Afternoon folks. My name is Alex Lennon. I'm the editor of the Washington Quarterly here at CSIS. I'm also a senior fellow at the Security Program. We have just finished a project actually on the future of democracy support in U.S. Security Strategy, which we'll be talking about a bit during the session. And I'm delighted to welcome you here to this bipartisan dialogue on the future of democracy support. What we'll do for the session is we'll actually do this in a couple of different parts. Both House members may have to leave. Apparently there's a couple of other votes going on on the hill today about something. Actually, we're just afraid of questions. Right, exactly. Sort of a duck-and-run exercise. So what we'd like to do is have them make initial remarks and then we'll open it up to the question and answer session. We're delighted both to have Lauren Craner and Ken Wallach as well here. And when we open it up beyond that, we'll open up the question and answer and they'll get into the dialogue as well, subsequently. For starters, I'd like to welcome the co-chairs of the House Democracy Assistance Commission, both representative... It's not quite right. That's not quite right just in my hierarchy, would you say that? Close. He's the chair and I'm the ranking number. My apologies. Representative Dreyer from California and we'll actually start with the remarks from Representative Price from North Carolina. Okay, thank you.  And I want to thank CSIS and IRI and NDI and anybody else who's sponsored this event, we have quite a collaborative effort here. And we're going to talk about another collaborative effort. That is democracy promotion and particularly promoting the development of strong and effective and responsive legislatures in our partner countries around the world, the mission of the House Democracy Assistance Commission. This has been a partnership and it's a much more crowded field fortunately in the sense of many players. Contrasts in many ways to the first such effort back in the early 90s when the Frost Solomon Commission first began working in Central and Eastern Europe with the former communist states as all of a sudden showcase parliaments had to become real parliaments. I was involved in that effort as was David Dreyer and at that time the field wasn't as replete with groups working effectively. Now fortunately we have lots of partners and we do take pains to not replicate each other's efforts but to compliment each other's efforts and I think we succeeded that very well. It's a particular pleasure for me to work with David Dreyer. It's true I'm the chairman now and he's the ranking member but then it wasn't too long ago that he was the chairman and I was the ranking member given the way things work in the House. In fact David was the founding chairman of this effort four years ago and he has shown a passionate commitment to the work of our commission and to strengthen democratic institutions and it was his leadership that got us launched and of course he's continuing to be a full partner in this effort. We have 20 members operating on a bipartisan basis in a very effective way. I just prepared a few minutes of remarks here to get us started. We want to have a discussion with you. I'll just say a word though about our work and also about some of the lessons I think we've learned about democracy promotion as we enter a new administration and on a fairly widespread basis I think we're going to be rethinking foreign assistance and foreign aid and I would hope that the question of democracy promotion and aid to institutions of the sort we've been involved in would be on that agenda. Our founding premise as we often say on HDAC is that democracy isn't just about elections. Democracy is equally about what happens between elections and advancing voters' concerns through peaceful constitutional responsive means requires moving beyond elections and developing the capacities of representative institutions. We have had an opportunity to travel worldwide. We're no longer focused just on Central and Eastern Europe as the Solomon group was. We have 12 partners worldwide and we'll add a few more judiciously. We have observed democracy promotion efforts of our government and other governments and do have a few suggestions about how we might proceed in the years ahead now with new administration. I think we do need to take a good look at how our democracy promotion resources are allocated. The high-profile crises of the day not withstanding democracy funding needs to be allocated to sustained programs in nations that are still in the midst of democratic transitions and to support nations beginning such transitions. We must avoid devoting outsized portions of the budget to a concentrated group of recipients for the detriment of burgeoning democracies that may have smaller, lower profiles. Moreover, we need to be persistent in this. We need to finish the job. The rug can't be pulled out from other nations just as they're beginning to stabilize or beginning to show some success. A good case in point, I think, is Sub-Saharan Africa where there have been numerous positive democratic developments recently. Africa currently receives less than half as much in democracy assistance funding as any other region in the world on a per-country basis. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the U.S. funds only seven democracy strengthening programs working directly with national legislatures, and one of those is Ethiopia, where it says Freedom House flatly understates is not an electoral democracy. Of the roughly $1.5 billion our country spends on democracy promotion, one-fourth is spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. In all, the top ten largest recipients claim more than half the budget. In fact, the money spent annually in Afghanistan alone is enough to fund the entire democracy assistance program in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Africa example suggests that we may be misdeploying our resources in three key ways. First, we aren't spreading money around sufficiently. Iraq and Afghanistan are clearly priorities, but they should be allowed to cripple efforts elsewhere. Secondly, sometimes we're allocating funding in the wrong places. We need to focus on places where our efforts can have a strong marginal impact. Non-democracies like Ethiopia, in my opinion, should take a back seat due to democracies in transition. And thirdly, support too often doesn't extend to key governmental institutions, particularly the legislative branch. I'm hopeful that the new administration will make it a point to include legislative branches both in capacity building programs and in consultation on bilateral policymaking. A secondary in need of re-examination is the set of assumptions that currently guides how and with whom we engage. Two quick points here. The first is that the new administration must emphasize engagement with institutions, not individuals. Much has been made of President Bush's personal relationships, at least initially with Russian President Putin and then Pakistani President Mishorov. But, you know, overly personalizing diplomacy is just as risky when the leaders are firmly committed to democracy. In any case, we need to focus on institutional development, not just personal diplomacy. Indeed, instead, the new administration should emphasize the construction of effective, enduring institutions by supporting capacity, building of capacity in the executive legislative and judicial branches of government, fostering civil society and media, promoting active political debate. In many cases, this is supporting the development of democracy, might even entail enabling the political participation of opponents and critics of leaders that are friendly to us. And that leads to the second point. Our credibility is undermined to the extent it is seen as partial, partial to our country's most vocal friends or partial to our near-term bilateral interests. U.S. democracy strengthening programs should, to the extent possible, engage all relevant parties. Such a principle will, particularly with regard to Islamist parties in the Middle East, mean engaging parties that are dubious or sometimes