Tuesday October 30 1:05 PM ET Clinton Wants Broader Sharing in Globalization By Alister Doyle
GHENT, Belgium (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton urged an onslaught on everything from illiteracy to AIDS (news - web sites) in poor nations on Tuesday to create fairer globalization policies after the September 11 attacks on the United States.
``When it comes to globalization, we can no longer claim for ourselves what we deny to others,'' he told a one-day conference hosted by Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt on how to rein in unfettered capitalism. ``We all have to change.''
Verhofstadt, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said that he favored a new political world order to help counterbalance the effects of economic globalization, which many poor nations say are mainly helping the rich get richer.
Clinton told an audience of 400 people at Ghent University that the world should work on policies for education, health care, the environment and education to ensure a fairer shareout of ``burdens and benefits'' of globalization.
He said such policies would also help isolate militants like Saudi-born Osama bin Laden , blamed by the United States for masterminding the suicide hijacker attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in which 4,800 people died.
CASH FOR AIDS
Clinton said, for instance, that the world should agree to a U.N. call to provide $10 billion a year to fight AIDS, saying it was a fraction of the cost if the killer virus keeps spreading.
Verhofstadt said that: ``The events of September 11 even made fervent globalists aware of the need for a worldwide political order...Economic globalization needs a political counterpart.''
He reiterated a suggestion he made last month of opening up the G8 club of rich nations to regional continental organizations such as the EU, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), or Latin America's Mercosur.
At the end of the conference, Verhofstadt said he would propose that each EU each nation host talks on globalization during its six-month presidency, starting with Spain which takes over in January.
He said that free trade was a key to globalization. He said that Ghent had been the largest European city after Paris 700 years ago when it was a center of the clothmaking trade. ``The reason for this prosperity was free trade,'' he said.
But he added: ``There is a bit of Western hypocrisy in all the rhetoric about free trade, for we are not really opening our borders to trade...we are still very far from opening up the borders of richer countries to textiles and agricultural produce from the poorer countries of the world.''
Verhoftstadt called Tuesday's one-day conference after writing a letter last month in which he called for 'ethical globalization', muting free markets after anti-capitalist riots at a string of international summits.
An Italian protester was shot dead by police at a G8 summit in Genoa in July.
Other speakers denounced the spread of capitalism and what they said was a yawning gap between rich and poor.
Canada's Naomi Klein, author of the best-selling ``No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies,'' said globalization forced nations to comply with a strait-jacket capitalist standard, which she described as ``McRule'' in a reference to the McDonalds restaurant chain.
And U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson said it was stunning how much cash the United States was spending to combat anthrax when funds to fight AIDS in Africa were so scarce.