    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [November 5, 1999]
    [Pages 1993-1996]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1993]]

    Remarks to the Englewood Community in Chicago, Illinois
    November 5, 1999

        Thank you very, very much. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for
    coming and for being so full of enthusiasm and making me feel so
    welcome. Mr. Speaker, thank you for
    coming. We are honored by your presence and your alliance.
        I want to also thank my good friend Congressman Bobby Rush. We've been friends a long time, and he has worked in
    these last weeks through his own personal sadness still on your business
    and to bring us all here today. And I thank him for that.
        I thank this great array of Members of the House of Representatives
    who are here, Congressman Danny Davis--we're
    the Arkansas contingent on the platform, Danny and I are--[laughter]--
    Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., and
    Congressman Paul Kanjorski who has made
    this whole tour with us twice, coming all the way from Pennsylvania--a
    good man.
        I thank the Secretary of State,
    the Attorney General, and the State treasurer of
    the State of Illinois, all of them, for
    being here. I thank Secretary Slater and
    Small Business Administrator Alvarez for their
    strong support for our new markets initiative and their involvement. I
    want to thank Samuel Williams, your
    principal here, for welcoming us.
        You know, this is the second biggest hand he's gotten here. [Laughter] Bobby, I hope you have made sure he's not interested in running
    for Congress. [Laughter] This is amazing. When he got his first big
    hand, the Speaker leaned over to me and said, ``You know, when a school
    principal gets that kind of hand, something must be going right there.''
    [Laughter]
        I want to thank Paul Vallas, the CEO of
    the Chicago public schools, for being here and for the great job that
    Chicago is making in turning around its schools. This school, I was just
    told by the principal--when I walked in, the first thing he said was,
    ``Thank you for Goals 2000.'' The second thing he said was, ``We are
    hooked up to the Internet in this school; we are ready for the 21st
    century.''
        I want to thank David Shryock for his
    leadership and all the other CEO's who are here, Jack
    Greenberg from McDonald's and all the others
    from the banks and the other companies. Thank you all for being here.
        And let me say, this has acquired a greater significance here
    because the Speaker's come in, and in
    honor of this bipartisan event, we had the Speaker of the House, and out
    of respect, Reverend Jackson has dressed up
    like a Republican today. [Laughter] So this is a whole new day.
    [Laughter]
        I am glad to be back here in Chicago. I have been interested in this
    city for a long time. And as you know, the First Lady is a native of Chicago, and we spent lots of years
    here. And I was interested in all these neighborhoods long before I even
    thought I'd have a chance to be President. And I worked with the South
    Shore Bank and set up a parallel bank in Arkansas, where we just were
    today.
        There's one other thing I would like to say before I go further,
    both as President and as a citizen of this country. I am very grateful
    for the life and the example of Walter Payton. I know that this is the
    day of his service, and tomorrow there will be a great memorial service,
    and there will be sadness and sorrow. But what a magnificent life. And
    what gifts he gave us, not just on the playing field but on the playing
    field of life. And right to the very end, he showed us a lot of lessons
    about how we should all conduct ourselves and what kind of legacy we
    should leave to our children. And I think we should remember that today,
    for this is a day about our children.
        Let me tell you--we use this word ``new markets,'' and Bobby issued all these announcements, and I want to make a
    few more. But let me try to put this into some context for you. Compared
    to the day I became President, this is a different country, economically
    and socially. We have nearly 20 million new jobs; a 4.1 percent
    unemployment rate, the lowest in 30 years. We have the lowest female
    unemployment in 46 years; the lowest minority unemployment ever
    recorded. We have the lowest welfare rolls, the lowest crime rates in 30
    years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, over 5 million men, women,
    and children lifted out of poverty. We have the highest homeownership,
    including

    [[Page 1994]]

