[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 27 (Monday, July 12, 1999)]
[Pages 1285-1289]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks in a Roundtable Discussion on Investment in the Mississippi 
Delta Region in Clarksdale, Mississippi

July 6, 1999

    The President. Thank you. Please be seated. Well, it's hot as a 
firecracker in here. [Laughter] So I feel right at home. [Laughter] I 
don't know whether Bob Koerber and the people at Waterfield are insured 
against heatstroke by strangers happening in along the way, but let me 
say that I am delighted to be here today. I've had a good day already.
    And I've got a large group with me, and I can't mention them all, 
but I'd like to mention a few of them. First I want to thank Secretary 
Slater, who is, as all of you know, also from Arkansas and worked with 
me on the Delta commission. I want to thank our Secretary of 
Agriculture, Dan Glickman; our Secretary of Labor, Alexis Herman, who is 
here with me; our SBA Administrator Aida Alvarez. Reverend Jackson, 
thank you for being here.
    I'd like to thank David Bronczek from FedEx; Jack Haugsland from 
Greyhound. We'll introduce our panelists later. I'd also like to say a 
special word of thanks to Lieutenant Governor Ronnie Musgrove and his 
family. They're here, and we thank him for his interest in the 
development of the Delta.
    Our Congressmen, Bennie Thompson, from this district, thank you. And 
I understand Congressman Ronnie Shows from Mississippi is also here--
Ronnie is standing up there; thank you. And we have two visitors who 
have come from a long way away to be with us, Congressman Jim Clyburn 
from South Carolina and Congressman Paul Kanjorski, all the way from 
Pennsylvania, down here. Thank you very much.
    And we thank Attorney General Mike Moore for being here, and all the 
other people from Mississippi who are here.
    Let me say again to Bob Koerber and all the folks here at 
Waterfield, we thank you for giving us a chance to both tour this plant 
and to camp out in some of your space.
    And I would like to be very brief. I've learned to attenuate these 
remarks of mine. Yesterday it was 100 degrees in Hazard, Kentucky; we 
had 10,000 or 15,000 people outside. And I said I don't believe I better 
give this speech I was going to give.
    Hello, Governor Mabus. It's nice to see you. Welcome. Thank you very 
much for being here. And I think my friend William Winter is here. 
Governor Winter, are you here somewhere? He met me at the airport.

[[Page 1286]]

So anyway, I talked for about 5 minutes, and I'd like to do that.
    I just want to tell you exactly why we're here. First of all, the 
people in the Delta know better than anybody else that while this 
country has had an unbelievable run--we've had the longest peacetime 
expansion in our history, nearly 19 million jobs since the day I took 
the oath of office. We have the lowest recorded rates ever of 
unemployment among African-Americans and Hispanics. We have the highest 
rate of homeownership ever. We have a million kids lifted out of 
poverty.
    Now, having said all that, in the Delta, the poverty rate is much 
higher than the country as a whole; in this county, it's over twice as 
high. The unemployment rate is higher than the national average, and the 
investment rate is lower.
    Now, a lot of you--I remember when I was out on a barge in the 
Mississippi River outside Rosedale with Ray Mabus back in the mid-
eighties, and we signed this agreement with the then-Governor of 
Louisiana about all the things we wanted to do with the Delta. And then 
we worked on the Delta commission for all those years. A lot of good 
things have happened here, and I want to talk a little about some of 
them. But I want you to know I am making this tour of America for one 
simple reason: I want everybody in America to know that while our 
country has been blessed with this economic recovery, not all Americans 
have been blessed by it, that it hasn't reached every place.
    I want our country to know that there are great opportunities out 
here for investment for jobs in America. I want them to know what we 
have done already to make it easier for people to make the most of those 
opportunities and what we're still trying to do.
    Now, let me say, ever since I became President, I have done what I 
could to increase investment in undeveloped areas through the 
empowerment zones, which give tax credits and put tax money into 
distressed areas, through the enterprise communities, through getting 
banks to more vigorously approach the Community Reinvestment Act, and 
setting up community development financial institutions or supporting 
those that are already in business, like the Enterprise Corporation of 
the Delta. It's a private, tax-exempt business group. It is a real 
success story. Just since 1994, it's given financial or technical 
assistance to more than 600 companies, including Delta Laundry and 
Computers here in Clarksdale.
    Now, we set these operations up all over the country. Overall, the 
ECD here has helped to generate more than 5,000 jobs and $200 million in 
annual sales. Bill Bynum, the CEO and president of ECD is here. We thank 
him for being here today.
    Today corporations represented here with me are going to invest $14 
million more in the ECD, so they'll have more money to loan out to 
people here to create more jobs. Today, around the country, there will 
be about $150 million more announced to be invested in organizations 
like this.
    In addition to that, I'm trying to get Congress to pass a bill which 
will give tax incentives, tax credits, and loan guarantees to people to 
invest in the Delta and other poor areas of America, just like they get 
today to invest in poor areas around the world. I think that it's a good 
thing that we encourage people to invest in Africa, Latin America, and 
the Caribbean, but they ought to have the same incentives to invest in 
the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia and the Native American 
reservations and the inner cities. That is what we're trying to do here. 
We're trying to close what Reverend Jackson calls the ``resource gap.''
    Now, let me say, we've got a lot of other challenges in the Delta. 
We have a terrible crisis in American agriculture today. Last year we 
came up with billions of dollars to try to keep our farmers going. This 
year we're going to have to do it all over again. And we've got a lot of 
other problems. But fundamentally, what I want America to know is that 
every place in the country, and today this place, is full of good 
people, capable of doing good work, who can be trained to do any kind of 
work. And we are going to do everything we can in the Government to give 
the financial incentives necessary for people to invest here.
    And I want to make the same point I made yesterday: Everybody in 
America has a selfish interest now in developing the Delta. Why? Because 
most economists believe that if we're going to keep our economic 
recovery

