    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [July 8, 1999]
    [Pages 1169-1174]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the National Academy Foundation Conference in Anaheim,
    California
    July 8, 1999

        You know, Hazel, you might consider
    just skipping that hotel business and going right into politics.
    [Laughter] I want to thank all of you for your welcome, and I thank
    Hazel and her fellow winners behind us for reminding us of why we're
    here. Mayor Daly, thank you for making me feel
    welcome, and Secretary Daley, Secretary
    Slater. Representative Sanchez, we're delighted to be in your district and to be here
    with other Members of Congress who are here.
        I'd like to say a special word of appreciation to my wonderful
    friend, our former Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, who is here with us today and supporting this
    endeavor.
        Since this is the last event for me in this weeklong odyssey across
    America to our--what we called America's new markets, I'd like to say a
    special word of thanks to the folks on the White House staff who made it
    possible, including my National Economic Adviser, Gene
    Sperling, without whom this never would have
    occurred.
        And I want to say a special word of thanks to Reverend Jesse
    Jackson, who worked with Sandy Weill on the Wall Street Project, went to Appalachia
    before it was fashionable, who always believed that poor people were
    smart, wanted to work, and had a right, a moral right

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    to be part of America's future. Thank you, Jesse Jackson, and thank you,
    Sandy Weill, for the Wall Street Project,
    which attempts to marry the investment capacity of Wall Street with the
    human capacity of all those places we've been visiting. Thank you for
    the National Academy Foundation, thank you for being a good friend to me
    and to all these young people and so many others, and thank you for
    inviting me to this annual conference.
        This is really quite an appropriate place for me and those who have
    traveled with me this last week on our new markets trip to end our
    journey, reaffirming your commitment and ours to prepare all our
    children for the new century. Over the past 4 days, as I have traveled
    across America, we have sought to shine the spotlight on places still
    unlit by the sunshine of our present prosperity. A number of you have
    been along for what has truly been a remarkable ride.
        We've seen the power of people in public and private life to work
    together in the Appalachians and in the Mississippi Delta. We've seen
    the spark that retail investment can bring in the first shopping center
    built in decades in East St. Louis, Illinois. We've seen the impact in
    the most basic infrastructure and housing opportunities, even in the
    remote regions of Indian country in South Dakota, still the most left-
    behind part of America.
        In south Phoenix yesterday, in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees,
    we saw the enormous benefits of community reinvestment initiatives. And
    here, earlier today, we saw what education and job training can bring to
    young people in Watts, people who are normally identified with
    distressed neighborhoods, showing me how to design automobiles on a
    computer or to conduct sophisticated business transactions between two
    different countries with young Americans 17 years old picking up a
    commission for being the middleman.
        I took this trip for three reasons. First, I wanted every American
    businessperson, every American investor to see that there are enormous
    opportunities out there today in the areas that have been left behind by
    our economic recovery.
        Second, because I wanted to highlight the tools that have already
    been put in place to encourage more people to invest in those
    communities: the empowerment zones and the enterprise communities which
    Vice President Gore has so ably led for 6
    years now; the community development financial institutions that we have
    supported; the Community Reinvestment Act, which has led to billions of
    dollars of reinvestment in our developing neighborhoods; the education
    and training initiatives designed to give all of our people a chance not
    only to have good, basic skills, but to keep on learning for a lifetime.
        And third, I wanted to highlight our new markets initiative, a piece
    of legislation simply designed to give American investors who are
    willing to take a chance on new and expanded businesses in distressed
    urban and rural communities access to the same kind of tax credits and
    loan guarantees--to lower the relative risk of their investment--in
    America that they can get to invest in poor communities from Africa to
    Asia to Latin America to the Caribbean. I'm for those investments, but I
    think America's communities should have access to the same capital with
    the same incentives.
        The idea behind this, obviously, is that the Government cannot do
    this alone, but business cannot be expected to go it alone. When
    government provides the conditions and tools, acts as a catalyst to
    bring the power of the private sector to benefit all of our citizens,
    and provides the investment and the education and training of our young
    people, this is not only good economics, it is the right thing to do. We
    can build one America where nobody is left behind when we cross that
    bridge into a new century, and if we do, we'll all be better off.
        The CEO's and national leaders I have traveled with, we've heard it
    every stop: ``Look, we just need a chance; our kids need education; our
    adults need training; and we need somebody who believes in us enough to
    give us a chance.''
        I'll never forget the woman we met in the Mississippi Delta, who was
    working for a very small business in a depressed community that had five
    employees. She made a very modest wage, and the owner of the business
    just decided to close up. He said to her she was the only person capable
    of running the business. But nobody would give her a loan because she'd
    never had any money in her life; she had only worked for modest hourly
    wages.
