11:00 EDT
NEW YORK FOREIGN PRESS CENTER, 799 UNITED NATIONS PLAZA, 10TH FLOOR
MODERATOR: Good morning. Thank you all for coming. Welcome to the Foreign Press Center. You all know who our distinguished guest is – Congressman Gregory Meeks, the New York 6th district for 13 years now. He’s going to speak to you briefly, and then we’ll go into Q&A. And just for transcription purposes, please state your name and media organization before your questions. Thank you.
Congressman Meeks.
MR. MEEKS: Thank you. I thank you for joining me this morning. It’s an opportunity that I’ve been looking for for a while just to have a conversation. I’ve been a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee for the past 13 years, and at the time that I was elected – that’s when I was elected to Congress – and it was always my focus and hope in getting elected – and I need to cut these things off because they’re already bothering me, the vibrating – at the time that I was elected, my goal was to sit on this committee, because I thought that dealing with foreign affairs would be growingly more important. And that it was a time for a number of members of Congress and the Americans that I think we need to change, that we always looked inward and didn’t look outward, and about our relationships with other countries and how the world was now much a smaller place, and that the old mentality of just dealing with ourselves and saying that the two oceans was going to protect us, that those days were long gone. And as we moved on for the benefit of all of us on the planet, I thought that it would be more important for us to begin to talk and to work together.
And so it had always been my goal to sit on this committee, and I’ve been delighted over the years to do that and then, with what we call seniority, grow in responsibility on the committee so much so that today, for the past nine months, I’ve been the ranking Democrat on international relations dealing with Europe and Eurasia. And prior to that, because the other committee I sit on was Financial Services, and I thought that’s important, not only nationally with the United States but that’s also important globally. And the committee I chose to chair was International Monetary Policy and Trade because that also is something that’s important, I think, to the stability of all of us on the planet. And I think that we see that right now, given the economy that’s taking place all over the place, especially here in the United States but also especially in Europe. And we’ve got to figure out how we can work collective together, and I think one of the focuses I had as chair of International Monetary Policy and Trade was to make sure that we had harmonization and we were able to avoid a regulatory arbitrage, and that we begin to work together because we’ve got to focus on the economies of both places because we’re all globally interconnected now even more so than we were just five or six years ago.
And so it becomes more important that we work together, we talk together, and we figure out things together. And so it is going to be my focus to continue to move on as the ranking Democrat on Europe and Eurasia to work with our NATO allies, with the EU, I think with – we’ve started or hit a reset button with Russia, which I think is important for a number of reasons there, and you see what’s taking place in North Africa. I think that it’s important to work with the UN and to do things in a multilateral manner as opposed to a bilateral – well, a unilateral manner, which generally isolates us from the rest of the world, and I don’t think that that’s the way that we should be moving. And I think that the current Administration has demonstrated its desires to do so in a multilateral way, and I would hope that Congress would continue to move in a multilateral way, and I know that that’s been – that’s some of the opportunities that I look forward to.
So on the committee, I’ve started a caucus, a U.S.-Russia caucus for economic stability. I’ve asked the chair of the committee to join me. I look forward to trying to make sure that we begin to pull that together once we resume session next week. I look forward to continuing to work and talking with our NATO allies. One of the first things that I did was go to Brussels once I became the ranking member so that I could go to Brussels and talk to some of our NATO allies and deal, even at that time, with the situation in North Africa.
I have welcomed and talked to members of the EU. In fact, we’ve got a situation covering in the last spring – late fall where we’re going to exchange. I’m going to send one of my staff members over to the EU, where they work over there for two weeks, and the EU will send a staff member over to my office who will work within my office for two weeks just so that we can continually get a better understanding of how each work and so that we can work closely together. I look forward to working with my colleagues in various parliaments with the debt (ph). I’ve also had an opportunity to have some great conversations in Brussels when I was there, attended a conference at that time with a number of other parliamentarians. And so we want to continue to do that and have that kind of exchange.
So I’ll stop there just to make sure that I now open it up to questions that you may have specific questions about, and I’ll try to address them to the best of my ability. But again, I thank you because this is the way that we open dialogue and thought, and I look forward to having further conversation and reaching out and talking to some other folks.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Congressman, my question is about something that’s probably very important to you as a congressman from New York. You were in the Foreign Relations Committee right after 9/11, and the main topic was, of course, terrorism. How has this changed now over the years? Is that still the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy as we approach the 10th anniversary?
MR. MEEKS: Yeah. As we – being a New Yorker, and as you correctly stated, approaching the 10th anniversary, there’s not a day, not a single day, that goes by that I don’t think of what took place on September the 11th. Not seeing those two towers there, those two towers – I taught my kids how to navigate Manhattan based upon those two towers, and so it deeply affects us and affects me. The question then is: What do we do to combat terrorism? It has become clear to me that to fight terrorism, we can’t do it by ourselves. It has become clear over the last 10 years also that other countries have been victims of terrorism and are still threatened by terrorism. And so therefore to combat it, we’ve got to work closer together. We’ve got to do the kinds of operations that are cooperative, that tends to show that both economically, because terrorism is financed by some, we’d better make sure that we get into the inner workings of the financing of terrorism and to the cells, and it’s spread out.
And so I come away with the commitment that, again, we’ve got to work closer like never before. I think that – 9/11 reinforced that for me. I believe that also I don’t want the terrorists to win because part of the targets of which they looked at – they looked at New York because it was the financial capital of the world, and they wanted to bring down our economies. And so therefore, I take away from that we’ve got to make sure that that does not happen, that we do work with our colleagues and that we – and our allies all over the planet to make a difference there so that we can show that if you have these strong democracies, they will survive terrorists and those who would love to break us down because we are democracies.
And so it gives me a – it made a greater determination of making sure that we come together to work together because that’s the way I think that we defeat terrorism. We don’t isolate ourselves; we become one with other democracies and encourage other democracies, other places that are not democracies to become democracies so that we don’t become victims ourselves of the very terrorist acts that were committed.
QUESTION: As (inaudible) question, as opposed to in the Bush years in U.S. foreign policy, terrorism?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I think that we’re still fighting terrorism, but we’re fighting it differently, and I’ve always wanted to fight it differently. I don’t believe that it was the right thing to do to say it is my way or the highway. Now surely, there’s time that the United States have to do what they feel – what we feel is in our best interests. And sometimes we’re going to have disagreements with some of our allies, and we need to try to figure that out. But I think that it was just, in my opinion, and that the President, when he said – started talking about our allies as old Europe or whatever, that’s not the way to defeat terrorism. That’s a way of isolating ourselves and not bringing partnerships that we need to make sure that we are safer.
And so I happen to like the way that this Administration has been moving because I think to make a safer as a result of what took place, we have more allies who are working collectively to help us fight terrorists and terrorism. And I believe that the world has perceived the difference also, and that’s a positive for us ongoing. And I look forward to continuing that fight. We can’t win the fight by ourselves as one nation. I don’t care how many weapons you have, et cetera; that’s not what’s going to defeat terrorism. It’s a collective working together to show that free countries and democracies and free people will defeat those who wish to bring them down.
Yes.
