Article 4911 of alt.politics.clinton: Path: bilver!tous!peora!masscomp!usenet.coe.montana.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!news.acns.nwu.edu!uicvm.uic.edu!u45301 Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago Date: Thursday, 20 Aug 1992 02:17:42 CDT From: Mary Jacobs Message-ID: <92233.021742U45301@uicvm.uic.edu> Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton Subject: CLINTON SPEECH TEXT: UNITED AUTO WORKERS Lines: 503 SEND COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS REGARDING THIS INFORMATION TO THE CLINTON/GORE CAMPAIGN AT 75300.3115@COMPUSERVE.COM (This information is posted for public education/information purposes. It does not necessarily represent the views of The University.) ======================================================================== REMARKS BY GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON UNITED AUTO WORKERS CONVENTION SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA 6/15/92 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much President Bieber. I want to thank my delegates from Arkansas for walking up here with me and thank all of you for this very warm welcome. I also want to thank the music, I like the music. Let's give them a hand. You know I like music. I never thought that running for President of the United States would boil down to my being willing to go on the Arsenio Hall Show and play my saxophone. Then have Arsenio Hall look at me and say he was glad to see a Democrat blow something besides an election. Well I got news for him, we're not going to blow this election. The last time I saw Owen Bieber, we were walking the line in Peoria at the Caterpillar plant with Senator Paul Simon. I got a chance to see some of the finest workers in the world. I got a chance to sit down and make a case to the management team that a great company like that ought never to fire it's workers for exercising their right to strike. I got a chance to say that I believe we could move beyond the old hostilities of division between labor and management, but not if people could not exercise their lawful rights. And as the old saying goes, "there ought to be a law." We are in the grip of the longest period of economic stagnation since before World War II. We are governed by an administration that promised us fifteen million new jobs in this four year period. They're over fourteen and a half million short. We're five hundred thousand behind in California alone and this administration has no vision, no strategy, and vetoed a tax bill that would have given manufacturers in this country new incentives for plant and equipment to put our people back to work here, while letting millions of our jobs be lost for no strategy overseas, and to a stagnant economy. This is an administration that promised us environmentalism but has no energy policy, was left bringing up the rear at the recent Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, embarrassed America before the world, instead of leading us to new heights. This is an administration that promised us to give us an education presidency. Their idea of that was to propose a year ago that nobody should get any scholarship money from the government if their family income was over ten thousand dollars. If you were over ten thousand dollars in income you were too rich to get a college scholarship, but if your income was over three hundred thousand, you were still poor enough to need a capital gains tax (cut). That's what we got from this administration. This is an administration that said it wanted to give our citizens more choices. It turned out what they meant was they wanted to take limited public funds and put them into private schools, and deny women the most fundamental choice of all by criminalizing the decision of choice in the abortion area. And that is wrong too. This is an administration that promised to be tough on crime but for one solid year has refused the pleas of virtually every police and law enforcement office in this country to have a simple law which requires a check for criminal and mental history before people can buy handguns. We've got cities in this country where the grade schools now have metal detectors to take the guns and knives off the eight and nine year olds when they come to school. Don't take to me about tough on crime. They've made a mockery of their efforts. This is an administration which promised us to be for family values. They've attacked Murphy Brown in public, but in private they've attacked the real working families of America. What about the families in Los Angeles who did not burn, who did not loot, who did not riot, whose children stayed home. They're still working harder for less money. This administration vetoes family leave and collapses family income and wants credit for family values. Give me a break. This is an administration which now has the pit bull, that's what he called himself, the Vice President--the pit bull of this campaign. I can tell you, when I heard that, I thought every fire hydrant in America's going to be terrified. He says that we're all part of a cultural elite. He went to New York to attack Governor Cuomo, saying he's part of a cultural elite. Mario Cuomo, the son of an immigrant grocer who graduated first in his class at St. John's Law School, worked for everything he ever got, still didn't get a Wall Street law firm offer because he was part of America's heartland--being attacked by a guy with a trust fund as being part a cultural elite--give me a break. Who do these people think they are and how dare them try to divide us like this. You know, I guess Quayle thinks I'm part of the cultural elite too. Although when I was here in this state a couple of weeks ago, I established by credentials to be out of the cultural elite beyond any doubt, when I had proved that I was the last person to run for President who actually lived in a home without indoor plumbing when I was a kid. Now how can I be in a cultural elite. I'm having a good time and so are you but this is deadly serious. This election is about whether we will reverse the 1980's and the first of this decade. Do we have the courage to stop what is going on in America? Most of our people are working harder for less and paying higher taxes. We've lost our economic leadership. For the first time since the 1920's the top one percent of Americans have more wealth than the bottom