Remarks at the World Steel Association 42nd Annual Meeting
Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Renaissance Mayflower Hotel
Washington, DC
October 7, 2008
SECRETARY RICE: Thank you, Mr. Mittal, for that wonderful introduction. It is absolutely true that I was at one time a
music major. It just shows that sometimes things change. Often I’m asked, “Why are you no longer a music major?” Well,
because, quite frankly, I wasn’t very good at it and I found something else to do with my life. (Laughter.)
But I want to thank you for the lovely introduction, and I want to thank everyone in this great organization for having
me here today. It’s an honor to join you this afternoon. And it’s my privilege to be one of the first guests ever to
welcome you under your new name – the World Steel Association.
And this is my first time addressing your organization under any name, and of course, I venture to say it will be my
last time as Secretary of State. And I’m very glad that you didn’t all applaud that prospect. (Laughter.)
Now, I recognize that what is very much on everybody’s mind these days is the global financial crisis. I know that this
is a deeply challenging moment for everyone. People around the world are worried. And I think there is concern about
just the sense that fear could feed on itself.
But I want to assure you that our Administration, together with Congress and the private sector, is working very closely
with other countries and indeed with the international financial institutions and authorities to respond effectively to
these circumstances. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, and their teams of experts, people that
I know well, are working hard, with the trust and the support of the President. And they are taking bold actions to
restore confidence in the U.S. financial system and ultimately in the global financial system.
While they do their work, though, I am going to focus today not on today’s specific crisis, but really on the
fundamentals that we have been trying to build over these last several years to expand access to the global economy. We
have indeed been deepening our engagement, as was just said, with emerging economic leaders. We have strong, strong
relationships with China, and with India, where I just visited, and with Brazil, and with others. Because the
international system is changing, and the emergence of these great, large economies – great, large countries, has got to
be accommodated in an international framework.
We’ve convened the Major Economies framework to seek a new and better approach to the interrelated issues of climate
change, energy security, and economic growth. And they are indeed interrelated.
The Bush Administration has concluded free trade agreements with 17 countries around the world. And here in this
hemisphere, under the Pathways to Prosperity initiative, which President Bush and nine other leaders launched at the UN
General Assembly last month, we are deepening our ties among trading partners here in the hemisphere to ensure that the
opportunities of free markets and free trade are open to all.
And just as importantly, to support people in the developing world in lifting themselves out of poverty and achieving
social justice, this Administration, working with Congress, has launched the largest international development agenda
since the Marshall Plan. We have doubled foreign assistance in the Americas, we have tripled it worldwide, we have
quadrupled it in Africa, forgiving billions of dollars of debt to the world’s poorest nations, devoting now $48 billion
to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and providing billions of dollars in grants, under the Millennium
Challenge Account initiative, to states that govern justly, reform their economies, and invest in their people.
In short, the Administration has sought to contribute a responsible international solution to what is one of the central
challenges facing every country in the 21st century – to develop a confident, constructive, and sustainable engagement
with the global economy.
Now, we recognize that this is indeed challenging. There have been, in fact – it’s easy to forget today, but there have
been decades of global economic growth. There’s been a greater expansion of trade and opportunity in which more people
worldwide have lifted themselves out of poverty than at any other time in history.
But at the same time, this has come with dislocations that affect many workers, including Americans, when global labor
markets as – are as large and as competitive as they have been. And of course, the same global networks of
transportation and communication that facilitate the spread of trade and technology, of capital and ideas, also
facilitate the spread of the downside of globalization – transnational crime and disease, weapons of mass destruction,
and of course, global terrorism. We and all in the international system are wrestling with these pressures of
globalization.
So in the face of this truly unprecedented pace of global change, how do nations strengthen themselves to compete
confidently? And how do we do so in a sustainable way? Again, I know that it’s difficult to focus on the basics when we
were in the midst of the crisis that we face. But if we step back for a moment, leaders, political leaders, and business
leaders like yourselves, will need to deal with today’s crisis, but continue to do the right things to ensure that there
is a firm foundation for tomorrow’s recovery. U.S. business leaders, of course, have an enormous stake in this work, and
an enormous stake in building confidence about the future.
