KING: How did the idea for a global initiative begin?
CLINTON: ...I wanted to take advantage of the fact that I am in New York, the U.N. is here. These world leaders come in. And my sense from just the work I do with AIDS and anti-poverty work around the world that more people than ever before who have made some money are willing to give it away if they think it is funding constructive action.
And so I thought, well, why don't we just see? Why don't we see if you could hold a meeting and say, "You can't come to our meeting and talk." You've got to come to our meeting and literally fill out a card and say, "This is what I'm going to do in the next year."
KING: Now, you have people coming here. Attendees include Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Condoleezza Rice, Shimon Peres, Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner. You're going to have them in the same room?
CLINTON: We are. I hope.
KING: King Abdullah and Queen Rania and they're all pledging something.
CLINTON: Well, a lot of the world leaders are already doing things. You know, Blair has been way out there on aid to Africa and other things but all the -- the private sector people who are coming are pledging things.
For example, the -- Tony Blair's principle private sector supporter for this whole aid to Africa initiative is a Scottish multimillionaire, maybe billionaire, named Kyle Hunter (ph), self-made man, started out selling sports shoes. You'd be interested to know.
KING: But you -- in order to be a participant, you must be doing something constructive, right? You're not just attending and listening?
CLINTON: No. Well, in order -- when you attend, you can be a listener now but when you leave, you have to have made a commitment and if you don't, we won't ask you back next year.
KING: Do it as a pledge?
CLINTON: Yes, you know, so we don't know. The thing that's astonished me is that -- that people have come to us in advance of this conference and made these commitments, over $300 million worth.
But a lot of the commitments which will be made are by the conference participants are commitments that will be made as people listen during the course of the conference to the people talk about these four areas we're dealing with. Then at the end, we'll ask the people who haven't yet made a commitment to make one.
KING: And the four areas are poverty, enhancing governance, climate change and religion conflict and reconciliation. Is climate change an addition since Katrina?
(GLOBAL WARMING)
CLINTON: No. It was always going to be there. I've been worried about it for years. I gave some very important -- I thought important speeches about it when I was president but nobody was interested in it back then. Now, you know, a lot of people understand global warming is related to the increase in the number and the severity of weather events.
No one can say for sure that Katrina was caused by global warming but we know that the climate is warming up. We know that 12 big chunks of ice the size of the state of Rhode Island have broken off of the South Pole in the last decade.
We know if something doesn't happen to slow this warming down, whole island nations in the Pacific will be flooded. We'll lose 50 feet of Manhattan Island in New York within the next 50 years if we don't do something to turn this around.
(ENERGY)
CLINTON: ...We've got -- in other words, economic deprivation and economic uncertainty and national security issues with our dependence on foreign oil, and we know that the climate is warming at an unsustainable rate, in part because we're putting -- we're burning too much oil.
So we know also that we can now economically produce bio-fuels from farm waste and sugar principally, the most efficient ways. We know we can dramatically increase energy conservation. Sixty percent of all power put into electric generating facilities is wasted.
We know that we can generate tons of energy through solar and wind and other things that we've only scratched the surface of. The price of solar energy is going down 15 percent a year. The price of wind energy going down 15 percent a year and we've just barely touched it.
(POVERTY)
KING: We're back with President Clinton, the Global Initiative all this weekend. We've discussed climate change. Poverty, now there is the old-fashioned statement, there'll always be poverty. That's kind of a give up kind of thing.
CLINTON: So the question is, can something be done to help those people who are willing to help themselves? And the answer to that is a resounding yes. I mean, let me just give you an example.
Back in 2000, my last year as president, we had the first big round of debt relief. And we said sort of what President Bush has tried to say with his program of foreign aid. You can have this debt relief, but you have to observe human rights and be honest about accounting for the money, and you've got to put it into education, health care or economic development.
The results were stunning. They had this huge debt relief initiative and you had over two dozen countries doing things like -- Uganda has now tripled its primarily school enrollment by making sure the money not only went to education but the money actually got to education.
We know how to do this. We know how to do -- provide the credit, micro credit loans and financing for entrepreneurs in poor areas. We know what a difference these kinds of things can make. If we know how to do this and we know these people are smart, they work hard and they can make a difference.
(TRADE)
When we adopted the Africa Trade Bill in 2000, we went from having 10 times, 20 times the amount of exports, didn't hurt our economy. Let's take tiny Lesotho, a country surrounded by South Africa, third highest AIDS rates in the world. They went from 2,000 to 50,000 jobs in textiles because of that trade bill. Tanzania, 4,000 to 50,000.
