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Parker Spitzer
Afghanistan: What's the Mission?
Aired December 30, 2010 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KATHLEEN PARKER, CO-HOST: Good evening. I'm Kathleen Parker.
ELIOT SPITZER, CO-HOST: And I'm Eliot Spitzer. Welcome to the program.
Kathleen, tonight's top story, the end of the year 2010 has been the worst year in Afghanistan. Yet over nine years of war, casualties mounting, going up at a rapid clip. We've spoken to a lot of smart people -- the experts about that war.
And you know what, Kathleen? I still don't know why we're there. The terrorists, al Qaeda in particular, have left Afghanistan. They've gone to Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. This is a tragedy.
It's not clear to me why we are fighting a war, the way we are sacrificing human lives. We should be out of there. We should be out right now.
PARKER: Well, Eliot, you're re not the only person for him it's not clear. I think a lot of people are confused about why we're still there nine years later. Al Qaeda has moved on and dispersed to other countries. But let's hope by the end of next year, we have a different story to tell.
SPITZER: I hope.
PARKER: In the meantime, one of the smart people we talked about what's going on in Afghanistan is Gary Berntsen, a former CIA officer who has spent a lot of time on the ground in Afghanistan and the region. Bernstein more than 21 years of experience and is an expert on counterterrorism and insurgency and he was, in fact, in Tora Bora in December 2001 when Osama bin Laden escaped capture.
So, we talked to him about that and about the ongoing search for bin Laden. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GARY BERNTSEN, FORMER CIA OFFICER: He's a problem. He's still out there. We still have to do our best to capture him.
The problem is that Pakistan, you know, the state, Pakistan has got 175 million people, over 20 militant groups, over 900,000 people that have cycled through the terrorist training camps or less 20 years. There's infrastructure that he can hide within. There are tribal groups that because of Pashtunwali, the honor code, that will hide him.
If he is still actually even in that area and hasn't moved on to Yemen, it's a problem for us and it's something that we're going to continue to work at and eventually we'll have success on this -- eventually. But I know it's disappointing. It's almost 10 years.
PARKER: Almost 10 years. But what exactly will be the benefit of catching bin Laden and killing him?
BERNTSEN: Oh, you know, it will be symbolic at that point. You know, Al Qaeda has morphed over the years. And what al Qaeda does now in a place like Pakistan is it's a -- it's almost like a coordinating body among the militant organizations. It provides training to them. It will send operatives in with militants to teach them how to create IEDs.
PARKER: And by killing him, do we defeat the idea or at least degrade it?
BERNTSEN: Well, you know, anyone who can execute an operation that kills 3,000 Americans has got to be captured and is going to have to be tried and executed. And at -- you know, at a principle, you know, and because we owe them and we owe those that lost their lives.
SPITZER: You said he's hiding. Is he hiding or is he being protected? And the difference is not one without significance in my view. If he's being protected perhaps by forces within the Pakistani government, the ISI -- whomever it may be -- that creates an entirely different set of issues for us, both with respect to Pakistan and Afghanistan. So, which do you think it is?
BERNTSEN: Clearly, there's a sort of gray area in there. And, you know, do they really want him? Did they want him in the beginning? Why haven't they captured Mullah Omar and turned him over to us, the Pakistanis? This is something that they should do immediately. And that would help us and provide great assistance to us in terms of the fight in Afghanistan where Americans are dying.
SPITZER: And this, of course, goes to the very heart of the problem I think so many people have with our policies in Afghanistan and consequently in Pakistan. We don't know who our partners are. We know who they pretend to be.
But the Pakistani government, Karzai over in Afghanistan, there is such doubt about whether we can rely upon them the moment we either withdraw troops or start giving them hard, cold cash. What are they? Are they partners? And if they aren't, is there a future there?
BERNTSEN: Look, part of the problem is with the creation of Pakistan, you know, almost immediately, they were conducting insurgency inside of Kashmir. And ISI was created and the individuals that managed that, you know, that organization was born running insurgencies and doing, you know -- and conducting violent types of operations.
And they've continued throughout their history. They had a love affair with Kashmir militancy which then blended over into working with the Afghans and the Taliban when control was lost essentially in Afghanistan by -- you know, this is President Rabbani period of time.
So Americans have misjudged the Pakistanis, at a time we were helping them fight, you know, the Soviets, they were siphoning off large amounts of that aid and using it to train Kashmiris to kill Indians. So, they're not reliable partners completely. They've gotten a little bit better. You have to continue to maintain pressure on the Pakistanis, but the problem with Pakistan is the 90 nuclear weapons.
PARKER: Yes.
BERNTSEN: And, you know, the one thing we don't want to have happen is a collapse of a failed state and loss of control of that arsenal.
PARKER: And --
SPITZER: Can we go back to -- go ahead.
PARKER: Well, I was going to ask your view of our place in Afghanistan and our progress to this point. Of course, one of the main arguments is we don't want the Taliban to regain strength and thus create a safe haven for al Qaeda. Is the Taliban getting stronger?
BERNTSEN: I think that the report the Obama administration put out, accurate in the sense that we've made some gains. You know, I've been in Afghanistan constantly over the years. I had a son that just finished a year in combat there, with the 82nd Airborne. And from discussions with him, too, I can see where there's been improvement, certain areas where there hasn't been.
