Jon Stewart Interviews President Bill Clinton: CGI U 2012 Closing Conversation

before I ever appeared in the Jon Stewart Show my daughter told me years ago when she was just a little older than you that more people in her generation got their news from Jon Stewart than from the network news and first I thought it sounded a little weird but I can tell you now I have been on Jon Stewart's show to talk about two of the three books I've written since I left the White House he clearly had read them he knew what the facts were he had been well briefed and every other time I've been on there he really seemed to me to have put in more time and more preparation as more serious questions while poking a little fun at me along the way than anybody else who interviewed me in short he has done what we need to do more of in our schools he makes learning fun and it's still learning please welcome Jon Stewart hello you guys how are ya it's a it's an absolute honor to be here you know it's funny as I see I already got signs I cannot read them in any way you know I'm in the light but you're in the dark so I really this is uh this is an honor you know as I as I went over a lot of the projects that that these kids are doing from around the world I can't I can't help but think how much they remind me of me when I was their age just I guess just the commitment and the dedication and the know I I can't tell you how incredibly impressed I am with the work that you guys are doing and with the enthusiasm that you bring to it and the passion and the ingenuity and I made a bong out of an apple once and I just know how difficult it can be now and now I know I should have used bamboo because clearly clearly that's how you win that's how you get prizes but I'm honored to be here and to the you know President Clinton is being very modest he could have taken the route that some ex-presidents take you do a couple of speaking engagements and you get yourself a nice little manner in a pool and a you know the whole thing but his commitment to changing the world and to making conditions better around it has been very inspiring so I just wanted to thank you for everything that you've done as well and and it's exciting I got a better deal because you think I get to hang out with them it is kind of exciting keeps me young long as I don't look in the mirror so what have you so you've been here now you've spent the weekend you've been doing the CGI for a while what did you learn this weekend from interacting with the students here and with some of the projects that they're doing what did you take away from it well two things one is we had the largest number of non American students here people who are citizens of other countries many go to school in the United States some go to school around the world and came all the way from where they are in school and I learned all over again that all these young people partly because of the social media and internet communication generally have a much more global perspective on a person-to-person basis than any generation before second thing I learned is that every year their commitments are getting better that is they are thinking of things that they can do that they really can do and they understand that and they don't over promise that is these guys get a promise they were going to build 24,000 bicycles instead of 24 but they know they can build 24 shaking it and if they and they understand that the power of their ideas will rest in part on either other people replicating what they have done or putting money into what they're doing so it can be done everywhere else but they think about things that they can actually do that will not only help the people they set out to help but could help other people and that I think is really important I mentioned when we opened that a couple years ago a commitment was made that I profess I didn't notice at the time and I'm surprised because I care about it by an undergraduate at Vanderbilt who's now graduated to train people who've been sent to prison when they're released from prison but they're not yet free they go to halfway houses is a transition period and he offered them train in making shirts and marketing handling the inventory and their upscale good shirts so you people would buy them without knowing this and he knew he could do it for twenty people so that's what he promised but the point is if every college in America had a similar plan to train ex-inmates the repeater rate would go way down and the chronic long-term unemployment rate would be positively affected because even though we like to say we're a country of second chances and almost everybody who goes to prison is going to get out the truth is that most people are expected to wear some sort of Scarlet Letter around their neck for the rest of their lives and it's nuts we should try to put these people back into productive life in America so that's the sort of thing that we see them do is there a plan in any way to get you know you've got CGI you is you know and it has taken off as its own separate entity is there a plan to integrate this into the larger initiative where business leaders people that have taken on commitments on a larger scale can come in and steal and exploit their ideas wait that was subtext hold on well actually but but that they can interact with so that they can get a sense of where there's I go last year I started having a separate meeting with the non American students they have a lunch and I just go by and answer questions for 45 minutes or so so I did that today for the very first time one of those students asked me the same question can we graduate our ideas up to CGI and we are also having in June in Chicago our second CGI just for America to try to help grow jobs in America which I promised a whole until we return to a full employment economy so what I'm going to do when all of you go home is take all the commitments and figure out which ones we could present at either CGI America as things that would create jobs in our country if someone would support them and try to get some of the people who are there to finance them or take them to CGI in New York and September it's a really good idea and I'm I'm embarrassed that we got all the way to the fifth CGI you and I never thought about it but you're always one step ahead of me we think these kids are thinking when they get out of college they'd like to be employed because that's AI doesn't work that way anymore it's a different world out there what do you see you know you're doing this five years you've obviously you've been a quote-unquote the most powerful man in the world the ability to affect change what's the difference in the ability to affect change through an NGO through the types of student commitments that you see through this and through governmental action because I find that there has been an erosion of confidence in government's ability to engage its own corruption create change in the way you want and yet there's been an enormous energy towards these NGOs towards these smaller groups what's been your experience on both sides of it well first when I took office as president confidence in government was very low because the economy was weak and inequality was growing and we had a lot of problems when I left office because we had a lot of jobs because it was the first time the only time now in more than 40 years when the bottom 20% earnings increased in percentage terms as much as the top 20% and a hundred times as many people moved out of poverty as in the previous 12 years there was a lot of a big increase in confidence in government so I think the level of confidence in government pretty much tracks people's sense of well-being and whether they can boot by effort and work do better but there is a big difference if if you're president in theory you're handling more money and you can direct it to more places you can help more people for example we gave out two million micro enterprise loans here in poor countries in Africa East Asia and Latin America but you also have to deal with all the things that you didn't expect to deal with like the incoming fire that Bosnia Kosovo what you know and so and you have to go through both Congress and bureaucracies and deal with resistances in foreign countries if you run a foundation or you're like them with their ideas you wake up and you start with one thing and you