ninety percent. We were promised, you and I, that if we would just let things be a little more unequal we'd have so much more growth because the people with money would invest it back in our economy. It turned out that the money was invested abroad or consumed at home, but not invested in American jobs. We have a government that is paralyzed by special interests and privileged, and we have a country that is in deep disarray. The American people are as disillusioned, as frustrated, as angry as they have ever been. There is less belief in politics than ever before. We have a President who says he will do whatever it takes to get reelected. We have an independent who says he will spend whatever it takes to get elected, and that we ought to vote for him because he's not part of the system and not sure what he'll do, but he can't possibly be worse than anybody with a 'D' or an 'R' behind their name. Then you've got me. You're stuck with it whether you like it or not. I've got a lot of ideas which a lot of people don't agree with, and a lot which people do, but I'll tell you one thing: I am the only fellow out here running that ever balanced any government budgets in the 1980s, that ever worked with the private sector to create an industrial strategy that created manufacturing jobs instead of losing them -- the way this government has done in Washington. That actually tried to do something to educate our children, move people from welfare to work, and make the government work again. And that's what we need a president for in 1992. The only way we can reverse the 1980s, the only way we can reverse the legacy of Reagan and Bush is not to go back to some former time. You and I know we can not recreate the economy of the 1970s, or 60s or 50s. There is too much foreign competition for that. We know that the world we once knew will never be again, and that we have to make a newer and better world. At the end of World War II, we created economic prosperity for Europe and Japan, and in so doing helped ourselves. At the end of the Cold War, we've got to rebuild America. It's not a New World Order, its a New American Order we need today. And we have to begin by the old-fashioned notion of putting our people first, by investing in America for a change -- in our jobs, in our health care, in our education. To do it we are going to have to shake the government up and give it back to the people. To do it we're going to have to -- all of us -- have the courage to change. But change we can, and change we must. We need in this country some new rules that all of us follow. One of your local leaders gave a speech not long ago in which he asked the question whether labor and management could live without enemies in America. I ask you whether we can live without enemies and whether we can have a government that is a partner and not a problem. Because if you look at the competition around the world in the high-wage countries, if you look at the Germans, who work a shorter work week, for 20% higher wages, with family leave and health care and a four week paid vacation a year: What do they do that we don't do? They don't work harder; you work harder. Americans work harder. It's not hard work. It's not hard work; it's vision, and organization, and planning, and investment, and continuous training. They don't work harder than we do but they're better organized and better led and we better catch up and compete if we want to make this country what it ought to be and save the American dream in this last decade of the twentieth century. What do we have to do? First of all, we have to have an economic strategy again. There is no point in blaming other people beyond our borders for problems that we don't address here at home. What should our economic strategy begin with? For manufacturing, first, the tax system. This is the only advanced country in the world where you don't get an investment tax credit for new plants and new equipment, but you get lots of tax breaks for shutting your plants down here and moving them overseas. So, I say, let's change the tax code and give people new incentives to start new businesses here at home. Give our manufacturers big, middle-sized, and small, the incentives they need to modernize plants and equipment and to continuously retrain their workforce, but take those things out of the tax code which encourage people to shut their plants down here and move them overseas. Do you know that today if you need a new piece of equipment to keep an american manufacturing facility productive you don't get an investment tax credit for it, but if you want to shut the old plant down, move the plant overseas, and take the old equipment, you get a tax deduction for the cost of shutting the plant down. You can take the losses in the plant's early years off of your American income tax. Then, when you start to make money, as long as you leave the money in a foreign bank, you don't have to pay one red cent in American taxes. I say more incentives to invest here at home, no more incentives to move our jobs overseas. Let's reverse this. Thank you. Thank you. A second place we begin is with health care. The UAW knows better than any union in the United States of America what it does to our competitive position when we are the only nation in the world that stubbornly, persistently refuses to provide a system of affordable health care to all of our people. One that lets health care costs go up at two and three times the rate of inflation every year. One that lets the most inefficient system of insurance and bureaucracy and government regulations pile up literally, literally $80 to $100 billion in unnecessary costs in paperwork and insurance profits instead of health care needs of our people. We can't blame that on anybody else. Only the United States has had a government so in the grip of the status quo and the existing order of things that we have refused to liberate our people from this stupid system and provide a system of affordable health care to all Americans that keeps costs within inflation. Within the first 100 days of the next administration, I will send a bill to Congress to do just that, and which will makes us more competitive again. The third part of our economic strategy has to do with education. What are we going to do in a world where what we earn depends on what we can learn. When our children drop out of school and they earn less