 Cory Booker is my senator. It makes me so proud to say that. That may be the single best thing about living in New Jersey. Quite seriously, Senator Booker was elected in 2013. He's the first African-American senator from New Jersey, another reason to be proud. But I first heard about Cory Booker when I was the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and I heard about him because getting a job with him when he was mayor of Newark was like winning the lottery for a public policy student. Suddenly, all my students are talking about what's happening in Newark and this new mayor and the excitement and the ideas and the engagement. I have to tell you, when you're at Princeton, that's not always how you hear about Newark. That's not the sort of buzz. And yet, he was doing something that excited young people, who want to make a difference with their lives, who are studying public policy. So that's how I first heard about him, and then I really met him on Twitter. He might not have been aware that he was meeting me on Twitter, among those tens and thousands and hundreds of thousands of followers. I was just one, but I was following him after Sandy. And many of us, I mean in those days, that was a smaller time. There were not nearly as many people on Twitter. And following him, actively being there for his citizens in Newark. Sort of telling them where he was, where things were and retweeting things from other people. If you put those three things together, what you have is an inspirational leader. Somebody who knows how to connect to people directly on the ground. Someone who knows how to connect virtually. And somebody who knows how to inspire rhetorically. You're in for a treat. Okay, for her to say, one of the best things about living in New Jersey is me. I couldn't figure out if she was insulting the state of New Jersey or complimenting me. But I'm so happy to be here. And I apologize, I was supposed to be here earlier, but we were doing a small thing over in the Senate of confirming Loretta Lynch, which is just exciting to have happened. Usually you go into vote and you just sort of raise your hand. I stood there in the middle of this well of the Senate and yelled out aye, as my friends in the Senate made fun of me. But this is extraordinary to be here today. And I want to thank the dean for her incredible leadership and her willingness actually to think on the edge of where this nation needs to go. And to see not only and understand our history, but more importantly than that, to help to begin to present a policy vision for how we can move forward. I am extraordinarily honored to be in the United States Senate. And I have a mom and dad, especially before he passed, who would never let me forget where I came from. There's an old saying, some of you as parents might be able to recognize this. My mom has a way of saying to me that behind every successful child is an astonished parent. And so coming to the United States Senate, I was so pleased to be there, but the Wall Street Journal wrote an article before I got to the Senate talking about how rare it is in American history. Maybe, I think if I remember correctly, about 24 times has it ever happened that someone has ever gone directly from being a mayor of a big city to the United States Senate? And the perspective that I have coming from New Jersey are nation's most densely populated state, having two major metropolitan areas, the Philly metropolitan area, and the greater Newark metropolitan area. Some of you know it as the New York metropolitan area. But having that be such a major part of our state really has helped to inform me about policy and what works. And we're actually a nation returning to its cities with 85% of Americans now living in cities or directly in their suburbs. And as I began to think about public policy when I was just a city council person, I began to understand that the ecosystems which make up economic development, education, that the interrelatedness of so many of the policy issues from housing to the environment, it was critical to look at them, not necessarily even within city borders or state borders, but at these larger metropolitan areas. And it drove me to think about them as how can we make them thrive? And I pulled in thinkers from all over the region, especially when I became mayor, leaning on some public policy people at Woodrow Wilson to all the way to a friend of mine, Michael Porter up at Harvard, which is difficult for me as a Stanford man to say that, but leaned on the wisdom of a gentleman up at Harvard, and to look at the competitiveness of inner cities. And one of the things I learned hard as mayor, in fact, the best book I have that I never will write was all the mistakes I made in management when I first became a mayor and suddenly was managing tens of thousands of people, a complex organization, I learned a lot very quickly, but I quickly learned when it came to management, I had a saying about my city and with my age, I said, look, in God we trust I'm a man of faith, but everybody else bring me data. And it became so important to me because I began to be challenged that with a lot of my political perspectives or as a Democrat or whatever the biases I had that brought to policy, a lot of it if I began to analyze the data, began to change my views on what was really necessary in the public policy sphere. For example, if you told me when I became a city council person, asked me about gun policy in America, I would have had a traditional, very far left view of guns. The only thing I wanna shout off in America were people's mouths, but when I started looking