You know, most Americans didn't understand how heavy this lift was going to be. You know, where Saddam Hussein had trained a generation of teachers, engineers, people like that to help him seize control of the Middle East, he was -- you know, a power hungry man; Afghanistan has had a complete collapse of civil society.
Afghans, you know, there was a recent survey done in Afghanistan among 1,000 young men from the age of 18 to 20 or 29 or 30 or so, and 90 percent of them never heard of 9/11. They don't know why we're there.
PARKER: And that's stunning.
BERNTSEN: They believe, 40 percent of them think America is out to destroy Islam and another 70 percent think that we don't respect Islam. We have failed in the public policy war there.
PARKER: Well, how do we turn that around? How do you --
BERNTSEN: The State Department has got to do that.
Part of the problem in America is everybody wants to throw everything on the U.S. military. This is State's responsibility, selling America there.
SPITZER: Well, here's what I don't understand. There's been really an effort at nation-building.
BERNTSEN: Right.
SPITZER: And even though we don't want to call it that, that's what we're doing in Afghanistan. Yet, we haven't even begun, it seems to me, as you just said, to persuade the public in Afghanistan that we are there and we are their partners and if we don't cross that emotional divide, we will never succeed.
BERNTSEN: The most -- that's the most fundamental piece of this that we've missed. And that's what -- this polling -- this poll was taken in November 2010.
PARKER: Right.
BERNTSEN: You know, in the first three or four years that we lost, when we went into Iraq, we did lose those first few years. We didn't have programs we were providing literacy training. We didn't help women and development. We missed the first couple of years because we got stuck in Iraq --
SPITZER: Here's what I don't get, the president says over and over again we're not involved in nation-building. Of course, you can't use those words. People will say, no, we don't want to go there. But you're saying we can't win unless we get involved in nation-building.
We're not putting enough resources in to succeed at nation- building but we're also not withdrawing the resources because we're not involved in nation-building. So, we seem to be stuck in a netherworld, neither success nor failure. It's going to go on for another four years.
Does this make sense to you?
BERNTSEN: Well, you know, we can't flee Afghanistan because the Taliban would return and al Qaeda would return with them. They have a symbiotic relationship.
We're going to have to do it but it is nation-building that no one wants to talk about. We're going to have to help them with the development issues that are critical. And by doing so, then simultaneously, draw down traditional troops, you know, U.S. military, and have a larger sort SOCOM, special operations community, footprint there.
SPITZER: What is wrong with the strategy that goes almost immediately just to counter terrorism? You specialty and says, look, we will use Special Ops, all the high tech stuff. Go right out al Qaeda and do it in a surgical way rather than the nation-building.
(CROSSTALK) BERNTSEN: But it's not just about al Qaeda. Look, you got on the other side of the border in Pakistan, you got, you know, Lashkar- e-Taiba, you got Lashar-e-Jhangvi. You've got the Tariki Taliban Pakistan.
SPITZER: But they're in Pakistan.
BERNTSEN: But they all cross over and they're all fighting on the ground. We're fighting against not just the Taliban inside of Afghanistan, but multiple number of groups.
PARKER: They come in and they participate and then they go back home and take a little nap.
SPITZER: But if the Pakistani government won't help us eradicate those forces, then will nation-building in Afghanistan get us there?
BERNTSEN: We have to do both. And, sadly, the late Richard Holbrooke understood this. This is the guy the first guy that came in and said, we need an Af-Pak solution.
Really, what we need is an Af/Pak/India solution. I would take one country further because the entire Indo-Pak problem sort of, you know, shadows over this and it increases Pakistani paranoia when they see Indian involvement in Afghanistan. This is part of this. This is all part of this, too.
SPITZER: But, Gary, our concerns about al Qaeda coming back into Afghanistan, legitimate as they are, how do we fight this battle against al Qaeda when they are in Yemen and in northern Africa and other places, and they can keep popping up and keep re-inventing themselves? I don't know how many hundreds of second in commands we've killed and yet they keep reproducing.
BERNTSEN: Americans failed to recognize that CIA and the clandestine service is a very, very small organization. The D.O. should probably be double the size, the director of operations. Now, it's called the National Clandestine Service.
You know, you probably have, you know, one-fifth or one-tenth the number of CIA officers compared to the FBI officers that are -- you know, that are covering the United States. It's a very small organization. We need to invest in intelligence and in diplomacy.
We need to do those sorts of things because the entire burden cannot always fall on the military. They catch a lot of heat unnecessarily and they're asked to do more than they should be doing.
SPITZER: OK. If you could in one sentence say what our policy should be for clarity because it's one of these things, nobody quite --
BERNTSEN: We need -- we need to create an Afghanistan that -- or assist Afghanistan to get to the point where they can help defend themselves. We can have a significant drawdown of forces by 2014. I'm glad the administration has moved from 2011 back to 2014. That is possibly achievable.
And recognize that we need to have much, much lower number of troops on the ground. We cannot afford this. If you look at the economy in the United States, can we afford what we're spending in Afghanistan? No, we cannot over the long haul. We have to reduce that.
