[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[April 18, 2000]
[Pages 744-749]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the COMDEX 2000 Spring Conference in Chicago, Illinois
April 18, 2000

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Frederic Rosen, and thank you, Jason Chudnofsky. I am delighted to be here. I want to thank Director 
Tony Streit and the young people from Street-
Level Youth Media who went on my tour with me over in the other part of 
the McCormick Center to see some of the new wonders of the information 
technology revolution. I want to thank those who have come with me here 
today on this last stop of this part of our new markets tour, including 
several Members of the United States Congress: Jan 
Schakowsky from Chicago; Stephanie 
Tubbs Jones from Cleveland; Silvestre 
Reyes from El Paso, Texas; and 
Representative Bill Jefferson from New 
Orleans.
    I want to thank Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater; Federal Communications Chair Bill Kennard; Reverend Jesse Jackson; 
Bob Johnson, the president of Black 
Entertainment Television; and Gene Sperling 
and Maria Echaveste, who operate this 
program for me out of the White House.
    I am glad to be the first President to address this conference, but 
I am quite sure I will not be the last. Information technology has 
accounted for about 30 percent of this remarkable economic growth we've 
had, even though people directly working in IT only account for about 8 
percent of our employment.
    What we have tried to do in Government is to provide the conditions 
and give people the tools to make the most of this phenomenal new era in 
human affairs. What you and people like you all across this country have 
done, have made the most of that--the balanced budget, the 
Telecommunications Act, doubling our investment in education and 
training, and dramatically increasing basic research, opening trade to 
new countries. And it's given us the longest economic expansion in 
history, the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates 
ever recorded, the lowest female unemployment rate recorded in 40 years, 
poverty down to a 20-year low, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the 
lowest overall unemployment in 30 years. That is the good news. And it 
was brought about primarily by this incredible environment and the 
gifted people who have made the most of this celebration of ideas and 
innovation and ingenuity.
    But as Mr. Rosen said when he 
introduced me, what I have been focused on now in the last year-plus of 
my term as President is the people and places who have been left behind 
in this phenomenal new economy, and I have for two reasons. One is, I 
think that all of us would like to see every American who is willing to 
work for it have a chance to be a part of this astonishing new era of 
enterprise. I think, just on pure ethical grounds, we all sense that the 
American values require that everybody be given a fair chance to 
participate. But secondly, I think it is in our economic interest to do 
it.
    You know, we spend a lot of time in Washington discussing, how in 
the world can we keep this economic expansion going? It's already the 
longest economic expansion in history, far longer than any other one 
that did not include a major war. How long can it go? What will happen? 
How will it come to an end? Will we really have inflation that will 
somehow bring an end to this long boom?
    Well, it's clear to me that if we want it to continue, we have to do 
more to find new markets. New markets mean creating new businesses and 
new employees, as well as new customers. And if you do both, it means 
you can have growth without inflation. So this idea of closing the 
digital divide is good social policy. It's good personal ethics. But 
it's also very, very important for our continued economic expansion as a 
nation.

[[Page 745]]

