runner-up in the BBC's Apprentice 2010 will be our special guest and lead judge at the Corporate Challenge 2011.
Bill Clinton - Globalization and Progression Speech Guildhall London 2006
Thank you very much. Thank you, Gordon for inviting me here today to come back to this magnificent place, for your wondrous leadership of the economy and the Treasury, and for your continued vigorous efforts to find responses to the challenges of globalization at home and around the world.
The last time I was here, almost three years ago, we had this big Third Way conference, the future of the global Third Way movement. One of our big deals, from the time I ran for President in '92, was that all progressive parties in developed countries were basically the creatures of the industrial revolution. We were organized in response to the fact that whenever you have a big change in the economic paradigm, a lot of good things happen and a lot of problems are created. And the market alone in the industrial revolution, unrestrained, unregulated, un-held accountable and unsupported, and people unsupported, led us to abuses of labor among children, horrible working conditions, horrible pollution, the absence of a middle class lifestyle, the absence of healthcare and all of that, so you needed government to step into the breach, and that was the original mission of the government and of the progressive movement.
Then as the industrial revolution began to wane and began to be replaced by a more globalized economy, a more service-orientated economy, a more information-based economy, the question was, number one, since we were going to a new economic paradigm we knew vast new wealth would be created but just as always happens when you change the economic paradigm, there are also pressures that tend to create enormous new inequalities and dislocations, and upheavals.
So the answer to the question we had to face was, were we going to change to meet these new conditions or are we going to try to hold on to the gains just as they were achieved in the industrial revolution - it was the great dilemma. So we used to have a little phrase for that in America that I think you often used here, that the business of new progressive politics was to avoid false choices; that you didn't have to choose between the environment and the economy, you didn't have to choose between the worker and the business, you didn't have to choose between succeeding at work and succeeding at home. You had to avoid false choices.
So, I'm here to tell you that I'm a friend of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. On a more serious note, I read with some distress when I come to Europe all these little, I'm so glad to see your press beating on you instead of my press beating on me the way they used to. But you know, I read this business about where some people say, Labour is getting a little long in the tooth, having served so long in government. I can only tell you that if you lived where I lived and you were looking across the Atlantic it would not look at that way to you.
So let me just ask you all first to see ourselves as others view you, who live in very different circumstances. I see a country that has kept the values, the ideas, the politics alive that I believe in for five years when they've been under relentless assault across the sea. Your economic policy of investment, modernization and fiscal responsibility has led to job growth, low unemployment and decreasing income inequality, when the reverse is true in my country. You have been committed to fighting global warming, supporting the Kyoto protocol, reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a way that creates jobs here, in stark contrast to the policies of our country. Your leadership in the world for cooperative efforts at reducing the debt of the poorest countries in the world, increasing aid to Africa, internationalized efforts against AIDS, TB and malaria, and a host of other initiatives, is the envy of many countries. And you're still involved in these relentless ongoing efforts at modernization in health, education and a whole host of other areas.
And the fact that you have debates within the party, I personally believe is quite healthy. If nobody disagrees on anything it means either somebody stopped thinking or everybody stopped doing. And after all, if we're going to be the change agents and we're going to get into the future business, the debate always will be, for the progressives, how do you resolve the ongoing tension between experimentation and egalitarian ideas, in every context. So, I would say to all of you, you should really lighten up about this, you're doing real well, and you should be very proud of it.
I think since we are in the future business I want to talk a little about that. This meeting, Chancellor, is fresh evidence of New Labour's continued determination to be in the future business, and in the people business, keeping score the right way. Will the course we take leave ordinary people better off than when we started. Will it give our children a chance to be safer, more secure, have more opportunities, a better chance to live their dreams than their parents had. Will our course help to divide or unite an increasingly fractious and interdependent nation and world. That's the way you should keep score, the all the rest of the stuff does not amount to a hill of beans. Politics, work and life are about the impact of our decisions on others, most of the rest is just idle chatter. And as I said, if you lived across the Atlantic and you saw what was happening here, you'd think you were doing pretty well, and a lot of us depend upon you to stay in this future business.
