John Edwards- Election '08: The Global Impact

Sen. John Edwards: "Smart Power: America and Global Poverty"

2008 Washington Conference, "Election '08: The Global Impact"

As prepared for delivery

It is an honor to be with you.

“Remember us.” Those are the words I hear over and over again.

Two years ago, I traveled to Uganda, leading an International Rescue Committee delegation. We first went to an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp outside Kitgum, just 30 miles from the Sudan Border. This camp was one of hundreds in the region created by the civil war that rages on in that country. The living conditions were about as bad as you can imagine: open sewage, little or no clean water, and never enough food. I sat under a tree with adults and children and they told me their stories. They told me about the horrors committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). I met a little girl under that tree. She sat with her mother because her father had been killed by the LRA. The mother said that her daughter had never smiled. I tried and almost got a smile from her.

We flew to another camp in Lira in northern Uganda. I spent time with a family who had adopted a young girl named Lilly. She was about the same age as my daughter, Emma Claire. But in her arms she carried a baby and another on her back. There was no life in her eyes.

At the Kira School, a 14-year old boy sang a song he’d written. And even though he had lived alone most of his life, there he was in that school singing about how happy he was to have a new life. “Remember us.” That’s what one of his teachers said as he took my hand before we left. There in the middle of such hardships was a boy, in school for probably the first time, having survived the unimaginable for your child or mine, singing and celebrating his new chance. “Remember us.” How can anyone forget?

This is the room where thinkers and leaders never forget because we know that some poverty comes from cruelty and some comes from neglect. And we’ve come together to do something about both. We’ve come together in the same collective spirit to make this a better world. We may differ greatly in how to get there. But in the end, we are all connected in our hope to live in a world at peace, a world where extreme poverty is non-existent and every child no matter which village or corner stoop they come from will feel connected to this ever changing world. But when more than half the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day, we have one of the greatest challenges in our life-time staring us in the face: ending extreme poverty. We cannot ignore it. We cannot look away. And we cannot continue on this path where preventable diseases kill thousands and thousands every day; where women are denied fundamental rights, and where extremists feed on this despair and turn young girls and boys into the terrorists of tomorrow. We have to change.

If we want to live in a moral and just world, a world at peace, then we need a sustained and constant global effort to end extreme poverty in our lifetime. This effort cannot be left only to the work of struggling governments and relief organizations who are trying to solve this problem with a band aid when they need miles and miles of gauze. There is one country in the world that can lead in this effort and that country is America. In little less than a year we will have a new president. Our new president will be faced with this choice: do we lead in this effort or do we continue on this same path with half-measures and reliance on just the defense pillar of power and ignore diplomacy and development. Our next president must understand that ending extreme poverty is more than a moral issue; it is a national security issue facing the United States.

We know that terrorists thrive in failed states torn apart by internal conflict and poverty. We know that in many African and Muslim countries today, extreme poverty and civil wars have gutted government educational systems. And a great portion of a generation is being educated in madrassas run by militant extremists rather than in public schools. As a result, thousands and thousands of young people who might once have aspired to be educated in America are being taught to hate America. We have to change this and here’s how.

First, our next president must launch a sweeping effort to support primary education in the developing world. More than 72 million young children have no school at all and are denied even a primary education to learn how to read and write. Women’s illiteracy rates are as high as 70 percent in more than 20 countries. This education deficit is what keeps the cycle of poverty spinning for generation after generation. Our next president can stop it in 2015 by creating a $2 billion Global Education Fund.

Second, our next president must support preventive health care in the developing world. Right now, more than 33 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS, including one million here in America. Eight thousand die every day. Our next president must extend the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and make sure that ideology never gets in the way of medicine again. With $50 billion invested over the next 5 years, our next president could lead the world and stop this pandemic in its path.

“Remember us” and we can provide $4 medicine so pregnant mothers no longer pass on HIV/AIDS to their children. “Remember us” and we can find the $5 dollars it costs to invest in mosquito netting to prevent malaria deaths the way Prime Minister Gordon Brown has proposed. “Remember us” and we can increase aid so that women don’t have a higher chance of dying in child birth. “Remember us” and we can do more so that 10 million children live and thrive instead of die of preventable disease. This is what we can do today, if we always remember and never forget.

