Google Zeitgeist October 15, 2012
The World to Watch
[ Video.
] >>Lorraine Twohill: Good afternoon, folks.
[ Applause.
] >>Lorraine Twohill: I want to start by thanking
our house band, cdza.
Aren't they wonderful?
They were just so great.
So a big hand.
[ Applause.
] >>Lorraine Twohill: As an Irishwoman, I've
told how to pronounce ZDZA, and not zed A, as we say over in Europe.
So I'm excited to be introducing the afternoon sessions.
We heard some great stuff this morning, but we have so much more to come in the two sessions
this afternoon.
I run marketing at Google.
One of the things my team works on is organizing this event.
So we're very, very thrilled to be here.
Oh, be my goodness.
Thanks, team.
Just as I mention you, you stick up -- this is me doing the zero G yesterday.
It was an extraordinary experience.
And my stomach stayed inside my body, so I was very proud of that fact.
It was interesting on the zero G flight that all the women did not get sick.
My theory is that the women were all moms and they have been through morning sickness,
so they took the ginger gum we were offered and it worked.
And the men did not.
It was great fun and we had a good time.
This afternoon, a couple things I want to mention about the event and then I will introduce
the panel.
Over a year, we get so much feedback from you.
And you ask us to put more Google content in the agenda.
We try and not have, like, Google product sessions in the content, because we think
it would take from what this event is.
I wanted to mention that outside here, we have an area called the Google sandbox out
here.
If you want to learn more about how search works or get a demo of Google Wallet or play
with the Nexus 7 or use any of the Google products, I suggest you look in the sandbox.
This session is called The World to Watch.
I think the band set it up so beautifully in their video.
When they were rehearsing that, we did not know what they were doing or where they were
going with that, but I think it turned out quite well.
So we're going to take you on a journey from Europe, to China, to Africa, to Pakistan,
to Syria, literally all around the world.
So much of these countries are in the Zeitgeist for many different reasons.
So we felt it was very, very important, as our theme is "The World Around Us," to really
focus in on The World to Watch.
We'll take you through lots of these journeys, but through the eyes of storytellers, people
who actually go out there and live this and experience this themselves day in, day out.
News is something that interests all of us.
It's how we often hear about what's happening in the world.
So within this session, we hear from amazing newsmakers, news creators, who go out and
actually capture these stories and bring these stories to us again and again.
Now, within this session, I want to call out just one particular speaker.
We tend as we work on Zeitgeist to bring in new, fresh names every year, folks you haven't
heard of before, so we don't tend to bring back speakers too many times.
We're making one exception this year, which is Sharmeen.
You know, as we work with the speakers each year, we really become friends.
And we develop a friendship over many, many years.
And we follow the speakers' journeys as they leave this stage and go on and do just extraordinary
things, often because of the folks they've met here like all of you.
And Sharmeen left this stage and then went and won an Oscar, which is no small feat,
but also had an extraordinary year.
So many incredible things happened in her life.
So we asked her to come back this year and talk to us again.
She brought a friend with her called Khalida, who is just doing amazing things in Pakistan.
So for -- the Sharmeen and Khalida conversation is completely off the record.
And it's extremely important that everybody respects that in this room.
It's extremely important that we understand what they go through every day when they leave
these kinds of events and go back home to their country and that we respect that what
they're going to tell us and share with us is very private.
Now I'm going to introduce the moderator who is going to take us through this incredible
journey around the world, Campbell Brown.
No new name to any of us, but Campbell is an Emmy award winning storyteller herself,
writer and journalist.
She had the Campbell Brown Show on CNN for many, many years and has traveled the world
reporting for CNN and NBC.
She's also interviewed three presidents while -- three presidents of the U.S. while acting
as president.
So I think she is more than capable of handling this panel we have ahead of us this afternoon.
So, Campbell, please join me on stage.
[ Applause. ] >>Campbell Brown: Hi, everybody.
Thank you, Lorraine.
Great to be here.
I'm going to dive right in, because as Lorraine said, we're going to try to cover multiple
continents in a very, very short period of time.
I think our first panel is going to be a really fascinating follow-up to the conversation
you heard this morning between Eric and Austan Goolsbee.
Let me bring them up, David, Yang, Dambisa, come on up.
[ Applause. ] >>Campbell Brown: So let me tell you a little
bit about these guys.
David McWilliams was the very first economist to see that the Irish boom was nothing more
than a credit bubble and was one of the few to accurately predict that it would end in
a monumental crash with bank failures, negative equity and rising unemployment.
He has also written many books, documentaries, hosted television, and even done theater,
which I think is a little unusual for an economist.
>>David McWilliams: You have to make it up as you go along.
>>Campbell Brown: Welcome.
Dambisa Moyo is an expert on China, Africa, merging economies.
You were named by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential -- 100 most influential
people in the world recently and also named to the World Economic Forum's young global
leaders.
Yang is a writer, Yang Hengjun.
He is an expert on international affairs.
He is a very popular Chinese Blogger. 10 million people read his blog every day.
He is a business executive, a well-known writer of spy fiction, a man of many talents.
>>Yang Hengjun: I prefer Blogger. >>Campbell Brown: As you described to me last
night, you're a half dissident, one foot in, one foot out.
Anyway, welcome to everybody.
David, let me start with you, we'll start with Europe.
Professor Goolsbee, very pessimistic about Europe and its ability to pull its act together.
Do you agree with him?
>>David McWilliams: I think you no he that everything is not right in Europe when the
Pope is a German and the head of the central bank is an Italian.
[ Laughter ] >>David McWilliams: Because we know what the
Pope is doing to Catholicism, he's turning it into a Protestant religion with all the
rules.
And the Italian is trying to turn the euro into the lira behind the backs of the Germans.
That's really what's going on, is that the Germans are now beginning to realize that
they were sold a pub, because the great plan was that the rest of Europe would turn into
Germany with the euro.
But as that great economist Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan until they get
a punch in the face.
[ Laughter ] >>David McWilliams: And the -- the punch in
the face for the Germans has been that not only did the Irish not turn into Germans or
the Greeks turn into Germans, or Spanish.
Worse still, the Greeks became more Greek in the euro.
The Irish became flamboyantly Irish in the euro.
The Spanish, shamelessly Spanish.
And worse for the Germans, we used their money to do it.
So Irish banks overlent and overborrowed.
The Greeks lent too much themselves.
The Spanish built too many apartments.
And when the Germans came looking for their money back, it wasn't there.
So it is culture what we're talking about.
If you look at the European economy -- and I think Professor Goolsbee was right -- it
is caught in a brace, a sort of liquidity trap, because on the one side of the balance
sheet is too much debt, and the other side of the balance sheet, the assets we bought
fell in value.
And when you have a liquidity trap, you need to inflate your way out of the problem.
But we're doing the opposite.
So the Germans have said, what we must do is have austerity for all, kind of equal-opportunity
austerity.
But this is making the situation worse, because the economy is caught in a liquidity trap,
not unlike the United States would have been back in the 1930s.
And it's very interesting this morning to hear all the stuff about Roosevelt in the
1930s.
And, you know, imposing more austerity on a weak economy, it's kind of like putting,
I don't know, an anorexic on a diet and expecting that person to get fat, because unless the
European economy can be stimulated from within, it's very difficult to see how unemployment
-- Europe's got three big problems.
We have too much debt, not enough growth, and no political leadership.
So you take those three issues, and I think Professor Goolsbee is right, it's a kind of
recipe for an ongoing crisis, because every time a decision is taken, you might notice
in Europe at the European level, what will happen is that it simply buys less and less
time each time before the next crisis.
So I think what really has to happen, and I speak as somebody from Ireland, which is
a very pro-European country.
It's not like talking to a British person who almost their DNA is anti-European.
They want the whole thing to fail.
We're really part of a country that really is a big supporter of the European Union and
the European project in general.
But what we can see is, austerity is crippling our countries.
For example, Ireland has lost 400,000 people, out of a population of 4 million, in three
years, have left the country.
So this is what happens.
It's real.
Lorraine is one of our more glamorous and successful emigrants.
But most of us, like I worked in a bar in New York in the '80s for the same reason.
Well, actually worked as a dishwasher.
But there you go.
I was actually probably the worst dishwasher ever.
But the point is, you get a country that is caught in a liquidity trap.
You impose more austerity, unemployment just rises, the political project becomes less
and less convincing for people, and ultimately, in a country like Ireland, for example, people
emigrate in huge numbers.
Now, that is not a recipe for political and economic peace.
It's a recipe for disaster.
And it's going on and on and on.
The problem is that the elites in Europe have no real connection -- I mean, it's interesting
you were talking about -- I was listening -- very interested to listen to Van talk about
politics here and listen to the heart and the head and all that sort of stuff.
What you have in the European Union, unfortunately, is, the elites seem to have no mechanism whereby
they can register social and economic turmoil, as is happening in all our countries.
So I think the professor was right to say the European crisis will go on for a long,
long time, because there's no mechanism to fix it.
>>Campbell Brown: But talk a little more specifically about the players in what you're describing
as a culture war, essentially.
>>David McWilliams: I think it is a culture war.
I think what you have is you've got the creditor nations of Germany, Finland, Netherlands,
Austria.
They are on one side of the equation.
And then you have the debtor nations of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland on the
other side of the equation.
The Germans naturally want to get all their money back.
