[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 8 (Monday, February 26, 1996)]
[Pages 349-354]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the White House Conference on Empowerment Zones

February 22, 1996

    Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President, Hannah and Vinnie and the 
congressmen, the mayors, county officials, and others here. Can you 
believe the Vice President--[laughter]--asked me in front of all of you 
about this trade deal? [Laughter] I figured that the--you know, in this 
league there's only two teams. [Laughter] Nobody on their team I want to 
trade him for. [Laughter] I'm a lot more worried about the other team 
treating him like a free agent, making him an offer he can't refuse. 
[Laughter]
    I want to say to Vinnie Johnson, all of us saw him play on 
television with Detroit, but I was in my very first term as Governor of 
Arkansas when he was a star at Baylor. So I want to say here in front of 
all of you, I forgive him for all the points he scored against my team--
[laughter]--when I was trying to succeed at everything, in every 
endeavor.
    I thank him; I thank Hannah for their stunning examples. I want to 
thank the Vice President and Secretary Cisneros and Assistant Secretary 
Cuomo and Secretary Glickman and all the people in our other Departments 
who have worked to make this community empowerment effort a success.
    I had believed in this concept long before I became President, long 
before I ran for President. But to make it work in the way that it has 
worked required an incredible amount of planning and discipline and 
followup and effort. And I must say, I have been pleased beyond my 
wildest dreams not only with what you have done but with the role that 
our administration has played and the role that they have done. The idea 
and the passing of the law in Congress was only the first step, and had 
they not done such a superb job in the followup--all the people on the 
Community Empowerment Board, but beginning with those I mentioned and 
starting first and foremost with the Vice President, this would not have 
happened. So I want to thank them for what they did.
    I also want to say, just before I get into my remarks about you, the 
Congress is coming back next Monday, and in the weeks since they've been 
gone you can see that sometimes partisan activities lead to inattention 
to the public's business. Now we've got a real opportunity for action 
between now and Easter when the Congress goes out for its next recess, 
and I think it's time that we here got down to doing our work the way 
you are doing your work in your communities. It's time to deal with the 
unfinished business of this country: to continue to create oppor- 

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tunity, to continue to give people like you the opportunity to take 
responsibility for your own lives, and to build our American community, 
to grow this economy in a way that will help you to succeed.
    That means we should act now--not later but now--to pass a 7-year 
balanced budget plan that is consistent with our values and our 
interests: that protect Medicare and Medicaid, our investments in 
education and the environment, that gives a modest tax cut to those who 
really need it, and that grows our economy. It means we ought to act now 
to pass real welfare reform that elevates work and family and protects 
children and gives people a chance to make the most of their own lives.
    You want to know what kind of welfare reform I want? You just heard 
her speak up here. That's what this country needs.
    We ought to pass the health care reform bill now before the Senate, 
unanimously voted out of the committee, Republicans and Democrats alike 
for it. The labor unions are for it. The National Association of 
Manufacturers are for it. The chamber of commerce is for it. Why has it 
not been voted on? The health insurance lobby is against it. Everybody 
else is for it. It's a simple little bill. It says if we can't find a 
way to give everybody health insurance, at least everybody ought to be 
able to afford health insurance, and people shouldn't lose their 
insurance just because someone in their family gets sick or because they 
have to change jobs. That bill, the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill, should be 
passed immediately to help the American people.
    I heard Vinnie say he was going to give his employees a 401-K plan. 
There are a lot of small businesses that simply cannot afford pension 
plans for their employees now because of the laws that exist. One of the 
things in our balanced budget plan--it's a top priority of the White 
House Conference on Small Business--would make it much easier for the 
small businesses in your community empowerment zones to take out 
retirement programs for themselves and their employees. We ought to pass 
that right away.
    And I'll tell you something else we ought to do when they come back. 
We ought to raise the minimum wage. You know, I believe if we raise the 
minimum wage, you'd have people coming out of welfare looking for work 
even more intensely than they are now. If we don't raise the minimum 
wage, it will fall to a 40-year low this year in terms of what it will 
buy. You know, it's hard to raise a family with children on $4.25 an 
hour. And yet, that's what a lot of people are trying to do. Now if we 
want to value our families and value work, we ought to do it. We ought 
to do it now.
    We ought to pass antiterrorism legislation that has been languishing 
for a year almost. And we ought to enact real campaign finance reform. 
There is a lot for Congress to do. And this can be an era of genuine 
bipartisan achievement for our country. It's the only way we can achieve 
anything since the Congress is in the hands of the Republicans, but we 
need Republicans and Democrats to vote for things, and the White House 
is in the hands of the other party. We can do that.
    What we really need to do here is to behave the way you are back 
home. What we really need to do is to adopt a model that you have had to 
adopt back home, get all kinds of people together, different people, 
different walks of life, different parties, different attitudes, 
different outlooks, and bring everybody's strengths to the table and 
prove that we can create an era of possibility for everyone.
    You know, sometimes people say to me when I give these speeches, 
``Well, what exactly is it that you believe? What is your philosophy of 
how people ought to work together and how this country ought to work?'' 
And you're it. I mean, basically, this is how I think we ought to 
approach all of our major challenges. If you want to know how I think we 
should work and what Government should do, look at what we have done to 
work with you to basically empower you to work together to take control 
of your own destinies, to help individuals and families and 
neighborhoods and communities make the most of their own present and 
their own future.
    I said in the State of the Union Address that these enormous 
economic changes, our movement to an information and technology age, 
into a global economy, have created an age of possibility for untold 
numbers of