    So I came here today to ask you to set another trend, to devote more 
time and technology, more ideas and energy to closing the digital 
divide, the growing gap between those who have the tools and skills and 
motivation to succeed in the economy, which you've come here to explore 
and celebrate and push the frontiers of, and those who do not have those 
at this time.
    Now, over the past year I have been to a lot of these places. I have 
been to the hills and hollows of Appalachia, to the heart of the 
Mississippi Delta. I've been to Englewood here in inner-city Chicago and 
to East Los Angeles. I've been to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South 
Dakota, the home of the Oglala Sioux. I have tried everywhere to shine 
the spotlight on the potential, not the problems, of these places.
    Yesterday we began our third new markets tour in East Palo Alto, 
California, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, because I wanted the 
American people to know that even there, there are a lot of our fellow 
citizens who are not yet fully participating in the information age.
    Yesterday we also went to Shiprock, Navajo country, in the far north 
of New Mexico, and saw the vast differences, the literal vast distances, 
literal distances in this case that have to be overcome to build an 
information infrastructure that all of America is a part of. We visited 
a community living in the place where their forebears have been for more 
than 1,000 years. We celebrated the Navajo Code Talkers, who were very 
instrumental in America winning World War II with our Allies in the 
Pacific because they developed a unique means of communication. They 
transferred messages back and forth in Navajo, and the language was so 
different from any code or any known language that our adversaries in 
World War II couldn't break it. And it's quite ironic that a people 
whose major contribution to the modern world was helping us to win World 
War II based on unique communications now live in a place where 70 
percent of them don't even have telephones.
    I was introduced by a young woman, a 13-year-
old young girl who won a contest--really a bright young woman, and she 
won this contest, and she won a computer. And she found that she 
couldn't get on the Internet because she didn't have a telephone line in 
her home.
    Next week we're going to rural North Carolina to discuss the 
prospects of broadband communications and what it might do to open 
opportunities in poor, rural, isolated places. And then in a couple of 
months we will have a part of this digital divide tour devoted solely to 
the potential that web accessibility offers to disabled Americans to 
participate more fully in the educational and economic life of the 
United States.
    Now, this is all sobering at one level, but increasingly hopeful to 
me, because I honestly believe that the new information economy has the 
potential, at home and around the world, to lift more people out of 
poverty more quickly than at any previous period in all of human 
history; and that tapping that potential is actually in our enlightened 
self-interest.
    And that's why I came here today, because I need your help and your 
support, because now we've come through all these years of this 
remarkable economic expansion. We have finally seen even income 
inequality begin to diminish over the last 2\1/2\ years, as more and 
more Americans at the lower end of the income scale begin to fully 
participate in the economy. We have a very important choice before us. 
And only with your help can America make the right choice to make sure 
that no one is left behind; to use these new technologies to widen the 
circle of opportunity rather than allowing the digital divide to widen 
the lines of division in education, race, income, and region. I will say 
again, it's not only morally the right choice. It's not just good social 
policy; it is imperative, in my judgment, if we're going to keep the 
economy growing, to find new places where we create not only new 
customers but new businesses and new employees.
    Now, I believe we've got to find the right combination of incentives 
and initiative to bridge this divide. The distances that exist are, in 
some cases, as I said, they're physical. They're also educational, and 
they're clearly economic. But on every one of these new markets trips, 
we have met people who are eager for opportunity. And like the young 
people here today who made this tour with me, they demonstrate that 
ability and drive and dreams are evenly distributed throughout the human 
race and throughout American society. It is opportunity which is still 
not evenly distributed.
    Everywhere I have been, I find Americans who are not at all 
interested in charity but very interested in opportunity, not a handout 
but a

[[Page 746]]