But we don't have it.
And, actually, a German friend of mine said to me, "Oh, yeah, that's very strange, Ireland,
Portugal, and Spain, it's all you Catholics."
I said, "Maybe, maybe."
The point is, the culture war is that Germany needs to make a choice.
And that choice is, does it pay the bill for its own banks that lent recklessly to banks
elsewhere in Europe?
And it is going to be do that, will it allow Draghi at the head of the Central Bank to
print money to operate a QE-type policy?
Because if it doesn't do that, what's going to happen is, the economy will continue to
slow.
And then the really fractious country in all this that nobody is speaking about is France.
France is the country which is incapable of reform.
There are countries like ourselves and Spain who have -- and Portugal, who have abided
by these IMF programs and have made deep, deep cuts, which I believe is the wrong policy,
but the fact is, we've done it.
There is no political constituency in France to reform the country in the way which that
Spain has been asked to reform or Italy has been asked to reform.
And if this is the case, I think in the next 24 months, the European crisis -- -- which,
again, started in Greece, then went to Ireland, then went to Portugal, then went to Italy,
then to Spain, then back to Italy and back to Spain -- will actually go to France.
And once France is affected -- and by that I mean the bond market will be sold quite
aggressively -- then Germany has a serious choice, which is, does it embrace France and
cut the rest of us off in order to save itself and the euro?
Or does it allow its citizens to face the idea that they will constantly have to inject
money into the periphery for the next generation?
And that is -- that's the big choice.
And, again, you know, Merkel is fighting an election this year.
And she will do and articulate what Germany wants rather than what Europe wants.
And we know what -- already that the Bundesbank is in open war with the ECB.
>>Campbell Brown: I know I'm moving fast here, but we've only have a brief amount of time.
We're going to go to China.
And Yang and Dambisa, and, yank, just talk to us, I guess, your overview.
You have this booming middle class, future's biggest market.
Looks like China is on a path to merge with the rest of the world.
But how far can it really go given the political system?
>>Yang Hengjun: Yesterday we talked with David, China, the big economy, and big productivity.
And, actually, I think China has some big problems, especially in the field of economy.
But when I come here, I can feel the China economy is booming.
I feel strong here than I was in China.
There was -- >>Campbell Brown: Meaning the perception among
Americans is that the economy is -- >>Yang Hengjun: Yeah, yeah.
So many rich people come here.
You know, they buy the expensive house in the area in San Francisco, and they go to
the outlet shopping spree like the end of the war.
This make the China economy look good; right?
But if you go inside, you say we have a big problem.
The first problem is that -- is the Chinese economic model.
That model is based on the lower human rights and big government.
The government controls money, power, and the people, and even the people's minds.
But now, because of the information -- because of the Chinese are further open to the outside
world, because of the information and communication technology, that situation changed.
Why?
Give you example.
The middle class now increased rapidly.
It's booming.
I think the statistic is different, but I guess at least 100 million middle class.
Now, they are -- want more from the government.
They want political rights.
They want less tax.
So our government got a lot of money from the people.
So when the United States -- they go to the United States, buy the debt.
When Greece got problem the prior several months, they tried to help Greece out.
But the middle class just becomes angry, say, "You help us out first.
Come back."
So China do nothing.
So the lower class is wakening up, too, because the lower human rights.
But now they're waking up, too, because of the Internet.
Mainly because of the Internet.
They want more from government.
They want welfare.
You know, before that, China don't have that.
>>Campbell Brown: The irony is, they're living almost double lives on the Internet versus
how they are existing in real life.
Dambisa, give us your take on the social and economic situation there now.
>>Dambisa Moyo: So I think it's really important that we set this in context.
And for me, the thing that I think is particularly interesting in regards to China is what the
rest of the world, particularly people in the emerging markets, think about China and
view China in the context of global economics and politics in the decades to come.
And let me frame it like this.
You have two economies.
The largest economy, the United States, let's call it $15 trillion GDP.
It has democracy as its political ethos, and it has private capitalism as its economic
strategy.
You have the second largest economy in the planet, China, with about $7.5 trillion.
It has no democracy as its political strategy, and it has state capitalism as its economic
approach.
These two strategies have the same Gini coefficient, which is the measure that economists use to
measure income and equality.
So because 90% of the world's population lives in the emerging world -- I know living in
the United States, you're all obsessed with November 6th.
But I've had the good fortune to travel to over 50 countries around the world, and many
of them in the emerging world.
People in the emerging world are actually obsessed with who's going to win this competition.
Is it going to be an American dream or a Chinese vision?
What do we really mean by this?
And I think there are lots of different things that we can point to, even with the context
or with the backdrop that China is going through a bumpy road right now.
Many more leaders and people from the -- policymakers from the emerging world spend time in Beijing
than they do in Washington.
The discourse in the United States continues to be incredibly negative towards China.
And more than that, policymakers from the United States tend to go to emerging countries
and almost are now on a campaign of scare mongering, oh, Chinese are just about near
colonialism, they cheat, they lie.
And it seems to me that there's a missing component in Washington, missing sort of chip
in their brain, to understand that the world has changed and it's changing quite considerably.
May I just also give you a bit more context, in the sense that this 90% of the world that
lives in the emerging world, of that population, I should have said my disclaimers, I'm from
Africa, in places like my own continent, 75% of the population is under the age of 24.
In places like Uganda, for example, 50% of the population is under the age of 15.
We need jobs.
We need investment.
That is something that the Chinese have been able to deliver very strategically.
Are there issues?
Of course there are.
However, I think to think that the Chinese are on this sort of raping and pillaging near
colonialist campaign is actually back-footing the United States in what I think is the most
important election that's going to decide where the world goes in the next decade.
>>Campbell Brown: David, do you agree with that that in this war of ideas, the Chinese
are winning?
And talk a little bit about what it means for the E.U.
>>David McWilliams: I'm not too sure they're winning.
But I think Dambisa's point is right that there's a portrayal that this is a neocolonial
movement by China.
And "How dare they invest in Africa."
"How dare they not ask us first before they invest in African infrastructural products."
I think Europeans are, in a typically neurotic European way, were afraid of China's potential
success and China's potential failure.
The success, for us is, we've seen it all before.
The shock that is China opening up was exactly like the shock when the United States opened
up in the late 19th century and Europe was flooded with cheap grain from the Midwest
of the States that pushed down prices, agricultural prices, that led to mass depopulation of European
agricultural workers.
They all went to the cities.
They embraced Marxism.
They embraced Leninism.
And what you had was a huge change in the industrial working class of Europe facing
the opening up of China.
And it was all based on deflation in agricultural prices.
In the case now -- of America.
In the case of China, most European workers are afraid of China.
They realize that their companies are investing in China.
They realize that free trade, most people will realize that ultimately, free trade will
have a massive impact on manufacturing workers in Europe.
And this is an enormous ongoing existential fear on the part of the labor movement in
Europe.
On the other hand -- that's the success of China.
That's the fear of success.
>>Campbell Brown: Let me let Yang respond to that before you go on to your next point.
Should they be afraid?
I mean, you know better than anyone.
>>Yang Hengjun: China is 30 years of economic development due to the openness.
You know who opened the China door in 1814 is Great Britain's war opened China's door.
Talking about China waning, yes, economically, I agree.
But China right now, everything in China, inside, we feel very strong.
Economy, is politics.
We've got a big hill to climb.
That's political system.
And 95% of Chinese feel we've got a difficulty to climb the mountain.
If that mountain didn't climb, we will feel.
For the past 3,000 years, China was always very advanced; right?
It's the only one uninterrupted civilization.
But why we are interrupted so frequently?
Because of politics, not economy.
Right now, it's very serious in China.
All of the people unsatisfied with government.
For example, in the Internet business, I want to give an example, you've got Google; we've
got Baidu.
You've got YouTube; we've got -- You've got Twitter; we've got Microblogger.
You've got everything we've copied in China.
And we do better within China than Google.
Baidu do better.
And it's a copy; right?
>>Campbell Brown: Except for the political system.
>>Yang Hengjun: Why?
Because so simple.
There is an invisible war.
That's -- The Chinese, we have productivity, but we don't have creativity, initiative.
The onus of the world we created by ourselves.
It's the firewall.
[ Laughter.
] >>Yang Hengjun: I think some guys here in
United States and Great Britain helped the Chinese government do that.
Please don't.
Please don't tell the firewall.
When the firewall was torn down, our Internet company go down with it.
Because the firewall protected us right now.
But when I come here, many more of my readers are asking me to ask a question of Google
boss, "When will you come back?"
And many people say, "Will you come back, please?
Together, fight the evil with us."
Of course, 20% are afraid.
They say, "Don't come back, or you have to do evil."
>>Campbell Brown: So let me -- let's say, David, Dambisa, if you could both address
this, if you agree with Dambisa and China is sort of winning this war of ideas or more
than that around the world, and the U.S. wants to re-exert itself, how do we reassert ourselves
in this world?
What should the U.S. be doing now, in your view?
And you as well, Europe, or in the emerging economy.
>>Dambisa Moyo: It's quite interesting being here and listening to people talk about disruptive
solutions.
Everybody has -- We know what the problem is.
But what should we do?
What can be disruptive to kind of come up with a solution?
What I would challenge people in the room to right now is rather than have a disruption
focused on solutions, you might want to also start thinking about disruptions around your
assumptions about what's happening in the rest of the world.
