Peter DeFazio

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Lipinski) for his hard work on this bill. This bill will fund thousands of critical highway bridge and transportation projects across the United States, putting millions to work, maintaining and improving our critical transportation infrastructure. Unfortunately, it is not enough to both catch up with the maintenance backlog and make the needed capacity improvements. It is not for lack of trying by the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Lipinski) or the ranking member, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Oberstar), or the chairman or the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Petri), but at the insistence of the White House they insisted that the bill be reduced by $100 billion. That means thousands more weight-limited bridges across this country and detours; it means more congestion because the White House says we cannot afford to invest in America. That means 800,000 jobs a year that will not be created, 4.8 million over the life of the bill. The White House also objects to the fact that this bill does not gut the environmental laws, so they have threatened to veto. If I were sitting in the White House and I presided over the lives of 2.8 million jobs, as has President Bush in a so-called jobless recovery, I would be a little bit more anxious to get out and cut ribbons for critical projects to put real Americans to work on real needs and create real jobs. But not this White House. They say they will veto the bill. Is it an April fool or are they just fools at the White House?

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, 2.8 million jobs lost, 1.1 million long- term unemployed with expired benefits, 24 months into a jobless recovery spurred by record deficits and trickle-down tax cuts. But finally, today, hope is on the horizon. Mr. Speaker, a $275 billion highway bill, it should be more, is pending. It would create real jobs to meet real needs, put Americans to work; and, yet, the White House is threatening a veto. April fool, or is it fools at the White House?

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow the OPEC nations will meet to seal the deal on their collusion to restrict production of oil and drive up the price, damaging the U.S. economy, devastating U.S. consumers and other countries around the world. Now, the Bush administration thus far has taken no action. Perhaps not too strange when you read about the long-enduring links between the Bush family and the rulers of Saudi Arabia, but still I would think in an election year we could at least get some modicum of action out of this administration. Now Energy Secretary Abraham recently said the U.S. is not going to beg OPEC for oil. I agree. We should not beg. We should make them follow the law. This is an administration that is so big on the WTO and rules-based trade. I opposed the WTO. But when you are stuck in it, like we are, you ought to at least then use the rules that would be to the advantage of your people and your economy. And the rules, there are rules in OPEC that prohibit what is being done in the WTO by the OPEC countries. There are 11 OPEC countries, six are members of the WTO, and two have applied to join. Therefore, since they are violating the rules of the WTO, the Bush administration should file a complaint. It is quite easy to read. Article 11. ``No prohibitions or restrictions other than duties, taxes, or other charges whether made effective through quotas, import or export licenses or other measures shall be instituted or maintained by any contracting party on the importation of any product of the territory of any other contracting party or on the exportation or sale for export of any product destined for the territory of any other contracting party.'' Now that is legalese, but the bottom line it says is what those OPEC countries who are members of the WTO are doing to collude, to restrict production, to drive up the price of oil, to price-gouge Americans, violates the rules; and the Bush administration should file a complaint in the WTO on that issue. I corresponded with the Bush administration last year. They came back after 6 months and said, well, there is an exclusion for a conservation of exhaustible natural resources. Well, that is true, except nobody in OPEC alleges that they are conserving exhaustible natural resources. They are very up front about it. They are trying to drive up the price. There is no conservation ethic there. So that exclusion does not apply, particularly since the rules go on to say, disguised restrictions on international trade are prohibited. That is what this is. It is not a conservation exception. So the Bush administration could use its favorite entity, the WTO, which it frequently uses for multinational corporations to enhance their profits, to degrade consumer protections, labor protections. They could use it now to protect the American economy, American consumers against price-gouging. They are not doing that, and one has to wonder why. I think it is because so they are so tight with the oil industry. People say, wait a minute. The oil industry is buying oil. No, the oil industry has all these special deals with the OPEC countries. If the OPEC countries make big headlines and say they are rising the price of oil by 4 bucks a barrel, the oil industry applauds. Because what they then do is at the pump they raise it effectively 8 bucks a barrel; and then when American consumers, they complain, they point to OPEC and say we cannot do anything about it. It is those OPECers. They raised it. They raised it. Well, if you look at the profits of the oil industry, they are