and of me and our family, sue ellen and harvey. that is the beginning of bipartisanship. i thank them. [applause] i want to thank my personal assistant without whom i could not function. a graduate of university of kansas, hannah ricker. she is here today. [applause] every march, she always picks kansas and the basketball pool -- in the basketball pool in the office. we go along with her. one of my secret service agents here whose father was one of my detail heads when i was president, he is here. i thank him. [applause]

i now have a scheduler and her parents are here. thank you for the millers. also, i can tell her one more time that kansas city has the most complete baseball team i have seen in the last 30 or 40 years. [applause] so, i want to thank also the chancellor for welcoming me here. 11 years ago, i came here to launch a lecture series. i was honored to do with then because i always like bob dole and i always admired him. and because even when we were, we knew we were going to be running against each other for president, we found a way to work together.

so, i think we need to be serious about this topic today. we can all say we are here at the university, we have comfortable lives, we will be nice to each other. this is a much more serious subject. for the polarization of america's politics, as present not just in washington but american life. you just look at how many of our collective bigotries we have overcome in america in the last 100 years. we are less racist than we used to be, less sexist. less religiously bigoted. less homophobic than we used to be. we have one remaining bigotry.

we don't want to be around anyone that disagrees with us. [laughter] we are laughing but you know it is true. we don't even want to watch television news we disagree with. my late mother in law whom i adored lives with hillary in washington when she was a senator and secretary of state until she passed away at almost 92. and she was the most liberal member of our family. but, she forced herself to watch an hour of fox news every day. [laughter] we are laughing and i sat down with her once at the table. we were drinking a cup of coffee watching fox news. i said why do you do this? [laughter] she said, first, i want to know what they are saying and i want to make sure i can answer it. secondly, nobody is wrong all

the time and nobody is right all the time. she was a remarkable woman. but, i never will forget my little lecture from my mother in law who was then 90 years old. i have a couple of introductory things i want to say about this and then i will try to give you some examples. we live in an interdependent age. not the most -- it is the wealthiest country in the world and we are slightly more trade dependent and the percentage of gdp before world war i than we are today. i might caution you in considering this issue seriously that a lot of opinions in all

the countries of the world thought war was unthinkable between the great economic powers because they were so economically interdependent. it turned out to be wrong. that is because none of us are completely economic animals. in the end, the question of how we relate to each other in america is part of the larger identity challenge that is a function of the age of interdependence which goes beyond trade to travel and basically instantaneous access to information of all kinds. the power of technology like social media. the staggering capacity of the

simple cell phone to do good and evil. that is what we live in. the headlines are, by definition, mostly negative. for example, in 2000, the united nations adopted the millennium development goals, calling for big reductions in international poverty and putting girls in schools in equal basis with boys. dealing with the challenges of climate change. we did not meet all those goals but we made a lot of progress. people have moved out of extreme poverty. we are moving towards parity in many places in educational opportunities for girls and boys. there have been more economic empowerment of women. a lot of it was done by the cell phone. we know a cell phone can be used to detonate a bomb, but when the first president bush and i worked in south asia after the

tsunami more than a decade ago -- i was asked to stay behind for two years to work for the u.n. -- we put every family that had lost a fishing boat back in the water. if the fisherman had been killed and who else wanted a boat, got it. this time, we gave every single one of them a cell phone. for the first time in their lives in indonesia, in southeast india, in sri lanka, they could find out what the price of fish was up and down the coast and average incomes increased by 30%. we know that boko haram continues to terrorize northern nigeria and the surrounding areas, but our clinton health access initiative is part of a global effort to save one million children under five from waterborne diseases.