What do I mean by that?
Let's go back to 1948 at the time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed by
the United Nations.
Even at that point, there was a schism between the developed economies, so the United States
and European countries, on what they defined human rights to be, and the emerging economies.
At that time obviously much poorer than they are today.
Western economies defined human rights to be political rights, so things like democracy,
universal suffrage, issues around participation in -- political infrastructure was really
what they defined to be human rights.
Quite the contrary, emerging economies define human rights around access to food, water,
education, so very much Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
And that conflict has been basically playing out over multiple decades.
As an economist, perhaps it's not surprising, my -- my general view is that -- is that you
need to get the economics right first before you get the democracy in place.
And we have already experienced multiple decades, certainly 15 years -- at least 15 years of
efforts by western countries to shoehorn democracy across the world.
Places like Africa, South American, Eastern Europe, and so on.
And I would argue that it's been relatively unsuccessful.
If you look at the Freedom House statistics, for example, the majority of democracies that
exist around the world are actually not liberal democracies.
In that context, it's been a failure.
The question we should ask is why is that the case?
Well, I believe it's the case because we don't have middle class -- the middle classes on
the ground in these countries able to hold their governments to account.
Now, what does that mean about China?
It means that China, not China alone, places like Chile, Singapore, are beautiful examples,
live examples of countries that have actually been able to create sustainable economic growth
and meaningfully put a dent in poverty over multiple decades without democratic process.
Will there be need for democratic and political change in China?
Of course there will.
But I think it ought to come up more organically and therefore we oughtn't be sort of assuming
that China's experiment with economics first, democracy later is going to fail.
I actually am very sanguine that you will see a democratic process emerge in China,
but I think it perhaps will not emerge in the shoehorn way that we expect it to.
>>Campbell Brown: David.
>>David McWilliams: I agree Dambisa of the idea of this sort of almost the new-fangled
version of gun boat diplomacy, from which the British operated into the late 19th century.
Starting with Professor Goolsbee, all the way down to Ken, that the United States is
in the process of managing the decline of American power.
And if we -- if we start from that point, that empires grow, they get big, they overreach
themselves, and they generally get smaller, particularly if they are emerging not just
China, but as Dambisa said, all sorts of emerging countries, I mean, it strikes me that what
the United States has got to do is manage -- I wouldn't say the decline, but the relative
decline of the United States over the course of the next 50 years.
I acknowledge that as Professor Goolsbee said this morning, maybe the growth rate will only
be 2% or maybe at best 2.5% over the course of the next 10 years or as the growth rate
of other countries will be much more dramatic.
In that context, to make sure inasmuch as possible that whatever the United States does,
it doesn't aggravate the position of change.
Take the Middle East.
It doesn't aggravate what is an organic process in the Middle East to any great extent.
Or if we take resources, 7 billion people -- the first thing that we heard this morning,
7 billion potential consumers, one planet, so it's very clear that the battle for resources,
whether it's energy, whether it's food, whether it's water, these are all the big issues of
not only our generation, but as Van was talking about, the kids whose grandparents like Prince,
their generation.
Because if you have a planet that can't get any bigger, which we have, and if you have
a population growing explosively outside of the United States, outside of Europe, which
we have, then the key battle is the battle over resources, whether it's energy, or food.
And I would say that the -- that for me as a non-American, but somebody who comes here
all of the time, has family here, et cetera, who feels has family here, et cetera.
Who feels culturally very close to the United States, as many Irish people do, I think what
best we could expect American to do is husband that change in a way in which it comes to
term with the fact that sometimes in a game other players emerge and they are better.
>>Campbell Brown: I somehow cannot imagine either of our candidates for president talking
about -- [ Laughter ]
>>Campbell Brown: -- how they are going to manage the decline of America in tomorrow
night's debate.
>>David McWilliams: Yeah, I know they can't, but that's because they're not telling the
truth.
That's because -- since they want to get voted in.
You know, the truth is that countries get very, very powerful, they overreach themselves,
other people cop on to their ideas, copy them, and ultimately the resources are shared more
equally than has been the case in the last 50 years of the globe, that is.
>>Dambisa Moyo: May I just say one quick thing.
Sorry, I know you have to watch the time.
Just very quickly, what I would leave you with is that there are three key ingredients
that drive economic growth from the perspective of an economist.
They are capital, labor, and productivity.
If you look at the American picture, in fact including Western Europe, the picture of capital
where they have debts and deficits, both at the household and corporate -- especially
the corporate, but the household and government level, labor, you have both an issue with
quality and quantity.
So you have declining populations, lots of resistance towards immigration and also very
poor statistics around quality.
So there are always CTP statistics.
For example, in math, reading and science are a classic example of how America has declined
and European countries are declining in terms of competitiveness.
And then finally this last thing, which we call an X factor, a factor of productivity
which defines 60% of why one country grows and another one doesn't.
If you just look at these three ingredients, you will see why it is and what it is that
the United States needs to do to get back in the game.
But you can also see why it is China, again, capital, labor, productivity, why it is the
China story is so strong and that of the emerging market.
So in summation, what is it that the United States need to do?
It needs to forget about worrying about what China is doing, fix your own capital, labor
and productivity story and then start to engage with the world in the way it is and not the
way that you would like it to be and the world has changed considerably.
>>Campbell Brown: Thank you very much.
[ Applause ] >>Campbell Brown: Fascinating conversation,
Dambisa, Yang and David.
Appreciate it.
>>Campbell Brown: Thanks, guys.
A lot of ground covered in a very short period of time as I promised.
I'm very pleased to introduce your next speaker who, if you were here last year you may remember
her as Lorraine mentioned earlier.
Sharmeen Obaid gave a very moving talk at last year's Zeitgeist and she's back this
year now as an Academy Award winner and an Emmy award winner, come on up.
I just want to remind everyone of what Lorraine said at the very beginning, also, that this
portion of this segment is off the record, so please no tweeting or blogging while their
conversation is taking place.
[ Applause ]. >>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: On February 26th,
this year, I walked the red carpet at the Academy Awards and for a woman who grew up
in Pakistan, this is the kind of stuff that dreams are made of.
Really.
Earlier, this year, when the nomination happened, I was in my office in Karachi.
And in Pakistan, the Academy Awards fever had never really hit.
People knew about it, but when my name was announced, everybody wanted to know what an
Oscar nomination meant and, you know, of course, when -- when I had worked on a film called
Saving Face, which I spoke about last year, which profiled the lives of two women, Zakia
and Rukhsana, who had a corrosive substance thrown on their face, and they had fought
the system to overcome it.
It was a film about how Pakistan can solve its own problems if it wants to.
And so for me, particularly, it was the kind of film that I wanted to get to the Academy
Awards.
It was the kind of film that should have won.
And when we did, everybody went insane in Pakistan.
It made headlines.
I instantly became a household name.
Twitter, Facebook, everybody was talking about it.
For a nation that doesn't get good news, and for a nation that's -- very seldom invests
in its people, especially its women, it was incredible to see that.
But like everything, it was very short-lived.
A few weeks after the film was released in the United States, and the Oscar win happened,
a movement was started to discredit me.
Particularly difficult because this is a time for anybody to be celebrating.
It is an achievement.
It's a milestone.
These were the headlines that were taken out once the Oscar was won.
Very soon afterwards, of course, things changed.
A non-profit that I was working with on the ground decided to block the film.
They started extorting money from us.
When we refused, they went out into the press, started making up lies.
One of the women who I profiled in the film, her husband convinced her that she had millions
to make in the wake of an Academy Award.
We started getting calls, blackmails, letters.
She said that we owed her $30,000 and a house.
For someone who worked around the world in over 10 countries and made 16 films, it particularly
shook me.
That somebody would come out and do this.
But more importantly, when I started looking at the issue and started looking at how I
was systematically being discredited, I realized that there was something bigger happening.
I had done something.
I had shaken the status quo.
Women do not do what I do.
We do not highlight the issues that I speak about.
Because as a nation, we hide them under the carpet.
And when we do speak about them, we certainly don't go out into the world and proclaim it.
And so I needed to be taught a lesson.
And this is how I was being taught a lesson.
A local assembly in parliament started an inquiry.
I was summoned.
I was threatened with jail time.
And I was told, in not so many words, that I needed to stop telling these difficult stories.
An online movement was started with a hashtag called justice for Rukhsana, the woman featured
in my film.
All of the right wing movement was galvanized.
It was the first time in my life where I felt that I should move away from Pakistan.
I have always been that eternal optimist who felt that if we invested in our country, my
generation particularly, the educated people, then change would come.
But it's becoming increasingly difficult for our voices.
Just before I left for the United States, a 14-year-old girl who I have worked with
was shot point-blank.
Why?
Because she wanted an education and wanted young women like her to get an education.
We are all targets today.
Every single one of us who wants to shake the status quo is a target today.
But instead of taking that negativity and allowing that to eat me out, I decided that
we would do something about it.
There is change in Pakistan.
There are many, many people working on the ground, pockets of change, especially women
and their voices needed to be heard.
We as a nation needed people to look up to, to aspire to, to give us hope that we can
fight on; that we aren't alone.
And out of that started a campaign.
We convinced Coca-Cola to buy 16 television channel air time.