So -- and we've already spent enough in blood and, you know, blood and treasure in Afghanistan. We need to be thinking about the fastest way to put this thing together, a secure way, so that we can exit that theater and leave it where it has a modicum of stability. We're not here to build Jeffersonian democracy.
PARKER: All right. Gary Berntsen, thank you so much for being with us.
BERNTSEN: A pleasure.
PARKER: We'll be right back.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PARKER: The rise of the fringe led in part to the Republican sweep this year. There was this ideal pushed by the Tea Party that one had to have ideological purity in order to hold office. If you weren't conservative enough, you couldn't be in power.
One of the victims of this was Congressman Bob Inglis from my home state of South Carolina. He refused, for example, to call President Obama a Muslim. He refused to say the president wasn't American and he lost the election because of it. He is a rational conservative.
SPITZER: All right, Kathleen. I would admit, there are a couple of rational conservatives out there and we had Congressman Inglis on the show, a very decent guy. We asked him about losing the election and his experience with the fringe. Take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SPITZER: You ran into the buzz saw of hard right politics. What lesson do you take from that about the future of our political structure?
REP. BOB INGLIS (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: I think what's going to have to happen is at some point is we're all going to have to pick up the mirror and look in it, take a real honest, hard look at ourselves and say we have found the problem and the problem is us. I believe that America's best days are still ahead. That's Ronald Reagan conservatism.
Right now, what we got going is a populism that's not really like the conservatism of Reagan. Reagan was an optimist. This current populism is more of a -- it's all gone to pot the country has done for. We'll get through and we'll get back to optimistic conservatism. We just got to get through this unfortunate period.
PARKER: And your dealings with the Tea Party contingent in South Carolina, you have been -- one of the problems was that you refused to call President Obama a socialist. You actually told your constituents to turn off Glenn Beck. That got you in a good bit of hot water.
Can you tell us about that?
INGLIS: Yes. You know, really if you boil it right down, what it's a lot about is just the sense that I didn't join in the real bitterness toward the president.
You know, I don't call him a socialist because he's not. I don't doubt that he was born in Hawaii because he was. I don't call him a Muslim because he says he's a Christian. And I didn't say anything about death panels because there weren't any in that health care bill.
So, I believe if you're going to lead a credible conservative movement, you got to start with credible information. And if you try to sell people on a scapegoat and say it's the president's fault that we have a structural deficit, well, how can that be? He's been in office two years. Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security have been around for decades. So, how could it possibly be his fault?
The reality is the president is a handsome, articulate, brilliant fellow. I just disagree with him on a lot of policy issues. But I don't need to join in this hatred of the man.
What I need to do is just say, we have better ideas. I'm a conservative with better ideas, and I can serve the country by presenting those ideas and being credible not attacking him.
Because, you know, remember, Bill Clinton said one year at a prayer breakfast, the most violated commandment in Washington, D.C., is the ninth, thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor. And I think there's an awful lot of that going on right now.
PARKER: Can you give us a specific instance where you actually felt pressure to do that, to turn on the president and say things that -- you know, to bear false witness, in other words?
INGLIS: Yes, for example, I had a breakfast gathering, about 25 people there. A guy stands up and he says, "The president is so unpatriotic. He doesn't even put his hand over his heart when the National Anthem is played or when the Pledge is recited."
And I'm standing there and I'm thinking, I know what I need to do if I want to win this primary. I'm supposed to say -- well, what do you expect out of a socialist or, you know, somebody not born in America?
But I just -- I couldn't, wouldn't -- so I just said, you know, that's just not true. I've been with the president. I've seen him put his hand over his heart. It's just not true.
The man is a patriotic American who loves the country, loves his wife, loves his kids.
Afterwards -- I went on to say but I just disagreed with him. After this, a Republican operative came up to me and said, don't give him that.
SPITZER: You know --
INGLIS: That he's a patriotic American.
PARKER: Don't give the president that.
INGLIS: Yes. And, of course, I'm thinking how are we going to get to these hard things, like I was just complimenting Paul Ryan on having a great plan for fixing Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security.
How are we going to get to that if we're embroiled in this mosh pit about where we maul each other about whether he's a socialist and a secret Muslim and whatever when we should be saying is, listen, you disagree with him. We conservatives have better ideas that will really work. But we don't need to attack him as a person. And we don't need to drag the country down in all that negative kind of -- disastrous kind of mauling of one another.
PARKER: I just want to say, I think it's sad that you will not be going back to Washington in January. You're exactly the kind of voice we need there. But before we let you go, what are your plans for the future?
INGLIS: Well, I don't know exactly that. Can I give out a phone number and see if --
(LAUGHTER)
INGLIS: There might be somebody out there interested.
PARKER: Absolutely.
INGLIS: So -- I hope there's an opportunity for me in that alternative energy sector. That's what I'm very excited about. It's a -- it would be exciting for me to move from something I've loved, which is being in Congress, to something I could love even more, which is actually delivering products to customers.
That's the -- that's what's available to us as entrepreneurs across America. It's available to us as a country if we just get this good policy in place.
