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tv   [untitled]    February 4, 2013 11:00pm-11:30pm PST

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answer the 1% question. what tax rate would you be willing to be taxed at if people at that level are all taxed at a rate? >> i would go back to the eisenhower rate. you know what eisenhower was taxing people out? 70% to 90%. you want to go back to a rate where there is a supertax on the very rich and millionaires. you want to get rid of the loopholes. look at the capital gains tax of 15%. we are taxing work the barely taxing wealth region but barely tax and wealth. that is the wrong priority.
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-- we're taxing work but barely taxing wealth. the robin hood taxes an idea whose time has come. radicals light nicholke nicolasy and angela merkel have a tax on currency transactions that would bring in $350 billion a year. some of my heroes are the nurses of this country. national nurses united heal america. tax-loss there are a slew -- tax on wall street. there are a slew of good things that 1%ers are for. >> he is not really offering of a lot. >> he is talking about being
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taxed less than his assistant. there is a group of patriotic millionaires. it is the belief that you owe backe to a country that has helped to make you what you are. steve jobs -- we had a tough column in the last issue. it was tough not about apple labor practices in china. here you had a man of great wealth was talking about cutting taxes and never really gave of his philanthropic wealth. poor bill gates, he gets nailed for being so square. you can disagree with some things. but he is out there. >> all of them out there now
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came a little late to the party. they got very rich, very young. i wanted to leave some time for audience questions. i have not read more questions from the audience because they are also good. usually it is the guy with the aluminum hat on getting cia messages. [laughter] not really. if you want to line up, we have a few more minutes at the microphones. we will take a few questions. please make sure that you make them questions. >> i have been interested in americorps and other related programs. from what i can tell, you do not support it or talk about it very much. the tea party is advocating limiting national service. president obama campaigned to expand to 250,000. senator kennedy helped to pass
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the expansion. i was wondering what role "the nation" can play in helping to support the program. >> we've done a lot of work around expanding doctors into rural community centers. americorps is a good program. all of those should be supported. we have not done as much. there has been controversy at the magazine. i am more of a supporter of teach for america than my colleagues. they are good programs. >> what could we do collectively as the next up for occupy wall street? -- next step for occupy wall street? >> what is your main interest in
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the issues raised by occupy wall street? if it is money and politics, you should join with those who are occupying the supreme court, fighting in states for clean money reform, and fighting for an amendment strategy to overturn the citizens united decision, and fighting in elections to change the supreme court. >> what would you think of having a national general assembly modeled on the original continental congress in philadelphia beginning on july 4 of 2012? coming up with a list of grievances that this assembly
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debated. >> lawrence blessing has talked about a new constitutional convention. i think it is early. i think it is tricky. i do not mean to sound too conservative. when you say to make a list of grievances, we could sit in this room and come up with a list of six ideas or grievances that need to be made real and lead to change. you need to find your issue, work in your community. work in the organizing around the issue. link up with groups doing work. if it is student debt, find ways to take on the banks, local
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legislators, and congress in the short term. is not very revolutionary. at the event we did on 9/11, i said i felt this country was in a pre-revolutionary moment. it was about a week before occupy was street launched. i believe in evolution, not revolution. >> katrina, did you read the foreign affairs article that backs up the occupy movement? there was a recent article about the new progressive movement. there is more coming out about the occupy agenda and what they want. you have articulated some of the agenda. geoffrey sax talked about three- regulating the market -- regulating the market.
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it is all there. why is it not been articulated by the media? >> i think it is. it is not up to -- different occupy's have different demands. it is up to people like "the nation" and other groups like rebuild the dream, national people's action, the progressive caucus. occupy wall street is a spirit. they're committed at the moment to not having concrete demands. we have six ideas. one would be the robin hood tax. the other would be to change the way our tax structure is organized, how to get money out of politics, hold corporations
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responsible, support attorney general's fighting for for closure relief. there are six of 10. >> have you ever been wrong? [laughter] >> occupy wall street is a moral compass. they are articulating what they think it should be. the lead essay is a shift. i am wrong all the time. >> give me one example. [laughter] >> i said on national television the night -- election night of 2000 as florida was coming in that the election would be decided that night. people may remember that election was decided by the
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supreme court. it went on for two or three months. it ended up being decided by the governors, bush's brother, a supreme court judge chosen by his father. george bush was asked if he had ever been wrong and said he could not think of a time. he is still saying that. [laughter] humble man. we are about out of time. do you have a short question? >> what is the circulation of "the nation"? >> 1.5 million readers online and 160,000 paper circulation. paul newman was a great and loyal friend and supporter.
