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Good afternoon, I'm Robert Birgeneau,
Chancellor of UC Berkeley, [applause] thank you, and Professor of Physics
and Material Science and Engineering. It's my very great pleasure
and privilege to welcome you to this very special event. I
warmly welcome both those who have filled Zellerbach Hall today and
the very many others who are watching this event by webcast.
Today we have the distinct honor of welcoming back to the Berkeley
campus one of our nation's great leaders, the 42nd President of the
United States, William Jefferson Clinton. [applause] His visit to
Berkeley in 2002 is still remembered by those who heard him speak as
one of the great highlights and most inspiring moments of their
campus careers. Most of you are students who are here today were
pre-teens during his Presidency. Nonetheless, within five minutes of
the tickets for today's events becoming available to students, they
were snapped up by you. Clearly Bill Clinton's charisma and ability
to motivate has extended way beyond his Presidency to attract and inspire
the next generation. President Clinton is a leader by whom I was
personally very inspired. His two-term, eight-year administration from
1993 through the year 2000 was marked by achievement as a time of
peace and economic wellbeing for America. The United States enjoyed
a strong economy and a period of real social progress. Levels
of unemployment, poverty and crime were low and college enrollment
rates were high. His efforts for health care reform laid the
groundwork for President Obama's initiative on this critical issue.
His accomplishments include promoting peace and strengthening
democracy throughout the world. He showed an unrelenting commitment
to equity and inclusion, values we hold very deeply here at Berkeley.
Since leaving the White House President Clinton has dedicated himself
philanthropy and continue public service through the William J.
Clinton Foundation. The state goal of the foundation is
strengthening the capacity of people throughout the world to meet the
challenges of global interdependence. Most recently he was invited by President
Obama to lead, together with former President George W. Bush, an effort
to help the Haitian people reclaim their country and rebuild their
lives. He has been working tirelessly. You cannot help but be
inspired by his dedication. It is the mission of a great public
teaching and research university like Berkeley to serve
the public good. We take special pride in public service which is exemplified
by our historically by having the greatest number
of Peace Corps volunteers. President Clinton's call to global citizenship
by turning good intentions into positive actions resonates
deeply in our campus DNA. President Clinton has returned to campus at
the invitation of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. The
Blum Center's goals for serving the poor of the world in a practical
way are completely synonymous with the Clinton Foundation's focus
on issues that demand urgent action, solutions and measurable results.
The Blum Center was established March 2006, the end result of
a conversation I had with Richard Blum a Berkeley alumnus, UC Regent
and philanthropist, a man deeply committed to alleviating human suffering.
***'s innovative idea driven by his passion for alleviating poverty
in the developing world was to combine the knowledge and
multidisciplinary expertise of our faculty with education and
real-life experience for our students in the struggle against global
poverty. Our deans and faculty responded enthusiastically. ***'s
idea and personal generosity attracted other wonderful supporters and
the center was formed. The interest and eagerness of our students
and faculty have been tremendous. Berkeley's commitment to public
service to making an impact on the world and helping those less
fortunate has made the center a remarkable and resounding success.
Under the center's faculty director, S. Shankar Sastry, who is
also our dean of the College of Engineering, the center also spans
UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco and Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory. It is inspiring a new generation of global citizens
to improve the wellbeing of the poor in developing countries
in practical and engaging ways.
We're most grateful to the Blum Center for Developing Economies for
giving us this wonderful opportunity today to hear from President
Clinton. And it's now my great pleasure to invite to the podium
Richard Blum who will introduce President Clinton.
[applause] Thank you, Bob, for your kind, thoughtful
and generous remarks. Before I introduce President Clinton, I think
many of you know or may know that I served as Chairman of the Board
of Regents for UC for three years. When I became Chairman, I was
quite outspoken about the need to restructure the University, to downsize
the bureaucracy, to make it strategically dynamic in order to
advance its academic mission.
I was then very surprised to receive in the mail a handwritten note
from Bill Clinton that said the following, "***, I really liked your
speech to the California Regents. It is important to make these
changes because most of the universities have too much administrative
overhead and too little strategic investment and because what most
Americans don't know is that our universities are one area where we
still have a great competitive advantage. It is vital to our
future." When he spoke of competitive advantage he was talking about
all of you. President Clinton last spoke here on January
29, 2002. He talked most articulately that day about the challenges
of creating a world where people in the poorest countries could
strive toward making their lives better through education, innovation
and opportunity. He said that as Americans we could all help by
being good ambassadors and by committing human capital as well as
our funds and helping emerging nations grow, prosper and embrace
democratic values and human rights.
On that same evening George Bush gave his State of the Union Address
but Bill Clinton here at Berkeley went on to give a State of the
World Address as eloquently as any speech I've ever heard. You will
probably hear the same here today. President Clinton has certainly
proven that he not only walks his talk, he in fact runs it. Since
President Clinton was last here, he started the Clinton Global
Initiative, which has raised tens of billions of dollars for projects
all over the world. Since its inception CGI has received 1700
commitments valued at $57 billion, and it's already impacted 220 million
lives in 170 different countries. [applause] His CGI meetings in
September in New York each year bring people from all over the world
together who are committed to solving as we are the surrounding
poverty, health care and environmental and human rights issues.