QUESTION: Entirely different subject really, but regarding housing and --
MODERATOR: Your name and --
QUESTION: Jostein Loevaas with the Norwegian financial business daily. Regarding housing and the banks, I believe the President is gave a – going to give a jobs speech on Thursday, and this issue of all the underwater mortgages and the depressed state of the housing market, I believe that must be one of your concerns, too.
MR. MEEKS: It’s a big concern. My district in New York was the number one area for home foreclosures in all of New York City. The people of my district are suffering from that crisis and jobs. The creation of jobs for many of those individuals in my district is absolutely important. So yes. We are all anxiously awaiting the President’s statement this coming Thursday on job creation. And working with the President, I would hope, and not playing politics with the idea of creating jobs and how to put America back to work. And that takes some thinking, and it also takes, in my belief, some investment.
And to that end, there’s a couple of things. Number one, on this last Friday, I just dropped a bill – hopefully by tomorrow, I’ll have a bill number – called Putting America Back to Work. And because of the – and I’ll show how this is related to the housing crisis in my district, number one, but let me just tell you about the bill first. What it does – and I think that the bill appeals to all segments of Congress, both Republicans, Democrats, unions, because it accomplishes what everybody wants to accomplish.
We currently have over a trillion dollars worth – our corporations – worth of money that is overseas. And many of those corporations don’t want to bring them back here because they have been taxed where they were doing business overseas, and they feel that it is to pay a 35 percent tax to bring it back – bring that money back to the United States would not be the right thing to do. So we’ve got over a trillion dollars of what I look at as revenue or potential revenue that we should be utilizing.
So our Republican colleagues, they always talk about they want to reduce the tax cuts for the – to repatriate some of the money. The labor unions and a lot of Democrats, we want to create jobs. So let’s do at least – let’s try it for one year, where we will give a tax break to those corporations who will bring money back from the sitting overseas, and let’s not tax them that 35 percent. Let’s tax them at 15 percent, somewhere in there. My bill says 15 percent, and I’m willing to work with it. But let’s tax them at 15 percent.
Now, what we do with this new revenue is put it in a infrastructure fund because the big debate is – and everybody seems to agree that building a – rebuilding of our infrastructure will create jobs, that we need to do it because our infrastructure is old, et cetera. So let’s put it in a fund for infrastructure to build roads, to deal with subway systems and airports because all of that has to be redone. I mean, I have an airport in my district. I think next-generation technology is the way to go over the long run. It’s something that we can do in the future. I want to be able to compete with a lot of the airlines and the airports that I see when I go overseas to Europe. They – I think they are taking the next step. So let’s utilize that money as revenue because part of the debate, the crazy debate that we had, was you’ve got to – we want to balance the budget, we’ve got to cut. We talk about where’s new revenue. Well, here’s new revenue. So it also should be something that is scored neutrally by the Congressional Budget Office. And then let’s put all of that money into building our infrastructure. That creates jobs.
Now, you create jobs because I’m concerned about the next hit the housing market, at least in districts like mine, people getting laid off or who are laid off who now, not only because of the subprime crisis but now because they are unemployed can’t pay their mortgages. So more people then will go into foreclosure. And before that happens, when I look in New York, for example, all of the highways and bridges, and as I said, in my district, the number one employer is an airport, and the ports that we have and the trains, there’s great opportunity to put people to work, which will then keep them in their homes. Because the other aspect of the housing crisis, in my estimation, is a number of individuals – and here’s where the battle is, because I’ve shut my offices down to a large degree in the past on a few days a week, just trying to help people that were going into foreclosures. And by doing that, what I discovered was that for many of them, if in fact the interest rate was at the interest rate that they had agreed to because it was the flexible interest rates, say at three percent or four percent, if it was at that level, the individuals could still afford to stay in their home. What they couldn’t do is when the interest rates went from four percent and jumped up to eight percent, and then the additional costs, they couldn’t afford it at the job that they had.
And so if we were able to keep the interest rates or lower the interest rates almost to what those so-called introductory rates in the adjustable-rate mortgages, many of those individuals could stay in their home, and – but they have to have a job, because we also found that some of those people under no circumstances could afford a home because they didn’t have any income or any – the income that they were earning was nowhere near what it should have been for the house that they were in. And here’s a way to give them a job and we can then negotiate with the banks to keep those interest rates or get a fixed rate for those individuals who were in adjustable rates and work it so that we can fix – and I think that would help, along with a fix our economy here in the United States.
QUESTION: So you think there’s going to come a new relief program, a mortgage relief program, on Thursday?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I don’t know if there’s going to be a new relief program, because the President, quite frankly, had a program, and he was putting it together and trying to work to have a program in the past, and there’s a fight within Congress. I don’t know whether the President is going to decide to put a big deal picture together that’s futuristic or whether he’s going to try to deal with something that he believes that can pass in Congress right now.
You know from the debt debate, the debt debate, the debt ceiling debate, that that’s been very contentious in Congress, and we’re about to enter into an election year. For me, this President has not played politics much. He’s done the kinds of things that he thinks that he can get done, that get passed. And it’s been controversial by doing that. Certain people have said, even in his own party, he shouldn’t have focused on healthcare. But the fact of the matter is, had he not focused on healthcare when he focused on healthcare, we’d have never had a healthcare bill passed. And he focused at a level of what he thought could get passed as opposed to having nothing.
And I can go on and on. We talked about the stimulus package. Many people thought that that should have been bigger, but we couldn’t get the votes to make it bigger, even some votes on the Democratic side. But he focused on what we could pass, and I’m one to say that the stimulus bill that he passed then, the $800 billion, was a success because had he not, it would have been more devastating for states, and we’d have lost even more jobs. So I am not sure whether the President is going to talk about a bill of which he believes can pass or – which I would not have an objection to – a bigger picture of what he thinks should happen and that should happen, and let others then try to say what they will do, and then we negotiate it.
So – but for me, I want a – I want to be able to put Americans back to work, and I think that we’ve got to do it not as we did it – have done it 30, 40, or even 10 years ago because the world is so different than it was. We’ve got to do differently. I think that if we’re talking about creating jobs, I’m one – I’m a Democrat, but I do believe that we’ve got to focus on some of these trade – the three trade bills that we have dealing with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama.
I think that we then – we’ve got to also look at where we are with TPP. We’ve got to make sure that we then recognize the fact that we’ve got to have stability in our markets, and that’s why I am a proponent of the consumer bureau that was created in Dodd Frank so that we can make sure that don’t have the kind of problem that we had before and consumers understand the products that are being offered to them. And so I’m hoping that he has something in the speech to deal with those items also because I think going forward, they all are very important to the underpinnings of our financial institutions and our financial stability in the United States, and as a result, because of the interconnectedness, to the rest of the world also.
Yes.
QUESTION: Paulo Dias from the News Agency of Portugal. Congressman, going back to 9/11 – sorry.
MR. MEEKS: Not a problem.