just see how far you can walk it out how big you can make it so we started out with a very modest proposal with AIDS drugs and now in our foundation we negotiated contracts that get four million people about half all the people in poor countries in the world the least expensive high-quality AIDS medicines so I think that in some ways running a foundation any kind of nongovernmental work gives you more flexibility more creativity more ability to build from the ground up it's hard to help as many people as you can help if you're president if things are going well and you're not spending all your time trying to bail out a boat but it is immensely personally rewarding because you get to you know for example a couple years ago I visited this reforestation project we were running in Malawi through a young malawian University graduate it was we were in an area where the incomes were less than a dollar a day where the kids never went to school but the people all chose in these three different villages different kinds of trees they wanted to plant to get their carbon credits and then decided that they would keep only 55 percent of their income and give the other forty five percent to their fellow villagers to get them in the system they had this sense that they needed to plant more trees they wanted to reverse global warming they wanted to preserve agriculture it took me an hour and a half to drive about 11 miles 18 kilometers on this road to get there but it was worth all the money in the world to me to see one more time and one of the tourist places on earth and one that was hard to reach and one where people didn't know who I was from Adam I guess anyway wasn't Adam I don't look that old up that intelligence that you know intelligence and effort and actual social consciousness in a way are pretty well evenly distributed but investment and opportunity aren't and it's a real inspiration to keep hitting it I want to ask you you know brought them allow I think it brings up you're going to do a CGI just for America you know there's a sense that oh we got to do all these global initiatives we've got to help people in Malawi and in areas that are quote unquote third-world and underdeveloped and you know a friend of mine runs something called the global portrait project they connect kids in different communities to each other through the internet and classrooms and things of that nature and they connected kids in Haiti with kids in Harlem and the idea was through art for them to learn an understanding of each other and they were stunned because the project upset the kids in Harlem because they felt from everything that they had heard and read that their lives were going to be far superior and this is post-earthquake and this is kids in Haiti that had been hit really hard but what they found was the kids in Harlem were suffering really badly as well and so what do you do about in so-called developed countries the intractable social problems of poverty and how do you attack them in the same creative ways that you can in in countries like Haiti well first in my mind the two problems it's I don't think we have to we have to or we should choose one over the other that is the United States does not spend a high percentage of its income on foreign assistance and for our development if you ask people what we should spend they say oh all the polls help let's say between five and fifteen percent of the budget if you say well what do we spend they say oh 25 percent of the budget through things we spend 1 percent of the budget you're saying people are sometimes misinformed yeah and and interestingly enough these numbers have not changed for 20 years and it doesn't matter how many times someone like me says it we can say it too we're blue in the face people are sort of pre-programmed somehow to think we are putting all this money into foreign assistance in America when we aren't so since we live in an interdependent world since we need more customers since America has only about 12 percent of its GDP tried to tied to exports as compared with Germany the number one country in the world which has over 25 percent they do even better than Japan we need to widen the circle of opportunity particularly in places like Africa that feel is special tie to us on the other hand I think that we need to go back and take a whack at American poverty to much harder I personally believe we should reinvigorate the empowerment zones and grants I know the president has proposed this and I proposed at the end of my term and we passed a bill to try to make it possible for every area in the country they had an unemployment rate above the national average or an income rate below get special investments the poorest communities in America are still the Native American communities that have no gambling I think every one of them should become a center for solar and wind power that's west of the Mississippi they have lots of money and all we have to do is build a transmission lines sufficient to carry the power back to the urban areas that's one real problem America for all for the Americans here we know we rank first or second in the world in every survey of potential to generate electricity from the Sun and the wind every single one the problem is that with the exception of California and a few other places the Sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest where the people aren't we have a hundred and forty separate electrical grids that are connected so for example if we're about to have a brownout in Washington DC in theory they could wield power all the way from California to us but as you go from one system to the other you lose a lot of power a lot of the distribution systems are inefficient and linked in Wyoming they're building a big wind farm now and the people building the wind farm are having to build their own transmission lines to connect it to urban areas in California so this is a huge deal if we could just simply do that if the government could do that solar power now has gotten about as cheap as wind power it won't be forever but there's been a lot of overproduction and we could do that we could revolutionize the lives of Native Americans in a way that allowed them to be self-supporting diversify their economies and lift themselves out of poverty the same thing is true in the Mississippi Delta the same thing is true in Appalachia the same thing is true in a lot of inner cities the other thing I would say is one of the things I do in Harlem Oakland in a number of other cities is run a mentorship program for people running inner city businesses with ink magazine they pick their most successful small business people and they come and help our folks and they help them on market surveys on inventory management you'd be amazed how many when I started as how many businesses we had in Harlem that still hadn't computerized their records and didn't know how to really manage their inventory and hadn't sort of measured the changes in markets so I they're no different than people anywhere there's perfectly intelligent enough to make the most of the modern world if they know what their options are and they know what the benefits are that's what I think is important and I'm not surprised trust me the people most people living in Haiti are still much worse off we still got a half a million people living in tents there although we're moving them out pretty fast but the Haitians are incredibly gifted creative intelligent hard-working people who have never had a government or society worthy of them so if you're going in when you're first starting to sort of unravel some of these issues and trying to empower local populations you were going to rank where you needed to attack first is it order is it corruption is it health is it all three at once do you have to focus on you know when you are stepping into an area and you want to unleash the type of creativity that you see here and in those communities you have a hierarchy of issues that you feel like you have to walk through to get to that point yes but it depends really I'd looked at them in three baskets if you're going into developing society first of all the number one thing everybody in the world wants is a decent job that pays a decent income they want a predictable income that will enable them to support a family and raise their kids in dignity and they'll solve a lot of the other problems