Thursday, January 27, 2005

Clinton, Gates, Bono, Blair, Mbeki, Obasanjo - on stage together

World Economic Forum - Webcasts
you oughta hear this. 27 minutes, 15 of them rock. A weird mix of very clever people who care, sharing the stage talking about how to avoid incomprehensible suffering. At Davos, where the people who are supposed to rule earth have gathered.
Rock star Bono and Clinton are both amazing communicators.

Here's Bono telling about talking to Tom Lantos, an originally hungarian politician and democratic member of congres, who was put on the trains to a hungarian concentration camp. He told Bono of his experiences, of what it was like to deal with the holocaust as a child.:
"He told me that the thing that haunts him later on in his life more than anything was, as a child, the looks of the faces of the people who stood by and watched them be loaded on the trains – the passersby, just the people who stopped . They saw these families being put on trains and they didn’t ask where they where going.
Well, I asked him – and it was a very hard thing to do to someone who has had that experience – is there anything analogues to this [the global development and poverty issues] here?
And he said yes, there is, but here we know where the trains are going. We know that these people are going to die from lack of drugs that you can get in any corner shop, we know that people are going to die because of a mosquito bite when they shouldn’t.
And Bono replied to him that whenever he spoke about this, he would say that we, this time, are going to lie in front of the trains".

Nigeria's president Obasanjo points out very clearly how our security - the rich man's security - is directly dependent upon the poor man's security:
"You cannot really talk about security without talking in military terms or in the absence of violence and conflict terms without talking about security in terms of food, in terms of employment, in terms of education, in terms of health".

And here’s Bill Clinton, speaking about the lack of funding for combating disease:
"This is cheap. Let’s get real: The president just asked for 80 billion dollars for the Irak war – for a year. For a pittance of that we could double Americas international assistance. It’s cheap!".

And while we're at it. There's a one hour conversation with Bill Clinton, you cannot turn away:

World Economic Forum - Webcasts


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