how you ask it is crucial. this is why i never, ever ask a negative question. i think it's insulting to the person you want to talk to and it creates a bad impression about what you're doing. you're asking for someone's time because you need information that will lead you to a better understanding of your subject. sometimes you get negative information when you really don't want it and you haven't even asked for it, i know, i remember calling a woman to ask her about a senate wives luncheon in honor of the first lady. she said to me, quote, i know why you're calling. you want me to repeat those nasty things that nancy reagan was telling us yesterday about barbara bush.

[laughter] actually, all i wanted to find out was how much money the senate wife his raised for mrs. reagan's drug abuse fund. in that telephone call i got more than i asked for and i used every single w

...

cities in this country doing things well.

you always try to learn from those were doing it best. i think back to when i was a prosecutor and the violence in this community was a terrible rate -- was that a terrible rate. new york and boston had reduced their rates. we brought a lot of the strategies here. we teamed up. -- altogetherea to crack down on every single gun crime. so that we prosecuted it and made it clear that if you carried a gun in this county, you are going to prison. we had the fewest murders in 30 years. the other thing they did with boston was that paired with the ministerial committee -- community. they provided conflict resolution etc. i think we can make this a safer city i learning from others. -- by learning from others.

>> i don't agree with you that detroit is isolationist. the people of detroit are private people who want to be suspected. the people of this community believe that they have been under attack. lansing took away revenue- sharing. office took away the school system. i don't think their isolationist, they just want to be respected. yes, i took an opportunity to meet the mayor of atlanta. atlanta was very much like detroit at one time. poor, anddominantly large african-american population, employment and education challenges. i had a long conversation with them. there are things we could implement here in detroit. >> anything else to say on that?

ok. let's go to our next question. senior added -- editor of the "michigan chronicle." >> you took about lansing. what the governor has done. this question goes to benny and mike as well. you look at the cities that have come under emergency management. critics have said that race is at the center of all of this. we have seen activists and leaders who have come out and cities were not african-american, it would be difficult to see how this administration could take over the cities. do you share this opinion, that race is a part of the agenda? know that we stand here

today and discussed this issue -- 50% of the people in the state who look like you and i have been disenfranchised by the state. there are other cities in the financialhave similar challenges as the city of detroit. yet there has been no emergency manager put there. can you imagine if any governor -- take a southern state like alabama, mississippi, or georgia -- would have the nerve to go the a city that was at heart of the civil rights movement and disenfranchised the population? be up inhat we would arms as a nation and we would be highly offended, as well we should be.

it is a question of democracy. that hasis no question what has been happening in the state is disproportionately affecting the african -- african-american voters. i'm not going to be able to pretend to read inside the governor's motives. you have to look at the effect. the effect is disturbing. the people are feeling the complete failure of the emergency managers in their history. park, look at highland then threw it over and over. when you disenfranchise the local voters, there is no evidence that the emergency manager has made it any better. my objection is two-fold. there was no evidence it works and you are disenfranchising the voters. incredible that my opponent would stand here today and suggest that he is offended

by the placement of a number urgently manager and the city of detroit when we have e-mails -- the cityncy manager in of detroit when we have e-mails that show that he was a candidate to be the emergency manager. but as opposed to being selected, he wants to be elected. how dirty> this is this campaign has gotten. that we are just making things up. i wrote op-ed's make -- saying that this will not work. i lobbied against the emergency manager position. i said you cannot disenfranchise the voters. peopled to let the decide. that is what those e-mails show. the truth as i was fighting the emergency managers. race, racetion about

relations is very divisive in the city of detroit. news" this week tom a there was an op-ed -- this week, there was an op-ed. i am not here to debate that. andng a racial agenda dealing with issues of balance do you have aike specific agenda to deal with these issues? >> exactly as i have been. i talk to people face-to-face. i would continue to do that as mayor. the only way to get to know people and let people get to know you is to talk to them face-to-face. -- treated in

extremely well. ministers have opened their doors to me. i think the ministers have every right to decide who they are supporting, as does anybody else in this town. i don't agree with that criticism. i will keep doing what i am doing. i'm running on a platform of unity, that we shouldn't be divided, we should be united. has don't think anyone who the interests of this region apart should suggest that this region should be divided along any lines. we shouldn't be divided. the only way this region is going to grow is growing together through harmony. there are differences among us. we have to be respected for those differences. i have been in and out of homes in the cities in detroit for 58 years. i have been here 58 years. i understand how the citizens of this community feel when it