QUESTION: Ten years on, what do you think that Washington has yet to do? And specifically, there’s been a lot of talk about compensating families and about people suffered injuries, psychological or physical, and have not been compensated. What do you think is more a priority at this point for Washington to do regarding 9/11?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I think we made a big step forward during this Congress because we had a number of New Yorkers particularly, but some from New Jersey and Connecticut also, that we passed a bill that the President ultimately signed to give healthcare and to make sure that we take care of those heroes who put their families and themselves at great risks. I think we have and owe a great and have a lot of responsibility to make sure that, to the degree that we could make them as whole as we possibly can. Not one individual who put their lives at line should be suffering because they don’t have healthcare. I mean, that was the whole part of, I think, the message when we talk about overall healthcare, but we owe a special debt to this group of Americans and those who are not American, in my estimation, who also went down there to volunteer to help out. We need to make sure that we take care of them. We need to make sure that there’s opportunities for their children.
I saw a show over the weekend that really kind of broke my heart. These were children of individuals who were deceased as a result of 9/11. They were 10, 11, and 12 years old at the time of their parents’ death. So they’re now 20, 21, 22 years old. And they were talking about what life has been like for the last 10 years without their parents as they are about to enter school. They talked about how they wished their mothers or their fathers were there to see them graduate high school, enter college. They wish that in the future that their parent would have been there to see them get married. They thought of other huge events at which their parents were not there.
Now you could never make them fully whole for that, but we can for sure make sure they have an opportunity to be educated and go to school. We for sure can make sure that they are able to have health care themselves. And so to that degree I think that we as a country can unite and rally and show that we’re going to protect those that have stood up for us. And I extend that and I think that’s another reason why I think that in Congress it’s all interconnected, because I think that we should do the same for our military men and women and we should treat many of those individuals who were victims of 9/11 in the same way that we try to make sure that we take care of the health care of our veterans. We can even utilize it in my estimation with our VA hospitals so that the mechanisms in place, because to me they put their lives at risk in a similar way that some of the men and women who volunteer to join our armed forces does.
QUESTION: I have a follow-up on 9/11. My name is Karim Lebhour from Radio France International. As a Congressman from New York, how do you see the past constructions at Ground Zero? It has been 10 years and the memorial is only opening in a few days. It has been a long time to bring it up again at this hour, hasn’t it?
MR. MEEKS: I think when you want to do something right, sometimes it takes time. Sometimes you have to be patient. It’s a sacred place. Sacred to the families and sacred to not just New Yorkers but to all Americans. I think sacred to all individuals who seek freedom and love democracy, because when you think about 9/11, people from all ethnic backgrounds, all religions, all areas of the world died there. So that’s not something that you rush into. A lot of people have comments. A lot people have thoughts. A lot of people have ideas. So you take your time and you try to do it the right way.
And I think that as the memorial opens you’ll see a memorial that most people think is beautiful in the sense that it memorializes those individuals who lost their lives there and it is appropriate. I think that the structures that are going up says to the terrorists, “You can’t keep us down, we’re still going to build, and we’re going to build.” And that’s the tallest structure. It’s going to be the tallest structure in the city, in the nation is is a message to terrorists that we are a great nation, we are a great people, and we will not succumb to those woeful kinds of acts.
So yes, it’s taken some time, but I believe we’ve done it the right way, in a way that all visitors, and in the future, my 11-year-old daughter will be able to go because she won’t recall the World Trade Centers even though it was there when she was born. But she can go there and understand what took place there. So the time doesn’t matter to me. It is the quality of what is happening there that is important, and I think it’s quality development appropriate for what it stands for.
QUESTION: Gabriel Mellqvist from Sweden’s business daily. How will you commemorate on Sunday? What will you do?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I will be out at the ceremony with the President and the families along with members of the New York congressional delegation and New Jersey and Connecticut. And so I plan on starting my day there. I probably will leave there, and there’s a special service at my place of worship in the District, Allen AME, where we’ve also had a number of our church members who lost loved ones at the Trade Center. So I will go back and go to church, be prayerful with them, and that’s how I plan on celebrating.
QUESTION: Back to some European issues. So you’ve cut in defense budgets – Alf Ask, Aftenposten – in Europe. Do you see that this in some way jeopardizes NATO as part for the U.S.?
MR. MEEKS: Jeopardize NATO? No. I would hope again that what that will do is help strengthen NATO, because we need one another more now than we do. And it’s times – NATO was created to resolve crises, not to dissolve within a crisis. And so it should be something that makes us stronger, that we’re going to work closer together because we are in a crisis whether you’re talking about terrorism or whether you’re talking about the economy.
And we’ve got to make sure that dealing with the Arab Spring for example, dealing with Libya, NATO, I think, was instrumental. I look at what took place, it’s possibly avoiding one of the – which could have been one of the major tragedies of humankind since Adolph Hitler, to be quite honest with you. Because when you talk about an individual who was going to go into a city and just kill thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the world and NATO decided to take the lead and say we are not going to let this happen again. That’s significant in a time of crisis.
And so for me, we need more of that, not less of that. We need to be stronger as a result of that, not decline away from that. And for the United States, playing its role in that was very appropriate. It wasn’t – and I compliment the members of NATO for sticking together, and for it being a NATO-led operation. And as this world continues to shrink, I think it’s most important that that continues to happen, and just adding on top of that the role that the Arab League played, the role that the African Union played. It was the world coming together, which was completely different than doing an operation unilaterally.
QUESTION: We were just sitting across the United Nation and I know that the Republican Party is turning up the heat on the UN, asking for cutting fundings to the UN and the possibility for the U.S. to choose what they want to fund inside the UN. Where do you stand on that?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I’m a supporter of the UN, and we’ve had this debate in our Foreign Affairs Committee, especially recently, dealing with the appropriations side. Do I think that the UN is perfect? Absolutely not. Do I think that the UN needs some reform? Probably so. But do I think that we should not participate, especially economically? That would be the exact wrong way to go. I think that the UN plays a tremendously important role, and we should pay our dues to the UN and we should pay them on a timely basis and we should be able to talk on diplomatic levels, and that’s what the UN provides so that we resolve some of our mutual problems.
So I will be absolutely opposed to the cutting or the elimination of the United States and its dues to the UN. I think that we need to work together and we need to make sure that the UN plays an important role. Are we going to agree all the time? No, but we’ve got rules and process where we have a veto and we need to utilize that when we feel that it’s appropriate and/or try to convince and talk to our allies to the nations of the UN. We are – and I’m not at all suggesting that we not do what’s in the national interest of United States of America, because that is the first job of any President of the United States. And I’m saying that it is in our national interest to try to work collectively with the UN and the nations that form it. And to take away or to not be a part of it, when you’re not paying your dues, that’s what that means, would be a mistake.
QUESTION: I think he said you chaired a committee on currency; is that so? A subcommittee?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I chaired, last term, when Democrats were in the majority, the International Monetary Policy and Trade Subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee.
QUESTION: Okay. So we’re thinking a little bit about this debate about the currency, I mean the strength of the dollar versus China and so on, but I don’t know if you would like to comment on that.
MR. MEEKS: The only thing that I would say on that is we want there to be a level playing field for all. We don’t want people to be able to manipulate currency or anything of that nature. That shouldn’t happen to make one’s economy weaker or stronger. We don’t want that to take place, so we think that there should be a level playing field. And I think that’s what the President of the United States has advocated for and so that there’s no currency manipulation.
