Everybody needs to understand that policies are going to change to make it unprofitable if you wreck the planet, those companies that continue exploring and developing fossil fuel resources for which there is no safe use are going to pay a very heavy cost for that.

White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues.

Tax the rich. End the wars. Break the power of lobbies in Washington. These are the demands of Occupy Wall Street. They are very important. The US corporations dominate Washington. The big oil companies, Wall Street banks and the military-industrial complex - they rule this country and their influence and power has to be broken.

Deep down, if we really accept that their lives - African lives - are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. Its an uncomfortable truth.

Business often does a good job supporting communities: the arts, universities, and scientific enterprises... But that philosophy has rarely reached poor countries. Even businesses that are enlightened in their home bases see Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia as places to exploit natural resources or use cheap labor.

We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy.

The essence of Africa's crisis is fundamentally its extreme poverty and therefore its inability to mobilize out of its own resources even the barest of minimum resources to address any of the public health crises that Africa faces.