question -- the folks that served under you in iraq would obably not take kindly to be known as paid volunteers and they were given a stipend so what mcchrystal said that was so kidstant was i won these to come not just from scarsdale but from east l.a. all americans to serve, including americans of these families to serve while they are serving their country, you have to have somebody behind them. i think you need the will to try to create this, and will can create some willingness to pay for it, but it is going to be at a time where budget crunches -- this is a real challenge. i think is worth paying for for for a variety of reasons. he might agree on that, but a

lot of people need to be persuaded. us -- let's get a few other voices here. you run the interface youth -- ith youth court in chicago, and we were in a conversation yesterday about pluralism and citizenship in the united states. >> we talked about a number of fascinating things from the arab spring to rugged individualism the government. one of the great geniuses of american society was institutions -- from little pca's to ymca's. unaffiliateder of millennial's, historically religious communities have been a major driver of civic institutions. those code is the rise of the internet. two is the rise

of the internet. the section list revolution. many other trends as well. in 30 or 40 years will we have the same kind of civic institutional structure in the u.s. that we do now? >> heather, christina? do you want to take the first crack? >> i spent a lot of time evincing people to vote, and i would add to that list party affiliation. so they do not identify as democrats or republicans but independently. i think they will reshape what it looks like. they are continuing to gather together and take collective action. but just two very different institutions. right now that is often online and through these social networks they are building, and locallynnected not just but also in other states across the country, and then in fact quite globally as well. that will turnat

into, but it is an interesting question. >> i think what we have seen with the immigrant youth community is if it is not there for us, we have to build it. even within the immigrant advocacy community, there was not empowerment, and at some point we decided we need to create space for young people to make our choices, to drive our agenda, to organize and create an have an impact. that is what we do with the united dream network. our constituency is that from 2008 we had seven affiliate organizations. -- we havein 20 side 52 in 25 states today. there is a hunger to belong, to be part of a network. facebook and twitter are the tools that give us the sense of connection. even with young people in egypt, right? -- leadingir soulful

their social movements. i see millennial's and the dreamers in particular using social networking tools to our advantage and being able to be as innovative that in the fun neck -- in the next five to 10 years we think about the possibility of immigration reform, you're talking about 11 million people, living in the what does government institutions have to get those youth engage? that is where we see the opportunity to do that. >> what we are talking about largely is the intermediary organizations in society. the story shows us that the bigger and more powerful government gets, the less of those organizations we have, the less organized they are, and the less powerful they are. ofessary to the existence those organizations is power, and we are talking about the distribution of power through society. -- so thee intermarry

more intermediary institutions have power, the more effective they will be. they will make a difference fundamentally in the way we live, and that is what makes them strong. we can organize all the organizations we want, but if they are disempowered, simply structured or communication, then people won't participate. just when i am about to want to go and sit in one of those limiting rooms, he says something that is -- and one of those living rooms, he says something that is flatly wrong. the g.i. bill, veterans organizations. i think it is a great question. obsessedsports country. sports deal with my kids. one of the things we don't take into account enough is how much our civic infrastructure is unpaid labor of

women, and we had a long period of time where women were not given opportunities in the workforce the way they should be. when wagesd of time were high enough that people could raise a family, and women decided we want these same opportunities, which is legit. but we were leaving on them a lot more than that we want to let on ourselves, and we had to figure out in these new circumstances what to do. i worry about organizations that makes people across lines. mark and i coaching together. the same team, whatever. really even live apart from each other, and we don't have enough bridging social capital, and we have to work on that. >> several hands have been up here. let's start here and we will move to the other side of the room. right up front here. >> hi.

i work for a nonprofit in education, and we talked about kind of the populations that we serve, and i have done different volunteer projects throughout the last five to 10 years, and the thing i'm wondering about, what about the ethics of service. we don't often talk about the ethical implications of particularly white middle-class people going into low income , low-income --munities, saying that i that you deserve this service. it is a powerful message saying that certain people are deserving of service and certain people are deserving to provide that service. how does that play out in the rest of your citizenship and your identity as a leader or potential or -- potentially as a follower, and your ability to imagine yourself as maybe someone who will be a change maker rather than a follower. i would really like to see more discussion around the ethics of

service. >> great question. i think the value of universal service -- and i am not talking about compulsory, but the idea that everybody should serve, is it says that the lowest income kid in the country has as much to give as the highest income kid in the country, and the service is not just about better off kids going to help out less well-off kids, even though that is a wonderful and good and decent thing to do. those kidsabout knowing stuff that the rich kids don't, serving the country the way they can. universal service says we are all in this together, no matter ourcolor, our background, regional status. >> let's get another question into the mix here.