And the other piece that I talked about was regulatory, we don’t want regulatory arbitrage, where individuals play with their rules so that they try to get people to get money into their various areas, to the detriment of, quite frankly, some of our EU allies and the United States. So that we’ve got to make sure that we have a level playing field in that regard. There’s some harmonization in that regard and rules.
I mean, that’s the other reason, just on a different topic real quick, why I think that we should look for Russia to join the WTO, because then they would have to play by rules, and the rules that affect everyone. And I want China to play by rules. I don’t think that we should be afraid of China or anything of that nature. We just want everyone to play by the same rules, and then I think the world will be fine. And we’ll get along better economically. And I say in many speeches that I give there are the two oldest forms of relationships between countries over time is war and trade. I just happen to like trade better than war. And if we can have certain things and levels where we can become interdependent to one another with trade, because the truth of the matter is China is dependent on the United States and our economy buying, et cetera. We want to make sure that we – there’s over a billion people there – we have an open market to China, so that our folks have the ability to sell there too. And we become interdependent and therefore it would be unwise for either of us to want to fight one another if we are trading with one another.
We need to do much more with Russia. I think they’re like only – what is it? They’re like our 37th trade partner or something of that nature. That’s a huge market and when you talk about the Cold War, this is post-Cold War time, so we need to figure how to do more things together. And what that does also, because I hear the cries and understand of human rights violations. But when we interact with one another, we believe that then helps also to get nations and countries to clean up their human rights violations. And so absent that, you just get upset with one another, you get further and further apart, and then that leads itself to the possibility of military conflict. I’d rather go the other direction. I think that we have to, because in today’s world, military conflict can be almost anywhere and endangers the entire planet and endangers us all. And we’ve got to be very, I think strategically more protective of this planet, irrespective of the government that we come from, because it’s home for all of us, and I think that we’ve got to be more aware of that.
MODERATOR: I think we have time for one more question.
MR. MEEKS: Anybody? Okay.
QUESTION: What do you think of North Africa and the – I mean, could you detail a little bit on – there was a lot of criticism against the President for this statement about leading from behind. I think it was from one of his advisors. But – well, how did it turn out and --
MR. MEEKS: Perfect. (Laughter.) Absolutely perfect. Number one, what I like about this President, in my estimation, is he says what he means and he means what he says. It would have been wrong for the United States of America to turn its back on our NATO allies. This was a NATO-led operation. We wanted – and as I stated earlier – and we need the cooperation of our allies in Afghanistan. They came when they didn’t have to; they had soldiers on the ground. So when they come to the United States of America because of the conflict in Northern Africa and Libya and ask for us to play our role there, I think that was the right thing to do.
Now, the President said on the table, he says, “Look, here’s what we can do, given what our economic situation and our military limitations are. We have unique access – assets.” He said we will utilize our unique access – assets early on, the first two or three weeks. We weren’t going to put any boots on the ground. We would also help strategize and work with our NATO allies, but it would be a NATO-led function. That’s what NATO wanted. They didn’t want the United States either to come in and say, “Do what we tell you to do.”
So it worked out. Just – the President did exactly what he said. He worked in a multilateral way. The outcomes, as I think that we’ve seen over the last few days, is what had been predicted, giving the Libyan people an opportunity to have a democracy. That’s still a long way to go, and there’s a lot of things to happen yet. But I think that, thus far, it is working the way it should work, and the President made the right calls and the right decisions, because to do otherwise would be saying, “Okay, when we call you, you come. But when you call us, we’re not going to come.” That’s not a real alliance. That’s not what allies do to allies. We work together, and that’s what we did in that instance.
QUESTION: But is he going to be reelected with nine percent unemployment?
MR. MEEKS: I believe that the President is going to be reelected because what some people – you talk about, number one, there’s a debate going on for the Republican nomination. So you’ve got to tell me who’s the nominee. And then once that nominee is chosen, then they’re going to have to have real debates with the President of the United States. Now, the policies that I hear them talking about right now are the very same policies that put us in the problems in the first place. You see, I can recall when I came into Congress they were in charge. There was a Republican President, there was a Republican House, it was a Republican Senate, and they’re talking – the strategies that they’re talking about now are the strategies that they put in place then that caused us to be where we are today. And when that comes out against this is what you are proposing as opposed to where we are with President Obama now, then I think that the American people will see both sides. Because remember the President is really not debating anybody right now, and people are hurting, and so they don’t have the facts as they will be in front of them when it’s someone from the Republican Party and someone against the President and you’re having a straight up and up debate.
When that happens, it becomes clear because this month, of course, no net job gain. But last month we gained something about 90,000 jobs. But I can recall when the President became president we were losing jobs every month at a substantial rate. So we really have began to change direction, but it’s like moving a big ship. It just doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not happening as quick as we can. And it also takes a different type of thinking, because I said earlier that I’m in favor of – even from my party – and this is what’s got to go to the American people – I’m in favor of these trade agreements. I’m in favor of trying to make sure that we work closer with our foreign allies. In relation to the other side, they are more in favor of being isolated and that we should not have the kind of alliances that we have, and we should just cut ourselves off. That’s not the right direction to go.
And when you talk about creating jobs, you’ve got to consider our immigration policies, which I think hurts us in the United States of America, and we’ve got to make sure that we have a different immigration policy than we have right now. You’ve got to consider where technology is taking us in the future and what kinds of jobs those create. Thereby, you’ve got to consider what kind of investments you’re making in education, of which this President has been talking about all of the time. And he’ll be able – better than anyone else – to articulate, because I think there’s many things that this Administration has done that has helped the American people, that had he not done them and allowed the policies of those who are criticizing him to take place, we would be in a lot worse shape right now than we are currently in, and we’re in very bad shape right now. But I still believe that we’ve got the right president at the right time to get us out of the scenario that we’re in. And I think that as we get to 2012, the American people will see that, and he will be reelected to a second term of office, and we will reverse ourselves.
I’ll end on this: The United States of America, its people in this country, we’ve had a lot of problems in our history. Our history is not as long as many others, but in our short history, we’ve had a lot of problems. Its strength is we’ve been able to overcome them. We’ve been able to go through them. We’ve been able to deal with them. This is not the first time we’ve had an economic problem. We’ve survived the economic problems before. This is not the first time we’ve had wars. And our European allies understand that more because it’s been on – many on your soils, more than such then attacked ours, but we’ve been able to overcome that. We’ve been able to overcome internal fights before.
So I am still, given as bad as a lot of people forecast the situation to be, an optimist. And my optimism is in the American people and the American system, because the greatness of the founding fathers, who – and I’m saying this, and I’ll say this here – who I don’t know even had the vision of what is taking place now, but they set up a system that was such that democracy could live, even changing undemocratic ideas that existed, so much so that a Gregory Meeks at the time of the founding of this country was only considered 3/5ths of a human being, and now a member of Congress and Barack Obama is the President of the United States. That speaks well for the United States of America, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican or an independent. And in the end, we will get it right, and we will continue to grow and do so with other people in other countries of the world because this planet we share. And we have to do it that way for the betterment of all mankind. Thank you.
MODERATOR/CORRESPONDENTS: Thank you.