comes to the things that happened to the city of detroit down through the years. since the last 40 years, the citizens of this community feel that they have been treated as second-class citizens of the state of michigan. we need leadership that they are confident will stand up to this community and the fan -- demand that this community be respected. have been hosted in a number of homes where the house next-door is abandoned. the people say, i wonder if that house will catch fire and spread to my house? i have been hosted by parents who have children murdered. the police have not solved the crime. they say, we are supporting you because we know there will be a different level of commitment to the city. i want to say thank you for those who believe in me. i believe we can bring change to the city. >> transforming this community

is essential. in ournd violence community is something i have lived with daily. i started putting my life out on the line for this community since i was 19 years old. i continue to do that almost 40 years later. i have been in those same homes. i have been in before the victims get cleaned up. i have seen the devastation firsthand. -- our next question from cliff russell. there is nothing wrong with detroit that enough good paying jobs can't fix -- a quote. those jobs will not from the manufactured -- come from the manufacturing of cars. what we do specifically to bring investment and jobs to detroit?

>> great question. out and economic transformation plan for the city that focuses on the neighborhoods. anchor put an economic inside every neighborhood in detroit. it will be the kind of community up in.e -- i grew attendant to that economic anchor will be public safety models. we don't feel safe. but when you put the police, the, emts attendant to economic anchors, it will grow jobs. were people used to walk to work, they now have to catch a bus. i have a bold, 3.5 billion economic -- $3.5 billion

economic recovery plan. of,his is a classic example you can say anything. the idea that we will build $3 billion of police stations and isls when we are bankrupt completely unrealistic. if it works, we would've done it 20 years ago. detroit willruth, come back when lots of entrepreneurs start lots of small companies and feed off of each other. we can take the vacant storefronts, taken from the owners and make them available to the entrepreneurs. i am talking about a $10 million pool of startup funds. if you want to start a company in this town, you will have the means to get funding.

we can get people thinking, i can be my own boss, i can be my own company. >> that is the difference between me and my company. i didn't go to the school of i went to the school of i can. i believe we can. i have vision. i believe the city can grow and be a bigger, better, tougher city than it has ever been. we do not need to have a defeatist attitude. >> the sheriff went to the , i have as and said vision for a new jail. we will save money. it was a senseless thing from the beginning. he didn't check out the numbers. now there are -- they are $100

million over budget and they are tearing it down. we ought to talk about what we have done, not we are -- what we are going to do. >> thank you. this is for both of you. what do you do with the elderly woman who bought a home back in the 1960's in a nice and since then she has watched neighborhood crumble and she can't afford to move out if she wanted to? her home was ransacked by scrappers. this is one of thousands of stories just like this. preventionr crime plan address that specific issue to bring these neighborhoods back to life so people like this woman can feel safe? websitean go onto my

and you can see the plan. every neighborhood has a future. we will go back to doing what i was doing as the prosecutor. we will take the homes when they are first abandoned and move families into them. i have done it 1000 times. grass,going to cut the so after the scrapyards who are buying from scrappers to take out the financial incentive of doing it. we need to get the police show up when you call. we need to make better use of the officers we already have. we have offices dispatching cars. we need to take all of the available officers we have and put them on the street. we need to back fill, as many do, the other jobs. >> i we use the first few seconds to comment on this jail

issue. sheriff's and employees and department heads don't build buildings. mother has been in the same house she has been in since 1960. my plan will focus on making our neighborhoods livable, walkable, and sustainable. i now have a square-mile initiative that will further initiative my crime-fighting plan. we will reduce crime. it can be done. necessary,ble, it is it is about the folks in the neighborhoods. >> if you have a crime-fighting plan, you have been there for

, sing you ran for sheriff you had a crime-fighting plan. in 4 years, there has not been a single initiative out of your office that has been effective. we are still waiting for the answer to this. we can't figure out what year you think you are measung>> thon the fbi's website. let's talk about crime-fighting. never heard of someone crime-fighting looking out of the window of the 11th floor of the hall of justice. until you work the streets of the city, you are not equipped to tell anybody about fighting crime. gentlemen, let's put our

fingers on crime. citizen does not have time to go on your website. she probably does not have to go on your computer. how is your crime-fighting plan different from benny napoleon's? doingill go right back to what i was doing when i was a prosecutor. if the sheriff lets them right out of the jail, you haven't accomplished anything. if they are not sent its properly, you haven't accomplished anything. if the probation officer does not handle it correctly, you haven't accomplished anything. when i was the prosecutor, we went to boston, we went to new york and we established the approach. i am not running to be police chief. we have a police chief.