even hostile toward U.S. interests. But we'll do well to remember, I think, that when these increasingly popular parties actually take power, their policies will be shaped by their experiences in opposition and their perception of the U.S. posture toward their political participation. Engagement with these parties offers the U.S. an opportunity to encourage their commitment to democracy, as well as the expression of their views and grievances through democratic means. Finally, I'd suggest that democracy promotion as a discipline can't be considered in isolation. It must be coordinated with a broader range of U.S. foreign assistance programs. Transitioning democracies need to be able to deliver some kind of democracy dividend, a tangible improvement in the quality of life for their citizens. Such an improvement is vital for cementing public support for democracy, and our development assistance programs can play a key role in helping new democracies deliver the goods. More than that, democracy assistance should be coordinated with large infusions of foreign aid, such as through the Millennium Challenge Account so that governments develop the capabilities to manage and oversee such projects. Unfortunately, all too often our foreign assistance can seem like a zero-sum game. As Millennium Challenge money comes in, democracy assistance is phased out. As policymakers take on the difficult challenge of foreign aid reform, I urgently advocate mechanisms for ensuring far greater coordination so that our democracy assistance efforts and our broader foreign aid can achieve a true synergy. So let me stop there and turn to David Dreyer. Thank you. I look forward to our discussion. Thank you very much, Alex, and to Ken and Lauren, and of course David Price, and to all of CSIS. It's a great privilege to be back once again talking about our favorite subject, and that is the building of democracies around the world. So we last year had a great celebration of the 25th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's great Westminster speech that led to the establishment of insurance that Lauren and Tanner employed, that being the establishment of the National Delta Democracy and the core organizations, which have been very important. And I really see our House Democracy Assistance Commission as an offshoot of that original vision that was put forward by President Reagan then and has had strong bipartisanship. And in many ways, I would argue that the work that is going on in democracy building is more important today or as important as it ever has been. And I think that ensuring that it continues to be a high priority is something that all of us are committed to. And I hope that our government will continue to have the strong commitment that it has in the past. This organization is, well, the issue of democracy building and the question is, I believe in many ways, misunderstood. It's often seen as simply a priority of the extreme liberal bleeding heart left or as a tool, as a weapon in the arsenal of the neo-conservatives. And that really, from my perspective, does not correctly characterize the importance of democracy building. The reason being that if you look at the question of peace and stability, economic growth, and ensuring, as David correctly said, this need to have gauges that determine our success, that being improving the quality of life for peoples around the world, that is really what this is about. I think that the notion that we've had in the past of the United States of America through democracy building, attempting to impose its form of government on peoples around the world, again, I believe to be a real mischaracterization. I've always wondered how it is that you can impose self-determination on people. And to build on what David said, I argue that one election of democracy does not make, and the real work begins after the elections. And in many ways, there are more than a few countries that become more vulnerable after the transition than they had been before. And that's why this work continues to be of utmost importance to us. This commission is right now partnered with 12 countries around the world. I'm going to try and name them if I can. I'm sure David will catch me if I don't include all of them for you. Mongolia, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Haiti, Colombia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Liberia, Kenya, Macedonia, Ukraine, Georgia. What have I left out? David? I got 12. I got 12. Okay. And right now, I don't think that I would be breaking any confidence to say that we have just had a staff delegation working at the newest country in the world at being Kosovo. And so we very much want to do what we can to ensure that we assist in building the parliament. Because we all know that as you look at these institutions that exist, the parliament is certainly from the perspective of David Price and me. This is the most important part of government. We are the first among equals, the first branch of government. So we understand how important the United States Congress and parliaments are. And we know that when it comes to the issue of oversight, I should tell you just a little bit about what it is that our commission does, because we spend time with these countries, with these parliamentarians and their staffs working to do many things that we have a tendency to take for granted. Committee oversight of the executive branch. Building a budget process. Building the libraries for these parliaments. Constituent service. And one of our great, you know, anecdotally one of our great experiences was we were in Kenya and went to Ambacelli in the south and were able to see the kind of work that a member of parliament of the Kenyan parliament did there. It was a very, very eye-opening process. And to me, as I look at one of the most interesting accomplishments, and we're not quite there yet, but we really made very bold steps towards it, is that to take the most populist Muslim country in the world, the fourth most populist country in the world, Indonesia. We found, on our first trip there, that the Indonesian parliament in fact has its entire staffing and budgeting process and all of the hiring within the parliament handled by the executive branch. Now we sat with President Yonho Yono in Jakarta and talked with him about this and, you know, the notion of having either George Bush or Barack Obama hire my staff was something that I had a difficult time with and as we made this case to members of the Indonesian parliament, they have been very sympathetic and interestingly enough President Yonho Yono was responsive in a positive way to that. Now there are some within the government who are not, but we have continued to beat this drum with a great deal of enthusiasm about the need for independence of the parliament from the executive branch. And I think that if you look at directly impacting a large number of people, and you've got whatever Indonesia is, 230 million people, this has I believe the opportunity for us to have a really wide ranging impact on working directly parliament to parliament. So I will say that I also, bipartisanship is something that everyone is talking about. President talked about it last night in his news conference and we all throw that out, we all aspire to trying to deal with the economic downturn and a wide range of other issues in a bipartisan way. There is no better example of bipartisanship in the relationship that my partner David Price and I have in working with this commission. In fact, I'm always proud to say we've never had a single vote. We've worked on consensus in determining the countries that will be our partners and in determining our priorities. We haven't always agreed on absolutely everything and very easily come to a consensus and I would like to think that in parliaments around the world and maybe even in the congress of the United States we could use our commission as a model. Thank you all very much. Great. To take advantage of the congressman's time while they're here we're going to open it up directly to a question and answer session which both Ken Wallach and Lauren Craner have been gracious enough to say don't have us do