even with high school diplomas when we have no system to make sure that everybody after high school goes on to do better. I'll tell you where we'll begin--we'll begin with Head Start for every child who needs it. We'll have national standards for our schools and a real meaningful system so you can see every year in tests that mean something whether your kids our measuring up to international standards. For the kids who don't want to go to college, we'll restore the dignity of blue collar work by guaranteeing an apprenticeship program to every non-college bound student in the United States of America. And for those who do, let us be clear that the cost of a college education is the only thing that has gone up more rapidly than health care in this country. The drop out rate from college is more than twice the high school drop out rate in part because of the costs and in this administration for more than a decade has made it difficult for people to get the help they need. Every year you as taxpayers pay $3 billion in student loans that are never repaid so you have to make up the difference. So, we don't give enough help and yet too many loans are defaulted on. What is the answer? The answer is to take two of the best ideas this country ever had and put them together: the G.I. Bill, that educated a whole generation of service people after World War II, and the Peace Corps that sent some of our brightest and best people all across the world starting when John Kennedy was President. I say we need a National Service Trust out of which any American can borrow the money to got to college. No questions asked. No income questions asked. You want the money, borrow the money, it's there for you and then pay it back after they go to work, as a percentage of their income that they can afford to pay every year at tax time, so nobody can beat the bill. Or you have another option and a better option: an American Peace Corps. Instead of paying your loan back, work it back. Go back to your hometown in your state work off your college loan by giving two years of your life at a reduced pay to your community. Work as a police officer, work as a teacher, work in a drug program, work to rebuild your community in any way that is needed. It would be the best money we ever spent. Education. The next thing we've got to do is do a better job of spending your tax money. Not only has the deficit quadrupled in the last twelve years, but the crying shame of it is we have reduced our investment in the future. And so we spend less than the people do around the world on our roads, on our bridges, on our water and sewer system. In Los Angeles, when they want to order high speed rail, they look abroad to Germany and Japan because we're not building it here. It's criminal. We need more short haul aircraft. Our airports are clogged. We could be making a fortune out of it. The Europeans have partnerships between the government and their airline manufacturers but not us, we just close the airplane companies down and lay the people off. Example, after example, after example, tells us that with over nine million people unemployed the best thing we can do is to invest more of your tax money in putting the American people back to work in areas where work is sorely needed so we can compete with the rest of the world. Look at California. A half a million jobs in this state alone lost, largely because of defense cuts. We should take every dollar by which defense is reduced and put it into a trust fund to rebuild America, to build high speed rail, to modernize water and sewer systems, to modernize waste recycling systems, to build the roads, the streets, the bridges, to put the people to work who don't have the education and the jobs they need but can do this work and earn a decent living and get this economy going again. Every one of you has had debt in your life, to borrow a car or buy a house. You work for businesses that have borrowed money for new plant and new equipment. The small businesses of America go to banks every day and say, "loan me some money so I can invest in my business, borrowing is not all bad, but borrowing kills you if you borrow money to go to dinner every night and that's what America has been doing. In farming states like mine we say that's "eating your seed corn" and that's exactly what we've been doing. But I'm telling you that all these politicians come along and promise they're going to balance this budget overnight, you just remind them that we got in this mess over twelve years and we're not going to get out of it overnight, we can't afford to, but what we cannot afford not to do is to finally begin to invest your tax money. So, I will, put down the lid on health care costs, reduce the administrative costs of government, put the defense cuts into domestic buildup and build a New American Order with jobs for Americans here in America which will give us the kind of growth we need. We have got to do that here in this country. The last thing we have to do economically is to use the government to continue to break down the barriers to new technology development in robotics and biotechnology and computers. Only 16% of the American workforce is in manufacturing today, 28% in Japan, 32% in Germany. Why? They export more and do a better job of taking their ideas and turning them into manufacturing jobs and they move into the new areas in manufacturing. They may not use as many people as we do to make certain products, but they make more different things in their country and we have got to do a better job of moving relentlessly, constantly, always into newer and newer areas, where there will be manufacturing jobs. I disagree with the people who say we can make it as a service economy. That's nuts. We have to make things in America. My granddaddy told me in the Depression in Arkansas, which had an income about half the national average, he used to say when I was a boy, he said "Bill, people were so poor they took in one another's washing for a living." Now that's what a service economy does. Anybody in a service economy who wants the service to prosper will want America to make things, and make things, and make things, and make things. Yes, we'll have to get more and more productive. Yes, we'll have to make things with fewer people, but we got to keep making more things. And that means a trade policy and a technology policy that will permit us to