight months, the longest stretch since the great depression. 14 million of our fellow

citizens remain out of work. so is it any surprise that the number one question in america remains, where are the jobs? now by and large, lack of confidence in our nation's future is holding our economy back. it's uncertainty about our national debt, uncertainty about taxes, uncertainty about the regulations and mandates that keep pouring out of washington. small business owners are pleading for the government to stop the reck less spending, balance the budge and then just get out of the way. that's why the republican-led house is focused on relieve -- removing government barriers to private sector job growth. the kind of growth the president promised in the stimulus but failed to deliver. it's part of our plan for america's job create jors, we pass a series of jobs bills to cut wasteful washington spend, rein in needless red tape and increase american energy production. our plan includes the budget,

written by chairman paul ryan in the budget committee that pays down our debt over time and pays -- paves a path to prosperity and economic growth. we americans are the best entrepreneurs and workers in the world. given a level playing field, we can compete and win against anyone, anywhere, any time. but not as long as the policies coming out of washington remain harmful to jobs. what we need to do is get government out of the way so our economy can get back to creating jobs. that's what makes this debate we're having about america's fiscal future so important. our government has gotten so big, so expensive, it's keeping our economy from recovering as it should. job creators are fearful that our $14 trillion debt will lead to higher taxes which could harm their businesses and destroy even more jobs. just this week, the co-founder of home depot, bernie marcus,

when he was asked what's the single biggest impediment to job growth, he answered, the u.s. government. he went on to say, if we don't lower spending and bring down the debt, we're going to have to raise taxes and when you raise taxes, it costs jobs. this sentiment is echoed by small business people and entrepreneurs from coast to coast. the american people have long since said, it's time to quit spending money we don't have. it's time to stop borrowing 42 cents on the dollar, much of it from the chinese and sending the bill to our children and grandchildren. credit rating agencies spelled out the consequences of failing to heed this message, warning that even if we're able to avoid any kind of default that may very well downgrade our status unless we take serious action to get our fiscal house in order. that's why the house this week

passed cut, cap, and balance legislation. first the legislation immediately cuts government spending to 2008 levels. i just haven't really met anybody who thought government was too small before president obama became president. second, it puts caps in place to ensure government spending is put on a path to be no more than 20% of our economy as it has been on arch since world war ii. last but not least, it amends the constitution to balance the budget once and for all. every family, small business and almost every state has to balance their budget. why should the federal government be any different? our plan accomplishes this without imposing job-crushing tax hikes. now unfortunately, the democratic-led senate tabled this common sense measure, despite the fact that it received bipartisan backing in the house and overwhelming

support from the american people. you know, the democrats who run washington are good at telling us what they're against but they have yet to put a plan on the table that tells us what they're for. speeches and press releases won't do the trick. it's time for some action. senator reid if you don't like our plan to deal with the debt crisis, where is your plan? mr. president if you don't like you are plan to deal with the debt crisis, where is your plan? if we're going to have any type of default and downgrade and resume job creation in america, the president and his allies need to listen to the people and work with republicans to cut up the credit cards once and for all. it's time to cut, cap, and balance. that's what would give us jobs, hope, and opportunities. thank you for listening. >> next, highlights from nasa's final shuttle flight. after that, details on nasa's unmanned mission to mars.

then another chance to see the discussion on job growth in america. tomorrow on "washington journal" a political round table with "washington post's" blogger generalerer rubin and writer jim gerstein. they'll talk about how both parties are gearing up for the next election. j.j. messner talks about the 2011 failed states index and john jarvis will talk about the state and safety of national parks. "washington journal" live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. nasa completed its 30-year space shuttle program this week with the safe landing of atlantis following a 13-day mission to the international space station. tonight a look at highlights of the shuttle flight, from preflight activities to the

launch, late we'll hear atlantis crew members talking about their trip. this is about 45 minutes. >> this is the second -- his second trip into space. and here's mission specialist number one sandy magnus. and mission specialist number two here. and here they come. crew going down the elevator where they'll be greeted by employees from kennedy space

center and members of the news media. this is the same elevator that's been used by the astronauts ever since apollo.

>> the flight crew is now in the white room of the orbiter access arm. members of the closeout crew in the white coverls and the asttro -- coverlalls, the astronauts in their orange space suits. >> they're just getting rex. in hopefully this will be the last astronaut you'll see climbing into a vehicle to go fly in space on the shuttle.

>> attention all personnel. this is he this launch status check. >> t.t.c. go. >> houston flight. >> houston flight if you give me, you call me again, i would appreciate it. standby. >> yes, will call you later. s.t.m. >> s.t.m. is go. >> l.r.d. >> l.r.d. is go. >> s.r.o. >> s.r.o. is go. >> c.d.r. >> c.d.r. is go. we are ready to proceed with the exception of flight who needs more time.