80% of all people who die are under five. for $.50 a person, a zinc packet will save their lives. it is never in the press, but we are making our goals in nigeria and we are working in those same areas. the first thing i want you to know is that in this great age of interdependence, good things and bad things are going on. most of the bad is rooted in a self-concept of negative identity. that is, in order for me to think well of myself, i have to think less of you to the extent you are different from me, from

my religion or ideology, as i define it. to the extent that we are making progress, it is almost always the product of networks of cooperation rooted in positive identity. i like who i am. i'm proud of my race, gender, whatever it is, but i think what we have in common matters more so why don't we figure out how to work together? what does that have to do with bipartisanship at home? everything. i can fill this auditorium with a social science survey proving that created cooperation among diverse groups works better than closely held decision-making by like thinking elite. if we can miraculously here identify the person in this audience with the highest iq and take you to the nearest really

cushy room and give you whatever you wanted for the next two days, and the rest of us were locked in this auditorium with stale coffee. then, the same set of questions were fed into this auditorium into that room for two days, we would make the better decisions than the lone genius. there's a book which illustrates it. it is written by james wickey called "the wisdom of crowd." if you define success as the empowerment of individuals to improve their well-being and that of their families and communities, groups make better decisions if they are diverse and reach understanding and knowledge. second, you live in a country with a constitution that has

made us the longest continuously existing democracy in history because it mandates compromise. the founders almost bent over backwards to slow down the train of un-debated thought. because they were very concerned about the prospect of unlimited government power to do arbitrary things. so, they gave us an executive, legislative and judicial branch. and they gave us state and local authority with explicit responsibilities, not enumerated in the constitution. and they gave the senate -- they required two thirds vote to pass a treaty or override a veto or to escape a veto.

they did a lot of other things basically to say you guys have to work together here. why? because they were creatures of the enlightened. they believe there are few final victories in politics, in economics, in social policy. they believed the most important thing was the set in motion a progress of debate and resolution, debate and resolution. moving forward. so, that they would be thrilled to see the things going on around the world today that involved multiple stakeholders trying to reach consensus and mortified that the capital is often grounded to a halt over ideological divide. a couple of days ago i was in

jacksonville, florida. jacksonville is a fairly large city but the city, county government is united so it is vast. it is the site of my foundation's health matters initiatives to get the people in the community to work together to increase health outcomes. jacksonville has an interesting problem. it's got the largest amount of urban green space in america. almost 80,000 acres. yet, it has the third highest pedestrian fatality rate in america because of the way those spaces are not connected and not necessarily related to traffic patterns which include people walking around. so, they were all gathered there to talk about how they were going to get rid of this problem

and how they wanted to deal with the other lifestyle related health challenges they face, including reasonably high rates of diabetes and other problems. the point is everybody was there. the republicans and the democrats showed up. the people in health care, the people in business, the people in education -- there was a widely diverse representative group of the ethnic and religious makeup of the county. and they will do that. they will succeed in doing what they are trying to do and i urge them to take on the bigger challenges we all face. now, i think about this a lot. in little rock, where i will spend the night, i have a presidential library and a school of public service. we offer only graduate programs.

one and two-year programs, but half of the time of the students is spent in the field figuring out how to turn their good intentions into positive changes. they find without exception to succeed over the long run, they need partners. so that their identity, i hope, will be more positive. the second president bush and i have joined together in a presidential leadership scholars program which includes, with the support of his father's library and the lbj library -- we just had our first graduation. it is for younger people in their 30's mostly who are starting out in a wide variety of careers with great promise. it is nothing if not politically diverse. after they spend time going

through this program together and then they stood up and told us about their experiences, they felt more strongly than ever that with the right attitude, we can solve the problems of america. and do the right thing in the world. one of the things i always liked about bob dole is that he can fight you like no tomorrow, but he never closed the door to actually doing something that might benefit a real person. there is a big difference. he worked with senator moynihan, my wife's predecessor in the senate in new york, on social security. he worked with senator george mcgovern on the food stamp program.

he supported voting rights and its extension without fail for 25 years. when i was president and after we had opposed each other in the presidential campaign, he served as chairman of the international commission on missing persons in the former yugoslavia to find out what happened in kosovo and bosnia after the terrible conflicts there. in 2000, bob dole and george mcgovern agreed to help senator jim mcgovern from massachusetts -- no relationship -- and me to pass a $300 million program in the congress to provide a free nutritious meal to children in poor countries but only if they came to school to get the mail. meal. the

we made it available in the poorest countries in the world just as we were trying to give debt relief to them in the millennium debt relief initiative. that $300 million increased school enrollment by 6 million. it only cost $50 a person a year then to give them a nutritious meal. he was interested in that. after i left the white house in the aftermath of 9/11, bob dole and i joined together to help fund something called the families of freedom fund. in which we proposed to provide higher education assistance to the children and spouses of everyone killed or disabled in 9/11 regardless of their citizenship. there were, for example, more than 200 people from the united kingdom who were killed.

