Month: June 2005

EMINENT DOMAIN

In case you missed this comment on the recent 5-4 decision:

Weare, New Hampshire (PRWEB) – Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter’s land.

Justice Souter’s vote in the “Kelo vs. City of New London” decision allows city governments to take land from one private owner and give it to another if the government will generate greater tax revenue or other economic benefits when the land is developed by the new owner.

On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter’s home.

Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.

The proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel” will feature the “Just Desserts Café” and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon’s Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans.

“This is not a prank” said Clements, “The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development.”

Clements’ plan is to raise investment capital from wealthy pro-liberty investors and draw up architectural plans. These plans would then be used to raise investment capital for the project. Clements hopes that regular customers of the hotel might include supporters of the Institute For Justice and participants in the Free State Project among others.

FINDING NPR

Gary Diehl: ‘Since there has been some interest in the ‘This American Life’ piece on National Public Radio, you might note that NPR can always be found between 89.1 and 89.9 on the FM dial. (This is enormously handy on those long road trips.) It can also be heard anywhere in the world here: npr.org.’

DARYL’S DISAPPOINTMENT

Daryl M: ‘Sorry to see you are a Democrat. Must have inherited your wealth certainly did not earn it I am very disappointed in you.’

☞ Actually, I did earn it. Democrats Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett earned considerably more. Why would you even SEND a dumb e-mail like that? I have to assume you were not having your best day. No problem. I have bad days, too. But why not send a more substantive e-mail? For starters, let me know your thoughts on the Republican leadership’s $700 billion annual deficit . . . its failure to catch Bin Laden after nearly 4 years . . . and its effort to seek a global ban on embryonic stem cell research.

ALMOST MAKES YOU WANT TO PUCHA

There are those who believe the Democrats are trying to bring back the 1990s while the Republican leadership would prefer the 1890s. Here is one more example. (Hint: they want to repeal the law Samuel Insull inspired.)

We learned quite some time ago that the ‘humble foreign policy’ the Republican leader promised us began with his very first National Security Council meeting a few days after taking office, the agenda for which was Iraq. (Bin Laden – against the threat of whom the incoming President and Vice President had been warned in urgent terms by the CIA on January 7, 2001, at Blair House – was nowhere on the agenda.)

This is long before 9/11, and it makes it clear to many of us that there were TWO great lies: the first, domestically, was that ‘by far the vast majority’ of the benefit of the proposed tax cuts ‘would go to people at the bottom of the economic ladder.’ That was a complete, knowing lie. By far the vast majority of the benefit of the tax cuts has gone to people at the very top of the economic ladder. It is a trillion dollar lie masking a fundamental shift of resources away from average Americans to the group already best off.

The second lie, internationally, was this humble foreign policy deal and the way we were taken to war. The facts and spin were fixed around the policy – a policy the Republican Administration had been looking to implement long before 9/11 (witness that first National Security Council agenda). As you’ll see from what follows, in a moment, there’s more to the Downing Street memo than that one quote.

But let us acknowledge that there is much more to be dismayed about than just these two points. There is, for example, the effort to impede stem cell research – but at least that is out in the open and based on conviction (if not the Administration’s conviction, that of their key constituency).

And there was the sudden ‘energy crisis’ that arose in California (a deep blue state) and drained billions and billions of dollars to oil companies in Texas (a deep red one) right after the election, and which it was explicitly in the power of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to avert. Boy, would I like to know what went on in those secret Cheney energy meetings, a list of whose participants even a subpoena from the General Accounting Office could not pry loose.

(As bad as things have gotten in the world after those 19 Saudis did the unthinkable on September 11, for one group – the Texas oil interests and Saudi royal family with whom the Bushes are so tightly tied – these last few years been the greatest bonanza in history. Literally. A coincidence, one assumes, but, at the least, ruefully ironic.)

And there is this: Even if you agree that we needed to attack Iraq rather than topple Saddam more along the lines of the way we toppled Slobodan Milosovich – and had, therefore, to invent the justification to do so – what are we to think of the planning and execution of the effort?

We really did rush to war without a plan to win the peace, with disastrous results that have greatly weakened our country and jeopardized our security and our prosperity. The Republican leadership ignored the advice of generals who would have sent enough troops to do fundamental things like securing ammunition dumps and national treasures . . . relying instead on advice from people like ‘Curveball.’ We pumped billions into Halliburton but failed to employ ordinary Iraqis (or the Iraqi army), who would have worked a lot cheaper and – employed – been far more supportive. We had no plan for what to do in case we weren’t greeted with flowers. Our soldiers have been magnificent. Their civilian leaders have done our country grave harm.

So here’s the latest, from the Los Angeles Times:

COMMENTARY
The Real News in the Downing Street Memos
By Michael Smith
Michael Smith writes on defense issues for the Sunday Times of London.

June 23, 2005

It is now nine months since I obtained the first of the “Downing Street memos,” thrust into my hand by someone who asked me to meet him in a quiet watering hole in London for what I imagined would just be a friendly drink.

At the time, I was defense correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, and a staunch supporter of the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The source was a friend. He’d given me a few stories before but nothing nearly as interesting as this.

The six leaked documents I took away with me that night were to change completely my opinion of the decision to go to war and the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush.

They focused on the period leading up to the Crawford, Texas, summit between Blair and Bush in early April 2002, and were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq would become. Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.

The second batch of leaks arrived in the middle of this year’s British general election, by which time I was writing for a different newspaper, the Sunday Times. These documents, which came from a different source, related to a crucial meeting of Blair’s war Cabinet on July 23, 2002. The timing of the leak was significant, with Blair clearly in electoral difficulties because of an unpopular war.

I did not then regard the now-infamous memo – the one that includes the minutes of the July 23 meeting – as the most important. My main article focused on the separate briefing paper for those taking part, prepared beforehand by Cabinet Office experts.

It said that Blair agreed at Crawford that “the UK would support military action to bring about regime change.” Because this was illegal, the officials noted, it was “necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action.”

But Downing Street had a “clever” plan that it hoped would trap Hussein into giving the allies the excuse they needed to go to war. It would persuade the U.N. Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors.

Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about “wrong-footing” Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.

British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B.

American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that “the U.S. had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime.” This we now realize was Plan B.

Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.

But these initial “spikes of activity” didn’t have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn’t retaliate. They didn’t provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.

The way in which the intelligence was “fixed” to justify war is old news. The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.

My country right or wrong, of course. But the Republican leadership has dramatically weakened my country. Economically, with this crazy fiscal policy that now puts us $2 billion a day further into debt to enrich the already rich . . . and that hands control of our fate to creditors like China and Japan. And militarily, by focusing on Iraq instead of Bin Laden and, in fact, doing virtually everything Bin Laden could have hoped we would . . . at the expense of so many more brave American and innocent Iraqi lives than should have been necessary.

THIS AMERICAN LIFE

Marissa Hendrickson: ‘Loved the ‘This American Life’ audio link last Friday. For your readers who don’t listen to the show, they should check their local NPR listings – it’s probably the best show on radio today. As far as the separation of church and state, my favorite answer to people who say the Ten Commandments are the basis of our legal system is that in reality, fully 8 of the 10 are not even illegal (unless you read ‘bear false witness’ as meaning ‘perjury,’ rather than the more general and not illegal ‘lying’). How can they be the basis of our laws if it is lawful to violate them?’

Sue Hoell: ‘Thanks for referencing Julie Sweeney’s work on your blog. I heard her one woman show, ‘Letting Go of God,’ on This American Life, last week. It is pure genious. Her story of growing up in the Catholic Church respecting all that it represented, transitioning into critical thought and reality, is not all that uncommon. Her presentation of the transition is very real and hopefully, very persuasive to those who might be considering taking the same giant step. Her archives on juliasweeney.com are of interest, especially the piece on Lyndie England, commenting that women do crazy things because their boyfriends ask them to.’

