And also, oversight over how tax dollars apart from social insurance are spent. This is an arena which is, at present, shaped heavily by corporations that, despite record profits, pay far less in taxes as a percent of the federal budget than in the 1950s and 1960s. The democracy gap in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote or listlessly vote for the least worst every four years and then wonder why after another cycle the least worst gets worse. It is time to redress fundamentally these imbalances of power. We need a deep initiatory democracy in the embrace of its citizens, highlighting the humane ideas and practical ways to raise and meet our expectations and resolve our societys deficiencies and injustices. A few illustrative questions can begin to raise our expectations why cant the wealthiest nation in the world abolish the chronic poverty of millions of working and nonworking americans, including our children . Are we re
One clear sign of the reign of corporations over our government is that the key laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s that we use to curb corporate misbehavior would not even pass through congressional committees today. Planning ahead, multinational corporations shaped the world trade organizations autocratic and secretive governing procedures to undermine nontrade health, safety, and other Living Standard laws and proposals to do better. Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves to ask to choose between lookalike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interests nullifies genuine voter choice and trust. Our elections have been put out for auction to the highest bidders. Public elections must be publicly financed and it can be done with wellpromoted voluntary checkoffs and free tv and radio time for ballotqualified candidates. Either we have voluntary Public Fina
A National Security meeting to get updates on where we are and what we are doing. And particularly when were in the moment of a particular threat or challenge. I think what the department of Homeland Security was really talking about is sort of a generic set of threats and challenges that are out there that were working to respond to. We have an unprecedented level of communication and information sharing, intelligence sharing taking place. With other countries. We have the Counter Terrorism Partnership Fund which were requesting money from all of you to implement. And thats 390 million which will be used to enhance Border Security among our foreign partners. Were working with europeans to move them now to sharing lists on passengers which they hadnt been doing. Were trying to increase the scrutiny of people moving in between countries. And share more information about it. Were trying to stem the financial flow to these groups through nations and increased scrutiny of whos giving money
But theyre out of patience. And we couldnt contain that. And as you know, they went to the u. N. And i spent three weeks over Christmas Holiday working to keep people that we would like to be working with constructively from doing something negative. And in the end, by a vote where they didnt get the nine votes at the u. N. , so now we never had to exercise a veto. But theres a great deal of frustration build and this is not the moment to go into it in any depths. You know, were very anxious not to get dragged into the election process. Were not going to. Israel has the this important election coming up and they need to do it without us commenting from the sidelines. Im not going to go further on this. I just say to you we wish the palestinians had behaved differently. And thats why theyre not getting aid right now. And therefore maybe some other people we think others are going to step up and try to help bridge the gap in order to get them over the hurdle. But when the israeli electio
Nuclear weapon than a war. Or then going first to the threats that lead you to confrontation. So, we are trying. I cant make a prediction what the outcome will be. But we are leading the effort to make that happen, together with p5 plus one partners. In korea, we are working with the chinese. We are trying to make certain changes it that i would rather talk about that in a classified section. In afghanistan, we rescued a very complicated election process, negotiated a , got a unified government and now we are working on a transition with the potential of talks taking place with the taliban. Global trade, we are pursuing two of the biggest mobile agreements in memory. And the asia rebalance, in africa we hosted the summit of african leaders. Aids, we have ramped up a deeper commitment. The result is that we are on the cusp of having the first aids Free Generation in history in africa. And in china, we came through with a historic climate agreement by which both of us can agree to try an