absorbent all of the unemployment everywhere -- how are we going to put people back to work? i do not mean it marginally. how is this economy going to take off again until we have absorbed the excess out there? i do not think you can do it by stimulus programs, because if you could we could argue all day about that, but the to the economy today. go ahead, sir. it is your forum. >> the problem was much deeper than i think if people had appreciated, and that shows up in the revisions to the gdp data back in 2008 and early 2009. the proposals the president made in the american jobs that have high bang for the buck. private forecasters have forecasted that the program will raise employment by roughly 1.9

million jobs, lower the unemployment rate by 1%, and lower -- raise gdp by 2%. i think the proposal the president made selected the types of programs that independent analysis think have the biggest bang for the buck, but we need to do many things at once. we face three great challenges. first is the sustaining job growth. second, invest in the future, continuing to educate, innovating, and investing in infrastructure, which would also help right now. thirdly, as we discussed in your office, we need to get on a sustainable fiscal path. we need to do all of that, and that includes entitlement spending. >> none of us want to talk about it, but does it not include real, sustainable, economic

plan in any trajectory, we have to deal with entitlements. i think the president has alluded to it. i do not think he is on board, but he talks about it. >> what you said is exactly right. we need to look at the whole budget including entitlements. the fast growth is in medicare and medicaid. if the president put out a proposal that brings down the debt relative to gdp over the next 10 years substantially, and if that were enacted, i think that would put us on much more solid footing in terms of sustainability over the next decade. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> dr. alan krueger, we are talking about a variety of important issues. what would you summarize the economic policy changes but we face? >> fundamentally, we face weak demand. consumption has been growing at

a modest pace. we have a lot more capacity to produce than people are willing to buy 10 right now. that slack capacity shows up in unemployment numbers. it shows up in the capacity utilization numbers. so, fundamentally, i think we need to strengthen demand. some of that could come out by people becoming more confident that their jobs are more secure, that they can buy purchases they have put off. some of it could come about by focusing our measures amazing job growth, so people have more income. the diagnosis that i have of the economy the the number one problem has been weak demand. >> i think the witnesses -- thank you for your testimonies and your witnesses --

willingness to serve the nation. i ask all members of the committee to submit questions for the record by close of business on tuesday, september 27, and would request that the witnesses submit your answers to us in a timely manner, so we can move your nominations forward as quickly as possible. this hearing is adjourned. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> was part of the u.s. constitution is important to you? that is our question in the studentcam competition open to middle and high school students. make a video documentary, entellus the part of the constitution that is important to you and why. he could more than one point of view and video of sees parent --

of c-span programming. there is $50,000 in total prizes, and a grand prize of $5,000. >> on tuesday, north korean prison camp survivors described conditions there during a house foreign affairs subcommittee hearing. u.s. special envoy for north korea, robert king has been meeting with south korean officials try to get an agreement on resuming food aid to the north. this hearing is to the wall hours and 30 minutes. -- two hours and 30 minutes. this is two and a half hours. >> come to order. >> thank you for joining us for this very important hearing. human rights record in the entire world. the democratic peoples republic of korea is known to be the

world's most isolateed country as the citizens are prevented from traveling either internally or internatially without express permission. communications with the outside world are also tightly regulated, and attempts by the dictatorship to filter all information accessible bill the north korean people therefore, the testimony to be provided today by our distinguished panel, and in particular our two defector witnesses, is particularly welcomed and appreciated. mrs. kim young soon and mrs. kim hisuk, who survived the north core afternoon prison camps halve traveled from south corridor ya. -- korea. i want to thank suzanne scholte,

i've chaired hearings, and she has played a critical part in every one of those hearings in helping us to get the witnesses to tell the true unvarnished story of what is actually happening in north korea. our witnesses will be speaking on behalf o an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners currently held in north korean labor camps. it's our hope their testimony will help to galvanize the international community to take action to secure the freedom of those who are needlessly suffering and dying under truly horrific conditions. those living in the prison camps are not only -- are not the only ones suffering in north korea. as one of our witnesses, suzanne scholte, will testify in north rea, ery single human right is enshined in the universal

decoration of human rights is violated with absolute impunity. north korea is a tier three country, buying and selling women and others as a commodity. northerer to -- north korea was listed as a country of concern for violation of religious freedom. we'll hear about the new potential for communication through and with north korean people, and explore possibilities for peaceful change, given upcoming political events in north korea and changes in other countries in th region. we look forward to discussing this potential to improve the lives of all people living in north core -- north korea.

i want to thank you for your being here and thank c-span for taking this information and conveying it to the american people. north korea, because it is so closed, very often evades all scrutiny, so people know about it but don't know very much. your testimony, again, will help to shatter that lackadaisical sense of what americans know and think about north korea. so, thank you again. we'll begin with miss suzanne scholte. and is a leader of several groups focused on protecting human rights in north korea. she was recognized with the walter judd freedom aired and with the seoul peace prize. she has helped rescue hundreds of refugees and facilitated the travel of defectors to speak in the united states. she has participated in numerous

congreional hears on north korea, on topics including political prison camps, trafficking of north korean women, religious persecution and north korean refugees in china. i will note that when we held a hearing on trafficked women, some of what they thought were lucky women, who got out of north korea, into china, miss scholte actually brought to this committee, women who -- one woman who went after her daughter, who made her way into china, only to be sold into slavery, and then she and her daughter who went looking to rescue the trafficked woman, were themselves sold into sexual slavery. we'll then hear from miss kim young soon, committee for the democratization of north korea. she was arrested in 1970 and sent to a political prison camp with members of her fily. her parents and el test son died in the camp and her husband and

youngest son later died trying to escape north korea. miss kim eventually escaped and has dedicated her life to exposing the truth about the hideous prison camps in north korea, by sharing her story around the globe. she is an outspoken defector, serving as the vice president of the committee for the democracyization of north korea and other human rights advocacy groups. we this will then hear from miss kim hye sook who is a survivor of a political prison camp. she and her famy were impresented by guilt by association because of the grandfather's defection to south korea. she was just 13 years old. miss kim regularly witnessed executions and abuse and endured manual labor, constant hunger, and death of several family members. once released, she fled to children's but was forced to

return to north korea by her employer, where she was arrested again. when she escaped, she returned to china but was sold by human traffickers, like other witnesses we have had. she eventually escaped to south korea, a continues to tell her story around the world. earlier this year she published her memoirs in a book entitled "a concentration camp retold in tears." we'll then hear from mr. greg scarlatoiu. the executive director of the committee for human rights in north korea. he was witnessed the fall of communism. he as authored articles on the

applicability of the eastern european experience to the north korean context, and a broadcast into forthkorea by radio free korea. i now yield for opening comments. >> thank you very much, mr. chairman, for calling this very important hearing. and i'd like to certainly express our protection to the -- appreciation to the witnesses here who have agreed to testify. each year, each of your stories help us to better understand the extent and magnitude of the human rights abuses of north korea, and your guidance will help to us target our efforts in alleviating some of these terrible injustices. the human rights vibratio north rea are among the worst in the world. under kim jong-il regime,

citizens face killings and detention for basic political expression, seemingly organized market activities, unauthorized travel. north korea seems to vie violate the regime's rules themsels bass they can be penalized for the actions not of themselves but of the actions ofheir families, which are certainly unjust. according to some observers the conditions are worsening, due to the presentation for lee myung-k to take over. there was a human rights act in improving the flow of information to north korea.

currently this amounts to $2 million annually for human rights and democracy, 2 million for freedom of information programs, and 20 million to assist north korean refugees. i am interested in hearing from the panelists, if you have expertise in that area, about the views on how proposed cuts to our international affairs budget would impact on our ability to adequately continue fund these programs that have been successful in getting inrmation to date. although it's not in the realm of your testimony necessarily, i was very disturbed at the behavior of the north korean leadership in november of 2010 when it attacked south koreas a island of pyongyang with

artillery shells, killing several people. this irresponsible behavior of a government really is unwarranted an really needs to have continued watching and scrutinizing as to their behavior. also, their continued adventurism into ballistic missiles and other weapons of war. certainly disturb us. so i certainly look forward to your testimonies and thank you again for your willingness to share them, and i yield back the balance of my time. >> thank you very much. would either of my other colleagu -- i'd like to now then yield the floor for such time as you may consume to ms. scholte. >> just before you start, make a point. we also invited ambassador at

large king, who could not be here because he is out of the country. he has - he wanted to be here. said very clearly he would gladly come and testify at a later date and wanted to provide the subcommittee with a closed briefing as well on recent events, including the human rights situation in north korea. bob king, as my colleagues know so well,as the chief of staff for the foreign affairs committee, and very good choice for ambassador, so, we look forward to hearing from him as well. so, miss schte. >> first of all i just want to thank congressman smith for your many years of devotion on the north korean human rights. and it's been a honor to work with your staff for the people of the sahara. another country trying to get freedom through self-determination. i want to give two main pnts at this hearing today.

first of all, north korea continues to be one hover the darkest places on earth, yet we fail to focus on the main issue, which is the human rights issues, because we have instead focused on the nuclear issue and that hays had tragic results. second, despite the tragedy, there's hope because of changes in the country, but if we fail to enact the policies that dress human rights conditions and empower those who can bring about cheng, we'll certainly end up just prolonging this regime. while we witnessed people rising up in north africa and the middle east, we wonder why the north koreans, who, arguably the most persecuted people in the world, not rise up. it is precisely because they are the most persecuted in the world. north koreans are the only people in the world that do not enjoy one single human right that is enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights, a document ironically that was adopted in 1948, the

same year that kim kim il-sung e to power. when nazi death camps were librated, the international commute vowed never again, never again, would we allow these kinds o atrocities to occur. but the political prison camps in north korea have existed longer than the soviet gulag, longer than the chinese prisons and longer than the nazi death camps. your two detector witnesses today are living proof of the horrors of the camp and the length of their experience, one was in prison in the 1970s, and another was in prisoned for 28 years. we have seen millions of north koreans starved to death, despite billions in economic assistance, and north koreans are not the only ones who surveil from kim jong-il's

dictator south. south korean p.o.w.s are still being held and at least 108,308 captives are being held in north koa, including 80,000 abductees from south korea, and hubs of others from 13 countries a recently documented by the committee for humidity rights in north korea. former presidents bill clinton and president bush made human rights a secondary issue in the hope of getting them to give up nuclear amibitions. we see the failure of these efforts has north korea realized it nuclear amibitions and its prolifertion activity continues. kim jong-il may be an evil dictator, but he has brilliantly manipulatedded the good intentions of both america and south korea. my second point. there is hope because things are changing in nth korea. despite kim kim kim jong-il's bt efforts to keep north koreans in the dark, up to 60% of north

koreans have access to some form of iormation beyd the ridge anymore. they're learning the source of the misery is not america or south korea as they're brain washed from childhood to believe. the source of their misery is in fact the kim jong-il and his regime. detectors are sending remittances to their families to help demonstrate their pros apart in south korea. north korea has a cell phone system with 500,000 subscribers, dough -- defectors pay brokers in china to contact their families, and they get dvds, flash drives and balloon launches. nor koreans, especially the eleads, are keeping up with south korean soap operas, and watching south korean and western films. it's more important than over to raise the human rights concerns so they know our concerns are

for them. for example, it was a brilliant action by the obama administration to include ecial envoy for north korean human rights, ambassador robert king in the delegion that went to north korea to investigate the food situation. it's the human rights in north korea that are causing the starvation. furthermore, north koreans are no long dependent on kim jong-il to survive, and because of farmer markets and the capitalism is saving them. kim jong-il's unprovoked attacks on south korea, as congressman paine mentioned, have awake ended south koreans to the truth, we must not ignore the human righ of north koreans for the false promise of this regime to end its nuclear program. governments, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals, first of all, should make human

rights central to all negotiations with or about north korea. second, we should only provide food when relief organizations can stay and monitor it to the point of consumption. otherwise, it will most assuredly be diverted to maintain the regime that is causing the starvation in the first place. third, we need to continue to support radio broadcasting, especially programs like radio free asia and voi of america,; fourth, we need to empower the defector organizations using creative methods to get information into north korea. like fires for a free north korea, and the north korean peoples liberation front. five, we must convince the chinese to end their brutal policy of forced repatriation for north korean refugees which is prolonging the crisis by giving kim jong-il a reason to

resist any reforms that would improve e situation in the country so north koreans do not want to risk their lives trying to three. sixth, we should support the 12 north korean defector churches. i've been working to try to connect church here in the united states with these detector churches in south korea. seven, we need to put the elites in the regime on notice they will be held accountable for their crimes against the north korean people. la week a north korean was caught. his mission was to kill the head of the fighters for a free north korea. hock has been doing the balloon launches, sending up information. both park and another m have been argentinaed targeted -- regularly talladega by assays sans. this tells us they're doing the most effective work in 2009,

radio korea started broadcasting interviews from inside the country. supporting this flow of informion through radio broadcast, especially by north korean defectors, is the most effective w to reach the people because the internet is only available to the elites in the regime. recently the north korean people's liberation front was formed by former military, including officers, special forces, cyberwarfare specialist propaganda specialists. this is significant because there the only time there was opposition against the regime was from the military who studied in the soviet union and came back wanting reform. they operated against the regime not 198 4. because all north korean males musterve for ten years and the elites are exempt from service, this means the north korean

military truly represents the people. we saw the army in romania turn against kim jong-il and a good friend cue chess sky when the people rose up against the dictate tar. right now the elites in power have no incentive to oppose kim jong-il because they're lives are based on the successful transition to lee myung-bak. we have to assure them they will have a stake in the future. because north koreans are citizens under south corear, south korea has an important role to play, and that they should convene a tribunal of respect judges to begin the precution of those in the regime responsible for the political prison camps and other atrocities. there are 23,000 eye witnesses now, and we should start naming the nes of those who are committing these crimes. when north korea finally opens up, i believe we will be even

more horrified at the atrocities that the kim regimes committed against the north korean people today that are beyond our imagination. we'll face the same questions the world faced when the allies librated the nazi death camps. what did you know and what did you do to help stop the tragic circumstances? thank you, mr. chairman. >> ms. scholte, thank you for your testimony and your leadership. all those year all these years, and for that very incisesive testimony. we'll now her from miss kim young soon. >> i'm kim young soon. i'm a north korean defector and a survivor of a prison camp.

[speaking korean] >> translator: i want to thank the united states congress and related officials of t congress for giving me a chance to speak at this important venue. i want to thank mrs. scholte for her years of friendship and for listening to my story of the political prison camp experience. [speaking korean] [speaking korean]

>> translator: t camp where i was is known around the world. it was created in 1969 in south province in a region moan known for rough and mountainous regions. andhey died silent deaths. [speaking korean]

>> translator: i wrote of my time in a book. my friend was hidden mistress of kim jung ill. and i became a victim of this myself and was, therefore, sent to prison. i want to tell the world about the reality of what happened to me and the reality of the prison camp system. [speaking korean]

>> translator: the workers parties establishment of the principle was instituted whereby the citizens were sent to prison camps for total isolation from the general society for the following crimes. the crime of defaming the authority and refrigerator of kim il-sung and kim jong-il. the crime of knowledge about the private life of kim jong-il and releasing information about it to the general public, thus defaming the prestige of the leader. i had no knowledge about these facts when i was sent to prison camp. ...