remarks, we'll just talk in the question and answer. There are two microphones at the front. If I can ask to come up to those microphones I'll point directly. I'm going to ask the first question as we launch into it and then we'll go directly over here. Can I ask both of you what do you expect that democracy assistance, both political and development assistance will come under extraordinary pressure because of the financial downturn? How vulnerable is financial assistance right now because of the ongoing fiscal crisis? David's on the appropriations committee. That would be a pass to you. All right. I don't feel like I can give you a very precise answer but I don't think it's just totally wishful thinking to believe that we have pretty well made clear our intent to keep, we're going to look very carefully at Howard Berman and there's a lot of support for this from all sorts of reporters but Howard Berman is made very clear that he's going to use these early months to take a very hard look at foreign assistance and of course the new administration coming in we'll do that as well. I do not expect that to include a serious reduction in foreign aid levels. Now there will be pressures on all sorts of components of the budget but one thing that has happened and I hope this is a lasting situation. One thing that has happened I think with this past Republican administration and I give President Bush credit for this and Colin Powell and lots of other people. The tendency for detractors to just hammer on foreign aid mercilessly and to make this so difficult for a lot of members to support foreign aid and to put forward all kinds of damaging amendments to cut foreign aid, to kind of demonize foreign aid. You all know what I'm talking about and you can remember times in our history where this was pretty recent history where this was a quite common exercise on Capitol Hill that really hasn't happened. It hasn't happened during the Bush presidency and so as a result a lot of people who might otherwise have been tempted to try to go after foreign aid have actually been part of a coalition that has maintained fairly decent aid levels. I don't look for great increases and I do look for some shifts within aid categories but I do not at this point see any kind of move to greatly decrease the overall level of aid. David may have heard differently but I don't think so and I certainly hope that's not just wishful thinking. I really don't think it is and let me say that having worked with Lorne and Ken over the years I've been on the board of the IRI for more than two decades and one of the responsibilities that I had early on was to ensure that our colleagues who wanted a gut funding for the now international democracy were not successful and I'm happy to say that we've gone through those debates and frankly those of us who are very committed to democracy building have succeeded and we have prevailed I'm happy to say and I don't see an effort being made to undermine it why because again one of the I suppose you can say a silver lining from the tremendous expenditures we've had in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past several years the notion as Ronald Reagan pointed out in his speech the notion of building up these institutions is certainly much more cost effective than relying on the military as a means to bring about self-determination in these countries and obviously I believe that both are very very important but I see democracy building as an important part of our national security and we will continue I think to have an interesting debate on this question but I should add here that the United States Agency for International Development has been extraordinarily helpful to our work in this quest for democracy building Ken before we came out Ken was very correctly talking about the need to look at the priorities and David mentioned in his remarks this notion of having too much building in one particular area and so just as is the case and Alex was saying this earlier before we came out too the notion of ensuring the most cost effective use of democracy building dollars is a challenge and we always need to be vigilant in ensuring that we do that although in many ways democracy building front gets back to feels great directive on advertising you know in the Marshall field when he said I know that only half of my my advertising budget is effective but you tell me which half is effective and so we don't always know exactly how we can determine the level of success but we should establish whatever gauges we possibly can the first hand I saw was over here if I can ask you to step up to the microphone identify your name and the institutional affiliation Hi, I'm Vladimir Karamazov with our TVI Russian television I got a question specifically on Russia where everybody agrees Democratic institutions have been rolled back completely in the last nine years Vice President Biden in his speech in Munich last week, first major foreign project he talked a lot about having cooperation with Russia improving relations with Russia he didn't mention a word about democracy or human rights problems do you expect this new administration and the new congress to do something about democracy and Russia may be engaging in dialogue with the Russian Democratic opposition or what remains of the independent media and things like that and what do you think should be done about it, thank you Do you want to bring Dan on that? Well I want to say that he did mention democracy the President talked about diplomacy in this section about the need for greater diplomacy something that this administration the Obama administration will pursue more aggressively he said diplomacy isn't enough that you also need democracy and development so he had a whole section in that speech about democracy so from reading that speech I think that you can assume that that will be part of the dialogue with Russia and between President Obama and President Medvedev when they meet in April and I assume that there will be a continuing commitment on this front but I can't speak for the administration but certainly in the Vice President's speech he was forceful on the issue Needless to say I can't speak for the administration but I was actually there for the speech and he did refer to a number of areas where we do disagree with and he was very very forceful on the line talking about the regions of Georgia that have been taken over for example it is true that in that section he didn't talk about democracy he talked about it at some length later in the speech so I think it's we would be mistaken if we think that there's going to be a wholesale engagement with Russia I think it would also be fair to say if that happens my guess is it wouldn't last very long because I'm not seeing any kind of responses that one would hope for coming out of Russia I think that's the kind of it is certainly the case that in the first term of the Bush administration there was a lot more engagement but I think by the second term people had figured out they weren't getting what they had hoped to get back and the second term looked a lot different so I'd be very surprised to see a wholesale engagement just forgetting about all these other issues I'd add one point to the work of our commission as I said Georgia is one of our 12 partner countries and last December we had a delegation in Georgia and John Kerry was in Georgia just a few days before we were there and had met as we did with President Sakashvili and the one request that was made by President Sakashvili and other leaders in his government was that we pursue the establishment of a West Georgia free trade agreement and I've been working with Senator Kerry on this and our request to put together a bipartisan support for this President Sakashvili with whom I spoke I guess week before last maybe it was last week or the week before feels very, very strongly about the need for that and as we look at the challenge that Georgia faces you know in Abtazia and South Ossetia I believe that the idea of strengthening our economic ties which has been as really an offshoot of our democracy building effort there will go a long way towards dealing with that challenge