You can’t trust politicians. It doesn’t matter who makes a political speech. It’s all lies – and it applies to any rock star who wants to make a political speech as well.
It’s really very simple, Governor. When people are hungry they die. So spare me your politics and tell me what you need and how you’re going to get it to these people.
Actually, today I had to defend the Bush Administration in France again. They refuse to accept, because of their political ideology, that he has actually done more than any American President for Africa. But it’s empirically so.
But if somebody dies, if something happens to you, there is a normal process of depression, it is part of being human, and some people view it as a learning experience etc.
We’re looking at the singular condition of poverty. All the other individual problems spring from that condition… doesn’t matter if it’s death, aid, trade, AIDS, famine, instability, governance, corruption or war. All of that is poverty.
It’s like you asked me about the depression thing: you grope towards an understanding of whatever it is your going through, and it’s not personal, there are forces in play around you, and you seek to understand them and that way you can go on
Again, in an imaginary other universe, maybe we’d have done it. That’s the terrible truth that lies at the heart of each of us; that imponderable, ‘were I not Jewish, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, would I have gone down on the other side?’
I don’t think anyone sets out to malign poor people but certainly that’s what we do through organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