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11:00 EDT
NEW YORK FOREIGN PRESS CENTER, 799 UNITED NATIONS PLAZA, 10TH FLOOR
MODERATOR: Good morning. Thank you all for coming. Welcome to the Foreign Press Center. You all know who our distinguished guest is – Congressman Gregory Meeks, the New York 6th district for 13 years now. He’s going to speak to you briefly, and then we’ll go into Q&A. And just for transcription purposes, please state your name and media organization before your questions. Thank you.
Congressman Meeks.
MR. MEEKS: Thank you. I thank you for joining me this morning. It’s an opportunity that I’ve been looking for for a while just to have a conversation. I’ve been a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee for the past 13 years, and at the time that I was elected – that’s when I was elected to Congress – and it was always my focus and hope in getting elected – and I need to cut these things off because they’re already bothering me, the vibrating – at the time that I was elected, my goal was to sit on this committee, because I thought that dealing with foreign affairs would be growingly more important. And that it was a time for a number of members of Congress and the Americans that I think we need to change, that we always looked inward and didn’t look outward, and about our relationships with other countries and how the world was now much a smaller place, and that the old mentality of just dealing with ourselves and saying that the two oceans was going to protect us, that those days were long gone. And as we moved on for the benefit of all of us on the planet, I thought that it would be more important for us to begin to talk and to work together.
And so it had always been my goal to sit on this committee, and I’ve been delighted over the years to do that and then, with what we call seniority, grow in responsibility on the committee so much so that today, for the past nine months, I’ve been the ranking Democrat on international relations dealing with Europe and Eurasia. And prior to that, because the other committee I sit on was Financial Services, and I thought that’s important, not only nationally with the United States but that’s also important globally. And the committee I chose to chair was International Monetary Policy and Trade because that also is something that’s important, I think, to the stability of all of us on the planet. And I think that we see that right now, given the economy that’s taking place all over the place, especially here in the United States but also especially in Europe. And we’ve got to figure out how we can work collective together, and I think one of the focuses I had as chair of International Monetary Policy and Trade was to make sure that we had harmonization and we were able to avoid a regulatory arbitrage, and that we begin to work together because we’ve got to focus on the economies of both places because we’re all globally interconnected now even more so than we were just five or six years ago.
And so it becomes more important that we work together, we talk together, and we figure out things together. And so it is going to be my focus to continue to move on as the ranking Democrat on Europe and Eurasia to work with our NATO allies, with the EU, I think with – we’ve started or hit a reset button with Russia, which I think is important for a number of reasons there, and you see what’s taking place in North Africa. I think that it’s important to work with the UN and to do things in a multilateral manner as opposed to a bilateral – well, a unilateral manner, which generally isolates us from the rest of the world, and I don’t think that that’s the way that we should be moving. And I think that the current Administration has demonstrated its desires to do so in a multilateral way, and I would hope that Congress would continue to move in a multilateral way, and I know that that’s been – that’s some of the opportunities that I look forward to.
So on the committee, I’ve started a caucus, a U.S.-Russia caucus for economic stability. I’ve asked the chair of the committee to join me. I look forward to trying to make sure that we begin to pull that together once we resume session next week. I look forward to continuing to work and talking with our NATO allies. One of the first things that I did was go to Brussels once I became the ranking member so that I could go to Brussels and talk to some of our NATO allies and deal, even at that time, with the situation in North Africa.
I have welcomed and talked to members of the EU. In fact, we’ve got a situation covering in the last spring – late fall where we’re going to exchange. I’m going to send one of my staff members over to the EU, where they work over there for two weeks, and the EU will send a staff member over to my office who will work within my office for two weeks just so that we can continually get a better understanding of how each work and so that we can work closely together. I look forward to working with my colleagues in various parliaments with the debt (ph). I’ve also had an opportunity to have some great conversations in Brussels when I was there, attended a conference at that time with a number of other parliamentarians. And so we want to continue to do that and have that kind of exchange.
So I’ll stop there just to make sure that I now open it up to questions that you may have specific questions about, and I’ll try to address them to the best of my ability. But again, I thank you because this is the way that we open dialogue and thought, and I look forward to having further conversation and reaching out and talking to some other folks.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Congressman, my question is about something that’s probably very important to you as a congressman from New York. You were in the Foreign Relations Committee right after 9/11, and the main topic was, of course, terrorism. How has this changed now over the years? Is that still the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy as we approach the 10th anniversary?
MR. MEEKS: Yeah. As we – being a New Yorker, and as you correctly stated, approaching the 10th anniversary, there’s not a day, not a single day, that goes by that I don’t think of what took place on September the 11th. Not seeing those two towers there, those two towers – I taught my kids how to navigate Manhattan based upon those two towers, and so it deeply affects us and affects me. The question then is: What do we do to combat terrorism? It has become clear to me that to fight terrorism, we can’t do it by ourselves. It has become clear over the last 10 years also that other countries have been victims of terrorism and are still threatened by terrorism. And so therefore to combat it, we’ve got to work closer together. We’ve got to do the kinds of operations that are cooperative, that tends to show that both economically, because terrorism is financed by some, we’d better make sure that we get into the inner workings of the financing of terrorism and to the cells, and it’s spread out.
And so I come away with the commitment that, again, we’ve got to work closer like never before. I think that – 9/11 reinforced that for me. I believe that also I don’t want the terrorists to win because part of the targets of which they looked at – they looked at New York because it was the financial capital of the world, and they wanted to bring down our economies. And so therefore, I take away from that we’ve got to make sure that that does not happen, that we do work with our colleagues and that we – and our allies all over the planet to make a difference there so that we can show that if you have these strong democracies, they will survive terrorists and those who would love to break us down because we are democracies.
And so it gives me a – it made a greater determination of making sure that we come together to work together because that’s the way I think that we defeat terrorism. We don’t isolate ourselves; we become one with other democracies and encourage other democracies, other places that are not democracies to become democracies so that we don’t become victims ourselves of the very terrorist acts that were committed.
QUESTION: As (inaudible) question, as opposed to in the Bush years in U.S. foreign policy, terrorism?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I think that we’re still fighting terrorism, but we’re fighting it differently, and I’ve always wanted to fight it differently. I don’t believe that it was the right thing to do to say it is my way or the highway. Now surely, there’s time that the United States have to do what they feel – what we feel is in our best interests. And sometimes we’re going to have disagreements with some of our allies, and we need to try to figure that out. But I think that it was just, in my opinion, and that the President, when he said – started talking about our allies as old Europe or whatever, that’s not the way to defeat terrorism. That’s a way of isolating ourselves and not bringing partnerships that we need to make sure that we are safer.
And so I happen to like the way that this Administration has been moving because I think to make a safer as a result of what took place, we have more allies who are working collectively to help us fight terrorists and terrorism. And I believe that the world has perceived the difference also, and that’s a positive for us ongoing. And I look forward to continuing that fight. We can’t win the fight by ourselves as one nation. I don’t care how many weapons you have, et cetera; that’s not what’s going to defeat terrorism. It’s a collective working together to show that free countries and democracies and free people will defeat those who wish to bring them down.
Yes.