Well, they haven't asked us for an HDAC program and Russia quite yet Well, the implication of what I had said earlier about about working with countries that are in the right place in terms of democratic development and transition I think we we're taking on some pretty great challenges but we also I think just talking about HDAC and about the kind of work we do we do understand I think what our strengths are and what some of our limitations might be and we we are operating only in places where there's a full and willing and eager partnership and where there's a certain development already underway in the parliament and we can facilitate and encourage now that in the remaining work in Central and Eastern Europe and we're at work in Macedonia, Georgia and Ukraine some places I would say more successfully than others but I understand that for our kind of work there really are some pretty important preconditions that are going to determine where we can be most effective and where the leverage whatever we've got to offer can be most best utilized Let me say one more thing on Russia as difficult as our economic situation is here there are a number of countries around the world that are going through or are going to go through a much more difficult situation and I think what this administration is going to encounter is a very, very dynamic situation in places like China, Iran Venezuela, Russia it is also the case that this economic these economic problems are going to affect friends, countries in Latin America places like Ukraine, etc but my guess is that the if we assume that things are just going to continue on as they are in places like China and Venezuela and Russia it is very much mistaken that there is going to be a very dynamic situation and opportunities will arise there Last one? Before the congressman leave and I don't know what time to have to depart but I wanted to make one point about Pichda, it gets beyond the Russia issue traditionally I think over the past quarter century when you look at the international development community at large they have tended to look at development in terms of supporting state institutions government ministries to deliver and to the development of civil society and in the process they have largely ignored the institutions of representative democracy the political parties and parliaments within which they operate and at the same time there have been a number of studies the most recent by Stephen Fischer at Berkeley who have made a correlation between the strength of legislatures and the stability of a country that if the legislatures fail to fulfill their special role it will place in jeopardy the democratic system itself and often times the peer to peer support that parliaments and parliamentarians provide each other becomes quite significant in this effort and the H-TAC initiative has become so important because often times members of congress will travel to foreign countries and they will meet with heads of state and heads of government and government ministries and they have traditionally not spent enough time with their peers and the commission has provided now a vehicle through which members of congress can support their colleagues in other countries in support of an institution that has largely been if not ignored and marginalized in the development community and so I think it is quite significant and I think it is being welcomed by parliaments and I speak as an organization that is sort of operational on the ground along with IRI we see among parliaments that we work with a real deep appreciation for the commitment of the commission and the time that is spent by individual members of congress to support their peers in these countries Thanks for that, Canon one of the reasons that members of congress have had a tendency to do that is that there are parliaments around the world that for all intents and purposes are impotent and we know that to be the case and we have felt that if you have the rule of law and it is great to see the former attorney general here who is clearly focused on that internationally and if you look at security relations trade relations and things like that we know that for that to continue to be successful it is imperative that you build a parliament to help ensure that and so again because of this commission's commitment to building the strength of that parliament oversight of the executive branch and better constituent services and having libraries and a budget process and all I think that is part of our goal here is to strengthen those institutions within the countries and I think one of the best lessons you give is walking in the room together people are always stunned that NDI and IRI work closely together but overseas sometimes the best lesson we can give is to walk in the room as the two competing American political parties and say in our system nobody goes to jail nobody goes into exile because of who wins, we have to work together you know one of the things that I've observed actually is one of the greatest challenges and today the elections are taking place in Israel and we know that Sipi Lidni had a difficult time in trying to build a coalition going back three months and as we look at these twelve partnered countries for us while it's not enshrined in our constitution at all one of our greatest strengths is the two-party system and you guys know it better than we the multi-party structures that exist in so many countries create a very unique and often difficult challenge right although there are some people argue that parliamentary systems provide more stability in new democracies because they are more inclusive for that initial phase now when you have a fractionalized party system when you have 60 or 70 or 80 political parties it creates huge problems open it up in the middle there in the back that you guys are on the hook with us until four o'clock you don't want to be pulled over a little Paul Vaca Georgetown University if we were here talking about AIDS or malaria we'd probably be talking about working with other countries to jointly fund and implement programs but yet when we talk about democracy systems we rarely talk about bringing in other democracies that have also been at this game for quite a while I'm wondering looking at the new administration the new congress to what extent do we see working with other democracies to jointly fund and implement democracy systems you know I've been president of IRI twice once in the 90s and once in this decade the biggest difference in doing this work in this decade is how many more countries are engaged in this work now and how closely we work with them in the 1990s it was us the British and the Germans doing this work now there are dozens of countries from Australia to South Korea to South Africa to Central Europe to Latin America that are doing this work we work with Mexico in other Latin American countries if you had told me that 10 years ago I would have just laughed and I would have said that's not possible more and more of our staffs are from other countries preferably frankly recent democracies you know people look at Americans when you're trying to help them assist them building their democracy and they say well you really don't understand government and democracy for 200 and some years but when somebody from Serbia or somebody from El Salvador or somebody from South Korea that Ken and I have brought Ken or I have brought to the country walks in there is a real empathy that they you know that really advances and catalyzes the program so just in the last I would say five or six years it is a dramatic difference and really by working with them enormous amounts of synergy it's not one plus one it's one times many many things to be able to help so I would say it's something that has well along at this point and hopefully will only increase because it's all for the better Lord reminded me of an anecdote which I've shared with him that was part of the work of the IRI in the well nearly 20 years ago one of the staff was in Romania working on democracy do you remember the storyline working on democracy building there they had gone through elections and he spent time working with