    the highest minority homeownership, in the history of our country, and
    the first back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 years.
        Now, we are here because we know there are people and places, in
    spite of all these wonderful numbers, that have still not been touched
    by this prosperity. In spite of the fact that this is the longest
    economic recovery in peacetime in our history--and in February will
    become the longest recovery of any kind in our history--there are people
    and places untouched by our prosperity. We know that we have an
    opportunity now, with all this good fortune, to deal with our obligation
    to bring the American dream to those people and places.
        And I believe that the only way we can keep this economic recovery
    going is to find new customers, new jobs, and new businesses. There's a
    huge debate--I say this because this is, yes, about discharging our
    responsibility to our fellow citizens, but it's also very much in the
    self-interest of everybody from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. You can't
    imagine how many hours we spend in the White House talking about how in
    the world we can keep this economic expansion going.
        You know, every time in the past, things either get so hot there's a
    lot of inflation and then you have to break the inflation and that
    brings on a recession, or the economic expansion just runs out of gas.
    So we have to find a way not to run out of gas and to keep going without
    inflation.
        Obviously, if you bring opportunity to people and places that
    haven't had it, if there are new businesses, new workers, new consumers,
    you can have growth without inflation. So we are here today--what this
    new markets name means is that if Englewood still has a poverty rate
    more than 2\1/2\ times the rate of Chicago, if the median household
    income in this community is barely more than half of Chicago, if there
    are still boarded-up brownstones and shutup storefronts, that means this
    is not just a problem; this is an opportunity. This is a new market, and
    everybody in America ought to care about it and be committed to it and
    do what can be done to advance it.
        You have proved, by these announcements here and more, that there is
    more than poverty here; there is enormous promise. Look at these kids.
    Look at this school. Get the idea, the feeling, the pride, the
    accomplishment here. This is a place of promise. Later I will meet with
    some of the members of the women's self-employment project, which has
    given--listen to this--more than 7,000 women the tools to create their
    own businesses and shape their own futures. I'm going to go visit Franz
    Print Shop, which is a small business making large strides in your
    community. You have more partnerships to build, more success stories to
    write with government and business working together. That's what we're
    here to celebrate.
        We have seen it here in Englewood, thanks to the announcements that
    Congressman Rush made and all the work he did
    to lay the foundation for our business here today; thanks to the work of
    the mayor, who has committed over $250 million in public and private
    investment for this neighborhood in the next 4 years; thanks to the
    efforts of Reverend Jackson, who launched not
    only a Wall Street project but a LaSalle Street project to bring private
    capital to our poorest neighborhoods.
        This can work. It can work here; it can work all across America. It
    is already working in many places across America in the empowerment
    zones, in the enterprise communities we have been establishing since
    1993 under the strong leadership of Vice President Gore. But Government can't do it alone.
        One of the most important things that we have to do is to make sure
    we have genuine partnerships. And this ought to be an American idea. I
    mean, when you go into the bank and you deposit money or borrow money,
    your party doesn't make any difference. When you go into the restaurant
    and you spend money, nobody asks you before they take the money or the
    credit card whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. Nobody has a
    vested interest in anybody who wants to work staying unemployed. No one
    in America has a vested interest in anybody with a good idea for a new
    business not being able to act on that idea and bring their creative
    genius and their hard work to the arena of enterprise that has given our
    country all these blessings we enjoy today.
        And I said in January, when I proposed this new markets effort, that
    I wanted it to be a bipartisan effort, indeed an American effort, above
    politics, because we all have a stake in this. I want to compliment
    Danny Davis for recognizing this and working
    with two Republican Members of the House of Representatives, Congressman
    Watts and Congressman Talent,

    [[Page 1995]]

