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

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Article 4734 of alt.politics.clinton:
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Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Wednesday, 19 Aug 1992 02:59:04 CDT
From: Mary Jacobs <[e-mail]>
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Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton
Subject: CLINTON TEXT: NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER'S ASSOC
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GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON REMARKS TO THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION
OF NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS WALDORF ASTORIA HOTEL, NEW YORK CITY
MAY 5, 1992


Thank you very much. Thank you very much Mark. That was an interesting
introduction. When I heard that you were associated with a newspaper that
was called the "Republican," I wondered if my paranoia were not even more
justified than I dreamed. I think I want to thank the publisher of the
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Walter Husseman, for getting me to come
here today. It certainly is a beautiful room for us to be here at. I come
with some trepidation having been covered, as my introduction said, in
such an exhaustive way. I was in Texas the other night to receive the
endorsement of Governor Ann Richards, a good friend of mine, who has had
her share of difficult press coverage, and I asked her what I should do here
today. She said "give a short speech and don't forget to inhale."

So I thought I would do that. Ladies and gentlemen, I got into this race for
President after working for over eleven years as governor of my state, one
of the poorest states in America, but a state full of remarkable people. I
worked at the problems that now grip our whole country: How do you get
and keep good jobs in a global economy? How do you educate children to
international standards? How do you solve these thorny social problems
that are eating at the heart of America? How can people be brought
together across racial lines to celebrate our diversity instead of letting it
be a source of our undoing? I entered because I believe this country is in
the grip of two great problems that must be addressed. We have lost our
economic leadership and we are coming apart when we ought be coming
together. Most places I have talked more about the former subject,
because that is mostly what I do. How do we recover our productivity
growth? How do we restore the middle class? How can we reward those
who work and who are still poor? But today, I want to talk to you a little
about the second subject: how we can rebuild our American community.
Yesterday and on Sunday evening, I was in Los Angeles in the aftermath of
the riots which has now left 58 dead, over 2000 wounded, and well over
700 million dollars in damages. Having had to deal with riots and other
life threatening situations as a governor, I understand and support the
decision to make the restoration of order and peace the first priority. And
I was impressed by the efforts made by everyone from the firefighters and
the police men and women, and citizens at the grass roots level, to the
guardsmen called out by the governor, to the federal officials called out
by the president. They worked hard to do that. I was also impressed by the
scope and the intensity of the cleanup efforts, showing a residual spirit in
the city of Los Angeles, where people come together across race and
income lines.

But what I want to talk to you today about, is what happens after the
smoke clears and the rubble disappears. What happens after the troops and
the cameras are gone? What happens in that city and in every other city in
America today that has almost numbed us to the painful problems that
grip a very large percentage of our country men and women. I was in
Washington D.C. on Sunday before I flew to Los Angeles, and the front page
of the Washington Post had a heartbreaking picture of a beautiful thirteen
year old honor student, named Joey Ford, who was giving a speech in his
church on Saturday and then left with his mother and his brother and
sisters and was shot dead because they happened to drive in the middle of
a random shooting, a skirmish between two people, in a city altogether too
dominated by guns and gangs and drugs. In Los Angeles I tried to meet with
people who had been fighting the struggle to keep community and
community values alive. I went to the First A.M.E. Church and met with
Reverend Cecil Murray and his leadership, a church with 7500 people,
ranking from Arsenio Hall all the way down to a lot of poor community
residents, where 100 men went out to protect the firemen and fighting the
fires before the police could come and protect them. I met in Rep. Maxine
Waters home, she is the congresswoman for much of what was destroyed
in L.A., her own office burned to the ground, she had 35 or so people come
into her home, everybody from a local banker and a developer, to the
singer, Dionne Warwick, to her next door neighbor, to the local mailman.
All they were talking about [was] what they were wanting to re-establish
a sense of community. I went to St. Vincent's school, a Catholic school
with grades Kindergarten through eighth grade, and met with a couple of
hundred community leaders associated with groups that some of you may
know, the United Neighborhood Organization, the South Central Organizing
committee, and two other groups of people who represent a quarter of a
million families who pay about $10 a year through their churches, that
belong to community groups in the Los Angeles area, to try to reclaim
their future. These are people we never read about or hear about very
often, who are really trying to deal with the problems of the long run. It
became clear to me that underneath the Rodney King verdict, and the
reaction to it, underneath the outrageous burning and killing and looting by
people for whom that verdict was little more than an excuse to unleash
irresponsible behavior, that there are still profound divisions in this
country, most deeply in our largest cities, which present a threat to our
common way of life and to our efforts to revitalize the American economy
and they cannot be ignored.

