that is different from personal culpability. i do feel a strong sense of responsibility that when we recognize mistakes, we are open about them. we report them to the regulators and take action on the people. i know how angry it makes others, because it made me angry that we had this behavior, but i am also very proud of barclays because they were not worried about how this was going to look. two of the most successful of large international law firms.

>> how much do you think forensics exercises to place? how much did it cost? spent on this investigation is about 100 million pounds. >> ethics in the forecast -- >> i'm not sure if that is the word used -- >> in the last three years, what was actually done, specific actions, to rectify what is actually a cultural rot that led us here today? >> we focus on three categories. if you take the traders first and foremost, there is significant investment in the

system and controls in this area. various areas -- upgraded compliance. we have a new head of compliance and people under them in the entire organization as part of it. each individual involved in this -- we did not have to wait for the final investigation, then we acted. there were some cases where we felt it would have been better to keep them working -- >> in january 2011, you said there was a period of remorse and apologies for the bank, and "i think it needs to be over."

do you think it is? early part of 2011. >> i think it came across in a way that was not meant -- banks have to be better citizens, and i was aware of this investigation -- we have to evolve the culture -- >> that is a long time, though. mr. diamond, given that you have grown up in banking, you have a meteoric rise, and yet you say the behavior of these people was so shocking it made you physically sick, and yet you spent your life in banking. surely the culture did not come as a surprise to you.

you word not shocked. they were disappointed and angry. you were not shocked. >> i think it is wrong. it took us too long to fined it. i am making no excuses. but the actions we took when we found out, i think all of them were appropriate, including recognizing that we would be ahead of the pack in helping the regulators.

we did not think the focus on this would be as intense in terms of potentially harming our reputation. one of the reasons i thought it was important to come here today -- barclays is an amazing place -- [unintelligible] >> we understand. >> you say you don't know anything that was going on. you keep saying, "i didn't know, i didn't know" -- >> i am saying more than that. i am talking a lot about what we did about it. >> you also said that culture is how people behave when no one is watching. no one was watching, not even the compliance desk.

you forgive us for thinking that there is something more widely wrong with the culture. >> i have taken such pains to go into the things we've done and put it into context, but i don't think i've taken any moment or second to excuse the behavior. >> transaction reporting -- fined millions of dollars for willingly and knowingly violating international sanctions in cuba, iran. it had to pay 60 million pounds for selling risky investment products to older people. all that was before the issues we're talking about today.

what do these repeated breaches of the law and regulations say about the culture? >> the periods were from quite a while and many of them were in areas i am not familiar with because i have not worked in those areas. we worked with the authorities and worked to get to solutions and the changes in place. [unintelligible] we had ppi -- we had a number of them. there is no excuse for any of them, but many of these go back quite a period of time. one of the frustrations of keeping our organization positive today is that so many of these issues feel like -- it feels like this is current behavior as opposed to behavior

that was quite a while ago. that does not excuse it, and we still have to go through the process. >> you said many, many times today that e-mails you saw from traders made you physically sick. isn't it the case that your high-risk, sometimes high-reward investment bank helped to give rise to that kind of risk taking, and sits uneasily from what the public wants from banks, lending to small businesses and looking after people's savings?

>> i think it is a fair question. in the period from 1997 mentioned, it is focused on its clients, and it has a track record in the business of compliance, consistency of earnings, risk-management. this is a horrible experience, but if you look at the track record of barclays capital, consistency of earnings -- in areas like foreign exchange, barclays was not considered one of the top 25 participants in that market in the world, and today barclays -- the investment in technology, the investment in customers -- it is interesting, the fines you mentioned, the sanctions with iran, the ppi is in retail banking and credit cards.

it does not excuse it, and the head of the retail bank today -- a lot of this was happening in what you would think of as foreign banking. if you look at the history of the united kingdom financial- services industry to the crisis, bank of scotland failed, halifax failed. it wasn't investment-banking that was creating issues.

i worry that people are willing to assume that it was risky behavior that causes these things or bad culture. it is bad culture that causes these things. in these cases, we had a bad performance. if it happened in an investment bank, it can happen in a retail bank as well. we need a strong culture, strong systems and controls -- >> isn't a big part -- you talk in your letter last week to us about changing the culture. >> i think last week i recognize, in spite of the support i have, if you look at the barclays performance to the financial crisis, the things we're doing with businesses in africa, technology is being developed -- the technology coming to the u.k.

-- there is a lot of -- >> can i take you back to the memo that was released yesterday -- >> i think that memo was part of the investigation. >> paragraph 1112, which talks about the year before, senior managers at barclays instructed putting in false information about the libor rate. we're talking about the financial crisis period and your concerns about media attention. do you accept that as accurate? >> yes. >> there was a conference call where the manager said, "this is going to cause a storm." a lower rate was submitted.

again, there was a full year before paul tucker called. paragraph 1127 details an instruction to the money market desk to give a lower estimate of funding costs because "the honest truth would be a can of worms." that was in march 2008. am i correct? >> mm-hmm. >> there is a pattern within the financial crisis where there was consistently dishonest submissions to libor, detailed in paragraph after paragraph of the report.

do you accept that? >> we presented in documents to you come from the period of 2000 to 2008, the financial crisis, there was pressure on a libor submissions from the group treasury area to get back on the path. what i want to point out to you is this -- you go to the same point, that barclays went with the regulators and we were consistently on the high end of submissions -- i will answer it directly. it was inexcusable, but the actions of getting away from the notoriety, and the question of barclays, why do you always have to be high, and we were trying to lower our rates, and 90% of the cases in that 12-to-13-month time frame, barclays was knocked out.

>> paragraphs 118, 127, does detail instances where barclays agreed to put in rates that were lower. when you acknowledge that there is a pattern, in terms of the image of the bank, of putting in lower submissions, why was that released?

>> i did not release the document. it was a package that came from barclays. i wasn't aware that it was new. the package came from barclays. i think this the package, chairman, that came yesterday? >> yes. the point i'm making is how significant is this phone call, given the details in paragraph after paragraph of the report that said that you had been consistently low balling your submissions? >> the behavior of the people influencing the lower submissions was wrong. what is the importance to me of the call?

the call was alerting me that there was concern about why barclays rates were high, and it was important for me to get in touch with john so that he could get in touch with whitehall and let them know that there was misunderstanding. the importance of the call to me was the heads-up about the concerns with the white hall. it might mean something different. >> thank you, chairman. i just want to know if you could remind me of the founding principles of barclays.

i could help, and offer to -- honesty, integrity, plain dealing. that is the ethos of this bank that he spent two hours telling us is doing so well. i wonder why you have not made an extra bonus. you told us that it was right that there was a criminal investigation. you told us that other banks were doing the same thing. i understand from what you are saying that you never questioned the rates reported between 2005 and 2008, and you never discussed at the senior level the possibility of misreporting, misrepresenting by your traders.

>> first of all, in terms of honesty, integrity, and play dealing, that is how i have behaved through my career in the business. as soon as i knew -- >> from 2005 to 2008, you never questioned were asked about any time there was misreporting -- >> no one was aware of any misreporting. >> did you read anything of other people's suggestions that there might be misreporting?

>> there were reports that came out, 2007, 2008, on a different issue. i was not aware of any report relating to this -- >> nobody came to you, not even those people who refused to act criminally -- even those who refused to act improperly did not come and tell you during that three-year period? >> they did not act improperly. >> no, but they do not report that to the senior management?

you talked about your obligation to complete transparency, that seeing is believing. you see nothing, heard nothing, know nothing during the three- year period? in 1973, the report about potential misreporting was written by a u.s. academic. in 2007, another group of u.s. academics produced a precise report into this scandal, alleging that it was going on in companies like yours.

that was then repeated. we have a series of academics who are reporting that is going on. eventually it gets into "the wall street journal," and from that, the fed reports on this. you are in charge. you are not seeing this, you are not reading it. i don't understand. >> you are conflicting two separate things. "the wall street journal" report and the federal reserve report were about -- >> the academic reports -- you have not read them, but you are the man in charge. people are suggesting from outside in society, and you're not even asking questions internally?

people are not coming to you. either you are complicit in what was going on, or you were grossly negligent. >> i have agreed from the beginning that the behavior was wrong. it did not get above the supervisory level for a period of time. as soon as it did, we took action. it's hard to give another answer than that. >> you said last time that you don't really like barclays, do you -- "i'm in a more favorable group to people out there." you are in charge, you are paid bonuses, 20-odd million a year,

you are the man in charge, you are telling everyone that if you cannot work with trust and integrity, you cannot be on your team. you get these huge bonuses, and yet you did not see any of it. you must have been grossly incompetent during that period of time. >> is there a question? >> last time you were here, you said, "i think it is clear that if any banking institution gets into trouble, it goes to the chief executive."

someone asked you, how would you lose out? you said, "i would lose out by losing any share in the company." that is what you told us you do in this situation. >> as i said earlier, that is a discussion with of the board. i don't make the decisions. >> you are in favor of consistency. you can take the high ground in this -- >> we have been through this a number of times. we have a profound issue that is an industry-wide issue, not just a barclays issue, in terms of libor submissions. i would suggest that we wait and

see what the ramifications of the industry-wide investigation are -- >> there were no clear lines of responsibility for systems and control. you are the man in charge, and when you are the man in charge, you are the man being paid these huge, phenomenal bonuses -- you are accepting all the good side, the bonuses, and the people working for you, potentially some of them going to prison, criminality -- you are the man in charge. you tell us modestly that if this is the situation, you lose your job and lose your shares. that is a pretty small price for you to pay. and how you could show some contrition to the customers -- where's all me money, do i take it out of this bleeding bank? that is what they are asking me. you are responsible.

>> as i said earlier, i accept responsibility and i also accept responsibility for the actions we've taken to correct the situation, not just at barclays, but the way we have engaged with the regulators. you know and i know -- i take the full results of the organization as having been on my watch. >> if you -- [unintelligible] what happens to the shares -- it disappeared somewhere.

your bonus each year is equivalent to the amount of money that all the charity shelters have to survive on. why don't you make the proper gesture and put some serious money and pursue others to do likewise so that you can show to the outside world that you do mean business, and persuader colleagues to do likewise? then you might get a little love. >> i told you, i feel i have done a responsible thing in how we handled this since the day we understood. the word of the barclays management team, the culture of the organization, whether it is in ppi or this, is to learn our lesson in terms of how we behave going forward, and if any of our clients suffered --

>> the reputation of the bank is in tatters worldwide. >> if you were an english cricketer, i suspect your name would be jeffrey. let me try to weigh this with the culture and ethics of more than just barclays. i think the question a lot of people want to make is is this problem with libor a symptom of a much deeper and wider malaise? you can answer yes or no.

first of all, do you consider traders using libor for their own gain to be unethical? >> yes. >> to you consider managers putting in false quotes unethical? >> yes. >> do you think the submitters during the crisis were engaged in that behavior? do you think selling a complex swap, as reported on the 25th of april, to a turkish shop owner with very little english, to be ethical? >> i don't know the situation as well as you do, the specific one, we looked into each and every instance where customer claims -- there are occasions where product has been sold the someone where it should not have been.

in the vast majority of cases, going to the issue of derivatives with small businesses, the decision has been in favor of barclays. we do work hard -- >> i understand that from -- >> don't know the specifics -- >> you can find that on the front page of "telegraph" business from the 25th of april. writs against barclays for libel fixing. would you consider that to be unethical? it is possible to conclude that there was quite a considerable degree of activity that was, at least, questionable and, in some cases, unethical.

how does a bank with a culture that you tried to put forward to us >> i have been to many of the larger cities in the united kingdom, visiting with small businesses and medium-sized businesses. the feedback on the service they get from our police has been a very strong. the amount of business we are doing in business lending has increased more than any other bank in the united kingdom in the last year and a half. i am confident our team gets it. one of the frustrations with the day like today if you are bringing up something u.n. sanctions -- unsanctioned which

was so long ago. i was not aware of it at the time. to bring it up today is not as relevant. most of this behavior was in 2005-2007. >> can i just ask you something? does your board get a list of legal actions against it? >> sure. >> so you are seeing a list of the legal actions and he would know a writ was issued in april? that would be something you would know as an executive sitting on the main board? >> i would know the summary of the legal issues. yes. >> you would also know what the little -- legal department is proposing to do with that? >> guess. -- yes.