And we launched Pakistan's first documentary series that profiled the brave work of people
who no one talked about or celebrated.
I want to play a clip of the series so you know and it kind of -- we use the Oscar as
a starting point.
[ Video ] >>> I want to dedicate this award to all of
the heroes working on the ground in Pakistan working for change.
This is for you.
[ Music ] [ Video ]
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: I traveled the length and breadth of Pakistan finding the heroes.
I found a young woman in one of the most violent parts of Karachi who was transforming the
primary education system for the poorest of poor.
I found a man who was rebuilding an entire city out of a rubble of an earthquake without
any government help.
A doctor in the City of Peshawar on the front lines of the war on terror rehabilitating
drug addicts, especially children.
A woman who fought day and night to free bonded labor, who had been shot at, whose brother
had been paralyzed, because she decided that no Pakistani should be involved in bonded
labor.
A man who was providing clean water to entire communities, who are dying because the water
is contaminated in the deserts in Pakistan.
And a young woman, who in Balochistan is changing education for women.
All of these people risk their lives every single day and they do it because they have
to.
The price of us not winning is too high.
We cannot afford for the Taliban to win.
When these stories started coming out, people started writing to us, hundreds and thousands
of people across Pakistan wrote to us and thanked us for changing the discourse in Pakistan.
The press started favorably talking about things.
And for the first time I felt that, you know, we can take the negative and convert that
into the positive, but really it's these very people that I've profiled that inspire me
to go back and continue living there.
Despite the fact that I now have a bodyguard, my daughter who is two years old cannot leave
our house without one, my husband has two.
Our cars are bullet-proof.
This is not the kind of life that most of you are familiar with, but this is my reality
every single day.
Only because I choose to write and speak out about the things that neither the government
of Pakistan nor the Taliban want to hear.
I want to play a clip of a young woman I found in my travels who inspired me to no end who
is here with me today.
I want you to watch.
I've just finished a film on her.
Watch two minutes of the film and I'm going to bring her up on stage.
[ Video ]. >>> Days have passed, unto me, until one day
when I was 10.
Exhausted in the field work of all day, I wish to rest and there I lay.
Seized I was in your hands, I was a sinner.
I slept on open lands.
My heart stopped just at the time and I was killed for an unknown crime.
[ Video ] >>> Life has realities for me, to know and
to learn and to see.
[ Video ] >>> Thank you so much.
[ Applause ] >>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: It's women like Khalida
and the women and men that I've profiled in my series this year, those are the voices
of the Pakistan the world needs to hear.
Because we are invested in our country.
It will just be a long and difficult fight and many of us may not live to see the Pakistan
that we dream about today.
But we strongly believe it's one worth fighting for.
Please join me in welcoming Khalida on to stage.
[ Applause ] >>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: First, can I just
say that she's 24 years old.
24!
>>Kahlida Brohl: I'm really old, seriously.
24 in my community it would be like a grandmother's age.
[ Laughter ] >>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: Khalida told me that
she snuck out of her house to come to Google Zeitgeist, might I add.
Khalida, what happened?
>>Kahlida Brohl: We got bombed recently at our office, and somehow I escaped at life.
We got out of the office and it blew and where I am from -- and my dad was really concerned
about that.
Because before that, there has been incidents when he's been like you have to stop or you
have to do these things or that.
And I've never listened.
And there's been incidents like, you know, arrests, warrants and tribal people coming
up with their guns and stuff.
So this was one of those things and after that, dad got really mad at me.
And he said that "You are not going to the U.S."
Because he knew that if I go to the U.S., I will be meeting, you know, supporters, I
will be meeting mentors, would tell me more how to go ahead with your work.
He was really concerned.
And this night I just left and came here.
He's not talking to me.
[ Laughter ] >>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: Tell me, tell everybody
about the work that you do.
>>Kahlida Brohl: My work?
I feel like it's kind of -- I mean, it's just not a work.
It's all of those stories of women that we're working with, all of those women we're surrounded
by.
Every women that we work with has a story and all of those stories tell us what we are
really doing.
Because me and my team, we are just crazy people.
We are going out there, working with the tribal communities, tribal leaders, Mullahs, telling
them that this is something that we are going to do and this is what it's going to change
for you.
And somehow we have to hide the fact that we are going to end the custom of honor killings.
We have to work around all of those things and tell them that we are going to promote
your traditions, we are going to provide income support to your families, but never tell them
that it's income support for your women.
Eventually there's a process where we create Sughar centers.
These are skill and learning centers in villages where women come and supposedly make embroidery
products like these, but in the meantime they also get trainings on enterprise development,
education, basic education, life skills, et cetera in sessions for six months.
And after that they get a loan to start their own businesses.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: So what she's not telling you is that she tells the men that
she's reviving local handicrafts.
And when they are gone, she start empowering the women.
And it's pretty cool the way she does it.
Because they have absolutely no idea what's happening.
It's a little two-page -- >>Khalida Brohi: They actually get slight
anxiety after a few weeks.
Like women start speaking up, they are making decisions, but somehow they are bringing chunks
of money home, you know, from the product they make.
So they are, like, maybe if we stop them, the money would stop as well.
So it's like a thing that we learned after a failure from campaigns that I was doing
in (inaudible) so this really worked.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: So -- so I think people need to hear about where you're from
because, you know, my world and her world are very different, even though we come from
the same country.
So you should talk a little bit about where you grew up and what your village is like
and -- and your family structure.
>>Khalida Brohi: Yeah.
I'm from a village and Province of Balochistan in Pakistan.
It's the province that's connected with Afghanistan and Iran.
We share a lot of traditions and a lot of customs with each other.
There are many, many Beautiful traditions, but somehow there are traditions that actually
enforce violence towards women and force them in a way that they should be at home, child
marriages and exchange marriages and things like that.
My mom was nine years old when she was exchanged into marriage and my dad was 11 or 12 at that
time.
And it was something I think that was the basic thing from where my life started, from
everything and how I have turned out to be right now it started.
Because my mom was given away in an exchange for her uncle's bride and she did not even
know it was happening.
She was playing for her dolls when they called her and they were like "You're getting married,"
and she did not know the answer to that, how to respond, what to do.
She tells me that she would keep thinking about how should she react.
Should she cry to go back home?
Should she actually adopt herself to the new house?
She just stood paralyzed and went about with the processes that happened around her.
My dad actually ran away from home after the marriage.
He could run away.
He showed his anger.
Because he was 11 he didn't know what was happening.
He went to a boarding school, and when he went to university through the processes,
I'm really fortunate that he was supported by friends to go to a school where going to
-- school is really not that much education and stuff, but he got his education and saw
what university is like.
In the university he saw some girls that he really wanted -- he was like, wow, these girls
can actually speak about politics and they can be very knowledgeable as well.
He said, "Maybe I can marry again and maybe I can marry one of these women."
When he was about to do that he thought to himself why don't I go back home and educate
my wife, the one that I actually left back home.
He decided to do that.
He took a year off and went back and educated my mom, and they fall in love and that's where
my mom learned about education and she demanded that they go out of the village.
That's where they had a fight with the tribal leaders, they were kicked out of the tribe
and they went and we were born there and we got to go to school and we had all our freedom
and everything.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: Despite the work that you do now, what you're doing is groundbreaking
because your cousins and everybody else around you is already married.
I just want people to understand that every single day you are fighting this system which
needs you to be married like yesterday.
>>Khalida Brohi: Yeah, it's pretty hard walking back in my village where everyone is married
and I'm the oldest person who is not married over there, and especially a girl.
And then people really talk about different things, but then a marriage in our village
is not something that people have to do -- you know, like do you want to or not?
It's compulsory and it's decided when a girl is born.
Now that I know this is off the record, I really hope so --
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: It's completely off the record.
>>Khalida Brohi: I was given into engagement already even before I was born.
My mom was only nine years old when she was given into exchange, and the family demanded
that she's only nine and she cannot do much in our house and we want another girl in exchange
as well.
They said, "We don't have anyone."
They were like, "Okay.
So the first girl born into this family, born from this new house, then she will be given
off into marriage to that certain cousin."
My dad actually bought me back when I was 11 years old.
He paid money for me.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: Tell us about the centers that you've established.
How many are they, where are they and how are you sustaining this work?
>>Khalida Brohi: Yeah.
There are about 23 centers in Balochistan Province.
We are working with more than 700 women currently.
And it's been really great.
The way we see it, the idea has really worked a lot.
Before Sughar we were doing a campaign where we were out on the streets shouting, trying
to change the policies and things like that, and eventually we were actually attacked by
the tribal leaders.
In my own community they said how dare a person from the community as she stands against the
customs like that?
And when we failed after that and Sughar was created, it worked so quickly we actually
scaled up to Sin recently in 2011 and there right now we're working with more than 300
women in Sin as well.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: When you look at Pakistan today and you travel into the heartland,
and you and I were talking about it, you have a lot of hope.
>>Khalida Brohi: I do.
People call me crazy for how positive I am.
My dad especially tells me maybe I've lost my mind somewhere because it's been seven
years of what I'm doing, and I feel like everyday of my life gives me so much hope and so much
energy.
I just can't deny the fact that there's hope in Pakistan.
Whenever we enter a village -- I hadn't seen this video before and this was like a surprise
for me, but it just amazed me how much seeing these women actually makes me so much happy.