up, phenomenal, yet the Republicans are proposing an energy bill that would subsidize the oil, gas, and coal industries, all of whom are recognizing record profits. And they say that would be the solution. Well, you are already subsidizing them by not taking action in the interest of the American people against the colluders, the price- fixers, at OPEC. There is no explanation for the inactivity of the Bush administration on this other than they are getting the support of that industry for their reelection. That is the only potential explanation of why they would abandon the American economy. Because they are talking about the recovery is fragile, and it is just starting. Well, you heard from the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) earlier on that. There is not much of a recovery for most Americans. There is some recovery in profits, but with the outsourcing of jobs there are no new jobs here in the United States. But now they are sticking it to consumers and the few businesses that we have left that are trying to produce goods to export and every other business that is based in this country through these extortionate gasoline prices and the Bush administration has done nothing, zero, nada, zilch. Not one thing, not one action has been taken. They are buying oil at these extortionate prices to put in the reserve, and they will not do anything about the high price. So they are gouging both taxpayers and consumers. It is a twofer for the Bush administration.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. What does the President's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, have to hide? It might have been that she told the 9/ 11 Commission that she misspoke when she said that there was no intelligence that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons and that the administration had no knowledge of that. Of course, she did all that in private. In public she is spinning a very different story. She has appeared everywhere and anywhere on the press, with the press, in public; but she will not go before the 9/11 Commission and give sworn testimony to that commission and the American public. We deserve better. We deserve the truth about 9/11, what the administration knew and when they knew it.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, congratulations to the Bush administration. They have set yet another record. This complements their previous record of the largest job loss and the worst job record since Herbert Hoover was President of the United States in the 1920s. But their latest is notable also: 1.1 million jobless workers by the end of this month will have exhausted their regular unemployment benefits without receiving an extension or additional aid. If we go all the way back, we have been keeping data on extended unemployment since 1971, 33 years ago, there have never been so many people who have exhausted unemployment benefits without successfully finding work. Now the Bush administration and the Republican leaders in Congress are refusing to extend unemployment benefits. Is that because we are in such a deep economic hole? After all, their tax cuts have dug us into a $650 billion deficit in the coming year, so maybe we just cannot afford unemployment benefits any more. No, actually there is $17 billion in the Unemployment Trust Fund, money paid in by workers and their employers, sitting on deposit, or actually not, they borrowed the money and spent it on something else. But at least there is a credit for $17 billion; and, in fact, they are expecting that because of the taxes levied for unemployment benefits, that that fund will actually grow in the coming year, as 1.1 million people exhaust their benefits, do not find jobs, and cannot get an extension. Now, the Republicans have a couple of arguments as to why they think this is a good thing. They think it is a good thing because the unemployment rate is low. Well, yes, actually, the way they keep the books, the unemployment rate is low. All of these workers, these 1.1 million who will have exhausted their benefits will no longer be considered to be in the workforce, and they will not be counted as unemployed. It is sort of a beautiful thing they have created here. If everybody in America lost their job today, a year from today, when they had all exhausted their unemployment benefits and no one had gotten a job back, if they had all been outsourced to India or somewhere else, we would have zero unemployment, according to the Bush administration, the way they keep the books. So that is a pretty phony argument, and you do not have to travel very far in America to find people who want work and cannot find it. Certainly in my State, that is not hard at all. Then they say, now the Republicans have decided that unemployment benefits are welfare. Yes, that is true: an earned benefit for people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, most often through trade policies that exported their jobs or misplaced budget priorities on the part of this administration and tax policies and trickle down economics. Those people, they say, are just a bunch of welfare cheats, because they say that this would discourage people from going out and finding work if we extended unemployment benefits. Mr. Speaker, that is the most outrageous thing. I mean, I guess a lot of these Republicans and the Bush administration do not know real people and they have not gone out and walked the streets and gone into the malls and talked to people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, cannot find work, and just wanted a little bit of help so that they can keep their household together, so they can make the bare minimum payments on their