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:
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“Both at-home and working mothers can overmeet their mothering responsibilities. In order to justify their jobs, working mothers can overnurture, overconnect with, and overschedule their children into activities and classes. Similarly, some at-home mothers,... can make at- home mothering into a bigger deal than it is, over stimulating, overeducating, and overwhelming their children with purposeful attention.”
—Jean Marzollo (20th century)
“Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still the most important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)