hand up. We can only tap the potential of these new workers, these new 
business owners, these new learners, if we work together. Over and over 
again over the last 7 years, I have found, in some of our most important 
endeavors, the only thing that really works is the right kind of public-
private partnership.
    I'll just give you one example. We have the lowest welfare rolls in 
30 years. The welfare rolls have been cut roughly in half since I became 
President. And part of it is the laws that have been passed, including 
the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which required people who could work to 
work, but also invested more money in child care for their children and 
transportation so they could get to work, and kept their kids in food 
and medicine while they were making the transition.
    But part of it was this remarkable partnership now that numbers over 
12,000 businesses, people who committed that they would personally go 
out and find people, help them move from the welfare rolls, give them 
the training, give them the support they needed to succeed. And these 
people alone, just the 12,000 people in our partnership, have hired 
hundreds of thousands of people from the welfare rolls, many of whom 
were difficult to place but have succeeded. No Government mandate could 
have gotten that done. If we hadn't had the public-private partnership, 
it would not have worked nearly as well as it has.
    The Vice President has worked for more 
than 7, or about 7 years now, in our partnership with the auto companies 
and the auto workers on the new generation vehicle, and we put a lot of 
money into it. But we couldn't develop a car in the Government. And yet 
you see--if you noticed in the last Detroit auto show, they're showing 
cars that they expect to market in the next year or two, including 
larger cars that get 70 to 80 miles a gallon. We have research going on 
now into the production of biofuels, not just from corn but from 
agricultural waste products, even from grasses. And if we ever get the 
conversion level down to about 1 gallon of gasoline for 8 gallons of 
fuel, biofuel, and then you get in a 70-mile-an-hour gas car, you'll be 
driving a car that gets over 500 miles a gallon in conventional terms. 
That will change the energy future of America and the world forever and 
will prove something I deeply believe, that we can conquer the challenge 
of global warming and continue to grow not only our economy but the 
developing economies of the world.
    All of this has to be done in partnership. And that's basically what 
I propose for closing the digital divide and creating new markets 
throughout America. What we want to do is to be a catalyst, to provide 
investment incentives and the kind of framework and tools that will 
enable people in the private sector to do what is in their interest 
anyway. We believe that tax incentives and loan guarantees can leverage 
private sector investment in distressed areas, get capital flowing to 
people in neighborhoods it might otherwise miss, having basically 
nothing to do, necessarily, with high technology investment.
    Today, if you want to invest in a poor area of Latin America or Asia 
or Africa, we have a framework set up that could get you a combination 
of tax breaks and loan guarantees to lower the risk of doing that. Why? 
Because we think that we have an obligation as Americans to help poor 
people around the world develop stable lives. We know it promotes 
democracy; it promotes peace; it promotes environmental cleanup; it 
undermines the destabilizing forces at work in the world. All I'm trying 
to do, in terms of the law, is to give Americans who have money to 
invest the same incentives to invest in poor areas in America we give 
them today to invest in poor areas in Latin America or Africa or Asia. I 
think that's the right thing to do.
    Last fall the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis 
Hastert, and I came here to Chicago, met 
with Reverend Jackson and Congressman Bobby 
Rush and others, and we pledged to work 
together on a bipartisan initiative to spur investments in new markets. 
We are making real progress on our end of the deal. The House of 
Representatives took a very important step last week toward creating the 
American Private Investment Companies that I've proposed to spur as much 
as $1.5 billion in private investment in our hard-pressed communities. 
Now, I understand Speaker Hastert is going to be with you tomorrow, and 
I think you will see, if this is part of the discussion, that his 
commitment is genuine. This should not be a partisan issue.
    Every American--Republican, Democrat, independent, Green Party 
member, whatever--every American has got a vested interest in seeing 
that every other American has the chance to live up to his or her God-
given potential.

[[Page 747]]

So this is very, very important. And the main thing that we want to do 
with this portion of the new markets initiative is to make sure that we 
can get some investment in areas where people literally are isolated, 
where we need local, community-based investment because you can't just 
say, ``Well, we'll give them an education. They can hop on the subway or 
get in their car and drive to a job.'' But we also have to have a 
comprehensive approach that gives individuals the ability to bridge the 
digital divide, to create businesses which are far distant because 
technology permits them to overcome distances, and to get the education 
and training they need in the first place to succeed.
    Now, what have we done in that? Well, when the Congress adopted the 
Telecommunications Act a few years ago, we insisted--the Vice President 
and I did--on something called the E-rate, the power of the Federal 
Communications Commission to set the E-rate. It is now worth over $2 
billion, and it gives discounts to schools, to libraries, public 
institutions, so they can afford to be a part of the Internet. And it's 
had a huge impact.
    When I became President, only 3 percent of our classrooms, about 11 
percent of our schools, were connected to the Internet. We've been 
working on this hard, now, for 6 years. Today, over two-thirds of our 
classrooms and 95 percent of our schools are connected, including 90 
percent of very poor schools. And we'll be, by the end of the year, 
we'll probably be at 100 percent of the schools connected, except for 
those whose physical facilities are literally in too much disrepair to 
have a connection.
    I know that may be hard for some of you to believe, but it's true. 
We have cities where the average school building is 65 years of age or 
more. We have--there are schools in New York City that are still heated 
by coal-fired furnaces. But by and large, this E-rate has really worked.
    We have a $450 million technology literacy challenge, which is 
designed to make sure that we try to match contributions from others who 
put technology into our schools. Our budget offers $2 billion in new tax 
incentives to help bridge the digital divide, to get the technology into 
the schools and into the rural communities, into community computing 
centers. And things like that can be available to adults as well as 
children.
    We provide $150 million to train new teachers to use technology in 
the classroom, so that they aren't repeatedly embarrassed by their 
students knowing more than they do, and so that they can actually make 
the most of it; and $100 million to create more technology centers in 
1,000 communities across the country.
    Today I can tell you that 214 of these community technology centers 
will be created this year alone and 136 more will be expanded. These are 
very important because they are not only available to young people but 
also to adults who can use such centers after work and themselves 
acquire these skills. It's very, very important that we recognize that 
this cannot be solely the province of the school years. We have got to 
do more to bring adults who have been left on the other side of the 
digital divide into the economic mainstream. We are going to expand our 
investment in these centers by about $86 million from State, local, 
private, and Federal sources together.
    Not far from here, on Chicago's West Side, is one of these centers. 
I mentioned the young people I met today from there, at Street-Level 
Youth Media. They spend a lot of their time there. They are here in this 
audience today. They can access the Internet and a lot more. They can 
have classes in website design, projects in video production, and, most 
important, the chance to apply their skills in real work for real wages. 
Every child in America should have this opportunity, and we are trying 
to give it to every child in America.
    If the budget passes, we will have 1,000 of these neighborhood 
networks next year. That is double the number we have now in the 
country. These computer learning centers are the fruit of public-private 
partnership under the leadership of the Department of Housing and Urban 
Development. They have already helped residents of some of our poorest 
neighborhoods move from welfare to work, increase their earnings, even 
start their own businesses.
    One of the things that is totally unappreciated about the nature of 
the Internet revolution is the extent to which it gives people who are 
otherwise completely out of the economic mainstream, who could never 
have access to the kind of up-front capital it would take to start a 
traditional business and rent a big office space, the chance to actually 
earn money on the net. The first time I discovered this was when some of 
my friends at eBay told me that they now have

