morning at 7:00 a.m. on c-span. discussion about the 2008 financial crisis and what has been learned from then. then president obama with the emea are of kuwait. later, stand your ground laws. theresident obama with mthe emir of kuwait. include -- panelists barney frank, bill thomas, and douglas holtz he can. posted by the american action for them, this is an hour and a half. [applause] >> i need to start off by saying how disappointed i am, not i the panel, but i thought i had my one chance to sit on the chairs

behind me and that did not happen. >> you did not negotiate. >> we could get a photo of you afterward. >> ok. >> well, let's go to a committee now, not a subcommittee. >> the two gentlemen to my right and left have had ample opportunity to sit in the stuffed chairs behind me. barney frank cocreated the legislation known as dodd frank. to my right is the honorable bill thomas, who served in congress until 2007. he was the chair of the house ways and means committee.

and for purposes here today, he was the vice-chairman of of the financial crisis inquiry commission. to my left is a member of the fcic who i have known for many years, headed the cbo for 4 years, was john mccain's economic adviser, and was on the council of economic advisers. a guy who, for whatever reason, when he calls me up to do this stuff, i always say yes. >> there may be people who do not know what cbo means. it is the congressional budget office. barney and i have one thing in common, if nothing else, we were frustrated over and over again by the congressional budget office on our plans based on what we thought they cost and

what they told us, given their statutory power, it costs. >> always cost too much and never raised enough revenue. >> no, we knew that. [laughter] they just didn't say yes. >> i, for the record, loved working as the director of the cbo, but i was also 6'4" then and had a full head of hair. let's begin. we are five years after the collapse of lehman brothers. as a person who cover the financial crisis from day one, or even before that, there were a lot of important numbers. there was $16 trillion in lost wealth, the number of americans who lost their homes, the number of americans unemployed, but the most important number to me is 30. 30 is the number of years after the great depression it took friedman and schwartz to figure out what happened.

we are still in early days, figuring out what led to what has become known as the great recession. i want to start with doug before i get to the two former congressman. what is your understanding? have we arrived -- there are polar opposite ideas, which is, the government caused it all through their housing policy. wall street caused it all through greed. then there is a middle ground. i think you were distinct in your dissent on the fcic by saying, you know what, it is all of these. >> i think the two popular versions you have heard are wrong. they are too simplistic.

i think we do now appreciate some of the things that were central. first, it was not just a housing story. it was a broad credit problem. number two, it was characterized by instances of poor regulation. under regulation in some cases, but also overregulation. i think it is not a simple story there. the thing that needs the most work is global character. too much discussion is about what happened in the u.s., but we had housing bubbles, real estate bubbles in general, across the globe. large institutions failed. a french firm got in trouble

with liquidity. those failures occurred in a variety of ways and regimes. i think it would be very useful to go back and look at global curator much more carefully if we are going to understand this thoroughly. -- global character much more thoroughly if we're are going to understand this fully. >> i think the two polar opposites are wrong. and i have reread the dissent by bill, thomas, doug and keith. i am very much in agreement with it. they talk about a number of individual things rather than talking about deregulation. four or five of those were -- deregulation was part of the reason they were there. to talk about deregulation in general doesn't get you anywhere, but there were some specific instances. it is economic history here. the private sector innovates. because the nature of the

private sector is that you don't participate unless you want to, it is voluntary, the innovations, if they do not have economic value to the public, they don't go anywhere. at some point, innovation outstrips the public rules. in 1880, there were no large enterprises in america. by 1890 there were. what happened then was antitrust, the federal trade commission. much of the new deal is rules for large institutions. the rules that came out of the new deal, securities and exchange ask, worked pretty well until the 1980s. two things happen, it seems to

me. a lot of liquidity was built outside the banks. secondly, information technology. it becomes possible to do things, particularly in regard to securitization. people have come up with ways in the industry to pass the buck on the risk. there are systems whereby people think they can make some money and minimize the responsibility for the risk. what i think the job of the public sector is, not to tell people you can't do this and you can't do that, it is to try to reconnect risk-taking with responsibility for taking it. >> let me give bill a chance to

respond to that question. when you think about the reasons for the crisis, where do you end up? >> i was asked to serve on this commission and i told them, this is a pearly -- a purely political device and a placeholder, don't expect much out of it. and i think we lived up to that. i agree with barney. when you just say think of the 1920s in the u.s. in terms of the criminal element versus the government infrastructure, you have bonnie and clyde crossing jurisdictions, state lines, submachine guns, they were so much ahead of the transportation and legal system at the time, we had to rethink the way the federal system operated and the jurisdiction. between world war i and world war ii, we had to make sure we could stop these new mechanisms coming in. government can never be a head of or outthink. what happened was, we got caught

up with a lot of very clever people, as bernie said, utilizing new technology and the human desire to get something for nothing, and the technology got ahead of us. ultimately, it is transparency and the ability to understand so that when you legislate, you do not actually complicate the problem, you provide society with tools to be able to watch what is happening and monitor. that is one of the problems i have with the legislation that came out of the crisis. i think over time people are going to figure out how to make whatever is currently measured by stressed -- stress tests worthless, and they are doing other things. so you have to decide how to create the new fbi to keep up with the technology and the

changes. but the most important thing i am concerned about is the failure of the international government system to understand it was international. we were ahead of others in addressing directly, and five years later, a lot of the international relationships and compacts and agreements, i think, are woefully behind us to a certain extent. and therefore, there are places that this could potentially break out in a kind of different structure and not be monitored. i just don't think we did the job.

>> i think we want to come back to the international aspect. barney, the criticism build dave is one you hear -- bill gave is one you hear very often. it is too long. it is too complicated. it is too difficult to implement. we still have not implemented the volcker rule. fast forward from five years ago to what is happening now. does the dodd frank legislation guarantee or otherwise make it less possible to have another crisis? >> make it less possible. nobody guarantees anything. first, let me say, i disagree with those who say deregulation caused the crisis.

i think it was non-regulation. it was not putting in new regulations to catch up with what was going on. with regard to what bill said, he said they are going to figure out how to get around it. i agree. that is why it is not very specific. it is long. if you look at the new deal, they dealt with bank insurance, mutual funds and the sec. we put it all in one bill. if you look at the totality of the legislation of the new deal, it is similar. you gave the number 30. i will give the number 60. all of us in congress understand what that means. that is what it takes to break a filibuster. we had nine separate markups in our committee, voted on them separately, and they had some relationship, but they stood alone. we are a marvel of precision beyond that. it is their job to figure out ways to innovate.

the more specific you are, the harder it is to implement. we empowered the regulators to be innovative. that is basically why we did not write the specifics. i don't think they put enough risk retention in there, but at least it is regulatory and it can be done. but i agree with bill's point. we need to retain the ability to move in the future, and we didn't. there is no aspect of the financial system which some regulator does not now have the ability to deal with. >> and that is new. >> yes. >> there were whole pieces of the financial system -- >> we regulated known things. we knew there were going to be some unknown things.

>> if you look at the 1930's and what money was, and ways in which it was used, and today -- >> howdy respond -- how do you respond to criticism that you did not reform the regulatory structure? >> we created the office of consumer protection because nobody else was doing that job. fisk supervision was where everybody went. i had to proposals. one was to rename it the office of fig leaf dispensation. >> let me explain what we are talking about just real quick. there are three or four agencies that regulate banks. >> now there are three. >> and there was talk during the dodd frank regulation about

if they should be consolidated to one. >> and which would the one be? >> the fed. >> and do you know why we didn't? because nobody wanted to deal with the fed. the proposal was basically to give all powers to one or the other, and the state-chartered banks, by and large the smaller banks said do not throw us in with the bigger banks. they insisted. so the fed deals with smaller banks. there was one proposal to take the fed bank supervisory powers away and put that in the oecd. the fed chairman have always said we need some looksee to be able to do monetary policy. but the key was that the state- chartered banks said don't you dare throw us in their -- in there with the megabanks.

the problem is, if we had done that, we would have seen an outbreak of shays rebellion. the farmers would have been there. this is american cultural history. >> which rebellion? >> the cftc was created for the farmers when commodities is what you dealt with. then commodities get financial eyes. if you try to merge the two -- get financialized. if you try to merge the two, the financial community rebels. the reason we did not merge them was political. >> it is friday, and the major bank is having liquidity problems and it is not -- it is thought that it will not survive the weekend.

what happens now as opposed to what happened then, which was regulators gathering over the weekend, on the phone to regulators in london, begging other banks to take them out, the other banks refusing and saying what happens when they come for me? >> last time, two things happen that were very important. first is, the initial responses were very much institutional. lehman brothers has a problem. there stearns has a problem. aig. correctly, the response was to pump liquidity into the system. really, the whole goal was to get liquidity to anybody who needs it with reasonable

collateral. we are in 2013. it is friday. the fed is seeing that, not as an institutional problem, but as a broad-based financial problem, the fed needs to be there quickly as opposed to dipping in slowly as they did in 2008. an article disabused people of the notion that the fed would somehow bailout its friends. they created a system that is broadly available to everybody and could be used by everybody. i think it is misleading -- >> i know the vice chairman. i will never get another word. >> you just got it. >> there are automatic procedures now to get liquidity to that institution. it turns out, if it is not just liquidity, it is a solvency problem, it will go away.

>> i thought the question was bogus. [laughter] >> insulting the moderator is not the best policy. i just want to point that out. i mean you're not a politician >> how many votes do you have? >> none. [laughter] >> basically, after dodd frank, take us back to a scenario that is now going to occur. in fact, if you do get a belly up, what has happened to

transparency? what has happened to all the other things that are supposed to be in place. in obamacare, everybody is now looking at the old single-payer model. well, picking the fed as the single governor made no sense either. but it is always going to be difficult. you have to appreciate that the things that we did -- and i think, notwithstanding the fact that it took two tries to get it passed in congress, the bailout money, that it could've been a much more significant disaster at the time. but dodd frank said you don't need that power anymore because and barney used the word politics, and i think he and i probably agree on the definition of politics which is who gets what, when and how. we could not have the kinds of

interventions today unless you not only decided you could put money up at you had to go back and either waive the law, create a window in a law -- >> let me do a point of information. there have been three substantive changes of emperor mei sheng -- changes of information. in order to create the broad- based programs that doug talked about that were so helpful, it needs the approval of the treasury secretary. that is one. i am going to have a terry moment here if i get all three. let's see if i can. you cannot do individual bailouts at all. so the 13-3 powers no longer

exist. the third as i understand it is that it can no longer use the economic stabilization fund to bail out the money market. why is that significant? because it was really hard for the treasury to find a pot of money to bail out the money market. there are not pots of money lying around which a president in the middle of a financial crisis can rely on to bail out and in touche and. therefore, the upside is, in order to bail out -- bail out an institution. therefore, the upside is, in order to bail out an institution today, you must go to congress. >> no. >> no? >> doug got it essentially right. the fed had a power signed into law by herbert hoover that said they could basically give money to any entity they deemed expedient. that is where the $85 billion to aig came, to a lot of people's surprise. that has been abolished.

instead, the fed has the ability it might be a big institution, but it is money anybody can apply for, but they can only extend that money to an institution they find to be solvent. it has been abolished. but here is the other factor. if an institution cannot pay its debts, there is an alternative pot of money. that pot of money is the power of the secretary of the treasury. the secretary of the treasury is empowered to pay off debts and

put money in if he thinks it is necessary to prevent a meltdown, but he is mandated, not permitted, but mandated under the bill to recover every dollar from an assessment of financial institutions with $50 billion in assets or more with a form that essentially says, if you are to play with derivatives, this is not mutual funds -- >> you make a good point. and i want to -- >> let me make one more point. i think it is inconceivable that a secretary of the treasury would say to the fed, you can't do that. >> if we keep getting secretaries of the treasury from the fed and vice versa, they do.

>> of course, i am the most -- it is a horserace for the most cynical person on the panel, but in my experience, policymakers are so risk averse -- adverse. you can tell them, there is a .0001% chance this is going to happen, and they will not do it. if you look at the dodd frank legislation and where we are, a lot of this relies upon being able to tell liquidity from solvency, and a lot of people can't. if you are a financial institution and you are holding a bunch of bonds. if you'd take them at face value, your solvent. your net worth is positive. but you cannot sell them off. there are not any buyers. there is no cash out there. you are ill liquid. the trouble is, in the moment of liquidity crisis, you start

wondering if the bonds are worth face value or $.10 on the dollar. if you take $.10 on the dollar, you are also broke. >> the problem is that the government has been willing to finance a liquidity run but not solvency. and can't tell the difference. >> basically, the answer is, if the fed makes a mistake and they extend liquidity to someone who turns out to be insolvent, they still have dinner the next day. there is no penalty on the fed. this is one of the key things we were asked to do and one of the debates. in some cases, the pot of money would be the secretary of the treasury advancing it and

getting it back from the financial institution. we're talking about institutions institutions that are insolvent, not just a liquid. yes, some of their debts will be paid, but only after they have been put out of business. we had that panels in 2010, but they were for big tanks and not old ladies. the secretary of the treasury -- nobody is going to advance that until the institution is put out of business. there are no longer institutions

that are too big to fail, but there are institutions that are so big that you cannot let them fail without attention to their debts. people criticized us for lehman and aig. first you let them go bankrupt then you shovel money at them. what we are saying is -- there is no longer an institution that is too big to fail, but there are some institutions that you cannot let them fail without attention to their debts. we were told earlier, he predicted it, and when people chris as lehman and aig, then you -- criticize him for lehman and aig, he said those were the only two choices i had. i either paid all of the debts or some of the debts. so we created a system where he

can pay some of the debts but the institution dies. >> but this gets back to what i said probably earlier. to me, solvency and a difference between solvency and liquidity is think of two pieces of metal that rubbed together to make things work. they are both installment, but if you don't have the liquid between the two, the ability to make them slide, then you have got problems, but if you go back to the two pieces of metal, there is more air than substance, and it turns out they discover that maybe some of the stuff they were counting over on the solvency side had more air than stuff, and no one was willing to buy it because they did not know what it was worth. they could not price it. so this is where it really starts to devolve into a very

complicated structure where you could not tell what something was worth and you are not willing to risk what people would call something to play, if you cannot dump in and job between of two pieces of metal >> there are two pieces of principle. >> i do not know there were any. >> title ii legislation -- >> beefing up the rating was another bipartisan -- >> here is what happened, management gets thrown out, the state -- the stockholders are wiped out, the unsecured creditors are come to for losses, and i believe also the >> the extremism -- >> they can begun to through payouts. if all of that is insufficient, there is a clawback provision, you called it, or whatever it is where you go to the industry and you can recover losses from the bank, $50 billion.

it is not technically a bankruptcy because it is not part of the bankruptcy law, but people call it chapter two bankruptcy. it is probably that's known as a bankruptcy for banks. they simply did not exist when they went to go shut down. this is what is new. here is the question on the table -- does this end too big to fail? to answer that question, you have got to put yourself in the minds of the people who were the secured and unsecured creditors i just spoke about. are they now lending to the banks with a mind that if this bank gets in trouble, the government will bail me out? and that it be? now. doug, why don't you take a crack at that? >> i don't believe in too big to fail. there are things that are too big to fail quickly. everything can fail. that was true before, it remains true now. point number one. point number two, we have ways for people to fail, and we really attempted to create any dodd frank essentially a special bingo supervision for large

institutions. >> one point make that clear, you do talk about not paying the secured creditor -- the reason it has something to do with bankruptcy is the constitutional power for this comes from the bankruptcy lane which in a constitution, so it is because the constitution said that it is legitimate to go to some people. i know you thought you were going to get paid, but you ain't. >> at the last one i'm going to make -- in terms of big to fail as an economic and legal phenomenon, the answer is that is gone. we know that. the question is whether market participants believe that, and there is an extraordinarily good academic skirmish about whether they believe that or not, and a variety of test looking at yields -- >> i get in on this because doug is an economist, and on the fdic, the democrats, and they are usually very intelligent, six of the 10 members who

understand politics, and my side, policy walks. so what i was constantly trying to do from the fdic perspective was to explain politics. it is easy. i gave your definition, you go out and look for it. but you hear it in various ways. congress never ask, they only react. well, bureaucracy never ask, they only react. people are not going to stop doing what you have told them not to do unless it is at least equally painful or more painful to stop what you are doing. the idea that somehow obama care is going to solve the health care problem by imposing some

nickel or dime fine if you don't get insurance is to weigh the costs of the fine first is the cost of insurance. this is going to be ongoing. you can never stop failure. you can try to stay up with the measurements stress test, which is a great term, as to where failure might occur. had we had stress tests on most of the bridges in the u.s. over the last 50 years, we would not be crossing them. so you have got to realize that politics is the beginning of the end permeated that decision to deal with the problem. those agencies, the alphabet they ran off, the federal deposit insurance corporation of fdic, ok, i will put my money there, they were all created for a reason.

they are still around, notwithstanding the reason for their creation is not necessary in some instances, and they have a life that they want to continue to live. >> i want to come to the defense of the fdic in particular. we did not have a function -- first of all, dodd and shelby worked closely. the idea for this whole approach came in part from hank paulson, and in the execution, a republican george bush appointee, great regulator, had a major role in it. i want to be your opinion, what about too big to fail -- here is the deal, first of all, the people who say we did not result to be to fail are the best friends of the doctrine because this is a matter of perception, and when people read that too big to fail is still there, some of them are going to invest their money that way. legally in fact, it is very clear, no secretary of the treasury, no federal official

campaigning the debt of one of these institutions without first abolishing it. the secretary of the treasury would commit a felony. no, he won't. especially since we have provided a way to do it that is systemic impact by advancing the money, wiping everybody out as we have noted, and then testing the large financial institutions. moody's is now apparently going onto this, and it is talking about reducing the ratings of the very large financial institution. quoting them makes me very unhappy because they think they know -- they were the biggest screwup. >> we're never going to get through it -- >> i think they will catch up. here is what we are told. the argument we get is oh, yeah, but here is the deal.

if a major bank or investment house was about to fail, yes, your horse says they fail and then you deal with the death, but there would be overwhelming political restaurant administration to bail them out anyway. in what universe? release he will not hear the last five years? just remember the tarp. bill said it took us two strikes. you had george bush, barack obama, the democratic leadership of the house and senate, the leadership of the committee working as hard as we could and barely got the thing through. >> everyone was for it, no one had an alternative, and you still had to pull heat to get the vote.

