Transcripts For CSPAN Washington This Week 20130819

Small gardens replace in our classrooms or our homes. One thing i did was i endeavored when there was an issue of conflict between a muslim and Christian Community, i had the Muslim Community school right down what they felt would be the ideal garden, the shapes and sounds and images that warmed them and brought a sense of peace. Then i had the Christian Community to the same. Then i had them actually create each others garden, literally tending each others garden. I think that kind of work is very valuable and can be a tremendous source of healing. You think about any kind of trauma, not simply war, but natural disasters, the idea of bringing aspiration to action and doing things for others i think is very important. One thing i wanted us to brainstorm together in addition to some external places and spaces we can create, i think there is some internal spaces that we can that we can build and nourish through things like spoken word, giving victims and the people around them restored sense of voice. Obviously, journals, theater, music. There are a limitless set of options. I think one thing that has been very effective for me in working with the victims of trauma has been to have them not only write their own stories someone gave me a book yesterday that was a very good book from what i have been able to see called sold. It was perhaps for young adults. It is about a girl who was trafficked from nepal and it was very powerful. I want to see the young adults themselves writing the stories. It is an amazing way for people of every age to begin that process. Or perhaps they can take a story what i have my students do is change the endings of stories. It gives them a sense of empowerment, helps them to recognize that they can alter what they perceive to be inevitable. There is great strength in giving voice in these ways and others. It is no small matter. There is an indonesian phrase that i conjure on a regular basis. It means, to wash the eyes. You will see that phrase in my Childrens Book and you will see in the book that the very talented illustrator opens the book with a view of the moon from the earths perspective and closes it with the view of the earth from the moons perspective. The idea is to constantly shift perspectives not only so we can empathize and build peace in those ways, but also so that we can change the way we view ourselves. We can name ourselves differently. We can do identity the link and find a future that is more robust. And perhaps by virtue of changing our own stories, it means to wash the eyes and indonesia they use that phrase to speak of the need at the end of the workweek to go and get a different view and to relax and to recline. But it can be used to think about something even more powerful, this notion that we can see ourselves in the world and our own potential and the beauty that resides both within and externally by washing our eyes, by changing not necessarily the way we look, but the way that we see. A gap toothed state of mind. I think it is a powerful part of the work both to prevent and to heal trafficking. We can see visible in the work, we can see as their bodies become stronger that the people who are doing yoga and who are working together in one place, having an opportunity to find strength through peer resources as well as mentorship, that they have changed the way they see. Having given an opportunity to wash their eyes. I think we can do that in an organizational level as well as an individual level. I did mediation conflict we call the conflict resolution then, now we call a conflict transformation. Some conflicts never resolve, but they can be transformed into something more productive and interesting and useful, perhaps. I would always have the kids who were the bullies, the gang leaders and the class clowns, be the negotiators are the mediators. The reason was because, as many of you probably know, it allowed them to see themselves differently. They were already hungry for attention, already dynamic and charismatic and leaders, but the idea of giving them the tools to engage in benevolent readership, to remind them they can do that, too, and there are those who will listen and follow and who will be interested, even if they are speaking softly is an important one. The work they do to also bring in the traffickers, the perpetrators, i think is therefore very important. We mustnt forget about that. I think that excuse me. I think that is part of culturally competent work. We need to meet the community where they are on some levels. We need to build bridges between schools and organizations and businesses in the community and the families that exist and if we are going to be culturally responsive, then we have to address the culture that has created this. We dont have to be arrogant about it. We dont need to come down and tell other cultures what theyre doing wrong. The idea is to bring local knowledges to bear. It is to also unearth and explore and truly excavate the reasons why you have perpetrators. What is happening here, how do we empower them to behave differently and to see themselves differently in their task in the world. We all know organizations that have succeeded by virtue of using this method Second Chance is one with gangs. They have former gang members who go out and persuade. It is not about being scared straight or instilling fear, but it is about really working with clear and powerful knowledge, a deeprooted knowledge of the problem. And only then can we have, i think, a full and effective set of solutions. I think there are two important tools for helping the victims as well as their communities as they reintegrate into society, to feel empowered, to find meaning in helping others, to feel safe in their new circumstances for their worldly for they will be forever changed, but not necessarily forever damaged. There does need to be, i think, this Work Together, building bridges to eliminate isolation, alienation, and to find a sort of future orientation. I think we need to bring in their own personal history in order to move forward, in order to first grapple with it and then unearth something brighter. A brazilian poet talks about planting dates, even though we will never meet those who are tasting our dates, this idea of being disciplined about the future. And giving to our children something that emerges from our own creative acts. Even if we cant see it, this sort of disciplined love, as he calls it, is what makes profits and revolutionaries and saints so effective. They have the courage to die for things they will never see. Im not asking any of you to martyr your self for the cause, but i am asking you to perhaps sacrifice and find others willing to do so and then work hard to build something and work hard to help young people to do something as well for something perhaps we will never see, having a longterm vision. I would like to close as i do believe my time is winding, and we can talk some more after this in conversation, but with a prayer from the navajo tradition because i was just in the four corners area a couple of weeks ago it goes as follows. In beauty may i walk all day long may i walk through the returning seasons may i walk on the trail marked with pollen with grasshoppers about my feet may i walk with dew about my feet may i walk with beauty before me with beauty above me. I walked with beauty below me may i walk with beauty all around me in old age wandering on a trail of beauty lively may i walk living again may i walk it is finished in beauty it is finished in beauty so thank you very much and let us help these stories find a different ending and we will help them be finished in beauty. Thank you for being here and talking to one another and for the important work that you do. [applause] thank you. And thank you for all you do. We both practice yoga, so were not going to do yoga right now, that we are going to stand and have a moderated discussion because we dont like to set all the time. As maya was saying, we do events, we do healing through yoga and meditation at odanadi. It is quite ironic in the home of yoga, in india, because of the caste system that still continues, they themselves are not able to participate in yoga because you have to be of a certain caste. It is ironic that westerners are coming in to teach them yoga, but, alas, this is the paradox of our life. We are just doing yoga together and i really appreciate that you were speaking about creating the spaces inside through gardens and having quiet time for healing. Can you share your own personal experience as how that helps you in your very busy, busy life . I didnt know what question she was going to ask me. I can. There is another indonesian phrase which means to be silent in a thousand languages. It is sort of beautiful, but melancholy in a away. Growing up in indonesia, i was granted many gifts. I was granted a community by and large of tolerance, of artistry, of sweetness and i was there and until age 14. I was born there, though my brother, the president , was not. [laughter] for the record. Again. [laughter] you had to. But it was a place it was a place of great diversity. Diverse cultures within indonesia. Were talking about thousands of islands. And each one possessing its own language and cultural artifacts and moors. There was a lot of conflict when i was growing up in the 1970s between the chinese, indonesians and the malay indonesians. My father was malayan. The chinese were often scapegoated because of times of poverty, the perception that chinese folks owned businesses and were doing better. It is not an unfamiliar story. But i remember several riots where cars would be overturned and i would watch from my window as people would be pulled out of their cars and harmed. Or stores would have their windows busted. And i remember the next day, there would be, perhaps in the papers, nothing about it. It was censored. It was a time when folks were not that embarrassed about censoring because i remember in the International Herald tribune we would have big black foxes boxes covering like, something mustve happened. But it was shocking to me the silence that surrounded these events. And the silence that does surround this trauma. And when we talk about gardens, there is a valuable silence, a stillness that can help us to sort of recognize our own feelings and thoughts. And it wasnt that kind of silence. It was a different sort of silence. There are many kinds of silence, and i wanted to