if they have that but you also need to help them build systems that make good behavior have predictable possible consequences which is why predictable positive consequences which is why I work on building school systems and health care systems and water systems and energy systems and to get all that done and make it work you've got to have honest transparent government that is also capable of providing security to the people so I see it in those three baskets then I ask myself what can I do the most on so in Haiti for example I worked first on bing and investment in second on helping get money for health care systems and school systems and energy systems and third on supporting the United Nations peacekeeping force and trying to get order and in working with the donors to Haiti to put every single red cent that went through the Commission that I co-chaired on the internet here's how much Canada gave here's who got it here's what they're supposed to do and when it's over you'll get a performance and an accounting on it all that I think is really important and meanwhile we have to have governments that are willing to give money to the Haitian government to rebuild its capacity but you need to think of it in those three areas and not every person will have the ability in even me you know whether but I have a pretty wide portfolio and reach I can't do all three of those things in all the countries so if let's say I we have an enormous Lee gifted group of people over a thousand of them working all over the world in increasing health access I still won't go into any country unless the government invites us and signs a strict no corruption pledge I don't ask them not to have corruption in some area I'm not working in because I don't have I'm not president anymore I don't have any control over that but if somebody pays $500 for my $60 medicine that keeps children alive for a year and aids that will be known in 72 hours in some other country where people don't have the $500 so if it happens there you will have seven or eight kids dying for every one life we save so I think the best thing that NGOs that are actually wanted by governments can do is to say when you're dealing with us there has to be a no corruption place and we have to be able to enforce it and we have to be able to monitor it and report on it I think it's really important right now has there been something that you've seen through CGI through the last five years that has had pound-for-pound the most impact in terms of when you look back and you think of a program an initiative a commitment that for what was put into it gave you the results in a powerful way well there are I I can't say one over the other but I can say that that a lot of these all these programs that the students do the ones that help people in America and did what they were supposed to do probably had the most immediate impact like students that went home and organized the greening of their own campuses maximize the retrofits of all the buildings had more you know bicycles on the campuses instead of cars recycled all the waste did all that stuff that's something where you can actually say here we are here we're a model in America and we proved it was economical and didn't raise your tuition instead it lowered the utility bill of the college that's an example of something that has a comprehensive impact on the other hand a lot of these commitments again what we've got to do and I need to help do a better job of getting other people to recognize their potential like we talked a little about the socket ball where one of our committees a couple years ago said designed a soccer ball that would actually capture the heat energy driven into a soccer ball during a hot soccer match on a hot day on a hot field and then it can be used actually to run lights in a village Hut just take the soccer ball and you plug it into it and then it says that's what you call as well is there other is a socket but but it was an interesting idea because it was a way of turning human heat energy and a usable energy so that's the kind of thing that I would like to see done I think this bamboo bike winter here if you think of all the places in the world that can grow bamboo and where it grows and what it could be what it could do to reduce all kinds of other environmental problems it has staggering potential so what I you know the what I think we need to do is to do more to try to take these things to scale and it may be that the only way to do it is to take those that have proved extraordinarily successful and take them to CGI and say instead of thinking of a new commitment how about funding some of these right okay how many people do you think coupled up this weekend just ballpark it's just I'm just asking for a ballpark just a little throw it out there about 100 hears oh sorry getting back to the there's a disease and poverty we know one of my promises to myself in my old age is that I'm going to try to find an opportunity every day for the rest of my life even if I'm just saying it to myself to say either I don't know where I was wrong this is the grave I don't know I don't know I don't know what have you come up you know I'm always surprised at your ability to be tenacious your ability to approach these issues that are seemingly intractable have has your commitment ever wavered has your commitment ever been challenged in a way that you know not necessarily dark night of the soul but but that you've thought to yourself I just can't keep banging my head against this wall because everybody's going to face it with the type of idealistic solutions that they're looking for they're going to come up against seemingly intractable issues well the closest I came I think was in after the financial crisis in 2009 and my foundation you know I didn't have any private wealth when I left the White House I was in debt so everything I do with my foundation comes from other people's contributions thankfully I make enough money now where I can give money to the foundation to every year but I didn't for a long time and it's nowhere near enough to run it and so we had a bad year in 2009 and I couldn't blame anybody I mean I had people who were giving me a million dollars or more a year who lost 75% of their net worth over night and we had saved a small endowment and I do mean small about twenty-seven million dollars and we basically had to see are you going to just shut down what you're doing in Ethiopia where I had hundreds and hundreds of employees trying to build clinics for people because people are still dying anonymously in Ethiopia because they just live out there somewhere in there no clinics are are you going to bet that you can come back and blow what you saved and I chose the latter course and I thought boy if this sucker didn't turn around I am one dead duck because there is no way I'll ever be able to do this and I was really worried I was afraid you know I could have another health problem something could happen I got all these people's jobs depending on me all these lives depending on me and what if I make the wrong call here maybe I should cut back now and instead I decided to roll the dice and try for one more year and it worked out fine but that was hard and then you know when you work at something and it doesn't work that's tough then I had a much more ambitious plan trying to turn around businesses in inner-city areas and help them hire more people we started off with a whole strategy to get them Mackenzie like consulting services across the board and it was highly expensive for business even though Booz Allen one of our sponsors and the bright MBA Association and African American property management association others were helping us it just didn't work and I just in one of the businesses I helped to start failed and I was personally involved with it and I'm not big on I you know I hate to fail especially when somebody else gets hurt so those things are hard but you just have to go on you've got to figure out how you're going to keep score if you're going to keep score in a way that if you ever lose you failed then you shouldn't play the only thing that matters is whether somebody's better off when you quit than when you started and so that's what matters so a but it's hard now I don't ever wish you know I were sitting on an island in the Florida Keys somewhere you know going to play golf and