Thank you very much. I am delighted to be here at the University of Miami. I am very honored that Donna Shalala invited me to do this. You are fortunate to have her as your leader. Some of you might know this, but Donna Shalala served as the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services longer than anyone in history, but also better than anyone. Among the things that she did was to immunize over 90 percent of our children against serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of the country. Lots of other good things happened under her tenure. We passed the Children's Health Insurance Program and reversed a 12 year trend in rising numbers of Americans without health insurance, which unfortunately has resumed. She dealt with all different kinds of people fairly and firmly. She always lands on her feet. I knew Donna Shalala would do well when I met her mother, who's still winning tennis matches at 87, and now I'm happy to say that, unlike me, she has a Presidency without term limits.

The University of Miami has an incredibly interesting and diverse student body. I can look around here and see it, and I'm very glad that this is primarily, indeed overwhelmingly, a student event today. I'm going to talk for a while, and then President Shalala collected questions from students that she wants to ask. I'm going to try to abbreviate my remarks a little bit so I have more time for questions. At least if I'm talking about what you're interested in, I've got a fair chance of succeeding here today.

First, I'm going to give you an abbreviated version of what I try to say to audiences all over the world of all ages and backgrounds. I have modified the outline of this talk, but in its core, it remains very much as it was when I prepared my first remarks for the first big speech I gave after 9/11 in 2001, so here goes.

I believe every responsible citizen of every country, whatever your politics are, must be able to ask and answer five simple questions, so I'm going to give you the questions and my answers. Even though I'm not running for anything, I'm still a politician. I hope you'll agree with my answers, but that's not nearly as important as that you have your own, so I want you to think about this and how would you answer these questions.

The first question: what is the fundamental character of the 21st century world? If you had to describe it in a word, what would the word be? Most people would say globalization. I far prefer the word interdependence, because the way we're tied together goes way beyond economics, and it is fundamentally different, not only across national borders, but within them. We are bound together by trade, investment, travel, immigration, growing diversity, information technology, culture, and a global awareness of things that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. I can go to Florida or Idaho, and some young person will ask me about Darfur. That’s interdependence.

The second question: is it a good or a bad thing? My answer: both. It is good in ways that I take it would be self-evident to you. This student body is a lot more interesting than it would be if I were giving a speech 35 years ago. You're more diverse ethnically, religiously, and culturally. You know more things. You share more things. You can imagine doing different things. The interdependent world has been good for you. It has enabled the Chinese government and the private sector to lift more people out of poverty there in a brief period than ever before. It has enabled the Indian government to reclaim the historic legacy of India, where the decimal system was developed, as a leader in information technology.

But there are three principal problems. One is that our interdependent world is unequal. Half the world's people still live on less than $2 a day, a billion people on less than a dollar a day, a billion people have no access to clean water, a billion go to bed hungry every night, 2.5 billion have no access to sanitation, and one in four of all deaths this year will come from AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to dirty water -- things that will kill virtually nobody that anybody here has ever met. Even people who are HIV-positive in the United States, if they get medication soon enough and have good intervention to take care of themselves, can look forward to long lives. This is an unequal world.

Sometimes I read columns where people are really upset that Hugo Chavez is popular in Venezuela and Mr. Morales became the first Native Indian elected president of Bolivia. If you were a 45 year old Bolivian miner whose body was old before its time, and you had four children, and you thought you'd never get any benefits from your long years of labor except a thin scrap of food on the table at night, and there were no reasonable prospects that your kids would do better than you did, you would have voted for Evo Morales, too. So it's unequal.

The second thing about this interdependent world is it's unstable. The vulnerabilities that we have to terror, to weapons of mass destruction, and to the spread of disease are in some ways not as great as the vulnerabilities of the 20th century, which led to two world wars, massive purges in the former Soviet Union and in China, and the slaughters in Cambodia, but everybody feels them when there is a plan to put explosives in a baby bottle on an airplane going from London to the United States. Everybody who ever got into an airplane in a rich country could feel this shiver, a shared sense of vulnerability.

