Remarks at Serono International SA

February 3, 2005
The Bahamas

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, I—- Can you hear me? First of all, I-- If I had come to The Bahamas, I’m not sure I would want to hear a speech by a retired politician, [LAUGHS] but I’m delighted to be here. I love this place and the company, which owns the Atlantis, has been our major partner here in The Bahamas, and the work I do in fighting AIDS in the Caribbean, so I appreciate you being here for them. [APPLAUSE, CHEERS]

I want to say I was delighted to be invited to come here tonight, first of all, because it’s cold in New York. [LAUGHS] And you know, I’m not a kid anymore. I just want this biotech firm to find the secret of eternal youth. [LAUGHS] Because for most of my life, I was the youngest person doing whatever I was doing, and people wrote stories about how young I was and how unbelievable it was. All of a sudden, I’m the oldest guy in every room. [LAUGHS] I wanted to come because I’m a miracle of modern medicine. I dodged a heart attack and had a good surgery and I’m glad to be alive. [CHEERS, APPLAUSE] And I wanted to come because even though you’re having a good time, I want to take just a few minutes to ask you to be serious about what you do.

If I ask you in one word—- You don’t have to say it, but I said, if I ask you to describe in one word, the 21st Century world, what one word would you tack onto that? The 21st Century world is the age of what? [PEOPLE YELLING OUT]

What? [AUDIENCE MEMBER YELLS “HOPE”] Hope. I think hope is a good one, because I’ve lived off it for nearly 60 years now. [LAUGHS] But you know, a lot of-- For example, a lot of economists and politicians would say it’s the age of globalization, and some would say it’s good and some would say it’s horrible. And the truth is it’s good and it’s horrible.

I would argue-- The word I use is “interdependence” for a simple reason. Interdependence means that we cannot escape each other, that our fates are bound up, but it can be good and it can be bad. Biotechnology essentially represents the promise of positive interdependence. In the last century, life expectancy went, in the Western world, from roughly 47 years to roughly 77 years. The sequencing of the human genome will probably take it to well above 90 years for the children born to those of you still of childbearing age in this audience. Lots of good things have happened. But what happened to the United States on 9/11 was interdependence.

If you’re following the news out of Iraq, the voting of those brave people was interdependence but so [CHEERS, APPLAUSE], but when the insurgents kill people with their bombs, that’s interdependence. So if you think about it in those terms, it seems clear that the great challenge of the 21st Century world is to make it an age of hope, to basically elevate the forces of positive interdependence and to depress the forces of negative interdependence. Now if you read what a lot of people say For example, in my party, a lot of my critics on the left criticized me for promoting trade with poor countries and for trying to find a way to build our links with the world because they said it would inevitably lead to a decline in American living standards. It didn’t when I was there and I never agreed with it. But there are people who say what we do is to become less interdependent, to try to pull away from the rest of the world. I don't really think that’s an option. Even if you want to do it, I don’t see how you’d get it done.

Look around this room. How would this company function if you didn’t have people from Europe, from Asia, from Latin American, from the United States and Canada? [CHEERS, APPLAUSE] You couldn’t do it. So if you don’t remember anything else I say tonight, remember that. That you are in your prime years, your best years, at the first time in all of history when there really is global interdependence. The most, the fastest growing small business in the poor country of Bangladesh with a per capita income of under $1.00 a day, the fastest growing small business, are village women getting cell phones, which they then use to rent out time on for people to call their relatives who are cab drivers or otherwise working in the United States or Europe and sending money back home. Interdependence.

The Discovery Channel has got solar powered television programs to reach way up into the Andes in Latin America and remote villages in Africa. These solar generators are small enough and durable enough that you can carry them on wagons drawn by horses or other animals into remote places.

In Brazil, 100% of the people with AIDS get HIV antiretrovirals even way up in the Amazon Rainforest valley, because they go up there and figure out how to talk to them even if they don’t speak Portuguese and they only speak Aboriginal languages, so high tech medicine in the oldest of cultures, interdependence.