        Because there was a community investor willing to take a chance on
    her, she got investment capital. She bought the business. Two years
    later she went from 5 to 11 employees, and she has just about paid her
    loan off. There are thousands of stories like that waiting to be written
    in

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    America in every community that is still depressed.
        So we want to encourage that, and that's why so much of this trip is
    focused on how to get financing. A remarkable businesswoman from New
    York, Marianne Spraggins, went on this
    trip. She's trying to set up a vision fund with $250 million in private
    sector capital to give venture capital to these kinds of places. If we
    get our way, the people who invest in that fund will be eligible for a
    25 percent tax credit for putting that money into high unemployment
    areas, and they'll be eligible to borrow $2 for every $1 they put up in
    that fund and have it guaranteed by the Government so we lower the
    interest rate. That's the Government's contribution. But somebody still
    has to make the investment to put these people to work.
        So most of the capital we've been talking about these last several
    days has been money. We see in the Pine Ridge reservation in South
    Dakota a remarkable grandmother,
    providing schoolclothes for her grandchildren, having to literally buy
    the tennis shoes her grandchildren wear to school on the installment
    plan all summer long while the shoes are kept in layaway, so the kids
    will have them. Then there were 11 people living in a house with about
    800 square feet, another 17 in an adjoining housetrailer with about 900
    square feet. We need money; those people need housing.
        We also saw American Indians, that have been waiting for 9 years,
    moving into their first homes. A little 5-year-old boy, 6-year-old boy
    took me by the hand and led me all through his new home and showed me
    his sister's room and explained why it was okay that she had a bigger
    room than he did. [Laughter] She was a teenager, and teenagers needed
    things like that--[laughter]--the pride that they felt, these people,
    this mother who had worked all her life and finally getting a decent
    home for her children to live in.
        So a lot of this is a money problem. I used to joke with a lot of my
    friends--I still say this--that I had about 9 or 10 rules of politics
    that I kept in my mind all during my career running for office, and rule
    number two was: when anybody stands up and tells you it's not a money
    problem, they're talking about somebody else's problem, not theirs.
    [Laughter]
        So money is a big issue here. But there's another kind of capital
    that in some ways is even more fundamental: human capital, people. When
    Hazel stood up here, and you clapped for
    her, you were clapping for the astonishing development of human capital,
    of what she has done with her life and the chance that her mother took
    in going to Hawaii, the risks and the heartache and the difficulties her
    family went through. It made you feel good.
        And what I want to say to you today is that there are people, just
    like these young people we're honoring back here, on every Indian
    reservation, in every hill and hollow of Appalachia, up and down the
    Mississippi Delta, in every inner city, and they deserve--they deserve--
    the chance to be whatever they're willing to work hard to be. And unless
    we're prepared to do that, even our best efforts to bring new investment
    to these distressed communities will be less than fully successful.
        Now, we have a better opportunity and a better reason to do that now
    than ever before. As I tell people, I spend a lot of time in Washington;
    Sandy's always saying that I've done a good
    job as a Democrat with the economy so more people can live like
    Republicans--[laughter]--and I've done my best to do that.
        But you should know that one of the things that we seriously debate
    back in Washington, DC, a long way from Anaheim, is how can we keep this
    going. We already have the longest economic expansion in peacetime in
    our history. We have the lowest African-American and Hispanic
    unemployment rates ever recorded. We have almost 19 million new jobs,
    and we have very low inflation, and we've had unemployment rate below
    five percent for 2 years. So a big question is, how much longer can this
    go on, and how can we keep it going without having inflation buildup,
    then having interest rates go up and having the recovery stop?
        This is not an academic issue if you're about to get your first job
    or if you're sitting there trying to make up your mind whether to take
    out a huge bank loan to expand your business. You want to know if we can
    keep this going.
        My answer is we can keep it going if we can find noninflationary
    ways to promote growth. Now, what are those? Well, we can sell more
    American goods and services around the world--why I hope the Congress
    will agree to help us expand our trade with other countries. We can also
    bring populations that are outside the work force into the work force.
    With the welfare rolls--they're now the lowest they've been in 30 years,
    and there are a lot of people

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    still on welfare that are able-bodied, but they have limited skills. We
    could bring more people from welfare into the work force.
        You can bring hundreds of thousands of disabled people who are
    capable of doing more and more kinds of jobs, thanks to technology now,
    into the work force. And the Congress, I believe, will soon send me a
    bill that will enable those that have high health care costs that are
    now being paid by the Government to keep that health care coverage so
    private employers can afford to hire them.
        But by far, the biggest opportunity--by far--in keeping this economy
    going without inflation is to get more investments, more jobs, more new
    business owners, more new workers, and therefore, more new consumers
    into the rural and urban areas that have not yet been blessed by this
    recovery.
