[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 45 (Monday, November 15, 1999)]
[Pages 2271-2275]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Englewood Community in Chicago, Illinois

November 5, 1999

    Thank you very, very much. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for 
coming and for being so full of enthusiasm and making me feel so 
welcome. Mr. Speaker, thank you for coming. We are honored by your 
presence and your alliance.
    I want to also thank my good friend Congressman Bobby Rush. We've 
been friends a long time, and he has worked in these last weeks through 
his own personal sadness still on your business and to bring us all here 
today. And I thank him for that.
    I thank this great array of Members of the House of Representatives 
who are here, Congressman Danny Davis--we're the Arkansas contingent on 
the platform, Danny and I are--[laughter]--Congressman Jesse Jackson, 
Jr., and Congressman Paul Kanjorski who has made this whole tour with us 
twice, coming all the way from Pennsylvania--a good man.
    I thank the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the State 
treasurer of the State of Illinois, all of them, for being here. I thank 
Secretary Slater and Small Business Administrator Alvarez for their 
strong support for our new markets initiative and their involvement. I 
want to thank Samuel Williams, your principal here, for welcoming us. 
[Applause]
    You know, this is the second biggest hand he's gotten here. 
[Laughter] Bobby, I hope you have made sure he's not interested in 
running for Congress. [Laughter] This is amazing. When he got his first 
big hand, the Speaker leaned over to me and said, ``You know, when a 
school principal gets that kind of hand, something must be going right 
there.'' [Laughter]
    I want to thank Paul Vallas, the CEO of the Chicago public schools, 
for being here and for the great job that Chicago is making in turning 
around its schools. This school, I was just told by the principal--when 
I walked in, the first thing he said was, ``Thank you

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for Goals 2000.'' The second thing he said was, ``We are hooked up to 
the Internet in this school; we are ready for the 21st century.''
    I want to thank David Shryock for his leadership and all the other 
CEO's who are here, Jack Greenberg from McDonald's and all the others 
from the banks and the other companies. Thank you all for being here.
    And let me say, this has acquired a greater significance here 
because the Speaker's come in, and in honor of this bipartisan event, we 
had the Speaker of the House, and out of respect, Reverend Jackson has 
dressed up like a Republican today. [Laughter] So this is a whole new 
day. [Laughter]
    I am glad to be back here in Chicago. I have been interested in this 
city for a long time. And as you know, the First Lady is a native of 
Chicago, and we spent lots of years here. And I was interested in all 
these neighborhoods long before I even thought I'd have a chance to be 
President. And I worked with the South Shore Bank and set up a parallel 
bank in Arkansas, where we just were today.
    There's one other thing I would like to say before I go further, 
both as President and as a citizen of this country. I am very grateful 
for the life and the example of Walter Payton. I know that this is the 
day of his service, and tomorrow there will be a great memorial service, 
and there will be sadness and sorrow. But what a magnificent life. And 
what gifts he gave us, not just on the playing field but on the playing 
field of life. And right to the very end, he showed us a lot of lessons 
about how we should all conduct ourselves and what kind of legacy we 
should leave to our children. And I think we should remember that today, 
for this is a day about our children.
    Let me tell you--we use this word, ``new markets,'' and Bobby issued 
all these announcements, and I want to make a few more. But let me try 
to put this into some context for you. Compared to the day I became 
President, this is a different country, economically and socially. We 
have nearly 20 million new jobs; a 4.1 percent unemployment rate, the 
lowest in 30 years. We have the lowest female unemployment in 46 years; 
the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded. We have the lowest 
welfare rolls, the lowest crime rates in 30 years, the lowest poverty 
rates in 20 years, over 5 million men, women, and children lifted out of 
poverty. We have the highest homeownership, including the highest 
minority homeownership, in the history of our country, and the first 
back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 years.
    Now, we are here because we know there are people and places, in 
spite of all these wonderful numbers, that have still not been touched 
by this prosperity. In spite of the fact that this is the longest 
economic recovery in peacetime in our history--and in February will 
become the longest recovery of any kind in our history--there are people 
and places untouched by our prosperity. We know that we have an 
opportunity now, with all this good fortune, to deal with our obligation 
to bring the American dream to those people and places.
    And I believe that the only way we can keep this economic recovery 
going is to find new customers, new jobs, and new businesses. There's a 
huge debate--I say this because this is, yes, about discharging our 
responsibility to our fellow citizens, but it's also very much in the 
self-interest of everybody from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. You can't 
imagine how many hours we spend in the White House talking about how in 
the world we can keep this economic expansion going.
    You know, every time in the past, things either get so hot there's a 
lot of inflation, and then you have to break the inflation, and that 
brings on a recession--or the economic expansion just runs out of gas. 
So we have to find a way not to run out of gas and to keep going without 
inflation.
    Obviously, if you bring opportunity to people and places that 
haven't had it, if there are new businesses, new workers, new consumers, 
you can have growth without inflation. So we are here today--what this 
new markets name means is that if Englewood still has a poverty rate 
more than 2\1/2\ times the rate of Chicago, if the median household 
income in this community is barely more than half of Chicago, if there 
are still boarded-up brownstones and shutup storefronts, that means this 
is not just a problem, this is an opportunity. This is a new market, and 
everybody in America ought to care

