instability and conflict. i am afraid the next escalation will be just a matter of time. as i told the general assembly recently from cairo, the basic wage and must consist on addressing consider -- addressing security concerns. the assessment of gaza's needs have not yet been completed, but there will be at least three steps needed after the so-called got let in 2000 nine. approximately 1600 housing units have been destroyed or severely damaged, affecting some 100,000 palestinians. is necessary to help the economy get back on its

feet. construction materials must be allowed into gaza. and their access to gaza must be facilitated in a way that the phils israel security concerns. the united nations stands ready to lend its support in this regard. for years, the u.n. has been supporting projects under the monitornt of israel to the exclusive civilian use of andmaterials, entering allowing for successful implementation of crucial projects. reconstruction of the managed to do that is now needed can only be accomplished with the palestinian authority and private sector in gaza, meaning large materials are required to enter gaza. we stand with stakeholders on how it can be implemented.

engagement of the the community will be necessary to help gaza back on its feet. we call on the government in egypt once a cease-fire is in place and conditions have been established. at theartened spearheading of reconstruction action in gaza. last week, i met with deputy prime minister in gaza. i appreciate he was able to enter gaza. eyes seeing with my own the massive destruction in which whole neighborhoods have been flattened, discussed with the deputy prime mister and is cap members for a way forward. he assured me there is a way

forward. as part of bringing gaza back under one legitimate palestinian .overnment i reiterate the appeal that i made last week in gaza. in gaza to rally for thehe government transformative change the gaza so badly needs. right now, gaza urgently needs houses, hospitals, and schools. not rockets, tunnels, and conflict. hamas to act responsibly. be talkinge will about wikipedia editing for congress. speakers likes to point out that in a recent 90 day time freight, almost 400 -- timeframe, almost 400,000

articles on bills pending in congress. those most knowledgeable have an aversion to this. the people that work with members, work with counsel, work with crs, are largely not largeg the website that a segment of the mirkin population used to get it -- that of the american population used to get information about bills pending in congress. we have a huge manner in which government can deliver , andparency to the public the public likewise can demand better outcomes. to help navigate the rules around wikipedia, and a little history on the legislation, we have three scholars here today. jim harper is the senior fellow at the cato institute and works on issues such as privacy, telecommunications, and intellectual property, transparency, and security.

from 2004-14, he was the director of policy studies at cato. in 2014 to me became an cato senior fellow and the policy council on the bitcoin town station -- foundation. next up is michelle new become a legislative researcher and writer in the in the informational studies at the cato institute. she has a masters degree from the university of chicago in international relations. she has been editing wikipedia since august, 2012. she has made nearly 6000 at its on 1392 unique pages. grated 339 articles, most of which are about legislation from the 113 congress. a graduatem hayes, of old dominion and george mason university. with that, i will turn it over to jim. >> thanks, john. i'm very pleased to be here and

to have you all here as well as the c-span audience. we can do a lot to advance the ball on transparency in congress. very interesting. wikipedia editing for congressional staff. there is an aversion to editing on wikipedia and a mistrust within the community for edits coming from congress. informationve the that is available to any american people about what happens here. i want to open by doing a brief history, the sort of modern history of the transparency issue him and the work we have been doing at cato, before i turn it over to michelle and then jim. michelle obviously has the caners to prove that she make a talented and capable wikipedia and we want to make others as good as michelle at producing information for people together to get insight into what people are -- into what is happening inside congress. what is going on within transparency?

it longer.orking on since 2000, i run a website called washingtonwatch.com. it has had a lot of traffic. 200,000 comments on a single bill come a for example. really impressive stuff. the transparency project has never taken off like a good command that is basically because the data is not available. i was excited when president with the first elected promises of transparency that he made. good-faith promises, and i think a good-faith effort was made within the first couple of years of the obama administration to deliver on transparency. but i think a problem existed, and that is, people did not early no how to deliver transparency. -- people did not really know how to deliver transparency. what is been spared the within the government? how does it deliver on the oversight that we want for the public today echo -- today? i have seen a slowdown in the

transparency efforts during the current administration also and i wrote a couple of pieces that , and i think they are available on the desk outside. what do you have to do with the asked on the transparency side? what we want them to be doing to data.e transparent it has to be available from an authoritative voice, so be below where to get it. , and completeness. that is, you want all of the relevant data in a given area. you want it to be up all the time come and to stay in one place of there can be a consistent datastream and website asked and information services can be built on a datastream that is reliable. forourse, the machine searching is important. google and other crawlers need to be able to find the data and deliver it to people. and the most important parties readability.

structuring -- the most important part is readability. structuring the data so that it is usable. a subsequent publication is called "grading the public -- "grading the governments availability of public practices ," grading the legislative process, the budget and appropriations process. the grades are generally fairly poor. have been steps taken in the congress and in the administration in and in a new law recently passed called the did act that may well improve those great -- those grades quite a bit. in a study we are about to again, regrading the availability of data, the numbers will still be fairly poor. actual data about what is going on in congress is not readily available. actual data about the budgeting is not readily available. but over the years, we have set

to work at cato trying to make some of that work available -- that data available for sub you can follow our work on these bills on twitter. cato.org/resources/data is where the data is downloadable in bulk, or through the api. gather versions of the bill from the government printing office, and then using highly software -- highly xmlomized software, we add aat indicates when there is reference to an existing law in all of the ways that reference might exist. when it is referencing a bureau, we have the data automatically available for those who want to parse and find it. a have a bill -- when we have bill that contained spending, or an authorization of appropriations, or an

appropriation, we also make that available as data. the publishing of these bills and making them available for anyone to use, and the did -- the data that we are starting to seize, for example, the washington examiner has a page called "appropriate appropriations." they are displaying to their users the existence of the bill proposed to spend money. a few months ago when this came out, this was the first time anyone could systematically find what ails in congress proposed to spend taxpayer dollars. it is surprising and fascinating that there was no systematic way of learning when congress was proposing spending. but the appropriate appropriations page on the washington examiner uses that data within these bills to make that available to the public, positioning for better oversight of the congress. the new york times is a better user of this data. you do tracking of legislation, votes, and such. on pages about legislation

there, there is a section in the lower right called "mentions." they use the references that we have to show what agencies are mentioning what bills. if you are interested in what is happening at the department of labor, or the environmental protection agency, the data we produce allows you to see all of the bills that affect these agencies. when i mentioned that it references existing law, that is another thing we mark up in all the ways that robert refers to them. the legal institute at cornell letbegun using this data to their visitors know that when they are visiting a page of the u.s. code, that code is subject to amendment by the u.s. congress. we have relatively sophisticated people going onto the cornell law website -- and many of you here are filling with that and many people out of the land are familiar with that. it is usually the top searchers when you are searching for u.s. code. when you are on one of those pages and the section of code

you are looking for is up for amendment in congress, they are giving you a link to that. you can go to congress.gov and look at the bill must find out who authored it, and where it is in the process. at the bill, find out who authored it, and where it is in the process. that will be important information for those who are looking for the code and the legislation that is pending. they may be able to offer educated opinions on what congress is doing an improved democratic processes. we at cato are also using the data on wikipedia. i come now to the subject of today's topic. we take the data that is produced in deep bills and we produce info boxes that we use on legislative pages. you're probably familiar with the info boxes on wikipedia about a movie star, political actor, what their party has been in their career, and so on and so forth. wikipedia info boxes can show

any discrete way what is going on with a particular bill. those are produced with deep bill data as well. and to sort of highlight what is now, we with wikipedia have created a twitter bot that is a riff on the congress at its twitter boxed. out withrecently came a great deal of interest in this. it tracks anonymous edits coming from capitol hill. little bit of a back-and-forth and forth between one or more anonymous editors, and the cutie at large, because the community seems to be trolling the edits that they do. it is interesting stuff. someone edited them i believe, the cato institute page on wikipedia anonymously on the hill about this event happening. it was kind of meta-and we saw our minds a coating when that happened. edits, not just those coming from the hill. at wikisee the bot bills. you can see what legislation is

being edited. you can take a look at what people are doing with bills and find those there. many of the edits are coming from michelle, who does so much work. we are trying to make government more legible. we are trying to make it more available. editing wikipedia is a way of doing that. getting the notable bills up there, getting them written about, so people when they are doing a search to find out what is going on in congress can go to that resource, which is so valuable for so many things. and at least start their investigation there. as john mentioned, there has been reticence on the ,ongressional side to wikipedia and that has to do with history early on. there was controversy, because people from the hill, people from congressional offices were going in and editing the pages of the members of congress that they work for. there would be back and forth and there were conflicts of interest in doing that. generally, there is. there is a version to wikipedia editing on the hill. there is suspicion of wikipedia editing from the hill on the part of the wikipedia community.

