[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book II)]
[September 14, 2000]
[Pages 1823-1829]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Breakfast With Religious Leaders
September 14, 2000

    Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to welcome you to the White 
House. This is the eighth, and final--[laughter]--for me, White House 
prayer breakfast that we have at this time every year.
    I want to thank Secretary Glickman for 
joining us. He's sort of a symbol of our broad-based and ecumenical 
approach in this administration. He's the first Jewish Secretary of 
Agriculture. [Laughter] And he's helping people to understand that 
``Jewish farmer'' is not an oxymoron. So that's good. [Laughter]
    I want to say I bring you greetings on behalf of Hillary, who called me early this morning to ask what I 
was going to say--[laughter]--and the Vice President and Mrs. Gore. As you know, the 
three of them are otherwise occupied, but they need your prayers, maybe 
even more than I do. [Laughter]
    I want to thank you, particularly those of you who have been here in 
past years. Each one of these breakfasts has been quite meaningful to 
me, often for different reasons. We've talked about personal journeys 
and the journey of our

[[Page 1824]]

Nation and often talked about particular challenges within our borders, 
very often due to problems of the spirit in our efforts to create one 
America. We've talked about that a lot.
    Today, because of the enormous good fortune that we as Americans 
have enjoyed, I would like to talk just for a few moments about what our 
responsibilities are to the rest of the world. There is a huge debate 
going on today all over the world about whether the two central 
revolutions of our time, the globalization of human societies and the 
explosion of information technology, which are quite related--whether 
these things are, on balance, positive or, on balance, negative.
    When we had the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, the 
streets were full of thousands of people who were saying in a very loud 
voice, this whole deal is, on balance, negative. Interestingly enough, 
they were marching in solidarity, although often they had positions that 
directly contradicted one another. There were those who said this is, on 
balance, negative because it will make the rich countries richer and the 
poor countries poorer. And then there were those who said that this is, 
on balance, negative because it will weaken the middle class in the 
developed countries, because we don't require poor countries to lift 
their labor and environmental standards. And there were other various 
conflicts among them.
    But the point is, there's a lot of ferment here and a lot of people 
who are, at the very least, highly ambivalent about whether the coming 
together of the world in the new century is going to be a good or a bad 
thing.
    Then there's the whole question of how the coming together of the 
world and the way we make a living and, particularly, the way we produce 
energy to make a living, is contributing to changing the climate, which 
it is. There's more and more evidence that the world is warming at an 
unsustainable rate, and the polar ice cap--if you've seen the latest 
stories there about how much it's melting, it's incontestable that 
sometime in the next 50 years, we're going to begin to sustain severe, 
adverse common consequences to the warming of the climate if we don't do 
something to turn that around.
    And some people believe that there's no way to fix this, if we keep 
trying to get richer and more global with our economy. I don't happen to 
agree with that, and I'm not going to talk about it today. But there's a 
big issue. And very few people are in denial on climate change any more. 
Virtually all the major oil companies now concede, for example, that it 
is a serious problem and that they have a responsibility to deal with 
it, and if they don't, it could shape the way we are all--or our 
grandchildren are living, in ways that are quite different and, on 
balance, negative.
    Then there is the whole question of whether technology will offer 
more benefits to the organized forces of destruction than it does to the 
forces of good over the next 30 years.
    I just came back from a remarkable trip to Colombia. I went to 
Cartagena with the Speaker of the House. 
We only get publicity around here for the partisan fights we have, but 
in an astonishing display of bipartisanship, we passed something called 
Plan Colombia, which is designed to help primarily the Colombians but 
also all the nations on the borders reduce drug--narcotics production, 
coca production primarily, steer farmers into alternative ways of making 
a living, and develop an increase in the capacity of the Colombian 
Government to fight the narcotraffickers, and to keep drugs from coming 
into this country, which are directly responsible for the deaths of 
about 14,000 kids a year in America. And it was this really beautiful 
effort.
    And then we got criticized, the Republicans and Democrats together, 
those of us that supported this, because people said, ``Oh, Clinton is 
going down there to make another Vietnam,'' or we're trying to interfere 
in Colombia's politics or be an imperialist country. And I told 
everybody there that I didn't want anything out of Colombia except a 
decent life for the people there, with a way to make a living on 
honorable circumstances that didn't put drugs into the bodies of 
American children and children in Europe and Asia and throughout the 
world.
    But the point I want to make is, there are a lot of people who 
believe that with more open borders, greater access, smaller and smaller 
technology--you know, you now get a little hand-held computer with a 
keyboard that's plastic, that fits inside of your hand, that has a 
screen that hooks you up to the Internet--and we know that, for example, 
terrorist networks in the world very often have some of the most 
sophisticated uses of the Internet. We know that as we get more and more 
open, we may become more vulnerable to people who develop small-