When I see them and I see the smallest shine in their eyes, I think that's the brightest
morning we have ever seen in Pakistan.
Whenever they earn just a little bit of more money, and they feel like, you know, this
is something we own, this is something we can decide upon, that's where my -- you know,
all of my success compiles up right there.
And I feel like I've earned everything in my life.
So these are the things I live for and I feel like there's so much more of that.
Sorry.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: You have your own personal struggles going on right now.
I know from speaking with you and spending time with you, this is a particularly difficult
time for you personally.
>>Khalida Brohi: Yeah.
I'll face my dad when I go back.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: But more than that I think what you've managed to achieve, very,
very few women, if at all, ever get to where you are.
And when they do, the system doesn't support them.
If you want to talk a little bit about that.
>>Khalida Brohi: I feel like there's been forces all the time.
Everything that has happened in my life was in four or two ways all the time.
I would go this way and the forces or the society would get me back that way.
It's like two arrows going in different directions.
I feel that currently as well.
And there are times when I'm just not able to make decisions, but then the hope -- like
I said, the hope that carries me forward with what work we are doing and the team that I
have, every person in our team comes from the villages.
That's how we create passion because they feel like we're working for our own selves.
And that's what actually makes me go further.
And I feel like no matter how many obstacles there are, no matter how many bomb blasts
there are, we don't care.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: And what is your now long-term goal?
What are you trying to achieve now?
>>Khalida Brohi: One million women in 10 years.
Yeah.
Seven months of first year are gone.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: So what is the centers that you want to set up?
You've just opened a shop.
If you can just tell everybody that you're going from the source to the consumer, how
are you doing the productivity line.
>>Khalida Brohi: Yeah, this is very weird for me to share because coming from a village
where we only talk about -- we only get to wear what men are supposed to bring us.
They would bring us clothes and we would sew them and wear them.
For me my mom usually makes my dresses and this is a traditional dress.
But when we scaled up to Sin recently and we were like women should earn more, we tried
to explore the markets and we found out that there is something called fashion and something
called style, and people go buy brands.
And we were like, "Oh my God, we have to find out what these creatures are."
And we found out that -- yeah, it was so amazing for us.
We did a long market research.
I had to fly to different places in Pakistan and meet with some of the amazing fashion
designers and I saw what it really meant.
I felt like sometimes we do things for our own good, but right now we have to do things
for customers' good, how customers like that.
That's where we decided to do something totally ridiculous in Pakistan.
We launched Pakistan's first ever tribal women fashion brand and we did a fashion show where
women from the villages came together with the top models in Pakistan who actually wore
their products and went to -- and exhibited their products.
It was one of the biggest moments in my life and I felt like, you know, this is it.
And after that we launched the store, like you said.
It's in one of the malls in Karachi where the products from different villages, smallest
villages and tribal areas, made by women are there and sometimes there are people who come
up and look at these products and they just can't understand how it came from where -- everything
made over there is from the women.
They make it in singles, they make it in stories.
Like the product I have right now also has a really big story to it.
And these things, we really want to share them with everybody, and that makes us really
happy.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: What about your family structure?
You have several siblings.
Do they aspire to become who you are?
What happens at home?
>>Khalida Brohi: I've got eight siblings, six sisters and two brothers.
It's a tradition, I think, to have bigger families.
Most of my family, my siblings have -- live in Karachi right now.
They go to different colleges, different universities.
Sometimes I feel like -- there was a time when I jumped out of the house to do my travels
to work.
I would go village to village and village to village.
About 80% of my life is spent inside villages.
When I go back home I see something different.
Each time I feel like I'm going inside into a different direction and my siblings are
becoming the modern Karachi people, going to higher universities.
One of my sisters has gone to one of the biggest universities in Karachi.
And I just couldn't understand how proud I felt for that.
And they have all -- they all have different dreams and different hopes for their own lives.
But sometimes there are moments when I feel like when I'm sitting right there in my house,
I feel like I have -- I can be a source of danger for my family.
I have been shown that treatment at some point, you know, because of the things that we have
faced.
Bomb blast is not an easy thing.
Everybody was talking about it.
And they feel like when we're trying to build relationships inside Karachi, meet people,
meet people who are educated everyone, I bring back all of these stories that are supposed
to be hidden right now.
I bring -- expose everything in my history that is supposed to be not there right now.
And my family is struggling on the other side to hide everything and start a new life; I'm
struggling on the other side to expose so that we can help the other ones who are back
in my village.
It's a struggle.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: Well, on that note, Khalida has been doing some incredibly groundbreaking
work, but at the age of 24 I think we can expect much, much, much more work.
But given the fact that so many women across Pakistan who are working are getting singled
out, my last question to you would be do you think you'll ever stop?
>>Khalida Brohi: I will never stop.
My name actually means to live forever.
It means immortal.
Khalida means immortal.
I'm taking advantage of that name.
And also about this picture that we have in our back.
That's my team member, Hafiza.
She has a story of her own.
The team that we have built it is amazing how we actually come across people who I cannot
imagine that have lived in such amazing stories.
Three years before she was accused of having relationships with someone and she was about
to be killed for that.
With the bullet -- with her -- when she was just about to be hit on her head, her husband
came up and stopped that guy.
That was her husband's brother.
And said that she's my wife.
You don't do anything.
Like you are not supposed to do anything with her.
Whatever she's done, you're not going to kill her.
But after he rescued her, he kicked her out of the house because she was dishonored and
she could be a dishonor for the family.
For three years she was kept in the house with her family where she was looked at as
something as ashamed.
They treated her like something -- like a thing.
They would just give her something to eat.
They would not talk to her and stuff.
When we were hiring in Sin we gave out for interviews and there were so many women who
wanted to join us.
During the interviews of short listed we called a lot of girls and there were about 30 of
them.
In them she actually came as well and she said that "My sister had applied, but she
was not at home today.
My parents sent me."
I felt like there was something strange about her.
Her fingers shook all the time.
Everything else was fine.
She spoke really nicely, but her fingers shook.
And when I started talking to her, when we did the interview, when we asked her questions,
I felt like when someone's asking questions I am repeating the answers in my heart, but
everything that I was about to repeat she was repeating that.
She was seeing my dream.
She has seen my dream long ago before I had seen it.
She was explaining every single thing that I wanted to do in my life.
She was talking about those women who were facing all of that.
And she cried right there and she's like "I really want to do this.
Please hire me.
I will do anything to be a part of this."
We hired her.
She was a part of this campaign.
I'm sorry I'm really emotional on this because she recently left us.
Her husband came back after a year when she worked with us.
Her husband came back and decided to take her back, just like that.
You know, you throw something out and when you want it, you just come back and take her
back.
Her family celebrated by throwing sugar at everyone.
It's a celebration that they do in Sin.
They were like what a respect she's getting.
Her husband is coming back after four years and taking her back.
And I actually said we can help you going through courts and getting you some security
and everything, but she says "This is what I'm going to do for my family.
You see how happy they are?"
And she went back to her life in a small village.
Now she lives over there.
And I feel like every woman in Pakistan lives her life like that.
They spend their life for someone else.
Every time it's someone else, it's never them.
I really wanted to share this story.
Thank you.
>>Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: Thank you.
[ Applause ] >>Campbell Brown: Oooh, okay.
Awe-inspiring bravery and a glimpse of a world that most of us will certainly never experience
or even see.
And the next three people I'm going to introduce also work to open our eyes to a world that
most of us will never see.
Barbara Davidson, Josh Partlow and Alessio Romenzi, come on up.
[ Applause ] Welcome, everybody.
So Barbara Davidson has been a staff photographer at the "LA Times" for awhile and has traveled
the world and covered many conflicts and issue-driven stories, but she recently, which we're going
to talk about today, did one of the most moving, beautiful series of photographs about gang
violence in Los Angeles.
And we're going to show a couple of images and talk about that, which I should mention
she won a Pulitzer prize for.
It's nice to have you here, Barbara.
Josh Partlow is a foreign correspondent with the "Washington Post" who has spent quite
a bit of time in Iraq and Afghanistan and is probably happily resting in Boston with
a fellowship catching his breath right now, but I'm sure you will be off very soon.
And Alessio is a freelance photographer who has extensively covered the Arab Spring with
a special focus on Egypt and Libya, but Alessio also has spent time in Syria and was one of
the very first journalists who was smuggled into Syria when they sort of shut everything
down.
So welcome to everybody.
I -- Alessio, why don't I start with you.
We're going to look at some of Alessio and Barbara's photographs while we're speaking.
And you can talk about some of the images we see.
But I just -- I want you to start, because, I mean, we're so closely following what's
happening in Syria right now.
You're one of the few people who has been there recently.
And tell us first how you got in and give us a sense for what it's like.
>>Alessio Romenzi: Okay.
So as you know, Syria is one of those countries that doesn't like that much journalists inside.
So to get there, it can be complicated, especially at the beginning.
>>Campbell Brown: And they're not letting anyone in now at all.
>>Alessio Romenzi: (Inaudible.) >>Campbell Brown: The journalists.
>>Alessio Romenzi: So since the beginning, it's been complicated and, of course, dangerous.
You have to find the right way.
I mean, and possibly safe.
The best way so far is to get in touch with smugglers, people that make business along
the border.
>>Campbell Brown: Smuggling what?
>>Alessio Romenzi: Weapons, fuel, and animals, not necessarily really bad things.
