[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 32 (Monday, August 16, 1999)]
[Pages 1607-1610]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks in a Roundtable Discussion on BusinessLINC

August 10, 1999

    The President. Well, hello, everyone. I have a few remarks, but I 
want to be brief so we can get on to the business at hand. But first, 
I'd like to thank James Powell for making us feel welcome in his place 
of business, and his family and his co-workers and the instruction that 
he gave me on making a mop. I'm always looking for new skills since I 
have to acquire some pretty soon. [Laughter]
    And the Vice President appreciates the fact that he buys the cord 
from Tennessee.
    The Vice President. Humboldt, Tennessee.
    The President. And I want to thank the Mayor and the two 
councilpersons, and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, for making us 
feel welcome up here. We're always glad to be out in DC, but this is a 
special opportunity. And I know that the Mayor and Councilwoman Charlene 
Drew Jarvis and Kevin Chavous--Councilman Chavous--are excited about 
what's going on here.
    I want to thank Dana Mead, the president and CEO of Tenneco; the 
gentleman to my right who is the chair of the Business Roundtable; and 
Peter Bijur, the president and CEO of Texaco, who is going to chair our 
BusinessLINC National Coalition, for their willingness to undertake this 
project with gusto; and all the others around here who are proving that 
this kind of thing works and who will be introduced as we go through,

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including the members of the administration who are here: Secretary 
Summers; Gene Sperling, my National Economic Counselor, who has done so 
much to develop the new markets initiative; Aida Alvarez of the SBA; and 
Jack Lew, Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
    We all know why we're here. We have a record expansion in America, 
the longest peacetime expansion in history. It has finally, in the last 
3 years, given us substantial increases in wages for ordinary workers, 
after 20 years of stagnation, and the lowest minority unemployment rate 
ever recorded. Yet we know that there are still people in places that 
have not been touched by this recovery.
    And it's very interesting to me that what many of us in the business 
community, as well as in the public sector, believe is a moral 
obligation we have to try to give all our people a chance to participate 
in this great economy is also an economic opportunity and perhaps an 
economic imperative. Every day, I promise you, the people here who run 
these big companies have got people scouring the press every day trying 
to divine the intention of the markets--have we reached the limits of 
this expansion; can we continue to grow the economy without inflation; 
how can we do it?
    Well, obviously, if we expand economic opportunity and create 
businesses, employees, and consumers in areas where they didn't exist 
before, that is an inflation-free way to expand the economy. So we have 
reached a point in our country's economic development where I think we 
finally have a chance to do something for the places that have been left 
behind, from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the Native American 
reservations to the inner-city neighborhoods, in ways that will benefit 
all Americans. That's the idea behind the new markets initiative and the 
tour I took of areas that have been left behind, a few weeks ago with a 
lot of CEO's and other people.
    And the idea is simple, that we want a partnership between business 
and Government to make investments more attractive in areas where they 
haven't been made in the past but only on the basis of profit--that this 
has to be a profitable decision. This is not a social program. This is 
free enterprise economics. We are trying to create the conditions in 
which the economic expansion, which has so benefited so many millions of 
Americans, can reach people who have been left behind for decades.
    Mr. Powell's exhibit A. He introduced me to someone who moved from 
welfare to work in his company. He introduced me to a man who has eight 
children that he feels he can now support. He introduced me to a man who 
immigrated to this country 10 years ago from Central America, who's 
proud to be working here.
    And this is a very, very important moment for our country, because 
for at least 30 years, Americans have wanted to do this, not just 
politicians; people in business have wished there was some way to bring 
free enterprise to the people and the places that have been left behind. 
And we believe we have found some ways to do it.
    Now, I said, we have to do this in partnership. And just this last 
week, legislation based on our new markets initiative was introduced in 
both the House and Senate. It's pretty simple. It's basically designed 
to give American investors like those around this table, the same 
incentive to invest in developing markets in America that we give you to 
invest in developing markets in Central America or the Caribbean or Asia 
or Africa. I support those incentives for those countries, but they 
ought to exist in this country as well.
    It builds on the successful approach that the Vice President and I 
have developed over the last 6\1/2\ years, and that he has so very ably 
headed, of our empowerment zones, our enterprise communities, a stronger 
Community Reinvestment Act, community financial institutions. This 
approach is working where we have applied it. What we want is a 
nationwide framework.
    What we're here today to talk about is what I think is perhaps the 
single most important thing the business community can do to make this 
work: BusinessLINC. Let me tell you how BusinessLINC got started.
    Nearly 2 years ago, Vice President Gore met Tom Lazo down there in 
Dallas, in south Dallas. He had a small company that built 
telecommunications equipment. It was doing well, but he told the Vice 
President that his company couldn't grow and thrive without