there was an enormous amount of racial diversity and no small number of muslims who were killed on 9/11. and, since then, our goal was to raise $100 million. that fund has already awarded $118 million in financial aid. that is something we did together because we thought it was the right thing to do. it has been really rewarding. it has also been good for our country. a lot of you know that senator dole is one of the people behind the americans with disabilities act for good reason. working with primarily democratic senator tom harkin of iowa. a couple of years ago, i saw him in a wheelchair on the floor of the senate asking them to ratify the international convention on

disabilities and explaining to reluctant members of his own party that this would not do anything bad to america because we have the highest standards for disability rights in the entire world. but, it could take people like him when he was young, deeply injured, and give them a chance to have a fuller life. he did not win that fight, but i think eventually we will win it. as long as i live, i will remember bob dole in his wheelchair talking to the members of the senate about the imperative of recognizing not only human dignity, but the human potential of everyone without regard of their physical abilities. if you go on the dole

institute's website, there is a letter that he wrote about his recuperation from the wound he suffered in italy about how he is adapting to life with his disabilities. he downplayed the pain and mentioned he got himself elected to the state legislature. he got a degree and a law degree after the war. that sort of just tacked on. here is what he said -- "the rehabilitation is an endless task. i feel confident that the most difficult period has passed. i have not met any appreciable economic gain, but i have salvaged security out of bitter disappointment by rebuilding dreams and reshaping aspirations. i give thanks to god for this opportunity which was denied for many who made the supreme sacrifice."

that experience kept bob dole in a place that enabled him to balance his enormous political skills and his great ambition with the understanding that life is fleeting, things can change and ultimately what makes a democracy work is whether it responds to the challenges of a given moment. that rarely happens when political paralysis takes over. this year marked the 20th anniversary of a number of events which had a lot to do with my presidency, but listen to them and think if they have any relevance to our current challenges. this was the 20th anniversary of

the bombing of the building in oklahoma city. this was the 20th anniversary of the donnybrook we had which led to two government shutdowns, but also in 1996, the passage of the balanced budget bill which gave us three surpluses in a row when i was president. it was the 20th anniversary of the cease-fire of northern ireland which led to peace. the 20th anniversary of our decision to give financial assistance to mexico when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. i have to say that when i hear all this stuff about immigration in mexico, how we need a five-story wall, i never hear anybody say there was no net in migration of undocumented people

in mexico from 2010 to 2014. the numbers went down. they are going down again this year. because we helped them to build a self-sustaining economy. i will talk more about that later because bob dole supported me in that. of the 20th anniversary of the slaughter of a thousand men and boys in bosnia that led to nato's military actions and the end of the bosnian war. which claimed a couple hundred thousand lives and made 2.5 million refugees, the worst ethnic cleansing since the end of world war ii. most of the victims were european muslims. interestingly enough the late pope john paul ii called me within two days of the king of saudi arabia, both pleaded with

me to do something to save their lives. across the lines that divide. the 20th anniversary of the normalization of our relationships with vietnam, 58,000 americans were killed in that war. many more vietnamese. they are still working with us to find the remains of soldiers that were lost their. and they are now our strongest ally in southeast asia. why am i telling you all this? because the bipartisanship issue is one piece of this huge coming together and the identity crises that it creates. we live in a world with a lot of instability, with a lot of economic inequality, a world

threatened by the growth of population and the depletion of resources and the looming specter of climate change and there is not an end of power but a dispersal of power. so in the face of insecurity the most predictable going perhaps to the beginning of humanity and people coming out of caves and clans to stick to your own kind. in an interdependent world where you cannot get away, where action anywhere affect people everywhere, it is probably not the best choice which does not mean we should not worry about legitimate security concerns. it just means we cannot escape each other. so, the real question of the