IN CASE YOU DON’T REMEMBER YOUR COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

Do you remember who spoke at your graduation? What was said? In course yours is lost to the ravages of time – mine is (except that I think it was the Shah of Iran and I wasn’t there) – here’s another one for you: Barack Obama’s recent Commencement Address to Knox College. Tiny excerpt:

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. You need to take up the challenges that we face as a nation and make them your own. Not because you have a debt to those who helped you get here, although you do have that debt. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate than you, although I do think you do have that obligation. It’s primarily because you have an obligation to yourself. Because individual salvation has always depended on collective salvation. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

And if the link is not working, here’s the whole thing, if you’re interested. Have a great weekend.

Saturday, June 4, 2005 – Good morning President Taylor, Board of Trustees, faculty, parents, family, friends, the community of Galesburg, the class of 1955-which I understand was out partying last night, and yet still showed up here on time-and most of all, the Class of 2005. Congratulations on your graduation, and thank you for the honor of allowing me to be a part of it. Thank you also, Mr. President, for this honorary degree. It was only a couple of years ago that I stopped paying my student loans in law school. Had I known it was this easy, I would have ran for the United States Senate earlier.

You know, it has been about six months now since you sent me to Washington as your United States Senator. I recognize that not all of you voted for me, so for those of you muttering under your breath ‘I didn’t send you anywhere,’ that’s ok too. Maybe we’ll hold-what do you call it-a little Pumphandle after the ceremony. Change your mind for next time.

It has been a fascinating journey thus far. Each time I walk onto the Senate floor, I’m reminded of the history, for good and for ill, that has been made there. But there have been a few surreal moments. For example, I remember the day before I was sworn in, myself and my staff, we decided to hold a press conference in our office. Now, keep in mind that I am ranked 99th in seniority. I was proud that I wasn’t ranked dead last until I found out that it’s just because Illinois is bigger than Colorado. So I’m 99th in seniority, and all the reporters are crammed into the tiny transition office that I have, which is right next to the janitor’s closet in the basement of the Dirksen Office Building. It’s my first day in the building, I have not taken a single vote, I have not introduced one bill, had not even sat down in my desk, and this very earnest reporter raises his hand and says:

‘Senator Obama, what is your place in history?’

I did what you just did, which is laugh out loud. I said, place in history? I thought he was kidding! At that point, I wasn’t even sure the other Senators would save a place for me at the cool kids’ table.

But as I was thinking about the words to share with this class, about what’s next, about what’s possible, and what opportunities lay ahead, I actually think it’s not a bad question for you, the class of 2005, to ask yourselves:

‘What will be your place in history?’

In other eras, across distant lands, this question could be answered with relative ease and certainty. As a servant in Rome, you knew you’d spend your life forced to build somebody else’s Empire. As a peasant in 11th Century China, you knew that no matter how hard you worked, the local warlord might come and take everything you had-and you also knew that famine might come knocking at the door. As a subject of King George, you knew that your freedom of worship and your freedom to speak and to build your own life would be ultimately limited by the throne.

And then America happened.

A place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form ‘a more perfect union’ on this new frontier.

And as people around the world began to hear the tale of the lowly colonists who overthrew an empire for the sake of an idea, they started to come. Across oceans and the ages, they settled in Boston and Charleston, Chicago and St. Louis, Kalamazoo and Galesburg, to try and build their own American Dream. This collective dream moved forward imperfectly-it was scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of women, shaken by war and depression. And yet, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, people kept dreaming, and building, and working, and marching, and petitioning their government, until they made America a land where the question of our place in history is not answered for us. It’s answered by us.

Have we failed at times? Absolutely. Will you occasionally fail when you embark on your own American journey? You surely will. But the test is not perfection.

The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them. Whether chance of birth or circumstance decides life’s big winners and losers, or whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams.

We have faced this choice before.

At the end of the Civil War, when farmers and their families began moving into the cities to work in the big factories that were sprouting up all across America, we had to decide: Do we do nothing and allow captains of industry and robber barons to run roughshod over the economy and workers by competing to see who can pay the lowest wages at the worst working conditions? Or do we try to make the system work by setting up basic rules for the market, instituting the first public schools, busting up monopolies, letting workers organize into unions?

We chose to act, and we rose together.

When the irrational exuberance of the Roaring Twenties came crashing down with the stock market, we had to decide: do we follow the call of leaders who would do nothing, or the call of a leader who, perhaps because of his physical paralysis, refused to accept political paralysis?

We chose to act-regulating the market, putting people back to work, expanding bargaining rights to include health care and a secure retirement-and together we rose.

When World War II required the most massive homefront mobilization in history and we needed every single American to lend a hand, we had to decide: Do we listen to skeptics who told us it wasn’t possible to produce that many tanks and planes? Or, did we build Roosevelt’s Arsenal for Democracy and grow our economy even further by providing our returning heroes with a chance to go to college and own their own home?

Again, we chose to act, and again, we rose together.

Today, at the beginning of this young century, we have to decide again. But this time, it is your turn to choose.

Here in Galesburg, you know what this new challenge is. You’ve seen it.

All of you, your first year in college saw what happened at 9/11. It’s already been noted, the degree to which your lives will be intertwined with the war on terrorism that currently is taking place. But what you’ve also seen, perhaps not as spectacularly, is the fact that when you drive by the old Maytag plant around lunchtime, no one walks out anymore. I saw it during the campaign when I met union guys who worked at the plant for 20, 30 years and now wonder what they’re gonna do at the age of 55 without a pension or health care; when I met the man who’s son needed a new liver but because he’d been laid off, didn’t know if he could afford to provide his child the care that he needed.

It’s as if someone changed the rules in the middle of the game and no one bothered to tell these folks. And, in reality, the rules have changed.

It started with technology and automation that rendered entire occupations obsolete-when was the last time anybody here stood in line for the bank teller instead of going to the ATM, or talked to a switchboard operator? Then it continued when companies like Maytag were able to pick up and move their factories to some under developed country where workers were a lot cheaper than they are in the United States.

As Tom Friedman points out in his new book, The World Is Flat, over the last decade or so, these forces-technology and globalization-have combined like never before. So that while most of us have been paying attention to how much easier technology has made our own lives-sending e-mails back and forth on our blackberries, surfing the Web on our cell phones, instant messaging with friends across the world-a quiet revolution has been breaking down barriers and connecting the world’s economies. Now business not only has the ability to move jobs wherever there’s a factory, but wherever there’s an internet connection.

Countries like India and China realized this. They understand that they no longer need to be just a source of cheap labor or cheap exports. They can compete with us on a global scale. The one resource they needed were skilled, educated workers. So they started schooling their kids earlier, longer, with a greater emphasis on math and science and technology, until their most talented students realized they don’t have to come to America to have a decent life-they can stay right where they are.

The result? China is graduating four times the number of engineers that the United States is graduating. Not only are those Maytag employees competing with Chinese and Indian and Indonesian and Mexican workers, you are too. Today, accounting firms are e-mailing your tax returns to workers in India who will figure them out and send them back to you as fast as any worker in Illinois or Indiana could.

When you lose your luggage in Boston at an airport, tracking it down may involve a call to an agent in Bangalore, who will find it by making a phone call to Baltimore. Even the Associated Press has outsourced some of their jobs to writers all over the world who can send in a story at a click of a mouse.

As Prime Minister Tony Blair has said, in this new economy, ‘Talent is the 21st century wealth.’ If you’ve got the skills, you’ve got the education, and you have the opportunity to upgrade and improve both, you’ll be able to compete and win anywhere. If not, the fall will be further and harder than it ever was before.

So what do we do about this? How does America find its way in this new, global economy? What will our place in history be?

Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn’t much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government-divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on.

In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it-Social Darwinism-every man or woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford-tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job-life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child who was born into poverty-pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life’s lottery, that we’re the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won’t be the chump who Donald Trump says: ‘You’re fired!’

But there is a problem. It won’t work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it’s been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It’s been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot at opportunity. That’s what’s produced our unrivaled political stability.

And so if we do nothing in the face of globalization, more people will continue to lose their health care. Fewer kids will be able to afford the diploma you’re about to receive.