>> a lot of people voting, no one saying yes. >> oh, barney, barney -- >> and so they could vote no -- >> don't talk about our secrets in this forum. >> doug is recalling the suspense of the campaign amid that vote. >> i did peek when he suspended, to be honest. >> there'll be an extra session afterwards. [applause] [laughter] >> i will not be attending. >> foreign policy in syria -- >> health care -- >> barney, did you feel that tarp was going to go down any system with it? >> i disability system -- if we had to do target would go down by the way, bill had mentioned people said this could be as bad as the great depression. it could've been worse for this reason.

seven years ago, you had geographic particularly cared things can happen in one part of the world that would not necessarily destroy the other. by 2008, we were on one grade. so people afraid that they would not get paid -- i mean, that had a global shock. that is why we knew we had to do it, though we had some differences about relief and compensation. when we lost on the floor of the house, i was sure it would be turned around. two factors. first of all, bill knows this, when a measure is coming up, the people who are for it tend to take for granted that it will happen, and the people who are

against it scream and yell. you hear disproportionally from the antis. we heard from all the people who thought it was terrible. after the vote, people started hearing from other people who thought that not doing it was terrible. and of course -- and i would say this is not purely hindsight here. hank paulson will verify this. we talked that night, and hank, who had done a great job, was in despair. the day the vote was going on, there was a gathering in the well of the house of the bipartisan leadership ready to go into the usual drill of trying to change members vote. i will take credit for going to steny hoyer and others if they do not do this, this is too serious, don't win this by these kind of tactics. we will pay a big price. i called hank that night and he

called me and i said -- don't worry about it. sometimes the kid gets really mad, you have to let him run away, go a few blocks away, get hungry and cold and scared and then he will come home again. i said, how did your representative to vote? he voted no. they got right on the phone. he voted yes this time. the people who are opposed, you hear from them more. >> you gave an interesting economic history lesson earlier, and i wanted to see if you would be amenable to my amendment to that, which is we talked about innovation, a kind of lurch forward, and in a need for regulation to catch up. there is often a piece of that, which is innovation, lack of crisis, and the regulations get lax. you look at it for a long time, and suddenly disappears, it is not there, you cannot see it. there is something that economist call a ulysses act, which is the idea that ulysses

strapped himself to the mast so he will not heed the call of the sirens and orders the shipment not to listen to anything he says. there is a big of that any legislation, there is a bit of that in any legislation. and bill was getting at this earlier. this notion that ultimately politics determines the quality of regulation. what stops us next time when the markets are booming, everybody is feeling at this good times are here again, and as happened somewhat during the pre-crisis period, regulators come forward, try to slap on the banks, they get slapped down again by congress, and are told back off, these guys. what keeps that from happening again? >> nothing. memory will retard the process, but memories fade. there were ups and downs, but there was also a trend. clearly, intellectually the 1980's and the 1990's, regulation became credible. academic theory was to be

critical. it has made something of a comeback, but nobody can predict that going forward. i do think now there is more of a sense of regulation and how to do it well, but that is the problem of democracy, you will always have the people most rectally involved more engaged than the general public. >> i do not think it is a democracy necessarily. >> america is not a democracy? i'm talking about in america. >> that is not the problem. to me, the problem is -- i think a lot of people, you talked about the desire to deregulate. it was an understanding of relationships over things. deregulate the railroads. in this situation, we all spent

a lot of time looking at booms and busts in history, and we lived through a dot com, and i heard people talking about, can you imagine the stupid dutch? they started buying tulip bulbs, and it is that crazy, they were paying enormous amounts for a tulip bulb. i said maybe they're not crazy because of their athletic turns worthless, at least they can eat it. and that is not the case with -- >> i agree with some of what you said. there was a good case we may for deregulation where the government had committed -- had created monopolies. and airlines, where the government had interfered with

the market. what happened was deregulation became non-regulation, as i said, because we did not deregulate derivatives. we had not regulated them in the first place. what happened was the whole philosophy of the regulation or not the regulation got so strong that a kind of jumped the phenomenon where it was not as reasonable. but there was a philosophical kind of semantic carryover. >> i agree completely on that, and especially when you have people who are paid to estimate the value of it, and they give you a value that is not accurate, and then they flip it. there was so much blue sky involved in everything that everyone was doing, i and all the fun, they will go to the blue skies. >> i have one quick semantic difference -- >> hold on, barney, it you pick the panel, -- >> once it is to bill -- one sentence to bill. i think you are right about the word, and it begins with a b and

an s, but it is not blue sky. [laughter] >> a couple of points. number one, the history lesson i think is important. a lot of the stuff is just the same as before in new clothing. here is the thing we learned on the commission that is the most striking. the dot com bubble destroyed welcome and we remember that in the late 1990's, and there was a little recession afterwards. the housing collapse destroyed wealth. the decline in the housing rate and the decline in the dot com were the same. one produced the great recession because it was deafening, the other one with equity finance. the lesson is control levers, and you should never forget

that. that is important. that will inflate in the future. >> didn't the great depression have something to do with leverage? >> i will stop there. you can integrate a little bit with smart design, and mistakes still being made in the u.s. and elsewhere are too much arrogance about our ability to identify specific risks and somehow hedge against them. that is going to be impossible. i prefer stress tests, which are on the bus tests, and too much institution specific stuff because financial institutions work all the time, and the labels on them are not important. i do not think we are out of the woods yet -- >> on the institution specific way, what would be your example? >> we still have labels for things that are banks -- >> i said this what you want to have risks. >> basil 3 goes a long way. >> if you look at what we do -- >> a lot of legacy --

>> i understand, but in the bill, we regulate this and that any other, no matter who does it, precisely -- >> ok, i will raise your grade. >> government institutions were created for a specific -- >> i really can't think of any. which ones? i can merge the sec and the fdic >> one that comes to mind is the credit agency. >> the government editions. >> 12 fed employee to suffer greater oversight in the money market. >> that is not what i asked bill. by the way, what happened, one of the problems we had, a ghost

of his west of how do you deal with the regulators. i wish there was some way to tell the senate that appointment of the commissioners on the sec and the others was not part of their charter. we had a system that were the president gets to appoint the chair of the commission, but then the senators of the committee of jurisdiction get to appoint the democratic and republican other members. there is a quote that said you do not have any chairs the directing ability, and too many of those commissioners are now there as special interest representatives to the senators >> yep, barney and i will agree on anything to say about the sense --

>> it is a time-honored tradition in the rayburn house building. >> we have about 40 minutes less, 38 minutes or so. i have questions that have come to me over twitter. if you want to send questions, it is #5afterthefall. i am monitoring it here. let me start with the audience and ask questions here. >> i am david christie. my question has to do with the title ii of the so-called bail and policy. i understand as you guys have admitted, the ballot is lyrically hard -- bail out is politically hard. before, the bailout was enforced by a threat of martial law from the bush administration. so i see the political difficulties in it. i guess my question is as terms

of the bail in, as we have seen in now, and cyprus and detroit, the financial institutions where the deposit can be included to bail in the derivatives. given i had just came from the program last he go, five years pro-glass-steagall, though you dig it would be better that we enact it, bank of the wall street instead of fleece the american citizens by stealing their savings under the liquidation authority of just being able to bail in the derivatives of the -- >> the question makes no sense. >> normally, i would think that is a radical question, but i do not think he is too far from the public and how they think about what is happened. >> i understand that. >> and there are factual issues >> let me start with this

nonsense about martial law. i do not care what the chairman thought he needed to do to get reelected, but this notion about martial law, that is a very serious thing. there is no threat to democracy. that is a silly rhetoric that drives people -- secondly, as far as the glass-steagall is concerned, we are not the anti- glass-steagall panel, most of us thought it was not relevant. aig would have done it everything it had done whether there had been glass-steagall or not. glass was a lot smarter than steagall, but that is getting into the senate there, bill, but they had never heard of derivatives. derivatives did not exist in

1931. they never heard of the subprime loan. so it was a relevant here the notion that an acting glass- steagall would somehow bankrupt wall street is nonsense. it is not make any sense. you may feel that things are too big from the political sticker say why, and there's an argument to be made, but it is not relevant to what happened. i voted against the repeal of glass-steagall for a number of reasons. country right was a -- countrywide was a bank. they could've gone all of their loans if the glass-steagall was in effect or not. as far as getting rid of the pensions of people, no, that is now we do. the first people to get hit are the shareholders, the executors, the people below the money. and that, i think, if the alternative than to have it come from the taxpayers, and we don't want to do that. >> a quick response, and i do want to get these out because one of the fun things of focusing on this five years after the crash is that there

have been some publications talking about -- here is one, what has changed since the lehman failure five years ago, the crisis, the response, and the responses since? carolyn bowman, this is a really a fun one, five years after the crash, what americans think about wall street, banks, business, and free enterprise. the appendix is a whole series of an examination of past polls from the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's. and the fact is that virtually no opinions have been changed about the role of business, labor action went down a little bit, and government and the rest. you heard about barney's -- i just want to say, for the record, i have two children, and the treatment of the child in my opinion is not to let them run off unsupervised and it will come back. i guess your position is that if a runoff, you should lock the door. and that would guarantee they don't come back. when you talk about all these

people who are victims on the sideline, i may be point briefly, i want to go back to it. the old pogo, we met the enemy, and he it is us. it is not wall street -- it is mainstream. it is not the bank, it is the people writing the value of the home. it is not those people, it is the people who believed that in buying shelter -- it is their greatest investment and it will always -- a multitude of reasons why it happened. it is always fun to gather around those people who over the years have been the ones you pick on. wall street, banks, business, free enterprise, as though the enemy is a masked cartoon of this overweight banker with his top hat on with the dollar bill signed and a big cigar and if we could just stop that, then we could deal with it. it is far more fundamental than

that. for more difficult. i will turn my time back. >> in the free market, you want the government to back up the wall street derivatives behavior. >> it is exactly the opposite. it requires them to put margins. we try to put them on exchanges. we do introduce competent and in the derivatives in the industry. >> and i believe in free enterprise, and i believe in what ronald reagan said when he said trust but verify. it is the verification of the relationships that really makes free enterprise work. it is not darwinian. >> point that are grounded in the facts. >> here we go. >> i think good policy has to become good politics. number one, size of and institutions are not simply a political choice -- they are driven by economic forces. we have large banks, small banks, a whole range of scopes

of activities. those are economic forces at work, and to pretend otherwise is a mistake. second, i 100% agree that glass- steagall had nothing to do with this. there is no evidence that proprietary trading with the problem. indeed, if you want to look at risks and what is risky out there, it is making loans. everyone has this beautiful vision we are going to go back these banks just make loans to their customers. that is where the risk was. that is where we lost money. mortgages went south. >> i think everybody forgot the savings and loan crisis -- >> sure. >> the last please, let me just finish this, i understand all the concern about the solvency and the wind down these largest editions, but - >> i understand the concern and the wind down of these large institutions but a fair reading of the crisis is that it was

more a liquidity fireman on -- a liquidity phenomenon than anything else. when the fed stepped up to liquidity, the financial system turn -- return to solvency pretty quickly. i think the bigger threats are liquidity. >> it was the role the fed played with the money coming in that created a comfort level. the old western where the banker will only loan money to people who don't need the loan -- if we had continued to practice that, we would not have the problems we encountered but we also would not have the economy and the lifestyle and quality of life. >> one of the arguments against error view that we have done away with too big to fail -- we have done away with the legal ability of officials to keep alive an institution that is in fact insolvent. some of these arguments are that won't work if one institution has that problem but the pattern is for them all to have it and that is not the pattern. that was not the pattern in 2008.

most of them were not in that situation. >> the payment system, the system by which money travels within the country and around the world is in private hands. even though it is effectively a public utility in the sense that as long as that is the case, there is going to be a nexus for government involvement. the body politic will not stand for the payment system to shut down. that is where the quandary is. it is a bit like how private tenure water company be? how private tenure gas company be? the body politic demands the service at a cost that is reasonable.

>> and they recover it from the large financial institutions. >> this first question on twitter -- very simple -- why is no one in jail? >> because being stupid is not illegal. >> even worse, being immoral is not illegal. we had to pass a lot of laws because some of the things that people did were not illegal. one argument i heard from the administration is you don't want to prosecute an institution but i accept that, go after the individuals. some of my friends need to remember that one element of due process is that you cannot be criminally prosecuted if you did not have good reason to know that the activity was illegal. ambiguity is the enemy of due process. you also have to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

a guards of the law is no excuse. if the law was there and you did not know about it, that does not help you. if the best informed person in the world could not have known that was a legal, it is hard do a criminal prosecution. that's why insider trading is what you see in criminal prosecutions because it is illegal. there was great ambiguity and going forward now, we have made some things illegal that i hope will lead to greater prosecution if those things are done. >> an example of something that was done during the crisis that if it was done now would be criminal? >> some of these sub rime loans that people made. >> giving the loan to somebody who you know does not qualify. >> the falsification of some of the documents. you would think it is illegal but in our system of law, things are not illegal just because we

think they suck. somebody has to write down it is illegal. a lot of these mortgage practices were not terminally prosecutable but will be in the future. >> a lot of people run for office on the part thatsucks, that will be their platform. >> i knew people were unhappy but you don't get credit for disaster averted. i wanted to make a big bumper sticker that said "things would have sucked worse without me." >> which is true. >> i wanted to counter a little of what has been said about the orderly liquidation authority. in fact, it does insure for the stealing of depositors accounts and is completely unconstitutional and has been cited by the bank of england and the model for the global approach to the systemic crisis.

the point that senator warren has made about glass-steagall is that for over 60 years, there was no major financial crisis and since 2007, the large banks have increased their indebtedness and only glass- steagall would create the firewall where derivatives would have no federal insurance allowing for an actual reorganization of the system and allow for human progress. what's being done now is an attack on human creativity saying there is no way to the future and no other solution and these are lies. just as obama is lying and should be impeached. >> no, this is totally wrong. deposits are not only protected but the legislation increased the amount of deposit insurance from $100,000-200 $50,000 for the smaller banks. there is nothing in our

legislation that in any way weakens deposit insurance. if you deposit in any fdic insured institution up to 250 thousand dollars for any individual, you are completely and legally protected. that's what the public might think. you mentioned glass-steagall and the savings and loan crisis which was a terrible problem. it cost the federal government much more than this in terms of payout. that happened while we had glass-steagall. there is just no rationale to this argument -- the shareholders lose. >> the shareholders are not depositors. >> the shareholders lose, the the alternative is maybe they want the taxpayers bail them out. the notion that depositors are at risk is completely and totally not true.

depositors came out of this legislation that are protected because the amount went from 100,000 - $ 250,000 permanently. >> in terms of the actions and how it changed the legal landscape, the most important thing it did was it nationalized a lot of the rules. people forget that much of the mortgage origination was state regulated. the states were very different in their oversight and different and their standards and we had very different housing problems as a result. >> i'm glad you made that point. yes, the states were the ones that had dealt with this and in 2004, the comptroller of the currency, gated a regulation preempting the regulation of national banks not by saying this is a bad regulation but they tempted it with field preemption.

some of the states started to regulate mortgages and in 2004, the rule came in that said mortgage practices of nationally chartered banks are none of the states this was and that was part of the problem. >> to other areas we need to cover -- fannie mae and freddie mac- and the international aspect. barney, i think people would say it is a huge failure five years after the collapse. i guess it's five years in one week that fannie mae and freddie mac were taken over by the treasury department and there is still no plan and they remain wards of the state. they are doing better, obviously

they are not bleeding money and returning some money to treasury. fundamentally, we have not come up with a plan for how to resolve fannie mae and freddie mac and get it out of government ownership. and then getting the subsidy right for housing in the united states. first of all, why hasn't this happened? are there any prospects for to happen soon and how would you do it? >> first, nothing had happened with fannie mae and freddie mac for a long time. the house passed a bill in 2005. the senate under republican control rejected that bill. oxley said george bush gave him the one finger salute. paulsen in 2006 become secretary of treasury and says we have to fix it. he says if you become the chairman, will you do that? i said yes. i knew we needed to do something by 2004. in 2007, we gave the bush administration most of what it wanted with regard to fannie mae and freddie mac. paulsen use that power in 2008 to put them into receivership. we were then planning to do something about it and then the

financial crisis hit and we made the judgment in the congress that trying to restructure housing, finance going forward at the same time as you are doing all the other financial reforms which were more backward looking, it was too heavy a lift. if we had maintained the majority, i promised we would look at fannie mae and freddie mac going forward. the republicans took over and this is the dilemma -- there is a genuine split ideologically as to what we would do. there are a large number of people who believe, including people in the housing business,

that you cannot have 30 year fixed rate mortgages unless the lender who was ultimately responsible for that can get some guarantee against interest rate fluctuation. they say people will not lock in. unless the initial interest rate is so high that you can make money. i think there is a consensus, i hope so, that fannie may and freddie mac, that was not a good model. there were to alternative approaches. the conservatives have is it is time for them to phase out and let the market do it. on the other side, there is a minority of republicans and the home builders and realtors and others saying that you need to do something.

you have the proposal that says somebody should be able to sell a lender who is a 30 year fixed rate mortgage a guarantee against interest rate fluctuation, a hedge, which should not be a bad word in general priced to breakeven. my own view is the flipside of banning the bad mortgages which we did is to put more money into rental housing. we should get poor people into rental housing and not homeownership. there are two conflicting views. one is to build a house and get the government out of the business. the alternative is getting some kind of guarantee again to -- against interest rate fluctuation. >> the problem is, and it's one of the reasons it went worldwide, other places that used to rent got into buying and picked up some of these

securities. when you take a social desire like everybody should go to college and you create a system in which everyone should go to college and therefore everyone gets to go to college, and you then say what good is it to go to college? if you start out believing everyone should own their own home and it turns out to be the primary asset which generates money, and then congress passes the tax code change that says certain interest cannot be deducted and so you play gimmicks and that is your mortgage was being paid down. the lending institutions provided you with a sample check of what you could cash out from your home ownership to use to pay off the suv and the other things. you never built up that equity. in the old days, you built up the equity to wait for the burning of the mortgage.