[[Page 1287]]

going without inflation, the only way we can possibly do it is to find 
more customers for our products and then add more workers at home. If 
you come here, you get both in the same place. You get more workers and 
more consumers. So it's good for the rest of America as well.
    So again, I say I am delighted to be here. I had a wonderful time in 
Memphis last night, but I ate too much. I'm sorry it's so hot, but I 
hope nobody passes out. And I want to give Secretary Slater now a chance 
to talk to our panelists, and then I want all of you to think about, 
when we leave here, what we can do to show people the opportunity that's 
here now, and what you could do to help me pass, on a bipartisan basis, 
the necessary tax incentives and loan guarantees to say to any investor, 
anywhere in America, if you come to the Mississippi Delta, you can get 
at least a good a deal as you could investing anywhere else in the 
world. And we're right here at home, and we need you.
    Thank you very much.

[At this point, the discussion proceeded.]

    The President. I just want to emphasize for everybody who is here 
listening, because a lot of you may be able to come to Bill with a good 
idea, there are--it's not just that there is not enough money available 
in this area for good investments, someone has to decide what's a good 
investment. And what he has done is to basically go out and get money 
from other people who, on their own, would never have the time or effort 
or maybe even the inclination to make these investments, but they trust 
them to do it--including our community development fund, which, as you 
heard, has given him $4.5 million.
    Hillary and I, when we were in Arkansas, helped to set up the 
Southern Development Bank in Arkansas, as you know, so we believe in 
this. In addition to that, I want to emphasize one other thing. In the 
empowerment zone program that the Vice President has run for us over the 
last 6 years, people who invest there can get substantial tax benefits 
for investing, and then they get tax benefits for hiring people. But 
they don't get them if they're outside of these zones.
    One of the reasons that I'm trying so hard to pass this legislation 
is not every place in America can be in an empowerment zone, even if we 
keep increasing them every year. So what I want to do is to make every 
area in America that needs an investor equally eligible to get the 
investors' attention by being able to get these kinds of tax benefits, 
so we can get more money into these development corporations and then 
have equal tax incentives for investors to go into high unemployment 
areas--those two things, if we have enough people like you who are as 
good as it as you have been, I think will make a huge difference. I 
think it will really, in the next 5 or 6 years, would make a 
breathtaking difference, because people are out here looking at these 
markets now. And I want to thank you.

[The discussion continued.]

    The President. Let me say this very briefly. I was there when you 
started, and I was delighted when I heard you were going to be on the 
program. I wish we'd had time today--we don't--to tell everybody the 
fascinating story of how you got started, how you found the equipment to 
do the brown rice in the first place. And someday you ought to write it 
up, because no one who understands what was going on in America at the 
time would believe it. And it's a real tribute to your initiative. And 
I'm glad you're still doing well and glad you're still growing. Thank 
you for being here today. Thank you.

[The discussion continued.]

    The President. Let me say, I'm delighted that you've done so well 
over these years since you began in Arkansas. I remember when you 
planted roots in Pine Bluff. I just think it's worth pointing out that 
the South Shore Bank of Chicago, which financed you, was really the 
first great community development bank in the United States. And they 
were inspired, among others, by a man named Muhammad Yunus from 
Bangladesh, who has now made millions of loans to poor, poor village 
people in Bangladesh through the bank you set up.
    Hillary and I had some contact with him; that's what led to the 
establishment of the bank in Arkadelphia and to my belief that

[[Page 1288]]

we in the National Government ought to do more to support people like 
Bill. I think--again, you've just heard now three stories, and two of 
them involve people who have had to get credit. A lot--I always say one 
of Clinton's laws of politics is, when somebody tells you that a problem 
is not a money problem, they're almost always talking about someone 
else's problem, not their own. To a great extent, this is a money 
problem. You have all these talented people and all these good ideas; 
there is a pretty even distribution of human resources and ability in 
this whole world, but there is not an even distribution of access to 
capital. And that's what it is we're trying to fix. So I thank you.