do it. It means that we have to have agreements with our neighbors that favor expanded trade, but on terms that are fair to all countries. It means we have to say, as you well know, that their is no such thing as free trade and no such thing as complete protectionism. Everybody is somewhere in between and what the president of the United States owes the American people is a relentless effort to expand trade so that we can increase our markets and increase our wealth, but on terms that are fair and decent to the American people. Expanded trade, fair trade, we can do that, if you work. If you look at one of the most controversial areas in the discussion today, and one thing that caused a lot of discussion in the primaries, you will see my point. The question of whether we should have an agreement with Mexico or not. Here is the thing. I know. I've been a Governor. If we do nothing. If we do nothing, many jobs will continue on a fast track to Mexico. Why? Because, for 12 years, our business community have been conditioned to believe that it's okay to build a hard work, low wage economy. And when you can't build it in America, move it somewhere else. Because the government was not there with a health care strategy, with a tax strategy, with an investment strategy, with a trade strategy, with a partnership between management and labor and government to build this economy. If we do nothing, that will continue to occur. But, if we had an agreement which said, "Hey, you want to keep investment coming? You want to keep trade flowing? Raise your labor standards. Raise your wage standards. Raise your safety standards. Raise your environmental standards." We could integrate, in a large trading bloc, over the next ten years, countries south of our border in ways that increased our income, increased our jobs and did not erode our manufacturing base. You can't do one thing without another. You have to do all of these things at once. But, we can do it. We can do it. I don't want people dumping on the United States, whether they're dumping micro-chips or mini-vans and if I'm the President of the United States, I'm going to make sure we're treated fairly. But, I know. Thank you. But, I know that, in the end, what happens to us, will depend on us. What we do, the strategies we follow, the future we carve, we can work together. We're going to have to have more fairness, more shared responsibilities, we're going to have to ride these roller coasters up and down. And when labor does the right thing, and so many UAW plants have done, eliminating middle layers of management, pushing decisions down to the shop floor, taking responsibility for increasing productivity. When you do that, you ought to be rewarded and not shafted. There's a remarkable plant here in this town called the NASsCO Steel Company, the only place in America today making a commercial ship. Because in 1981 President Reagan signed a bill eliminating all the ship building subsidies, sounded like a good thing to do except we didn't make any of our competitors do it. The Japanese are building ships and we aren't. But this one plant, NASSCO, does. It's a remarkable place. I went out and met with the workers the other day. Seven unions, employee ownership, management working together, productivity, determined to survive, determined to compete. They felt good about where they were and what they were doing because they had a sense of shared destiny. That's what we've got to have more of in this country. We can't through another ten years where the heads of the biggest corporations in this country raise their pay by four times what their worker pay goes up, and three time what their profits go up. And when it happens I'll be darned if it ought to be tax deductible. It should not be. We should not permit that kind of unfair behavior. We cannot go through another decade where the rhetoric of every meeting of labor and management is against the other. The countries that are winning today are finding a way to work together. The countries that are winning today are finding a way to be pro-business and pro-labor, pro-environment and pro-growth. How come the Germans and the Japanese thought they could live with reducing CO2 emissions to their 1990 for the year 2000 down in Rio and we didn't? I'll tell you why. Because they have invested in pollution control equipment and they now have seventy percent of the American market -- manufacturing jobs that ought to be in this country. And so we have to decide, can we be pro-business and pro-labor? Can we be pro-environment and pro-growth? Can we be pro-civil rights and tough on crime? Can we be pro-family and pro-choice? Can we unite America? Can we do it in an atmosphere in which we all say, "We're willing to change, but we want work and family to be rewarded. We don't want ten more years where the people who work hard and play by the rules are punished by doing it." If the people who work hard and play by the rules are going to be rewarded, yes we will change, yes we will be together, yes we know the enemy is not us, if the enemy is us we are finished, the competition is aboard. And they are eating our lunch because we have stubbornly refused to work together. To do what it takes to compete and win. I don't want to lose. I don't want us to lose this election. But that is secondary. The election is only important if it leads to a change in the country. The purpose of the election is for people to take their country back. To render a judgement, to make a decision, and I'm telling you, we've got some big decisions to make this year. I want you to help me in this election, not because whether I care about moving from Arkansas to Washington or not, if you have ever been to my state you would have to be out of your mind to want to leave, but that is what you have to do to live in Washington. I want to do this because the political process is the only way that we have in this country, to make a decision to take a different road. I'm telling you let's call an end to the eighties. Let's put our people first again. Let invest in our jobs, our health care, our education again. Let's shake the government up and give it back to people who own it again. Let's prove that labor and management and government, education can work together and America can win again. I am tired of losing. I want us to win. That what this election is all about. Thank you very much.