house, their utilities, and put food on their table for their kids. The Bush people think, well, that is welfare. It is an earned benefit. People paid these taxes. There is money sitting in the unemployment trust fund. They should just give us a straight up-or-down vote. Well, that is sort of the third thing here, is the Republican leadership does not want a straight up-or-down vote on this issue. Why? Because if we had a straight up-or-down vote in the United States House of Representatives and in the United States Senate on an extension of unemployment benefits, to spend some of the money out of the trust fund to help these 1.1 million people who cannot find jobs and their benefits are exhausted, it would pass overwhelmingly. So they will not allow us a vote. We managed to attach an amendment to an unrelated bill and finally did trigger a vote on that, and it was amusing to watch all of the Republicans line up on the other side of the aisle after they had been beat to heck by their leadership to change their votes one after another after another after another, because they did not want to be on the wrong side of the issue. But then their leader got up at the end of the day and said, do not worry, that will never come out of conference. Why will that not come out of conference? Why will not the will of the people of the elected House of Representatives, who voted 227 to 179 in a tangential way of extending unemployment benefits, and who voted more overwhelmingly to up front extend those unemployment benefits, why will he not let that come out of conference? The money is in the trust fund, the suffering is real, people need some help. Let us have an up-or-down vote and extend unemployment benefits for all Americans.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, it was just over a year ago that House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle said, ``I don't like deficits, I don't want deficits, and I won't pretend deficits don't matter.'' Yet, the budget we're considering today, which he drafted along with the House Republican leadership, would make federal budget deficits worse, not better. Relative to current law, the Republican resolution will increase the deficit by $247 billion over the next 5 years and $1.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The Republicans claim their budget will cut the deficit in half by 2009. That claim is only accurate if you ignore the fact that they use every penny of the surplus Social Security revenue to mask the true size of the deficit. Two years ago Chairman Nussle said, ``I don't know how many times we have to say it: We are not going to spend the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.'' Apparently, he's suffering from amnesia because the reality this year is that the Republican party is proposing to do exactly that, every single penny. If you don't count the Social Security money the Republicans are proposing to borrow, the deficit this year will be $550 billion and will be $471 billion in 2009, which is not exactly cutting the deficit in half. Under the Republican plan, the debt held by the public, which excludes Social Security, will rise from $4.4 trillion today to $5.9 trillion by 2009. The total federal debt will rise from $7.4 trillion today to $10.5 trillion in 2009. The ``debt tax'' a family of four owes on this debt will rise from $4,400 this year to $7,000 by 2009. Interest payments on the debt will rise from $154 billion today to $296 billion by 2009, rising from approximately 7 percent of the total federal budget to 11 percent. This debt load is clearly not sustainable. It unfairly burdens our children, grandchildren and their children with a debt they did not accumulate. And, it puts our country more and more in hock to foreign investors. The top two owners of U.S. government debt are Japan and China. I do not believe it is in the interests of our country to continue to run large budget deficits financed by China or Japan for that matter. You might think that in the face of these deficits, the House Republican leadership would make a serious attempt to restore some semblance of sanity to the federal budget. You would be wrong. But, please don't think they are in denial about the scope of the problem. They know exactly what they're doing. The debt escalation is a conscious--though disingenuous--policy the Republican party is pursuing in order to force drastic cuts in programs they don't like, but that the American people support. The House Republicans are willfully digging the budget hole deeper-- and are putting the financial stability of our country at risk--by providing $153 billion in tax cuts through 2009, including maintaining the repeal of the estate tax and reductions in capital gains and dividend taxes, which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans, those who make more than $300,000 a year. Over 10 years, the cost of the tax cuts in the Republican budget will cost $1.2 trillion. Now, my colleagues on other side of the aisle will protest that it is spending, not tax cuts, that have driven the sudden appearance of record budget deficits. While their rigid ideology may cause them to believe that, it happens not to be true. Republicans have repeatedly refused to acknowledge the obvious role tax cuts have played in the $9 trillion reversal in the 10-year budget projections since Bush took office. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, tax cuts are responsible for 36 percent of the deterioration in the surplus, spending increases are responsible for 28 percent, technical changes-- primarily lower revenue assumptions--are responsible for 27 percent, and the recession is responsible for 9 percent. Looking more in-depth at the aforementioned spending increases, the vast majority of the spending increases were in the areas of defense and homeland security, and were requested by President Bush. From 2001 to 2003, an average of 70 percent of the spending increases went to defense, 14 percent went to homeland security, and 11 percent went to NYC, aviation, and international aid. When Republicans talk about reducing ``government spending,'' they are generally referring to non-defense discretionary spending. While Republicans act as if non-defense discretionary spending only includes wasteful welfare programs, the reality is that it includes law enforcement programs, education, veterans, environmental protection, health care, Army Corps, energy, etc. Congress could eliminate the entire non-defense, non-homeland security portion of the federal budget--$391 billion--and the budget would still be in deficit by several hundred billion dollars. I agree there are federal programs that deserve to be eliminated or reduced. I support reducing the space program, agriculture subsidies, weapon systems that are irrelevant to meeting today's threats, and foreign aid, among other areas. However, spending restraint alone cannot solve the deficit problem. Getting the federal budget under control will require discipline on both spending and taxation. That is why the budgets I am supporting today contain both spending and restraint and reductions in tax relief to the wealthiest one percent of income earners and multinational corporations. I am also a cosponsor of stand-alone legislation, H.R. 3995, the Aspiring Fiscal Honesty and Accountability Act of 2004, to impose some discipline on the federal budget process. This legislation would cap discretionary spending for the next 3 years at the same level requested by President Bush. The bill would also reinstate the so-called ``pay- as-you-go'' rules that helped bring the budget into balance in the late 1990s. These rules require that any legislative changes that would increase the deficit--whether spending increases or tax cuts--must be offset by cuts or revenue increases somewhere else in the budget. H.R. 3995 would also reform the ``emergency'' spending loophole that allows Congress to spend billions of dollars a year outside the normal budget process. Finally, I disagree with the spending priorities in the Republican budget. For example, the Republican budget provides $8.8 billion less for education programs than the $34.3 billion authorized by the No Child Left Behind Act for 2005. That means local school districts will continue to struggle with the unfunded mandates of the President's key education initiative. And, inexplicably, the House Republican budget follows the President's lead by cutting programs to assist America's small businesses. There are 23 million small businesses in the United States, representing 99 percent of all employers. The generate three-fourths of all new jobs. They create more than half of our GDP. Small technology companies are the trailblazers, producing 13-14 times more patents per employees than large firms. Small companies employ 40 percent of high- tech workers. Funding for the Small Business Administration has decreased every year since President Bush took office. If the Republicans have their way, the microloan and New Market Venture Capital programs will be eliminated, funding for Women's Business Centers, technical assistance, and technology programs will be cut, and the SBA's largest loan program, the 7(a) programs, will be slashed and fees will be increased. These policies are harmful at any time, but they are particularly detrimental to our Nation's small businesses during a time of economic instability. The Republican budget provides $1.3 billion less for veterans programs in 2005 than what the House Committee on Veterans Affairs recommended on a bipartisan basis. It provides $2 billion less for veterans programs than what veterans themselves requested in their Independent Budget proposal. That is why veterans organizations, including Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, AMVETS, and the Paralyzed Veterans of America have called the Republican budget ``half-hearted'' and ``ill- advised''. They urged a vote against it and said the Republican budget ``would be a disservice to those men and women who have served this country and who are currently serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world in our fight against terrorism.'' I am also concerned that the Republican budget cuts homeland security funding by $857 million below even the level requested by President Bush, which includes cuts to port security grants and cuts to grants for our Nation's first responders like police and firefighters. Because the Republican budget borrows so much money, runs up record budget deficits, and still fails to adequately fund priority programs that Oregonians depend on, I will vote against the Republican budget.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, oil hit a new high yesterday. Prices over 2 bucks a gallon in places in the western United States; $30 billion will be extorted from American consumers this year because OPEC is fixing prices and driving up the cost. Now, what is the response of the oil men at the Bush White House? A collective yawn and silence from the Bush administration. I guess their buddies in the oil industry are doing pretty well because they are adding on a little margin to these increases in prices. Now OPEC is violating the rules of the World Trade Organization. We have an administration that is a big fan of the World Trade Organization and rules-based trade. Will they file a complaint on behalf of American consumers because OPEC is breaking the rules? They have told me they will not do that. They are going to unilaterally disarm Americans in face of this attack against our economy by OPEC because some of their buddies in the oil industry are adding a little margin on and doing okay.