PARKER: All right, Congressman Inglis, a great conversation. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll be right back.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
PARKER: Our "Person of Interest" today is a Bjorn Lomborg, a controversial author with a global reputation as a skeptic on climate change. A business professor and founder of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Lomborg argues that the consequences of climate change are vastly exaggerated and that money spent on climate change policy would be much more effective if it were used to fight major global problems like malaria eradication or water sanitation. Lomborg's views are exploited in a new documentary, "Cool It."
Let's take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, COURTESY ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS)
PAUL RETTER, PROFESSOR: Science has been hijacked by alarmists and the public are given to believe that they are to blame.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We started washing our clothes with stones.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm completely off the electronics.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Energy efficient light bulbs.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Recycle more. Drive hybrids.
BJORN LOMBORG, COPENHAGEN CONSENSUS CENTER: These are great things, by all means, let's do them. But let's not kid ourselves and believe this is what's going to fix the problem.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PARKER: Welcome, Bjorn. Thank you for joining us. So, you're sort of the anti-Al Gore?
LOMBORG: Not so much anti as post-Al Gore. You know, Al Gore was good in getting our attention to global warming. And global warming is real. But he did so by scaring the pants off of us and that's not a good way to go down if you're actually going to make good decisions.
PARKER: But, when you say it's real, is it manmade?
LOMBORG: It is manmade and it is a problem we need to tackle. But, look, we aren't tackling it very well and we haven't been tackling it for 20 years -- and to a very large extent because we're so panicked that we can't think straight about this and we are proposing grand carbon cuts which sound good, but honestly don't do anything.
PARKER: Well, as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, you are saying you made a dollar analysis in our language, and that if you are to get the best results from your spending limited resources, you would do better to, for example, provide drinking water for people in sub-Sahara Africa, right? But that doesn't change the fact that global warming exists. So, I'm not sure.
I mean, you might go in and say, OK, let's say as an example -- I'm going to put plumbing in your house, I'm going to give you water. You have until 6:00 p.m. to enjoy it. That's when the earthquake comes or the tsunami or whatever.
So, how does that -- how does that work?
LOMBORG: Well, there's two parts to this. First of all, remember, three-fourths of the world's population live dire poverty, they have much more important things to deal with. And so, we should help them with those issues.
But that doesn't mean, as you say, we shouldn't fix global warming. But we should fix it smartly. Right now, we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to do virtually no good.
The only policy on the books is the E.U. 2020 policy. If we actually go through with that, which I think the E.U. will do, we'll be spending $250 billion every year for the rest of the century.
And do you know what the impact is? We'll reduce temperatures by the end of the century, by 0.1 degree Fahrenheit.
So, we're essentially spending $20 trillion and we won't be able to tell the difference in 100 years.
SPITZER: Can we agree -- it seems to me we have a large area of consensus here but a vast area of disagreement about what we should do. The consensus is it's manmade. Temperatures are rising. The water levels are going to rise. CO2, carbon dioxide, is pouring into the atmosphere at a rate unheard of historically and it's causing this. And the only question which we're debating right now is what to do.
LOMBORG: Yes.
SPITZER: Now, here is the question: at three feet -- two to three feet, you would still have significant global consequences for Bangladesh, for instance.
LOMBORG: Yes, but there are two points we need to remember. One is to say we can adapt to many of these things and certainly the real question to Bangladesh is do we want to make them rich now and be able to deal with this or do we want to reduce seal level rise by a little bit in 100 years.
SPITZER: Well, let me ask this question -- take as a given, if we can save 50 kids tomorrow by spending $1 or spend that dollar and have no consequences on global warming, I think everybody would say, spend the dollar, save the 50 kids. I think that to a certain extent that's a false choice because we're not making the choice between HIV research or food for starving kids versus global warming. These are separate areas of spending that we're talking about. So, we're not really in the tradeoff context, right?
LOMBORG: I would actually disagree with you. If you ask, for instance, the global fund for malaria, T.B. and tuberculosis -- sorry, and for HIV, they actually tell us they have seen declining levels of investment because of global warming. You know, if this is what we're focused on, there's many other things we don't focus quite as much on. But if you'll just allow me -- the real point here is not to say that we shouldn't deal with global warming, but it is to say, we are not right now.
So when people are saying, no, no, let's make these grand promises for 2100, we don't actually do them. And there's a very simple reason why. Because it's very costly to cut carbon emissions right now. That's why we should make it cheaper.
PARKER: Let me ask you something. In your book, upon which your documentary is based, you use examples of -- well, you have several examples of things that make you feel good, but things that actually do good. OK. So, in the case of polar bears, that's the iconic image of what we most fear will happen, we'll lose all the polar bears. I think there are more than there have ever been.
LOMBORG: Yes.
PARKER: But we'll leave that to Sarah Palin.
OK. Under the feel good, which is you have written up here Kyoto, you would save 0.06 polar bears, and if you do good, you would save 49 polar bears. How does -- how does that work?
LOMBORG: Well, and that's just for one area. Let's just take it for the whole North Pole. Basically, if we all did the Kyoto Protocol, which is much, much more than we've ever managed to actually do, we would save about one polar bear a year. Now, that's nice for a couple hundred billion dollars.