training people as the elections were taking place and finished that work and four years ago he was in Iraq and this woman came up to him as they were working on the election there in Romania for our election and reintroduced herself and to me that was one of the best anecdotes that I've forgotten on the fact that your quest and our shared quest of taking these developing and developed democracies and bringing them into the process is very important it's not only countries by the way too if you look at intergovernmental organizations right now the United Nations Development Program which is the aid arm of the United Nations is approximately 40% of its budget now goes to democracy and governance programs the OAS has a Democratic Charter the African Union is in the process of doing this the OSCE has been engaged in this for many years so this is really a community of organizations and intergovernmental organizations and donor aid agencies now that see sort of this interconnectedness between economic development and political development right now it's changed dramatically over the last 20 years and that's the irony as democracy promotion although I hate that term because we do more reacting than promoting we're reacting to events that are taking place on the ground as it's become a little more controversial here because of the Iraq war and because of the elections in Palestine and in Egypt the irony is that it has become much more accepted internationally even among the most conservative international financial institutions that basically stay away from politics so this has truly been now an international consensus on this issue and I think that it will continue to be a bipartisan issue here despite the controversies that have surrounded the Iraq war and those elections I think there are there's a lot of potential here for work with other countries I don't know of any other country where the parliament is engaged directly in the kind of exercise that we're engaged in and moreover we try very hard Ken stressed I think rightly the importance of the member engagement that's really what we bring to this this kind of peer relationship but we also want very much to be more than just member to member exchanges and visits and relationships we have an extensive program with staff and this involves workshops here with staff budget staff central leadership staff committee staff who come here we send teams out to individual countries or groups of countries this whole thing is more than member exchanges it really has to do with strengthening capacity and we all know that means working with staff CRS works very closely with us as well as staff from the hill and so it's a unique program I think I don't know of any country that comes close at the same time there are there are efforts afoot that I think where we can join forces really ought to be open to that in the future I'll tell a quick anecdote myself because this kind of international effort is connected in my mind to the least successful effort I ever was involved in in the 90s there was with the Frost Sullivan commission there was also in the NATO assembly the NATO parliamentary assembly there was some outreach going on of a similar sort with countries in central and eastern Europe and actually in some cases the people who have been through the program in places like Poland and the Baltics then worked in some of the other countries it really was pretty interesting what went on I was part of one such team in Slovakia the only trouble was that in between the planning of the it was an orientation for new members in between the planning of this orientation and the execution of it the wrong side had won the election the former communists had won big time and so I've never had a less receptive audience in all my life these beefy guys just daring us to interest them from the provinces the former communist officials who weren't let's say a very receptive audience so it doesn't always work but actually there is some precedent for that kind of work with certainly with other European countries and we're very much open to developing that but I can't say that there's in any of our 12 countries that this is very far advanced right now we it's more a future aspiration Nestor Iqueda and associate a press reporter for Latin America I have a question on Latin America and what kind of work you think the Obama's administration needs to do in Latin America especially in countries like Venezuela where in the next Sunday referendum the president Travis is looking to be a president for life well you'll have to ask that of the administration and the incoming policymakers will be dealing with Latin America but I think even President Chavez once confided to some people that he is not the cause he's the result in a sense he's the result of failed political institutions in Latin America that were seen as corrupt and out of touch with the citizenry not surprising we have found in Latin America and in any place around the world people are in a demanding mood and I think Stiglitz once said if people do not get what they expect from their political institutions they're either going to go to the streets and that is not the place to solve public policy issues or they end up oftentimes voting over time voting for populist leaders to offer very easy answers to complex questions and then move against those those very institutions that have been part of the political life of a country so in my view there has to be a much greater investment in reforming modernizing and renewing political institutions in the hemisphere so they begin to as congressman Price said they begin to deliver on quality of life issues and privileged view and they have to connect with citizens they have to begin opening up their political institutions to women and youth and indigenous communities because if they don't we're going to find more situations like we have in a number of countries in Latin America so I think that's the greatest challenge in the hemisphere is how these institutions perform on economic issues how they perform on quality of life issues and how they deal with the citizenry not to be too provocative but I will anyway so I happen to feel very strongly that one of the most important things that we as a country can do and I've spoken with President Obama about this is to ensure that we proceed with more trade agreements with countries within this hemisphere and I think that one of the greatest mistakes that was made in the last congress was the unprecedented decision for the first time since the 1974 trade act was put into place denying a vote that was promised President Uribe in Colombia as they proceeded with good faith negotiations for an FTA a chance for that vote to take place in the congress in the United States as we look at the challenges of dealing with Korea, Morales and with Chavez and the strength that President Uribe has shown and the impact that has had on other countries on the South American continent and frankly around the world I hope very much that we will be able to proceed with that because I think that will go a long way towards doing exactly what Ken has said improving the quality of life the standard of living and demonstrating that the United States of America can in fact maintain its commitments I think it's going to be very important for President Obama in the first place simply to express a commitment to to give great priority, front burner priority to this hemisphere and to our relationships in this hemisphere it was of course a very important way that John F. Kennedy launched his presidency with the announcement of the Alliance for Progress and then action that followed to make good on that commitment I think peoples of this of this hemisphere are looking for that and I hope the president can deliver it and can work bilaterally in all sorts of ways to improve relationships and help bring about the payoff that can describe I hope we can contribute in a more substantial way to this from the Congress and as far as H-DAC is concerned I think this has been an underdeveloped area of our own involvement not for any lack of interest it's just kind of worked out that way we have plans though to