[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

[[Page 1170]]

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

[[Page 1173]]

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.