Our next president must also increase our Foreign Assistance to $50 billion by 2012. This is not the time to do this the old way: write the check and never ask where the money went. When billions of lives are at stake, corruption will not be tolerated and we will demand results. We want to see results and that clean water wells have been dug and basic sanitation built. We want to see health clinics being built and children lining up to be vaccinated. We want to see safe and healthy housing being built so that the more than 1 billion people who live in deplorable conditions around the world can live in a better home. We want to see the new school buildings, the fee for uniforms banished from this earth, and we want to see that the development is working so that boys and girls in places like Uganda can sing about their new life.

Our next president has to embrace the Millennium Development Goals. We can cut the extreme poverty rate in half by 2015 if we make these the world’s goals. If our next president says to our partners in the G-8 match our assistance to assist the weakest states, build schools, develop markets, and provide healthcare so we can achieve these goals. “Remember us” is what the Millennium Goals say to us, too.

And our next president must expand economic initiatives like microfinance and micro-insurance can spark entrepreneurship. Once we end extreme poverty, there needs to be a place where people can get a micro-loan to start their own business and build wealth and stop the cycle of poverty. This is “smart power.” This is a national security strategy which recognizes the importance of diplomacy and development as well as defense. And having spent the last several years traveling all across the country, I can tell you that Americans agree with us that our country needs to show its moral values again to the world through increased support for development and diplomacy, and by leading a global effort to fight poverty.

This is what our next president must commit to. And on a January day, he will raise his right hand and recites the words written long ago. What billions of people in the forgotten corners of this earth will hear is, “I remember you.” There is only one man who has committed to all of the ideas I have talked about. There is only one man who will take history’s hand to meet the great challenge of ending extreme poverty in our life-time. There is only one man who will always remember and never forget. That man is Barack Obama.

What he understands is this—“Remember us” is what billions say around the world, including 37 million people in America.

“Remember us” echoes in my heart not just because of the trip to Uganda. But it’s what I heard from men and women living under a bridge in New Orleans. On the day I withdrew from the presidential campaign, I traveled back to the city. We were driving to the event and passed under a bridge where as many as 200 homeless Americans sleep every night. We stopped and we spoke to them.

Many told us stories about the storm. They talked about the water rising and how they lost everything except their lives. They didn’t want to leave the city because they believed that soon, things would be rebuilt and they would have a home once again. There was a minister there who comes every morning and feeds the homeless out of her own pocket. Her bank account is empty and she struggles to do what she knows is a very moral and just act. And as we left the bridge one woman said to me, "You won't forget us, will you? Promise me you won’t forget about us….you’ll remember us."

How can we forget the moral shame of 37 million people in our own country who are denied opportunity and economic justice every single day? When I talk about ending global poverty, I’m also talking about ending poverty in our country. This is the cause of my life because “Remember us” is said too often here.

The Two Americas I talk about—one for the very wealthy and then another for everybody else—are growing further and further apart. These inequities are pulling this country apart at its soul and the great divides have settled in.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in Appalachia who don’t have indoor plumbing. There are thousands more along the Southwest border suffering from preventable disease found in developing countries because they lack clean water. 12 million children went hungry in America. There are too many families sitting in our emergency rooms begging for health care. There are too many bright young people giving up on education because their school is crumbling. There are too many of our veterans sleeping under bridges and on grates. There are too many who are denied justice every single day in this land of opportunity.

And while these injustices go on, there’s another CEO who loses jobs but gets a multi-million dollar bonus; there’s another company that got a tax break for taking our jobs overseas; there’s another billion dollar contract for Halliburton; there’s another corporate farm overrunning the family farm; there’s another bank foreclosing on a home and sending grandparents to live in a tent city.

What these injustices show us with stark clarity is that a government of the few, by the few, for the few hurts the many. We don’t want to be divided any longer. We want to be one America, strong and united—one America that works for everybody. This is what “Half in Ten” is all about. It is about cutting our poverty rate in half over the next ten years and then ending it in 30 years.