        That's why every single American actually has a vested interest in
    our success here. And more and more businesses are looking for young
    people like those we celebrate, because there's a shortage of skilled
    workers, even though there are people who are still looking for jobs, in
    some job categories, a shortage of hundreds of thousands. Therefore, if
    Americans are willing to look a few exits off the beaten path, we can
    continue to grow this economy, and we can continue to have more of the
    kind of stories we just heard.
        Let me also say to you, if we can't do this now, with the strongest
    economy we have ever had, when it is manifestly in the self-interest of
    every enlightened decisionmaker in the country, when will we ever get
    around to doing it?
        Let me tell you some of the things that we saw on the human capital
    front. We walked down the dusty streets on an Indian reservation. We saw
    the boarded-up storefronts in a town in the Mississippi Delta, famous
    for its role in the civil rights struggle. We saw desperate living
    conditions in a little hollow in Appalachia where everybody had a job,
    and they still couldn't afford a decent house to live in.
        But every place we went, nobody wanted charity, nobody wanted a
    handout. What they wanted was a hand up. That's why this will work. What
    people want is a good private sector job, the simple dignity of a
    paycheck, the ability to house and educate their children and provide
    health care for them. And what you know here, what these young people
    behind me demonstrate is that intelligence and ability and drive and
    dreams are equally distributed in this country among the poor and the
    nonpoor.
        I've often said, things happen to people that derail their lives,
    and then they have to work hard to get them back on track. Things happen
    to places like that, too. I know the Mississippi Delta, which includes a
    big part of my own home State, the economy that once sustained that area
    has been gone a long time. Nobody was ever able to figure out how to put
    a new economy in its place. But there's a new economy out there that
    could fit in that place.
        There are new economies that could fit in the most remote villages
    of the Appalachian Mountains. There are new economies that could go into
    the Native American reservations. How many data processing jobs do
    American companies ship overseas on airplanes every night to go to poor
    countries and other places? They could be done on Indian reservations,
    for example. We have got to think about that.
        We all can identify with a human story. If Hazel stands up here and
    tells us the story of her family, it grips us, and we pull for her. But
    what you need to know is all these places have stories like that. We got
    the land and the mineral rights away from the Indians, and we said, oh,
    we'll make a deal; we'll have a nation-to-nation relationship with you,
    and we will provide for the education and health care and housing of
    your people. But we'll do a poor job of it, and we'll spend just as
    little as we can get away with; and then, we'll say you must not really
    want to do any better.
        We have to write new stories for these places, and it takes a
    commitment to money capital and to human capital. And what Sandy and all of you who have been involved in this
    magnificent project show--this is Exhibit A--that we can do it.
        Now, let me say, on a very positive note, I'm quite optimistic, that
    I am quite sure that one answer to this, in the United States and all
    across the world, is better dispersal of technology. When I went to
    Africa, I went to these little villages where people had maps--these
    children were in these little village schools where they had maps that
    still showed the Soviet Union and other nations that haven't existed in
    a long time. But if those kids just had one computer for the school and
    a printer, they would never have to worry about that. We could change
    the map of the world every day, and

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    all those little kids would have an updated map. Right?
        Technology will enable some of these areas to skip a whole
    generation of development if it is broadly dispersed. Secretary
    Daley referred to the Department of
    Commerce report today on technology. Let me tell you what it says. It
    confirms what you already know. More and more Americans than ever are
    connected to the Internet. It is the fastest-growing method of human
    communication in all of history by far.
        But it also shows, this report, that there is a growing digital
    divide between those who have access to the digital economy and the
    Internet and those who don't and that the divide exists along the lines
    of education, income, region, and race. It might have pointed out, of
    course, that all of us parents are not as good as our kids; that
    divide's not so serious. But the real one is.
        And yet we know, I will say again, that the very information
    technology driving this new economy gives us the tools to ensure that no
    one gets left behind. It gives us the tools to provide a story for these
    communities, to literally provide a self-sustaining economic
    infrastructure for the 21st century. Millions of Americans now on the
    economic margins can join the mainstream in the enterprise of building
    our Nation.
        A child in south central L.A., in the most remote part of Indian
    country can have access to the same world of knowledge in an instant as
    a child in the wealthiest suburban school in this country. Now, just
    imagine if not simply a fraction, but all of our young people entered
    the work force, had access to the Internet always, and had mastered the
    skills of the new information economy.