21st century is not whether americans will live together to my but on what terms. the real question is not whether we will live with people all around the world but on what terms. will our independence be positive or negative? human nature being what it is, it is a little bit of both but it is clear that for every one of the young people here, students, for the children you hope to have, the grandchildren i hope you get to see, our job is to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of our interdependence. to try to keep big, bad things from happening and make as many good things happen as possible and make sure people understand

what the promise as well as the peril is of the age in which we live. and believe it or not, if i could do it, i would give up being president to be 20 and take my chances because i think there is a good chance this will be a most peaceful, prosperous time in human history, time of breathtaking scientific advances, and which all the bad things we are worried about will probably not be quite as bad as we fear and the good things we hope for will be more bountiful than we dreamed. but only if we understand that the world is full of positive and negative forces that nobody has as absolute power as some

governments once did and every person working with or supporting a nongovernmental effort has a responsibility to maximize the possibilities and minimize the perils. and it all begins with the idea that what we have in common is more important than our interesting differences. in 1998, on a bipartisan vote, we passed an amazing budget which included doubling the budgets of the national institutes of health and had the last big chunk of money of the $3 billion of your tax money spent to sequence the human genome. the best money we ever spent. you got a good return on

investment. it has been in excess of $800 billion in economic activity generated from that. san diego, long known as the naval capital of the world is the human genome research capital of america. there are 700 computer companies alone that have been formed there just to do aspects of this scientific research. in new york, sloan-kettering and in texas and st. jude's children's hospital and los angeles, the pathbreaking research is all made possible because of the advances in the

human genome. i have talked to two or three doctors who work in this field in the last 10 days and i asked them the same questions and got a resounding yes to both when i said do you actually believe that we might get to an 85% or higher survival rate for all forms of cancer within 10 years, all three said absolutely. because of what we have learned about how to get the human body to defend itself and how to attack tumors. all the years that i worked with bob dole, even when we were fighting, we only had one unresolved disagreement and that was over health care and i could not blame him because he wanted to run for president. that was ok.

but no matter what else we were doing in the end i kept my door open, he kept his door open. we never lost our sense of humor, and we found a way to do what seems to be best for the american people. this mexican peso crisis was interesting. on the day that i had to help mexico, bob dole and newt gingrich wanted to congress to vote to do it but there was an article in the morning paper that said by 81-11 the american people were against my helping mexico. keep in mind this was early 1995. we had not fully recovered from the economic difficulties of the late 1980's and 1990's. everybody had these preconceptions about mexico.

bob dole knew it was the right thing to do and when they pay the money back with almost $600 million in interest even his own members had to say you were right and we were wrong. but i want to bring it back, something happened to him laying in all those hospital beds, struggling to recover his movement. learning to have the discipline of gratitude because at least he had lived when so many others had died. that made it possible for him to identify with other people so that no matter how hard you fought or you disagreed you did not want to dehumanize people to the point where when it came right down to it you could not join hands with them and do it had to be done to keep going forward. that is the essence of the tests we all face today.

you look at the faces of all those young people who committed murders in paris and you realize that they had been swayed in a very different direction to believe they are at the beginning of their lives, there is somehow more glory in a premature death and -- that claimed the lives of innocent people than there was in getting up and going to work and trying to learn something useful and use it to change other people's lives. for the celebration of bipartisanship, we fed a lot of people on the mcgovern-dole food

program around the world. all these poor kids since we started 15 years ago, a lot of them are grown now. their lives are different now. and they do not know who bob dole is and they do not know who bill clinton is. but they do know that they are alive, they are healthy, to have an education. because people that a certain responsibility decided would be a good thing to work together. all those people whose hearts were broken on 9/11 who lost loved ones or had the horribly disabled but who got aid to begin again with their own lives and get college education because bob dole, bill clinton, two people that are probably largely irrelevant to the young people's lives hustled up a bunch of money from other people and said why don't you give us something to send these kids to

school, it makes a difference. and so let's come back to the genome. the genome will raise your chances of surviving any kind of cancer and i hope one day will provide a cure for als and a lot of other totally debilitating diseases. we are making real progress with parkinson's and alzheimer's. no matter what you think you care about, as a citizen, the most important finding of the human genome has already been made. it is that every non--age-related difference you see in this audience, you think about this when you go out, every non-age-related difference, body size and shape, skin color, eye color, hair or

lack thereof, even gender, is rooted in one half of 1% of your genome. if you are a scientist, since you have 3.6 billion genomes a half a percent is a pretty good number. but still it means that we are 99.5% the same and yet this is not just politics. don't we all spend 99.5 percent of our time thinking the half of the percent of us that is different? really, don't we? we are in this sports frenzy coming to an end of the football season and i do not know how