what i am going to do is take my experience and my relationships to make sure that when somebody thatrested for gun crime, we go to the state and make novation is followed up, that if they need to be prosecuted on the federal side, they are. >> the only way to reduce crime is to use proven crime reduction tactics. policing, thatd is the only thing that has been proven to work throughout this country. i have a square-mile initiative that will place officers on every single square mile of this community. that officer will take care of quality-of-life issues. that are notes cutting the grass, getting rid of graffiti, residence causing

disruption in the neighborhood -- knock on the door and tell them to be a good neighbor. every community leader, every make sure we have livable, walkable sustainable neighborhoods. i plan is focused directly where the problems are. -- in the neighborhoods where the people live. plan, youhave a crime have been sheriff for 4 years, what have you done to make the city safer? you have all kinds of talk. officers we stick 139 and take them off of responding to people's calls. you haven't taken the streetlights, the abandoned houses -- you will have 139 need to be oney the street responding to calls. >> i have done more in one day

as a police officer in the city then you have done in a let me start out with that. the only way you will reduce crime is by using the proven techniques. i have my program that is working throughout the entire city of detroit that has impacted the lives in these neighborhoods. reduceded it -- breaking and entering spy 200%. 200%. been -- by i have been taking care of this community for 40 years. >> we will take a quick timeout out and be back right after this. welcome back to our michigan matters special.

i will start off the questioning here with a question that many people have been asking. any, let me begin with you. with crime, unemployment, blight -- what is the very first issue you will tackle as mayor? there is no question. , a safeelong detroiter city has to be the number one issue. in addition to that, we have serious issues with finances. we need to make sure that we do whatever we can to make sure 's tenure in the city of detroit is limited. hopefully he will be gone by january 1. getting rid of him and getting control of the government has to be a top priority. then you have to focus on the other issues. we have serious issues as detroiters.

one of those issues is insurance. detroiters are plagued with the in the insurance rates nation. those of the things we need to focus on. >> i think the mayor of this city should be judged on one standard. is the population of the city going up or going down? if the population is going down, more people want to leave them come here. -- than come here. i am going to work very hard to reverse the population. we need to cut the police response time. we have to be confident that officers will show up. we need to repair the streetlights. it is an embarrassment. we have people living in the dark. we need to start taking the abandoned homes and moving families and. -- in.

police showinghe up, the streetlights on, and the abandoned buildings occupied, i think we can generate hope and we can grow on a path that we can rebuild the city the way we want to. forillman, a question again both of you. mike, i will start with you. with many residents i speak to, they fear that those commitments may come with a price. what are your views, gentlemen, on corporate responsibility and corporate roles in detroit? i think it is important to build a coalition that includes all of the community. business leaders

in the town support me. the detroit firefighters, the sanitation workers, the plumbers, the health care workers, and grassroots organizations support me. all of these have a place at the table. at the end of the day, here is what we need to do. we have a lot of growth going on in downtown and in midtown. we are losing way too much population out of the neighborhoods. we will come back to the plan you will find on my website. every neighborhood has a future. that means take the abandoned homes and move the families and. take the vacant lots and sell it to the person who is there. i think what we want to do is get many of these businesses to partner with new entrepreneurs and fill in some of the storefronts. we can bring every neighborhood back. >> i don't think there is anything wrong with the corporate community helping out

the city of detroit. i believe that as good corporate citizens they should do that. those are not the people who gave me $3 million in contributions, so to say that we are for sale, that cannot be referring to me. i have enjoyed the support of the teamsters, food and commercial workers, i have enjoyed a tremendous amount of support from labor. we both have support in the community. thatact is, the question is most important, who was going to focus on the neighborhoods? i have been in the neighborhoods since the beginning. unless we focus on neighborhoods , we will grow this community. think tax abatements should be given to people who are here doing business as opposed to new people. >> i will come back to the same question. you have been sheriff for 4

years, for the neighborhoods, what have you done? if you look at the three years i spent in the prosecutor's office, i went in the neighborhoods and seized 900 drug houses, removed the drug dealers out, moved families in. we went block by block. we took 1000 abandoned houses. we didn't just demolish them. when you replace the abandoned houses and move people and, the rest of the block, people plan for more. hope spreads. i would have to give the former deputy city prosecutor a civics lesson. city in wayne county has its own police department. they also are responsible for policing the communities. he is disingenuous when he talks about what i done. i have a style program that has worked in our community to make it safe. you talked about a few houses.