>> the following are the political crimes i came to annul -- i came to know. the crime of unwittingly destroying or damaging the portrait. the crime of knowing about the private life of kim jong il, like, for example, the private mistress. the crime of revealing the birth of the firstborn son. the crime of listening to foreign radio or television

broadcasts. the crime of questioning or criticizing the policy of the workers' party, or expressing complaints about north korean society. [speaking korean] >> we were close friends. one day i heard directly from her that she would be going to special residence #5. those in the know knew that meant the residence of kim jong il. [speaking korean] qassam -- if kim sung il [speaking korean] >> translator:

[speaking korean] >> translator: at the time i was taken to a political prison can i have no idea why i was being incarcerated and there was in the summer of 1989 after i was released that i find out the reason why from the state security agent read the security agent said the following to me colin quote she was not the wife nor did she dare him a son. these were all rumors. if you mention anything about this again you will not be forgiven.

>> [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> i would like to talk briefly about my interrogation before i was sent to the political prison camp. on august 1st, 1970i was forced into a cary state security agents taken to a secret location where i was interrogated for two months by the unit called unit 312 for

preliminary investigation in a state security investigation room to read under fear for two months i was told to write my entire life story and to include everything and leave out nothing, so i wrote on and on. in my riding i confessed and wre about him coming over to my house and telling me she would be going to the special residence number five and also admitted people around me knew this information as well. >> [speaking korean] bixby seven

after the investigations were overall october 1st 1970 my entire family and i, seven people in total were sent to the political prison camp. the person who committed the crime was labeled the conspirators were the ringleader of for the yanna torian of workforce association were labeled monk principal, also and this is how the criminals and prison camp for classified. we book about 3:city in the morning to go to work before:40 a.m. and the labor was from some of until sundown. mills had to be provided by ourselves to self-suiciency. i saw countless prisoners contract the disease and suffer from diarrhea. >> [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] >> translator: after work there would be the fifer ideology meetings forthe prisoners. those were unfortunate to be called by the security agents during these ideology meetings sent away in shackles were never seen again. the first manual labor was beyond anyone's imagination and in case of falling short of work goals the whole group was punished. there were so many dead bodies that i saw of their coming enough to fill the field. >> [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] >> translator: my three sons, one daughter father and mother died from starvation. there were no coffins so their bodies were ruled in a straw mat and buried. when my son was 9-years-old at the time in the river near the prison camps. my daughter was given away for adoption after hours release so that she could have a better life to lead to this day i do not know her whereabouts what she is alive or dead. my youngest son was publicly executed by firing squad for trying to is good north korea after his release and attempting to go to south korea in 1993 at

the age of 23. >> [speaking korean] >> translator: my husband was sent to another political prison camp in a total and complete controls on july 18th, 1970, and to this day i do not know whether he is dead or alive, so my original family of eight people, currently only to have rvived and successfully he escaped from north korea. myself and another son. the rest of my family, six people, have all died. >> [speaking korean]

>> translator: my older brother, who was the killer of our family was a criminal in the army during the north korean war serving the third infantry and why on a mission for the commander, she was killed in battle at the age of 25. accordingly, our family received favors from my brothers x and kim il-sung and we lived will allow our family was sent to the political prison camp and as a way of feeling betrayed, i escapes from north korea. >> [speaking korean]

>> translator: even after i was released from the political prison cp, i was classified as an antiregime action mary and suffered by the state security apparatus. i.e. state number triet feb first come in 2001 and entered south korea in november of 2003. >> [speaking korean] >> tralator: in conclusion i would just like to see that in the political prison camps of north korea, it is a place where the prisoners will eat anything that flies, crawls or grows in the field. >> [speaking korean]

>> translator: bye wasted ni years in the prime of my life in that hell hole of a place where even animals will turn away, turned their faces away. i lost all my family members and have lived a life of years, blood and hardship. please save the 23 million people of north korea living a life of misery, not unlike what i have suffered. >> [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] >> translato: even though i am now over 70-years-old, i will fight for the freedom of my people, my countrymen until all of my strength is expended to read this is the reason why i have lived so far and also my purpose and on that note i want to deeply thank again the members f this committee for yournterest in thhuman rights situation of north korea, especially the political prison camps. thank you. >> thank you so muc. the brutality that you, yourself, suffered in the loss of your family members, including your daughter, who as you said, was adopted obviously without your permission, you have no idea where she is, your husband, you have no idea where he is and the loss of your other family members, just underscores the brutality of kim il-jung and the fact that the west united states and any country that has any sense of compassion needs to speak out against this terrific abuse and this shouldn't be a

second-tier issues of human rights abuses that are commonplace of north korea so we think you for making us further aware of the extreme who barbarity that you have been made to endure and your family. we will now hear from another who has suffered three decades in the gulag of and we look forward to hearing her testimony. >> [speaking korean] >> translator: hello i am an earthquake per specter in political prison camp number eit team in the province for 28 years.

and in 2009 i.e. skate north korea and entered south korea through china, lao and thailand >> [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: in february of 1975, for reasons that were unknown to me at that time i was tried with my parents to e prison camp. i was 13 years of the time. during my incarceraon at camp number 18i lost my grandmother, mother, brother and my husband. >> [speaking korean]

>> translator: i found out after i was out of that hell on earth can't 18 why i was sent to prison camp, because my father had dissented during the south korean war but by then i had nowhere to go and complain that the situation. i would like to say that the term of north korea is a living hell for human beings, a place where people have committed so-called crimes percent and incarcerated as a group and forced to work emanuel slave labor -- manual slave labor. >> [speaking korean]

>> translator: there are prison camps where people have been found guilty of being against for those resisting the regime are sent intel whereas in places like camp number 18 where i s icarcerated in besides political prisoners, those were guilty of economic crimes are sent along with family members and forced to work in coal mines >> [speing korean]

[speaking korean] >> translator: in camp number 18 where i was in prison the whole prison camp was encircled by a 13-foot high the electrified fence and trying to ease get through this over 3,000 volts of the electrified fencing was unimaginable. when i first entered the prison camp, we were ld to memorize ten rules of the prison camp. i still remember it vividly because i remember it from such ange one of the rules was that the prisoners were not supposed to know the reason for ending up in the prison camp and those caught violating this rule would be a relentlessly executed by a firing squad. >> [speaking korean]

[speang korean] >> translator: the young people like me that in the that in the prison camp at a young age, we were given very rudimentary educatin, basic current language education and then when we turned 16 or 17 with exception everyone was set to decline and this goes without sayi for the adults as well. we had to work 16 to 18 hour work days without rest or holidays an for food in our family of seven was provided only about 10 pounds of corn per month and this was supplemented

by anything that we picked up from the ground, tree bark, grass, and that's what we ate, one meal a day, corn and the mixed grass we had to make for ourselves. >> if you cld suspend for one brief moment. we are joined by the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee which justice issues and science, but isalso the author of the international religious freedom act of 1998, and as we all know, north korea is a tier three countries and so congressman frank wolf can only say a brief minute. >> thank you. i want to thank you and the committee for having this hearing. i met with the witnesses earlier today. it was one of the most significant and moving testimony reports that i have ever heard, and i think certainly the state department should do everything they can quite frankly to bring

about regime change in north korea. when this government falls, as it will fall the same way the east germn government fell with regard to the berlin wall, the west will feel so guilty to know that it said nothing other than the hearings that the members here. they said nothing with regard to what takes place. this administration should do everything and lastly and with this. i think the church in the west to all of religious faith in the west should come together and support these people in every way that they can to see about the fact that hundreds of thousands are in these camps. it's totally unacceptable. as anyone within the voice can hear this, can follow this hearing ought to be advocating it. so i want to again, thank you and the other members and thank the witnesses for coming by my office to and i'm on my way to a

4 o'clock but i was just moved to come by because what i heard was just so powerful. with that, mr. chairman, i yield back to this too terminable, thank you very much. if you could continue. >> [speaking korean] [speaking korean] i was plagued with ponder by the time i entered the prison camp until the day that i was released, and by one which was

to just eat one bowl of white fleiss for one meal and after i became an adult and after lifetimes of working at coal mine walking to and from work i would look for anything to eat and it became a habit to scrape or pluck anything the was green and make soup whether it was from a tree bark or grass. >> [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: i cannot even begin to describe how many people suffered and died because of starvion in the prison camp and how many people were killed without reason for not listening

to the 40's or not showing enough repentance through a public execution by execution by firing squad through public execution by firin squad their bodies were riddled ad i saw countless bodies that ended up like this. the was a time i saw the bodies of people who were killed by firing squad rolled up in straw mats and carried away on carts, and i said to myself even dogs will not die so pitifully. >> [speaking korea [speaking korean]

>> translator: in this place where human lives were worth less this is where m brother and husband died also. their deaths were classified as due to accidents, but they were intentional deaths carried out in the amosphere of the prison camps, where nothing was normal. >> [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: and as a result of working declines for over 12 years, i contacted black lung

and faced death many times, but in place of my mother who passed away before me i vowed to survive and liv on and look out after my siblings, my remaining siblings and that devoon is what allowed me to survive that hell. >> [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: and my siblings are still incarcerated at camp number 18. my brother and sister. in december of 1974, before our family was sent off to prison camp number 18, my father was

pulled away by the state security bureau never to be heard from again. i do not know what happened to him to this day. even at this moment as i speak, there arevr 10,000 -- 20,0 people who are in camp 18 without knowing th reason why. people who are dying of abuse and lack of rights at thisvery moment. >> [speaking korean] [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: and this is not just happening in camp number 18, but i would like to say that this is the suffering and sadness that 23 million north

kore citizens are going through and suffering and experiencing right now. not only that, but besides the human rights violations going on in north korea is now the cruelty end of misery inflicted on the refugee women have the state north korea into china for the terrible situation of human trafficking happening in different places. after nearly is getting def coming out of of korea and into china, and then becoming victims of human and sexual trafficking, i can say with authority that the tragic situation of the north mut be told again and again in the international community. i, myself, was sold for different times in four different cities in china and the indescribable suffering that these women go through and china being sold like commodity still keeps me awake at night. >> [speaking korean]

>> translator: please ended the existence of such a society and make it into a place humans can live as people. please, let the people without any rights in north 311 freedom and happiness. please get rid of the political prison camps and please tell those who do not know about freedom of freedom is about. [speaking korean] >> translator: i sincerely hope my earnest these will be delivered to the united states congress come to the united states government and the people of america. i also want to thank the honorable members of this committee to hear today who have made it possible to speak as well as the defense foundation.

thank you. >> without a doubt, your message has been heard, and thank you for sharing what can only be described as the enormous suffering that you experienced being sold into sexual slavery, the last of family members, and so there will be positive consequences in your testimony. we will work hard to promote human rights. i can assure you of that. before going to mr. scholte have the combating of his and that 2011, so i will leave briefly but without objection i would like to point out basically -- key will take the committee now. >> this is a picture of the camp that she was in.

we will now hear from our final witness. good afternoon mr. payne. thank you for inviting me to speak about t human rights situation in northorea and about the apparent increase in the amount of the information getting into the country. it is an honor and a privilege to have the opportunity to discuss these issues with you today. mr. payne, i would like to begin by informing you that i will be presenting a brief summary of the views included in my prepared statement. >> thank you. without objection. >> after the emotional comprehensive testimony and after the hard pricking testimony ms. kim hye-sook, there is barely anything i can have on the human-rights situation of north korea. the human-rights situation in north korea remains abysmal according to experts and testimony by the recent north

korean defectors there is no evidence that the human-rights sedition and north korea has improved as the regime proceeds th steps towards leadership succession. on the contrary, it appears the border crackdown aimed at preventing the north koreans from defecting to china has intensified, and the political prisoner camp population has been on the increase. in may of this year, amnesty international released satellite imagery and new testimony shedding light on the horrific conditions of north korea's political prisoner camps. according to the organization, the prisoner population detained at such camps is up to 200,000, and it compares in the latest satellite photographs of satellite imagery from 2001 indicates a considerable increase in the scale of the camps. moving on to the flow of information and getting into north korea, although officially all personal radios must have a

fixed dial and be registered with state security offices, programming by stations including voice of america, radio free asia and broadcasters based in south korea may ave a listenership of around 40% in north korea. the number of radio's smuggled from china has beenn the increase. the north korean authorities continue to attempt to am the foreign broadcasting and it's a serious limitation in their efforts as jamming is energy intensive and north korea is experiencing in chemnick energies shortages. in the recent years, we have found out that there has been a significant increase in the amount of information entering north krea. this development is the result of the marketization that has taken place in that country. such is byno means and intended top-down reform program, but

rather the function of state faire. small and informal markets provide ordinary people a coping mechanism that enables them to survive. during the marketization of north koea, supply chains have developed from china to north korea's defense capital city of pyongyang and in pt plater, ct rahman tvd and some drivers have been entering north korea. statistical ata, including the the 2010 survey of north korean refugees and travelers by the broadcasting board of governors indicates 27% of respondents have listened to foreign radio. 48% have come in contact with foreign dvds and other material while 27% have watched foreign tv. information is also being passed from one member to the next along such supply chains.

it appears that the korean wheat consisted of south korea soap opera and musical, exceptionally popular asia and beyond has also reached north korea. according to japan's one member of a group of nine north koreans who recently sailed for five days before being picked up off the west coast of japan one a week ago on september 13th this gentleman a squid fishermen said that he as inspired to leave his home by south korean selwa press. in january, 2008, the egyptian companies telecom holding was awarded a license to establish a 3g mobile networkn north korea when it launched in december, 2008, the audio link had 5,300 subscribers. in its half year earnings report

for january, june, 2011 published on august 10th they stated the number of subscribers in north korea had reached 660,000. separate from the expansion of the network, citizens of north korea have also been using a chinese cellphone smuggled across the border into north korea. we have indication that the intent to launch 3g internet service by the apple ipad in pyongyang this fall by a special card. nevertheless, internet access is likely to continue to be restricted to foreign residents and those close to the regime. there are also those north koreans that possess computers not connected to the web and their estimated to represent about 3% of the entire population. based on the data collected with interviews in the north korean

defectors and proven track record of success in winning the tautological confrontation during the cold war, radio broadcasting will continue to be one of the few media available to grant the people north orea access to information from the outside world. computers not connected to the internet, some drives from the disease from a cd rom's and m p3 players have become increasngly available although access to such devices is still relativel limited. efforts to increase the flow of the information into north korea should take into account the increasing availability of such vehicles. i wish to thank the subcommittee and the staff for the opportunity to testify before you today. and i will nowbe pleased to try to answer any questions that he might have. thank you very much. >> thank you very much. let me once again thank each of the witnesses. your testimony is certainly very

compelling. we of course have heard and we try to keep up with the situation of north korea, but it certainly brings it home whenever we have a hearing and to hear especially from individuals who have lived through the horror of this regime, and of course we appreciate our experts from the defense foundation and the committee for human rights in north korea. perhaps to either one of you who are working with the organizations that deal with that, mr. scarlatoiu, i have that closely >> the special envoy for north

korean human rights ambassador robert kaine has said that the united states government would engage in and in that dialogue on human rights issues at the six-party talks. the six-party talks are at an impasse and in the absence of the six-party talks, first of all what do each of you feel that the six-party talks have achieved in the past and whether there were any real gains for word first of all and second, if indeed you feel that it is ann password there is really not a real effort on the part of north korea would with the obama administration consider employee for the human rights dialogue with pyongyang? so whether the talks past and the have been going on a bit

through the several administrations come and if their scrapped in absence of that could there be anything else or should we continue, if you would like to comment. >> well, fst of all, i think that regarding the six-party talks, this is an effort by the bush administration to rein in the nuclear ambitions, and they made the decision that they would just focus on the nuclear issue and not entered as any of these concerns to kick the human rights concerns down the road. we can tell the history that north koreans are brilliant at manipulating the talks and using the talks to gain aid and support and make promises they