many times i am guilty, i will not point the finger, i have walked down the street, bypassed a department store or window that has a reflection thinking if i had a body like lebron james i would have gone into a different line of work. haven't we all done it? if i were a little taller or thinner or little "thatter." it is an act of supreme arrogance to believe that our differences are more important than our common humanity. it is recipe for disaster in an interdependent world. because it unleashes us to act

on impulse in a dehumanizing way to other people. we live in a country where the constitution that puts limits on everybody. i got an interesting argument once with another of my political adversaries who i liked very much personally, not bob dole. who i like also but this guy was not as accommodating. the reason i got into this argument is that he said he

--you really believe we should all be treated the same, don't you? i said, i do. he said we believe there should be one rule for us and for you. there are some things we will not do. i said absolutely. he says that puts you at a terrible disagreement. here is what i want to say to all of you. i do not care if you are republican, democrat, independent or whatever. we know the constitution mandates compromise and groups make better decisions than small homogenous elites. and we know that everywhere in the world where people are practicing inclusive politics and inclusive economics to get inclusive societies, good things are happening and everywhere in the world someone believes that they are in so much position of the truth they have the right to kill innocent and anonymous people at random or just spend their time fighting, good things are not happening. this is not rocket science.

and the findings of the human genome that we are 99.5 the same confirm the teachings of all great faiths. the new testament, love your neighbor as yourself, the torah, he who turns aside a stranger may as well turn aside from the most high god the koran -- allah put different people on the

earth that they could learn from each other. they can come to learn from one another. you are fully human until you can feel the arrow piercing another's skin as if it were entering your own. so i ask you to think about that. the great struggle in america to restore some sort of balance to our politics is a reflection of the awful anxieties that many of our people feel because of the combination of economic disappointment and cultural conflict and change. we learned this week from economists saying [indiscernible] because of increased alcohol consumption, prescription drug construction and other behaviors but they are dying from a broken heart. you do not ever want to get into a position where you do not have something to look forward to when you get up in the morning.

bob dole became bob dole instead of some tragic victim because he had something to look forward to when he got up in the morning. and that he saw it in other people's lives. it turned out there were some things he just would not do. as a result of which he got a lot done. i like all these debates. i like a good fight as well as the next person. but in the end the constitution was set up so that it might have been subtitled let's make a deal. go read it if you do not believe me. we voters, those of us who can't run for anything -- we have to remember that we sometimes feed this.

we feed it if we want to be around people we agree with and we feed it if we do not vote in elections just as well as if we do. nobody gets off scott free here. but if you want public service that addresses the great challenges of the age, the attempt to restore broad-based prosperity and a serious response to the security challenges we face that does not require us to abandon our basic values but does make us a safer country but still an inclusive one, we got to go back to that. two final things. the most important political book i have read in five years was not written by a politician or political scientist or even a historian but by a micro biologists, e.o. wilson.

he has warned us for decades that we are destroying species at the fastest rate in to that -- 10,000 years because of the way we developed. this book is less than 250 pages long. it is called the social conquest of earth. and in it, dr. wilson attempts and -- to describe all life on planet earth going back to the emergence of single celled organisms from the primordial slime. he says that any reasonable look at all of history including prehistory based on the evidence would lead you to the conclusion

that of all the species had -- that have existed the foremost successful's are and, termites, bees, and people. he is a guy who taught me 20 years ago that the combined way -- weight of all the ants on earth is greater than the weight of the combined people on earth. that is a lot of ants. [laughter] there are species in africa that when being chased by predators a bunch of them will go on the tallest sprig of grass and sacrifice themselves so everyone else can get away. there are termites in south america in hot and wet climates that build underground housing with five holes, one to go in and out of and the other are for air-conditioning. i myself last summer when my daughter and i were on our

foundation trip to africa went to this elephant preserve at one of our partners and with my own eyes i saw three different anthills that were more than five feet high. one was six feet high and it was built around a tree like a hotel with its own shade tree. [laughter] these are the things you do. wilson's point is there are ants, termites, bees, and people. the difference is we have two things that termites and bees do not have. we have far greater potential for good because of our consciousness and our conscience. we have not just evolved our patterns of communication, we can think and grow quickly and feel. but, he said, because we have these, we are prone to arrogance . and therefore we are dancing around the edges of our own