But they know -- Better now?
>>Campbell Brown: Yes.
We want to hear every word.
>>Alessio Romenzi: Okay.
And so with their help, because they know the ground, it's easier to get inside the
country, basically, illegally, because that country doesn't want you to get there.
And after that, you have to be in touch with the Army side of the revolution, because they
are the one that can let you in without at least trying to avoid to face the regime Army,
which is something bad.
Because a journalist probably is dead if it happened.
>>Campbell Brown: If they know you are?
>>Alessio Romenzi: Yeah, of course, of course.
I'm wanted.
My name is not only mine.
It starts to be a lot.
Unfortunately, we are kind of blacklisted.
We cannot be (indiscernible).
>>Campbell Brown: I want to talk a little more with all of you about sort of why you
do what you do.
But let's show some of your photographs.
I'm not sure which ones we have.
But tell us where this was taken and the story behind it.
>>Alessio Romenzi: Oh, okay.
This picture has been taken February, and south of Homs, I don't know how much you get
inside the story of Syria.
Homs has been one of the towns most hit by the regime.
We are 20 kilometers south.
The name of the village is Al Qusayr.
And these are a mother with a son mourning two other sons that has been killed by a mortar
attack.
So the husband has been already killed two months before, and the mortar just entered
from the window in the house, killed two of the four sons she still have.
And I decided -- I think it's a very powerful, powerful picture, this, because it reminds
kind of of a religious figure, and the eyes, it seems only to ask, "Why?"
And we are civilian.
We don't fight, and why we have to pass through this.
>>Campbell Brown: She looks broken.
>>Alessio Romenzi: Yeah.
>>Campbell Brown: Let's pull up the next picture.
>>Alessio Romenzi: Homs, especially Baba Amr.
This is the 5th of February.
It's the first day of the siege, let's say, of that -- of that neighborhood.
They started bombing for 24 days at 6:30 in the morning, stopping around 6:00 in the afternoon.
I don't know why they do like this.
And I could personally count myself in two hours more than 200 explosions, only in a
neighborhood, not in a town, which is quite big, about a million people used to live there.
But it was really amazing how -- you know to think that the regime was bombing randomly,
like if here starts to rain mortars here and there, without any real target.
It was only an ongoing act of terrorism on the city.
These are two brothers.
And I think he's still alive, even if the house where he was fell on him.
>>Campbell Brown: Alessio, because people there don't -- or have very little contact
with westerners, and few journalists, do they feel like the world knows what's going on?
Do they feel like the world is watching, is paying attention?
>>Alessio Romenzi: Yes, they know that the world knows what is going on.
But everybody's asking why nobody is doing anything for them.
Yes, they know.
They know.
And they're waiting for help.
>>Campbell Brown: So, Josh, tell everybody a little about your background, and we'll
mostly focus on Afghanistan, because you have spent a lot of time here.
And, I mean, it's sort of the same issue in that it's harder and harder to get these stories
in the paper, on TV, get your photographs in the paper.
It's -- we -- it's been going on for so long that it is very easy for us to tune things
out.
But kind of tell people, at least based on your latest time there, what things are like
on the ground.
>>Joshua Partlow: I've worked probably most of the last six years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I came to move to Iraq in the summer of 2006 and have pretty much been covering the wars,
with one lovely ten-month interlude in Rio de Janeiro in between.
But mostly in those parts of the world.
And, you know, I think -- now is an interesting time in Afghanistan.
The president early in his term sent 30,000 new troops to the country.
They have left now.
So, you know, it's interesting to look at where we thought we might -- or where they
hoped to be at this point in Afghanistan.
I think they hoped that the Taliban, particularly in the southern and eastern parts of the country,
would have been significantly rolled back or disrupted.
I think, you know, they were hoping they could focus primarily on training the Afghan soldiers
and police to take over and strengthen the Afghan government.
And a lot of that, I think the most important development in the past year has been -- which
has prevented some of that from taking place, has been these -- the spate of what they call
the green-on-blue attacks, these insider attacks where the Afghan soldiers and police are turning
their guns on the U.S. soldiers who are there and really fundamentally undermining the partnership.
And the if you can't, you know -- even temporarily has halted missions.
They often go on missions, the U.S. troops will go out on patrol and, you know, on operations
to hunt for the Taliban with Afghan soldiers.
And these are mentor -- the idea is these are mentoring opportunities that the Afghan
soldiers will ultimately be able to do this on their own effectively.
Anyway, they had to suspend some of those operations because of these spate of killings.
I think it's something like 15% of all U.S. soldiers killed this year were killed by Afghan
soldiers or police or someone wearing their uniform.
So It's become a significant, huge issue for how they -- you know, the core of the U.S.
military strategy in Afghanistan.
And so that's -- that's been a big challenge.
They had to pull a western U.S. advisors out of the ministries at various times.
And, you know, the Taliban is still pretty strong.
They've -- just last month, they -- they attacked one of the biggest U.S. and British bases
in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan and destroyed something like $200 million
worth of aircraft, which I heard was the largest loss of U.S. aircraft since Vietnam.
They're still capable of pretty significant acts of violence.
And a lot of the country is still not -- you know, I would say is in their control.
So it's -- so I think right now, we're in a slow motion withdrawal.
So the 68,000 U.S. troops that are left, they'll be leaving over the next two years.
But it's a fragile and a dangerous time for that to be happening.
So I think it's an important time to be watching Afghanistan.
And, you know, we've obviously spent a lot of time and money and lives there.
And all the structures we set up in terms of their government and their soldiers and
police, you know, are going to be durable enough is the big question.
>>Campbell Brown: That slow withdrawal is not likely to change, regardless of who is
elected president, I think.
>>Joshua Partlow: Yeah.
It hasn't been much of a campaign issue at all.
President Obama, you know, Governor Romney, nobody's really talking about Afghanistan.
And when they do, they don't have much of a -- you know, their opinions -- their -- you
know, their approach is pretty similar.
>>Campbell Brown: They basically have the same position.
>>Joshua Partlow: 2014, we're going to do get out of, no matter how that curve will
be.
There may be some slight difference.
And President Karzai's government as well.
I think they're all on the same page broadly, that they want the U.S. troops out, or the
bulk of them.
>>Campbell Brown: Americans are exhausted by it.
How do the troops feel?
And did you, when you were there covering it, feel like nobody wanted to hear what you
had to say?
I mean, in a way, is it sort of -- were you exhausted by it in the same way that many
of us are?
>>Joshua Partlow: It's hard coming up with new and interesting ways to cover a conflict
that's been going on for 11 years.
And there isn't a lot of -- you can just tell -- you all probably know better than me.
I haven't lived in the U.S. for a long time.
But it doesn't feel like people are really paying attention that much.
When I was writing about Iraq, just from the volume of reader email, that sort of thing,
you know that there was a level of engagement.
And with Afghanistan, it's kind of like you send articles out into the void, and there's
-- just silence greets them.
I mean, I don't know, I still think it's a -- an important issue, obviously.
But....
>>Campbell Brown: Critically important, but challenging and hard for people to absorb
and to look at or read about.
>>Joshua Partlow: Right.
>>Campbell Brown: And Barbara, let me bring you in here, because, you know, we're talking
about places far, far away.
And, yet, many things equally challenging are taking place in our own backyard that
we don't see, that don't get covered.
Set us up as we show some of your images from your series.
But also explain why you wanted to do this and tell the story, and how hard it was to
get the story told.
>>Barbara Davidson: Right.
Well, -- you know, I've spent the majority of my career covering people in conflict,
whether it be in Iraq or Afghanistan or Gaza.
You know, I've done a lot of overseas work.
And I moved to Los Angeles five years ago.
And I started seeing these, you know, crimes that were happening to people who lived in
the inner cities.
And nobody was paying attention to them.
Innocent victims of gang violence.
You know, people -- >>Campbell Brown: Its own war zone.
>>Barbara Davidson: No, they're not official war zones.
Yet you're seeing the same types of incidents play out.
For these families, they are war zones, because they're walking through the street to buy
a jug of milk, and they're gunned down.
They're getting hit with stray bullets.
And I was fascinated by this.
I don't know if it's my Canadian sensibility or what.
But I couldn't believe this could play out in my city and often we weren't even covering
these stories.
So I had proposed to my editors that we do a comprehensive look at this issue, how this
plays out for families, and what are the consequences after they've been shot, how does their life
look.
And in this particular photo, this is Rose Smith.
She was the inspiration for this whole piece.
I met her after she had been shot in the back.
She lives in Nickerson Gardens, which is a very dangerous area in Los Angeles.
And she heard shots.
There were several gangs battling and she heard shots.
And she ran to her door because her children were looking out the window, her younger children.
And as soon as she grabbed the door to run inside, and she was yelling at them to get
away from the window, she was shot in the spine.
She's never walked.
She was three months pregnant at the time.
And the bullet missed her child by a blink of an eye.
This is her child who was in her womb when she was shot.
This is Baby Miracle.
And she named her Baby Miracle because she is a miracle.
This child shouldn't be alive.
She's actually my youngest victim.
And this photo for me is so tragic in many ways, because this child has never had a childhood,
from day one, she's been a victim of gang violence.
And here she is helping her mother into the wheelchair so they can spend their day like
a normal family would.
>>Campbell Brown: Heart-breaking.
