Activities
The Pacific Council has hosted a number of influential speakers. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, at the time a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, unveiled his national security views in front of the Council in December 2003. John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, addressed a number of foreign policy concerns in June 2006. In May 2009, it hosted then-CIA Director Leon Panetta, who defended air strikes against al Qaeda in Pakistan, calling them “very effective.” Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, General Stanley McChrystal, Joseph S. Nye, and Alec Ross were among the speakers that addressed the Pacific Council in 2011. In 2012, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Huntsman, and World Bank President Robert Zoellick all spoke in front of the Council.
Members also participate in international fact-finding missions, during which members meet with government officials and business leaders. At a 2011 meeting in Juba, South Sudan, members met with Vice President Riek Machar and discussed how the Council could support the country’s development and establishment of its independence. In the same year, member delegations visited Afghanistan, China, and Australia. In 2012, a delegation visited Chile and Argentina. 2010 destinations included Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, and France.
The Pacific Council also organizes task forces to address international policy issues and make policy recommendations. Its U.S.-Mexico Border Security Task Force, led by former DEA Administrator and U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner, recommended that the U.S. Congress and the Obama Administration renew a ban on assault weapons. In 2010, its Climate Change Adaptation Task Force recommended that the state of California create a Climate Risk Council and reported the potential effects of climate change on the California coast. Findings of the Latino Leadership Task Force will be released in August 2012.
Read more about this topic: Pacific Council On International Policy
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)