?es either way. a struggle for the microphone. >> that is my daughter. [laughter] i am the national finance cochair for the ready for hillary pack -- the ready for hillary pac. i want to highlight one of the things we are doing and then ask you a question. you touched on money before. we are trying to build in the grassroots pack. has had a reputation for buying elections, attempts to buying elections from billionaires, etc. you'll see what we have a compass today since april when we launched the thousands and thousands of people who have chosen to step up and support it. i wanted to ask because money is an issue.

we are talking about national service. even national services need to be paid at some point. where does the money come from, and what should the role of pac's and other organizations that can support these important initiatives to break through to new levels? >> let's hear from mark or heather. we were having conversations before we went live about money and politics. with thatu're doing pac is phenomenal, and they are like any entity. they can be used for good or bad. they're like people. some people do good,, some people do bad. are evilea that pac's is just wrong. it depends on how they are structured. it it depends on your politics, right? a vessel tohem as be used, and it depends on the ideas in the ethics. i don't personally have a

problem with money and politics. if you look at the last presidential cycle, we as a nation spend more money on potato chips in the last presidential cycle than we did on presidential policy. i want more money spent on politics, more messaging, more people heard. you are to be for what you're doing. i appreciate it. -- i dohave a money have a problem with money in politics and the role it plays right now. 60% turning have out in a presidential election nationally. 51% of voters under 30 -- in thee 2012 and 2012 election. only half of them voted. what would it look like if 60%, 70%, 80% turned out? people would spend money any day of the week in making decisions if that was the case.

empowering people to be invested in the came pain, writing a >> i want to create big incentives for small giving. i think the answer with money is going to be matching funds or the privilege, the small giver. i don't think you will flood out the big-money. legislature ina new york, a five to one match, we could argue how to fund it. now,est answer we have given that citizens united will not let us do given the big- money. could literally have this conversation all afternoon, and i just want to close as our time comes to an end with a simple charged all of you. this has has been a great conversation. you have all asked great

questions and put great comments in there. the question is, what are we all going to do? tot is it within our power do to revitalize citizenship within the united states? several different great overlapping conceptions of what it means to show up as a citizen, whether strictly intellectual politics and the workings of government, whether it is more at the level of service to the community, whether trying to mobilize money in new ways, and whether it is about trying to reinvigorate the way we teach the very nature of citizenship and self-governing democracy. is,atter what your angle everybody here has a way to engage. let me put it a different way. everybody here has an obligation. we cannot come out of the conversation and say that is great, i am going to the planetarium now. we have to think, what am i going to do? if not i going to pledge

literally to myself then to the person i came into this room with? it might be in my neighborhood, my city, houston, or at a national level. if we make that kind of commitment, we will set forth the kind of civic social contagion that everybody has been talking about. being parto much for of this conversation, and pass it on. [applause those bracken -- [applause] think -- america is the land of opportunity, so there are so many things you can accomplish in my lifetime, it those my daughter has all opportunities. that is one of the greatest things about america. she can do whatever she wants. sex, hert matter her nationality, it doesn't matter

her race. i think that opportunity that our forefathers fought for is presently available, and i think it is great. i can use that and build a great life and be happy. well, you have got to know the history of america, you know. i know my history of my culture, black and native americans, so i consider myself american and i am thankful for what i have. i were toe time, if ask this question to my grandmother or somebody, it would be a totally different answer. you have to play your part, do the right thing, go to work. you cannot be relying on the government to pay for your living. i think that is a big thing, like a lot of people on welfare or people who do have money still tried to use the system. that plays a big role. people really do need money, and