Now, we know what will not work. No nation is going to be able to withdraw from the world, to isolate itself and to deny
the realities of a 21st century in which we are all integrated and entangled with one another. No one should expect to
be able to answer the siren song of protectionism, which is a self-defeating and self-destructive proposition if ever
there were one. And it is certainly not going to be effective to bar the doors of modernity to the billions of striving
poor, who are struggling desperately to lift themselves out of misery.
The challenge ahead of us, ladies and gentlemen, will be to affirm the basis for confident engagement with the global
economy going forward, for every country to create conditions that foster success for its citizens and that enable more
people to share in that success.
Every country is going to have to work overtime to transform its own internal system, what we in America once called
“internal improvements” – the investments that give all citizens an opportunity for self-betterment and social mobility,
that enable economies to grow while empowering all people to share in its benefits.
These internal systems are going to be unique and different for every country – determined by their people, and for
their people. Still, there are certain ideas that will be common everywhere, that are essential to success all the time.
For instance, all states must protect property rights and work to liberate the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of
their people. You have seen the power of entrepreneurship and you’ve seen the power of innovation. Those must not be
allowed to be within the walls of just several countries of the international system.
States must, of course, invest in modern infrastructure – not just in roads, and railways, and ports, but in modern
communications networks, in pathways for information technology, and indeed in flexible platforms to achieve information
flow.
States must build and reform transparent and accountable institutions of governance that protect human rights and human
dignity, that fight corruption, that promote basic liberties, and that govern justly by the rule of law. Because in the
final analysis, it is not possible to defend people’s talents in the workplace and deny them rights at home.
States must invest in their citizens, create new incentives for people to work, and to save, and to raise strong
families. And they must help workers to educate and, if necessary, retrain themselves and develop the skills to succeed
in the 21st century.
President Bush has, for this reason, consistently called on Congress to reauthorize Trade Adjustment Assistance, the
main federal program to support workers displaced by trade in transitioning to new careers. In addition to providing
billions of dollars annually through the workforce investment system, our Administration has provided more than $1
billion to help educate and prepare American workers for the jobs of the 21st century.
And earlier this year, our Administration announced more than $100 million in new community-based job training grants.
These grants support community college programs that provide training for jobs in high-growth fields so that workers can
get the skills that they need for jobs in this area. We are very pleased that last month the Senate voted to extend
funding for Trade Adjustment Assistance through the Continuing Resolution.
Now, why is this so important? Well, it’s important to talk about education and training and retraining, ladies and
gentlemen, because I believe so strongly that education more than any other factor is the indispensible requirement for
every nation to build a confident, constructive, and sustainable engagement with the international system. If people are
not educated, if people do not – if leaders do not know that their populations can, in fact, compete, they will most
certainly turn inward. They will most certainly attempt to protect.
We all know that the better educated you are, the better you are likely to do in terms of economic progression and
economic well-being. We know, too, that education is a foundation for better things in life But I’d like to suggest to
you for just a moment that we set aside this rather instrumental view of education, and talk about why it is important
in its very essence.
You see, I’ve never believed that education is just a way to get a job. Education is, in fact, a way to remake yourself.
It’s a way to ensure that you don’t have limits on your horizons. It’s a way to be completely and fully more than you
currently are, to become who you could be, who you want to be, who you ought to be. Education is, in a way, a sense of
being born anew. It opens the mind. It opens the heart. It expands the horizons. It allows one to be tolerant of others
who are different. A good education, then, is at the core of what it requires to reach one’s full potential, not just as
an economic actor, but as a human being.
I’ve learned this in my own life. It’s because of the transformational power of education that I stand before you as the
66th Secretary of State of the United States of America. It’s because my country at long last has begun to live up to
its ideals. As you said, I’m a young girl from Birmingham, Alabama. We had a statue there called Vulcan, the steel man,
and Birmingham was indeed a center for steel. And so there is a connection here. But coming from Birmingham it was not
just the place of steel, it was also the place of segregation and Bull Connor’s police dogs, and a church bombing that
took my little classmate, Denise McNair, on a September Sunday in 1963.
And yet, here I stand before you as the successor, 65 times removed, of Thomas Jefferson, who, though he wrote the great
words of all men being created equal, was, of course, a slave owner. It shows how much can change, even if not
necessarily very fast.
