    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [February 22, 1996]
    [Pages 309-314]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the White House Conference on Empowerment Zones
    February 22, 1996

        Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President, Hannah and Vinnie and the
    Congressmen, the mayors, county officials, and others here. Can you
    believe the Vice President asked me in front of all of you about this
    trade deal? [Laughter] I figured that the--you know, in this league
    there's only two teams. [Laughter] Nobody on their team I want to trade
    him for. [Laughter]

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    I'm a lot more worried about the other team treating him like a free
    agent, making him an offer he can't refuse. [Laughter]
        I want to say to Vinnie Johnson, all of us saw him play on
    television with Detroit, but I was in my very first term as Governor of
    Arkansas when he was a star at Baylor. So I want to say here in front of
    all of you, I forgive him for all the points he scored against my team--
    [laughter]--when I was trying to succeed at everything, in every
    endeavor. I thank him, I thank Hannah for their stunning examples. I
    want to thank the Vice President and Secretary Cisneros and Assistant
    Secretary Cuomo and Secretary Glickman and all the people in our other
    departments who have worked to make this communityempowerment effort a
    success.
        I had believed in this concept long before I became President, long
    before I ran for President. But to make it work in the way that it has
    worked required an incredible amount of planning and discipline and
    followup and effort. And I must say, I have been pleased beyond my
    wildest dreams not only with what you have done but with the role that
    our administration has played and the role that they have done. The idea
    and the passing of the law in Congress was only the first step, and had
    they not done such a superb job in the followup--all the people on
    Community Empowerment Board, but beginning with those I mentioned and
    starting first and foremost with the Vice President--this would not have
    happened. So I want to thank them for what they did.
        I also want to say, just before I get into my remarks about you, the
    Congress is coming back next Monday, and in the weeks since they've been
    gone you can see that sometimes partisan activities lead to inattention
    to the public's business. Now we've got a real opportunity for action
    between now and Easter when the Congress goes out for its next recess,
    and I think it's time that we here got down to doing our work the way
    you are doing your work in your communities. It's time to deal with the
    unfinished business of this country: to continue to create opportunity,
    to continue to give people like you the opportunity to take
    responsibility for your own lives and to build our American community,
    to grow this economy in a way that will help you to succeed.
        That means we should act now--not later but now--to pass a 7-year
    balanced budget plan that is consistent with our values and our
    interests, that protect Medicare and Medicaid, our investments in
    education and the environment, that gives a modest tax cut to those who
    really need it, and that grows our economy. It means we ought to act now
    to pass real welfare reform that elevates work and family and protects
    children and gives people a chance to make the most of their own lives.
    You want to know what kind of welfare reform I want? You just heard her
    speak up here; that's what this country needs.
        We ought to pass the health care reform bill now before the Senate,
    unanimously voted out of the committee, Republicans and Democrats alike
    for it. The labor unions are for it. The National Association of
    Manufacturers are for it. The chamber of commerce is for it. Why has it
    not been voted on? The health insurance lobby is against it. Everybody
    else is for it. It's a simple little bill. It says if we can't find a
    way to give everybody health insurance, at least everybody ought to be
    able to afford health insurance, and people shouldn't lose their
    insurance just because someone in their family gets sick or because they
    have to change jobs. That bill, the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill, should be
    passed immediately to help the American people.
        I heard Vinnie say he was going to give his employees a 401(k) plan.
    There are a lot of small businesses that simply cannot afford pension
    plans for their employees now because of the laws that exist. One of the
    things in our balanced budget plan--it's a top priority of the White
    House Conference on Small Business--would make it much easier for the
    small businesses in your community empowerment zones to take out
    retirement programs for themselves and their employees. We ought to pass
    that right away.
        And I'll tell you something else we ought to do when they come back.
    We ought to raise the minimum wage. You know, I believe if we raise the
    minimum wage, you'd have people coming out of welfare looking for work
    even more intensely than they are now. If we don't raise the minimum
    wage, it will fall to a 40-year low this year in terms of what it will
    buy. You know, it's hard to raise a family with children on $4.25 an
    hour. And yet, that's what a lot of people are trying to do. Now if we
    want to value our families and value work, we ought to do it. We ought
    to do it now.

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        We ought to pass antiterrorism legislation that has been languishing
    for a year almost. And we ought to enact real campaign finance reform.
    There is a lot for Congress to do. And this can be an era of genuine
    bipartisan achievement for our country. It's the only way we can achieve
    anything since the Congress is in the hands of the Republicans, but we
    need Republicans and Democrats to vote for things, and the White House
    is in the hands of the other party. We can do that.