i think if everybody just would be honest and work hard, the country could be even greater than it already is. >> well, i am canadian. few yearsed here a and i have an american daughter now. what it means to be an american, you generally live in a free country. you have so many opportunities, so many opportunities to grow and do different things with your life, and you can honestly change the course of your life from wherever you are at. i find big differences in the u.s. tend to be really pushy with different things, and in canada we tend to be more relaxed. we do our best to move ahead but not be -- i see that as something i have just sort of noticed, in different. -- i have noticed is different. i love my homeland, but i love being in the u.s. >> next, former president bill

clinton and new jersey governor chris christie discuss planning and persevering through natural disasters. they gave advice to u.s. governors on ways to plan for future events, and what the federal government can do to help. help us by the global initiative meeting in chicago, this -- helped by the global initiative meeting in chicago, this is 45 minutes. >> now were going to have a little fun. awant to invite to the stage man whose reputation i have virtually ruined more than once. [laughter] we are both big basketball fans, and governor christie used to have seats right behind mine at the big east tournament. i remember the first time i plopped down and started talking to him, i thought this is going to wreck this guy's career. they will show pictures of him talking to me, and maybe he can get elected in new jersey, but

everybody else will say, oh, my god, he is consorting with a letter. and he never blinked. as far as he was concerned, as long as i talked about basketball, it was all right with him. i am honored that he has joined us today. i do want to say, in the interest of my commitment to keep cgi completely nonpartisan, we did invite my governor, governor cuomo, to join him, but he could not be here today. we are going to talk about something that is really important. that is, what happens when the cameras go home after a disaster. and this is so important. to set this up, when i was president, i went to california 29 times in four years, and part of it was just one natural disaster after another. they had everything but a plague of locusts. then we have a 500 year flood in the mississippi river, and to

rebuild it, we had to rebuild all the communities, which was impractical for some because they were within the 100 year floodplain. then all these other things happened. and then we come to sandy, ted by what- bracke happened with the horrible joplin,s that wrecked hit oklahoma. we had tornadoes as far as massachusetts and new york city last year. so we need to give more thought to the responsibilities of leadership and how to plan for what happens after the disaster. mayor bloomberg, as i mentioned earlier in the conference last week, revealed the $20 billion plan to try to make new york city resilient in the face of what is almost certainly going to be rising water levels in the

years ahead. it is a big challenge. governor christie received an ,normous amount of publicity entirely well-deserved, for his passionate advocacy for the people of new jersey and the work he did in the immediate aftermath of sandy. there,re are no cameras but there are a lot of people still in trouble, and he is still doing that work. that is what i want all of you to think about, because many of you live in communities that are vulnerable to one kind or another natural disaster. and we need to think what happens when the worst is over and you have to plan for tomorrow. join me in welcoming the governor of new jersey, governor chris christie. [applause]

so -- even as effective as you are and as i once was, we could not stop the big east from dissolving. >> no. >> so after we get rid of this resilience thing, i want you to think about how television revenues from football games can stop short of dissolving the greatest basketball conference. it was really said. >> what are we going to do next spring is the next question. a lot of television. first, thank you for coming. >> my pleasure. >> thank you for bringing your family. your wife and son are here. where are they? stand up. [applause]

is a student' son at princeton where he plays baseball, so he is ok with the big east dissolving. so once you got through that terrible emergency period, and all the gripping pictures of everybody showing up and all that, what did you do next? what have you done from the time of this day, from the time the emergency ended to this day, about the places i were devastated and the places that remain vulnerable? i it is hard for me now as look back on it to pinpoint when the emergency ended. it is when you get into the immediate aftermath of this type of situation. our view was the first thing you

had to do was return people to normalcy. we define normalcy in five ways -- get their power back on, yet ande water -- get the water wastewater treatment backup, gas treatment reopened, highways back opened, and get the kids back into school. we knew that once we got those five things done, probably 90% of the state would pay -- would be back to a sense of normalcy. i would gauge it from there. about three weeks out, we had most of that under control. so as you move forward from there, what you realize is this is going to be a years-long enterprise. sandy in new jersey alone, 355,000 homes were severely damaged or destroyed. 355,000. so what you are looking at is how do you get people a sense of hope and also do it in a smart

