[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 2 (Monday, January 17, 2000)]
[Pages 66-72]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Wall Street Project Conference in New York City

January 13, 2000

    Thank you. The reason we were scurrying around up here is that 
Reverend Jackson had taken my speech. [Laughter] That's okay. I've taken 
a lot of his over the years. [Laughter]
    Sandy, thank you for that wonderful introduction. I'm glad one of us 
made money out of this administration. [Laughter] I want to congratulate 
Robert Knowling and my longtime, wonderful friend Berry Gordy on their 
awards. I thank Mr. Ivester and Mr. Seidenberg for supporting this 
important work. I thank Secretary Slater and our SBA Administrator, Aida 
Alvarez, for being here with me. And I think Secretary Cuomo spoke here 
earlier today. He and the Vice President have done a wonderful job with 
our empowerment zone program and the other HUD economic development 
initiatives.
    I want to say a special word of appreciation here today to the 
Members of Congress who are here--Congressmen Rangel, Velazquez, Owens, 
Maloney, Engel, and Jackson. And my personal thanks to two former 
Members of Congress who are here, the leader of the NAACP, Kweisi Mfume, 
and my good friend Reverend Floyd Flake, who went home to his mission in 
life. And I thank him.
    I saw my friend Mayor Willie Brown from San Francisco, and we 
congratulate him on his reelection. And former Mayor David Dinkins of 
New York--thank you, Mayor Dinkins; and our comptroller, Carl McCall, 
and so many others who are here.
    I want to thank Hugh Price for the Urban League's work. And I'd like 
to thank all the business leaders here who have helped the whole effort 
that Reverend Jackson has made over the last several years, but I would 
like to say a special word of appreciation to three who have been close 
to me and also close to Reverend Jackson: Willie Gary and Ron Burkle and 
Dennis Rivera. Thank you all very much for what you have done.
    Now, we've got a lot of folks here who have done things, but I want 
to say also how much I appreciate Reverend Jackson's family--Jackie and 
all their wonderful children. They've been great friends to Hillary and 
to Chelsea and me, and I just get a big rush every time they stand up 
and get introduced. It's quite exciting. Reverend, you've done a lot of 
important things in your life, but those kids are the most important, by 
a long, good way, and I want to thank you.
    Let me say, I always look forward to this event, but it keeps 
getting bigger and bigger and bigger. If it gets any bigger, we've going 
to have to start holding it in Yankee Stadium--[laughter]--and that's a 
good thing. I would like that very much.
    You know, I'm just practicing for my--did you see the way I got 
Berry up here and I took out the stand and then I picked up his glasses 
when he dropped them? I'm practicing for my role as a Senate spouse. 
[Laughter] Did you catch my wife on Letterman last night? Was she great, 
or what? [Applause] You know, it's bad enough that I have to give up 
being President; now I've got to give up being the funny one in my 
family. [Laughter] Life is always teaching you lessons of humility. 
[Laughter]
    Although the press, you know, they keep saying I'm a lame duck. I 
think what a lame duck is, you know, you show up for one of these 
things, and nobody else comes.

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[Laughter] So I want to thank all of you for making me feel like I'm 
still President today.
    Now, to the business at hand. We all know why we're here, and we all 
know what we're supporting. I am profoundly grateful, not only as 
President but as a citizen, for the work that Reverend Jackson has done 
with this Wall Street Project. I am profoundly grateful that so many 
business leaders have supported it.
    I want to say, also, a special word of appreciation to the Members 
of the Congress that I have already introduced and to the current and 
former leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional 
Hispanic Caucus--Representatives Waters, Clyburn, Roybal-Allard, and 
Becerra. I want to thank Senators Sarbanes, Kerry, Robb, Rockefeller, 
and Congressman LaFalce from New York, because they've been especially 
supportive of this new markets initiative.
    Now, you heard Sandy Weill say some very kind things about the 
economic record of the administration, but I would like to put it in a 
little different context. It is true that we have the lowest 
unemployment rate in 30 years, that in just a few weeks we'll have the 
longest economic expansion in the history of America. We'll then be over 
20 million new jobs, surpassing the expansions that occurred in World 
War II when we were fully mobilized for war. It is true that we have the 
lowest recorded Africa-American and Hispanic unemployment rates, the 
lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years. That's all true. But it's 
also true that the minority unemployment rate and the minority poverty 
rate is still about twice the national average.
