[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 37 (Monday, September 18, 2000)]
[Pages 2075-2081]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
<R04>
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]
[[Page 2076]]
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 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.
[[Page 2077]]
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-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.
[[Page 2078]]
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.
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
[[Page 2079]]
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 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 ascent 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
small pox, 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.
[[Page 2080]]
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 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 school
children 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
[[Page 2081]]
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.
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 looses.
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.