[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
[December 8, 1994]
[Pages 2160-2161]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 2160]]


Remarks on Signing the Uruguay Round Agreements Act
December 8, 1994

    Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. As usual, you did a 
generous and magnificent job of recognizing the contributions of all 
these people who made this day possible. You did, however, leave one 
very important person out. If you hadn't gone on television in that 
national debate on NAFTA and refuted the theory of the giant sucking 
sound--[laughter]--I'm not sure we would be here today. And we thank you 
for that.
    I thank the Members of Congress who are here and those who are not 
who have been acknowledged. I thank the members of our administration. I 
am so proud of all of them. I want to say a special word of thanks to 
Secretary Espy for helping us resolve these terribly difficult 
agricultural issues, without which we would not have been able to get 
this agreement. I thank Mickey Kantor and Rufus Yerxa and John Schmidt 
and John Emerson, all the people who worked on our team. I thank the 
business community, a bipartisan group, a remarkably diverse group, for 
standing up and being counted and working hard on this and our other 
trade initiatives.
    I thank the Vice President for what he said about trade. In the last 
2 years we've not only had NAFTA and GATT, but we have done our outreach 
to Asia through the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation group. We've had 
two meetings of the leaders of the APEC countries now. We have reached a 
new agreement with Japan which I believe is a very good one, and we 
continue our efforts there. And this evening I am leaving for the Summit 
of the Americas in Miami, which Mr. McLarty and others have done so much 
work on to make a success.
    Two days ago when I regrettably accepted his resignation, Secretary 
Bentsen said that history would show that the economic future of our 
children and grandchildren will be more secure because of the 
politically difficult decisions taken in the last 2 years. I appreciate 
his saying that. He had a lot to do with them, and he's earned a well-
deserved rest.
    But I want to emphasize again how important I think this trade issue 
is and why I think it's important for the people who are not on the 
program today, the people who are working in our factories and working 
in our offices and trying to raise their children and having a difficult 
time.
    When this administration and our economic team took office, we were 
rightly concerned about economic problems gripping every advanced 
country in the globe and certainly affecting the United States, the 
problems of low growth, high unemployment, stagnant incomes, declining 
benefits for working people, increasing insecurity. It seemed to me then 
and it seems to me now that we had to have a serious, disciplined 
strategy to reverse these trends; that if we continue to see increasing 
inequality and loss of opportunity, not among the working and the 
nonworking but among people who are all working full-time and longer 
workweeks today than they were working 20 years ago, that it is going to 
be very difficult for us to preserve the essence of what America is, the 
whole core of the American dream that people here who work hard and obey 
the law and play by the rules are going to be given a chance to do 
better, going to be given a chance to build a better world for their 
children.
    There were those, 2 years ago, and certainly there were those even 
in this debate on GATT, who believe the only way we can do that is to 
try to create a world that used to be. I wonder sometimes about that 
world that used to be. I remember what Will Rogers used to say: ``Don't 
tell me about the good old days. I lived through them. They never was.'' 
[Laughter] Well, that's somewhat true, but it is also true that for the 
last 10 or 15 years we have been struggling with longer workweeks, 
declining security, increasing inequality, and a lot of people who 
literally have worked harder for less.
    Some say the answer is to try to just hunker down within our 
borders. That is clearly not an option. No country can escape the global 
economy, and the greatest, largest, most powerful country in the world 
cannot escape the global economy. We must lead it in a direction that is 
consistent with our values, consistent with our interests, consistent 
with what is necessary to keep the American dream alive. That's really 
what GATT is all about.

[[Page 2161]]

    We've worked hard here, these folks and a lot of our friends from 
the Congress--and a lot of you in this room have helped us--to try to 
bring the deficit down, to try to reduce what I call yesterday's 
Government, to try to reduce destructive regulation and unleash the 
forces of creativity and enterprise, to try to increase investment in 
the education and training of our work force and in the technologies of 
the future. But no matter what we do, unless we can expand the markets 
for America's products and services, we will ultimately fail in our 
economic mission.
    Yes, it is true that one of the reasons for stagnant wages in the 
United States is intense competition in our own markets and in other 
markets from people who work for wages our folks couldn't live on. That 
will happen if there is never another trade agreement in the history of 
the United States. The reason NAFTA was important, the reason GATT's 
important, the reason our outreach in Asia is important, the reason this 
Summit of the Americas is phenomenally important, and why I wanted to be 
in this building today with the fine Secretary General we're very proud 
to see in this leadership position, is because America cannot and will 
not succeed and we will never restore stability to the lives of the 
working people of our country until we have more folks buying what we 
sell, until the work of our people is rewarded more. And that can only 
happen if we have a fair and increasingly open world trading system that 
allows the free market to work and rewards the most productive people in 
the world.
    There are not many of them here today, maybe, but the real victors 
in GATT are the autoworkers, the accountants, the engineers, the 
farmers, the communications workers, the people who will now have a 
chance to be more rewarded for their labors. Ultimately, that is what 
the purpose of any country is about. So I am very, very happy to be 
here.
    All of you know what's in this agreement. Let's never forget what's 
behind it, and let's never forget, too, that this is ultimately a 
victory for a couple of simple ideas, that people ought to be able to 
relate more and more and more every year now to people beyond their 
borders, to work in harmony. The end of the cold war imposes more than 
relief. It gives us a responsibility to finally take advantage of the 
interconnections that exist in the world today. It's a victory for the 
idea that America can lead in the 21st century, that we need not fear 
competition, that we want our neighbors to do better than they have been 
doing, and when they do better, we will do better--old-fashioned, simple 
ideas.
    We must never run away from the world. We must go into the 21st 
century convinced that the only way to preserve the American dream is to 
be involved with the rest of the world, to be willing to compete, to be 
determined to win, to be serious about overcoming our problems, but to 
realize that the only way you can ever do it is to see the opportunities 
that are plainly there.
    I want to thank every Republican and every Democrat here. I thank my 
predecessors for the work they did on this treaty. I thank, especially, 
Presidents Carter, Ford, and Bush for their lobbying here for the votes 
we needed at the last minute. But most of all, I am very pleased to see 
in recent days evidence in public opinion surveys that for the first 
time in history, the American people see trade as more of an opportunity 
than a threat. That is, of course, the ultimately critical factor, 
because we all serve at the sufferance of the people. They have to 
believe in themselves and their future and in an open world. And I think 
that all of you who fought these battles, and especially this last 
debate on GATT, played a major role in persuading the American people 
that the future is bright, that our best days are ahead, and that we are 
going forward with confidence. That ultimately may be the most important 
significance of the bill I am now proud to sign.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 9:30 a.m. at the Organization of American 
States Building. In his remarks, he referred to Cesar Juairia, Secretary 
General, Organization of American States. H.R. 5110, approved December 
8, was assigned Public Law No. 103-465. The proclamation of December 23 
implementing the Uruguay Round Agreements and the related memorandum of 
December 23 on acceptance of the World Trade Organization Agreement are 
listed in Appendix D at the end of this volume.