now you whittled it down every bond to pay for those things that the government used to excuse on the interest adoptions and it does not. the problem for me with fannie mae and freddie mac was they tried to play both sides of the street. the whole savings and loan came from people who did not have money to get into a home. at some point, we have to reassess homeownership, its value, and its cost. frankly, i don't know why a rental cannot get a deduction if somebody who can afford a mortgage gets the payment of the interest deducted. if somebody wants to live on a boat, why can't they get a deduction? white is a mobile home or manufactured housing depreciate

and homes don't? it just needs to be a fundamental reassessment. freddie mae and fannie got carried away playing the market to make money and still wound up holding the bag on those 30 year mortgages. >> they made money on their multifamily housing. the other disadvantage is you can build up a good credit score by making your mortgage payment but you can pay your rent faithfully every year for 40 years and you get zip in terms of credit. >> first i get to say we told you so. in 2003, there is a study that said the structure of these gse's will cost the taxpayer a lot of money. we testified and it happened faster than anyone dreamed. it was a known problem. fannie mae and freddie mac did a couple of things. they provided a guarantee. going forward, you could provide that guarantee but it should be explicitly charged. that will raise the cost of mortgages. or you cannot have the guarantee and that will raise the cost of mortgages.

one of the things stopping this is going back to the good old days when mortgages were that cheap. the whole housing industry will have to come to grips with the fact that mortgages will be more expensive. the second thing they did is they had a large taxpayer backed hedge funds and we all lost our shirts bird they should not be allowed to do that again. it was a disaster. the third thing they did which is a source of disagreement is affordable housing goals. essentially, off budget activities to promote shelter whether it's multi family or single-family. >> i think i have been the biggest for rental housing. no more goals are telling the

private sector what they need to do. >> i'm with you. >> what we had in the bill and worked on it in 2005 and 2007, we created an affordable housing trust fund on budget. when you are building housing, you don't do on annual appropriation. it was to be funded out of the profits of fannie mae and freddie mac. fat chance. we talked about pricing that guarantee per home mortgages 50 basis points would give you enough money to build the affordable housing. it was a mishmash and it should not be off budget. it is an on budget appropriation. >> not everyone is with you. >> one of the goals of fannie mae and freddie mac was the concept of promoting homeownership and that was something that contributed to the crisis. >> very much so. "the new york times" had an appalling article a couple of

weeks ago on the front page of the business section. it said that rental housing is ruining neighborhoods. it was this vicious attack on renters saying look what is going on in the financial crisis and investors are buying these properties and letting them be rented and isn't that terribly unfair to the owners? that was beyond what i would've expected. homeownership is a good thing. when we were younger, you expected to pay 25% of your income for shelter and then it became make 25% on the appreciation of your home. it should not be the way that poor people built up equity. for many low income people, rental housing is a better fit for their status than all the

questions of homeownership. >> we come full circle to politics because that defines any number of areas where desired social policy gets under government control and you lose complete site of what you are doing. look how long we paid farmers subsidies to grow crops based on parity. some magic amount they made back in 1914. >> that would be still. >> we knocked a lot of that out. i come from non-subsidy state. we are currently in this mess of subsidizing the making of ethanol principally from corn. ethanol has a lower btu rating than gasoline. cows eat corn. the price of corn has gone up because government is subsidizing the making of ethanol. it turns out, e-85 more than 10% corrodes many working parts of

cars. you get into these policies that are written into government determining what the outcome should be rather than the market and housing probably is the single best example of how much we got carried away believing that home ownership is so important. >> i partially agree with you. we have all agreed about glass- steagall. all of us agree that one of the things that did not contribute to that was the community reinvestment act. >> i agree with that. >> i want to make that explicit because some say that's what you got out of the cra.

>> it goes back to the business that if you want something, incentivize it. >> i just wanted to make it clear that we all agree that the community reinvestment act was good. >> let's see if the panel can go further. if these government incentive programs created distortions -- fannie mae and freddie mac admittedly came to the game later but they propelled it further -- would wall street have done quite as badly as it did in the absence of the political incentives that were out there? >> qualitatively, yes, quantitatively, no. fannie mae and freddie mac help them do it more but they did not do it because they were told homeownership was a good thing. they did it because it was a good way to make money. >> they existed because we thought homeownership was a good thing and a people could not finance it --

>> how much of this blame from the beginning of the conversation goes to the government sector and how much goes to the private sector? it seems the government sector propelled the private sector to some of its excesses. >> fannie mae and freddie mac were propelling that. >> let's go another step. >> the mechanics of that -- one of the great ironies is that fannie mae and freddie mac were created to securitize so we could get away from the regional mortgage markets that were supposed to be good. >> if the government political process propels the private sector to access as it would not have otherwise gone to, d isodd- frank too tough on the private sector and somewhat unnecessary if we don't have these government policies that propel the private sector to its excesses? >> you don't get to go first because you are biased. >> you respond first. >> the root of all evil is

money. bright people get attracted to money. wall street is a manufacturer of a way to make more money. some people resent that. if we come back another five years years for the 10 year reunion and then the 15 or the 20, dodd-frank was not a shot in the dark at a shot in the misty evening. like all the other stuff government does to stop behavior, if it is not on oversight and review and adjustment as what we per pose to regulate continues to change, i imagine some french thought them maginot line was a good buy. it constantly has to be reviewed.

vigilance and the willingness to be transparent and educate people making choices is our only alternative and from an historical point of view, we will make the mistakes over and over. >> i'm glad you asked that question. fannie mae and freddie mac got off. the first thing we got under my being chairman was to put fannie mae and freddie mac out of business and put them into receivership. we shut down the problem and stopped the bleeding. what you do going forward is still there. you are too pessimistic about fannie mae and freddie mac. once we stopped it, there is the value of the housing inventory. i don't that will not -- i did not think it would cost as much as you predicted in 2003.

>> putting him out of business was a good idea. >> it now will be a breakeven. >> so far. >> it looks that way. had we done it we would have been better off. nothing that we did in the financial reform bill whether you approve of it or not was punishing them for fannie mae and freddie mac. someone would have to tell me specifically what we did. we made it illegal to give bad mortgages. that's the only prohibition in the bill. there were other things that we said to increase your margins and capital. i think it was market oriented. >> you also saw wasn't institutions but the leadership and the direction it takes under the rules they play had changed. you had some go-go guys running the place making money.

>> you were too tough on wall street is one question and none of them went to jail. can i debate the winner of that argument? >> we will have semi finals. >> nothing we did i think penalize them for fannie mae and freddie mac mistakes. the harshness of it essentially said, except for the subprime mortgages, we did not stop them from taking any risk they wanted. we try to increase two things. the people who took the risk should bear the responsibility and they should have the money to back it up in terms of capital. >> that's after the fact because that's all you can do. >> we have just a few minutes. doug? what remains significantly undone and do you emerge optimistic about five years on

now or are you as scared as you ever were? >> i certainly think we are in far better shape than we were in 2006. part of that is simply cultural and memories will fade. one of my striking observations from the commission is markets failed the price risk. spreads were notoriously narrow. internally, attention to risk management fell apart. the number of times we had hearings with executives and talked to them about internal risk management, it was a disaster. some of it was dealt with legislatively but most of it was cultural. i am very worried about the future of housing finance. this remains untouched and on result is a terrible thing in my view. it is the single biggest domestic peace the international coordination remains problematic.

it is way too expensive and complicated for what we are getting so we are exposed there. when i worry, i worry about the europeans banking system and the ills it can visit upon the u.s. >> do you want to take this? >> to come full circle, many times we look at the symptoms and don't deal with the causes on a fundamental basis. dollars times politics, who gets what when and how and one of the fundamental rule structures is the tax structure. just as we outdated the earlier laws and you could repeal them but they almost don't apply anymore is the change. i think we need a wholesale

reevaluation of what we have in no way in which we separate people from their means in the tax structure and begin an equitable rewarding of investment in various ways that people can utilize their dollars and to let somebody put it into a mortgage expecting it to be building equity is crazy. to tax things that should not be taxed -- i think it is a good step but i think a lot of the problem is that this society is not addressing fundamentals in terms of a safety net or the tax structure or how people and the government coordinate pay for their senior years. you've got social security as a

financial structure and medicare as a senior healthcare structure. nobody looks at the fact that the healthcare structure is primarily acute-care and is not long-term and we should combine combine social security and medicare to create a long-term assistance to health care. we need to look at fundamentals because the world has changed. >> i have another question. 70 years from now after the next financial crisis and whoever has managed to water down. will they say we should go back to dodd frank? is it a piece of legislation that you're proud of? >> a quick semantic point. the way from which we separate people from their meanings, that is why we are called the ways and means committee. the international one -- whatever we think about what we have done, we have done a better job than most of the rest of the

world on the international side. one of the dangers is the business community -- and going back to our family analogy -- the business and financial community has come to some extent, adopted the mode -- adopted the mood of the teenage parent -- the teenage child against most parents. "england let me do it." we have to talk to each other about this. why i do think -- if you have been to a national airport legally there is a racist quote from carter glass and he was in the constitutional assembly, explaining why it is terribly

important not to use the -- not to let those "black people" -- i don't think that's the word he used -- don't let them vote. we are going to use these regulators to do with the problems we don't know about yet. he have a margin for this, risk retention there. i believe we have given the regulators the broad powers that are going to make it work. on the other hand, i don't think it is going to be all that relevant. >> i would like to exercise my prerogative and thank my fellow panelists. >> this could have been something completely different but it was fascinating.

generally in the television business the viewer clicks the channel between financial and reform. what is interesting about this from my perspective is this is not something ordinary people had to listen or think about five or six years ago. now what happens to the banks and bank regulation is a matter of public policy debates. click some of our former colleagues will probably want some record of you telling me when we could talk. >> what you don't know can't hurt you. >> exactly. >> thank you very much, folks. [applause]

>> the obama administration announced that gene sperling plans to leave in january. he will be replaced jeffrey zients. on the next washington journal, former cia operative. followed by alan gomez on immigration.

george mason university infessor talks about people washington who moved between careers and business consulting, politics, and government. >> let me focused on something called advanced persistent threat. it relates to what stewart was talking about. there are footprints that are left regarding behaviors that go on out there that are indications of something that will occur. one of the reasons the changes that need to be made in the cyber security posture that eight have been made -- that have been made is that we need to move to continuous monitoring and we need to move to be able to look at the precursor or the context being set.

defeatare never going to the cyber enemy, whether it is a nationstate, organized crime, any organization by having the private sector check for compliance box. that is inadequate. there has to be timely and continual information sharing. after all, the federal government relies on the private sector. >> the senate homeland security committee looks at where the next threats may come from saturday at 10:00 eastern. the story of the first female rocket scientist on book tv.

>> president obama met with the in year of kuwait today at the white house. they spoke to reporters about and otherion in syria issues for about 10 minutes. >> it is a great pleasure to welcome our friend to the oval office. kuwait is one of our most and important partners in the region and we have a very strong bilateral defense agreement as well as working together on a whole range of economic and

social and security issues. we have the opportunity to discuss a wide range of issues. obviously, at the top of the list was serious -- was the syria.on in ser our two countries are in agreement that the use of chemical weapons was a criminal it is absolutely important for the international community to respond in not only eterringing -- did t

the use of chemical weapons, but getting those weapons outside of syria. i shared with the emir my hopes that the negotiations currently taking place between the secretary of state and the foreign minister in geneva bear fruit.

but i repeated what i have said publicly, which is that any agreement needs to be verifiable and enforceable. we agreed that ultimately what is needed for the underlying conflict is a political settlement that allows ordinary syrians to get back to their homes to rebuild and to relieve the enormous suffering that has taken place.

i wanted to express our appreciation to the kuwaiti people for this humanitarian support they have provided to the refugees. we also have an opportunity to discuss other regional issues. to continued efforts facilitate negotiations between the israelis and the palestinians and arrived at a peace deal in that part of the world. we appreciated the wisdom and

engaging with the government of iraq and helping to improve and create peaceful relations between kuwait and iraq. and we also discussed ways that we can improve the economic prospects for people in the region. yemen, countries like who are experiencing great challenges. we appreciate the strength and and itsip of kuwait friendship and we're looking forward to cooperation in the future.

to -- it included

topics related to our bilateral relations, determination to achieve what is the best for the mutual interests of our countries. we also discussed the continued detention of the detainees and asked president obama to speed up the process of releasing them and also closing down

guantánamo. the positive developments related to the kuwaiti-iraq relations. we also discussed the security of the gulf region. consideration the current developments in the region.

we discussed the suffering of and thean people refugees and the importance of efforts to reach a peaceful solution and keep the region free from the danger of war. we also discussed the importance of achieving security and stability in the arab republic of egypt and support the constructive efforts.

we also discussed the peaceful -- the importance of focusing on international efforts to advance the plant negotiations to create positive elements in this regard in the continued efforts of the united states of the america and the peace process. >> thank you very much, everybody. >> some news about syria. russianry met with the foreign minister to work on the proposal to disarm the chemical

weapons. secretary kerry said we both agreed to do homework and meet again in new york around the time of the general assembly. >> let's try to understand the problem. the russians have been on the ground since the beginning. they have long-term military contracts. warm water need that port. military a strategic

interest in keeping their footprint in syria. we should try to eliminate some benevolent interest in being the peace worker. they are concerned about losing a strategic -- they have been on the ground providing it is in theird interest to make sure the first people who might show up at a chemical storage facility, the russians want to be the first one in the door. , ourroblem with syria interest have to align and we have to push the interest to align. you need a credible military threat in order to continue to and success.ation

that is exactly why the russian said they would not allow that to happen in the united nations. chapter seven. i think they are buying themselves -- they got exactly what they wanted on day one, which was time. toy needed a side -- assad have more time. it allows them to engage in deception campaigns on the ground. it allows them to supply arms, financing, and other things, and it sends a dangerous message to the opposition. i am skeptical. i hope it works. i do not think it will work if we do not have some credible threat to say, yes what, if this does not go well, we have a

whole other set of options and you will not like any of them. without them, this becomes a game of taking four months to decide when to meet. another six months to decide who gets to go into syria. that is not helpful to what is happening on the ground. >> do you agree there needs to be a credible threat? >> without a doubt. we are here because the threat of military force. opposition was starting to gain momentum, that is when russia wanted us to come to the table and to see what we could resolve. putin will only do what is good and second, russia. they know they are on the wrong side of the issue. it is about the only jurisdiction that works with russia.

when hezbollah got into the game, things changed. we are winning. that was why we decided to coordinate. help them change the tide. we know where we are, the president made the right decision. asidely leverage we have, 100,000 of his own people. pullinger's people are all of his strings. we have to verify and we need time limitations. this is a stalling tactic and we

have to continue with the threat of war or nothing is going to happen. we have to verify. that is going to be a tough situation. these are things we have to deal with. >> that is some of the event with a chair and the ranking member of the house intelligence committee. we will show it sunday morning at 10:35 eastern. joe biden will be the featured speaker at the stake fry hosted by tom harkin. you can watch that beginning at 3:00 eastern on c-span. >> c-span, we bring public affairs events from washington directly to you.

offering complete coverage of the u.s. house, all as a public service of private industry. created by the cable tv industry 34 years ago and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. you can watch us in hd. >> a look at stand your ground laws which have been enacted in 25 states. this is part of a series of hearings examining the laws. is a 2.5 hours. >> we are the coalition of racial and ethnic justice. i am from chicago. the coalition works with aba and non-aba groups on social justice issues involving equality, inclusion, and tolerance.

our major effort was facilitation of the task force on "stand your ground" laws. the task force came about because we felt it necessary to look deeply at the effects of stand your ground laws across the nations following the national conversation under merits and under consequences. i want to thank the dedicated cochairs, leeann buchanan and jack middleton, for their leadership. leeann is often sending e-mails at 3:30 or 4:30 in the morning. rachel patrick, our executive director, i want to thank you on your conscious and your work behalf of the coalition.

this is the fourth public hearing. we have had successful hearings in dallas, philadelphia, and chicago. the hearings have solicited voices from all sides to ensure the critical examination of perspectives without regard to political ideology. ultimately it will be the citizens of the state that have various versions of stand your ground laws, to decide the fate of their own stand your ground law. it is my hope that the task force reports will be a catalyst for a reasonable discussion of the issues and be able to make

reasoned decision making. before we begin we have the honor of having the president of the american bar association, a mentor of mine, laura belos, with us. i would ask you to step forward and welcome everyone. [applause] >> now that the important things are over, this is quite a serious event, as you all know. the aba and our country have a

responsibility to scrutinize any law with life or death consequences. this is such a law. thank you judge michael hyman, not just because i can root for chicago and say we are there, and again rachel patrick for leading this from the inside to make certain that we are including the right to people -- that means everyone -- into this discussion. and jack buchanan and leeann for being cochairs for the stand your ground task force. as judge hyman has just told you, the aba has no policy on standard ground laws. that is exactly the point of these hearings, to hear from the community. we want to examine the impact of stand your ground laws on public safety. we need to talk about the impact of stand your ground laws on

criminal justice systems. these are not easy questions but we have brought the experts to the table from all over the country over the last year. we will be issuing a report in 2014. meanwhile, the task force is expected to look at the terrible violence that we have seen in newtown connecticut, aurora colorado. this standard ground examination also gives us a chance to have a national conversation about gun violence. we know that three people are killed every hour by a gun. several people are injured every hour by a gun in this country. it is time for us to look at sandra ground laws, it is time for us to have a national conversation.