And that the number one challenge of this world is to elevate positive interdependent and diminish negative interdependence. In order to do that, it seems to me that you have to have a vision of what you think positive interdependence is. And to me, it is a global community rooted in three things: shared benefits, shared responsibilities and a shared commitment to our common humanity. We really know how to do this. And I remember, in my last year as President, we had enormous bipartisan support to relieve the debts of the poorest countries in the world, but only if they would take all the savings and put it into education, healthcare or job development. Nothing for military, nothing for conspicuous consumption.

In Uganda, they doubled primary school enrollment. In Bolivia, 77,000 people got healthcare who never had it before. So we had mutual benefits and mutual responsibilities. We need more of that. I spend a lot of my time today in my Foundation working on AIDS. You have 43 million people, more or less, who are HIV positive; 6 million people at death’s door in the poor countries and scandalously only about 300,000 getting medicine. 130,000 of them are in one country, Brazil, because the government can manufacture and distribute the medicine. So here, we work, my Foundation does, in the Caribbean, Africa, India, China (and soon to go into Russia and Ukraine) trying to help develop plans to treat people and get the medicine in. And we cut the cost of, the low cost medicine from $500 a person a year to $140 a person a year. This year, by the end of this first quarter, there’ll be over 110,000 people getting medicine who weren’t getting it before and within a couple of years, we think another 2 million. That’s positive interdependence. You actually have a stake in that.
If you live in Europe, you should know that the fastest growing rates of AIDS are in Russia and the former Soviet Union. How is Europe going to be prosperous in the 21st Century if every, if every country that was in the Soviet Union is overrun with an AIDS problem and all those people want to immigrate in Europe to make a living? And the second fastest growing rates of AIDS are in the Caribbean. And if you live in America, you know that every Caribbean nation has lots of immigrants in the United States. It’s a symbol of interdependence.

The other fast growing places are China and India, the two largest countries in the world. If you want a stable, it's hard to imagine how it will be stable unless they can support themselves and be responsible partners in the global society, and if they have millions and millions of people caught up in AIDS, it’s going to be hard for them to do that. So I do what I can to help people stay alive. It's the most maddening problem in the world to me, because this is the disease that’s 100% preventable and completely treatable, where we know the medicine’s available and somehow 6 million people need it and until the beginning of this year, outside of Brazil, only a couple of 100,000 were getting it. But even if you don’t know anybody who’s ever died of AIDS (and I’m old enough that I do), because I remember when America had the biggest problem in the world, you should really care about this.

This Tsunami Relief, President Bush and I, former President Bush and I, have been going around trying to raise money for the Tsunami Relief and to make sure that it goes into charities and specific projects that will actually keep children alive. It’s the most amazing example of positive interdependence. One-third of all American households have made a contribution to Tsunami Relief [APPLAUSE, CHEERS], amazing, and over, over half of them on the Internet.

When I became President in January of 1993, there were only 50 sites (5-0), 50 websites on the Internet. The idea that there would be a real worldwide web that would have serious interchange was unthinkable. That’s 12 years ago. When I left office, there were over 50 million. Now there are hundreds of millions. It’s the fastest growing engine of communication in history. Just think about it, over half the American people who gave contributions did it with a click, and now we see this everywhere.

When the SARS epidemic broke out in Asia, there was an initial denial by the Chinese government until the citizens rose up, basically in guerrilla war raged on the Internet demanding that the truth be told, and in no time we had a quarantine in Toronto, and everybody was open and honest about what had to be done and what could have been an devastating, deadly epidemic was turned back rather quickly. That’s positive interdependence. I could give you example after example, of where we could do this, not with AIDS, with TB, with Malaria, with 130 million children in the world who never go to school.