never intend to keep. they did the same thing to bill clinton during the framework and ithink before president clinton could be excus from that because he was dealing with a new dictator when he was president, but the bush administration i think should have known better. they should have known the history of how this regime is and what you see during this talk the result has been north korea has developed nuclear weapons, it's a reactive and the weapons and the exact purpose was never realized, but at the same time, millions of north koreans have died, and so i think that talking with says regime is useless. the only use these talks to extract concessions and support and legitimize the regime. i think instead we need to take a new approach. i think that president obama is in a unique position to do that. i see that we should make

human-rights the number one policy of our government. i think that we should reach out to the north korean people and i ink president obama should be talking about the fact that i think we should say we want to give north korea as much aid as the need so that people are not staing, but e want to be able to see that it is consumed. i think that we should be talking about the fact that we want to help the people. we want to improve conditions and we would like to see the international red crosspeople to go to prison camps. number triet denies the have camps refine it, let's let the independent agency like the international red cross go to these camps. and i think that we need to be focusing on the human rights issues and policies that at e same time, do everything we can to support the kind of things the defectors themselves are doing in the radiobroadcasting

because the impact the free north korean radio has that has been on the internet broadcast in 2004 and then went on the shortwave in 2006, the impact that it had was amazing. it set the pace for all the broadcasters because it was the defectors themselves and a you know they were raised to believe that south korea, the united states cost the korean war. they are brainwashed with stuff we would think is completely ridiculous, but they believe that. so when the north koreans themselves are talking in broadcasting these views and opinions and to north korea, the north korean can't can't dismiss them. so it's a tremendous impact and we have to do everything we can to reach out with that message to the north korean people and use the defectors especially. >> the reason why nothing has been happening on the six-party talks for a while now is that

north korea has refused to act as a responsible member of the inernational community. north korea has continued to proceed with the nuclear developments. north korea engaged in very serious provocations' last year in march it launched a torpedo attack on th south korean that killed the sailorin that attack as it has already been been mentioned as you mentioned on november 23rd, north korea showed of the south korean territory the island and this attack resulted in the military and civiln casualties. we have already heard about assassins sent to kill one of the very active north korean defectors and south korea a few weeks back. the deep concerns about and the alleged assassination plot targeting the defense minister of south korea cut and before

the most high-profile north korean defector castaway last year, late last year, but only a few months before that we've heard about the plot that was stored on him for assassination. that being said, north korea has also continued to press its own people. north korea has continued to refuse to abide by the international obligations they are supposed to abide by given its the party to the international covenant on civil to the kosovo and political life and economic, social and cultural life in the convention against all forms of discrimination against women, theconventional the rights of the child, and as a u.n. member stated it's supposed to be bound by the u.n. declaration of human rights. as to whether the human rights should be on the agenda, it is a firm belief of the committee for human rights in north korea that human-rights, the improvement of the human rights of korea should

be a top of our priorities and personally, as i hope that one day we will see the complete irreversible and very dismantlement of mr. rhea's nuclear program. i also hope that we will see the omplete irreversible and verifiable dismantlement of the political prisoner camps as well >> thank you very much. what me ask you, s. kim hye-sook, there is -- and i know that your experiences in north korea was years ago and you have a very compelling testimony. i'm just curious to know in your days as a young person and as a child, as a teenager growing up, what type of society, what type

of programs does the government impose on children it's supposed to be a time of life when people are happy, they are growing, they are learning. to your best recollection, if you can explain what is life like for a young child and a young teenager and young adut and growing up in north korea? today if you can sort of transpose your experiences. >> [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: in answer to the question the liberation from japan of 1945 and until the 70's, north korea is actually a little it better, was better than south korea in terms of the

economic situation, and as for myself, when i was young i went to school and i attended at the university of fine arts and i majored in her dance and i learned under the teachings of a very well-known dancer and before i went to the prison camp i could say with assurance i was happy, but my happiness quotient to speak was very high in terms of living in the north korean society. >> thank ou -- [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] >> translator: before i was sent to the can buy a life where i had no worries about food or eating. i went to school, i live a normal life but because i was sent to the prison camp at such an early age that's all i can share in terms of my experience in relation to your question. >> thank you. >> another question that i'm just curious about as we know in world war ii there was the question of the brothels that were created in korea, and i wder whether it was in the north of korea or was that primarily in korea itself if anyone recalls as you may know we are still working on the a

policy of the government of japan. there's been some apologies but this has been an initial five house played to to the to -- plea to the world since that timend i wonder whether it was prevalent throughout korea. >> [speaking korean] >> translator: my answer you, sir, is before t liberation of 1945, even in the north of the peninsula there were instances are places where these women were her based in

north korea and i believe that even if this issue were to be addressed with the japanese government, we would not be getting a satisfactory answer in regarding your question, sir. >> i will yield to the gentle lady from california. >> thank you very much mr. chair. i would like to follow on a question that mr. payne said about your childhood until you went into the camp, and you said that until the 70's and i realize that is whenyou went into the camps, but did things drastically change in nor korea? and when?

>> [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean]

>> to answer the question colin the propaganda was set in place between the liberation, years of liberationand until the korean war those years were known as the best years in terms of the efforts and prosperity of north korea, andafter the korean war there were various economic plans instituted to try to help the economy and help people who live better. but in 1987, in the late 80's after the soviet union collapsed and after the help from that part of the region that's what brought on the change in terms of the econocs and the downtrend the conditions for the people in north korea.

>> first of all, let me also just thank you sharing your testimony. i think it'svery important that people in this country here learn what is going on in north korea because i don't think much is known here about what is happening there. and the pan and the suffering that you described, the life of your -- loss of your family members, not knowing where your children or your husband are, i think it is in a measurable amount of pain, and i appreciate you taking the time and sharing it with us. i think it is especially important because the need for foreign aid and for assistance has said, i don't want to pronounced your name, ms. kim hye-sook, when you talked about the need for there to the foreign assistance ad food and all in times we are talking about cutting back so i think the message is critically

important. but you were saying that you thought that we shouldn't have discussions, negotiations with north korea, but at the same time we should do what we can to, you know, deliver food and other things the population would need. by understand the communication part, but how would we get aid to people? >> if you could answer first that would be great ms. soon and ms. sook. [inaudible conversations]

>> [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> i wld like to say that the world as supporting north korea because they hear stories of people starving and suffering but as a defector, i believe the regime of north korea should be

completely isolated and that's the only way to change the regime and unless number three at optus the market economy and changes drastically with the country is run, no change will come and as a defector, i would like to say thatwe are helping the regime to continue to be isolated and stop the aid that has been given to the regime. >> i agree except i was just making the point that if we are going -- i agree in a substantial amount of assistance but only if we can stay to the point of consumption because if we send any amount of assistance o north korea it will be diverted.

when you talk to defectors than ev saw food aid and when you talk to defectors that serve another three they will tell you the world food program lls into town, delivers rice to these families right after they leave the army comes back and takes it back. as was testified years ago about how she had gone to an orphanage and they handed out cookies and the kids just sat there with the cookies waiting for somebody to come back and take it away so of the diversion has been absolute, and because of that i think that is the kind of message the we can send that would be a very powerful message for the positive propaganda,which is that we are very much concrned about the starvation and political prisoner camps and the situation in north korea. we want to help you. we hear about these stories. we want to help you but we want to be sure that we are actually helping the people and we're only going to give that aid if we know that we can stay there. even from the very beginning with the famine first started,

north korea put six stipulations on the food. they actually didn't want -- i never heard of this before, that -- i never heard about this efore. in a challenging on this i don't think in any situation where there was a country where tre was starvation or the country that wasthe intended recipient of the demanded that the aid delivers couldn't speak their language. i don't tnk that's ever happened in any place but north korea because usually to go to a country to deliver ai you are desperate for somebody that speaks the language but that speaks volumes from the very beginning of their intention to divert eight so because of the difficulty of preventing that's why we should only provide aid if we can be there at the point of the consumptn. i can tell you all kinds of stories that if we were to go into the orphanages oliver we have to make sure those babies get that formula because actions against hunter did that and it

ended p in pyongyang in the markets and of those babies were given watered-down goat's milk when they showed up late to the current leader to find ut the tons of baby formula they delivered, that is just one example, but then in the second poini was making is tht we should be looking atcreative ways to get information and also through the north koreans that have defected that are sending in remittances to the country for helping to support their families. >> thank you very much. >> i will hold any other questions i have until later time. mr. trash. >> -- mr. chairman. >> thank you in ranking member pain for leading the committee. i had to leave because a bill of mine on the autism was on the floor and didt pass thankfully. let me ask a question if i could with regards to a few years back

in 2002i chaired a hearing on the north korean hun rights, one of several and we had a doctor, former medical doctor inside of north korea who actually was given a huge award by the dictatorship for his medical expertise and the fact that he helped cure a lot of people but he also then told the truth about the human rights situation, and he said that they are using food as a weapon, talking about a dictatorship for and against their own people they are treating the genocide, and i think we have to care as an international community we have tointervene. would you say that was in 2002 that the international community i heard in the opening comments that you had criticism that bush didn't focus on human rights during -- did pass the north

korean human rights act and was one of the co-sponsors of that and it's anexcellent bill and all of us strongly support it. has that legislation lived up to its promise, or reemphasizing sufficiently in our dialogue or whatever it is of a dialogue with the north koreans? >> guice been very disappointed after all the hard work that we did on the human-rights act. i've been disappointed right from the very start. the bush administration said we welcome these tools or helping on this iss but then they never really used the tools. one thing it did help i know the radiobroadcasting is expanding support which i believe was a result of that legislation and was a huge thing that happened that some important and also

helping the independent broadcasters. the other thing too is the special envoy position. i think it's very significant that president obama has made it very clear the special envoy robert king will be a part of the discussions on north korea. that was in the case during the bush administration. it was cut out so i think that president obama is taking greater advantage of that legislati to try to do more with the north koreans act right by the very nature that he's elevated the ambassador king's position. on the comment you made about north korea using food as a weapon that is absolutely true. it uses food as a weapon against its own people and they have an apartheid side of system in north korea here people are classified based on the regime on the eletes and then you have what they consider the way ding class which is a class that isn't considered to be to

the regime and then you've got the hostile class and if you are in that elite you may get white rice but if you are down on that system you may never see any your whole life you may get corn meal so the thing that has happened with the food is because of the breakdown in the public distribution system which is how the regime will reward people for the apartheid system based on loyalty that system is broken down and that is why the markets are so significant that you have over 200 markets and these are just the ones we know by satellite, the ones we know by satellite. so there's probably many more are markets but some people are surviving they are chilling and the the to -- trading and selling and buying them on these markets. >> either or both can just comment. on the use of torture and the gulags we have had testimony before this committee in the

past that christians and people of faith are even more selective out for repression especially in the women who are pregnant or often forcibly aborted in an absolutely crude -- they get beaten and around the abdomen and then miss carey so it is a horrible thing. we even have a testimony for its being put on how the women an soldiers were gulag security guards jumping on the boards on the abdomen of the pregnant women. did you experience torture -- you mentioned how both of you saw the littered bodies everywhere, but people were treated like animals. you said that a society where the whole country is a prison, society where does that the escape for cost and the prison and those that had the state

become lost in the international community to the society where trust the and virginity which is more precious than life is sold teeth cheaper than the cheapest of things of course talking about the human trafficking. if you could speak to the use of torture and these terrible and despicable atrocities being committed by the dictatorship. >> [speaking korean] [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] >> in answer to your question, during the two months of interrogation i was stuck in a room with no calendar, no clocks, a black hole for two months and for somebody to come out of that and not go crazy is america and that's what i experienced and in terms of dealing th my experience there i saw violence. i was injured with my shoulder during work and my fingers were injured during work and in terms of torture that's what i experienced during my prison experience at the prison camp.

>> thank you. >> [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> regarding my experience in the qu >> regarding my experience in the question, in some of the drawings i displayed what i went through, but at the prison camp number 18 there was no paved road, and there were many times when the prison guards would force prisoners would stop the prisoners walking back and forth within the camp they would stop these prisoners forced them to open their mouths and these prisoners from the prison guards would stick to -- spit into the

open mouth as prisoners and told them if you swallow it he will not be beaten but if you throw up or resist you will be beaten. she experienced that torture during her 20 years there. and in 2005, in 2005 after she was released from the campus she went into china and during the detention period when she was going thrgh that, she saw an instance where the women who were also tortured were forced to repeat sitting and standing up so that hiding the uterus would fall out and the other contraband the prisoners were trying to find, so that is about the extent of the torture she witnessed from her time in north korea.

>> mr. scarlatoiu, if they are intensifying as they take steps towards leadership uccession, could you speak further on that issue and perhaps some of the issues that you have that suggest that? mr. chairman, i should tell you that our organize asia and has published one quite well known report on the political prisoner camps in north korea called hidden gulags that happened in 2003 and i am in the process of putting together a second edition. towards that goal we have collected testimony by at least about 60 former inmates of political prisoner camps. the difference between now and then is that we have testimony from some of the guards. we have better satellite imagery. based on such testimony, we seem to see intensified political repression. we seem to see a crackdown along

the border with china, and all indications are that the new nuclear power been created around the service on the gulf kim jong il is not proposed any type of reform. we have all indications in putting violent provocations against south korea while in military provocations discussion of assassins, intensified human rights violations in north korea. we have all the evdence that we are dealing with very hard liners. it's been a glut may ask a question -- i read a book some years back about of the self-reliance, religion and the cult of personality, the deification of kim jong il and kim il-sunbefore hand, and it was a very detailed heavily footnoted booklets how they

brainwashed the people of north korea, and i'm wondering if all of you might speak to this and especially from the two kims, how did the overcome the brainwashing effort? do people in north korea really regard kim jong il as that? there was a national geographic peace recently and i watched with great interest, i watched it more than once, and a doctor went to north korea to do some surgery on the eye and he was having phenomenal success teaching other doctors and practitioners and north korea to do so, but i was astonished how the people who have been helped, especially at a group meeting, were looking at a picture of kim jong il and sinking him and

getting on their knees and for shipping him and the intensity of it was quite unnerving frankly. .. >> was what we saw in that video true, that is regarded as a god? [speaking korean] [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translar: i can answer the question by saying in north to reaffirm basically child birth, from kindergarten on, littlehildren are brainwashe ino believing that kid jong il and kim il-sung are capable of words to praise, not enough for us to praise can il-sung and kim jong il that there is no words to think otherwise in north korea. [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: and that the people in north korea -- the situation where their minds have been replaced with the brainwashed mind and there is no freedom to travel to a country where you need special color-coded passes to travel to a particular paste into niche activism site for hansard feet are part of the people so they

cannot travel or be free of that society. [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] speaking korean] [speaking korean]

>> translator: two into your question, from my experience as soon as you are born in north korea, you -- the phrases is thank you, great leader. one might say about that to give you is inthousand nine, there is a woman with a young daughter, a young child who accompanied me and the chinese family that was helping us this starving child food. the first words out of the chan not when she received the food with thank you, cheerleader, kim jong il. this goes to the extent ofthe brainwashing from the day you're born until. thank you cheerleader, kim jong il. thosewords are just a brain washing into people's minds. >> just a few final questions -- did you want to --