way. so the first thing we did was sit down with the mayors in the most affected towns and we said we want you to begin to think about this in new jersey, very much a home rule state, so they control local zoning and ordinances. they had to be full partners. so we bring the mayors in, met with a lot of them one-on-one to honestwill have an conversation with your residence. residents, to buyout homes and properties that are no longer standing because they are so perpetually flooded over time. but i am not going to force people out, so i want you to start having that conversation. then in the places that don't want to sell out, how are we going to protect it? we came up with nothing novel, but three ways to go about protecting it. first, in the jersey shore communities, not all of our

shore communities had army corps of engineers designed doom systems. and there is a debate about this in new jersey -- are they worth it or aren't they? damage was, the minimal. in the ones that did not, the damage was complete. now there is no longer a debate in new jersey about whether we should have them as a safety precaution. that is number one. , i told him that was one of the things that had to be included in the aid package. over the 130 mile long atlantic coast of new jersey. the congress agreed and we have the money now to do that, and that is what we are working on right now, to do that. [applause] second is that you had to deal with the ordinances in towns regarding the building code and

work with the state to now deal better materials and more resilient types of standards because what we saw in new jersey, in a town like mental look -- in a town an older town, they look beautiful. beautiful, but they could not stand up to the storm. they had no sand dunes and very old codes, so we need to bring those codes up to date to deal with the new reality, which is that our homes have to be much more hearty if they are going to be in those areas. third, you have to work with fema on flood maps and the updating of flood maps and see how much you have to raise existing houses. what we have seen on the new

jersey shore, if any of you have been there, and you come back in a couple of years, post homes within a doctor or five block area of the ocean will be on or five- within a four block area of the ocean will be on stilts, to create the war -- to ring the water underneath and not create structural damage. jerseyans have a tradition rule,ng fiercely home don't like these things imposed from the state downward, and will fight brutally to prevent it. so my job as governor was to go to these towns and convince them that this is something they need to do. so far, with some exceptions, we have been successful. that is part of what we had to withwith -- to do to deal the homeowner side of things. to convince them this is a new world that we are living in, and here,f you want to live

tos is what we have to do make the fiscal damage to property and the loss of human life be minimal. refused to people buyout? >> very few, it turns out. in our more middle-class class towns, those folks had had it. so in a place like sayreville, john bon jovi's birthplace. 375re buying out probably thousand homes, and those people are willingly doing it. they are ready. we will probably get the first half of those bought out by this september, so pretty quickly after the storm. within a year those people will be out. will go to another community and buy another home. my approach has been i want to buy another neighbor -- i want to buy whole neighborhoods. you will be helping a few people, but you will still have to do with physical destruction

of those neighborhoods in the aftermath, so we have been encouraging folks to get together in neighborhoods and decide we need to go, all of us need to go together. in sayreville and south river, between those two, we will 500,000 homes in those areas. coasts will go down the and offer the same kind of deals to others. >> >> once you buy the homes and you are in the position with the land and whatever remains, what are you going to do? what are you going to do with the land? >> passive use and try to set it up so we know it floods there -- let's use the lands and work the terrain to try to protect other parts of town. use natural approaches that will allow us to slow water down as it goes through. not walls, but natural types of structures, but nothing on the

land for any human use. what we want to do is to use it as a buffer against neighborhoods that are closer. >> is their federal money to help to do that, to restore the land to its natural condition? >> yes,and the hazard mitigation funds we are getting in the aid package, it helps us to mitigate against future hazards. >> if you do this and complete this project in a given community, will it have any effect on the availability and cost of flood insurance for the people that remain behind? >> no question. the fact is if we are able to do it effectively, for them, it will probably get them out of -- without getting too deep in the weeds -- out of the high velocity zones of water into either a regular flood zone or even out of a flood zone completely. the ripple effect for it will be significant.