[[Page 1825]]

scale means of delivering chemical and biological weapons. And all these 
scenarios are real, by the way. We've spent a lot of money in the 
Defense Department trying to prepare for the adverse consequences of 
terrorism, using chemical and biological weapons.
    So you've got that on one side. You've got the people that say that 
globalization of the economy is going to lead to increasing inequality 
and oppression, and whatever happens is going to destroy the 
environment. And if it doesn't, the organized forces of destruction will 
cross national borders and wreck everything, anyway. That's sort of what 
you might call the modest dark side.
    And then you've got people like me that don't buy it, that 
basically--I think if you look at over the last 50 years, that over a 
50-year period the countries that were poor, that organized themselves 
properly and rewarded work and had lawful systems and related well to 
the rest of the world and traded more, grew much more rapidly.
    If you just look at the last 10 years, with the explosion of the 
Internet, countries that are highly wired, even though they're poor, had 
growth rates that were 6, 7 percent a year higher than they otherwise 
would have been. And so finally, there is no alternative. It's not like 
we're all going to go back to huts and quit talking to each other.
    So if we believe that every person is a child of God, that everyone 
counts, that everyone should have a certain level of decency in their 
lives and a certain fair chance to make something, what are our 
obligations? And I just want to mention three things that are before us 
today that I think are quite important. And a lot of you in this room 
have been involved in one or all three.
    The most important thing I'd like to talk about is debt relief. 
There are many countries that, either because of internal problems or 
abject misgovernment, piled up a lot of debt that can't be repaid. And 
now every year they have to spend huge amounts of their national 
treasure just making interest payments on the debt, money they can't 
spend on the education of their children, on the development of public 
health systems--which, by the way, are under huge stress around the 
world--and on other things that will give them a chance to take 
advantage of the new global economy in society.
    Now, there are people who don't favor this sweeping debt relief. 
They say that it rewards misconduct, that it creates what is known, not 
in your business but in the economics business, as a moral hazard. 
[Laughter] In economic terms, moral hazard is created--the idea is, if 
you don't hold people liable for every penny of the mistakes they made 
or their predecessors made, then somehow you've created a mess in which 
everybody will go around until the end of time borrowing money they have 
no intention of paying back.
    And there's something to that, by the way. It's not a trivial 
concern to be dismissed. The problem you have is that a lot of these 
countries were grievously misgoverned, often by people who looted the 
national treasury. And when they get a good government, a new 
government, a clean government, when they agree to new rules, when they 
hook themselves into the International Monetary Fund, to the World Bank 
on the condition that they'll change everything they've done, they still 
can never get out of debt and can never educate their kids and make 
their people healthy and create a country that is attractive to 
investors to give people opportunity, which is why the Pope and so many other people urge that we use the year 
2000 as Jubilee Year to have a sweeping debt relief initiative. And 
there's a whole thing in the Judeo-Christian religion about how the 
Jubilee is supposed to be used every 50 years to forgive debts, to aid 
the poor, to proclaim liberty to all; and there are trends--there are 
similar traditions in other faiths of the world, represented in this 
room.
    So for those of you who have been working on this, I want to thank 
you. What I would like to tell you is, I think that it is very much in 
the interest of America to have big, large-scale debt relief if the 
countries that get the relief are committed to and held accountable to 
good governance and using the money not to build up military power but 
to invest in the human needs of their people.
    We worked very hard to develop a plan. And a lot of you are involved 
in other--in developing countries throughout the world. There are a lot 
of people here, I know, that are involved in Africa, for example, where 
many of the countries most in need are, but you also see this in Asia 
and Latin America, which is a very important thing.