Some say the Clinton Global Initiative is a little bit like Davos.
I think it's different. CGI is not a think tank. It's an
action machine. We are all aware that President Clinton and President
George H. W. Bush tirelessly brought about help to the victims
of the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean. He has worked on Hurricane Katrina
issues. President Clinton is currently the UN special envoy
to help Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. And despite not
feeling perfectly well he has been down there two times since it
happened. We at Berkeley have been up and running for three years,
making great progress at the Blum Center for Developing Economies.
Thanks to many of you 2500 students have been through our classes.
220 Berkeley kids went to 38 countries last summer. And we are
finding ways to work with the Clinton Global Initiative. I just
returned from Ghana and Sudan. I was in Darfur last week. Our
Darfur stoves burn one-third as much wood as the traditional ones do.
And the women, therefore, don't have to leave the villages to seek
something to burn and be at risk. Our ultraviolet water filters are
now bringing literally clean water to hundreds of thousands of people
in Asia and Africa, particularly India. Mr. President, we hope we can become your
West Coast cousins. Of all the relationships my wife Diane Feinstein and
I in Washington over the last 17 years, there are no two people that
we admire more than Bill and Hillary Clinton, a great Secretary of
State I might add. [applause]
I would now like to introduce my good friend, the 42nd President of
the United States, William Jefferson Clinton. Thank you.
[applause] Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you very much, first, to my good friend *** Blum for the
introduction and the great work that the Blum Center does to improve
the lives of people who live on less than on $2 a day all over the
world, about half the world's population. I thank Chancellor Birgeneau
for welcoming me back to Berkeley. I'm glad to be here. I was
shocked to be reminded that it was 8 years ago that I last spoke
on this stage. You will find that as you get older the years fly faster,
and you remember things that you did with absolute clarity.
It's just that you can't remember the year in which you did them. [laughter]
But I'm glad to be back.
I remember well that day 8 years ago. I tried to speak about what I
thought the nature of the 21st century world was and what the
challenges facing America were. Today I want to build on that and
repeat very briefly some of the points I made then, but updated to
this new decade. The Blum Center and the work it does around
the world, the work my foundation does in America and around the
world, reflect two of the most hopeful developments of the early 21st
century. First is the rise of what I would call "communitarianism."
Not necessarily a more leftwing philosophy but a more embracing one.
The idea that we are in an interdependent world, and we will either
make a community of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities
or we will pay the price because we're interdependent. Divorce
is not an option. What we do affects others, what others do affects
us. There is a deeper understanding of this, I
think, than ever before. Not just in places with a level of diversity
you can see if you look around this crowd but in every nook and cranny
of our country. Accompanying that has been the rise of non-governmental
organizations. NGOs are groups that do all different kinds of
things, but America has a million of them, not counting the 355,000
religious institutions from all faiths that do community-based work.
They are an old tradition in America, and I'll say more about that in
a moment. But it is fascinating that we do. Now you see them
everywhere. India has a million, more than a million now NGOs working
in India, about half of them Indian-based, half of them
international. China has a few hundred thousand, Russian,
notwithstanding the opposition of the government, has a couple
hundred thousand. There are fabulous NGOs mostly concentrating in
microcredit in the rest of the Indian subcontinent, especially in
Bangladesh. You see them in Southeast Asia. You see them in Africa.
You see them in Latin America. This explosion of non-governmental
activity. And I think that on balance this is a very, very good
thing. But I do not want to imply by extolling the virtues of
non-governmental citizen action that I think governments and policies
of governments are not important. I'll come back to that in a moment.
But let's just begin with where we are. We live in an interdependent
world. We need a communitarian mentality, we need more non-government
action because this world, for all of its joys, and there's lots of
them, the increasing diversity, the increasing ways of communicating
because of the internet, the increasing way of getting information in
a nanosecond, all the advances. This is a pretty interesting time to
be alive. When I was elected back in 1993, which hardly qualifies as
the Dark Ages, when I took office, there were a grand total of 50,
five-oh, sites on the world wide web. There've been more than that
added since I've been talking. The day I took the Oath of Office, the
average cell phone weighed 5 pounds. Now I have to get one of the
wider models for my big hands and I still misdial about one in every
three numbers. There's a lot of great stuff going on here.
But there are three really profound problems for the modern world
that are persistent, that have to be met with a communitarian response.
The first is that the world is entirely too unequal, both between
rich and poor countries and within countries. Half the world's
people live on less than two bucks a day, a billion people live
on less than a dollar a day. 75% of the people in Haiti where I'm
working now lived on less than $2 a day, lived on it before the earthquake.
A billion people never have access to clean water. Two and
half billion people have no access to sanitation. Think of all the things
you take for granted here.