That's good for us. These people can do business with us now. They don't become terrorists. They don't fight in tribal wars. Adults get jobs. Kids go to school. We have partners for the future.
KING: It pays for us.
CLINTON: Yes. It's in our interest to do it. It's not -- it's not only morally right, it's in our interest to do it. Look, we've got four percent of the world's people and 20 percent of the world's wealth. Obviously, to sustain that, with competitors coming on from China, competitors coming on from India, where more than half the computer software in the world is made now, we've got to find more customers. We have to have more partners.
(KATRINA)
KING: Have to move the topography a little?
CLINTON: Yes, I think, you know, I think first of all, we ought to try to have mixed neighborhoods, not isolate the poor. I really believe in that. I worked hard on that when I was president, trying to get people with -- move people from welfare to work and at the same time move them into middle class neighborhoods and kind of break this kind of culture of grinding poverty.
Mixed neighborhoods do that, they help kids to get in better schools. They help people to model different behaviors and they help people to have a sense of hope. So I'd like to see that done.
And I think that we may want to build some of those areas further away from both the Lake Pontchartrain and the river and maybe even bring in fill. You can -- even if these places are elevated two, three, four feet, it could make a difference in the next situation.
So they've got time now to think through it and goodness knows they're going to have lots of money, lots of federal money. I would like to see some significant thought given to the rebuilding process, making the whole neighborhoods, all these areas, a little more protected from the next natural disaster.
(IRAQ)
KING: I want to get back to the Global Initiative, but one question on Iraq how does it end? What's at the end of the tunnel?
CLINTON: Nobody knows yet. You know, 58 percent of the people voted in the election. They're having trouble getting a functioning constitution, and a lot of people are still getting killed.
KING: Every day.
CLINTON: Every day, all of which was, I think, quite predictable, given the history of Iraq and the animosity between the various groups. But I think that we're doing about all we can, which is to try to as quickly as we can develop police and security services capable of defending themselves and holding their country together, and at least giving them a chance to have a constitution that they can work on and a government that they can live under. At some point, if the security services become self-sustaining, they'll want us to go.
KING: How far away is that?
CLINTON: And we should go. Well, nobody knows. If we leave before that time, it will be because either our leaders have concluded that we can't make it work or the American people have just said, enough, you know, enough money, enough drain on the military, enough dying, and enough wounding -- enough.
But I think that for now even though, as you know, I thought we should have let the U.N. inspectors finish before we went in there. I think we showed way too much hurry going in there the first place. We are where we are.
And we had a lot of good people sacrifice and serve there. There's still a chance it will work. And so, we ought to just keep training and we ought to keep working for the constitution to be completed, accepted and then implemented.
(TERRORISM)
KING: And religion, conflict and reconciliation those three go hand-in-hand?
CLINTON: Well, I think so. We all know what the religious roots of conflicts today are in the Middle East. We all know about the Islamic militants who believe in terror, whether it's in London or New York or in the Middle East.
But the truth is that most religious leaders and most religious texts offer the promise of reconciliation based on our common humanity and our common imperfection and our common need for a god in this life and the next.
So, what I tried to do here was to say religion doesn't have to be a source of discord and can be a source of harmony. And the king of Jordan, King Abdullah had the heads of all the major sects in Islam to Jordan several months ago and they talked about that and they all agreed that there's no reasonable reason where the Koran would support terrorism and the killing of innocents.
The IRA recently agreed to get rid of all their weapons and to validate it to the Irish people they asked that the destruction be viewed and approved by the heads of both the Protestant and the Catholic Church in Ireland, which is really good.
I was just in Tanzania and we announced a new AIDS program and, you know, there's a lot of controversy about whether the Catholic Church or other religious organizations have policies that undermine the AIDS effort.
But in Tanzania, we had the heads of every major religious group, Christian, Muslim, and even local, the traditional African religions, all there together, all supporting the same policy. So religion can bring people together. It doesn't just have to be a source of division and I wanted it to be seen in the positive as well as the negative light.
...So, religion can be a force of reconciliation. That's the point I want to make. It doesn't have to be, even Islam, which many people in the West are afraid of now, I think it's wrong to see that religion -- to say religion's at the root of all this killing, I just don't believe it.
Read what Clinton said again.