at the data of what was happening in my city, I began to realize that wait a minute, law abiding people buying guns is not the problem. In fact, every one of the shootings I had as mayor of Newark and we had too many, one is too many frankly, but we had hundreds and hundreds was done by somebody who acquired a gun illegally through the underground market. And that if we were to apply resources to the problem of mass shootings in America, which there are far too many, we have a carnage going on every single day, during the time I give these remarks, someone will be killed, we tend to don't care as much, it seems, with some children dying as we do others in this country, but today we'll have a Virginia Tech in America. And so understanding the data of that problem began to help me focus my public policy on those issues that were at hand. And so coming to the United States Senate, I came with the mission really to focus on areas that I knew could make a big difference in this country. And I began to look a lot of indices of competitiveness. Where did our country need to be if we were gonna continue to have a globally competitive economy that included more and more of its people? And I began to have my staff pull every indices of competitiveness we can find from OECD, keeps a lot of great data all the way to the World Economic Forum. And the more data that I started going through, the more disheartened or discouraged I got because I saw the trend. America was going from number one in all kind of categories to falling down further and further and further compared to our industrial peers. And where we wouldn't wanna be number one, we began to grow to be the top dominant country in those indices, those measurable indices that we don't wanna be number one in. And so let me give you a few examples here. The World Economic Forum ranks the US number three in global competitiveness. We used to be number one and we are falling. We are now, we rank a fifth in the World Economic Forum's innovation index. In other words, we used to be the number one country for investing and being an innovative country. Now we fall in behind countries like Switzerland and Japan. When it comes to some of the things that make up these indices, none of this will be surprising to you. We used to be the top country investing in infrastructure there was. We used to have a globally, a global infrastructure that was the envy of the globe. Excuse me. And now we are going from the country building the Hoover Dam, massive sprawling interstate highways to now being ranked number 14 globally in the world when it comes to infrastructure. And if you look at our infrastructure debt, I always look at this, what did I inherit from my parents and grandparents? We inherited this incredible system of infrastructure. We have failed to invest in it and now the money needed to make that infrastructure even what it was, not what it needs to be, that debt is now into the trillions of dollars. And I've sat in Congress seeing the anemic amount of money that we wanna invest, it's frustrating to me. We used to be this country that invested in R&D. We were global R&D investors. The Information and Technology Innovation Foundation ranked the US now last out of 40 economies assessed when it came to improvements in innovation capacity. The long, the investments in R&D intensity relative to the rest of the world is revealing a disturbing deemphasis in this country on innovation. We once had the most R&D intensive economy and now studies are showing that we're about 10th behind Israel, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, Taiwan, Germany, and many economies are increasing their R&D investment relative to GDP while we have about the same R&D investment in when it comes to our economy or GDP as we did in 1960. And so we know these areas of R&D, we know these areas of infrastructure, we know they produce returns on investment. In fact, I know on infrastructure, New Jerseyans, I'm sorry to say this, are paying $1,000 to $2,000 more because of inadequate infrastructure, what it's doing to their cars, not to mention the return on investment you get when you invest in infrastructure. And I'm talking about aviation infrastructure. I'm talking about broadband infrastructure. I'm talking about what other countries are doing in an incredible way. In addition to that, though, you see things like the NIH. We used to be a country that was leading the globe in NIH investment. That's another area. For every dollar that you invest in NIH funding, it increases your economy. You get about a return of $2 for every $1 you invest. There's not anybody on Wall Street that wouldn't want to be investing in those areas. And time and time again, when you look at these areas to me that are important for economic growth and opportunity, I get frustrated, but what frustrates me even more is where we're going the wrong way. We're now the number one country in terms of our peers and things like obesity. Number one country for hours watching TV, not being outside. We're number one country according to our peers in things like the cost of healthcare relative to the quality of the health of our people. We spend so much more and we get so much less back. It's frustrating to me to see us when it comes to our competitive peers at the top, when it comes to infant mortality. One of the things I said when I was leaving the city of Newark, one of my frustrations, and it took me a long while to get back there as a mayor as I was focused so much on K through 12 education was just what happens to our children from the time that a woman gets pregnant to