|
Bill
Clinton, former president of the United States
Landon Lecture
March 05, 2007
Thank
you. Mr. President, I always like being on platforms with presidents
who aren't term limited. Apparently C-SPAN is covering this and
did you notice how he used that introduction to shamelessly flack
for K-State? Wasn't he great?
I
expect Monday morning to be another 5,000 young people here demanding
open admission right away. I thank you for having me here. Governor,
I'm delighted to see you again. We first met nearly 20 years ago
when we were in different positions and I flew home and told my
wife after I met you that I had met, I thought, one of the most
gifted natural politicians I had met in many a day. I waited a while
but you have certainly proved my prognosis right. Thank you for
your outstanding service.
I'd
like to thank the others on the platform ... Mr. Seaton, Director
Reagan, Faculty President Adams. I learned that Mr. Maddie's sister
Katie is the elected vice president of the student body and I was
glad that you didn't have any anti-nepotism law that interferes
with the popular will of the students here.
Whatever
their parents raised them on we need to find it and give it to all
the non-voters in America. That was very, very impressive. Thank
you for your service. I want to thank my old friends, Rep. Moore
and Rep. Moran, thank you both for coming so much.
John
Carlin and I served as governors together 100 years ago and as you
see he looks younger than I do now that his mummifying process is
working better than mine. We had a great time and then he was the
National Archivist caring for our country's most important records
when I was President and he stayed on under President Bush when
I left. Thank you for a lifetime of friendship and for your service
to Kansas and to America.
In
their absence I want to mention three other Kansans. First of all
your former Congressman, Dan Glickman, who was my Secretary of Agriculture
and did a great job in that position. Secondly, former Senators
Dole and Kassebaum. I went to Bob Dole Center to give a speech for
him and you know we do a few things together. After 9-11 we raised
$110 million to guarantee college scholarships to the children and
spouses of all the people killed or disabled on 9-11, from all over
the world not just the Americans, everybody who was.
I
loved him but in his droll way when I was there, I said Bob, I'm
having a good time. He said yeah, but he says, you know how Kansas
works now you got to go to K-State. He said, Nancy will get to check
that box.
Sen.
Kassebaum invited me many years. This is the first time I've been
able to come so I'm delighted to be here and particularly honored
by the presence of the men and women in uniform from Fort Riley
and Fort Leavenworth who are here. Let's give them a hand. You all
deserve that, thank you. Thank you all very much, thank you. I will
get back to them in a moment.
For
all the students here especially here's the deal. What we're supposed
to do as I understand is I'm supposed to say something halfway profound
and then you're supposed to ask questions about it. I'm going to
take you on a trip through my mind sort of, it might be scary, to
try to help you make up your mind about various things.
Forty-one
years ago when Alf Landon gave the first Landon Series lecture,
the title of the lecture was New Challenges in International Relations.
This, in shorthand, the title of what I'm about to say to you in
part at least is, Why There's No Dividing Line Anymore Between International
and Domestic Relations. If you're a Kansas farmer worried about
the price of wheat you know that in one level. If you're a K-State
student and you spend half your time on the Internet you know it
at another level.
If
you, as I and my wife did, if you know anybody who was on one of
those airplanes or in those office buildings on 9-11, you know it
at another level. If you saw what happened to the stock market in
America this week after it dropped in China you know it in another
way.
So
the first thing I want to say is I'm here in the heartland of the
country with a bunch of people who are far more connected to the
world beyond America's borders than students would have been 41
years ago on either coast.
What
I want to talk about today in my remarks before we get to questions
is how are you supposed to think about this world? I believe that
every concerned citizen without regard to party or religion or whether
you think you're more conservative or more liberal, everybody needs
some sort of framework within which you can evaluate all these issues
that are happening all the time and where you can sort out the ones
that don't amount to much.