QUESTION: Entirely different subject really, but regarding housing and --
MODERATOR: Your name and --
QUESTION: Jostein Loevaas with the Norwegian financial business daily. Regarding housing and the banks, I believe the President is gave a – going to give a jobs speech on Thursday, and this issue of all the underwater mortgages and the depressed state of the housing market, I believe that must be one of your concerns, too.
MR. MEEKS: It’s a big concern. My district in New York was the number one area for home foreclosures in all of New York City. The people of my district are suffering from that crisis and jobs. The creation of jobs for many of those individuals in my district is absolutely important. So yes. We are all anxiously awaiting the President’s statement this coming Thursday on job creation. And working with the President, I would hope, and not playing politics with the idea of creating jobs and how to put America back to work. And that takes some thinking, and it also takes, in my belief, some investment.
And to that end, there’s a couple of things. Number one, on this last Friday, I just dropped a bill – hopefully by tomorrow, I’ll have a bill number – called Putting America Back to Work. And because of the – and I’ll show how this is related to the housing crisis in my district, number one, but let me just tell you about the bill first. What it does – and I think that the bill appeals to all segments of Congress, both Republicans, Democrats, unions, because it accomplishes what everybody wants to accomplish.
We currently have over a trillion dollars worth – our corporations – worth of money that is overseas. And many of those corporations don’t want to bring them back here because they have been taxed where they were doing business overseas, and they feel that it is to pay a 35 percent tax to bring it back – bring that money back to the United States would not be the right thing to do. So we’ve got over a trillion dollars of what I look at as revenue or potential revenue that we should be utilizing.
So our Republican colleagues, they always talk about they want to reduce the tax cuts for the – to repatriate some of the money. The labor unions and a lot of Democrats, we want to create jobs. So let’s do at least – let’s try it for one year, where we will give a tax break to those corporations who will bring money back from the sitting overseas, and let’s not tax them that 35 percent. Let’s tax them at 15 percent, somewhere in there. My bill says 15 percent, and I’m willing to work with it. But let’s tax them at 15 percent.
Now, what we do with this new revenue is put it in a infrastructure fund because the big debate is – and everybody seems to agree that building a – rebuilding of our infrastructure will create jobs, that we need to do it because our infrastructure is old, et cetera. So let’s put it in a fund for infrastructure to build roads, to deal with subway systems and airports because all of that has to be redone. I mean, I have an airport in my district. I think next-generation technology is the way to go over the long run. It’s something that we can do in the future. I want to be able to compete with a lot of the airlines and the airports that I see when I go overseas to Europe. They – I think they are taking the next step. So let’s utilize that money as revenue because part of the debate, the crazy debate that we had, was you’ve got to – we want to balance the budget, we’ve got to cut. We talk about where’s new revenue. Well, here’s new revenue. So it also should be something that is scored neutrally by the Congressional Budget Office. And then let’s put all of that money into building our infrastructure. That creates jobs.
Now, you create jobs because I’m concerned about the next hit the housing market, at least in districts like mine, people getting laid off or who are laid off who now, not only because of the subprime crisis but now because they are unemployed can’t pay their mortgages. So more people then will go into foreclosure. And before that happens, when I look in New York, for example, all of the highways and bridges, and as I said, in my district, the number one employer is an airport, and the ports that we have and the trains, there’s great opportunity to put people to work, which will then keep them in their homes. Because the other aspect of the housing crisis, in my estimation, is a number of individuals – and here’s where the battle is, because I’ve shut my offices down to a large degree in the past on a few days a week, just trying to help people that were going into foreclosures. And by doing that, what I discovered was that for many of them, if in fact the interest rate was at the interest rate that they had agreed to because it was the flexible interest rates, say at three percent or four percent, if it was at that level, the individuals could still afford to stay in their home. What they couldn’t do is when the interest rates went from four percent and jumped up to eight percent, and then the additional costs, they couldn’t afford it at the job that they had.
And so if we were able to keep the interest rates or lower the interest rates almost to what those so-called introductory rates in the adjustable-rate mortgages, many of those individuals could stay in their home, and – but they have to have a job, because we also found that some of those people under no circumstances could afford a home because they didn’t have any income or any – the income that they were earning was nowhere near what it should have been for the house that they were in. And here’s a way to give them a job and we can then negotiate with the banks to keep those interest rates or get a fixed rate for those individuals who were in adjustable rates and work it so that we can fix – and I think that would help, along with a fix our economy here in the United States.
QUESTION: So you think there’s going to come a new relief program, a mortgage relief program, on Thursday?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I don’t know if there’s going to be a new relief program, because the President, quite frankly, had a program, and he was putting it together and trying to work to have a program in the past, and there’s a fight within Congress. I don’t know whether the President is going to decide to put a big deal picture together that’s futuristic or whether he’s going to try to deal with something that he believes that can pass in Congress right now.
You know from the debt debate, the debt debate, the debt ceiling debate, that that’s been very contentious in Congress, and we’re about to enter into an election year. For me, this President has not played politics much. He’s done the kinds of things that he thinks that he can get done, that get passed. And it’s been controversial by doing that. Certain people have said, even in his own party, he shouldn’t have focused on healthcare. But the fact of the matter is, had he not focused on healthcare when he focused on healthcare, we’d have never had a healthcare bill passed. And he focused at a level of what he thought could get passed as opposed to having nothing.
And I can go on and on. We talked about the stimulus package. Many people thought that that should have been bigger, but we couldn’t get the votes to make it bigger, even some votes on the Democratic side. But he focused on what we could pass, and I’m one to say that the stimulus bill that he passed then, the $800 billion, was a success because had he not, it would have been more devastating for states, and we’d have lost even more jobs. So I am not sure whether the President is going to talk about a bill of which he believes can pass or – which I would not have an objection to – a bigger picture of what he thinks should happen and that should happen, and let others then try to say what they will do, and then we negotiate it.
So – but for me, I want a – I want to be able to put Americans back to work, and I think that we’ve got to do it not as we did it – have done it 30, 40, or even 10 years ago because the world is so different than it was. We’ve got to do differently. I think that if we’re talking about creating jobs, I’m one – I’m a Democrat, but I do believe that we’ve got to focus on some of these trade – the three trade bills that we have dealing with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama.
I think that we then – we’ve got to also look at where we are with TPP. We’ve got to make sure that we then recognize the fact that we’ve got to have stability in our markets, and that’s why I am a proponent of the consumer bureau that was created in Dodd Frank so that we can make sure that don’t have the kind of problem that we had before and consumers understand the products that are being offered to them. And so I’m hoping that he has something in the speech to deal with those items also because I think going forward, they all are very important to the underpinnings of our financial institutions and our financial stability in the United States, and as a result, because of the interconnectedness, to the rest of the world also.
Yes.
QUESTION: Paulo Dias from the News Agency of Portugal. Congressman, going back to 9/11 – sorry.
MR. MEEKS: Not a problem.