[[Page 748]]

30,000 people making a living off eBay--not working for the company but 
making a living buying and selling and trading--and that the profiles 
indicated to them that a very substantial number of these people had 
previously been on welfare.
    So again I will say, if you believe that there is an equal 
distribution of intelligence, ability, and dreams throughout the 
population, and if you have seen in your own lives what this has done 
for you and for this economy, it seems to me that closing the digital 
divide is one of the most important things we could do that would have 
the quickest results in alleviating the kind of poverty which is 
inexcusable in the kind of economy we're experiencing today.
    Let me also say that--I made a joke about it earlier, but I think 
the idea of having teachers who are really able to make the most of 
technology in the classroom and teach their students is something that's 
very important. Everybody I have ever worked with on this in the last 
several years, all the heads of all the companies that have tried to 
really help our schools continue to hammer this.
    I got a letter from the deans of more than 200 colleges and 
universities, pledging to join in that effort, holding themselves 
responsible for results, being willing to test their progress with a 
tool designed by the CEO Forum on Education and Technology, a forum that 
includes a lot of the companies that are represented in this auditorium 
today. But this is a big deal. This is a serious commitment that we 
haven't had in the past. And I want to thank the Forum on Education and 
Technology and these 200 deans for what they want to do to train our 
teachers.
    But this is just the start. So here is what I came to do, really. I 
want to ask you to do the following things. First of all, if you are not 
already a part of it, I hope that the companies, everyone represented 
here from the largest to the smallest, would support our national call 
to action, which I issued 2 weeks ago. Its basic goals are to provide 
21st century learning tools for every child in every school and to 
create digital opportunity for every family and every community.
    I have asked for businesses and schools and community groups and 
volunteers to enlist in the effort. More than 400 organizations have 
signed on in the first 2 weeks, and they are already doing amazing 
things. Many of you have been working at this for some years now, to 
help in education and in economic development. But if you are not part 
of this, I hope you will become part of this. I hope you will do more 
than sign a pledge. I hope you will commit to fulfill it.
    I want you all to ask if there is anything you are not doing that 
you could do to give our schools computers and high-speed connections, 
to design the educational software our children need to succeed, to make 
sure our teachers are as comfortable in front of a computer as in front 
of a chalkboard. Again I say, many companies are leading this effort 
today, but we need more. The biggest problem in American education and 
the biggest problem in combating poverty and creating economic 
opportunity is not that there are no good ideas. Every problem in 
American education today has been solved by somebody somewhere.
    I remember when I started running for President and I was coming to 
Chicago, there was a woman here from my home State of Arkansas who was 
principal of a junior high school that was in a neighborhood with the 
highest murder rate in the State of Illinois. And you had to ask to get 
into this junior high school. They had 150 mothers and 75 fathers in 
that school every week. They had a strict no-weapons policy; if you had 
one, you were history. They had a zero dropout rate. The kids went on to 
high school and did well, and a phenomenal percentage of them went on to 
college. And I could give you lots of examples like that.
    The problem we have--and in terms of closing the digital divide and 
education and economics, there are examples everywhere. The problem we 
have in America with social change is getting things to scale, is 
reaching a critical mass of people. That's why I came here today. This 
is a critical mass of the IT community. And you need to reach a critical 
mass of the at-risk kids and the communities where economic and 
educational opportunities are needed to close the digital divide.
    The second thing I want to ask you to do, so that today's students 
can become tomorrow's success stories, is to expand internships and to 
deepen your talent pool. I just received a survey that I read just the 
day before yesterday indicating that, even making allowances for 
differences in education, women and minorities are still comparatively 
underrepresented in most IT occupations. We can do a lot to close the 
digital