think about how we can provide places for reflective silence and then of the voice, the stories, the imaginings and the activists words that must necessarily follow rather than the silence of shame or the silence so for me, practices like yoga, creating the spaces, are about a preparatory silence that proceeds sound, cacophony even. I remember that one of the my mother came across all of these unmarked graves from 1965. There was conflict in indonesia about the communists coup and counter coup and there was a lot of people who were well, the United States went through things in the 1950s. There was a lot of silence surrounding that era. And my mother wasnt really told when she arrived what had happened. And things were whispered in hushed ways. I think the idea is we have to be sensitive to why perhaps cultures or individuals to remain silent. We have to do a lot of work to make them feel safe. So a lot of these practices i think are about building safety. Thank you. Thank you for bringing silence to the very noisy washington, d. C. It is so refreshing because often we just hear about policy all day. It is important, too. It is. Im not going to put your brothers work down, but we need to get back to connect, right . And come back to the human part of it. Im wondering as an educator if you can talk more about the importance of empathy and how do you instill that in others who maybe dont want to connect . A lot of what i do as an educator is about building empathy. So we will do things like rather than simply having the facts of the civil war, for instance. Facts are important to building narratives. It is important they are accurate. There are some things that perhaps im not saying everything is relative, but what we do is we sometimes do things like pick a pill pick a picture and build a life. The civil war was an important time in this country because it was a documented war. There are amazing photographs. Ill have my students find any picture and begin to tell the war from the perspective of someone who has not been sort of featured in the textbook. So they will have to imagine what is this persons greatest fear or desire . What does this person need for breakfast . Do they have a family . You begin to build, add flash to the skeleton, build dimension is what i mean to say. Rapid is the same thing. You take a story and ask questions to address the things that are not said it is an important way i think to build history, to remember the real work of an educator is researching. And then coming up with understandings, not simply information. Molding that into wisdom. Rapid is where you wrap a story with Additional Information and research and emotion. That is a good way to empathize. Some call it poetry where you write a poem about another medium, like a painting or photograph. The idea is to begin connecting with history. One of the things i often do my classroom is i will create a visual bridge. I will do an outline of a bridge the goes from one end of the room to the other, and ill have students outline bricks through index cards. In each brick that will write from the perspective of someone who is not seen, someone who has been rendered invisible. They will write poetry, prose, letters, journal entries, you name it. Then they will put that as a brick on to the wall. By the end of the semester, the bridge is filled. It has been finished. They represent sort of a connection between the past and the present and the future, between our lives, the hallowed halls of learning, and the world outside between school and community, between the self of the learner and the many people residing in the world. So those are some ways that i think we can help with empathy. How lucky are those students to have such an amazing teacher . Oh, thank you. We will have a couple of more questions than open it to the audience. We want to shout out to our folks in india who are watching the survivors. They are also so grateful, it is amazing. They have so little. You come here and there so much materialism and there is nothing there, but theyre so grateful for our presence. What is interesting is when our Board Members who are back there you can meet them later we try to go back annually to work with the survivors. We are the ones who are transformed. So why dont we do more of that, kind of Service Component . We should. Why dont we . I think we should. When i was teaching on the Lower East Side of manhattan, we would have service day on wednesdays. Wednesday morning the students would create service projects. They would decide what they wanted to do. Some would work in public old folks homes to work with the elderly, to bring the connection with the elders and the youth. Theres a wonderful thing that happens between the two. We would also do things like the First Recycling project in the projects, on the Lower East Side. Or they would go and read two younger kids. School beautification. We had a project where there was an abandoned lot nextdoor that we transformed into immunity Garden Community garden. Teachers would take care of the composting and the paneling and our teachers would create the murals, in which teachers would have workspaces where poetry could be read later. The shop teacher could build the benches. Math teachers would figure out how to make a Basketball Court level. I still have a blister from laying down some of that sod. Service to ourselves, service to our community and in service to the wider world were very important. We can have global collaboration, have people Work Together. When we had the japanese tsunami, a lot of our students created projects and plans to think about what would be needed to restore a sense of strength to that part of japan, to rebuild the schools, infrastructure, and other things. The projects were largely aspirational. They did not have the resources, necessarily. But these are things they can do later. There were an assortment of things they could do to reach out to make people feel connected, scene known, cared about. They did that. They raised money. As well an important part of service is what christina was talking about, which is i think you have to not simply get kids to do good things which is wonderful but you have to help them reflect afterwards on what they accomplished, whether they might have a compost more, how they were impacted by the service they did and how they were transformed. The idea of looking at that reciprocal effect i think is very valuable to make service both relevant and enduring. We are so grateful for your service. Thank you. You are a tireless leader. She has been nonstop since shes been here from hawaii. I want to open it to our audience. We have some members of the press, too. We have a microphone here. Thank you very much. My name is jenny. I write for an asian paper. I would like to suggest a fundraising project about what you said today. I was born there, though my brother was not. A tshirt or Bumper Sticker for a fundraiser. They said youre currently writing a book. It is a young adult novel based on the robert frost poem that had to do roads to verge in the yellow road and i took the one less traveled and that is made all the difference. It is about a 16yearold girl in the world of war. A lot of it looks at the themes of conflict and a lot of it also brings in a sort of easter narrative, images, and motives into a western narrative construct. Im trying to create something that is a cultural hybrid. It is hard to finish. You dont want young adult novels to be pedantic, yet you want them to be instructive. I keep thinking, well, how much burgeoning romance do i need to include in order [laughter] to make 14yearolds interested. So i have a little bit of that. I try to find a 16yearold within. But im also doing some work with a colleague. She does elementary education. We do a workshop in hawaii. I am also beginning to work with people nationally and internationally as scarlet lewis is coming tomorrow, the mother of jesse lewis who lost his life at newtown. She is thinking about how to heal her community. We make these connections. But the idea of seeds of peace is to work with educators and create lesson plans connected to the standard. How do we have them teach what there are ready teaching but with in eye toward building empathy, moral courage . Your organization is called upstanding . Up stander. Rather than a bystander. That is an important part i think of the piece of work we can do. If you can have educators who leave with unit plans or portfolios, that is wonderful. What we do is for parents we create little refrigerator magnets, reminders of activities, things they can do with their kids. The book i wrote is basically a book that is meant to be shared. My nineyearold daughter was very honest. We were walking one day last month and she asked me to tell a story which she often does. It was fanciful and there was magic and she said, wow, that is such a good story, you should write a good book like that. [laughter] i thought i wrote a good book, one the kids would like. Point taken. The idea is the book is really meant to be a means for opening the children might like some of the illustrations. There are certain images, certain words or phrases in there, but it is meant to open up dialogue with your children and the children in your community about what came before them, about their own inheritance, about their own power, their strength, their ability to impact. So in the book the young protagonist reaches down and learns how to help others. They go to the moon and it becomes a sanctuary, a place of sweetness and connection. The reason i wrote the book is because my mother used to wake me up in the middle of the night to go look at the moon. I would call her a lunatic and tell her to leave me alone, but i really enjoyed those times. Mom really loved the moon because she said everywhere in the world it is the same. The constellations can change, but the moon that i experience here is going to be the moon that is the same on a fire escape in new york, in the on a stoop in hawaii, on any given day. So the moon became this image of connection. When she was dying, she decided she wanted to have her ashes scattered into the water because she said, how else can i get to all of the wonderful places that i love so much and see all of the people i care about so profoundly . The moon i virtue of governing the tides is also sort of, i think, a connecting force. Peace education book sort of conjures a lot of i hope the activities that have been most