>> k.t.c. processing engineer. >> we are go. >> thank you, bill, appreciate that. >> we are go. >> thank you. >> we need final go here, let's hear what he says and we'll get back to you. >> atlantis go. >> ok, starting to feel good down here on the ground about this one today so on behalf of the greatest team in the world, good luck to you and your crew on the final flight of this true american icon.

so for the final time, good luck, god speed and have a little fun up there. >> thanks to you and your team, mike. until the very end you made it look easy. this is a reflection of what a great nation can do when it dare tots follow through. we are completing another chapter of a journey that will never end. celebrating the thousands of men and women who gave their hearts, souls, and even lives in this program. the crew of atlantis is ready to launch. >> thank you, sir. we'll get you going in a minute. >> houston flight. >> for the record i'm go. >> launch director, that's our entire launch team. we are ready to proceed at this time. >> i copy that.

clear to launch atlantis. >> countdown on my mark. three, two, one, mark, t minus nine minutes and counting. auto sequence has been initiated. >> atlantis, this day has been 30 years in the making, there have been many fabulous missions over the years, on behalf of our launch team, we salute the entire astronaut corps for their dedication not only in ex-up and downing our knowledge of the universe but also here on earth. have an excellent mission and god speed. >> thank you very much. >> perform a.t. start.

>> reconfigure. >> flight crew o.t.c., close and lock your visors, initiate o2 flow. >> t-minus two minutes. >> t-minus 40 seconds. handing off to atlantis' computers at t-minus 31. 35, 33. we have had a failure. sequencer.

>> we have to go through the verification, please. >> all right. >> we need to verify using a camera, positioning camera 62 now. >> let us know as soon as 62 is swung over. >> countdown will resume on my mark. three, two, one, mark. >> t-minus -- handoff to atlantis' computers has occurred. firing chain is armed.

>> 15. >> go for main engine start. t-minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5 -- the engines up and burning. 2, 1, 0, and liftoff. the final liftoff of atlantis on the shoulders of the space shuttle, america will continue the dream. >> houston now controlling the flight of atlantis, the space shuttle spreads its wings one last time for the start of a sentimental journey into history. 24 seconds into flight. wings level on a proper alignment. 4.5 million pounds of hardware and humans taking aim on the international space station. 40 seconds into the flight, the three liquid fuel main engines

throttling back to 72%, reducing stress on the shuttle as it goes transsonic for the final time. >> once again, from the pilot point of view camera, one minute until touchdown.

the preflare maneuver executed. landing gear down and locked. main gear touchdown, now deploying the drag chute. rotating the nose gear down to the deck. nose gear touch down. having fired the imagination of a generation a ship like no other, its place in history secured, the space shuttle pulls into port for the last time, its voyage at an end.

>> after serving the world for 30 years, the space shuttle has earned its place and history, it has come to a stop. >> we'll take this opportunity to congratulate you, atlantis, as well as the thousands of passionate individuals who brought this great space faring nation who truly empowered this incredible spacecraft which for three decades has inspired millions around the globe. job well done, america. >> thanks. great words, great words.

it's changed the way we view the world and changed the way we view the universe. a lot of emotion today but one thing is indisputable, america will not stop exploring. thank you for protecting us and keeping this program until the end. >> all right, guys, one more step here to do but before we do that, hopefully i can get through this, but -- let's see, i want to take this opportunity to pass on a few words this will be the last time this team will be together. first and foremost, i want to thank you guys. it's been my extreme privilege and honor to have work with each one of you and been part of this outstanding team of individuals so dedicated and passionate about the work they do. each of you should take great

pride in what you have achieved and know you're the main reason for the success of the space shuttle program. 30 years ago, the dream had just begun. as columbia's nose gear touched down, he told his team, prepare to make history. that was a moment for the rhysry -- history books. today is also a moment for history books. the work done in this room and this building will never again be duplicated. i believe that those in the shuttle program will become the shoulders for the next generation to stand on. hold your heads with pride as we close out the space shuttle program, you have earned it. savor it, soak it in, you are the best. you have made america and the

world a better place. it's been an unbelievable and amazing journey. to the entire nasa team, god bless you all and god speed. with that, why don't you guys bring them in here, we'll watch the crew walk around while i finish handing over the vehicle. [applause] >> heart felt words from the entry flight director, signing off to the entry team for the final time as 30 years of space shuttle operations and mission control come to an end with the safe landing of atlantis, its

four astronauts now off the vehicle for the final time. >> the commander is now leaving the crew transport vehicle along with our other astronauts. being greeted by our nasa administrator. and our center director, bob cabana. we see sandy magnus, rex will i'm and chris ferguson. john shannon from houston. our launch vehicle atlantis manager angie brewer.

john shannon who served as our program manager at at houston for the shuttle program. >> our launch director in the background, mike linebaugh. and mike moses along with mike linebaugh. there's laurie, our deputy administrator, our

administrator charlie bolden. >> a scene of happiness as well as mixed emotions. there's the atlantis banner that was on the hatch of atlantis when the hatch was closed. with rex wallheim, getting his picture made with atlantis'

banner. mark knappy from the united states alliance. >> you probably can't hear me out there but i'm going to talk to the mike anyway. it's a great day to be here and welcome the crew back home. i personally want to salute them an everybody who has been involved in this program. it's been a 30-year journey that's been absolutely incredible. i want to say that all of us stand on the shoulders of some giants, none any better than these. they have come been known as the final four. they did an absolutely incredible job. if you have an opportunity to watch during the mission, they were like racehorses the whole time. they made us very proud. we've been exploring since early in our country's history. what the crew did this time was close out this era of our