But let's just remember, we shoot 300 to 500 polar bears every year. So, I'm simply pointing out, why don't we talk about stop shooting 300 polar bears first?
(LAUGHTER)
SPITZER: Bjorn, don't you feel -- and when I read your stuff and watched the movie and, yes, you make a powerful cost benefit analysis, but it reminded me very much -- and I hope you'll be flattered by this -- but it reminded me of you're playing the role of Ben Bernanke who in the midst of the subprime crisis back in '07 said, and let me quote, he said -- he said, "The troubles in the market for risky mortgages thus far don't appear to be spreading to the overall economy."
He was saying, "Don't worry. It's a small little problem. We have time to deal with it." And, of course, then it metastasized in a way that brought destruction to the whole world economy.
Isn't the possibility that this is the same situation, sufficient to say we should, in fact, do something really dramatic?
LOMBORG: All right. Let me just take -- I'm not going to go into the quote. I'm just going to take a little look at the global warming argument. Right now, Al Gore and everyone else have had 20 years to prove their policy and they've done nothing. I'm simply saying, if you actually care about this issue, why on earth should we not try to find a different, much smarter way rather than going down this failed road?
And so, I'm saying, let's invest dramatically more in research and development into green energy. Because fundamentally, as long as solar panels cost 10 times as much as fossil fuels, a few rich, well- meaning westerners will put them up on rooftops. If we can make solar panels cheaper than fossil fuels, we would have solved global warming.
SPITZER: Totally agree. Totally agree.
LOMBORG: And so we -- but the trick here is because we focus so much on cutting carbon emissions, we actually spend less, not more on investment in research and development.
SPITZER: It seems to me that given the cataclysmic risk we should do both.
LOMBORG: But we haven't done one of them, namely cutting carbon emissions, because it's very costly. And I'll say every time you spend a dollar on cutting carbon emissions, which is fairly costly, it means you can spend less on research and development. Or to put it differently --
SPITZER: Right.
LOMBORG: -- if you can find $100 billion, I would rather not see us saying, let's spend $50 billion really smartly and let's spend $50 billion pretty poorly. Let's spend all of the $100 billion on research and development because ultimately, you will only get China to say yes to cutting carbon emissions if solar panels and all the other green technologies are cheaper.
SPITZER: Kyoto is going nowhere. Cap-and-trade, given the politics of the midterm elections, seems to be going nowhere. So, a new direction is critically important. If you could pick one research area, what would it be?
LOMBORG: Ah, this is exactly what I don't want because politicians love to pick a favorite project.
SPITZER: But, wait, wait, wait a minute.
LOMBORG: Not you.
SPITZER: You're not being fair. I'm not saying the politician. If you let's play your game with you. If you had $1 to spend, not to do the cost benefit, where would you put it?
LOMBORG: Fortunately, I don't have just $1.
SPITZER: You have two.
LOMBORG: Well, we have, you know, at least a couple billion dollars.
SPITZER: OK. LOMBORG: And because researchers are cheap, you should spread it across all the different areas because most of the areas are not going to work out. But because there are lots of different opportunities, some of them will, and those are the ones that are going to be powering the 21st century. So, we should be careful not to pick winners but exactly fund all of these areas.
SPITZER: Now, you're saying what I was saying before on the other side, which is because the cataclysmic risk is so great, do it all.
LOMBORG: I would argue that there's a difference because it's a fundamental -- we don't know which of these technologies will work out, which is why we need to fund a vast array of them.
PARKER: I want to ask you the last technical question. What's your next project?
LOMBORG: What's going to be my next project? Honestly, this is a -- this is a discussion we haven't gotten right for 20 years. I think I'm probably going to be staying here for a while before we actually get this right.
PARKER: All right. Thank you so much, Bjorn. This is a very interesting conversation. We appreciate you joining us.
LOMBORG: Thank you.
SPITZER: We'll be right back.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SPITZER: Joining us now is Leo Gerard, the president of the United Steelworkers Union, the largest manufacturing union in America. It used to have 1.2 million members. Now it's down to 775,000, but beneath those numbers is another story.
Leo Gerard knows how to do deals. He knows how to work with the steel industry to save an industry that was back on its heels that was dying. And so even though there are fewer members now and those members have taken pay cuts, he has saved hundreds of thousands of jobs here in the United States.
Here to discuss how he did it and how he sees our economy moving forward, Leo Gerard. Leo, thank you for joining us tonight.
Earlier in your years as president of the United Steelworkers, the union, the industry, was back on its heels. You worked with the employers, with the companies themselves to craft deals to bring things back. How did you do that? What were the givebacks and is that a model for other sectors? LEO GERARD, PRESIDENT, UNITED STEELWORKERS INTERNATIONAL: Well, what we did is that we ended up as a result of a flood of unfairly traded steel and there was no doubt about that. We formed an alliance with the industry to file trade cases to defend what we had. We then worked with the industry to find a way to do what we called humane consolidation.
There were too many steel companies that were all too small and none could set a price and what they did was tried to kill each other. The only people they disliked more than us was each other and so they tried to kill each other. We brought them all in a room and said, look, you can't do this. We helped. We worked with some Wall Street folks like Wilbur Ross and we helped bring about a consolidation of the industry. We helped U.S. steel acquire national steel. We helped acquire LTV and Bethlehem.