of this isn't an issue to be talked about only by lawyers. this is not an issue to be talked about only by our legislators and congressional representatives. this is a community, national, opinion leader conversation and a conversation that has to take place within our community. that is why this is so exciting. on an upbeat note we have jumped into this conversation with all the aba could muster him all the experts we could bring to the table. we hope to have a resolution to a problem that is touching every person in this country as of this minute. thank you, again, to the task force and a particular thank you to jack middleton and leeann buchanan for leading this task force. i look for to hearing the results of this hearing and reading your report in the near future. thank you all. [applause]

until recently, little to no attention has been paid to stand your ground laws. these laws are self-defense laws which expands the parameters of a self-defense and protection that can be used when one uses deadly force against another. these laws exist on the books in over 25 states across the united states of america and indeed have ignited a national debate. and forced individuals, communities, scholars, policy makers, and even the aba to grapple with many important questions, questions such as whether the policy concerns which underscored the enactment of stand your ground laws were

justified. whether stand your ground laws strike the correct balance between public safety and individual liberties. what impact if any is stand your ground laws have on the criminal justice system? do stand your ground laws make communities safer? these are important issues of the justice and the entities that form the task force thought the aba should look into by holding a series of public hearings and embarking upon a national study. you'll hear from a variety of stake holders and community leaders who will offer a diverse perspective on the areas that we heard laurel and judge hyman

just mention. oh before that, i would like to acting knowledge the members of the committee who are here today. i would like to introduce our assistant district of attorney from philadelphia. our task force reporter the professor of law. my co-chair, jack middleton. the managing partner of mcclain law firm and like to thank rachel stafford mcgee. she's put in countless hours and time and energy into making this project a success. so i hope that you enjoy the testimony here today. i hope the questions and issues raised by the speakers cause you to think a little more of the impact of stand your ground laws. and i would like to introduce the first speaker, the keynote speaker, ms. eva patterson.

the civil rights attorney and the co-founder and president of the equal zwris society. she previously served as the executive director of a lawyer's committee for civil rights. and she was part of a broad coalition that brokered the suit against race and racial discrimination by the san francisco fire department. i'm pleased to present eva patterson. >> good morning, how's everybody doing? welcome to san francisco. the weather will clear up by afternoon. don't worry. don't worry i'd like to say thank you to president bellow, to justice highman, to ms. buchanon, to the other presenters who were a cavalcade of first rate people who know a

lot of things about the law and justice and the like. i think it's fair to say that the reason we're here today is because of the murder of as his mother calls him trayvon benjamin martin. that was very disturbing for many reasons. it raised once again the issue of the great racial divide and highlighted the notion of stand your ground laws that i had not paid attention to until they were discuss in the case. people wrongfully say stand your ground was not an issue in the murder trial. if you follow the trial, you will notice that the judge did mention stand your ground and the jury instructions and if you listened to the reporting of some of the juror, they said that stand your ground really did enter their minds and turn -- whether or not to determine if mr. zimmerman was guilty or not. i will start with what stand your ground laws are. i have to say paul heroinedson and the district attorney, you

should give her a raise. he did a great job of comment tating on cnn and oh stations in the trial. i'm not a criminal lawyer and he was able to make things clear and he helped me a lot in this presentation. and my summer intern thomas cochran did a lot of work for me as well. i want to acknowledge his help. stand your ground law was tasked in florida in 205. i was listening to msnbc. there was a man in his trailer in hurricane isaac and he shot at an intruder and it took months and months to determine whether or not to prosecute hichlt and this single incident led to the passage of stand your ground laws in florida. they're now in 30 states, there are seven state where is the laws were pending. but after the murder of trayvon martin, everything came to a screeching halt for the advancement of misguided laws. i hope that will give the a.b.a. some firepower, so to speak, in

terps of stopping the laws, the murder and the subsequent acquittal of george zimmerman has made people think twice about this. as ms. buchanan pointed out, stand your ground laws make legitimate the use of deadly force in a place where you feel threatened in a place where one has the right be. i think the phrase i want to focus on is if you feel threatened. instead of having a duty to retreat, a person is justified in using deadly force when he or she reasonably believes it's necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm or to prevent the commission of a felony. there are lots of problems with this kind of a law. there's people more attuned with law enforcement who will give more texture to the problems of stand your ground laws. here are a few of the problems. it encourages vigilante law.

george zimmerman was the judge, jury, and executioner of mr. trayvon martin. the stand your ground laws allow that to happen. i was listening to msnbc this morning, apparently there was another incident of stand your ground where there were a bunch of people who ran across a person who had a stick and was threatening with a stick. most of the people left. one person stayed and ended up shooting and killing the threatening person. that person will not be prosecuted for murder because he can say he felt threatened. so one of the critical problems with the stand your ground law is that before that person would have had the impetus to leave, to go away. he could have safely gotten away as mr. george zimmerman could have as well. but the stand your ground laws allow people to stand, shoot, and murder with no consequences. another problem your stand the ground laws they do not have a deterrent effect. a study was done by texas a&m

that found that in stand your ground states, murders and manslaughters actually increase by 7% to 9%. so it doesn't deter crime at all. it actually results in more crime. another problem with your stand your ground law is that self-defense laws were adequate before the passage of the stand your ground statutes. you were able to use lethal force in self-defense if you felt pinned down or cornered but you had the only dpags to leave if you could leave safely. and if you could retreat from easily escapable situations. the stand your ground law now allows people to stand, fire, shoot, murder, and be out on the street with no consequences whatsoever. another problem with stand your ground laws is that in some states, it immuneizes you from civil litigation. so apparently in kentucky and other states, if you say i was standing my ground, you could not go after the perpetrator of

the crime or the murder. people said that there was a lots of controversy around the stand your ground law in the zimmerman case. one person speculates that the reason they didn't use it as a defense was that zimmerman would have had to get on the stage and stand and explain what he did, even though he didn't use it as a defense as i said before, the judge gave it great credence in her jury instructions and the jury was moved by that. so what i want to really spend time on, but there are going be two really amazing speakers later today who i hold extremely high regard who are going to go in more detail on this, john powell and jennifer ebber heart who are incredible scholars in the area of racial bias, implicit bias, unconscious races and the like. i want to talk about racial bias and the impact racially that the stand your ground laws have. and what i want to do is comment the aba and commend this task force because one of the things

you're looking at explicitly is the impact of stand your ground laws on the communities of color. i'm not a criminal lawyer, i'm a civil lawyer. but all of us are riveted on the trayvon martin case and heart broken and angry and upset. and the implication and connection of the stand your ground laws and the racial impact is why we're here today. when i come to speak at events like this, i feel very privileged because i feel i get to be in rooms where a lot of are not. you're going to be told things you're not going to hear in polite conversation. i can convey anger, dismay, sadness over what happened and the implications of the stand your ground laws. that's what i want to do. touch your hearts and minds and activate you all in your continued effort oh do something about the stand your ground laws. a researcher named dr. john

roman, a senior fellow at the justice policy center at the urban institute released a report last july. here are the statistics in stand your ground states. as i was rehearsing my remarks last night to myself to make sure i didn't run over time, i found myself pounding on my desk with anger. you'll understand why. in homicide where the shooter is white and the victim is black, it's found to be justified in 17% of the cases. bite shooter, black victim, justified 17%. black shooter, white victim, justified 1.4%. black shooter, white victim, justified homicide, 1.4%. in nonstand your ground states, a white shooter and black victim, it's justified only 9%. so when you have stand your ground laws, 70% justified white shooter, black victim.

nonstand your ground states, only 9%. now here's -- here's the other statistic that really had me very angry. this is fbi data that was provided by paul henderson. when an older white man kills a younger black man. older white man kills younger black man, it's deemed justifiable 49%. when an older black man kills a younger white man, it's deemed justifiable 9% of the time. it's not just black people feeling all sensitive and we're feeling so victimized as we often hear in these debates. i don't field like a victim. i'm up here with the aba talking to lawyers and judges. i do not feel like a victim. but these statistics are galling and troubling and why most of your black friends and the people who care about black people were so devastated after the trayvon martin situation.

basically we felt like the women verdict gave a license to kill black people. i wrote a piece about how i felt i'd been with a bunch of my black friends in a reading group. and we heard the verdict. i was upset but i felt very safe. i came back down and degraded society. look at a bunch of folks and thought, do they feel now that they can shoot me and they're going to get away with it? if i'm a young black man or an older black man, i feel that more poignantly. why does this happen? the two scholars i referenced, powell and ebber heart, will undoubtedly talk about this more. but a lot of it has to do with how black people are perceived. there's science out there that says if you look at my face, the -- the association you have is with criminality or aggression jennifer ebber heart has researched -- it breaks my

heart every time i hear about it. but if you're walking down the street as a black person, people who look at you associate your face with that of an ape. this is verifiable. the part of your brain that lights up when you see a snake or spider is the same part of your brain that lights up if you see a black person. jesse jackson said when he was walking down the street and he hears footsteps behind him, it -- he turns around and they're black kids, he's nervous. if he turns around and they're white kids, he relaxes. this isn't about o you white devils. this isn't about that. it's about the associations we have in our brains with black faces, black men, and the like. you remember amadou dee yeah low who was pulling out his wallet and shot 41 times. social science up research will show that that will happen not just with amadou diallo, but

black people generally. veronica, john, and i were in a conference in chicago in april. our friend shows a very disturbing video where police are looking at a simulation of a -- of a person who's threatening. the person has a stick. and the police officers to tell the person to stop. when the person is white, the police officers talk, talk, talk. when the person is black, the police officers unload their guns into the black person. this is what's going on. this is why stand your ground laws are so important in terms of being stopped and if you're allowed to use deadly force when you feel threatened and when most people feel threatened just by a black person showing up, then stand your ground laws are going to result in the loss of black life. how many of the black men in this room feel they have been stopped for no good reason by

police or other people or profiled in stores. any black man who does not feel that's happened to him? these are some of the most distinguished black people you'll find. imagine how a young boy in a hoody is going to be treated. let's put this together. i am almost done. this information is what had me pounding my hand in anger on the table. anger and pain. in in florida, less than 30% of the victims of justified homicide were armed. let me say that again. less than 30% of the victims of justified homicide were armed. less than 26% of the victims were committing a crime that led to the confrontation. in more than 63% of the cases, there was deemed an indisputable opportunity for the attacker to retreat. despite these facts, the homicide was still justified

according to the law. those statistics were borne out in a horrible reality with the murder of trayvon martin and the stand your ground laws, i believe, have that effect. this morning once again on msnbc, another incident happened in florida. many of us felt that this legalizes a form of lynching against black people. so i want to return to where i started. it's so important and we're so grateful that the aba is taking this on. i feel like we're not out here by ourselves as black folks. there's a larger issue. that's the faith and the judicial system and the legal system that black people mainly don't have. the pugh study that i'm sure you heard said that only 30% of white people were dissatisfied by the zimmerman verdict. 86% of black people were dissatisfied. we're told we live in two different americas and that

statistic -- those statistics bear that out. just to go to another level of disaffiliation and bad feelings that black people have about the justice system, we saw the shelby county voting rights case. we saw that two hours after the case came down, texas was rushing to pass more restrictive voting rights laws. we know what that's all about. we know the supreme court, the highest court in the country, basically sanctioned moves that will keep us from voting. so the aba in part is to give people confidence in the legal system. we don't have confidence in the legal system. we see that stand your ground laws are used against us. we see that george zimmerman is free. marissa alexander who fired a gun in the air because she was being beaten got 20 years. she was also prosecuted by the same person who moved the george zimmerman trial. so as you move forward -- i was

talking to the commissioner of the u.s. civil rights have to strategic about what states you go after. it's clear the trayvon martin case has changed people's consciousness. but you have a formidable enemy on this ground in the national rifle association. we saw how upset everyone was upset after sandy hook. we saw little happened because the nra is relentless. many, many artists are refusing to perform in florida until the stand your ground laws are revised. young people sitting and sleeping in at the state legislature. young people started the whole heightened consciousness about trayvon martin. somebody sent me an e-mail about it. yeah, okay. i know this goes on. but young people understood this was a problem and they mobilized and got people going. so thank you for having me here.

i didn't curse or cry as i thought i might last night when i was preparing. they wanted me to set the stage. i'm not an expert in this. i'm an expert in being black. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> eva, thank you kindly for your presentation. we very much appreciate you for highlighting the important consideration that the task force should take into consideration when looking at the impact of stand your ground laws on communities of color. and as you mentionled, we're remiss for not mentioning that the commissioner was indeed present so i would like to acknowledge him and thank him for being here. commissioner yalke is leading the u.s. commission on civil rights efforts into investigating the potential impact on stand your ground laws on racial and ethnic minorities. the next speaker is the

president of the national bar association which is the largest organization of african-american attorneys, ms. patricia rose yeah. she is the current general council for american general securities. the national bar association has been on the forefront of the national stage in addressing some of the issues related to stand your ground. i'm looking forward to hearing from her now. >> good morning. >> good morning. >> your mic on? >> yeah, it's on now, thank you. >> ms. patterson described and told about a lot of the thing and facts that i was going to testify on. so now i'm going to kind of alter my testimony to kind of

really let you know how the national bar feels about the stand your ground laws. in case you don't know, the national barre cently celebrated the 88th anniversary last week. we were founded in 1925. among our missions, primarily, we have the administration of justice as a protection of civil rights of all citizens in the united states. we're very, very disturbed by the stand your ground laws. as you know, there have been many people who have been killed and the killers free using the stand your ground defense. however, it wasn't until the trayvon martin case that these laws came to national attention. the two lawyers involved primarily in that case were

national bar association members, one being the past president daryl parks. we view these laws as a license to kill. mainly because the reason to establish the law is totally subjective. meaning if a person feels threatened, that's how do you quantify that? how do you know what one person is going to be threatened by and another not? so if you file threatened, you kill someone and say i felt threatened? during the trayvon martin case, again, as ms. patterson said, there wasn't a stand your ground defense asserted but instructions were given, etc., and the jury testified and made statements afterwards they did consider the stand your ground. but it's interesting that no one talked about trayvon martin's right to stand his ground. george zimmerman apparently, you

know, followed him and did all these things. then he was attacked and they got into an altercation. but at that point -- and if you were walking around and if someone was following you and approached you, maybe you want to defend yourself. but it's never been considered that trayvon martin might have had a right to stand his ground. these laws, we believe, allow kind of like a bully law. i can bully you and when you want to defend yourself, i can say i'm so afraid, i think you're going to hurt me so i'm going to kill you. it's just totally wrong. communities of color, particularly african-americans as ms. patterson pointed out, are disproportionately affected by these laws. we believe that the stand your ground laws have to be repealed. and amended if they're allowed to stand. there were no problems with the

self-defense laws that every jurisdiction has. the right to retreat the obligation to retreat is what's now the problem. you don't have an obligation to retreat. so, in other words, you can be like a superhero. provoke someone, get them to engage you. then say i'm afraid for my life. i'm going to shoot you and i'll be able to get away with it. much worse than the lynching that happened earlier in our history. because now it can be openly done and, you know, more than likely, according to statistics, when it's a racially mixed victim and aggressor, the aggressor if the aggressor is white, the victim is black, they're more than likely going to have a justified killing. not true on the other side.

we believe that the civil rights of all people are adversely affected by these stand your ground laws. we will do everything that we can to help amend and/or repeal these laws and have equal justice. this is very, very important for all of us. because if one of us is not allowed to have justice none of us will. we black people are singled out. we're just the first ones. once we allow this type of racial profiling and did krim nation to occur against black people. it's just a matter of time it's going to start affecting other people. we have to stop it, we have to protect all people. the stand your ground laws are the exact opposite of giving and allowing civil liberties.

the national bar association stands with you. and we applaud your efforts in this in having your hearings and addressing what policies may come out of the hearings. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you, patricia. the next speaker is yolanda jackson, the deputy executive director and diversity director of the bar association of san francisco. ms. jackson is a seasoned litigator, mediator, arbitrator, consultant trainer and facilitator and is well versed in issues relating to diversity. ms. jackson has served on the board of various legal and professional organizations throughout the country. >> thank you. good morning, everyone. thank you for coming out so early to grapple with such a complicated yet important topic. i'm pleased to be here on behalf of the bar association of san francisco. which is ap organization that's

141 years old and is far back as i can find records, we have always been involved in controversial and tough issues that are important. to preserve equal justice, equality, and diversity, not only in the legal profession, but in society more broadly. so that is why we are here today to be a part of this hearing. i would like to thank the aba coalition on racial and ethnic jus tills. and by the nature of its name, they are a group that focuses on race and ethnic justice. so thank you for being brave enough to have this conversation on a national level in front of a mixed crowd. and with a lot of thought leaders at the table on the market. my remarks will focus on four things. the first being race. and when he must recognize that is a huge factor in these discussions that we're having. the second will be on the unequal application of the laws

that exist throughout the country. the third will be to make us very strong statement that we need to study this problem and not shy away from it. and the fourth is that we need to solve the problem. so those will be the -- the framework -- that will be the framework for my comments. so as you heard a little bit about, historically the united states mandated the duty to retreat in cases such as this. that requires a person facing immediate danger to retreat before resorting to violent self-defense. essentially what stand your ground laws did was revoke that duty to retreat and have that use of force without the initial attempt to retreat. in many states, stand your ground laws offers immunity from prosecution and in fact a person could avoid trial uh altogether, on your stand your ground laws.

