Ben Affleck Speaks Out for Poor

Sept. 16, 2007 — -- The Oscar winner for "Good Will Hunting" is working with One Vote '08, urging presidential candidates from both parties to make global poverty a priority.

Affleck: I think people fundamentally, in America, recognize the basic core decency of, you know, when someone else is in terrible pain and suffering, reaching out a hand. When you have a billion people living on less than a dollar a day, you know that the right thing to do, the American thing to do, is lend a hand.

You know Franklin Roosevelt said, when he was talking about England being under attack before we got into the second World War, "When your neighbor's house is on fire, the least you can do is lend them a hose."

And as the world gets smaller and more interconnected, we need to be extremely smart and mindful about how the rest of the world is constructed and put together. And when we have failed states, when we have extreme poverty and we have terrible countries ravaged by disease, we have an unstable world. And an unstable world is terribly dangerous for us here in this country.

And ultimately dangers that are on faraway shores make their way to our shores. And that's not safe for us and it's not safe for our children. And what this organization wants to do is to make it safe for us and for our children.