exploration but i want everybody who was involved in this to feel incredibly proud of what you did and what your role was. like me they got an opportunity to do the flying but we owe an incredible debt of gratitude to the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of folk around the country who made this all possible. i had a chance to talk to some of you this morning, we were lining up the convoy, i think you -- i thank you again for everything you have done. what we have done has set us up for exploration for the future, but right now i want to welcome them home and let them know how proud we are of them. i ask you to come up and talk for your crew now. thank you. >> thank you, charlie. we appreciate those remarks. i'll tell you that, you know, flying in space is a real dream but flying in space has a lot

more to do with who you do it with than what you do. these three folks, rex and sandy and doug, i'll tell you, a commander couldn't ask for three better people to go and perform an aggressive and to a certain extent, historic mission. there's no doubt that there was a lot of attention paid to this mission because it does bring to a final close 30 years of space shuttle history. i'm going to speak on behalf of them and just say that we're all, the three of us, the four of us were honored to be part of this. but ultimately it's, everyone who has worked on the shuttle program, though we got to take the ride, we sure hope that everybody who has ever worked or touched or looked at or envied or admired a space shuttle was able to take just a little part of the journey with us. we're going to put atlantis in

a museum now along with the other three orbiters for generations that will come after us to admire and appreciate and hopefully, i want that picture of a young 6-year-old boy looking up at a space shuttle in a museum and say, you know, daddy, i want to do something like that when i grow up, or i want our country to do fantastic things like this for the continued future. if we take those steps right now and they continue with that next generation of space explorers, then i consider our job here complete. again on behalf of the crew, i thank you so much for the time and attention and for the folks at k.f.c. thank you for this vehicle, it performed wonderfully, it's just as pristine as it was, i hope, on the day we took it, barring maybe a door that opened up a little bit on entry. but everything is wonderful, the vehicle is great, thank you

very much. >> and there they go.

>> space shuttle atlantis landed early thursday morning at the kennedy space center. later that day, the shuttle astronauts, including commander chris ferguson, briefed reporters on their experience and most memorable moments in the space shuttle program. this is about 20 minutes. >> good afternoon, everyone. this is our post-landing news knchts. we'll start with comments from the crew and then take questions. we'll turn it over to our commander, chris ferguson. >> hello. i think we're elated to be back

here in florida. the weather was perfect today. one of the things we always have in the back of our mind is are we going to end up back in florida or in california? the launch director, before we launched, said, you may not go to california. we had to come back to florida. fortunately the weather cooperated and we had a nice predawn landing. to my left, sandy magnus, m.s.-1, she had to haul the heavy stuff out of the t.l.m., did everything from robotics to taking care of us on the mid deck and she was just a tremendous asset to this crew and i'm proud to have called her my crew mate. sandy? >> the mission was incrediblely busy. we knew it would be incredibly busy when we started. we got tons of help from the space station crew and with their help and all the great work that these guys did we were able to get that cargo transferred and then more cargo

transferred back. . that is pretty much all we did. it was an absolutely great experience. it was tremendously. -- busy. i just want to say what an honor it has been to be part of the space shuttle program. i started 26 years ago as a

black -- back flight controller. it has been such an honor. you will notice when you talk to people here at the kennedy space station that it runs in the blood. everyone wants to be a part of it. we understand it is time to transition, but we will cherish every minute of it. and i wanted to thank all the folks on the ground who helped get us off on a very exciting launch and to recover on a wonderful landing in mission control and all of the folks at the other space flights that helped us on the other missions. on my left is the pilot, doug curley. doug was the chief of the great undocking fly around. i am sure look pretty, but it was pretty challenging inside. he was calm as a cucumber as all things were lining up and we were all doing a different cast, and he was running the show.

he did a great job. >> i do not know what else to say, other than we are glad to be back here in florida. it felt like about a two-month mission crammed into 13 days. we ran from dawn till dusk literally up there. i think we left the station better than we found it. i think we have them set up for the long haul. fergie never gets introduced. he is the glue that kept us together heading in the same direction for the surreal experience. i do not think any of you appreciate the demands and pressures and emails that only chris gets that he dealt with. there was no indication positive or negative to the rest of us.

he kept us going in the right direction. we cannot say enough about sandy, but we also cannot say enough about chris. he was a great guy to work for. i would like to do it again with him sooner rather than later. >> with that, we will take questions. we will start down here in the front with march up here again to gsha. >> we just heard that tears were flowing on the runway. i would like to know if tears were slowing in the cockpit and what were the emotions. >> there are certain times you have to do nothing but concentrate in cannot feel the historic nature of it. for instance, when doug did the

undocking. it was a magnificent sight. it was dark and we were departing. i was set back so i could be more detached for the first part. when the station crews of the atlantis is departing, that is one there really choked me up. it depicted on what part of the mission your ads in what your job was. there were times that you would take the big picture and get to you. -- it depended on what part of the mission it was for you. >> thank you for answering the same questions hundreds of times. every 10 years we interview genus and then on the anniversary of him being the last man to walk on the moon. -- gene sinnon. in 10 years, where do you think we will be in terms of the u.s. and human space flight and exploration? >> that is a great question, i

know it really is. i know where i hope will be. given everything i know today, i think we will be traversing back and forth and a lower orbit with one of the four or five vehicles that are being considered right now. i think that will be a well- travelled path. i think we will have spending either short or perhaps long amount of time in orbit who have paid for a trip there. i do not think it is too much unlike the airlines. recalled whole airline industry, the aviation industry got started with designed airfoils. they enable the aviation to take off. nasa has really laid the foundation for space flight, commercial space flight to take off. i think in 10 years we will see

that. i think you will be on the verge, if not already, have launched a heavy lift vehicle. liftif's developed heavy vehicles with the intent of leaving orbit. if we're not there, we will have been there very -- we will be there very shortly. clearly, it is my opinion. i hope it is something that the ads placed play -- does take place, because we need something to look forward to. right now is a time of morning, but that is to be expected. we have said we're saying goodbye to a good friend, and we will get over that. once we get over it, we will start looking for it and make it happen again. >> high. -- hi. i'm with space.com.