[[Page 1826]]

    We developed a plan with other creditor nations to triple the debt 
relief available to the world's poorest nations, provided they agreed to 
take the savings from the debt payments and put it into health and 
education. The United States--I announced last year that we would 
completely write off the bilateral debt owed to us by countries that 
qualify for this plan. That is, they've got to be too poor to pay the 
money back and well enough governed to be able to assure that they'll 
take the savings and put it into health and education. That's as many as 
33 nations right now.
    I'll just tell you, in the last year, Bolivia--an amazing story, by 
the way--the poorest country in the Andes, has done the most to get rid 
of drug production. The poorest country has done the most to get rid of 
drug production. Astonishing story. That ought to be worth it to us to 
give them debt relief, complete debt relief. But they saved $77 million 
that they spent entirely on health, education, and other social needs. 
Uganda, one of the two countries in Africa that has dramatically reduced 
the AIDS rate, has used its savings to double primary school enrollment. 
Honduras has qualified but not received their money yet. They intend to 
offer every one of the children in the country 9 years of education 
instead of 6. Mozambique, a country which last year, until the floods, 
had the first or second highest growth rate in the world, after having 
been devastated by internal conflict just a few years ago, because of 
the flood is going to use a lot of their money to buy medicine for 
government clinics, because they've got a lot of serious health problems 
that are attendant on the fact that the country was practically washed 
away.
    Ten nations so far have qualified for the debt relief. Ten more, I 
think, will do so by the end of this year. We've got to make sure the 
money is there for them. Last year I got--the Congress was supported on 
a bipartisan basis the money for America to forgive our bilateral debt 
relief. And we have to come up with money that--for example, if somebody 
owes a billion dollars, even though we know they won't pay, because they 
can't, it gets budgeted at some figure. And we actually have to put that 
money in the budget before we can forgive it.
    But the Congress did not appropriate the funds for the highly 
indebted poor countries initiative to forgive their multilateral debt 
relief. Most countries owe more money to the International Monetary Fund 
than they do to America or France or Germany or Britain or Japan or 
anybody else.
    So if we want this to work, we have got to pass legislation this 
year to pay our fair share of this international debt relief initiative. 
Now, we have members of both parties from dramatically different 
backgrounds supporting this. It's really quite moving to see, because a 
lot of times this is the only thing these people have ever agreed on. 
It's really touching.
    You know, we have a lot of Democrats who represent inner-city 
districts with people who have roots in these countries, allied for the 
first time in their entire career with conservative Republican 
evangelical Christians who believe they have a moral responsibility to 
do this, because it's ordained, and then all kinds of other people in 
the Congress. But it's given us a coalition that I would give anything 
to see formed around other issues and issues here at home--anything. And 
it could really--if we can actually pull it off, it can change the 
nature of the whole political debate in America because of something 
they did together that they all believe so deeply in.
    What's the problem? The problem is, there is competition for this 
money, and some people would rather spend it on something else where 
there are more immediate political benefits. None of these people have 
any votes, we're helping. And some people do buy the moral hazard 
argument.
    But I'm just telling you, I've been in these countries, and I know 
what many of their governments were like 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and 
I just don't think it washes. If you want people to organize themselves 
well, run themselves well, and build a future, we've got to do this. And 
I think it is a moral issue.
    How can we sit here on the biggest mountain of wealth we have ever 
accumulated, that any nation in all of human history has ever 
accumulated--and we're not just throwing money away. We're only giving 
this money to people who not only promise to, but prove they are able to 
take all the savings and invest it in the human needs of their people.
    So I would just say, anything that any of you can do--Bolivia is 
waiting for more money that they haven't gotten. Honduras is waiting for 
money that they haven't gotten. They're going to spend this money to 
send kids to school for

[[Page 1827]]