>> that's one of the things about this whole idea. there is a woman i met who has been a defect dirt and she taught philosophy come as i caally asked her, who is your favorite philosopher? and she is like i only taught kim il-sung in marxism for th first years of my ear and then r the last, kim jong il. i said when you let to south korea, did you pursue philosophy? she said no, i was afraid the brain was too twisted to understand. the fact that she admitted that proved that it was sent. but her brain had opened up. she was actually studying north korean studies to take your way to help help her country. i wanted to say one of the programs that treat north korea is trying to do is we are reaching out to christian churches to help us, but they want to do a program explaining

the concept of what we think of religious faith of self-sacrifice and helping others versus what they are brainwashed to believe to try to help north korns open their mind to understanding the conceptof what we value in the western world, which is serving others and helping others is the complete opposite of everything they are taught. they are the servants of the regime and that's one thing important because the defect or sell how to articulate those kinds of things. there is an organization called the coalition for north korea appeared when an solitaire is a coalition north korean women, most of whom were the answer trafficking. when they first came to south korea, the whole concept of human rights was completely alien to them. you believethat the socialist societies try to say women are equal appeared in nor korea, women are treated horribly. so this is something the are doing to restore the assignments

d teach them the value they are assuming teams cannot tell you they are as women. >> mr. chairman, i think pirtle and birth are dictators such as the personality depends by far and large i'm denying the knowledge of alternative economi, social and political systems. you have mentioned that christians are subject to harsh punishment. we have also comacross those forcibly pictured it from china have come in contact with christian missionaries for south korea's space particularly harsh punishment amounting to public executions. most likely come of the main reason beyond that is that christianity and south korea present alternative systems. one great advantage of eastern europeans have primarily through public rod casting they are receiving from the outside world was thatt was clear to them that the capitalist liberal democracy is a west were clearly

the opportunity now to focus on improving the informati to persuade not only the overwhelming majority were so oppressed, but also why not the elites of north korea, that there is life after the regime and alternatives are available. >> let me just make a notehere to access the administration in hearings and other meetings to put china on human trafficking, not only because of the horrific rise in sex trafficking i republican china, but also because they north korean women thinks she has gotten to relative safety by crossing the border, she invariably sold into human trafficking a chinese government doesn't let the single singer to mitigate pain

and crack down on the traffickers who got the border looking for women pleading for that country. they also represent a signatory to the refugee convention because they send back men and women who are most likely to be incarcerated in the gulags if not executed for leaving without permission. so china bears a huge sponsibility for its enabling and complicity in the crimes of pyongyang. let me also ask a final question. how would you rate the international community's response including the u.s., europe and especially the united states. there's a high commission of human rights. there's a whole wrapper char system, but there's also the

human rights council, which was supposed to speak truth to power regardless of the coequences and whole countries to account. now, i frequently, wen it was the comission and not the council, which asked the council are commissioned to raise human rights in north korea and frankly there've been revolutions in the past, but it has struck me, flake pro forma resolutions. they havlow expectations, no sense of shock or dismay over what kim jong il has been doing and his fellow dictators in pyongyang, but there is a sense that it's an obligatory chastisement and no one expects anything to change because of those low expectations, that country in no way is held to account. so is the international community so incredibly passive when it comes to what is equivalent to what the did in its gulags to its own people

into jewish and other scum which is going on current day in north korea. if you can speak to that and find a way, i was in south korea recently, spoke to a number of lawmakers and others in seoul. i was surprised maybe i'm wrong and my impression, to glean from that experience that many people in south korea don't have the kind of understanding that the two camps here have brought to this committee. and that is what goes on in the gulags and the huge repression that is reoved to tune by the dictatorship. the young people kind of trivialize in south korea. is that true? or is that a false impression i picked up on that trip? they know it's there, but it is not as bad and they just don't seem to take it at face value for the huge atrocity that it is. for any of you who would like to speak to that.

>> chairman smith regarding your first question, at the committee for human rights in north korea, we are very familiar with the work and the reporting done by the u.n. special rapporteur's on north korea. both of the current repertory, professor dauber time and the previous from thailand are very dedicated scholars in very good human beings who have worked very hard to put together. >> testified before a committee to pass. >> said they done extraordinary work to shed light on the atrocities and violations happening in north korea. i think that organizations such as ours have a duty to inform the nternational community to conduct research to publish on the human rights violations happening in north korea and to engage in robust public informationcampaigns to inform

the public here in the united states and beyond and also to inform north koreans have the right but they have that are being violated with such. >> i was going to say that you mentioned china. and i would say there is a correlation between the ability of the u.n. to do anything in china stating those efforts. what you mentioned about the refugees, does says the most vulnerable of human rights crisis going on today. it can be solved overnight at china simply followed the treaties that i signed. the u.n. has an office in beijing. these refugees have a place to go. the only refugees they know and the world that makes north korea unique that has aplace to go

because they are citizens of the south korean constitution and the access we will take some year and people are willing to resettle them. so there is no reason for china to continue this. brutal policy reputation has caused 80% of north korean women to be traffic in this basically modern-day slave markets. i believe you have a hearing tomorrow. one of the pressures on this is the fact that china has a shortage of women because they have been murdering unborn baby girls all these years. they've had this one child policy and that afflicted the shortage of women, so that's why you have north korean women that are vulnerable and been sold. china is the reason we can't get more action at the united nations because they actually block when everyone realized that north korea had caused the death of the south korean sailors, china was the one that was depressing that action on that. as long as you have tremendous

influence in the u.n. but has evolved in perpetrating these kinds are happening in rth america come you're not going to get any action by the united nations. i know you wanted to say something, too. [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: i would like to have that north korea, currently the kim jong il regime committed

by the regime is the worst in the world in. to totally isolate and the best way to go about prosecuting crimes against humanity to report into the international criminal court. it would do a good job of leading an international movement to make this -- to bring about this work of bringing kim jong il to the criminal court. [speaking korean] [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] >> translator: i want to say as long as kim jong il exists, the people suffering will continue. at that to say once again that our earnest desires of the united states to take a lead in helping the world focus on the important issue of human rights issue and isolating that regime to not provide aid or help that would only go towards keeping the regime alive. [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean]

[speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: i also would like to point out as i am sitting here before a media and for the congressman here that regarding food aid, i would like to plant a younger sister and brother who are still in the

prison camp certainly all the food aid that has been given is not going to dad has not been sent to them with the people who need it the most common is starving and prison would need the food aid for most, but it is only going to be a lp, to the military and security apparatus and feeding them and empowering them, only giving them more life, more power to continue the abuse that i drew in maturing as you can see on display here. >> also about the attitude inside korea, right? you asked also about the attitude in south korea? >> especially the young people. >> i definitely think they might want to have a comment about it. >> it's almost a sense of disbelief to the crew tee of kim jong il. this is so important as the media who has downplayed it --

>> that's a huge issue. that's so important because you would think the country that should care the most has been the slowest to respond. the reason for that is during the years of the kim government and the roh governme, they actually banned information to be reported about north korea because they have the sunshine policy, basically an engagement olicy. and the award-winning documentary, soul train, which is popular today that was produced by americans that the refugee crisis in china. north koreans escaping in the whole situation was banned from being shown in south korea by the government. so there was a suppression of the horrors that were going on. they can tell you stories -- he wanted to speak before the south korean assembly, but wasn't able to do it. and what has happened now -- she was going to speak before this. they can share that with you,

but what happened was what the ovocations that it happened against south korea, by north korea, unprovoked attacks at 10 a weekend and i'm very pleased to see a lot of young people trying to this issue. have gone to a conference in 2000 to come an international conference in seoul, which people like this where people will speak in their students protesting against the conference. but that has changed a lot. young people are really getting john to the issue. it's been two very difficult to move the hearts and soul of korean lawmakers. they still have not passed the korean act, which has been done by japan and the united states and that has been the real source of contention. >> it brings to mind after world war ii, eisenhower said do not burn down the concentration camps because there were some germans who were disbelief that he was real and it seems to me

when it's an actual policy of the government to suppress the truth, there is something inherently wrong with that because it creates a distortion, a gross caricature of what pyongyang is actually doing. i hope this hearing and it will be followed by additional hearings will further the information. i was telling -- and conversations, complete information about what i had read and learn from hearings and from and from terrorists who hi in my friends who were u korean, with whom i was meeting was met with disbelief, as i somehow i was exaggerating for engaging in some kind of hyperbole when the truth on the ground, as you have so ably witness to is even worse than what we can imagine in terms of the cruelty and mistreatment. >> by something else i need to share with you. in october i was at a balloon

launch and i was with ken sung min, north korea signed and we were getting ready to do a balloon lunch. there is a former north korean who served in the military and he was so upset because they were south koreans trying to stop the balloon lines and saying they were pro-kim il-sung and almost had tears in his eyes. he said i came from that country. how can they deny the horrible things i've seen? i remember him saying we don't want to get in a confrontation. i said something like i know how you feel. i thought, i don't know how he feels, that he could have gone through these horrible things and then have people be denying it and trying to stop them fom doing something to reach out to people suffering. >> translator:

[speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: of ms. kim would like to read what she said conscious about the people in south korea, the young people to the politicians not fully knowing or understanding or appreciation of situation north korea, she wholeheartedly concurs with that statement.

because of the strong presence of the last days and the pro-north korean elements in society, mrs. kim believes the peninsula is not ready for unification. south korea is not ready to be unified and she would again like to ask for the united states to take the lead in increasing knowledge and awareness about the situation in north korea and hope that other nations to be able to do this. [speaking korean] [speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: and there are 23,000 north and korea and also

a tf bat north korean set is better all over the world. if there's any sort of encouragement, financial help given to us, we'll stop at nothing and dedicate our very lives to bring about change and the regime in the korea. you can trust me when i say that. >> well, miss dane, i think you think about the left is truly enabling by either suppressing for denying that these atrocities are occurring, that makes you complicit in these crimes against humanity. i would hope that clear thinking people come in newspapers and other media in south korea were just tell the truth about what is going on in north korea because the truth is liberating. i would also add m endorsement to what you said about kim jong il and others being held to account for genocide at the international criminal court. they have committed barbaric

crimes. and while there are some u.n. individuals who have spoken out, the has been no holding to account in any meaningful way. so i asked colin endorsement he said. >> thank you very much. i just had a quick question and might make a quick comment. with the prospect of the anticipation that kim jong il believes would take over a horrible prospect, what do you see the consequences and am like that happening? [inaudible conversations]

[speaking korean] [speaking korean] >> translator: mrs. kim believes that kim jong il will never be e true leader, but if he were to become the next leader, mrs. kim believes that the areas a chance that he might open up and reform the country from her point of view in her opinion. >> thank you very much. i just want to comment and i think that an separated country like we see in korea, the fact that many instances the truths are cast from the people in the

south, the total truth and it's difficult to know whose responsibility, the government, the press, and is it deliberate? one thing that usually happens in divided countries as beside eastern and western europe although you can't compare to eastern europe totally certainly not to north korea but there is a strong move toward reunification as just a natural nationalistic move to reunite countries that were once united. and so, i could possibly understand why some of these younger people would be striving for unification, trying to of course have a change -- a regime change in the north. so i think it's just kind of normal nationalism, especially a country that may have felt that it has been, you know, abused or

exploited by world wars and things of that nature. the other thing i remember clearly as i travel to eastern europe in the lae 60s and i went to poland and germany and russia with eastern europeans and saw especially in poland, otos and news reels of the films taken inside of warsaw, with warsaw at uprisings. and these were young adults my age at the time who could not believe how brutal their parents were when they were leaving the not see regime. they were talking in their own

language, but i could kind of understand what the internal discussion was going on about in almost disbelief. so i think that as we move forward, we'll have to work with educating people to overcome some of these natural things. i also think that we should try to become even more active in the human rights council. there have been some progress made because of before the u.s. joined the council, when it was the committee before and then the council, issues like what is happening in syria, the brutality f bashir on his people, do some of the other issues would never ever be raised. and so i think sense because the u.s. has raised the issue scum and they to deal with them and that's why it's important for us to be in the room said that

there could be answers when our allies are criticized for resolutions continually com criticizing them. we cannot now say, wait a minute, let me give you the other point of view. i do hope those agencies will also be strengthened as they move and then of course i guess not being part of the bronze statues, and makes us a little less significant in the icc, where we have difficulty pushing for indictments for war criminals who should be indicted and th cases should be raised. finally, i'd like to say that really commending the south korean government, several years ago i visited one of my hospitals they are that the south korean government does, probably the best hospital in sub-saharan africa just about. and they did it because they

were appreciative of the ethiopian soldiers to fight in the korean war. and actually, most stunning is that for those veterans who were sti alive who serve, they have been paying pensions to these ethiopian soldiers ever since the end -- i don't know exactly if it started right at the end of the war, but for decades and those that are still alive received a month away regular stipend from the government of korea. so i think if some of the goodwill in southern korea could kind of workts way out to the north, that would be a positive statement. >> thank you, chair for calling

this important meeting. >> just to conclude, i'd like to ask unanimous consent that the testimony of kim sung min, director of free north korea be made part of the record. >> about objections to what are. >> await us to revise the exnded remarks and make one comment with a related issue. and i to comment on receipt comports of the part tensioners from south korea to china. as is well known, they are persecuted in china and not forcibly return them to china what they were certain face persecution. south korea should find appropriate means within the korean legal system in international conventions on

torture and refugees that is ratified 2% these pyongyang practitioners to remain in south korea. i would note on thursday, the subcommittee will hear testimony. it will be the 30th hearing on human rights abuses in china. it is entitled china's one child policy, the government's massive crime against women and unborn babies. i mention this especially in light is essential to you and others. this and ask you between woodchopper policy, the dearth of females in the prc. estimates range from an excess of 100illion missing girls in china so thatwhen north korean women make their way over the border, the traffickers are waiting to sell them into modern-day slavery and sex trafficking and china has not only not lifted a finger to stop it, they have enabled it and it is attributable in part, maybe large part to the wind policy. we would hear from to the dems

have forced abortion who will tell their stories. chai ling, the great tiananmen square activist who found all gros allowed, but, richard littlejohn and valerie johnson will speak about the military implicions. i do want to think this very, very affect his group of witnesses for shedding light on the egregious human rights abuses of kim jong l and thank you for bearing witness to the truth. when it's too much what we've done. because her subcommittee, congress, executive branch and the free world. and again, i want to thank all of our witnesses, especially our two women who ave made their way to the u.s. has come long distance, suffered, lost loved ones for speaking truth to a very totalitarian power. i would like to get he last word if any of our witnesses would like to say anything and conclusion.