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Americans. But as all of us know, it is a strange and different time.
    None of us have ever lived through a time of this much economic 
change before. The last time this happened was a hundred years ago when 
we moved from an agricultural to an industrial society. So none of us 
have the experience of knowing what this is like. But what is going on 
is we are exploding opportunities at a record rate, and half our people 
feel like they are stuck in idle. And there's a reason for that.
    I mean, if I had told you 3 years ago--suppose I had given the 
following Inaugural Address, how would you have responded: ``My fellow 
Americans, in 3 years we'll cut the deficit in half; have 8 million new 
jobs; have 3 years in a row of record new formations of small 
businesses; record new self-made millionaires, not people who were given 
it; we'll have the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation 
in 27 years; homeownership will be at a 15-year high; we will have 
record exports--for the first time in 10 years our exports to other 
countries will be growing faster than their imports to us; and after 3 
years, half the American people will be making the same thing they were 
making 3 years ago.''
    You would have said, ``That guy is on another planet,'' right? 
[Laughter] Those things don't follow, but that's exactly what happened. 
And that's why you see these different stories coming out about the 
economy, and people taking a different tack on it and the rhetoric of 
the election season, because the good news is true and so is the bad 
news.
    And what is causing that is this great uprooting, this time of 
change we're going through where more and more work is more mind and 
less muscle; where this fine lady and her son do computer programs and 
work out the software to help the empowerment zone work in their 
community; and more and more work is being created by people like 
Vinnie, small-business people in highly flexible interpersonal 
relationships with fewer layers of bureaucracy. And more and more people 
who used to be in big structural bureaucracies are finding themselves 
downsized, which is a cruel way of saying you're middle-aged and out of 
work.
    And so it is the best of times for America, except for the people 
who don't quite fit into all the changes when the gears don't quite 
mesh. And obviously, if you look across America, economically, you will 
see that there are essentially three big problems. There are places 
where the recovery hasn't hit, where the unemployment rate is still too 
high and people want jobs and don't have them. There are the people who 
are working harder and harder just to keep up because they haven't 
gotten a raise. And then there are people who happen to be in certain 
sectors of the economy where they're being downsized, and it's taking 
them a much longer time to find another job making what they were making 
before with the same level of benefits.
    So the challenge, the economic challenge for America is not how do 
we put up a wall and walk away from the world, but how do we capture the 
dynamism of the good sectors of the economy, all these great things that 
are happening, and spread it to the rest of the economy so that 
everybody has opportunity again; so that when you talk about how the 
country's doing, you're talking about how everybody can do and not just 
how some can do.
    The same thing is true on the social front. If you look at it, 3 
years ago I would not have believed that in 3 years we could have the 
crime rate, the poverty rate, the welfare rolls, the food stamp rolls, 
the teen pregnancy rolls all dropping. But that is good. That's the good 
news. They're all going down. The bad news is, in most places they're 
still too high.
    And the really troubling thing is that if I had told you this 3 
years ago--what if I had given you this speech. ``My fellow Americans, 
in 3 years the rate of drug use in our country among people between the 
ages of 18 and 34 will be going down, and the crime rate in America will 
be going down, but the rate of casual drug use among people under 18 
will be going up and random violence among people under 18 will be going 
up.'' You would say, ``Wow, how did that happen?''
    It's the same story on the social front. We have not--we have not 
succeeded in revitalizing our institutions, our neighborhoods, in 
strengthening our families and reaching oth- 