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about it and be committed to it and do what can be done to advance it.
    You have proved, by these announcements here and more, that there is 
more than poverty here; there is enormous promise. Look at these kids. 
Look at this school. Get the idea, the feeling, the pride, the 
accomplishment here. This is a place of promise. Later I will meet with 
some of the members of the women's self-employment project, which has 
given--listen to this--more than 7,000 women the tools to create their 
own businesses and shape their own futures. I'm going to go visit Franz 
Print Shop, which is a small business making large strides in your 
community. You have more partnerships to build, more success stories to 
write with government and business working together. That's what we're 
here to celebrate.
    We have seen it here in Englewood, thanks to the announcements that 
Congressman Rush made and all the work he did to lay the foundation for 
our business here today; thanks to the work of the mayor, who has 
committed over $250 million in public and private investment for this 
neighborhood in the next 4 years; thanks to the efforts of Reverend 
Jackson, who launched not only a Wall Street project but a LaSalle 
Street project to bring private capital to our poorest neighborhoods.
    This can work. It can work here; it can work all across America. It 
is already working in many places across America in the empowerment 
zones, in the enterprise communities we have been establishing since 
1993 under the strong leadership of Vice President Gore. But Government 
can't do it alone.
    One of the most important things that we have to do is to make sure 
we have genuine partnerships. And this ought to be an American idea. I 
mean, when you go into the bank and you deposit money or borrow money, 
your party doesn't make any difference. When you go into the restaurant 
and you spend money, nobody asks you before they take the money or the 
credit card whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. Nobody has a 
vested interest in anybody who wants to work staying unemployed. No one 
in America has a vested interest in anybody with a good idea for a new 
business not being able to act on that idea and bring their creative 
genius and their hard work to the arena of enterprise that has given our 
country all these blessings we enjoy today.
    And I said in January, when I proposed this new markets effort, that 
I wanted it to be a bipartisan effort, indeed an American effort, above 
politics, because we all have a stake in this. I want to compliment 
Danny Davis for recognizing this and working with two Republican Members 
of the House of Representatives, Congressman Watts and Congressman 
Talent, to come up with an ``American Community Renewal Act,'' which has 
a lot of the same goals of our empowerment zone effort and our new 
markets initiative.
    Now, this is something we ought to do together. I'm amazed we got 
any press about this at all today--Mr. Hastert got a lot of press coming 
all the way from Washington to be with us--and I think it's because 
they're used to writing in Washington about how we all fight about 
everything. So we had two choices here. We can say, well, they've got an 
idea; we've got an idea; let's have a fight. Or we can do what the 
Speaker and I and the others here have decided to do. In Reverend 
Jackson's famous words, we have decided to seek common ground and higher 
ground because it's the right ground for these children's futures to 
stand on.
    Today the Speaker and I--I'll let him speak for himself--but 
basically we're here to commit to you, and to the American people, to 
work in good faith, to merge our proposals into a historic bipartisan 
effort to renew our communities, to open new markets and new doors of 
opportunity. If we work together in this way, Mr. Speaker, we can ensure 
that every hard-working family has a share of the prosperity and a stake 
in the future that our country plainly has before it.
    We have a lot that we can do. We just worked together on a historic 
bill to modernize and broaden the reach of the financial institutions of 
this country. But we did it by keeping and broadening the reach of the 
Community Reinvestment Act, which has been responsible for about $88 
billion in investment into our communities in the last year alone. This 
is the kind of thing we can do together.