QUESTION: Ten years on, what do you think that Washington has yet to do? And specifically, there’s been a lot of talk about compensating families and about people suffered injuries, psychological or physical, and have not been compensated. What do you think is more a priority at this point for Washington to do regarding 9/11?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I think we made a big step forward during this Congress because we had a number of New Yorkers particularly, but some from New Jersey and Connecticut also, that we passed a bill that the President ultimately signed to give healthcare and to make sure that we take care of those heroes who put their families and themselves at great risks. I think we have and owe a great and have a lot of responsibility to make sure that, to the degree that we could make them as whole as we possibly can. Not one individual who put their lives at line should be suffering because they don’t have healthcare. I mean, that was the whole part of, I think, the message when we talk about overall healthcare, but we owe a special debt to this group of Americans and those who are not American, in my estimation, who also went down there to volunteer to help out. We need to make sure that we take care of them. We need to make sure that there’s opportunities for their children.
I saw a show over the weekend that really kind of broke my heart. These were children of individuals who were deceased as a result of 9/11. They were 10, 11, and 12 years old at the time of their parents’ death. So they’re now 20, 21, 22 years old. And they were talking about what life has been like for the last 10 years without their parents as they are about to enter school. They talked about how they wished their mothers or their fathers were there to see them graduate high school, enter college. They wish that in the future that their parent would have been there to see them get married. They thought of other huge events at which their parents were not there.
Now you could never make them fully whole for that, but we can for sure make sure they have an opportunity to be educated and go to school. We for sure can make sure that they are able to have health care themselves. And so to that degree I think that we as a country can unite and rally and show that we’re going to protect those that have stood up for us. And I extend that and I think that’s another reason why I think that in Congress it’s all interconnected, because I think that we should do the same for our military men and women and we should treat many of those individuals who were victims of 9/11 in the same way that we try to make sure that we take care of the health care of our veterans. We can even utilize it in my estimation with our VA hospitals so that the mechanisms in place, because to me they put their lives at risk in a similar way that some of the men and women who volunteer to join our armed forces does.
QUESTION: I have a follow-up on 9/11. My name is Karim Lebhour from Radio France International. As a Congressman from New York, how do you see the past constructions at Ground Zero? It has been 10 years and the memorial is only opening in a few days. It has been a long time to bring it up again at this hour, hasn’t it?
MR. MEEKS: I think when you want to do something right, sometimes it takes time. Sometimes you have to be patient. It’s a sacred place. Sacred to the families and sacred to not just New Yorkers but to all Americans. I think sacred to all individuals who seek freedom and love democracy, because when you think about 9/11, people from all ethnic backgrounds, all religions, all areas of the world died there. So that’s not something that you rush into. A lot of people have comments. A lot people have thoughts. A lot of people have ideas. So you take your time and you try to do it the right way.
And I think that as the memorial opens you’ll see a memorial that most people think is beautiful in the sense that it memorializes those individuals who lost their lives there and it is appropriate. I think that the structures that are going up says to the terrorists, “You can’t keep us down, we’re still going to build, and we’re going to build.” And that’s the tallest structure. It’s going to be the tallest structure in the city, in the nation is is a message to terrorists that we are a great nation, we are a great people, and we will not succumb to those woeful kinds of acts.
So yes, it’s taken some time, but I believe we’ve done it the right way, in a way that all visitors, and in the future, my 11-year-old daughter will be able to go because she won’t recall the World Trade Centers even though it was there when she was born. But she can go there and understand what took place there. So the time doesn’t matter to me. It is the quality of what is happening there that is important, and I think it’s quality development appropriate for what it stands for.
QUESTION: Gabriel Mellqvist from Sweden’s business daily. How will you commemorate on Sunday? What will you do?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I will be out at the ceremony with the President and the families along with members of the New York congressional delegation and New Jersey and Connecticut. And so I plan on starting my day there. I probably will leave there, and there’s a special service at my place of worship in the District, Allen AME, where we’ve also had a number of our church members who lost loved ones at the Trade Center. So I will go back and go to church, be prayerful with them, and that’s how I plan on celebrating.
QUESTION: Back to some European issues. So you’ve cut in defense budgets – Alf Ask, Aftenposten – in Europe. Do you see that this in some way jeopardizes NATO as part for the U.S.?
MR. MEEKS: Jeopardize NATO? No. I would hope again that what that will do is help strengthen NATO, because we need one another more now than we do. And it’s times – NATO was created to resolve crises, not to dissolve within a crisis. And so it should be something that makes us stronger, that we’re going to work closer together because we are in a crisis whether you’re talking about terrorism or whether you’re talking about the economy.
And we’ve got to make sure that dealing with the Arab Spring for example, dealing with Libya, NATO, I think, was instrumental. I look at what took place, it’s possibly avoiding one of the – which could have been one of the major tragedies of humankind since Adolph Hitler, to be quite honest with you. Because when you talk about an individual who was going to go into a city and just kill thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the world and NATO decided to take the lead and say we are not going to let this happen again. That’s significant in a time of crisis.
And so for me, we need more of that, not less of that. We need to be stronger as a result of that, not decline away from that. And for the United States, playing its role in that was very appropriate. It wasn’t – and I compliment the members of NATO for sticking together, and for it being a NATO-led operation. And as this world continues to shrink, I think it’s most important that that continues to happen, and just adding on top of that the role that the Arab League played, the role that the African Union played. It was the world coming together, which was completely different than doing an operation unilaterally.
QUESTION: We were just sitting across the United Nation and I know that the Republican Party is turning up the heat on the UN, asking for cutting fundings to the UN and the possibility for the U.S. to choose what they want to fund inside the UN. Where do you stand on that?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I’m a supporter of the UN, and we’ve had this debate in our Foreign Affairs Committee, especially recently, dealing with the appropriations side. Do I think that the UN is perfect? Absolutely not. Do I think that the UN needs some reform? Probably so. But do I think that we should not participate, especially economically? That would be the exact wrong way to go. I think that the UN plays a tremendously important role, and we should pay our dues to the UN and we should pay them on a timely basis and we should be able to talk on diplomatic levels, and that’s what the UN provides so that we resolve some of our mutual problems.
So I will be absolutely opposed to the cutting or the elimination of the United States and its dues to the UN. I think that we need to work together and we need to make sure that the UN plays an important role. Are we going to agree all the time? No, but we’ve got rules and process where we have a veto and we need to utilize that when we feel that it’s appropriate and/or try to convince and talk to our allies to the nations of the UN. We are – and I’m not at all suggesting that we not do what’s in the national interest of United States of America, because that is the first job of any President of the United States. And I’m saying that it is in our national interest to try to work collectively with the UN and the nations that form it. And to take away or to not be a part of it, when you’re not paying your dues, that’s what that means, would be a mistake.
QUESTION: I think he said you chaired a committee on currency; is that so? A subcommittee?
MR. MEEKS: Well, I chaired, last term, when Democrats were in the majority, the International Monetary Policy and Trade Subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee.
QUESTION: Okay. So we’re thinking a little bit about this debate about the currency, I mean the strength of the dollar versus China and so on, but I don’t know if you would like to comment on that.
MR. MEEKS: The only thing that I would say on that is we want there to be a level playing field for all. We don’t want people to be able to manipulate currency or anything of that nature. That shouldn’t happen to make one’s economy weaker or stronger. We don’t want that to take place, so we think that there should be a level playing field. And I think that’s what the President of the United States has advocated for and so that there’s no currency manipulation.
