|
Anchor: Keeping you up to the minute, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell just finished an interview with former presidents Clinton and Bush who are heading up a fundraising effort for the victims of hurricane Katrina, here's that interview in its entirety.
Kelly O'Donnell: (Yes.)We all remember your partnership during the tsunami, with that experience, how will your approach change now that this crisis is at home. What do you hope to achieve?
Former Presdient Bush: Let me start it, if you...but we hope to achieve the same thing, encourage the outpouring of money, uh, and good wishes from the American people, and that's exactly what is happening and will happen. We are not in the operational business, we are not trying to tell somebody how to drain the, you know, the streets in New Orleans. But what we are gonna try to do is to encourage the innate compassion of the American people by asking them to contribute to several things. Mainly we are thinking of the funds being set up by the governors of each state. Red Cross money will keep coming in as it should. But there are three organizations that in these three hard-hit states and we will be encouraging people to give too.
Bill Clinton: We also are gonna try to work with some big companies to get them to do some things and we hope to be able to stagger these gives over time. Unlike the tsunami countries, our country is able to pay for most of what needs to be done that will cost huge amounts of money. But still that millions of people have been displaced here. In New Orleans, poverty rate's about 30%. There are people who have no place to live. They're, right now they are a long way from home. If they get a chance to go back to work they're not even in a place where they can live close enough to get to work. So there will be a need for private donations here, and what we hope to do is to spread it out over enough time so that we can get the money where it needs to go. And these governors' funds seemed to offer the best flexibility over the long run. Right now, the Red Cross, the Salvations Army, the Catholic relief charity, all these people are getting the water, the food, the basic needs of staying alive. But this thing, we've got to stay with this for a while.
Kelly O'Donnell: When we think of foreign aid, we usually think of the US as a donor country. Do you believe this crisis will necessitate receiving funds from other countries?
Bill Clinton: I don't know if they wanna necessitate but we wouldn't be surprised if we don't get some help, and over the president just told us that Europeans already changed the way they handle their oil allocations to get us some more gasoline because they realized we have refineries shut down. That's really a kind thing. And he said that Sri Lanka's ambassador had offered to organize(Very touching) the tsunami countries in trying to give what they could back to poor people in America who are hurt. I mean it's really touching. These countries have very low per capita incomes. They want to give something back 'cause they see on the news there are a lot of our people who are hurt are quite poor. So I wouldn't be surprised if we did get some help from some other countries.
Kelly O'Donnell: President Bush, back in 1992, a political year, you were criticized for not responding quickly enough to hurricane Andrew..
Bush: I hated that criticism. It is so grossly, folk go ahead, what we are gonna say…
Kelly O'Donnell: Do you believe that experience is affecting this president how he is responding?
Bush: Well, I think, I think every president learns from every disaster and this president is on top of this, and he's got a wonderful team on the ground and we are gonna stay out of their way in terms of evacuation and bringing in military forces, but I expect to learn from everything, I learn from my own experiences, and seeing, living through hurricane do not have to drill in this. And I expect President Clinton to learn from hurricane Andrew and went on to others when he was president.
Bill Clinton: I think it's important for the American people in 02 (o two)that there is an increasingly professional aspect to this, that is, after Andrew, we had the 500-year flood in the Mississippi, we had the Northridge Earthquake, we had all these natural disasters. They are increasing in frequency not only in the United States but around the world. And FIMA has been overhauled. This's dramatically improved its capacity to deal with things and the same is true with others . So I think we are just getting better as we go along. And most of us don't see this is a political deal. This is a human issue that just has no political component on one way the other, to me at least.
Kelly O'Donnell: About one third of Louisiana and Mississippi's National Guard is deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan; do you believe that is in any way compromising the Guard's ability to respond to this domestic need?
Bush: Definitively, no. It is not. There are plenty of troops, plenty of forces available. And they will be deployed in the best most effective way. So I don't.
Bill Clinton: Now if they need more people they can get from other places, so I think the reserved guards are going down. I know what, you know, my native state Arkansas is next door to Louisiana. We always have a completely subscribed National Guard. We can give help. The other states will be happy to send people there if they need more people. I don't think it's a problem.
Kelly O'Donnell: The president said we should expect this temporary disruption in gas supplies. How high will gas prices go?
Bush: I couldn't begin to tell you.
Bill Clinton: I don't think we know. I think it'll vary from place to place, and it will depend on how quickly they, either the refineries get up and start refining oil again or we get to refine products from somewhere else. I do think it's important to the American people understand this problem particlularly in the southeast or the south where the prices have been hit is somewhat devotion of the price of oil. This is about the crash of the refinery capacity although some of the oilrigs on the Gulf are down too. So we can't predict. No one knows. I think it's important that the government guard against price gauging. And the President says hes gonna do that. We have a heavy responsibility there. But then if there is less supply than demand, and the price will go up until we get some more supply.
Kelly O'Donnell: President Bush, President Clinton. Thank you for your time.
Former presidents: Thank you.
|