drinking pina coladas because this is fun for me this is I do this this is the most selfish thing I do I love bringing all these young people here I love listening to their ideas I love you so I don't I feel like I should pay for the privilege of doing it I mean it's just it's fun so it's not that it's just that when you have more yesterday's and tomorrow's you just hate to fail you know you just hate to but you just have to keep that's part of the human condition you just got to keep up and banging your head against the wall and pushing the rocks up the hill sometimes I get there well I think what I took away from that is President Bill Clinton is going to start paying all of you for this privilege I think that's what I I think that's what I took from this now here's what I want to do so we've got all these students gathered we've got all this energy I want to open it up to them give them an opportunity to ask some questions of you some ideas that they have so I think we've got some things said I give you permission ask questions of him I I will lie to you President Bill Clinton will not I will all right so we've got some I'm just gonna see if I can get under the light a little bit to get is there someone right there who's got a question oh here we go right here there you go uh right right through there if you can just state your name and then whatever your question is hi my name is Izzy I'm actually a student here at GW I was just wondering out what in spot continues to inspire you despite the fact that there are so many problems out there so what do we what should we continue to focus on what continues to inspire you to do the great work that you do um I tell you what inspires me the most is whether two things one is the whole CGI Network CGI in September CGI u CGI for America there seems to be an almost unlimited number of people who care about other people and find meaning in life by doing something that helps other people do what they ought to do I mean you couldn't come here and listen to your ideas without being inspired the other thing that inspires me is when I go out in the world and actually see the people that we're working with I just give you one simple example when I made my Africa trip a couple years ago in addition to this climate change if I stopped to see one of our farm projects and we have agriculture products in Malawi and Rwanda and I grew up in a farming State I lived on a farm when I was a little boy I loved agriculture and I know farmers are equally intelligent everywhere in the world and they're pretty good environmentalists in general family farmers take good care of the land and make the most of whatever water they have so we're meeting with these eleven farmers and also you know we were in Tanzania then rural Tanzania and they picked one and these people have little farms average one or two acres they picked one person to be the spokesperson the only woman she was a widow with a 13 year old son her sole asset was a quarter acre of land in the previous year she had made $80 she and her son lived on 80 dollars for a year so we come in and give them better fertilizer and feed and seed and we take their products to market you know the average African farmer loses one half of his or her income every year paying someone to take the food to market because none of them have the vehicles it's scandalous so we take the food to market this woman made four hundred dollars the first year we work with her her income went up fivefold right that's no money that's less than $2 a day but to her she was relatively rich because it was five times more than she ate the year before and I said well what's the best thing about it she said my 13 year old son he finally got to go to school because in poor countries with no revenue based they actually had to pay tuition for their kids to go to school so this woman was sending her kid to school now I'm about to go to Vienna to the oldest aids fundraising initiative in Europe to AIDS Life Ball and they support my foundation every year and so I go over there and every year I see this couple who run along with a group of Catholic nuns and one Catholic priest from Brooklyn an orphanage in Cambodia that they support an I support we provide the pediatric AIDS medicine they keep 320 plus kids alive and my second book giving the only picture in it's me holding this nine-year-old boy who's nine month old boy whose parents had both died of AIDS his father before he was born in his mother slightly after he was born being raised as an orphan and he was about to die he got this medicine so about a year later somebody in California who worked at the orphanage came out to me when I was doing a book signing and said I see you got Basil's picture here here he is now and they had a picture of him with all the other kids he's - looking good then I go to the aides life ball year before last they give me a picture of basil at 5:00 looking good I know when I go back this time I'm going to get another picture of this Cambodian kid he doesn't know me but he's alive that's the most meaningful thing in the world to be not only knows what this kid will make of his life but I know he's going to have a chance that's that would keep you going let's get let's get someone else over here if you're asking me I would just say ditto all right yes right here and then we'll go over that way yeah we'll get you guys so my group and I we just went to the Navajo Nation and we found out that eighty percent of each dollars actually spent off reservation and most power generated on the reservation and to Big Coal Fired plants only goes to LA in Las Vegas so what can we do to help develop these extremely poor global areas in the United States well first of all I'll go back to the energy every Indian Reservation in the West you're a new good for you you think anyone else is going to shout Las Vegas oh wait no that's not yeah yeah I went to the reservation Window Rock and you know where it is so I went to visit to highlight this very problem you're talking about in my last term as president where there was a young 13 year old student who had won this great contest and her prize was her very own personal computer except in her home she didn't have an electrical outlet to plug in the computer so my first suggestion is right now solar panels are the cheapest they've ever been because this is actually what caused the failure of the famous Solyndra company they needed they were designing a solar panel that was actually cylindrical like this and had a higher efficiency conversion rate but cost more than twice as much as the average photovoltaic like all electrical products they go down in price as the volume soul goes up so they knew they were going to lose money for four or five years in any of this loan and that's why the energy department gave it to him because it was technologically so much more efficient then after they did that the Chinese came in and offered 32 billion dollars more in solar subsidies which immediately collapsed the market especially for the less efficient Chinese products so that's what happened so instead of looking at a four year time loss they were looking at a ten year time loss and nobody was willing to wait that long that's really what happened okay so as a result of that these panels are cheap I personally believe that federal government ought to have an initiative and local NGOs on to help to make every one of these reservations at least self-sufficient with these centralized power photovoltaics do the same thing for electricity that cell phones do for communication and every one of these buildings on every reservation in the United States that will efficiently handle it should have solar power every one of them that can generate wind power on-site should have wind power and then you can have a simple battery that will give you a day or two storage if the wind doesn't blow or the Sun doesn't shine and then I believe that they ought to be able to export power in phione coal plants it's okay if they sell it but the problem is they probably don't get much benefit from it I don't know it depends on what the what the agreement was when they gave permission to build a plan on the site but energy independence would be a good place to start with diversifying the income of the Native American reservations let's try over here sir right there yes sir you gotta get him the mic