am wondering if you plan to visit the space shuttle once they are installed in the museum homes? >> i think it will be nice to visit them in the museum. i think to go and see it through other people's ideas they have chosen to display it and what people -- i think it would be fun to go to the museum and what people look at the shuttle and listened to the comments they are making. that would be very interesting. >> right here. >> [unintelligible] before this flight you spoke of you did not know when it would sink and that this was the final flight. has that started to sink in that this is it for the space shuttle? >> yes.

i think it started to sink in sooner than i thought it would. every once in awhile it would start to sink in, and it was in the quiet times. one of the times when we were on mid deck of the space station where we live and sleep. i was thinking about all the other cruises before me, and i thought this is the last time. someone else as me when we go to visit atlantis and the museum. i certainly plan to. we were the last crew that lived on there. >> evan braun, fox news radio. how did atlantis perform on the final trip? she came back, landed, being

towed back. what kind of shape is she in? if for some magical reason there was another set of srv's, cou ifld she do it? -- could she do it? >> absolutely. other than we had a with a call in the middle of the night. one of them got a little cranky. that happens. everything worked just like it is supposed to. chris and wrecks and i got practice with malfunction procedures to get them back in order, but that was not a big deal. it was probably a bigger deal down here that wasn't there. the funniest thing about that, -- that is really the only thing i can think of that did not work. everything worked perfectly. and the memory i will have but that is the alarm went off, we

are all in the sleeping bags and the mid deck is stark. chris and i popped out of the sleeping bags and look at each other and say what is that? [laughter] we get the sleeping bags and go up to the flight deck and turn on the display and short out it -- sort out it was gpc four. chris described them as gofers coming out of their holes. sandy popped up after that. what do we say? will everybody please go back to bed. angie and her team had atlantis ready to go. i guarantee 60 days from now she could go again. to go rex's africa stands notwithstanding, did you leave anything of yourself on board atlantis before leaving the final four description you did

back in houston? >> we did. we left a little something. we did not want to make it permanent. we did not want to deface atlantis. we wanted to leave it up to the ground processing crude to decide what to do with what we left behind, but we left an inscription, a low plaque. it was basically a tribute to the people that had worked on the space shuttle program since day one thanking them for their dedication and to let them know how much we thought about the work they do from the astronauts, from the people that it to operate the vehicles that they maintain. a lot of people think the astronauts to live here in florida and rub elbows with these folks every day, so we do not. sometimes it is a little bit of an ever to give them the things and praised the desert, and we try to give them the extra things.

>> now that the wheels have stopped, when it is mentioned, what will be your most memorable moment of that flight? what would be your most memorable moment of all your flights? >> that is a hard one. well, probably not one that you would think. when the countdown clock stops at 31 seconds, and someone says the clock has stopped due to a malfunction, that tends to stick with you. >> the first question that comes to mind is what kind of malfunction? that is just the pilot's perspective. i think if i had to look at it from a layman's perspective, just the image of the space station out there, and

unfortunately we cannot convey -- the pictures just did not capture the majesty of what humans have built in the low earth orbit. this is an immense vehicle. people are living and working in it like it is ours, only the flow from module to montreal. it is almost as a real experience. that is probably my most touching memory. >> the question is for sandy. you have more space flight time in orbit than the rest of the crew. with the conclusion of this mission and the shuttle program, it seems like the rules of the game are changing in terms of the spacecraft in years to come, as well as the inception of the lower court but operations contrasting with nasa's plan for deep space exploration. the you foresee a time when there may be different career paths for astronauts based on

the work force operations verses deep space? is that a consideration? you have to decide which direction you want to go in? >> i think that is a conceivable idea. as to get more access, the scope of the missions possible increases. that would require a different type of skill set. it becomes a less of an exploration and more of utilization. the deep space missions are more of an exploration flavor. that requires different skill sets. just as when the shuttle came on line, you see an expansion of opportunities available. we now need scientists and medical doctors and a wide variety of skills sets. i think you'll see the same thing during this transition. every little the province the possibilities for people to go to space. >> one final question. >> on the subject of commitment,

question for doug harley. you each individually said yes, you would be a member of the crew. what happens from today? what things you continue to do as the crew? what happens in the near future? >> i think today we will probably go out and get a nice meal somewhere, and dead head back to houston tomorrow and say hi to the folks back there. and then we will start in debriefs on monday. we will probably pretty busy. debrief usually takes a couple of weeks. then there is post flight p-our experiences after that. we have a few more months together, which is great, because it would be hard to stop it right now. i think that is generally what we will be doing over the next couple three months. a quick one.