but we think that suspicion can be abated, if not gotten rid of them entirely. but it will be hard. there are customs and rules on againsta against rules conflict of interest, for cabell, but i think have to be navigated very carefully. michelle is going to -- for example, but i think they have to be navigated very carefully. michelle is going to talk about this culture. she is very highly decorated within wikipedia. i'm very pleased with her work. her experience of the culture is an experience that others have had. there's a lot of controversy that goes into these bills. we will have more discussion around what the rules are and how to navigate the process. we very much like to see congressional offices flipped from a version to embrace wikipedia. after a sort of initial phase of concern and worry and suspicion, i think things will change

dramatically and wikipedians will come to expect that the mers of congress are sharing with the public in the best possible way ways to introduce congressional legislation. the question is, which will -- which congressional office will step up and start editing wikipedia first check on unofficial banana, but she's here to talk about her experience. -- wikipedia first. i don't know if michelle will talk about that, but she's here to talk about her experience. we had a meet013, and thewikipedians transparency activists within d.c. and sat down to talk about how we can use the deep bill data that jim just described in a way to make the wikipedia boxes on wikipedia better. and improve the discussion. one of the things we discussed that day was how we determine if a piece of legislation is

notable. obviously, the person who introduces it hopes that it is notable. they put it there for a reason. but with 10,000 pieces of legislation in a congress, we cannot really do with the pd articles on all 10,000. one of the lines that we decided on at this meeting and have held to is that pieces of legislation are notable if they come up for the house andn senate. that is several hundred bills so far in this congress. and we have articles about 350 of them. obviously, there are many more that we do not have articles about. one of the things i've noticed you canthis, is that track to hit count an article gets, and you can track exactly who the editors are of an article. i can tell you that when we write an article, posted out there, put it in the article people read it will stop -- people read it. especially bills like immigration bill, farm bill,

those get attention. if you search for the bill name, your article is up on the first page of the google hit. people can find it and they use would be as a source of information. they will go there and read the article. you put theis, once article up there, there are some hard-core wikipedians they come by and do some maintenance on the article. very little additional information gets added. that is what we would like to see people on the hill do. you guys know more about these pieces of legislation than anyone does. you have personal and professional interest in their re beingrrect -- thee wrecked information for the general public in the bill and why the information is good or bad or terrible and how it can be improved. you have incentive to add to these articles. is, wikipedia can provide

one, a knowledge of the rules, and the culture of wikipedia. how to maintain neutrality in an article. how to ethically address conflicts of interest situations. how to spruce up the article by adding images. and maps that show the vote counts for which states or which district voted for or against a piece of legislation, and how to make cool info boxes. that is something wikipedians can add, but we still need people from the hillside, experts and policy, -- experts on policy for my to add to the comments side. we had a situation where bill was passed. there was no accurate total of, you know, bob voted yes, john voted no. you can make a map of visually who voted yes and no. but there was a guy who just cap putting a map on there. it turns out he was using data from a vote taken on a bill by

the same name, but from the 112th congress. and he did not notice the difference. that is something where we need people who are experts, like yourselves, to do and help us out with. can is also a thing that come up with multiple versions of the same bill with different titles, but have completely different contents. that is something wikipedians don't necessarily understand, but staffers would. staffers would understand a legislative vehicle they go straight over the head of wikipedians. i think it's a very valuable project. if you think about a piece of legislation, even if you can pull a summary of it from someplace like the congressional research servers, it will not necessarily make sense to a layperson who does not have deep knowledge of that issue. and the great part about wikipedia is that you can make a link to all of the concepts and

agencies and organizations and locations and places that are in the summary. studying up on their congressperson to decide if they're going to vote for that guy again. he can go in and look at the legislation and say, i don't know what a hydropower dam is, but i can clicked on this link in wikipedia and read about what that is. people love to see more edit wikipedia. i think there are good reasons to. hopefully, jim will be able to tell you some about wikimedia here in d.c., which is a group that knows wikipedia really well and would love to partner with you guys to help staffers and people with knowledge to edit in a strong and knowledgeable way. jim? >> thanks for coming. thanks, cato.

we look forward to more collaboration in the future. by way of background, wikipedia -- i mean, it seems ubiquitous, and that is wherever one page hits go. -- where everyone's page hits go. but keep in mind that the wikimedia foundation is a nonprofit and they run the servers and software and are based out of san francisco, but all the content is written by volunteers. a local chapter of volunteers called wikimedia, d.c. trying toy active have local funds for distribution, including through the cato institute, and we have worked with the smithsonian and international archives. conflict of interest has a long history on wikipedia. there is an article you can read about it that gives you all the gory details. conflict of interest on editing on wikipedia.

in 2006, -- and congress was part of that. there were some good takeaways from that and some good examples. there was an article about wasressman joe wilson that a precursor to some of the conflict of interest rules where staffers put content on the top page, and then it was incorporated in the article and the article was relatively good quality after that. that is on your handout, some of the concepts about neutral point of view and conflict of interest. things have become more formalized over time. now, there is a nice, long, written policy about conflict of interest. the idea is to give you some best practices of how to do fax correction in articles -- a fact correction in articles, if you find something that is not correct them even if you have a

conflict. the idea is not to -- the idea is to register your account, declare your potential conflicts of interest on the user page, and then make the comments on the top page. and also, if you need help editing, there are some good suggestions on your handout. suggest -- there is a forum on wikipedia called the teahouse. that is a nice place to go for some semi-real-time help. friend the people will help you out if you have concerns. and also, if you want more hands on help, come to our some -- some of our local events. new tonight backstage pass -- you get a nice backstage pass. there are many social media people there and we can help you with your concerns about editing. a lot of this conflict of someest is also tied into pr controversies that have occurred on wikipedia.