You would be shocked if the air control system here malfunctioned, if
all the lights went out and we couldn't see each other, or if the
sound system failed and you couldn't hear anything. I spend most of
my time now working in places where people can't take any of this for
granted because of the inequality of opportunity. And it has
enormous consequences. The number one public health problem we have
in Haiti today, after the immediate emergency is over and people were
performing amputations in the middle of the night with *** and hack
saws, and there were no supplies, the number one problem we have now
is sanitation because everybody's moved somewhere else, living in
makeshift settlements. And I learned much to my distress when I
started trying to help after the earthquake even though I'd been
working in Haiti a year before then that none of the people who make
latrines in the world, including compost toilets, ever developed any
residual production capacity to account for a natural disaster.
I learned that a lot of most gifted NGOs in the world think they know
how to dig big latrines and don't. I learned all kinds of things
because of the gap between rich and poor. We think we know what other
people need some times and we don't. This is unsustainable. You see it in healthcare.
One fourth of all the deaths on planet Earth last year, including
those from natural disasters, from wars, from traditional heart
disease and cancers, from violence and accidents, one quarter of
all deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and diseases were related
to dirty water, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea. 80% of the deaths
in that last category are children under five which should
tell you why I'm worried about the sanitation conditions in
Haiti. Little children walking in makeshift settlements with one
cut on their feet stepping in wrong puddle of water could lead to unbelievably
dire consequences. By and large these diseases
are diseases of the poor. You may know someone who dies of AIDS, but
that's because they're among the few for whom medicine doesn't work
anymore in America or because they get off their treatment regime.
By and large these are the diseases of the poor and a manifestation
of global inequality. We are trying to get the schools back up in
Haiti again. 130 million people never go to school at all, and at least
that many do go to schools but they do so nominally. That is,
their teachers aren't trained and they have no access to learning
materials. Yet we know in the poorest countries just one year of schooling
adds 10% per year to earning capacity for life. And it's something
to think about when -- and I'll say more about this in a minute,
but here you are in the crown jewel of the finest system of public
higher education ever developed by anybody, anywhere, under assault
because of the economic conditions of our time. But you think about
how many people there are who were born with the same mental capacity
you do -- you have that never even got to spend a day in school.
So the world is entirely too unequal.
The second problem the world has is it is highly unstable. The
interdependence mean, among other things, that not only divorce is
not an option but that borders don't count for as much anymore. And
it's great if you're sending something over the internet, unless it's
how to make a bomb. Look at the interdependence as manifested by the
financial crisis. It begins in the United States. Then all of a
sudden people think, maybe we should look at our bankbooks. Turns
out in the U.K. and Ireland, they are more leveraged than we are. So
it spreads there. Then these little pension funds in small English
towns start failing. Turns out it's because they all invested in
Iceland in financial instruments that promised even higher rates of
return than were being promised by the highly leveraged institutions
in the U.K, in Ireland, or the U.S. So Iceland collapses, the whole
government got wiped out and the reputation of that wonderful little
place was badly damaged, even though before this happened it was
largely known as the European country that had produced the largest
percentage of self-made millionaires of any European country, not
through finance but through starting, by and large, information
technology and marketing enterprises. Then China, which had more
money than it new what to do with because we bought so much stuff
from them, [laughter] but had no financial crisis, all of a sudden
winds up with 35 million unemployed workers because we and the
Europeans don't buy so much of their production anymore. That is a
manifestation of interdependence just as much as any kind of pen pal
you have halfway around the world is. Before 9-11 the Al Qaeda proves itself able
to conduct operations in Tanzania and Kenya where most of its victims
were Africans even though the targets were American embassies.
To blow up a ship in Yemen, then to mount operations in Spain,
and the United Kingdom, in Bali and Indonesia. And that's why, whether
you agree with it or not, there's been an emphasis on sending the drones
into the borderless area between Afghanistan and Pakistan to try
to constrain the instability of a clever adversary which has
proved itself over and over again able to inspire people, to organize
them and to use information technology to conduct operations
a long way from the base. So it's a highly unstable world.
And finally, it's unsustainable because of the way we produce and
consume energy. We are all dependent or affecting each other in that
pattern. For example, the United States and China are the biggest
emitters of green house gases, but Australia is the first place to be
truly hit hard by climate change. You can see it in the dramatic
increase in wildfires and their reduced ability to grow crops and
feed livestock and all kinds of other areas. A few months ago a
study came out saying most cruelly the next group of countries to be
hard hit by climate change are the poorest countries that are making
the smallest contribution to it, the equatorial African countries.
Places like Afghanistan and Haiti. So that too is a form of
interdependence. And I take it I don't have to make the case here,
that notwithstanding the new energy given by the deniers of climate
change, that the fundamental subtle science has not changed. Then
somebody steals a few e-mails out of the University of East Anglia
and commits a crime. If they had been trying to prove that climate
change was real, the same crowd that's extolling this theft would be
asking that they be put in jail. But they steal the e-mails and
doctor them up a little bit and make it look like this is a case that
climate change doesn't exist. A relatively minor mistake is made by
The International Panel on Climate Change by the United Nations, but
it's a glaring one, acting as if there is a fixed date which we will
know the Himalayan glacier will melt, and all of a sudden people say,
oh, it's not real, as if the Himalayan glaciers weren't melting. Oh,
it's not 2035, it's 2039. Let's go back to sleep.