The third thing is that the current world is unsustainable because of climate change, which everybody now admits is occurring. It's caused by human activity, and the only serious debate is how bad are the consequences going to be and how soon. It’s also caused by another factor, less well appreciated, which might bite us sooner, which is the significant depletion of critical resources on earth: water, soil, biodiversity, and interestingly enough, oil and natural gas. Some serious petroleum experts believe we only have 35 years of recoverable oil left on Earth. I know of no one who believes we can get Earth off an oil platform in 35 years. Ironically, the depletion of oil should appeal to people who are turned off by climate change to be aggressive about energy conservation and clean energy, and people who are worried about spreading hunger and tens of billions of food refugees should be worried about the distress on topsoil and trees and the fact that 90 percent of the fisheries in the world are understocked now. All of this is also related to climate change. Even if you thought this was a peachy keen world, it's clearly an unsustainable one.

The third question: how should we change it? My answer: we should work from interdependence, which is good for us, but unequal, unstable, and unsustainable, to create integrated communities locally, nationally, and globally. The definition of all successful communities includes shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, and a genuine sense of belonging, which is different from sharing the same piece of land, or the same last name, or the same ethnic group, or the same religion. A genuine sense of belonging.

When the terrorist bombs went off in the United Kingdom, it was traumatizing for many British people, because the Muslims who set the bombs off were not infiltrators from other places, as happened on 9/11, but native British citizens who shared the same land, went to work, and talked to their neighbors and their coworkers in a friendly way, but obviously had no genuine sense of belonging. Beneath the mask, there was a profound alienation.

What does it take to have a sense of belonging locally, nationally, and globally? Do you have to give up your faith, give up your heritage, or give up your different political views? No. I'll go back to what I said. This is a much more interesting world than it was 35 years ago, and this is a much more interesting university than it was. You only have to embrace one simple idea: that your differences are interesting and make life more exciting and aid the search for truth and progress, but your common humanity matters more. It’s a simple, elemental idea. Easy to say, hard to do, but it makes all the difference. I’m proud of who I am, I like my roots, but the humanity I share with you is even more important than the differences we have.

So we've now gone through three of the five questions: what's the nature of the 21st Century world? Interdependence. Is it good or bad? It's both. What do we have to do? Move from interdependence to integrated communities of shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, and a genuine sense of belonging. It gets harder.

The fourth question: how in the wide world can we do that? What steps are necessary to achieve this transformation? Well, first, we do have to have a security policy. It's a dangerous world, and the forces of disintegration are at play against the forces of integration all over the world. You have to have a security policy to cope with terror, weapons of mass destruction, the slaughter of innocents in places like Darfur, consequences of failed states, organized crime, trading in blood diamonds, as well as other security issues, like climate change. Avian influenza is a security issue until we figure out exactly how to treat people quickly who have it, but security alone is never enough in an interdependent world for a very simple reason: it is never possible to kill, jail, or occupy all your adversaries. If you live in an environment where you cannot kill, jail, or occupy all your adversaries, then you have to do diplomacy as much as you can. You have to do cooperation as much as you can. You have to build international organizations. You must try to have a world with more partners and fewer enemies.

We got a fresh example not very long ago of the diplomacy argument when the United States, after years of being at loggerheads with North Korea over its nuclear program, announced a breakthrough, which was very much like the kind of negotiations that I engaged in when I was President. It was important on its own merits and because the diplomacy worked. It is always, always cheaper than going to war.

I'll give you a couple of other examples. The most successful military operation undertaken by the United States in Asia in the last six years was the humanitarian airlift in Indonesia after the Tsunami. Former President Bush and I went there and tried to raise money, and then I agreed to work with the U.N. for two years and tried to oversee the reconstruction effort, but I never will forget going into these little villages. I was in a tent city, and I met a man who was elected as chairman of the group of people who were living there. He was supposed to represent all of them, so he trundled around with me when I toured the camp with his wife and his beautiful boy. I said to my interpreter, "I think this young boy is the single most beautiful child I ever laid my eyes on," and the young woman said, "Yes, he's very beautiful. Before the Tsunami, he had nine brothers and sisters, and they're all gone."