[[Page 749]]

divide just by equalizing the representation once people do have the 
education and skills they need.
    The third thing I would like to ask you to do is to recognize, as I 
said before, there is a limit to what the Federal Government can do. I 
intend to set up a framework and to try to provide the necessary tools 
and to generate as much activity as I can. But we need more partnerships 
at the local level with the schools, with the local communities, with 
the local community groups, and with local government. I think you will 
find that if you are not involved in this kind of work, there is more 
interest in it than ever before, and people are eager for help.
    If we work together, we can empower people with the tools and the 
training they need to lift themselves out of poverty. If we work 
together, we can give people the ability to use new technology to start 
new businesses. If we work together, we can close the digital divide and 
open digital opportunities.
    I am asking you to do this because you can. I am asking you to do 
this because it's right. And I am asking you to do this because America 
needs it to have a continually growing economy.
    The productivity increases generated by information technology in 
the IT companies themselves, and then through application throughout the 
economy, is what has enabled us to continue to grow at 4 percent and to 
keep inflation down. I am doing my best to open new markets around the 
world and to keep our markets open, which helps to keep inflation down 
and to grow. But the best opportunity we have are all those people out 
there that are dying to be part of what the rest of us may take for 
granted.
    And I can tell you, I have lived longer than most people who do very 
well in the work that you do. Our country has never had an economy like 
this. The last time we had anything close was in the 1960's. It came 
apart over the competing claims and crises in civil rights and the war 
in Vietnam and the attempt to finance all that and deal with the 
problems of the poor. I see a lot of people who are gray-headed like me 
out there nodding their heads.
    And when it happened, when I grew up in it, I thought that economy 
would last forever. I just took it for granted that we were the most 
productive economy in the world; we were going to win the cold war; we'd 
solve the civil rights problems in the courts and the Congress, and 
everything would be hunky-dory. And then boom, one day it was gone.
    And I've waited 35 years, as a citizen, for our country to have the 
chance to give all our people the future of our dreams for our children. 
That's the chance we've got now. And I know you're very busy. I know you 
have a lot of other things to do, but I don't know how many years we'll 
ever have to wait again until a moment like this comes along.
    I can't do it alone. The Federal Government can't do it alone. But 
if we all do it together, there is nothing we can't do. We will never, 
ever, ever have a better chance, and, therefore, a more profound 
responsibility, to close the digital divide.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 2:10 p.m. in the Arie Crown Theater at the 
McCormick Place Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to 
Frederic D. Rosen, chairman, Key3Media Group, Inc., who introduced the 
President; Jason Chudnofsky, president, SOFTBANK COMDEX, Inc.; Tony 
Streit, administrative director, Street-Level Youth Media; Rev. Jesse 
Jackson, civil rights activist; and Myra Jodie, student, Steamboat 
Navajo Nation, AZ.