the do not want to get in weeds, but i think this is important. the thing i love about the beachfront for new york and new jersey is it is one of the last remaining big stretches were middle-class people have real homes, real neighborhoods, real communities, real routes. i'm shocked by the number of people who have come up to me personally -- chelsea organized a day where our foundation took 1000 people to the rockaways -- they had little publicity -- a lot of people here at cgi worked there, and i had so many people come up to me to say, i grew up here. all of their parents had standard middle-class jobs.

i was afraid that wheni was afrs property was vacated it would become the stuff of land speculation and all of these people would be thrown off the land. both you and our governor cuomo in new york have tried to keep the character of the place. in doing that, the insurers are really important. the availability of insurance and the affordability of insurance -- that is why i asked you about it. i think all of them should know that because there are similar decisions that have to be made in tornado alley. that is where i was governor. most of the years i was governor, we had the highest tornado destruction rate in the country. now it has moved little bit a tad north. you see southern oklahoma city and joplin. how much have you or your government had to work with the insurance industry since this happened? >> flood insurance now is being completely governmentally controlled. by fema.

if you want to buy flood insurance, which have to new jersey if you are in a flood area and you have a mortgage, the banks will require it. the only place you can buy as the national flood insurance plan. that is not completely controlled by the government. they will have private brokers who will help them to sell it, but the insurer is the national flood insurance when within fema. the way we've got to work with insurance companies, it has been the business insurances and homeowners, and homeowners pay very little on this because every homeowners plan that i know, there is a flood exclusion. it predominately fell on the national flood insurance plan. that is why the real sandy relief package is about $50 billion, because $10 billion of the $60 billion went to the national flood insurance land, it should been underfunded by congress and the administration. we have worked with nfip. it is challenging. sometimes it seems they are more concerned about an oig

audit than the people that are buying insurance from them. we have worked with the administration to help keep pressure on them. they are the only game in town. >> i think it is really interesting -- the coastal land presented different rating challenges to them because most of these people were set up to deal with rivers overflowing their banks, so we had a 500 year flood in the lower mississippi. i think it was 1993 or 1994. we relocated entire towns that were built on a floodplain because we did not have enough information to know that those areas were going to flood more often than every 100 years. we know something generally like that about the oceans, but i think a lot of these guys are

shellshocked because they are not sure that all of the prediction models are out of the window. >> it's true. for a place like new jersey, there is a real romantic attraction to the jersey shore. for folks who live there, whether it is their primary residence or they go to vacation there and they rent those homes, they are close or on the ocean, new jerseyans do not want to give that away, even in the face of these obvious challenges that these storms have brought. there is an emotional connection by the people. we just reopened when the two of the 23 boardwalks on the jersey shore by memorial day. -- 22 of the 23 boardwalks on the jersey shore by what -- memorial day. i was going to a number of boardwalks, and i cannot tell you how many people came up to me, grabbing at me saying,

thank you for giving us the shore back. there is an emotional connection. as a leader, you have to recognize that part of it, it is not not just going to be a calculation -- it is an emotional connection could you have to do things to try to give people the ability to still have that emotional connection to the place they grew up, where they took their children. not those children are taking their children there. that is part of the challenge from a leadership perspective. >> let's talk about what we should do next. what should we do, what advice would you give the governors and mayors of these coastal towns that have not been hit yet? what can they do to improve resilience, to improve resistance, to reduce damage from a storm as severe as sandy now? i got to thinking about this,

because obviously, we could just watch what you guys have been through in new york and new jersey, to a lesser extent in connecticut, and say, well, we should do as much of this is possible, and we ought to be able to do it at lower cost if we start now all up and down the atlantic coast and into the gulf area, but it looks to me like the funds do not flow until something bad happens. if you were designing this, what would you recommend to the governors and the mayors of these communities, and what would you recommend to the national government in terms of redesigning our response? >> you are right that we had a number of these systems that have been authorized by congress, and some of them were authorized by congress for 20 years but never funded. you have to have a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not you