Now, I spent a lot of time working on globalization when I was President, coming to terms with the fundamental fact of interdependence that goes far beyond economics: open border, easy travel, easy immigration, free flow of money as well as people, products and services. I tried to figure out how to maximize the dynamism of global interdependence and still broaden its impact in terms of economics and opportunity. The one thing that I am quite sure of is that interdependence is not a choice, it's not a policy, it is the inevitable condition of our time. So, divorce is not an option.
On the other hand, interdependence can be good or bad. Gordon mentioned the need, the imperative, to reduce agricultural subsidies in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. We're no less interdependent with those African cotton farmers, even if we shut them out of our markets. We're still tied to them, it's just that instead of letting them make a living now, we're going to have to pay for the consequences of their poverty. We're not less interdependent.
In all the years when America was educating the largest number of Muslim students from all across the Middle East we were interdependent in a very positive way but we were no less interdependent on 9/11/2001 when open borders, easy travel, easy immigration were used to turn three jet airplanes into giant chemical weapons to kill nearly 3,000 people, including hundreds from the UK and over 200 other Muslims; people from 70 countries.
So, whether you're talking about economics or security or our cultural interactions, divorce is not an option. Therefore, the mission of the moment clearly is to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of global interdependence in a way that enables us to keep score in the right way. Are people going to be better off, will our children have a better chance, will we be more united than divided.
Now, I start with a few fundamental assumptions. Number one, interdependence is interesting and most of us have done quite well with it, otherwise we wouldn't be in Guildhall today, we'd be out trying to scrape up a living somewhere. So this world has been pretty good to us or we wouldn't be here, by definition. But interdependence is inherently unequal and unstable as it exists in the world today, and therefore the way to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces is to have a vision of moving from interdependence to integrated communities; locally, nationally, globally, more integrated communities.
Now, I have to tell the far right back home – what we used to call the black helicopter crowd because they were convinced we had some international conspiracy to bring in world government through black helicopters with great weapons – that I'm not calling for the abolition of American sovereignty here, but what is the definition of an integrated community, what is the definition of any successful union: a successful family, a successful church, archbishop, a successful civic club, a successful business, what do all group endeavours contain? They all have three things, they have shared opportunities, shared responsibilities and a shared sense of community. They all are imperfect but they work because people believe they've got a fair chance, everybody is called upon to do something responsible, and whatever differences you bring to the unit you still are a member of it.
How do we get there, in this age of globalization? My other assumptions are, number one, that no one has yet found anything approaching the free market that is as an efficient allocator of goods, services, capital and opportunity. But, the free market left alone, as we saw in the Great Depression, as we saw over and over again in the pre-Labour, Democratic, progressive governance tradition, will not take account of human needs, not equally distribute human opportunity, will not empower people to make the most of what is there and eventually will consume itself unless there is a role for government to create the conditions, the systems and the tools people need to make the most of their own lives, and to build up their communities, so there is a necessary role for government.
Third, there is a necessary role for civil society, for the simple reason that – well, let's just take the UK where you've had a better political run, longer, from my point of view, than we had, partly because you've got a parliamentary system, but even if the time comes when everyone you vote for wins and they do everything you think they should do, and you believe your private sector is performing at 100% peak efficiency, there will still be gaps between what is and what ought to be, at home and around the world, and into those gaps must step civil society, the so called NGO movement. And the good news is today that private citizens have more power to do public good than ever before, if they do it with government and the private sector in partnership. It is no accident that in the United States, when this year Time magazine's people of the year were Bill and Melinda Gates, who run the biggest NGO in the world, and Bono. They've never been elected to anything but they have done massive public good. So when you think about the challenges of globalization you need to ask yourself, what is the responsibility of the private sector, what is the responsibility of the government, what is the responsibility of the NGO movement, what are the potentials here of each sector.
