Night Owl 9/Night Owl CD-ROM (NOPV9) (Night Owl Publisher) (1993).ISO/044a/wh930403.zip/4-3B.TXT

Internet Message Format | 1993-04-05 | 4KB

From @lex-luthor.ai.mit.edu:[e-mail] Sat Apr  3 19:25:17 1993
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1993 13:01-0500
From: The White House <[e-mail]>
Subject: President's Remarks at end of Round Table One 4.2.93
To: [e-mail]
Status: OR


USNEWS  04-02-93 06:08 PET
bc-forest-conference-3 04-02
  Remarks by the President at the End of Roundtable One of Forest
Conference
  To: National Desk
  Contact: White House Office of the Press Secretary, 202-456-2100
  WASHINGTON, April 2 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is President's
Clinton's remarks at the end of roundtable one of the Forest
Conference:
Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Ore. 12:57 p.m. PST
  THE PRESIDENT: I'm going to refrain until the afternoon session
from getting into the specifics of what we ought to do. But I'd like
to say something to the people who were on this panel that talked
about the human impact of the present conditions.
  Mr. Espy and I are neighbors and we share a border of the
Mississippi River. For almost all the history of this country our two
states were the poorest states in America. When agriculture collapsed
there in and after the great depression, the people who loved my state
more than life were forced to leave in huge numbers. As a matter of
fact, it's the only way I got elected President -- every third voter
in Illinois and Michigan and --(laughter) and in the inland empire in
California was from Arkansas. (Laughter.)
  But it bespoke a terrible inability to manage a process of change
so that people could stay with their roots and their culture and their
lives. And then we got everything going again, and then when he and I
came of age, in the early '80s, and began to assume positions of
responsibility, we had another horrible structural collapse in the
rural areas and the small towns along the Mississippi River because
agriculture and the labor-intensive, low-scale, low-wage industries
both collapsed at the same time.
  And our little towns were turned into ghost towns. We had whole
counties -- county after county after county -- with 20, 25 percent
unemployment. And what we found was -- when we talk about managing the
process of change, it was like a lot of what Nadine and others have
said -- Mike, you showed us those pictures -- you had people who knew
they had to change or they ought to change, but they had a relatively
low skill level, they had limits on what kind of opportunities you
could immediately put in the small towns, that the mayor talked about,
and they had a horrendous aversion to moving because they lived where
they -- I mean, their life was more than their livelihood.
  And then it all became complicated by the incredible pressures on
family life, which led more and more families to disintegrate under
the burden. And Mike and I literally began our careers dealing with
the broken pieces of people's lives against that background.
  I say that only to make this point: I cannot repeal the laws of
change. In every state in every area of this country the average
18-year-old will change the nature of work seven or eight times in a
lifetime now, in a global economy. People who take jobs as bank
tellers, for example, even if they keep working for the banks, 10
years after they started what they do will be different because of
technology and because of the changes in the economy.
  But what we have to find a way to do is to try to make it possible
for more people to be faithful to their cultural roots and their way
of life and to work through this process in a human way. And if you
look at it, there's a lot of analogy here to all these defense workers
that are on the food lines in southern California now. I mean, they
think they -- they did what they thought they were supposed to do.
They won the Cold War and then we just cut back on defense spending.
There they were in the street; nobody had even a theory about how they
might go through the kind of process Larry described and be given the
opportunity to reclaim their own destiny.
  I don't pretend that any of this is easy, but I want you to know
that at least some of us have a feel for what this must be like in
those little towns. And we'll do what we can. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
  END 1:03 P.M. PST
  -0-
  /U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/