Speech: Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative Event

President Clinton praises the work and dedication of his friend Frank Giustra, highlighting his commitment to issues as a source of inspiration. He urges all to come together and effectively address the growing inequality in the world, a move that will also alleviate a host of other crucial problems.

Full Text:

Thank you very much. Frank, I'm grateful for the introduction and profoundly grateful for the opportunity to work with you. Premier McGuinty, thank you for being here. I'd like to thank all the entertainers who've already been introduced and all the people who work with the initiative, especially my good friend, Eric Nonacs, whom I hated to lose. But he's gained a great job. I'd like to thank the leader of the Inter-American Development Bank, Luis Moreno, and all our friends from Latin America who are here. And all of you from Canada who have helped me to do the work I try to do around the world.

A lot of our entertainers are also involved in remarkable ways in their own work. Elton John and I work together to try to save people from AIDS, and I'm very grateful for that. Shakira, as you will hear in a moment, is one of our partners in Colombia. And Wyclef Jean probably could be elected President of Haiti unanimously. He has been after me to do more for his native land for as long as I can remember. We both love it very much. I thank Norah Jones, Burton Cummings, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Kelly Preston. Thank you for being here.

My longtime friend, Robin Williams, is the funniest person I ever met, except he plays himself. He's just as funny in private as he is in public. Eugene Levy said I made him feel uncomfortable by making him feel comfortable. All I told him was that I liked Best In Show. I thought it was one of the funniest movies I ever saw in my life. I think he thought it odd that a politician would go for a dog show, but then I explained that I spent my career in one. I also want to thank my friend Morgan Freeman for narrating this video. He is a remarkable man, and the power of his voice is more than just biological; he believes the things he was saying.

Most of all, I want to again thank the Canadians who have helped us, and all of you in the mining community who have helped us. I would be remiss if I did not say a word of thanks to our founding investors: Frank, Carlos Slim, and Lukas Lundin, who has had a very unfortunate illness, but is getting better. I want him to know that we're all pulling for him. Anybody who can ride a motorcycle across the world can get over an infection, and he will do it.

I really can't say enough about Frank Giustra. I got a call one day from a mutual friend of ours who said, "There's this guy in Vancouver who is probably interested in what you're trying to do, and you probably ought to meet him." I never met Frank when I was President. I was out here wandering the world doing my work, doing my business, and then all of a sudden there he was. Then we were going around the world looking at our AIDS work. Before I knew it, he was one of our three biggest contributors, including people who had been giving me money for four or five years. And then I'd look around and I could actually count the number of children who were alive in the world because of the money he had given. The man didn't know me; he had no reason in the world to support what I was doing. Then he comes to me with this idea. I want to make it clear to you. I am here because I believe in this initiative, but I had nothing to do with it. This is Frank Giustra's idea -- his idea, his $100 million, and his commitment to invest half his income for the rest of his life in this work. This is an amazing, astonishing commitment. But I do believe, as I said and Frank mentioned in my book, that if you have it and you give it away in a way that makes you feel smart instead of dumb, and you can actually see that people are alive, and children are empowered, and people are enriched, it does make you happier.

I try never to do anything that doesn't have a positive return. You saw on the screen there that we now have over 1.2 million people staying alive on our AIDS medicine. It's the least expensive in the world, and we sell it in over 71 countries, but the companies that give me this medicine make money. I insist that they do. They just make money in a different way: instead of making a higher margin on a lower volume, they make money selling a bigger volume with a lower margin, and they keep more people alive. It enables us to do this work for a literal fraction of what it costs governments to do it. That's what we want to do when we work in Mexico and Peru and Colombia, and eventually in Africa and East Asia and all the places that mining goes on.

Frank is being a little bit too modest. When we first discussed this idea he said, "Look this is readymade for you. This is like your economic initiatives, like your AIDS initiatives, like your health care initiatives. Miners are going to make a lot of money in the next 50 years, because the world's population is projected to grow from 6.5 to 9 billion. So people will have to take more stuff out of the ground. The price of coffee may go up and down, who knows if we'll ever figure out how to keep from burning up the planet, the price of oil may go up and down, but people in mining are going to have an increasing demand for their products. So we need to be better citizens, and almost everybody I know who does this work hates it if they have to close mines and move away when the mines play out. Then the area has no way to make a living if there's not a sustainable commitment to recover the land and find a different long range opportunity for the people who live there."

So here I was taking all these incredible contributions from Frank to try to keep the things that I was doing going: save people's lives and change the future for people. And he laid down quite a challenge for me. I don't want to minimize the difficulty of what we're trying to do, nor do I want to minimize its importance, nor my absolute conviction that if we get enough help and we work hard enough and smart enough, we can do it.

The world is bedeviled by three great crises: persistent and growing inequality in economic opportunity, education, and health care; the insecurity caused by our interdependence, making us all vulnerable to terror, to weapons of mass destruction, to the spread of dangerous materials, to global epidemics; and the unsustainability of our current developmental course because of the threat of global warming, which is real and unassailable. Ironically, addressing the problem of inequality in the most intelligent way will help us to deal with the other two crises. It will lessen the resentments and hatreds and divisions that fuel so much of the violence and destruction in the world. If we have a truly sustainable economic process, it will reduce the threat of climate change, and the only way we will ever save this planet is by proving that it's good economics to do so.

None of this would be possible without the idea Frank had and the initial gifts that were made first by our three largest donors and then by so many more of you. Tonight you will hear some announcements about the things we are doing. These are our test runs. And I, too, want to thank Eric Nonacs for what he's done. I hated when he left me in Harlem, but this is important.

I just want you to understand that we're not afraid to make a mistake, but if you contribute to this we will not waste your money if we can possibly help it. If we find that we're doing something that doesn't work, we will stop it immediately and do something else. The thing that has enabled our previous efforts to succeed is being entrepreneurial and smart about it, and helping to build systems that will get predictable results.

I find all over the world today that intelligence is equally distributed. Energy and hard work are equally distributed. What are not equally distributed are investments and organizations that take good intentions and turn them into positive results. If you just look at this dinner tonight, compare where we are with where we're working and where your contributions will work. Look at the table, look at the room, look at what you take for granted. You don't have a doubt in the world that you can drink the water on your table and it'll be safe and better for you than most of the other things we're drinking tonight. You would be shocked if the temperature controls in this room didn't work. Stunned if my microphone went off and you couldn't hear a word I was saying. You take things like clean water, stable power, and comfortable conditions for granted. The people we're trying to help, most of them can't take any of those things for granted. Insofar as we can give them systems which form a connection between the efforts they make, the dreams in their hearts, the power in their brains, and the results they achieve, they will plot their own course, and the whole world will be better off.

We cannot continue to grow in a healthy, wholesome way if the world grows more unequal, more insecure, and more unsustainable. What we're trying to do here in little pieces of the earth, where miners have to do their work, is to leave a legacy where people can say they're better off, their children have a brighter future, and things are coming together instead of being driven apart. This is a worthy thing for you to support.

Can I promise you that we will succeed in this rather audacious endeavor? I can't. Do I think we will? Absolutely. I am also absolutely positive that along the way a lot of good things will happen that have intrinsic merit. None of this, I will say again, would have been possible if Frank Giustra didn't have a remarkable combination of caring and modesty of vision and energy and iron determination and lately a little rhinoceros attitude to take the incoming fire because his partner was inadvertently dragged back into American politics. I love this guy, and you should too.

Thank you and God bless you.