[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[April 6, 2000]
[Pages 640-643]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to Corporate Leaders on the One America Initiative
April 6, 2000

    Thank you. Let me begin by welcoming all of you here and thanking 
our previous speakers. I thank Ben Johnson for making sure I won't be alone to turn the lights out 
at the end of my tenure here--[laughter]--and for what you can see is 
his evident passion for his work. I don't know if I've ever heard 
anybody tell a centipede joke before. [Laughter] I grew up in a place 
when I was a kid where I could collect centipedes, scorpions, brown 
recluse spiders, all kinds of snakes. I never thought they were very 
funny before. [Laughter] But he made 
it funny.
    I want to thank George Fisher for his 
leadership on this and so many other issues. I have really loved working 
with him over the course of my Presidency. And I want to thank Duane 
Ackerman for what he said. We didn't know 
each other very well until I started on this whole new markets tour, 
which is an important part of building one America, giving everybody a 
chance to participate in our prosperity. And I realized that he had 
come, like me, from pretty modest circumstances to a very high position, 
and he never forgot where he came from. And he's interested in giving 
all people a chance to be a part of it, and I am grateful.
    I was looking at these two leaders of our business community and 
looking at many of you out here with whom I had the privilege to work, 
and it made me feel very proud of my country and very confident of our 
future success.
    I'd like to thank the members of the administration who are here: 
Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman; our FCC 
Chair, Bill Kennard; and the front row 
here has a whole lineup of our White House stars. I thank them for all 
being here and for their commitment to this work.
    As Ben said, this is the third time we have brought key leaders to 
the White House to talk about the role of specific elements in American 
society for building one America. Last year we had a distinguished group 
of lawyers here who answered our call to use the power of the legal 
profession not only to fight discrimination and empower citizens who 
want to do the same but to have their law firms reflect the legal causes 
that lawyers have been fighting for, for decades in this country, and I 
appreciated that. Last month we had a coalition of religious leaders 
here who pledged the power of faith in our ongoing efforts. Today we 
recognize that corporate America is an equally, perhaps even more

[[Page 641]]