>> james. a question for doug as well. he waited a very long time for your first flight, i believe like nine years. hopefully it is not that long for the next one, but did that experience give you any kind of perspective, any lessons learned in terms of patients, perseverance that you think might help you and the rest of the astronaut corps? anything else to deal with a gap that is to come? >> we are still pouring to fly people. it will be three or 4 per year rather than 30 or 40. for my class, the timing was not good for flying quickly, but there were folks in brick and sandy's class that we did 10 or 11 years. class rick or sandy's that we did 10 or 11 years.

it is worth the wait, but you have to put the effort in as well. hopefully if i fly again -- waiting another nine years would be harder rather than easier, but the opportunity to go beyond low or or orbit or to a six- month expedition is a great opportunity -- exhibition is a great opportunity as well. you put your time in and do your job well and good things come. i think i will leave it at that. >> that is all the time that we have with atlantis crew. that will conclude this briefing. we would like to think the crew very much for coming. thank you very much. this does conclude the briefing. >> on friday, nasa announced the next mars rover, nicknamed curiosity will land near a mound near the tail crater to search for evidence that the plan that

was once capable of supporting microbial life. the landing site was chosen as the target as the mars laboratory mission after an extensive review of potential sites. this 55 minute news conference took place of this money than -- smithsonian national air and space museum in washington, d.c. we're here this morning to land -- announced the landing site. and we will share the details of what the mission hopes to accomplish. on july 1, 1976, 35 years ago, on the front steps of the brand new air and space museum, a ribbon cutting ceremony was held to dedicate the smithsonian's

newest museum, but it was no ordinary rich and cutting. the task was not accomplished by the traditional large signals, but by a signal from the spacecraft orbiting mars. it was a dramatic connection between the exploration of mars and the new national air and space museum, but hardly the last. the relationship was just beginning. i might add that we have a viking spacecraft on display here in the museum. the viking that is on mars actually has been transferred to the smithsonian by nasa, so we are free to pick it up anytime we like, but i dare say that the reach of the smithsonian museum is farther than any other museum in the world with our collections on another world. this museum is world renowned for the collection of historic spacecraft and the millions of visitors that come every year to learn about them and be inspired by them.

for decades we have been enjoyed a close relationship to expect -- insure the extraordinary artifacts are preserved. this partnership to preserve the heritage in space flight will add another milestone to than actual collection with the arrival of the space shuttle discovery at the space station next spring. i would like to take this opportunity to publicly think nasa for selecting us as the repository for this treasure. i can assure you we will bring our best schools set to this mission. with its duration of the world changing artifacts and the stunning buildings that housed them, enjoy widespread awareness, but what is less well-known is it is not only keeper of history, but also a maker of history. the founding director, michael collins, created the center for

urban planning and studies in the 1970's to engage in research and house imagery and data for all researchers to investigate, thereby establishing the dual mission of history and science. he selected the man to build and lead the center. he had been a principal scientist involving the landing sites for the apollo missions. my colleagues knew him quite well. in addition, satellites have been the focus throughout the history. nasa scientists have been key contributors to many historic missions, and are currently involved with the marks -- mars exploration rovers and others. the mercury surface space and garden geochemistry and ranging aircraft that are known as messenger, and the focus of today's announcement, the mars and science laboratory. as the staff works to preserve

the history of space exploration, the museum's planetary sciences at to the current exploration of space with a highly regarded research in space. we are fond of saying around here that if it is on mars, orbiting mars, or on its way to mars, nasa scientists are involved. scientists collaborate with researchers all over the world. we are extremely proud of the contributions they make to the inhabitants of this precious planet -- precious planet we call earth. for those who think this is the closing of the curtain on american space exploration, they need only to look at the current data, and the next one is about to launch, to note the space station is very healthy and every day we're still going places we never seen -- been. we're very proud of our own planetary studies. in his role. we will hear of it from him

later. i would also like to point out of a full-sized model of msl on display at the museum of the far end. i invite you to take a look at that after the press conference, as well as the many programs we have going on. we have stations all over talking about the research that our group does on mars, and generally about mars. with that, i would like to pick -- began the discussion by asking the chief scientist to come forward. [applause] >> thank you, and thank you for hosting this event, because i love this museum. every time i come in here i am a kid again looking around at all the incredible and exciting stuff. since i have become chief scientist at nasa, i have gone

to nurture the child that much more. i think it is a great event, and a wonderful venue, and i really appreciate that. i want to start by saying a lot of attention has been given in the last weeks, months, years perhaps to the event that concluded yesterday with the landing of the space shuttle, the say, a successful landing of the shuttle marking the turning of a page to a new chapter in human exploration of space. things change. what remains constant and what brings us here today to this room to this conversation is the fact -- what remains constant is the urge to explore. the urge to reach out beyond where we are and understand our surroundings and place in it.