SPITZER: A lot of these companies were on the verge of bankruptcy.
GERARD: They were pretty much all on the verge of bankruptcy.
SPITZER: And Ross brought them in some cases out of bankruptcy, put them together into a consolidated company.
GERARD: And what people didn't understand and still don't, it wasn't about the consolidation alone. It wasn't about concessions. What we, in fact, did was we refined the way we did the work and we went from 32 job descriptions to five.
SPITZER: Explain that because I think people need to understand how you simplified the process itself.
GERARD: We simplified the process. We got lots of management out of the way. We gave our membership more right to make determinations and, for example, if you were an operator, you could order your own parts.
Before you had to go through a scheduler who went through a purchasing guy and maybe you got the parts two weeks later. So we reorganized the way work is done. We took out layers and layers of management. We then had, because no fault of our own we lost pension and health care benefits through the bankruptcy.
We negotiated voluntary employee benefit for a benefit program, but we based them on profits. So for every -- if the company was making not very much, it put just the bare minimum. If the company was making a lot, it had to put more in.
SPITZER: You became partners with the owners of the company?
GERARD: In that regard. They made more profit. That went in to fund the health care in a bigger chunk. To give you an example, the last quarter of 2008 just as the economy was sinking, our members in a couple of steel companies got over $10 an hour in profit sharing for that quarter. By the time we got to the second quarter of 2009, they got zero. The economy tanked. But you know what? They still had their health care, their benefits, and they had their jobs but they had all of those things that we prepaid when profits were good.
SPITZER: Right. So the notion is simplified the organizational structure, put decision making where it should have been in the first place. Gave up something on the health care side that is a consequence the company was able to compete.
GERARD: That's right and still to this day we have the most productive steel industry in the world.
SPITZER: Per capita?
GERARD: Per worker, per capita. We can make steel on average and most of our steel plants one man-hour per ton. The rest is at 2 1/2 and 3. Russia and China are still at 20.
SPITZER: Now can you take this model, what you've done, and extrapolate that, use that in other sectors where we are being beaten up by foreign competition?
GERARD: I think that we need to -- in the case of what happened in the steel industry, I think it's slightly different than what's happened in other industries. Maybe a lot more similar, though, to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler because they're mature industries that had peaks of high employment and as those industries got more productive, people went on to the retiree health care role.
So you take General Motors as an example, there were almost a million retirees, 79,000 were supporting. It can't work that way and the reason that's the case is it takes us back to health care.
America is the only major industrialized country where if your retirees are going to retire, the only way they can have health care is if the employer pays for it.
The rest of the world you retire at that age of 60. You get health care. You lose your job at 58, you have health care. Only in America does that not hold true.
SPITZER: We will have to continue this conversation some other time. You are a union leader who sounds like an investment banker and that's a good thing. You know how to make deals so your employees and your members have jobs.
GERARD: I don't want to be like some of those investment bankers.
SPITZER: Neither do I. Keep doing exactly what you've been doing. Leo Gerard, fascinating conversation. Thanks so much for being here. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) SPITZER: Tonight in the "Culture of Politics," our guest is not a politician, but a poet. But then again, he believes that two professions have something in common.
PARKER: Terrence Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina, a place close to my heart. Another poet praises the unblinking truth telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world. Not bad from another poet. His latest collection "Light Head" won the national book award for poetry. Welcome, Terrence.
TERRENCE HAYES, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER: Thank you. It's great to be here.
PARKER: It's great to have another South Carolinian.
HAYES: Sure that's rare especially in New York.
PARKER: Especially a poet.
SPITZER: I've been surrounded by two word smiths here. Pulitzer Price winning, you know columnist. You just won this huge for poetry. I was a mediocre politician.
HAYES: I think you've done pretty well.
SPITZER: Do you think poetry and politics actually have something in common. In this day and age how does that work?
HAYES: We have quite a bit in common. I think if you are trying to convince people you are worth being heard that's something all artists run into, poets run into to shape a language and what do you want to tell people to make them interested in your methods and, of course, that's something that politicians deal with often. How are you going to shape a message and how are you going to engaged people.
PARKET: Terrence, poetry has this kind of a stigma attached to it. It seems more and more something that takes place in coffeehouses. How do we make poetry more popular? How do we bring it back?
HAYES: It's interesting because if you're a poet, it's pretty popular. There are so many insular worlds. I'm very pleased with the number of people I engage that are reading poems and thinking about poems, in particular even with this prize. The love I receive from so many people suggest that there are people reading and there are people that care about what we do.
PARKER: Do we have any politicians who are poets?
HAYES: There's an interesting question. We have politicians who are writers including our president. I don't know about politicians who are poets. No one knew I was a poet for a long time.
SPITZER: Not literally poets, but are any politicians whose use of language is so eloquent you look at them and say they could have been a poet, they write with a grace, they write with a sensibility that you think borders on artistry? PARKER: Sometimes you hear a great speech and you go, now that was poetry.
HAYES: Abraham Lincoln?
PARKER: There we go.
SPITZER: That's a dismal statement.