9 years instead of 6. This is not a complicated thing.
    And I would just implore you, anything you can do to urge members of 
both parties to make this a high priority. Let me remind you, we've got 
a budget worth nearly $2 trillion, and this money is for 2 years. So 
we're talking about $210 million in one year and $225 million in the 
second year to lift the burden off poor people around the world only if 
they earn it, in effect. So I just ask you all, please help us with 
that.
    And let me just mention two other things very briefly. The public 
health crisis in a lot of these countries is threatening to take out all 
the gains of good government and even debt relief. There are African 
countries with AIDS infection rates in the military of 30 percent or 
more. A quarter of all the world's people every year who die, die from 
AIDS, malaria, and TB, those three things. A phenomenal number of people 
die from malaria, in part, because there are no public health 
infrastructures in a lot of these places.
    So the second thing I want to ask for your help on is, we want to 
double or increase by $100 million--it's about a 50 percent increase--
our efforts to help countries fight AIDS. We want to increase, 
dramatically, our contributions to the global alliance for vaccines that 
helps countries who are poor afford the medicine that is there.
    I just got back from Nigeria, and the President of 
Nigeria, who was a military leader in 
prison because he stood up for democracy and against a corrupt 
government that was there before, dealt with all these taboos that have 
gripped Africa and kept Africa from dealing with AIDS in an astonishing 
way. We went into an auditorium, and he and I stood on a stage with a 
16-year-old girl who was an AIDS peer educator and a young man in his 
mid-twenties--this is an amazing story--or maybe he's in his early 
thirties now. He and his wife are both HIV-positive. He fell in love 
with a young woman who is HIV-positive. Her parents didn't want them to 
get married; his parents didn't want them to get married. They were 
devout Christians. Their minister didn't want them to get married. And 
he finally convinced the pastor that he would never love anyone else, 
and the pastor gave his assent to their getting married. Within 4 months 
of their getting married, he was HIV-positive. She got pregnant. He had 
to quit his job to go around and scrounge up, because his job didn't 
give him enough money to buy the drugs that would free their child of 
being HIV-positive. So he finally was let go of his job, excuse me, 
because he was HIV-positive, and they were still afraid and prejudiced. 
So with no money he found a way to get the drugs to his wife, and they 
had a child who was born free of the virus.
    So we were sitting there with hundreds of people in Nigeria, and the 
President is talking about this. So this guy comes up, and he tells this 
story and about what a blessing God has been in his life and how much he 
appreciates his pastor for marrying them and how much he appreciates 
their families for sticking with them. And then the President of the 
country called his wife up out of the stands, and he embraced her in 
front of hundreds of people. Now, this is a big deal on a continent 
where most people have acted like, you know, you might as well have 
smallpox, and you were giving it out by talking to people. This is a 
huge deal. And the President got up and said, ``We have to fight the 
disease, not the people who have it. Our enemy are not the people with 
it. We have to fight the disease.'' It was an amazing thing.
    Now, I think these people ought to be helped, so we--but it's $100 
million I want to come up with for that, and I forget how much we're 
giving to the Vaccine Alliance. And in addition to that, I have asked 
the Congress, after meeting with a lot of our big drug research 
companies, not just the big pharmaceutical companies but a lot of them 
that do biomedical research, to give us a billion dollar tax credit to 
encourage companies to develop vaccines for AIDS, malaria, and TB, 
because we have to do that, because they don't see any front-end benefit 
in it. And they have to--they can't justify the massive amounts of money 
that are needed to develop these vaccines, because they know that most 
of the people that need them can't afford to buy them.
    So if they develop them, we'll figure out how to get the money to 
get them out there. But first we've got to have them developed. So I've 
proposed a tax credit, more money to help buy the medicines that are out 
there now, and a hundred million more dollars directly to help these 
countries fight AIDS. I want to ask you to help me get that money. It 
ought to be

[[Page 1828]]

