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Change Your Life! |
Bill Gates, Alan Greenspan attending White House conference |
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News
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April 6, 2000
WASHINGTON, APR 5 (AP) - With advice from billionaire Bill Gates and Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, President Bill Clinton is exploring the idea that computers and the Internet are the best tools ever available to combat world poverty.
"Technology can be the greatest equalizing force our society or any other has ever known," Clinton said.
On Wednesday, Clinton was hosting a White House conference of two dozen Wall Street gurus, economists, thinkers and high-tech entrepreneurs about how to keep America's economy strong and spread prosperity to neglected poverty pockets.
The purpose was to demonstrate "that we're all continuing to focus like a laser beam on the economy, as the president promised to do when he came into office," said Gene Sperling, director of the president's National Economic Council. "And that means not sitting around and patting yourself on the back because of the unemployment and inflation rates being low."
Gates, the founder of Microsoft, sits down at the White House two days after a federal judge ruled that the software giant violated antitrust laws by stifling competition. He was meeting with members of Congress before seeing Clinton.
Sperling said the White House supports the Justice Department's suit against Microsoft but that Gates "has much to offer in terms of his point of view. We aren't endorsing or necessarily disagreeing with all sorts of things people are going to say."
Gates was to speak at a panel called, "Closing the global divide: strategies for health, education and technology." Gates and his wife Melinda have donated dlrs 750 million to help protect poor children around the world against disease.
Before going to the White House, Gates was expected to attend closed meetings on Capitol Hill with House Republicans, Senate Republican leaders, Senate Democrats and Washington state House Democrats.
The Capitol Hill meetings were set up to discuss education, trade and other high-tech issues, not the antitrust case, although the antitrust issue is certain to come up in lawmakers' questions, said Tovah Ravitz, spokeswoman for Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington state Democrat.
At the White House, Greenspan was to lead a discussion on technology's impact on the economy. Clinton addressed the same subject Tuesday when he talked about the "digital divide" between computer haves and have-nots.
"I believe that the computer and the Internet give us a chance to move more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in all of human history," the president said.
He announced he would spend two days travelling from Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley, to Chicago, site of a computer conference. The trip, scheduled for April 17-18, would focus attention on efforts to help poor people gain computer skills and access to high technology.
Clinton said he would make the case that new technologies "can be an incredible tool of empowerment in schools, homes, businesses, community centres and every other part of our civic life."
Wednesday's White House conference comes on the heels of two days of turbulence in the stock market. But the administration professed no concern.
"Right now we have about the lowest unemployment rate we've had in 30 years," Sperling said. "We've seen remarkable productivity growth, we've seen very high levels of business investment."
He said that "the new economy is doing quite well. And I do not think that one should judge the strength of the fundamentals of our economy based on the movement of the market over a one-day or even a one-month period."
Many of the issues addressed at the White House conference were raised by protesters last December in Seattle, where they disrupted meetings of the World Trade Organization to highlight their complaints that the poor in many nations were being left behind in the current global economic boom.
Wednesday's conference occurs a week before many of the Seattle protest groups are scheduled to stage demonstrations in conjunction with the spring meetings in Washington of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
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