More companies like United Airlines won’t be able to provide pensions for their employees. And those Maytag workers will be joined in the unemployment line by any worker whose skills can be bought and sold on the global market.

So today I’m here to tell you what most of you already know. This is not us-the option that I just mentioned. Doing nothing. It’s not how our story ends-not in this country. America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes.

It is this hope that has sustained us through revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before.

So let’s dream. Instead of doing nothing or simply defending 20th century solutions, let’s imagine together what we could do to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century.

What if we prepared every child in America with the education and skills they need to compete in the new economy? If we made sure that college was affordable for everyone who wanted to go? If we walked up to those Maytag workers and we said ‘Your old job is not coming back, but a new job will be there because we’re going to seriously retrain you and there’s life-long education that’s waiting for you-the sorts of opportunities that Knox has created with the Strong Futures scholarship program.

What if no matter where you worked or how many times you switched jobs, you had health care and a pension that stayed with you always, so you all had the flexibility to move to a better job or start a new business? What if instead of cutting budgets for research and development and science, we fueled the genius and the innovation that will lead to the new jobs and new industries of the future?

Right now, all across America, there are amazing discoveries being made. If we supported these discoveries on a national level, if we committed ourselves to investing in these possibilities, just imagine what it could do for a town like Galesburg. Ten or twenty years down the road, that old Maytag plant could re-open its doors as an Ethanol refinery that turned corn into fuel. Down the street, a biotechnology research lab could open up on the cusp of discovering a cure for cancer. And across the way, a new auto company could be busy churning out electric cars. The new jobs created would be filled by American workers trained with new skills and a world-class education.

All of that is possible but none of it will come easy. Every one of us is going to have to work more, read more, train more, think more. We will have to slough off some bad habits-like driving gas guzzlers that weaken our economy and feed our enemies abroad. Our children will have to turn off the TV set once in a while and put away the video games and start hitting the books. We’ll have to reform institutions, like our public schools, that were designed for an earlier time. Republicans will have to recognize our collective responsibilities, even as Democrats recognize that we have to do more than just defend old programs.

It won’t be easy, but it can be done. It can be our future. We have the talent and the resources and brainpower. But now we need the political will. We need a national commitment.

And we need each of you.

Now, no one can force you to meet these challenges. If you want, it will be pretty easy for you to leave here today and not give another thought to towns like Galesburg and the challenges they face. There is no community service requirement in the real world; no one is forcing you to care. You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and go chasing after the big house, and the nice suits, and all the other things that our money culture says that you should want, that you should aspire to, that you can buy.

But I hope you don’t walk away from the challenge. Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. You need to take up the challenges that we face as a nation and make them your own. Not because you have a debt to those who helped you get here, although you do have that debt. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate than you, although I do think you do have that obligation. It’s primarily because you have an obligation to yourself. Because individual salvation has always depended on collective salvation. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

And I know that all of you are wondering how you’ll do this, the challenges seem so big. They seem so difficult for one person to make a difference.

But we know it can be done. Because where you’re sitting, in this very place, in this town, it’s happened before.

Nearly two centuries ago, before civil rights, before voting rights, before Abraham Lincoln, before the Civil War, before all of that, America was stained by the sin of slavery. In the sweltering heat of southern plantations, men and women who looked like me could not escape the life of pain and servitude in which they were sold. And yet, year after year, as this moral cancer ate away at the American ideals of liberty and equality, the nation was silent.

But its people didn’t stay silent for long.

One by one, abolitionists emerged to tell their fellow Americans that this would not be our place in history-that this was not the America that had captured the imagination of the world.

This resistance that they met was fierce, and some paid with their lives. But they would not be deterred, and they soon spread out across the country to fight for their cause. One man from New York went west, all the way to the prairies of Illinois to start a colony.

And here in Galesburg, freedom found a home.

Here in Galesburg, the main depot for the Underground Railroad in Illinois, escaped slaves could roam freely on the streets and take shelter in people’s homes. And when their masters or the police would come for them, the people of this town would help them escape north, some literally carrying them in their arms to freedom.

Think about the risks that involved. If they were caught abetting a fugitive, you could’ve been jailed or lynched. It would have been simple for these townspeople to turn the other way; to go live their lives in a private peace.

And yet, they didn’t do that. Why?

Because they knew that we were all Americans; that we were all brothers and sisters; the same reason that a century later, young men and women your age would take Freedom Rides down south, to work for the Civil Rights movement. The same reason that black women would walk instead of ride a bus after a long day of doing somebody else’s laundry and cleaning somebody else’s kitchen. Because they were marching for freedom.

Today, on this day of possibility, we stand in the shadow of a lanky, raw-boned man with little formal education who once took the stage at Old Main and told the nation that if anyone did not believe the American principles of freedom and equality, that those principles were timeless and all-inclusive, they should go rip that page out of the Declaration of Independence.

My hope for all of you is that as you leave here today, you decide to keep these principles alive in your own life and in the life of this country. You will be tested. You won’t always succeed. But know that you have it within your power to try. That generations who have come before you faced these same fears and uncertainties in their own time. And that through our collective labor, and through God’s providence, and our willingness to shoulder each other’s burdens, America will continue on its precious journey towards that distant horizon, and a better day.

Thank you so much class of 2005, and congratulations on your graduation. Thank you.

James Hereford: ‘You write, Tony Blair came to America to beseech George Bush for $25 billion over ten years in aid to the impoverished nations of Africa, he got not quite 3% of it – $674 million. ‘I was hungry and you gave me nothing; I was thirsty and you gave me nothing; I was a stranger and you did not invite me in.” We have now reached the point that $674 million dollars is ‘nothing’? Have we completely lost perspective? We have dumped untold billions of dollars into Africa over many years and to what end? Is there a success story we can point to that shows money was the answer? We have made a few individuals very rich (along with some American and French arms dealers), but the average African is in the same boat he was in 30 years ago. Americans are always so quick to throw money at problems (especially other people’s money), thinking that money is always the solution.’

☞ I think this states the view of a great many Americans. Which is why I think the following interview with one of the world’s leading hands-on economists is so important.

Because it’s long, I’ve highlighted parts to save you time. (Or listen to it here, though it takes a while to load.)

Telephone Press Briefing for Journalists with Economist Jeffrey Sachs Discussing the Upcoming G-8 Summit
June 15, 2005

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the UN Millennium Project and Dr. Joanne Carter, legislative director of RESULTS International in Washington, DC.

Operator: Excuse me, everyone, we will now begin the conference. All lines will be muted during the broadcast. If you should need operator assistance during the call, you may press star zero, and an operator will come by to assist you. There will be a question and answer session following the presentation. Instructions for asking questions will be given at that time.

At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Joanne Carter. You may begin.

Joanne Carter: Thanks very much, Operator, and thank you to everyone for joining us for this conference call briefing with the economist Jeffrey Sachs, at this extraordinarily important time in advance of the G-8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, in early July. My name is Joanne Carter, I am the legislative director of RESULTS, which is the organization sponsoring this call. RESULTS is an international advocacy organization that works to influence the U.S. and other donor country policies and priorities to ensure access to health care, education, and other basic needs for people in the world.

We set up this call to provide you with background to the upcoming G-8, the issues at stake related to poverty in Africa, the opportunities, and a realistic assessment of where the U.S. stands right now. In a moment I will introduce Jeff Sachs, and he will make some opening comments and then take your questions. But I would just say that it is really becoming clear that this year, and specifically, this year and this year’s G-8 may be the most important and most opportune moment we’ve ever seen to address poverty – the poverty that has over 1 billion people surviving on less than $1 a day, with a particular opportunity to address the severe poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Jeff Sachs is going to put U.S. efforts to date in context by looking at some of the scale-up that we have seen in USAID’s efforts and the recent agreement on debt. But also, be clear that the U.S. is still far behind in providing its fair share by any standards. I would just point out that when we look at some specific critical areas like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, we are so in danger of under-funding it from the U.S. side that the fund won’t even potentially have money to assist in grants, never mind funding new projects to be approved this fall, if the U.S. doesn’t do its fair share. Certainly the world and the U.S. have made very little progress to date on access even to primary education for all children in Africa, which has an especially detrimental effect on girls and AIDS orphans who are often kept out by school fees. So I would just say, whatever the United States chooses to do or not do at this G-8, whether or not we step up to the plate, is going to have a huge impact on the global momentum and successive global efforts.