Half
the stuff that makes the headlines every day you know instinctively
are just fleeting dross. They don't amount to anything. And then
some things represent trend lines. They reflect things that show
big underlying sweeping changes in society. You need to be able
to have a framework that you use to think about all this stuff otherwise
when you look at the news or read the paper or scroll up on the
internet the day's events it looks like the political equivalent
of chaos theory in physics. Looks like just a bunch of stuff unrelated
and how are you supposed to remember it all and figure out how to
evaluate it?
Now
the way I do it, the process that I arrived at, was to ask and answer
five simple questions. I think every one of you needs to be able
to answer the same questions. Even though I'm not running for anything
I'm still enough of a politician to hope you'd get the same answer
as I would but I know you won't, not all of you.
It's
not nearly as important that your answer is the same as mine as
that you have an answer. But if you can answer these five questions
then you'll be able to think about where America and the world are
going, what you ought to do, how you fit into the larger stream
of events, and what your responsibilities are not only to your family
and your community but to the future as it unfolds. So here they
are.
Question
#1: What is the fundamental nature of the twenty-first century world
in a word? Most people would say globalization. I prefer interdependence.
I prefer interdependence for two reasons. Number one, globalization
to most of us is an economic term. This goes way beyond economics.
Before World War I the rich countries of the world were as tied
together economically as they are today by trade. But now there's
more money movement but there's far more information technology
movement, more travel, much more interchange going way beyond economics.
Number two, there is more internal diversity in America and in all
other rich countries than there used to be as people flock to centers
of opportunity seeking a better tomorrow. I just look through this
crowd and I bet it's more diverse by race, by religion, even by
gender than it would have been if we'd had a meeting here 40 years
ago. So I like the term interdependence.
Question
#2: Is it a good or a bad thing that we're living in an age of global
interdependence? My answer is both. It's self-evidently good for
most of us, right? We wear reasonably decent clothes and we know
how to log on to the Internet and we'll probably get to take a trip
or two in our lives and we meet people who are from different places
and different backgrounds. We learn things and see things and do
things and we are empowered in a way by our being connected to this
global economy.
But
it doesn't really work today for about half the people. Half the
world's people live on less than $2 a day. A billion people live
on less than $1 a day. A billion people will go to bed hungry every
night. A billion people have no access to clean water. Two-and-a-half
billion people have no access to sanitation.
One
in four of all the people who perish on earth this year from the
wars, the terrorist incidents, the natural disasters, from cancer,
from heart attack, from stroke, from you name it, one in four of
all deaths will come from four sources that almost no American will
die from — AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to dirty
water, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea. Eighty percent in the last
category will be children under five years of age. So all those
people are not very well connected to the rest of the world. Even
in the wealthy countries in most of them a huge percentage of the
people are only peripherally benefitted by globalization.
If
you look at the United States for example this process has been
going for more than 30 years. Median, not average — average
includes guys that make a lot of money like me — median, those
in the middle, wages have been more or less flat in America from
1973 through 1996.
In
my second term they went up again and inequality diminished for
the first time in 20 years and then in this decade they've been
flat again. It'd been very unusual in this decade because we've
had high rates of economic growth, high rates of work or productivity
growth, a 40-year high in corporate profits and yet you have in
the United States median wages flat, the percentage of working families
dropping below the poverty level going up, the percentage of working
families without health insurance going up by four percent.
You
can see that I'm sure all over small towns and rural areas in Kansas.
You can see it in Arkansas, where I grew up and where my library
now is and you can see it all throughout New York where I travel
a lot now because both my office is there and my wife represents
the state in the Senate so I see all this. So is this good or bad?
The answer is both.
A
lot of people in America were upset when all these kind of left
wing guys started winning public office in Latin America —
Evo Morales the first native Indian in Bolivia, the poorest country
in South America, ever elected to his country's presidency. He wasn't
married and his sister served as his First Lady and she had to borrow
a dress and take a bus from their little village to the capital
in order to participate in his inaugural ceremony.