there they go my name is IDO is billa from the University of Oxford in the UK my question are is we get in Africa since our President Bill Clinton pays a lot of visits to Africa so if I know most of the leaders there past and present all of you in high regard so is there a way to scale up your efforts the kind of work you do here by encouraging those presidents when they leave power to actually engage in similar initiatives to support their people yeah yeah someone had a nerve you know there's now a program funded by a Somali billionaire who made a lot of money in the cell phone business to actually give cash stipends to former presidents who were honest when in office and wished to do public service when they get out of office it's a great idea and I actually keep in touch with for example every year at the CGI almost every year at least two former African presidents of Boston Joe from Nigeria and Rawlings from Ghana come but a number of others and you know God has got a pretty good record they keep rolling over people with elections that's pretty good and and Senegal president Wadi finally admitted that he lost the last election which was a good thing they had an honest election in Senegal because they're doing very well on most indicators anyway I I would like to do that I have done work in Zambia with probably the most respected African former leader next to Mandela on the continent Kenneth Kaunda we do work in aids education and prevention together but I think it's a good idea and maybe I should try to do it more systematically because a lot of those people are still very vigorous very interested in of course before mr. Mandela got so frail I supported all of his charitable work in South Africa I try to go every year around his birthday and see him and do some event that supports either the work of the foundation or the work of some other foundation that he supports now and I think it's something that can make a real difference in Africa thank you let's go yeah right right there you're right next time the other gonna dive with the blue ladies please not a piece of media's ideas I'm a student coming from Afghanistan study I'm standing at the california university of pacific this is my second conference in CGI you and i have been impressed by the commitments i see students making here from technology to agriculture to other commitments but i get inspired as well and i make commitments to what I can not to bring peace in I think I son because I cannot do that so my question is um all these commitments that people make here they go back to a country they have security that allows them to implement those commitments when I make a commitment my commitment is at risk because it's in danger because it's there it's not secure if I make a commitment to go to Kandahar or Helmand I'm I'm a danger of being attacked by Taliban what could be done to bring peace in your opinion having served as the United States president and now with all your success in mobilizing an army of change agents to go and do that in their countries what could be done because I think the idea my dream and I think everyone can hear that is that we should see on CNN BBC al Jazeera news about commitments about changing world not war Oh nicely done Afghanistan is a particularly difficult case for three reasons one there is the question of the capacity of the government and its allies not just the United States but the other country that are there to actually create a secure environment second there is the alienation caused by the widespread corruption and third the most productive most likely path to a less violent future on a daily basis would be some sort of agreement between the Afghan government and the Taliban and most people question whether that could be done without the guarantees of the Constitution for equal rights for women and girls being severely eroded so we're in a terrible moral dilemma there you want fewer people to die and you want to stop the violence and you don't think the government is currently constituted will ever be able to totally defeat the Taliban and dominate the country but if you make a deal under conditions of weakness or without guaranteed enforcement you may be selling out the futures of countless women and girls so that's not the answer you want sometimes I get to say I don't know when I don't want to say it but that's the truth and I think my experience has been working in other areas that were dominated by violence not nothing as bad as Afghanistan but in different places for example in when President Musharraf was still in office in Pakistan and I had my differences with him which we aired on television actually when I was president and his into his credit with his support in a you know big press conference but the Musharraf government actually invited our foundation to come and help them set up a National AIDS program and provide the medicine and a testing equipment and the training and it was the first non African Muslim nation not a city not an area a whole nation to ask us to come in to say we are out of denial we got a problem here will you come help us so I feel but what we did do and none of our people were ever hurt there anything we were able to negotiate basically place by place security arrangements with the powers that be who thought that it was worth doing so my guess is given the conflicts of Klan as well as the Taliban and the government in order for you to be able to go safely to Kandahar there's probably a deal to be cut there with somebody locally and it would probably have to be done that way if you had the support of the right people in the government I think it would make a difference if I can help you get it I'd be glad to try but I think that the United States has said we'd be happy to support the resumption of the talks between the Taliban and the and the government but we don't want to sell out the future of every woman and every girl in Afghanistan to make a Peake's it is a horrible dilemma and I think in the meanwhile the best someone like you can do and I applaud you for loving your country and making commitments to help it there and it may be that we could make a deal that would secure the safety and freedom of movement for the people involved in your commitment in the specific areas for the specific purposes you want I have had some success in doing that in other countries and so far somebody promised us they'd do it they've done it nobody's ever double-cross us yet on the deal like that all right come on somebody give him a hard question come on yes ma'am right there yeah hi my name is Charisse Madigan I'm from Rochester New York and I was just wondering with the economic situation as is it's hard enough to go to college and try to get a job when you graduate as movements like Occupy Wall Street have highlighted but it's even harder to graduate from college and try to start a business with humanitarian endeavors such as all of us here are probably trying to do at least to further our commitments so how do you suggest that we go ahead and try to help the world while at the same time trying to keep our heads above water I can't change this way of course I think you might want to host your own TV show because I found the money terrific and you have a real broad platform so that's what I would recommend you might want to help her anymore first of all I want to compliment you on inviting the competition most people don't do that here's my specific suggestion and you can find this out on the internet or you can contact my foundation and we'll give you information there are eight or ten foundations in America whose specialty is funding other people's non-governmental activities and vital voices could help the Rockefeller Foundation Fund sometimes new foundations there are other people who do it depends on what you want to do and how you want to do it and how you want to design it but there are foundations with a lot of money that are interested in doing this and so I think assuming you could find somebody who likes your idea in this economy it might be easier to start a business that is an NGO than to find a particular job that you find fruitful now I believe once we get the direct student loan program fully implemented in America for people who did not take bank loans over and above that that is it just got whatever Pell grants or other grants were available and all their