When these kids who survived are going through grief therapy, one of the things they do is draw things, and I saw the succession of their drawings. When they first start, they typically draw very dark things, like pictures of storms and floods. Then at the end of the process, they'll be drawing kid things. In the middle, they began to draw positive visions of what happened after the Tsunami. Their drawings were of American military helicopters dropping food, dropping medicine, dropping ropes where people would symbolically climb out of the water and be saved.

Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country. Before the Tsunami, our approval rating there after Iraq was 30 percent and bin Laden's approval was 58 percent. In a poll taken after the Tsunami, our approval was 60 percent and his was 28 percent. Why? He didn’t do anything to them after the Tsunami, but he didn’t do anything for them either, and when you are flat on your back and your loved ones are dead, everything you have is gone, and you have to begin again, all of a sudden building is more important than tearing down, and caring is more important than hate, and common humanity is more important than interesting differences. We even had a bump in Pakistan after the earthquake, in a very tough area of Pakistan, because of the same sorts of things.

We know how to do this. The Millennium Development goals call for a halving of serious poverty by 2015 in the world. We know how to lift people's incomes. We know how to fight AIDS, TB, and malaria, and build health care systems. We know how to get 130 million kids in school who aren't in school. The United States could do all that, and we could pay our fair share of doing all that for somewhere between $25 and $30 billion more a year in targeted aid. That sounds like a lot of money, but we have already spent over $100 billion in Afghanistan and over $400 billion in Iraq, and we will have to spend, in my opinion, another $500 billion dealing with the consequences of all those who've already been wounded, and all the problems of rebuilding the military, almost no matter what path we take from here on out. So we need to focus more on building a world with more partners and fewer terrorists. You have to have security, diplomacy, cooperation, and partnership.

The fourth thing we have to do is engage in relentless home improvement, and so does everyone else. I do a lot of work around the world now with my Foundation. When I am asked to go into a developing country, we agree on the plan, and we have standards to guarantee transparency, no corruption, and the building of systems to improve the way things are done. In developing countries, if they don't have home improvement, then all the help that we seek to get them will be diluted, if not totally undermined. In wealthier countries, if we don't have continuous home improvement, our own citizens will wonder why we're thinking about other people when we're not taking care of our own.

If you look at the United States, for example, we have severely dysfunctional health and energy systems, both of which are playing into a serious growth of inequality in our economy. We just had five years of economic growth, five years of productivity growth among working people, a 40 year high in corporate profits, and yet median wages are flat or declining, and the number of working families without health insurance went up by four percent. Nothing like this has ever happened quite like that before, but the globalized economy has kept pressure on median wages for quite a long while, which is why it's so important for you to be here. Median wages were flat from 1973 through my first term. Then in my second term, we got enough good new jobs that wages started rising and inequality started declining again, and then when I left and we went back to trickle down economics, the inequality trend resumed with a vengeance. It's a serious problem. You can't deal with the economics without dealing with health care or energy. I could keep you here until tomorrow morning talking about this, but the point is, we have to do something about it.

Okay, so that's the fourth question: how do we move from interdependence to integration? With security, diplomacy, cooperation, a policy to make more partners and fewer enemies, and with relentless home improvement.

Here’s the final question: who's supposed to do all this? Like I said, it gets harder as you go on. Well, the answer is: we all have to do something. Government is really important. We will not be able to do everything we need to do to fight climate change, for example, and avoid a calamitous consequence either in your lifetime or your children's lifetime, unless we have much more aggressive government policies, particularly at the national level. We do need an emission trading system. We need a much more aggressive effort to accelerate the maximum use of solar, wind, and other clean energy and stop using oil for transportation as quickly as possible.