>> a note saying what is going to happen. how many actions are there outstanding against barkley is -- barclays? >> i am not sure of the number. if there are legal actions, there are not many. the number that went over the last year, i think it was 40 something. it might have been more than that. i cannot recall. that would not have been in the legal report. >> if a libal rate goes down -- [unintelligible] pay interest, he has a swap libal tax and may have to pay

another $2 million. that is now $4 million. >> the economic impact is a swap. the main level goes down because rates are flying? top about ther's value of the loan and the covenant he is given on that. the outstanding loan and the new one together. that would be outside of their government. -- of their covenant. >> i am not sure the point. >> there are small and medium businesses who in the last five years were advised to buy product. the net result is you are able to negotiate -- >> i am not sure i understand. >> there is a huge cost relating

libel to what is happening to their businesses. is that the reason lots of small businesses are finding it difficult because of the swap they were sold. libel has gone down costing the swap to go up. none of them understood what they were purchasing. but they were obliged to take it. as it was for most banks. >> i think there are errors. there are parts of that i will but that very differently. that the walk through it. was there an impact on businesses in the u.k. -- the issues within barkley's were not sterling as opposed to the

longer-term as -- longer terms. even if it was, the relative rankings is being changed. the impact on businesses that have taken out fixed loans, in theory, the economic impact in a fixed term rate loan versus a floating loan, the impact on the business, when you say it went down, it went down because interest rates went down. the bank of england has a low monetary policy interest rate because of the economy. if anyone had taken out a fixed rate loan or a floating rate loan, they would be out not because of some issue on swaps but on overall interest rates. i think there has been an impact on business who have taken out

fixed rate loans. today, it would be more to take the loan today at a reduced rate. >> we just had a conversation lasting three or four minutes that probably helped understanding of most people. our banks are run by people who talk that language. that is investment banking. high-speed used to be run by people who did not understand it but who led people money. that is a cultural problem, is it not? what we need is not one bar clay's but two colter's. and culture that understands the high street and the city. >> i think we have that. i think it can be done. i do not think this is about business models. the people will cover our

smaller businesses, throughout most of the areas in the north, is very focused on what are the needs of the small businesses? if there is a need to provide a fixed term loan where it would not potentially be a program from a credit point of view or you cannot get the loan in a derivative is a good replacement. these are not of the people unnecessarily. i came back from africa recently. in areas like ghana and uganda, the country is interested in barclay's bring in this of rustication along the smaller banks -- in bringing the

sophistication to the smaller banks. they have to compete much more with companies coming down from china, india and the middle east. they need access to head out to monitor -- commodity prices and interest rates. there is a place for an integrated model. this is not about our business model. it is about our culture. the definition we talked about inside is that every single decision remake -- we make, -- for us to believe that, everyone has to behave in that way. it is about culture, values, integrity, honesty. that is what barclay's is about. i think the issues we are

facing are about bad behavior and in some instances, culture. >> we may -- in your letter to us on the 28th of june, you spoke about your concerns. various individuals [unintelligible] who at barclays said concerns with these various agencies? >> i do not know the exact level of every meeting. i think one of the letters, there is a discussion of who the people were on both sides. is there not? it will not provide that information? >> i am just asking if you knew

who the people were raising these concerns. >> it was often in the group treasury. in some cases, from the compliance area. >> to you have compliance people -- so you have complied people making approaches to regulators. the bank of england is named. >> a suspect the conversation came up in the general sense that we talked about earlier about the wall street journal report. >> how long had barkleys been concerned about other people

making the libor rate -- >> this became a much bigger concern during 2007 and 2008 because rates have been fairly steady. liquidity was plentiful. all of a sudden there was a financial crisis and we had much more volatility in rates and banks were having difficulty lending to each other which is the genesis of liber -- libor. there was far less liquidity in the markets. it was coming from money funds, large corporate, asset management firms. but were higher levels of capital required and higher

charges. >> there was a fundamental change driven by those factors. >> some of the rate he received [unintelligible] >> not just that. there appeared to be postings being made at levels people would not be able to borrow. >> what was the response from the bba and fsa and others when you raised concerns of some of the rates your competitors have? >> various levels of acknowledgement but no action. >> the thing i find odd is that between january of 2005 and july of 2008, [unintelligible]

reputation risk-management. barclays -- you did not appear to know what was happening internally until very late. it strikes me as odd that barkley's people were able to notice other people doing this but no one internally was able to identify that it was going inside -- going on inside the bank. do you understand why we find that difficult to believe? >> it is why i have been very clear today that -- to not conflict the three issues. the issue with the traders on the -- >> i'm familiar with the

various reasons. i am asking why people at barclays notice other people doing this but were unable for what ever reason to recognize it going on internally. >> it is a completely different issue. barclays was talking to the authorities about the relative ranking elaborates -- of libor rates. >> but it is not a different issue at all. except barclays notice of the people doing it but could not notice themselves doing it. what was the fall in management -- the flaw in mannesmann that

allow your people to see other banks but not what was going on internally? >> ipad the trader behavior we have been through -- i think the trader behavior we have been through -- the issue should've come up to see management. it was an attempt to get -- not to impact libor rates. >> so as not to be noticed to manage the risk. your people were submitting rates. >> this behavior was discussed with the fsa. there were discussions between compliance and the fsa about the fact that people were trying to get back into the pact. >> when you say discuss with the fsa, d amine during the inquiry

or what was happening prior to the -- do you mean during the inquiry or what was happening prior to the inquiry? >> i think they would say they had a different interpretation of the meetings but what came back to barkley's and the chief operating officer was that it was all -- i think it is all documented in the report. >> the discussion with mr. tucker. you said -- [unintelligible] did he speak to ministers or officials in the treasury about that matter? >> yes. i cannot remember the exact

conversation i had with john after that but he did follow up. right in that today window before we completed the equity transaction in abu dhabi. it was a delicate time. >> it would be useful to know who you spoke to and what the nature of that conversation would be at some point. >> i will see if we can provide that. >> you have explained how there might be some misunderstanding. i understand that. what i am not clear about is what is your understanding of what mr. tucker wanted you to do? >> i think that was the source of confusion within barkley's -- barclays. this was not the first conversation i had with paul or jerry and i had with paul r. jerry had had with paul.

paul posted job is to work with people at our level. he is closer to the activity than i was. sometimes it would go right to jerry. it was a broad discussion about barclays as high relative to the others. we had many conversations about it. >> what is it you thought mr. tucker wanted you to do? >> he was pointing out the problem and i was pointing out that the problem was not with barclays. >> what did he want you to do about it? >> as i said, i did not take it as a directive. i took it as a head up that youare -- you are high. what i said there was pretty clear. i said the reality is that we

are reporting rates at which we borrow. it appeared giving that a number of the institutions posting below us had to take government money that they are not posting at those levels. this is the same issue that the wall street journal reported on. the same issue that bloomberg reported on. the same issue that the federal reserve report after the crisis reported on. i do not think anyone should be surprised these conversations were happening. it did not cross your mind to launch an investigation inside your own organization to check that this did not mean you as well? >> of course we knew our policies. i was under the impression that -- >> it did not occur to you to say, let's check? >> as i said, i re-confirm our

-- >> [unintelligible] >> i reaffirmed it in that note. fromm holding an article may 29 of 2008 which says, banks routinely misstated borrowing costs to avoid the perception they had difficulty raising funds as credit markets [unintelligible] you had in your own organization -- [unintelligible] you could not have been aware at that time. >> let me say this again.

i'm not excusing any behavior. if we can have a bigger discussion. what i said is this is not just barclays. you keep coming back to barclays. >> that is the institution you are responsible for. >> can i finish? you will see that throughout 2007 and 2008, no institution of the 16 banks with at the higher and more consistent than barclays. questions was getting and we were saying we were high because of the -- for someone to sit there was a big concern, clearly there was an issue there. with that, there was pressure being put to get back into the

pact. i am not excusing that behavior. there are profound issues about the operation during the financial crisis and implications that may have. i talked with the chancellor who will make the investigation more broad. it was bad behavior.

i can continue to apologize, but i cannot change it. >> is there a danger people will not see this in the context of the corrective action you say was taken after? it will be seen in the context of the swaps can -- scam and transaction undertaken in italy. this is a culture the was deeply flawed and corrected. that is where it went wrong. at went wrong. >> i hope we look at that in the context of decisive action. when there is a problem, we will get to the bottom of it. within the broader industry issue -- a number of years ago -- >> two more colleagues want to chip in. we will finish in less than

three hours. >> given the fact that strategy had been shared -- on march 5, 2008, the fsa contacted barkleys to ask for information. they asked them to provide information, including the rate that barclays was currently using. in a statement, barclays said they were at a bar -- had a lot more of 20 basis points. that was in a discussion -- manager b stated, i would not go there for a moment. the senator stated -- if they are really trying to do something useful, we want to

acknowledge they had been worried, because it might be accountable. barclays informed the fsa. the truth is that -- you lied to them. >> there were other meetings and there is documentation of that. >> my question is very simple. i am very suspicious of the libor submissions. reading through the new york report, they talk about it. of two or three years.

it. of two months or three months. >> what i thought was presented and what was done by barclays -- what i thought was in my pack, the same as your pack, was in 2007 and 2008. if you do not have those, i am sure barkleys would be happy to send them to you. you can also look at the 1 months to 12 months -- the stories are similar. you can look to other currencies, like sterling or oreo. i could have your office did that. there was no -- there is no attempt here other than communications other than the discussion paul and jerry -- jerry and i had. many of the other issues were around three months. the sterling -- we can send you the sterling as well, if that

helps. >> that would be helpful for the commission. >> mr. dimon, we tried, at any rate, -- mr. diamond, we have tried to contact barkleys over the past three hours. we had readings we had heard about -- market readings in the other direction, underreporting during the financial crisis, which goes to the highest levels. of course, we had the extraordinary situation wister -- where mr. del missier did not seem surprised that he had gotten information from you to adjusted libor returns. that is a concern to this committee.

have you anything you want to add in response to that? >> i appreciate the opportunity to go here -- come here. chairman, as you learned today, as soon as the behaviors we discussed in the report, as soon as they were identified, they were acted upon immediately. there was no expense. they brought in the right firms and took firm action. when activities like this are found, often when there are mistakes, they admit them. they do have consequences. i think that the second thing i would say in response to that is, it is difficult for the firm that i care about so deeply, who has been isolated on this, i

worry -- if there is another situation going forward, can we come out and be first to collect? i worry that the impact of being first was because we put the most resources into this, because of the outside it creates incentives for others to come forward. at the end of the day some of those issues are profound enough that if there is anything that barclays can do it in that process, we would. >> it has not been an easy

hearing for you. thank you very much indeed. >> thank you, gentlemen. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> lee saunders, on " newsmakers," discusses his plans for the union. today, at 6:00 p.m. eastern, on c-span. >> we had more of the ship to a pier in the harbor. >> the events surrounding be out qaeda attack that left 17 dead and 30 injured. >> i was back to my routine paperwork when there was a thunderous explosion.

you could feel that destroyer thrust into the right. it was doing and odd, three- dimensional twisting. everything on my desk lifted up 1 foot and slammed back down. i literally grab to the underside of my desk so that i could stand up. >> tonight, 8:00 on a "q&a." >> this week, david cameron talks about the banking scandal, which resulted in several recent resignations. members also questioned holding a european union referendum. prime minister's questions, tonight. >> and now, low tax advocates

from the bush administration present a historical look at tax economic growth in the 21st century -- 20th-century, including larry lindsey and former white house advisor, karl rove, who moderates the panel. part of the conference hosted by the george w. bush institute in new york city. >> if i could have your attention, please. governor, you are out of order. secretary, you can open the meeting with a prayer. [laughter]

[laughter] we have been given the impossible task. we have to cover 92 years of federal tax policy in less than 60 minutes. we are going to do it by decade. we will have 12 different presentations on those nine decades. i will leave the extensive biographies to be found in your notebook to suffice for most of these people. you know them. i will give. a brief give they have each been asked to describe their decade or decades in a word or phrase. why not launch into it? we hope to have enough time for each of them to go at each other in mortal academic economical contact. there will be blood on the floor. let's start with 1920's with the director of the 4% growth project. she has also worked on a terrific biography of calvin coolidge that will be coming out. "silent cal." she will talk about the 1920's. the roaring '20s. >> thanks for coming. they did not start with a roar. we always look for comparisons

in history. i'm looking at it for the point of college. when he was coming to washington. -- calvin coolidge. the federal debt went up from $1 billion to $26 billion. it was out of control. taxes were in the '70s. they had nationalized the railroad, killed it, and then denationalized. there was no area into which the government would not go. they had inflation that they refused to call inflation, because it was embarrassing. if workers were underpaid and were going on strike like in russia, which had just had a revolution. we think we have hard times,

there was greater uncertainty then. you look at that recession. what was the policy response to the aftermath of world war and -- world war i. there was even a bombing of wall street after world war i. so they raised the interest rates 300 basis points and cut the budget in half. if that was the policy response of the administration. unemployment and inflation and general upheaval and mystery. so they cut the government in half partly because of the war. many angry disabled veterans. they raised interest rates like crazy to prove to the world you are serious about inflation. what was good about what they did is they set the direction of taxes down.