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his partner in crime, robert redford, has been a supporter. we have a circle of 100 people who give each year. 30,000 associates give little each month above the subscription price in the belief it is not just a media institution but a community. there are 40 discussion groups around the country. [applause] >> these people obviously support it for what it espouses and believes in. do they all know that you have dirty martinis and marvin gaye? >> you have to keep perspectives. everyone's work is demanding. it is trying to make sense of these times and keep some hope.
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if we were meeting this time last year, it was a bully -- bleak time. we were coming off an election with the tea party claimed it had a mandate. i try to read history, drink dirty martinis, listen to marvin gaye, watch "true blood." vampires, everything. >> this has been fabulous. our thanks to katrina vanden h euvel, publisher of "the nation." [applause] we want to remind everybody that copies of her book are on sale in the lobby. she would be pleased to sign
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them. we aappreciate your allowing her to make her wait the lobby as quickly as possible. this meeting is adjourned. [applause] >> to introduce this illustrates how, please welcome the ceo of our nation's second-largest green builder, a member of the silicon valley leadership group border directors, and the ceo of webcor builders andy ball.
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>> thank you [applause] -- thank you. [applause] welcome back to our third session. i hope you enjoy the first two as much as i did. i think we found out how much of a character governor brown can be we are going to talk about silicon valley and the bay area innovation to the economy today. as you look at the panel, talking about the silicon valley, we have the mayor of san francisco. it will come into perspective, that when you have a giant like ibm anchor here in the valley, you are seeing in between companies like google and apple and facebook with incredible growth. in san francisco, mayor lee has welcomed to the fold in twitter, zynga, companies that are into
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cloud computing, hiring lots of people that not only want to live and work in the valley but recognize san francisco as being part of the valley. we are, indeed, fortunate, from san jose to san francisco, to be part of the innovation economy. we are finally seeing once again california's innovation is leading us out of the last three years of recession. i do not know about you but i am pretty tired of the recession. i made a statement several years ago that it was about time for an adjustment to the economy, things were too expensive, overheated. two years after that, i regretted making that comment. it was great to hear jim say when you look at education, you look at the programs, traveling
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around the world, that there is one constant. there are people and technology that say this is a place they want to be. entrepreneurs say this is where they want to be. when companies like facebook are started at an institution like harvard and a pier, you start to recognize why this is so special and fiber and why innovation is a bleeding heart economy. so let me try to give some brief introductions about our panel today. i have to confess, i only just met one of our panelists, lee said dyson, the ceo of coverity. she got a ph.d. in physics from mit but felt the urge to come out here to california and she did her research at stanford and lawrence berkeley. that is an indication we are
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getting smart people like her out to california to start companies like hers. 15 employees in 2008. it is interesting, we talk about cloud computing and these technology companies, but she takes electronic waste that is rich in carbon and recycles that into oil for plastics and a variety of other things. i wish i had more time to talk to you and get to know you because i am sure there's an interesting story that you will really enjoy hearing from her. you have already heard from michael, who is wonderful at ibm. clearly, they are a leader in this area. with michael's travels around the world, he will share more of his experience, and that will also be an interesting perspective. i really want to welcome the san francisco mayor ed lee.
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it is difficult for me to call him mayor lee because i have always known him as ed. you are going to get to know him really well. the 43rd mayor of san francisco was born in seattle, went to college in maine, this tiny college out there. he decided to come back and get his law degree from uc-berkeley, and then was appointed by art agnos in government in 1979. he became the director of the human rights commission under willie brown. he became the director of public works. 2005 city administrator, and then the fateful day in january 2011 when the board of supervisors could not decide on anybody and decided that family was not going to be a threat to their future political aspirations. [laughter] he got more than six votes, six
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more than anyone else. and he became the interim mayor. he did an amazing job. he is outspoken, both feet on the ground, a person you can trust, a person who is very honest, and based upon his experience, knows how to get the job done. i believe he is the best player ever that san francisco has had. we are so lucky to have him up there. he has balanced the budget, reform pensions, created jobs, and mayor, it has been a pleasure to work with you. i look forward to working with you further. they san francisco transplant coming down here to work on yet another newspaper, the business journal, doing a great job of it, and james mcgregor. we welcome you here as a moderator. we know you have a lot of questions, so i will let you
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have at it. thank you. >> mayor lee, after that stellar introduction -- the first question is for you. it is apparent that you are trying to make san francisco more friendly for business and employees. can you talk about the payroll tax issue and how it is helping san francisco in the region? >> thank you, james, for the question. let me say i am happy to be here in silicon valley. i know the relationship with san francisco, the valley, san jose, is extremely important. i wanted to be down here to join these electors panel of guests as well. the payroll tax in san francisco had been one -- i was here about a year ago explaining twitter. as everybody knows, they were not only threatening, they were
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planning to leave the city of san francisco. they had already identified a building. they said, we are about to grow to about 2000 employees and we are quick to get taxed for that. we think that is not going to be our business model. so we fought through it, david chiu, jane kim and i, we started to discuss with them, met with them. the key thing was job growth for our city, coming out of the economic challenges. so we started a good conversation, started the central market tax exemption. we got something out of it, which was to potentially relocate. they responded by signing the lease and we gave them a six- year exemption. we also said that we would have dialogue, continue to discuss with them and other technology companies what it is we reading
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they need to stay in the city. they indicated strongly there were about 30 of us to meet -- they really had to look at the long term. what could we do to not punished job creation? so we have had a very robust discussion with all the different elements of our business community. we are at the cusp now of making some long-term decisions about replacing our payroll tax with some ideas of hybrids and gross receipts. >> i want to follow up on that. what surprises did you hear when you met with all those businesses? >> they wanted to be engaged. that was the number-one thing that they said. the city, if you wanted job creation, innovation, you had to create an ongoing dialogue.