we rated tens of thousands of houses during my tenure. -- raided tens of thousands of houses during my tenure. what specific relationships do you gentlemen have with specific people in lansing that you believe will have a positive impact on the city of detroit? with folksorked throughout wayne county. i worked closely with all of the elected officials in wayne county. i worked closely -- i have been endorsed and supported by almost -- of the detroit low delegation, the house and the senate. that is where my strength is. working across county lines. to focus on issues that are

important to this region. i enjoyed support throughout this community. i have been in public service for 38 years. i am going to use those connections, that focus, to go into the communities and make our neighborhoods safer and more livable, walkable, and sustainable. the neighborhoods, the neighborhoods, the neighborhoods. thee need to recognize reality that detroit is 8% of the population. if we are only going to fight with the other 92%, we are going to continue losing. when rick snyder was elected governor in 2010 and the republicans took the house and took the senate, i went up and said, we will lobby for our money. was a group of hospitals out of state that immediately

started changing the funding to move it out of the city and the state. i sat with the new republican senate chair, i sat with governor snyder, i showed them objectively. john's werend st. doing an outstanding job delivering care to the poor in our community. what i show them that, every single dollar got reinstated to detroit. we can do it on a bipartisan basis, but we have to work on it. >> let's talk about a fairytale of the dnc turnaround. $50 million came from the government. for countyeaks executives. $30 million paid in fines to justice department for brock -- fines, fraud, kickbacks. my opponent got millions of dollars in cash and stock options while hundreds of

thousands of people got laid off. that is not a turnaround. >> it is astonishing how many unproved things you said in three seconds. the $50 million was given to my predecessor to bailout before i got there. when i came in, dnc was on the -- weof laying off people work together to turn it around. got, my wife and i created a scholarship fund that we gave to dmc employees. let's expand this into leadership. what you just said goes into the leadership question. you have your supporters. there are people who have sent me lots of e-mails both said that you have both been a part of wayne county government for a long time.

what can you tell voters who are watching tonight or not supporting you, they're in the middle wondering what you can demonstrate that shows them leadership and ethics? >> i will start with this. in wayne county i was there 14 years. we balanced the budget 14 years. while there was one member of art ministration indicted, the u.s. and ernie said, i have never been under investigation -- u.s. attorney said that i have never been under investigation. i think what you really ought to look at our results. -- are results. call dmc. people who remember what it was like. how we came in and turned it

around and delivered their care in 29 minutes. how we went from having almost no cardiology program to one of the best in the country. how we went from 11,000 employees to 14,000 ploys. -- employees. those are the kind of results that we need in the city of detroit. >> it is no secret that both of us have been in government for a very long time. neither one of us are new. mike has been involved in government probably longer than i have. the fact is, from a leadership standpoint, i have always been open and transparent. i have always been open to letting someone come in, look at this agency -- wherever i have been, it doesn't matter. to see if we are operating cleanly. i have never been afraid of the fed's, i have never been afraid of anyone.

i believe that the essence of government is that people should have trust in their government. as a leader, that is what you do. you instill trust. when people do wrong when i'm around, they go to prison. it is that simple. i have never been accused. i would never sanction it. i would never be a part of it. >> any response? >> no thanks. >> next question from cliff russell. concerned, asely i am sure you are, about the young people in detroit. we have heard our schools described as pipelines to prison. one of the issues people don't talk or think about a lot are the scores of young people. they don't have jobs. you don't have the training we used to have. what commitments can you give us now, that as mayor you will make sure that these young people have better opportunities for jobs, for recreation, and for

the future in detroit that you both say want to create? >> it is absolutely the center question. there are many things i disagree with the current mayor with. he basically said police and our priority. parks and recreation, we will cut them off. if we don't provide things for young people to do, we will be hiring police down the road to catch them. we may not be able to afford to build stand-alone recreation centers in the future. it does not mean we can't have smart partnership. ascan hire staff and partner opposed to opening our own centers. i want to do what we did at the detroit medical center. kids to high school work for $10 per hour to work in the dmc.

