Bill Clinton: “Conference in Portland April 2, 1993 I'm going to refrain until the afternoon session from getting into the specifics of…”

“Conference in Portland April 2, 1993 I'm going to refrain until the afternoon session from getting into the specifics of what we ought to do. But I'd like to say something to the people who were on this panel that talked about the human impact of the present conditions. Mr. Espy and I are neighbors, and we share a border of the Mississippi River. For almost all the history of this country our two States were the poorest States in America. When agriculture collapsed there in and after the Great Depression, the people who loved my State more than life were forced to leave in huge numbers. As a matter of fact, it's the only way I got elected President. Every third voter in Illinois and Michigan and in the inland empire in California was from Arkansas. [Laughter] But it bespoke a terrible inability to manage a process of change so that people could stay with their roots and their culture and their lives. Then we got everything going again. And then when he and I came of age in the early eighties and began to assume positions of responsibility, we had another horrible structural collapse in the rural areas and the small towns along the Mississippi River because agriculture and the labor-intensive, low-scale, low-wage industries both collapsed at the same time. And our little towns were turned into ghost towns. We had whole counties, county after county after county, with 20, 25 percent unemployment.…”