so there was less uncertainty about taxes. this is just are down payment in terms of tax cuts. we will go all the way. as certainty build that the government meant it, the economy began to come back. so the decade was a roar where you had a serious productivity gains, great happiness among the population, general bounty. you found that lower earners paid less taxes as the rates come down. their top rate that they got to was 25%. that remains the gold standard

tax rate for us now. top rate of 25%. shall i stop there? >> one minor historical note, the first director of the bureau of the budget was charles dawes under the harding era. then he became vice-president under calvin coolidge. >> there was a terrific law that we repealed in the 1970's and they did it by calling them into a room just like this, the department heads, and yelling at them. you must cut your budget by 1%! the departments behaved and did what the president said. >> for slightly different view of the twenties is the executive director and editor of the dow jones indexes whose view

is slightly longer and a little more downbeat at the end. from bust to boom and back again. >> it was a time of big change. the capital gains tax rate was in the '70s in world war i, as high as 8%. it was cut down to 12.5% in the early 1920's. that helped the big stock market rally that happened in the latter part of that decade when the shoeshine boys and the taxi drivers were buying stocks on margin, barring as much as 95% to put into the stock markets that would never go down except that it did in 1929. over two or three days it lost

over 20% and continued down into the depression. the interesting thing about the dow jones industrial average from 1922 when the capital gains rate was 12.5% through 1933, which some people think is the depth of the great depression, the dow jones gained 1.75% over that time. that's because it was starting out pretty low after the war. the crash wiped out a lot of that, but there was some bounces in the early '30's, so it was a perioed of great

exuberance, great intention. -- period. my favorite was the a new invention of the automatic bread slicer that happens in that decade. and the first talking pictures, the first movies in color. all of that was a great innovative time in american history. of course the depression was a downer for everybody. >> john, thank you. you left out of the one innovation of the 1920's which has doomed western civilization. that is the discovery of the television set by farnsworth. don't ask me why, but we have slightly different views on the

1930's. let's look at her view of the 1930's, entitled "wrong direction." and then joseph thorndike with his view of the 30's, which is an title "fair share." >> there was less concerned for growth in terms of companies and less interest in the private sector. you see the tax rate go up under herbert hoover. that was a great sorrow of the republicans, that they betray themselves by raising taxes at the very end, going from 25 into to the '60s where there were a lot of ugly taxes

including a tax on checks at a time when you want people to transact. they were trying to raise money because they were short, because the depression had started. then you go into the 30's and you see the government's scrambling for revenue, raising rates. what happens? the revenues were disappointing. the economy -- we are looking at the tax factor today. after the monetary and credit events and all the trouble, there was not enough money to go-around. the government was scrambling with taxes. they often found they did not have enough money. then the government grew a little angry with the economy, because it was not yielding its

bounty. later you see some weird and vindictive taxes which are hard to explain, such as the undistributed profits tax. the businesses are not spending what they could be paid on wages. they are hawking their money. so the government is cross with the economy, a bazaar dynamic we have seen repeated self more recently. towards the end, you see the government get together with businesses again because of the war. the person we were prosecuting is now our partner in washington and we are meeting together and spending for the war. that's one component at the end of the depression that we tend to neglect. there was also the relief of the companies that there were no longer targets and were instead partners. >> joe is going to do three decades starting with the 1930's, which is "fair share."

he will do the 1940's. and the 1950's. you have about 10 minutes to do 30 years, joe. >> i don't know that she and i disagree on much about the 1930's. one of the unsung stories -- the notion of fair share is a phrase that gets confused all the time in the 30's, -- gets used mostly by democrats and people in the roosevelt administration. the government in the 1930's was still raising a vast chunk of revenue with a very regressive taxes, raising it with excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. these are providing a very large chunk of federal revenue a long time, more than the income tax. the roosevelt administration does nothing to get rid of the excise taxes, because there was a genuine strain of fiscal conservatism? in the roosevelt administration. some people might challenge that, but it was true. they were not willing to give up the money from these very productive old taxes. what they would try to do is balance the regressive taxes by ratcheting up the rates on a variety of other more progressive taxes, particularly

the income tax, corporate and individual, and the estate tax. this is the heir of the wealth tax act of 1935, which dramatically raises rates on the states and in comes -- on the estates and incomes. it raises a lot of money on the richest americans. a bunch of economists especially in the treasury department by the late 1930's and particular said that we are all in favor of progressive tax reform, but we might consider lowering the rates on the richest americans and reducing or eliminating some of the more burdensome business taxes, because they were worried that roosevelt's tax policy was inhibiting recovery to some degree. the new deal people had a response to that. it was essentially that by -- sort of elements of keynesian theory, developed by taking

money away from rich people and corporations, you would get all this accumulation of capital from the rich people and giving to the poor and they would spend them and that would encourage the economy to recover. that argument is not driving tax policy in the 1930's, but it's an important part. by the end of the 1930's, you see them reconsidering all this, partly because roosevelt's administration was losing a lot of political battles. some of their marquee progressive tax reforms get gutted almost immediately by congress within a couple years. it's gone off the books

essentially. then the war. the war dustings the discussion entirely. the federal government is faced with much larger revenue needs. their first response is one of the treasury department had suggested for some time, which is we will have to tax the middle class with an income tax. until then, only rich people pay the income tax. they said this is our most efficient tax, the most fair tax, a point to raise the most money. so they did that over the course of about five years or six years. a number of income -- the number of income tax payers goes up by seven times or eight times.

it does become a middle class reality in the way federal taxes never had been before, with the exception of social security tax in the mid 30's. the driving force behind all this is a resurgent fears of inflation. they are extremely worried about runaway inflation during the war. they tried to deal with that with price controls but they also use progressive taxes, extremely heavy taxes to try to drain producing power out of the economy. by most accounts, it does a fairly good job. the economy recovers from depression very effectively. world war ii is called a gdp war as the united states won on its capacity to produce. excess profits tax is taking almost all taxes away. they're very concerned that people are afraid to invest. at the end of the war, use in natural sort of pullback in taxes. there's a moment when tax rates come down and tax burden comes

down here that happens a little bit in the 40's of especially because the republicans won an election. truman pushes back against that effectively. he embraced new deal definitions of what constitutes fairness in taxation. he's not excited about cutting rates. the rhetoric has not changed at all over. the over but truman is able to push back against it. then there's the war in korea. that pushes the rates back up. the real question comes as what happens in the '50s after 1952 when you have a? republican a the paradox is you have a republican president, you have a peacetime economy after the end of the korean war and yet the tax rates stay extraordinarily high. over 90% during world war ii and dropped down for a minute

and they stay over 90% throughout the 1950's. the eisenhower administration does nothing to challenge that. that is perplexing. you see this a lot in contemporary debate about tax policy. holding the correlation of you find under high tax rates we have had high growth. so the implication being high taxes must be good for growth. the reality is the 1950's are anomalous. historians tell you that you should not go fishing around for policy lessons in history because there's no good point of comparison. but the 50's are particularly bad point of comparison because it is a unique time in u.s. history. we are economically dominant on the global stage of like we never had been and never would be again. those high rates could be maintained with a relatively minimal economic damage for a while. what is driving the eisenhower administration to keep these rates is a deep and abiding fear of inflation. eisenhower is extremely worried that the economy is going to

overheat. extremely worried about deficits. he is all about fiscal responsibility. he makes a deal with democrats to protect rates as they existed during the war in exchange for some restraint on spending, to try to get back to a. balanced that is the only factor that really matters in 1950's tax policy is his commitment to not cutting taxes and trying to restrain spending. -- made a deal with democrats to protect rates as they existed during the war in exchange for some restraint on spending, to get back to a balanced budget. the effective tax rates start to decline. high margins create incentives to create loopholes. congress is very good at selling those loopholes. effective tax rates are at 60% during the war and drop down to about 40% after the war and then about 30% in the 1930's, this is the effective tax rate on the top % of earners. -- top percentile. that leads us into the 1960's and when we actually do see

some great reductions. >> thank you. all we have another three- havehitter. the youngest federal reserve board governor in history at the time of his appointment. and my colleague in the bush and administration on the second floor as the head of the national economic council. he will cover the 1960's, 1970's, 1980's. two the decades with a bad decade in between. victory, disaster, and the pivot point, the 1940's. >> thank you, carl. the 60's are interesting because it is the time when economists that dangerous.

what gave us our ability to be dangerous was [unintelligible] . we began to figure out all these theories, keynesian theory, which actually calibrate. in the960's, 1970's, 1980's, the economic recession beginning to experiment in ways it had never done before. looking at income tax data from 1960, the top rate was 91%. there were 8 americans who paid 91% tax rate. [laughter] >> there was a bracket in the 1930's that had one. >> there were avoidable. you have to scratch your head and worry about the gene pool that produced those eight. how ere they avoidable?

by doing something that was non-economic. if you could -- if your tax rate is 91% and you have an economically viable project that produces 10% returns and one that produces a two% return with a 91% tax rate, you go for the to% project. so there was a lot of that going on. the other thing that helped was we had a president who knew what it was like to be rich. that was john kennedy. kennedy was very well aware and may be learned from his dad or from himself about the effective tax rates on people

oppose the decision making. a lot of his rhetoric would be thought of as supply side. he was very anxious to cut the top rate tax. the problem was he had a legacy. on his left he had the new deal legacy and a lot of his own party was reluctant to cut rates. if on the right he had the eyes and our legacy of balanced budgets. republicans were really not pushing on getting tax cuts through. the president was also worried and he had keynesian legacy. we had a recession in 1958, said his economists, and a short recession in the 1960's, so he was very aggressive at pushing tax cuts for supply-side reasons and demand side reasons.

he was assassinated in 1963. lyndon johnson, who was not exactly incapable of doing political calculations, decided to pick up the legacy and in 1964 used kennedy's debt to pass the kennedy. tax kennedy pickup the top rate from 91 to 70. we still think of 70 as a very high rate of tax. think of what you have just done. and 91, you keep 9 cents on the dollar. at 70, you keep 30 cents on the dollar. you have now more than tripled the after-tax returns. this is a huge supply side effect. use of rapid growth in 1964, 1965, 1966. the tax cuts were among the most successful we have ever had. the income tax collections from people at the top actually rose during this period. again, 70 cents, you have tripled the incentive for

people to do something. this is a win-win situation. the kennedy tax cuts were the first real proof that there is a revenue maximizing rate and it is certainly below 91 andand blows -- and below 70. that was a positive experiment. then things turned down a bit. nixon came in. we had our aversion to the eisenhower mindset. we had a 10% income-tax surcharge, which took the top rate back up to 77. in the recessions of the early 1970's we had experimentation with one-time lump-sum tax credits. a child credit of $35, which was real money back then. things like that. the thought, we had a return of

the 1930's thinking. that is higher rates for fairness to collect revenue. then keynesian fiscal experimentation to overcome the recessions at that time. most of you were too young to remember the 1970's, but it was not a successful experiment. it was a disaster. it was capped with a view of the carter administration, since we have inflation, you can find rhetoric from senior administration officials testifying. people get pushed into higher tax brackets and then they have less money to spend.

that is a way of cooling inflation. this rhetoric we have heard all along was playing out. we end of the 1980's with a 70% top tax brackets that kicked in $200,000. that was a lot of money in 1950 and was less money in 1980. ronald reagan proposed an across-the-board cut in tax rates. when legislation got through, it included a lot of other things as well, some of which were not traditional supply side. i will cut to the bottom line. you cut the rate from 70 down to 50, instead of keeping 30 cents on the dollar, you keep 50 cents on the dollar, that is a two thirds increase in what you are. able to are suddenly, people began a lot

more economically rational use of their money. the disincentive to work, save, and invest were dissipated. the research on the 1980's suggests that the cut in the rate from 70 down to a 50 was a net revenue gainer. however, the overall cut across the board was a small revenue loser. this is sometimes complicated in the debate. when you cut a rate from 20 down to 4, how much of the supply side effect is there -- from 20 to 80. the guy used to keep 80 cents and now he keeps 6 cents. so the reagan tax cuts, because they were across the board, overall lost revenue, not necessarily a bad thing. the top rates on net were a net

producer of revenue. if you look at the data, the top rate for maximizing government revenue is probably somewhere in the high 40's. here's something we all should keep in mind, who on earth would want to maximize government revenue? we thought of the high point been a great thing to shoot for. what do we say if the government is maximizing revenue? it means we are getting all the blood from a stone that we can possibly have. it is a preference function between years the government and here is society.

if i don't care how society does as long as the government is extracting. that is maybe a function that maybe stalin would have. what you really want to have is the rate well below the and revenue maximizing point. the government is doing great and the rest of us are not. those who believe in lower taxes need to start emphasizing that you don't want to shoot for the maximum, that the rate should be well below. when you start crossing, 40 generally, you start making the government about $1 better off and you make a private-sector about $2.25 worse off. you do have to collect revenue. so you take the profits from the private sector and give it to the government, but the economic burden of moving that dollar will cost another dollar and a quarter.

as you move up into the 40's, that number rises and rises. i really think that we need to stand firm, that once you cross 40, the mathematics of higher rates does not make a lot of sense. we have a decade of experimentation in the 1980's to prove that. we have experimentation in the 1960's and 1970's about what works and what does not. that's the bottom-line conclusion. >> thank you. our final presenter is ceo and president -- ceo of an historic bottom fisher. he attended harvard on the struggling scholars program, rural appalachian youth. he was director of the national economic council.