We
were all worried because he said he was going to nationalize the
mines and all that. I told everybody, I said, if you were a 45-year
old Bolivian miner and you had four children and your body was old
before its time and you thought your kids would never do any better
than you and all you could do for them no matter how hard you worked
was put a scrap a food on the table at night you would have voted
for Evo Morales.
He
was clearly an honorable man, clearly an intelligent man, clearly
a person who just wanted to try to make things work for ordinary
people. So that's the second question, is it good or bad? I think
it's both.
Third
question: How should we try to change this world? I think we should
try to move from interdependence which is good or bad to integration
to a set of integrated communities locally, nationally, and globally.
All integrated communities — university sports teams, families,
businesses, military units — all integrated communities, successful
ones, have three things in common.
They
have shared opportunities to participate, shared responsibilities
for the welfare of the whole, and a sense of genuine belonging.
That is if you're part of one related to all the other members in
the unit you think that your differences are interesting but your
common humanity, your common membership, matters more. This is very,
very important.
Do
you remember a year or so ago when they had the terrorist bombings
in London? The British were shattered by this because unlike 9-11
when the United States was penetrated by terrorists from other countries
the people who pulled off these horrible killings were British citizens
who had grown up there, who went to work and lived in neighborhoods
and had friendly relations with people at work and in neighborhoods
and people that were interviewed afterward were just stunned because
they didn't really belong did they?
The
people that strapped those bombs on thought their differences were
more important than the common humanity they had shared with people
some of them for decades. Meals, holidays, playing games down the
street, the whole nine yards and still it did not penetrate them.
A lot of people died because of that.
But
if you look at the modern world we have no choice but to try to
move from interdependence to integration cause the world we live
in today is we can't keep going this way. We can't keep going with
half the people left out of it economically. It's unequal. It's
also unstable.
I
think it's highly unlikely that this century, for all of you who
are younger than me which is nearly everybody these days, I think
it's highly unlikely that this century will claim as many innocent
lives as the twentieth century did. You just go back and add up
sometime when you're feeling really pessimistic about terrorism
and really worried about Iraq and Afghanistan and all that, you
should be concerned about all this, but go back and look at how
many people died in a much smaller world in World War I and World
War II in the Soviet Union between the Wars and the Chinese purges
and when Pol Pot took over in Cambodia, a country with only eight
million people, two million killed, I think that it's unlikely.
On
the other hand, unlike the last century we all feel vulnerable all
the time. When the news just broke not very long ago about the terrorist
groups in England trying to put an explosive into baby bottles to
put it on airplanes, everybody who flies an airplane felt a tingle
up and down their spine because it meant we were all feeling vulnerable.
And
we all feel vulnerable to other things, disease. One of the most
interesting things about the news that's changed over the last 10
years is you can now turn on the evening news and if a chicken has
been found with avian influenza — this is in the last few months,
I watch the news and I've seen a chicken in Romania, a chicken in
India, and a chicken in Indonesia they found with avian influenza.
I can tell you how many square kilometers in those three countries
and they killed every last chicken to make sure that no bird with
avian influenza got out here into the human population.
Now
we're smiling but this is a good thing because they recognize there
is no known cure no known vaccine right now for avian influenza
in people and we know that at the end of World War I in three rolling
waves the so-called Spanish influenza which actually began on an
Army base here in Kansas, killed 25 to 50 million people because
there was no known antidote to it. This is an unstable setup.
The
third thing I want to say about it is that it is unsustainable because
of climate change and because in addition to climate change because
of resource depletion. Matthew Simmons, a distinguished petroleum
investor who is no liberal Democrat tree-hugger like me, he is one
of the Bush family's close friends. He's a conservative Republican.
He says we have 35 years of recoverable oil left. The Saudis and
Exxon say no, no we've probably got 100 years. Now the oldest city
in civilization according to carbon dating that we know about today
is Jericho in the Middle East, 10,000 years old. That means that
the real happy talk people are saying we have a hundred years out
of 10,000, one percent of the whole history of civilization, left
to burn oil.