rectify that and I think we'll see us in the next couple of years much more directly involved with partner parliaments in Latin America again a number of those parliaments for better or for worse are mature parliaments pretty well set in their ways others are not taking off in the way that would make it possible for us to engage but there are a number of countries in Central and South America where I think what we have to offer can really make a difference and we're going to explore that with great great energy and an interesting point that David makes and Ken touched on as well is concerned about the issue of promotion we really see these countries as partners as opposed to our telling them exactly the way it's done because we regularly describe the United States of America as and our democracy as a work in progress and we learn that every single day you know I think that I mean I'm reminded I there was the IRI delegation we had on July 2nd of 2000 when former Secretary of State Jim Baker and I got to co-lead that delegation you were there to Mexico and we saw after 71 years the first transition from the the PRI to the PAN's success there and I remember on the night of July 2nd 2000 Jim Baker and I were standing in the hills above Puebla, Mexico checking the validity of ballots and four months later he was doing the exact same thing in South Florida and so that demonstrated clearly that democracy is a work in progress I remember I called him when he was down there and I just reminded him that we were in Mexico doing the same thing he was doing in Florida and so that's why we do see our work with these countries in partnership as opposed to our in any way telling them how it's done but also the Western Hemisphere may be a victim of its own success as well I think Freedom House rates Latin America is the most successful in terms of democracy the most successful region in the world and if you look at funds that are dedicated for this for this hemisphere they are alarmingly low and so and I think it takes certain things for granted in this hemisphere and we shouldn't because it's a great peril that we ignore this hemisphere on some of these fundamental political development issues don't forget that Venezuela used to be the country that used to be the exporter of democracy and its party foundations used to spend a great deal of time throughout the hemisphere and outside the hemisphere supporting political party development and development so we take these things for granted with that I'm afraid we promise folks that we would be done by four o'clock we have two things to tempt your interest in this continuing discussion one is we were honored to have Representative Price have an article on the latest issue of the Washington Quarterly for seven lessons for the new administration there are copies of that that should be outside on your way out to get a chance to stop and pick it up the second is on March 11th we have an event to release the findings of the democracy in the future of U.S. security strategy report the punchline for that I'll give you a little preview is exactly what Ken was talking about in moving away from promotion and towards support as the principal diplomatic umbrella for U.S. efforts in this area based on series of interviews we had throughout the security community which included with Bransko Croft, Jim Steinberg, Lee Hamilton and a number of others outside of the democracy in security policy as a whole we have been working on this for the last 11th about a month from now in the meantime, please help me both thank Ken Wallach and Lauren Craner for co-hosting this with us and especially for Representative Pryor Representative Dreyse for their very valuable time with us here today for an hour thank you very much


Hey, hello, and welcome to Stand Energy Man on Aloha Friday here in ThinkTec Hawaii where community matters. It's been a busy couple of weeks with Verge two weeks ago, and this week we had an interesting renew rebuild Hawaii yesterday at the Foreign Trade Zone and had some great presentations. The theme, one of the main themes besides microgrids, and of course because I was there I had the hijack hydrogen into it, was sustainability. And that's kind of what we're going to focus on today. You know Hawaii sits on basically two legs of a three-legged stool, and the third leg used to be agriculture, and we still have the military and tourism as the other two main legs. But we're trying to get high-tech and agriculture back in position to be an economic leg of our economy and help us really to be less dependent on mainland, shipping and mainland products for our own sustainable upkeep with food products, but also to use some of the byproducts from agriculture to help us do clean energy. And I told the group yesterday at Renewable Build that one of the best quotes on sustainability I've ever heard was from a gentleman named Robert Kennedy Jr., Bobby Kennedy's son, who's an environmental lawyer. I ran into him about two years ago in Texas, and he said sustainability has to be quantified in economic terms, and it has to go from cradle to grave, has to go from the time you start the project and put in the initial compounds, components, energy, whatever, all the way to what you're going to do at the end of life, whether it's recycle, put it in a landfill, burn it, shoot it off to the sun, whatever it is. And when you don't do the sustainability in that definition, you get things like Yucca Mountain where you got to store nuclear, spent nuclear material and nobody wants it in their backyard, or you get CFL light bulbs where everybody's going, going renewable and going clean and going more energy efficient, only to find out we got mercury in these things and now they're going to end up in landfills, and you make those kind of mistakes. So if you want to do sustainability right, you got to do the cradle to grave analysis. So fully burdened costs of that, that process. And so today we're going to talk a little bit about sustainability and how agriculture and sustainability can be applied here in Hawaii, and my guest today is Dennis Furukawa from Real Green Power. Almost forgot the power part. Dennis, thanks for being here today. Nice to be here. I've known Dennis for quite a while, and don't get a chance to talk to him very much, so he's kind of secretive and he's kind of quiet, but he gets a lot done. So Dennis, tell us a little bit, number one, about how you got started in what you're doing with Real Green Power. Our genesis was all about trying to deal with the massive amounts of water, waste water that was coming out of the sugar mills. And so that was about like eight years ago while we still had sugar mills. There is a lot of energy potential in water in two ways. One of them, when you've got polluted water that has fermentables in it, then you can create biogas, methane, which is a combustible fuel. On the other end, water itself has a lot of energy value. Number one, it takes a lot of energy to access it. And so if you have it in proximity to a use, then you've really shortcut the amount of energy that goes into supplying the resource to where you need it. And then on the other end, it takes an awful lot of permitting and energy and compliance to get rid of waste water. So our main objective was actually to take the water, which is, back then it was in the millions of gallons a day, five to six millions of gallons a day, which was our target. And then there are a lot of other agricultural byproducts in sugar, you're familiar with molasses. There's invert sugars. And then so being able to use those resources in combination with the waste water to produce baseload energy was our objective. So yeah, we went pretty far along that route and then troubles in terms of the stability of the long-term viability of sugar really torpedoed our efforts there. But then at the same time, we were taking a look at processing domestic waste water, which is a much, much larger issue. Our approach is different, however, from the traditional methods of waste water treatment. And our objectives are different too. So our focus was actually taking the technology that we had developed for this ag waste water thing and