effective, but will also i hope inspire other teachers because i can only do so much in terms of pulling a poem, a phrase, a film clip, and narrative. The stories are endless. My hope is the book, which emerges from the seeds of peace, is just or starts a kind of inspiration from the same level of connection, global competence, a sense of fearlessness so that we do a little less othering and perhaps can offer opportunities for international, national, you know, all kinds of collaboration. Thanks for shouting out i am working on both simultaneously. I promise you they will both the birds, but i cant tell you. I look forward to seeing you when the time comes. Thank you for remembering our folks in hawaii. It is 7 00 there, and some are watching, including my husband. Thank you very much. I thank you for your presentation. I am very touched when he talk about empathy and connection and you even make a point that i think is very powerful, that to put the power into the bully or the people that are out there, the traffickers, the human traffickers because they are the ones that if we help them to change, you talk about conflict transformation. I think that is very powerful. I am from vietnam. I am vietnameseamerican now. Am hoping you will help her with the unum and Human Trafficking situation in vietnam is her rent if. Is karen does. Horrendous. We are very worried. Not only women, girls, but also men. Just two days ago at the center for International Strategy international studies. Just two days ago at the center for International Strategy and international studies, the director of the labor, the International Labor organization told us that she knew that there were young man in vietnam, the fisherman being trafficked because others around the area, chinese people, that do not have good fisherman, and they capture these men and made them. So the problem because the power of the, you know, sometimes even the state power that concern us. Is there a way are has that been thinking or anyway we go work with you ,collaborate, so that we can build some kind of new Program Involving the stronger nations, india and china, and maybe indonesia, in the area, because indonesia is a strong country in asia. I also wanted to ask you a question regarding the economy aspect of it because actually the main problem is the job situation, many People Volunteer to be kidnappers, sell their own children because of survival and lack of living ability. Is there a way that we can turn this Human Trafficking into a new sort of an area, a glazing the workforce. Areas that need more younger adults, younger workforce, the lack of young generation, and areas that somehow you talk about global collaboration and conflict transformation. Is there a way that you can do this . I do think that you have a lot of good ideas. I think that there should be a lot of conversation. In some cases, there can be active partnerships, but in some cases it is also about information sharing. It is about finding those places of innovation where things are duplicable. We need to be informed because we have a nuance and rigorous understanding and not simply you know, placid. I think understanding the role of poverty, finding ways to offer economic solutions, and alternatives. Its critical. Our mother did a lot of work with microfinance, and at the time that she did it, it was not strong, and abundantly available the way that it is now. It was the solution of that time to give a sense of strength, to fortify village economy and people at a time when it was sorely needed. There are other solutions that are sorely needed now and that are both culturally relevant but also perhaps have universal some of them, applications. And in terms of economics, i am definitely not the person who knows the most. I am not necessarily even the person in the first two rows. I do know that there are a lot of very competent people, and we can engage and change both top up, bottom up, rather, topdown, and we can lead around and behind. I think the idea of taking a look at grassroots and Educational Options in all of those countries and seeing buildings, a pattern of understanding about what is the same and what is different is something that we should do. To wrap up, were going to do a little bit of, you know, take you back to new york, inside the actors studio. We want to know a little bit about you, so just some quick questions, and you can answer, stream of consciousness, so people can get a segue into the artistic closing. What is your Favorite Book . That is impossible. I used to really love 100 years of solitude. I love the book, but i have not read it in so long. But i love magic realism, i like this idea of being able to sort of magically move beyond our physical limitations and guide characters in ways that are astonishing. Ok. Who is your role model . Practically speaking or ideally . However you want to answer it. I could never be like right, because they are just way more than i can master or muster. But i do see them as sort of idealized role models in the sense that people who really were willing to sacrifice that much i have my two daughters that i love too much like him and i would love to see them grow up. I cant quite get there, but this idea of being able to take something soft and to make enormous changes to something jagged, sharp, and explosive, i think, is an extraordinary idea. What perception other than yours you would like to attempt . Other than mine . You are very much a renaissance woman. I think that we i think i would have really loved michelle does the lets move, and occasionally i used to teach global dance, bringing a little salsa and a little, you know, dancing and all of that stuff. I would have liked to have done something very physical. This belly is evidence of too much sedentary, too much a similar verbal too much cerebral work. I think gosh, those extraordinary athletes who put in those hours are amazing because they inspire levels of discipline and commitment of a different sort, so different from what i possess. So an olympic athlete, that is what i would love to be. Do it, you still have time. Your favorite word. One word. It changes. I know i can do one word. I could do a hawaiian word, which is my current favorite word and it means both light and responsibility. Responsibility and carrying out your responsibility to others, you earn our rights. Tomorrow is mayas birthday, and what is your favorite birthday activity . Hopefully her husband is watching. Well, i think that, again, that changes, but i think we are doing well if every single day have a little bit of friendship, a little bit of conversation, some good grub, a little bit of adventure, some novelty, and some good words to sit with. So i would like to do all of those things. Tomorrow, thank you. Community. Thank you also much for being here. I am looking forward to meeting you. Yeah, thank you. [applause] and a small Birthday Gift we have for maya is yoga has the a yoga stops traffic tshirt, this is a you stop trafficking tshirt, so every march we do one day of yoga together with survivors in india. And happy birthday. Thank you. And we will close. Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming out today. We were talking about trafficking in india, but also remember it is an international problem. When you walk out of the door, we are living in a community in a country that is also dealing with sex trafficking. This poem is entitled dont sell bodies. All she did was run a way to get some attention he said hed give her love if she just did what he mentioned but what happened next, she is too embarrassed to mention he pimped her out and locked her up in his detention this aint supposed to happen to her, she knew the guy supposed to happen in a far away land she wanna cry wanna fly, wanna die, anything but lie with another stranger violatin her thighs heard she was bought on the internet man, easy as pie this country preached freedom why wont anyone try to free me, see me, just let me be me a runaway shouldnt become a sex slave, feel me . Now she is hearing sirens, cops took her and her pimp but why is she the only one at the arraignment . Prosecutin me and letting him go, im twice raped im just a kid what did i do to feel such hate . More people enslaved now than ever before most of em in the sex trade, man i implore you to listen closely cause were selling bodies an act most ungodly that should anger everybody dont have enough dough for a phone, buy a slave costs 90 to to buy a kid in this trade and i aint just talkin overseas hear what i say cause its happenin right here in the usa you gotta pay more attention to maya for the sake of our children gotta end this today how much is your daughter worth . A thought you cant imagine but on the daily mothers lose their daughters they stranded we import drugs, tvs and girls, whatevers demanded but slavery ended with the 14th amendment to the constitution but theres still no solution but to catch our kids and prosecute them for prostitution . We have to do more to protect our children too many end up sex slaves, too many missin we tracked down bin laden we can track those who traffick police the internet, arrest pimps, it dont take magic just the fact that im writing this song is so tragic cause some a yall wont understand unless i rap it well track it, 83 of those sold in the states are born in the states not some other place 46 of them know their recruiters pimped out and sold to all types of suitors who want to invest in the destruction of children but what we need to do is invest them in prison dontsellbodies. Org, yeah, they on a mission to liberate all those enslaved, wont ask permission gotta Work Together for the sake of our seeds so they can blossom into flowers, beautiful and free [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] programs to tell you tomorrow. Two am ofm. On cspan the air force association hosted a discussion on Defense Strategies and planning and report on the ways the military can maintain its advantage. Later in the day, a new America Foundation on human surveillance and rights to access now an organization focused on individual acts of the internet and the right to privacy area that is live at 6 00 a. M. Eastern. Week thepast association for unmanned vehicles held a discussion about the use of drums and concerns over privacy. Thank you for, about for this topic. Before introduce our moderators am a little bit about us. We are the International Trade association of the Unmanned Systems industry