it is really ingrained in our dna. it is at the very heart of who we are as human beings and human spirit. to feed that, i believe -- i know that now set this up a nominal. i believe the greatest agency in the world and feeding the hungry, helping us explore and to understand our panic -- planet, solar system in universe and place in that. we do this in the amazing ways. people doingedible doin incredible things. you are hearing from them today. i know four of them, and the fifth i will assume by the company you keep. we have incredible people doing incredible things. think about it, landing the

rover on mars with pinpoint accuracy, at a location you hear about today, i almost wish i did not know it, because i am scared today i am going to say it, but i do not think i will. really, it is not just mars and human exploration. this year alone we have entered orbit around mercury with the messenger spacecraft selling of secrets about planet closest to the sun. we are launching to jupiter. we have earth observing capers -- capabilities in place. we have a very robust science portfolio. that is important for a couple of reasons. one is science is really one of the three pillars on which this agency stands. human space flight, science, and

aeronautics. to see it robust and to be a part of this conversation is really incredible for me. with that, i want to invite you as you hear what your want to hear it in the next few minutes, i want you to go back to the kid in new that looked as stars and was fascinated. in i am sure you felt it when you walked into the museum and saw the module that landed on the moon. find that person as you hear this information and let that person come this -- come inside you informed by the smart things you have over the years -- you have learned over the years.

we are all still in all of it. there is not the day that goes by where i do not think about that rover or other activities we do at nasa and get blown away. i encourage you to receive this information in that spirit. deep inside you there is something that craves this stuff, that hunters for this stuff. the fact that we have the capability, the science capabilities and engineering capabilities to deliver what we are delivering is incredible. let's not lose sight of that spirit and in fact, let's elevate it. it is crucial.

you will hear some amazing things about unbelievable capabilities. i am certainly excited to hear what everyone has to say. with that as a set up, did not let me down. [applause] good morning. my name is dwayne brown with nasa's office of communications in nasa headquarters. as you have heard, today's mars days, and what better venue to announce the destination of the next mars rover. with a lot to cover. i will introduce to you the participants. first up, michael meyer. lead scientist. mars exploration program as i have corridor's washington, d.c. -- nasa headquarters,

washington, d.c. john grant, a geologist, smithsonian national air and space museum here in washington. don sumner, a geologist, uc- davis california. john bratsinger. with that, michael, kick it off. take a think you. ago, biking35 years one that landed on the surface of mars and made the first measurements on another planet. the landing was delayed because they did not have the images to know where to land. we are in a different era. we're here today to announce exactly where we are going to

put the mars science laboratory. we live in a different era. in 1995 nasa produced a strategy for exploring mars and laid out a series of missions on how to understand the red planet. basically it has led the exploration program to go from global reconnaissance to detailed measurements on the surface and the eventual returns from mars. the mars science laboratory is on that path and plays a very critical role in it. we have done our homework. the engineers have designed spacecraft that get us to where we want to go. scientists have integrated information to decide the best

places to go on the planet. we are able to do that. so it was through a process of five science community workshops, detailed engineering evaluations, and the directorate program management council in which it was finally decided to adopt what the mar science laboratory science team preference was and select a site. we are going to the mountain and gail crater. this has layered terrain. it exhibits three different kinds of environmental settings. serhaps a trilogy of mar history. it is a worthy goal of a worthy challenge.

to tell us about the capabilities, i will now turn the podium over to mike watkins, the mission manager. >> it is great to be here at the air and space museum to announce the landing sites. one of my jobs is to prepare for operations. before we get into the characteristics of the sites, i would like to talk a little bit about the characteristics of the rover and how it compares to previous reverse. if you go to the first graphic, this is the family tree. this is a family portrait of rovers. these are all related. a lot of the same people worked on all three of these rovers. that is starting with the general path rover.

opportunity is still checking on long on the surface of mars much after the nominal mission. then you see curiosity there on the right. as mentioned earlier, the model is out in the hallway that you can take a look at here in the museum. the progression of size -- a lot of times we ask why they're getting better -- bigger. the reason we're asking is that the mars program is a science- driven program. sciencearrying more payloads. you see rooms full of instruments. we're trying to get as much of that as we can onto the surface of mars. we see a very small payload to something like five or 6 kilograms of payload on certain opportunity. now more than 10 times that on curiosity. we will talk about how we will use the payload of the deal san -- landing site.

we have made a lot of improvements to the landing system and the capabilities that make it easier to get do better spots on mars to do more detailed scientific investigations. let's go to the next graphics. this particular family portrait is a model. this is the real thing. rover has been shipped down to nasa. on top of that, we call this the descent stage. but rocket attaches and will land on the surface after we get to atmosphere. i will show that in animation later. that allows us to land directly on the wheels so we do not have

a separate tally or landing gear. we use the wheels in the mobility system. they are affecting landing systems. that allows us to use the capability of the system and save weight. let's go to the next graphic. here you can see testing the mobility system, but actual flight unit. you can see 4 scale some folks standing around it. it is quite large. it is wider and taller than most cars. the next graphic. the next graphic is actually an animation. there is a couple of changes that we made to this mission

that will improve the ability to access the most scientifically important places on mars. one is we control the lift of the vehicle on entry and can cancel out unexpected differences in the atmospheric drag that would cause the landing to be large. previous missions there have been landing zones of to 10 times larger than msl. this will allow us to snub this up closer to very important sites that the scientists would like to explore. then we restart the engines. then we go into tower defense mode here. this is what you saw in the previous picture. when we 0 out of our horizontal