In
addition to oil we have serious topsoil erosion around the world,
which is going to create food shortages and food refugees. In the
last decade only Argentina and Brazil which have about 22 feet of
topsoil, still the biggest deposits in the world, only Argentina
and Brazil in the last decade had significant increases in food
yields.
America
and Canada and the bread basket of Europe, they held their own.
They continued to produce very well but we didn't have any big breakthroughs.
That
only happened in those two countries. The world population is supposed
to go to nine billion by the middle of the century from six-and-a-half
billion today. How are we going to feed all these people if the
soil keeps eroding?
You
have water quality erosion, you have biodiversity loss. Ninety percent
of the major fishing areas of the world are now understocked. So
what we're doing is not sustainable. Good and bad but unequal, unstable,
unsustainable but if we went to a set of communities locally, nationally,
globally where we had shared opportunities for participation, shared
responsibilities for our common welfare, and a genuine sense of
belonging because our common humanity is more important than our
interesting differences we'd have a chance to overcome all these
problems.
Fourth
question: How in the world would you do that? These questions get
harder as you go along. I could keep you here until tomorrow morning
talking about any part of this answer so I'm going to be very brief
to get to the questions. How would you do it? You have to have a
security policy. We need people in uniform like these people. You've
got to have a security policy.
There
are people trying to take us down and destroy the enterprise.
But,
I just read a stunning essay by a young man that I feel that I helped
raise who just retired as a captain in the Marine Corps to pursue
the rest of his life. He won the bronze star at Fallujah. His unit
lost no men in the battles. His Iraqi unit had no deserters that
he trained to fight. He was, in other words, a successful American
soldier in the Marine Corps. He wrote an essay because for this
study he wants to do to go on with the rest of his life in which
he said, we did about as good as you can do over there and what
I think is we can't look to our military solution first. The military
can only be effective if we also have a diplomatic solution and
if we're over there trying to make friends as well as deal with
enemies.
He
said, with all the problems in the world with unstable circumstances
and non-state actors like terrorist groups and organized criminals
and drug dealers and all this you've always got to have politics
at work with military. There will be very few purely military solutions
available, no matter how good we are at what we do. If you look
for example at this deal the President just made with North Korea
I happen to think it's a pretty good deal and I was delighted to
see it happen but it was produced by diplomacy.
So
you need a security strategy, a diplomacy strategy, you need thirdly
a strategy to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists.
If you remember that whole litany of numbers I gave you showing
that half the world is not part of what we are let me give you some
good numbers. Bob Dole wrote a book with George McGovern in the
last year or two about how he could end hunger. Guess what? It doesn't
cost very much money. We know how to get the 130 million children
in the world who don't ever go to school into school and it doesn't
cost very much money. We know how to achieve the so-called millennium
development goals to eradicate extreme poverty on earth by 2015
and it doesn't cost all that much money. We actually know how to
do it now.
In
my last year as President we put $300 million into a school feeding
program that Sen. Dole and Sen. McGovern supported, and we increased
enrollment in poor countries by offering them a free student lunch
or student breakfast but they had to come to school to get the meal.
Enrollment went up with $300 million by 6 million. Cost us 50 bucks
a kid to get children in school. How much is it worth if out of
those 6 million kids 10 of them would have become terrorists? Just
10? We saved money didn't we? We spent $100 billion in Afghanistan;
we spent $400 billion in Iraq.
It
is irrelevant whether you support or oppose our policies in either
of those places. The point I'm trying to make is we've got to have
a security strategy but if you live in an interdependent environment
and you can't kill, jail, or occupy all your enemies you've got
to have a strategy to make more partners and fewer enemies too.
It is always, always cheaper than fighting — the health, the
education, the development.