    I was just in Brooklyn with Nydia Velazquez to kick off a small 
business center with Aida Alvarez. You heard her talking about it. In 
Brooklyn, a borough in New York City that has been very good to me and 
to the Vice President, the national unemployment rate is 4.1 percent; 
the Brooklyn unemployment rate is still over 9 percent. The national 
poverty rate down to about 11 percent; the Brooklyn poverty rate way 
over 25 percent. The national homeownership rate, 66 percent; Brooklyn 
homeownership rate about 28 percent.
    A lot of good things are happening there. And the whole area has 
been reborn on the energy of new immigrants. And I feel very good about 
it long term. But I want to make a point here. If we're in a position--
which we weren't in 7 years ago because the whole country was in a mess, 
economically and otherwise--but if now it is true that we have perhaps 
the best economy we've ever had--instead of having the biggest debt in 
history, we're now paying the debt off for the first time in the history 
of the country--the Treasury Department started buying the debt in early 
so we could provide more capital for the private sector at lower 
interest rates, and our goal is to have America debt-free, the 
Government debt-free in 15 years. Now, if we're in a position to do 
that, there will never be, number one, a better time for us to bring 
economic opportunity to people and places that have been left behind. 
Number two, it has to be done in a partnership with the public and 
private sector, because we've still got a debt to pay off and an economy 
to keep strong, and the Government can't do this alone. This needs to be 
driven by private sector investment, private sector expertise, the kind 
of thing that will change for the long term not only people but whole 
neighborhoods and rural areas, Native American reservations, by 
empowering them to shape a different future for themselves.
    If we can't do this now, we will never do this. We will never get 
around to doing this if we don't do it now. So, point number one, we 
have a moral obligation to use our prosperity at this moment, 
especially, to lift up the areas not only of New York City but upstate 
New York, which would rank 49th of all our States in job creation--if 
you took the city and the suburbs out, the rest of New York would be 
49th of the 50 States in job creation. And there are lots of things that 
need to be done there that creative entrepreneurs can deal with, in 
terms of transportation and investment, lots of other issues--and all 
over America.
    The second thing I want to say is this is in the economic self-
interest of the people who are doing very well, the people whose stock 
has gone from 5 bucks to 55 bucks. Why? Why is that? Well, Sandy stole 
Bob Rubin from me, and he probably figures that now he's bulletproof 
from whatever we do in the Government, you know. But let me

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tell you, you would be astonished at the time we spent both when 
Secretary Rubin was there and after he left, in the White House and a 
few blocks down, the time Chairman Greenspan and his staff spend at the 
Federal Reserve thinking about the following question: How can we keep 
this going? How much longer can this go on, after we even eclipse the 
record of expansion in wartime in just a couple of weeks? How can we do 
it? How do economic expansions end?
    Well, sometimes they just run out of steam. There's nobody left that 
doesn't have any loose money to buy more stuff. You know? And then, 
sometimes, they run out of steam because everybody starts making so much 
money that they ask for higher pay, or supplies get tight and they 
become so expensive they could get inflation in the economy, and then 
you have to raise interest rates to stop inflation, and the cure for 
stopping inflation also breaks the economic growth. Unemployment goes 
up, growth goes down, and it happens over and over again.
    Have we sort of repealed the laws of the private economy? No, we 
haven't repealed it, but technology and open markets and competitiveness 
and productivity have changed it and made new things possible. But how 
are we going to keep this going?
    Well, I would argue the only way to keep the growth going without 
inflation is to find both new businesses and new employees and new 
customers at the same time. If you have new people with money to spend 
and jobs to hold, then you can have growth without inflation--so that if 
the unemployment rate in Brooklyn drops from 9.4 percent to 4.1 percent, 
where it is nationwide, because you've got a whole lot of new jobs 
there, and then those people that have the jobs spend their money there, 
that won't contribute to inflation; it will keep the economy going.
    And the same thing is true all across the country. And don't forget, 
folks, this is not just an inner-city problem. One of the best things 
Jesse Jackson ever did was go to Appalachia. We were out there in 
Appalachia with this new markets tour last summer, in this little 
courthouse town in West Virginia, and he got a bigger hand than I did 
because he had been there before. [Laughter] The face of--today we 
celebrate the fact that the face on wealth is colorblind and that there 
is an equal distribution of talent in our country. You also see that the 
face of poverty and deprivation and the lack of opportunity is 
colorblind. This is an American challenge.
    We were in Appalachia; we visited a company called Mid-South 
Electronics that now makes communications equipment--some of you might 
buy it--that makes its way onto the desktops of many Fortune 500 
companies represented in this room. Ten years ago, in a distant place in 
Appalachia that's hard to get to, they had 40 employees. And now, thanks 
to the availability of capital, they have 850--way back in the hills in 
Appalachia.