the time of their second year and seeing that about 40% and Newark is not unique for many cities, but about 40% of my kids were being born with no prenatal care or getting it too late in the emergency room. We're a country that has child poverty rates that are way out of whack for our peers and why is child poverty, infant mortality, all of these things important? Well, it leads right into the next area which we've fallen dramatically and that is on every industry that I can find on education as well. Not just performance on math or language skills, but just as sheer high school graduation rates we've fallen compared to our peers. We used to be the best place on the globe for the percentage of population graduating from college. Now we've fallen dramatically compared to our peers. All of this taken together seems to be for a person like me who was so full of hope, I call myself a prisoner of hope, seems to be sort of a down way to start a presentation, but I'll tell you this. The truth of the matter is what excites me and encourages me is that we have the power from a policy perspective to choose differently, to choose to invest in these things that we know in an evidence-based analysis make a big return. This is not a fade-a-complete. This is not something that has to be. We simply don't lack the ability to do and change these indices. Right now we're manifesting a lack of will to change what we know and must believe have to change. And our economy is demanding it. I've introduced legislation now since I've been a senator a little over a year now. I still have that new Senate smell. I'm so new in the Senate, but I made a decision that I would partner with Republicans as much as I could. The overwhelming majority of my bills are in partnership with Republicans. And one of the first ones was addressing what I found when I just crisscrossed my state and talked to manufacturers. What do you guys need? What's going on? And it was interesting the feedback that I got. It wasn't that, hey, we need, God, tax reform is important. And by the way, it is critically important, but that's not the first thing I heard. I thought I'd get complaints about Obamacare, but that didn't hear that much at all. The first complaint I got from manufacturers was an inability to find the skilled workers they needed. I heard that we needed machinists in New Jersey and a whole bunch of other mid-level technical skills that we weren't finding. There's this huge gap that exists in our country right now between a workforce needs and our worker skills according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of February 2015, there were 5.1 million jobs open in the United States, the highest number of openings since January of 2001. And so for me, the first piece of legislation I did with Tim Scott, a Republican of South Carolina, who when I went to vote yesterday, we and he and I were talking before I went up to vote and he said, the opposite of whatever he said, as a joke to the person sitting there. But the reality is we both understood that what was happening in Germany, what's happening in Canada, what's happening in England is they're rushing past our country in terms of apprenticeships for their populations. And so I wanna focus in on one of these areas that evidence is my sense of hope in that we can change policy that will have a dramatic effect on the outcomes of our country. We can choose as a nation now to go back down the path of innovation, back down the path of competitiveness, back down the path of being number one globally in those areas that are important to us collectively. Because when I sit down with my Republican peers, whether it's Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, and I came down to have dinner and lunch, Bill Bradley advised me to do with all of my Republican peers and for Ted Cruz and I to agree on what restaurant we would go to as a vegan and him from Texas, which I think they, I don't know how they treat vegans in that state, but I know I'm afraid to go down there and tell people I'm a vegan. But the reality is every peer that I talk to, there is great encouraging news that I get about that they agree with me on the ends, that on these areas in which we wanna be competitive again, that we have to work together. And so one of the big areas that I've now found that bipartisan support that I believe that we as a country need to pull together because it is key to our competitiveness in changing us from being number one in an industry that we don't want to be and to help us to get back to being number one where we do wanna be is just the area where we lead the globe. In fact, we're unprecedented in human history for being dominant in the globe in this one category and that is incarcerating your own people, costing our country a quarter of a trillion dollars a year that we could be investing in roads, bridges, education, policy, things that we know work like nurse family partnerships for pregnant women. And having a country that when we pledge allegiance to the flag, liberty and justice for all that has a system that is so far out of whack with our collective conceptions of justice, it just cannot be defended. We have a country right now that has more incarcerated people anyplace else in the globe that does it in a way that is so expensive to taxpayers. And not only do we have this country that over incarcerates, but even worse than that, it over incarcerates in a way that then when a person comes out of incarceration, we do everything possible we can to make it so that about three quarters of the people will at one point end up back being