loans came through the student loan program when that's fully implemented and I think they're going to move it up and fully implement it next year then from then forward I think you will have less pressure because everybody's loan obligation per year will be tied to your income so your loan payments will be a function of your job so your job doesn't have to become a function of your loan payments and this is a when when in in 1993 my first year as president I passed this as an option for all the colleges and the banks went crazy because they had guaranteed loans you know but a lot of the colleges took it a lot of students took advantage of it the students save nine billion dollars and lower interests in repayment they are the ones who joined it could pay back as a fixed percentage of their income and the taxpayers save four billion dollars because when people can pay back their loans they do they don't default so when President Obama was elected there was a Democratic Congress and they gave him a mandatory program that just forced everybody to shift to direct student loans but it took a few years to get implemented when that's done I think it will change everything I think that a lot of young people like you will be able to say well you know I always kind of wanted to teach school for a year or two but I can't do it for life and gosh I've got fifty thousand dollars in student loans it's totally irrelevant now because your loan repayment obligation will be capped as a percentage of your income so you might say well I'm going to go teach in a Native American reservation or in an inner-city school or do something else they work in some other way for a couple of years just to see what it's like and then maybe I'll go back and go into business and you'll be able to afford to do it because you won't be bankrupted by loan repayment obligations so you all remember that when you're going through this right let's get a woman right there standing right there sorry what is it hi my name is Brittany King I'm a graduate student from Houston Texas and from Houston Texas yes and I'm also a single mother and survivor of domestic abuse brutal domestic abuse and I know that when you came on earlier you said that we in this room are overachievers but because of my past I haven't always been that way my first semester of college I felt out just completely flunked just with everything that I was facing last night a gentleman said that talent is universal but opportunity is not so my question to you is how do we optimize the talent of those who don't always have the same opportunity someone like me who's had to fight very hard just to be standing today with everything that I've had to face so how do we make that something that's real um this is an excellent opportunity that I sought out my school didn't tell me about it I just kind of went looking so how do we make that something that's real well let me ask you something stand up how did you get through it how did you become a good student how did you get over it did somebody help you and do with that somebody back in your home with it somebody on your college campus was it someone in high school tell how did you get to where you are um I think because I have because my daughter was so dependent on me as a single mother looking into her face saying that we're going to make it has she not been there I may not be standing today um and I think innately I've always had this unwavering determination and resilience but I also recognize that everybody may not have that character trait which is why I asked that question um when I wake up every morning and I see that I still have the air to take breath I say that I still have a purpose on this earth but I understand that there are those who feel like there is no purpose when hope seems to elude them but I will say that I have had I have had people who have come alongside me and encouraged me and just told me to keep pushing and those were people that I sought out and some people who just kind of saw my determination and resilience who helped me but for those who may not have that drive or that motivation or a child looking at them saying mommy what are we going to eat tonight what do we do for those people well one other that's a great question there's been an extraordinary amount of publicity given to the problem of abuse of children both physical and sexual abuse in the last several months not only the well-known case at Penn State but a major league baseball player has just written his memoirs about his own experience the senator from Massachusetts Scott Brown wrote a memoir about his own experience Joe Torre who coached the New York Yankees in the Los Angeles Dodgers his whole foundation is called the safe at home foundation because he was brutalized as a child until he got big enough to stop it and I think one of the things that you could do all of you could do is to try to get the people who work with this to establish some kind of beachhead on every campus so that people would have someone who could help them get over this because one of the things you have to do is you have to get to the point where you either you either put it in a box somewhere or forgive somebody or go ream amount or do whatever so they don't hold you prisoner anymore I mean your daughter basically liberating your child if your daughter or son okay your daughter because you had to care about her you didn't have the option of being a prisoner to your past your daughter sets you free and with people that don't have children have to have something else that will set them free I'll tell you an interesting story the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison early 1991 on Sunday morning I got Chelsea out of bed she was somewhat younger than she is now and I sat her up on the kitchen counter and I turned on the television and I said Chelsea they're letting Nelson Mandela out of prison today this may be the most important thing you ever see in terms of a political event so he walks down this dusty road you remember these and none of you are old enough to remember but you may have seen the films you should get to get it on the Internet's beautiful he walks down this dusty road this dramatic gesture he gets a little car they opened the gate and he drives out to freedom and before you know what he's president after 27 years so when Mandela and I became friends I said you know you're a great man but you're also a canny politician it was smart to invite your jailers to the inauguration it was essential to invite the parties that put you in prison to be part of your government you held the country together but tell me the truth and I tell them about getting Chelsea up and watching him I said when you were walking down that road for the last time tell the truth now didn't she hate their guts again and then they said well of course I did he said I was full of hatred and fear I had not been free and so long but he said I realized if I hated them after I got in that car and got to that gate I would still be their prisoner he said and he said you said and he smiled to me says I wanted to be free and so I let it go and he looked at me and said so should you so should everyone some in all these cases of childhood abuse it's so caught up with things that are wrong what shouldn't happen to people what the power relationships are it's just like it's so hard to let it go but there are people who do this all the time on every continent think what it's like in Africa for all those kids that were turn into soldiers think about all the childhood soldiers that have somehow miraculously made something of their lives and the US or Europe or gone back to Africa and done it I mean it's the cruelest of all kind of abuse child abuse but in the end it's about no longer being a prisoner to it and so you have to give people the strength of mind to look forward instead of by per your daughter sets you free see if I can get someone from up in the back there yes ma'am you're standing right there and then back yeah at the University of Pittsburgh all right so we've been talking a lot about how wonderful it is that we all are getting off our butts and committing ourselves to all these wonderful goals and we hold babies in Africa and we spit off numbers about how well development has helped these countries what about the negative impacts of foreign aid we haven't said a thing