then use it for domestic. But with a similar objective, though, to create recycled water for ag, and the situation that we have typically is you have a centralized waste water treatment plant, which is located at the lowest spot, right, so that you have gravity working for you. But then that puts it the far furthest away, it could possibly be from where all of the water re-used. Exactly, right. So what we've been focused on is packaging waste water treatment systems so that you can put them in distributed locations so that you can create agricultural water re-uses. Yeah, it's important to realize that energy is in every step of the process. So you've got to look at your whole process, like I said, the whole curtail-of-grave look at where you're using energy. And energy could be potential energy with gravity taking your water all the way down stream and somehow it's got to get back upstream. Things like that are important. And Maui Sugar, which is probably one of the last entities that went down in the sugar business, they were doing the gas to make power on Maui and produce almost all of Maui's power with sugarcane waste. So between recycling the water products and able to use the gas and things like that, really important. I'd like to mention too that a lot of people when they hear methane or they hear natural gas, they automatically get defensive because they go, that's a greenhouse gas. It's not good. Well, it isn't good if you let it up. It's really bad. But the whole idea is nature produces it and you can either let it go into the air or you can use it. And when you use it, especially if you burn it or use it as a natural gas or you pull the hydrogen out of it, now all of a sudden you mitigate all the negatives that you get from natural gas and it turns into something that's usable and something that's more environmentally friendly. So that kind of gets to the heart of what you folks are focusing on and correct. It indeed, yeah. It's trying to essentially take all of those negatives and turn them into positives. The other aspect of our technology is that it's really super energy efficient. And so the latest iterations of our work, we've got package sewage treatment plants that are able to be powered by solar energy, a very small solar package. And then it can be augmented by the renewable energy that is produced through the biogas. But in general, our objectives are to minimize the amount of methane that we're producing because actually, so the biological process that takes you to methane is actually relatively long. It can take days if you've got difficult to digest materials. But the biology that we're utilizing is very rapid in degrading fermentable solids and solubilizing them, making them into liquids. And so our energy efficiency is about 85% better than the traditional methods of sewage treatment. Well, I know we've got some images of some of the mere equipment stuff. You want to go through those and talk to them? Sure. OK, hey, Robert, can you bring up some of those images? So this is your interest slide. Next slide. All right, so our technology was developed at industrial scale. And the objectives were to produce things that could handle in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of gallons per day. And the upper image is at the Hawaii Kai sewage treatment plant. OK, right by Sandy Beach. Exactly. And it was put in there as an alternative means in cooperation with UH, American Waters and AECOM. And it was used as a study. Papers were written, and it indicated that our, that technology right there, was capable of reducing the energy demands by half over the traditional means of sewage treatment. And when did that equipment go into service? That was 2013. OK, and then the lower slide, that's just another view of it? The lower slide is actually a project that predated it by about a year, which is at a brewery in California. And in the background of that, it's a pond full of sludge from brewery wastewater. And so our tanks there were essentially treating that brewery sludge. OK, next slide, Robert. So what we've done is we've focused on providing sanitation in places where there's no sewers. And in particular, because our system is so energy efficient and that we could power the whole thing with just the number of solar panels that are sitting on top of a 20-foot shipping container, the objective was that you could put these things out in the middle of a desert and try and address the problems of displaced people, all of the millions of people that are displaced, and parks, military bases, places where you don't have the infrastructure to support populations. Or for instance, like in a military base, you have groups of people that come and go. They can be lots of people. Sure. Well, they're transient on the way to a deployment or something like that. Yeah, so the objective would be to cite one of these units where you've got that waste issue and then to turn the water into reusable irrigation water. And that pretty much eliminates the need to go around and provide porta-potties. And those things require a lot of servicing. And it's highly cost-intensive. Well, we all know that on an Air Force basis, there's always golf courses. So you definitely want to have water for your golf course to get to the airport. That's really important. That would work perfect for them. Is there any power that comes off of these as well? Or the solar panels provide energy to move your process along. But you're basically providing the water a solution to reusing the water and putting it back into a usable form. Well, so because actually, can we go to the next slide? Sure. Robert, bring up the next slide there. All right, so actually, if you can go to the next one. So what we have here, this is a system that we just installed at a homeless camp on Zand Island. And you can see that we have solar panels on a wastewater treatment unit. And that unit itself, just those six panels, those are 360 watt panels. Those six panels have enough energy to run the bathroom units, which are shown on the lower part of that image. And so if we were actually to put solar panels on top of the bathroom unit as well, we would have export power. Great. That'd be awesome. Yeah, it is kind of awesome. Because the idea would be that if you have a population that is essentially bereft of infrastructure, you can drop these things in there. And as long as you have a source of drinking water and water for showers and whatnot, then you can use this as the center point of creating a small village. Yeah, right. You know, we're about halfway through our 30 minutes here. So we're going to take a quick break and we'll come back with Dennis and talk a little bit more about his system shortly. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Despang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Hi, everyone. I'm Andrea Gabrieli, the host for Young Talent's Making Way here on Think Tech Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m. only on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man on my lunch hour. We're talking sustainability and turning what everybody else doesn't want into something that you can actually use, which is always nice. And I've got Dennis Furukawa here from Real Power, Real Green Power. I'm close, I'm really close. I almost got it. At my age, I'm lucky to remember anything. And Real Green Power takes wastewater and treats it and makes it usable for agriculture and other things right where you need it, which is the key part. Because every time you're moving something, old, cubby business people know that transportation is non-value added. It doesn't do anything but cost you stuff and it gets your stuff to market, but you don't need it to build it, you don't need it to make stuff. So we bring in value to water and treating it and using it where you need it. So we're showing some pictures of potential use in homeless camps and things like that. So let's jump back into some of those images and see what we've got coming up. So this is the one that, this one you said is at Sand Island here on Oahu? Yes, it is. Okay. And what we have there is the things behind the blue doors. Those are full bathrooms. So it's