incarcerated. And that's what I call collateral consequences. We have a nation right now that if you're a young kid who made a mistake who was caught with a felony that frankly the last three presidents admitted to doing that many members of Congress admit to doing but a kid that's caught doing that and gets convicted of that felony, now they have an inability to get a job. They can't get a Pell Grant. They can't get many business licenses. They can't vote in many states. They can't get food stamps. I've had situations where I've talked to people that 20 years ago had a nonviolent drug crime and still couldn't get many jobs, couldn't get a taxi license in New Jersey because they were still paying a penalty for things that people in elected office have admitted to doing for some time now. And these collateral consequences when you take it to a young man in a community that hasn't received a great education, make it very easy for them to go back into the only economic endeavor they have which is an underground economy. And so if you add a system that is broken that punishes people continuously and then you add on to that that we use this system, we implement this system, this unjust justice system in a disparate way amongst different groups that if you're poor or minority, you're gonna face a very different criminal justice system than someone who's not. In fact, if you're African-American in this country and you smoke marijuana or sell marijuana and there's no differences between blacks and whites for use of drugs, but you're almost four times more likely to be arrested for it than if you're somebody who's white. And I've lived that in my own experience. When I was at Stanford and I cannot confirm or deny this, but let's just assume that there were a lot of people using pot there. At a university which by the way can't study marijuana because it's a schedule one drug. Very different experiences with police officers than I saw as mayor of Newark when I was running a police department and we were churning so many young people into our system for nonviolent drug offenses. And so now we've gotten to a point where by the way, Latino men, it's the same thing. By the time Latino men are 23 years old, stunning statistic, by the time Latino men are 23 years old, 44% of them have been arrested. 44%. And so the level of minorities we're churning into our system now. In fact, we have racial disparities and incarceration between black and white in this country that are worse than South Africa at the height of apartheid. We have more blacks now in the criminal justice system than all the slaves in 1850. And so this reality of a criminal justice system that over-incarcerates especially based on geography and poor communities, the levels of men, black and Latino men that are being churned into the system and it's costing us so much money. Tens of billions of dollars in lost earnings for our formerly incarcerated people because of their inability to get jobs connected to the economy. Quarter of a trillion dollars, add that to the quarter of a trillion dollars just to warehouse human capital. That you begin to see that the long-term effects of incarcerating people on the economic drag is incredibly difficult, but I'm telling you it's even more difficult for another reason. Turn on Sesame Street. Because I'm telling you what I saw on Sesame Street made me cry. That they now, because of the 10 million children in America, that either now or have at some point have a parent incarcerated. Sesame Street has a skit, you can find it online if you wanna look at it, talking to these children because there are generational impacts of our over-incarceration. Let me give you this example. Here's a woman that wrote me from Florida. Why is a Floridian writing me when they could write Rubio for crying out loud? I've gotta throw Rubio jokes and he's a friend. If I had a glass of water, I'd give a drink to him. That was gratuitous, that was gratuitous. But here's what this woman from Florida wrote to me and she writes me from Florida because that's where she's in prison. She's a New Jersey resident. I was sentenced to 30 years and four months as a first-time nonviolent offender for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. And there's so many stories, especially of women getting caught up in conspiracies because they were living in the same household as somebody for people getting attacked with violent crimes often because even though they were not violent themselves. But let's stick to her. She says, as a first-time nonviolent offender for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, 30 years and four months was her sentence. I've watched my only son grow up from behind prison walls. I've missed every important milestone in his life. He's now 18 years old, struggles with depression and trust issues. He's had to figure out how to be a man on his own with both of his parents incarcerated. Some of the most common people, likely people who go to prison in America are children of incarcerated adults. And so for me, it's difficult in this nation to reconcile our ideals and what we brag about as the American dream when we're not making what I consider the right policy choices that can change the nightmare that we're experiencing in many corners of our country that are actually nightmares that are affecting us all. I in New Jersey spend thousands of my taxpayer dollars supporting this broken system, billions of dollars, a criminal justice system in a state with 14% blacks but over 60% of its prison population, African-American, I'm paying for that system. It affects us all because I'm