I want to turn this over now to Jeff Sachs. For those of you who do not know him, Jeff Sachs is currently the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is the special advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. He is the director of the Millennium Project, which in January released a very important report that’s maybe the most detailed blueprint we have ever had for cutting severe poverty in half in the next decade. Jeff is also the author of the recently released The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. So Jeff, if you go ahead with your comments and then we will take questions from journalists. Thanks very much.

Jeffrey Sachs: Thank you, Joanne, and thanks everybody for the opportunity to have a discussion. As Joanne Carter has just said, this is an extremely important year and a very important moment in our nation’s decision making. It is an important year because 2005 is in many ways a make-or-break year for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. These are international goals that were agreed [upon] by the world’s governments in September 2000, at the time of the Millennium Assembly at the United Nations. They call for very significant progress in cutting all aspects of extreme poverty by the year 2015, and they have the advantage that they’re quantified. They are specific goals in the relevant areas of life and death for the world’s poorest people: income, poverty, hunger, child survival, maternal survival, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, access to safe drinking water, and so on.

We know that for dozens of the world’s poorest people[s], we’re not on track to meet the goals, although happily for hundreds of millions of people, especially in Asia, indeed for billions of people, there’s been a lot of progress. It’s the progress that gives us the realistic hope that that kind of progress can be achieved everywhere, including the places where it is not being achieved right now. The epicenter of disaster is certainly sub-Saharan Africa, although places in our own hemisphere, in the Andean region, which we know is in turmoil again, and in central Asia around Afghanistan, but including places like Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and other landlocked parts of central Asia, are also trapped in an extreme poverty trap.

There are ways out of this. In fact, all the recent studies that have been done, whether by the UN Millennium Project, which I had the honor to direct, or by Tony Blair’s Africa Commission, or by the Global Monitoring Report of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have all come to the same conclusion: extreme poverty can be reduced, indeed eliminated by our generation. The Millennium Development Goals can be achieved, but they require a greatly increased level of investment. That’s the core: increased investment in people themselves and their health, their education, their nutrition, in the environments in which they live, the soils, the water, the habitats and in the infrastructure: roads, power, Internet connectivity, and telecommunications. With these investments, the poorest of the poor, who suffer from an extremely low level of productivity can have their productivity enhanced tremendously and they can become productive members of the world economy.

But all of these studies agree on the point that for the poorest of the poor, they can’t afford the vital investments that are needed, even when these are at very low cost. An example is something as simple as an anti-malaria bed net which is $7, it lasts for five years, and yet it is financially out of reach of hundreds of millions of people living in the extreme poverty of endemic malaria regions. If we help the poorest of the poor make the investments, not simply send over emergency food aid, but actually help them to grow more food, and help them to fight diseases like malaria, as we’re doing with AIDS, if we step up this effort, this kind of extreme poverty can be ended.

Now all of these studies found the same thing; that aid needs to be doubled in the next few years in order to meet these goals. Our project did the most detailed costing ever done. The Africa Commission came up with very similar numbers; so did the IMF and the World Bank in fact in their report. We do need to double overall aid in the next few years, in particular to Africa, as Prime Minister Tony Blair has said. We need to raise aid from about $25 billion a year now to about $50 billion a year within the next few years, and direct that aid towards high-priority investments: controlling malaria, helping farmers grow more food, building basic infrastructure, assuring the children are in school, providing school meals, replenishing soil nutrients, helping with micro-irrigation and many other very practical things. If that’s done, extreme poverty can be ended.

Now, unfortunately, we are not on track, and the United States is not following through on commitments that the Bush administration made in Monterrey, Mexico in March 2002 when it, together with other governments in the world, signed the Monterrey Consensus. That consensus says in paragraph 42 – I’ll quote it exactly – ‘We urge developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of gross national product as official development assistance to developing countries.’ Now that goal of 0.7 percent, where we have committed to make concrete efforts, has become now the commitment of the European Union as of last month, with a specific timetable to reach 0.7 [percent] in steps by the year 2015 and to reach 0.5 percent of gross national product by the year 2010. This was the message that Prime Minister Tony Blair brought to Washington last week. The Bush administration has not agreed to this target, even though it is part of our commitment, as it is the commitment of all the signatories of the Monterrey Consensus. It is also part of the need for Africa to be able to surmount the multiple crises of hunger, and disease, and despair, and economic isolation that Africa now faces.

Let me put this in human terms if I can. I was in a village last week in Mali, sitting around a circle on the ground with a number of the impoverished farmers in the village. I asked whether any children had died in the village recently and everybody was shocked. A man stood up and said, ‘But mister, so many children, so many children dying all the time’. I see those children dying on each visit to Africa because I go to the clinics. I see children in coma, in convulsions from malaria. I know that this is a disease which will kill up to three million children this year, even though it is largely preventable and 100 percent treatable, but it is neither being prevented nor treated. These places are too impoverished to be able to fight on their own. We have started with AIDS; we have not started with malaria in the same way. We have not helped farmers grow more food; [instead] we’ve been sending food aid. There are practical things that are part of Tony Blair’s call for a doubling of aid to Africa by the year 2010. All of the governments around the world are sharing in this. The European Union is speaking clearly. I very much hope – I urge in every possible way for the United States, for the sake of the spirit of America and the sake of American security, to join in this call of Prime Minister Blair so that the summit in July can be a success for the world and a success for America. And I believe that all hangs in the balance still, to this day. Thank you.

Joanne Carter: Thanks very much, Jeff. Why don’t we go ahead then, too, so we have plenty of time for questions, and then, perhaps, Jeff, in the context of that, you can give a few more details, and then we can provide in writing the background note that you put together about America’s current aid to Africa if that would be helpful. For now, Operator, will you please let folks know how they can ask questions, and we will get started with that.

Operator: Ok. We will now begin the question and answer segment of the conference. If you would like to ask a question at this time, please press star one on your touch-tone keypad. Again, to ask a question, please press star one.

And your first question comes from Lynne Varner with the Seattle Times. Go ahead, Ms. Varner.

Lynne Varner: I wanted to ask Jeff, what is the role of politics, of reforming government in many of the poor countries you are talking about, and are we doing that? Is the U.S. moving toward pushing those governments to reform?

Jeffrey Sachs: Well, there are many reform governments in Africa that are struggling to survive. In fact, President Bush met with a number of those leaders a few days ago, but we are not helping those places either. So it is not just a matter of us pushing, because Africa has democratized all throughout the continent, not every place, but in many many countries. And yet, those democracies which struggle for survival, with hungry populations, facing very desperate odds, facing massive disease, are not getting the kind of help that they need to break out of extreme poverty. So my suggestion – in fact the suggestion of everyone that looks at this, including the Bush administration – is to help those countries that are ready for that help, prepared, and there are many of them, but they are not getting the help. That’s the basic point. The level of our assistance right now is really so extraordinarily small compared to the need and compared to the possibilities of dramatic use of such aid, that all governments around the world are saying to the United States, it’s time. We can do a lot more. That’s why Tony Blair came last week, to say we can do a lot more. So it’s not just a matter of pushing for reform. Reforms have happened, but we are not backing up the reformers.

Lynne Varner: OK.

Operator: Thank you sir, your next question comes from Martin Crutsinger with the Associated Press.

Martin Crutsinger: Yes, Jeff. Could you make a prediction on what is going to happen at Gleneagles? Do you think that the U.S. will come part of the way to meet Blair’s request, or is it likely that, that it will end up in some sort of an impasse?