powerful force in the movement for building one America.
    Dr. King once said, ``We refuse to believe there are insufficient 
funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this Nation.'' Today, there 
is a new understanding that actually building one America replenishes 
the funds in the vaults of opportunity, that this is not an act of 
charity or kindness or even constitutional obligation but enlightened 
self-interest.
    For the past 7 years, I have tried to unlock those vaults and let 
the river of opportunity flow to every community and every person. And I 
am grateful for the chance that we have had to be part of building the 
longest economic expansion in our history and the lowest African-
American and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded. I'm proud of the 
fact that we have an administration that looks like America, with the 
most diverse Cabinet and staff in history.
    But we all know there are still people and places left behind, and 
there are still places where problems exist even when people try to root 
them out. And I appreciated George Fisher 
citing his own company. I am quite sure that any of us, including me, 
who had any organization of any size have similar experiences somewhere 
in the operations which we lead.
    Now, a part of what we're trying to do is just to get economic 
opportunity out there. That's what the whole new markets effort is 
about. We've been to the Mississippi Delta, to Appalachia, to the Pine 
Ridge Reservation, to inner cities. On April the 16th, I'm going to go 
out to East Palo Alto, to the Shiprock Native American Reservation in 
New Mexico, and to one or two other places to try to focus specifically 
on what technology can do, not to open but to close the digital divide 
and increase economic opportunity for our people.
    But it is also important to put the power of diversity to work for 
our economy in daily ways. And that means encouraging diversity 
throughout every single corporate organization in America, from the 
boardroom to the stockroom, forging partnerships between corporations 
and others who need them, schools and communities, to promote 
educational opportunities. It means working with efforts like the 
Welfare to Work Partnership, the School to Work Partnership, to get more 
young people on the path to good careers. It means doing more business 
with small, minority-owned suppliers of all kinds. It means using the 
corporate bully pulpit to convince others that an investment in 
diversity is the right and the smart thing to do.
    Yesterday we had a fascinating economic summit here at the White 
House. It highlighted how the rapid development of information 
technology in the last years--10 years--has dramatically transformed our 
economy, giving us unprecedented growth, wealth, and job creation.
    We also faced the fact that a lot of people have been left behind in 
this development. We know that minorities and poor whites have 
participated at a lower rate in the new economy because they don't have 
the skills necessary to fill a large number of the high-tech jobs being 
created every day.
    Even though we have a very low unemployment rate, the lowest in 30 
years, it's very interesting--to highlight this--where the shortage of 
high-tech jobs is. The Congress, once again, is debating the need to 
raise the ceiling on what we call the H-1B visas. Those are visas that 
people get because they have special skills to come to contribute here. 
And we will raise it, and we should raise it, because first of all 
immigration is good for our country, and secondly, these companies need 
to continue to grow.
    But it is very interesting that in the largest center of pure 
information technology employment, Silicon Valley, right next to it you 
have East Palo Alto, where I'm going, which has a 20 percent poverty 
rate and a high unemployment rate. Now, if you believe as I do, that 
intelligence is evenly distributed throughout the human race, that means 
some of those people could fill some of those H-1B slots if only they 
had had the education and training to do it.
    The second-largest concentration of high-tech information technology 
jobs, interestingly enough, is not in New York or on Corridor 128 in 
Massachusetts, it's here in the Washington, DC, area. The city of 
Washington, even though the unemployment rate is now--I think we've got 
it down below 6 percent--is still the second or third highest in the 
country compared to all the other States. And there's a huge job 
shortage here.
    And if you believe that intelligence is evenly distributed and a lot 
of these people could be filling those jobs, if more people had had 
attitudes like those we've had here expressed and more systems in place 
like those that many of the corporate leaders here have put in place, 
and they could fill some of those H-1B jobs.

[[Page 642]]

Now, the trick is to do both at the same time, and that is what we're 
committed to doing. But I think it's worth pointing out.
    According to our Office of Science and Technology Policy, African-
Americans and Hispanics are less than half as likely, still today, to 
earn degrees in science and engineering as whites. According to a 
February issue of Black Enterprise magazine, only 4 of the top 50 blacks 
in corporate America work in the high-tech industry.
    The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate that information technology 
will need 3 million more workers by the year 2008. So, this is just one 
example of something we need to be doing. And I might say this: This is 
not just these dot-com companies; information technology is dominating, 
driving, and making more efficient all kinds of traditional 
corporations. In that sense, they're just as important as they are to 
Duane Ackerman's connecting people. They 
also will create more Kodak moments for George in the years ahead. [Laughter]
    I'm glad you mentioned that Kodak moment, by the way. I've often 
thought I should be getting some sort of stock benefit--[laughter]--for 
all the film I use here.
    Let me just say, I want to make a couple of announcements today, to 
put some teeth into this enormously important event. First of all, 25 
companies, all of them represented here today, have pledged to commit at 
least $1 million a year for the next 10 years to expand diversity in the 
high-tech work force. That's a $250 million long-term commitment by 
American corporations to close the technology skills gap.
    A classic example of doing well by doing good will help us to create 
one America. The funds being pledged today include contributions to 
strengthen math and science education; to provide scholarships for 
minorities and women; to train more math and science teachers in our 
inner cities, a very important thing; to help young people pursue 
careers in science, engineering, and information technology. This is a 
very important proposition.
    Many other things can be done. And I hope that this meeting today 
will just be the beginning of a whole new burst of effort by corporate 
America. And I want to thank George Fisher for saying that you don't want to judge your performance 
by just whether the numbers look good or whether you've met the minimum 
or whether you can't be sued in a court of law. That's not what all this 
is about. This is not about keeping something bad from happening. This 
is about making good things happen. And the more I represent you around 
the world, the more I realize that this effort to build one America is, 
in a way, the most advanced example of a struggle going on all over the 
world, which has gone on throughout human history.
    I was in this little village in India a couple weeks ago, and I met 
with this women's dairy co-op. And they showed me how they had some, for 
them, very high technology to test the fat content of their milk and how 
proud they were that even in this poor village they had--everything that 
they did, all their transactions were conducted by computer.
    And then I saw, in this little poor village, that the State 
government there had put a computer up in whatever language the people 
who would come to it spoke, so that even the poorest village people 
could get the information they needed that the Government had. And one 
woman who had just had a baby came in, pulled up the Health Department's 
page, and found out what she was supposed to do the first 2 months of 
her baby's life, and then printed it right out. And she went home with 
information as good as you could get if you had walked out of a doctor's 
office in Chevy Chase here today. That is the kind of thing we ought to 
be doing.
    But the point I want to make is, what they told me was, all these 
changes started in 1993 when the Government adopted a new law that said 
the local governments had to reflect all the tribes and all the castes 
of India and that women had to be given 30 percent of the positions in 
local government. And they told me, these people in this poor village--
you'd think, well, they'd think, ``Gosh, you know, we're so poor we've 
got to work together.'' They told me that until this law passed and they 
all got elected, that people had never had dinner together in this tiny 
village across the caste lines and the tribal lines. And now that 
they've been doing it, you know, they know what they were missing, and 
they can't imagine why they didn't do it all along.
    You see these things happen; you all know all the terrible stories 
from Bosnia to Rwanda, to the continuing strife we have in the Middle 
East and the struggles we're having in Kosovo. But what I want you to 
understand is, there's