>> i was just going to announce that we are having, and a on thursday, september 22nd, a protest. we are calling on people wherever you're in the world to go to the chinese embassy admitted to poster rupee chichi in and we have 25 cities in 13 countries participating. >> mr. chairman, i would like to tell you in addition to one report that i've mentioned that we are working on the prisoner camps in north korea, also a report on the circulation of information inside north korea and we will be hapy to share reports as soon as they are published for the subcommittee. >> will disseminate widely among the congress. thankyou. >> thank yu. the hearing is adjourned and thank you vy uch. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] sunday, how congress has changed its operations over his four years in leadership, at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> in my opinion, i think that, the bounds of academic freedom have just been pushed too far. >> in the faculty lounges, naomi schaefer riley suggests that ten jobs in

for life mentality entitlement needs to go. >> there are professors of nutritional studies who have tenure now, and you know, when pressed, someone at the a.p. or a professor towing the party line will say, oh, well, we need someone to have tenure in security studies so they can talk about immigration, even though it's controversial, and someone in nutritional studies needs to be able to say something controversial without obesity. >> >> that and other reasons why you won't get the college education you paid for, sunday night on c-span's q&a. >> goodwill executive chairman eric schmidt told a senate judiciary subcommittee wednesday that his company does not give preference to its own products in search results. google owns motorola and youtube among others. it is currently being reviewed by the federal trade commission for trust complaints. they also heard from on-line

companies who say google is crowding out competition. this is an hour and 45 minutes. we will examine how google conducts its search results and whether google biases the results in its favor and its critics charge that, or whether google does its best to present results in a manner that best serves consumers as it claims. i wish to stress that i come to this hearing with an entirely open mind, without any prejudgment of these issues. my goal is to provide both google and its critics with a forum to air their views. in examining these issues, we recognize the incredible

technological achievements of google and the move to not stifle its creative energy but at the same time need to be mindful of the hundreds of thousands of businesses that depend on google to grow and prosper and also need to recognize that as a dominant firm in internet search, google has special obligations under antitrust law not to deploy its market power to squelch competition. there can be no question of the astounding achievements of google's search engine. through the magic of its search technology, google, a company that started in a garage by two stanford students less than 15 years ago, has done nothing less than organize all the billions of internet web pages into an easily accessible listing on the computer screen. 65 to 70% of all u.s. searches on computers and

mobile devices are done on google's search engines. people use goog toll find out the answer to every question imaginable including the best and cheapest services from electronics to clothing to hotels to restaurants to give just a few examples. and businesses equally rely on google to find customers. the search premise of its founding was that it would be an unbiased search engine that consumeers would see the most relevant search results first and that the search results would not be influenced by the web's pages commercial relationship with google. its goal was to get the user off of google's home page and on to websites as soon as possible. as google's cofounder larry paige said in 2004, and i quote "we want you to come to google and quickly find what you want and then we're happy to send you to the other sites. in fact, that's the point."

however, as other searches become a channel of e commerce google has grown more powerful and it appears its mission may having changed and in the last five years or so, goog google has been an acquisition binge acquiring internet businesses culminating most recently with its proposed acquisitions of motorola mobility and zagats and now owns finance products and comparison, transforming google from a mere search engine to a major internet conglomerate and this raises a fundamental question -- is it possible for google to be both an unbiased search engine and at the same time own a vast portfolio of web-based products and services? does google's transformation create a conflict of interest which threatens to stifle competition? in the last two years internet businesses that

compete with google's new products and services have complained that google is now behaving in a way contrary to free and fair competition. they say that google is trying to leverage its dominance in internet search into key areas of internet commerce where it stands to capture from its competitors billions of dollars in advertising reaching knew. rather than fairly presenting app search results the competitors say they search in favor of their own services and this conduct has the potential to harm commerce on the inter net and retire innovation by companies that fear the market power of goog. antitrust is about picking winners and losers but about picking a competitive environment so consumers can fairly pick winners and losers. as more and more of our commerce moves to the internet, it should be the highest policy that the

internet remain a bastion of open and free competition as it has been since its founding. we need to protect the ability of the next google to emerge, the next great website or application being developed in the garage of silicon valley and we would like to hear what you have to say. >> thank you, mr. chairman. internet search is critical for economic growth and indeed, americans google so frequently that the company's name has become a generic verb that means to search the internet. the in the united states, google controls between 6 a and 70% of the general search arena and more than 75% of paid search advertising and 95% of global search. given its dominant position, most internet-based businesses rely on google for a substantial share of

their traffic and revenues. as a result, last year google generated nearly $30 billion in searched a ver tizing revenues. -- search advertising revenue. studies show that the first few google search results attract nearly 90% of all user clicks. google's search ranking has enormous power over the information users find, which websites receive traffic and the amount businesses must pay to be found on the internet. a former reagan administration antitrust chief recently suggested that this market power has essentially made google a monopoly gatekeeper to the internet. whether or not google formally qualifies as a monopoly under our antitrust laws, one thing is clear, given its significant ability to steer e-commerce, and the flow of on-line information, google is in a position to help determine who will succeed and who will fail on the internet. in the words of 0 google's

search ranking team, google is, quote, the biggest king maker on earth, unquote. google has used its revenues to branch out into a multitude of secondary internet businesses, largely by acquiring more than 100 different companies, google now offers youtube video, gmail, chrome, internet browser, google plus, android mobile smartphone operating services and google maps, news, books, shopping, places and flight search. and with its recent purchase of motorola mobility, google is poised to get into the business of mobile handset manufacturing. with google's expansion, a large large number of businesses and consumer groups have raised concerns regarding google's activitys suggesting they may be acting in deceptive and anti-competitive ways, and as a result google is under investigation by antitrust

groups that are calling a hearing to address this important topic. from its inception, google's stated goal was to have users leave its website as quickly as possible, but over time the company appears to have changed its approach to steer users not to other businesses an sources of information but to its own complement of competing services. google has worked hard to cultivate the public perception that its searches are unbiased but there is growing concern that google uses different algorithms and more attractive visual displays to the detriment of competing specialized search sites and to other disadvantaged businesses. there is evidence that google has taken information and reviews from competing search sites like yelp and trip advisor, used this datas as part of its own services and demoted the search rankings of the site from which google acquired

that information and some reports say google has taken steps to impede search engines from returning to its youtube and book scan, and access to these popular stores of content is crucial and critical to enabling other search engines to compete. there are allegations thatting google has sought to maintain its dominance in search by posting exclusivity in blocking search tools. this includes a broad array of -- and a broad network of exclusive search syndication deals with websites like a.o.l. and ebay, exclusive arrangements for google's search box to appear on mozilo firefox and is a far are ry, an agreement that google be the exclusive search provider on the i phone and android models. similarly google's contract with advertisers apparently imposes limits on the advertiser's ability to transfer data to any other

advertising platform when using third party tools that would make the process simple or even automatic. studied by a harvard business school says they use google ad works to the exclusion of other platforms. many thing google wants to prevent smartphone customers who wish to use the android platform from using competitors' services for example, by tying android to google's program to exclude competing services. in addressing these concerns, the primary focus of our antitrust analysis should be consumer welfare. growing complaints thatting google is using its search dominance to favor its own offerings at the expense of competition deserves serious attention especially if consumers are misled by googles self-rankings and preferential display. said bias would deny user traffic and revenue to

competing sites. when competing websites lose traffic, they're force to increase their paid searched a ver tizing on google, ultimately leading to increased prices for consumers. as a conservative republican who favors free markets i believe that ensuring robust come pe digs will benefit consumers. it will spur innovation and lead to job creation. in this instance, i believe that preserving competitive markets through antitrust principles can help stop the burden some governmenting regulation. thank you. >> i would like to introduce our first witness who will be mr. schmidt. he has served as executive chairman of google since april of this year and from 2001 to 20011 was the chief executive officer of the company. we will introduce our second panel before they testify but i would now turn to senator feinstein who would

like to make remarks in order to introduce our witnesses from california. >> thank you very much, mr. chairman. i really appreciate this very special privilege. the three gentlemen you're going to hear from today come right from the heart of the san francisco bay area. i have known the chairman of google for many years. i've always known him as a fourth right forthright man filled with integrity and has been at the helm of a number of america's most innovative companies. he has been with google since 2001. he has helped google grow from less than a thousand employees to 28,000, 13,000 of whom are in california. it's a 45% growth in employment even in the most difficult times of the past two years with 5,000 new hires in california in about that same time. under his leadership, google has been helping business

throughout the golden state, last year alone providing $15 billion in economic activity to nearly 300,000 small businesses, publishers and non-profits. mr. jeff task, the c.e.o. of nextag is from san francisco. this is a price comparison website company in san mateo that allows people to search for products and see lists of available on-line prices for those products. mr. katz has extensive experience in the internet and travel i haves, having held a variety of positions at american airlines, serving as president and c.e.o. of swissair, being the chairman and founding c.e.o. of the well-known travel website orbitz, and serving as president and c.e.o. of leapfrog interprices, a --

enterprises, and he holds a master's degree of science, master of science degree from my alma mater, sanford, among other degrees. finally, jerry stoppleman, cofounder and chief executive officer of yelp joininging will katz on the second panel will be jeremy stosselman, cofounder and c.e.o. of a small innovative company that allows people to search and find profiles of businesses in the results, including customer reviews and rankings, photographs and other similar businesses. he worked as the vice president of engineering at paypal before dropping out of harvard business school to cofound yelp with russell simmons. as you can see, mr. chairman, you have three very well qualified citizens and i hope they tango rather

than tangle. >> thank you very much, senator feinstein. we thank all witnesses who are appearing here today, and i would like you all now to rise and step forward and raise your right hand and take the oath as i administer it. do you testify that the testimony you are about to give before this committee will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you god? thank you all. mr. schmidt, we will hear what you have to say. >> good afternoon. thank you for inviting me here today. i want to start first by taking a step back 20 years ago. a large technology firm was setting the world on fire. its software was on nearly every computer and its name was synonymous with

innovation but that company lost sight of what mattered and washington stepped in. i was an executive at know vel at the time and in the years since, many have absorbed the lessons of that era. i'm here carrying a long history in the technology business, thank you, senator, and a very short message about our company. we get it. by that, i mean we get the lessons of our corporate predecessors. we also get that it is natural for you to have questions about our business and that's certainly fine. what we ask is that you help us ensure that the federal trade commission's inquire are ry means a fair and focused process, which i'm sure you will do, and that we can continue to build jobs and create products that delight our users so before i talk about our perspective on the state of technology in general, i would like to start by explaining hough we think about our business and two of the principles that guide the decisions which i'm sure you will want to talk about. first, always put consumers first. last year alone, we made

more than 500 changes to improve search. it is not an easy task. our challenges return the most relevant answers first. this means that not every website can come on top. it is a ranking problem, and there are definitely complaints from businesses who want to be first in rankings even when they're not best match, as best as we can tell for user search. second, focus on loyalty, not lock-in. we don't trap our users. if you don't like the answer that the google search provides, you can search to another engine with literally one click and we have lots of evidence that people do this, and if you want to leave other google services we make it easy for you to do so. you can take your data with you without any hassle. we want consumers to stay with us, because we're innovating and making our product better, not because they're locked in. third, the open not closed, open technology includes both open source, meaning that we release and actively support code that helps grow the internet and open standards meaning we adhere

to acceptance standards and if none exist, we work to he create the standards and improve the entire internet. fourth, be transparent. we share more information about how our search engine and other products work than any of our competitors and we give advertisers detailed information about their performance and return on investment. finally, the only constant is change. ten years ago, no one would have guessed, certainly i and i don't think anybody else that the economics of the web would look like it does today and no one knows what it will look like next year or in five years. i think our future in america is very bright. there's no doubt we are facing difficult times. there has never been a more exciting time to be part of the technology business. other than doubling down, we are rin vesting in people. in 2002, we had a thousand employees and now have

24,000. we announced 2011 would be our biggest hiring year yet. we are investing in mobile, which was earlier suggested. just look at our plans to acquire motorola mobility. we believe our proposed acquisition of motorola like many previous moves we have made is good for competition and the american economy. it is a big bet that we're confident that this will lead to growth in mobile technology. we're also investing in local. 97% of the people look on-line for local goods and services but only 62% of america's small businesses do not have a website. this is a missed opportunity in my view. we started an initiative to get small businesses on-line and partnered with intuit and other small businesses,ette. last year google's searched provided $64 billion in economic activity to other companies, publishers an non-profits in the united

states. we're very proud of this. this year it will be even greater. without exaggeration, high-tech is the most dynamic part of the economy. advertising alone is 3.1 million jobs according to something i just read and according to mckin zy, the internet is responsible for 15% of america's g.d.p. growth in the last five years and it is home to some of the america's most successful companies, amazon, apple, facebook and google. we compete hard and welcome the competition. it makes us better and makes our competitors better, too, but most importantly it means better products for our users. today is google's turn in the spotlight and we respect the rule that you all have in this process. i do ask you to remember that not all companies are cut from the same cloth and that one company's past not be another's future. we live in a different world today and the open internet is the ultimate level playing field so to keep that in mind and we believe

that the federal trade commission inquiry will reveal an enthusiastic company filled with people that believe we have only scratched the surface of what's possible. that passion to do better will not only serve our users well, but it will serve our nation well, and by helping create new jobs and job growth that our wonderful country needs, so thank you very much for this opportunity to speak. >> thank you. mr. schmidt, we appreciate what you just had to say and now we will begin our inquiries of you individually and will asks for the next seven minutes. mr. schmidt, many industry experts believe that the mission of google has fundamentally changed, at the outset, their goal in 2004 was to get consumers off google's page and, quote, send you to the other sites. at that time, google has acquired or expanded into internet areas including travel videos and shopping

and now we hear you say you want to provide answers to questions not merely link to websites that provide those answers. what do you say to those who argue that there is a fundamental conflict of interest between only providing beck links and now providing answers when you own many of the services providing the answers? a rational business trying to make the most profit, wouldn't we expect google to favor its products and services in providing these answers? >> i'm not sure google is a rational business trying to maximize its own profits, senator, as we addressed in our founding of our ipo letter in the founders' letter. goog is run under a set of principles that are quite profound within the company and one of the most important principles is solve the problem that the consumer has, so ten years ago, the best answer may have been the ten links that we saw but the answer answer is that we can

algorithmically compute an answer. if you are looking for an answer, you want the answer quickly and speed matters especially at the scale we are at so if we can calculate an answer more quickly, that's an improvement for the end-user >> >> isn't that like saying we will dot right thing? isn't trusting google to do the right thing really sufficient given your clear business incentives to maximize the value of your company, shouldn't we be guided by the words of the great president of ronald reagan who said trust? yes, but verify. >> i completely agree with trust but verify. i hope this is the process that we're into right now. the ultimate correction against any mistakes that google makes is how consumers behave and we live

in a great fear every day that consumers will switch extraordinarily quickly to other services. one of the consequences of the open internet is that people have choices that they did not have ins previous generations. in every ka case a site that is lower ranked is still available if you type their name into our browser and off you go. in all cases what we're trying to do is we're saying that our customers want quick and accurate answers and if you will, the guide or the way we correct ourselfs is if they switch.