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ers. There are still too many of those kids out there raising 
themselves, with nothing to say yes to and people not touching them and 
working on them. That's what you're trying to do.
    Now there is no way a Government program alone can either deal with 
the issue of opening up opportunity for all who will assume 
responsibility for it, or solving all the social problems. And not only 
that, no big bureaucracy is particularly effective anymore. This 
Government is much smaller than it was when I took office, 205,000 
smaller. It's the smallest Government we've had in 30 years. But that 
does not mean, as the Vice President said, it does not mean that the 
answer to America's issues and America's challenges is going back to a 
time when people were left to fend for themselves or that we need a weak 
Government. What we need is a kind of partnership embodied by this 
endeavor, community-based efforts where everybody does their part. 
That's what we have tried to do and that is what you are doing.
    And I just want to tell you that I am grateful to you for the 
progress you have made. And I want you to continue, and I want this 
model to sweep the country.
    The solutions to America's real challenges, economic and social 
challenges, have got to be community driven. The private sector has got 
to be an integral part. The Government--it's not like the Depression--
the Government is broke. We have some money to invest in education and 
training, to invest in environmental protection, to invest in new 
technologies, to invest in infrastructure, but we got to get rid of this 
deficit. So we can't go out and just hire everybody that doesn't have a 
job. The private sector has got to do that. And we have to have the 
right kind of partnership to get them involved so that we have 10,000 
stories like the one Vinnie told today, or 100,000, or a million, or 
however many it takes to bring opportunity back to everybody in this 
country.
    The third thing we've got to do is to have Government at every level 
doing its part. The most important thing, I will say again, about this 
whole empowerment zone process, I think, is not that we broke 13 years 
of gridlock to finally pass it into law in 1993 in the budget, it is 
that after we did that, over 500 communities applied to participate. And 
even the ones that were not selected wound up being richer and better 
off because they had to get together and ask themselves, what is our 
vision for this community and what is my responsibility and what is your 
responsibility to achieve that vision, and how are we going to do it 
together?
    We cannot afford to be divided anymore. We can't afford to sit home 
passively and read the papers every day and watch the news every night 
and be upset about what's not happening and blame somebody else. 
Instead, we're going to go out and meet together and work together and 
change it together. If everybody in America would do that, we would be 
on the way toward the American dream for all of our people in the 21st 
century--just what you've done.
    The first round of the empowerment zone's Enterprise Community 
Initiative was so successful that more than $8 billion in additional 
commitments of investment in these areas have been made from the public 
and private sector in addition to the money that was committed by the 
Federal Government. That is amazing. One hundred and five communities 
were chosen in the first round. You heard Vinnie Johnson's story: 
Detroit alone has attracted $2 billion in local private sector 
investment commitments, creating hundreds and hundreds of jobs. We can 
do that everywhere.
    In Los Angeles, Federal funds helped to set up a public-private 
partnership to form the largest community development bank in the 
Nation. We know--this country, your country has funded banks in 
developing nations to make loans to people with far fewer assets, 
skills, and capacities than we have in the American inner cities. And we 
have put those people back to work and given them a stake in the future 
and strengthened the economy of other countries. It is unconscionable 
that we don't do it in this country. Every community should have one of 
those.
    In one of the smallest and poorest communities in the Mississippi 
Delta, two new manufacturing plants are coming to Itta Bena, a town that 
had never had one before. We can do that everywhere. One of the things 
that we ought to do in this budget debate is to make sure that we leave 
in the commit- 