2007 he became the only member of the bush staff to be arrested on the white house campus by two uniformed division officers of the secret service. al. [laughter] >> you can see how much you can trust me and trust karl rove. karl rove has stolen my car numerous times and that's what led to this. >> does this have anything to do with tax rates? >> larry lindsey, a professor, makes economics sound fun. we all remember the 1990's. we began with the budget deal done by president bush 41 that included a modest tax increase.

it went from 28 to 31. something -- 31 point something. then 39.6 under president clinton. if you recall the 1990's, there was a cover-up. it is important. the media will never get it straight. great90's were not the period that the clinton administration likes to remind us of. there's no question the economy boomed because of the technology boom.

stocks kept going up and up and the companies had no earnings. there was a byproduct of that. it was covering up the negative impact that the tax increases had had on the economy, the narrowing of the tax base at 39.6 and other high rates have had on the economy. the other thing that is extremely important to recognize is it increased dramatically the tax collection of the treasury. since world war ii taxes as a%

of gdp has averaged 18.4%. in the late 1990's when we started running a surplus, which the clinton administration love to brag about, tax collection got up to about 21% of gdp, because everyone had stock options and capital gains from these inflated stock prices and then you combine that with the fact the clinton administration dramatically cut defense spending, hollowed out the defense department. you end up with a surplus. it was not sustainable, obviously. it was. up. the technology will cover up fundamental problems that existed in the economy. i feel little uncomfortable as i move into the 200's to talk about what president bush, since president bush happens to be sitting right here. i'm sure he remembers much better than i. -- the 2000's. i was only on the periphery. when you were governor in 1999, president bush, you and your

advisers, many of whom are sitting here today, started talking about this by this big boom going on in the economy, there was a very real chance that the next president of the united states was going to have a recession. there was also a recognition that the dramatic increase in taxes under clinton was having an adverse impact on the economy. as a result, towards the end of 1999, governor bush proposed a very ambitious tax-cut proposal. that was the centerpiece of his campaign. once elected, the was successful in 2001 with the assistance of a lot of these people here, and getting that passed, the majority of which he got past. to give you a sense of what happens, the top rate dropped to 35. then the 15% rate dropped to zero and then drop to for some people.

in 2003 as the economy was still not as strong as it should have been, and recognizing that there were other tax burdens on the economy, president bush proposed it -- and this was very ambitious -- was the initial proposal to take dividends and capital gains to zero? there was certainly a discussion of that. >> [inaudible] >> 15. >> it's nice having the resources here to answer these questions. [laughter] so they were able to get accomplished cutting the dividend's tax from 35% to 15% and capital gains from 20% to 15%. there have been a lot of studies about what the impact the dramatic tax cuts were on the economy and on tax collection. the studies on the impact on the economy have concluded that it had an impact -- enlarged the economy by 0.7% over the long run. we have a 14 trillion dollar economy right now, so 0.7% is $300 per person in the u.s.. that's how much more -- how much larger this economy is as a result of the tax cuts. the other thing that happened,

empirical evidence, they studied what happened to tax collection. tax collection reduction was 40% less than would have been expected under a static model, assuming there was no change in behavior. because of the lower taxes, there was a change in behavior. you had more people working and working longer hours, an entrepreneur is taking a bigger risk, people moving their investments from tax-exempt investments to taxable investment, there was less tax avoidance. so the tax base was larger. as a result, the cost of the treasury was 40% less than what had been anticipated a under the static model. the dividend and capital gains area cut the cost of capital. it was additional investment,

higher productivity, higher wages, and more hiring.in 2003

as the economy was not as strong as it should have been, recognizing that there were other tax burdens on the economy. this was a very ambitious, bush proposed -- was the initial proposal to take it -- capital gains to zero? no. was the proposal 15? it is nice having the resources here to answer these questions. [laughter] so the proposal -- they were able to get accomplished cutting the dividend tax from 35% to 16 -- 15%. the capital gains from 20% to 15%. there have been a lot of studies about what the impact of these tax cuts were on the economy and not tax collections. i think the studies on the impact of the economy have a concluded that it had an impact of -- it enlarged the economy by 0.7%. let me translate that into real dollars. we have a 14 trillion dollar economy right now. every year, that is how much larger this economy is as a result of these tax cuts. the other thing that happened -- several other things happen. the and. -- empirical evidence of what happened to tax collections. the reduction was 40% less than what would have been expected under a static model. because of the lower taxes there was changing behavior. you had more people working, there were working longer hours, entrepreneurs taking bigger risks, there was less tax avoidance. the tax base was larger. as a result, the cost of the treasury was 40% less that what had been anticipated under a static model. on dividend and capital gains. there was additional investment. higher productivity, higher wages, and more hiring. on the entrepreneurial sector of the economy, the ones you paid their personal income taxes the way they pay business taxes, that is 80% of companies -- interestingly enough, and 55% of private companies and almost 50%

of business taxes come through flow through companies. the result was the dramatic cuts under the bush administration. you had significantly more investment, higher productivity. we have incredible productivity during the bush administration. therefore we have higher wages. i call this the roller-coaster decade because we had great growth beginning in 2003 through the end of 2007. the we had the collapse caused by the credit expansion finally reaching the breaking point. started after world war ii, dramatically increased during the 2000's and reached the point was not sustainable. it resulted in the great recession that we're still recovering from. we are now faced -- we are faced with a choice. we have the obama administration say the way to get the economy going is to start taxing rich people. we have studies that show -- and tax reform and cuts of the 1980's had a positive impact on economic growth, tax increases of the 1997 negative impact on growth, and the tax cuts of the 2000's had a positive impact on growth. >> before we jump to questions from the audience, let's go to each of the panel members and see if they have a comment on something they heard from one of their fellow panelists. i will say, it is interesting we talked about in 40 minutes 90 years of tax policy. we are talking about enormous volatility. down in the 1920's, up in the 1930's, turned into a mass tax in the 1940's, standpat in the 1950's. down in the 1960's, -- it is a wild pattern for the fundamental tax policy in the united states over a period of time. why do we not start with you, larry. any comments to add to what al said? or questions or observations. >> i think the point of experimentation is a good one. i think we are going to

experiment going forward. there are some basic rules so that i think the entire -- even our friends and the other side would say, you want a rate that is as low as possible and a base as broad as possible. that is all there is to it. we can negotiate whether the top rate should be 39.6% or 25%, but that is a lot narrower range then no one that i know of who is serious about the economy thinks we should ever go back to the really bad old days. >> i just want to say, why are we here? because there is a record. we just try to lay it out to you. you can add to it. you could alter it. there is a tremendous record. it is wonderful to consider it. why is that important? because easily these conversations happen as if there is no record. as of the world this starting. -- is starting anew. the 20th century is crucial at

this point. >> joe. >> i think this question of volatility and tax policy is important. i do think the take-home message for me from most of a century that we looked at, it is a brief traditional tax reform in the boring, expert dominated traditional tax reform. as you just said, a broader base and lower rates. almost everybody can agree that is a good combination. liberal, conservative, whatever. nobody serious once high rates just for the sake of having high rates. not to say that argument is out there. but we would all be better off with the broader base and the lower rates. if you need an example of this, it is that the extremely high

rates that some on the left do look at longingly at this point, they created an enormous amount of avoidance. and some amount of evasion. some had a legal evasion as well. what it really did was corrupted the policy process around attacks. eight tax loopholes extremely voluble to taxpayers. that undermines the whole legitimacy of the tax system. i said this earlier on another panel. i think if you are a liberal and you love taxes, then you should not like the high rates. if you of the income tax, you -- if you love the income tax, you should want low rates because what high rates do is they destroy the tax themselves. the create the loopholes and the avoidance, faith in the

fairness of the system declines and that is when people turn around and said, i did not want to put my money into this. i did not buy this foul the proposition anymore. -- i do not buy the volume proposition anymore. for a liberal, if you like big government and lots of tax revenue, higher rates are not the answer. for your conservatives, high rates are clearly not the answer. it seems to me that there is plenty of room to come together on the sort of boring, not exactly -- a traditional 1986- style tax reform. it is impossible to pull off. it was impossible in 1986, too, but it happened. >> yeah. john. >> in my work i live mainly at the capital gains tax rates rather than -- i look mainly at the capital gains rate rather than the overall income tax

rate. i think you will find something interesting here. in the 99 years through last year that we have had the 16th amendment in the fact, there -- in effecct, there were 63 years in which the capital gains rate tax was 25% or less. there were 36 years in which it was over 25%. during the 63 years of the 25% or less, the dow jones industrial average had an annualized rate of return of 6.05%. in the years that the capital gains rate was above 25%, the rate of return was 3.49%. there is a dramatic difference of 256 basis points of showing that the capital gains tax rate did seem to have any effect on behavior in the stock market. i think that is an interesting point of view.

>> thank you, john. al? >> i would like to pose a question to professor lindsey, please. i left out of my presentation that i forgot to mention -- i would like larry to comment on this. when you analyze the bush tax cuts, the economic growth came from the cuts at the higher end. i think they say the impact they had on the highest income people -- the bush administration, not only were the tax cuts i described, we reduce the penalty for the

marriage. we raise the tax credit for children, etc.. studies show that those kinds of things, although certainly important for fairness, do not have a positive impact on economic growth the way cuts and especially the higher rates do and especially for the highest income people. so, professor. >> can you knock this one out of the park? >> i will do my best. president obama was even more clever than you gave him credit for. what happens was we had two problems in 2001. we had a short-term recession that was made worse by 9/11. we had eight long term growth problem where we needed to improve the cash flow of the small business sector in particular, which had been badly hurt by the stock market collapse. remember, when president bush came to office, the nasdaq

collapse by 80%. the economy shrank in the third quarter of 2000 before he came into office. things were not going so well and 9/11 made them worse. i think the 2001, 2003 tax cuts are two sides of the barbell. as was the need to change psychology and getting the economy moving again. the doubling of the child credit, the cutting of the bottom rate from 15% to 10%. we mailed checks. they went out in august and that turned out to be vital. this economy came to a standstill. if we had daily gdp for the third and fourth week in september, it would be close to zero. we did not have planes flying. the stock market was closed for five days. although production had been

shut down -- auto production have been shut down. the fastest rate of inventory drawdown we have had. if people are not shopping, the goods pile up on the shelves, then the factories shut down. the fourth quarter of 2001 pulled those goods off the shelf and that money went out in people's pockets and we were able to get the economy growing again in spite of 9/11 and in spite of everything else. i would call that the demand

side part of the bush tax cuts. as the top rates came down, you started to see small business cash flow revived and we had rapid growth in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006. for all the experimentation up and down, we got supply side and the demand side right and in a way that helped the economy out. one more small point, if i may. general rove -- [laughter] >> that is not far off. >> you do not know all the names we called you. >> yes i do, larry.

you mentioned the 6% and the 3.5%. doesn't sound like a lot. the difference between 6% and 3.5% means the stock market would be eight times higher, 16,000 instead of 2,000. >> we have time for maybe a couple of questions. i want to apologize to al. i did not steal his car. i was repositioning his car to get it out of the sun. he retaliated by rapid my car in industrial cellophane. it was in self-defense that i asked people to handcuff him and have the photographic

evidence that it's a place. let's get to a couple of questions here. >> let's have a second question keyed up. you first. we can hear you. >> i'm wondering if someone would quantify all the changes in the transactions to avoid tax. [unintelligible] they're all sorts of transactions that have come and gone through the years. what are the implications?