And while we had a lot of success when I was President, we had in my eight years 50% more jobs than the previous 12, and moved a hundred times as many people out of poverty, and dealt with a whole range of issues, I have to tell you I think it is more difficult today. I see a deep sense of uncertainty, people wonder, we used to worry what would happen if countries failed, so I remember in my first three years America had major financial aid packages to Russia, which was opposed in the beginning by 76% of the American people, then I had a major economic assistance package to Mexico, which was opposed to 81% of the American people, and then when they worked everybody thought it was okay, which shows you why you can't be totally poll-driven. They hire us to make the right decisions and we are judged by whether the incomes are all right.
Now we worry because of the success of other countries; how in the world can we compete with China and India creating all these millions of jobs, and it used to be we had to worry about outsourcing, only these low skill jobs now, we see high skilled jobs being outsourced so that education is still a net advantage but no longer a guarantee of a good life in a country if it really has an open economy. I know some of you think America is too protectionist but let me remind you, with 4% of the world's population and 20% of the world's GDP, when I was President, every single year we bought between 33% and 40% of China's exports, so I think we have carried our load in the open economy, even though I too believe dramatically that we have to change our agricultural subsidy structure.
So, it seems to me that there are four fundamental challenges, and because I want to have more time for conversation I will just summarize them, but there are four fundamental challenges keeping us from making a world of integrated communities, of shared benefits and opportunities, shared responsibilities and a shared sense of community.
First, there is the security challenge, our shared vulnerability to terror, to weapons of mass destruction, to the abuse of innocents in Darfur and elsewhere, and something people ddon't often talk about is the security challenge of the spread of infectious diseases globally. I will only say that for these purposes that you have to recognize that this is a profound economic issue. Gordon and I were talking this morning about how we'll never really have peace in the Middle East if the Palestinians can't make a living. The Palestinians are younger and poorer today than they were when we started the peace process in 1993. And I have never met a single poor Palestinian anywhere in the world except in the Palestinian territories. Every single Palestinian I know in America is a millionaire or a college professor, and I say that with deep respect, but when there is a conflict, when there is an absence of security, there is always an absence of opportunity. Whatever you believe about the Iraq thing, we all have a stake in seeing it succeeded and one of the reasons it isn't is because the environment is still not secure and electricity production is still below where it was before the conflict began.
In America after 9/11 our economy was severely hampered for quite a long while, so the only other thing, I'd just like to make one point about this cooperation. Most of the success we've had against terror per se has come from thousands of people that most of us will never even know, through counter-terrorism cooperation and intelligence and law enforcement services, since 9/11, something over 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested, over 95% were not arrested either in the United States or by American security forces, but by people all over the world with whom we work together. That's the way to prevent more bombings in the UK, in America, and in the developing world, in the Middle East and elsewhere. But make no mistake about it, this will have a profound impact on globalization and our ability to have integrated communities.
On the religious differences and others I'll say more in a minute. One the killing of innocents, it's clear to me what we have to do, I tried to do this 12 years ago and failed at it. Part of the UN reform should be to give the United Nations the capacity to mobilize, with the support of NATO and others, more robust forces. Darfur is like a slow Rwanda, I've said this a thousand times publicly, I'll say it again: the greatest regret of my Presidency is that we did not send some troops to Rwanda. We couldn't have saved all those people but we could have saved a lot of them, but they killed 10% of the country in 90 days; this means that it's been going on a long time, we don't have the excuse of being surprised here.
The Africans are willing to serve but they have, a) a modest mandate, b) insufficient forces, and c) insufficient support. And this is because the Sudanese say we won't take anybody else. The Bangladeshis went to Haiti for me, they're Muslims and they're good soldiers. The Indians and Pakistanis are getting along now, why ddon't we ask both of them to send soldiers to serve together? One of the reasons we got a chance to get the Greece-Turkey dispute over Cyprus resolved is that they've been NATO allies for decades now, and then let the United States and others continue to give the logistic support. We've got to do something about this but there is no institutionalized support.