in some states, law enforcement can investigate the investigation. the law states no arrests can be made unless it's proven. please listen to this carefully -- unless it is proven that force was unnecessary. so talk about having to prove a negative. as leanne mentioned, there are 26 stapts in the united states that have either stand your ground laws or stand your ground doctrines. since the trayvon martin case, the one that sparked this discussion. it's important to note that they were the first state to have stand your ground laws in 2005. the impact of the stand your ground laws has been to send a message to our society that our commute -- that in our communities, someone who is armed potentially has the right to use firm arms, even if there is a way to exit from the situation. setting a more relaxed standard of self-defense encourages

tragic mistakes, poor justice, and perhaps vigilanteism. some of the state laws have taken historical legal doctrine that made it oh can to use force to protect yourself in your space, that means your home and your car. as mentioned, it's important to look at the notion of what it means to feel threatened. but i think it's also equally important to look at where these stand your ground laws apply. and, again, traditionally it used to be okay if you protected yourself with force, if you were in home or your car or as i'm calling it, in your space. but now, these laws have allowed people to respond with deadly force in reaction by taking it to the streets. that, i think, is where we're seeing a lot of our problems in 2010, five years after the first stand your ground laws were enacted in florida, justifiable

homicide busy ceruleans using fire arms doubled in states that have stand your ground laws, whereas justifiable homicide fell or remained the same in the states without these same laws. the top law enforcement officer of this country, attorney general eric holder stated, these laws senselessly expand the concept of self-defense by allowing or encouraging violent situations to escalate in public, such laws undermine safety. president barack obama said it best -- it's time to examine state and local laws to see if they encourage the kinds of altercations and tragedies that we saw in the trayvon martin case rather than confuse altercations. deadly force leads to a disproportionate impact on african-americans in our community. we recognize the problems with stand your ground laws lie in

how they are applied, how they are applied when people are arrested, when they're chargeled, when they're prosecuted, when the jury verdicts come down. and how they're sentenced. so what actions can we take? although this is not a practical problem, our recommendations by the bar association of san francisco are very practical. first we need to study the problem. state-by-state, we need to consider if stand your ground laws will be repealed or modified and amended. review the impact along racial lines. study the problem. look at various levels whether the prosecution from verdict through sentencing have been applied equally across racial lines or put another way, whether these laws have are a impact on african-americans or other racial minority group us. this includes reviewing anecdotal outcome like the

anecdotal case like eva referenced. review the impact of the laws on whether or not they increase homicide. you can call them justifiable homicide if you like. but look at the impact they've had on killings. mandate the gathering of data in order to assist on whether the laws have had an increase on justifiable homicide. conduct a national investigation. have the department of justice or other appropriate u.s. commissions such as the commission on civil rights and thank you, michael yalke for taking a leadership role on that, to look at the problem. i'm happy to hear that michael pointed out to me before we started out this morning that they believe they will be affected because they have subpoena power. they have the situation they need before they can make the right decisions. where appropriate, modify stand your ground laws to restrict or prohibit where individuals have the right to defend themselves. for example, in north carolina, they prohibit the use of deadly

force against law enforcement. bails bondsmen and landlords. in wisconsin, versions of -- the wisconsin version does not extend to public spaces. encouragement on discussions of modifications that would severely restrict or prohibit where individuals have the right to defend themselves with deadly force. and timely where appropriate, repeal stand your ground laws in those states where it's found that stand your ground laws have led to increase of homicide or where application of the laws across racial lines exist. thank you very much for inviting us to speak with you this morning. and i am rolling up my sleeves and getting readdy for this fight show we can get to the core of what the issues are and begin to solve the problem. so thank you very much. >> thank you, mrs. jackson, for highlighting a very comprehensive plan of action and we'll take all of your comments

and suggestions into consideration. next speaker is judge arthur burnett. a retired judge and the national executive director of the national african-american drug policy coalition. the former judge of the district of columbia superior court and also a former adjunct professor of law at catholic university and howard university. judge burnett? >> good morning. >> good morning. >> i come before you this morning with almost 55 years at the bench -- 55 years a a lawyer, 40 years on the bench, but i have a disclosure to make that's probably more valuable than that. in that at 17 years of age as a busboy at howard johnson restaurant, i was suspected of being a burglar, breaking in to howard johnson restaurant at 11 at night when i was a busboy

left by the owner to clean up the place and lock it up. fortunately, the officers arrested me and took me to the home of the owner first. the owner said he wished i hasn't gone to college. if i had been belligerent or acted in a oppositional matter to the two police officers who jumped out of the squad car and pointed guns at me, i may not be alive here to talk to you and tell you about my career. i was compliant and i lived to sigh another day. that story is told in the hepry gates book. second incident as a pledgee to a from a terpty in howard university in a scavenger hunt at 1:00 in the morning with a colleague or another pledgee who had borrowed a car from his father's garage.

which he did not have the registration for it. i spent three hours in custody again because they would not take black boys' words, even college students, that we were pledgees and the car was not stolen, that, in fact the driver's car, the father was working on the car as a repairment. we were released from police custody until 4:00 in the morning. i tell that story when i talk across the country. to youngsters about not being oppositional or defiant, belligerent, boisterous or disorderly. at age 33, i became the first general council over the metropolitan police department to put a lid back on washington toll lowing the assassination of martin luther king. i hope i'm not biassed because of my own practical experiences. but i tell you that i ended up in the justice department in the

attorney general's honest program. ended up being advisor to bobby kennedy and monitoring the martin luther king movement to make sure it wasn't sabotaged or subject to inclusion by the communist party to overtake it. so i try to teach young black boys about how to react to police authorities across this country. for more than ten years i teved as a prosecutor for the u.s. attorney's office and the justice department. then they became the first african-american united states magistrate judge in the hiss history of the nation. i often look back and say how many young black boys lives were lost who could have had a promising career like i had. then, served on the superior court for 25 years.

after about 10 or 11 years on the superior court, marian wright edleman per sbad -- persuaded me to retire. and then went on to help found the national african-american drug policy coalition to the creation being the national bar association to create a conglomerate of black american organizations working together in unison and today we're 25 organizations strong representing over a million black professionals to deal with the problems of substance abuse in america and criminal justice reforms and juvenile justice reforms in this country. one of the issues that concern us in the criminal justice reform is the subject of this discussion today.

based on my ten years or more as a prosecutor and 40 years on the bench, and i've had hundreds of homicide cases, both as a prosecutor and as a judge, the self-defense common law approach in a duty to retreat has proven to be adequate in all of the cases i dealt with by the hundreds. and, indeed, the -- the person's life, death results, that's irrevocable. and i wonder -- as a result of this law, how much human capital and prowess we have for the people who are in fact killed. the focus of this problem in this trayvon martin case is the composition of the jury. was it really a true cross section of the community? the supreme court justified six-person juries, but that's really to four of what jury

composition can be in noncapital cases. citizens of this country can vote to put legislators in office to require 12-person jury with people with like experiences and backgrounds that understand the black experience, the negro or colored experience in this country. they can assess the credibility that's different of the five white woman and one latino woman who served on the jury in the trayvon martin case. i have advocated we abolish preemptory challenges because they're used as way of getting rid of people by way of, quote, profiling that maybe fave troobl black defendants. so therefore, a close question of jury compositions in this country. i taught two law schools for a total of 24, 25 years.

and i urged my black law students to contemplate public interests and running and becoming legislators and encouraging all eligible people who can vote to vote. no more important duties under the american constitution than the duty to vote or the duty to serve on juries. we need to give lessons that a person gets a summons to a jury duty shouldn't endeavor to get out of it or try to shirk jury duty. because jury duty can reflect the life and liberty of individuals. and finally, the issue of gun violence. it may be that back when we found it, the bill of rights, there was a question of concern of tyranny of the government and people having guns in their home to protect themselves against radical government. but today's democracy and the demographics in this country raises the question whether the fear and tyranny of a government in maintaining a national record

for who owns a gun justifies the life we have lost in this country and the capital potential talents and abilities of people who are killed by gun violence in this nation. the national african-american drug policy coalition with the national bar association has a catalyst, but also included in the national medical association dentists, psychiatrists, black school educators, a all of these organizations are working in unison to speak with a united voice to add dress not only the issues of stand your ground laws but to reflect the true cross section of the american public. and to deal with the gun violence issue with reference to national certification. to make sure we keep guns out of the hands of people who will deprive people of the capital investment and all of the citizens. thank you very much.

[ applause ] >> thank you, judge burnett. i will note that judge burnett's article that he referenced, "a judicial perspective on needed jury reforms to meet the commands of the 20 the 1st century" can be found on page 19 of your program books that you should have received when you registered. the next speaker is mark billpart. the senior program associate who supports the boys and men of color team at policy link. mark is co-director of the leadership and sustainability institute for black male achievement and he has specific expertise in supporting and developing the policies and practice to strengthen the field and further race and gender equity in areas of health, education, employment, and juvenile justice. mark? >> thank you, good morning, everyone.

if i had known my picture would have been plastered up there, i might have given you a different one. so thank you, ms. buchanan, for inviting me in, hosting this meeting. at policy link. it's a national nonprofit research and advocacy organization that's focused on advancing social and economic equity. we're headquarters in oakland, california and we're a national entity. in our work, we're specifically focused on working on behalf of people and people of color. this issue hoff stand your ground laws touches at the core of what we're about. i'm going to frame my remarks in two specific areas and talk a little bit about how we got here and what's happening within the advocacy landscape.

i'm not an attorney. many of the issues we touch on are legal issues or are related to legal institutions. but what we really do is focus on policy advocacy. in that vein, i want to share what is happening and how the stand your ground laws have essentially been proliferated across the country. ms. patterson mentioned the nra earlier. and, you know, at a high level, i think, you know, she characterized it rightly. but there are so much more behind the nr a's involvement with stand your ground that i want to share so marian hammer, an nra lobbyist and first female president, wrote and lobbied for florida's stand your ground law. and after florida's stand your ground law was implemented, the nra declared it was such a success they wanted to spread it throughout the country. and in doing that, in seeking

the spread of these -- these stand your ground laws, the nra began to partner with alec, the american legislative exchange council, in order to do this. and alec is essentially a conservative right wing entity that is basically implementing the right wing agenda in several states throughout the country. so they develop model policy that fits within the right wing or conservative framework. and help with legislators. help legislators to implement that policy in certain places. they also assist legislators and candidates that sort of fit their profile to run for office. this is a huge mechanism, if you will. that the conservative folks in this country have used as a tool

to advance their agenda. and it's one that i think we need to be very mindful of. and so as you think about the stand your ground laws and how they've begun to be advanced in different parts of the country, i think we need to think about the political nature of what's happening here. uh so according to several news articles like "the washington post," distanced himself from the martin case saying was not involved in florida law, but the minutes of the meetings describe something different. the castle act throughout the states and the 2007 legislative scorecard highlight the introduction and adoption of florida law as one of the group's successes, these are minutes of the meetings. after the passage of florida's law, the nra and other

conservative groups have worked in many other places as i said earlier to advance these laws. and there are heard varying numbers from 26 to 30. there are some estimates that say stand your ground laws passed in 32 places. including alabama, arizona, florida, ga, indiana, kansas, kentucky, mississippi, etc., etc. so when we think about all of this, i thit's important to know that these are entities that aren't necessarily working alone. they're working in tandem with corporations. they're working in partnership with other professional associations such as yourselves. and so we need a coordinated strategy and approach to repeal them and bring them down in terms of fostering justice in our society.

in terms of the current advocacy efforts that are under way, there are several things that are happening throughout the country, several bright spots if i'd like to call them. and commissioner yalke's investigation is one of them. so thank you for that.

f this was a political -- a

political effort. a power play on their part. so that's what it will take in order to counter that. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you very much, mark. you're going to do a bit of a switch and have the next few

speakers come to the dais. david mohammed, district attorney george garcon, bob elco. as the speakers come forward, i want to talk about the highlights. mark just mentioned it's important to consider what policy makers are doing and what grassroots organizations are doing to address some of the issues concerning the impact of stand your ground laws on communities and just dictions where they exist, encouraged us to consider the statistics and how they bear out in the analysis of the impact of stand your ground laws, not only in the communities of colors but specific groups such as the african-american group and particularly black males who may be disparately impacted by stand your ground laws. ms. jackson also encouraged us to conduct a very comprehensive legal analysis and also to take into consideration the empirical

data that may support the policies that are enacted at the state level. our next set of speakers have now sat down. our first presenter is going be david mohammed. david is a leader in the field of criminal justice. violence prevention and youth development. david is the ceo of solutions inc. which is a technical term that provides philanthropic work to agencies. david is also the coordinator for the statewide coalition on juvenile justice advocates to see california alliance for youth and community justice.

david? the tragedy of the murder of 17-year-old unarmed trayvon martin has sparked wide and needed debate about race, guns, and the proliferation of state policy that encouraged violence. a teenager walking home from the school was racially profiled, confronted, shot, and killed. the assailant was let free and one of the jurors said themselves, zimmerman, quote, got away with murder. one of the main reasons it's been no justice in the murder of trayvon is the the so-called stand your ground laws.

these laws have not come about because of the citizens of the states wanting them. but because of the injection of the big money from the gun lobby. the nra and alex as my friend and partner talked about, has spent millions of dollars in florida and other states to pass laws that promote guns and violenc i don't see a deeper conspiracy other than the gun lobby is trying to sell more guns. since the sandy hook shooting and the verdict -- the zimmerman verdict, gun sales have reached incredible proportions throughout the country, but particularly in stand your ground states. there's no concern for public

profits and the policies of the gun lobby. i want to go a little beyond stand your ground in my discussion as well. another reason trayvon was killed was because he was black. had trayvon been white, he would not have been profiled, stopped, and shot. if he had, george zimmerman would certainly be in prison today. there have been social commentators said that black america should focus on the senseless violence on the black community, not on the racist killing of trayvon martin. that's an absurd assertion. we must be passionate about stopping both. we must aye light and work to end all violence. we need sensible gun safety legislation. we heard a lot about this after sandy hook and several other mass shootings, they bare repeting. we need universal background checks and sensible waiting periods on gun purchases. we need to ban the assault weapons that have no place in

the public and outside of the war zone. we need to limit the size of firearm magazines and something that hasn't gotten enough attention, we need to increase the federal research into gun violence. the center for disease control's pathetic research on gun violence which is a public health crisis is another result of the gun lobby's huge and destructive reach. they tried to reduce the budget of cdc in regards to research on gun violence and they've been successful. this is the area that needs much, much more attention. in addition to passing common sense gun safety legislation and policies, we must urgently address the daily carnage of gun violence and cities across america. we should acknowledge and celebrate the current historic low rates of violence, homicide in america, there remains an epidemic level amount of shooting particularly in places like oakland and chicago. we must increase the level of

services, supports, and opportunities by those besieged by violence. we need to fundamentally change these neighborhoods. we must alleviate concentrated poverty. we need to improve schools and the quality of education. we must invest and develop in these communities real in meaningful ways so they're not food deserts that also have inferior schools and a liquor store on every corner, drugs and guns accessible. we must reverse the decades-old trend of spending billions of dollars on ineffective, harmful, and racially disproportionate incarceration and redirect those funds on developing neighborhoods, families, and interventions that are innovative and proven effective. there are blocks in mark that are the most impoverished but

the government spends millions of dollars every year to incarcerate individuals from those blocks. and there's been a project called the million dollar blocks projects which shows the most impoverished neighborhoods with millions and millions, not just neighborhoods but blocks, single blocks with millions of dollars spent on incarceration. if they were to be used to better education, create jobs, support families, improve infrastructure in all of the same neighborhoods, we will see a massive difference and further decreases in violence. massive incarceration is senseless and expensive. if we invest on what does work, we'll see significant change and improvement. the challenge is, it takes political will. most of the politicians don't seem to have the will to do the

right thing. thankfully the american people do. we must marry the will of the people with those who make and govern the laws and policies with our city, states, and federal government. i want to highlight a few things, particularly in california, but for the country. one is there is building momentum to have a ballot initiative or state legislation to put back in the hands of the judiciary the decision to charge youth as adults because most of our d.a.'s aren't like my good friend and colleague here to make right decisions, probably one d.a. in the state who make right decisions on charging youth and adults so we need to put it back in the hands of judges who look at the evidence and make good decisions because the evidence of young people's brain development and decision making is clear that we shouldn't be wholesale charging young people and adults.

there's an enormous amount of research that shows controls for other factors that incarceration decreased the likelihood of high school graduation aned creases the likelihood of later adult incarceration. why am i talking about all of this in the stand your ground hearing. one, the issue of gun violence, yes, is absurd when you have a george zimmerman. when you have a man who killed oscar grant on a park platform on the face down. but we have the daily carnage that took the life of a 20-year-old father and 1-year-old son two days ago in oakland. and we must intervene in the daily carnage and often caused of it, the racially disproportionate injust administration of the policies in america. so i want to thank the aba coalition on racial and ethnic justice and the stand your ground task force for allowing me this opportunity.

i hope we take things away to do and give hope and opportunity for our young men, thank you. >> thank you, david. the first latino to hold the office in san francisco and the nation's first police chief to become district attorney. district attorney guston has a 30-year career in law enforcement and has successfully lowered crime rates in all of his positions, both in law enforcement and as the district attorney. he's created three ground breaking initiatives which have caught the attention of communities across the united states and other governments. the alternative sentencing

program, the neighborhood courts and neighborhood prosecution program and the county level to begin addressing the high rate of recidivism rates in california. >> thank you, everyone. >> good morning. >> thank you, your honor. show good to have a judge in the room. keeps us all in line very quickly. but it's hard coming to this discussion here after so many very well informed speakers that already cover so much ground. and i want to begin by saying i think yolanda jackson and david just spoke to what i believe is the primary problem that is race and america and the equal application of the law. but i think there's a secondary issue. david talked about it. i'm going to continue the dialogue. that has to do with guns, the accessibility of guns, and gun

lobby. i have to tell you that the stand your ground laws, while they are take certainly a different configuration in the last few years, the reality is they have been on the books for many, many years. california has very, very similar laws that have been on the books for many years. now the difference between what occurred in california and what occurred in florida and 20 other states at this point, i think it eight to be a focus of attention here. because it has been the path, the journey, as to how the laws have become effective and how they're being implemented that i believe has led not only the outcome of the tragic event involving trayvon martin, but

frankly very tragic events that we're not talking about here today. that has to do with who is supporting the law and how the law actually gets implemented. if you look at the california law and the florida law, if you look at the essence of it, they're almost indistinguishable. in fact, i would tell you not only do people in california do not have a duty to retreat. that was well established for judicial decisions all the way back to 1961. but you have the ability to pursue the alleged attacker which you don't have in florida. so arguably some of the laws are more permissive than they are in florida and some other places. the laws in the state of california and many other places were the result of judicial decisions clearly coming back to common law and while it is true

that self-defense in common law did have a duty to retreat, the retreat has been removed. so many years ago in many places, but we haven't seen the outcomes that we're seeing this 20-some states where we have legislation that was created as a result of aggressive lobbying by the gun industry. and the dire consequences of that. if you look at the 20 some states where the stand your ground laws are legislateively implemented through gun lobby, this is a place where we're seeing different results. we're seeing as it was stated earlier, a texas a&m study indicated that homicide in the state have gone up by roughly 8%. somewhere between 7% and 9%. obviously what has been said by

many speakers earlier, the unequal application of the law where african-americans tent to be generally impacted negatively more so than any other group when these laws are applied. i think it is important to recognize that it is not so much the stand your ground laws that have given us the problems that we have today, but it's the gun lobby and the access of guns and the promotion of guns in our culture. because i indicated before, you can go back decades in california and you have very similar laws but you have the outcomes and the impact of those laws are having are very, very different. i believe that in order for us to really address this issue. again, i'm going to say something i said in the beginning because it think it bears repeating. putting aside the fact that i personally have the conviction,

the race, and the unequal application of the law are really the 500-pound gorilla in the room. but understanding that that is a very complicated issue that i don't believe this group is going to be able to fix overnight, i want to focus on the second part of it, on the one i think we can have a greater impact. that's that we need to deal with thoughtful gun legislation in conjunction with dealing with stand your ground laws because the two are so well connected and i don't think you can address one without addressing the other. i believe that certainly in the legal profession, we have both the moral imperative and the legal obligation to continue to raise this issue and continue to talk about it. i don't think it's good enough to say the gun lobby is so strong, we're going be able to deal with that issue. we need to continue to deal with that issue because it's so important that we do so.