losing out on the children of incarcerated, their productivity, their challenges that they face, they're losing out on the productivity of people in the system. This is affecting everyone. But the point I really wanna drive home as with infrastructure, R&D, is that we have a different way forward. Right now I've had, again, a little over a year in Congress, but I've had incredible, infirming meetings with New Gangrich, with Grover Norquist, Mark Holden, the chief counsel for the Koch brothers, I consider him a friend working together on these issues. I've partnered now with legislation with people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and Mike Lee who I met with today because we all now know as we look out at the states who are being crushed by this challenging burden of a criminal justice system growing out of control that there actually are things that states are doing that are doing dramatic things. In fact, if you have a Republican governor in Georgia like we have that goes to black communities and brags about lowering the black male incarceration rate 50%, 20% while also lowering crime, it demonstrates there's a way forward. Some of the legislation we've put out there now has done everything from common sense things. Our peers consider juvenile incarceration torture because it so traumatizes children to put them in solitary confinement. We've called for things like doing away with that, lowering mandatory minimums, sealing people's records or expunging them if they made nonviolent drug offenses when they were children, teenagers, so it doesn't haunt them when they're still 30, 40 or 50 years old. There is so much common sense that me and a bunch of senators who met today talking about this know that we have it within our hands to make a difference on some really critical issues which brings me back to this audience here. I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance to listen to some of the other panels and we'll have to go back to the Capitol now but I know some of the people that are before you today and some of the incredible brilliance that is being exhibited in terms of understanding policy and what we can do. I learned this on the streets of Newark though that unless we fully sacrifice and engage in the change-making process, we're not gonna make the change. Well, I'll tell you my frustrating day in the legislature, and I'm not talking about the federal legislature, I'm talking about the Newark City Council. I was a first year city council person and so frustrated and I remember coming home in a funk and the tenant president of some high-rise public housing projects I lived in looks at me and says what's wrong and I poured out my heart on her and then she, this wise elderly woman in our community, this leader in this very tough neighborhood with a high-density low-income population, she looks at me, I always joke, I got my BA from Stanford but my PhD on my streets of Newark and this was one of my great teachers, she looks at me and says very simply, Cory, I've listened to you but I now know what you should do and I'm like, really? And she's like, no, I know what you should do. I said, okay, tell me. And then she crosses her arms and she wasn't done playing with me yet so she goes, yep, I know what you should do. And I look at her and Miss Jones, what should I do? And she looks at me almost angrily and she says, boy, you should do something. And I said, that's it? And she goes, yeah, that's it, do something. And I say that because we allow our inability often to do everything to undermine our determination to do something, that we get caught up in what I call a state of sedentary agitation. What frustrates me now is we get so upset about what's going on in the world but forget those 10 two-letter words, if it is to be, it is up to me. I've been invited generously to conferences to speak since I was a city council person and the conversations are wonderful, affirming, I learned things, I brought them back to my work but the one thing I hope one day that we can talk about is how much we are accomplishing because of our new level of activism that reflects where we come from. My father used to tell me, boy, you are the result of a grand conspiracy of love, of people who are willing to not just believe things or talk about things but make extraordinary sacrifices towards those ends. We live in a country with such injustice right in our midst going on facing poor folks and minorities whether it's the criminal justice system or the inability to access avenues to good education and training. That doesn't have to be demands, a commitment and a sacrifice. I'm so encouraged now to have found many colleagues who share my commitment and are willing to make that sacrifice but I'm telling you right now if we're back here 10 years from now and have not addressed these issues, America's place of dominance and innovation and competitiveness and quality of life will not have reversed these trends I've seen for the last 10 to 20 years, it will have sank in deeper and that's not the calling of our people. There is this dream of America that is so precious. It's what kept my parents' generation going through some pretty awful times. It's what called to their conscience and had a chorus of conviction that answered that call to do something about it and I believe we in this room can and if we understand that truth then we will make real on the promise of our nation to what our children say every single day when they pledge allegiance not just to a flag but to the ideals that we can become that country with liberty and justice for all. Thank you.