On infectious diseases I just would make this remark. The world cooperated well after a hiccup on the SARS epidemic, it could have killed tens of thousands of people, and just killed a few because of global cooperation. The world is cooperating now and there has been very vigorous national action against Avian influenza. Every time a chicken gets sick in Romania we hear about it all over the world, right. And we're laughing but this is good, not bad. We're debating now whether we're spending too much money on vaccines in America, this is a good thing. There are people who now get malaria in airports. There is literally a condition called Airport Malaria because of the globalization of travel and communication and infectious diseases have the power to do a great deal. Remember the great influenza called the Spanish Flu but it should have been called the Kansas Flu, it started on a military base in the middle of the United States and was taken first to Europe at the end of World War One by soldiers and then spread across the world, killed somewhere between 25 and 50 million people over three years before anybody figured it out. That would be at least 100-150 million people today who'd die from that if the same thing happened. So, this is a very serious thing, believe me, once you get to 30 or 40 million people dying in a hurry it will have a severe impact on globalization, on open borders, on travel, on immigration, on our mutual self-confidence. All of these security things have to be taken into account.
Second thing is, we have to realise that global warming is a challenge of a different order of magnitude. It is an existential threat to the life we hope to leave our children and grandchildren. Just in the last couple of months there is a whole new spate of books and articles and studies coming out, and they all say the same thing: we're warming even faster than thought we were. There has now been a drilling into the deepest ice core ever on Antarctica so that we can measure the changes in the climate in the last 200,000 years and we are warming it more rapidly than at any time in 200,000 years. That's before human beings were on the planet, people rose up on the African Savannah about 130,000 years ago, the last ice age receded 15,000 years ago. The oldest urban relics are in Jericho in the Middle East, there were five civilizations in Iraq, Egypt, China, Peru and Mexico 5,000 years ago and soon after India came along and everything else we've done since is basically variations on a theme – truly.
And now we're playing with the planet in the most arrogant way imaginable, thinking, oh, we can't do anything to reverse this. We had an ice age 15,000 years ago on a planet that's two and a half billion years ago, that we've only been walking around on 130,000 years. Give me a break here. I mean, I realize that democratic politics is not organised to deal with this, but if the whole Greenland ice cap melts in the next few decades the North Atlantic will rise so much that we'll literally have whole coastal areas wiped out in North America. If we just keep going for the next 50 years the rate of the last ten we'll lose 50 feet of Manhattan Island. And one of the countries I worked with in the tsunami area, the Maldives, I will no longer have to worry about, we'll just take a bunch of boats out there and take them away, and watch their country just go beneath the water.
You'll have tens of millions of water refugees in Africa, a new study says last week, food refugees all over the world as food production moves north in the northern hemisphere and south in the southern hemisphere. More wars, more cost, more disruption, more disintegration, but none the less still interdependent, and all your dreams for globalization could be wiped out like that because of the climate. A study a few months ago says the UK as a result of this will probably suffer much more bitter winters, perversely, because the melting of the ice caps in the North Atlantic will put more fresh water here, dilute the salinity of the ocean and interrupt the tidal flows that moderate the winters here. So you could have very bitter winters here, very bitter winters especially in Scotland – Gordon even won't be able to go home with a fur coat – bitter winters in Norway, awful winters in Ireland interrupting the fastest growing economy in Europe.
All because we persist in the notion that a country can't grow rich, stay rich and get richer without putting more greenhouse gases, primary from oil and coal, into the atmosphere, when we have already been saying that that era is behind us. If we're in the future business we know that is simply not true. Why does Germany lead the world in wind power? Is it the windiest country on earth? No. On this they've got the smartest investors. Why does Denmark produce 20% of its electricity from wind, wind is almost as cheap now as the cheapest coal contracts if you use the best technology and you put it up right and you manage it right. Solar is still more expensive if you're talking about solar cells but the price comes down rapidly, every time you double production the price drops 20% to 30%.