there are certain public relations firms and there is kind of a spectrum there and some bad actors who are creating a bad atmosphere on wikipedia. some local firms have gotten together with some public relations firms and there is a statement from wikipedia on -- from participating firms and that is something we might consider among staffs and have a statement for people to sign on to. it helps to foster a sense of cooperation, and perhaps do some cold throw management there ns.ng wikipedia also, conflict of interest has the terms ofthin

use. it is giving you more tools to deal with bad actors, and part of the editing practice would be to differentiate your at it from what bad actors might do. also, one thing that our chapter does in the spring is we do wiki loves capitol hill. we have been having some conversations with the staff of the ip subcommittees. are interested in talking with us in the spring, we would be happy to talk to about that. we are looking forward to questions and i would be happy to expand if you have general concerns. thanks. >> before john gets up and takes over as master of ceremonies, i'm curious to know among people in the room, who among you feel you are experienced wikipedians and you edit fairly regularly. ok, we have five or six. and the rest of you, you know

what wikipedia is, i take it, but not regular editors. >> actually, of those who raise their hand, who he'll -- who here is a hill staffer? onlyhose who did not see, two. that raises a good point. we have plenty of time for questions if anyone has any. -- i will take moderators privilege and take the first question. i was on a hill not too long ago , and even though i might be open to the idea of editing wikipedia, let's say my boss is ok with it and all of that, wikipedia still has a sort of stigma to it where you would not find it on a college paper. it may not be accurate. it may not be the best place for a source. how do you address that? >> i know for sure there are hill staffers that edit

wikipedia. a couple of them commented on a discussion i was having with them people what we are planning this event, that they were very interested in knowing about the event. the twitter bot that captures from -- anonymous edits from the house and ip addresses have proved there are people from the house editing wikipedia. i think anyone who looks down on wikipedia needs to reconsider their mindset. theoes wikipedia is one of six most heavily trafficked websites in the world. it.your constituency use it's ok if your college professor doesn't want to cite the article. your college professor is not really your audience when you are editing wikipedia. you are editing it to speak to people who will go to your town hall and ask you questions about the legislation you voted for.

and they are the people who are going to donate to your campaign , and to help you out and who you are supposed to be helping in turn. it is ordinary people who read wikipedia, and most of the world is full of ordinary, normal people. we are the people who care about wikipedia. the other thing i would point to is wikipedia's rules regarding citations have improved over time, and people are much more vigilant about properly citing information i goes into wikipedia than they used to. i -- that is something i would encourage any of you as staffers or anyone at all editing wikipedia, cite your sources. cite your sources. cite your sources. if you use proper citations, which there is a little button.

you pick the button and tell it whether you want to cite a book, website, or newspaper, and then you fill in the blanks and it does all of the citation for you. if you do that, people cannot accuse you of taking things up. they have a hard time deleting information that you have added, because you have shown where it came from. i think that adds to the legitimacy as well. wikipediadon't cite in your college paper, but you do look there first and you find all the citations and use those as information. clicks on that subject, i will share a story from some years back. understanding the value of wiki editing, or wiki style editing, it is quite a while back now -- i added to washingtonwatch.com. a is not wikipedia, but capability still exists today on the site. i went around on the hill and talked to some friends and said, you know, hey, this is a chance

for you to put on public record a really good description of your bill. your bill can access a lot more people this way. and you will be able to give them the story directly. how does congress to indicate with the public now? you are still very much intermediated by the press. you have someone in the press. you reach out to them to try to get a story written. you try to get a favorable release. it is sometimes high-quality and sometimes low-quality. you have people come to your individual member website, yes, but the flow of information out to the public about legislation is rather poor. on the other side, you have a lot of people who are highly suspicious, because the flow is so poor. the information they have is veryy varied and not reliable sources in many cases. there is a lot of distrust. the instinct on the hill has been not to want to actually engage.

was in friend -- it jest, but a friend said, o, the last and we want is for the public to actually know what we are doing up here. it was in jest, but it was based on the fact that often, the loudest of the members of the public are the most distrustful. there is antagonistic elision between congress and the public at large. but that can be flipped. and i think straightforward, meritorious information about be communicated to the public. -- the editors and authors will sometimes joust get one another on how to to certain issues. out of that jousting, the

competition, you'll get very good information. wikipedia handle some of the most controversial debate. people work very hard to choose words carefully, to choose the structure of articles very carefully, so the debate is accurately represented on wikipedia. you cannot go to wikipedia and use it to win debates. you just accurately represent the debate, and from that challenge comes good information for the public to use. for asents an opportunity seachange in transparency about what the hill is doing. a sea change in public attitudes about what the government is doing. as john stated at the beginning, and i believe this as well, this will the -- this will position the public to understand better what they want from congress. they will be able to communicate accurately, communicate about specifics rather than phone banks coming from the home district. people calling saying, hey, i understand that hr 1234 does x,

and it's up for committee vote next week. how much better does that work? those phone banks versus the person calling up to say, "i've been told to tell you" etc., etc. >> what is the gap that cato has filled about what congress is --ng and its relationship nine clicks i'm sorry, could you go but -- and its relationship [indiscernible] >> i'm sorry, could you repeat the question you asked the gap in information between what >>gress is doing -- like oakham of the community should gap between what congress is public knowst the

is going on. pages do you have up on wikipedia from this project echo >> from this comment, not very many. repeathat existed were multiple congresses. -- the had an article violence against women act had an article. not very many. there is one for equal employment rights for gay people. if the employment nondiscrimination act. -- >> the employment nondiscrimination act. >> yes. there are about 10 or so. they preexisted us adding. >> bills that have come up year-over-year, they had articles. and sometimes, they would accurately represent one the next bill in

the next congress, and so on and so forth. at but as for systematic reporting from congress, virtually none. a bill would go by without any article at all on wikipedia. now we are getting them there. and as michelle said, we need to get those articles fleshed out so there is more information available to the public. >> or take the national defense authorization act. there is one of those every year, as i recall. they have articles on many of those, but one particular year, the article will be 5000 words. you know, fairly lengthy. and the previous year it will be three sentences long. i think most of us would consider each year to have equal weight and equal importance to our country. just getting more information and making sure that we write a more robust article every year is something that is important. >> yeah, but i would say the gap a summary style of what is going

on on the hill. you are well aware of the specialized media that is around tracking things, but i don't think it's getting to the web in an easy to digest or find method for the average person. they're obviously googling trying to find out about bills, but how do we mediate between to thearch to lead them more specialized references? that is the gap we are filling in. the problem is, a lot of this ends up being even driven. you have a relatively good editor that writes about this one year and then does not come back the next year to do the same thing. importantng that is is the conflict of interest. how you might handle it. you work in a congressional office. i don't want to talk about

members pages. it is probably a bad idea to edit members pages. but you could. how about legislation? you work for a member of congress. your member of congress had legislation introduced. you know a lot about it. a lot ofould provide information. but on the other hand, there may be a conflict of interest with the page. what is your thinking on whether there is a conflict of interest and what to do about it? my way of thinking about the conflict of interest rules is that your mindset matters as much as your actual technical conflict. if you are just editing your site and going to remove all counter arguments, all information from your opponent. you will act like 100% of the world is behind this bill, that would be a conflict of interest.

not treating the topic ethically or fairly. i would say, your first step if you're going to edit a piece of legislation, or any article, really, is you should join and become a user. you don't even have to give the website and e-mail address. just a username and a password. it givesood because you accountability. if you are logged in, every edit you make is tracked to that account. i mean this not confused with edits made by other people. you can as tablets, yes, i am a good community member, and even though i am -- you can establish, yes, i am a good committee member, and even though i am editing from this same building as this jerk over here, my edits and hit -- his edits are different. can keep others from saying, you did this good at it here, and here, but you did these terrible ones, so we are blocking you. having your own user account is important. another thing you can do is

right on your own user page. it is kind of like your profile, and you can write on that just like any other profile about yourself will serve you can write who you are on this page. you can say, i am bob, i work for congressman such and such, and i'm interested in these fields. you can say what your credentials are. like, i have a bachelors degree in agricultural economics will so that it interesting for anyone who read your edits, because they can say, o, they studied this in school. they know a lot about it. you can give you credentials. establishing editor accounts also improves other people's perceptions of you, because you show more commitment to the website. people take you more seriously. they can also reward you by giving you these things called barn stars, or cookies. that can be good. it also allows you to build relationships with people. by doing that, you establish that you want to join this community and be in good standing. the next thing you could do is

if you are really unsure and you really don't want to make any mistakes, because you could edit on the talk page instead of on the main page. behind every wikipedia article is a page called a talk page. tot is for people, editors write about the article without writing the article. they can say, hey, i found this paragraph in here and it is total junk and it's a bunch of lies by our filthy appointment -- opponent, and we want it taken out. the editor would say, well, you shouldn't say filthy dog -- filthy, but i think you're right . or they can have this whole huge battle. you can be more cautious right on the top page. if you're ready to go anything you have good information and you will contribute well and are comfortable with doing it, you can just edit the main page and make sure you cite your sources. wikipedia, and i think i listed this on the worksheet, has very clear guidelines for what good and bad sources are.