a shower, a toilet, and a sink. Okay. So it provides hygiene and sanitation. All right. And next image, Robert. This is what it looks like inside then. Right, so in the image prior to that, essentially we had the bathrooms in a separate container as a wastewater thing. So, and that was because we needed extra capacity. We needed, the image that you're seeing here, those are only, those are six half bathrooms. Okay, I see. Right, so there's no showers in there. Whereas the other one with the requirement was just half showers. So in this case, what the objective is, is something that you can drop onto a site plug it in and then start processing for irrigation uses. And one of the largest headaches that you have in dealing with domestic wastewater is what to do with sludge. The sludge. Yeah. And our process essentially concentrates up sludge. It focuses on processing the water. And then so the volume of sludge that you remove is really, really small. So we're, in this case, we've been operating the sewage, or the sanitation thing for about three weeks over at the Sand Island facility. And we've ended up with about 150 gallons of sludge. And in a typical situation, right, you would, well, the current, or the situation that they had there was not processing and using portable potties. They were removing several thousand gallons a day of wastewater by hauling. So when you let the sludge concentrate a little bit, from my understanding, you actually help downstream in terms of, if you wanted to take that sludge and put it in like a gasifier, you just have to dewater it a little bit because the gasifier needs some moisture in it. And you could actually take that sludge and process it through a gasifier, which would, again, give you power and heat and other things. And again, it's like using that whole value chain in the process. So take the sludge, dewater it a little bit more, stick it in the gasifier, get some power and some heat. And then that's another added energy source at your site right there. Well, you know, on the energy efficiency side and the water quality side, by removing all of those solids and not liquefying them, then all of the carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and magnesium and all of those things are actually held back in the sludge. And then so the water quality is better on the back end. So, yeah, we're just really trying to focus on the efficiency of, yeah. So what's the next image we got, Robert? Actually, you can continue down. A little bit more. Yeah. Oh, that's the last image you have? OK, this is the last image that came through. So we can get all of them on there, I guess. But I think you had somewhere, you can talk to the ones that we have here on the sheets. But we had some here. And also, there were some where it actually showed over in African continent some of the refugee camps on African continent. Exactly. So there's a program that's developed by a nonprofit called Face2Face. And their objective is to teach villagers in these remote locations how to reuse their domestic water. Mostly, it's their bathing water and the stuff for dishes to create small gardens that are next to their houses, rather than relying entirely on the farmland that is outside of the village, which is not personal. So you can't decide that you want to grow tomatoes or cucumbers when essentially the village is growing sorghum, for example. And it has been transformative. So you've got, within two months, you've got people who have kale to eat. And in a few months, corn and pumpkin and squashes, and it's made a huge difference in their diets. Now, we'd like to take that and to do that at refugee camps because everybody has hygiene, or the good refugee camps have a pretty good hygiene requirement and facilities for that. But I mean, if you take a look at the images of these refugee camps or some trees, there's no parks. There's no way for them to actually grow food. So our objective is actually to work with nonprofits like Face2Face or the UNHCR and get the reuse of water and small-scale farming going in these refugee camps. And the economic snowball effect is really powerful because it's not that you're just going to have one or two people growing lettuce and hoarding it. There's a lot of sharing. And if you can create cooperation between individual families or blocks of families and get value-added activities like making salads or baking bread or creating value-added food products or creating other services, then you've actually brought a lot of dignity back to the lives of these people because it's not that they're just necessarily waiting for hand out. And a lot of these people come from very mercantile backgrounds. I mean, in Syria, that's the focal point of global trade back in the ancient world. So these people have lots and lots of experience in these sorts of things. And that's all been lost because they've been refugees. So if we can help glue everything back together in a small way, it will bring a lot of dignity and a lot less strife and happiness, I think. I know in a lot of the underdeveloped locations around the world, human waste is put right back into fields and stuff, and that causes other problems. How does your system basically mitigate that? We want to do that in Hawaii with all the permitting and things that you mentioned. How do we get things like waste at Sand Island going to the system to be in the sludge that we can put back in the field as fertilizer and put the nitrogen and everything back where we really need it? How does your system do that? Well, first of all, you separate the water from the solids. So the solids go towards a composting, or if you wanted to put it in age power or something like that, that's quite possible. But the water, depending upon the reuse, there are requirements for reuse. And so our biological process will take it so far. And then the addition of filtration, polishing, and disinfection will allow that water to be used for any grade of water, which you decide to choose. Now there are requirements for testing that you would be subject to if you were going to propose using this for, for instance, reuse for washing yourself, or flushing toilets, or putting it on food products. But we've built in capacity to meet whatever sorts of reuse. But this is part of your proprietary process then to mitigate any of the dangers involved with reusing this wastewater or whatever and using it viably in agriculture and putting it back into service, basically. Right, well there's essentially two main focuses. One, to get all of the particulates out of there and the viruses and all of that is the second part. So yeah, we focus on our proprietary part is actually the biological processing of it. And then we can plug on, for instance, reverse osmosis, UV disinfection, or any other sorts of process change which are required by the various jurisdictions that we find ourselves in. Yeah, I know most people would find this a little uneasy to talk about at dinner time or something.  I mean, they're recycling their water, probably using similar processes to what you're talking about. And they end up reusing every bit of H2O they can get through their system. So there are systems that are designed to take care of those issues. And we probably should be doing more to use them, especially if we can use them economically and help sustain our environment. Because Hawaii needs to get more back into growing its own food, things like that. We've got that down. The ancient Hawaiians supported about the same size population as we have now. And they didn't have Costco or Sam's Club or Safeway or anybody or Food Ladder, anybody to bring all this food in. And they did it. And so why can't we do it too? They probably got to look back and look at some of their stuff too. So Dennis, we were not a half hour full on by. And we appreciate you coming and showcasing your stuff. We're glad to have you back another couple months and talk about maybe some of your deployed units out in other places and catch up with you then. So thanks for being with us. And until next week, just down there and sign it off. And we'll catch up to you with some more great things in the world of energy. Aloha.