>> joe? >> i'm the wrong guy. >> here is a simple way of quantifying it. we had eight people in the top bracket. last year we had roughly 400,000 taxpayers making over $1 million. people are willing to report in come and do business that results in reporting in come. i cannot think of any more dramatic explosion than that statistics. >> we apologize for putting a picture of a bearded man in your place with your biography today. >> might have been an upgrade on the photo.

he talked about the part of the tax strategy in 2001 and 2003. we did these parts for fairness and we did other parts for growth. growth seems to have dropped out. the growth discussion verses fairness -- is that the strategy -- how you sell growth over fairness? isn't growth the fairness of all? >> fairness in 2001 was the finest what kind of tax cuts would benefit people that would not otherwise derive a significant advantage from the other kinds of pro-growth cuts. how can we sock it to someone that is not paying enough, in our view. thing sunday child tax credit

did not have implications for growth but they did have implications for the ability of families with large numbers of children to get by. the feedback was not significant. it was a way to help people get by in a tougher economy. >> jobs. >> can i say one thing? jobs. if unemployment is high, it's not there. >> brian from chicago. right now, government spending is 24% of gdp. is there any way that the tax code remotely like we have seen over the last 90 years could

actually raise 24% of g.d.p.? we know historic fleet has averaged 18%. -- we know historically it has averaged 18%. is there any other way we can actually raise it 24%? >> let's have a show of hands. a thinks it could and? -- who thinks it could? >> the effective tax rates were 51%. it's possible, but it's hard. >> we have a number of economists in the audience. those who believe that it could raise that much of gdp, raise your hand. >> in one year? >> on an ongoing basis.

how many think it could not? on the one hand, yes. on the other, no. thank you for coming. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> by the end of the day, you are ready for rest. you do not get eight hours of sleep. this is four on, four off. >> this weekend, the life of an enlisted man during the war of 1812. >> the sailor used to fear the possibility of getting whipped by a cat and nine tail. this thing they never wanted to see was a petty officer getting ready for a flogging. it's a phrase we still used today. don't let the cat out of the bag. we do not want to see it coming

out of the bad for a flogging. also, more from the contenders, our series on key political figures who ran for president and lost the changed political history. today, and former new york governor al smith. that is at 7:30 p.m. eastern and pacific. >> one of my favorite one to talk about is this chemical that is in maybe half of pigs and cows. most of the drugs are to make the animals grow faster so they make more money. it is not what's wrong when they walk onto the floor. when that animal is killed and the meat is sold, the drug is in there. >> looking behind the scenes of the food and drug administration and looking at regulatory lapses and complicity in undermining the public health.

tonight at 9:00 tonight on book tv on c-span2. >> the problem is right from the beginning we hire the hands. the first was petraeus and mcchrystal and demanding a force of 40 and they got 30. what did that do to was? they wanted to conduct a simultaneous campaign to collapse the enemy and put more pressure on them without the additional 10,000 and they could not do it. we had to do to quench elite. what did that do? it evaporates more political will at home. the second problem is another handcuff. petraeus wants to keep the surge forces the president gave them, the 30,000, much launderette a higher level. they are all gone before the year is out. that is where we are at the point of your question. given those two have already

happened, there is pressure on the commanders to stay on a schedule that transitions are combat forces totally and be out of there by 2014. in my judgment, what is happening to support that is far from condition-based is a date we're moving to and, by god, we're doing this. we should take the pressure off of them so they can come back and we can slow it back. >> nato forces are scheduled to withdraw in 2014 and they testify on the process of afghan security forces. watch the hearing on line in the online video library. >> the center for the study of responsive law hosted a debate discussing discrimination against arab and jewish americans. they include james zogby and kenneth markets, of the brandeis center. this is just under two hours.

[applause] >> thank you. i have called him democracy's restaurant for for all the events that he sponsors. i'm ralph nader. together, we welcome you to the fourth debate in a series known as debating taboos. the website is debatingtaboos.com. covered the subject of mandatory voting. wall street speculation tax in the issue of presidential war crimes. today, on the subject of taboos it seems to never go ways. all societies have them. for our purposes, they are defined as subjects not normally discussed in the electoral, political, or mass media arenas.

historically, they block the flow of information and viewpoints allowing to confront a series of significance. whenever taboos are replaced with open discussion, the resulting freedom of speech is likely to bring on improvements in the conditions camouflaged by the taboo. we saw this in our road history when slavery was taboo and public discussion on women's rights to vote, toxic pollutants in the workplace and, in my place, on safety engineering and the lack thereof. today, the question is if there is a double standard in the response to a anti-semitism when it comes to arab-americans as compared with the response to anti-semitism against the jewish americans?

the question before us is a reflection by many arab americans and others that the varieties of bigotry against them is treated far too lightly by segments of society including hollywood, and journalists, blogs, media, and what they believe to be fearful stereotypes and profiling, arbitrary arrests, profiling, and enforcement by federal government agencies. some see this question not as a zero sum, but as a plea for empathy and inclusion. others may disagree. hence the debate. our moderator, patrick sloyan, is known for his journalistic integrity won the pulitzer prize in 1992 for his coverage of the first gulf war.

he is now writing a book on the vietnam war. he will commence by a introducing the debaters, james zogby, kenneth markus, jack shaheen, and joseph olmert. thank them all for being here. mr. sloyan. [applause] >> good afternoon. equal justice under law, that fundamental american truth, that sentiment carved on the supreme court of the united states but few know my plan the timeless

truth of american politics that comes from the late senator russell long who was defending a fellow senator accused of mishandling campaign finances. he unveiled the truth then and the truth today about our political system. the words i want carved into marble is the proclamation that there is only a hair line between a campaign contribution and a bribe. he knew intimately and the corruption of big money in politics, have undercut courage, silent, honest discourse, and turns campaign speeches into endless helpings of oatmeal. he was also quick to show how the american political brain function and what -- in one campaign, his opponent was arrested for driving while intoxicated. he said he did not want to

alienate the drunken vote. there were all sorts of despicable voting blocks out there today that our political leaders still treat with kid gloves. the republican presidential primaries show them appealing to hate merchants of all walks of life. traditional republicans were appalled by what had become of the grand old party. i recall john fitzgerald kennedy's 1960 firing, in houston to a convention of protestant ministers as a catholic. that under the major portion of american voters. this year, the thing you're of suspicion is pointed. in other years, it has been and maybe someday again will be a jew, a quaker, a unitarian, a

baptist. to that list today, i at arab- americans who were shipped in mosques across the united states. kennedy predicted 52 years ago such intolerance would one day and the united states. that takes a vigorous fate. too often the bully pulpit of the white house seems empty when it comes to persecution and intolerance and romney's seems strangled when it comes to substance. he became obsessed with it the source of kobe sandwiches. three times he demanded to know how they arrived. that was the news of the day. perhaps this can help fill the void and provide substance to an issue that has been ignored by our political leaders for far

too long. our first debater is james zogby, founder and president of the arab-american institute and the author of arab voices. mr. zogby. [applause] >> thank you, patrick. thank you ralph. thank you for hosting this. i want to begin by trying to frame the discussion, if i could. i will do so in the following way. historic plea, those that have inspired bigotry directed at arabs and muslims on the one side, jews on the other, has been cut of the same cloth. this is a largely western phenomenon directed against two semitic peoples once they found living in their midst and was defined as an internal risk.

it is similarly defined as a threat to its survival. in some ways, these two were no different than any other racial or tribal conflict except in the matter of degrees. both jews, arabs, and muslims were perceived as threats, their organization, their wealth, even their corporate identities being viewed as threatening to the west. as a result, both groups suffered a dehumanization and have endured systematic and persistence campaigns of intense violence. jews, in history, were segregated and tormented, targeted, forced to endure programs leading to the horrors of the holocaust. the dehumanization campaign against the arabs come on the other hand, was used to justify imperial conquest, the colonization of arab lands and

efforts to eradicate their identity and the dismemberment and dispersal of their people. three decades ago, i collaborated in a study of political cartoons and other forms of popular culture comparing the depiction of jews in czarist russia in pre-nazi germany with those of the contemporary arabs in the united states. in both content and form, the treatment given to reach of the two groups were virtually identical. the two most prevalent depictions of jews in the german and russian treason parallel the two most common images of arabs depicted in the u.s. cartoons. there was the fat jewish banker or merchants. he found his counterpart in the obese oil sheik. the view of the of subversive communist terrorist now into the

muslim terrorist, differing only in a tire. facial features and the rest were the same. both were alien and hostile. they were accused of not sharing western values and being lecherous usurpers of our wealth and therefore threats to western civilization. they were portrayed internally as being associated with capitalist greed and externally with foreign threats to our security in a way of life. they were responsible for our economic decline. they were seen involved in conspiracies and associated with an external source that was threatening to our security and our way of life. what we are discussing here today is a sad but true fact that, while it has become unacceptable to politically express were manifest bigotry against jews, anti-semitism

against arabs and, increasingly, by extension, muslims, remains a part of our popular culture and our political discourse. we are not here to debate israeli policies are the reactions to them, however, however some may judge the policies or as harsh or unfair some might perceive the criticisms to be, nor are we debating the policies and practices of various arab states, groups, or the reactions to them, however some may perceive the criticisms to be. what we are discussing is racism. the perverse tendency to negatively stereotyped a group and see all members of that group as being possessed of some certain innate trait in behavior that are peculiar to them. for several reasons, this type of bigotry has become

unacceptable. one was the collective memory of the holocaust. it looms large in our culture, as it ought to be. that theres the fact is the rich diversity of the jewish community and we are aware of the many contributions that the jews have made to our common heritage. image as jews of all types are prevalent in our common culture. there is the reality that the jewish community and their organization, with many allies across religious, ethnic, and the political spectrums have made it clear there is a prize for public manifestation of bigotry. it has not gone away, to be sure, but rather the proponents of this anti-semitism have become marginalized to go underground. this is sadly not the case with regards to bigotry regarded against arabs and muslims.

despite some advances by their allies, in many communities and despite the strong statements by several political leaders, the bubigotry persists. they're still seen as more violent, less humane, not sharing of our values, more prone to anchor, less trustworthy than the rest of us. these notions are fuelled daily by are popular and political cultures. hollywood has an arab and muslim problem. it's important because, since our educational system is so deficient in teaching about the arab world and is long, popular culture is where most americans form their ideas. our political culture is no better, but with a distinct partisan twist. for more than one decade, elements within the republican

party have been engaged in a poisonous discourse directed against muslims to make it an issue in several campaigns culminating in the mass historical movements to block the building of an islamist community center in lower manhattan would spread to other communities where efforts were made to block the building of mosques. there has been a rash of referendum and legislations to block the imposition of sharia law in two dozen states and no one was proposing it in the first place. there were declarations by legitimate major presidential candidates that they would insist muslims would have to take a special loyalty oath before allowing them into public service. it has been revealed that in the highest level, our law enforcement agencies and their military have continued to receive deeply flawed and biased training about arabs and muslims in ways that can only be described as racist.

the resulting hysteria has had an impact on the partisan divide. the numbers are all available on our website. among republicans in the last survey, 12% were favorable, 85% unfavorable. are muslims more violent? the same split. are they taught to hate? why do they hate us? when we pull in the arab world, 80% like our values. the impact of this hate has devastating consequences on the arab and muslim communities in hate crimes, discrimination, violence, and the purveyors of this hate have received nary a slap on the wrist. racist books continues to be

used and reissued by our military. they train our military through the end of the war. hate mongers like an colter stay on the air and have strong cult- like following is. abscessed bigots, writers -- obsessed bigots and writers are quoted by candidates. the influence these hate criminals. i know this from experience. of the three men who went to jail for threatening my life, two or regular followers of their blog and frequently for did to me and commentary they put on those web sites. before dismissing a double standard at work in all of this. i asked you to take a simple test that a mentor of mine once taught me.

take what any of the above individuals have done and substitute "jew" for "arab" and ask yourself what the reaction would be. what would we say about this book? what would be called them? would it even have been published by major publishing houses? if the billionaire had distributed millions of copies of movies saying there was a massive and violent jewish conspiracy of to take over, when presidential candidates beall lining their campaign coffers as there with children -- sheldon addelson? need i go on? the bottom line? a shameful double standard and it must end. i'm thankful to ralph nader for his courage in helping us

recognize this fact and creating the opportunity for this debate to take place. [applause] >> amex debater, the president of the brandeis center for human rights under law and the former staff director on civil rights. >> ralph nader, i want to thank you for putting together this event to expand public attention to anti-semitism and for inviting me. i established the brandeis center to combat anti-semitism so i appreciate it when people are being more aware of these subjects. i also accept this invitation because i think the public needs to be more aware of the anti- arab discrimination. i'm thankful for the people here

and those were watching. i'm going to try and address the broader themes. there were some individuals who have been mentioned in a particular way who can defend themselves, so instead of dealing with individuals, broader themes. for those of you who are here, go for the mahi mahi. i'm sure everything else is good, but it is excellent. at home, you will just have to imagine. the question is framed in a funny way when we are asked to talk about anti-semitism against arab disburses jews. -- verses jews. there are no double standards comparing the two forms of anti- semitism because there is only one kind, discrimination against

jews. the coin -- the term was coined in germany for a particular reason. they were concerned that their own views were being marginalized. their own views that they hated jews. they hated them on racial grounds. they wanted a new term that would be more scientific and less susceptible like "jew hatred" then they were focused on racial issues. historically, it has been used in that way and that is why would use the term. the different question, i suppose, is should we be taking anti-arab discrimination and anti-jewish discrimination very seriously. i would argue the answer to both questions is yes. i do not want to get into a persecution olympics in reached