and wouldve over 7000 members from 60 countries and is our biggest event here in washington dc. As manager and our general ounsel, i have been at the forefront of auvsis response to the privacy issues being raised about Unmanned Aircraft systems and i believe it will get more in depth in these issues at these panels. I wanted our members to know that we have been dealing with this this issue in a very proactive way. We encourage you to visit our website to see how we have been responding to this. It is my great pleasure to introduce al frazier. He was a Law Enforcement officer previously with numerous years of experience in the airborne what was the Police Department . In the glendale Police Department. He is now in north dakota and heads up their Research Efforts and is one of the experts on how Law Enforcement agencies can use and fly Unmanned Aircraft and has worked with the grand Forks Sheriffs Office after their uas operations. Join me in welcoming al, thank you. [applause] i thank all of you for coming. I am a little bit relieved because when we did this session last year in las vegas, the room was packed. What it tells me is that maybe this issue is going to the back burner a little bit where it should be. That is heartening to me. To set the tone a little bit, what we are here to discuss a something very important and that is the respect for citizens that we serve that law and so that Law Enforcement should have using new technology, respect for the Fourth Amendment and i have had experiences in my background where i have seen that even though a particular lawenforcement agency does not abuse the technology or abuse the freedoms of the public that they serve, another agency doing something that could be perceived like that puts a black mark on all of us. Two instances that come to mind most of my Law Enforcement was in the Southern California area. Im sure all of you remember the arrest of rodney king in 1991 and two subsequent trials that followed that. Several of the Police Officers and the supervisor on scene were charged with violation of rodney kings rights. Throughout that trial and the riots that followed after the first acquittal in state court come on numerous occasions, i would be called to assist officers on basically complaints that the citizens had of those officers behaviors. I cannot tell you the number of times that something similar to this was told to me by citizens are you going to beat me like you did rodney king . We are a completely Different Agency and have nothing to do with the los angeles Police Department but our actions were tainted with a broad brush. Later, in 1995, after the trial of o. J. Simpson, and the revelations about lapd detective mark fuhrman and some racially insensitive comments he made, the same thing occurred. We were broadbrush, as were many agencies in the country, with being racist cops. That is a great fear that i have. The most sacred thing we have in this country other than god is the maintenance and respect for our u. S. Constitution and the bill of rights. We want to protect that. Even if that does not hit close to your heart, just as an industry and as a group of users in Law Enforcement that want to use this technology, if we do not get the public to agree to its use, we will be unsuccessful. We will fail before we ever leave the starting gate. So far, of being able to use this Technology Effectively we have to win the public over. Anyone that thinks that Police Department is rude is ruled by an iron fist has never been a police officer. We police through acquiescence and consent of the public. If the public does not consent and acquiesce to us in our role as Law Enforcement officers, we will fail. With that, i want to go through a couple of housekeeping issues. If there was an emergency, the closest egress is out the doors at the back of the room and to the right and out to the main thorough fire a thorough fair. You have surveys in front of you and i encourage you to fill those out. I know it is difficult when you want to move to another session but it is a simple five questions and is valuable to auvsi in determining whether they should repeat sessions and so forth. If you could provide that input, take a couple of moments toward the end of the presentation to fill that out, you can leave them on a chair at the back of the room and i will make sure they get to the auvsi representative. We are hoping to have at least half the session dedicated to audiencedirected questions. I would ask that you hold those questions until the end of the session and when you want to pose one of those, come to one of the microphones. That way, everyone will hear your question and this is being recorded for distribution and that will make sure that the audience watching those recordings is able to hear your question as well. I would also ask having worked with these panelists and i know they will comply with this i would ask you the same thing treat the issue with respect and pose your questions and a respectful manner. Not like saturday night live andjane curtin you ignorant, misguided you fill in the rest. I would like to introduce our panelists. Jay stanley is a policy analyst with aclu based in the dc area. He has written extensively on the issues of privacy and the use of technology. He wrote an informative paper with a coauthor that has to do with the implementation of Uas Technology by Law Enforcement. If you have not read it [indiscernible] doug is a Division Manager at new mexico state university. He is very influential in uas and sits on numerous panels and is generally recognized as one of the experts in the implementation of Uas Technology. Worldwide. Greg is a professor in pepperdine university. It is one of the most beautiful campuses in the world although the law school does not share that campus but the main campus is wonderful in malibu. I thought you guys were downtown. Oh, my gosh. I take that back. I am jealous, now. There you go, perfect. Gregs research focuses on the interaction of law, security and Public Policies and has written extensively on the subject of the use of technology and how it interfaces with law with such renowned publications as the New York Times, the baltimore times and others. He is quite a well spoken expert in the area of the intersection of technology and law. Finally, you have met ben gilo, general counsel for the association of unmanned Vehicles Systems international and services auvsi in the role of a lobbyist and stays on top of what is a pivotal issue and the implementation of this technology. It has to do with privacy concerns and respect for the Fourth Amendment. The format we will use is that we have some prearranged questions that i will be asking each of the panelists. They were given these questions before the panel and they had time to prepare their responses to them. We are also going to open it up to other panelists if they want to counterpoint that particular response or they want to segue or add something onto it. As we work through those questions, once we have made it through those questions, i would ask you to hold your questions and responses until the end of the presentation and then we will invite you to one of the microphones. You can either address an area we have discussed or you. Can suggest a completely new topic you can pose your question to an individual panelist rapoza to the entire panel. I will open it up to the entire panel to answer that question. We will start off with jay. What are the privacy concerns with the use of Unmanned Aircraft systems . There are a number of concerns as to how to precisely deploy and implement it but the gig is concerned we have the biggest concerns we have is that the drones not be used for pervasive surveillance. The technology now exists to have aerial surveillance using gigapixel cameras watching 25 square miles and track pedestrians and vehicles that move in that area and put those into a database and store the databases, and data mined them and that is our biggest concern. Isaac explains that panicky policies made by panicked policymakers make an ordinary economic downturn into a financial run for the exit. We saw that play out in 2008. John ellisons book, the financial crisis in the free market cure, was published early this year. He emphasizes how interfering market distorting Government Policies lay the groundwork for the crisis and have been making things work making things worse since that. Peter wallace and first book on on recession and the crisis the battle history, worst policy. This is a collection of essays of the many essays that peter wrote the demonstrates that peter, before, during as well as been the recession, has writing the official narrative and wouldnt it have been great if there was some that someone in 1930 writing about challenging the official narrative that had been spun at the time. I understand that peter is working on his second book on the subject and im looking for in looking forward to see that when it comes out. And there are others who believe as i do that eventually the truth comes out. Discussed the book demonstrating that the true story will come out dan, if the people work on it, the effort is growing in strength and is ever more appealing. One of the things that i like about his book is that it is a book that really can be taken to the beach and enjoy rather than, oh, yeah, im supposed to read this. It is tough to reach. This is a very enjoyable book to reach and very well researched. Its a story that began long before the recession and continues afterwards. And its a bigger story, bigger than his book. Its core message is well illuminated by the recent events and the aftermath. Richardsis book, demonstrates and transcends and filled with the drama. It is dont think that traumatized, then you live in the tc area. The d. C. Ve out of area, you really are as a people are traumatized. They think anxiety and at her and maybe a little bit, but they are still going through the effects. And the enduring lesson that we should take away with us today is brought out very well in this book. And i referred to the human peoplee caused when some are able to harness the coercive force of government to impose their personal notions of benevolence on the rest of us. Roger kimball, writing in 2011 in the new criterion, warned that such governmentenforced benevolence is both intoxicating, addictive, expensive, and ultimately ruinous. And richards offers several well described examples, well illustrating the truth of kimballs