hiredyears later, kids we as high school juniors are working full-time jobs, biology majors at wayne state, are in medical school. know, cliff, i was not born a child of privilege. my grandfather was a sharecropper. a sharecropper with an eighth grade education. they came here with great promise of making a living for their family. educating our children is the quickest way to lift them up out of the circumstances that they are in. we have to recognize that our kids after school not equal. they come in on 2 different tracks. children is a challenge. it is a challenge that i understand. i was the head of the child abuse unit, head of the gang unit. working with the detroit public

school system for years and years -- 13 years of my career. we have to be the strongest advocates for education. until you get the school straight, there is no growth. >> this is one of the few times that we will completely agree. the next mayor has to be the best partner the detroit public schools has ever had. that means finding lots of ways to partner, not taking away schools. thecity is not providing kind of truancy enforcement that we ought to be. i want to come back to projects genesis. it is my intention to go to every business leader in this community and say, let's create job opportunities, part-time and summer, that these kids can see the opportunities that there are. >> i have to say that it is amazing to me that my opponent will say that he is opposed to the mayor or anyone taking over our school system when he has

served on the eaa board as its treasurer. the schoolking over system. how can you be against it while being a part of it? we need to move forward and educate from the city of detroit. >> there is much conversation about the city of detroit being reinvented. plan whichut forth a talks about shrinking some of the neighborhoods. your quick thoughts on the need to shrink neighborhoods and which neighborhoods should be the ones to go or add? >> i have gone through all of the information that was put out by detroit future cities. a lot of it i agree with. i am not sure i agree with shrinking the city from the perspective of putting people out of their homes and relocating them someplace

different than where they have been. think aboutthat, i my mother. she has been in her house since 1960. the neighborhood is not the same neighborhood that she raised her children and. it is not the same area. to tell her, after all this time, that she has to leave her house and go someplace else because you want to shrink the aty is a little unfair and little insensitive. we have to be a little more creative in what we do. -- thete -- it relates city of detroit was once a great metropolis. it can be that once again if we have the vision and foresight to do it. we will be bigger, better, and stronger. >> this is our difference. i have a plan. it is on my website. what do you do with the neighborhoods that have only 2 or 3 houses on the block? nobody should be pressuring to leave your house if you want to go.

-- don't want to go. we need to create positive incentive. sell abandoned houses. to say to the folks on these blocks, if you want to you wantpressure, if to move, we will give you triple the credit on this house. i think if we create positive incentives, we can get people to do two things at once. fill in the neighborhoods we need filled then and allow some people who want to have the option to move. >> are you ok? >> a fly in the house here. [applause] [laughter] >> i have an economic development plan to put anchors

in every community in the city and every new council district. from there, we will go out. i hope to see the city i grew up in. we you get rid of the blights, you build new houses, you bring new residents in. detroit has an opportunity to regrow itself. i'm not saying i disagree with mike, i have a different idea. >> let me come back to specific plans. here is my next piece. when we move folks out of these sparsely populated neighborhoods, we will sit down and partner with the neighborhoods to say, what do you want to do with the structural land? do you want a recreational garden, do you want -- we will partner with the community groups to see what we can do to reuse the property. when we create that kind of partnership, we use the land well. >> i will ask you both to be a

copy editor. it is january 2015, what will be different for the city of detroit? >> detroit, the miracle city. it has come back. it is bigger, it is better, it is stronger, it is greater, it is better than it has ever been. >> i have a clear plan of what i want to do. we are going to get the police to show up. we're going to cut that response time so people feel safe. we're going to demand accountability for the streetlight repair crews so we can stop living in the dark. we are going to start to take these abandoned homes. if we do that, we can bring the neighborhoods back. the other thing i will do, similar to do at the mc, i want -- dmc, i want to start a city auto insurance program.