about that all weekend she talked about the negative impact of foreign aid I think she's talking about people being sick of bono I think that's pretty much what it is nothing's bono no she's she's saying are do you have anything to say about are there any negative impacts to foreign aid and is anything that you've seen that has gone in that is there are yeah there can be negative impacts to foreign aid there can also be negative impacts of development let me just mention that foreign aid if it's not if it's not held accountable can just reinforce the status quo in a country and increase the amount of money available for corruption one possible negative secondly foreign aid can be a project that the donor feels that the country needs that the country hasn't bought into in which case it will be wasted money as soon as the money runs out the project will vanish and won't have any lasting impact foreign aid can be harmful if a country sees that less than half the money appropriated is actually being spent in the country on the people because the developed countries NGOs are getting big cuts off the top so there are lots of problems with foreign aid and I spend a lot of time trying to help improve its impact in countries where I don't take the money directly obviously I have a conflict in the United States now so I don't do that but I do try to help improve the impact of American foreign aid by seeing that a higher percentage of it is actually spent in the country on the people it was intended to reach we could if we had a simple requirement a requirement like the health care law's requirement that 85% of all the money that you pay in healthcare goes through your health care instead of profits or promotion if 85 percent of all the foreign aid appropriated by every wealthy country in the world had to be spent on the people and through the people in the country it was designed to help in a way that was transparent accountable and honest that would dramatically increase the impact of whatever dollars are appropriated by Parliament's and Congress around the world but let me also say that there can be corruption in private development - that's the well-known resource curse why do so many countries with oil and minerals and metals wind up with average people poorer and the economy polluted because they just pay off people who want to be paid off and they don't reinvest money in the country one of the most rewarding things I do is work with Canadian mining companies who put money into funds in equity meaning Bolivia and Peru to reinvest some of their mining profits in the areas where the mining occurs to diversify the economy and strengthen society so that when the mines play out the people will be better off every country in the world with mineral wealth or mining wealth or oil wealth should have the money spent the way Botswana spent its diamond money there's a reason that the per capita income in Botswana is twice that of any other country in sub-saharan Africa apart from the fact that it's a very small country with a lot of wealth and that is they put a hundred percent of the money into a transparent trust the money goes into a trust and you know what the contracts are worth and you can follow the money to see if that much money is in the trust and then when the money is spent it's spent to benefit the people and diversify the economy and that's all transparent that's the way every country should handle its resource wealth if they did it would be the biggest boon to Africa and ordinary people would see their incomes rise I go to Nigeria once a year we mostly just have climate change projects in Nigeria but I go there once a year to a major press event where a Nigerian press man brings in all the people from all the sections of the economy and then brings in people like me from outside to tell them that they should be honest and transparent because it would work better and point out how it's working in other places because if Nigeria works South Africa works and you can avoid the worst of what's going on in the Congo and give them a responsible path forward the rest of sub-saharan Africa would have magnets that would guarantee much more rapid and positive growth so there are problems with foreign aid but there are also problems with private development and they both need to be addressed in a way that benefits real people in the countries affected gentlemen right there in the baseball hat we got a hello my name is Dan chasse more and to be honest I'm putting a lot at risk for speaking right now but I have to bring an issue that I feel I need to be addressed so I'll start mr. president during your presidency you signed significant legislations such as Don't Ask Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act after attending CGI you there's obviously a focus on alleviating poverty and making commitments to sustainability education health and development however I identify as being a minority because of my identification with the LGBT community thank you nope though campaigns such as Liaquat the It Gets Better Project have made considerable differences in the lives of LGBT youth both in America and across the world LG LGBT youth are still most at risk for teen suicide what can we as students do to ensure equality and fair treatment for LGBT Americans also one will this country finally rule that separate is inherently unequal when it comes to the social institution of marriage because I will not ask my future partner to civil union me or domestic partnership me be and I refuse to again be treated as a second-class citizen thank you first of all one of the things the food but the answer the answer to the gay marriage question is this this Supreme Court is not even sure you should have to have health insurance there they're not about I don't think to say that you have a constitutional right to be married they'll say it's a matter of state law but I think we're making progress there and my answer on the marriage issue is I've changed my position a lot of other people have we got it in New York you have to keep working and you'll get there let me just say this but I'm since you brought it up I thank you for doing it I'm always curious at how selective people's memories are the the LGBT community must wonder about how I maintain such broad support in your community when I was president since I did those two terrible things here's why number one I did not sign Don't Ask Don't Tell until both houses of Congress had voted by a veto-proof majority for a resolution saying if I kept trying to put gays in the military they would go back to making it a crime and colon Powell came to me as chairman the Joint Chiefs of Staff and said if you accept this we're you're beat on this other thing if you accept this here is how we will enforce it no gay person will be asked about his sexual orientation getting gay materials going to gay bars out of uniform marching in gay rights parades out of uniform none of that will be used to kick anybody out of the military in other words we'll let everybody alone if you agree to this okay so rather than go back to what happened I agreed to do it and what happened the minute he left they broke every single commitment they made to me and started wasting money trying to kick people out the reason I supported gays in the military in the first place was partly because in the first Gulf War the military allowed more than 100 gay members of the service to put their lives at risk in the first Gulf War in 1991 knowing they were gay waited till they put their lives at risk waited till the war was over and then kicked him out so it's true I did it but if you understand all the facts and what my options are I'm not sure I did the wrong thing and on the DOMA bill the whole purpose of DOMA was to keep the Congress from voting out a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in the US Constitution which had it gotten to the States would almost certainly back then have secured the votes of three-quarters of the state legislatures in the country it was a cold calculation based on that we may have been wrong but but most of the leaders of the gay community and most of my congressional advisors believed that if we didn't go along with that the Congress the Republican Congress would put a gay marriage ban amendment to the Federal Constitution and that they would get the votes in the house in the