observation. Because my own experiences, i am drawn to the kennedy reinvestment act, working with the senator investment the senate hanging committee, notice the how the cra offered no additives avenue for the banks to lend to their own communities. Banks were already doing that in 1970 and it has been doing that ever since. Where else is the bangor to lend if not in its own community . Was how cra was put to other use. For example, cra became a lever employed by some banks for competitive advantage over others, advantage that they had not earned in the market place. One bank in particular was aggressively buying up other banks and using cra as a means of keeping competing bidders for those particular banks at bay and out of competition. Crabased protest by Community Activists and organizers can slow down a Bank Acquisition effort can buy the assertion that they are ignoring their own markets, surgeons that are in almost never prove but always carefully investigated the regulators. Slowing everything down. The bank to which i referred to discovered billions of dollars of Financial Arrangements with Community Groups before announcing a net position plan. And to no surprise, those groups later wrote records and sometimes testified in support of the banks merger efforts. The cra supporters got the joke in 1999 when i came across a wonderful quote look we in the congressional records. Actually i was there. I know it was there some when i was able to find appeared when senator phil gramm and others were pursuing legislation to stop the expansion of cra must senators john edwards and Barbara Boxer held a colloquy on the senate floor for the official record. And they were talking and praising this particular bank and its cra records. And senator edwards was proud to quote the head of the bank. The companysupports reinvestment act, both in spirit and in fact. We have gone way beyond its requirements. And we had fun doing it have made a business out of it. Indeed they did. A news article in may 2008 explains how as a reporter in a series of what new englanders called wicked smart moves, wellpublicized deeds helped pave its way was quote to this growth by on by an protested acquisition. It helped to avoid delays that gummed up deals between banks accused of noncompliance. Some people today complain about some banks being too big. But cra helped this bank grow good a valuable bank grow. A valuable lesson for policymakers and for the people they would govern is this the more description you give to you create the more the opportunity for abuse of that discretion for private gain. I will say it again. The more discretion you give to government, the more you create the opportunity for abuse of that discretion for private gain. Europe in the 18th century was lousy with the practice can our forebears sought to escape it and fought a revolution to get out of its grip. The tea thrown into the harbor in boston was in protest of the partnership between the British Crown and the privately owned reddish east india company. Beware the privatepublic hardships. J richards explains in his book how some publicprivate ownerships went very bad for the partners and for all of us cut it for all of us caught in the dust in the debris of the effort. When you enter into a partnership with the devil, you are always the junior partner. [laughter] now to conclude with the words of the new york city democrat congressman burr conquer it or at conklin 110 years ago city democrat cosman erred, current desperate cochran said that government only is great. That only is just which has neither favorites nor victims. That should be our government. Thank you. [applause] i thank tim for the invitation and j for what is the im not sure whether i should thank william but i will for hiring me back in 2001. Im not sure if he bears responsibility for me spending the last 10 years fighting these efforts. , i reallyo the point do want to emphasize that this is an enjoyable book. That i reallyhing enjoyed reading. I also want to emphasize that it is straightforward that you dont need a phd in emphasize and finance. He does a great job in breaking down complex ideas very straightforward. I can see this book as forming the center of a discussion in undergraduate course discussion in Consumer Finance. This leads me to where i think this book really succeeds where so many others fail. I had to reach her men this amount of books in the financial crisis, probably more than him. [applause] generally following the two types, the best seller accounts written by journalists with fastpaced stories of bad people doing bad things and then there tend to be the scholarly accounts that sometimes offer a theoretical framework on the forces behind the cronk behind the crisis. The one thing that i think he has done that really is not out there is that he has found a balance between these two. In that sense, one of these books is a broad economic and philosophical discussion about Consumer Lending the talks about the crisis that goes beyond the crisis. You had discussions about user he consumer choice, regulation. These discussions to me were always relevant. But go beyond the crisis. They are presented in a manner that is very accessible. Again come i think that is one thing to follow on. The other part of the book him again come along the lines of bad people doing bad things, i will emphasize that often these bad things are really done and motivated by sometimes very good intentions and i think that is something that is important to keep in mind. One of the interesting aspects of the book is that he does not focus on the usual suspects. So if you read Something Like him, you are not going to get repetition. There is no pages on pages about jimmy kanes rage game or john paulson taking big bets against the Housing Market. In fact, there is little discussion about wall street and some might use that as a criticism of the book but i see it as a strength. It is important to keep in mind that i september 2008, we had been in recession for a year already. For me, it seems to suggest that the reaction of wall street was more a reflection of a crisis that it was a cause of the crisis. Thatld go as far to say the usual obsession with wall street has reduced the publics understanding of the crisis rather than proved it. So i think he rightly focuses this crisis blame where it belongs here in washington. He also reminds us that washington is a reflection of the goals and agendas that originate very often outside of the beltway. For instance, mention the agendas of herman marion sandler, the founders of golden west, and their agenda to use Charitable Giving to harass the competitors in the mortgage industry. He touches upon this. Let me emphasize my experience in financial regulation. It is often far more about competitors trying to stifle competition that it is about protecting consumers. I really would emphasize during my seven years on the Banking Committee staff that the real battles were rarely about the taxpayer or the economy. They really were about big banks trying to stick it to little banks in the wall street trying to stick it to commercial banks, commercials insurers try to stick it to commercials. That is what is 80 of what goes on in Banking Committee, very little about the taxpayer. One of the results of the crisis and one of the results of. Frank will be an increased concentration in the Insurance Services industry. I really want to emphasize that i often hear it it the here unintended as an consequence of. France. I think it is an intense at best unintended consequence of. Frank. You see the financial of. Frank. You see the financial style. Essentially giving you the monopoly oligopolies profits, government will come back and demand that you give back rockets that favor constituencies. A near perfectly competitive market does not offer rents that government can redistribute. It was formalized back in the 1970s, a better description of how Government Works in practice. He talks at length about the center for responsible lending and a lot of detail and discussion by their activities. During my time on the Banking Committee, i was lobbied regularly by crl. I might even go as far to say martinique. I disagreed on a number of things. Emphasize that crl is a symbol of a lot of other groups. They are certainly not the only. They are probably the best organized, the best articulate, but certainly far from being alone. I also the size and i think this is a real credit to a lot of the research of that went into the book, despite me having spent 10 years dealing with many of these groups, he does dig up a number of stories. Ands nice to read a book learn a few things and not just have it read heated back to me. I want to not repeated back to me. Want to say that he is 100 consistent with my experience in being alive be by these groups. To give a little flushed the story, we often get presented with the recent crisis being a subprime crisis first time ever. But the fact is that we had a movement in the subprime market in the 1990s. Most of these were state chartered finance companies that were not depositories. When the asia crisis may be Interest Rates go up, many of these institutions went out of business. What we immediately saw on the Banking Committee and in congress was a number of groups deciding that come in the aftermath of this bus, fannie and freddie should get the subprime. So wanted to be incredibly clear. I was lobbied on numerous occasions in the early 2000 to allow and to push fannie and freddie into subprime. I was there. And iainly not alone would give credit to many of these organizations. They were very up front. There was a letter that was read that was very common. So these are not things that were being hit at the time. Efforts i see these behind dodd frank to recreate this model. There is also a fair amount of important philosophical discussion in his book. At the heart of much of this is a rejection of competition as an avenue for protecting and benefiting consumers. As i mentioned, the model viewers really tried to re create a monopolystyle government monopolystyle finance. I will give you an example of some of this. Dodd frank section 1205 creates a governmentsubsidized of payday loans. That, to showote that commerce has a good sense of humor in many cases, they titled this section lowcost terms to pay their loans unfairly lowcost loans. Payday and subprime are only part of the war on fisk braced pricing. Are owers pay a lower rate than lower risk borrowers. It