[The discussion continued.]

    The President. You have an announcement, right? Okay. You're being 
way too modest. Now, you know, this lady is the assistant plant manager 
here. According to my notes, she also is the mother of five children. 
When this place was in bankruptcy, they took it out, and they've turned 
it around. They're doing good business; they're expanding their work 
force. And I think what we need, frankly, are more people that have this 
particular expertise, particularly in the Delta, because there's more 
than one place like this.
    Our host was telling us there's another place across the river in 
Arkansas that he's been looking at now. If we had a core of people who 
had this skill to go with what our local venture capitalist and banker 
here is doing for us, we could really do some good. But I think we ought 
to recognize that what these people have done here and the jobs that 
they've given folks the opportunity to hold is quite important and could 
be a good model for others in the Delta. So I thank you for what you've 
done.

[The discussion continued.]

    The President. Well, I know we've got to wrap up. If you don't 
remember anything else when you leave, remember what Cathy said--not 
just the $500 million, although that's real money even in 1999; that's 
very impressive. This is a good business opportunity here. If we cannot 
fully develop the Delta now when we have the strongest economy in our 
lifetime, when will we ever get around to it?
    And remember--put yourself in my position. I sit in Washington all 
the time, trying to think about how can we keep this economic recovery 
going, adding more jobs, raising incomes, without having inflation. If 
we get inflation, then the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest 
rates so much the economic recovery will slow down.
    The only way to do it--I will say again to all of America--the only 
way to do it is more customers, which then makes possible more 
employees, when you can do that with higher productivity and no 
inflation. The best place in America to do that is a place which has not 
yet felt recovery. This is a big deal.
    I want to thank all of our business leaders for coming. And all of 
our great entrepreneurs here in the Delta, I want to thank you. I know 
we could stay here until tomorrow if we could all keep breathing.
    I do want to point out that except for the occasional reverend of 
the cloth and the odd politician, the head of the electric utility is 
the only guy still wearing his coat because he wants you to use more 
juice. [Laughter] And I think that is very impressive. I want to thank 
our friend from Greyhound because we may always need some people to be 
able to get to and from jobs that aren't in the small towns of rural 
America but who want to live in rural America. That's been one of the 
big challenges Secretary Slater has tried to face with welfare reform, 
even; trying to make sure people who live in the inner cities can at 
least get to the suburbs, or who live in small towns and get to a big 
city so they can take a job without having to undermine their ability to 
be good parents.
    And I want to thank my friend Bob Cabe from Blue Cross. You need to 
know that in our former lives, we were both lawyers. And he's a very 
special economic development expert for me, because in 1981, I was the 
youngest ex-Governor in the history of America with very limited future 
prospects, and he and his firm offered me a job. So I am living proof 
that economic development works, thanks to Bob Cabe, and I thank you 
very much. And I want to thank, again, all these people for their 
wonderful work.

[[Page 1289]]

    The story needs to go out across America. This is a good investment. 
This is a good deal. We will help you. We will help you. We have 
institutions to help you. We have tax relief to help you. And more and 
more, our financial institutions are coming up with the money. But 
America needs to wake up and recognize that the best new market for 
American products and for new American investment is right here in the 
U.S. of A.
    Thank you very much, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 10:25 a.m. at the Waterfield Cabinet Co. In 
his remarks, he referred to Robert C. Koerber, president and chief 
executive officer, and Cora Porter, assistant plant manager, Waterfield 
Cabinet Co.; civil rights leader Jesse Jackson; David J. Bronczek, 
executive vice president and chief operating officer, Federal Express; 
Jack W. Haugsland, executive vice president and chief operating officer, 
Greyhound Lines, Inc.; Lt. Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, State Attorney General 
Mike Moore, and former Governors Ray Mabus and William Winter of 
Mississippi; former Gov. Charles (Buddy) Roemer of Louisiana; William J. 
Bynum, president, Enterprise Corporation of the Delta; Muhammad Yunus, 
founder and chief executive officer, Grameen Bank, Bangladesh; Catherine 
P. Bessant, president, Community Development Banking Group, Bank of 
America; J. Wayne Leonard, chief executive officer, Entergy Corp.; and 
Robert D. Cabe, executive vice president for legal, governmental 
relations, and community services, Arkansas Blue Cross & Blue Shield. 
Former Governors Mabus and Roemer were vice chairs of the now-defunct 
Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission. A tape was not available 
for verification of the content of these remarks.