-- in which each groups argue that their growth has been faced with greater discriminations. we need to do a better job as a society the combat discrimination against all groups, aerobes, and jews alike. there has been a lot of talked about the way in which arabs have been mistreated in this country. we could agree or disagree about where you draw the line on anti arab or anti-jewish discrimination. we need to stand again there in combat. it's interesting to hear this notion that as a society we have been more successful in combating discrimination against jews because it is my feeling we need to do better against both. ideal quite a bit with anti- semitism and i have heard quite frequently people underestimating or belittling

anti-semitism or not responding in what i consider to be inappropriate way. there are a couple of reasons why they say we should be reacting firmly. one thing i hear, and i hear this a lot, is that jews are doing just fine. they're economically successful and we do not need to worry about jews. their wealthy anyhow. there are lots of problems with this. new data came out in new york city on the condition of jewish- american in new york. what you find is 27% of jewish americans in new york to live in poor households. that figure is slightly lower than non-jewish households, but it is a non negligible. we have a number of poor jewish

americans that seems to be increasing and it's a problem. it should not matter if you are rich or poor if you're subjected to bigotry. we should be taking it seriously. suffice to say despite the progress we have made, there is still a significant amount of bias, bigotry, discrimination against jews. i would say we're doing better than anywhere else in the world. i would say there's no better time to be a jewish-american than today. yes, there are hundreds of americans every year who come on as the jews do, face hate crimes. last year, according to the most recent data of the hate crimes against jews exceed those of any other religious groups and the number against all ethnic groups.

when people say we have succeeded in dealing with anti- semitism or that we are responding firmly enough, the facts are against it. i mentioned that my focus with the brandeis center has been on anti-semitism. after all, universities are supposed to be places of reason and tolerance. yet, one finds there, not on every campus and not affecting every jewish student, but a disturbing number of incidents, whether these are threats, actual assaults, or violence around the country. i would say, in terms of comparison, we should not be asking either which has it worse, nor should we be saying we have solved the problem for one group. rather, we should recognize that

discrimination is a problem matter the group facing a. it's a problem for jewish americans. it's a problem for arab- americans. we need to work together to combat this wherever and whenever it occurs. [applause] >> our next evader is jack shaheen. he is a professor emeritus from southern illinois university. [applause] >> thank you, patrick. my distinguished colleagues, ralph nader, i appreciate you putting this together.

there's a wonderful proverb that goes something like this. this repetition really could have been used by goebbels. in the 1930's talked-about the propaganda that the all the propaganda can be effective is if you take a few select images of people and you repeat them over and over again. the same images. the question here today is that these same images of arabs, christians and muslims, they have been with us for more than one century, constantly repeated over and over again. every form of american popular culture from the television era but, hollywood, comic book, the editorial cartoon.

it does not deviate. as a result of that, the media has a tendency to follow policy. that includes television commentators on all the major networks, especially fox, which sometimes follows policy and sometimes not depending on who is in office and then hollywood itself. taken together, these three -- the government, the press, and hollywood -- over the past 100 years, we have created the arab bogeyman. the methodology of the day, kennedy said it best, he talked about the myth being much more dangerous than the line because the myth is persistent,

persuasive, and unrealistic. what we have now is a mythology shorthand that arab equal muslim equal evil enemy of us. that is the reality. you can say anything you want about an arab today anywhere to anyone and get away with it. i will give you one example. i live on hilton head island, a very nice place. really, it's quite comfortable. every now and again, i will just say if it would be nice if we had more arabs living here and have a mosque next to the synagogue. i will just give you one other example. i stumbled this -- upon this. the word arab, i have yet to find a restaurant called that. it cannot be used. we can go to jerusalem, ali

baba, the arabian nights. it is simply unacceptable. we never referred to the arab nation as our friend. in my life, and the jack shaheen called me an old man the other day, but we find out why they are called moderates. i do not want to be moderate. i would hope i could be someone's friend. the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning in a lightning bug. the question here -- if, in fact, we are prejudiced against arabs and we use the term anti- semitism instead of anti-arab, i think the prejudice will evaporate over a period of time. i think a fellow semites can unite in this and not

necessarily take away this phrase, but to use it to bring us together, the only reason we are a part of this and not together is because of politics of the day. it has nothing to do with interpersonal relationships. i think that's extremely important. no one can deny the fact we are part of the semantic race. now when i can take away what jim argued so welcome on the demonization of jews that took place in not to germany and russia, or the demonization, the vicious demonization in editorial cartoons that takes place against arabs. i can only tell you that i want to refer you to new york university, a distinguished visiting scholar at nyu that has taken on my collection of over 4000 artifacts from editorial cartoons to movies, comic books,

toys, and games. if you go there and you look up the archive, you will see how history over the years has really demonized all things arab. i would hope that this afternoon, that this is not a debate. i do not see this as a debate. i see this as a discussion where american citizens which have worked together so that we can erase this hatred that has been, for so long, injuring the people i ask your assistance in the assistance of my esteemed colleagues here at the head table. [applause] >> our final debater, joseph olmert, at the university of

south carolina, and the author knot."unraveling the no [applause] >> thank you very much, ralph nader and others. thank you for inviting me. don't look at me as their representative. i'm not. if there are many journalists here. i heard that one of the group's [inaudible] remember that when you come later on. i came to the united states after 9/11 in november.

i landed at jfk and i went to longoria in order to catch a flight to atlanta. an american airlines plane had just collided in queens. i was standing next to a group of muslim women and people looked at them with murderous looks. i was shivering. i do not like murderous look to be named that may. but also, i felt that this is a problem now about muslims. i say this because i totally agree with the sentiment that

this is that a mutually exclusive situation. two arabs and two jews have to take immediate opposite positions. we should be on one side. i just wondered why it is so nice to be out from under the cloud of anti-semitism. this is very jewish to be sent cementing about being out from under it. nation that could have been under. this is my way of agreeing. i would like to make a few points here that may be different than others. one of the problems, and i do not know how many american journalists are here, but it is

the ignorance for american media fundamentalists. how many of them talked about the middle east and know anything? they are ignorant. how many of those who talk about islamic and jewish countries really know the profound aspect of those cultures? they don't. [no audio] -- [unintelligible]

it was in his favor. hosted by an american organization. i say because i'm watching from the sidelines, in a way, the discussion about the arabs bring more arab awakening. i find myself in a delicate situation never predicting anything like this. when you read about what they say to you, the does not matter. this is a problem we need to understand and ultimately something will be done about it. the problem is there's not enough going on in the academic community, which is my second

point. the american academic community has a problem teaching the middle east. it has a problem. i do not want to make it personal. i could. but there's a problem. there's too much involvement of foreign money in middle eastern studies making it not academic. because we are all in a friendly and tolerable place, trust me. there is no need to do too much research to understand that a lot of the middle eastern studies in america are being financed by foreign money, with the aid of influencing public opinion.

we can give examples but i do not want to get in all about in terms of the exact figures, but it can be researched and sean. i know that hollywood is somehow connected with the jewish influence. in 1945, dwight d. eisenhower invited 13 hollywood executives, producers, and whenever to go to the concentration camps and take pictures in order to make a movie. all of them were jewish. i can make two points out of that. one of the points is they may have thought it was not that

bad. [unintelligible] it did not want to emphasize their distinctiveness from the rest of society. this is our culture, this is our history. we have some things we need to tell you and show you. we will not bend over backwards to take these pictures. it may be a question of generational gap. compare that to what is happening in these days and i find myself in an interesting situation.

it was in the kingdom of saudi arabia, right? >> misinformation? >> that is time for another discussion. this movie is very interesting and want to make a point here. [unintelligible] ask a question. i will be honest about it. do you perceive anything like that movie now in hollywood about saudi arabia?

[unintelligible] i do not think there can be a movie like that. there is a trend now and this may be my other controversial point, there's a trend to create some kind of affirmative action and in terms of, yes, we're anti-arab, anti-muslim, but now they're going all the way to the other side to show some kind of civility. there cannot be affirmative- action elite telling the truth in terms of what is happening. to end, i would say to you, many friends asked if i was crazy coming to this place. it's important for me to go to these places because they will said, "he's not that bad

doctoral. it's not funny the to that is how we got here. i'm happy to be here. i think it's going to be a great time. thank you very much for inviting me. [applause] >> h debater will have two minutes more or less to run but the statements made by other debaters. we will start in the same order. marcus, mrmr. shaheen. >> i want to refer in this discussion back where i think it was intended to be. is one form of discrimination more tolerable than the other? the discrimination against arabs

get the same reaction? by framing it as anti-semitism, he intended to say that if we call them both and entice some of -- antisemitism, it would make an effort. could herman cain have stayed in the presidential debate for more than five minutes of the haves and the same thing about any other group of people? could newt gingrich have stayed in the debate for more than five minutes? would sheldon addelson be able to give money to anyone given the stuff that he's done and who he has sponsored docks right now the big issues he gets money from china and it has nothing to do with the fact that he funded and sent two of the most tremendous propaganda films

preaching hatred about islam but you could ever imagine. some people got physically nauseous watching these. they were so hurt by them. yet he as a legitimate personality? i have to save that when you say the universities cannot be trusted because there's foreign money, that's exactly the point. i'm understand. it doesn't matter. the point is it's not the money, it's what they do. with the question what they do? top voted. this is the same when people come back and say there's jewish money in hollywood or jewish money in washington or jewish money in the banking industry? look at what they do, not who they are. there are some arab programs -- not enough. i wish there were more. there are 54 american college gives -- colleges that offer

middle eastern studies. let kids take arabic were they take agent greek. nothing against them. they're great people. people are not study because the programs are not there. when we try to start current studies programs, they come along in johnny mata business. the one school that was going to be viable in new york was going to be shut down. let's get real. this is a problem. until we address the with the same forcefulness that we address discrimination against jews, it will not go away. it is not of this verse is that. is this and that. both are repugnant, despicable. both should be ended. it is not either/or. it's both. [applause]

>> on the issue of the word itself, do you know what the word poppycock means? it means loose stool. that's not how we use it. semitism is a bad term. there were no raises. there is not a caucasian race. people use the word though. they use it to describe it arabs and jews. if your anti one or the other coming your anti-semitic. leave it alone. it is what it is. thank you. >> we could talk about poppycock, which was what that was. i agree. there is much i agree on. we need to do much more effective job combating american administration. i feel uncomfortable about the fact that i do not want anyone to think loading am not

rebutting but i agree with. there have been a lot of research and about people not in the realm who could do a much more effective job defending themselves. instead of addressing what this individual said or did is to talk about the question of how we can do the best job of combating a reform of discrimination. i have heard some strong arguments for why we should use the word different ways. why is it that any one group should have a monopoly on this term or that term? that has a lot of resonance with many people. the term anti-semitism is not all the popular even with the jewish organizations. if you took a poll of anti- semitism scholars, certainly if you included asking you wanted to use it to describe an ossining and jewish people, it's not a good term for many

reasons. one reason is because it was developed and popularized by people who call themselves anti- semites. it was a term developed specifically as a means of propaganda for a particular political movement that was adverse to jews in germany. it's a terrible word with a terrible history. it would be rice -- would be nice to get rid of it. first, i would like to get rid of the phenomenon that it describes people want a different word for hatred aimed only at jews. let's say we will call it judeo- phobia. that's fine. it assumes we're talking about a phobia and that brings in all kinds of psychological dimensions. if it just as jews let's just say is a jew hatred. that might be ok. that's an older term. we're talking about that is not always specifically hatred.

anti-semitism is not a good word for any particular groups, but it is a term in multiple languages which has a history, except in some common usage and it's awkward to try to go back. what is gained and what is lost if you try to lump in multiple groups together? some will say it's not hatred against one particular groups but hatred against the others. i would say yes. let's define ourselves as people who are against hatred, bigotry, and discrimination first and foremost. there are some distinctive aspects of the bias of some groups. if you're disabled, african- american, a woman, hispanic.

he may face common forms of disadvantage, but you also have distinctive forms of discrimination that you face. it makes sense that if you're going to combat these problems that you understand them. this means looking at the history. the history of anti-arab discrimination and anti-jewish discrimination has some similarities. mr. shaheen and mr. zogby had some persuasive statements. this is based on the peculiar demonization that jews space under christianity and its specific relationship between jews and christians this are -- in certain historical periods. there is also a post-9/11 context for those arabs who are molal or are perceived as being moslems. -- these arabs who are muslim or

are perceived as being a muslim. while i enjoy the notion that we need to fight all kinds of bigotry, i think it's a important that we do not act as though we have solved once and for all any sorts of discrimination because we certainly have not. yes, we will sometimes react when bad things are done to this group for the other. we find we are continually facing persecution against a whole range of groups including arabs, jews, and muslims. i do not want to lump these two under the same name. the most important thing is to identify, when we see it, and to try to join forces in opposing it. [applause]

>> it's a very compelling argument and i would agree in joining forces. i must say this new anti- semitism is new. that's not to save the remnants of it are still not with us, and fortunately they are. it has not completely gone away. i think this new anti-semitism has to be addressed. it has not been addressed. the only people who addressed it are those who are victimized by this particular name. those of us in academia, by and large it popular presidents and hollywood treats us with yawns of indifference. i want to go back to the

statement about eisenhower. the motion picture industry, even when they knew about the holocaust, they continued sending films to germany. they wanted to make a buck. you are right. that was the past. it's a shameful part of that past. to the credit of the filmmakers, and jewish and non-jewish alike, that has been addressed. o there has never been a group of american or american-arab filmmakers who have created their own company which demonizes dozens of arabs, mainly palestinians come over and over again while the company was in existence. i'm not out to make a profit. you should read the "reel bad arabs." there are 1200 films documented.