[[Page 643]]

something endemic in the human condition that both makes us afraid of 
people who are different from us and beneath that makes us long to reach 
out and connect with them.
    And I think it's important to point out that this whole effort of 
building one America is not about homogenizing us. Four or 5 years from 
now, they will be having events like this at the White House, and--
certainly within 10 years--it will be impossible to have four speakers 
and they will all be middle-aged gray-haired guys and three of them will 
be white. It won't happen. It will change. In my lifetime, I think we 
will have a woman President and certainly an African-American or 
Hispanic or an Asian-American President--maybe all three.
    But the point is, it won't diminish white guys. It will make life 
more interesting. [Laughter] But the struggle is to understand it that 
way. This is not a matter of homogenizing this country; it's a matter of 
celebrating, relishing our differences and somehow finding a way to 
affirm our common humanity. And the older I get, the more I become 
convinced that it may be one of the two or three most important journeys 
in life for all of us--not just as an organization, just individual 
journeys--figuring out how to understand and respect the differences 
between people and not feel that in order for you to matter more, 
someone else has to matter less; in order for you to be secure, someone 
else has to be insecure; in order for you to win, someone else has to 
lose.
    It is a constant theme throughout all human history, and it is 
something that, in positive and profoundly negative ways, is being 
played out all over the world today. And I am grateful that in our 
country, we are largely dealing with--in spite of the tragedy of the 
hate crimes against people because of their race or their religion or 
because they are gay, which we have to try to stamp out--largely, we're 
playing this out in positive ways today.
    But I would ask you to remember as we close--just one last thing--
what George said. This is not a matter of getting everybody right with 
the law. It's not a matter of having the right statistics. It's a matter 
of making the businesses of America a joy to work in, because they will 
be more productive, they will be more profitable. People are happy to go 
to work because they are proud of who they are; they respect those who 
are different from them; and they are making progress on this very 
difficult journey of life. Now I think it is a great, great endeavor in 
which to be involved, and I thank you so much for your support.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 3:43 p.m. in Presidential Hall in the 
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In his remarks, he 
referred to George M. C. Fisher, chairman, Eastman Kodak Co.; and F. 
Duane Ackerman, chief executive officer, BellSouth.