philosophy, we will lower it down on cable. we touch that down to the surface. -- -- then we zero that out on the horizontal stage. we will then get it out of the way so it does not affect the chemical analysis equipment. this will be several hundred millimeters away. then it is prepared to execute the mission by driving around. it has the ability to drive a lot on the surface is important. driving many kilometers around the landing site allows you to explore a lot of different you logic settings. and learn a lot about the history of for they have been on the surface. we have taken that ability,

which was a bonus and built it into the baseline, nominal mission. we intend to drive quite a bit. in terms of how to select the landing site, we have the capability of their rover and science schools that the science community wanted us to explore. we had to take a look at each one of the sites in excess -- assess the safety. we worked with the project to basically takes loss. so we have this 1 meter

resolution where we could see every rock we could land on and every float and do scientific characterization's of the site. on this graphic here, you can see the blue swaths you can see were the high-resolution images are. in most cases we have 2 images from different viewpoints so we can make a three-dimensional view of mars and show this very accurately. when we are completed with the analysis of what the characteristics of the terrain on mars work, go to the next graphic. we then felt mockups of the surfaces and actually tested touching down the river and driving over those different surfaces. sometimes we put boulders on there to see how it would interact. this is an engineering copy of the rover.

we dropped it and all possible rotations. when we are finished, our conclusion was that all four of those final sites were safe for the mission to land on and we could safely execute the surface mission. we could sickness of the late -- successfully navigate and try to the targets. at that point we turned it back to the science committee and said pick the best of these sites. i think that it's a tribute to the engineering team that built a really beautiful rover that is capable of accessing all of these different landing sites. those for landing sites that were the finalists we talked about very originated with over 50 sites in a process that played out over a five-year period. to talk about that, i would like to turn over to my colleague, john grant from here at the

museum. tico's 60 sites, five years, 150 scientists. -- >> 60 sites, five years, 150 scientists. the science community came together and work very closely with the project and had very robust discussions that are arrived up for terrific final four candidates sides. what i would like to do before i turn it over to talk about bill crater is to tell you a little bit about that process -- about the crater and tell you a little bit about that process. what you're looking at is a map of mars that has some shaded areas. the lighter shaded areas represent latitudes that are too far to the north and south to land. he will also see an area that is blacked out through the middle. those are areas where the surface righty of colored

terrain that represents the potential targets for us to go and evaluate the have the ability of mars. the red dots represent the 60 locations that were proposed by science team members, by the science community and evaluated during the workshops. the four blue dots represent the four candidates sites. i want to tell you about why those represent terrific final canada sites. the next graphic, please. the show you little snippets for each of the sites. gail crater to the right. holding greater to the bottom left. why do these represent great sites? and every quality crater you land at the best delta on mars. this is an incredible system of drainage into a crater that was probably filled with water, accumulated deposit bearded they'll crater, as you heard

from michael, there is an enormous stack of layered material, which represents the opportunity to read chapters in a book of past depositions -- exhibitions on mars. yet the history of dry rivers that drain down into a deposit of finely laird materials, which probably represents an ancient river system. you have an incredibly detailed system of iron rich and aluminum rich clay is better layard and occur in a regional setting that represent a long history of water interaction. it is probably the oldest of the four sites. these are sort of like different flavors of ice cream. all fantastic, but slightly different twist on the take. let me give you different examples of what we might have gone to look at with the next

graphic. i mentioned the best built on mars, you can see on the left, and all the steel bars are in kilometers. the craters represented -- the colors represent low is purple and blue. big yellow box that you see represents a potential science target outside the ellipse. all four sites represent a variety of high-valued science targets. all side of the ellipse, you can see this roles that are the produce and the drainage system came down and deposited in the bill tush, much like we see on earth. -- and deposited into the delta of, much like we see owners. this provides us with a view of a setting on earth we're very familiar with. if we go to gail greater with the next graphic, we see the

landing ... as just to the north of this large amount of material. we will land on a fan that represents material off the wall. then we would traverse to the south and access through the grand canyon-like that into the wall of this not material. and these are finely layered sediments that allows us to read the environmental conditions that occur over time. if we think about holden crater, as i mentioned this to first system, we will land and access the dry systems, much like the drainage is uc and death valley. through craters we can see the kinds of sentiments that have been transported and reconstruct the environmental conditions, but ultimately access the finely-layered materials and assigned whether there was an ancient lake that could have accumulated the materials that might allow us to evaluate how

the ability. with the last ballot, this isn't the northern hemisphere. -- this is in the northern hemisphere. there is an incredibly detailed epigraphy of iron-rich in aluminum-rich clays that represents our regional deposit. it record something fundamental about the early interaction of water on mars and those rocks. i hope i have told you that all four of the final candidate sites represent an incredible opportunity for msl. it was a very difficult decision to arrive at a final one. i will now let don sumner tell you about gale crater in white and ended up being the eventual landing site. >> i have the joy of co- chairing the projects of landing site working group, and we spend hundreds of dollars discussing

the sites, doing analysis of the sites and trying to come up with the best science we can do with the payload. there are lots of flavors of ice cream, and we have certain ways to investigate those. the project scientists and nasa felt like gail was the best match for the goals of the mission come evaluating habit ability. if we could get the first graphic, i am just going to show a slide into real crater and give you a sense of what an incredible place it is geologically. we will land in a landing ellipse, which is then the soft part of the amount of that you see now. within that, those materials

shut off the crater walls. it will give us a chance to look at what the crust is like. that material is moved by water. those drops are transported by water, and the water is in -- infiltrated into the ground. we are wondering how this reflects the changes in the environment. this is the young this environment we will look at. one of the fantastic things about this rover that might talk about is that it can go along ways. this allows us to grow towards places where the rocks are better exposed. geologist like climbing up cliffs. we get to go to those places for the first time on mars. the area of most scientific interests is that the base of the mound, which we're zooming into here. there we see signatures of clays, and also soleplate salts.

