Jack Kemp Named Distinguished Fellow At Competitive Enterprise Institute

Washington, DC, April 29, 1999 – The Competitive Enterprise Institute is pleased to announce that the Honorable Jack Kemp has been named CEI’s first Distinguished Fellow. Mr. Kemp will work primarily on promoting rational, free-market environmental policies and on raising awareness of international efforts to restrict economic growth.

Mr. Kemp said he “welcomes with tremendous enthusiasm the opportunity to work with Fred Smith and his outstanding team. Not only am I being honored with the title of Distinguished Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I’m privileged to work with CEI on some of the pivotal issues of our time: the global spread of free-market principles, and the danger that emerging international bureaucracies will stifle capitalism before it can truly take hold in the developing world.

“The bureaucratic mindset is all too apparent in the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which uses bad science to justify ‘world industrial policy’ controlling energy markets and by proxy the entire world economy. Fred and I will fight the good fight in explaining to the people of America, and to corporate and world leaders, the huge consequences of failing to advance market principles in the global arena. I’m eager to get to work.”

“We are excited to bring Jack aboard,” commented Fred L. Smith, Jr., president of CEI. “He will be such a tremendous asset as we work to educate policymakers and Americans to the common-sense approach of free-market environmentalism.”

Mr. Kemp is the founder (with Dr. William Bennett, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Vin Weber, and Founding Chairman Ted Forstmann) of Empower America, served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 1989 to 1993, and served in Congress from 1971 to 1989. Mr. Kemp received the Republican Party’s nomination for Vice President in August of 1996.

CEI, a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group founded in 1984, is dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. For more information, please contact Emily McGee, director of media relations, at 202-331-1010, ext. 209, or 703-728-0138 (cell).