The World of Computer Software/World_Of_Computer_Software-02-387-Vol-3of3.iso/c/clinspch.zip/CLINAUTO.TXT

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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 <[e-mail]>
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Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton
Subject: CLINTON SPEECH TEXT: UNITED AUTO WORKERS
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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.