need to do this upfront because what happens now is, as you said, the funds do not flow until there is a disaster. inn you are dealing with it a hyper elevated state in terms of cost and demand. we have companies coming from all over the country to help redo this rather than doing it in an orderly way because we are back in the middle of hurricane season again. what i would say to other all over the country to governors is you need to look at your own funds that you use grid every state along the coast has this. there is beach replenishment funds that they put to either a dedicated fee or tax from general funds monies, and start to look at, instead of doing these replenishments to make the beach broader and prettier, but to take some of that money and saying, let's build doing systems. to me, the only way besides the

ordinance exchanges in making the homes are resilient, the only way to do this on the coast, it is a type of natural system that will protect you against this type of storm surge. whether it is a wall or a dune system, either one, those are the things you will have to do. i think states have always looked at it along the coast and the monies for beach replenishment, it is a tourism investment -- i want to make the beach broader, ready or, more blankets, more chairs. now you have to start thinking, i've got to protect the property in land, and the only way to do that is through dunes. they can push congress, although in the current climate, whether or not congress will appropriate that money is questionable. states have already spent along the coast significant amounts of this money in other ways. maybe they need to redirect it. that is what we are doing now not only with the federal money

but with the state money, i am now redirecting it towards paying for our share of the dune building because there is a cost share with the federal government. >> what about -- is there some way to use the insurance system to require that any new housing built conform to new standards? >> absolutely. we are doing it. we are giving people a choice essentially. if your house is 50% destroyed or greater, you have no choice. femaust build to the new standards. if you are at 51% destruction of your home or greater, it is require that you rebuild to new federal standards, but what we are saying to folks who are not to at all or less than that, we are offering to them the opportunity to raise their houses now. the benefit is going to be, they are going to cut their

flood insurance costs by two thirds if they do it. the upfront investment of about the $2000, which is the average $50,000, which is about the average, you are going to save that amount of money within three years of the investment, maybe two years. a are trying to give people mix of the regulatory requirement, and those for who are less than the 51%, we try economicou a powerful incentive that if you elevate now, that that investment will pay for itself within two or three years. >> the reason i am talking to all of about it -- you may live in nebraska and think this is crazy, but the truth is if you

live in nebraska, you've got probably the same kind of considerations about either local river flooding or tornadoes -- we do not talk enough about this generally and publicly. the only country that has ever really done this right is the netherlands because it is so small, and they were totally flooded. at the beginning of this year, i took my first trip to africa weree some of the work we doing in northwest africa. in nigeria, which we associate with oil systems that do not work, brownouts, religious and political conflicts, a developer is building a 9.5 with interlocking to let water in,

designed by a dutch firm, based on their experience, and they have already recovered 10 million square meters of land to protect the point of lagos, which is an island. it is a first time in a developing country i have seen the kind of preparation to avoid disaster that i think we should be doing all over the world. if you have a population map of america, and you look at the percentage of our people that live from main all the way down to florida and around in the gulf coast and at the pacific coast, as is something we need to think about. we need to redefine leadership beyond just how you respond in an emergency to how you keep the emergencies from happening. >> no question.

[applause] >> he's done a good job. i wanted you to hear this. the enduring image most americans have of you is standing there in your jacket, grieving with their people, working with them, and working with the president, and you got both praise and damnation for ignoring the political differences that you had then and still have with the president and all of us in the other party, to do something that was really important grade i wanted them to hear what you are doing now because i think this should be as unifying as that. we've got to stop waiting for something horrible to happen and then spend 10 times as much as we would have to spend to keep it from happening. >> the people in nebraska should care about it because they are paying for it. right? [applause] even if you have no interest in this subject, you are paying to rebuild the jersey shore right now. nebraska, iowa, kansas, south dakota, north dakota, you are paying it.

arkansas, of course, mr. president. [laughter] it is an issue because of the number of people who live there and the expense associated with rebuilding in that area. one of the things i was trying to explain to president obama was, when he took the first two were there two days after the storm, i said, mr. president, in a state like new jersey, to rebuild 365,000 homes in some of the most, if not the most, expensive real estate in america in new jersey and new york, this is incredibly costly and one we have to try to avoid another time after this. that is part of the argument i made to him about the investment of billions of dollars that is going to cost the federal government and state government to build that dune system, but to do it is going to avoid -- the loss to new jersey in the storm of property was