Finally,
last question — who's supposed to do all this? This is the
most important question of all. Who's supposed to do all this? And
the answer is we all are. Are there things that the government has
to do? Absolutely. There are things that need doing that you can't
do legally unless you put on a uniform and train properly for it
and you'd be ineffective if you tried.
There
are policies that cannot really change in America effectively unless
the government changes its direction. I'm encouraged that we had
Wal-Mart, basically a conservative company not unionized and the
SEIU one of the most liberal unions in America standing together
last week calling for universal health care for all Americans because
SEIU wants it for humanitarian reasons and Wal-Mart realizes that
we're going to go bankrupt if we won't do something about it. It
was really interesting. We all have to do something about it.
That
brings me to the second point which is that in America we have a
whole history of citizen action too and that's what I do now. When
I got out of the White House it was interesting and my wife went
to the Senate it's like we changed roles in a play after 30 years
cause for 30 years she'd been out there doing those things that
non-politicians do — starting advocacy groups for families
and children, bringing in free school programs to Arkansas from
Israel, worrying about how we built up health care and education
in rural areas, doing all this stuff not elected to anything. Traipsing
over to Beijing to tell people who were oppressing women and kids
to quit.
All
just as a person and then all of a sudden I had to do that and I
realized I didn't have a clue. I'll never forget that I was shaving
one day in early 2001 after I left the White House and I looked
in the mirror and I said I have become a non-governmental organization.
Who am I? What am I supposed to do? Now I spend lots and lots of
time answering that question every day.
I've
done a lot of work with people that were otherwise political adversaries
of mine. Former President Bush and I, we always had a good relationship
and we've become immensely close working on the tsunami relief,
working on the Katrina relief, and I've developed a good relationship
with the current President and we don't agree on much of anything
but I have a good relationship with him.
When
he does something I like I take up for him like something that may
not be popular here. He wants to speed food aid to poor countries
where people are starving quicker by letting us buy 25 percent of
the food in the country next door which I think is better than requiring
that it all be grown in America even though farmers markets on Kansas
don't like it very much. Your tax dollars would go further and more
people would live quicker. I try to think about all these issues
in a different way now.
I
try to say I'm a citizen now. What can a citizen do? Let's answer
that question then you identify everything that's left and you say
what has to be done at the state or local or national level or what
can be done by the business community? Identify that question and
sort of in my mind I'm passing out assignments every day.
I
want you all to think about that because a big part of building
this world is the last point I want to make before we open for questions
is what I would call a relentless search for home improvement. I
want to end where I began. If Alf Landon were giving the lecture
today I guess he'd be 120 years old almost but he wouldn't be able
to say trends in international relations cause he was a very smart
guy. He would talk about how the line between what is international
and national. What is local and global has totally evaporated.
I
find I work in a lot of poor countries. I have AIDS projects in
25 countries where we provide the least expensive high quality aids
drugs in the world. We sell them in 62 countries; 540 thousand people
in the world who are getting aids medicine since 2003 are getting
off these contracts we negotiated. We work in 25 countries.
I
can tell you I won't go into a country unless the government asked
me in and they agree to work with us and we work through them cause
if something happens to me I want to know the system, the health
care system, is working better. Not just for AIDS but for TB, for
malaria, for maternal and child health, for tropical diseases.
I
want people to be stronger. If they don't have a good government
there's not much the rest of us can do to help them, similarly in
America. If half the people in Kansas believe that the world is
going darker for them, that they're not part of this new future
that's bright and Dennis Moore as a representative in Congress goes
out and tries to give a speech in his district about how we should
be feeding all these kids in poor countries so we'll get them all
in school and then they won't go to madrasahs and they won't be
radicalized, then people are going to look at him like he's nuts.
They're going to say, Dennis, every third store front in our town
is closed. What the heck are you worried about those people for?
They can't vote for you. Take care of me.