destruction and hazardous times. but every time we come up to the brink we have done what was necessary to go forward. he is almost 90 now. he said i am betting that is what we are going to do again. so, i will say again the history of bipartisanship which the dole institute seeks to advance, what senator dole's career embodies both in office and after he we have doneff together is an example of the triumph of cooperation over conflict. an example of diverse groups making better decisions than homogenous elites. an example of the kind of compromise that our founding fathers sought to drill in to

the fabric of american life. i want to read you something i wrote in my autobiography about bob dole. this is when we were running against each other for president in 1996. after a rocky start in february, bob dole won all the primaries in march, wrapping up his party's nomination for the late victory in california. even though senator phil gramm who ran to the right of dole would have been easier to beat, i was pulling for dole. no election is a sure thing. and if i lost, i believe the country would be in more solid and moderate hands with him. that is what i thought when we were in the middle of a campaign fighting in debates, trying to

beat each other's brains out. [laughter] and that is a good thing. not a bad thing. so, i leave you with that. next time you think there is no hope and there is no way for us to work out whatever the heck we are fighting about, what we are arguing about here, remember the 99.5%. we need to develop one more time. remember all they did was uncover what the fate of been telling us all along. and remember, you live in the most glorious time in history in terms of its potential and one of the scariest in terms of its potential. we are condemned to share the future. the only thing that is open for

question is what the terms of the sharing will be. and that is for you to decide. thank you very much. [applause] [cheering]

[whistling] [applause] >> mr. president, it is a great honor to give you the dole leadership prize and thank you so much for coming to the campus of ku today. thank you so very much, sir. [applause]

>> sunday night on cue and day, pearsonson of mary talks about the diaries which give an insider take on washington, d.c. from 1960-1969. >> it was just remarkable all the things he did. and sometimes coming he would criticize himself in the diary, you read them that carefully 10d you can come across different places where he says the column was too strong. or lyndon is going to get mad about the way i wrote that. but he needed to be told what i wrote. i'm glad i wrote it. q&a.ncer: sunday night on

with congress on holiday recess, the c-span networks feature a full lineup of primetime programming. monday night on 8:00 p.m. eastern, lara logan, sebastian younger, and other journalist to have risked their lives covering events in the middle east. tuesday night at 8:00, celebrity activists speak out on a variety of issues. wednesday night, events from the c-span archives featuring notable public figures who died in 2015. thursday at 8 p.m. eastern, a look back at the year in congress and on new year's day, friday night at 8 p.m., law enforcement officials, activists, and journalist examine the prison system and its impact on minority communities. on c-span two monday night at 8:30 eastern, memoirs by reporters, activists and a former white house press secretary. tuesday night features books on economics and the economy. wednesday night, others talk

about their books on science and technology. thursday, discussions on isis and terrorism. and on new year's day, friday night at 8:00, several of our in-depth programs from this year. on american history tv on c-span3, monday at 8 p.m. eastern the 70th anniversary of the liberation of auschwitz. , asday night at 8:00 congressional ceremony on the 150th anniversary of the 13th amendment. wednesday night a debate on which president would be a better model for gop candidates today. calvin coolidge or ronald reagan. thursday at 8 p.m. eastern, road to the white house rewind and on new year's day friday night a playwright and star of the broadway musical hamilton accepts that george washington book prize special achievement award. that is some of the programs featured in prime time on the c-span networks. now, part of an annual series of

interviews hosted by the atlantic and the aspen institute. this part of the event includes former secretary of state colin powell and commerce secretary penny pritzker. it is two hours. >> good morning, thank you for joining us. the census bureau which is part of your domain reported that the incomeincome for middle households was lower in 2014 that he was in 2013. it was lower when george w. bush left office than when he arrived and now it appears president obama is at risk of duplicating that dubious achievement. median income is lower than it was 15 years ago which is something that has almost never been true in american history. why have incomes stagnated and is there a path that you can see forward toward consistently raising them again?