A long time ago, Thomas Jefferson said that "slavery was a firebell in the
night for our democracy." Perhaps the LA riots can be a firebell in the
night for all of us as citizens in 1992. These challenges our country face
at the end of the Cold War: how to rebuild the economy, how to restore the
community. We cannot do one without the other. We ought to learn from
the experiences of Los Angeles and go forth to try to build our
communities. It starts with facing the problem of race more squarely than
we have. The struggle of the '50s and the '60s in the area of civil rights
focused on the integration of public facilities, access to education, and
achieving political equality. I lived through those struggles. When I was a
little boy growing up I lived with my grandparents until I was four, my
mother was widowed shortly before I was born and she went off to
nursing school so she could support me. And my grandfather had a store, a
tiny store, in the community of Hope, Arkansas. About half of his
customers were black. He only had a grade school education but he had a
world of common sense, a heart of gold, and he believed that segregation
was wrong. He taught me something that I carried with me for the rest of
my life, and I saw the evil that was done because my state resisted it.
President Eisenhower had to send the troops to Little Rock to integrate
Little Rock Central High School. All during the '60s, I remember when
Watts burned in Los Angeles when Martin Luther King spoke in the Lincoln
Memorial, when Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, just two months
before Robert Kennedy was killed, I remember well putting a red cross on
my car and driving down into the burning streets in Washington D.C. to
carry food to people who were huddled alone in church basements waiting
for someone to feed them. In the aftermath of all that, a lot of progress
has been made. There is a much bigger black and minority middle class
than there used to be. We have seen dramatic political gains. If you look at
most of the cities where there was any sort of disturbance in the last few
days, almost all of them were governed by black mayors, including of
course, the city of Los Angeles. But many of those mayors, reside over
cities in which poverty is growing among both working and out of work
Americans and where too often too many people live in neighborhoods
dominated by gangs and guns and drugs, without any of the fundamental
connections which hold the rest of us to the American Dream. Connection
to family, to work, to school, to church.

When I was born in Arkansas at the end of World War II, our per capita
income was just barely above half the national average. Our neighbors next
door in Mississippi were just below half the national average, which
meant that all of us had about a 50% chance of being classified as poor by
the then prevailing standard of the national government. But if we had
family, if we had some to love and discipline us, if we had clothes on our
back, and a place to sleep at night, and food to eat, we basically felt that
we were part of the great American community because we had things
that money couldn't buy and because we believed that tomorrow could be
better than today. Today I'll tell you there are millions of people who don't
have those things that money can't buy and who don't believe that
tomorrow will be better than today. All Americans, whether we live in
cities, or suburbs, or quiet rural hamlets, are paying for the unraveling of
the American community. We are paying for the denial and the neglect of
the last decade and more. We have the highest crime rate of any advanced
nation in the world and more and more of our tax dollars go every year to
jails instead of schools and jobs. We pay for the high costs of health care,
occasioned at least in part, by the spiraling costs of hospital emergency
rooms where there are so many people without health insurance who are
treated every week for being beaten and cut and shot. The costs are passed
along to the rest of us. We pay when twice as many of our children as any
other advanced nation are born with low birth weights and we pay for
them $1500 dollars a day in our (tape skips) in total the costs of normal
child's birth. We pay when we accept a permanent underclass caught in a
culture where children cannot imagine, even imagine, the future we want
them to live. Where most of the incomes comes from government checks
and drug deals and where gangs are the only place in which some of our
young people feel that they are truly important to anyone else. The
question is "what are we going to do about it?" The current administration
in this crisis has focused first on restoring order, with which I agree, and
second on assisting the burned out businesses with FBA loans, with which
I also agree, but lately has turned to blaming these riots on the social
programs and liberal approaches of the 1960's which is clearly mere
posturing and almost unbelievable after they have held the White House
for eleven and a half years in a row and their party has governed for
twenty of the last twenty-four years. The question of this White House,
according to the morning papers, is not "what are we going to do?" but
"who are we going to blame?" I don't know about you, but I don't care
anymore who's to blame. There's plenty of blame to go around. I think as
Americans we ought to be asking ourselves "what are we going to do?" It
may be because I'm a governor and not a member of the federal
establishment, because I live in a world where we don't have a printing
press to meet our financial needs, where rhetoric gives way to reality in
every day the tough decisions and their consequences are left at our
doorsteps. I don't want scapegoats, but I do want action. And I have to tell
you that if you don't want someone to try to face these problems, who
really believes (tape skips) you should vote for someone else for President
of the United States, because I do not believe we can build this country
unless we face squarely the fact that millions of our fellow Americans
are divorced from the values, the interests, and the future, that all of us
must share.