will be to reduce the risk based pricing. Average cost, pricing where the prudent subsidize the imprudent pimp that is a very explicit agenda and explicit agenda of this agency. He also discusses a lot of the s out there. Objective scholars, very well known scholars and academic, solid evidence. Sadly, despite the repeated claims that we have about it being evidencebased, they pretty much ignore all of the academic evidence contrary to results. We should be why concerned with this. He talks about the back story. Let me really emphasize that many of the organizations of discussed in the book early did take advantage of the crisis and were very much behind the scenes creating the s creating the cfp be the cfpb. I am usually fairly reluctant to question anybodys motives or funding sources. I generally take the perspective that you should judge policies on their merits. Of course, i believe that dodd frank fails on its merits. Theeven that said, i think back story that is given in this book really does eliminate the campaign that we have seen to the campaignpb and to eliminate lending alternatives for borrowers. So i find us a back story to be again, if theen, approach should always be what is the argument and how do we address the argument on the merits. Let me wrap up with a few minor criticisms of the book. That the dualr scholar listed nature of this book that i see is a plus, the downside is that the organization of it can be a little disruptive and your flipping pages as if you are reading a book on the beach and all there is a regression into philosophy. It is well done, but there is a sort of oh, i want to get back to see what this person is going to do next. Toin, the flow of it trying achieve both of those things at the same time, i think it could have been done differently. But again, i will commend him with being the only book that has tried to achieve both of those things in one book. I like to think that every book is written from a but i recognize that it some ways it is not. If you are familiar with finance theory, it will be about a third of the book that you can quickly flip through and get two maybe the more story. I also want to emphasize that this is less a story about the financial crisis, sir norman summit answer and wrist boxes to. My opinion is that the financial crisis was the result of at least a dozen harmful policies that were enacted. Some of them are mentioned. This is where i disagree with some of my friends. I think Monetary Policy was a very big player. I think maybe we have a page of that and it is appropriate. But there are a number of things that really arent discussed. So i wouldve a size that come if your primary interest is Consumer Finance, this book should be at the top of your reading list. If your turn to get your head around the financial crisis come i would say that i think that jays book is useful in fortifying other books that you should as well. Again, it is also a good discussionsith about dodd frank. But in my opinion, there are some harmful provisions but it is a massive bill with 16 titles and 800 some pages. If youre looking for an overview of dodd frank, this is a good play a good place to start the should also look at other places as well. Let me emphasize by saying that it is a really well researched book and gives you the economics and politics. A Rearview Mirror approach. Yes, this is how we got here, but there really is a roadmap to go forward and the issues of concern that are pointed out. Certainly, the organizations likely to like acorn have disappeared, but they have been replaced and reform. The staff has not gone away. There is a continuing effort to a little size Consumer Finance which a big attribute or to the financial crisis. My real worry about the Consumer Finance agency is that we will manage to do for all other forms of Consumer Finance with the government what the government has done to the mortgage martin the Mortgage Market which is to clearly screwed up. [applause] i want everyone to take a minute and think of what your question might be because we will get to it. But we will do 12 we will do two quick things. Thanks so much to mark and wayne. I wish i knew you guys earlier. Wayne mentioned market panic. The conventional wisdom is that market panics because the government allows Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt. I dont think thats right. Of course, we are talking about counterfactuals. But think of what actually happened. Spento of Lehman Brothers the year not preparing for bankruptcy. The reason is because the government had arty negotiated a deal, not a direct a lot, but a soft landing. A soft landing for bear stearns. Bear stearns tends to emphasize Lehman Brothers. If the government is going to step in there, theyre not going to let lehman for but thats let lehman collapse. Letheyre not going to lehman collapse. Yuliya is that there is no principle involved in determining which companies are bailed out and which are not. So that level of uncertainty was bound to lead to panic. And i think that had these things been handled according to bankruptcy laws already in the books, there may not have been a panic could i would have required regulators and legislators and politicians to restrain themselves. There is a very good book on statey a professor at and called the new financial deal tuchman the new financial deal. I think there are a couple more books like that out there. But it was a really good scholarly treatment of donfrank that was published about a year afterwards. Im glad you noticed. This book is an attempt to combine both argument and analysis and little. The goal or flexion. Im a roof im a philosopher so it is difficult to not do a little bit of that. There have been a lot of books written on these subjects and the financial crisis. I wanted one that was readable. There is narrative nonfiction like the big short by michael ballack. It focuses on five guys you have never heard of and it doesnt give you a whole lot of argument. They have a lot of analysis books, including by many good ones here in washington. I decided to split the difference and try to combine these things and put a section on Additional Resources at the end of the book. Just starting on this and you want to dig deeper, go to steeles book, go to peter wallacons peter book. You will get the story in detail. One other thing that mark said is that i think is right and emphasize Affordable Housing prices as a causal element. I dont think it is the only thing. Policy andthink that to be to fail mentality had something to do with it. But i was interested in that i of toonow the fed policy big to fail would have created all of these risky loans in the market but for the it but for the missing link. There are all of these policies in place. Martin said that what we are really saying is the new gse. Those are governmentsponsored enterprises, fannie mae and Freddie Mac Freddie mac. They are not government owned enterprises. They are hosting a profit at the moment. And i think there is a reason for that. The new governmentsponsored enterprises i suspect will be Something Like these systemically important financial institutions. Systemically are important nonfinancial institutions that cover everything else. It ends up being things like large insurance. What we are seeing the kind of ratification of things that were implicit policies before now sort of put into place by law. I think theres still a lot ahead of us. If the financial crisis and the housing collapse had been done by fannie mae and then collapsing and taxpayers bailing out and that was the boundaries of it, then we could chalk it up to government intervention. But banks failed and many of those banks are still around today. Also, there were people who bought up these mortgage securities. It wasnt just the government. A lot of people thought, a lot of investors, Big Companies and big investors, they thought it was a good investment. And inount of blame which way does the blame lie in the private sector, especially banks and wall street . And separate from the private sector, but markets themselves . Well start this way and go towards jason. Mark . This ally approach maybe i will echo the point earlier by greed. People respond to incentives. Different people will depend will behave differently to the wrong incentives. We set up a system where banks made bad decisions because based on the incentives they faced, fannie and freddie made bad decisions based on the benefits they faced. I think it is completely wrong because fannie and freddie during that time bought about 40 of the privatelabel mortgagebacked securities. When they doubled their purchase of them, the subprime market doubled. We dont have a free market. There is often this sort of comparison between fannie and freddie and the banks. I would think that competition between the banks and fannie and freddie are less active than cooperation between fannie and freddie and the banks. At the end of the day, fannie and freddie were vehicles for the banks to dump their losses on to the taxpayer. Countrywide at one point was about a third of families business. The question a third of fannys business. Again, i think we need to deal with the too big to fail across the board. You also have to keep in mind that this is that least the fourth time that we bailed out citi. It is really important in my opinion that you have to have failure. We have to have a way for weeding out that as his practices, corruption, incompetence, any of these things that are going to be weeded out of the system and these continued bailouts keep that business cultures around. So its incredibly important in my opinion it would have these institutions go away. I think its counterproductive to separate out the banks from fannie and freddie as something different. Nots differences of degree, differences of content. How much blended the banks take . The reason why this crisis focused at this particular time in the housing area and not other areas and other things that we talked about, but the risks that were in the Mortgage Market system had been incredibly camouflaged and disguised by a whole host of different types of Government Policies and programs. Remember, these are very large investments. We are not talking about well but even auto loans. Were talking about hundred thousand dollars, 200,000 and home loans. So it was a large part of the economy. So people investing in the mortgage area felt they were going into low risk investments. They were chasing lower