I
guess what I'm trying to tell all of you is I think we have to take
care of us too but in the end we can't take full care of America's
next generation unless we take care of the world. I leave you with
this thought. I think there are three home improvement issues that
if we dealt with them they would dramatically increase our ability
to deal with the challenges the face. We can't keep going with the
health care system we got —we can't.
Of
all the new members of the House of Representatives that were elected
the one I was closest to, Joe Sestak from Pennsylvania, is a retired
three-star admiral, former commander of the George Washington battle
carrier group, from a Catholic family of seven siblings and he had
six in the district and all their relatives. All he had to do was
find 10 non-relatives to vote for him and he got elected.
But
Sestak ran for Congress in part because he started a family late
in life. He was traveling at sea a lot and his only child got brain
cancer. He was told in all probability that she would die. It has
a happy ending, this story, she did not. She recovered but he didn't
know that.
So
he took early retirement so he could be at his daughter's bedside
every single day she still had left on this earth. He kept meeting
all these people who unlike him had not been in the military and
didn't have a good health insurance policy whose kids were sick.
He just couldn't take it anymore. It was one of the three reasons
he cited at every speech when running for United States Congress.
Most over qualified person I used to tell him to go to the Congress.
The guy ran a carrier battle group.
We've
got to do something. We're spending 16 percent of our income on
health care. No other country spends more than 11. That's $800 billion
a year we're spending. This is supposed to be a state of fiscal
conservatives, prudent people. So if you're going to spend 800 billion
dollars more on something than anybody else on earth surely you're
going to get something out of it, right? We insure 84 percent. Nobody
else insures fewer than 100 percent.
Our
overall health outcomes rating is 37th although we do rank as high
as 34th in life expectancy. What are we paying for? Well we spend
34 percent of the health care dollar on administration costs from
providers and insurers. No one else spends more than 19. That's
$300 billion a year that we pay for 2 million Americans to go out
and play tug-of-war every day over getting paid for providing health
care. One side trying to get the money and the other side trying
either to keep from paying or hold on as long as you can and earn
interest. In the grinding transaction cost there's more than enough
to insure everybody in the country who doesn't have insurance today.
There
are other things that we should talk about if we had all day that
involve medicine that involve life style. We have enormous rates
of obesity. Our diabetes among young people, adult onset diabetes
among young people, exploding in America. Emory University said
that in the 1990s when I served 27 percent of the increase in health
care costs was caused by diabetes and its consequences — more
heart attacks, more strokes, more blindness, more amputations. These
members of Congress here will have to spend a lot of your tax money
on a Medicaid budget this year. Twenty percent of the Medicaid budget
which cares for poor people goes to conditions directly related
to the explosion of diabetes in America. There are lots of issues.
That's issue number one.
Issue
number two is the economy. We can't keep having an economy where
people like me in the top one-tenth of one percent get more and
more and more money every year and they throw a tax cut at us every
year and middle class people's wages don't rise.
Now
here's what happens. I promised at the very beginning of the talk
to come back to this. I would like to tell you that we got inequality
down and wages up in my second term because Bob Rubin and I were
utter economic geniuses. I'd love to stand here with a straight
face and tell you that. We didn't hurt anything. We had good policies.
Our policies were directly responsible for moving 100 times as many
people from poverty to the middle class in our 8 years as in the
previous 12 but the real reason that all the jobs were created is
that America had a source of good new jobs in the 1990s because
the jobs in information technology moved out of the dot.com companies
and the video game companies in Texas and exploded into every aspect
of American life.
I
could go out when I was governor of Arkansas I remember at the very
end I'd go out at harvest season when they were bringing in the
rice crop or I'd go to planting season and all my farmer friends
all of sudden were in air-conditioned tractor cabs with computers
telling them what to plant, when to plant it, and what kind of fertilizer
to use. It was the darndest thing I ever saw. That created millions
of jobs. Every work place in America changed in the 90s.
Now,
this decade has not seen its source of new jobs, that's the problem.