I'm not here to argue for a big old fashioned top down government response
to this problem. I don't want another four years of denial, retrenchment,
and neglect. On Sunday and Monday night in Los Angeles, I met with
community leaders who are fighting to keep their dreams alive, to get
their children back, to rebuild their community, to revive Los Angeles as a
city of angels. Believe it or not, not a single person in any of the meetings
I attended, not one, asked me for another big top down government
program. They want us to get the economy going again, and they know most
new investment ought to be directed towards rebuilding our infrastructure
and doing the things that will make us all wealthier as a people. Instead,
these leaders asked me for the same things I've been hearing from them,
and people like them, for years, so I went into South Central Los Angeles
and met with the community leaders three years ago when they told me no
elected state official from any state, including California, had ever been
there. They don't want neglect and denial, but they don't want the federal
government to give them a free ride either. They want opportunity and
empowerment within the free enterprise system. They want better
education and training. They want community based, non-bureaucratic,
public-private partnerships to deal with their social problems. And they
want safe streets just like you and I do. They want to revitalize the
values of family, faith and work. They want to reward those who play by
the rules and hold those who don't strictly accountable. That's exactly
what I've tried to do in my years as Governor, in changing schools,
creating jobs, addressing social problems. Here are some of the specific
things that I recommend to you as Americans, based on what I heard
yesterday, and what I know that works, and it may surprise you exactly
what they asked for and how very specific they were. First of all, more
than government help, the people I talked to in Los Angeles who were on
the outside of the mainstream, want private investment to make free
enterprise work in their neighborhood. They believe the Community
Reinvestment Act has been largely a sham and a fraud. They know that
their neighborhood has been red-lined. They understand that even the
Federal Reserve has issued a report showing a massive dis- investment,
an inequality of treatment in minority neighborhoods all across America.
They want a new community reinvestment act, or a system that I have
recommended, a national community development bank, where people loan
money to those who deposit in their bank and have a neighborhood focus.
Those of you from Chicago or from the northern Illinois area, are all
familiar, I'm sure, with the South Shore Development Bank of Chicago,
which played a major role in revolutionizing a poor inner city
neighborhood by bringing free enterprise back. So we need new rules for
bank investment or a new banking system couple with small business
development centers. Most of these cities built jobs for poor and minority
and immigrant people based on an industrial base that does not exist
anymore. Eight-five percent of the new jobs in America are being created
in units of under 50. We cannot hope to bring economic opportunity back to
the cities unless those kinds of jobs can be created for the people who
live there through a banking system that simply does not exist for them
now. That is what they want. Not a hand out but a hand up.

Second, they want more public-private partnership where the local people
decide what is best. They want a new housing program but not a new
federally-directed top down housing initiative. Instead more partnership
like the Nehemiah program which was created in New York City and which
is now flourishing in Baltimore, in which in order for a project to be built,
there must be partnerships between the Federal government, the local
government, private development, and bankers. Nothing can be done from
the top down. It is all crafted from the bottom up. That is what they asked
for. Don't send me something from Washington. Give me some seed money
to make it possible for us to put people back in housing here who are
working for a living.

Third, they want safe streets. Let me just mention two or three very
specific things. Number one: community policing works. When people know
their police officers and police officers know their neighbors, when there
are enough law enforcement to go around, you can actually use police to
prevent crime instead of catch criminals after crime occurs. Thirty years
ago there were three police for every serious crime reported, today there
are three crimes for every police officer. We must put more police
officers back on the street. There are two recommendations which I have
heard that I embrace, that I commend to you. Number one, we ought to
scrap the existing student loan program and substitute for it a national
service trust out of which any American could borrow the money to
finance a college education and then pay it back either with a small
percentage of their income, after they go to work, at tax time, so they
can't beat the bill, as so many do today. Or, we should let people pay their
college loans off by being part of the "domestic peace corps," if you will,
being police officers or teachers or doing some other public service work.
Train them and let them do that. Have the federal government pay at a
reduced rate so that the cities can have more police officers to do what
they need to do. A second recommendation...you like that? I'm sorry...I
didn't mean to...you can clap for it...A second recommendation made by
Senator Sam Nunn, would permit people who have at least 15 years of
military service to be mustered out as we try to create a peace dividend
and then permit those people to be trained to be police officers and work
for the last five years building up their full military retirement as police
officers in local communities around the United States. There may be
other things we can do, but we have to do something to enable these
communities with very high crime rates, to put more police officers
actually walking the streets, driving the same blocks everyday, working
with their neighbors and neighborhood patrols. One of the most hopeful
things for Los Angeles is that a new police chief, Willie Williams, coming
out of Philadelphia, has practiced community policing in Philadelphia, and
I walked some of those streets with the Mayor of Philadelphia, I know it
works. We have got to put the people back on our streets to reclaim our
streets. Without order none of the rest of this can occur.