This challenge we plan to meet is man-made. Poverty for those who work goes on because our leaders don’t act to change things immediately. Poverty for those who work didn’t just happen because of a jagged system of justice, but rather is the direct result of a straight and long-line of indifference that can be drawn from the last moment we made this a priority to the current occupant in our Oval Office.

When we forget that we all succeed together; that we all hope for fundamentally the same peace in life; that we are all capable of great wisdom in the middle of hardship, then history is able to draw that line of indifference a little longer. But when we remember that we are equal, fair, and have a deep sense of American generosity, we can take that pen away from history and replace that indifference with the shiny mark of justice for millions and millions of our own people.

“Remember us” is what we can all hear because there are practical steps that can be taken that would lift millions and millions of Americans out of poverty…right now.

To start, we can make sure that our workers earn enough by raising the minimum wage so that it’s a livable wage.

We can give those workers a tax break by tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for 4 million single workers to $1200 and by cutting the marriage penalty that still puts an extra tax on 3 million low-income working couples. We can extend the Child Tax Credits to actually help more children. Right now, they leave out families earning between $8,000 and $12,000 a year. Families earning more get the credit -- but the working families who need help the most do not. It makes no sense.

We can provide another 1 million housing vouchers so people aren’t forced to sleep under our bridges in New Orleans or on the streets of Washington, DC. By investing in vouchers instead building more housing projects, we can break up areas of concentrated poverty and break the cycle that can come from irresponsible actions. We can ensure that parents all across this country don't have to choose between the job they need and the heartache of leaving their child in unhealthy and possibly dangerous care by guaranteeing access to quality child care. Parents struggle with this every day and millions of kids are sent to places where there's no guidance, learning, and love to get them through the day. They say, “Remember us” too.

We can start to do something about the two and very unequal public school systems in this country. We can start by doing something about the more than 1,000 high schools which have turned into “dropout factories” where more than half of our students fail to graduate. We need to build second chance schools and invest in adult literacy classes. And we can provide more than 1 million Stepping Stone jobs so that people who want to work and learn a skill can.

These proposals are proven and effective. They could be enacted tomorrow if Congress and the president chose to, and for a fraction of the cost of the tax cuts for the wealthy. But a hard truth is that it’s been forty years since we’ve led a sustainable effort to fight for economic justice in this country. We had many successes and failures in the 1960’s, but we’ve forgotten the most important lesson: in order to end poverty you have to make it a priority. Well, if Moses was able to find the Promised Land after forty years in the desert, then certainly we can renew the cause after wandering our own.

I encourage all of you to get involved with Half In Ten. We need your help because the America I believe in—we believe in—is fair and just and no one who works should ever live in poverty.

On Sunday 60 Minutes re-aired a piece about an organization called Remote Area Medical. It was started to provide healthcare to people in developing countries. Right now, 60 percent of their work is in rural and urban centers in America—an organization started to help the poor in developing countries is now spending most of their time in America. Not over there, not in some other country thousands of miles away, but here. There was one woman who was there to have her eyes checked. She sat on the stairs after learning that the vision line had closed. She was living on a disability check and relied on her church for help. She said fighting back tears, “I’ve worked hard all of my life. I just hate to have to ask.”

She received care, but at the end we see hundreds of people turned away from the gate and walking away—unable to get care. “Remember us” is what they would have said if someone had been there to shake their hands. Next weekend Remote Area Medical will be in Wise, Virginia to hold another weekend-long clinic. It was at a similar event where I met a man named James Lowe. He went 50 years without being able to speak because of a cleft pallet until he got help.

Let us get to work for them and for all those who are turned away at the gates. Let this be the moment when people say here is where the great transformation began. This is when America and the world made fighting poverty a priority. This is what is possible. We can end poverty for those who work in this country. We can end extreme poverty around the world and build a more peaceful and secure world. We can do this by never forgetting.

“Remember us” are words that echo. They echo for all who are ready to listen and ready to get to work.