HAYES: They might be a reflection of the culture. I think our general relationship with language has changed. So someone that thinks about it as a kind of a material to shape is a rare thing.
SPITZER: How about President Obama? Certainly some of his speeches, his books, he gets high praise for his use of language. Is that only because he's being compared to other politicians or do you read them and say they actually are crafted?
HAYES: For sure. Absolutely. He's a writer. That's one of the most exciting things about having him in office, to have someone who is literary, which is sort of different from being a writer.
SPITZER: Look, I don't want to suggest we set you up with you that. Our first literary president and everyone is saying at the same time his communication with the public hasn't worked. How do you square those two?
HAYES: I have an opinion about that. I think when you think about the earliest work, the very first book, you know, dreams of my father, and when you think about the lead up to becoming president, I felt like there was a bit more shapeliness to the speech and to the language that he was giving us and that's what inspired us.
SPITZER: More personal perhaps?
HAYES: Yes, for sure. I think there was a response to that where people thought it's just rhetoric. It's just inspiring people, which baffled me because I think that, you know, action grows out of language. It grows out of the expression that he gave us.
SPITZER: Is poetry perhaps a voice of dissent? We had this conversation with another artist on the show who basically said that when you have an oppressive government, artists are the voice that rises up because other forms of -- other voices are perhaps pushed back.
HAYES: Sure.
SPITZER: Is poetry, can it fill that void?
HAYES: I think it does. Most people have a sense of dissention them and it just so happens the people can shape the message in the most effective way become our artists.
And I think that's one of the relationships between poets and politicians. So it is a voice of dissent, but it's mostly because maybe writers and artists know how to craft the message more than them being the individuals who have that message.
PARKER: You write a poem about Katrina and we will ask to you read it for us. Can do you that?
HAYES: OK, well, this goes back to the idea what it means to be an artist. In the time shortly after Katrina happened, a very good literary magazine asked me and bunch of other poets associated with the group I'm familiar with if we could write something about it. It was many years before I was able to write this poem about Katrina and it's called "Fish Head for Katrina."
PARKER: It's called, say that again.
HAYES: Fish head for Katrina.
The mouth is rather dead who are not dead, do not dream. A house of damaged translations. Task, marry to distraction. As in a bucket left in a storm, acquire singing in the rain like fish acquiring air under water. Prayer and sin, the body performs to know it is alive. Lit from the inside by reckoning as in a city, which is no longer a city.
The tongue reaching down a tunnel and the teeth wet as windows, set along the highway where the dead live in the noise of their shotgun houses. They drift from their wards like fish spreading thin as a song, diminished by its own opening. Split by faith and soaked in it. The mouth is a flooded machine.
PARKER: Wow, just a few words. Great feeling. Great, amazing images. It's what poetry does.
HAYES: Thank you.
SPITZER: I was in a profession, a lot of words, little meaning. Few words and much meaning. I applaud that.
HAYES: Thank you.
PARKER: Terrence Hayes, thank you so much for being with us.
HAYES: It was an honor to be here with you two.
PARKER: We appreciate it. Thank you. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SPITZER: In his new book "Scorpions" our "Person of Interest" Noah Feldman tells the story of how a modern relationship between the government and the people was created by four Supreme Court justices who fought each other at every turn.
Welcome, Noah, and thank you for coming. Tell me, who were these justices and what did they do to modern America?
NOAH FELDMAN, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL PROFESSOR: These were for self- made men with huge ambition, all start as liberals. The two ended up as conservative. Appointed by FDR to really change the way our constitution operated and to allow the government to do the things what the new deal wanted to do.
SPITZER: Now, FDR came to power when there was a vision of the constitution that did not have any real strength behind the federal government. The government was constrained by it. Did they change that fundamental principle?
FELDMAN: They shifted it completely. The court that FDR faced in the beginning his presidency was a conservative court that invented constitutional rights for big corporations and the direct result of that was that all of the new deal programs that he and the public wanted were struck down by the Supreme Court. And Roosevelt hated that, as you can imagine.
SPITZER: And what did he do as a consequence? He basically tried to do a hostile takeover of the Supreme Court.
FELDMAN: He did. He threatened the Supreme Court with adding new members and he went to Congress and he said I control Congress. There's nothing in the constitution --
SPITZER: By adding new members, you mean expanding the size from nine to what?
FELDMAN: Exactly. He was going to add four people, take it up to 13. And the reason is if the Constitution says you have to have a Supreme Court and people have life tenure, but doesn't say anything about how many. The number nine was invented by Congress.
SPITZER: As we all know that didn't happen, but among the justices he appointed were the four that the write about. Who were they?
FELDMAN: The first was Hugo Black who was a fascinating guy. A Ku Klux Klansman who had become a Klan member in order to get elected to the Senate from Alabama where he became the most left wing member of the Senate.
And Roosevelt chose him because he really wanted somebody whom the senators would hate, but they would have to confirm. And because he was a senator, he knew they'd have to confirm him, which is exactly --
SPITZER: And the other three had similar stories in terms of being self-made individualists with a sense of the power the Supreme Court needed?