Why aren't spending more money on this? One of the things I want to compliment the Chancellor on is this proposed partnership with the energy companies to really do serious research. My wife produced a bill in the Senate to create a research agency in America like the one we had in defense that developed the internet because we don't put our best scientific minds into the central problem civilization faces today, which also – and I'll say more about this in a minute – is the central opportunity we have, just as the Chancellor said, to create a new range of jobs that will not be outsourced in America for a while, or in Europe or anywhere else they're created. And this is not just a rich country issue. In Latin America today primarily there are one million homes that get enough electricity to turn on the lights and cook the food from small solar packs attached to the house that can be paid off in 18 months at a monthly rate equal to how much the family would spend for candles otherwise. Why aren't there a billion and how many jobs would be created if we were making such devices? Why aren't they being made in the poor countries of the Middle East that have no oil, in Yemen, in the Palestinian territories, in Jordan – why? Because everybody talks about this but it's not really a serious priority when you get down to the mechanics and the specifics. We've got to go from rhetoric to action and we have all used the wrongheaded reluctance of the United States to embrace Kyoto and the importance of creating a carbon emissions market as an excuse not to get on with the business of just seizing all the opportunities that are out there. We've got to go, and in a hurry.
And if we don't, I literally consider this, it may be the most remote security threat we face but it's the only existential one. No terrorist act alone has ever defeated a single country in history and it will not happen now. If we fail to secure the stocks of chemical, biological and nuclear agents there could even be a small scale nuclear explosion set off by a terrorist, it could be terrible, but it will not destroy civilization or defeat the British society or the American society. But if you take away the very foundations on which we structure our living together then everything that's going to be said here today will become completely irrelevant. This is both the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity of our lifetime and we don't act like it is either.
Third thing is something that you all know about, that's, we can't expect to have a globalized world and integrated communities when half the people, more, are left out of it, and there is no point in belabouring this but I just want to state some of the facts again. Don't forget, half the people in the world live on less than two dollars a day, a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, a billion people go to bed hungry every night, a billion people have no access to clean water, 2.6 billion have no access to sanitation, ten million children die every year of completely preventable childhood diseases that no child in the UK or America dies from, and one in four of all the deaths on earth this year, from every kind of human depravity and heart attack, strokes and you name it, is from AIDS, TB, malaria and infections related to dirty water, principally cholera and infections related to diarrhea. Three million people will die from those, 80% of them will be five years old or younger. And nobody is dying in your country or mine from that.
So, we go around and give these speeches, you wonder why Hugo Chavez is popular in Venezuela with $65 oil and he subsidizes oil prices to poor countries, pays for Cuban doctors to go take care of poor people, and we sit here and make these pontificating speeches about the glories of the global economy. Why did a cocoa farmer whose sister rode public transportation from her rural village to the capital of Bolivia to take up her duties as First Lady, why did they get elected? Because in the poorest country in the Andes the majority of the people have felt absolutely no benefit from the globalization of their natural resources and their development. So we can give all the speeches you want but in America and other wealthy countries we have protectionist impulses because the benefits are widely spread and the burdens are keenly felt, even if on a minority. That's not the problem in these poor countries, the problem is half the people don't get any benefits, felt or unfelt.
So we have to do what we can to implement the millennium development goals to put all the kids of the world in school, something I know the Chancellor is committed to, to tell with all these health challenges. I won't belabour this a great deal to you because there are people in this audience who know more about it than I do but I will just say this: if you look at the total price tag for all of us to do what we're supposed to do, for the next decade if we paid our part, we paid 25%, whatever the increase is would be far less than we're spending every year in Iraq alone, and we get more benefits from it.
Let me just give you one example. Before the tsunami in Southeast Asia, there was a survey done in Indonesia, the world's biggest Muslim country, and it showed that our approval rating, America's, was down to 28% because they disagreed with what we'd done in Iraq. Osama Bin Laden's approval rating was 58%. On the day that former President Bush and I went in to report to the President on our mission there when we went out raising out money in America for tsunami relief, I was given a poll that was done the day before in Indonesia. America's approval had risen from 28% to 58%, Bin Laden's approval had dropped from 58% to 30%. Bin Laden did nothing to them but he wasn't helpful after the tsunami. Our military, our civilian agencies, our NGO community, religious and non-religious, they all showed up just like yours did. Our citizens gave money, yours gave even more per capita. And all of a sudden there was no politics, there was a people connection, they felt that they were part of an integrated community with us. Never mind the religious differences and all the other differences, all of a sudden we were just people. All of a sudden, in a blinding flash of insight they saw that it was a hell of a lot harder to build a barn than to tear one down, but a lot more important. And so without belabouring the details I will just tell you that to me is important.