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we listened carefully and acted on it. we created a whole technology group. ron conaway and others have stepped up and said, why don't we have a consistent voice? yes we have the chamber of commerce, the wonderful group we have worked with for many years, but why not also have an additional voice? so we formed sf city, a citizen's initiative for technology and innovation, which was aimed at the new developing companies to give us a constant dialogue about their ongoing needs. anything we have done is they have also embraced the needs of our city. it is a two-way conversation. that led to us revising our stock options. we were one of the few cities in the country that was taxing stock options. again, not understanding how the ipo was working for the startup
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companies, realizing that we would be punishing them for their growth and turnaround, so we gave them another six-year exemption on that. by the way, if we grow, if we sustain and assist you in growing, can you help us with job training? that is what started the conversation on sf city. they have an ongoing program to create the curriculum for hiring kids or our public schools and aimed at returning veterans, career folks that want to get into technology-based industries, and then the snowball effect has really helped. twitter, not even moving in -- there are four companies that have moved into the market because of this. san disk, zoosk, allie pincus
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started an on-line returned as an company. hundreds of square feet of space that had been vacant for many years. revitalizing our city of the same time, doing job creation, creating the conditions for hiring and training local 7 siskins to get into the workforce. as andy is saying, that has caused other industries, particularly the construction industry, to get revitalized immediately. you have heard sales force had 18 acres in mission bay. they got excited about just being downtown, so they went ahead and did 400,000 square feet, now looking at an even larger space to continue their growth downtown. >> i want to direct this next question to you, lisa. every company in the valley, no matter how it is defined in terms of geography, has been a start up at some point. where did the idea for great
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products and services come from? >> thank you very much for allowing me to be here to address you today. that is a great question. i want to start by thanking the city of san francisco for being a part of an incubator that we are a part of, the kiwi3 innovation center. it is located in san francisco next to the ucsf mission building. there are lots of biotechnology laboratories available. about 29 startup companies in that space developing innovative technologies. i am in biotechnology primarily. our technology creates oil using a biological process that takes waste carbon as an input. ideas such as ours often come from universities and it is a real benefit for us to be by ucsf to be part of the innovation center.
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not only is ucsf a part of that, but uc-berkeley and uc santa cruz. so we are part of this network. in addition, we have technology partners with berkeley laboratories. for us, a lot of the breakthroughs in our technology have really come from our partners that research laboratories and our staff. i would add to that, not only is that where it came from, but it is the type of environment that fosters creation. there is another benefit to being in this type of environment. lots of service providers, lots of other companies that are also starting businesses, whether you need legal assistance -- obviously, we have the lab space. recruiting is important for start-ups. staffing, exactly. so we have that as part of this
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innovation center. >> access to education and access to the right environment. >> yes, i would say so. >> ibm is a big company. i am sure there are a lot of people in the valley that still see it as an east coast-based company. the reality is you have been here for a long time. can you talk about the ontario culture here and what is being done that with the great ideas -- a entrepreneurial culture here and what is being done with the great ideas? >> we started here in 1962. this building is about 25 years old. we were down the hill at the san jose raiders center. -- research center. one of the things that ibm does -- a couple of things. one is having an eye on where
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things are going. one of the reasons that we focused here on data, relational database disk drive, was, looking at the time, the inability to access data quickly on a computer was actually an inhibitor to getting business done. one of the ways that you get innovation out there is you understand how it is going to be used, really, before you start. the major reason for working on the disk drive, aside from the obvious technology base that this place has and continues to have, was just an understanding that high-speed access to data would create an opportunity