Obama on the Record: Strasbourg Town Hall

Obama on the Record: Strasbourg Town Hall


If we create the right framework so that what happened in the banking system can’t happen again, then globalization can be good for everybody and lift everybody’s living standards up. And by the way, history has shown us that we are most vulnerable to war and conflict when people are desperate economically. And nobody knows that history more than Europe.

So that would be number one. Number two is I would like to be able to say that as a consequence of my work, that we drastically lessened the threat of not only terrorism but also nuclear terrorism. And we can’t reduce the threat of a nuclear weapon going off unless those who possess the most nuclear weapons — the United States and Russia — take serious steps to actually reduce our stockpiles.

So we are going to — (applause) — so we want to pursue that vigorously in the years ahead. And I had a excellent meeting with President Medvedev of Russia to get started that process of reducing our nuclear stockpiles, which will then give us greater moral authority to say to Iran, don’t develop a nuclear weapon; to say to North Korea, don’t proliferate nuclear weapons.

In my own country, what I think is very important is that we finally get a health care system that is reliable and cost-effective. That’s something that — (applause) — you know, that’s a social safety net that exits in almost all of Europe that doesn’t exist in the United States. You have millions of people who work hard every single day, but if they get sick they could potentially lose everything. And in a country as wealthy as ours, that’s not acceptable to me.

So we are going to work hard to make sure that we have a health care system that won’t be identical to what you have in Europe — each country has its own traditions and approaches — but that provides people quality, affordable, accessible health care.

And then, I would like to see us in the United States take the lead on a new approach to energy — because none of the developed countries are going to be able to sustain their growth if we don’t start using energy differently, and the world cannot survive all countries using energy in the same ways that we use it.

I was meeting with the Indian Prime Minister yesterday after the summit — a very good and wise man, Prime Minister Singh — and he was talking about how Indian growth rates have gone up 9 percent every year. They need to grow at that pace in order to bring hundreds of millions of people in their country out of abject poverty, desperate poverty. They have to grow at a rapid pace.


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