In Kenya, the new President dropped the school fees. The were charging the poorest people In Africa, they typically charge people to go to public school because they have no money to pay for it. So the new President of Kenya got up enough money to drop the school fees, overnight a million kids showed up. Overnight. [APPLAUSE]

We had-- At the end of my second term, I got $300 million dollars to offer a free nutritious meal to kids in poor countries if they’d come to school, but they had to come to school to get it. Enrollments went up by 6 million. This does not cost a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. But all these are examples of positive interdependence. And for every person who sets off a bomb in Fallujah, or in Gaza, or the West Bank, or Israel proper, for every breakdown of the peace talks you read about, there are hundreds and thousands of people in organizations, millions maybe, out there that you don’t know, who are working to build a world of positive interdependence, a world where hope triumphs over fear. A world where the science and technology, which has made this company so prosperous and kept driving it for nearly a century now, sets our lone star.

So I hope you’ll think about that. Whenever you see something on television, or somebody asks you to volunteer for something, or somebody makes an appeal, you ought to ask yourself, “Will this create more positive interdependence?” And we all have to be a little humble about this. We don’t know the answer to everything.

When I was President, all of these trade deals I did accounted for a third of the jobs that America had. And we bought more things from the poorest countries in Africa and Latin America and we helped them, but there’s no question, that not everything about globalization’s been good. There’s no question that it’s led to an unreasonable depletion of environmental resources in some countries. There’s no question that it’s led to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States without a corresponding rise in the income of ordinary citizens in other countries. We haven't solved all these problems yet. But one thing I know, we can’t run away from each other, so we have to run toward each other in a positive and constructive way.

A lot of times people ask me why I spend all my time doing this, and I say, "Well, because Hillary doesn’t want me underfoot.” [LAUGHS, APPLAUSE] That’s not entirely true, but not entirely false either. [LAUGHS] One politician in the family is enough, I think. But it’s a simple answer.

You know, I’d like all of you to think about it, because almost all of you are considerably younger than I am. I was born at the end of the World War II. I'm the oldest of the so-called “baby-boom generation,” and I hate it, but I am. [FEW LAUGHS] The State into which I was born, in the middle of the United States, had a per capita income of barely half the national average. The people who came home from the war believed we had an obligation to work with our allies in Europe and throughout the world for freedom, to stand against tyranny and to build a structure of opportunity in the United States, which would provide universal education. The building blocks of a middle class lifestyle, to everybody who's responsible enough to work for it. And within that great framework, with an awful lot of luck and help from other people, coming from a family with no money, no education, no apparent advantages, I wound up becoming President and it was not altogether and not even primarily, because of any inherent abilities I had. There had to be lots of other people just as smart as me, lots of other people who worked as hard as I did, maybe very few who loved the work in politics as much as I did. But I feel that I grew up in a society that gave people a chance. The Civil Rights Movement came along and we gave African Americans and people of color a chance. The Women’s Movement came along and we began to break the glass ceiling.

When I left the White House and I saw this great, cluttered world with all the wonderful things and all the terrible things going on, I said to myself, “What I really would like to do is spend the rest of my life making sure that nobody younger than me dies who doesn't have to, and that everybody has their chance. Not a guaranty, but a chance.

The promise of biotechnology and the perils of the modern world that dominate our headlines are sort of the two pole stars of the 21st Century interdependence. You’re here celebrating, having a good time. Look at this crowd. If you have had a meeting like this 30 years ago, would it have looked like this? Would there have been as many women here? No. Would there have been as many people of color here? No. Would there have been as many people from other countries here? No. Can anyone seriously say that we are not better off because we have grown more interdependent? No. [APPLAUSE] No one can seriously say that. But none of us can seriously deny that the deal, which has worked so well for us, does not really work for a lot of people.

Half the world’s people live on $2.00 a day; a billion people go to bed hungry every night; one in four people don’t have access to clean water, which is one of the things I’m trying to fix with this Tsunami Relief effort we’re doing. 10 million children die every year of completely preventable childhood diseases. So what I want The only seriously thing I want to say to you is, there’s a reason you’re having a good time here, quite apart from your own devices. You are part of a positive future and you know it. [APPLAUSE] You know it. [APPLAUSE] What you do has inherent value and adds to human dignity and possibility and you know it. And what I want to say to you is the only way it can keep going and growing is if while you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing and enjoying more success, you’re also constantly widening the circle of positive interdependence and constantly shrinking the reach of negative interdependence. In a way, that’s what all of us should be doing.