The second thing I would say is that this is the area where the NGO community can make the most difference. You heard Gordon say that we had done all this work on AIDS pricing. The AIDS drug market even for generics was totally disorganized when our foundation went to work there, so we guaranteed higher volumes, prompt payment and cut the generic price from $500 to $140 dollars. Now the overall generic price is $190 because we're driving the market down, with children's drugs from $600 to $200, and eventually the overall price will come down. We're trying to get children's drugs to more people.
Last year - this is appalling, I'll just give you one example, this is totally appalling – 500,000 kids under 12 died of AIDS last year, 25,000 in the whole undeveloped world got any medicine, and the biochemistry is different, you can't just divide up the adult medicine. 15,000 of those kids were in Thailand and Brazil. The whole rest of the world – all of Africa, China, India, the former Soviet Union, the Caribbean, everywhere –10,000 got medicine. So thanks to some British philanthropist who gave my foundation the money, we doubled the number of those kids to 20,000 last year, we're going to go to 50,000 this year. Most governments, because they have limited money, spend most of their medicine on adults, but we're just letting these half a million kids die. What are we saying to all these people that we want to be part of our globalized world? And so I ask you to think about that.
The other thing I ask you to think about is a more conservative and controversial proposition, maybe. 90% of the people who are HIV positive do not know it. You want to know why we're still losing ground? 90% of the people who have the infection don't know it, that's why several million more people get infected every year. That's why abstinence is an important part of the argument because you're going around there playing with a loaded deck all the time, it's important but it's not sufficient. We cut the cost of instant testing with which we can find our whether you're HIV positive or not in 15 minutes from about two and a half, three dollars a test down to 50 to 65 cents. We need to test 200 million people and we're spending billions every year in the global fund, you just test 200 million for now, $100 million.
When you see all these numbers about how many people are infected, they're extrapolated from the people who have to have medicine to stay alive or who are dying and recorded as dying from AIDS, because we know that in any given country 10% to 15% of all those who are positive will need the medicine to stay alive. We don't know and worse, they don't know.
In the 1980s all the people who were AIDS activists, and I'll never forget the first person who I knew well who died of AIDS in the early ‘80s, nobody was for mandatory testing who really worked in this area because it was a stigma and because it was a death sentence. Now we can get rid of the stigma and it can give you a normal life if you can find out and then you can stop from giving it to somebody else.
This year Lesotho, with only 2.2 million people, the third highest infection rate in the world, 27%, will become the first country in the world to mandate the testing of all of its citizens 12 years old and older, with strict requirements that there be no discrimination in jobs and in any other way against people. now, if you think we are ever going to get ahead of this AIDS deal without finding out who is infected I think you're wrong, and the only way to find out who is infected is to get rid of the stigma and give the test.
I was very encouraged, Pakistan is now one of our partners, the first non-African Muslim country to do so. In Zanzibar, which is totally Muslim, the women's support group, walks down the streets of the capital Stonetown in a Muslim community with t-shirts saying, I'm HIV positive. We've got to get over, we've been fooling with this too long. We can test people for 50 cents, we need to do it in all the high risk groups. The employers need to support us, the NGO community needs to support us, we need to fight against discrimination, yes, but if you want to stop this you've got to know who is infected, and they have to know, they have a right to know.
The final thing I'd like to say is the thing that Gordon speaks most about, obviously, is that we have to keep improving conditions at home. If you want to have open labor markets, open capital markets, free flow of people, goods and services, you have to find a source of new jobs every five to ten years in a rich country. We haven't done it in America yet, that's why wages are stagnant or declining. The best candidates are, I believe, in order: energy conservation and clean energy, biotechnology and the practical ramifications of the sequencing of the human genome which were completed in our joint project when I was President, and education. But we have to keep creating new jobs.
Secondly, and at least in our country, we have to fight inequality. I said every new economic paradigm increase inequality and only government policy can offset it.