So I personally believe that, and I want to say more about that in a
minute. Hold that thought because I think that one of the problems
with the way information is communicated in the modern world is if
we're not careful we all start majoring in the minors when we should
be majoring in the majors. I don't think anything that I have seen or
read has called into serious question the fact that the ten hottest
years onrecord have occurred since 1995. I notice one of the climate change opponents
in the Senate the other day said obviously this whole global warming
thing was a hoax because they had a record snow in Washington. [laughter]
I think our friends in China and India and elsewhere would tell
us that you cannot extrapolate from what is happening in Washington,
DC a general rule for the world. [laughter and applause] You
can't even extrapolate a general rule for America.
And we have had a real cold February, but January was the warmest
January ever recorded. They always kind of forget. They always leave
that out. And while we were worried about how cold Washington DC was,
when the Olympics opened in Vancouver, if you'll remember, in the
first week one of the big problems was they didn't have enough snow
and it was too slushy and they were worried that some of the events
would be dangerous because their weather was too warm. So I want you
to keep that framework in mind. The world's pretty great or you
wouldn't be sitting here today for a lot of us. But it is far too
unequal, too unstable and too unsustainable for this pattern to
continue throughout your lifetime. Therefore, the major job you will
have is to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of
interdependence. If you ask me what my position is on anything,
I may not give you the correct answer, but I'm sure I have the correct
filter. That is, whatever your question is, my mind will immediately
go to the following question: Will this build up the
positive or reduce negative forces of interdependence? If it
will, I'm for it. If it won't, I'm against it. And I spend my life
now trying to think about that. So that's the first point.
Now, what is the role of the private citizen, the university student
in building the positive and reducing the negative forces of
interdependence? I believe it is to participate in some way,
according to your interest, ability, and capacity, in the
non-governmental revolution sweeping the world. I already said
America had a million NGOs here. This tradition in America of citizen
organizations is actually older than our country. Benjamin Franklin
organized the first volunteer fire department in the United States
before the Constitution was ratified, and he did it in our founding
city of Philadelphia. When de Tocqueville wrote, "Democracy in
America", he observed in the early 19th century that the difference
in the U.S. and what the previous administration disparagingly
referred to as "Old Europe", I kind of like Old Europe myself. He
said the difference is at that time if the government had not met
some need in Europe, people would complain about it and keep
complaining about it until the government either did something or
didn't. In America, he said, they tend to complain about it a day or
two and then they just go home and organize and fix the problem.
Now, I like that but it shouldn't be a virtue that you apply so
broadly as to say government doesn't matter. I want to come back to
that. The point is we've always been into doing for ourselves with
each other, and it's now become a global phenomenon. I told you at
the outset of the talk how this whole non-governmental movement is
sweeping the world. One of the biggest challenges we have in Haiti is
how to coordinate all the NGOs that are there now so that we at least
meet certain standards for public health and good education in
dealing with all the great things they're trying to do. And that to
whatever extent we can we harmonize their work with the World Food
Program, with UNICEF and all these multinational agencies, as well as
the work that the US and others are doing. But this is exploding
across the world. In my foundation, we now sell the world's least
expensive AIDS medicine in 70 countries. And we work on building
health care systems in about 30 and we have economic projects in
Latin America and Africa and in the United States. We have health
care projects in America, the most important of which is the campaign
against childhood obesity, which the First Lady Michelle Obama has
just taken on and I applaud her for that. I just left Los Angeles
where Governor Schwarzenegger and I and a number of other people from
schools all over California talked about what is being done on that.
That's a number one public health problem in America, and that should
tell you something about rich and poor. In America our biggest
problem is childhood obesity. In earthquake-ravaged Haiti their
biggest public health problem is basic sanitation. And that illustrates a point I will come back
to, but I might as well make it now. In poor countries the biggest
problem is lack of capacity. People are just as smart as we are,
and they work hard. Sometimes they work harder just to keep body
and soul together. They don't have the organized structures that we
take for granted that give predictability to our lives make a connection
between the ability we have and the effort we exert and
the result we get. Therefore, life is so chaotic it's almost
impossible to build a harmonious, coherent society in which everybody
has a chance to live their dreams and develop their abilities,
and you're continuously taking down the forces of inequality and instability.