Let's assume oil is going to run out in 35 years. Let's assume that the most pessimistic forecasts are right. We import 60 percent of our oil and use 70 percent on transportation. Well, we don't need oil to get around. We just use oil to get around. However, we do need oil for a lot of things. We don't know how to make plastics, or how to make some chemicals and a lot of other products without oil. If we stopped using oil to get around tomorrow, then that 35 years would immediately become 100 years. I don't know any expert who believes we can move civilization off an oil platform in 35 years, but most think we could in 100 years. That would both help climate change and avert economic disaster. There are lots of other things that the national government should do.

The point I want to make to you is that if there ever comes a time when everyone you vote for wins, and they do exactly what you think they should do, there will still be gaps between what is and what ought to be, and citizens have to step into those gaps. One of the reasons I'm glad the University of Miami has a really strong tradition of community service among its students is that we all need to get in the habit of doing that. Everybody can be a servant. Everybody can give. No matter how much money you have or haven't, no matter how much time you have or haven't, we should embed in our minds the idea that a part of the price of living in this country is some sort of service and pursuit of the objectives that I just outlined. I've been working on a book about this for a year now to try to persuade people that they should think about this without regard to their income levels or their time availability. Everybody can do something if they think about it in the right way.

I've had a very unique perspective on this for 35 years now. My wife and I have changed roles on the dance floor. We started going together in 1971 and were married in '75 -- I know it was the Dark Ages. From then until 2000, when I was leaving the White House and she was getting elected to the Senate, I was primarily a politician and she was primarily a citizen servant, and I always marveled at how much she got done. She started clinics to provide legal services to poor people. She worked for the Children's Defense Fund and advocated for the interests of young children. She helped grow our children's hospital in Arkansas to the seventh largest in the country. She started a statewide advocacy program for children and families that was nationally recognized. She brought in an Israeli preschool program for kids where they train parents to be their children’s first teachers. It’s now in 26 states, and the biggest one is still the one she started 25 years ago. She did all that and never was elected anything. She headed up a committee to improve rural health care and raised the education standards of our state. When I ran for President, an expert in educational performance said our state and South Carolina had showed the biggest improvement in education in the 1980s of any states in the country. All as a private citizen.

I was watching this while I was slogging away in government. I would get the big things done that would affect huge numbers of people, but I also spent a lot of time pushing rocks uphill that fell right back down, because that's the way politics is. Then she goes to the Senate, and all of a sudden, I become part of the NGO movement, the non-government organization movement, and she's in politics. So I watch her try to help New York after 9/11 and come up with policies for climate change, health care, and economic revitalization. All of a sudden, I get to decide what I want to do and how to do it, and I realized there were things that I could do as a citizen that I couldn't do when I was President.

For example, when I started working with countries, beginning in the Caribbean, with HIV/AIDS problems, I realized that the markets for the medicine were totally disorganized and dysfunctional. In the first country I worked with, the Bahamas, they paid $10,000 a year per person for AIDS drugs made by the big pharmaceutical companies; the same drugs that the Europeans, Canadians, and Japanese paid $3,500 for, which is why they tell you if we re-import from Canada something they've made in America, you'll immediately drop dead. You'll be healthier if you paid ten grand for it than if you paid $3,500. Anyway, the price of generic AIDS drugs made primarily in India and South Africa was $500 a person a year. That's what it was at the time. I thought, “Well, I'm going to organize and raise money and get people to give care to people with AIDS, and I'm going to buy this $500 medicine.” Because the market was so disorganized, the Bahamian government didn't know, and they ran it through two agents who bumped the price up that much. The first four days I was in business, we negotiated the price back down to $500, and all of a sudden the Bahamas could treat seven times as many people as they were treating before for exactly the same amount of money. Then we thought maybe we could do more of this, if we could agree to buy these drugs in big volumes and have certain payments, maybe we could cut it again. We cut the price to $140, and today that price is about $100. For children's medicine, it was $600, because the volume was so low, so we cut it to $190. Now we have a program that we're doing with a group called UNITAID, spearheaded by the French government and others, in which they put a small tax on airline traffic to pay for massive health care advances, and they asked us to buy the drugs, so we can now give these kids drugs for $60. If you're in the non-governmental world, you have time to worry about that. If I were President, I couldn't think about how I was going to negotiate the deals for Indian and South African pharmaceutical companies when my own companies didn't want us to spend money on anything.