Jeffrey Sachs: Let me go through a few of the numbers just to be clear where we are right now. Europe has committed on a timetable to reach 0.5 percent of GNP in overall official development assistance by 2010 and to reach 0.7 [percent] by 2015. The United States is second from bottom of the rankings of aid relative to GNP. (Last year Italy was lower.) The United States is at 0.16 percent, but even the fact that we are at 0.16 [percent] and Europe is at around 0.4 [percent] now, on its way to 0.5 [percent] by the end of the decade and 0.7 [percent] by 2015, really in a way understates the issue. The U.S. is at 0.16 [percent] without any timetable, without any set of clear policies on how it is going to meet the obligation under the Monterrey Consensus of making concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 [percent]. So we don’t even have a clear U.S. policy on this of how we’re going to get to where we have promised to aim. This is what Europe is saying to the United States – are you going to participate in this process? And the answer is very unclear right now because basically, the answer so far has been no. The U.S. says we don’t accept artificial targets – ironically it signed up to making concrete efforts to 0.7 [percent] so it signed the Monterrey Consensus together with everybody else. And these are not arbitrary except to the United States. These are life and death targets for the poorest people in the world.

So, I think that it’s not possible to answer the question of what will happen right now, because we are in a situation that I believe is neither in America’s interests, nor is it a place where I believe we are likely to remain. But, it’s very unclear what the administration’s policy will be. It has not really explained any policy of how it’s going to respond to this clear international commitment and to the repeated findings from all over the world of what can be accomplished right now.

Martin Crutsinger: Thank you.

Speaker: Next question, sorry, go ahead.

Operator: Your next question comes from David Francis with the Christian Science Monitor.

David Francis: Jeff, in Africa there is still a rapid population growth in many of these countries which, I imagine, would make the problem of development much harder and more difficult. And the United States seems to have some restrictions on population control. Is there conflict here? Is this a serious issue that should be addressed in the efforts to improve Africa’s situation?

Jeffrey Sachs: I believe that sexual reproductive health is a vital part of economic development, and I believe that the opportunity for families to choose family planning is a vital part of that. What’s also true is that in the poorest places in the world the population growth tends to be highest, because impoverished people, seeing their children die in such large numbers, tend to choose to have very many children as a kind of insurance policy, so that there will be some surviving children in the old age of the parents. And what this means is that ironically, it’s in the poorest places in the world, often the places least able to support a growing population, where you find the most rapid population growth.

What it also means is that when economic development begins, starting with child survival itself, fertility rates tend to fall quite sharply, as do population growth rates. And so I think there’s a real prospect through a strong development policy of saving children, of creating more productive agriculture, of empowering women, of having literacy and girls in school and literate mothers, another huge contributor to lower population growth. THAT All of these things, in my view, good development policy, will turn the tide in what is right now an unsustainably rapid growth of population. And I always find people amazed, but it’s true, that saving children actually will slow population growth, not speed it, because of the response of parents choosing smaller families and investing more in the health, and the education and the nutrition of each of the children that they have.

So yes, it’s very important, but the main thing that is happening right now is that we don’t have a coherent development strategy in Africa at all, and I have not really explained it properly. Our total aid budget for Africa is right now about $3 billion, total. In other words it is less than a couple of days of the Pentagon budget, for example. Of that $3 billion about $1 billion is emergency food aid. About $1 billion is the AIDS program, and about $1 billion is for everything else. Of the ‘everything else’, almost all of that is American consultancy salaries, rather than actual investable funds. What this means is that the image that Americans have, that we push huge amounts of money into Africa and it somehow goes bad or goes missing, is simply wrong. It’s simply wrong. It is a misunderstanding – it’s one of America’s great myths. In fact, we give very small amounts of assistance, most of which are our own salaries or food aid. What we give to actually invest in clinics, and schools, and irrigation projects, and soil replenishment is so small, it’s less than $1 per African. No wonder we don’t find it, we don’t do it! And this is the biggest misunderstanding in America, because you can understand American feelings. They say ‘Well, we give so much aid, and we see so few results’. If they understood we give so little and we see so few results, and if we gave more, we’d see more results, there would be considerably more support. And that’s what I would hope the president would explain to the American people. The truth about how much more could be done if we would simply make the effort. We could control malaria. We could help to promote a Green Revolution for Africa. We could ensure that all Africa’s children have a midday meal at their schools. Which would do wonders for getting the girls and the boys in school. We could enable Africa to drop user fees for primary education and primary health. These are all practical steps that could be accomplished quickly, but we haven’t tried them. And I believe the American people would support such practical results-based assistance, especially if the president of the United States would explain this to the American people.

Operator: Your next question comes from Shihoko Goto with UPI.

Shihoko Goto: Mr. Sachs, I actually wanted to know about how the private sector might fit into the development precis that you have for Africa. It seems to me that right now the G-8 is more concerned about immediate relief and aid, food aid, health, sanitation. But, if Africa is to grow in the longer term there needs to be a lot of business investment, and specifically technological transfer. How do you see that sort of private/public partnership developing?

Jeffrey Sachs: I think that the clear sense of international business, and of Africans and the experience of development in Asia and elsewhere is that the reason that Africa does not get the investment that it needs for growth in the private sector is because there’s a lack of basic infrastructure. Electricity is irregular. The roads don’t exist or are unreliable. The port facilities are unreliable. The population is hungry, the people are sick and the labor force is without all of the skills needed. Now, that sounds like a pretty daunting set of challenges, except that one can see practical solutions for each of them. It comes back to investment. Investing in basic infrastructure, investing in health. Which is a series of straightforward investments right now, such as control of malaria, that are not done yet. Investing in schooling for children with techniques as simple as ending user fees and promoting midday meals, using locally-produced foodstuffs.

These steps are what makes a business environment attractive for the private sector. So with roads, ports, electricity, health and an increasingly literate labor force, Africa would have the same kind of development that Asia is having right now. And in fact, Asia and Africa were in a similar situation 50 years ago, but Asia started with a Green Revolution to grow more food, feed the population and thereby escape from the cycles of famine, disease and extreme poverty. Africa has not had that Green Revolution yet and that’s because the farmers in Africa lack the basic inputs of improved seed, fertilizer or soil nutrients and small-scale water management. And yet, now, the scientists have shown in repeated projects that this can be done. This is where practical investment – for example at the G-8 Summit – could enable Africa to have a Green Revolution. That would change the face of Africa, that would change the business climate, that would change possibility over the coming generation, for the private sector to invest in a significant way. It was the trigger for Asia’s development. It requires financing, right now, the financing which, so far, the White House has not agreed, but if it did agree would change the prospects. But the one thing that will not create a Green Revolution is sending American food aid to Africa. That will not create Africa’s Green Revolution.

Operator: OK. Just so you know, there are 10 questions in queue.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yup!

Operator: Next question comes from Dan Carpenter with the Indianapolis Star.

Dan Carpenter: Hello. When we speak of the private sector, again, shouldn’t we be holding their feet to the fire more? So much of the money that is necessary for this investment that you speak of is already being extracted in places like Nigeria, for example. By corporations that are not being required to pay taxes, to protect the environment, or to engage and contribute to local needs. Are we talking too much about reform of government and not enough about reform of the private sector?

Jeffrey Sachs: Well, again, let me first say that the first thing we should be talking about is investment and then the areas of priority again are health, education, nutrition, the productivity of agriculture, which is an investments in the environments such as soils and infrastructure.

The question then becomes how to mobilize those investments. The problem is that in most countries, there is simply not the domestic resource base of any sort in order to finance the basic level of investments that are needed. This is true, incidentally, even in oil countries like Nigeria, because the costs are simply beyond what Nigeria can afford. It is often thought Nigeria is a rich country, it’s not a rich country. It produces 2 million barrels of oil per day, but it has 120 million people that are dependent on that.

The point you make is a good one, though, because when you have resources like oil, even if it’s not that much per capita – and it isn’t in the case of Nigeria – it is still important to use properly. At times, the oil has just been stolen by dictatorships like Abacha, but it’s clear that there is a tremendous lack of transparency about how that oil is extracted by the international industry as well in these countries. And so there are initiatives for extractive industries transparency, or the EITI, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, or the ‘Publish What You Pay’ initiative. And that is extremely important because I believe that those resources would be used much better if there were transparency on the international business side as well.

