I'd
like to begin with my conclusion: The
greatest challenge of our times is to get our two
great countries with such different histories and
cultures, the US and China, to work together as allies
rather than to be protagonists and adversaries.
For even if we avoid war -- which these days can be
political, economic, covert, and cyber, as well as
military -- we have to start using our combined
talents and energies for positive purposes, not for
conflict preparations. We can no longer afford
to squander our resources preparing for conflict with
each other. Rather we have to use everything we
have to jointly and collaboratively fight the grave
problems that truly threaten all of us human beings on
this small endangered planet.
The geo-political trajectory our two great countries are
on will sooner or later lead to confrontation which can
take various forms. We are already in the early
stages of such hostilities. If you
don't think this is the case I urge you to simply read
some of the public statements made by both Chinese and
American military leaders in the last year and to
imagine the kinds of war games they are playing in
private. And if you need a little help
imaging the war games look no further than the very
popular American TV program 24. In the
most recent weekly episodes in fact, China, for the
first time, sends an aircraft carrier into the
Mediterranean. The Americans then sink it
killing everyone. The Chinese in response
decide to attack the largest American military base in
the Pacific, that's Okinawa Japan. But then, in a
twist, the Americans at the last minute convince the
Chinese that their aircraft carrier was sunk by mistake
because of a false attack order caused by a covert
Russian plot to get the US and China to go to war with
each other!
Just a few other historical reminders about how when
nations prepare for war and start threatening and
sanctioning each other they risk a war igniting for
unexpected reasons. This month is the 100th
anniversary of the start of World War I. No one
then imagined an assassination in the Balkans would lead
to a multi-year war killing 17 million people. No
one then imagined that the way this War to End all
Wars would end, as it was known then, would
set the stage for World War II and all the wars
that have taken place in the Middle East since the 1918
Paris Peace Conference, now known
as the PEACE TO END ALL PEACE.
Even in recent years think 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Balkans,
Palestine..and now Ukraine, and not that long ago Korea
and Vietnam, and now the military build-up being
undertaken by both of our countries in the Pacific.
And so our overall task as Chinese and Americans must be
to change this trajectory from fear and huge
expenditures for confrontation preparations to
understanding, appreciation, and cooperation. Only
then can we responsibly deal with the real dangers all
of us should be collectively, synergistically and
urgently confronting.
I know that most of you are business people concentrating
on building your own companies. And we all know how
time-consuming and difficult that is these days even for
the most talented and well-educated and connected among
us.
But even as you concentrate on your own lives and
businesses, at the same time we are all citizens of the
two most important countries as well as citizens of the
now globalized world. And we just happen to be alive
at this sui generis, unprecedented, unique time in
human history. Our world is literally
pregnant right now with immense dangers, as well as with
great opportunities, as never before.
I've come from Washington DC, modern-day Rome, to be with
you today. And I want to sincerely thank the
organizers for inviting me and making this special event
possible for all of us.
I went to law school here at NYU and spent 4 years
representing the International Student Movement at
the United Nations up the street. I didn't pursue
business, or law, but rather became a journalist, traveled
to many countries on some 200 international trips, making
new friends with people all over the world and learning
from them in many intense exchanges how they see the world
so differently. Along the way I've gotten a little
older than many of you, so today I feel the most valuable
thing I can do, in the few minutes we have together, is to
share with you my conclusions, my fears, as well as my
hopes. I am independent, not
representing any government or business interest, and thus
free to say what I really think and believe. Hoping
to make this short time we have together worthwhile for
you I will be blunt, not diplomatic, about what's going on
in our world and what we should all be extremely concerned
about.
The bottom line is that never before in human history have
we all collectively faced such global and urgent
dangers. The list includes:
- climate change is now our mutual, universal,
great enemy
- we must work together to end poverty, disease,
and war
- we must work together to insure basic food and
water for all
- we have to use science and technology to
advance all of human society while avoiding using
these same means to destroy ourselves.
- we have to prevent the arms race from going
into space and prevent war itself from being sanitized
by robots and drones who will fight proxy wars in our
names but killing others rather than ourselves.
The bottom line is that our two
countries -- China and the U.S. -- now have the
future and fate of humanity in their hands. And
well-educated privileged people like us have the future
and fate of our countries in our hands.