i this i if we take the gun lobby on and we deal with the issues of stand your ground conjunctively, we'll be able to have a much better result and for that is the reason i'm here today. i'm honored for the opportunity to be around people who can speak to this issue better than i ever could. thank you so much. [ applause ] >> thank you, mr. district attorney. our next speaker is bob alcoe, a career journalist. he spent 30 years with the associated press and now is the court reporter at the san francisco chronicle. bob received his j.d. and did pass the bar exam so he's among the attorneys in the room. and he's also scheduled to receive a very prestigious award in a few hours. he's going be the legal

representative from the american society -- bob, congratulations. >> thank you. >> i wanted to elaborate on the law that he was just discussing. i hasn't been aware before being encouraged to look into it in the wake of the trayvon martin shooting that we have anything like that. it turns out that we do. as a product of homicide laws. but the instruction, if i can get it here, from calcrem, 3470 says that in a case of a defendant who says that he or she acted in self-defense because of reasonable belief of danger, death or serious bodily injury, quote, is entitled to stand his or her ground and

defend himself or herself and if reasonably necessary, pursue an assailant until the danger has passed, even if safety could have been achieved by retreating. the local language to pursue an assailant as the district attorney said. this has been a fixture of california jury instructions since the 19th century. the 1897 california supreme court language addressing this. one of the differences between california and florida and the post 2005 legislation that's taking effect in more than 20 states. one is that you're entitled to a

pretrial hearing. mr. zimmerman did not vail himself of that. it's possible to go before the judge and win civil liberties from that as well. there's a more practical difference. it's the culture of maybe shown by the fact that florida's law was passed by legislative action by lobbying. and it sends a message to the courts to show great defense to the defendants who claim self-defense. it's also the availability of guns. in florida, there's little restriction to carry a gun concealed in public. in california, a great bit of difficulty. those laws are under challenge. we don't know how it's going to turn out. the fact is that the stand your ground law in california is little known. it hasn't had a lot of impact. hasn't been interpreted very

much by courts, but there it is, it exists. when i found out it doesn't exist, i tried to find out if somebody wanted to do anything about it. there was a logical place to ask. a legislator announced about a month ago that he was going to sponsor a legislation to boycott florida, for california to boycott florida on behalf of the black caucaus. until they repealed and made changes in stand your ground. i thought, well, go close to home. i called holderman's office to see if you might want to do something about the california legislation. the california law. i'm still waiting for a response, quite possibly. maybe this is the sort of symbolic action that's easier to

take when the target is 3,000 miles away than it is when it's closer to home when you might have to take on the gun lobby. the other thing is labels. these are called the stand your ground laws by in large. the jury instruction refers just in those terms. but it's the kind of law that could be labeled in -- it could be described as any number of things and the gun violence, for example, calls them shoot first laws. stand your ground appeals to -- you're asked to put yourself in the person of the defendant. we can identify that. we can stand our ground. the other person who is the person who constitutes the threat. this sort of thing comes up a lot.

particularly for journalists. meaning the victims' bill of right righ rights and several laws were callled that. it's turned up since mainly a initiative to make it more difficult to challenge illegal searches. how about marcy's law or jessica's law or all of these laws that are sort of named after victims of crime ms. really they don't have too much to do by those who were victims of the crimes and the prosecutors to span prosecutions and limit defenses and the like. i'm saying for journalists in particular and in the public discussion is probably a good idea to debate how we're going to refer to the laws. i don't have a substitute label for stand your ground particularly. you know, the obama care debate. do we want to refer to the

federal health care law by a president's name? or do we want to call it the affordable care act? probably neither one. do we want to describe what these things do. these this ought to be an element that we can discuss rather than just refer to stand your ground. and of course people want to stand our ground. maybe say a little bit more of what the laws do so it will be a little easier to analyze and think about changing them, thanks. >> thank you, bob. our next speaker is judge demetrius shelton who served as the judge for the city of oakland. he has extensive experience in representing governmental entities as demetrius formerly served as the deputy city attorney for the city of oakland for 11 years and served as

special count counsel to the oakland police department and lead counsel to a number of agencies. judge shelton? >> good morning, everyone. i am demetrius shelton, administrative law judge for the state of california. i'm a past president of the national bar association, a former vice president of the state bar of california. the oldest and largest mandatory bar association in the country.

past president of the united states association of past lawyers. and member of the 100 black men of america. and i come before you this morning a reflection of many to urge this assembly to join bar associations across the nation, members of the fl legislature itself and the president and eric holder calling for an immediate review and fix to these broken and statistically often failed stand your ground laws. i submit to you that whatever their intent -- whatever their intent, they are having failed consequences. ones that we must not ignore. highlighting the problematic laws is the fact that we have a law in place that has allowed a young innocent child to be unlawfully killed and his murderer set free. colleagues, we cannot stand for

this. as lawyers and lawmakers are representing some of the best and brightest legal minds thist here on this date, august 9, 2013. again, i 2013, we cannot sit back and i go or feign ignorance to this fact and allow such tragedies to continue. these laws must be addressed and fixed. an aggressor cannot hide behind these laws. if the stand your ground laws have some utility as some have suggested, and i'm not sure they do as we have the defense of self-defense, then the stand your ground laws as we collectively refer to them, must be amended to fix this glaring loophole. i submit to you as many states as written, analysis of these laws suggest they do no more than to promote vigilantes and protect the aggressors.

it is the stain on our legal history to have such outcomes as that in the case of trayvon martin. and even more outrageous yet telling is where you have cases like in columbia, south carolina where a burglar murders the man whose home he invaded and the lawyers argued stand your ground as a defense as they said the burglar feared for his life. surely this is not what the originators haed in mind. but it does evidence the stretch that the current language allows. surely this is not what we as the gatekeepers of justice will stand for. we must put a glaring halt to such a detrimental evolution and application of these laws. i've had the privilege of leading and listening to the martin family. the proud father, tracy martin, the amazingly strong mother, sabrina fulton. and the gifted brother, javalis

fulton. i stand with them and by them in this struggle, as should we all. we should all keep them in our prayers. most parents want their child to leave their mark on the world and go down in history. but not in this way. i ask we keep them in mind as we analyze this issue. this is real, not just textbook or academic debate. i was at the national bar association dinner last week when it was announced that trayvon's brother, travaris announced he wants to be an attorney and plans to go to law school. as i looked directly across at him and felt pride and joy in that moment and reading the promise was made and bear witness to the strong resilience that historically so many have had, i grew saddened in that not one -- not one but both brothers should be here, both should be

displaying their gifts and promise. many questions came to mind at that moment. two of which were, one, how can we promote our line if we don't first protect it? and two, i thought as have so many, what if what happened to trayvon martin happened to me or my brother? what if as a teenager during many many walks to the corner store for soda pop, chips, candy, someone followed, stalked, accosted me, in the end i was left dead for no reason and he was not held responsible. ask yourself if this is your child, your loved one, would you want the killer, the aggressor, the vigilante to walk free. then ask yourself if you think the stand your ground laws promote justice and fairness. i submit they do not and ask

that we, allel of us assemble todayed from our varying backgrounds and disciplines, draw together from the application of the law send the message to the members of our legislator to our congress to fix these broken laws. i asked we do this with one voice juaned message. show our respect for every life and fix these laws as we would any law that demonstrate that it does not further justice equality and fairness of the law. colleagues, thank you for your time and consideration in my request. >> thank you, judge shelton. we're going to do a switch again to bring forward our next four speakers. dr. jennifer ebberhart. judge john lakin from florida,

and jeff adagi. while the speakers come forward, i would like to recognize one of the task force advisory members who has joined us, professor cynthia lee. if you would stand. she is a -- she is a well-known expert in the area of criminal law and the author of murder and reasonable men. professor lee is published several articles on criminal law issues and criminal racial bias. to take away from the last group of speakers, they raise some important points that i wish to reiterate. bob encouraged us to think about the labels on smisk pieces of legislation and how these labels may cause the public to maybe misunderstand how and when laws operate. so that's definitely an important point that the task force is going to look at, bob.

and the other takeaway is to scrutinize whether or not these laws may promote vigilanteism or aggression in public spaces. so thank you to the last group of speakers. our first individual presenter is going to be dr. jennifer ebberhart. you heard mention and others that it she's currently an assistant professor and she received her phd. in psychology from harvard. she conducts research on racial stereotyping, prejudice, and stigma. she's examined how stereotypes and associations with black americans may interplay with criminality and can influence visual perception, attention, and memory. she explored this topic not only with members of the public but also with law enforcement agencies to help them in making the determinations when they respond to incidents. >> thank you. thank you for inviting me.

thank you all for coming. for many decades, social psychologists have studied the associations between blacks and crime. in the 1940s, they conducted a classic city duh. they showed an image of a white man and black man standing in the middle of a subway car in the discussion. the white man held a razor in his hand. later in the study, when the researchers removed the image from sight and asked them to try to remember many of you remember the blackman holding the razor. the association between blacks and violence and crime is so strong that it changed their

memory of what they saw. associated with threats of violence. stand your ground laws give people leeway on what constitutes a threat and how to act upon those perceived threats. such laws can easily render blacks vulnerable. the association between blacks and threats are not only influences people's memory, it can influence what they see, where they look, and how they respond. so, for example, in my own lab in stanford, we found that simply exposing people to black faces facilitates their ability to see weapons.

when you fwring them in, exposing the black faces beforehand helped them to detect the grainy manuals of guns better. this is not only for people high in prejudice, but people who are low in prejudice. we get the same effects regardless of prejudice level. in the association between blackness and threat, not only influences the weapon detection, it can influence decisions to shoot. in other labs across the country, researchers have examined this in the shoot don't shoot computer simulations. and 234 these studies researchers show study participants' images in black and white people holding guns and holding harmless objects. and the participants are asked to press the computer key board key labeled shoot if they see a person holding a gun or to press a key labeled don't shoot if

they see that person holding a harmless object. and, josh carell and others have found that people are faster to shoot a black man with guns than they are to shoot a white man with guns. they found that when people make an error on this task, they're more likely to shoot a black person who has no gun than they are to shoot a white person who has no gun. so the association between blacks and threat not only influences the weapon detection, it also influences the use of force. in our lab, we found prompting people to think about crime can produce this intentional bias that causes people to shift their attention towards black faces and away from white faces so that we found that simply

getting people to think about crime places black male faces under surveillance. initially we found these effects with college students who served as the study participants. but we also found these effects the same effects with police officers. when you prompt police officers to think of arresting, capturing, shooting, they're drawn to the black face. so the -- the honorable judge here told a story earlier this morning that inspired me to tell my own story. so i'm going to stop here for a second. my husband is a law professor at stanford. he was invited to teach a two-week class in harvard in the winter break. so we went there as a family.

son looks up and says, i

hope he does not rob the plane. i said, what did you say? i said, what? why would you say that? daddy would not rob a plane. he said, i know. i said, why would you say that? he looked at me with a sad face and he said, i do not know. i do not know why i was thinking that. racialliving such stratification that even a 5 year old can tell you what is supposed to happen next. even with no racial animus, the black crime association remains. it creeps in. world,ng how we see the how we act upon it. how we make sense of it.

it can also influence what crime policies we see as fair and appropriate. one last study. my collaborators and i presented people with a crime policy. and we asked them whether they supported it. we told them about a supreme court case that the court was deciding on at the time, and it was a case that involved sentencing, juvenile to life in prison without the possibility of parole. and we conducted this study as the court was deciding on this issue, but before they had actually issued a ruling. two casesk one or that the lawyers presented in court. we took the case of a 14-year- old name joe sullivan. and we described joe sullivan. our participants.

and we outlined the key features of his crime. in fact, we only change one word in the entire study. we described joe sullivan as a black juvenile defendant or a white juvenile defendant. when joe sullivan was described as black, our study are dissidents v0---participants viewed juveniles as more similar as adults. therefore, they were more inclined to support sending juveniles to prison for life with no possibility of parole. so one word, one critical word led people to see the person it led them to see the law differently. tn the absence of laws tha constrain the use of force in the service of defense, you know, black are more likely to

draw our attention. they are more likely to be perceived as threatening. they are more likely to be retaliated against. blackness can color our assessment of the law itself, rendering even our children vulnerable. thank you. [applause] thank you. a circuitt speaker is a circuit ofith florida that covers sarasota minnesota counties. he started in boston and criminal defense. and has been lead trial counsel and 50 trials. >> thanks so much. i hate to say i'm a florida judge.

i was coming over from the hotel i was at in the taxi driver drove me over. he heard my boston accent. he goes to the, westin st. francis, the wrong hotel. the police pull us over and pulled him over for speeding. i said, florida judge. --'s talk a little bit about there have been some really tremendous -- i want to thank my fellow floridian resident for all of her help. look it. this is difficult stuff. there are no two ways about it. very few veteran trial lawyers that end up in the court as a judge that take experiences bench everythe single day. i did 11 murder trials in two states. this is not easy. it takes a lot of ability to do this kind of work. i think he made a good point

earlier when he talked about the political will. i can go back to when my law partner in boston was frustrated with some of the laws and ended up running for the massachusetts house of representatives and was on it for 14 years and became the chairman of the criminal justice committee, one of the minority states in the nation where 11 states have appointed judges and 39 are elected. he did good at that jbo. ob. he was tremendous as a legislator. our hands are tied as judges. do i like certain laws of the state of florida? yes and no. i have done hearings on the stand your ground long were you have a limited standard because of the preponderance standard. but when i tell you how long it takes for us to review the evidence in these cases, this is not something that can be reduced to a journalist writing something in five sentences. detailed information

about what were the circumstances involving his death, what were the circumstances and the use of this weapon third . the judge in the zimmerman case. i know her. there are 18 million citizens in florida. there is a lot going on in florida. in my courtroom, the west coast of florida, we are making a difference. every one of those lawyers that come in front of me, you had better be prepared. i had the same standard when i was a lawyer. you had better be telling me what is the basis that you say there is immunity for this person. what happened? who are the witnesses? cross examine these people. i do not take that lightly. i understand the enormity of it. counsel, the judge made some good points as well about the enormous emotional toll. i see this in. my courtroom to take into

consideration, we have veteran lawyers on the bench, people who have been down this road, understand the circumstances, but we have to follow the law. it is my sworn obligation. i cannot inject my personal feelings in the proceedings as a circuit court judge. i cannot do that. so therefore, going to the zimmerman case, on the standard florida construction of self- defense, look it. nothing good is going to happen when you bring a gun to a fight. and that is a fight that never should've happened to begin with. it was almost like a perfect storm. the meeting in the night, people did not know one another, it led to a horrible tragedy. as the law says, when you give instruction -- i talk to jurors after trials are over with and they give me their feedback as citizens, and i listen to them. when you have a situation where in his mind he believed, he

believed that he may die. now, is that an enormous overreaction? if he did not have a weapon, trayvon martin would be alive. it would've been a fight just like when i was in the high school. you lose a tooth, something would've happened, but trayvon m artin would be alive. the district attorney talked about guns. that is the problem. i see the chilly in my courtroom. in myitually courtroom. i saw a case two weeks ago where they elected to go to trial. if you talk to lawyers, they will tell you that the judge was a very -- was very good when it comes to sentencing people. this person was from california who had 10 felony convictions, came to tampa and was arrested and then came to sarasota, was arrested again on christmas eve, when he goes out in the middle of the street, fires a handgun

on a crowded street. nerve, when he got into custody, to yellow to his brother, i will take this one, implying that the brother took the shots. when the brother came to trial and got on the witness stand and gave the jury his conduct, i was pretty mad about that. at the sentencing hearing, was facing the guidelines of three to seven years. i gave him seven years. you know why? because i believe he will shoot until somebody in the next seven years. that is what i believe. i have an obligation, i say to the lawyers every day, be prepared. there is a 50% rule that judge laken has. to protect the state of florida by 50%. % is that defendant's constitutional rights, rights that i take seriously. he an absolute right to a fair trial. an absolute right to present evidence. the conscience of the

community, will decide the outcome of this case. they will make that decision, not me. i just want to be clear. not to demonize the judiciary or demonize the judges. it is our job to do it. the political process is the root to resolve these issues -- the route to resolve these issues. when i tell you my hands are tied, they are tied. do agree with some of the things going on in this nation? i have serious trepidation about it and it is very concerning to me. in the west coast of florida, we call it jimmy buffet land there it is a mellow place. we areart of the world doing everything we can to protect individuals and i do everyday. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. our next speaker is the legal director for the law center to

prevent gun violence, the organization formerly known as the legal community against violence, which is a national law center that provides legal assistance to legislators seeking to advance legally defensible laws to reduce violence. thee is also a member of standing committee on gun violence which is one of the cosponsors of the task force on grant -- on standard ground. she has worked on the drafting of state and local gun laws throughout the united states. julie? >> thank you. good morning, everyone. >> good morning. >> i first got involved in the issue of gun violence on july 1, 1993. that was the date of the assault weapons massacre at 101 california street, which is a few blocks from here. on that day, a disgruntled former client of a law firm walked into the building armed with assault weapons and a handgun.