nonrisk investments. In fact, they were going into very high risk areas because of the government camouflaging what was going on. And then when the reality that started to assert itself, then chaos ensued. And that was added to by the government. The government panicked. Of 2008, early fall or maybe late summer of 2008, the Banking Industry had written down their losses. They were still in the game making loans. Then the Treasury Department called nine of the top into the treasury and said you will all take i have 700 billion that i have to find out what to do with. They had just gotten tarp money and said what i have the money for im not going to use afford to buy bad loans for the government. I cant do that. Instead, im going to invest in banks. The nine that were there, maybe you caught this i caught this about a month ago. Chris dodd and barney frank wrote an oped piece where they said the for some i had seen policymakers dues as we knew, all the banks that were pulled into that meeting were to camouflage the few that needed the money. Point, that tart money, nobody investing in the war nobody in the investment world knew what the roles were anymore and they went to the sidelines to figure out what the rules would be. I do think the ratings agencies played a role. This is where i agree with the majority of the reporting. They caused that they called it as a central cause. Standard cause the poors and such are corrupt or Something Like that. I guess thats possible. I dont see any evidence of that. In general, the principal you want to assume his ignorance before malice before accusing malice if you can prove it. There is this underlying assumption that was held by Mortgage Brokers and Mortgage Bankers and homebuyers and builders and ratings agencies. But the Housing Market will nationwide keep going up. He might get a job in one or two different places, but it wouldnt suddenly collapse and go in the opposite direction. As a result of that, there were these collateralized debt obligations. But heres the basic idea. You divide up the assets according to the risk and the high risk things have a higher risk a return. The low rate of return is for the low risks stop that low risk stuff. But they were geographically diversified so you have a thousand laws from around the country. But what if we take a bunch of trenches, thet of triple b or mezzanine trenches, and take those from a thousand different collateralized debt obligations. Now you have this radical geographical diversity. By doing that, they were able to get many of these bonds that were made up of triple b rated stuff rated as trouble way. So now you have a complete scrambling of the information signals with respect to risk and the market. But its amazing how much you can explain that the ratings agencies by the false assumption about this national continued uptick. And also by the bed incentives because of the way ratings agencies are paid. They are paid by the people creating the bonds rather the ones buying the bonds. Aat is a little more than little screwy. It doesnt make sense. You certainly want to do that the other way. If you wonder how that arrangement came around, it was government regulation because pensions and Retirement Funds and unions didnt like paying these fees to get this research done. So i got moved to the people rating the bonds. So you have bed incentives, scrambled with information and it is no surprise that we had a disaster as a result. We are ready to take questions. We have a microphone going around. Please raise your hand. Well have time for a few questions so lets try to make them quick. Michael, we will come to you. We will start with fred smith in from theing back. Is who do we blame about all of these things . What i like to buy your book is what the reasons were said. You brought a cronyism into a dimension of baptist and bootleggers which is too often denied and there has been so missed him on the bootleggers that that we forget the other. And your book correctly identifies baptists as more dominant at least as a root cause than the bootleggers and that is something that i think we forget. The rhetoric is more important in economic power. Getelieve that, but one we into the political world, its all economics, all negative economic cronyism. And that exit question that we what extentsk to is our tendency is a movement to be overly critical of cronyism or crony capitalism, libertarian populism or what have we. Running the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater . The ideological causes of the problems and focusing only on economic players in a game . I will quickly translate just in case. Fred was not talking about theology. Who benefits about county a dry county is the bootlegger but who is making the argument for it the baptist minister. I referred to baptism and bootleggers in early editions. I think him i have been edited out before publication. My view is this. Beltway,le outside the 90 of those people, they are interested in economic reasons they are interested in economics for oral reasons. They end up being moral concerns and they are rooted in moral intuition. Moral intuitions will trump statistical arguments or arcane economic arguments every time. But i think it is very important for lovers of freedom that we a valid andf intuitively compelling moral arguments for these things. To do that, we have to take on the moral challenges to these things. I think the thing that we have to give people who are deeply oriented by their moral concerns is a bit of prudence. Prudence is the intellectual virtue of seeing the world as it is and then acting accordingly as opposed to seeing the world as you would like it to be and acting accordingly. Peoplesjob to connect moral intuitions with the you. Consisting of not looking at the media but the longer terms of interactive policy. You dont have to have a course in macro to be able to do that. But you still have to connect thatmoral intuition to economic reasoning if you dont like your actions to actually lead to disruptive consequences. Microphone have the in the back, you, maam. I really enjoyed your presentation. Over the years, i heard dozens of presentations about the financial crisis. I never tire of it. Its fascinating. 2008 go back to around when this was really hot, one guys i remember is hearing like barney frank and even people from Brookings Brookings and some sort of middleofthe road people, if you mentioned Community Reinvestment act, the immediately think that this has nothing to do with cra. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Is that a lie or were they speaking technically . Could you explain that to me . Let me start with that. It is a very long and complicated explanation, and i will give the sure hand. If you look at the numbers of cra loans that banks had on their banks, it was not very great and they tended to perform very well. That is because banks got rid of the has stuck him it would sell it off in a hold on the books. But the biggest part of what cra did was changing the mentality with which a banker approaches a loan. The risk weighting or the risk evaluation on the part of banking and it basically said aboutnkers, dont worry the ability to repay and dont worry about past Credit History. Those are all kinds of things or make it difficult for some people to get loans. You need to give loans to those people anyway. So when you broke that just broken and not for the banks, but for the regulators, the regulators would then come men might look at some loans and say, well, why are you engaging in some of these kinds of things. Well, i am reaching out to the underserved heart of the the government turn a blind eye to that. It is what the cra did to the regulatory approach to sound underwriting. In the biggerself consumer loans that banks make. Cra would say would not put in my top five but definitely in the five but definitely in the top 20. There are a lot of things behind the crisis. You often hear that, while cra it was so in 1977, if bad, why did they not go bad right away . I think it was largely irrelevant up until you got to about the 1990s. Then the regulations from 1977 to about 1995, it was a process driven not an outcomedriven regulation. To aing in 1995, you move more quota system. We also had a boston fed study done in 19 921993 that presented the intellectual argument that, well, it is all race. But race. Isk so the point that he makes in the book about good intentions and i will emphasize as for my own experience negotiating and working on these issues on the Banking Committee, i think there are a number of people who sincerely believed that, despite of a number of academic articles i would tell you that if your cost of living in housing, and a much all the differences, 95 of the differences in Home Ownership rates is appear. There was a sincere believe that you would not be lowering credit but eliminating racism. Leftng my friends on the believe that that is all they were doing. Then you have the boston fed and many other fed banks and regulators publishing paper saying, if you look things like utility payments or rent payment, thing you see an erosion of underwriting. My think people sincerely believe that they were not taking additional risk. But it was what they were doing. Ok, lets get a question over here. One of the things we hear that we have not discussed today with some of our friends on the left during the crisis, there is this idea or notion that predatory lending was one of the main drivers of the crisis, you for. X that were set aside a very small set of people that became more mainstream and let people down into bad loans and that was the trigger that then caused waves of default and economic realms that lead to more default. But it all started with predatory lending. Can you just come in on that . Figure out what predatory lending is and how it is distinguished from other types of lending. We can perfectly understand bank fraud where some broker misrepresents the terms of the loan. But that is illegal. Sticks to the word the Banking Sector to wait. To wit. This word continually that it was simply a result of predatory lending. Quiteen those who use it know how the word is defined. As i mentioned, one of the key funders of selfhelp and crl are herb and marion sandler. What would you call a loan that allows people or for people without giving evidence of their somethingment that world savings brag about a loan where they can get deeper and deeper into debt for 10 years before the loan