Show the next images.
I think there are two of the same little boy.
>>Barbara Davidson: This is Josue.
At the age of four, he was playing outside his house in Long Beach with his little sister,
who was six.
You see this play out over and over and over again.
A gang dispute literally at the end of the street and shots rang out, and Josue got hit
in the head.
The children tried to run from the gun battle.
And, unfortunately, Josue couldn't run fast enough.
He was only four.
And his six-year-old sister picked him up, scooped him up off the sidewalk, and brought
him to their front door, laid him on the front door for his mother, and said, "Josue has
been shot."
And, I mean, these are the kinds of situations that are playing out in many inner cities
in the United States.
That's the unfortunate thing.
The tragedy of this story is, it could be told in any city in the United States.
And we're not paying attention to this.
And for me, the whole reason why I did this story was to create awareness, to remind everybody
that, yes, we are involved in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza, and everywhere
else around the world.
But we have to start looking inward as well and seeing what's happening with families
in inner city -- you know, in communities in inner cities of the United States.
And often these families are in areas, there are high crimes, obviously, but they're poor.
And I believe that just because you're poor doesn't mean you should have to grow up in
an area that's incredibly dangerous.
>>Campbell Brown: There is a second picture that goes with this, too.
I just want to pull it up real -- yeah, this is -- with his brothers and sisters?
>>Barbara Davidson: Yes.
This is his family.
Little Josue is at the end of the bed.
They are impoverished.
At the end of the night, the mom sneaks into this bed, too.
You can imagine where all these little bodies end up.
There is one bed for the family.
And something else to be noted.
This kind of stress, the stress of being victimized by gang violence, tears apart a family.
So at one point, you know, there was a father in this family.
But the stress of this violence eats up an entire family.
And now the -- the family structure is broken.
And so no longer does the father live here.
I mean, it doesn't just affect the person who's been shot.
It affects an entire community.
It's like gang violence is like cancer.
It just spreads and grows and eventually destroys. >>Campbell Brown: Let me ask all of you this
question, because I think it's hard to relate to -- I think it's hard for a lot of us to
relate to you and what you do.
I did some of it briefly, and then as soon as I had kids, I couldn't imagine going back
into those environments, because I was too sensitive.
>>Barbara Davidson: Yeah.
>>Campbell Brown: So I guess each of you comment on this.
Does -- You know, why?
Is it -- does it feel like a cause to you to do this job?
Josh.
>>Joshua Partlow: For me, I think I was a little bit a part of the September 11th generation
of journalism.
I was living in Manhattan in journalism school at the time.
And I can't remember exactly what we were writing about in school before that, but afterwards,
that's all anyone was writing about.
And that -- I think how America prosecuted the war on terror has been kind of a defining
theme in a lot of newspapers for the last decade.
So coming into newspapers at that time, I mean, that was the obvious -- you know, I
think that had a lot of my attention.
And we -- I volunteered when I got the opportunity to go to Iraq.
It's an honor.
Some of my colleagues at the Washington Post, Dana Priest comes to mind, who broke a lot
of these really important stories about what our government was doing in our name overseas,
and some of the treatment of detainees and the -- you know, the CIA black sites and these
wireless -- warrantless wiretapping, all of those issues that came out over the past decade.
So I think it's -- and Iraq and Afghanistan, I think you're -- the military and the embassies
and the state department and back home in Washington will say their version of what's
happening.
It's pretty -- I think it is important to go out there and test how that looks on ground
the and interview, people.
Like our previous speakers, who are -- they have such compelling stories about how they
see reality this their countries so I think adding those stories to the mix is important.
>>Campbell Brown: Alessio?
>>Alessio Romenzi: It's quite important.
I am going to be quite selfish.
But one of the reasons we're there, because we want to see with our eyes.
>>Campbell Brown: With your own eyes?
>>Alessio Romenzi: Yeah, sure, sure, first of all.
>>Campbell Brown: Why?
Why do you need to see it with your own eyes?
>>Alessio Romenzi: Curiosity, fascinating stuff.
I cannot answer for all of us, of course.
But many, many people who talk with about this issue, yeah, just because we are curious.
We want to see.
We want to touch the situation right there.
>>Campbell Brown: And there's a lot of adrenaline involved, and it can be a little bit addictive.
Is that fair?
I know a lot of junkies.
Yeah?
>>Alessio Romenzi: Yeah.
>>Campbell Brown: Barbara?
>>Barbara Davidson: Well, I definitely think that there is an addictive element to being
in war zones and covering these stories that are incredibly visceral and just so instant
and so incredibly alive in many ways, you know.
And it is addicting.
And, you know, I -- at some point, you have to shut it down.
At some point, you have to decide, well, maybe it's time to do something else, because it
eats you up as well.
You know, I think everybody can speak to that who's had that kind of experience.
>>Campbell Brown: We were talking last night, and -- Josh, I think, you know, when I said
about being too sensitive to do it anymore.
And I can't remember, someone said, "Oh, you build up" -- you know, "you build a thick
skin over time."
And you said it was actually the opposite, you feel like you become increasingly sensitive
the more time you spend there.
>>Joshua Partlow: Yeah.
I think so.
I think it accumulates a little bit, just living with that -- I mean, it's not -- it's
a low level of anxiety, level of danger.
But it's constant over time, and it kind of -- I think it does affect you in ways you
don't quite understand at the time.
But, yeah, personally, I hate adrenaline, and I try to avoid it at all costs.
[ Laughter ] >>Campbell Brown: Just comment, too, on how
you -- I mean, I'm just looking, Barbara, why don't you just tell us a little bit about
that picture before I address it specifically.
But this is from -- one of yours as well.
>>Barbara Davidson: This is a portrait of Tori in the middle.
Her friend, Melody Ross, was a 16-year-old teenager whose parents were from Cambodia,
and they fled the killing fields of Cambodia to come to the United States to give a better
life to their children in the land of opportunity.
And they decided to let her out this one time to go to the football game to enjoy the homecoming
game.
Again, rival gangs were battling out, and Melody was shot in the head by a stray bullet
and killed.
And her friend Tori was right beside her.
And here the friends and family are watching as they lower her body into the -- as they
lower the coffin into the ground.
>>Campbell Brown: What's your goal?
I mean, what are you -- each of you, what do you want your images to do?
Wake people up?
What do you want them -- >>Barbara Davidson: I -- for this particular
project, I worked on this for three years, which is a lifetime for a newspaper.
And the fact that they gave me the opportunity to do that is incredible.
And I truly wanted to create awareness with this piece.
I was driven to educate people and to let them know this is going on and to force people
to look at this and to see it's happening in our communities.
And it was really all about awareness for me.
I mean, as journalists, we have a lot of power.
And we can use that power in different ways.
And with this particular project, I wanted to use that power for good, to give a voice
to the voiceless and to allow people to hear these stories, because they're important and
they need to be told.
So that's kind of my goal as a photo journalist.
I do primarily social documentary work, and it's a calling for me.
I wanted to be a photographer before I ever took a picture.
And it never left me, that desire and that passion to tell stories.
So that's kind of what I do.
>>Campbell Brown: Alessio?
>>Alessio Romenzi: I just want to show the reality, what is going on, what is going on,
just give to the people as many inputs as possible, and they will take the decision,
they will take -- they will decide by themselves.
But without any specific purpose, only the reality.
>>Campbell Brown: We've shown some challenging and difficult things in all of these images.
So just for our final question, I want to kind of end on an uplifting note.
Josh, you're not a photographer, but you do have an image to share that is one I think
-- let's see if we can put it up -- you actually took with your iPhone.
>>Joshua Partlow: I would have taken it with my Android if I had it available.
>>Campbell Brown: Tell the story behind this.
>>Joshua Partlow: Yes, I just wanted to bring this.
I thought, hopefully, this would be a little interesting anecdote.
I live in Kabul, which is relatively cosmopolitan for Afghanistan, a little bit more liberal.
There are restaurants, and bars, even a couple, and there's a golf course, although it has
no grass.
[ Laughter ] >>Joshua Partlow: But in -- this is the Kandahar
Airport.
I would go there periodically.
It's a little bit more intense version of Afghanistan.
To an outsider, it seems a bit more distilled.
It's more conservative.
It's where the Taliban emerged, where they came from, where they still consider their
important political territory.
You see fewer women on the streets.
The ones you do see are typically more often in the full burqa.
It's just a -- it's a place of -- you know, it's a center of the heroin trafficking business.
There's a lot of smuggling that goes through there.
So I was coming down to see the situation down there.
And this man in the middle was on the plane.
And when he got off, there was this complete mob scene, local press, huge crowd.
It was like the Beatles had arrived.
And I didn't know who he was.
That was kind of a problem.
So I thought -- you know, what was going through my mind was he's either a drug Lord that I
wasn't aware of or a power broker of some sort or some political kingpin, and I needed
to figure out who this was.
So I was kind of back pedaling, so it's all blurry.
It turns out he's a poet.
And he's -- the next night, I think he had a poetry reading that attracted 3- or 4,000
people.
And that was just one of those moments for me where I thought, there's layers going on
here that I don't understand and that, you know, it's easy to fall into these perceptions
about what these people are like in this place that you're unfamiliar with.