        What we really need to do here is to behave the way you are back
    home. What we really need to do is to adopt a model that you have had to
    adopt back home, get all kinds of people together, different people,
    different walks of life, different parties, different attitudes,
    different outlooks, and bring everybody's strengths to the table and
    prove that we can create an era of possibility for everyone.
        You know, sometimes people say to me when I give these speeches,
    ``Well, what exactly is it that you believe? What is your philosophy of
    how people ought to work together and how this country ought to work?''
    And you're it. I mean, basically, this is how I think we ought to
    approach all of our major challenges. If you want to know how I think we
    should work and what Government should do, look at what we have done to
    work with you to basically empower you to work together to take control
    of your own destinies, to help individuals and families and
    neighborhoods and communities make the most of their own present and
    their own future.
        I said in the State of the Union Address that these enormous
    economic changes, our movement to an information and technology age,
    into a global economy, have created an age of possibility for untold
    numbers of Americans. But as all of us know, it is a strange and
    different time.
        None of us have ever lived through a time of this much economic
    change before. The last time this happened was a hundred years ago when
    we moved from an agricultural to an industrial society. So none of us
    have the experience of knowing what this is like. But what is going on
    is we are exploding opportunities at a record rate, and half our people
    feel like they are stuck in idle. And there's a reason for that.
        I mean, if I had told you 3 years ago--suppose I had given the
    following Inaugural Address, how would you have responded? ``My fellow
    Americans, in 3 years we'll cut the deficit in half, have 8 million new
    jobs, have 3 years in a row of record new formations of small
    businesses, record new self-made millionaires, not people who were given
    it. We'll have the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation
    in 27 years. Homeownership will be at a 15-year high. We will have
    record exports; for the first time in 10 years our exports to other
    countries will be growing faster than their imports to us. And after 3
    years, half the American people will be making the same thing they were
    making 3 years ago.'' You would have said, ``That guy is on another
    planet,'' right? [Laughter] Those things don't follow, but that's
    exactly what happened. And that's why you see these different stories
    coming out about the economy and people taking a different tack on it
    and the rhetoric of the election season, because the good news is true
    and so is the bad news.
        And what is causing that is this great uprooting, this time of
    change we're going through, where more and more work is more mind and
    less muscle; where this fine lady and her son do computer programs and
    work out the software to help the empowerment zone work in their
    community; and more and more work is being created by people like
    Vinnie, small-business people in highly flexible, interpersonal
    relationships with fewer layers of bureaucracy. And more and more people
    who used to be in big structural bureaucracies are finding themselves
    downsized, which is a cruel way of saying you're middle-aged and out of
    work.
        And so it is the best of times for America, except for the people
    who don't quite fit into all the changes when the gears don't quite
    mesh. And obviously, if you look across America, economically, you will
    see that there are essentially three big problems. There are places
    where the recovery hasn't hit, where the unemployment rate is still too
    high and people want jobs and don't have them. There are the people who
    are working harder and harder just to keep up because they haven't
    gotten a raise. And then there are people who happen to be in certain
    sectors of the economy where they're being downsized, and it's taking
    them a much longer time to find another job making what they were making
    before with the same level of benefits.
        So the challenge, the economic challenge for America is not, how do
    we put up a wall and walk away from the world, but how do we cap-

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    ture the dynamism of the good sectors of the economy, all these great
    things that are happening, and spread it to the rest of the economy so
    that everybody has opportunity again, so that when you talk about how
    the country's doing, you're talking about how everybody can do and not
    just how some can do?
        The same thing is true on the social front. If you look at it, 3
    years ago I would not have believed that in 3 years we could have the
    crime rate, the poverty rate, the welfare rolls, the food stamp rolls,
    the teen pregnancy rolls all dropping. But that is good. That's the good
    news; they're all going down. The bad news is, in most places they're
    still too high.
        And the really troubling thing is that if I had told you this 3
    years ago--what if I had given you this speech? ``My fellow Americans,
    in 3 years the rate of drug use in our country among people between the
    ages of 18 and 34 will be going down, and the crime rate in America will
    be going down, but the rate of casual drug use among people under 18
    will be going up and random violence among people under 18 will be going
    up.'' You would say, ``Wow, how did that happen?''
        It's the same story on the social front. We have not--we have not
    succeeded in revitalizing our institutions, our neighborhoods, in
    strengthening our families and reaching others. There are still too many
    of those kids out there raising themselves, with nothing to say yes to
    and people not touching them and working on them. That's what you're
    trying to do.