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ment of a modest amount of money to establish these community 
development financial institutions everywhere. If it works in Third 
World countries, it will work in the rural and urban areas of America 
that have been left out. Stay with it. We have to do it.
    And let me say that most of what we are talking about here--all of 
what we are talking about here--need not be a partisan issue. Every 
American, Republican and Democrat alike, independent, Green Party, 
whatever, there's nobody in America that says, ``I've got a real vested 
interest in keeping that crime rate up,'' except people we want out of 
the way. There's no one in America that says, ``I've got a vested 
interest in keeping more mothers on welfare. I've got a vested interest 
in keeping our schools substandard.'' Nobody's giving these speeches.
    Fiorello LaGuardia once said, there is no Republican or Democratic 
way to clean the streets. No one in America says, ``I've got a vested 
interest in making sure that that playground a block down from my 
apartment house never has a net on the basketball goal.''
    This is basic human values. When we fail to give every person a shot 
at the American dream, when we fail to grow the economy, when we fail to 
build up the potential of the American people, and when we fail to work 
together, we all lose. And when we do it, we all win.
    This is not a question of class warfare. Americans don't resent 
successful people. They admire successful people. Americans want people 
who are successful to be rewarded. We do expect successful people to do 
what Vinnie's done, that sometime in their lives to give a little 
something back to help other people succeed. But nobody resents success.
    The only time resentment comes into our society is not when people 
who are successful have more; it's when people who don't have more never 
have a chance to do better. That is the problem here. People want their 
own chance to do better. And we have an obligation to give it to them, 
and that's what this whole empowerment zone enterprise community 
endeavor is all about.
    Now let me say that I believe that you have made round one a 
phenomenal success. There are many other rural and urban and Indian 
Nation communities that I believe deserve a chance. And so let me say, 
when the Congress comes back I'm going to urge them to do one more 
thing; I'm going to ask them in this budget negotiations to give us a 
round two so that others have a chance to do what you have done.
    If we are going to have tax relief, we will never give so little tax 
relief and have spent so little money to have such a big impact, to 
generate so much private sector and other public sector investment in 
any other way as we will with this. There is more bang for the buck here 
than anything else we could do. And I believe we should do it.
    I also want to say that I want to challenge, again, every community 
to come together and devise your own rebirth. There are other ways for 
communities to work with us. For example, if the Baltimore empowerment 
zone can develop a plan to transform 600 acres of abandoned industrial 
land into an eco-industrial park, imagine how many other acres can be 
reclaimed. If the Kentucky Highlands empowerment zone can create a 
cooperative to get credit to farmers, imagine how other farmers and 
businesses could be helped if only credit were available. If other 
communities have done this kind of thing to help themselves, why can't 
every community do the same thing?
    We want to do everything we can to help everybody in America be a 
part of the kind of comprehensive strategy for the future embodied in 
the empowerment zones in the enterprise communities, taking on tough 
jobs like reclaiming abandoned industrial sites, improving access to 
capital and making homeownership easier, working with the communities 
with which we are working and those with whom we are prepared to work. 
We are beginning to clean the environment in our cities by taking a 
commonsense approach.
    And I wish I had a chance to talk about 10 of these examples, 
because they're all so thrilling to me. But there are literally hundreds 
of thousands of old, neglected industrial sites now popularly called 
``brownfields,'' that can be redeveloped, as Baltimore is doing. 
Protecting our environment in the urban areas can go hand-in-hand with 
redevelopment. It can create jobs and at the same

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time make more people want to live in the cities of America again.
    Finally, let me say we have to do more to create housing that will 
encourage vibrant neighborhoods in our inner cities and rural areas. You 
know, cities used to be places where teachers and firefighters and 
police officers wanted to live, and they can be again if we can help 
communities to develop good, affordable housing.
    If we really want all of our communities to be revitalized again, we 
not only have to create opportunities for poor people, we have to make 
the environment so that middle class people will want to live in them 
again and that the poor and the middle class will live side by side, as 
they did in the neighborhoods when I grew up. We have to do that. We 
have to be committed to helping all Americans achieve this large part of 
the American dream known as homeownership.
    I'm very proud of what Secretary Cisneros has done with dwindling 
resources at HUD, working with the private sector to see homeownership 
reach a 15-year high this year, and we have to do more. We proposed to 
reclaim tracts of vacant or blighted land and to renovate whole 
neighborhoods, to bring back to the city hard-working middle-income 
families, to stimulate business and private investment. We want to work 
with private sector and other investment to create scores of livable, 
inviting, inner-city neighborhoods.
    Homeownership initiatives now are working in Detroit, Buffalo, in 
San Antonio and New York and Baltimore. I say again, let us build on our 
success. Homeownership is one of the best ways to empower local 
residents, to give them a stake in the community and to increase the 
bonds that tie people together. It means commitment. If we have any hope 
of bringing success back to these inner cities, we have to have people 
there who care and who are committed. Homeownership can help us achieve 
that goal as well.
    Together, I believe we can find the kind of long-term solutions we 
need. But I will say again, if we really have a vision of all-American 
communities--where there are good jobs, where there are businesses that 
are flourishing, where the streets are safe and the environment is clean 
and the families are stable and the schools work to educate and prepare 
all children--it begins, not so much with any specific initiative as 
with you, with people like you who are committed to working together, to 
working in an honest, forthright way. And it ends with having the kind 
of partnership that you have achieved with each other and with every 
level of government and with the private sector. The difference is the 
way you are doing this and your understanding that you cannot succeed 
unless you work together.
    So I ask you when you leave here to continue to prove that we can do 
this. And I ask you to join us in reclaiming more of our distressed 
communities, and spreading the message throughout America that there is 
no challenge facing this country we cannot meet if we will get rid of 
our cynicism, get rid of every excuse for inaction, get rid of the 
notion that we have the luxury of blaming other people for our problems 
instead of working together to solve them together. That's what you have 
done. That's what you can give to all America.
    Thank you very much, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:46 a.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the 
Mayflower Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Vinnie Johnson, former 
Detroit Piston basketball player and chairman of Pistons Packaging, and 
Hannah Oakman, public information officer, Philadelphia/Camden 
Empowerment Zone.