    In East St. Louis, with the great Mel Farr, Jesse Jackson and I 
visited a large new Walgreens store, first store that had been built in 
this distressed neighborhood in 30 years. And the manager of the store 
was a 24-year-old woman who just graduated from college a couple of 
years ago--running that store with 30 employees. And I believe every one 
of them but two were older than her, and they thought she was great. And 
the neighborhood was coming alive because of capital.
    In Mississippi we met a woman who had been working for years in a 
small computer store and never made any money at all--just in this 
little, bitty store in a town in Mississippi. She had no money in the 
bank, and they were going to close her store. But she got an equity 
capital investment, and then she could get some loans. And she bought 
her business, where she had just been an employee all these years, but 
within a year, she had more than doubled the size of the business and 
was making good money. She went from modest wages to being a proud 
business owner.
    And there are lots of stories like this everywhere. But for every 
story like it, in these distressed places there are 10 more people who 
could be this story and aren't yet. And that's why people like you come 
to events like this.
    This country owes a lot to visionary business people who are part of 
this movement. We owe a lot to the Members of Congress who are trying to 
help me pass my initiative, without which I could do nothing, and I 
thank them for being here. And we owe a

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lot to you, Jesse Jackson, for understanding that this was the next 
great frontier in the civil rights movement, years and years ago, and 
fighting for it all these years.
    Now, here's what I'm going to try to do this year, in our last year 
in office, to set up a framework that will enable us to bring 
opportunity to the people and places that have been left behind. First, 
I will resubmit, with certain changes, my new markets initiative. The 
general idea is that I want to give people the same incentives to put 
money in underdeveloped neighborhoods and towns in America that we give 
them today to put money into poor areas in Latin America and Africa and 
all over the developing world.
    Now, I strongly support that, too. I believe that when Americans 
give people in distant villages a chance to build a decent life, they're 
more likely to be good citizens and to support democracy and less likely 
to join the narcotraffickers or the people that are trying to corrupt 
governments and end freedom, or later try to cause problems in the world 
that the United States will have to deal with. So we need to keep 
reaching out there. But we can't say, at this moment of heightened 
prosperity and a real challenge to keep our growth going, that we're not 
going to give the very same opportunities to our own
people.
    Now, what are we going to do? First, I will propose a major 
expansion of the new markets and empowerment zones tax credits, to give 
investors tremendous incentives to give a long look to the 
underdeveloped areas in urban and rural America. I want to thank, 
especially, Representative Charles Rangel for the very large role that 
he has played in leading the charge on both these tax credits. I'll ask 
for more than twice the funding I asked for last year for this tax 
credit to spur $15 billion in new investment.
    I'm also going to ask Congress to authorize two new components of 
our new markets agenda. First, our New Markets Venture Capital Firms, a 
program geared toward helping small and first-time entrepreneurs; and 
then America's private investment companies, modeled, as I said earlier, 
on the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, to help larger 
businesses expand or relocate to distressed, inner-city or rural areas. 
Now, together, all these components of the new markets initiative will 
leverage over $20 billion of new equity investment in our underserved 
communities.
    Here's how it works. Through our New Markets Venture Capital 
initiative and the American Private Investment Corporation, we'll spur 
new investments in both small and large businesses by telling investors 
the following: If you put up $1 of equity capital for new markets 
investments, we'll provide $2 of Government-guaranteed loans. In some 
cases, we'll even defer interest payments for up to 5 years.
    What is the practical impact of this? It says, if you're willing to 
take the chance of seeking a profit in the new markets with new 
partners, we'll help to lower your financing costs and some of your 
risks. Then, on top of that, the new markets tax credit will give 
investors a 25-percent tax credit on investments in the Private 
Investment Corporation, in the New Market Venture Capital Group, in 
community development banks, and other funds that invest in our new 
markets. This will enable us, alone, to increase the amount this tax 
credit serves, from 6 to 15 billion dollars.
    Now, is anybody going to, all of a sudden, put money into a sinkhole 
where they think they'll lose it? No, not unless we give you a 100-
percent tax credit. But if you know there is a marginal increased risk, 
but a potential big reward, not only for your investment but for our 
country as a whole, what these initiatives will do will say, hey, take a 
look at these places in America that have been left behind. And they're 
out there, and they're gifted people.
    I ordered Christmas presents, a few Christmas presents on the 
Internet this year for the first time. But you know who my seller was? 