anything from the mainstream media pre-much counts as a good source. -- pretty much counts as a good source, and from books and journals, things like that. sources, useour neutral phrasing, and say, this is such and such group or persons opinion instead of true," then you have been helpful. most have a watch feature. -- if you are logged in as a user, you can watch a page. which means if you go to your watch pay -- your watch list, you can go to the most recent edits from the last three to seven days that are on your watch list. people can watch the page you did, and if they grew -- if they agree with your edits, they will let it go. if they hate your edits, they can change them immediately. that is one of the best parts about wikipedia.

it is a self-governing society, and it protects you and your opponents, and cuts down on some of the political fighting because people are viewing what you're doing, and they can undo your work if you are not behaving appropriately. say, if it's ad have an ax to grind, you definitely have a conflict there. to try tortant maintain a neutral point of view, which is another policy. yes, top ages, people don't know that they are there, but yes, please, let's use them. there is a process we are supposed to follow called edit, revert, talk. if someone reverts your edits, please don't am revert. it then you are edit warring. please go to the talk page and try to engage in a discussion about what your issues are.

the idea is that we are supposed to be writing an encyclopedia that is based on facts. and we are going to now have a meta-discussion about what the facts are, and then try to mediate with the best references are to make an argument about what the facts are. >> i think the panel did a good how peopleing about who are knowledgeable can become more engaged, and improve public and government, essentially. i think what is on most staffers mind -- i'm not really being paid to engage in public debate. what benefits are there to , andessional staffers maybe can clarify with some bills that are being attacked in the media. could you elaborate on war tangible benefits that would encourage a staffer to go out and become more engaged?

>> i think the battle over legislation, and i think most , it is largelys fought and built on a terrain out of talking point. it is a contest of talking points, a contest of getting favorable constituencies or authorities to weigh in on your side. it is really not as high a quality debate as we all would like to have. i think wikipedia allows you to provide information and allows actual public, the constituents, to access information and make up his or her own mind. i think quality articles about or dissuadeonvince people on the merits, and all of them will be happier with the opportunity to do that than they where there opportunity

is to choose what team they are on, or what ideology is theirs. are facts about what is happening in congress. there are fax that can be gathered -- there are facts that can be gathered and arguments that can be organized. there doesn't seem to be a lot of opportunity for a lot of folks, because again, that is -- the consensus out there is actually anger in discomfort. indicating with the people in the land is actually what often brings back that discomfort or anger. but i think you will find people are motivated and concerned about wanting what is best for the country, and they are more willing to work toward consensus than they were would fight. thisof what happens in debate is about fighting. great mass of people out there who want what is best for the country and they

want a way to productively work toward that. i think, informing them through wikipedia would facilitate that kind of democratic deliberation. >> yes? >> there have been some questions around the twitter bot . and in the last couple of weeks, there have been questions about edits in the house, ip addresses being blocked. think this discourages people from editing because x, y, and z, or does it encourage people in general you are >> on the whole, i think it's good to congress edits twitter bot, because it spurs discussion. the discussion is profitable and worth having. on the other hand, it is not a

full win, because there are anonymous edits that are not as good, and certainly not as well trusted as edits by users who are logged in. anonymous edits coming from the , they are immediately cast with the likelihood that there are low quality edits and inappropriate edits that have to be reversed. i don't know the intentions of the designer of the bot, but perhaps it was to show that congress is monkeying around with wikipedia. there is another way to do things, and that is why we created wiki bill. it's in the same spirit. i don't think congress edits are all bad. but wiki bills, our bot, is just meant to show edits happening to legislation. it doesn't matter whether it is coming from the hill, anonymous, or not. fair amount of editing happening, but not enough. the more people follow wiki bills, the more they will be

aware of what is happening and inclined to participate on the hill and off. is a net positive because it's for discussion and inspired our own wiki bills. that theing point is aiting from congress is negative. nothing that can be reversed. we can have high quality, careful editing of wikipedia that would be a very good thing for transparency. twitter bot made a lot of news, because it's easy and it's automated. but again, you had the same problem in 2006 with ip editing. the story could have been written anyway, even without bot. and part of this is a volunteer at mintz who block network -- volunteer administrators who ip's.network i fees -- after all, they blocked the d.c. public library, too.

it's not like they are picking on capitol hill. it's that they see a problem and they want to address it. theould you both discuss policy called "don't bite the newbie"? maybe that will encourage people to edit. >> this is another policy that i'm afraid all of the older have forgotten about. i keep fighting this battle myself, trying to get people to editors.riendly to new and there are a lot of issues, such as the tea house, and we do a lot of this at our local events. keep in mind, this is a cultural thing going on among average wikipedians, that they will tend to view new editors as spammers and whatnot. you will have to build up some

report to prove yourself, which ,s unfortunate -- some rapport which is unfortunate. >> there is a guideline "don't be a jerk to someone just starting out." hopefully, you would not be a jerk if you were there for a long time. but wikipedia was having some trouble recruiting new editors, and part of that was because they would recruiting editor and they would not do that great because they did not do well with the editing tools or the secret code that goes on behind the scenes, and they would get yelled at or have all of their edits reverted, and they would never come back to the site. that he mentioned is a message board to be friendly to new people. i also encourage, sign up as a user. get your own username because then you can write on your talk page that says "high, i knew, and i would like advice and help

. and if you have a problem with one of my edits, please talk to me about it and we can have a discussion." i found this very much to be .rue i was being persecuted or hunted by this particular user who renamed every article that i started because he didn't like the naming convention that i was following. we had it out after about six months of him editing every single one of my pages every day. that was eventually resolved. it -- don'to join, let a handful of crazy people on the internet keep you from joining and being helpful and joining in with the community. talking to the people in the trinity, talking to myself, talking to other editors. --re are people who want to talking to the people in the community, talking to myself, talking to the editors. there are people who want to help you.

>> i don't know if it is done, but you could almost create a taxonomy of wikipedians. there are some who have a , fixing aspecialty certain element of every article. and they are indifferent to what the article is. it is some convention and they will fix it to where all the articles are polished to some particular convention. and in there seemed to be a wikipedians -- the wikipedians a certain way about a certain issue. we had some folks with a certain ownership because they had been and theyones there were doing good work and contribute in positively or productively. but one or two people can only do an incomplete job of this. when michelle came and started -- she had edited before, obviously, but the new kid on the block treatment was

what she got. okuma you will not be around for that long. here is how we do it. will not be around for that long. here is how we do it. care inpersistence and addressing forthrightly what the issues are, and encouraging and on talk conversation pages rather than going to battle, she established herself, andelle, as an experienced known editor. if people don't like an edit, they can go and look and see who this person is. she has a lot more credit with the community now. it is deep history now. you build experience. you build as an editor on wikipedia and you will be a stronger editor. your first day or two on the job will probably not be very comfortable. public policy tends to have a lot of high temperatures around it, some people will be very suspicious about it in the early going. but stay with it and building history and you will establish a reputation on wikipedia.

