I think that the words and the deeds we are hearing out of china, jim, are encouraging. This administration seems to be much more committed. Lets keep going. The reforms they are making in terms of letting the market determine the distribution of resources. These are revolutionary. We will hope that this leads to a kind of openness that ends up being a model for the world, if they continue with what they have told us. His activities are all related to corruption internally. They are not related to corruption that relates to external business. I think that is a very big hurdle to jump. Again, i think our role is to be as vigilant as we possibly can and call it out when we see it. The first decision i had to make was this one. It set a tone. This is what we have to do. We have to call it out when we see it. We have to encourage it everyone, especially all the major players, to look at it internally and externally. I think the new york example is a good one. There are so many things that happen because they set targets and went after them. In climate change, mayor bloomberg said we would reduce carbon by 30 by 2030. They are going to get there by 2017. You cant just say, we are going to deal with corruption generally. You have to have targets. If you have those in china and everywhere else, and very strong commitments, this has got to be an area, corruption, where we make tremendous commit his progress. Im going to give our guests time to sync up to send everybody way who is watching online and here in the auditorium, something for them to chew over that keeps them going, that makes this memorable for them. I will give you 2 or 3 minutes. I will ask Jim Wolfensohn to give us one more antidote. Anecdote. It is fabulous listening to your stories. You have one . I think you should talk to jim yong kim, the current president. Do you have anything that you would like to bring to our attention . [laughter] there is no particular story. That story of when i entered, it is an ongoing issue. The other piece of that story is that happens to be a Critical Development project. Canceling it was difficult. These are the things that we have to balance. I had to cancel something that would have had a Huge Development impact. That is the red line that you have to draw. No matter how important a Development Impact might be, you have to be ready to cancel something if you see carrots and corruption. It was a few people, a few people who had done this. Now, we hope it goes forward. It is unclear whether it will go forward. That is the difficulty of this job. Youve to be ready to make that kind of decision. Mr. Vogel, your closing thoughts . Absolutely. What he just said, he has got a long ways to go. It has been very resistant to dealing with corruption in their own companies. They found that within the world bank, but also in the u. N. The oil for food program. The principal violators were chinese violators, among the principal violators, and to try to get them to react was a blank wall. If they will not deal with it, theyll will not consider it, this was a few years ago, but i am not sure how much has changed today. I think that a lot of the Natural Resources of the future are in highly Vulnerable Countries or developing countries. I think if we can support those countries and help them give themselves the capacity and the power to be able to negotiate with the very strong powers, which are some of our countries, in addition to china, who want to those resources. At is one thing i would like. On thed one is that whole issue that, you know, if we could relegate power and greed to a new cemetery somewhere, that would help. Last point is that we were talking about development, which is so important, and we know the impediment that corruption is to development, how people have to pay bribes for essential services which they cannot afford to pay for, but it is also a question of peace, security, in our countries around the world. Of course, that also is a question of development, because it is hard to have development when you have conflicts, but hes and security and development, and at the end, it is a question of making this world a human one, where humanity prevails, as opposed to the power and greed. Mr. Wolfensohn . Do we use the microphone. I just congratulate jim and his colleagues on the formation of this new unit, which strikes me as being a practical and and iant step forward, wish them not only the very best of luck, but i would hope that they would tackle some of the , anddifficult cases also in publicity and in the annual meeting speech and things, not only talk about the successes but just how tough it is in so because ie countries, think a statement of all of the successes is useful, but i do think that even more useful is a statement of how prevalent the practice of corruption and inequities still is, and so i this department can report in two phases, one, what it has done, but also how much is to be done. Minister . Well, there is a direct correlation between poverty and and the world bank goal, if it is to reduce poverty, then they really have to make an equal amount of investment in working towards the reduction of corruption. I think this is especially important because corruption and poverty is effecting countries that are the younger countries, to bethat have potential, the drivers of growth for the world, so it is to our interest, because, after all, economies are about people and the young, the young of the world. The young in the countries of the world are in these countries that are dealing with the challenges, because it is our problem. Speak up against corruption was brought to you by the aim was toand my make this the most fascinating hour of your week. I will find out if it was when you applaud our panel. Hold it for a minute. Including the World Bank President , your panel, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] thank you for coming. Have a wonderful morning. Thank you. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] the 32nd version is the guys that were against the constitution were religions religious conservatives of the day, and it included patrick henry, who wanted to have religious tests for Office Holding and so forth. The founders were the cosmopolitans, and most of them were christians, but why did they take the approach they did . Why did they ultimately come down where madison came down . Because they believed that including their own was beyond faction. It was basically a multiplicity of sects. That is sects. There have been important changes in the law about the government defining religious institutions, so i would say there were some real issues to work there and to figure out the rules that govern this area during the clinton years, the early clinton years. They were different. They changed over time, and some people think that was a good thing, and some people think that was a bad thing. There are some really important issues that people fight about and fight about with some disagreement. Christmas day on cspan, corinth and former heads the. Hite house faithbased office on cspan two, book tv, the great war, july 1, 1916. That is at 5 00. American history tv, follow bob hope as he travels for his annual u. S. Tour of southeast asia, including stops in vietnam. Cspan. We bring Public Affairs events from washington directly to you, putting you in the room at congressional hearings, white house advance, briefings, and we offer complete gaveltogavel coverage of the u. S. House, all as a Public Service for private industry. We are cspan, created by the cable industry and funded by your local cable or satellite provider, and now, you can watch us in hd. Next, the General Motors chairman and ceo Daniel Ackerson speaking at the National Press club in washington, d. C. , where he talked about the stay of the u. S. Auto industry as well as projects and investments. He also talked about the companys first female ceo. This is one hour. Today rocked the world last week when he announced he would step down as chairman and ceo of General Motors, the worlds second largest automaker. He racked up tributes when he announced his plan to retire next month to care for his wife of more than 40 years. In two thousand 10 as the ceo to turn around the biggest of the big three from bankruptcy and the bailout by u. S. Taxpayers. That work ended last week when the u. S. Treasury sold the last of its shares. One can imagine the champagne corks popping at the Renaissance Center when that news was announced. General motors led global sales for 77 consecutive years through 2007, longer than any other automaker, the Global Financial downturn that began in 2008 also turned into a crisis or the u. S. Automotive industry, including gm. The industry was further weakened by increases in gasoline prices, discouraging the use of fuel efficient vehicles and sportutility trucks, the bread and butter of their profit. Gm filed bankruptcy in 2009 with 82 billion in assets and 173 billion in liabilities. Like saturn,rands pontiac, and homer. The government loaned them 30 billion in a turn for a 60 stake in the company. Following an ipo, the treasury last week said it recouped 39 billion of the 59 billion it spent in the bailout. Gm has turned a profit in the last three years, cut its debt, and renovated dealerships. Under his leadership, gm waste first in the jd power and Associates Initial Quality study, putting an american automaker on top of the first time in 27 years. Have wonnd trucks accolades from Consumer Reports and motor trend. Before joining gm, he was a managing director and head of global buyout for the Carlyle Group here in washington and or president of several telecommunications and technology companies, including mci, nextel, x oh, and general instruments. Please join me in giving a warm National Press club welcome to the General Motors chairman and ceo, dan ackerson. [applause] thank you, angela. Many thanks to the National Press club for inviting me to speak. This is an auspicious time to speak to an audience of reporters. As you may have heard, gm has been in the news a lot lately. Last week the transformation of General Motors passed two major milestones. First, the United States treasury sold it last share of General Motors stock, closing a remarkable fiveyear chapter in American Business history. That got immediate attention. The next day we announced that will become the next ceo. That did not go unnoticed either. On that day, for the first time in decades, all eyes at General Motors turned toward the future. The end of government motors era has cleared the way for General Motors to truly soar forward. We are building a gm that america can once again be proud debt. It has not been easy. The path forward for mary and the team will not be easy either. The enormity of the task became Crystal Clear when i became ceo. The new gm was fragile. When they emerge from bankruptcy that lasted only 39 days, that was good because we did not do it reparable damage to our brands or dealer networks. A 39 day bankruptcy only gave us time to repair the debt side of our Balance Sheet. Truly transforming a business would it take much more. We had to remedy decades of poor and,ions, indecisions, sadly, no decisions, that started to pile up. I categorized the problems we faced into three broad buckets. There were article troll costs, wasteful complexity, out of control costs, complexity, and debts. You could pick almost any point in time and find something to shake your head over. 1978, generaln motors paid almost as much in benefits as it earned in net income. Yet, saying next year, the company agreed to the largest pension increase in uaw history. Eventually, General Motors pensions in aggregate, the largest in the world, became chronically and dangerously underfunded despite tens of billions of dollars in cash, in stock infusions to make it whole , and these actions, although wellintentioned, actually weakened the company, as they treated the symptoms and not the disease. Dollars fromous Product Development. Costsecently, u. S. Hourly increased an average of four tocent annually from 2003 2007, even though the company had total operating losses of 17. 