In rich countries the problem is just the reverse. There is great
capacity and enormous strength in institutions, otherwise we could
not have risen to the point we are, not just the U.S., anywhere. The
problem in wealthy countries is rigidity, where institutions have
grown so used to their position in society, their power, their
influence, their wealth that they resist making the changes necessary
to allow them to pursue the thing they were set up to do in the
first place. So we have rigidity problems which have affected our
economic system, our financial regulation system, our health care
system, our education system and the way we produce and consume
energy and governance in general. So when you think about these things and building
the positive and reducing the negative forces, I think it will
help when you analyze America if you say, is this a rigidity problem,
why are we resisting change? You don't have to demonize the institutions
against change for they did something good in the past, otherwise
we wouldn't be where we are, but they've lost the capacity
to change. They would rather preserve their piece of the present
pie than pursue the purposes for which they were established in
the first place. This is, I would remind you, a tendency as old as government
itself, but it is a profound challenge in America today, complicated
by human psychology. In the 15th century Nicolo Machiavelli
said, "There is nothing so difficult in all of human affairs,
as to change the established order of things." Now I'll revert
to colloquial English to finish the quote. He didn't exactly say
it like this, but this is the point he made. The reason that is so is
that when any change is proposed, those who will lose are certain
of their loss, while those who will gain are uncertain of their advantage,
and you saw it all play out in this health care thing. So we
have rigidity problems. Haiti, they got capacity problems; in Africa,
capacity problems; in all poor countries, capacity problems. In
both areas, citizens can make a difference working through non-governmental
organizations, as well as advocating the right kind of public
policy changes. Just for example, I'll give you a couple of examples
in terms of what we try to do. When I started working in this AIDS
area there was not very much money being spent on AIDS medicine. President
Bush's PEPFAR program had not been stood up, the global
fund on HTB and malaria had not been funded, and we were charging $10,000
a year to the American tax payers for AIDS medicine for poor people
on Medicaid who got it or people who were otherwise Medicaid-eligible.
Generic drugs were only $500 a year, produced largely in India
and South Africa. Now that sounds cheap, but if you live in a country
with a per capita income of under a dollar a day that's still
a lot of money. If your government doesn't have the capacity to raise
revenues brought from a broad spectrum of its earners. That's a lot
of money. So when we looked at it, this is something that a non-governmental
group can do that a governmental group wouldn't normally
do. We found out that even at $500 dosage a year, this business
was run on the following model: low volume, uncertain payment, because
these countries didn't have a lot of money, therefore high profit
margin so they could stay in business. So we took a different proposal
to them. This is what a non-governmental organization can do. We said,
hey, how about changing your business model? We have, beginning
with Ireland and Canada, countries that will give you money
to buy this medicine, or we'll give poor countries money. So we asked
the manufacturers in India and South Afreica, we said, how about
changing your business model from low volume to high volume, from
uncertain payment to certain payment, and therefore from high profit
margins to low profit margins? In other words, stop running the
AIDS drugs business as if it were a small town jewelry store and start
running it as if it were a huge grocery store. That's all we did. But
the price went from $500 a person a year to $140 to 120. The children's
AIDS drugs went from $600 a year down to 120, down to 90,
down to 60. And half of all the people in the world who get medicines
in poor countries get it off these contracts; two-thirds of all the
children who get medicines get them off this contract. That's something
a non-governmental organization can do, to figure out how to
do something faster or cheaper or better. We try to do that in the
way we do building retrofits to fight climate change. And whether
we can work out the financing so we can do large solar-thermal
projects that will help to offset the effects of climate change and still
give poor people and people in rich countries a source of clean
power. We've tried to do that in fighting childhood obesity, negotiating
with soft drink companies, for example, to reduce the caloric
content of vending machine drinks in schools by 58%. We found
that we could get them all do it, that they'd all jump off together.
Now 80 percent of the schools in America are doing that. So, that's
one of the things a non-governmental organization can do. And
it represents the traditional role of the NGO to this extent.
All these non-governmental groups started the same way
the volunteer fire department in Philadelphia started. Because
in any given moment in history, even if the time comes when the economy
is rocking along and everyone you vote for wins and they do everything
you think they ought to do, there will always be some gaps
in the social fabric, some gaps between what the private economy
will produce and the government can provide. And historically,
the role of non-governmental groups has been to fill that
space. Now, in addition to that, however, there are
other things being done today. Innovation, the AIDS drug examples,
and integration. I never ask people to lose money who work with me.
I ask them to make money in a different way. That's what the AIDS manufacturers
did. I don't go to a country unless the government asks
me in with the understanding that we have a 100% no corruption
policy. If I catch anybody stealing money and having kids die
over it, we're out of there. So as a result, we're building government
capacity and helping the private sector to make money in a more
socially beneficial way rather than a less beneficial way. All of
these things can be done. And now the most important thing I can say
is, everybody can do this. Look at what happened after the Haiti
earthquake occurred. First you had George Clooney and others putting
together this amazing concert, "Hope for Haiti", in no time. They
put it together in a week and it raised $66 million. A lot of it in
$10 pops because you could text "Haiti" into your phone at one number
and automatically $10 would be transferred here or 5 bucks in Canada.
Amazing! Most of the rest of the money was given over the internet.
So very few people gave $100,000 or more in that $66 millionfigure.