Senate and they would send it to the States so I may have been wrong but I think under the circumstances since we believe that would happen it was worth it to block it because since then there has been steady long progress toward recognizing gay marriage which I support yes President Clinton my name is Francisco Estrada I'm from Salinas California which you visited while you were in office my city is about 140,000 people and we have we last year were the sixth highest city per capita in homicide rates in the entire country we have the highest incarceration rate per county in California of locking up youth under the age of 18 so my question to you is how do we as students and youth who are trying to break down some of these barriers and trying to reduce the youth recidivism rate and they used incarceration rate how do we break down some of these barriers that we confront with establishments like our local judges our local district attorneys well let me ask you something why do you think the incarceration rate is so high why do you think the crime rate is so high why do you think it happens I think absolute I think it's a two-part answer I think one of them is because our lack of resources in our educational system in our area and then the other one is because our local district attorney has a I'm going to drop the hammer lock you up and throw away the key mentality what percentage of these kids that are incarcerated have offenses involving drugs or guns it's a very it's a very minimal amount so a lot of the times that our youth is getting incarcerated is because of what some people call crimes of passage which is maybe sometimes underage drinking smoking marijuana which is kind of like a life passage type of crime I would say I I bet most let me ask you a question would you consider dark side of the Moon by Pink Floyd a life passage crime mr. Stewart I have have no idea what that is I am so old this is unconscionable I'm guessing that was something in the 60s yes yes yes yes get me my Walker I'm gonna get out of here let me ask you a question I when in my second term we had a precipitous drop in not just a crime rate will we debt of eight year drop in the crime rate but we really went after juvenile offenses tried to keep people out of prison and one of the things we did was to appropriate enough money for after-school programs for a million and a half young people it's with federal money and I gather a lot of them have been cut back now under all these financial constraints California has been under I believe that we've got to go back to turning these schools into community centers leave them open every night leave them open on the weekends you offer real support to kids and we also started something in Philadelphia that eventually we had half a million kids in called gear up where we would tell people in middle school they could go to college and we would tell them you can go to college and here's what your benefits will be will promise you right now if you do these things in school and follow this path I think you got to figure out look most people don't want to fail you know they don't want to fail most people want to succeed but they first don't think they'll be able to so then they do dumb things or they don't know how to and I don't think there's a magic elixir here I think that you've got to go to child's and figure out they need each need a mentor of some kind and then we need to put them on a path to the future by the time they're 13 there aren't many probably in detention under 13 there may be some but probably no many and then I think somehow they have to be able to choose their schools over the streets we we've got to go back I don't care how we find the money we've got to find a way to go back and do what I was trying to do at the end of my second term which is to turn all these schools in the community center so let me just give you one example andre agassi the famous tennis player started a school in las vegas which i had been to several times and he put it in the poorest neighborhood in las vegas one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of nevada and it was the first school in the entire county where vegas is you know half the population of the state to receive an excellent rating from the state and they're open all the time every night every weekend all the parents whether they're two-parent households or single working moms they're invited to come into the schools they give all of them computer training they do emailing with the teachers they give the kids something to do at night and on the weekends in other words the school recognizes that the families are under enormous assault economic and otherwise that these kids are in trouble and they also start early preparing them either to move into a training program where they can get a decent job or go on to college and it's made a huge difference now I see is not one of these celebrities that has to have a charity so you can check the box and somebody else runs it he runs that school I mean he has people who do that but I mean he's heavily involved in it and in the lives of the kids but it's stun what happened once they went after every one of these kids one by one by one and their families one by one by one and they made them all feel that they had a home in the school and that they were committed to their success and somehow we have to recreate that for everybody that you know when we leave here the basketball games are on tonight and went and by John I want to say this because it's relates to Salinas so one of you you have this what may be a route or maybe a fascinating game between Kentucky and Louisville and and Louisville has all these kids there's no way in the world they should be in the Final Four except they got a big tall African guy who can block shots like crazy and they got a great point guard with lots of tats but they didn't expect to be there but Rick Pitino the coach said an interesting thing that might relate to Salinas he said they said how did you do this these kids they got no business being in the Final Four you keep winning these games and he said everybody that plays this game wants to succeed but some don't believe they can so first everybody's got to believe they can then it turns out they want to succeed for different reasons some want to make their mothers proud some want to make their parents proud if the father left the home early some want to show their daddy that they're still good some want to do it for their teammates people want to succeed for different reasons you have to convince everybody that the only way you can succeed on your own terms is if you're part of a team that's doing something bigger and better than you are it was really smart you know and somehow all these kids that are getting in trouble they get they drift off there most of them are not bad kids they get disconnected they think that life is a dead end anyway we got to bring them back in and I have no better idea than what I have seen work in Vegas and several other places you have to give this you have to make the school the governing community institutions and when its economy picks up again that's the first thing that Congress ought to think about doing you can give all the tests in the world you do all this other stuff but kids they've got to believe they can succeed they have to want to succeed then they got to be given a way to do it and their families have to be given a place to support them and I think putting everybody in jail is nuts there's too many people in jail in this country in my opinion well listen uh that is we've been given the the all-clear sign that is all the time that we have I just wanted to very briefly state just what an honor it's been to be here and to listen to your questions you know a lot of things and it's always a pleasure to hear you speak I have rarely been in a room where I felt like I would like to work for each and every one of you you're a pretty incredible group of individuals and I wish you the greatest success in all the commitments that you've been working on and I want to thank President excito-ball morning you

Channel: Clinton Global Initiative

Views: 476,964

Keywords: CGI U 2012 CGI, President Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton (US President)

Id: OMCKgr86etQ

Length: 82min 46sec (4966 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2012