One of America's Indian tribes. When we went to the Pine Ridge 
Reservation in South Dakota--do you think it's tough in Brooklyn--do you 
know what the unemployment rate on the Pine Ridge Reservation is, 
because it's so far from everyplace? One of the most noble places in 
America, the home of the Oglala Sioux, the tribe of Crazy Horse--their 
unemployment rate in this economy is 73 percent.

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    I met--I was taken around through this neighborhood by this young 
woman who had had a very difficult childhood, but she was one of the 
most impressive, self-possessed, articulate people I have met in a long 
time for her age. And I thought to myself, there is an equal 
distribution of talent and intelligence everywhere in our country, and 
it is wrong for these people to be denied good jobs, good education, 
good housing, decent businesses, and the opportunity to build a 
different kind of 21st century community. Now, this is wrong.
    So I say to all of you again, I want you to help me pass this new 
markets initiative. I want you to help me increase the empowerment zone 
tax credits. And I want you to help me keep doing the things that are 
working. I want you to help me work with Vice President Gore and 
Secretary Cuomo to get a whole other round of empowerment zone 
communities, so we can put even more intense efforts there. And I want 
you to help me make it a nonpartisan deal.
    The Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, a Republican from 
Illinois, joined Reverend Jackson and me and Congressman Bobby Rush and 
some others in Englewood, Illinois, recently, and he pledged to work 
with us to find common ground on these proposals. Economic opportunity 
should not be the political province of any particular party. Economic 
opportunity should be the birthright of every American.
    Let me just mention one other thing I'm going to do, which is 
related to this, because I think it's important. Our new budget will 
carry a new initiative we call First Accounts to expand access to 
financial services to low-income Americans--an idea long championed by 
Maxine Waters and many other leaders in Congress. Today, it's hard for 
some of you to believe, but far too many families have no bank accounts 
at all. They wind up spending a lot of their precious money on 
unnecessary fees, therefore, when they pay bills or cash checks.
    Under this First Accounts initiative, we're going to work with 
financial institutions to encourage the creation of low cost bank 
accounts for low income families; to help bring more ATM's to safe 
places in low income communities, like the post office; to provide 
training to help families manage household finances and build assets 
over time, which will work very nicely with the financial education 
efforts you're launching at this conference.
    And then, finally, I want to convene a roundtable at the White House 
to build even greater awareness in the corporate community of the 
benefits of the Community Reinvestment Act. You've already heard a lot 
of talk about that, but we had to work hard to ensure that when we 
passed the financial modernization bill and expanded the powers and 
opportunities for banks, we expanded the CRA, as well, and kept it 
instead of weakening it. That law has been on the books for over 20 
years, with more than 95 percent of all the money loaned under it has 
occurred in the last 5 years. And I'm very proud of that because more 
than a $1 trillion in long-term commitments have been made to invest in 
our communities.
    So I say to you, we've got to do more of this. Especially when you 
put the responsibilities of financial institutions on the Community 
Reinvestment Act with all these incentives--if we can pass them through 
Congress, we can have a flood of money into areas that have never before 
had it, to people that have never before been able to get a loan, in 
ways that are good for all the rest of us, because they'll keep this 
engine going with no inflation.
    Anyway, that is the idea. And I loved all this new markets tours 
we've done. And Reverend Jackson and I, many Members of Congress, we've 
stopped at a lot of places where Presidents never go. And I'm having 
such a good time, we're going to do another one this spring. So, 
Reverend, you've got to clear your calendar; we're going to go. And 
we're going to specifically focus on something that I hope all of you 
will help us on. We're going to focus on the digital divide.
    This very conference is being broadcast live over the Internet to 
people all over the world. But a lot of the people you're trying to 
reach don't have a computer, can't afford the hookup. We have worked 
very hard, under the Vice President's leadership, to get something 
called the E-rate as a part of reform of the telecommunications system,

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which gives a couple of billion dollars in subsidies to schools and 
libraries around the country that are in low income areas, so everybody 
can afford to be hooked up.
    When we started 5 years ago we had--only about 14 percent of the 
schools in our country were connected to the Internet; now over 80 
percent are. We're really working hard, and we've had a wonderful 
partnership with the private sector. But it's not enough for the 
schools.
    I went to Hudson County, New Jersey, which has a lot of first-
generation immigrants, in a school that had so many problems it was 
almost closed by the State. And then the principal of this high school 
not only started making sure all the immigrant kids whose first language 
was not English were trained on the computer, they started putting 
computers in the parents' home and showing them how to do it, so that 
all these low income working people could E-mail their parents, 
teachers, and their principals every day. The dropout rate went way down 
and the performance of these kids in a low income neighborhood, most of 
them immigrant kids, rose about the State average of New Jersey.