Most people gave a hundred dollars or less. And these
massive amounts of money were given by people who wanted to make a
difference. By the same token, you have people who are
able to give some time. All of a sudden I had teams of doctors from
New York where I live calling me, saying, I can only stay five days
but send me down there. And a group of two or three who were particular
friends of mine and who work with Dr. Paul Farmer who runs Partners
in Health and is my U.N. deputy. A lot of you know who he is.
They were down there and they called me back and said, here are 36
antibiotics and other medicines we need, and by the way, get us
some standing lamps, even if you have to go to Walmart to get them and
bring me a generator to run them so we can operate 24-hours a day.
Otherwise babies are going to die in throes because of infection
from sepsis. So, I did it. All non-governmental groups. What I want
to say to you is that there is something all of you can do in this
way, whatever your politics, whatever else is going on.
I'll give you just a couple of examples. *** talked about the
Clinton global initiative. It is true. Every year at the opening of
the UN we have a two-and-a-half day meeting where we invite
philanthropists, business people, non-governmental organizations and
the world leaders that show up for the UN, and we talk about how to
meet the major challenges facing the world. No one gets to give a
speech except for the Secretary General of the UN or the President of
the United States if they show up, and they can't talk more than 10
minutes. Everything else is a conversation focused on what I believe
to be the most important question facing the 21st century world.
Most of the time in politics we debated three things: what are you
going to do, who's going to do it, public or private sector, how much
money are you going to spend on it? What we do at the Global
Initiative is we focus on the fourth question. However much money
you have, whatever it is you propose to do, how are you going to do
it so that you turn your good intentions to positive changes. In
other words, in the climate change area what's the analogue that we
did with AIDS drugs? In the health area, what's the analogue in
setting up health care systems? How can you use technology to
democratize education and get the 100 plus million people who aren't
in school the level of learning they need to function and to grow
their countries? How? The "how" question, I think, may well turn
out to be the most important question in the 21st century. And if
you're in the non-governmental area what you're always trying to do
is to answer the "how" question in a way that puts yourself out of
business because then the government changes its policy and the
private sector does what it can do, and then you go on to another
challenge. That's how I see what I am doing. And the Global
Initiative has literally raised 10-year commitments worth over $55
billion and already more than 220 million people have been helped.
So a couple of years ago we decided we ought to do one just for
university students. And we had the first one in Tulane in New
Orleans because it was the site of Katrina, and it was beginning to
come back, and because we wanted to highlight what could be done to
bring it back. Last year we met at the University of Texas at Austin.
We have increasing numbers of young people come from other countries.
Fourteen young students came all the way from China last year, and we
always do community service projects. If you go to New Orleans now
in the Lower Ninth Ward there are set up houses that are green houses
extremely energy efficient and hurricane and flood resistant built by
Brad Pitt's foundation, Make It Right, on a plot of land that was
cleared by our students at our CGI University meeting. So last year
we were in East Austin in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood
working at a community center. And I was going around shaking hands
with the students and I asked this young man where he was from and he
said, "I'm from Myanmar, I'm from Burma." You probably know we don't
have many relations with them. And I said, "How in the living
daylights did you get here?" He said, "You invited me." And I said,
"From Burma?" and he said, "No, I was in school in London." I said,
"Did we help you come?" Because we give sometimes 40% of the
students, we help pay their way. He said, "Nope, I raised the money
myself." And I said, "So you go from Burma to London and you're
standing in a Hispanic community center in Austin, Texas. Why did you
do this?" He said, "Because my country's got a lot of trouble and I
know it, but you're not going to fix it. People like me have to fix
it. And this is one way we'll fix it by proving we can help real
people and make the government work for people instead of for the
people who are in power." It was an amazing encounter.
About 50 students from Berkeley have come to one of these two
meetings. And they made some fascinating commitments. Everybody has
to make some commitment at the college meetings just like at the
regular CGI. A pilot program for vegetable gardens in California's
public schools, a health worker training program for a region of
Honduras and several others. Every student whose come from Berkeley
has made an interesting commitment. And together they have made a
real difference. So the next one is in April at the University of
Miami and it's April 16th to 18th. There will be a lot of focus
there on Haiti if you're interested in it, and we're still taking
applications. So if you want to come you can apply between now and
March 1st. You got another week to apply. I would urge you to do
that. If you don't want to come, we webcast this and I urge you to
follow it over the internet. And one of the things we've done is to
raise money from companies, including Walmart or the Pat Tillman
Foundation. You all know who Pat Tillman was? The professional
football player who was killed by friendly fire in Iraq? His wife is
a remarkable woman who has opened a foundation and raised money to
try to help young people who are survivors, who are not going to be
killed in the war to make more of their lives. That's the way she
thinks she can best honor her husband's life. So she and several
others have given us the money to help fund student projects. So
this year because there is a limit to the number of students who can
actually physically come to Miami, if you don't want to come or you
can't come, you can follow it on the internet and also apply for
support for some project you have even if you're not physically
present at the Clinton Global Initiative University meeting. The
website is CGIU.org. And I would urge you to check it out.