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technical assistance and better training, without tools and skills his 
larger competitors already had. He needed a corporate mentor. That's why 
we launched BusinessLINC last summer, under the leadership of the Vice 
President and with the support of Secretary Summers, Administrator 
Alvarez, and former Secretary Rubin.
    Tom Lazo's idea has a lot of power: large companies helping small 
companies get access to capital, learn the best technology and the best 
management techniques. As many of you can attest and will attest this 
morning, partnerships like this are good for investment, good for 
consumers, good for the bottom line. You see that at businesses like 
Powell's. And Mr. Powell and his big supporter will have a chance to 
talk here in just a moment.
    Today I am very pleased that the Business Roundtable, a coalition of 
Fortune 500 companies, is stepping up to lead BusinessLINC. This means 
that we'll be able to go national with this idea. This means we'll be 
able to do it in a big way. And this means people who know what they're 
doing will have a stake and a commitment to its success. I cannot thank 
Dana enough. I cannot thank Peter enough. This is a very, very 
impressive commitment, and I'm very grateful to both of you.
    Especially, I want to thank Texaco's Peter Bijur, because since he's 
going to lead the effort, Dana can look at him and ask for results. 
[Laughter] I've been on both ends of that; I'd rather be asking than 
answering. [Laughter] But this will help the corporate community to meet 
the challenge the Vice President issued a year ago to mentor more 
businesses, especially in the distressed communities.
    Now, I know the Vice President has more to say about BusinessLINC, 
so I'd like to ask him to say a few things, and then we'll just start 
calling on the people around the table. And I think the press and those 
who read about this or see about it on the media will quickly understand 
the great power of this idea.
    Mr. Vice President.

[At this point, Vice President Gore made brief remarks, and the 
roundtable discussion began.]

    The President. I just want to make one very brief point here, 
because the last two presentations illustrate something that we really 
believe and that basically is the whole reason for the existence of the 
Small Business Administration, which is that, even in the best of times 
there are almost artificial barriers to the success of free markets. We 
are not trying to supplant them; we're trying to take away the barriers 
to them. That's what you're doing, and in so doing you're creating more. 
And this is very impressive to me.

[The discussion continued.]

    The President. I think this has been wonderful. And let me say we 
are--I think we have a reasonably good chance to get a bipartisan big 
vote for the legislation that would provide some greater tax incentives 
and some eligibility for lower interest loans to go with the equity in 
some of these really distressed areas this year. But none of this is 
going to happen without the kind of partnerships that we've celebrated 
today. This is clearly something that is better done and can only be 
done, really, in the private sector with the Government sort of cheering 
on and then trying to provide the resources that SBA and others have.
    So, again I want to thank Dana and Peter and all the rest of you, 
and those of you who are living and doing this every day, and I just 
can't thank you enough. I also would like to say that it means a lot to 
me personally, having been a resident of Washington, DC, the last 6\1/2\ 
years, that we could do this in Washington, highlight this project, and 
remind people that there is another Washington where not everybody does 
have a good job or a good opportunity, and that we believe our Nation's 
Capital is small enough that the economies of scale work in a way that 
with sustained vigorous leadership, we can actually bring economic 
opportunity to all the neighborhoods here.
    So, Mr. Mayor and Congresswoman, and to all the rest of you, I want 
to thank you. And if you'd like to say anything in closing, we'd be glad 
to hear from you.

Note: The roundtable began at 12:45 p.m. in the workroom at Powell's 
Manufacturing Industries, Inc. In his remarks, the President referred to 
James Powell, president, Powell's Manufacturing

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Industries, Inc.; Mayor Anthony A. Williams of Washington, DC; and Tom 
Lazo, president and chief executive officer, Custom Programming 
Services, Inc. The transcript made available by the Office of the Press 
Secretary also included the remarks of Vice President Al Gore.