This is the huge challenge of our lifetime. It just
happens we are alive at what may well be the turning point
for human beings planet earth. The generations ahead
of us, tragically, have not solved our great problems, but
rather have brought them about. Now in the
21st century all of us wherever we were born, whatever
countries we are citizens of, are inter-connected with
each other daily as never before, in ways even our parents
just a few years ago could hardly imagine.
I was born and raised American and Jewish, in Minnesota,
and like each of you I have my own evolutionary
story. In my case I became, in my own mind and heart
that is, politically a citizen of the world and
religiously an existential humanist. These are
not just words, I will explain. After law school
when I went to graduate school at Princeton to study
international affairs, I was awed to find myself walking
the same paths as did Albert Einstein, the Man of the
Century, in his final years. For me it wasn't
Einstein's theories of space and relativity that inspired
me, but rather his succinct summary about the task of life
and the value of human beings. Please let me share
what he said with you:
"A human being is part of a
whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited
in time and space. He experiences himself, his
thoughts and feelings, as something separated from
the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his
consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison
for us, restricting us to our personal desires and
to affection for a few persons nearest us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening our circles of compassion to
embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty... The true value of a
human being is determined by the measure and the
sense in which they have obtained liberation from
the self. We will require a substantially new
manner of thinking if humanity
is to survive."
Einstein wrote
these powerful words as World War II was
approaching and with his awareness that
unprecedented atomic and other scientific
breakthroughs were looming.
Today, as we go about our individual lives and
businesses and relationships, we must
constantly be aware that humanity itself is
now at risk in our time. The threat of
global nuclear war remains real, even if we
don't focus on it as we did years ago.
The threat of global warming that already has
the potential to destroy human civilization is
real -- even the U.N. Panel of Scientists said
specifically this in their unprecedented
report earlier this year.
The threat of pandemic disease, global hunger,
worldwide economic catastrophe -- these are
all very real, not science fiction, not
something for future or just past
generations. And the threats resulting
from human hatreds -- fostered by terrible
injustices and inequalities and horribly
unjust wars of conquest and occupation like
today in Palestine -- mean that there will be
new generations and more non-state actors
seeking both liberation and revenge. And
they may turn to bio, chemical, dirty nukes,
and other weapons they can develop in addition
to becoming suicide bombers.
And so the overriding challenge for all of us
is indeed to promote serious "new ways of
thinking", and of acting, now -- in our
own lives, in the policies we advocate for our
countries, in what we must demand from our
international and transnational institutions
which includes our multinational corporations
and global organizations.
As we try to pursue the urgently needed "new
ways of thinking" we should all be
facing some basic facts that all too often are
glossed over or avoided.
Right now in both of our great countries the
political and economic systems are in urgent
need of basic structural reform.
China has one controlling establishment party,
mine has two wings of what is also a
controlling establishment party.
In both of our countries self-serving
rich and powerful elites have control and all
too often work primarily to benefit themselves
and those few nearest to them (think
Einstein). I'm no expert about China so
I'll only say that we all know there are very
basic issues of human rights, poverty,
corruption, and repression of free thought and
association that China must deal
with. Like the extremely serious
smog pollution in China there is also basic
values pollution that has not been handled
very well so far. This said I'll
primarily focus on my own country.
First of all some of us Americans have avoided
drinking the jingoistic nationalistic
militaristic cool-aide. We know
our country is not a democracy but rather a
kind of corporate oligarchy now in
decline. We
also know that while we may look good to many in
comparison to other countries, things are not
really so good for Americans if you take into
consideration all of the advantages we have had
for so long, our potentials versus our realities,
and how far we have strayed from our own basic
principles, values, and aspirations.
In my country the oligarchs using their huge sums of
money not only control the means of production and
investment, they have more and more in recent years
used their financial power to take control of the
means of governance and legislation as well as the
means of information. We have a cleverly
created deceptive veneer of democracy that is
purposefully designed in fact to mask these
realities.
In my country some 400 families have the combined
wealth of about half of our entire citizenry...that's
400 families versus 150 million people! In
my country the super-rich mini-class has figured out
how to use their money to buy and control the
political system in order to propagate the laws and
regulations that make them even richer and more
controlling! It has also figured out how to buy
up and control the so-called "Main Stream Media" enabling
them to manipulate public opinion and counter any and
all who dare challenge their exploitation and fiscal
crimes. In more recent years they have also
greatly infected our major think-tanks and our best
educational institutions so that professors fear to
speak up and students get short-changed in what they
learn and discuss among themselves at a formative time
in their own lives.