Now, let me just say a word on politics. Politics are important but
not an excuse not to do this kind of work. Because remember what I
said, even if there comes a day when everybody you vote for wins and
the economy's humming along again and the people in office do
everything you want them to do, there will still be gaps in the
social fabric that have to be filled by citizens. And we have more
power to do that than ever before, partly because of the internet and
partly because of information sharing and networking which enables us
to empower other people to do what they want to do. I really
believe, in spite of this horrible earthquake, that the people of
Haiti, where Hillary and I have been going since 1975, have the best
chance in my lifetime and perhaps in their 206-year history since
they became the first and to date the only successful nation
established by a slave revolt to escape the darker parts of their
heritage. And I really believe that America has a chance, in spite
of the frustrations of the moment, 50 years from now to still be a
world's leading force for peace and prosperity and social justice.
But we have to change. And the one thing I would say to you, we
don't have time to go through all these policy differences, but you
are at a university. We have to stop majoring in the minors.
You look at this healthcare debate is bewildering to me. And part of
it is the way news is disseminated today. You know you see the big
headline today, one of the major networks has got to cut their whole
news staff by 25% because old guys like me don't watch the evening
news anymore, we just turn on movies and sports. And because there's
a great sorting going on in America because we have more and more
choices over satellite television and over the internet. We don't
have to read newspapers. With Kindles we may never have to read
another book. We can read 25 blog sites everyday that agree with us.
And there is a great tendency among those that are left viewing only
to look at what agrees with us. There is a fascinating book, by the
way, written by a liberal Democrat named Bill Bishop, called "The Big
Sort." He lived in a neighborhood that voted for John Kerry more
than 4 to 1 over President Bush in Austin, Texas. But the
neighborhood lost it's only Republican who then moved to a
neighborhood that voted for Bush 5 to 1 over Kerry. And it got him
to thinking about how people are being sorted out. And that's
happening to all of us. We tend to cluster and listen to and learn
from people that agree with us. And it tends to create these really
churning sites like on television where people are trying to keep us
upset all the time. And news is delivered in a way designed to
increase the likelihood that you will have Attention Deficit
Disorder. And the problem is that makes you vulnerable to majoring
in the minors and minoring in the majors. I can tell you in my long
life, going way beyond politics, anytime I made a very important
decision when I was frustrated or angry or scared, there was about a
75% chance I'd make a mistake. And particularly a lot of these cable
channels they're trying to keep us frustrated, angry or scared all
the time. And so I think it's quite important that we get back to
the basics. In healthcare the basic fact is this: We're spending
17.2% of our income on health care. Nobody else in a rich country
spends more than 11 and a half and that's Switzerland, where the
delivery system's more expensive because so many people are in alpine
villages and the country's even older than we are. Canada spends 10
and a half. All of the other countries, including the two
consistently most highly rated, France and Germany, spend 10. The
difference in 10% of GDP and 17.2 is approximately $1 trillion. So
what do we get for the $1 trillion? That is, if we adopted their
systems we'd save $1 trillion. What do we get from that? You think
about Berkeley's budget needs, think about what's happened to tuition
at California's universities, think about what happened when the kids
are coming out of the two-year system don't automatically get in to
one of the Cal State schools anymore. Think about everything that's
happened here, okay? So, our first priority was to write a check for
a trillion dollars for a system that is 39th in infant mortality and
42nd in adult life expectancy and never ranks better than 35th in
overall end products of health care. And even if you make allowances
for how many poor people we have for first generation immigrants,
there is no way you can make this look pretty. We insure 84% of our
people. Everybody else insures 100 and that understates the problem.
At some point every year 30% of the American people will be without
health insurance coverage. And we seem to think we have nothing to
learn from anyone else. And the people that are trying to keep us
torn up are really shameless. I saw one guy wrote an article after
I had my little stent put in last week, said, "Boy, I'll bet Bill
Clinton's glad his health care plan failed. I'll bet he's glad
President Obama's healthcare plan failed otherwise he'd be dead."
Needless to say our friends in the United Kingdom and France and
Germany were appalled. And see, it's designed to keep you upset.
You. Forget about the public interest. You might have to give
something up if, God forbid, we save the American economy and had a
competitive and actually better health care system. We got to get
over that and we need to get this done. I'm telling you I cannot see
a scenario where the United States will be able to maintain its
higher education system and improve its public education system and
diversify its economy if we keep writing a hot check for a trillion
dollars to our competitors at the start of every year to keep
ourselves sicker. So we need to think. Same thing's true in education. I'll tell
you an interesting thing about American higher education. I wouldn't
have become president if I hadn't had a chance to go college, go
to law school, get a loan, a government-backed loan [laughter] and pay
it back [laughter] with honor. I wouldn't. From the end of World War
II until 2001 till I left office, through Republican and Democratic
administrations alike, through good and bad economies alike, the
United States always ranked first in the world in one category, the percentage
of our young adults with four-year college degrees. We
were always first. In one decade we fell to tenth. Now, part of
that to be fair is a lot of our competitors saw what it did for us
and they started sending more kids to school in their own countries.
And more power to them. You should never want anyone else to be poor.