        Now, there is no way a Government program alone can either deal with
    the issue of opening up opportunity for all who will assume
    responsibility for it or solving all the social problems. And not only
    that, no big bureaucracy is particularly effective anymore. This
    Government is much smaller than it was when I took office, 205,000
    smaller. It's the smallest Government we've had in 30 years. But that
    does not mean, as the Vice President said, it does not mean that the
    answer to America's issues and America's challenges is going back to a
    time when people were left to fend for themselves or that we need a weak
    Government.
        What we need is a kind of partnership embodied by this endeavor,
    community-based efforts where everybody does their part. That's what we
    have tried to do, and that is what you are doing. And I just want to
    tell you that I am grateful to you for the progress you have made. And I
    want you to continue, and I want this model to sweep the country.
        The solutions to America's real challenges, economic and social
    challenges, have got to be community driven. The private sector has got
    to be an integral part. The Government--it's not like the Depression--
    the Government is broke. We have some money to invest in education and
    training, to invest in environmental protection, to invest in new
    technologies, to invest in infrastructure, but we got to get rid of this
    deficit. So we can't go out and just hire everybody that doesn't have a
    job. The private sector has got to do that. And we have to have the
    right kind of partnership to get them involved so that we have 10,000
    stories like the one Vinnie told today, or 100,000, or a million, or
    however many it takes to bring opportunity back to everybody in this
    country.
        The third thing we've got to do is to have Government at every level
    doing its part. The most important thing, I will say again, about this
    whole empowerment zone process, I think, is not that we broke 13 years
    of gridlock to finally pass it into law in 1993 in the budget, it is
    that after we did that, over 500 communities applied to participate. And
    even the ones that were not selected wound up being richer and better
    off because they had to get together and ask themselves, what is our
    vision for this community and what is my responsibility and what is your
    responsibility to achieve that vision, and how are we going to do it
    together?
        We cannot afford to be divided anymore. We can't afford to sit home
    passively and read the papers every day and watch the news every night
    and be upset about what's not happening and blame somebody else.
    Instead, we're going to go out and meet together and work together and
    change it together. If everybody in America would do that, we would be
    on the way toward the American dream for all of our people in the 21st
    century--just what you've done.
        The first round of the empowerment zones enterprise community
    initiative was so successful that more than $8 billion in additional
    commitments of investment in these areas have been made from the public
    and private sector, in addition to the money that was committed by the
    Federal Government. That is amazing. One hundred and five communities
    were chosen in the first round. You heard Vinnie Johnson's story:
    Detroit alone has attracted $2 billion in local private sector
    investment commitments,

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    creating hundreds and hundreds of jobs. We can do that everywhere.
        In Los Angeles, Federal funds helped to set up a public/private
    partnership to form the largest community development bank in the
    Nation. This country--your country has funded banks in developing
    nations to make loans to people with far fewer assets, skills, and
    capacities than we have in the American inner cities. And we have put
    those people back to work and given them a stake in the future and
    strengthened the economy of other countries. It is unconscionable that
    we don't do it in this country. Every community should have one of
    those.
        In one of the smallest and poorest communities in the Mississippi
    Delta, two new manufacturing plants are coming to Itta Bena, a town that
    had never had one before. We can do that everywhere. One of the things
    that we ought to do in this budget debate is to make sure that we leave
    in the commitment of a modest amount of money to establish these
    community development financial institutions everywhere. If it works in
    Third World countries, it will work in the rural and urban areas of
    America that have been left out. Stay with it. We have to do it.
        And let me say that most of what we are talking about here--all of
    what we are talking about here--need not be a partisan issue. Every
    American, Republican and Democrat alike, independent, Green Party,
    whatever, there's nobody in America that says, ``I've got a real vested
    interest in keeping that crime rate up,'' except people we want out of
    the way. There's no one in America that says, ``I've got a vested
    interest in keeping more mothers on welfare. I've got a vested interest
    in keeping our schools substandard.'' Nobody's giving these speeches.
    Fiorello LaGuardia once said, there is no Republican or Democratic way
    to clean the streets. No one in America says, ``I've got a vested
    interest in making sure that that playground a block down from my
    apartment house never has a net on the basketball goal.''
        This is basic human values. When we fail to give every person a shot
    at the American dream, when we fail to grow the economy, when we fail to
    build up the potential of the American people, and when we fail to work
    together, we all lose. And when we do it, we all win.
        This is not a question of class warfare. Americans don't resent
    successful people; they admire successful people. Americans want people
    who are successful to be rewarded. We do expect successful people to do
    what Vinnie's done, that sometime in their lives to give a little
    something back to help other people succeed. But nobody resents success.
        The only time resentment comes into our society is not when people
    who are successful have more; it's when people who don't have more never
    have a chance to do better. That is the problem here. People want their
    own chance to do better. And we have an obligation to give it to them,
    and that's what this whole empowerment zone enterprise community
    endeavor is all about.