penny: ron, let's step back for a minute. wage growth and productivity used to grow in parallel and then in 1973 that stopped being the case. and if you step back and say why is that, it is this reduction in investment in what we call -- things that can keep america competitive and keep our workforce competitive. so, when we step back and think about what we going to do about that and what is the path, we have to think about how do we invest in worker productivity so that our workers are globally competitive? because what happened in 1960 -- 73 was there was the beginning of globalization, the beginning of when technology advances started to really impact productivity . to continueave investing, which is something that is not the way we think about our budget. we think about our budget as

expenditures. but we have to invest, we have to invest in our people, and infrastructure, invest in trade agreements, we have to invest in innovation, and entrepreneurship and i could go into detail. ron: let me ask you one question. you point out that productivity has continued to grow even though wages have not. are we talking about economics, technology, globalization, or problem of politics, the way the gains in the economy are distributed? penny: i think it is all of the above. right? i think what we have to do is use politics to prioritize and if you look at r&d, real investment has been flat since 1980. that is not going to help us when the rest of the world and other large economies are spending more and more money. that puts us at a less competitive situation. so, the path forward to me involves things like basic education, what are we teaching kids in school, how are we

teaching and how much -- why is so important? the president program for kids in school with a can have access to broadband. it is so we can stay ahead. we have to invest in immigration. we have a shortage of highly skilled workers, there is an opportunity in terms of immigration reform to do with that but also there is an economic opportunity and a moral obligation when it comes to skilled workforce. i mean immigration. second is we have to invest in not just roads and bridges and we have read the data about we are not investing enough but we have to invest in high speed broadband. with 20% of households do not have access, how can we compete? more business is being done on the internet. done on the internet. betsy -- etsy, a

company that allow someone to start a business at home, it is a public company. a fast public company here in the united states and it basically is a marketplace for craft workers to sell these things. we have to have broadband for those folks to have access, 90% of which are women, most of whom are staying at home, these are micro-businesses. there is a new definition of what business and productivity is that we are not connecting. >> and generally 2010 the president set the goal of doubling u.s. exports in five years, you did not meet that goal. a big reason was the slowdown in the national economy but i am wondering what else you learned about trying to get u.s. companies to export and trying to get those that do to expand their operations. one of the problems we face

internally on meeting a goal like that? >> first of all, why is the goal so important? we need and all of the above strategy. 96% of customers are outside the u.s. whether i am a craft worker or -- or superhero. but the point is that it is not just about our market, it is to access thele world's market and the fastest-growing market. with overt and spoke 2000 business leaders, they want market access. we want to be able to sell our goods trade we need a to about a specific market and a specific sector. what is the opportunity in india versus what is the opportunity in brazil for my particular good --?ervices question i think

window, we want a simple find form, we want finance forcess to international trade. we at the department of commerce to call this input and what have we done about it? we put out a report for the 19 top markets around the world, what is the demand in different sectors? we have made more of our data available online so the average person can access it. we have created screening tools online for exporters so that they can know better access. we have the export assistance centers. is to help you figure out which markets your goods and services -- there is a market for them and where they are competitive. ?> is there a target date

>> we mis-focused on the notion of when do we hit a doubling. american businesses need to be born global. they need to think global. globalization and competitiveness is what is happening. what we are trying to do is provide the tools and the services to help a business whether you are a small business like the craft businesses or your ge or boeing. >> the chinese president was just here last week when -- and when he arrived you greeted him with a speech that the formats would describe as a full and a -- frank exchange of views. "we had our companies continue to have serious concerns about an over all lack of transparency , inconsistent protection of intellectual property and the

lack of a proper playing field. how would you describe the state of our economic relations with china? this is what i said. it was notable, it got quoted a -- but basically >> any reaction from the president? >> we had lots of conversation about these issues. this is not news. they know it and they keep saying they want to do reform and part of my message was it is not just american companies that need intellectual property protection. your companies are telling us

they are having the same the big and so meta-message for the chinese, the way you got here over the last 30 years is extraordinary. what they have accomplished, 600 million people out of poverty is amazing but a lot of it was on the back of selling their goods and services around the world. global demand is slow. we know that. newspaper or it has slowed down. they cannot grow from where they are at to where they want to be based on exporting their goods around the world. they need to have a stronger domestic economy which made -- means they need to develop a greater social safety net for their people and it means that they need to develop things like intellectual