    to come up with an American community renewal act, which has a lot of
    the same goals of our empowerment zone effort and our new markets
    initiative.
        Now, this is something we ought to do together. I'm amazed we got
    any press about this at all today. Mr. Hastert got a lot of press coming all the way from Washington
    to be with us, and I think it's because they're used to writing in
    Washington about how we all fight about everything. So we had two
    choices here. We can say, well, they've got an idea; we've got an idea;
    let's have a fight. Or we can do what the Speaker and I and the others
    here have decided to do. In Reverend Jackson's
    famous words, we have decided to seek common ground and higher ground
    because it's the right ground for these children's futures to stand on.
        Today the Speaker and I--I'll let him
    speak for himself, but basically we're here to commit to you and to the
    American people to work in good faith, to merge our proposals into a
    historic bipartisan effort to renew our communities, to open new markets
    and new doors of opportunity. If we work together in this way, Mr.
    Speaker, we can ensure that every hard-working family has a share of the
    prosperity and a stake in the future that our country plainly has before
    it.
        We have a lot that we can do. We just worked together on a historic
    bill to modernize and broaden the reach of the financial institutions of
    this country. But we did it by keeping and broadening the reach of the
    Community Reinvestment Act, which has been responsible for about $88
    billion in investment into our communities in the last year alone. This
    is the kind of thing we can do together.
        And we know that all we can do, really, is to set up a framework. My
    new markets idea is that we ought to give Americans with money to invest
    the same incentives to invest in poor areas of America we give them to
    invest in poor areas of Latin America or Africa or Asia. And I think all
    of you know that, for me, that's not an either/or choice. I'm glad when
    we have Americans try to help people in Africa or Latin America or Asia
    have a better future, because I think as they do, they make more
    responsible citizens and they make war less likely and they make
    cooperation and shared prosperity more likely. But we clearly have the
    highest obligations to our own people and we cannot, in good conscience,
    not give people the same incentives to Americans a chance to make a
    living, to start a business, and to build a future.
        I also want to reiterate, nothing we do will work without the
    commitment of the private business sector. You've already heard about
    the vital commitments that SB Partners has made today. I'm also pleased
    to note that Allstate Insurance will invest $5 million in the Illinois
    Facilities Fund to go toward education and child care here in Englewood.
    That's very important. If you want to have jobs, you've got to have the
    child care support for parents. And I thank Ed Liddy* for joining us today. The Community Investment Corporation
    will expand its efforts here into Englewood and into the enterprise zone
    that is nearby.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        *White House correction.
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        And as part of the welfare-to-work partnership, Alliance Relocation
    Services is teaming up with Allied and DePaul University to launch a new
    job training program. McDonald's, represented here by its CEO, Jack
    Greenberg, which has a huge, long history of
    investing in America's untapped potential, is working to encourage
    mentoring relationships between large companies and small ones, through
    our BusinessLINC initiative. The idea is that big, successful companies
    can help small, emerging ones in neighborhoods like this succeed if they
    just know more about the basic things they have to do to get started and
    to keep going in the early periods of the business. This is a huge deal,
    pioneered by business leaders and the Vice President. And I want to thank you, sir, for doing this.
        Well, I want to make room now for the Speaker and for Reverend Jackson,
    but I just want to close with this observation. For a long time, we were
    so used to some people being down and out that we acted like we believed
    it had to be that way. This is a big issue, because all the money in the
    world and all the good government action in the world can't overcome
    your lack of faith in yourselves. And for a long time, we just acted
    like it had to be that way.
        The other night, Hillary
    sponsored a dinner at the White House, or an evening at the White House,
    to talk about the relationship of the revolution in computer technology
    to the revolution in the study of the human gene and the whole gene
    structure that's called the genome. And what the scientist and the computer
    genius said

    [[Page 1996]]

    was, we could never unlock the mysteries of the human gene unless we had
    this remarkable revolution in computers, which can literally allow us to
    map these microscopic things that make up our body.
        Here's the point I want to make to all of you here in Englewood--the
    most important thing that was said all night long. This big professor from Harvard who understands things about the
    human gene structure that I couldn't even describe said something I'll
    remember for the rest of my life. He said all human beings,
    genetically--all human beings--are 99.9 percent the same. And then he
    said, if you took any given racial or ethnic group--let's say you took
    100 people from west Africa and 100 Chinese and 100 people from Mexico
    and 100 people from India and 100 people from Ireland, the genetic
    differences of the individuals within each group would be significantly
    greater than the genetic differences from group to group--that is,
    between any group of Irish and group of Chinese or group of Africans or
    group of Mexicans. You remember that.
        You've got to believe. Just look at this high school. Look at the
    alumni of this high school. This high school's produced poets, Cabinet
    secretaries, the first African-American astronaut; Lorraine Hansberry,
    the playwright of the wonderful play ``A Raisin in the Sun.''
        Now--you're going to hear from a young man later who will do this
    better than me, but one of the greatest lines in ``A Raisin in the
    Sun''--you ought to go back and read it--is, a character says, ``All
    God's children got wings.'' That's another way of saying, genetically,
    we're 99.9 percent the same.
        Do you believe that? Do you believe that all God's children got
    wings? Then you have to believe that all God's children can fly.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 5:45 p.m. in the gymnasium at Englewood
    High School. In his remarks, he referred to Illinois State Treasurer
    Judy Baar Topinka; Samuel Williams, principal, Englewood High School;
    David Shryock, partner, SB Partners LP; Jack Greenberg, chief executive
    officer, McDonald's Corp.; civil rights leader Jesse Jackson; Mayor
    Richard M. Daley of Chicago; Edward M. Liddy, chief executive officer,
    Allstate Insurance Co.; Vinton G. Cerf, senior vice president of
    Internet architecture and technology, MCI WorldCom; and Eric Lander,
    director, Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research.