I also believe that the large oil companies have a much greater responsibility to help the communities in which they operate than they have met so far. Now there are differences among them, but I think as a general rule, they should be doing a considerable amount more. But I don’t want to pretend, and I think it’s a mistake and almost a cop-out for all the rest of us, to pretend that that can actually solve the problems, because most of sub-Saharan Africa, first of all, is not hydrocarbon exporting economy. Most of these economies are subsistence, impoverished, disease-ridden, agricultural economies and they need help. And the help is going to have to come from us, or the people will die. And they are dying in massive numbers right now – 6 to 8 million a year in Africa alone. I think reliably, one could say worldwide, that at least 8 million people a year die of their extreme poverty, 20,000 a day. One can say that 6 million of those can be located in sub-Saharan Africa, with the nearly 3 million dying of malaria, 2 million of AIDS, half a million of tuberculosis, and millions more, in fact, of other infectious diseases. Those places don’t have an easy way out from oil. They need our help, or their downward spiral will continue. Fortunately, we have promised, time and again, to help. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet followed through. And fortunately, the G-8 Summit is the opportunity when we can finally match our commitments and our actions.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Mark Bixler with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Mark Bixler: Dr. Sachs, as you know, the G-8 finance ministers recently agreed to cancel the debt of 18 poor countries, mainly in Africa. Can you give us your sense of how significant that decision is, and also could you put that into context by talking about the contributions through the years of faith-based activists, such as the Jubilee campaign. How significant a player have they been in the campaign to have some of the African nations’ debts cancelled?

Jeffrey Sachs: Thank you very much. What happened with the G-7 finance ministers is a step forward, definitely, but it’s a very modest step forward. As you have all been reading, the cash flow saving that results from this is at most about $1.5 billion per year. The aid need in sub-Saharan Africa is in the order of $25 billion per year. Even the headline number of $1.5 billion per year saving exaggerates the real net gain for Africa, perhaps by quite a large amount, actually, for somewhat complicated reasons. What’s happening is that these 18 countries are now being told, ‘you don’t have to repay that debt. The donor governments like the United States and U.K. will do it for you.’ And so the U.S., the U.K. and others are sharing that $1.5 billion annual flow, roughly, to repay to the World Bank and to other creditor institutions, who are the holders of the debt of those 18 countries.

But, there are several details in this. One is that the United States government, at least till now, has said that its share of those payments, which are on the order of $130 to $180 million a year, that’s all we’re talking about here, about 30 to 50 cents per American per year, that that amount is going to come out of the existing aid budget.

So if the U.S. pays that interest, it may cut aid of other kinds. This is extraordinarily worrisome, because it would say, if that’s really the case, it’s just a shell game. A certain kind of relief will be given, but it will be offset by cutting aid of other sorts. We haven’t seen the end of the story, but if that’s the case, it means that there’s no net change in what is being offered to the countries that need our help. There is even concern that when a country that otherwise would pay back to the World Bank, will not pay back, the World Bank will actually lend or give that country a lesser amount in response. This is another point that needs to be clarified. But I think the answer is unambiguous. This is a small step in the right direction, but it may even be smaller than the small amount that it looks like on paper, depending on how the deal is actually financed.

Now you asked a very important and interesting second question, which is, to the extent that we’re getting movement at all, what is the role of the faith-based community? I think it’s quite large. I’ve worked on these debt issues for 20 years, saying that these debts are unpayable. I have constantly been told, ‘oh no, they’re payable,’ only to see another part cancelled and another part cancelled. And twenty years ago this was all understandable, but it wasn’t understood. And by the way, when I was on the Meltzer commission in 2000, we voted unanimously, [that] the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the regional development banks should write off, in their entirety, all claims against heavily-indebted poor countries. We already had this five years ago; it took so long to do the obvious. And that is why it is fine, but what a lot of effort to accomplish so little when we have so much to accomplish.

Now on the faith groups, the Jubilee 2000 was definitely propelled and championed by faith groups. The turn to increased effort to provide anti-retroviral medicines has been championed by faith groups in this country. I know that an increasing number of faith-based groups are taking an interest, for the first time – but still, it’s great – in controlling malaria, which is a tremendous blight, a massive child killer that we could so easily control if the United States would simply step up to it, which it hasn’t yet. So I think the fact that it is a deep religious value to feed the hungry and help the poorest of the poor, to help the least among you, it is one of the powerful sources of movement in this country. But the biggest problem, in my view, is that people do not understand how little we’re doing compared to what we’ve committed, what’s needed, and what we could so readily afford. It’s those three criteria: what have we promised, what is actually needed, what can we afford, where there is massive confusion. Roughly a 30-fold overestimate by Americans of what we are actually doing. Unfortunately the White House and other political leaders not clarifying this at all, rather say how generous we are, rather than explaining the truth of what we should be doing and are not doing right now.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Penelope Purdy with the Denver Post.

Penelope Purdy: Dr. Sachs, we had talked a little bit about the 18 countries, the poorest countries involved in this debt cancellation. Of those, 3 are in this hemisphere. We have talked heavily about Africa, but given our region’s connections to the Latin Americas, I am very interested in what you can tell me about what’s going on in Latin America, and why are places like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Bolivia remain in such economic and political turmoil?

Jeffrey Sachs: Yeah. It is of course, of great pertinence to us. Generally these are societies that are bereft of basic infrastructure, often divided ethnically and racially in internal politics. In the case of Bolivia, notably suffering from a massive geographical problem, which is, as an Andean landlocked country, being in a position of extreme economic isolation, with some of the highest transport costs in the world. Now, because they are in our hemisphere, one might have thought that we would pay more attention to them. And, unfortunately we tend to view countries too often through the optic of our immediate interest rather than through the optic of their long term development as a way to also address our interests. An example of Bolivia is very stark- a country that I know very well. We pushed very hard over the last eight years for coca eradication, and I watched in the late 1990s as the United States insisted on eradication of the coca crop without alternatives being provided. And it was very clear at the time that this would create a social explosion because hundreds of thousands are dependent on farmers that grow coca leaf. And if you just say that this is a military action, and you provide a trickle of so-called alternative development funding, but it’s so tiny that it’s really a de minimus sum compared to what would need to be done, it’s not surprising that you get uprisings, that you get massive political backlash. And this is exactly what’s happened. And I am sorry to say that it is predictable, and it’s been predicted by Bolivia’s own political leaders who warned President Bush, warned the American leadership, without some help and some realism, we’re just going to have turmoil, and that’s, unfortunately, what we have right now.

Operator: OK, and your next question comes from Mark Green.

Mark Green: Hi. Near the end of your remarks you mentioned that you hoped the United States would step up to its commitment from the 2002 consensus, and you said, ‘for the sake of American security’. I wondered if you would talk more about that.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, the security experts in the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and in foreign policy circles are absolutely clear that impoverished and disease-ridden states are those that are also most likely to become failed states. It is the result of that kind of chaos that can put us into a terrible security bind. Let me quote. ‘Poverty doesn’t cause terrorism, being poor doesn’t make you a murderer, most of the plotters of September 11 were raised in comfort, yet persistent poverty and oppression can lead to hopelessness and despair, and when governments fail to meet the most basic needs of their people, these failed states can become havens for terror. Poverty prevents governments from controlling their borders, policing their territory, enforcing their laws. Development provides the resources to build hope and prosperity and security.’