Sooner or later, we have to build a global community that’s built on shared responsibilities and shared benefits and a set of simple shared values. Everybody counts. Everybody deserves a chance. We all do better when we work together. And our differences really are important. Our religious and political differences, they matter. But since no one has the whole truth, our common humanity matters more. If we can have those simple shared values, [APPLAUSE] then I’m very optimistic that the next several decades will be the most peaceful and prosperous times the world’s ever known. [FEW CLAPS]
There will never be a time when there are no problems. But you know, if you just look at this terrorism deal With all respect, that is, as we used to say when I was a kid growing up in Arkansas, “that is a dog that won’t hunt.” Because in the end, it’s a dead-bang loser for the people that embrace it. It’s neolistic. It’s easy. It’s a lot easier to tear down a barn than it is to build one. But it is based on the idea that once you have possession of the absolute truth, you identify an enemy and then anything you do or say about your enemy is legitimate. Most people who propagate that kind of politics and that sort of behavior are interested in their own power, not in the welfare of the people that they’re advancing. [APPLAUSE]

Again, I say, I want you to have a good time. But when you leave here, I want you to start thinking about this. How can the things that I take for granted about my work-- How can the things that I take for granted about this company, about our global reach, about the good we do, about the future we’re building I know it’s good and it is embracing. Just look around. How can I spread that to places and people that are left out and left behind and at risk of being part of a negative future that won’t be good for my children or my grandchildren, for world peace, for world prosperity, for human dignity? That is the great, great challenge of this new age. We can’t go back in the box we were in, where we can run away from the rest of the world, so we’ve got to build the box we’re in bigger. We’ve got to make it a home for all the world’s children. And if we’re animated by that vision, then you’re going to have an awful good ride for a very long time. Thank you and God bless you. [CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

QUESTION & ANSWER SESSION

MAIN SPEAKER: The President will take three questions. Anyone? Quicky! Quickly! Yes, one question here?

QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Yes. I just want to say, God bless you, Mr. President for all the _____________. [CAN’T HEAR] [APPLAUSE]

MAIN SPEAKER: That was a remark. Second question? Yes?

QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Mr. President, thank you very much. Sir, what do you the think the role of the United Nations is going to be in the interdependence of the future?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, I think-- I think it will grow larger. You’ve got to understand, the United Nations is inherently fraught with difficulty and I’m a huge supporter of the UN. I just agreed to go to work for the UN for a while, for two years, to work on the long-term Tsunami Relief. The countries that belong to the United Nations all want to preserve their sovereignty but they want to cooperate. And every time they cooperate there are people within their countries screaming bloody murder, “You’re giving up sovereignty. You’re giving up sovereignty.” That’s not true. The truth is there are a lot of problems that we can only solve by working together and we have to agree in advance on the terms of reference, first.

Second, there are-- The countries that are on the Security Council permanently (like the United States, the UK, France and the EU through them, and China and Russia) have a veto on the UN, so they have particular power but also greater responsibilities. The 21st Century array of nations will be different than that right after World War II, so all this is going to require constant modernization and improvement and all of that, but essentially, I don’t see any al.... [TAPE SIDE ENDS]

PRESIDENT CLINTON: ...is way back here, and that’s why you’ve got all these disconnects and all these anti-globalization protesters. The UN has to help us work through that, as well as all these other groups.

MAIN SPEAKER: One last question? Yes, over there?

QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: [CAN’T HEAR]

PRESIDENT CLINTON: If I knew a child in Arkansas, who came from a poor family, who wanted to grow up to President, I would say that she should reexamine her priorities. [CHEERS] [LAUGHING] No, no. Not really. [APPLAUSE] No. That’s not true. I guess I should first of all tell you, I would be encouraging. Look, I love the life I had. The worst days I had were good days. I could always make something good happen, and I was probably the most vilified politician in modern history because my Republican friends never thought there’d be another Democratic President when I got elected. So when I got elected, they thought the natural order had been interrupted. [LAUGHS, CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

They had always been able to convince enough white, middle-class voters that there was something inherently wrong with Democrats and you couldn’t trust them to be President before and lamentably they’ve been more successful since, but not as successful as in the 80’s, I might add. But I had a good time with it. I knew what the deal was. And a lot of those people who were, you know, cutting my guts out every day in public were, had the most friendly and cordial relationships with me, you can imagine in private. [FEW LAUGHS] It would surprise you. Because, you know, they knew better than 90% of what they were saying. It was just, they thought it would work and so they did it.