Fourth, there needs to be a new initiative to make schools work in our
inner cities. I think there should be more public school choice, more
parental involvement, more rules of conduct, including dress codes, more
availability of technology, more opportunity for people to control their
own schools and put basic values back into the schools, in the public
schools just as they existed in St. Vincent's Catholic School which I
visited yesterday.

Fifth, I think we need a pro-family policy in the cities where our families
are crumbling and in the poor rural areas. I think it should have the
following components: number one, we should increase the refundable
earned income tax credit for people who are working forty hours a week,
have children in the home, and are still below the poverty line. If people
are out there playing by the rules, doing their best to raise their children,
living law abiding lives, I tell you some of them are the real heroes in
America because they live on unsafe streets, in terrible housing
conditions, and they will not riot, they will not loot, they will not take
advantage, at least our tax system should lift them in dignity above
poverty if they are playing by the rules.

Next, we need real welfare reform. I have worked on this since 1980. I
represented the Democratic governors when 49 out of 50 of us supported
the welfare reform act of 1988. We must break the permanent culture of
dependents which embraces 20-25% of those on public assistance. You can
never do it until you have education and training, child support, child care
costs, and medical coverage for the children. If you do that, then I
recommend, number one, that you require people to take jobs. That's what
every state is supposed to be doing today but most aren't. They should be
required. Number two, we should move to a system such as that
recommended by the imminent sociologist, David Ellwood, in which we
give our children a uniform level of child support and then after a certain
length of time on welfare, if there are no private sector jobs, people
should do community service work and be employees not recipients of a
check. We must break the culture of poverty and dependence. Finally, we
ought to have the support we need that other countries do: adequate child
care, family and medical leave and the toughest possible system of child
support enforcement. It is a national scandal that billions of dollars a
year which are owed by parents to their children under court orders which
they are able to pay are not paid because people can cross the state line
and beat the bill. Governments don't raise children, people do and we have
got to crack down on this to restore the essential value of parents being
responsible for their children.

Finally, all of this rests on our embracing a rather simple concept. Do you
believe or don't you that we are all in this together? Do you believe that
the racial diversity which now in Los Angeles, where my hosts come from,
embraces people from 146 nations - 146 different nations. Is this going to
be a source of strength for us in the Post Cold War era or the instrument
of our undoing. Can we live in a country where blacks burn Korean
businesses because they believe Koreans get preference and credit for
setting up businesses in the first place? And where Koreans feel afraid in
their businesses because they think they are resented for their success.
Can we live in a country where when the Rodney King verdict comes down
people immediately believe it was either explicitly or implicitly racially
biased? Can we live in a country where too many people think that
violence has a black face, that is, what is consistent either with their
experiences or with they see on the news or the fact that they don't have
any friends of other races. And where too many black people know that
violence too often has a black face because it is their children who are
shot, their schools which are savaged, their new neighborhoods which are
war zones and they believe no one will make their streets safe simply
because they are black. This is going to tear this country down. We cannot
restore the economic leadership of America until we are one community
again. The greatest Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, said in a
different context over a century ago, that his fellow citizens had to
disenthrall themselves, that the times were new and we had to think anew
and act anew. So I ask all of you, in this election for once don't think as
Republicans or Democrat, liberals or conservatives, protectionists or
free-traders, internationalists or isolationists. Go back to the things
which made this country, the basic values and systems which have made
us the longest lasting and most successful free government in human
history and ask yourselves to forget about the blame - What does it take
to rebuild our economic leadership and restore our American community? I
hope that decision would lead people to vote for me for president but more
important it will lead all of us to fulfill our fundamental duties as
Americans and ensure the survival of the greatest experiment of
government in human history.