>> that will have to be the last word here. we have time for closing statements here. , you go first. >> it has been almost one year since i left dmc. i have campaigned in every corner of the city. i have been campaigning living room to living room, backyard to backyard, church to church. i have been greeted with warmth and kindness in every corner of this community. there have been tough times as well. every place i went, the place said mike -- the people said, ine, do it right in -- write . 48,000 people spelled my name properly and filled in the circle. i want to say thank you. i will promise you one thing.

if you will trust me with your vote on november 5, i will fight just as hard for the next four years as your mayor to help build a detroit that the people of the city deserve. .> benny napoleon >> this is a serious election. i have a neighborhood revitalization plan that is 63 pages long. it is going to revitalize the community in a way that it has not seen in 50 years. i have an initiative that will make the city safe, livable, walkable, and sustainable once again. one square mile at a time. let me just say this. my opponent says that he has been coming in and out of detroit for the last 32 years. how many of you have seen him in that last 32 years before he began to run for mayor? while he was sleeping in livonia , i put on a bullet-proof vest and patrolled the cities. while he was sleeping, i was arresting murderers.

while he was sleeping in livonia, we were getting rid of corruption. while he was sleeping, i was taking flags off of the coffins getlain police officers who -- have given their lives for years what you were sleeping. >> that concludes the first televised debate between mike duggan and benny napoleon. we hope you learned that more about them. if once was not enough, you can watch this debate on our sister station at 5:00 p.m. you can also listen to it again on the radio it in :00 p.m. this tuesday -- it :00 p.m. -- 8:00 p.m. this tuesday. from all of us here at michigan matters, thanks for being with

us. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013]

>> c-span student camp video competition asks, what is the most important issue congress should consider an 2014? 5-7 minute video and include c-span video. a grand prize of $5,000. this year we have doubled the number of winners in total prizes. entries are due by january 20, 2014. pakistanime minister is in washington this week. today, you can hear his remarks on relations between his country and the u.s. when he speaks at the u.s. institute of peace alive at 11:00 eastern on c-span two. >> every go, folks.

folks. we go, the chamber is the world's largest not-for-profit business federation. chamberhue has led the since 1997. before that he severed for resident and chief executive officer of the american trucking association. prior to that, he was crew vice president for the chamber. he is a new york native and has a bachelors degree from st. john's university and an mba. he started in the chamber's new york office as a telemarketer in 1974. he came to the organization well-equipped for a rapid rise

with a degree from harvard. we are on the record here. lease, no live blogging are tweeting during the session. our friends at c-span have agreed not to air the session until one after -- our after the breakfast ends. if you would like to ask a question, send me a subtle, nonthreatening signal and i will call on one and all. i would like to start with opening comments and then questions from around the table. thank you again for coming. >> thank you. good morning. thank you for getting up on an early monday morning for this. i will be brief and then you can have at it. we always enjoy coming here. it is the one place you can have a conversation.

-- our communication issues become more complicated every day. the buzz is still all about the debt deal, who won, who lost, who is up, who is down. i would like to open today's breakfast with looking a minute to the future. overall,ess community, is glad that the immediate crisis has been resolved. we are now landing for the next three rounds of this. the currentrfect agreement is, a gives us a chance to get ready for what is next. the fact is that we have a lot of work to do in this country and we need to get back to it now. you need to fire up our economy and speed up the recovery. we need to get our fiscal house in order.

if you don't hear anything else for me, we have got to reform our entitlement system before it eats us alive. we need to modernize our health and retirement immigration and regulatory systems. we need to ramp up our reclaim, and accelerate our competitive edge. oureed to get busy seizing extraordinary opportunities in this country today to create jobs, drive growth, and create government revenues. by developing all types of energy -- more on that in a minute -- by rapidly expanding our commercial relationships within the two biggest trading blocs in the world coming europe and the asian pacific. until we act on these opportunities, the kind of spending and debt standoff we endured over the past few weeks will repeat itself over and over again.

higher andll pile higher. the chamber is going to focused its efforts on a few key opportunities and a few key challenges. first, the opportunities. immigration. we are in a good position. there is still an appetite to get caught -- comprehensive immigration reform done this year. extendnot sure -- we may this year a few months. but we are really hot after it. there was still strong support among the public and lawmakers. our economy and our businesses and our workers need it more than ever. the chamber is keeping up the push for reform. thes an opportunity to show world that we can get a big thing done that we can all benefit from. energy is another major opportunity. you want more jobs, faster growth, revenues pouring into government coffers, manufacturing renaissance am a stronger national security?