5 billion from 2005 until 2007. In other words, while management was figuratively burning furniture to keep warm, we were also automatically increasing our fixed costs. Complexity was everywhere in the business. Just a few short years ago, General Motors had more than 30 different vehicle architectures supporting sales of about 9 million vehicles worldwide. And then the ridiculous. The company had almost 70 different advertising agencies around the world just to support the chevrolet brand. It is staggering, but it also shows how we lost focus, and we lost our advantage, economies of scale. Move, gm leaders outsourced nearly all of the Company Information technology. Dismissed datay capture and dietary analytics as a core competency, just as the internet was about to transform all modern business models. 23 leasedded up with or partially owned data centers, which is not only costly but risky. We are now in sourcing our i. T. , growing it as a core compensate. Those 23 data centers will be willed to two, which increase our performance, our reliability, and our cost. At one point in time, we could barely close our own books in a because many in the company were on different general ledgers, and for those of you who are financially trained, that is finance 101. The list goes on. We all know what happens next. The company, the top of the fortune 500, when it first was listed in 1955 and stayed there for 35 years, fell into disgrace. More sobering, mgm had lost sight of its customers and what they truly valued. Quality, impelling design, and reliability. Hearts, i new gm was fixable if the new Leadership Team played team ball and systematically addressed these. So i made a promise to myself and to the board to deliver on three important initiatives in my tenure. The restoration of gms good name. Second, the transformation of the companies, basic operations, and the third goal was to put quality and the customer back at the center of every decision we made. As a result, every aspect of our tookess, every angle we was to make every system and every operation that in class. We did not set out to become competitive. We did not come out to the average. We wanted to be best in class. Have committed 3 billion off our precious Balance Sheet to build our u. S. Dealerships and create the best customer sales and Service Experience in the industry. We have reduced the time it takes to resolve complex customer issues from 28 days to one week. To get itobjective down to one day. The industrysg largest employment of four g lte the analogo bring cars of today into the digital world. Than halfesting more of 1 billion to build informationtechnology capability that would make Silicon Valley proud. Than 4invested more billion for gm financial around the world. Soon, we will be able to provide financing in markets that account for 80 of our sales on a global basis. We had been the patent board innovation leader for years, decades, and yet, we were slow to commercialize our intellectual property. For theow innovating benefit of our customers. I will give you a good example. Reducing the weight of our cars will improve our mileage and fuel economy to meet the new, more demanding standards. That means were going to have to use more aluminum. Some maybe engineers in this group, no one has ever figure how to welded out aluminum. We have. We patented it, and today, we will use more aluminum, less cars,in such things as car doors, where typically the industry used pop rivets. In fact, you see them in airplanes and cars, and in an average car, it has about 25 pounds of pop rivets in it. We no longer have to do that. It takes complexity out of our assembly lines. It releases investment, increases the efficiency of our cars and our investment. Bottom, we are now getting to the point where we can take and understand profitability on each car by vin number no matter where it is manufactured or sold around the world. Before, we were not even able to figure out profitability because around thedoms world. On the product front, we will reduce the number of vehicle architectures by half within the decade. Looked at some 40 billion of our pension liabilities. We have doubled our revolving line of credit, and we have dramatically simplified our Balance Sheet. Even more important, we have to learn the trust of our employees both hourly and salaried, and get everyone on line with profit and quality targets. Example, when a salaried employee gets a bonus, hourly workers get a profit share. They are aligned and no longer at odds with each other. I can keep on going, but i think you get the picture. We have been trying to fix this airplane while in the air and i think doing an incredible job. The Bottom Line Results of all of this work has been encouraging. We had a 21 point 3 billion dollar ipo, the largest in i. T. History at the time. Generated lots of revenue since our reorganization in 2009 and have had 15 profitable quarters in a row and are earning nearly 30 billion in earnings before taxes. We have increased investments in u. S. Facilities and have returned to the s p 100 and s p 500, and we have retained our Investment Grade rating from moodys. There is much more to come. I am sure that mary