In America we desperately need to change our campaign
finance system because it's very purpose is to legalize
the social, political, and financial corruption all around
us. We also need to create a firewall between
those who have economic power and those who control
government, media, and education. These
concerns about how to most fairly govern
society go back to Plato and Socrates...but now in
the 21st century we are running out of time. We
don't need philosopher kings. We do need educated,
worldly, independent, principled, socially-concerned,
free-thinking men and women who understand why
Einstein said what he did.
Many of you may not realize that in the US today we
also have very serious and growing social and
economic problems. The wealth divide is greater than
at any time since the Depression. Belief in
government institutions -- in Congress, in the White
House, and in the Courts -- has never been
lower. 1 in 5 of our families are near poverty
living on food-stamps and welfare. Even in
Washington DC one in five children are growing up in
poverty, in major parts of the city some 40% of
students do not graduate high school, and about 1 in
15 are HIV infected. In some sections of our
big cities gang killings are daily occurrences and our
for-profit prisons are full of small-time
non-violent petty drug offenders. We have by far the
greatest percentage of our population in prison, mostly
the poor and black.
Yet, in just recent years, even with such problems here at
home, my country has invaded and destroyed other
countries in the Middle East at a cost of millions of
lives, many more millions of refugees, and trillions of
dollars, most of which we have borrowed from China and
others to feed our dangerous military-industrial complex
even at the expense of greatly weakening our financial
infrastructure and future.
Just in recent years in fact my country has helped foment
civil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya,
Bahrain, Sudan, Yemen and most recently Ukraine.
Egypt is now ruled by a terribly repressive military Junta
— also US trained and armed. Pakistan is on the
brink filled with anti-U.S. hatred. Saudi Arabia,
UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan — all more bastions of
severe repression and all with giant US military and
clandestine CIA bases in addition to American
"contractors" and NGOs — are collectively bulking up
buying more than $100 billion in arms from the same US
military-industrial complex.
Furthermore, I'll say something many Americans
believe but don't want to talk about even with each
other. The actions undertaken by many
top US government officials clearly make them
international war criminals by the standards I learned in
law school right here at NYU.
And so the starting bottom line is that in both of our
countries major political, social, and economic reforms
are urgently needed always keeping in mind that the
purpose of government should be to benefit society as a
whole not to further enrich the already privileged and
empowered.
That said there is another very major change that is
urgently needed. We have to stop letting ourselves
be manipulated by the fear-mongers, the war-profiteerers,
as well as the super nationalists and ideological zealots
among us. In this regard I urge all of you to
watch the amazing BBC documentary, THE POWER OF
NIGHTMARES, which, by the way, even though it deals
with 9/11 and major issues of our day, no American network
has been willing to broadcast.
The great dilemma of course is we cannot count on those
who currently have accumulated self-serving
economic, political and media power to make the
changes that will limit and in fact end their
special privileges. For that to
happen we who are journalists and academics, as well as
business people, somehow working much more together than
we have so far, have to constantly expose the corruption
and hold those in power accountable.
As another of my mentors, this one I knew personally, the
great journalist I.F. Stone said: "The purpose of journalism is to
comfort the afflicted" -- that is to tell
the stories of the powerless, the helpless, and what needs
to be changed -- and he added, "TO
AFFLICT THE COMFORTABLE" -- that is to
hold those in power accountable for their failures, their
corruption, their self-enriching narcissistic ways.
Thus we who are the privileged, the educated, the first
globalized generation -- we who have the luxury to attend
such conferences as this and who are so fortunate to have
each other as friends and colleagues -- we have huge
responsibilities and challenges ahead of us all. We
must stop finding excuses and start looking for new,
creative, impacting ways to engage with each
other. We should relish the opportunity to
work together to greatly improve the way our world is
governed and how our critical talents, energies, and
resources are used.
This is how we can at least have a fighting chance of
bringing about Einstein's "New Manner of Thinking"
and being able to truly work together for the rest of our
lives to urgently solve the global human problems that now bedevil
our world.