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    And we know that all we can do, really, is to set up a framework. My 
new markets idea is that we ought to give Americans with money to invest 
the same incentives to invest in poor areas of America we give them to 
invest in poor areas of Latin America or Africa or Asia. And I think all 
of you know that, for me, that's not an either/or choice. I'm glad when 
we have Americans try to help people in Africa or Latin America or Asia 
have a better future, because I think as they do, they make more 
responsible citizens and they make war less likely and they make 
cooperation and shared prosperity more likely. But we clearly have the 
highest obligations to our own people and we cannot, in good conscience, 
not give people the same incentives to Americans a chance to make a 
living, to start a business, and to build a future.
    I also want to reiterate, nothing we do will work without the 
commitment of the private business sector. You've already heard about 
the vital commitments that SB Partners has made today. I'm also pleased 
to note that Allstate Insurance will invest $5 million in the Illinois 
Facilities Fund to go toward education and child care here in Englewood. 
That's very important--if you want to have jobs, you've got to have the 
child care support for parents. And I thank Ed Liddy * for joining us 
today. The Community Investment Corporation will expand its efforts here 
into Englewood and into the enterprize zone that is nearby.
    * White House correction.
    And as part of the welfare-to-work partnership, Alliance Relocation 
Services is teaming up with Allied and DePaul University to launch a new 
job training program. McDonald's, represented here by its CEO, Jack 
Greenberg, which has a huge, long history of investing in America's 
untapped potential, is working to encourage mentoring relationships 
between large companies and small ones, through our BusinessLINC 
initiative. The idea is that big, successful companies can help small, 
emerging ones in neighborhoods like this succeed if they just know more 
about the basic things they have to do to get started and to keep going 
in the early periods of the business. This is a huge deal, pioneered by 
business leaders and the Vice President. And I want to thank you, sir, 
for doing this.
    Well, I want to make room now for the Speaker and for Reverend 
Jackson, but I just want to close with this observation. For a long 
time, we were so used to some people being down and out that we acted 
like we believed it had to be that way. This is a big issue, because all 
the money in the world and all the good government action in the world 
can't overcome your lack of faith in yourselves. And for a long time, we 
just acted like it had to be that way.
    The other night, Hillary sponsored a dinner at the White House, or 
an evening at the White House, to talk about the relationship of the 
revolution in computer technology to the revolution in the study of the 
human gene, and the whole gene structure, that's called the genome. And 
what the scientist and the computer genius said was, we could never 
unlock the mysteries of the human gene unless we had this remarkable 
revolution in computers, which can literally allow us to map these 
microscopic things that make up our body.
    Here's the point I want to make to all of you here in Englewood--the 
most important thing that was said all night long. This big professor 
from Harvard who understands things about the human gene structure that 
I couldn't even describe said something I'll remember for the rest of my 
life. He said all human beings, genetically--all human beings--are 99.9 
percent the same. And then he said, if you took any given racial or 
ethnic group--let's say you took 100 people from west Africa and 100 
Chinese and 100 people from Mexico and 100 people from India and 100 
people from Ireland, the genetic differences of the individuals within 
each group would be significantly greater than the genetic differences 
from group to group--that is, between any group of Irish and group of 
Chinese or group of Africans or group of Mexicans. You remember that.
    You've got to believe. Just look at this high school. Look at the 
alumni of this high school. This high school's produced poets, Cabinet 
secretaries, the first African-American astronaut; Lorraine Hansberry, 
the playwright of the wonderful play, ``A Raisin in the Sun.''

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    Now--you're going to hear from a young man later who will do this 
better than me, but one of the greatest lines in ``A Raisin in the 
Sun''--you ought to go back and read it--is, a character says, ``All 
God's children got wings.'' That's another way of saying, genetically, 
we're 99.9 percent the same.
    Do you believe that? Do you believe that all God's children got 
wings? Then you have to believe that all God's children can fly.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 5:45 p.m. in the gymnasium at Englewood 
High School. In his remarks, he referred to Illinois State Treasurer 
Judy Baar Topinka; Samuel Williams, principal, Englewood High School; 
David Shryock, partner, SB Partners LP; Jack Greenberg, chief executive 
officer, McDonald's Corp.; civil rights activist Jesse Jackson; National 
Football League Hall of Fame member Walter Payton, who died of cancer on 
November 1; Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago; and Edward M. Liddy, 
chief executive officer, Allstate Insurance Co. This item was not 
received in time for publication in the appropriate issue.