President Clinton Thursday told a business conference on expanding economic opportunity to minorities and women to "bring the world of the gleaming office tower and the dark shadow together."Clinton, who has given priority to examining race relations in the United States, joined civil rights leader Jesse Jackson at a three-day conference "Expanding the Marketplace: Inclusion the key to economic growth."
Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition convened the gathering to promote discussion about race and gender on Wall Street, which is often perceived as the preserve of white men.
"You can lead and create an alternative," Clinton said on the second day of the gathering of Wall Street businessmen and women on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center.
"We're going to do everything we can to put more on the table to be a better partner, to give you more options, to support the city, to support the state, to support the private sector, to support community groups," Clinton said.
Earlier Thursday, Jackson had also challenged Wall Street to lead "when it comes to expanding opportunity and embracing diversity."
The two-time presidential hopeful told a fund-raising luncheon at the meeting that urban minorities were "a big overlooked emerging market" of 60 million people or about 25 percent of the U.S. population.
"Never forget the largest market for American business is in America. Under-utilized, under-developed Americans limits production and slows growth," he said.
The gathering, which also commemorates the Jan. 15 birthday of America's most famous civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, is co-sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Travelers Group. King's birthday is marked as a national holiday on Monday, with the NYSE closing in his honor for the first time.
In his speech, Clinton said the business world needed to help government to reduce unemployment in urban areas and help cut the number of people on welfare and provide training.
"We need you to help us in all these ways. We have to bring the world of the gleaming office tower and the dark shadow together because the people who live in both places are all Americans."
Clinton quoted Martin Luther King's phrase that "we are all caught in an inescapable web of mutuality." Clinton said King was reminding Americans that "we had to reach across racial lines."
The president laid out some of his economic proposals for next year. He said he wanted to increase the number of so-called "empowerment zones" in hard-hit urban neighborhoods, increase funding for community development banks by 50 percent and expand eligibility for low income housing credit.
Jackson started the conference on Wednesday night by calling for a development formula to revive the "ghettos and barrios" of U.S. cities.
Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin picked up on that theme on Thursday, telling the conference he sees hopeful signs of renewal in America's cities but said: "Too many Americans are still not participating or are not participating fully in the economic well-being that most are sharing."
In an effort to change the debate to one about business practices from one purely about race, Jackson said, "there is no race gap, we should not say that anymore, there is an investment gap that is evidence of restraint of trade practices which limits growth."
The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition cited a summary of "minority economic power" showing that by 1995, black, Asian and Latino people comprised 25.5 percent of the total U.S. population. By the year 2010 those groups will constitute a third of the population and by the year 2040, half of all people living in the United States will be "minorities".
According to the U.S. Census Bureau there were 267,636,000 people in the country in mid-1997.
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney were both scheduled to address the conference on Friday.
Seven months ago, Clinton promised to lead the country in a "great and unprecedented conversation about race". Clinton appointed an advisory panel and debates have been held on race in towns and cities nationwide that have produced hundreds of suggestions for improving race relations in the United States.
But the initiative has run into confusion over whether the discussion should include only relations between whites and blacks or Hispanics and Asians as well.
Source: Newswire
January 15, 97
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