speaking of the google finance service, we said in the past, google ranked links, quote, based on popularity. but when we rolled out google finance, we did put the google link first, seems only fair; isn't that right, we do all the work for the research page and all these other things so we do it, put it first. that is actually been our policy since then. this is your employee. so for google maps again, it's the first link so on and so forth, and after that, it's ranked usually by popularity,

unquote. so when she made that comment back in , she was speaking in her mind accurately. how do you measure what she said then and what you're telling us now? >> well, again, i wasn't there, so maybe i should use my own voice on this question. there's a category of queries which are not well served by the links answer. you mentioned in marissa's quote maps. when people want a map, they actually want a map right then and there, so over a six or seven-year period, we not only acquired a set of companies, but also invested hundreds after millions of dollars producing what we think technologically and experience are the best mapping products around and we service those because our

testing and own tuition is that when somebody types in an address, they actually want to have a map and we show it to them very quickly. it would be quick to do that with the -links model. if we were forced to stay within the -links model, we would not be able to do that kind of innovation. furthermore, all our competitors have similar approaches and products to the placement of the maps, products and other things. >> let me say one again, she said, when we rolled out google finance, we did put the google link first. it seems only fair. we do all the work for the search page and all the other things so we do put it first. now, you recognize, of course, if that's company policy, that's very in the contrary to what you're telling us here today? >> well, i can speak for the policy of the company during my tenure and i represent i implemented and understood it and in our case, we implemented the way i described it. i'll let marissa speak for herself on her quote. if you look at google finance, we started off presenting google links as you described and then we decided it would be better to have a simple,

quick, stock quote if you will, a tool, and we licensed that technology from the nasdaq and nyc and others and that's the source of her answer. so again, we moved from the standard -links answer to this what we call a simple answer, and then what happened after that of course is right below it, you see all of the top engines. and if you do that inquiry today, not only will you see we show all the other competitors and ideas and great sources of information, but we also have hot links as they are called right below our answers including, for example, yahoo finance, which is probably the most popular of them. >> to be listed first is an advantage, isn't it? >> in this particular case, we don't list anybody first, we have an insertion which summarizes the answer and typically the yahoo answer comes right after our -- it's easier if i describe it, if you want a stock quote, we'll give you the stock quote and right after that we'll show you links to yahoo finance and the others right there, so i disagree with the characterization that

somehow we were discriminating against the others. the chairman: thank you very much. mr. lee. >> let me get right to the point of one of my concerns. our google products and services offered by google are subject to the same search ranking algorithmic process as all other organic search results? >> they are -- they are when they are actually in ranking -- in the answers that you're describing, but i think the core question that both of you addressed in your opening statements was this question of where we synthesize or come up with an answer to a question, so again, i want to just repeat, if we know the answer, it is better for the consumer for us to answer that question so they don't have to click anywhere and in that sense we tend to use data sources that are our own because we can't engineer it any other way. >>okay.

i'm not asking whether you're giving the right information, whether you're giving information that's, you know, you regard as most helpful to the customer, i'm asking whether your own secondary services that google itself offers, are they subject to the same test, the same standard as all the other results of an organicalgorithmic search? >> i believe so. as i understand your question, i believe the answer is question. i'm not aware of any unnecessary or strange boosts or biases. you'll see everything is mixed in a way and often competitor's links are in, for example, like youtube. >>i would like to show a visual aid. let's bring up the first slide if we can, mike.

this is a chart that reflects the results of a study comparing the search rankings of three popular price comparison sites and those of google shopping. now, the three popular price comparison sites results are depicted in various shades of green and the google results are depicted in red. these particular data points were gathered in april of this year and they represent the ranking results from shopping- related key word searches. while next tab, price graber and shopper all show significant variation, ranking first for some and near for others, google has a very consistent rate of success. google shopping ranked third in virtually every single instance. so to be clear, your testimony a moment ago that these google shopping rankings almost exclusively in the third spot are, in fact, the result of the same algorithm as the rankings for the other

comparison sites - >> there's a con affiliation of two different things going on in this study that i haven't seen so i shouldn't comment beyond that. there's a difference between sites that do product comparisons and sites that offer products themselves. google product search is about getting you to a product. and so we tend to look for the product, as opposed to the product comparison in this particular case, which is why the product is more highly ranked than the results of a product comparison site. if you did the same study with all of the other product sites, you would find a very different result. >> okay. so if we call this a product search, if we call the result a google product result, that is not subject to the samealgorithmic search input that brings about the other organicalgorithmic search result?

>> again, i'm sorry, i may have confused you and i apologize. we do product search ranking, things like the companies that are mentioned there are price comparison shopping. they are different animals, if you will. they do different -- they are important. they do different things. google product search is about searching for specific products. in that sense, product search does something similar to what price graber, nextag and shopper does which is why the confusion exists. it's an apples to oranges comparison. >> why is it always third? it seems to me this is an uncanny statistical coincidence, if we can call it that, third every single time. there are a few outliers where you're first or third or fourth, you're also interestingly never th. every one of those others will find themselves every where along the spectrum. you're always third almost every time. how do you explain that?

>> again, i would have to look at the specific results. >> we've got the results right here. >> i would actually need to see the technical details to give you a direct answer. but in general, what's happening here is you're having product comparison sites and their results are being compared against google answers, which are products, and the two cannot be properly compared and that's why i think you're seeing such a strange result. >> okay. okay. it seems to me for whatever it's worth, when i see this, when i say you magically coming up third every time, that seems to me, i don't know whether you call this a separate algorithm or reversed engineered, but either way you cooked it so you're always third? >> senator, may i assure you, we have not cooked anything. >> well, okay. you you have an uncanny ability and unnatural attraction to the number three in that instance. let's look at this search

result. this one is the product of a search query. here, it's a search query for a particular camera model and we bring up a google product listing. now, it's near the middle of the search screen result. you note from your research that the middle of the first screen is the area where users are most likely to focus. that's the prime real estate on- line; correct? >> well, actually, collision go from the top to the bottom. >> okay. so you want to be at or near the top of the list? >> in general, you want to be on the first page and then among the first entries; that's correct. >> okay. now, among the natural search ruts, the google listing, the google products listing is the only result that includes the photo. inve highlighted it here blue just to demonstrate here it's different, but there's nothing on-line that differentiates it as a google

listing. there's nothing that indicates this is an advertisement, that it's even google and it's prominent given its placement? >> again, that's not an ad, that is an organic search result which is triggered by a product search database which we have gathered by searching and ranking offerings from many different vendors. if you click within that, you go to the vendor that will sell you the product. >> i see my time has expired? >> thank you, senator lee. >> i want to thank mr. schmidt and the other witnesses being here to testify. i share -- especially in the high-tech sector. google and its competitors are building the infrastructure of the economy and it's critical that technological growth not be unfairly constrained. that's how all markets work, but particularly in this area where innovation really matters and things change quickly, so i think the ftc investigation will get to the facts behind the allegations we're hearing today and that's

a good thing. we have to examine -- i have been particularly passionate about the growth of the high- tech sector because it has been and will be critical to the future growth of new york. i realize that when most people hear about high-tech sectors in the united states, they don't necessarily think of new york, yet by many measures, new york is number one or two when it comes to employment or investment in the entire sector. we're now the second largest recipient of high-tech venture capital in the country. we passed boston this year and only trail silicon valley in the amount of venture capital invested and this is the state of connecticut most amazing to me, by some measures, the new york metropolitan has more --

over , men and women, , firms classified as high-tech companies, that's right, we have more than silicon valley, more than boston, more than washington. it's sort of hidden by some of the other industries. j.p. morgan, i have been told, has more computer programmers than companies like google or microsoft. so it's very important to new york. google, frankly, has been a very important part of that equation in new york. last year, google bought the largest office building in manhattan. google employs around , people in new york. that's double its employment rate from , and in , it provided $. billion of economic activity and i would like to

ask unanimous consent, a number of letters i received from members of the new york literature, new york businesses describing the significant role google place in new york's economic development. obviously with that great power google has, google has as my colleagues mentioned great responsibility. i want to get a fix on this, and frankly, the future of new york's high-tech is lots of little companies. there are hundreds of them that are burgeoning, one or two of whom might grow into a google or facebook or one of the others. so if google were being what patient us and shutting down the ability of these small companies to function, it would hurt new york and every six months or so i meet with the ceos of the high-tech companies in new york, the growing, the little ones, and we talk about problems they face. we don't have a good -- we don't have enough engineers in new york. we're trying to build an engineering school. immigration is a huge problem to them. we need reform of hb visas which we're working on, but without even prompting them, and this is important for my colleagues to hear, each of

whom had a hundred, , employees and most of whom hadn't existed a couple of years ago and i asked them, what do you think of google. this is off the record. is google rapatious? are they competing with you trying to steal what you do? i have been through this before where one of new york's companies kodak was being unfairly taken care of by another large high-tech company or are they generally, do they have a more positive attitude of being open and encouraging, et cetera. frankly, i expected them to attack google. that would be the natural thing you think. but they didn't. four-fifths of them said google is a positive force, much more positive than most of the other companies they deal with. they said it helps us more than hurts us.

their words were google is pretty good, we don't see them as rapatious. it surprised me and influenced me so i think my colleagues ought to hear that, that while it's important, of course, that we pay attention to competition in the high sector, i agree with you senator lee, that that's the best way to get growth, it's also important we focus on growth and investment and jobs, and so i thought i would just share that with my colleagues because i think it's important to hear and it was not -- you know, they had no idea i was going to ask about google. it was off the record. they are very frank with me about a lot of things including people's politics and things like that. now, i have a question for you that is specific for new york and then a couple of general questions -- well, i don't have too much time remaining. last year, google selected kansas city as a site for your new ultra high-speed internet

service. that really helped kansas city. hudson valley is very eager to be another test place for your network. we have ibm there, we have a lot of high-tech industry, it's growing, but it's being hindered by a lack of internet capacity. would you agree to consider the hudson valley as a future test site for your broad-band project? >> i think the answer is absolutely, i have been there and it's both a great technology place and also a wonderful natural resource. what we're doing in kansas city is we're actually experimenting for a new model for broadband, different pricing and different speed, and so forth, and if it works, it has the ability to change the discussion of broadband. we want it to succeed in kansas city first, absolutely. >> one last question. we've heard your answer, you have to think about this, what

do you think google could be doing better to foster competition that you're not doing now that you could do to help all those little companies grow into big successful companies? >> i'm always interested in creating greater platforms for innovation. if you take a look at android today, , phones, the platform for new companies to build mobile apps in android is exciting, we could invest a lot more money for the industry that will be built around the platforms google is building. i have always felt that's something we could invest more in. >> my time is up. >> thank you. mr. cornyn. >> i'm a frequent user of your product and learned a lot when i visited your facilities in california, and it is a marvel of modern technology. i have to confess when i read the nonprosecution agreement between google and the u.s. justice department, it gave me some concerns and i just want

to give you an opportunity to comment on that, because since the chairman talked about trust and ronald reagan talked about trust and verify, i want to know how you put this into the context of what i would regard generally as a very positive contribution to productivity and technology. but the nonprosecution agreement between google and the department of justice dated august basically google admits to helping on-line pharmacies illegally sell hundreds of millions of dollars of potentially counterfeit and tainted prescription drugs to u.s. consumers. as a result, you know google paid what is reported to be one of the largest criminal penalties levied in u.s. history. and just quoting, as early as , google was on notice that on- line canadian pharmacies were

advertising prescription drugs to google users in the united states through google's ad words advertising program. although google took steps to block pharmacies and countries other than canada from advertising in the united states through ad words, google continued to allow canadian pharmacy advertisers to geo target the united states in their ad words advertising campaigns. google knew that u.s. consumers were making on-line purposes of prescription drugs from these canadian on-line pharmacies. in this document, google admitted to knowing at the time that many of these canadian on-line advertising including controlled substances based on an on-line consultation rather than a valid prescription from a treating medical practitioner. and it was not until when google became aware of the doj's investigation of its advertising practices in the

on-line pharmacy area that google took a number of significant steps to prevent the unlawful sale of prescription drugs by on-line pharmacies to u.s. consumers. so i want to give you the opportunity, mr. schmidt, to put that in context so we can get a complete and accurate picture of google as a corporate citizen and i think it also speaks directly to the issue of trust? >> well, senator, thank you, and again, all of that is generally quite correct. we regret what happened, and we entered into the agreement that you named and cited from. unfortunately, as part of that agreement, and i have been advised very clearly by our lawyers, that we have an agreement with the department of justice that we are not to speak about any of the details of it, so i would have to ask you to speak to the department of justice for more of that. >> is that in the -page agreement?

>> it's in there somewhere, yes, sir. so, in any case, the important thing for me to say is that the conduct that was covered is not -- has nothing to do with any of our current advertising practices or policies. in other words, it was an historical event. >> was it -- was it the results of oversight or inadvertence or were there some employees in the company that were doing this without your knowledge, or -- >> certainly not without my knowledge. again, i have been advised. unfortunately, i'm not allowed to go into any of the details and i apologize, senator, except to say that we're very regret full and it was clearly a mistake. >> my counsel i advises me that under the agreement, you're not allowed to contradict the agreement, although you can comment on it. is your understanding different? >> let me ask my counsel. again, i'm not allowed to go

into the details or characterize it beyond the -- beyond what has been stated in the agreement. we absolutely regret what happened. it was a mistake and we certainly apologize. >> well, do you -- do you disagree with the characterization that i gave it or the word -- >> i agree with you, senator. tond you've taken the steps make sure that that sort of thing never happens again? >> absolutely. and again, i say that with great regret. >> mr. schmidt, the -- of course, this is the antitrust subcommittee. would you agree it becomes illegal under the antitrust laws to insist that customers of one product buy another separate product, generally called tying? >> yes, i'm not an attorney, but

my general understanding is that that's correct. >>do you believe that your mobile android operating system -- your mobile operating system android has reached that point? it's about percent of the market and growing fast; correct? >> as a bit of background, as i mentioned earlier, android is on its way to becoming the most successful mobile platform. we're proud of this. we have , activations and the android is first and foremost freely licensed, that is, there's no fee or whatever to use it. speculating on the basis of your question, it turns out that it's possible to use google search along with android, but it's expressly also possible to not use google search, so the answer is, that's not an example of a case you were describing. >> can -- can google design android so that other

applications cannot work as well as google applications; for example, the g mail application will always be faster than the yahoo mail application; is that possible? >> i'm sure that's not true in general because under the rules of open source, it's possible for anyone to take open source and modify it in any way possible. so anything that we did, which we wouldn't do, that would advantage our own apps would be reversible by somebody because we give them the source code. in other words, historically, the problem in this case is that there was a hidden feature a previous company would do that wasn't visible. because android is made available to everyone, we couldn't choose that if we wanted to. >> thank you. my time is up? >> thank you very much, senator cornyn. >> thank you very much, mr. chairman, and thank you for holding this important hearing. as we know, google is a big component of the internet i was doing my own research comparing googling my name which i'm sure no one on this

panel has ever googled their own named, but i googled my name on google and used bing, as well, and i will note google entry beating out my own facebook page, in which he says the laws of chance are basically silent on the odds of another football team matching the mind- bending performance of the minnesota vie kings on sunday. so bing luckily does not feature that article at all about the vie kings. but it was making me think about how you do these rankings, and according to some remarks attributed to google in a recent article, google uses factors to determine rankings and i know senator lee went through some of this with you and google changed its ranking formula according to this article about times in . obviously, these changes have a big impact. for example, the difference between being ranked first and being ranked second is that the first rang result gets about percent of the collision, the

second result gets only about percent and when google changes its formulas, companies that were once first might be second page or even further down the line and businesses are telling me how they want certainty and i know at the same time, google is i know novating and changing its algorithm to improve its product. do you think the company has a right to expect more certainty in how they are being ranked? >> in the situation you're describing, i have a lot . >> google uses its power to manipulate consumers and drive traffic to itself and away from potential competitors for traffic and ad revenue, end of quote. so kind of how do you respond to that? and the additional quote is, are you concerned that your

company has been, quote, exerting enormous power to direct internet traffic in ways that hurt many small, rural businesses, end of quote. >> sir, i would like to return to the philosophy that we have had for some years, which is to focus on getting to the right answer. and we have a lot of systems inside the company, internal testing, external testing, tests as they are called, to really make sure that we're producing the best results, and that is the guide that we use. it's really about consumers. as we discussed earlier, it's perfectly possible that in the course of that, extremely good and well-meaning small businesses move up and down in the rankings, but we are in the rankings business, so for every looser, there's a winner, and so forth. i am satisfied that the vast majority of small business are extremely well-served by our approach.