$39 billion -- so to invest $3 billion or $4 billion to try to prevent another $39 billion and losses seems to be whether you are republican or democrat a pretty smart investment to make for the country. [applause] >> just close the circle on this, if you were, if you could make federal policy by fiat -- >> how great would that be? >> looks better to me all the time. [laughter] how would you redesign this? would you put this prevention and resilience function, would you put it in fema or lodge it

somewhere else, or would you set up the funds for which states could apply if they had a preapproved plan -- how would you structure this so that we americans could minimize future losses and maximize future security? >> i would tell you that i would take it out of fema. i think fema's mission is getting too broad for it to be good at all of it. ithink fema should be what says, which is when you need to manage an emergency and natural disaster, they come in and help you manage through the emergency. the immediate crisis. i think within the homeland security department, taking this out of fema, and whether or not you put it in noaa, or you put it in a function like that and say, these are people who will have long-term planning responsibilities for dealing

with resilience -- i think matching funds or the state has to pony up as well for long- term planning makes sense, that the federal government should not have to absorb all of these costs themselves. you work and what the cost share would be. everybody would have skin in the game. if the feds are paying for everything, you might want to do things in one way, but if you have to justify to your home taxpayer the investment, you might do it another. i think it is hard to get the national flood insurance plan out as a sole source of flood insurance. i think it was a bad idea. i think you need to get the private sector involved in this as well. that kind of responsibility inside the government exclusively, any type of monopoly is not good. i think the government had a monopoly on providing a particular type of insurance, and it creates a bureaucracy that is self-defeating because now they are more worried about

oig investigations and audits than they are about paying claims. oig gives them more of a headache than any common citizen could. they react as bureaucracies due to that. to do with this over the long term, to make the flood insurance both affordable and responsive to the customer, they should take it out of the federal government and allow that to be handled by the private insurers and homeowners. listening,of you maybe most of you know what noaa is, but it is the national oceanic survey, and it is a great agency because they monitor the movement of the oceans. their ability to predict the likelihood of things like this happening is extraordinary. to imagine the effects of greater ice melts up north and other kinds of external factors in the ocean and the likelihood

of more storms and where up- and-down the continental united states, that is quite high. i never thought about using them before, but at least they could be a resource in trying to make good judgments about what the insurance rates could be. >> i think they could help prioritize the resiliency money. where do we have the greatest risks for this to happen again? focus federal resources on the place where there is the greatest risk the most quickly. it is going to be a long-term rocket for our country to deal with the coastline of the continental country and to deal with these types of problems. it seems to me that if they are in the business of predicting where we are at the greatest risks, the could be the agency better than fema who could be making the decisions on how to prioritize funds and a time when we have limited resources in the country on all types of infrastructure demand that we have. this is another infrastructure demand, this protection of our coastline, and i think that is

one idea -- none of them are perfect -- it is one idea that could work. >> do you think there is enough awareness between what you have been through and joplin and oklahoma and all of these things we have been through in the country -- now we are dealing with these unusually severe wildfires out west -- that we might be able to get a huge bipartisan majority of governors to ask for this kind of reform? >> i think so. so many more of us are now getting affected directly by it. i think it is very difficult to understand this until you have been through it. i think the overwhelming nature of a significant natural disaster -- to give you some perspective, there are 8.8 million people in new jersey -- when i woke up a morning of tuesday, october 30, 7 million

people in new jersey were without power. the state was closed. i went on google earth that night and looked. as he went up the east coast, he saw the lights in the evening. if you get to new jersey, it was dark. until you go through something like that, all of this is conceptualizing. i think governors are practical folks most of the time. they are trained to do with the problem in front of them. i think you're getting -- i have spoken with governor fallon and oklahoma who now has an even greater understanding of what it is like to see this kind of destruction and how to deal with the human cost and economic cost -- i think we are building towards that. you,ne thing i will tell there are no partisan lines on this one when it happens. you're reaching out to everybody you can print i was reaching out to every governor i could to say, can you urge your utility companies to send us crews? can you send some national

guard troops up? i think this type of crisis breaks down a lot of the barriers between us. [applause] >> one reason i ask is, i ran five times the governor, and not one time did anybody ask me on the street, in a press interview, or during a debate what i would do about any of this. i lived in a state that then had the highest incidence of tornado damage rates in the country repeatedly. i followed your governors race closely. nobody ever asked you about it. we were all arguing about the education policy, and to this one or that one get hired or not. you remember the whole thing. >> yes, i do. [laughter]