That's why we've got flat wages. Yet it is a bird's nest on the
ground. If we made a serious commitment to a clean independent energy
future, we would create those jobs in Kansas and across the country.
You
do not have to accept my word for this you can look at the evidence.
I'll give you two pieces of evidence.
Number
one, in Europe the economies that look most like America's, that
is the ones that are the most free market oriented, the most unregulated,
are probably the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. In
Denmark, unlike America, their unemployment rate is almost identical
to ours but their growth rate is higher, their wages are going up,
inequality is going down.
Why?
In the last few years the Danish economy has increased in size by
50 percent. Now at the same time estimate how much their energy
use has increased and how much their greenhouse gas emissions have
increased. Answer? Zero. Nothing, zero, no increase in energy use,
no increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
Their
greenhouse gas emissions have gone down while their economy has
gone up 50 percent because they have also decided to generate 22
percent of the electricity from wind. Let's take the U.K. even more
like us. In my last year as President when we negotiated, in '98
not my last year, we negotiated the Kyoto climate change accord
which calls for all these countries to cut their greenhouse gas
emission down below 1990 level by 2012.
Al
Gore and a guy named Stu Eizenstat went to Japan to propose this
deal for me and I was signing off on it. They didn't even get off
the airplane before the Senate voted against it. One hundred percent
of the Republicans and nearly 100 percent of the Democrats voted
against it before I could send it to them because they said ...
would bankrupt America if we had to reduce our energy consumption
and the poison we were spewing into the air. It would be the end
of civilization as we knew it.
Then
when I gave a speech on climate change it elicited a giant yawn
from all but the most fanatic members of the press on the subject.
Now look at what the United Kingdom did. United Kingdom said something
very different. They said oh we like the Kyoto accord. It's a perfectly
nice little piece of paper but the truth is it's a little bit of
a weak sister. It's too much compromise it's too weak. We're going
to beat our Kyoto targets by 25 to 50 percent.
Guess
what? They did and their unemployment rate is as low as ours but
their wages are going up and inequality has not gone up and their
growth is high because of all the jobs they created in clean energy.
The British government has actually put out a list by category of
how many new jobs they created by beating their Kyoto targets and
they're so excited they're gonna beat them again.
I'm
telling you if you look around here the greatest thing about biofuels
of any kind is that they don't travel well. That's good. That means
no big long pipelines and every 50 or 100 or 200 miles you got to
have a new production facility and a new distribution network and
we can revitalize rural America.
We
can bring back the small towns and the rural areas. Once we get
a cost conversion fix on cellulosic ethanol we can do it without
having corn prices so high that all the chicken people and the cattle
feeders go out of business and everybody goes crazy. We can do it
all in a balanced way here.
But
it's not just that, it's not just that. My library has 308 solar
reflectors. I cut my greenhouse gas emissions 34 percent. Those
things were made in America by Americans. I could go on and on and
on and on. If we made this a commitment then we could deal with
health care, deal with the economy, and deal with the climate change
and we would give Americans space — emotional space, financial
space, to say okay go out there with your security policy, your
diplomacy, your policy to build more partners and fewer terrorists
and bring the world together. Bring the world together. Give our
children the future they deserve.
So
anyway that's how I think. If something happens tomorrow and you
want to know how I feel about it you can already figure out my answer
cause my answer is always determined by this question. Does this
or that or the other course of action help or hurt our efforts to
build a world with more shared opportunities, shared responsibilities,
and genuine sense of belonging?
If
it helps I'm for it, if it hurts I'm against it, and if I don't
know I try to figure it out. That's how I deal with emerging events
every day. You may not agree with my analysis but you should be
able to answer those questions. What's the nature of the twenty-first
century world, is it good or bad? How would you like to change it?
What steps are necessary to do that? Who's supposed to do it? Finally
the answer is whether you're in or out of government, you are.
Thank
you very much.
|