we did make a large change that had to do with low-quality content farms. that is rare when we make such a change. >> one other issue has come up that are reports that google and associated websites to dissipate in the bidding that google holds for certain advertising. do companies participate in those options -- options? >> you are referring to auctioning? in that sense we participate in the auctions. we try to limit fat for obvious reasons.

it is a very tiny number. >> one thing i have been focusing on as it stealing intellectual property in books, movies, music. what happens sometimes when you type in a legitimate song more movie is that you might be steered to an illegitimate side. is there anything more that google can be doing to take responsibility for this? it is a different issue than antitrust, but it is something i care about. >> we agree there is a real problem here. we have taken the position that we have to represent the web as it is as opposed to the way we wish it to be. in those particular cases, we favor positions which involve following the money, people that

are stealing content to the extent money they are taking can be revoked from them. >> you follow the money they're still must be some way to figure out of these sites are legitimate but they still keep coming out. >> it is difficult. assume i am a stealing side. we can identify because we can do a test for a trademark violation and it served as is another site so it is a where kamal problem. the other problem we have a copyright is it is hard with who owns the copyright. property -- property owners to register their videos on youtube and if they'll legally uploaded copy comes up, we can do the comparison. we cannot do that in general because of the nature on the web. it is a huge issue and it has affected our business with content companies on whom we critically depend, so we are

under great pressure to resolve this with a good technical logical solution. the core problem is that you can look at website and tell it is copyright infringement, the problem is that the computer cannot. to do it systematically is a very hard computer science program. >> two were the things i wanted to ask. google did a very big event in minnesota and reaching out to some of our small business is helping to set up websites which was helpful another is legitimate work being done with small businesses. again, i share the concerns about the ordering. since senator schumer mentioned having the global site in new york, senator frank and and diet are still focusing on duluth. -- senator frank and and i are focusing on duluth. >> small businesses can be ranked higher than they would otherwise be because they can be

very specific. if we do anything, we probably show a small businesses better than they would in of the reproaches. >> thank you, senator. >> remind me one of those workshops that will be held in iowa next week. if we maintain our week-long motion, i will go to that. i have a statement. i have heard both good and bad and some are concerned that google is unfairly using its power to drive web traffic to their own sides to the detriment of small businesses and consumers. they believe google is in

beijing in anti-competitive better and thwarting the marketplace. others are truly supportive of google products and services in their concern the government is being overly aggressive and will place burdensome regulations on a company that is innovative consumer tools. we should not penalize successful companies that are innovating and providing cost- effective services and providing jobs. i also believe company should not take unfair advantage by using unfair business practices. the government should not be picking winners and losers. the antitrust laws and their role to play in ensuring there is a welcome playing field. they should employ open and fair practices.

"without to attribution several communications i have had with people on both sides. to quote iowans. a d have to say about google using its power to manipulate consumers and drive traffic to itself and away from potential competitors for traffic and ad revenue? how do you respond to that? and the additional quote is, are you concerned that your company has been, quote, exerting enormous power to direct internet traffic in ways that hurt many small, rural businesses, end of quote. >> sir, i would like to return to the philosophy that we have had for some years, which is to focus on getting to the right answer. and we have a lot of systems inside the company, internal testing, external testing, tests as they are called, to really make sure that we're producing the best results, and

that is the guide that we use. it's really about consumers. as we discussed earlier, it's perfectly possible that in the course of that, extremely good and well-meaning small businesses move up and down in the rankings, but we are in the rankings business, so for every looser, there's a winner, and so forth. i am satisfied that the vast majority of small business are extremely well-served by our approach. as i said earlier to senator klobuchar, i do believe our system promotes and enhances the small businesses over large businesses and it gives them a role they would not otherwise have because of the nature of the way the algorithms work. >> here is a quote from somebody who supports google. how would you respond to the eye would he and that wrote, further restrictions on successful businesses like google are the surest way to impede innovation, entrepreneur ship, ultimately sustain any sustainable economic recovery? >> again, we would like to be

judged and we're happy to be judged and reviewed by you all and on the principles we set out, consumer and consumer choices. we're always concerned about consumers moving from ourselves which is the larger being and the many new competitors. we argue we're in a highly competitive market. we welcome the oversight but we would ask the way you're making the decision based on the principles. >> you may want to say how you help small businesses beyond what we talked about here, these one shops that you have, but in addition to anything you want to along that line, how can small businesses web sites compete with large retailers and big-box tools on google? >> it's interesting that google was first and foremost a

success in small businesses because small businesses were more anymore bell than the big businesses when it came to the internet. we have a history of promoting small businesses and we love this. small businesses succeed precisely where the big ones don't, specially occasion. what we try to do when we get companies on-line, we try to get them to articulate the unique way they are different. in your constituent, there's something uniquely different about the view and culture of your state. they are on the margin going to rang higher and appeal to a broader audience. what's great about it, we can have local flavor with global impact in terms of the market that you're serving. >> a question that would come from somebody who is not an admirer, complaints along the line that google is directing internet users to google operated web sites regardless

of whether the organic results of the search would direct users to competing sites; specifically, some of my constituents are concerned that small local iowa businesses are not treated in a fair and competitive manner and that the top search results to a query are often given to large national companies, even when a search designates a specific iowa location in the query. so obviously feel small businesses are being cheated and consumers being misled. your response? >> it's perfectly possible that you're describing failures of our algorithm. a large company can masquerade as a small business in iowa and it's hard for us to detect it.

we're constantly making changes in testing to improve it. in the case you're describing, part of the answer we would give, hopefully you'll have a mixture of larger companies and smaller businesses that reflect the best of iowa in that particular scenario. but this precise ranking algorithm is difficult to characterize. why am i first? there are different signals and it's applied so broadly it's hard to reason from a specific case out to the general case. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you, senator grassley. senator franken. >>thank you, mr. chairman for the extremely important hearing. first of all, i want to start out by saying i love google and i said that the last time google was here in front of my subcommittee, but i think it bears repeating. google has transformed the way we use information and google will be among those setting the standard for innovation in this country for decades to come. but in many ways, google's unprecedented growth and success is also one of the reasons we need to pay attention to what you're doing. and as you get bigger and

bigger and bigger, i worry about what that means for the next larry page or sergey brin who are struggling to build the next innovative product in the garage. i am admittedly skeptical of big companies that simultaneously control both information and the distribution channels to that information, and for me, that is at the heart of the problem here. when you completely accommodate how people search for that -- for information and you own separate products and services that you want to succeed, you're incentives shift. your fiduciary duties to your shareholders shift and people have reason to worry that you aren't going to play fair.

and there's been a lot of talk about where -- where your placement on a search, companies, and i was a little taken aback by an answer you gave when the chairman brought up managers a marry quote when -- marissa myer's quote saying that when we rolled out google finance, we did put the google link first, right, we do all the work for the search page and all these other things so we do put it first. and you anxious had that by saying that, well, you put a map out there when someone wants a map to someplace, you

just put a map out there and that's what they want. and sort of understand that -- or a financial answer of stock price. but then the ranking member asked you, well, when that's not the case, when you're not putting out the answer that people want, when you're not doing that, do all your rankings reflect an unbiased algorithm, and you said after a little hesitation, "i believe so." that seemed like a pretty fuzzy answer to me coming from the chairman. if you don't know, who does? i really -- that really bothers me, because that's the crux of this, isn't it?

and you don't know so we're trying to have a hearing here about whether you favor your own stuff and you're asked that question and you admittedly don't know the answer. i want to talk about yelp! a little bit. i read through the testimony of mr. stoppelman, the co-founder and ceo of yelp! last night and i found his story to be quite compelling. it sounds to me that like google, google first tried to license yelp!'s content -- content and did, and then when yelp! terminated that contract, google tried to buy yelp!, and when yelp! refused, google started taking yelp!'s reviews and showed them on google's page, and we're going to hear from mr. stoppelman soon, but i want to give you a chance to

respond to some of the points in his testimony. did you get a chance to read it and did you get a chance to look at the exhibits? a in general terms, yes, not in specific, but i'm generally familiar with yelp!, so -- >> okay. first of all, yelp! contends that even now consumers cannot find links to yelp! in google emerged results, and mr. stoppelman goes on to say that, goat, it is impossible for any of google's competitors to be displayed as prominently as google itself even if google's own algorithm rates them higher. do you think that's a fair characterization? >> i generally disagree with. >> generally? >> again, with mr. stoppelman's comments and he will have an opportunity to say what he would like in a minute. the background on yelp! is that they have been a partner and an important site on the web for many years and they have been always relatively highly ranked and our search results, we have always had them part of our index.

some years ago, we decided to start working on a project about the around location and the idea was to create, if you will, a hub around an information, a place, so that would be a map, information about things at that map -- a restaurant, a store, what have you. so given we searched this information, we took snippets from the information from yelp! along with many others and put those in, those became known as place pages today. our competitors also have a similar offering and if it's -- if there's confusion as to why we need the place page, think about a mobile device. if you have phones, if you have a phone here, it's going to be very difficult for you to go through the links, whereas if

you have a map and can thumb around and move around, that all makes sense. so in the particular case of yelp!, i felt yelp! would be very happy with us pointing to their site and then using a little bit of their reviews because we've got even those in the index and then sending traffic to them. they were not happy with that. they sent us a letter to that affect and we took them out of the place pages. so if you look today, you'll see that they are not in there. you have the google reviews and a bunch of other stuff like that and ultimately, we bought a company called satisfy got to-- zaggat to try to do something similar. so this is not a case of generic ranking and so forth, it's about us trying to create these place pages and getting information to solve a different problem. >> i'm out of time. i would like to ask one short question and hopefully go to a second round if we can. is google still using yelp!'s content to drive business to google's place? >> as far as i know, not. >> as far as you know? >> again, i'll have to look but i'm not aware of any. >> maybe mr. stoppelman will help us on that. thank you. >> thank you very much. senator blumenthal. >> thank you for having this hearing, which i think is very important.

thank you for being here, mr. schmidt. we welcome you here and i want to join my colleagues who have remarked on what a tremendous success story google is, a great american success story, a great consumer success story. and i certainly have formed no conclusions whatsoever as to any of the questions you have been asked or others that may relate to the concerns that have been expressed, those concerns focusing on the size and market power of google and whether it is of a scope and scale that it invokes certain responsibilities under our law and whether or not google has complied with those responsibilities. but there's no question about the fact that google is really the bee me moth in the search market these days, and that it far out sizes its nearest competitor, which has less than percent of the market as compared to google's or percent more in searches and an even higher share in advertising revenue and that the trend will

be toward perhaps even more sizeable share on the part of google in the search market, and the reason i say it is is that your nearest competitor is losing billions a year and google made billions. and i think that the dynamic here is best summarized by jonathan rosenberg, who is your own vice president of product management who said, and i'm quoting -- he said it in , it's not your voice, but i think it does speak to the dynamic in the market, "so more users,

more information, more information, more users, more advertisers, more users. it's a beautiful thing, lather, rinse, repeat. that's what i do for the living. so that's the engine that can't be stopped." the hearing and the testimony here and a lot of what's been written and said has many allegations. they are only allegations. they haven't been proven about scraping content, co-opting that content. my colleague, senator franken, just raised yelp!'s allegations, the other kinds of claims about anticompetitive conduct so my question to you is: drawing on the lessons that presumably you have learned as you very

forthrightly acknowledged, can google suggest measures to be taken voluntarily at this point to promote competition, to disspell those allegations and perhaps dissipate some of the momentum towards government intervention? and i ask this question in the spirit of trying to avoid government regulation and intervention. in my view, some of the companies who have occupied your chair before you have been their own worst even me in that regard and your very frank acknowledgment about google's responsibilities and its approach, i think, speaks an approach to, in effect, try to do voluntarily what's in consumers' best interests because competition is in consumers' best interest before there is intervention either by

a government agency or by a court? >> my general answer would be that making the internet win guarantees very strong competition for all of us. i understand you were asking a more narrow question, but the fact of the matter is, there are many, many new start-ups that are potential future competitors of google and others. for example, there are sites now seeing more than half of their traffic coming from facebook and google is a very small component of the traffic that they get. so there's every reason to believe that a broad strategy to promote competition and investment in companies, the ipo markets were the hottest markets ever done, so i would argue that the levers are necessary -- that are necessary to guarantee the outcome you're looking for are largely already in place. >> let me be more narrow in my question. right now as i understand it, certain google properties; maps, for example, are at the

top of the search results? >> sure. >> regardless of the algorithm or the formula or the methodology, they are at the top. would, for example, eliminating that preference be a step in the right direction? >> well, i would disagree for two reasons; first, that it would be bad for consumers because consumers wanted a map, and now you're by virtue of such a rule, you're forcing people to do two steps. the second, of course, is that it would allow the competitors offer that but without competitors being able to do it because the competitors have that, as well. what i'm worried about, such a restriction would prevent us from meeting our primary mission. >> are there other specific steps that you would suggest; i mean, if we were a court and liability were found and the question were remedies, what would you suggest? >> well, again. >> and i don't mean to put you

in an unfair position. it's a very, very hypothetical question? >> i have actually spent a lot of time thinking about this. we had a long conversation some years ago about how google would behave to avoid being evil when we were big. we actually believe we have made those changes, steps and so forth. for example, we created the data liberation front so we cannot capture or hold your data. if you wish to flee google, we make it easy for you to do that with your personal data as well as your advertising data, so we think we've done the things to make sure we stay within an appropriate competitive box. we're open to suggestions on competitive steps. with the extraordinary expansion of choices on the internet, ultimately, the global playing field that is the internet is the real protection, the

combination of one click away and the huge amounts of many going into those spaces. >>my time expired and thank you for your responses. i hope there will be a second round but that's up to the chairman? >> second round, three minutes and we'll see if a third round. >> mr. schmidt, industries and statutes show google has -- 65%-75% of all searches and 95% on mobile devices this kind of a market share is considered to constitute monopoly power. does google recognize that as a monopolize or dominant power, special rules apply that there is conduct that must be taken and conduct that must be refrained from?