And the other piece that I talked about was regulatory, we don’t want regulatory arbitrage, where individuals play with their rules so that they try to get people to get money into their various areas, to the detriment of, quite frankly, some of our EU allies and the United States. So that we’ve got to make sure that we have a level playing field in that regard. There’s some harmonization in that regard and rules.
I mean, that’s the other reason, just on a different topic real quick, why I think that we should look for Russia to join the WTO, because then they would have to play by rules, and the rules that affect everyone. And I want China to play by rules. I don’t think that we should be afraid of China or anything of that nature. We just want everyone to play by the same rules, and then I think the world will be fine. And we’ll get along better economically. And I say in many speeches that I give there are the two oldest forms of relationships between countries over time is war and trade. I just happen to like trade better than war. And if we can have certain things and levels where we can become interdependent to one another with trade, because the truth of the matter is China is dependent on the United States and our economy buying, et cetera. We want to make sure that we – there’s over a billion people there – we have an open market to China, so that our folks have the ability to sell there too. And we become interdependent and therefore it would be unwise for either of us to want to fight one another if we are trading with one another.
We need to do much more with Russia. I think they’re like only – what is it? They’re like our 37th trade partner or something of that nature. That’s a huge market and when you talk about the Cold War, this is post-Cold War time, so we need to figure how to do more things together. And what that does also, because I hear the cries and understand of human rights violations. But when we interact with one another, we believe that then helps also to get nations and countries to clean up their human rights violations. And so absent that, you just get upset with one another, you get further and further apart, and then that leads itself to the possibility of military conflict. I’d rather go the other direction. I think that we have to, because in today’s world, military conflict can be almost anywhere and endangers the entire planet and endangers us all. And we’ve got to be very, I think strategically more protective of this planet, irrespective of the government that we come from, because it’s home for all of us, and I think that we’ve got to be more aware of that.
MODERATOR: I think we have time for one more question.
MR. MEEKS: Anybody? Okay.
QUESTION: What do you think of North Africa and the – I mean, could you detail a little bit on – there was a lot of criticism against the President for this statement about leading from behind. I think it was from one of his advisors. But – well, how did it turn out and --
MR. MEEKS: Perfect. (Laughter.) Absolutely perfect. Number one, what I like about this President, in my estimation, is he says what he means and he means what he says. It would have been wrong for the United States of America to turn its back on our NATO allies. This was a NATO-led operation. We wanted – and as I stated earlier – and we need the cooperation of our allies in Afghanistan. They came when they didn’t have to; they had soldiers on the ground. So when they come to the United States of America because of the conflict in Northern Africa and Libya and ask for us to play our role there, I think that was the right thing to do.
Now, the President said on the table, he says, “Look, here’s what we can do, given what our economic situation and our military limitations are. We have unique access – assets.” He said we will utilize our unique access – assets early on, the first two or three weeks. We weren’t going to put any boots on the ground. We would also help strategize and work with our NATO allies, but it would be a NATO-led function. That’s what NATO wanted. They didn’t want the United States either to come in and say, “Do what we tell you to do.”
So it worked out. Just – the President did exactly what he said. He worked in a multilateral way. The outcomes, as I think that we’ve seen over the last few days, is what had been predicted, giving the Libyan people an opportunity to have a democracy. That’s still a long way to go, and there’s a lot of things to happen yet. But I think that, thus far, it is working the way it should work, and the President made the right calls and the right decisions, because to do otherwise would be saying, “Okay, when we call you, you come. But when you call us, we’re not going to come.” That’s not a real alliance. That’s not what allies do to allies. We work together, and that’s what we did in that instance.
QUESTION: But is he going to be reelected with nine percent unemployment?
MR. MEEKS: I believe that the President is going to be reelected because what some people – you talk about, number one, there’s a debate going on for the Republican nomination. So you’ve got to tell me who’s the nominee. And then once that nominee is chosen, then they’re going to have to have real debates with the President of the United States. Now, the policies that I hear them talking about right now are the very same policies that put us in the problems in the first place. You see, I can recall when I came into Congress they were in charge. There was a Republican President, there was a Republican House, it was a Republican Senate, and they’re talking – the strategies that they’re talking about now are the strategies that they put in place then that caused us to be where we are today. And when that comes out against this is what you are proposing as opposed to where we are with President Obama now, then I think that the American people will see both sides. Because remember the President is really not debating anybody right now, and people are hurting, and so they don’t have the facts as they will be in front of them when it’s someone from the Republican Party and someone against the President and you’re having a straight up and up debate.
When that happens, it becomes clear because this month, of course, no net job gain. But last month we gained something about 90,000 jobs. But I can recall when the President became president we were losing jobs every month at a substantial rate. So we really have began to change direction, but it’s like moving a big ship. It just doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not happening as quick as we can. And it also takes a different type of thinking, because I said earlier that I’m in favor of – even from my party – and this is what’s got to go to the American people – I’m in favor of these trade agreements. I’m in favor of trying to make sure that we work closer with our foreign allies. In relation to the other side, they are more in favor of being isolated and that we should not have the kind of alliances that we have, and we should just cut ourselves off. That’s not the right direction to go.
And when you talk about creating jobs, you’ve got to consider our immigration policies, which I think hurts us in the United States of America, and we’ve got to make sure that we have a different immigration policy than we have right now. You’ve got to consider where technology is taking us in the future and what kinds of jobs those create. Thereby, you’ve got to consider what kind of investments you’re making in education, of which this President has been talking about all of the time. And he’ll be able – better than anyone else – to articulate, because I think there’s many things that this Administration has done that has helped the American people, that had he not done them and allowed the policies of those who are criticizing him to take place, we would be in a lot worse shape right now than we are currently in, and we’re in very bad shape right now. But I still believe that we’ve got the right president at the right time to get us out of the scenario that we’re in. And I think that as we get to 2012, the American people will see that, and he will be reelected to a second term of office, and we will reverse ourselves.
I’ll end on this: The United States of America, its people in this country, we’ve had a lot of problems in our history. Our history is not as long as many others, but in our short history, we’ve had a lot of problems. Its strength is we’ve been able to overcome them. We’ve been able to go through them. We’ve been able to deal with them. This is not the first time we’ve had an economic problem. We’ve survived the economic problems before. This is not the first time we’ve had wars. And our European allies understand that more because it’s been on – many on your soils, more than such then attacked ours, but we’ve been able to overcome that. We’ve been able to overcome internal fights before.
So I am still, given as bad as a lot of people forecast the situation to be, an optimist. And my optimism is in the American people and the American system, because the greatness of the founding fathers, who – and I’m saying this, and I’ll say this here – who I don’t know even had the vision of what is taking place now, but they set up a system that was such that democracy could live, even changing undemocratic ideas that existed, so much so that a Gregory Meeks at the time of the founding of this country was only considered 3/5ths of a human being, and now a member of Congress and Barack Obama is the President of the United States. That speaks well for the United States of America, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican or an independent. And in the end, we will get it right, and we will continue to grow and do so with other people in other countries of the world because this planet we share. And we have to do it that way for the betterment of all mankind. Thank you.
MODERATOR/CORRESPONDENTS: Thank you.
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