        So if we want to unlock the potential of our workers, we have to
    close that gap. We've done what we could. We have provided the HOPE
    scholarship and other tax credits so that we've literally opened the
    doors of college to all Americans. We have emphasized higher standards,
    smaller classes, more teachers. We're connecting every American
    classroom to the Internet, and I think we'll make our goal that the Vice
    President and I established here in California in 1994 of having all the
    classrooms connected by the year 2000.
        The $8 million in corporate commitments made today by this group are
    so very important, as are the information technology academies to which
    Sandy referred earlier. Sandy has said often that today's students are
    tomorrow's employees, today's students are tomorrow's economy. They're
    not just somebody else's employees they are tomorrow's economy. So,
    bringing these skills to distressed families in distressed communities
    can have more to do with our ability to restructure the economy in these
    areas than perhaps anything else.
        I also want to thank AT&T--and I think Dan Hesse, the CEO of AT&T Wireless, is here--for committing more
    than $1.4 million to increase access to the tools of the high-tech
    economy. I want to thank America Online--George Vradenburg of AOL is here--for providing more than $1
    million in grants to help narrow the digital divide. I want to thank
    Oxygen Media on the cable network it will launch next year. They will
    offer high-tech training on TV, so more embarrassed adults can learn
    what their kids already know. [Laughter]
        This is the kind of thing we have to do. If we have money capital
    and human capital, we can bring hope to the places that have been left
    behind.
        The last thing I want to say to you is this: This tour, this last
    four days that we have all spent together has been a significant step
    toward opening America's new markets. But it can't be the end of the
    journey. It has to be, instead, the opening salvo of a battle to build a
    real economy in every community in this country. The real measure of our
    success is not whether CEO's join the President on a trip like this
    which moved the nation, but whether the same CEO's and others will
    return to those markets and move the lives of the people there.
        So I say to you, you have to do that. The real test of the success
    is not whether I've got a legislative idea, but whether Congress will
    set aside its partisan differences and put that idea into law so we can
    have more investments in these communities.
        Next week I will send our new markets legislation to Congress. Over
    the next several weeks we'll announce a new national effort to promote
    the business link partnerships, pairing big businesses with smaller,
    often disadvantaged companies, an idea the Vice President has so strongly championed.
        And this fall we're going to take another tour. I am going to start
    in Newark to challenge the owners of professional sports teams and
    professional athletes to follow the example set by the

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    owners of the New Jersey Nets--Ray Chambers and
    Lew Katz--who set up the ownership of the Nets in
    a way that 35 percent of the profits of the franchise are reinvested in
    downtown Newark, to give the future to the people there. You might know
    that the Nets have now--those gentlemen have joined in a joint partnership with the New York
    Yankees, they now have a big partnership, and they have dedicated a
    significant percentage of the profits of the joint venture to reinvest
    in inner-city New York, in the Bronx, and in Newark.
        So I'm going to go up there. I'm going to highlight what they're doing. I'm going to
    see what we can do to help. And we're going to make another round here
    to show people that there are things that we can do together that are
    both morally right and good business.
        Often on this trip, Reverend Jackson has
    referred to the fact that Dr. Martin Luther King, just before he was
    killed, thought that he had done about all he could do to get the legal
    changes necessary to get rid of the stain of racial segregation and that
    the great disadvantages and discrimination still alive in America could
    only be eliminated if there were a new alliance of people across racial
    lines to create genuine economic opportunity for all Americans.
        It's hard to believe, to somebody like me anyway, at my age, that it
    has now been more than 30 years since Dr. King was killed and his dream
    was put on hold. One of the lesser known passages in his famous speech
    at the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963 involved language in which he
    challenged America, and I quote, ``to refuse to believe that there are
    insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this Nation.''
        Well, my fellow Americans, today, those vaults of opportunity are
    more full than they have ever been in the entire history of this
    country, and we have more evidence than we have ever had that, when
    children like those that we talked about today and when young people
    like those we celebrate today--Hazel and her peers behind me--do well,
    we are all strengthened; that there is a fundamental sense in which our
    futures are bound up together, from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta
    to the Native American reservations to the inner cities to the
    wealthiest corners of our land.
        All our kids need a chance to live their dreams, and the American
    dream needs for all Americans to be blessed by the opportunity that has
    given so much to us.
        Thank you for what you do to achieve that goal, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 3 p.m. in the Pacific Ballroom at the
    Anaheim Hilton and Towers Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to award
    winner Hazel del Rosario; Mayor Tom Daly of Anaheim; civil rights leader
    Jesse Jackson; Sanford I. Weill, chairman and co-chief executive
    officer, Citigroup, and founder and chairman of the board, National
    Academy Foundation; Marianne Spraggins, senior managing director, Smith
    Whiley and Co.; and George Vradenburg III, senior vice president for
    global and strategic policy, America Online, Inc. (AOL). A portion of
    these remarks could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.