then take advantage of the best energy resources that this nation has been blessed with. we need to tear down barriers to exploration and development. we need to put energy to work for the good of our country and then there are still some challenges. overregulation is a big one. we need to move on this very quickly before it consumes us. by the way, we need regulation in this country. any word early society does. but when the regulation becomes bigger than the thing we're trying to regulate, it gets worrisome. we have a threefold approach to dealing with this. work with the congress to advance legislation that will restore balance and sanity to the process, work with the agencies to improve the regulations that are being drafted, and, when all else fails, sue them. the chamber will not hesitate to take the fight to the courts. there is record

something to write home about. before a conclude, i ought to say a word about obamacare. it is a prime example of regulation run amok. the intention of what people set out to do was write. -- right. but we ended up with more than what we thought. we are finding ways to fix the obvious flaws in law and i expect the administration will join in some of those. we need to continue general reform. let me and where i started. in addition to these key priorities that i have just highlighted, the chamber will be focused on the budget talks established by last week's agreement to reopen the government and lift the debt ceiling. who knows if those talks will succeed, but they damn well better. it is an opportunity for some serious truth telling to our

elected officials and to the public. that unsustainable entitlements are the root core of our deficits and debts. note, that isease no administration's fault. it is a demographic reality. we are all living longer. let me give you one number. 10,000 people will retire every that comes atand 65 years old. and every day for the next 17 years. until there are 77 million of them. figure it out. we have a spending problem. we have a growth problem. the fundamental entitlement reform and comprehensive tax reform are the way to address them. until we face up to these hard steps and take the harder of acting on them, any future negotiations on the budget and the sequestration and the debt

be basically disconnected from the actual needs of the country. i know a lot of you are anxious to hear what we think about 2014 and how it will impact the chamber's political engagement in the next cycle. i will do my best to answer those questions as fully as possible, by avoiding the ones i don't want to answer. with that, let me take your questions. -- >>let me start ash >> let me start with one you might not want to answer. having given tens of millions of dollars to republican candidates, you were researching what 2014 candidates might be fireable. where does that effort stand -- viable. where does that effort stand? we are engaged in primaries on a regular basis.

idea what we are going to have on the table. we still have to see who is running. the nexthave to see activity on the deficit. we still have to see what the circumstances are. we have a formal process of doing this. we will pursue that process. we will do what ever seems to be for the to be -- country and for the business community. this is not about party. this is about how this country is going to be run. how this economy is going to be given. and what role we can plan that. >> i assume it is a safe assumption that you were disappointed with the tea party faction? groups calling for default are clearly less interested in the mainstream concern of businesses

-- main street concerns of businesses. >> we are not a single issue or a single vote organization. , for as longhard as i have been here and as long as bruce has been here, to go after the issues that concern the business community without crippling the country. i cannot stress enough what a debt, not our foreign , would putate debt us in a position that would change our position around the world and increase our interest very, veryut us in a challenging issue for creating jobs and running our economy. we continue to say that. we fundamentally believe it. at the same time, we think that

the members of various different other groups -- i don't like to say to you party -- tea party -- we have all types of people away in on these issues from all different groups. i don't know what the tea party is. maybe that is what republicans and democrats alike, they are not all the same. that someese issues of these folks have raised a really important issues. what are we spending? what is a revenue stream? -- our revenue stream? what are we doing about health care? to put the country's whole financial system at risk is not a good idea. >> i wanted to ask you about the power of the chamber.

[indiscernible] you in a concern to terms of the standing of where the chamber is? i am glad to have a lot of people trying to get into this issue and getting serious about -- hopefully, we will be able to bring them to a consensus. not on the issues. people have a lot of agreement on the issues. on the best way to move forward. the chamber continues to do well. we have had an extraordinary continuation of our success in the courts. when we had the last one of these debt and deficit issues. i looked at what happened on the tax side. i looked at what happened on the sequestration side, i looked at all of that and i came away and i said we continue to do well.

the most important thing to understand about your question is that the two things that we actually do -- we're advocates and we build coalitions of people. and groups to try to get something done. no one organization makes anything happen in this city. and bruce johnston and his team are probably the best people in this city on building coalitions, bringing large groups of people who differ on other issues together on specific issues to achieve some consensus. i think we're still doing very well. and i welcome more people to come in and row in the vote. if you're rowing, then you have to be playing.