But I’m here more than anything because I was the child of educators, who instilled in me a belief that hard work and
personal responsibility and my own limitless horizons were mine alone.
Now, I trace these beliefs back to my grandfather, Granddaddy Rice, my father’s father. He was a sharecropper’s son in
Ewtah – that’s E-W-T-A-H – Alabama – not even Birmingham. Well, one day, Granddaddy Rice decided that he wanted to get
book learning. And he asked, in the parlance of the day, how a colored man could go to college. And they told him about
little Stillman College, about 60 miles from where he lived. And so he sold his cotton and he went off to college.
But after his first year, the people at Stillman said, “All right, so how are you going to pay for your second year?”
And he said, “Well, I’m all out of cotton and I have no money.” And they said, “Then you’ll have to leave.” And he said,
“Well, how are those boys going to college?” They said, “Well, they have what’s called a scholarship, and if you wanted
to be a Presbyterian minister, you could have a scholarship too.” And Granddaddy Rice said, “Well, I always wanted to be
a Presbyterian minster.” (Laughter.) And in fact, my family has been college-educated and Presbyterian ever since.
(Laughter)
Now, I think a lot about that story these days because what it does mean? I understand that the pressures of the present
are very tough on many people. I understand that it feels at times as if we are living at the mercy of impersonal forces
beyond our control. I understand that it’s hard. I understand all of this.
But I do remain confident about the future. I remain confident that people can have a sense of control of their lives. I
am confident because my family’s story is not just my family’s story It is the story of families across the United
States and across the world. It is the story of countless men and women who just believed that their horizons were
limitless. And that ultimately is the source of strength for all of us.
Now, what can give a people – the people a sense of directing their lives toward an end, rather than simply being swept
by impersonal forces? Well, I submit to you that every country must ask, “Is there really educational opportunity for
all,” and must recognize how transforming it can be. Whether in Afghanistan, where finally girls are going to school and
women are learning, and that they’re learning that they ought to be in the parliament of Afghanistan; or in the Middle
East, where women’s education is making great strides, and where, in fact, women have learned that they ought to be in
the parliament of Kuwait; whether in Africa, where we know that if women are educated and given a chance, they don’t
just lift up their families, they lift up whole villages, and provide opportunity and well-being for whole villages; or
on the subcontinent, where I just visited in India, a place where universities are springing up all over to bring
innovation and technology to the core so that those great Indian software scientists who are populating my home, the
Silicon Valley, might also populate Hyderabad.
I see it in Latin America, where finally indigenous peoples and minorities, whether they are Afro-Colombians or
Afro-Brazilians that I met in Bahia, are insisting that they go to school and that they learn and that their children
study abroad, and that they can therefore be a part of the future.
And I see it, and ask it, in Europe and the United States, where despite long histories of a belief in equal education
for all, we face challenges, particularly in our public schools, to make certain that it is indeed true that it does not
matter where you came from; it matters where you’re going.
I believe strongly that if we focus on all of these fundamentals, but particularly on investing in people, we will find
that in a world that is turning in and out, and sometimes upside down, people will still be confident enough to say to
their leaders: We can do this. We can make it through this, and we don’t have to be fearful and we don’t have to be –
turn inward and we don’t have to protect. Because the economic pie can grow for all.
As business leaders, I know that you will advocate for that view, because without confidence in a global economy,
nothing will really be possible for economic growth. And even though, come January 20th , 2009 – 12:01 to be exact – I
will again be a private citizen, I know that I will go back to advocate too for a confident engagement with the
international system, based on the tremendous potential of each and every human being, unleashed by the power of
education.
You see, as an educator, when I see a child who is not getting the full benefits of an educator – of education, it
breaks my heart It breaks my heart because I benefitted so greatly from education. But as Secretary of State, and even
when I am a former Secretary of State, it will terrify me if people are not being educated. Because I know that if they
are not, we will not be confident of the future. And I know that without confidence, nothing good can happen.
And so I say to you that I will go back to work on education and global engagement, not as domestic policy but rather as
a national security issue. We have no future but the future that we have together.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
ENDS