but i will help you. >> michelle will help you. -- >> i will help you. >> michelle help you. were saying that they kept going back and changing what you had to say. is there a specific group that has this ability to go and are about toou publish before he goes online? how does the process work echo -- how does the process work? >> when you get your user account, you get different user privileges. there's a small group of about 1000 people who are administrators. they can block users for violations of policy. being a if someone is vandal, just going in and editing articles to include curse words, deleting an entire article, or just general series ofthere is a warnings that you post to their user page, and after a certain number of warnings, they are

blocked for a certain length of time. often, with congress people's an edit warere is going on there, or someone has very demeaning material that is incorrect and does not belong in a babbler fee, they can put a block on -- belong in a biography, they can put a block on a page fraser did their time frame, like two weeks or months or something like that. if you are personally having a problem with someone chasing you down or harassing you, or if there is a situation where it needs to be blocked, there are ways to bring that sort of visit sort oft and -- that situation to an administrator and they can deal with it. >> typically, any editor can revert any edit. in general. but then there are exceptions.

typically, if an editor is interested in the same topic matter, you will find yourself editing a lot of the same articles. there are dispute resolution processes to follow. and then yes, if a certain dispute,s a subject of and it is not being resolved on the talk page, then yes, certain and ministers will come by and, perhaps put locks on, and maybe even sanctions if people act out too much. there are whole levels of peak -- of things that happen to people. say, general, let's someone adds one sentence to the article. you want to say "this bill passed the house today in a vote ." x to y all you would have to do is go

to the page, whether you are logged in or not. if you log in, the edit will be credited to you. if you do not login, it will be edited to the ip address. you scroll down and hit the site ite button and it adds your citation. and then there is the boxed with the updated vote tally. then you hit save, and is done. that is the simplest way to edit. like the edits go live as soon as you save them. -- >> the edits go live as soon as you save them. there was some discussion about having a preview of changes by administrators, but that is not on wikipedia. other languages do other things. some german wikipedia has done some of that. right now, if you want to edit, typically, you can change things on the fly, or live.

>> how will you ensure people understand the credibility of the page you are reading? i use wikipedia every day, but i never add anything. i never knew about conflict of interest or that kind of thing. will you make sure you understand how pages are being maintained? thing the community does is if there is dispute about the neutrality of the article, at the top of the article someone will have edited template that gives you an alert notice that says that the neutrality of this article is under dispute. -- to a certain degree it is reader beware. all of the citations are in the footnotes of the text if they

want to know a citation is true they can find the footnote. occasionally there is a way, if another editor reads it and says i'm not sure that this fact is true, they can add a "this notation.tion" that, it is just a reader beware system. that thea problem average reader does not understand what is all behind the backend. hold yourhe editor tongues to be tour this other -- editor culture tends to be toward the other editors. part of what we do is deal with local cultural institutions and educational foundations.

it is a long and big problem going forward for wikipedia. >> there have been some studies done comparing the reliability and accuracy of wikipedia to byer formally written advanced degree holders scholars encyclopedias. i think they found that wikipedia was just as reliable as other encyclopedias. ofre is a list somewhere scholarly research done on wikipedia. it is more accurate than you may fear. >> we do have some allies oust reached -- nice out reach brochures. again, the average reader tends to not get that.

we are trying to explain it as we go along. >> that is another reason visit is important to have people in this audience. you have expertise and you should share that with this world. write you tell you bout a bill? when i write a piece of legislation, we have a skeleton that we use that includes the sample box we want to put in info, just dates and people. a background section, a provisions of section, t

congressional budget officehe section report. and thendural history, the debate section. really the debate section is probably the most controversial non-neutralthe most place that you could have problem's. provisions, whenever available i just use the commercial summary. the nouns, all of counting on crs to be neutral or for me. the congressional budget office, i use their info, and i used these governmental institutions with responsibilities to write about this legislation. with the debate, that is one of

the places i would like to see more everything happened. findten, it is easy to what one side is saying about the bill, and not to find with the other side is saying. that pass with bills under suspension. the people who want, who got their bill passed, are very proud and pleased to announce it and say look at this great thing we did. it is easy to find what they say, it is harder to find the greatzation who has some objection to it and say what they say. in terms of being a neutral i try to decide who said it -- to it, so you know you're getting this persons up e-mail rather than presenting the opinion as true facts. read then that, people

article, and they will help me to change it. >> in a lot of respects the article skeletons are the beginning of reporting. you say who said what on both sides. ifple can follow those links they want to. part of the goal of this event, and our push to get congressional staff and other people, is to get further into the debate of who said what on each side. here are the current social, economic facts. do, is what the bill would and that is also contestable. it is something that the article could flesh out and handle. the result would be an improvement in the state of on one in the country,

side, or it would not on the other. these are things that we should cap be out, there is no snap of the figures and in every wikipedia articles fully informative. but by getting a cohort of people who are highly knowledgeable and good editors will start to see higher quality articles that go deeper into what a bill does. what the circumstances are now, how it would affect his, and what the outcome would be. just to be circular, we can and the washington post, put a sentence in there about with the washington post said. there is a certain level of adding references on the newspaper level, and then the next that is to go to the scientific papers.

we will try to find academic studies with support statements. that is the next level of quality as we go along. >> we are just about out of time. thank you were coming. if you work on the hill as a congressional staffer, you care about the well-being of our republic, hopefully this battle has encourage you to become more involved in wikipedia editing and improve the debate. already on record as saying she will help you. i'm sure that the jims will not mind helping as well. if you have any questions, we will stick around. please join me in thanking our speakers. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014]

>> just a reminder you can see any of this discussion on wikipedia and congress on our website at c-span.org. also word today, wikileaks founder julian assange will be leaving the embassy in london. he faces questioning by prosecutors. all over claims made by two women and what the tent. he denied the allegations and sought refuge in ecuadorian embassy in june 2012. the plan was always for him to depart the u.k. when the u.k. calls off the siege.

u.s. senator james jeffords has died, he was 81 years old. his spokeswoman says the senator had been in and declining health . have links to one of the many interviews with him on our website. congress remains on recess throughout august and we continue with our primetime programming. here is a preview. , here are thes organizations.

problem with gmo's. they all part of the conspiracy -- are they all part of the conspiracy? .ere are other organizations , and australia, all over the world. we pay attention to the epa when it comes to global warming, and they say it would not pose unreasonable risk to human health and the environment. i can come up with dozens of these. zealandralian and new food safety group have identified no safety concerns gm foods thate we have assessed.

and is fear mongering, other organizations are just ignoring it? aboutre going to talk nine crops. you can ask me to say that slower later during q&a. [laughter] the reason they are on our plates is because of a sense in the fda policy from 1992. that sentence says that the organization is not aware of any significance that they have, so no labeling or testing as necessary. they can determine on their own and maybe get it right, that g seeds and the crops they

produce or safe. -- are safe. if that statement were for policy overseas, it was a lie. it was complete fiction. we found about it in 1999. fda secret memos were forced into the public domain by lawsuit. not only were they aware that they were completely different from it was the consensus among nonscientists that they were of high risk. scientist that they were of high risk. chairse democratic caucus xavier becerra

held a town hall. >> welcome, everyone, this evening. great evening. another l.a. evening, right? thank you for taking the time to be here. we're going to try to move through the way we always do. let me outline what we are going to do. i am very privileged to be in my 22nd year as a member of congress. [applause] i thank all of you for giving me that opportunity. thank you to so many of you who i have seen in town hall after town hall that we have done. thank you to those of you who participate in a telephone town halls i do from washington when i cannot be at home. i love that you participate. let's keep doing them. let me run through the format again in case anyone is new. most of you i have seen in my town halls in the past.