these there key classic minerals that tell us about the environment on mars and the interaction with water. the rover will go towards the amount. there are layers that we hope to see variations and minerals about how the minerals formed and how the end -- the environment change through time. based on the signature, we expect to find it variations and those minerals, particularly in the sulphate salts, which will tell us about the water, how concentrated it was, whether it evaporated, the sources of the water. that will give us a history about the ancient environments on mars and how this change and help us evaluate the habilitability on the planet.

we have a great instrument package to look at how the water and those adults is exchanging with the modern atmosphere. it will give us a better sense of the water cycle on mars, which has been very difficult to a evaluate. after the deposition of all of these layers, we had a time when you have water flowing down the mountain of mars. and that gives us the opportunity to read the environments. that canyon cut big event also were bruises and an arm of the could of been habitable. the fleet of things we can see at deal represents a diverse number environments over a long amount of time, possibly

hundreds of millions of years, plus water and the environment. the gaels sites represent an incredibly rich, sweet and thus bridging the gale site represents an incredibly rich scientific investigations we can do. -- the gale site represents an incredibly rich scientific investigation we can do. we have the incredible instrumentation to characterize the texture and shapes of the cliff and the mobility to travel to this area. the science will be amazing, and it is going to be a beautiful sight to visit. john will tell us more about how he will use the instrumentation to make the investigation? s. >> what i would like to talk to you now about is the way that curiosity will explore the gale

landing site, but let me drop back a minute to try to reinforce to you what an amazing precedent is being set right now with the mission. as my talked about, one of the things that became obvious to the science team members and the community, and john said there was 150 that attended the workshops, our science you -- our science team has 260 members at this time. by the time the students are added to this, in participating sciences, we're likely to swell to 300 team members. what we saw happening was the unexpected possible outcome that we may be left with for landing sites -- four landing sites, any of which that might be chosen as the final landing site, that engineering would not kick one of them out. that is what has happened in previous missions. we began to think about how in

the world we were going to come together with headquarters and arrive at this decision. as michael said, it was not easy. this metaphor of thinking about ice cream -- it is a hot day. if any of you decide to go after word, i bet you will not get the same thing. if someone asked you why you choose between vanilla and chocolate, you will say it tastes good, it is what i prefer. when you come down to four landing sites, that is basically what it comes down to, which one feels right. there is no hard yes or no it sir. you do not make a long list of things and put numbers by them. we as a science team, as a community, we got together, and in the end we pick the one that felt best. why does it feel good? as dawn was explaining, you have a mountain of rocks that is 5 kilometers high.

that is higher than the tallest mountain in the lower 48. it looks like hawaii. if you come sailing up to hawaii. this is not a tall spire. it is a broad, low, round-like shape. that means we can drive up the with the rover. this might be the tallest on anywhere in the solar system that we can live with the rover. we think and plan around this mission, but we of a hope that if we live longer, we might be able to go higher and higher up the mountain. that alone justifies spending -- sending the spacecraft there. then when you add in the science schools, it turns out the most attractive targets are at the base of the mountain. we of the payload to address those with. in the two years we have to run this mission, we can address the principal goals, which are the kinds of things that the mars community would really like answers to. what you can see in the first

graphic that we have up there is the spacecraft with all of that mission -- instruments that are on. we have nine principal investigators that have contributed instruments that are part of the rover in cape canaveral. those principal investigators are dave blake, 1ken edget, ralph gellter, paul mahaffey and roger weens. if i just described a few of these instruments, we can start off with everyone's favorite, which are the cameras. we have 17 cameras. you will get lots of pictures to look at. there is a camera that is mounted to the bottom of the rover. in the video where the sky crane is reeling down the rover, this camera will turn on and take a movie at five frames per second,

full-color, hd resolution. this will be one of the most fantastic projects that has ever been created. with cameras on the mast to look around and find the types of rocks that we would like to do chemical analysis on. when we think something is project really promising, we can drive up closer. then we have a laser that shoots out of to a distance of 7 meters away that is that the rock, creates of spark of life, and then we look at the start, and this tells us what chemical elements are in the rock. then we deploy the arm, put it down on top of the rock, and we have a drill. this is just like a drill you buy at home depot. the drill goes into the rock up to 5 centimeters, creates a powder. the armed collects the powder,

brings it back, takes it on top, drops it down into one of these holes on the top of the rover, and we have to instruments that are inside the rover. what you can see in those instruments is the mineral logic composition of what is down there on mars. we hear about hydrated minerals that we see from orbit, and now we will be able to determine the composition of the minerals. in addition to that, we can take a look at organic carbon. we're not a life of detection mission, and we cannot look for but we canany type, look for organic carbon that can be preserved there. our primary goal is to explore habitable environment. that means resource of energy from microbes to undertake metabolism and live, and we also have a source of carbon for life as we know it. here is the trick. if we want to