up the elevator to the 35th floor and began opening fire. he killed eight people and injured six. and then committed suicide in the stairwell. firm was on the 23rd floor. fortunately, i was one of the lucky ones. i did not know anyone who was injured or hurt. since then, i have become quite close with the families of those people, though. and the shooting profoundly affected me both personally and professionally. mentioned, we provide several services. we track all state and federal gun laws around the country. we draft model laws. we track second amendment litigation nationwide and briefs withe amicus the help of pro bono attorneys. we were aware of standard ground or we call them "shoot first"

laws. we were aware of these laws before the trayvon martin shooting but not focusing on them. once we looked at them, we realize they frustrate law enforcement efforts to prosecute criminals. they encourage vigilante behavior, and they deprive victims of recourse. these laws do not exist in a vacuum, however. as a district attorney mentioned earlier, we really to look at them in the context of other lost. -- laws. we need to look at them in the context of federal and state laws which are extremely wewak. the u.s. has the weakest gun laws of all industrialized nations and we have the highest rate of gun deaths. our federal laws are filled with loopholes. the biggest loophole is the private sale loophole that has been in the news over the last six months because of the senate's failure to pass a very watered-down bill.

under that loophole, federally licensed firearms dealers have to conduct background checks, but individual sellers do not. and you do not need to have a federal license to sell guns under federal law. 40% of all purchasers buy guns from unlicensed people, which makes it easy for criminals to get guns, from mentally ill people to get guns, and for under age people to get guns. we also have no licensing at the federal level. we have no registration, which makes it difficult for law enforcement to trace crime guns. in fact, because of the nra, federal law prohibits a federal registry of gun owners and those records are destroyed. we do not ban assault weapons or large capacity magazines. we have no waiting period. guns are exempt from the consumer product safety act. it covers all products that consumers use. it used to be that cigarettes were also exempt, but cigarettes

now are covered. so guns are the only product. you get the ridiculous situation would've federal government can oversee the manufacture -- where the federal government can oversee the manufacture of toy guns but not over real guns. we have a law that immunizes gun dealers from their reckless awnd negligent behavior. no other industry is afforded such protection. free tof course are adopt stronger laws, but most have not. because of the nra, most state laws have gotten significantly weaker in recent decades. 80's the gun lobby has pushed legislation nationwide to weaken laws regarding the carrying of concealed weapons in public. the nra began pushing shoot first laws in 2005. as other speakers have noted, most states now have those laws. one point that i think is really

important to make, though, is that although shoot first laws threaten public safety, it is really the combination of those laws and weak concealed carry laws that are particularly deadly. lakin mentioned, if george zimmerman had not been carrying a gun and he was caring that gun legally, trayvon martin would still be alive. fortunately, when you look at the big picture, things finally seem to be changing nationwide. newtonyvon martin and shootings have created a cultural shift in the way americans view gun violence. areing shows that americans sick of the bloodshed and they want their legislators to do something. 90% of thethat public supports universal background checks. 90%. try to think of what other policy have that kind of support. 80% of gun owners support

background checks. the nra leadership is out of touch with its own members. california is a great example of what can be done when a state adopts strong laws. the state has adopted 30 laws since 1993. we have adopted many innovative laws. they have had a huge impact between 1993 and 2010, california's gun death rate has dropped by 56%. and that is at a 27% higher rate than the drop nationwide. the final point i would like to is that the second amendment is not an obstacle to common sense laws reduce gun violence. there is so much misinformation about the second amended, opponents of rational gun laws are always saying, no, they violate the second amendment.

and legislators are confused. i watched the closing arguments case, andyvon martin overall i thought the prosecutors did a decent job. in closing argument, he said that george zimmerman had a right to have a gun in public because of the second amendment. that is not what the supreme court said. in the heller case in 2008, in a 5-4 decision, the supreme court held that the second amendment guarantees the right of law- abiding, responsible individuals to possess a handgun in the home for self-defense. that was the extent of its ruling. the court made very clear that the second amendment is not absolute and that it is consistent with a wide variety of gun laws. the bad news is that that written, a poorly decision, open the floodgates to litigation around the world -- fortunately, the rest of the world does not have the second amendment -- around the country challenging our nation's gun

laws. the good news is that those challenges have been unsuccessful. we reviewed over 700 decisions, and the courts have consistently upheld our nation's gun laws, including those restricting the carrying of concealed weapons in public. the bottom line is that the second amendment does not have anything to do with stand your or anyshoot first laws laws that do not prevent a law- abiding person from possessing a handgun in the home for self- defense. strong gun laws are constitutional. they simply require political will. the idea that the nra is all- powerful is really just a matter of perception. and fortunately that perception is changing. americans are finally speaking out about this issue and demanding the change that we all deserve. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, julie. julie has provided

supplemental written materials and they can be found on tape 58 of your program book. our next speaker is the elected public defender of the city and county of san francisco. jeff has also served on the american bar association standing committee on legal aid and is a member of the national board of trial advocacy. he sits on the board of the california public defenders association and is a past board member of the california attorneys for criminal justice and the san francisco bar association. jeff dodgey. >> good morning, everyone. thank you for inviting me to testify at this hearing. i have to say that i deeply agree with all of the objectives talked about this morning in terms of the outcomes that we as a society want to achieve. however, i probably am in the minority, which is not unusual

for me as public defender, and saying that i do not believe that the self-defense law should be changed. there is no question that what happened to trayvon martin was a horrible, horrible injustice. and it never should have happened. but that injustice, i do not believe is a result of self- defense laws. i believe that it's a result of racism. it is the same racism that causes disparities in every stage of a criminal or juvenile justice proceeding. as public defenders, we witness daily the inequities that build at each stage of the criminal s,oceeding, from arrestw profiling, charging by the district attorney, plea- bargaining, deciding what cases

proceed to trial, what cases are charged the death penalty, bail, every aspect of the cruel intice system is grounded racial bias. and that reality is that african-americans are more likely to be detained, to be searched, to be charged in adult courts as juveniles, denied access to quality representation, community resources and treatment, and generally put at it is advantage. -- at a disadvantage. when you look at trayvon martin, clearly a case of racial profiling that resulted in murder. call, george zimmerman said that he looks like he is up to no good, like he is on drugs. he also said he looks black. he saw trayvon martin as

threatening, even though travyyn had done nothing to threaten him. "f-ing punks, they always get away>' ." was on his martin way home with skittles at ice-t, he was not able to convince zimmerman that he was just walking down the street. that is where racism comes in. it is not always conscious racism. the concept known as implicit racism is insidious throughout the criminal justice system. people say, "i'm not biased. i do not own any prejudices." yet their actions speak otherwise. as eva mentioned earlier, brain activation levels mask racial bias in all of us. if someone sees a threat, then implicit bias will increase the threat that they feel. as a result, if someone sees an

african-american male, they feel that he is a threat simply because he is african-american and this is something that they may not even be conscious of. we also have to ask how this implicit bias affect the police investigation. immigrant witnesses testified, police immediately acted to protect george zimmerman. they surmised that he acted in self-defense without even an investigation. they identified more with his predicament than they did with trayvon martin's bloody body that was just left on the street. his parents were not contacted for three days. zimmerman, they coached his statements so it fit the standard grant narrative. the prosecutors did not mention

race. there was not one prosecutor of color amongst them. the only mention that i heard of race was that the defense had the strategic idea to have an african-american female intern sitting at the table to show that the proceeding was not racist. we have to eradicate implicit causes -- within our profession. we are going to continue to see unjust results. i just wanted to clarify that in trueornia, while it is that you can pursue your attacker if it means that you will save your life, you can only do that until the danger has passed.

you must not be the aggressor. you must not strike first and you have to believe that your life is in imminent danger. believing that your attacker is going to kill you at some point or if they are unarmed is not sufficient justification. finally, you have to believe that deadly force is necessary and can only use that amount of force which is needed to defend yourself. doctrine does is allow a person whose life is threatened not to be placed in a situation where you have to retreat if you believe that your life is still in danger. when that danger passes, so does your right of self-defense. reality is that implicit bias is everywhere. it is not uncommon that thousands of young black men are presumed to be criminals. look at the stop and frisk laws and look at how they have been implemented in places like new york.

their innocent behavior or minor infractions can be viewed as profound affronts. while all of them are not shot down like trayvon martin was, they are more frequently disciplined, suspended, expelled from school, more than their white classmates, relegated to juvenile halls and prisons. not hired, quickly fired, or forced to watch as people across the other side of the street, locking their car doors were clutching their purses. in order to increase our understanding of implicit bias, there is still so much that needs to be done to curtail racial injustice. even public defenders and defense attorneys. we have to ensure that people of color have access to qualified well-funded representation. we have to work to change

legislation that unfairly targets minorities. all of these things, in my opinion, are more important than changing self-defense laws. thank you. [applause] much, jeff for your remarks. our next speaker is john powell. the executive director of the hoss institute for a fair and inclusive society. professor powell is a well-known scholar in the areas of race and poverty and is the author of the book entitled "racing to justice , transforming our concept of self and other to build an inclusive society." professor powell. [applause] i want to join with others in

thanking the bar association -- the aba and leanne for bringing us together. to say what i was going has already been said, so i prepared remarks and a powerpoint presentation. since much of what has been said i am not going to cover everything that is in my powerpoint, i will touch on a few things. implicit bias was already discussed. give her the history of these laws. i'm not going to dwell on that because it has been talked about and i am limited on time. i want to talk about a couple of things, going forward. you just heard about the overall

issue of race in america and how that impacts what happened to trayvon martin. i was reading earlier this morning when i got up an article in "the new york times" about a man in new york who the police chased him into his house, in his bathroom, he had no weapon, but they shot and killed him and the police is not being charged with murder. yorkeason is, although new doesn't have formal standard ground loss, the reason is the police thought he had a weapon. jennifer already talked about that if you are black you are likely to be seen with a weapon. a person thinks they are in danger, they have a right, in many states, to actually use deadly force. what does this mean in the context of this discussion?

fort of all, let's back up a minute. again, i am hearing from my prepared remarks, so bear with me for a minute. one of the things that we looked there is a study, a meta- , the 10 million words that we use in our lifetime, and we look at associations with those words. this is actually a very robust science. what we find is that in this black, thee word word used in association with it most often in americans minds is poverty. , andext word is dangerous the third word is lazy. those are the three most salient associations that americans have with lax. ,hese are cultural associations these are not saying these individuals who are in a normal

sense racist or prejudiced. then we can show that both associations have an impact in terms of how we perceive black people, how we judge them, especially under stress. situation, theul unconscious is more likely to come online and affect how we perceive someone. again, you have heard dr. eberhardt talk about when we see , person that might have a gun a person who is black is more likely to be seen with a gun. i have two sons, my oldest son is 32 years old. , celle was in high school phones are becoming a big thing. he said i want to have a cell phone to and be cool like everyone else. i was a little concerned so i did a little research. in that year, when he was about do thes old, so you can math, there had been a number of killings of young black men when

police stopped them in cars. a number of times the police wrongly assumed when they were picking up their cell phone that they actually had a gun. in that same. there had not been one killing of a white young man making that mistake. i told my son know you can't get a cell phone. he was pierced. he was like, i haven't done anything wrong! you are black in america. there is an assumption, there is a deadly perception that you have done something wrong. think about this. in many of the states, and the states vary in terms of how they actually implement and talk about standard ground loss. i agree that we should think about how we cause these should first laws. part of it is the subjective assumption that your life is in danger. , and this study out

was predicted, that white america has a growing anxiety about race and about blacks. anxiety is both implicit and explicit racial anxiety that is increasing. the majority of whites think that the number one problem with race in america is discrimination against white people. so you start off with this background assumption that white people are already afraid of black people, especially young black men. then you say if you're afraid for your life, you have a right to defend yourself. they are halfway there. a black person with a hoodie is dangerous. they are already afraid. i think there are a lot of things that the aba should think and there are some things

that california is addressing such as did you start the fight? did you start the fight and then you say it i'm afraid that i'm going to lose the fight. then you say i'm afraid the black person is going to kill me. dander ground loss in florida would justify that. -- the stand your ground laws in florida would justify that. my time is almost up, but the , is thatant to make these are huge laws and that america is afraid of black people. america was afraid of my 15- year-old black son. and we say to blacks in new york city and latino men in new york city, you go outside and the mayor of new york is saying you

are dangerous. we haven't done anything. what have we done? you are black, you are latino, you don't belong. you are not seen as human. and then we pass these laws to institutionalize the fear of white americans. we legalize the fear of what americans and i am going to stop because my time is up. i want to end with two quick comments. i appreciate the judges constraint. we all constrained by institutions. i am constrained by the university of california berkeley. we all have constraints. i do a lot -- i did a lot of when itsouth africa existed under apartheid. there were laws that constrained interaction. we have to look at these laws. they institutionalize to the fear of white people. when we look at where these laws are most prevalent, who passed them, frankly they are passed most likely when there was a

or. we haveovernmen the proliferation of guns and conceal laws. all those things come together. we have this institutionalized fear of black people. i would say there is an article "lose greatest in the angeles times" saying that the number one problem facing this country as we talk about demographic change is actually the growing anxiety and fear of whites of the racial other. a noted researcher at harvard has argued that may be the most threatening thing to our society is the growing anxiety about the racial other. i think that we are going to see a lot of bad laws and bad actions unless we deal with this head on. this is partially the work that jennifer and others have done, but the rush not to talk about

race actually backfires. it actually increases racial anxiety especially in whites and it increases the symbolic racism that alex and other groups can use in pushing things like standard ground laws. i hope we will take this head on and make this part of a much larger discussion. thank you. [applause] thank you, professor powell. unfortunately we are over time, but i would like to take the opportunity to allow the commissioner to come up and make a few remarks if you'd like to do so. >> thank you very much, leanne, and thank you to the aba.

it is the first time we have actually had a partisan vote on anything in a long time. it is the first investigation on its own, a solo investigation without any preconceived notion that the commission has taken in decades. the reason i wanted to do this is after the trayvon martin shooting and all the press and attention on stand your ground, i want to make sure that we understand clearly what is going on with these laws. i understand and no one can argue that the combination of permissive laws and laws of standard ground are a deadly cocktail throughout this country and especially for young african-american males. i want to make sure that we have facts to back it up. the commission has always been in the factfinder for congress and for other jurisdictions and did so when it went down to the cell to investigate the jim crow laws. basis fors became the the civil rights act of 1964,

the ada violence against women. this i hope, possibly, with the right help, with the right information, could rise to that kind of level in terms of it stability to impact public policy. the reason it is important for we need the ability as an agency to go beyond the stats that are given to us. crime reports and statistics out there are only as good at the laws require the statistics to be reported. the fact of the matter remains that if george zimmerman had walked free in state free as he did the night that he killed trayvon martin, that statistic would never have been reported anywhere. there would have been no requirement to go to any database that we would be able to look at today. we are going to try to go beyond that, under that, and get through to the prosecutors and the criminal courts and police

stations and take a good hard look at how this law is being enforced. can be or not laws neutral on their face, we all know they can be very racist in their application. laws that have that are laws that must be examined, must be reviewed, and with the help of people like you and all the people who spoken here today, can be moved out of the public domain and begin a real real enlightened discussion on race that doesn't have to come in the context of ofse kinds of trevor the -- these kinds of tragedies over and over again. >> thank you, commissionertyari yaki. i would like to take this opportunity to thank all those people who gave speeches and presentations. we received a wealth of information and some key areas that we are going to investigate and look further into.

i would like to thank all of you who attended and i hope you received some great information. we will continue to follow on the dialogue inserting the impact of standard ground laws. with that he hearing is adjourned. [applause] -- the impact of stand your ground laws. with that the hearing is adjourned. [applause] [indiscernible] >> next on c-span, a discussion about the 2000 eight financial crisis. then, president obama's remarks on kuwait.

later, remarks about u.s. intelligence operations by defense intelligence agency director lieutenant general michael flynn. on the next "washington journal ," michael hurley will talk about threats to the united states from al qaeda related -- al qaeda related terrorist groups. then, george mason university infessor talks about people washington who move between careers in business consulting, politics and government. "washington journal," live on c- span. american history tv will be live from birmingham alabama tomorrow starting at 11:00 a.m. eastern. as we mark the 50th anniversary of the 16th street baptist

church bombing. the attacked by white supremacists killed four african-american girls and injured more than 20 other people. here's a brief reflection from september 15, 1963. >> september 15, 19 63, what happened? before 1962, 1960 three, was segregated and the civil rights movement was percolating. but in 1963, birmingham became bombingham. bombs off all the time. on september 15, 19 63, at the 16th street baptist church, homegrown terrorists set a bomb in the bathroom in the basement. four little girls were killed there just on their way to sunday school.

i can remember so well the day that it happened because my father was a minister and we had gone up to the church. my mother was the choirmaster and so we had gone to the church to get ready for service and all of a sudden there was this loud thud. we knew a bomb had gone off. you just knew that in birmingham in those days. we thought maybe in our community and within a little inle my father's cousin came and she said the 16th church had been bombed. a little while later we knew the names of the girls who had been and denise mcnair who was one of those girls had been a family friend, a kindergarten friend. there was a picture in the book of my father giving her her graduation diploma from kindergarten. sad and in many

ways terrifying day for our community. >> american history tv is our companion network on c-span three. live coverage from birmingham alabama is sunday starting at 11 a.m. eastern time. >> now a review of the 2000 eight financial crisis and what has changed in the past five years. panelists include former representatives barney frank and bill thomas. and former congressional budget office director. hosted by the american action forum, this is an hour and a half. [applause] to start off by saying how disappointed i am, not with a great panel we have, but i thought i had my one chance to sit on the chairs behind you. i guess that is not going to happen. >> you didn't negotiate well. we can get a still photo of

you afterwards. it's not a subcommittee room. >> i know one that has a picture in it. >> oh, that is right. the two gentlemen to my right and left have had ample opportunity to sit in those chairs with big backs. andar left is barney frank he headed the house financial services committee. his name graces, is that the right firm, mr. frank? graces -- to my right is the honorable bill thomas who served in congress from 1979- 2007. he was the chairman of the house ways and means committee. for our purposes today he was

the vice-chairman chairman of the financial crisis inquiry commission. to my left was a member of the fcic who i've known for many years who headed the cbo for four years, was john mccain's and also was on .he council of economic cea for some reason when he calls me to do the stuff i say yes because doug is one of those good guys in washington. >> we know what cbo means. >> do you you have a funny name for that? >> no. barney and i have one thing in common if nothing else. we were frustrated over and over again by the congressional budget office on our plans based it may cost thought and what they told us given the , what it would cost.