i try to keep it to an hour but we may go over. i will give you a quick presentation of what's going on in washington, the reserve the rest of the time to ask questions. we typically get more questions than we have time to answer. it's not me picking favorites. we have asked you to put your name on a piece of paper and i will randomly pick out names. i ask that everyone can find -- confine themselves to asking a quick question or make a quick comment and i have asked my staff to keep me on the clock to give as concise an answer i can. sometimes it is tough. you asked good questions so sometimes i have to dig a little deeper to get the meat of the response. thank you to the eagle center and the glendale community.

let's give them around of applause. [applause] michael is in the back. we want to say thank you to him. let me introduce my staff. i want to make sure you know who you can connect to directly when i am not here. jill greenberg is in charge of this particular town hall. where are you? raise your hand. my district director in los angeles, raise your hand. my two field deputies cover the entire district. 700,000 people. raise your hands. my press secretary.

the case supervisor who many of you speak to when you have an issue you need resolved. michael nielsen. ava garcia is my caseworker. many of you have spoken to her as well. two of my d.c. staffers are here this week. since we are not having votes, this is the best time to have my staff connecting coordinate. my chief of staff, who is new to the position, less than two months, but who has been with me for several years, sean mccluskey. sean is right here. sean is my new chief of staff. he has been my policy director for quite some time. if you ever want to talk health care, this is the guy to do it with. he knows as much as you will ever want to know. if you ever need to hire mariachi, danny is probably as good at marriott gse is a communications. he has a voice and he plays guitar. he is really good, really,

really good. let me introduce my interns. they get the loudest round of applause because they do tremendous work. they are fabulous college students, and we get them for free. melissa from uc berkeley. assad from usc. caesar from uc riverside and lily from williams college. wave your hands. thank you to them for their work. [applause] to armando florez who is doing our translating to assist those who need help understanding what we are saying. [speaking spanish]

who has the ear phones for the spanish translation? right here. i want to thank our guest from the los angeles police department who have been gracious enough to be here today. if we have any questions particular to the lapd, i know they would be willing to respond. they are also here to make sure everything goes well. one of the requirements for members of congress is to make sure we protect your safety as well as mine. we have never had to use them, but it is great that lapd make themselves available. let me introduce you to the senior lead officers. thank you all very much for being with us. ok.

having done that, let me just again mention some things about d.c.. maybe to stimulate conversation, but mostly to give you a sense of what is going on. i hope most of you receive the newsletter i just recently sent out. we have copies here as well. it gives information about what is going on. let me mention a couple of things that are pressing. you may have heard the congress finally was able to reconcile differences in past legislation to deal with the veterans administration crisis going on with our veterans. essentially, what has been happening is that with so many vets coming in as a result of finishing up their tours of duty in iraq and afghanistan and elsewhere, but also because the president did something i think presidents should have done before him a long time ago, and

that is to re-gauge the situation for veterans as far back as vietnam. remember agent orange? remember some of those things? we never gave vets full accountability and credit for their service, having served at a time when we use things like agent orange. many of them came back and suffered healthwise and we never gave them full credit for the disability they may have suffered due to the fact that they served at a time when we were using chemical agents. president obama said you are getting on in nature. -- in age. it is difficult to document 100% that your chronic emphysema or whatever it might be was caused by agent orange or something else, but there is a chance it could have been, a good

likelihood, and rather than make veterans get only partial service from v.a. for that and then have to go on and find services somewhere else at a high expense, the president that it's time to give service to our men and women who serve and consider it 100%. as a result of that, more vets made use of veterans health services. you put that in combination with all the men and women coming back from iraq and afghanistan, and it was too much. remember, today's soldiers are surviving what would've killed that soldier 40 years ago in vietnam. thank god that they are surviving, but they come back with injuries that make it difficult for them to adjust and get work and all the rest. so a compromise bill said this, for veterans who have been

waiting more than 30 days to get into a v.a. system and get their care, or for veterans who live more than 40 miles from a v.a. facility, they are going to be able to go to a health-care provider locally, close by, without having to go to a va hospital or center to get their services. that is to get them through the door right away. we are also providing additional services for the v.a. to beef up services so they can bring more doctors and health-care providers to provide service to those in the system. we are trying to beef up the v.a. as quickly as we can so we can provide them with the services they earned. they don't just deserve them. they earned them. that has been signed by the president, so that will be underway. two, we just signed a bill on

transportation. in l.a., we have seen major projects going forward. the purple line is moving west toward the ocean. we were able to secure funding that will help us move forward with that project, that is costing several billion dollars. we secured close to $800 million in federal loan moneys. that's about $2 billion to help extend that subway line to the west. we recently secured about two thirds of a billion dollars for what is being called the regional connector line downtown. if you try to travel mass transit downtown on the trains and subways, you often have to get off one to get on another. with the regional connector, it will be a seamless trip.

it will be a lot more convenient for people who want to use mass transit to get around. we got a grant commitment from the federal government for two thirds of a billion dollars and about another $200 million in loan guarantees as well. that will help cover a large portion of that connector. we are also going to be doing construction on the 6th street bridge. many of you are aware it needs refurbishing. it is not going to be just a patch job. a lot of work needs to be done. the transportation projects are not done in three months. many are not done in three years because they are very big projects. the difficulty in washington is we have not been able to get consensus, bipartisan consensus on reauthorizing the transportation legislation, the

law that makes possible all of these major infrastructure projects for rail, highway, buses, freeways and roads. and we didn't again. these past couple of weeks, we passed a patch bill. it moves us forward eight months. that's good because by then the highway trust fund would be so depleted that the federal government would have to inform the states, you know the money you're going to get from the highway trust fund, we have to take a back. if we gave you the full amount you were due, we would run out of trust fund moneys to quickly.

of course, the state can not go to some contractor who is about to purchase steel for a bridge renovation where the guy who purchases the asphalt and cement to do the highway renovation. just do me a favor. buy about four months of that stuff. you don't do it that way. time is money. we have to do what we typically do, and that's about a five-seven year bill on transportation. so counties and cities and major contractors and no ok, i can forecast for 5-7 years. hopefully when we come back we will get to work on doing the long-term transportation bill that everyone needs so we can get those tax dollars that when you go to the gas station and pumped gas in your car, that gas money helps pay for those projects.

we need to get that money coming back in a smart way. there are any number of things i can tell you about. we can talk about international issues, international hotspots. he can talk about education, immigration, the situation that the border with the kids who have come. we can talk about all of those things. but let me do this. let me stop and see how much time we have. we have a good 45 minutes. i can stay a little after we finish because i know sometimes a lot of you want to say a quick hello. we can do that. so after we break, we can stick around a little longer. please do me a favor and if you are going to say hello, just make it a quick hello because sometimes people want to unload all of their worries and cares and we have a long line of people who just want to say hello and it is tough. here is the bowl with the names. l.a., we are starting again to see activity. residentially, we have seen housing prices jump again -- i think a little too fast, and i know if you live in eagle rocket is a little scary.

it's reminiscent of what we saw before. it's heating up too much. i just told you about the construction projects. i told you about the guys i met with from the building and construction trade. construction had some of the highest rates of unemployment over the last several years. you had somewhere between 15%-30% unemployment, laborers, operating engineers, all the construction folks were really feeling it because everything got shut down, essentially. now they are starting to churn. they are starting to churn, and they are decent paying jobs. we like that, because we need to start the economy. and there are some decent signs. things are still tough for a lot of families in america, but they have gotten better.

last month we had more than 200,000 jobs created by the private sector. that's good. but the actual unemployment rate ticked up, not down. what's going on? a lot of folks during the 2008 crash who could not get back to work quickly left the workforce. they are discouraged workers who don't even get counted in the unemployment rates. now they are feeling better and coming back into the system. even though 200 thousand plus jobs were created last month in this country, the unemployment rate went up because more of those discouraged workers are filing again to get noticed to be part of the system to try to get jobs. which is good. i don't think you can see that very well, can you? you can see it some.