an American obligation. This is a serious global problem.
    The last thing I want to say is that there was a remarkable meeting 
in Senegal not very long ago, where essentially an alliance of the 
world's developing and developed countries made a commitment to try to 
make basic education available to every child in the world within 15 
years. And one of the reasons that kids don't go is, they're not sure it 
makes sense, or their parents--there are even countries--in the poorest 
countries where the parents, no matter how poor they are, have to pay 
some money for their kids to go to school--lots of problems.
    So Senator George McGovern, who is 
our Ambassador to the World Food Organization in Rome, and Senator Bob 
Dole came to me with Congressman Jim McGovern--no relation--from Massachusetts. And these 
three people from different worlds asked me to support an initiative to 
try to get to the point where the wealthier countries in the world could 
offer every poor child in the world a nutritious meal in school if 
they'd show up to school.
    And they reasoned that--even though there are lots of other issues; 
and by the way, I won't go into all that; we've got to do a lot more to 
help these schools in these developing countries--but they reasoned that 
if we could do that, there would be a dramatic enrollment, especially 
among young girls, who are often kept at home because their parents see 
no economic benefit, and in fact a burden, to having their daughters go 
to school. But there are a lot of young boys that aren't in school in 
countries, too.
    So we, thanks to Dan Glickman, got $300 
million up, and we are doing a test run. And we're going around to 
countries that want to do this. And with $300 million--listen to this--
we can feed 9 million schoolchildren for a year in school. But you don't 
get fed unless you come to school.
    Now, for somewhere between $3 billion and $4 billion, we could give 
a--if we can get the rest of the world to help us do this, we could give 
a nutritious meal, either breakfast or lunch, to every school-aged child 
in every really poor country in the entire world for a year.
    Now, you don't have to do anything about that now. I just want you 
to know about it, because we have to go figure out how to do this. And 
let me tell you why. Dan has got to figure out, how is this stuff going 
to be delivered to remote areas, or is it going to be in dried packages 
then hydrated and heated? How are we going to do this without messing up 
the local farm economies? The last thing we want to do is destabilize 
already fragile farmers. There are practical things. But we have many 
countries that are interested in this.
    When I was in Colombia on the drug thing, the President's 
wife asked me about this program. She said, 
``Can we be part of that, or are we too well off?'' You know, she said, 
``We're not really all that rich, with all these narcotraffickers taking 
the money.'' We were talking about it.
    But the point I want to say is, we have reaped great benefits from 
the information revolution and the globalization of the economy. We, 
therefore, have great responsibilities. We have responsibilities to put 
a human face on the global economy. That's why I think we're right to 
advocate higher environmental and labor standards, try to make sure 
everybody benefits.
    We have a responsibility to lead the way on climate change, not be 
stuck in denial, because we're still the number one producer of 
greenhouse gases. Although shortly, unless we help them find a different 
way to get rich, China and India will be, just because they've got more 
folks.
    And in the short run, we have a very heavy responsibility, I 
believe, to broaden and simplify this debt relief initiative; to lead 
the assault on the global diseases of AIDS, TB, and malaria that take 
out a quarter of the people who die, most of them very prematurely 
before their time every year; and to do more to universalize education 
so that everybody, everywhere, will be able to take advantage of what 
we're coming to take for granted.
    Now, we've had a lot of wonderful talks over the last 8 years, but I 
think that I do not believe that a nation, any more than a church, a 
synagogue, a mosque, a particular religious faith, can confine its 
compassion and concern and commitment only within its borders, 
especially if you happen to be in the most fortunate country in the 
world. And I can't figure out for you what you think about whether these 
sweeping historical trends are, on balance, good or bad. But it seems to 
me if you believe that people are, on balance, good or bad or capable of 
good, we can make these trends work for good.

[[Page 1829]]

    And I'll just close with this. There is a fascinating book out that 
I just read by a man named Robert Wright, called ``Non Zero.'' He wrote 
an earlier book called ``The Moral Animal,'' which some of you may have 
read. This whole book is about, is all this stuff that is happening in 
science and technology, on balance, good or bad, and are the dark 
scenarios going to prevail, or is there some other way?
    The argument of the book, from which it gets its title, is basically 
an attempt to historically validate something Martin Luther King once 
said, ``The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.'' It's 
pretty hard to make that case, arguably, when you look at what happened 
with World War I, with Nazi Germany and World War II, with the highly 
sophisticated oppressive systems of communism. But that's the argument 
of this book, that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward 
justice.
    The argument is that the more complex societies grow and the more 
interconnected we all get, the more interdependent we become, the more 
we have to look for non-zero sum solutions. That is, solutions in which 
we all win, instead of solutions in which I win at your expense.
    It's not a naive book. He says, ``Hey look, there's still going to 
be an election for President. One person wins; one person loses. There's 
still going to be choices for who runs the company or who gets the 
pulpit.'' [Laughter] There will be choices. It's not a naive book. But 
he says that, on balance, great organizations and great societies will 
have to increasingly look for ways for everyone to win, in an atmosphere 
of principled compromise, based on shared values, maximizing the tools 
at hand. Otherwise, you can't continue--societies cannot continue to 
grow both more complex and more interdependent.
    So I leave you with that thought and whatever it might mean for you 
in trying to reconcile your faith with the realities of modern life. And 
again I say, as Americans, we have, I think, a truly unique opportunity 
and a very profound responsibility to do something now on debt relief, 
disease, and education beyond our borders.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 9:57 a.m. in the State Dining Room at the 
White House. In his remarks, he referred to President Olusegun Obasanjo 
of Nigeria; Pope John Paul II; former Senator Bob Dole; and Nohra 
Pastrana, wife of President Andres Pastrana of Colombia.