Those are comments of President Bush, March 2002. I think he had it exactly right. If we want to face the security challenges in Africa, which are very real right now, and known to be real, sending military advisors to train armies in the Sahel, in my view, is the wrong approach for hungry, disease-ridden, impoverished countries. If we want to help those countries, we should help them get out of the cycle of massive disease, despair, and extreme hunger. And we could do this through practical development approaches. Unfortunately, we have taken an approach based on the military. We have not followed through on development. We’re pretty good on the development rhetoric, once in a while, but not on real development programs. Those are what are missing, and that is where you have to separate the rhetoric from the ground reality. The ground reality, which I see all the time, is that we do not have development programs in place. I am told repeatedly by our own ambassadors in private, there is nothing we can do; we have no aid budgets. This happens all over Africa, I know it. I see more and more American security officials around. They are concerned about the instability, but they cannot solve the problem. It’s development, people getting enough to eat, children surviving, children in school, societies with hope, that will solve the security challenge for us.

But we have to make investments. Of all our spending right now, other than the AIDS program, which I like and think the president has done a good job on, the emergency food aid, which is not a development program at all. If all the rest comes to $1 billion dollars, roughly, and most of that is American consultant salaries (and what you’re talking about In real investments of the sort that I’ve been discussing: of helping farmers grow more food; providing safe drinking water and sanitation; helping to connect the villages with markets, with telecom, with Internet connectivity; helping children have school meals; helping there to be the war against malaria, which could be won) if all of that comes to a few hundred million dollars, it’s shocking, because what we have effectively done is leave hundreds of millions of impoverished people to die and then we worry about security and then we send military advisors and we wonder why it’s not working. It cannot work this way, until we step up to actual development assistance.

Operator: Your next question comes from Richard Knox with NPR.

Richard Knox: Yes, hi, thanks. You mentioned that you like what the president has been doing on AIDS, and there has been encouraging progress in providing anti-retroviral treatment. It is sort of the spear point of a lot of other issues. I am hearing growing worry, though, about meeting the targets that have been set. A large part of that worry revolves around personnel on the ground to deliver care. I wonder what – you know that’s not something that’s easily and quickly remedied- and I wondered what ideas you may have about that. If I could also ask a second question that maybe too complicated, but I am hearing conflicting things about policies by IMF and World Bank concerning requiring countries to cut back some of their spending in areas like health care in order to offset new aid, in order to avoid inflation and currency devaluation. IMF tells me that that’s not the policy. Other people say that countries think it is. I wondered from your perspective what the reality is.

Jeffrey Sachs: Well, two important questions. First, on health personnel, there actually are, believe it or not, it is amazingly sad but true, there are large numbers of unemployed or underemployed, trained health personnel that are not being hired now because these governments, the local communities, the hospitals, cannot afford to bring them on a payroll. Often a payroll, by the way, where there is a budget ceiling put on in the context of an IMF program. And Kenya is a case in point where there are thousands of unemployed nurses – one of the most profound nursing shortages I have ever seen with my own eyes for years. And I have been saying this to U.S. officials, to European officials, to the IMF, to the World Bank, and it would cost some tens of millions of dollars of donor financing to bring several thousand trained health workers, nurses and doctors, into desperately understaffed hospitals – and it could be done basically overnight. And it’s a matter of donor assistance, exactly what we are talking about. It’s all ready to go and yet the donors have not come through. And we will not be able to achieve targets for anti-retrovirals and for malaria control and others if we don’t have these personnel, all hands mobilized – this is a matter of donor assistance. We are not talking about billions, in that case in Kenya, we’re talking about millions, but it hasn’t been done. The United States has actually helped with some of what needs to be done, perhaps about a tenth of what needs to be done, but we haven’t gotten anywhere close to the minimum practical scale to be able to achieve the kinds of goals that we have set.

Now, the IMF and the World Bank basically don’t block increases in health spending, if donors come forward. But, I don’t believe they also realize the urgency, and they don’t speak up and say in public what they say in private. In private they know that there is a silent tsunami, silent holocaust underway in rural Africa with mass death. They know that there is not enough budgetary support to hire doctors and nurses and to keep proper provisioning of the health system. But, they don’t say in public that the United States and other donor countries should therefore do more to save the millions of lives that could be saved. What they say is to the governments, ‘Well, so sorry you have what you have; now live and in fact die, within your meager means.’

This is the great fallacy of these IMF programs. Not that they stand in the way, so much, of increased spending, but that they watch unblinkingly as millions are dying without saying, country by country, back to the rich governments, ‘Come on now, you could save these lives. And you could save them now. And this is a matter of dollars and cents so help this country.‘ That’s what they say in private, not to the U.S. and to others, that’s what they wring their hands to me. But they don’t say it in public, and they don’t put pressure on the donors to actually come through and save the lives. That is why IMF, World Bank programs often have health systems that have four or five dollars per person per year as the total spending. That is what you get in an impoverished country if you don’t get help. You get a few dollars per person per year in the health sector. Compared with our country with more than $5,000 per person per year. In Africa, it’s a few dollars. It is one of the most shocking facts on our planet, because in effect it is a mass death sentence and the IMF and the World Bank should be standing up country by country and declaring this.

Now, they have stood up last month and said that they need an overall doubling of aid. That’s what was brushed aside by the White House last week. Bush just casually said, no we’re not going to do that, as if millions of lives are not lost as a direct result of such an attitude. But we need that country by country to make absolutely clear that it is pure mythology that there’s nothing that can be done. There is so much that can be done, and can be done quickly with a little bit of financial help, but the kind of help that so far has been refused by the U.S. government.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Nina Tandon with the Austin American-Statesman.

Nina Tandon: Good afternoon Mr. Sachs.

Jeffrey Sachs: Hi.

Nina Tandon: Could you talk a little bit about past aid programs that have been successful in Africa, and how the U.S. could learn from them to come up with its own effective strategies?

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, aid works when it is directed towards development, not towards politics, and when it is of measurable inputs and measurable outputs based around proven technology. In other words, when aid is specific, when it’s targeted, when it’s measurable, when it’s properly audited – when it’s really for development, not for Cold War purposes or to reward someone in the war against terror or something else, but actually for development, then aid works. Some examples: the eradication of smallpox, one of the great achievements of humankind. That wasn’t an eradication in the United States, that was an eradication in every country in the world, including the poorest of the poor in Africa; the control of African river blindness; the control of African Guinea worm which President Carter has championed. The control of polio – and it’s close to eradication – which Rotary International has championed; the rise of immunizations among children, which UNICEF in particular championed. All of these have the same characteristic. They are targeted towards specific outcomes, they are measurable, you can quantify them, you can measure how much goes in, how much comes out, you can track them and you can audit them. And they are development goals, they are not just waving one’s hands, they are specific targets.

Now another great goal like this was the Green Revolution itself, which was the spread of high-yield varieties of food crops throughout India and the rest of Asia in 1960s and 1970s. And the hero of that was the Rockefeller Foundation. I raise all of these examples because this is precisely the kind of program that we ought to have in Africa right now. We ought to be controlling malaria through targeted means by the year 2008, insuring that everybody in malaria regions is sleeping under a bed net, that everybody has access to the new generation of effective anti-malarial drugs, that every village has the capacity for local diagnostics and has trained community health workers to control malaria. This is absolutely achievable, but it requires U.S. government leadership together with other countries. We could help to promote a Green Revolution for Africa, which I believe is of fundamental importance for Africa to escape from this seemingly endless cycle of famine, disease and instability. Because we know what it would take to triple Africa’s food yields, which are a third of what other farmers in other parts of the world achieve. It requires improved seed, it requires fertilizer or other soil nutrient inputs, and it requires water management technologies. This is not high cost, but it is beyond the means of the poorest of the poor.

So these are the programs that work. When we put our mind to it, we achieve them. This is what is happening with anti-retrovirals also, although it started too late and it remains under-funded. It’s too small; we should be supporting the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria at a much larger level. But it’s why the president is having some success in that one area, which is the only aid initiative of this administration, the one on HIV/AIDS. Because it’s measurable, monitorable, targeted, and an actual development need. And so it’s working, and we should be doing that in many other areas as a practical approach that’s enabling Africa finally, once and for all, to escape from this seemingly endless cycle of extreme poverty. It could be accomplished if we would stop saying no, and roll up our sleeves and get to doing what we have committed to do.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Fran Quigley of the Indianapolis Recorder.

Fran Quigley: Hello, Professor Sachs.