with the lights from the cameras, it is also tough. here is another chart. maybe -- let me hold it up. the red is the beginning of the 2008 wall street crisis, where essentially everything shut down. just a quick note -- and i know i wanted to close, but in september, 2008, democrats were in the majority of the house at the time. nancy pelosi was speaker of the house. on a saturday, i remember, i was in california. she called and she said we need to do a conference call, i just got a call from the president of the united states, george bush. she said he needed immediate action on a bill he wanted to send to us on monday. she asked us all together for a

conference call. in the conference call she said this is what the president just said to me. he is going to send me a bill asking for $800 billion and he needs it by monday. if he doesn't get it by monday, wall street will crash and take the whole economy with it. we started asking the questions about how the money was going to be used. the legislation did not get passed on monday because a lot of folks were saying wait a minute, 800 billion dollars, for whom and for what? it took several times. during that time, if you look back, the market gyrated. it was swinging like 600 points in a day. well, what was going on is the beginning of that red. in the beginning of that red is

job losses. the bottom of the red lines, those were months in america where we were losing about 21,000 american jobs per day. over 800,000 jobs in january of 2009. and during that time, the red, everything below the zero line, those were all job losses. we lost over 8 million jobs in that short time. the economy collapsed. you couldn't borrow anymore. small businesses no longer have a line of credit. banks aren't lending. they had so many toxic loans, they didn't know who they could lend to and who would pay it back. so when they stopped lending, they stopped the wheels of the economy. four 52 consecutive months, since a little after that crash, we have had job growth.

but you don't see any blue line above the zero line that matches anything near the loss of jobs. so, 200,000 jobs, two hundred 80,000 jobs a month before, good. but when you lose 800 and one month, you need four good months to just catch up to one month. that's what's difficult. so the president has worked really hard with the private sector to see what we can do, but that's a lot of making up to do. and that's the difficulty. so many of us believe we still have to try to jumpstart the economy, and there are some simple things we can do to do that. we think we should concentrate on mostly middle-class americans right now because they are the ones who have been hit the hardest. if you are rich, you're not

going to feel it. warren buffett loss of major dollars during the downturn, but he is making some major dollars now. if you are very low income, we have programs to help you from falling through the safety net altogether. in some cases not enough, but we don't let people die on the streets and suffer that way. but the middle class, try to send your kid to college today if you are making $60,000-$70,000. it's very difficult. try to buy a house in eagle rock. it's not beverly hills. maybe in some peoples opinions it's better than beverly hills. we like our home in eagle rock. there are some basic things we can do. one of the things some of us would do is -- to me this was an easy one. if you are a company in america and you decide to shut down some of your jobs, and you reopen some of that manufacturing in another country, you get to write off the cost of sending jobs to that country and hiring people in that other country even if you let people in america go so you could do it over there because the wages are

lower. but if you open a new job in america in your company, you don't get any kind of tax relief for that. it's a little upside down. we give you tax relief if you ship a job overseas, but not if you open up a new job for an american here. use the money we give away in tax credits to countries that ship jobs overseas to give tax credits to companies that create new jobs. net increase. you want to do a net increase? we will give you a tax credit. we can pay for it by not giving tax credits to companies that ship jobs overseas. employee pay is stagnant right now. that's another problem. we are creating jobs but we don't see a big bump in salaries. where do we see a big bump? ceo pay.

today if you are a worker in a company, it is not unheard of to watch your president and chief executive officer make about 400 times what you make. when i was a kid, when my parents were working hard, the difference between the president of the company and the line worker was about 35-40 times greater, which is still pretty good money. today it's about 400 times. so let's do this. when you pay salary as a businessperson -- if any of you have a business -- that's an expense. all of your salaries to all of your employees are expenses. let's say i make $10 million in profits and i pay myself a million dollars and pay the rest of my workers another million dollars. that's $2 million in business expenses.

net that away from my 10 million 10 million dollars in profits, and of making $8 million in profits. what if i have a million and expenses for my employee salaries and the pay myself $9 million. that's a total of $10 million. guess how much i have in profits now? zero. do i pay on zero profit? zero. why should we subsidize companies that are willing to pay ceos in the tens of millions of dollars by giving them tax breaks that allow them to write off part of the salary when it is so high. if you are going to pay your chief executive more than a million dollars and you want to be able to write it off, then you have to be able to show you have also increased pay for your front-line workers as well.

otherwise, you can raise the salary for that ceo but you can't get a tax write off for having done it. maybe it will make them think more about sharing some of the gains with those who helped make the profit possible. we cannot continue to see middle-class workers have their incomes stay stagnant when the cost of college, housing, health care goes up. i will stop there. let's take questions. thank you all for patiently listening. let me pick a few names. ok, i have three names. we will go on the order that i selected them. the first person named will get to go first. raise your hand.

if you'll step out in the aisle that will make it easier. we have microphones. the first person is anna garcia. then we have alexia. then hunter cobb. those three will go first and then we will just keep going down the line. if you could do us a favor, your question or comment as concise as possible and i will try to be as well. >> thank you for holding the town hall. my question is regarding the issue of unaccompanied minors that have gone through severe trauma fleeing imminent poverty. how likely is it that these children are going to receive refugee status? >> the situation at the border, most of the kids are coming from three countries, el salvador, guatemala, and honduras. the law in place today which provides relief for those kids if they can prove they have a fear of persecution or death would allow them to get asylum, not refugee status. it is different.

a refugee in the home country are saying they need to escape and someone on the ground says, yes. like in syria, iraq. you have relief organizations who say absolutely you cannot remain here because you will perish because these terrorists or rebels will come after you. we know you are a refugee and then you get to come to a particular country. someone seeking asylum said they had to flee their country in secret and now they are here showing up at the doorstep of the border. if i am sent back, i fear persecution or death. please give me asylum. they would qualify if they could meet that standard for asylum. it's a distinction that a lot of people do not make. >> if they are under 18 years of

age, unaccompanied minors, the law says you treat that minor differently than a minor that is with an adult. what are you doing here, etc. those who come with an adult go through the process with an adult because it is far faster because you can ask the adult if there is persecution. if the adult says yes, then we process them quicker and we send them back. you have seen the news where some of these people were sent back because they could not prove they had a fear of persecution or death. can they prove fear of persecution or death? many will tell you that they have actually witnessed murder and torture of their family members or others. many have told stories about how

if they do not join the gang they will be killed. for some kids, they will be able to make those claims. it will be tough for a 10 or 12-year-old to make the claim which is why they are giving assistance. the sticking point here is the time it takes to process them. because it's a large number and we are not equipped, there are 240 immigration judges in the united states. to give you perspective, in the county of los angeles, there are twice as many judges just in the county of los angeles as there are the total number of immigration judges for the entire u.s. you have this bottleneck and it's making the process take a while. but i think will happen is a number of these kids if given the opportunity to present their

case will be able to make a claim. they will be given the opportunity. while they are waiting to have their hearing, the law requires they be treated under the least restricted setting as possible. you do not want to have a kid locked up in jail. if there's a way to have them with a responsible adult who is related, we will do that. if not, you try to find a temporary setting, possibly foster care. that is what you do. you monitor them and get a hearing. there's legislation about whether we change the law or not. some people want to change the law so in five or seven days you can process them and send them back. i'm against that.