When I agreed to try to work on childhood obesity, we made agreements with the snack food industry and the soft drink industry to try to cut the caloric intake of snacks and soft drinks available to kids in the schools, even as we tried to get the exercise and physical education programs back up. We’re trying to get the schools and the communities to have more wellness efforts, because if we don't do something about this, the kids now in public schools may be the first generation of Americans to live shorter lives than their parents. We're already spending 20 percent, as Secretary Shalala can tell you from her previous role, of the Medicaid budget on health care for poor people. We are paying for the consequences of diabetes. Not just diabetic care, but blindness, heart attacks, strokes, and amputations for young people. We have, for the first time in history, statistically significant numbers of young people with what we used to call adult onset diabetes, so we’ve got to deal with this. I'm not President anymore, but I’m still trying to figure out if there’s something we can do that might save a whole bunch of lives. So we cut a deal with the soft drink and snack people, and I think it will make a difference.

We're working on trying to help dramatically increase per capita income in two African countries, Malawi and Rwanda. The first thing we did was buy sustainable fertilizer. In Rwanda, we bought three and a half times as much as had ever been bought before. We told the fertilizer company, A, we're buying more than you ever sold before, and B, you know that the Clinton Foundation is good for the money. You don't have to worry about getting paid, so cut the price. In the end, we wound up with a 30 percent reduction in fertilizer price, and we then got a cut in the microcredit loan rates, because we developed an underwriting system for the loans, and the farmers had a 300 to 400 percent increase in yield in the first year. It's going to have a dramatic impact, allowing thousands and thousands of people to feed their children and feed the people in their village and have a decent standard of living, simply by organizing markets.

Now we’ve agreed to work with the biggest cities in the world on climate change, and we're going to go try to buy LED lighting, which is super-efficient for streetlights and parking lots and other technologies that can be put into all public buildings in big cities, and we're going to buy them in such big volumes for such certain payments that we're going to get a better deal. But the point is: that's just something that I could do, because of the life I had before I became an NGO. But if you're a mentor to a kid who needs a helping hand, if you spend an hour a week tutoring somebody, if you're in a Big Brother/Big Sister program, if you do any of this, it all counts, and it all adds up.

I'm a little sad today, because a friend of mine just died at 89, Arthur Schlesinger, probably the greatest American historian in my lifetime. Arthur Schlesinger was a little bitty guy, about so tall, and his wife was taller than me. They were an amazing couple. Especially as he got older, he seemed to get shorter, and he wore his little glasses and a big bow tie, but he had a mega brain, and a very big spirit, too, which is more important than having a big brain. He wrote very lucid prose. He became famous, because he was close to President Kennedy, with total access to the Kennedy White House. While President Kennedy was in office, he wrote a very famous book about the Kennedy Presidency. But his other books also meant a lot to me, because Schlesinger was always trying to get us to look past the headlines to look at the trend lines and the cycles of history, to see the big truths that we have to hang on to. He loved this country. He was a passionately patriotic person. He believed in politics. He loved politics until the day he died, and he harangued me about politics the last time I saw him, just a couple of weeks ago. If you read the histories of America, you will see that from the very beginning, we have been a place of citizen action.

Alexis de Tocqueville said in 1835, when he came here, that he was stunned that Americans, when they had a problem, didn't wait for the government to solve it. They organized themselves and went about doing something. So that's what I want to leave you with. You've got to be able to answer these five questions. You may not agree with me, but you need an answer. Otherwise, every time you pick up the paper or turn on the evening news or scroll up on the Internet to see the news, it's like the political government equivalent of chaos theory in physics. All these different things happen, but if you can answer what the nature of the 21st century world is, whether it’s good or bad, how you’d like to change it, what’s necessary to change it, and who’s supposed to do it, then it will help you deal with every single public challenge you read about or are faced with. It will organize your thoughts and bring you to a position on an issue and enable you to orient yourself as a public and private citizen, but as a public person. In an interdependent world, you must be both. Thank you very much.