resets at a higher rate higher Interest Rate . And if they paid it off early, they would pay prepayment multiperiod that is the sandberg special. Martinique is a man of principle and he does oppose prepayment penalties, but it just is very interesting that, if youre going to call something a predatory how long, that is what you would want in a home loan for it to be a winwin. The bank makes a good loan and earns a profit and the homeowner builds up equity and eventually owns a home and is able to get in it before they have all the money to pay for. That is winwin. I would say they should be illegal, but i think that they were generally that idea. If i was going to call a large batch a Mortgage Loan predatory, that is where i would point it. But i dont think the word has any specific means other than a rhetorical and emotional means. So its not very useful if you want to explain stuff. Effective footnote that a little bit. Gramm sent a letter to all the banking regulators who were starting to enforce on predatory lending. Ok, what is your definition of predatory lending . It went to the fdic, the occ, the ots. Everyone of them came back and said we have no definition. How can you in for something that you do not even know what it is or what the definition is . As far as i know, they havent come up with a definition yet. We are seeing the exact same thing with the word abusive do see it theb. With theconomy word abusive that we do see at organization. The bad loans jam in the crisis narrative is long. The Inflection Point of prices preceded the Inflection Point of default. Unless there was some star trek causedack in time, they rice declines caused defaults rather than defaults carousing priced at defaults causing price declines. There is a situation where you know better than they do, that this may not be good for them, that is something that i would call immoral. 18yearolds borrowing Student Loans is a moral. Were banks are not exploiting making loans they think will hoard will hurt many of their customers or some other reason will end up being profitable. If we define predatory that we almost certainly agree that there are some loans that do that. Ifould certainly agree that, i am a Mortgage Broker and i am dealing with somebody and i have a pretty good idea about their idea their ability to pay and a high degree of certainty of what their job is and i know they really shouldnt get into this loan and it will be good for them, but it will be give for me and my commission, then i do it anyway . That is a moral that is immoral. Laws can sort appear in and say, ok, did you intend to do this. When you see auditory loans, what is referred to is that you always get a sad story of someone who took out a home loan or a payday loan and got into trouble with it. Just because a person got into trouble with a loan, it doesnt mean that the lender meant for that to happen or did that it was going to happen. That is where the law has to take place in terms of explicit deck amended disclosure and things like that. Do think emphasize i that the morale and the argument is important. Of theseed at many products on said this is not good for our clients and we wont do them. I want to know if the economist in me, the ultimate sort of discipline has to be on the investor. The argument that i never understood in the predatory side is how is this profitable over a long amount of time. Peoplefigure out how figure out who you are and reputation matters. In the rest of the destiny nearly 1990s, loans and retailers were not priced differently. That changed. The real problem with the marketplace was that you had a number of very large investors like cna and freddie who did not care about economic returns. As a across the table staffer on the senate Banking Committee from the den ceo of freddie mac and he said, please give me cover to stop making these loans. Thatdont want to defend banking practices, but i do want to defend banking. Banks are separate from financial firms. Banks are longterm businesses. You cant get a charter quickly tomorrow arent gone generally speaking. Banks succeed because they do a longterm customer. They want you for a customer for life, starting from your teenagers and so forth and being a businessman. Loans is bad business. The banks that are trying to get into the business quickly and get into business by doing that underwriting, those are the 400 banks that failed during the last several years. They were the ones that were cut in the corners and underwriting. And those types of banks should get out of the business and you want a market system that fails those kinds of institutions that dont get into consumer practices. The banking as an industry benefits from good consumer practices. Right here, sir. With the department of baptists werethe out of touch with reality and created this huge government centralized mass, what should have been our free market sort of Hernando Desoto argument at the time to at least have a percentage of marginal buyers become part of acquiring capital and going from sort of lower or workingclass renters into the ownership category . \ a tankerw is, if i am and i am looking across a landscape and i have a lot of competition and know that there is a subset of the population just because they are lets say there credit record has a couple of bumps, but they can be good borrowers, what i would do as a banker is go after those people because no one else is giving them loans. So there is a natural incentive. And some of the loans were taking place already. The think that i think we should have said that the time is that congress, in particular, confused correlation with causation. We know from social science studies that homeownership correlates with any good metric. Youre more likely take care of your house, to vote, less likely to commit crime if you own your home. So lets increase that her people, including lowincome people. Then all of those causative virtues will accrue. Confusion ina correlation and causation. The way that you would acquire a home or a home loan, you would have to do certain things. He would have to exercise certain commercial virtues, work hard, save money to delay gratification and sit up and your loan. Of so now you have a skin in the game and you are less likely to default on it and maintain is virtues. So you have a virtual circle. Changed searching sets of the risk investment changes andoth buying and lending the basic market incentives of the bank make it once it is easier to acquire home so you can get a good financial history or without a down payment, then you get a home and that doesnt encourage those commercial virtues, does that, because you have does you have zero down payment. If you default on it, you dont have a bad history but you would have a bad Credit History anyway. Get a vicious circle. So there were this really important moral points having to viewpointsmercial than incentives the had to do with this bad correlation between homeownership. There is aay that Dessert Reception out there. And let me thank all of you for coming. Let me thank mark and wayne further comments and congratulate jay richards. They do all. [applause] thank you all. [applause] some live programs to tell you about today on the cspan network. The air force association hosts a discussion on military Defense Strategies and planning and a report on the ways the military can maintain its advantage at a time of tightening budgets. New america the foundation discussion on electronic surveillance and human rights with access now, an organization focused on individual access to the internet and the rights of privacy. That is live at 6 p. M. Eastern here on cspan. Cspan, we bring Public Affairs events from washington directly to you, putting you in the room at congressional hearings, white house events, briefings and conferences in offering complete gaveltogavel allrage of the u. S. House as a Public Service of private industry. We are cspan, created by the cable tv industry and funded by your local cable and satellite provider. Now you can watch us in hd. Coming up next, q and a with journalists and author mark leibovich. Mark washingtonm. It is. Urnal this week on q a, New York Times magazine correspondent and author Mark Leibovitch discusses his new book entitled this town two parties nd a funeral plus plenty of Valet Parking in americas gilded capital. Mark leibovitch, author of this town, i want to show you some video and get you to comment on it. They chartered a bus to take some visitors. I cannot tell you the last time i heard the words Henry Kissinger and Greyhound Bus in the same sentence. They wandered onto the wrong bus and ended up in a promise keepers rally in arlington, virginia. [laughter] but the marriage is obviously going very well indeed. Spina bifida roast, in 1997. What did you see in that clip you may comment on . Nothing. It is Andrea Mitchell who was a terrific journalist. You cannot emphasize that enough. It looked just seeing that right now it looked like a friendly washington event. Jokes are told. Looks like a lot of comedy. Anything wrong with that . No, not really. I think the reference he was making was to Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspans wedding that had been held around then. They are a power couple. Andrea mitchell is a great journalist. Alan greenspan is one of our most powerful economic minds in the last decade. It is an interesting dynamic when you have this crossover between friendship and social life. But the president of the Motion Picture association told you he would never lobby. He did. I think what chris dodd is implemented in this book is the impermanent feudal class, which is a term that tom coburn uses. It is used to describe the impermanent of washington. A lot of elected officials go to become lobbyists and consultants. Frankly, life is pretty good inside the belt. Lets watch this. This town. Mark leibovitch. This town. D. C. Is described as inflated by bigmoney. Senator schumer a human ladle in the local self celebration buffet. Wow, mark. All kinds of reaction. They are taking down the preening egos of this town. The washington post. I hear there is no index. We cannot find out what is going on in this work. This book was so widely anticipated in washington as a screaming indictment. Washington has created a bootleg index. Your colleague suggested the notion of the composition everyone is talking about the book. Everybody thinks they are in it. Why are people that you wrote about so happy about this book