i'm not one of those that for the grace of god could it have been me. i'm the son of immigrants. my country is better than that and we can do this the right way. at the same time, we don't have an obligation to keep kids who, simply for economic reasons. if you were duped and you get a permit -- no. i want our country to have a good heart to we have to do this the right way. we have the situation where you prove you really need a place to shelter were you might face persecution or death, absolutely. as much as i feel for you because of economic conditions, you've got to do it the right way. the next question from alexia then hunter. >> i'm over here. thank you for giving me a minute or two, congressman. good to see you again. sometimes, some of us who are

very low income, the city anf d the country keeps taking from us. you know it's very difficult. there are people out there who need but there are also the ones who don't want to give a penny. i'm not saying don't take some if you really needed, but when some of us are in dire need, teeth, glasses, and it's taken away from us and more, they might as well just dig a hole in the ground and put us there. if there is anything us you can do to help your friends up there, thank you. >> i appreciate the comment. as a sovereign nation to our whether it is through medicare, the pell grant program for students going to college, we try to figure out ways for all of us to succeed. i'm the first in my family to get a college degree. i got a lot of aid from the stanford. i worked all four years.

summers i worked construction with my dad. had it not been for pell grants, financial aid, student loans at low interest rates, i could not have gone to stanford. we have to do what we can. the best way to do well abroad is to do well at home. if we are strong domestically, we can be strong abroad. your point is well taken. we are a country for a reason. hopefully by our example and with our assistance, we can help others do it well also. right now, especially since we're barely coming back from that deep recession, it's time to really make sure that we take care of folks in america who work very hard to build this country. i don't think we will ever shirk our responsibility around the

world, i do think we need to be very smart about how we do things. whether it is iraq or people who come to our border, we have to do this the smart way. we don't want to give the wrong impression of what we are trying to do whether it is an iraq war kids at the border. thank you for your question. before hunter, let me pick out a couple more. it's pretty random, right? ok, so the next three after hunter, liz amsten? i always seem to pick you. jesse borden and then luis perez. presente? ok, in the back.

hunter, go right ahead. >> i listened to your little presentation on the economy with your graph and everything. this thing about the $800 billion bailout, i think people are a little tired of these stories. the economy is not recovering. the bailout was not necessary. it did not work. the country is in a mess. what i would like to ask is if you look at china, china's economy is booming. they want people to think all that china is doing is building a housing bubble or something that they're building infrastructure, highways, railroads. they are mining helium. a lot of americans don't know

what that's about but it is fusion energy. obama is shutting down our space program. why don't you demand that obama get the hell out of there? we need a president like the kennedy who says we're going to go to the moon and do things big again. if we had a driver like kennedy to land a man on the mountain, we could change education, industry. that's how to get the economy going. alexander hamilton knew how to finance industry. i would urge you to study this. you have opposed glass-steagall. we should have passed that instead of bailing out the banks. >> hunter you've raised some good points. again, try to be concise. i apologize. these are great questions and i

wish i could dive in and talk about it because that's what makes this job interesting. that is a recovery. as robust as it should be? absolutely not. on that bailout for wall street, i voted against it. i do believe we needed to do something. i just don't believe because it gave too much at the banks when they decided to take mortgages all over the country in slice and dice into little pieces and combine them and make them into stock so it takes real estate whereas before the bank used to lend you money and they would hold that mortgage and you would pay on it. for the life of the mortgage, you have the same lender because

the bank held it. so long as you were paying, they were ok because they were getting good interest off of you. someone on wall street got clever. what if we took all of these mortgages and packaged them together and now instead of one mortgage for $500,000 it is 1000 mortgages? you cut it up and you say, wall street, sell this little piece of that package for x amount of money because it is backed by 1000 mortgages. and that's what wall street did. it took all of these mortgages, some good, some horrendous, and it sold them out there in the market. when people started saying they could not pay because interest rates have gone up, they realize

their houses were not worth what they thought it they could not make the payments anymore. yes what? the banks could not pay on that stock anymore because they were not getting the money. that's what led to the crash and that's why you saw all of these homes just plummet so quickly. all of the paper was bad. all of the mortgages were terrible. the stock backed up by the mortgages was even worse. i said to the president, then

president bush, and my democratic leadership, if you want me to vote to give $800 billion to the folks who essentially helped maneuver this crash, i want to make sure the money will get down to the people, the decent people who are trying to buy a home. the market was crazy. i was looking to help my grandparents buy a small house in eagle rock. $679,000 for a two bedroom, one bath house. a lot of people bought thinking that's what the market was today. these are not people saying they were making 30 grand a year and

there were a lot of them, too, which is what really led to the downfall. the money was all going to the banks. there are a lot of people who said i have a mortgage valued higher than what my home is valued at that i made commitments on going to continue to pay my mortgage. even if i sold my house i would not get enough money. to me, those people were being very responsible hoping with time the value of the home would catch up to the mortgage. to me, we should help them. you're paying that mortgage at 7% interest rate? guess what, let me let you refinance. you still have to pay on the value of the mortgage but at a lower interest rate so let me save you money on the interest and the banks would not renegotiate. they would not renegotiate

because they could not. why? they no longer on the mortgage because they had sold at off to the stock market in 1000 little pieces. they had to get all of the owners of the mortgage to sign off on the renegotiated rate and they couldn't. why am i going to give the bank for money, this $800 billion? they are not going to do anything to help the homeowner who wants to be responsible. how do i know we are going to get repaid? we ultimately did recoup that money but in 2008, there was no guarantee, no mandate they had to pay back. banks are always going to make money. i wanted to see two provisions, one to help the homeowner and a guarantee that banks would pay back every cent of the $800 billion. in terms of going to the moon and mining, the president is doing everything he can to get us to renewable energy. i'm with him going toward solar , wind and all of the different energy sources that are clean. you can see what happens when you rely on petroleum. when iraq goes haywire, our prices at the pump go haywire. we should not be dependent nor do i think we should have to wait to extract, suck the shale

out of canada, and let them use a pipeline going through america to go to the shipping ports in louisiana so they can ship the oil to china and other countries abroad never leaving a bit of oil for the u.s. to use. they want to use american soil for the pipe so if some terrorist hits it, we suffer the consequence but all of the oil gets sold abroad with not a bit of it for the u.s. i don't think we need to go to the moon to be innovative in what we do. i think the president is trying in that regard so, hunter, i would disagree. the bailout was not the best way to do things, but i will admit even though i voted against it that it did help stop the hemorrhaging. i want to see peaks in job creation as big as the valleys. that would be a true, robust recovery. they cannot just be modest income jobs. there is more money parked on the sideline by corporate america today, over $1 trillion, in cash that they are waiting to see where to put it, where to

invest. we could jumpstart the middle class if we did this the right way. let's go to the next question. liz, you are on. >> i would like to point out that of those negative job losses, most of the increases are minimum wage. >> you are not seeing the recovery where the guy who lost a job is getting a job back who paid the same as the job he lost. it's tough. >> a lot of problems in 2008 and subsequent were caused by wall street and the banks. where do you stand on putting forward a policy to nationalize banks that take money from the government in the future because they are too big to fail? how about setting up public banks like in north dakota? how about supporting elizabeth warren's suggestion on allowing

the post office to be a bank for basic banking services? this will really help the consumer. >> as i keep trying to say, the engine of our economy has been, is, and will be for quite some time the middle of america. rich folks could only buy so many yachts, right? it is middle class america that buys the new clothes washer. son, daughter, i will give you the seven or eight-year-old car and i will get myself that little brand-new vehicle. those are things that turn the

economy. while the middle class has some disposable income, it does not have enough that it could just the hogwild. the other two demographics, rich or poor, they could only stimulate the economy so much. middle class, you get them in the 1950's when all of those servicemen and women came back after world war ii, they needed something to do. we did the g.i. bill and we got them educated. then when eisenhower was president he said we would never face a situation where we were not prepared. we're going to build a highway system that will connect us to every part of the country so we could never be caught offguard. guess what? a lot of road construction workers went to work. my dad into stanford --