I always tell the Democrats to quit whining when we lose. I said, “The Republicans are in business to beat us. If you had a business strategy that produced $100 million dollars a year without ever changing your plan, would you ever change it until it didn’t work anymore?” I actually get along fine with the

Let me just back and say, to answer your question. I had a wonderful life. If you like people and you believe in a free society and you think you’d like to have a job where you can help other people, then it’s really worth doing. If someone wanted to go into politics, I would say first of all, you cannot plan to be President, because you have no idea-- Abraham Lincoln had it right, even when the country was smaller. He said, “I will work and get ready and perhaps my chance will come.” When he was quite young, “I will work and get ready and perhaps my chance will come.” [APPLAUSE]

I could not have known. You know, once you’ve been President, they say you knew you were going to do it when you were 16. That’s a bunch of bull. You don’t know. You may hope you get a chance but you can’t possibly know. So I would say to this poor child the following thing. I would say do three things: Number one, develop your mind and study hard and learn a lot, all the way through high school and college. And it doesn’t matter what you study so as much as that you learn to think, that you learn to absorb disparate elements. You know, if you just think about what you do, a lot of politics and society and economics now, it looks like the social science of equivalent of chaos, theory and physics. And so people have access to more information than ever before but they can’t necessarily order it in their heads and put it all together in a way that fits a pattern and then leads them to a certain set of organized actions that will produce a good result. So what you need in political life now is not people who make great 30 second ads but people who can really absorb all this stuff that’s going on in the world, put it into patterns and come up with the kind of things we ought to do together. So I would say develop your mind.

The second thing I would say, is when you get old enough, work in campaigns. Learn about politics. See if you like it. A lot of people like people in general, but not in particular. [LAUGHS, APPLAUSE] Do you know what I mean? And then, then there are people who love people in particular and are great friends but are totally clueless when it comes to dealing with people at large. Right? So what you need in politics is both. You need to be able to look someone in the eye and know they have a story and want to know it without losing sight of the fact that you’re making decisions that will affect people by the millions.

And the third and most important thing I would say is put yourself in groups like this. That is, I would say to a kid growing up in Arkansas, spend time with people who are different from you [APPLAUSE]: a different race, a different religion. A different race, different religion, different politics, different everything.

One of the reasons I became President (I wrote about this in my book) is that I was the last, in the last group of Americans, to grow up in the pre-television age. And because we didn’t have television, we didn’t think we were poor. In my culture, if you had a job, a place to sleep at night, clean clothes when you got up in the morning, and you could feed whoever walked in the door, you were not poor. Right? There was no such-- There was none of this consciousness. But nobody could afford to take vacations and you-- There was only one movie every couple of weeks and there was no television. So our great entertainment was mealtime and conversation. And when You couldn’t tell a story unless you could listen to one. I think, in a funny way, the Internet and the globalization of our culture has taken us back to that sort of interpersonal reality and it’s very important to remember that every person on earth has a story, and if they were emotionally free enough to tell it, it would be a pretty interesting story. So that, I think is the most important thing of all. I want political leaders, no matter what their party or philosophy, to be humble in realizing that none of us have the whole truth, and to really appreciate all the differences that make up the world.

So this young kid in Arkansas, I’d say first of all, go for it. It’s the best life in the world. If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t make some of the mistakes I’ve made, but I’d sure do the same thing I did. I’d live the same life I did. I’d try to serve.

The second thing, develop your mind, work in politics and get to know people who aren’t like you, because they really are like you and you’ve got to figure that out. Thank you. [CHEERS, APPLAUSE]