Jeffrey Sachs: Hi.

Fran Quigley: You mentioned that the White House policies don’t really exist right now to put us in a position to ramp up to the 0.7 percent commitment. I know you have advised a lot of nations on economic policy, and then you realize this is currently a reflection of domestic concern. What kind of options do you think the Bush administration and Congress have domestically to quickly move up to meet the commitments we have made in the past years?

Jeffrey Sachs: I have been speaking all over the country in recent months, and also on a lot of talk shows, and [had] a lot of chance to sample opinion with Americans. I believe strongly that America is absolutely prepared, in many ways very eager, to help with these real life-saving and life-changing interventions right now. Americans tend to be very surprised to find out how little we do. It’s alarming to many, many Americans. And this is across the political spectrum, it is not a left-right division. It is religious groups, it’s groups across our society, ready to move. And then when Americans hear how practical it would be to control malaria; how practical it would be for Africa to have a Green Revolution; how readily children could have school meals; how readily we could enable impoverished African countries to drop user fees on schools and clinics, they’re ready to support it.

I said – at the White House during the first phase of the Bush administration, I advised on a $3 billion a year program on AIDS, and I remember for the first two years, I was told, well, that’s politically impossible. In the third year, in January 2003, the president announced a $3 billion AIDS program, and it’s turned out to be politically popular, as well as an effective program on the ground. It’s just a shame that it is the only thing the administration has done in this regard, and compared to our commitments and Africa’s needs, it’s a very small step. But it has not been a politically unpopular step, it’s been a politically popular step. So I don’t think that there is a great impasse. I wait to hear from the president. The speech about ending extreme poverty, about America’s lead in that, about our role in the world in fighting malaria, in promoting a Green Revolution and keeping children in school and promoting safe drinking water and using American technology. This is a winner politically. It’s a winner in foreign policy terms. It will increase our security markedly, and in the end it’s going to save, not only millions of lives, it’s going to save money for the United States because it’s going to save a lot of grief from insecurity in the planet and Americans would, I believe, rally to the president if he would lead.

Operator: Thank you. And your next question comes from Sara McGregor with the Embassy Newspaper in Canada.

Sara McGregor: Hi. Canada is one of the few countries that hasn’t yet committed to the timetable of 0.7 [percent], saying, you know, that we – the government can’t afford it. I’m just wondering, you were in Canada recently – what’s your sense if Canada actually doesn’t announce at the G-8 that it is going to commit to the 0.7 percent timetable, do you think there’s going to be a reputational problem or any sort of diplomatic rift because we’re not keeping up our part of the bargain?

Jeffrey Sachs: I think Canada’s friends in the world are utterly perplexed at Canada’s inaction right now. We find it completely inexplicable. First the 0.7 percent goal came from Lester Pearson, no less, in 1969. Paul Martin is in many ways a political protégé of that era and of Lester Pearson, and we know that he’s an internationalist as well. I also know that in Parliament there’s extremely strong support, all-party support, for 0.7 [percent]. Canada has the budgetary means to announce the timetable to 0.7 [percent]. So I have to say that we are dismayed and perplexed by the inaction, but I’m believing that Prime Minister Martin is going to come, through because I think that it would be one of the great disappointments for Canada and for himself to look back and to have missed this historic opportunity. Canada seeks to lead in the so-called L20, or G20. It seeks to have its voice heard in the world, but if it’s ducking its most basic issue for absolutely no understandable reason (because this could be accommodated financially, and after all, your own finance minister signed up to this recommendation as part of the Africa Commission) I believe that this will be a blight on Canada’s politics for a long time to come, so much so that I’m looking forward to Canada making the announcement about 0.7 [percent] before the summit.

Operator: Thank you. Your last question comes from Nancy Alexander with Citizens’ Network [on Essential Services].

Nancy Alexander: Thank you. In 2002, at the World Bank – at the U.S.’ leading, the World Bank adopted a private sector development strategy that makes it the purpose of the World Bank Group, which leads most of the other donors and creditors, to privatize health care, water, and education, and this has really caused havoc so that people are out in the streets of all these countries that we would like to help, demonstrating against the aid programs that are tied to their privatizing assets. Whether it’s in Malawi where the National Seed Agency is being sold to Monsanto, or in Ghana where the donors and creditors withdrew their money for water until Ghana agreed to privatize its water and the IMF set the rates. Or in Ethiopia where right now, farmers are really suffering because subsidies or inputs are being withdrawn and no private sector response is expected, just as it didn’t come about in Tanzania. So in terms of privatizing these basic services and the actions on the street, how do you square going ahead and doubling aid?

Jeffrey Sachs: Oh, I think that public health is a public issue. Malaria is not going to be controlled by the private sector; it’s going to be controlled as a public health intervention. It’s going to be controlled through a free, mass distribution of bed nets, just as we ensure a mass access to vaccines. And many of the other areas: children’s education, school meals, basic infrastructure, absolutely depend on government provision of basic services and an assurance of universal access to life – vital life needs. So what happens every time there is a call to privatize water without explaining to the poorest of the poor how they’re going to be able to survive, you do get great instability. The idea that health could be achieved with the access of the poorest of the poor through a market basis is absolutely bizarre when that view is actually held. I know of no African governments that believe it. They want to ensure universal access of the poorest of the poor.

Now in the United States, in control of malaria for example, we’ve had a failed policy for many years of trying to sell bed nets to people that have no money, and it’s been, in my view, a disastrously wrongheaded policy. During this whole time, the malaria burden has gone up, not gone down. Millions of children are dying on this administration’s watch for absolutely tragically inappropriate reasons of our neglect and our misguided policies of trying to sell things to people that have absolutely no money, and I think we have to get this right. Now, most of the world agrees that for the most basic needs, these cannot be sold to people that have no resources or the result is massive debt and I think that this is the right position. We need to continue to insist on it. Ironically we end up wasting the aid that we could otherwise provide in the case of malaria because we try to sell the nets. Then people don’t buy them. Then instead of spending our aid on getting nets to people, we actually spend our aid on advertising bed nets, and this is what was described as in the New York Times and Congressional hearings last week. It’s a shocking mistake and so when these basic needs are addressed, they have to be addressed in the recognition that people that have nothing, that are dying of their poverty, need help. They cannot find their way through market purchases. They’re just being left to die if we pretend that they can.

Nancy Alexander: Thank you.

Operator: At this point there are no further questions.

Jeffrey Sachs: I wonder if I could add one thing, I don’t know if anyone else is on the line but I think it’s interesting and important that not a single question came up about the Millennium Challenge Corporation. This was to be the administration’s big initiative. It was announced in March 2002 at the time of the Monterrey Summit. It was supposed to disperse $10 billion over the following three years. I don’t know whether it’s dispersed a penny yet, but I know that the one program in the first four years of the existence will be a program for Madagascar where the first-year disbursements are budgeted at $27 million. So this was a program that was announced in March 2002 and we have essentially done nothing, and this I think shows how urgent it is for the United States to do more than just talk and to do more than just wave away the entreaties of the world for the U.S. to live up to its commitments. This demonstrates the U.S. has an urgent role to play that it has not yet played.

Joanne Carter: Thanks. Thanks very much, Jeff, and just to let folks know that we have available from Jeff a brief analysis on U.S. foreign investment in Africa and also some background information on the needs of the Global Fund that we put together on opportunities for eliminating school fees, and school meals and access for other economic opportunity, so if anyone is interested in that, they will be posted to our website at results.org, and a transcript of this call should be available within about 24 hours, again from our office or, as soon as it is ready it will be posted on our website. And I believe there’s going to be, you will be able hear an audio version on the Earth Institute website.

Thanks very much everyone for joining us and thanks Jeff as well for your time.

Jeffrey Sachs: Thank you very much.

Joanne Carter: OK. It’s really important, thank you all. Bye.

Operator: Thank you.

☞ Three thoughts:

• ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’

• ‘No man is an island. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

• What if the people of Africa were white?

Tomorrow (or soon): Barack Obama’s Commencement Speech