FELDMAN: They did and they were very controversial in many ways. William O'Douglas had been chairman of the SEC where he attacked big government -- where he attacked big corporations again and again. Felix Frankfurter, who had defended (inaudible) who were essentially terrorist. These were very controversial people.
SPITZER: The consequence of this was that FDR appointed by the end of his term all nine members of the Supreme Court. FELDMAN: He got nine appointments including a new chief justice, which is a record that is very unlikely ever to be matched again.
SPITZER: And the Supreme Court then, which began, as you said, with a very conservative constrained view of federal power gave him enormous latitude and the federal government became what it is today.
FELDMAN: He got the main thing he wanted, which was a court that believed the federal government could pass laws. They could regulate the economy. They could regulate wages and hours of workers and they could also regulate Wall Street.
SPITZER: And safety and the environment and all of the other things that we've seen between World War II and the new deal and the present moment?
FELDMAN: They're all against the backdrop of the Supreme Court allowing those kinds of things.
SPITZER: So even though we don't think about the Supreme Court playing a role in our day to day politics, everything we debate today is really possible because of the vision that these four justices brought to the Supreme Court of the constitution.
FELDMAN: That's absolutely right.
SPITZER: Now we are about to see this potentially be flipped on its head. We have a very conservative court right now. We have Chief Justice Roberts. Alito, Scalia, Thomas, maybe Kennedy hanging out there as a pivot point with cases somewhat like the new deal cases on their way up there and what will happen when the health care legislation gets before the Supreme Court?
FELDMAN: We have seen some really similar moves recently in which the four conservative justices and Justice Kennedy who can go either way, depends on the case, have actually expanded the individual rights of corporations and blocked government regulation.
And so the big issues that are going to come before the court now are directly parallel to that. So the health care bill for example is being challenged right now in the lower courts and the claim that the conservatives are making is that the health care bill violates individual liberties and that's always the way it's done. To say there are individual liberties at stake when the real rights involving the rights of corporations.
SPITZER: What's your prediction here?
FELDMAN: A very close case. I predict that health care plan will survive ultimately although we'll see challenges to the financial regulation programs.
Because, I think that Justice Kennedy when push comes to shove is probably not willing to go all the way back to the bad old days when the Supreme Court blocked major popular legislation. It's a close thing. SPITZER: So the amazing thing is the world that you define in this brilliant book about the personalities of these four justices, they created modern America.
FELDMAN: They really shaped what we have today to an extraordinary degree and their personal relationships were a big part of that because, over time, these guys who starred as liberal allies changed their views and they start to hate each other.
SPITZER: Venomous. The name Scorpions describes their personal relationship.
FELDMAN: It does. Someone who observed the court said there were nine scorpions in a bottle all locked in and all wanting to outdo the others and through that they achieved their constitutional greatness.
SPITZER: And so what we're facing now is the potential for what they created to be reversed by the conservatives who are trying to bring us back to a different era of small government?
FELDMAN: I very much doubt it would go that far, but there is a reality that many people who on the conservative side and don't like big government think what went wrong in our country was precisely that the Supreme Court stood by and allowed that to happen and would like to turn it around.
SPITZER: The issue then is take today's nominees and full disclosure you and I are good friends of Elena Kagan. Where does she fit in this paragon of these four?
FELDMAN: One thing she has in common with them is she was never a judge before. None of these four people were judges. Eight of the other justices today were judges before. So Justice Kagan does have that distinctive feature.
SPITZER: Does that help or hurt?
FELDMAN: I think it's a huge plus. I think being a judge, especially an appellate judge, is a job someone tells you what to do and you listen. Not having that experience means you're less differential. I think that's a plus to start with. I think that on today's court in order to be a powerful voice on the court, you can't be a predictable vote and that's Justice O'Connor and of Justice Kennedy. So it would be interesting to see how Justice Kagan goes on that front.
SPITZER: Talk about being persuasive. She's up against justices from the conservative wing of the current court who are very precise and confirmed views. I can't imagine as persuasive as Elena can be, I have a hard time thinking she will persuade Justice Thomas or Justice Kennedy to kind of switch fundamentally on these critical issues.
FELDMAN: It's all about the vote, which is 4-4, in which Justice Kennedy is the person who is going to make the determining decision and Justice Stevens and Justice Kennedy had a good relationship and sometimes it looked as though they were influencing each other. So the question is, can Justice Kagan with her very good, diplomatic skills, develop that kind of relationship with Justice Kennedy?
SPITZER: It's going to be interesting. All right, the book of "Scorpions." You can read an excerpt on our blog CNN.com/parkerspitzer. Noah Feldman, thank you so much for being here. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GARY TUCHMAN: Hello, I'm Gary Tuchman. More "Parker Spitzer" in a moment. First the latest, Delta Flight 1921 en route Detroit to Phoenix made an emergency landing in the Colorado Springs Airport after the captain spotted an engine problem.
Two passengers suffered minor injuries during the evacuation. And tonight on 360, Christine O'Donnell fires back at allegations she misused campaign money. The question is do her answers fit the facts? We're keeping them honest. Back now to "Parker Spitzer."
SPITZER: Thank you so much for joining us tonight.
PARKER: Good night from New York. "Larry King" starts right now.