>> this is really important. we've got to start to become a resilient society. we know we are resilient internally, but if you plan to resist the worst destruction, if you plan for a quick spring back, you can do this and minimize these damages. i wanted all of you to know how much work he has done on this. i think it is really important. we see these disasters. they have these indelible impressions in our mind. we form conclusions about what people did or did not do. what matters equally as much is what happens the day after everybody else is gone, and you are left with trying to put people's lives back together. >> the other thing that contributes to this -- you are right, we never do get asked about it in the concept of campaigns unless you just got through something like this -- uniquely, when this kind of

thing happens, republicans, independents, democrats, you turn to government. no one in my state was arguing to me that on tuesday, october 30, governor, you should privatize the response to this storm from here on out. [applause] this is one of those things that i think regardless of where you fall on the ideological spectrum, you would agree that this is government's responsibility. if it is, and demonstrably so, when you look at joplin, moore, sandy in new york and new jersey, then governors need to be thinking about these things much more than we do before. to be focusing on how we prevent this kind of severe damage in the future.

one thing i can tell you for sure is you never want to go through it again. you do not. i can tell you that the other thing that contributes to this that makes people skeptical and not want to plan is the way the media covers this. any kind of storm, there is nothing that the networks love more than an oncoming storm. everybody is like ok, get in front of a television set, the storm is coming to me. i want to make it sound as bad as possible. if you make it sound really bad, people will stay in front of their tv and say, tell me more. when it is not bad, when it is just ok, people start to say, the hell with it. we had hurricane irene the year before. all the national weather service and other people are telling me, governor, this is going to be catastrophic. ok, so i will prepare for that. i evacuated the entire new jersey shore. i said, get the hell off the

beach. you pat said to me, did really tell people to get the hell off the beach on television? i said, this is new jersey, i felt like they did not understand. [laughter] it wasn't so bad on the shore. we had inland flooding. now when we had sandy and i told people, this is going to be bad, the rule people on the shore. i went to the shore the days before and had to tell people personally -- they would say, you said that last year -- part of the problem for planning is that people become cynical about whether we can really predict these things. if we predict them wrong, then why should we invest the money to do it? that contributes to the thesis of your question -- there is a growing bipartisan consensus on this because so many of us have now gone through it.

once you go through it in my state, people are going to get off the hell of the beach really quick because they saw what happened. >> i am looking at a sign that says, governor must depart for airport. [laughter] neither one of us control the chicago airport yet. let's give governor christie a big hand. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] >> you are watching c-span,

created for you as a public service by america's cable companies. next, "washington journal." at 10:00 a.m. eastern, a georgia congressman recalls his experience as a leader in the civil-rights movement. poststhat, the newseum interviews with reporters on the civil war. in syria. at theancy scoloff looks as a big data by the obama administration to drive decision making on a range of issues. then retired lieutenant-general discusses a recent report about mission readiness which examines the possible benefits of the obama administration's prekindergarten early education program. davidthat, paul kern and

houther talk about how much americans and foreign visitors to the u.s. banned in travel and tourism, plus your e-mails, phone calls and tweets "washington journal" is next. ♪ ♪ good morning, it is friday, july 5, 2013. president obama is scheduled to had to camp david after attending briefings at the white house regarding the situation in egypt. congress remains on recess in. will return monday with plenty to deal with in closing -- including rising federal interest rates for students and immigration reform and economic pieces will be a hot topic in the wake of monthly job numbers to be released at 8:30 a.m. today. we will get