Former President Bill Clinton talked about the value of a getting a college education, having an understanding of how to implement policy and raising the positives that come from interdependence during a packed talk at SEFCU Arena at the University of Albany.
During the nearly hour-and-a-half-long session on Wednesday, March 2, the 42nd president discussed what he achieved as president and what he is doing with his global initiative. Clinton recalled asking university officials what exactly they wanted him to talk about and being told to discuss higher education, job creation and the upstate New York economy.
And I said, well if you want to talk about the upstate economy, you invited the wrong member of my family, he joked. `You should have had Hillary come.`
United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent a lot of time in upstate New York while she was a junior senator, Clinton said. With the turmoil occurring over in the Middle East, she wished she could have made a trip to the Capital Region instead of her required duties, Clinton said.
`She said, ‘You know, I love my job, but I’m really jealous of you. I have to go to Switzerland and talk about Libya and you get to go to Albany,’` Clinton recalled.
On a more serious note, Clinton tried to drive home the message that knowledge is power and the only way to get anywhere is to answer the question of `how` when looking to change something.
`You can spend all the money you want, but if you can’t answer the ‘how’ question, you’re not going to get anywhere,` he said.
Clinton said he is bothered by a lot of the cable network television shows because they all lack factual information.
Most of them are also void of the right framework to view things. Clinton said, since it is hard to get the right answers from the wrong questions.
`The right answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer,` he said. `So I think everyone needs a certain basic understanding of the world.`
His framework is this:
Where are we?
Where do we want to go?
How do we get there?
What steps should be taken, and who should take them?
While Clinton said not everyone has to agree with his particular framework, he said everyone should at least have one. So he broke his down, starting with, where are we?
The world is in the most interdependent age, Clinton said. And while wealthier countries were more trade independent during the period before World War I, there wasn’t nearly as much communication between countries in terms of exchanging goods, sharing information or spreading various cultural ideas.
It is interesting that something can happen on the opposite side of the world and still affect the United States, Clinton said, quoting an article by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
The column said that the election of President Barack Obama had a great influence on the uprising of President Muhammad Hosni Sayyid, since seeing a man with the middle name Hussein and darker skin being elected president gave others in the Middle East hope that they can have a different future.
Clinton then moved onto the next step, where do we want to go? His answer is to build a world on shared opportunities and responsibilities, but the way to actually do that is creating a world where instead of producing zero sum gains, we increase the positive outcomes
`I try to keep it fact based,` he said when asking himself the question if the answer to an issue raises the positives of interdependence. `OK, if that’s where we want to go, how do we propose to get there?`
When it came to the question of who is supposed to act on these changes, he said that he has always been skeptical of the American government. This comes from past abuses of human rights. Clinton also said that our system of government has come under attack as private interests groups have hijacked democracy.
So who can do it? He suggested non-governmental groups are making a large impact on the world and are giving the opportunity to anyone to help change the direction of their countries.
`There are great things that non-governmental groups can do like mine,` he said. `We try to answer the how question and turn good intentions into policy changes.`
Clinton also focused on the vast differences between First World problems and Third World problems, proclaiming that if the power had gone out in the SEFCU Arena, the air conditioning had turned off and the microphone shut off, most of the people in the room would be afraid. In poorer countries, most of the people living there would have been happy just to have those luxuries in the first place.
Even before the earthquake in Haiti, where Clinton was working with his Clinton Global Initiative, 75 percent of there were people living on less than $2 a day.
`In the really poor places, what they need are the systems that got you from birth into these chairs tonight,` he said, adding that he understood some of the people in the audience have had struggles in their lives. `But at critical junctures along the way you had access to clean water, access to sanitation and a roof over your head and you would never starve or die of a disease.`
At the end of the evening, Clinton was asked questions that were submitted by students from the University of Albany. One wanted to know how the college could play a role in the economic growth.
He praised the university’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering as a program that could pave the way for the rest of the state.
`If you could paint the picture of what upstate New York will look like in 10 years, what does it look like now and what do you have to do?` he said. `You’re very well suited to do that.`
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