not one group has been vilified more. not american indians. i think we must recognize that and bring it to the forefront the that the empathy and action can be taken based on that reality. 9/11 changed the landscape, although there was not a single arab-american involved with 9/11. all of a sudden, after that tragic day we began being portrayed as terrorists and as a threat to our own country. i don't think i have been on a major television talk show in 15 years. i don't know why that is. i have gray hair. that means wisdom. much more moderate now that i used to be a much more levelheaded. but the is chita treated with a

yawn of indifference. the one and only reason that i say this new anti-semitism should be a part of our cultural landscape is i think it is a wake-up call, that people will look at the issue differently. i don't know that is the case, but i believe that might be because we share so much together. i think we complement one another. i think that is my take on it but we have to understand that because americans of arab origin are by and large and visible on television screens with the exception of the late danny thomas and the danny thomas show and jamie farr running around in a dress on mash. we don't exist. there are no arab american commentators.

i would love to say welcome to the cbs evening news. why not. why isn't there an anchor man like that? what would happen if all the 71 of the major networks employed her to be on the air? what would the reaction be? and levy to ponder that thought. -- i leave you to ponder that thought. [applause] >> let's establish the south carolina for am against bigotry. -- [unintelligible] byte told you the story about what happens israel, i love

israel. york andike the new philadelphia jews. he tells you where do you live and my wife says we would love to move to lexington and they would tell you with names that they welcome them and this is just a few months ago. when i went to california and the violence against the ambassador -- the first time -- there were 16 police cars to protect me. not thatm that -- i'm important. he said you don't know how many

you like -- that take true story. we have these stories but at the end of the day, we need to get back to some facts that were not mentioned here. 29% of americans say they are anti-semitic. [unintelligible] 30% or 60%, that shows there may be a bigger problem. to make sure there is a problem i want to make

two quick comments. anyn't think there is problem establishing a mosque at ground zero. and coulter said jews are in complete system -- incomplete christians. when you look at the debate on the mosque at ground zero, you see what i told you before -- how many of you know with the name of the project? [unintelligible] that was the capital of the islamic part of spain. then you go back to the

recordings of us, but lawton and he said we are going to go back to cordova to reestablish the muslim empire. this is a fact. even that should not rule out establishing the mosque but if -- i don't know -- if you know this was the name of the project, the have a better idea of analyzing what is happening here because you know more than the implication. this is not a reason to rule out the establishment of a mosque there. but you should know more to get a bigger context. when you have a better context you can come to a better decision. a quick correction to the comment about arab money.

i made the comment because we talk about the jewish money in hollywood. this, theyon't use should expect it to be used in sources of spending money -- i'd did not know they were out of business but i can tell you the last three israeli movie selected for the oscars are -- they were very critical of israel. a kind of affirmative action here? [applause]

>> this debate is very timely. it is as they used to say, it is ripped from today's headlines. if you saw the associated press story today, about lt. colonel matthew duly who is preparing our senior officers for command with the joint force staff college in norfolk, va., the one thing he said is when i came to dealing with arab prisoners, the geneva conventions was no longer relevant. because [inaudible] he said it had reached the point now where holy sites, the islamic holy sites of a mecca d medina might well be attacked by a the united states

without regard for civilian deaths. the president was world war two and a nuclear attack and of the firebombing of dresden. i want to ask each of our debaters what leads in lieutenant-colonel in the american army to reach this point of intelligence? what is involved? >> the post you point to says poor judgment but i think it is more than poor judgment. i think it's a cultural problem of insensitivity, a ignorance and bigotry toward islam and muslims that is as much a part of our culture as the water we drink and air with that we

breed and it needs a ralph nader who made it and fought for cleaner air, we need the same kind of ralph nader in the culture we teach and the education that goes to our kids and our military. we have been fighting this fight with the defense department and the fbi and local police department. it is horrific the material they use and the people they consult with. the people who come in and do that teaching and the reason i wrote the book in the first place is because since the end the vietnam, we have sent more money, weapons, troops, lost more lives in the middle east than anywhere in the world and be do not have a clue about the people we are engaging. in fact, our kids come back from their all too often bigot'' because of the fact they have seen them through the prism of

this false information they get. the use a book teaching about the arab mind and to our military. seymour hersh said there is a straight line from this to of the grave. he taught to things. one is that there is an innate cultural and genetic disposition of arabs and -- the are preoccupied with sex -- he hasn't been to washington recently. the other thing he taught was arabs do not like to be humiliated. that sounds like most of humanity. if you think about it, what was done to the prisoners at an art -- could you think of any group of people that would not be humiliated and shamed and

degraded into possibly confessing to crimes they didn't commit? but throughout this, our guys learned it and it's like you put a dirty gold fish -- if you put a well goldfish in a dirty ball, he comes out sec. you have people have gone through this process and they learn and then they become the teachers and and they produce new students and the back to the same textbooks. this book has been reissued every couple of years by the military. the last one was an introduction by colonel and it is used in military training programs, so this does not surprise me. he comes out of the school of this garbage and is a teacher of a because that is what he learned. it is tragic and wrong.

>> you asked why people think and say the things they do and it's a conundrum in our age where you think people should know better. for me, when i see bigotry and discrimination, and equally important question is why are people doing nothing and why are there some times we react and sometimes we don't? sometimes we speak out and sometimes we don't. i think that is some ways the topic of our conversation today, why is it we are sometimes sensitive for alert to the fact that bigotry is present and sometimes we're not? just a moment ago, there was a statement i would either strongly agree with are strongly disagree with but i will try to relate to this question -- the

new anti-semitism should not be part of our cultural landscape. if by that we mean we should stomp out all forms of anti- semitism and it should not be part of the cultural landscape, i agree. if it is this is a concept we should eliminate -- i will say that i see very frequently some forms of anti-semitism that reach an immediate response and others that do not. for instance, when you see nazi skinheads or bigots saying things about jews, there will be an immediate reaction from public officials, school officials if it is at a university, they know how to deal with it. when it is the new anti- semitism, there is a much

trickier response. i'm not talking about criticism of israel. i'm talking about the fact that half a century ago, people would say there are anti-semites and speak out explicitly against jews. whereas today, they will speak in coded terms and talk about the zionists. sometimes they will say things like hitler should have finished the job, making it clear what they were talking about. sometimes they will speak about israel using the set -- the exact same stereotypes about greediness and power hunger and a conspiratorial control and starting all of the world wars, the same things that have been said about jews for hundreds of years and there is not always a reaction. maybe it is just political. whether it is this an example or a host of others we could talk

about, it is unfortunate that there is some kind of bigotry we are conditioned to respond to and others we just let it pass by. >> i would agree 100%. i want to correct my distinguished south carolinian here who set up the anti- defamation league -- if you read hollywood's victims after 9/11, there is a selection about israeli independent filmmakers and the wonderful work they have done. second, please don't ever say i said something about jewish money in hollywood. i got criticized once for saying that when i never said it. the myth is much stronger than alive. i want to get back to the

comment about the lieutenant colonel -- he is a product of his environment. those of us with gray hair, when we were growing up, what we came to learn about other people and other cultures came from three centers of learning, the school, our peers, the church, the mosque, the synagogue, and our families. based on those three centers of learning, we shape how we felt about different people. now we have the media curriculum where a child born today, by the time she gets to the age of 65 will have spent nine years of her life watching television. what does television teach us if we take the images of that era on tv and all other forms of popular culture and exclude any

humane image of arabs, even arab americans or muslim americans -- if those images are excluded, what is the lieutenant colonel supposed to think? and my younger days, used to go to the marine staff and quantico and i interfaced with great young marine officers. they were completely different from this lieutenant-colonel. i have to tip my hat to the man and women who for years were not filled with this kind of prejudice and bias. i think what has to happen is we have to break the silence and i say this publicly -- you can count on me that anytime someone discriminates against the jew, a

black, hispanic, lesbian, gay, i am here and i will take a position on it. i have always tried to do that and whether you follow that are not, that's the only way we can contest prejudice. that is the only way we can be effective. i hope that we have too much in common. put politics aside. let that rest. as -- as americans, we can resolve this problem. >> [unintelligible] since i am not american, i do not want to attach anything to this kernel but you will

remember the scene from the movie about the air force academy where evangelical christians [unintelligible] established -- it happens and i don't want to compare this and that but it happens and i will say something here that will surprise some of you. 12 or 13 years ago, i was involved in the forum for a civil agreement. being part of my activities in this foundation was to promote understanding between jews and arabs in israel. one of the things we had to deal with was something that is very painful for me to say.

there are troubles if you come with an arab name. is just a fact of life and one cannot deny it. the director general was a a friend of mine. we come as a group and we want to see what can be done to improve and to change it. the point is when you have young security guards who just finished the army, there are conflicts that cannot be brushed aside only because we want them to be brushed aside. is not a question of who is right and who is wrong. if american soldiers are fighting in iraq or afghanistan, they are bound to have more anti-arab feelings. in order to be more optimistic,

i will ask you to watch a film -- did anyone watch this movie? the anti-terrorist fighter that a palestinian girl and they managed to bring a new gang of anti palestinian and they make peace with each other and they chose we can see this kind of stuff even if it comes from people with a military background. i would like to be of little more optimistic. any prejudice against arab on their ethnicity is a terrible even if i completely agree that you don't have to lump it under the title of anti-semitism. it is well known anti-semitism

is resumed at 4 -- reserved for jews only. i may be looking for something that why -- that may be will come out and that question and answer session that could enable us to some of this up with a practical idea about how to inform -- to join forces -- [unintelligible] [applause] >> large middle eastern countries are often divided by religion like shia and cities. morph more -- for more than 10 years now, american troops have been fighting -- 10 years in iraq, going on three years in

afghanistan. how much is the american perception of us being at war with arabs around the world, how much does it contribute to today's hostility toward arab- americans? >> i would say the hostility predates the war and the war simply did not help the situation. too many young men coming back from iraq calling them hyades is at a marriage -- is a product of war. they can be just like you or it it's hard to do what you do. we got over of a grave, but they

did not. that image will define us for a long time to come. but that notion that the region and the people being more violent and less humane and have less respect for human life, just fundamentally different people -- though war did not help change that. they fuelled the caricatures and stereotypes and it has had a blow back on the community. to the degree which some of us opposed those wars, we we became targets of abuse -- you are not supporting your country at war. i hope at had i been italian i would have opposed the war because it was based on a lie and took lives needlessly, thousands of americans and hundreds of thousands of iraqis

and left a country devastated with one fifth of its population either refugees or internally displaced. i would say the degree to which we see them at least as nothing but a seething cauldron of violence, hatred and anger when the first time some people learn of it is in the context of war, and only fuels the misconception. most americans had no clues about who arabs were. then a 19 basis, the terrorists who killed our people became the defining image of who we were. every event of that sort, when it becomes the only way we see them, if he gets up in the morning in egypt and goes to deliver to babies and comes back

and opened his clinic in a poor neighborhood, he's not a story. but if he straps a bomb on himself, it's all over the paper. if iraq is at war, that is our story. it is the only one we read and know about. it has had a huge contribution to shaping, distorting, and reinforcing the pre-existing distorted notion of who these people are. >> it is ironic and unfortunate that global developments will have an affect on u.s. relationships. starting with 9/11 and then with the combat that followed, many of us in the civil rights community feared there would be an enormous outbreak of violence against arab and muslim individuals.

fortunately, we have not seen the severity that we feared but we have seen issues of stereotyping and many issues that are deplorable. we have also seen some positive things and we have seen some efforts by law enforcement and community organizations and government officials to combat and that needs to continue. it is analogous to that aftermath of the onset of the second intifada. similar to 9/11, which was followed immediately after by outbreaks of bigotry and even some riots in various cities around the world and on u.s. college campuses. we saw turmoil in the middle east on television and there was a significant increase of tension on college campuses and

deeply unfortunate incidents involving criticism and attacks on jewish organizations. if we look at the last dozen years and chart instances in the middle east and is then charged incenses affecting jews or arabs or muslims, you will find when there is negative news coverage on the middle east, you will frequently find there are incidents and tensions in this country that happen. that means when there are times of tension internationally. -- we have to stay vigilant to make sure it does not translate into injury.