>> we certainly understand the rule that we play in information and we also understand the proper role of government and your role and so forth to expect what we're doing. we're satisfied the things we're doing are in the legal and philosophical balance of what we're trying to do. we answer the question in competitive market, we're focused on the consumers. we understand the role we have to play and we're kept honest all the time and not just by your good graces, but also that of the press and the many other people who look at what we do. >> but you do recognize that in the words that are used and antitrust kind of oversight,

your market share constitutes monopoly, dominant -- special power dominant for a monopoly firm. you recognize you're in that area? >> i would agree, senator, that we're in that area. again, with apologies because i'm not a lawyer, my understanding of monopoly findings is, this is a judicial process so i have to let the junction do such a finding. from, we have a special ability to debate all the issues that you're describing to us. we do understand it. >> thank you. our hearing is focused on commerce and business decisions but perhaps the potential information on news and influence the american people receive. this points out we need to preserve competition. in the internet search market, google is the primary way americans search for news and information on the internet. if your only search engine competitor which is bing would go away, google would be the only search engine consumers could use. given, to influence information and news coverage citizens find on the internet; for example, those searching the internet for information on today's

hearing could get links to my opening statement, your testimony, the testimony of your critics on the next panel as the first search result. or people searching for information on president obama could get links to the official white house web site or a critical column on the president or in the weekly standard. you would argue, i suppose, that google simply returns the most relevant results first for any news or information query, free of any political bias but is this really possible. there must be some decision as to whether my opening statement or your testimony at this hearing is at the top of the information results. is it really possible to have a

truly unbiased research results for news and information queries. should we be queried by any one company however well-intended as yours having huge, huge information over news and information citizens find on the internet, and doesn't this demonstrate the absolute need for competition and real competition in this area? >> well, as i said earlier, we're very strongly in favor of competition. there's a lot of evidence that much of the on-line news with respect to the question of ranking algorithms and bias, it is ultimately a judgment what comes first or second. in our case, because we have so many things to rank, it would not be possible for me to explain to your satisfaction or to my own 11 link about this testimony and in my testimony was one higher or lower. it is complex formula involving influence and who points to

whom using a proprietary algorithm that google has developed which are very, very proud of. it is the best that we can do, and i want to say right up front that we do occasionally make mistakes. >> we turn to senator edley. >> mr. schmidt, i just want to make sure and get a statement on the record, under oath, does google give any preference to its own listings? places, shopping results, etc., in its own natural search ranking results. >> the reason i was confused by your earlier question is the word preference. we have a product called universal search and universal search chooses how to organize the page. that decision includes many components in the national search. it will, for example, when we think you are looking for product, we will talk about this

product search in certification that you showed earlier. if you go through that product search thing that we put out, it actually takes you to other sites that want to sell products. so the answer is we give preference, but in the context of our best judgment as to the sum of what the person wants to do. >> i think that helps answer the question. so it does give preference perhaps in the case of a camera not to your own camera sales port but to another page where you may not be selling cameras, but you are selling advertisements. >> in that case, i don't think there is any advertising component in that. >> in preparing for this hearing, i was uncertain as to what might be the full extent of my concerns regarding googles current practices, but some of

my fears, i have to say, have been confirmed as a result of our conversation. i would just like to summarize what some of those concerns are. i am troubled by some of googles practices, its practice of inserting its own offerings, in the midst of natural algar rhythmic search results, usually in the most prominent position of the page and with the most eye-catching display. my concerns related to this are threefold. first, this practice seems to me to leverage googles primary search dominance to give its own secondary services in listings and unnatural an extraordinary advantage. no other specialized business or search site can hope to compete on anything close to a level playing field when google uses its significant market power to disadvantage online competitors. the same practice that i

described presents a clear and inherent conflict of interest, rather than acting as an honest broker of information. google now has a strong financial incentive to channel users to its own listings, regardless of their quality. as google -- as the google vice president noted, to the degree that we oppose content, we ultimately have a monetary incentive to drive people to those pages if those pages have act on them. finally, i worry that this practice forms consumers, manipulating algorithm search results violates consumers legitimate expectations and by unfairly disadvantage in competing services, may reduce consumer choice and stifle innovation. i am troubled by what we have learned today about google's practices, and i hope you'll take swift action to resolve these concerns. thank you very much.

>> thank you. i think i am the chairman now for a while, and then the chairman will be back. mr. schmidt, let's shift to talk about mobile search, because clearly the direction of search and the internet is going to mobile. i understand you control about 97% of global search. you are the default search engine on all apple phones. is that true? >> that is correct. >> and you also owned android, which is the largest mobile operating and this type of dominance ultimately means that you control what consumers use when they purchase an android phone. kneels even released a state last week that stated that five

of the six dominant apps on the android device are owned by google. only facebook made it into the top six. i have no doubt that part of the reason for that is that google often creates superior products. but that isn't the only reason. what comes preloaded on a phone impacts what apps, which ones win or loose, do all android devices come preloaded for apps for google maps, google places, g mail and now google plus? >> they do not. >> they do not. do many of them; do a large -- large number of them? >> my not too precise estimate is that a slight majority come with it, i would estimate on the order of two-thirds of it come preloaded. >> so if an equipment

manufacturer that makes android phones for you doesn't want to preload google apps on its devices, can they do that? >> absolutely. >> okay. if i am a customer and want to use yelp! instead of google places, is it easy for me to delete google places on my phone and up load yelp!? >> well, google places is essentially a result for most search results, so if you simply used -- if you didn't use google search, you wouldn't have google places at all and yelp! is available through all the browsers available on android, so yelp! is always available independent of that. >> i'm talking about as an app? >> it's not an app. google operations is not an

application on android. it's a result from search. >> okay. so what apps -- what google apps are there? >> g mail, chat applications, those sorts of things. >>okay. >> and again, to help, i think what you're -- if i may, i think what you're getting at is -- i think what you're getting at is -- >> tell me what i'm thinking. >> no, just trying to be helpful. >> yes, i know. >> many android partners combines google search, g mail, chat and a few other apps into a package, and i believe what you're referring to is the fact that in that case, we do a revenue share with them on the google search. >> thank you. my time is up. senator blumenthal. >> thank you . >> again, i want to emphasize to you, i have reached no conclusions and i will be submitting other questions in writing because we may not have time for a third round and i'm sure that you will be happy to

be relieved of that spot. but, you know, i have been trying to think of the analogy here to what the ordinary consumer can understand as to what google does, and as i sat here, the race track analogy, you run the race track, you own the race track. for a long time, you had no horses. now you have horses and you have control over where those horses are placed and your horses seem to be winning. and, you know, i think what a lot of these questions raise is the potential conflict of interest to use a sort of pejorative, but not necessarily to be critical, because you may have great products and you put them first

and you may regard that placement as a service to consumers, but inevitably, that will stimulate the kind of criticism that has brought you here today. youo it won't surprise senator to say i disagree with your analogy completely, so i prefer to think of the internet as the platform and you can think of google as the gps. one of the most important things to say here, and again, with respect to all the complaints and comments and so forth, google does nothing to block access to any of the competitors and other sources of information. we earn courage it and indeed in all the cases that have been used where we come to an answer, we also show all the other possible answers. we try to be as inclusive as possible. so from my perspective, when i netted out, we need to be able to be free to get to what we think algorithmically is the best answer to the query, if we can do that with no

collision, zero click and we can compete it algorithmically, that's better for the consumer. i believe that. >>but to return to my analogy, there's no allegation that you necessarily exclude those other horses, to use your analogy, there's no allegation that you would necessarily misguide a consumer to go in the wrong direction on the internet, but there is something different when you own a place and the directions happen to put the consumer at the place you own, as opposed to some other place that in appearance objectively might result in that consumer going to another place and, you know, i realize that we're over-simplifying a very difficult and complex area,

but again, i invite your comments and disagreement. >> again, i think that the most important thing for us to do is to come up with the quickest answer the best and this is the best we know how to do and we do, in fact, have the concerns you're describing in our mind as we make decisions, but we are, and we have said this for years, we really, really do test this stuff and we believe this is the best choice for the consumers and we run for the benefit of the consumers, not the other web sites. >> my time has expired. i thank the acting chairman. >> thank you. i think to carry your analogy one step further, your met for, that you might have been saying that you think google might be doping the horses? >> i didn't say that. >> i guess i misunderstood.

senator klobuchar. >> thank you. a lot of the questions have been focused on how the searches work and how you end up on one suddenly on one day. have you thought about more transparency and if there's other things you could do to explain to people why this is happening and when there's going to be a change? >> i think there's again an excellent point. we do a lot of tools for web sites so they can understand how they are ranked and the changes they have made. we don't in my view do enough so i agree with your question there. there's a limit to how much transparency we can provide for two reasons. one is that our actual ranking algorithm are viewed as quite proprietary by our great scientists at google and if we're transparent how the algorithms work, they would be heavy gamed by sites that spam us.

we have had experiences where people latch on to some behavior and manipulate the index to produce a really false answer which is often the butt of jokes, so on. there's a limit to how transparent we wish to be with respect to our actual ranking algorithm. i do agree we can do a better job of describing the change and so forth. i think that's exactly right. >> just one last question here. you know, on-line users are in many ways your customers but also the businesses that advertise are your customers. does google need to be careful that the privacy and protection of the web users doesn't come into conflict with the business interests of those that are advertising on the web and how do you resolve that conflict? >> we debate this quite a bit. we have a very detailed privacy policy about how we behave with users data and there have been a number of businesses suggested to us over the years that would use -- that would in

your view misuse people's private data, search histories and so forth and we have said no to those. it's very, very important that the history of people's searches, where they are, what they do is not used without their permission in these advertising products, and i think you'll find that google westbound one of the exemplars of that principle, and as this becomes a bigger thing for many, many companies, a lot of people will face this question. >> thank you very much. >> we are now going to transition to the second panel and we thank you, mr. schmidt, for being here and for your testimony and i'm glad that my colleague from minnesota brought up privacy. i am the chairman of the subcommittee on privacy technology and the law, and i would probably like to -- we'll be keeping the record open for days -- one week.

i'm the chairman right now and i think we'll do one week, which i think is actually the proper answer. chairman kohl apologize for not being here for the conclusion of your testimony but was needed for votes in the appropriations committee, so we thank you, and since we're open for, i think, a week, i also plan to submit a few questions on privacy and other -- and then i know electric eventual theft, so -- but i really thank you and i would like to call the second panel. >> thank you for giving me the opportunity to appear before your panel here.

we will be happy to answer any other questions and clarify any questions that require further clarification. so thank you very much. mr. franken: thank you very much. the record will be open for a week. we now call the second panel. we're going to take a brief recess so if you want to sit there, get used to that place and you can do that or if you want to just mil around and chat idly, you can do that, as well. we're going to take a brief recess, and i believe the chairman, the real chairman, will be back any moment. so, recess.

>> president obama talks about how education is an important part of his economic agenda and call for raising of standards in the nation's classrooms. then senator susan collins discusses how business owners are reluctant to hire new employees because of the cost of federal regulations. >> over the last few weeks, i have been making the case that we need to act now on the american jobs act so it can put americans back to work and build a lasting economy that last into the future. education is an essential part of this economic agenda. companies to out educate us today will announce compete us tomorrow. businesses will hire wherever the highly trained and highly skilled workers are located. today our kids trail too many other countries in math,

science, and reading. as many as a quarter of our students are not even finishing high school and we have fallen to 16 in the proportion of those with a college degree. even though we know 60% of the jobs in the coming decade will require more than a high-school diploma. we had better be serious about education. we have to pick up our game and raise our standards. as a nation, we have an obligation to make sure that all children have the resources we need to learn. quality schools, good teachers, the latest text books, and the right technology. that's why the jobs bill i sent to congress would put tens of thousands of teachers back to work across the country and modernize at least 35,000 schools. that is what congress should pass that bill right now. but money alone will not solve our education problems. we also need reform. we need to make sure that every classroom is a place of high

expectations and high performance. that has been our vision since taking office and that is why instead of just pouring money into the system that wasn't working, we launched a competition called race to the top. if you show us the most innovative plans to improve student achievement, we will show you the money. for less than 1 percent of what we spend on education teacher, raced to the top has led states to raise standards for teaching and learning. the standards were developed by republican and democratic governors throughout the country. since then, we have seen what is possible when reform is not just a top-down mandate, but the work of local teachers and principals. that is why in my state of the union address this year, i said to congress, you need to reform the note todd left behind all based on the same principles that have guided race to the top -- you need to reform no trial

left behind. experience has taught us the law has some serious flaws. teachers are being forced to teach to the test also declined history and science are being squeezed out. to avoid having their schools labeled as the years, some states lower worker standards and raced to the bottom. these problems have been obvious for years, but for years, congress has failed to fix them. so now, i will. our kids get one shot at a decent education, and they cannot afford to wait any longer. we will be giving states more flexibility to meet high standards for teaching and learning. it is time to let states and teachers and schools come up with innovative ways to give our students that skills they knew it -- the skills they need to compete in the future. yesterday i was with recall, the principle of the school in

worcester massachusetts. every single student who graduated from his school in the last three years went on to college. because they did not meet the standards of notes, but behind, his school was labeled us daily last year. that will change because of what we did yesterday. from now on, we will be able to encourage the progress of schools like rick dees. from now on, people like john becker, who teaches nbc, will be able to focus on teaching his fourth graders map in a way that improve their performance instead of just teaching to a test. superintendents like one from ohio will be able to improve teaching and learning that is desperate, instead of spending all his time on bureaucratic mandates that do not get results. this is not just the right thing to do for our kids. it is the right thing to do for our country and our future. it is time to put our teachers back on the job. it is time to rebuild and modernize our schools, and it is time to raise our standards and

do everything it takes to prepare our children to succeed in the global economy. now is the time to once again make our education system the envy of the world. thanks for listening. >> i am senator susan collins from the great state of maine. last month, our nation produced no net new jobs. more than 14 million americans could not find work. i have asked employers, what would it take to help them add more jobs? no matter the size of their business or the size of their work force, they tell me that washington must stop imposing crushing new regulations. some regulations are just plain silly. last year, the federal government issued a warning to a company that sells packaged walnuts. washington claimed that the walnuts for being marketed as a

drug, so the government or the company to stop telling consumers about the health benefits of nuts. other regulations have far more serious consequences. the va proposed a new rule -- epa has proposed a new rule on emissions from boilers that could cost the private sector billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. no wonder employers dread what is coming next out of washington. overregulation is hurting our economy. unfortunately, the problem is only growing worse. right now, federal agencies are at work on more than 4200 new rules, 845 of which affect small businesses, the engine of job creation. more than 100 have an economic impact of more than $100 million

each. no business owner i note questions the legitimate role of limited government and protecting our health and safety. too often, however, our small businesses are buried under a mountain of paperwork. business owners are reluctant to create jobs today if they are going to need to pay more tomorrow to comply with the onerous new regulations. that is why employers say that uncertainty generated by washington is a big, wet blanket on our economy. we republicans say enough is enough. america needs a time out from the regulations that discourage job creation and hurt our economy. republicans have many good ideas about how to tame the regulatory

behemoths. we want to prevent agencies from imposing new regulations without first thoroughly considering their costs and benefits. in addition, many of us have called for a one-year moratorium on certain costly new rules. if a rule would have an adverse impact on jobs, the economy, or america's international competitiveness, it should not go into effect. that ruling boilers is a good example of low we need a regulatory timeout. a recent study estimates that this rule aligned with other pending regulations could cost 36 paper mills across the country to close. that would put more than 20,000 americans out of work.

18% of that industry oppose the work force, and that is just for starters. once these mills close, their suppliers would also be forced to lay off workers. estimates are that nearly 90,000 americans would lose their jobs. even that is not the end of the story. people in businesses would still need paper. where do you think we would get it? we would be strengthening the economies of other countries like china, india, and brazil, while america's economy grows weaker. american businesses need pro- growth policies that will end the uncertainty and kickstart hiring and investment. american workers need policies that will get them off the sidelines and back on the job. the american economy needs a time out from excessive and

costly regulations. in sports, a timeout gives athletes a chance to catch their breath and make better decisions. american workers and businesses are the athletes in a global competition that we must win. we needed time out from excessive regulations so that america can get back to work. >> tomorrow on "washington journal," discussion on securing ballot access and third-party candidates with elliot ackerman. after that, a look at europe's fiscal troubles and the impact on the u.s. economy with stella toys it -- stella dawson of reuters. later, discussion on what employers can do to help secure employee pensions with rick rodgers. that is live at 7:00 a.m. eastern, here on c-span. >> in my opinion, i think that

bounds of academic freedom have just been pushed too far. >> naomi schaefer rally suggests is -- suggests the entitlement mentality needs to go pickax there are basically professions -- there are basically professors of cooking. when pressed, a professor who is telling the party line will say we need someone to do security study so they can talk about immigration, even though it is controversial. someone in nutritional studies needs to be able to say something controversial about obesity. >> that and other reasons why you will not get the college education you paid for, sunday night on "q&a". >> you don't play politics at a time of national crisis. you don't play politics with the economy, and you never, ever let politics with people's jobs. w