A conversation with Bill Clinton

OLBERMANN:  This is the thing that is below the surface here, I would imagine.  Obviously gifts, money, those keep the wheels moving, but the idea of an idea.  Last year the one, the stuck in my mind, were the micro-loans, the idea that you got people going begging in many countries, give them something to sell and all of a sudden you have turned them into door-to-door salesmen. 

CLINTON:  Well, I can just give you an example of that — we can all be micro-bankers now thanks to a little Web site called kiva.org, which made its introduction here last year. 

They came here for the first time.  And one of the people who followed us on the Internet, of the 48,000 people, several hundred of them made their own commitment.  One of them said, I’m going to loan $25 to somebody in Africa to start a business or expand a business. 

When I featured them in my book and then went on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and she brought them there, within three days, all of the people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Afghanistan, every one of their businesspeople was fully funded within three days by people giving between $25 and $200. 

It was amazing.  So now they all will get reports and when their loans are paid back, they can keep them or turn around and lend them again.  These are the kind of ideas that are circulating in the world.  And we can increase the visibility of the good idea.

And people, even with a very modest amount of money can have a huge impact.  Just think about it.  You and I could become bankers to people and we could monitor their progress and people in their neighborhoods will see and they will look for micro-loans, they have their own ideas, so we can give them a chance to raise their kids with dignity, send their kids to school, and in troubled places like Afghanistan, we marginally increase the chance that peace can prevail because people will see there is a positive alternative to conflict.

OLBERMANN:  So this is, you’d say, after three years of this that the spirit of giving and of creative thought towards how to help other people is contagious?

CLINTON:  Oh, yeah.  And how people spend — we have a commitments office that works all year long.  So we help people develop these commitments in the run-up to the CGI.  Then at the conference, people who came and haven’t yet made commitments, we help them make their commitments then a few months afterwards.

And then we spend six months helping everybody keep them.  It’s worked out so well, that probably the most innovative big thing that’s been announced is the $300 million that the Canadian mining interest and Carlos Slim the Mexican billionaire committed to going to mining communities and help them develop long-term economic development projects that benefit average people and are good for the environment.

As long as the world population is going up, mining will go up.  We’ll need more minerals, materials of all kinds.  But very often miners don’t do very well.  Their families don’t do very well.  The land is denuded.  When the mine plays out, everybody leaves and goes on and then all these people are left without a way to make a living.

So that this one man, Frank Giustra, a Canadian friend of mine with a social conscience said this is wrong and it’s not helpful, we make a ton of money, we should give a big portion back.

And there are $300 million have already been committed.  Twenty-four other companies lined up to give more.  Five countries in Latin America and Africa already selected.  There is some money in the bank in Peru for this that the government requires and the Europeans have already paid into the bank lots of money to buy carbon offsets to meet their global warming targets, but they don’t have good projects.

We’re going to try to put all of this together and I wouldn’t be surprised if this one guy’s idea and $100 million commitment leads to billions of dollars in reinvestment in good, environmentally responsible jobs for people in some of the poorest countries in the world.

OLBERMANN:  It’s nice to see the dominoes falling in good order.

CLINTON:  And it’s something you can do with relatively little bureaucracy.  And I tell, you, it doesn’t mean that we don’t need an international fund, and we do.  It doesn’t mean that the government is not important.  It is.  But these are things that can be done to fill the gap that is always there and always has been between even the healthiest economies and most vigorous government in the whole — in this society and where we ought to be.

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