    We can do this if we close the digital divide. Your company had a 
lot to do with that, and I thank you.
    So again I say, you know, when you know something works and you know 
you ought to do it, you know, by the way, it will help you as well as 
help other people, you need your head examined if you don't do it.
    I see this as a part of America making the most of this precious 
moment. This week--I'll just close with this--this week I had one of the 
great, sort of personal encounters with beauty in my whole life. I flew 
to the Grand Canyon, and I got there late at night. And I stayed in this 
old lodge built in 1905, which is right out on the edge of the Grand 
Canyon.
    Thirty years ago, when I was a young man, not long after I met 
Hillary, I drove all the way to California to see her. And I stopped at 
the Grand Canyon late in the afternoon. And back then, you had greater 
access before we lawyers got hold of everything. And I crawled out on a 
ledge, and I watched the Sun set over the Grand Canyon for 2 hours. And 
you know, that canyon was formed over millions of years, and there are 
lots of layers of rock and lots of different shapes. So when the Sun 
sets, the light comes out of the Canyon until it disappears, and it 
changes everything. So for the first time in my life, this week I got to 
see the Sun rise over the Grand Canyon. So when it rises, it goes down 
into the Canyon and has the same impact.
    And I went there to set aside another million acres to protect it 
there, under authority that Presidents have had since Theodore Roosevelt 
got Congress to pass something called the Antiquities Act in 1908. And 
really, 100 years ago the times were--bore a lot of similarities to 
today. We were becoming a nation of immigrants; we changed from being an 
agricultural country to an industrial country--just like we're going 
from being an industrial country to an information-based global society 
now.
    And Theodore Roosevelt said that the great hallmark of every young 
and growing society must be that it takes the long look ahead. It's a 
nice phrase, isn't it? So if we are what we dearly want our children and 
grandchildren to believe we are, we will take the long look ahead.
    We'll deal with the challenge of the aging of America, the children 
of America, the need to balance work and family, the need to prove that 
we can improve the environment as we grow the economy, the need to put a 
human face on the global economy, the need to stand against the new 
threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and the old demons 
of racial and ethnic and religious hatred around the world. But we need 
to start in the long look ahead with the clear understanding that this 
is the only time in the lifetimes of most of us here when we ever had a 
chance to give everyone their shot at the American dream.
    When Martin Luther King was preparing to go to Chicago a long, long 
time ago, and Jesse Jackson was not still in high school, but he was 
very young--[laughter]--in preparation for Dr. King's arrival, Jesse 
launched Chicago's Operation Breadbasket, an effort to open the dairy, 
the grocery, the other segregated industries to African-Americans. In 
just 2 years, he helped more than 3,000 men and women secure good jobs 
and an income that totaled over $22 million a year. So decades ago, 
Chicago got a glimpse of how good

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business could be when more people could play, to use the Reverend's 
phrase. Now, everyone in America knows this. You are all here in 
recognition of this.
    In a little more than a year, I'll just be a citizen again. And when 
I leave, I want to know that my country took the long look ahead, to 
give every poor person a chance to have the dignity that comes when your 
mind and your body and your spirit are engaged in productive labor for 
yourself and your family and your children.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 2 p.m. in the Imperial Room at the Sheraton 
Towers Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to civil rights leader Rev. 
Jesse Jackson, founder and president, Rainbow/
PUSH Coalition, and his wife, Jacqueline; Sanford I. Weill, chief 
executive officer, Citigroup; Robert E. Knowling, Jr., president and 
chief executive officer, Covad Communications Co.; Berry Gordy, Jr., 
founder, Motown Record Co.; M. Douglas Ivester, chairman of the board of 
directors and chief executive officer, Coca-Cola Co.; Ivan Seidenberg, 
vice chairman, president, and chief executive officer, Bell Atlantic; 
Kweisi Mfume, president and chief executive officer, National 
Association for the Advancement of Colored People; former Representative 
Floyd H. Flake, pastor, Allen AME Church, NY; Hugh B. Price, president 
and chief executive officer, National Urban League, Inc.; attorney 
Willie E. Gary, 1999
Horatio Alger Award winner; Ronald W. Burkle, chair, Yucaipa Companies; 
Dennis Rivera, cochair, board of directors, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition; late 
night television talk show host David Letterman; former Secretary of the 
Treasury
Robert E. Rubin; and former NFL Detroit Lion Mel Farr, Sr., president, 
Mel Farr Automotive Group.