Thirdly, we have to find security and flexibility. The Danish program is now called Flex Security, but if you look at the arrangements adopted by Denmark, by the Netherlands, by several other countries, its clear that you can have more flexible labor markets than let's say our friends in France and Germany do, and still have a high level of social security. But we have to be not ashamed to learn from one another.
Fourth, we have to do more to develop small business which are less vulnerable to being put out of business and have more potential to export than we have yet tapped.
Fifth, we have to have a trade plus strategy. Protectionism is a dead bang loser but we have to do more to lift labor and environmental standards and we have to follow more models like the Global Fairness Initiative, something I was involved in when I was President where we got the major foreign employers in Cambodia to agree to dramatic increases in labor rights and to unionization of the workforce in return for a guarantee that we'd continue to participate in their markets, and it led to a substantial increase in living standards in Cambodia, they still had the benefit of their labour differential but there was broad support in our country, in the labor movement as well as the employer community and among consumers for what was done.
Finally, we need to invest more clearly in all these educational areas, in the science and the math and all that, but we have to realize it's now just a better chance, not a guarantee.
The last point I want to make is this: I saw this in the shocking aftermath of articles after you suffered your bombing here. I saw this in the phenomenal missed opportunity of the Danish cartoon controversy. It is tragic that the overreaction, the violent, nihilistic overreaction to what I disagree with – I didn't like the Danish cartoons, not because they made fun of Muslims and terrorists, that's fair game and free speech, but because depicting the physical image of the prophet is blasphemy in their faith and I don't believe in blaspheming anybody's faith, but the point is, I doubt that the cartoonist or the publisher knew that. We missed this phenomenal opportunity to launch a global conversation about our religious differences. How many Muslims do you think know that most Jews won't write the word God for the same reason and they write G-d. We had this chance to use this cartoon controversy to reach across the divides to learn from one another and we blew it, by and large. But we can't keep blowing it. I read everything I could get out of the British press after the bombing and it's obvious that all of us, as we become more diverse, these societies, we have people among us who are invisible to us, we don't have a clue what's in their real heads, what's in their real hearts and whether they feel like they're part of our communities.
In one of the African countries where I work, the typical greeting of people who meet each other on walking past is you say hello, how are you, and the answer is not, I'm fine, the answer translated in English is, I see you. Think about that. How many people will you pass today that you do not see. You notice that people that maintain this Guildhall, make sure the sound system works and the lights are on, have to clean up for us when we leave? Just think about it. It's so easy for us to ignore these poor people half a world away because we don't see them.
So that's the last thing I leave you with. I think we should have a lot of confidence here, but we also need a lot of humility. One of the reasons why I like the role of the NGOs in the fight against global poverty is that nobody has got all the answers, if they did we'd have solved this already. And whenever I look at this modern world I feel a little bit of humility. I saved over the years all my favorite birthday cards and when I was 50 years old I got the following birthday card: there is a picture of a circus and a dog on a unicycle about to pedal the unicycle over a tightrope without a safety net under it, with two balls in his hand. And it says, as the dog looked out on the crowd, they were cheering but he was afraid. After all, he was an old dog and this was a new trick.
So I'm an old dog and this is a new trick we're facing, but it is really not that different from what faces people of goodwill who want to come together instead of be torn apart, who want everybody to have the chance to live their dreams, who want to leave the world better for their kids, every time there is a paradigm change in the world, except this time it involves everybody and this time there is this existential problem of climate change. If can face these I think it is unlikely the 21st century will be as bloody as the 20th. Whenever you get really pessimistic you just remember how many people got murdered by supposedly civilized people in the 20th century. How many died in the Soviet purges, in the Holocaust, in the Chinese purges, in the two world wars, in the smaller wars in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere, of starvation. Are you really sure that this world is in such bad shape today? Do you really think that the 21st century is going to be worse than the 20th? I doubt it, but it could be if we don't face these things. Denial is not an option, divorce is not an option. Empowerment, community, responsibility, the market, the government, the NGOs. We know what to do, it's just a question of whether we will. Thank you very much.
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