William Jefferson Clinton
05/03/2004
Almost 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville noticed the enormous proclivity of Americans to organize themselves in private charitable groups to fulfill public needs. Today, there is a greater necessity for private philanthropy than ever before. People at higher levels of income have more money to give away, now that the number one domestic priority of the current government is to make sure that nobody ever touches the tax cut. For me, that is kind of nice. For eight years, the Republicans were so mean to Hillary and me, and now, as millionaires, we are the most important people in the world to them.
If the tax cuts become
permanent they will eventually be worth an average of $180,000 per year to every
American in the highest income category. Since we do not need this money and
should not have received it in the first place, we ought to give it all away. I
do not know if abolishing the estate tax would, as the philanthropy community
has always worried, lead to a dramatic reduction in charitable giving. But what
it does mean is that we have to make an appeal for philanthropy explicitly on
its own merits.
Four Challenges
When I got out of office I had to figure out what I wanted
to do, since there is no real job description for former presidents. I could not
play saxophone well enough to be a full-time musician, nor did I play golf well
enough to go on the Senior Tour. What I decided to do was to work on four issues
where I believed I could still have an impact.
The first area is the
economic empowerment of poor people and poor communities, at home and around the
world. The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation has established a great
Small Business Initiative in Harlem, which will now be replicated elsewhere in
New York City thanks to New York University’s Stern School of Business, and
eventually all across America. After the earthquakes in Gujarat, I helped to set
up the American India Foundation, and we have now raised several million dollars
to help build economic and education projects in Gujarat and throughout India
that will contribute to the long-term and sustainable development of the part of
the Indian economy that is not being swept up by the big high-tech
centers.
Second, I wanted to work on racial and religious reconciliation. To
this end, we have set up the Clinton Peace Center in Northern Ireland. I just
took two trips to the Middle East, trying to help overcome the massive misperceptions that the Muslim world and we have about each other. That is a
dicey area for me because you can have only one president and one foreign policy
at one time, but there are a lot of underlying issues that all people of
goodwill can address.
The third thing we work on at the Clinton Foundation
is education and expanding community service by young people, at home and around
the world. We have a Clinton Democracy Fellowship program in South Africa, and
we are sending Americans to devise a feasibility study on bringing kids from
Rwanda to America to attend school. If you do something that helps one child,
you never know what kind of an impact you are going to have.
The fourth area
of my foundation’s work is the fight against HIV/AIDS; I kind of fell into that.
When I left office, President Nelson Mandela and I agreed to help Sandy Thurman,
who ran the AIDS program in the White House in my Administration, with a group
called the International AIDS Trust. Our plan was simply to go around the world
and berate all the world leaders still in office to give more money to the fight
against AIDS. Then, in 2002, at the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona,
Dr. Denzil Douglas, a medical doctor who is the prime minister of St. Kitts and
Nevis and the head of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and the
Caribbean community’s efforts against AIDS, told me that what he would really
like me to do is help his country set up health care networks that would provide
HIV/AIDS care and treatment, and then figure out how to pay for the medicine to
keep the patients alive.
There are 40 million people who are HIV-positive in
the world, and only about 400,000 out of the 5.9 million people who need
medicine immediately are getting it. Part of the reason is that the
antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) are expensive. Let me give you an example. The
Bahamas used to pay $3,800 a year for generic medicine. When we found out they
were buying through two different agents and getting ripped off, we jumped in to
cut the price from $3,800 to just under $500. All of a sudden, they could treat
seven times as many people. We have now made agreements with five drug
companies—Aspen, Ranbaxy, Cipla, Hetero and Matrix—to sell ARVs to the
developing world for $139 per person, per year, which is less than half the
price countries in Africa were paying before, and a small fraction of what some
countries in the Caribbean are being charged.
Then, in order to bring down
the prices for the diagnostic tests that are used to show whether the medicine
is working, we had to make agreements with some of the leading medical
technology companies, including Roche, Bayer, Beckman Coulter and BD. We have
done that, and have lowered the price of these tests by up to 80 percent.
Believe in the Future
Here is where other American philanthropists come
in. All of these projects stand for something bigger. They say that Americans
realize that we live in a smaller and smaller world, and that we think our
differences make life interesting, but our common humanity matters more. It says
that, of course, we want to find Osama bin Laden and uproot all the terrorist
networks in the world but, in the end, we know that since we cannot possibly
kill, jail or occupy all of our actual and potential enemies, we have to take a
little time and effort to build a world with more friends and fewer terrorists.
When President Roosevelt dedicated his library a couple of months before the
outbreak of World War II, up at Hyde Park, he said, “In order to do this sort of
thing, you have to believe three things. You have to believe in the past. You
have to believe in the future. And you have to believe people can learn from the
past, to make a better future.” And that is essentially what I am asking others
to do.
For those of us who have benefited from a tax policy that I deeply
disagree with, but which seems like an entrenched part of our national life for
at least a while, we need to recognize that the inevitable price of that policy
is a bigger gap between the government and the common good. And philanthropy is
willing to step in and help fill the gap, at home and around the world.
Do
not be discouraged if you cannot change everything; you can do something. Very
often, the thing you do will change the life of a family, or of a community, in
a way that goes far beyond the particulars of your action. Somehow, we have to
get into the habit of acting like and convincing others that the world is too
small for most of the fights we kill people over and waste our lives on. We are
on the same side, and we are all just passing through.
Art by Michael Gibbs
 | Former President Bill Clinton runs the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation. This essay was excerpted from his speech to the Council on Foundations 2004 Family Foundation Conference. |