And, you know, to think that in a place where, I guess, when you think of Afghanistan, you
think of maybe illiteracy or backwardness or violence, and this poet could convene thousands
of people, you know, in a time when it's not very safe to go across, you know -- a lot
of people to be traipsing across town, and there are political assassinations all the
time.
So that was one of the moments where it was interesting to me, one of the nice things
about, I think, the discovery process of being a foreign correspondent, is you get to challenge
your assumptions constantly.
And I think a lot of the issues we've seen over the decade have been these lack of communication
or misinformation and miscommunication between Americans and Afghans and what it is they
want and who is the enemy.
And more information and more people trying to understand the differences between these
two places can only be a benefit.
>>Campbell Brown: Well, thank you, all, for trying to show those layers to all of us.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you.
[ Applause. ] >>Campbell Brown: Thank you.
So our last speaker of this session, John Besh, hales from southern Louisiana, which
is where my roots are from, so I happen to know that my people cook better than anywhere
else, anyone else in the world.
He owns nine critically acclaimed restaurants, he has period on top chef, iron chef, Food
Network show.
And others.
Please welcome John Besh.
>>John Besh: Wow, this is so crazy to think of trying to follow -- and I'm here to talk
about food.
[ Laughter ] >>John Besh:
Prior to Hurricane Katrina, I was just dead set on being the fancy chef, winning all the
awards, making a little bit of money in the process.
And this is really, like, what drove me.
Like, I thought, yes, I want to be this great chef.
I don't do catering events.
I just have this one beautiful little restaurant called August.
If you're ever in New Orleans, make sure you hit us.
It's really about me, me, me, me, and my food.
And isn't it beautiful?
Then comes Hurricane Katrina.
Changes everything.
So with Hurricane Katrina, I then saw the -- you know, the ugliest sight that I've ever
seen inside America.
I had been in the Marine Corps, I had been in combat in the past and I saw ugly things
there.
But it didn't exist, not in my world.
And, yet, federal levees fail us, all of a sudden, chaos breaks out in New Orleans.
The political pundits on TV wonder, should we even rebuild New Orleans.
Why even bother doing this and that.
It's just a city.
And we'll just build another one.
And at that point, I saw so many people in despair.
And I thought, God put me on this Earth for a reason.
It's not to create just fancy food.
It's really about helping people.
It's about using my talents to make the world better.
And I think that's what we're all kind of called to do in our own way.
So, basically, what happened to my restaurant is, I turned it into a mass catering exercise.
We had no money.
We had no electricity.
We had no food.
And we also had no rules.
So that allowed us to break a lot of rules.
And so we broke as many of them as we possibly could in order to marshal the resources into
New Orleans to help feed people to give people hope.
And so we started first with feeding first-responders after the bulk of the refugees evacuees, whatever
the displaced people were called at the time, once everybody had a chance to leave, then
you had these -- you know, the people who kind of kept the peace.
Or tried to.
So we started feeding them.
And we were originally out on the streets and, literally, flooded streets, in flat boats
with igloo ice chests feeding red beans and rice.
That's the common Monday dish in New Orleans.
I remember feeding this one guy the first bowl of red beans that I dished up.
I handed it to him and he looked at it and he said, my mama's red beans are better than
these, baby, and then starts arguing with me on what's the proper recipe for red bean
and why didn't I have any andouille sausage in my red beans.
I thought this is good and this gives me hope for New Orleans.
And so we started catering.
That led to one thing and another.
Then I started thinking about how can we really help people?
We have to start the bare bones.
We have to invest in our foodways.
Because, again, using food as that common thread that I like to do, then we can affect
a huge change.
And my idea was that we will have to pull ourselves up the best we can.
And that's by localizing our economy.
I would buy from the farmers, support the farmers, the fishers, the foragers and all
the people it takes to bring us this great food.
And we might just be able to save the only indigenous urban cuisine left in America.
And if you think about it, so much of American culture has just eroded away.
And we're, like, this last little island, for better or for worse, New Orleans has its
own culture.
And I didn't want to lose that.
So we started investing in farmers and we started a microloan program where farmers
who couldn't get -- who could receive financial assistance through conventional means, they
could come to us, and we would run it through a local -- through a small-town savings and
loan, no-interest loans, and getting farmers back.
This was one of the farmers that actually -- I'll just skip through some of these, because
I've got a clock ticking.
Farmer right here, we were talking about school food earlier at lunch.
We kind of had a save-the-world lunch moment.
And this farmer approached me.
The farmer needed to buy $100,000 worth of more cattle.
Well, what are you going to do with the cattle?
Well, I've got this school and that school lined up.
If I just could ramp up my production, then I could start offering the kids real milk
from here, antibiotic free, the whole shebang, wonderful stuff.
So we pulled together resources, get them what they need.
They're on their feet and now they're up to about five different schools.
Giving them good milk, just starting with the basics, just like this.
And then came to me that we had another couple of outreach programs.
Been working with Associated Catholic Charities, along with the United Way through a couple
-- I hate to say outreach programs, but a couple outreach programs that target inner
city youth that have nowhere else to go.
I'm enjoying this life as this kind of celebrity chef in New Orleans.
We've got TV shows and cookbooks.
And I'm enjoying this great culture.
But the entire culture isn't enjoying it.
And then I look in the kitchens and they all look kind of like me.
Not that that should be a bad thing.
But being that I come from a predominantly African-American community, why wasn't everybody
else enjoying this prosperity and why didn't everybody else have a hope?
And I think it comes down to what Barbara was talking about when you were talking about
gang violence.
It happens in every inner city, and until we start doing something, then this cycle
will just continue.
So we have all this information.
Now what?
We -- we started a program called Chefs Move, where -- this is one program called Cafe Reconcile,
where we're taking inner city kids off the street, giving them just a very rudimentary
education in the hospitality industry that gives them a job above minimum wage in any
restaurant in New Orleans.
What about the people with drive and tenacity to do better?
Culinary schools cost as much as Ivy League schools these days.
It's insane to think about that.
But you're talking about $50,000 a year, plus, for a kid to go to culinary school, to go
to one of the really good ones.
So we started a project where we would target some of these youth, some of the youth that
really had what it took to be the best.
So we started a Chefs Move scholarship, where we would take -- we call it Chefs Move, because
we want to move you out of the inner city.
We want to move you out of your neighborhood and take you to New York City, take you to
Manhattan, and show you the bigger and broader world out there, broaden the horizons, give
a great education at the French Culinary Institute or what is now called ICC, and also have a
mentorship program with people like Marcus Samuelsson, Aaron Sanchez.
Even Rachel Ray is helping me with this project.
This is Serena, the very first one.
She is now a sous chef in New Orleans, doing great.
The whole key here is to allow for upward mobility, to arm somebody with the information
that they need, with the education that they need, and the support along the way.
That's where the mentorship process comes in.
And so we're arming people with hope, and we're really giving people just dignity that
I think all human beings deserve.
And we all have different talents, and we're all called to do different things and make
a different, I think -- we're all called to make a different impact in this world.
Some people are here just to say look what's happening.
There's other of us here that need to dig in, roll the sleeves up, and we feel the need
of these grass roots efforts.
And this is one of them that we started.
These two projects alone, I think -- these are two of our latest recipients.
Took them to Chinatown.
And there we go.
The interesting thing for me is that by doing all of these, you know, this different outreach
and the various ways that we go about trying to help people and change our community, and,
you know, with me, the lofty hopes of maybe saving, or at least staving the erosion of
this -- the cultural erosion and creating a bit more of a cultural economy in New Orleans,
because that's one thing that we have that is indigenous, and I think as long as we keep
investing in the human resource and just investing in humanity, then we have a hope of just taking
this model to other communities.
And I've -- the same model has been taken to different communities, different countries.
We've really been excited to work with Saint Vincent De Paul Society in Haiti.
Where we're actually creating microloan programs in Haiti, modeled after what it is that we're
doing in New Orleans, because it's worked an this disaster, and it can work -- you can
take this model where you're helping the farmer, you're helping -- you've got this educational
process, and then you're building a life that people can then build for themselves.
You're giving them just the boost that sometimes is all they need just to get back on their
feet.
And that is ten times more interesting than any fancy dish I could happen to serve.
Oh, but you know what?
We do have some food here, don't we?
I think you're about to be served a very sustainable dish --
>>> In your seat.
>>John Besh: -- any minute of -- Oh, no.
It's not under their seats.
>>Campbell Brown: No.
It's coming.
We just have to vamp for a minute.
>>John Besh: This is going to be like the big Oprah moment.
>>Campbell Brown: Everyone is getting a new car!
No!
Everyone's getting John's food.
>>John Besh: These are -- We have shrimpy grits coming out, just to give you a little
taste of home.
But the interesting thing is that the grits are all organically grown, which wasn't even
thought of ten years ago.
We've worked with the Vietnamese shrimpers, large association of Vietnamese New Orleans
shrimpers.
That's where all the shrimp comes from.
All the herbs and all the vegetables used in this dish also came from inner city -- actually,
three partner farms of ours in the ninth ward, which had been, like, this big battle zone
before the -- Hurricane Katrina.
Since Hurricane Katrina, it's kind of washed away.
And now we actually have all these seedling groups coming in and building a sustainable
food culture where it never existed before.
And you're having a taste of it here today.
And I think the butter that's in all this dish came from the one farm, came from the
one cow that you just saw.
So y'all enjoy.
[ Applause. ]