Bill Clinton: “If I might just say I will answer the question you asked me, but I would like to also comment on the question you asked…”

“If I might just say I will answer the question you asked me, but I would like to also comment on the question you asked the Prime Minister. The great struggle every serious country faces is how to reap the benefits of the astonishing revolution in technology and the globalization of the economy, and to minimize the disruptions so that you can have some sort of stable family and community life. Now, what we had to do when I took office was to get rid of this terrible deficit we had, which kept interest rates high for us and too high for you and was taking too much money out of the global economy, and to focus on some areas where we really needed to do better with our own economy. And it is true that we are blessed in this country with a very dynamic system. Of the 18.1 million new jobs we've had, almost 17 million of them were created in the private sector; they were non- governmental jobs. An enormous percentage of them were created in small businesses. But I wouldn't say that you have nothing to look to within Italy. I told the Prime Minister, when I was a Governor, I came to Italy 10 years ago to study the economic organizations of small businesses in Northern Italy that grew out of the medieval artisans' guilds. And I think--and they are quite flexible; they have individual business owners working together to market their products, to develop new products, to advertise their products. There are all kinds of exciting options which will be job-creating if you can figure out how to multiply them. And what we are trying to do in America, now--by strengthening our family leave law, by strengthening our child care support system, by moving people from welfare to work, but making sure they keep the health care for their children--is to get the benefits of having a social contract that recognizes the need for families and communities to get support, and the benefits of the dynamic economy. You're coming at it from a different direction. What you need to do is to keep as many of the benefits of the social contract as you can but to make the economy as dynamic as possible, because you know that you have a country full of intelligent, innovative people who could generate more jobs than they're generating. But understand that this is the dilemma that every single country is facing from some perspective or another. And no one has all the answers. And what I would hope that the people of Italy will give the Prime Minister the ability to do is to try some new ideas to support him in admitting that no one has solved this problem perfectly, and that we should want responsible leaders to have serious thoughts about new ideas and to try them out without having someone try to derail every effort that they make. I think he deserves some support in addressing this issue, because for any of us to pretend that we either shouldn't address it or have all the answers, I think both approaches would be quite wrong. Now, let me just say a word on the trade issue. First of all, the specific issue you mentioned must feel strange to Italy, since the Italians have not really been at the forefront of this decade-long dispute between the EU and the United States over the banana issue. It's not really about bananas; it's about rules. I'm trying now--right now--to get the United States, through the authority of the Congress, to take the lead in further market-opening measures. I have done my best to keep our markets open during this very difficult period for the Asian economy and for much of the Latin American economy. We had a record trade deficit last year. I thought that, except for where I thought our laws were being violated, like in steel--where we were having steel dumped--I felt that we should try to do that, that that should be our contribution, because we were doing well, and we ought to try to help these countries as much as we could. But we cannot maintain an open trading system, which I am convinced is essential for global prosperity, unless we also have rules that are abided by. Twice--just twice since I've been President, we've won this case in the EU. I think we've won it 4 times over the last 10 years. It has gone on--somehow the rules have to work. That's what this is about. And since it's the EU--I had nothing to do, by the way, with drawing up the details of what would be in the package of countervailing tariffs or duties. But I think our Trade Ambassador's office must have felt that since it was an EU dispute, there had to be some--we couldn't just pick out countries and play favorites in that way. But I regret this very much. And we still have time to fix this. We can still fix this and it can be avoided, and I hope very much we will, in the next few weeks, get a resolution of this. But it's been going on 10 years. And we lose cases in the WTO all the time, and we just take a deep breath and face the fact that we lost. It happens. Now, so I would say to the people of Italy, don't--it's not a unilateral issue. Now, on the--you asked me about the United Nations. Let me just say--I can't--there are very few countries in the world, in the years that I've been President, who have shown more consistent leadership, even through a successive change of governments, than Italy. For us, it's a critical country in so many ways. And I was delighted that the Prime Minister would come here today. I would do anything I could to increase the responsibility and reach of Italy. The United States has had a long-standing policy in favor of expanding the Security Council to include Japan and Germany, largely because of the size of their economies and their influence and their importance for that reason. And we have been--we have recognized that there are countries in the developing world that believe they should have more permanent membership. So we have been for an expansion in the size of the Security Council, generally, to guarantee certain continents and regions a permanent position. The position we have taken should not be viewed as an anti-Italian position. We've tried to calculate how many people can you have on the Security Council and still have it function. That's basically where we've been. I'm not obsessed with any--there is no magic number. But what we're trying to do is not to hold back anyone but to keep the Security Council as a functioning body. But I doubt very seriously that there's another leader of any other country in the world that has a higher opinion of the international responsibility and capacity of the Italian Government and the Italian people than I do, after having observed it for 6 years. Thank you very much.”