>> why did you send it over? [laughter] >> i loved working for these two gentlemen. had a full head of hair. >> so let's begin. we are five years after the collects -- after the collapse of lehman brothers. there are a lot of important numbers from the financial crisis. there is the $16 trillion in lost wealth. there is the decline in housing values, but the most important number to me is around 30. the reason i say 30 is that 30 years as a number of years it took friedman and schwartz after the great depression to figure out what happened. these are still early days in my opinion. i think everybody was listening we arenking about this,

still beginning to understand what happened, why it happened, white the housing collapse became a financial crisis, became what is known as the great recession. i want to start with to later predicate here. what is our state of understanding here. ? the government costs at all to our housing policy, washington cause it all through greed then there is the middle is all of these things. give us a sense of where we are and give us an understanding of what happened. >> i think the two popular versions that you heard are wrong. and ire too simplistic think we do now appreciate some of the things that were simple. it was not just a housing story, it was a broad credit problem.

number two, it was characterized by instances of under regulation, poor mortgage regulation and also overregulation. it is not a simple story either. the one i think that is least well appreciated and needs the most work is the global character. too much of the discussion in the u.s. is just about what happened in the u.s.. we had housing bubbles and real estate bubbles in general across the globe. we had large institutions fail and indeed the onset with the withh firm, the trouble liquidity. those failures occurred in a whole variety of regimes. i think it would be very useful to go back and look at the global character much more carefully if we are going to --erstand the roots heard >> to understand the roots. >> word you put most of the blame?

>> i think most of the assumptions are wrong. dissent and i'm very much in agreement. thatjust made the point i'm going to make witches they talk about a number of individual things rather than just saying deregulation. i counted out four or five of those were in fact deregulation were part of the reasons they were there. talking about deregulation in general is not going to get you anywhere. -- the private sector innovates. because the nature of the private sector is you don't participate unless you want to, it is voluntary, the innovations don't have value added to the economic public, they don't go anywhere. the innovation is constant rate at some point in our economic history innovation reaches a

critical mass and outstrips the existing set of rules. then it is the job of the public sector to come up with rules which maximize the benefits of the innovation and minimize the hurt. in 1850 there were no large economic enterprises in america. by 1880 there were. so much of what happens is antitrust, the federal reserve system. then you get the need for finance capitalism because of the large institutions and so much of the new deal is rules for that. the rules that came out of the new deal, the investment company bank insurance, worked pretty well until the 1980s. , a lot ofo things liquidity is available outside of the banks. secondly, information technology . it becomes possible to do things, particularly with regards to securitization. what happens in the 80s and 90s is people have come up with ways in the industry to pass the buck on the risks.

there are systems whereby people think they can make some money and minimize the responsibility for the risks. but i think the job of the public sector is not to tell people you can't do this and reconnects to try and the risk-taking with the responsibility for taking them. tolet me give bill a chance respond to that question. when you think about the reasons for the crisis, would you end up now? >> i was asked to serve on this commission and i told them that this is a purely political device as a placeholder. don't expect much out of it. i think we lived up to that. way, agree with the barney, i always use the example because i think people are familiar with it. when you just say think of the

1920s in the u.s. in terms of the criminal element versus the government in the structure. you've got bonnie and clyde crossing jurisdictions, state lines, submachine guns, they were so much ahead of technology transportation of the legal system at the time. we had to rethink the way in which the federal system operated in the jurisdictions. alliance the margin maginot linehesemaginoe in france. what happened was we get caught up with a lot of very clever people, as bernie said. they were utilizing the new technologies, and especially people's willingness to get something for nothing and the

desire to make box got ahead of us. ly the transparency and the ability -- you actually provide the society with tools to be able to watch what is happening and monitor. that is one of the concerns i have with the legislation that came out of the crisis. i think the stress tests are good. you can take a look at it, but over time people are going to figure out how to make whatever worthless.y measured they are doing other things. you go back and decide how do lineuild a new maginot and a new fbi to stay up with the changes. what am concerned about is the failure of the international government system to understand it was international. we were ahead of others in

addressing directly and five years later a lot of the international relationships and compacts and agreements are woefully behind us to a certain extent. therefore, there are places that this could potentially break out in a different structure and not be monitored. >> i think we want to come back to the international aspect. i think the criticism that bill thomas gave is one you isr very often which is, it too complicated, too long, it is even too difficult to implement grid they still haven't implemented the vocal role. we are going to fast forward to what happened five years ago to what is happening right now. if you wouldn't mind, start with , does the dodd-frank legislation guarantee or

otherwise make it less possible to have another crisis? less possible. who sayee with those that deregulation caused the crisis. i think it was non-regulation. it was not putting in new regulations to catch up on the whole -- with what was going on. -- bill saido the they're going to figure out ways to get around it. i agree. that is why it is not for a that is why it- is not very specific. look at the new deal, they dealt with bank insurance, with mutual funds. we put them in one bill. if you look at the totality of the legislation say with the new deal, and i will tell you why they are in one bill. 60, whiche the number

all of us who work in congress know that is what it takes to break a filibuster. we had nine separate markups in our committee and voted on them alonetely and they stood in the senate said to us, look it is going to be hard enough to get 60 votes. there's no way we're going to get it nine times. so we conglomerate it in that way. -- you delegated too much. first of all, compare it to the sherman act. no combination of restraint in trade. we are a marvel of precision beyond that. the point i take is that i agree with bill. it is a job to figure out new ways to innovate. the more specific you are, the harder it is to maintain it. what we did and this was to deal with some specifics that we thought were a problem, but also

empowered the regulators. that is why we didn't write a lot of these things in concrete heard they can be changed. i'm disappointed. regulatory.is i agree with bill's point. that abilityeframe to move those in the future. there is no aspect of the financial system which some regulator does not now have the ability to deal with. >> and that his new? >> yeah. -- we regulated known things. go back to the 1930s and look at what money was an ways in which it was used. today it is just a completely different. >> we had too many regulators before, we had too many regulators now.

that week we created one because no one was doing his job. .erging that with the occ renamed proposals, we it the office of fig leaf dispensation. >> barney, let me interrupt and explain here. there were three or four agencies that regulate banks. the fed, the fdic and the oti s. now there's is talk about whether it should be consolidated. >> to want know why we didn't do that? people were not ready to deal

with the fed and the second reason is that it is political. but in a legitimate sense, not that anybody was making some money off of this. the proposal was basically to give all powers to one or the other and the state chartered banks, bottom line, the smaller banks said, do not throw us in with the megabanks. regulates the very large banks, the fed the smaller banks bankhey took these said supervisory powers away and put that in the occ. he fed chairman have always said we need to have some looksee into the actual work to do monetary policy. the key was that the state- chartered banks said don't you dare throw us in there with the megabanks. the major thing i wish we could've done was to merge the

sec and the occ. if we had done that you would have seen an outbreak of the shays rebellion. thefarmers would have -- cftc was created for the farmers when commodities was what you dealt with. then the commodities get financial light. if you try to merge -- if we had tried to do it at that point everything would have blown up because you would've had in the agricultural community this, oh yeah, you're going to put the sharpies from the two coasts in charge of us. it was political. >> take it to a 30,000 foot level when you look at the dot- frank legislation, it is friday and a major bank is having liquidity problems and it is

thought that it will not survive the weekend. what happens now? thenposed to what happened which is regulators gathering over the weekend on the phone to beggingrs in london, other banks to take them out, refusing saying what happens when they come from? what happens this time now? two things happen that are very important. the initial responses were very , bearnstitutionally stearns has a problem, lehman has a problem, aig. totally, the fed turned running the oldest playbook in central banking. they pumped liquidity in. the whole goal was,'s get liquidity to anybody who needs it against any reasonable collateral which is rule number one for central banking. if you are going to have a crisis come if we are in 2013

and it is friday and the fed is seeing that, not as an institutional problem but as they finally diagnosed a broadly financial problem, they are going to flood the market with liquidity and that will be the most important difference is to start there instead of getting there slowly as they did in the crisis of 2007-2008. somehow what the fed did was go was at friends, that notion that needs to be disabused. it was misleading. i know the vice-chairman i will never get another word in. >> you just got it. i am learning. >> the other thing that will happen is that there are automatic procedures not to get liquidity. nott turns out that it is

just liquidity but a solvency problem they then go away and that is a good thing. i >> i thought the problem was bogus. >> insulting the moderator is not the best politics. i just want to lay that out. >> not anymore. [laughter] >> how many votes you have? >> i have none. after reason is, it is dot-frank. take us back to a scenario that is now going to occur and in fact if you do get a belly up, what happened to the transparency? what happened to all the other things that are supposed to be , inlace e in healthcare post obamacare, everybody is looking back at the old single- payer model.

taking the fed as the single governor made no sense either. it is always going to be difficult. appreciate that the things that we did, and notwithstanding the fact that it took two tries to get it passed in congress in terms of the bailout, if that hadn't happened it would have been a much more significant disaster at the time. dodd-frank said you don't need that power anymore because, and barney uses the word politics, i think he and i probably agree on the definition of politics, it is who gets what, when and how. that's what it was in spades in ,erms of the power they have the solution, where and how you can help. you couldn't have the kinds of interventions today unless you

not only decided you can put money up but you had to go back and either way if laws, change the law, create a window in the law -- >> let me do a point of information. there have been three substantive changes i understand to the fed and other changes that were made so that the fed cannot act the same way it did. in order to create the broad raised programs that duck talked about that were so helpful, it needed the approval of the treasury secretary. have a perry moment here if i get all three. it cannot do individual bailouts at all. emergency powers no longer exist. the third one as i understand it is you can no longer use the economic stabilization fund pot ofs a $50 billion money. why is that significant? it is significant because it was really hard for the treasury to bailout pot of money to

the money market. there are pots of money lying around with which a president in the middle of a financial crisis can rely upon to bailout an institution. therefore, the upshot of the prohibition on the stabilization fund is, in order to bailout an institution today, i believe the administration or somebody must go to congress. >> no. >> no? >> doug got it essentially right. a power under section 13 of the federal reserve act signed into law by herbert hoover which we had forgotten was there. it said basically they could thatmoney to any entity was expedient. that was where the 85 billion for aig came that surprised a lot of people. that has been abolished. instead, the fed set up a it might be for only one institution if only one

applied. for it andcan apply it is for cases where they believe there is a liquidity crisis caused by some kind of panic, but they can only extend that money to an institution they find to be solvent. that is a very important piece of it or it you are right, it has been abolished. s.t here are the other factor if a large institution cannot pay its debts or if it is a money market fund, that is an alternative pot of money. that money is the power of the to payry of the treasury off some debts and put some money in if he thinks is necessary to prevent a meltdown. but he is mandated, not permitted, but mandated under the bill to then recover every dollar from an assessment that onis authorized to assess

financial institutions of $50 billion of assets are more. if you are engaged in derivatives you would have to a more than if you are in a mutual fund. >> is his title to, right? >> one other point, the secretary of the treasury does have to sign off. some of the financial people are worried that the secretary of the treasury would veto the fed doing that. i think that is wholly unrealistic. that anconceivable to me secretary of the treasury would say to the fed, oh, you can't do that. >> especially if we keep getting secretary of the treasury's from the fed. >> and vice versa, maybe. >> horserace for the most cynical version of the panel. this.of all, i agree with my experience with policymakers in a crisis is they are so risk- averse. he say to them this is going to happen and there is a .0001%

chance of broad-based economic distress. i don't think that is ever going to happen. i guess the thing i worry about, when you look at that dot-frank legislation and where we are after this, is a lot of it relies on being to tell liquidity from solvency. in the moment, you just can't. is,et me explain what that doug, what liquidity is. >> you are holding a bunch of bonds and if you take them at face value your bonds are worth more than what you owe to your shareholders and the people you borrowed from. so you are solvent and your net worth is positive. you can't sell them off, there are no willing buyers. there is no cash out there. the trouble is in moments of a liquidity crisis when you can't sell you don't really know what the prices are so you start wondering if the bonds are worth face value or $.10 on the dollar.

if it's the latter then you are broke. >> doctrine for a couple of hundred years has been you go in and you finance a liquidity run but you do not finance and insolvency. i resisted efforts to hold the fed to to find a standard there. basically the answer there is if the fed makes a mistake and they extended liquidity to someone that turned out to be insolvent, they still have dinner the next day. there is no apparently on the on -- there is no penalty the fed. this is one of the key things we were asked to do. i said in some cases the pot of money would be the secretary of the treasury advancing it and getting it back to the federal institutions. but when we are talking about institutions that are insulted -- that are insolvent and not just illiquid, yes, some of their debts will be paid.

we had death panels in our legislation in 2010, but they were for big banks and not old ladies. the secretary of the treasury, nobody can advance that until the institution goes out of business. what we are saying is, there is no longer an institution that is too big to fail that there are institutions that are so big that you cannot let them fail without attention to their debts. senator paulson told us earlier that when people criticize him for lehman and aig, then you shovel money at them, he told me those are the only two choices i had, either paid all their debts or none of their debts. we have created a system where you can pay some of the debts, but the institution dies. saidis gets back to what i , probably not well, earlier. to me, solvency is the -- think of two

metals that europe together to make things work. they are solvent, but if you don't have liquid between the two to make them slide then you have problems. but if you go back to the two pieces of metal, from the atomic theory, there is more air than substance there, and it turns out, they discovered that maybe some of the stuff they were counting on the solvency side had more air than stuff that no one was willing to buy it because they didn't know what it was worth, they couldn't price it. so this is where it really starts to devolve into a very complicated structure where you couldn't tell what something was worth and you were not willing to risk what people would call to play. if you can't jump in and dump oil between those two pieces of me say, there is

a governing principle here which is the fact that some of the questions at the margin are going to be hard to decide. there is no reason to not decide them in general. yes, in a lot of cases you're going to know the difference between solvency and liquidity. you recognize that at some point and from the standpoint of safety, either legislation errors, if the fed makes those payments to somebody and it turns out they can't pay back, then they get put out. a what i want to do is tell little about what is in this legislation. what pornne piece -- is talking about is probably the single best part of god-frank. he also pointed out it is the one solely or completely by start -- or completely bipartisan part. there are other parts that may this is titled to

legislation. so, here's what happens. management gets thrown out. that is the first thing. the stockholders are wiped out. unsecured creditors are come to for losses and i believe the security. >> they can be gotten to to pay off. now if all of that is insufficient, there is a callback for vision? you go to the industry and you can recover losses from the bank , $50 billion. -- sois not detected the it is not technically a bankruptcy, but people call a chapter to bankruptcy. it is probably known as a bankruptcy for banks that simply did not exist when they went to go shut down lehman. this is what is new. this is a question on the table. does this and too big to fail? to answer the question you have

to put yourself in the minds of securedle who were the and the unsecured creditors i just spoke about. are they now lending to the banks with a mind that if this bank gets in trouble the government will bail me out? that is the question right now. what are take a crack at that? >> i don't believe in too big to fail. there are things that are too big to fail quickly. everything can fail. that was true before and it remains true now. that is point number one. , we haveber two is and inr people to fail this profession it is the bankruptcy code. we attempted to create in the dot-frank, is the special provision for large institutions. clear, when you

talk about not paying the secured creditor, the reason it has to do with bankruptcy is the constitutional power comes from the bankruptcy language in the constitution. it is because a constitution says that it is legitimate to go to some people and say i know you thought you're going to get paid but you aren't. asin terms of to be to fail an economic and legal phenomenon, the answer is that it is gone. we know that. the question is whether market participants believe that. there is an extraordinarily good, academic skirmish about whether they believe that or not and a variety of tests for looking at yields to see whether they believe it. >> i need to get in on this because doug is the economist in on the fcic the democrats their it usually very intelligent way, but six of the 10 members who understand side put policy

wonks on. what i was consummate trying to wasrom the fcic perspective to explain politics. it is easy, i gave you a definition, but you hear it in various ways. congress never acts they only react. well? pure rockers he is never act the only react. which -- they are not going to -- the idea that somehow obama care going to solve the health care problem by imposing some nickel or dime fine if you don't get insurance is to weigh the cost of the fine versus the cost of insurance.

this is going to be ongoing. you can never stop failure. up with theto stay measurements, stress tests, which is a great term, as to where failure might occur. have we had stress tests on most of the bridges in the u.s. over the last 50 years we wouldn't be crossing them. you have got to realize that politics was the beginning of -- of the andent permeated the decision to fix the problem. they were all created for a reason. they are still around, notwithstanding the reason for their creation isn't necessary in some instances. a life that they want to continue to live. me come to the defense of the fcic.

a couple of points, first of all, yes it was bipartisan. dodd and shelby worked closely on that. the idea for this whole approach came in part from hank paulson and the execution was a george bush appointee, a great regulator, had a major role. what about too big to fail and here's the deal. first of all, the people who say we did not resolve to beta fail are the best friends of the doctrine because this is a matter of perception. when people read that too big to legally itll there, is very clear. no federal reserve official can pay any of the debts of one of these institutions without first abolishing it.

no, especially since we have provided a system to deal with the systemic impact by advancing the money, wiping everybody out as noted. assessing the large financial institutions. moody's is now getting onto this and talking about reducing the ratings of the very large financial institutions. makes me very unhappy. ups were the biggest screw during the whole process. think they will catch up. here is what we were told. argument we get is oh yeah, but here's the deal. or investmentk house was about to fail, yes,

your law says they fail and then you deal with the debts, but there would be overwhelming political pressure on the administration to bail them out anyway. in what universe? were these people not hear the last five years? juster member the tarp. tarp.t remember the yet george bush, barack obama, the democratic leaders of house and senate, the leadership of committees working as hard as we could and barely got the thing through. the notion of some point in the future despite the law would be an overwhelming public demand to bail out one of these institutions and keep it alive is nonsense. >> everyone was for it and no one had an alternative and used it had to pull teeth to get the vote. >> that was an unbelievable

episode. >> barnett, did you fear it was ever going to go down? [laughter] >> i will not be attending. >> foreign policy in syria -- >> health care -- >> barney, did you feel that tarp was going to go down any system with it? >> i disability system -- if we had to do target would go down by the way, bill had mentioned people said this could be as bad as the great depression. it could've been worse for this reason. seven years ago, you had geographic particularly cared things can happen in one part of the world that would not necessarily destroy the other. by 2008, we were on one grade. so people afraid that they would not get paid -- i mean, that had a global shock. that is why we knew we had to do it, though we had some