        Now, let me say that I believe that you have made round one a
    phenomenal success. There are many other rural and urban and Indian
    Nation communities that I believe deserve a chance. And so let me say,
    when the Congress comes back I'm going to urge them to do one more
    thing; I'm going to ask them in this budget negotiations to give us a
    round two so that others have a chance to do what you have done. If we
    are going to have tax relief, we will never give so little tax relief
    and have spent so little money to have such a big impact, to generate so
    much private sector and other public sector investment in any other way
    as we will with this. There is more bang for the buck here than anything
    else we could do. And I believe we should do it.
        I also want to say that I want to challenge, again, every community
    to come together and devise your own rebirth. There are other ways for
    communities to work with us. For example, if the Baltimore empowerment
    zone can develop a plan to transform 600 acres of abandoned industrial
    land into an eco-industrial park, imagine how many other acres can be
    reclaimed. If the Kentucky Highlands empowerment zone can create a
    cooperative to get credit to farmers, imagine how other farmers and
    businesses could be helped if only credit were available. If other
    communities have done this kind of thing to help themselves, why can't
    every community do the same thing?
        We want to do everything we can to help everybody in America be a
    part of the kind of comprehensive strategy for the future embodied in
    the empowerment zones, in the enterprise communities, taking on tough
    jobs like reclaiming abandoned industrial sites, improving access to
    capital, and making homeownership easier, working with the communities
    with which

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    we are working and those with whom we are prepared to work.
        We are beginning to clean the environment in our cities by taking a
    commonsense approach. And I wish I had a chance to talk about 10 of
    these examples, because they're all so thrilling to me. But there are
    literally hundreds of thousands of old, neglected industrial sites, now
    popularly called brownfields, that can be redeveloped, as Baltimore is
    doing. Protecting our environment in the urban areas can go hand in hand
    with redevelopment. It can create jobs and at the same time make more
    people want to live in the cities of America again.
        Finally, let me say we have to do more to create housing that will
    encourage vibrant neighborhoods in our inner cities and rural areas. You
    know, cities used to be places where teachers and firefighters and
    police officers wanted to live, and they can be again if we can help
    communities to develop good, affordable housing. If we really want all
    of our communities to be revitalized again, we not only have to create
    opportunities for poor people, we have to make the environment so that
    middle class people will want to live in them again and that the poor
    and the middle class will live side by side, as they did in the
    neighborhoods when I grew up. We have to do that. We have to be
    committed to helping all Americans achieve this large part of the
    American dream known as homeownership.
        I'm very proud of what Secretary Cisneros has done with dwindling
    resources at HUD, working with the private sector to see homeownership
    reach a 15-year high this year. And we have to do more. We proposed to
    reclaim tracts of vacant or blighted land and to renovate whole
    neighborhoods, to bring back to the city hard-working, middle income
    families, to stimulate business and private investment. We want to work
    with private sector and other investment to create scores of livable,
    inviting, inner-city neighborhoods.
        Homeownership initiatives now are working in Detroit, Buffalo, in
    San Antonio and New York and Baltimore. I say again, let us build on our
    success. Homeownership is one of the best ways to empower local
    residents, to give them a stake in the community and to increase the
    bonds that tie people together. It means commitment. If we have any hope
    of bringing success back to these inner cities, we have to have people
    there who care and who are committed. Homeownership can help us achieve
    that goal as well.
        Together, I believe we can find the kind of long-term solutions we
    need. But I will say again, if we really have a vision of all-American
    communities where there are good jobs, where there are businesses that
    are flourishing, where the streets are safe and the environment is clean
    and the families are stable and the schools work to educate and prepare
    all children, it begins not so much with any specific initiative as with
    you, with people like you who are committed to working together, to
    working in an honest, forthright way. And it ends with having the kind
    of partnership that you have achieved with each other and with every
    level of government and with the private sector. The difference is the
    way you are doing this and your understanding that you cannot succeed
    unless you work together.
        So I ask you when you leave here to continue to prove that we can do
    this. And I ask you to join us in reclaiming more of our distressed
    communities and spreading the message throughout America that there is
    no challenge facing this country we cannot meet if we will get rid of
    our cynicism, get rid of every excuse for inaction, get rid of the
    notion that we have the luxury of blaming other people for our problems
    instead of working together to solve them together. That's what you have
    done. That's what you can give to all America.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:46 a.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the
    Mayflower Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Vinnie Johnson, former
    Detroit Piston basketball player and chairman of Pistons Packaging, and
    Hannah Oakman, public information officer, Philadelphia/Camden
    Empowerment Zone.