when it came time to go to war, journalists and certain politicians became cheerleaders and no one really questioned it. all iraqis were clones of saddam hussein. you judge a people by their leaders some time. i think the failure of the press, the mainstream press, good journalists had as much to do with that as the policies of bush. i want to go back to the first time we entered iraq and there were hearings on the hill. there was a girl from kuwait talking about that incubators in kuwait and the iraqi soldiers went then and unplug all of the incubators. they don't have that many incubators in kuwait and i am saying to myself who is this

person? not one journalist, not one politician asked the question is this witness credible? it turned out she was the daughter of the kuwaiti ambassador who had been coached by a pr firm here in washington to help us enter that particular conflict. when you have a press that bends over backwards to please the administration with embedded journalists -- i'm going on and on about a profession that i really admire and i used to teach journalism went on a time. it pained me desperately to see how quickly we went into that war and bought into the mess saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction. our adventure our, our tragedy was made in part and came about

in part because of decades of the dehumanization process. into thet want to get iraq war but saddam hussein did use chemical weapons to kill off 5000 iraqis. that was a justification to invade iraq -- he did use it and would use it again -- are what like to go to a point made about the man with two babies -- by a agree with you completely but i don't want to sound patronizing. you are absolutely right, but

here is the problem -- there was a movie made that tried to clarify them. that is an interpretation i heard and i would advocate a movie being made about the plight of the egyptian people that might have led to what happened now. they question is whether there are enough arab film producers or the directors who would like to do something like that? israelisnderstand why can send anti-israeli movies to hollywood and get into the competition and arabs can't do anything that might be critical of their own society. >> if i had a nickel for every arab film maker and every arab author and every arab art is to

try to get his work shown here and the states, i would be rich man. the simple fact it is not possible and that is the problem. we have not been able to break through because there is no tolerance for sympathetic treatment of arabs. we have dealt with these characters in hollywood and they shut us out. they do not see a problem. what i said that hollywood has an arab and muslim problem, i meant it. it does not make money for them because the popular culture reproduces itself. arabs sympathetic characters? nobody wants to see that. >> that joe can israel was -- >> [crosstalk] >> i have a really good question from the audience.

who is perpetuating the arab s and the press? how is it possible they are so continuously perpetuated? i was going to ask the same sort of question. we do have a commander in chief of the military who seems to be a major violator of the sensitivities of arab-americans. he is a president of the ad states, barack obama. how do you rate his role in dealing with this issue? >> i think on this issue, there is a tragic circumstances the president finds himself in. that is it is easy for george bush to say don't discriminate against these people, don't treat arabs and muslims as if they are the enemy. but brock hussein obama is perceived by the problem -- perceived as the problem by

these people. we have a collection of photographs of the sign that has been used that obama hate rallies that are as crows and despicable as any i have ever seen racist literature and slogans anywhere in the world toward the group of people. i would go one step further. i believe it is no accident that there has been a resurgence of islam a phobia in america today and it is because we have buraku same obama as president. it is an indirect way of getting him. he was not born here, he's not like us, he might be one of them. i pity the right wing that's right now they have to choose between the guy who is a mormon and the guy they believe is a muslim. it is a problem that while it was easy for george bush, it is

not easy for barack obama. i think he has tried to contribute and there are times he has been gun shy. i would like him to be more forceful like bill clinton was. i think he feels like he is identified as the problem and perceived as part of the problem. after the cairo speech she gave it three years ago, i was on most of the network's debating people. at the end of one of the debates with george allen, i was asked if the president could heal the divide. i think he would like to try but i think he has more chance of healing to divide here than he -- there that he does here with conservative republicans because the stuff they were saying the day he gave that speech, they never gave him an edge and he

apologized for america and he equivocated and has a moral equivalence between israel and arabs have lied about our history. they said the most -- and said the most outrageous things with the subtext that he is probably one of them. he is in that awkward situation where he would like to do something about it but he is perceived by the very biggest to created the problem that he is part of it. >> i think that is an interesting interpretation. when president obama was first elected, there was an uptick in internet noise chatter from extremist right wing racist organizations and some of that was about having an african- american president, but all lot of it was about having a president who is was assumed to be under control of the zionists. that may be part anti-black

racists, to assume the black president himself was not in control of his administration but various forms of bigotry are often intertwined. i am glad to hear the recognition that george that the bush was aggressive in our region and speaking out against post-9/11 discrimination against arabs and muslims. i don't think it was quite as easy as mr. is of the has suggested, nor is it obvious a president would have done that. i think during the george w. bush years, there was an emphasis on combating religious discrimination and there may have bad a number of reasons for that. the concern about anti muslim discrimination was a part of it and one of the things we have seen with this administration is a shift into other areas, a sense that religious discrimination was covered

emphatically by the last guys and we have other things we need to deal with. i would like to see more done. there was one thing that was positive that did come out of the obama administration. it resolved what was a surprisingly open question as to whether groups like the jews and seeks the should receive any civil-rights protection from the u.s. department of education because for many years, if an arab student came in and said i faced discrimination, the answer was pull up a chair. but if a jew came in and says i face anti-semitism, the answer wasn't you can hire a lawyer. it sells like religious discrimination and we don't handle that. i think president obama should be credited with having done

something positive on that. >> i feel that colin powell is the only one who made a statement addressing this and he said it eloquently about nothing wrong with an american child born today that happens to be a muslim war and arab who wants to grow up and become president of debt united states. that was his dream and that was what he thought should happen. he did that after he was out of office. given the fact that 62% of americans have never met a muslim and all of this is lot phobia, i think is different -- difficult for president obama. our country has room for muslim, jews, christians, buddhists, religion should not play role. if he is reelected, you can bet the kitchen sink and mortgage the house that someone will be on him to make a statement

because it needs to be set. it needs to come from the top. it has not yet for obvious reasons -- as gen so eloquently pointed out, many people think he is already a muslim and not a citizen and he can't say that now. i am hopeful in time he will make that statement. it is the right statement to make and he needs to make it. unfortunately -- it was interesting with john mccain. member when people said he was an arab. what if someone had said he's a jew or he's a black and a john mccain said he's a good, decent man. that's the argument, a man like john mccain can get away with

saying at and the story gets buried in the mainstream press. [applause] >> i really want to be more optimistic. brock hussein obama was elected. asked american people, let's be honest. the fact of the matter is we can look at it from a very positive thing -- barack obama was elected and i was skeptical there would be a president in my lifetime -- but do you think there will be one? >> i will wager you lunch.

i want to very quickly say the cairos speech is a good example. that are roused so many reactions that were very interesting on many levels. but what i find so interesting about all of this is put aside conservatives and republicans, about 50% of israelis saw it as a very positive speech and 50% saw that as negative. this is the level we have -- we expect them to be 100% on our side or 100% against us. this is part of the problem that characterizes minorities. they need to feel others relate to them in absolute terms.

arabs and jews are minorities. >> i would like to ask each debater to briefly some of with a little closing statement. >> i would like to thank ralph for raising this issue. i hope we have shed some light on it. but i don't believe we have resolved it. i think it is clear to me that the two phenomena are tied in history going back hundreds of years and tied in animus. and yet, as deplorable as they are, one remains acceptable, not just in polite company but in elite company.

why it is nottand easy to condemn herman cain and newt gingrich or why it's not easy to condemn those who write and have a prestigious audience to write and advisers of candidates, those who write bigotry about islam and arabs, it's a no-brainer to me. if someone wrote the kinds of things written about arabs and muslims about jews, they would not have a place in the public forums. they would be marginalized and i deplore that as much as i do from the elites but we have these people on television regular commentators, people running for high office, people

sitting in congress and they get away with it. of you say amturf i going to mention the names, but it is the same person -- if the same person were doing the same thing about another group of people, you would mention the names. when steve emerson can spread poison and a spread hate and create a situation where hate crimes occur because he calls me a champion of hezbollah, that resulted in hate threats to my office and death threats against me. not to speak of the craziness of a christian boy goes to catholic church being a guy for hezbollah. eric holder invited me to give

the closing remarks and his way of getting me was to write an article -- is that bigotry. is an incitement to violence. it is hatred and yet people cannot condemn him for it and i'd don't find it justifiable. i agree that they ought to be seen as the same phenomenon and until we can treat one with the same rebuke we treat the other, we are not going to get rid of it. one is going to be that's terrible and shouldn't happen ever. another will be i don't want to get into personalities and so forth. that is not the way to do it. [applause] >> we often work with activists and lawyers who are in the

trenches trying to combat anti- semitism on college campuses who say to me why isn't there are double standards when it comes to anti-semitism? why is that when there are awful situations on campus, administrators will say nothing and if they say anything, they say it was first amendment protected speech. they will say that even if it was things that nothing to do with speech, even if it with there was vandalism or threats. the same administrators often speak out very firmly with respect to other forms of discrimination. why are there these double standards? whereas discrimination against jews is not taking seriously. i find it a tough question. if you can find it instances where there's retreated differently, let's bring that to

their attention and sometimes we do and we can find situation where anti-jewish discrimination was treated less seriously. but the bigger issue is not the difference in the universal response but arafat -- the fact the university should respond effectively and all cases. that is true of people in the media and so on and so forth. i find it refreshing that there are people who think the double standard goes the other way and perhaps that can bring context and it should tell us that oftentimes people who advocate on behalf of particular groups are more sensitive to the discrimination facing their group that should be more sympathetic to all sorts of bigotry. why is it not easy to condemn individuals. my answer is it that it is easy. it is all too easy and we see and hear all the time. the same individuals just

mentioned are condemned repeatedly. in some cases justly and other cases i think unjustly. there are certainly public figures to have said several things against the jewish people but to continue to get numerous invitations of various kinds to speak on television and elsewhere. i am not going to name them because the issue is not so much is this person or that person doing a thing, the issue is why can we fight against all ies?hese bigotr it should be that in supporting equal opportunity, we try to pull each other up and not push each other down. becky for all of us is not so much to engage in these comparisons, but rather to say we need to be against all that. [applause]

>> i think there has been a sincere attempt today to pull each other up. if we differ, we differ in just one area and that is the current bogyman is the arab. he has been for decades now. because he is the bogyman, and some people have suffered. they have lost jobs, been deported, been harassed and kept out of the public mainstream. i think each and every one of us, we all suffer from some sort of discrimination, that's a given fact. but we have to target the boogie man of the day because if we don't come more people are going to be impacted from these demonizing images. thanks to ralph and thanks to c-

span, i think we have taken a very important step in helping to resolve the problem. we have presented it very well. we may have different perspectives of how it should be resolved, but i think and i will conclude briefly, we should always bear in mind when addressing this issue, if you will allow me to read two sentences, the people -- jews, christians, muslims are all children of abraham. central of the three faiths is a piece which is reflected in the similarity of their greetings. hebrew, latin and arabic, peace be with you. if we can take from this discussion from being together in what we do outside this room

and when we go back to our respective places of work, if we keep in mind peace, i think we will react to these images accordingly. [applause] >> i am a member of abraham's family and now i know why -- we need to mention names and i don't want to victimize myself as a minority but when louis farrakhan, the leader of the nation of islam, why is he not condemned for that? >> he is. >> great. know -- that's another story. we need to do something about every expression of bigotry.

right now, we have a lot of them. there is a democratic candidate in new york talking about [unintelligible] there is a movie about a how jews were responsible for 9/11. [unintelligible] i believe this was a great opportunity to show that even though we may have disagreements, there are much -- [unintelligible] that shows where there are two jews and two arabs, they don't need to fight each other. we can still agree on many things and i renew my proposal to you. you are not going to get away

from me so easily. we are going to establish something. thank you. [applause] >> thank you to you all for coming today. thank you for your questions. we cannot get them all. my family emigrated from ireland and my wife happily displays of her kitchen sink a sign that says "no irish need apply." i point out that john f. kennedy overcame that sign that used to hang in every shop in boston. to see barack obama become president -- this country changes for the better. we are enlightened and that's what these guys did today. thank you. [applause]

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> we had pulled into refuel that morning around 9:30 and we had more the ship to appear in the harbor. >> the former commander of the uss kohl on the events surrounding the attack that left 17 dead and 37 injured. >> i was doing -- -- i was doing routine paperwork and an 1118 in

the morning, there was -- a lot of clock 18 in the morning there was a tremendous aid explosion. you could feel the entire destroyer violently thrust up to the right. it seemed like we could hang a three seconds in the air and we came down in the water and lights went out and ceiling tiles popped out. everything on my desk lifted up a foot and slammed back down. i grabbed the undersigned of my desk. -- i grabbed the under side of my desk. >> more tonight at 8:00. >> and prime minister david cameron talk about the banking scandal that resulted in several resignations, including american banker, bought diamond, former ceo of barclays. member's question the prime minister about a referendum on uk's membership in the european union. that's "prime minister's questions" tonight on c-span.

sound like ian to want to go crazy and regulate the internet, and the other hand, i don't believe that internet should exist as a place outside the law. >> co-executive editor of the "wall street journal" online -- that monday night at 8:00 on "the communicator's." >> the problem is right from the beginning, we start tying our hands. the first one was the recommendation of late middle force of 40 and got 30. what did that do to us? they wanted to conduct a simultaneous campaign to collapse the enemy and put pressure on it. without an additional 10,000, they could not do it. we had to do is sequentially.