Never begrudge another nation's success. You should want them to
be more successful. No way in the world a country with only 330 million
people can be the only economic, political and military superpower
throughout the 21st century the way we were briefly at the end
of the Cold War. But we should be a leading force and we should be
a beacon of opportunity and change. And we allowed this to happen
in part because our delivery system got whacked out. After inflation
college costs went up 75% in the last decade while median income
after inflation declined $2,000. We could have handled the
increase in costs if people's incomes had been going up and we'd
created more jobs. It doesn't serve any purpose to deny these facts.
We have to figure out what should be done about the economic delivery
system and the education delivery system.
There are a hundred countries that are more energy efficient than we
are. Look, I'm all for solar and wind and geothermal and all of
that, but America needs jobs today. You get 870 jobs for every
billion dollars you put into coal plants. You put it into a nuclear
plant you get 1,000 to 1,500. You put it into solar power you get
1,900. You put it into wind if you make and assemble the windmills
and you put them up, you get 3300 jobs. Every billion dollars you
spend retrofitting buildings gets you 7,000 jobs. Unemployment in
the construction industry is 17%. Why are we pretending that it's
the end of economic life on our planet if we change the way we
produce and consume energy? The truth is it's the number one ticket
to a prosperous, broad-based economy in America and throughout the
world in the 21st century. [applause] Why did nobody say -- in
Copenhagen I noticed nobody said and all the people who were telling
how us how terrible it was and who were doing handstands when nobody
signed an agreement in Copenhagen. Everybody forgot to point out
some inconvenient facts. Forget now about climate change. Just be
nakedly selfish. [laughter] When Al Gore and I finished the Kyoto
Treaty we helped to finish it, and he went to Japan and actually
closed the deal. We had no support in the Congress for doing
something about climate change. It is the only bill I ever lost in
the Congress before I sent it to them. The Senate voted 98 to
nothing against Kyoto before Al got off the airplane coming home.
Why? Because then there was no consensus that climate change was
real and people believed that there's no way we could get rich or get
richer or even keep our standard of living if we didn't keep spewing
more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Now, we know better now. Kyoto, of the countries
that signed it, the 44 wealthiest were required to reduce their
greenhouse gases by very specific targets by 2012. Okay? Today we can
only be sure that four countries will do it. What are they? Denmark,
Sweden, the United Kingdom and Germany. We know they will meet
their Kyoto target. Now, before the economic meltdown which began on
September 15, 2008, all four of those countries had lower unemployment
rates than we did, higher growth rates than we did, less income
inequality than we have because of the dramatic increase in the number
of jobs and new businesses spawned by making a commitment
to change the way they produce and consume energy. Now the UK was
hurt very badly because for other reasons. They were more leveraged
and even less regulated than we were financially. But even today Denmark,
Sweden and Germany have considerably lower unemployment rates
than we do. Deutsche Bank recently did a study on the
impact of Germany's solar policies. Now this is not Greenpeace, this
is Deutsche Bank. Okay? And they said, even making allowances for
the cost of the subsidies to make Germany the number one user of solar
power in the world, when average sunlight in the whole country is the
same as it is in London, England, they had netted 300,000 new jobs.
Which if we just had a per capita extrapolation to America would
be 1.2 million from solar alone. But last year there was a scientific
survey published which assessed the relative capacity of various
countries to accommodate a transition to solar and to wind. The United
States was ranked first in solar capacity and third in wind capacity.
We need to have the right sorts of debates. But meanwhile that
what I'm pleading with you today is therefore don't give up your
citizenship, don't give up advocating, don't give up working and for
God's sake don't give up voting because that's the biggest pattern
in the last three elections, the two governorships and senate
race in Massachusetts has not been party differences in voting, it's
been drop off of young people. Don't do that. But just realize that
one of the best ways to change other people's minds is to demonstrate
with something they can see that what you are for works. That
you have answered the "how" question, that the fear that we can't
change the way we produce and consume energy without wrecking the economy
can best be answered by a physical manifestation that proves it's
not so, that the fear that we can't change healthcare without somehow
taking wonderful treatments away from people like me who want
to live forever is to demonstrate it's not so, that the fear that
you can't help poor people because there is just something wrong
and they don't have it can best be refuted by demonstrating that
it is not so. In Haiti and Africa and Latin America and Southeast Asia,
anywhere. And so, for all of your frustrations I have to tell you,
you are living at the time in human history when the individual
citizen, if he or she is a genuine communitarian, that is willing to
make common cause with like-minded people and willing to look at
the facts and not to major in the minors can have more influence over
the outcome of affairs than ever before. The future is in your hands.
You got to be able to answer the "how" question and you have
to be willing to put yourselves in the line. Thank you and good
luck. [applause] Thank you. [applause]
Is that for me? What can I say? I'm corruptible. I love having
this. It's beautiful. Thank you. And I will wear them both with
pride and given how cold it is at home in need. Thank you.
[applause] Thank you. Bless you. Thank you. I enjoyed it. Thank
you. [applause] Thanks.