[Full Transcript]
Bill Clinton: Five questions for the 21st Century
Following is the full text of former President Bill Clinton's
Landon Lecture Friday at Kansas State University.
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.