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to make a few comments about the resolution we are considering today in recognition of the one-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The resolution before us on the floor has significant shortcomings that I want to point out for the Record. On March 19, 2003, offensive U.S. military actions were initiated against Iraq. Just two days later, on March 21, 2003, the House of Representatives approved a resolution which expressed ``the unequivocal support and appreciation of the Nation for our troops and their families.'' Only 8 minutes before passing this feel good resolution, however, the House of Representatives passed a budget, which I voted against, that included a $28 billion cut over 10 years to veterans health care, disability compensation and pensions. While the Republican Party is able to eloquently express their support and admiration for our men and women in uniform via non-binding congratulatory resolutions, their follow through is non-existent. Here we are a year later, and this ``unequivocal support'' has not been translated into substantive action. Congress must deliver on this promise of support by providing our troops with the equipment and training they need. And, Congress must deliver on this promise by providing our nation's veterans with the health care and services they've earned and deserve. Words in a non-binding resolution will not provide a single soldier with the body armor necessary to protect his or her life nor will they ensure a single veteran can see a doctor in a timely manner or receive the disability compensation they've earned. Our soldiers and veterans need action, not words. Unfortunately, the actions of the President and his allies in Congress have repeatedly short-changed our men and women in uniform and the veterans who have served our nation honorably. Thousands of troops in Iraq remain in danger because the Pentagon leadership has failed to secure an adequate supply of body armor. Thousands of troops remain in danger because of inadequate supplies of armored Humvees and devices to disable roadside bombs. According to a recent article in USA Today, U.S. military officers are having to dip into their own unit's funds in order to get this critical protective equipment because ``bureaucratic delays'' in Washington, DC, have short-changed troops. I saw the dangers confronting U.S. troops first-hand during my recent trip to Iraq. I cannot understand why the President and the civilian leadership at the Pentagon would put our troops in harms' way without adequate protective equipment despite preparing for war with Iraq for 2 years prior to the actual invasion and despite $400 billion in annual Pentagon spending. Yet, the resolution on the floor today will do nothing to solve this problem. Further, our citizen-soldiers in the National Guard and Reserve continue to be subject to second-class treatment. When I recently visited Fort Hood, Texas, I discovered that the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry of the Oregon National Guard was sent to train without the basics: fuel, ammunition, toilet paper, field radios and other essentials, and they were housed in moldy, crumbling barracks. Media reports have documented that over 1,000 wounded Army National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers, evacuated from Iraq to Fort Stewart, Georgia, and Fort Knox, Kentucky, were housed in sub-standard concrete barracks with no air conditioning, indoor toilets or running water, while they were forced to wait weeks and sometimes months for medical care. Yet, the resolution on the floor today will do nothing to solve these problems. Next week, the House Republicans will present their budget on the House floor. Like last year's budget, this year's budget will fail to fully meet the needs of our troops and veterans. The budget resolution, as currently drafted, underfunds veterans programs by $1.3 billion below the level requested by the Republican Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs. The budget fails to repeal the age-62 penalty for military widows under the Survivor Benefit Plan. Yet, stand-alone legislation on this issue has 291 cosponsors, including 120 Republicans. The budget fails to fully fund repeal of the disabled veterans tax immediately for all veterans despite the fact that stand-alone legislation to repeal the tax, H.R. 303, has 377 cosponsors, including 185 Republican cosponsors. The budget fails to fund an expansion of the military health care program TRICARE to cover uninsured members of the National Guard and Reserve. The budget fails to provide wage support for National Guard and Reserve members who are forced to leave civilian jobs with higher pay. These families are forced to do more with less. The budget fails to provide additional compensation for soldiers who are forced to stay in the U.S. military through stop-loss orders despite having plans to retire or otherwise leave the service after fulfilling their time commitment under their enlistment contract. I have drafted legislation to provide a monthly bonus of $500 for soldiers subject to stop-loss orders, orders that amount to an involuntary draft. The budget fails to fund an extension of imminent danger pay and family separation pay for troops in Iraq past the end of this year when even Pentagon officials admit that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for the next several years. And, the budget cuts funding for military construction and quality- of-life improvements for U.S. troops by $1 billion from the levels approved before the Iraq war. The resolution on the floor today will do nothing to address these challenges. Finally, the resolution on the floor today fails to acknowledge the deaths of more than 550 American troops or the more than 3,000 wounded American soldiers. The resolution fails to acknowledge the deaths and injuries suffered by American and Iraqi civilians, United Nations personnel, and soldiers from allied countries. The resolution fails to adequately acknowledge the service and sacrifice of tens of thousands of National Guard and Reserve soldiers and their families. However, I intend to support this resolution. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. He oppressed and killed his own people. He invaded his neighbors, and he used chemical weapons. The Iraqi people and the world are better off without him. But, the fact that I am glad he's out of power and in U.S. custody does not mean I agree that the Iraq war was necessary. The war was not necessary. It was elective. I voted against the authorization for war. It was obvious even at the time of the vote, which occurred months before the war actually started, that the Administration had hyped, manipulated, and misrepresented the intelligence regarding the threat posed by Iraq and that the Administration had not planned adequately for post-war Iraq. The Administration's rosy scenario for post-war Iraq has not come to pass. Instead, the U.S. is bogged down in a costly-- both in terms of dollars and lives--and lengthy occupation of Iraq. I believe that America and the world would have been better served if the Administration had not become distracted by Iraq. Saddam was safely contained and defanged by sanctions supported by a broad international coalition. The sanctions prevented Iraq from redeveloping chemical or biological weapons, and made it impossible for Hussein to achieve his ultimate goal of developing nuclear weapons. The Administration should have kept its focus on the single gravest threat to our society--al Qaeda. It was al Qaeda, after all, who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001, not Iraq. It was al Qaeda who bombed U.S. embassies in Africa. It was al Qaeda who bombed a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf. And it is al Qqeda that continues to plan and carry out attacks against Americans and our allies around the world. The Administration should not have shifted intelligence and military resources away from the documented threat--al Qaeda--in order to invade and occupy Iraq. However, I will support this resolution because it is merely hortatory. The resolution does not set national policy. It is not legally binding on anyone or anything. It commends the Iraqi people for their courage in the face of the brutal Hussein regime and commends their adoption of an interim constitution. It also commends the members of the U.S. military for their valiant service. I am voting for the resolution because I want to express my support for the nascent democracy in Iraq and for our soldiers. I would urge the House Republican leadership to spend less time on resolutions like this, which offer merely words, and more time pushing through legislation that would actually provide our soldiers and veterans with the equipment, training and benefits they need and deserve.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, like many of my colleagues, I've been long concerned about the increasing coarseness of language and content on radio and TV. Had I not been required to travel to Oregon for official representational purposes, I would have voted ``aye'' on H.R. 3717, the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004. We have an obligation to balance first amendment rights with our duty to ensure that programming that's accessible to children, particularly those shows that are available on network TV, is free of language and material that's inappropriate for children. A recent study by the Parents Television Council found that foul language during the so- called family hour increased by 94.8 percent between 1998 and 2002. With the average American watching nearly 4 hours of TV per day, inappropriate programming affects us all. At the same time we need to be mindful not to scare broadcasters from pulling programming that is challenging and provocative. It's also likely that the dearth in quality programming is a result of increasing corporate concentration of mass media, which is leading to a loss of accountability to local values. Congress needs to address this before community standards are driven into the ground. H.R. 3717 would increase the fines on broadcasting obscene, indecent, or profane language to $500,000 per violation. Nonmonetary penalties could include forfeiture of broadcast licenses and producing public service announcements that serve the educational and informational needs of children and would have an audience up to five times larger than the offending broadcast. With his inability to defend the public interest against increasingly inappropriate broadcasts, Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has forced Congress to take action. While this legislation could have been improved with new restrictions on gratuitous TV violence, this bill is a good first step towards bringing some civility back to the public airwaves. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. I have been intimidated to follow the chairman to the well since he does have impeccable credentials in the area of nutrition. He is the gentleman responsible for renaming French fries and French toast, although, of course, that did not do much for the caloric content of those food items. But we do have a serious problem in this country; and, unfortunately, this bill and this debate will not rise to that issue. The statistics show an alarming increase in obesity among adults and, most alarmingly, an extraordinary increase in our youth. This can and will lead to real health problems. Those were talked about previously. So we have a real problem. This could become a crisis and the question is, Why are we here today? Is there a crisis in litigation? Yes, there have been a few flaky lawsuits filed that have been dismissed, including one being dismissed with prejudice, something judges do not do routinely. I think the majority is demeaning the intelligence of our juries, of the Americans who will sit there and cast judgment on their peers and say, no, have a little self-control; they did not make you eat that food. That is what the juries and judges have said so far, and I think they will continue to say. But beyond that, they have said fitness and health cannot be legislated. Well, they might remember a former Republican who had a little more productive idea about this, Dwight David Eisenhower. He brought about the Presidential Fitness Program in the 1950s, mandatory physical education in all the schools in America because of concerns of so many males failing the physical for the draft in World War II and Korea. That was mandated when I was a kid growing up, and then sports were free. What do we have today? Most States, many States no longer have mandatory physical education. They say they cannot afford it. In my State, kids have to pay to play sports. So many of them do not do it. What we could do a lot more productively here today on the floor would be to consider legislation to add a little amendment to the so- called No Child Left Behind bill that would help our States, our local school districts reinstate or mandate that they reinstate physical education; but since it will be a Federal mandate, give them some help with the Federal mandate, something that the majority party has failed to do with No Child Left Behind and other mandates here in the Congress. But let us send down a rule: we will have physical fitness. It will be mandatory. We will have kids able to play sports without having to pay and the Federal Government seeing that being in the national interest to avoid a crisis in health care caused by preventable illness, caused by obesity, we are going to take those steps. But that is not an amendment that would be allowed to this bill; that is not the subject here today. Instead, we will hear little funny speeches on that side where people will link together alliterations, as did the esteemed chairman of the committee, not dealing with the real problem. Here we are. We will be done early today. Do not have a highway bill. Do not have extended unemployment benefits. We cannot even get labels on our food that are meaningful for country of origin. Congress is being defied by the administration. Do we have time for those real issues? No, but we have time for this little frolic. This is a pretty sad day in the House of Representatives. Let us deal with this real problem and deal with it seriously and appropriately.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, well, congratulations to the Bush economic team. Yet another record under their belt. Last Friday, it was the announcement that no private sector jobs had been created in America and that they are presiding over the largest job loss since Herbert Hoover in the 1920s, but today, they are touting their record on trade, a new record, a $43 billion one month trade deficit, and they say this shows the U.S. economy is recovering. Why? We are running a large and growing trade deficit. This is recovery at the Bush White House, a jobless recovery because they are engaging in trade practices that are exporting the manufacturing base of this country, now the intellectual technology base of this country. They say it is good to outsource jobs, although they are trying to change the word there, that is, U.S. jobs sent overseas are good for American consumers. The problem is Americans need jobs to be able to consume, and under this administration, those jobs are not available here because they are being shipped to China, but this is good news, says the Bush administration.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. The implications are dire, not only for the standard of living of Americans, our productive capacity, our future standing in the world as a great power, but just one last item. During the war with Iraq, we used a lot of cruise missiles. There is a critical component of the cruise missile made in Europe, either Sweden or Switzerland make that component, and they refused to sell us any because they did not support the war. What is going to happen in 10 years when China is looking at invading Taiwan or Mongolia for its resources, and the United States has to go to the Chinese and say can we buy some weapons from you because we think next year we are going to have to defend ourselves from you. I do not understand the hawks around here who are blithely allowing this hollowing out of our wealth and capacity to happen. I know it is enriching the contributor class in this country, which has a lot of clout at the White House and in Congress; but it is very disturbing to me. There are so many reasons why Members should be appalled by the trade policy. The policy at the White House is to change the names, not the policy. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for participating on this, and for all the time he spends on the floor on this and on so many other issues.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, if I could, we are politicians talking. I was doing a round of town hall meetings in my district, and this is a pretty short letter so I would like to read it. Rayburn M. South, Oakland, Oregon, rural town in Oregon, and he wrote what he considered to be the State of the Union. He said, I could not afford a new car. He is an older gentleman, does not have a large income, $18,000 to $20,000. I bought a used car and drove it home. Looking it over, it was made in Mexico, a Nissan. I had to buy a jack so I could service my car. Went to Sears, bought a Craftsman jack. Came home, unpacked it. Made in China. Then I needed a pair of shoes. Came home, looked at the bottom of the shoe. Made in China. Ran out of batteries for my light. Came home, took the paper off the batteries, maximum alkaline batteries. Made in China. Christmas came. Someone gave me a shirt. Cutting the tape out, one read ``Made in China.'' Then my TV went on the blink. Looked around at TVs. Bought a good old RCA. I thought it was a good old American brand. Brought it home, unpacked it. Made in Mexico. Then I called my cousin in North Carolina. She was laid off. Her job went to Mexico. I called my other cousin in North Carolina. She is working 2 days a week. She does not know where her job is going. Seems like the people in China and Mexico are doing pretty good. We have a Congress, Senate, and President. Surely there is something you can do to help our people. Something stinks. Sincerely, Rayburn M. South, Oakland, Oregon. He speaks with more wisdom than most of our colleagues here in Congress who are ignoring the reality of this problem and just saying, oh, just hang in there, something will happen. Well, the something that is happening is really pretty bad. As I think I said earlier, they told us if only the value of the dollar drops, our goods will become cheaper, and we will sell more abroad. The value of the dollar is down 35 percent, and yet the amount of goods that we imported is up over a year ago by $5 billion, a deficit in goods. So how far does the dollar have to drop and what are the implications for the U.S. consumers and our standing in the world if the dollar gets into something like Argentina? I spoke a couple of years ago to a couple of economists, and I said I am pretty worried. I look at Argentina, and I said, I think that used to be one of the wealthiest countries in this hemisphere. They have an educated populace and a lot of stuff going for them, and look. I said their economic collapse is extraordinary. I said, but when I look at where we are, their deficit in trade was less than ours as a percent of GDP and their foreign debt was obviously much, much lower than ours. We owe over $2 trillion around the world because of these trade policies. I said, I think maybe we could become Argentina. I said to these economists, I think this could happen in 5 or 8 years. And they sort of leaned over to one another and whispered; and then one of them said, no, no, no, it will take at least 10. But the response was not, no, we are not at risk of becoming Argentina; no, we are not hollowing out our wealth, our manufacturing, our future; no, we are not exporting new technology jobs; no, everything is going to work out. The response was, well, it will take a little longer than that to totally destroy our standing in the world and our economy. That is a pretty alarming statement; but they said, oh, yeah, that is kind of the way things are going.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Oh, Mr. Speaker, my colleague just used a bad word. Protect. We should protect the American standard of living? We do not want to become protectionists. That is what this administration would say. I agree with my colleague. There is something at risk here. I think we are in an economic war, as I said earlier. I think we need to protect ourselves and maybe fight back. And this administration is choosing not to do that because there are a few people here in this country who are accumulating just fabulous wealth by outsourcing, by moving jobs and production overseas, producing goods much more cheaply. They are selling them at roughly the same price back here in the United States, but the profit margin is a lot larger. I noticed a number of years ago when we could still buy shirts made in America. I think that is probably something we cannot do any more. But I used to go through the labels looking for them, and 5 or 8 years ago I could still find some. I would notice they were right on the rack next to shirts made in Bangladesh or somewhere else, and they were all the same price. The Bangladesh shirt did not sell for 15 cents. It sold for $25. The U.S.-made shirt sold for $25. The person who made the U.S. shirt made enough money to raise a family, buy a home, be a productive citizen in our economy and live a good life. The Bangladeshi was earning less than a dollar a day, very often child labor or whatever else, but they sold for the same price. That is what is going on now, except now there is this new spin where the Bush people say they want a level playing field. And if their level playing field does not bring other people up, which they are indicating they have no intention of forcing, then what they are saying is they are expecting Americans to come down, as the CEO of Intel said. If people want to compete, they have to look at competing with engineers from Russia who earn $5,000 a year.

Mr. DeFAZIO. What about jobs here? What about production here? They are happy with the way this is going.

Mr. DeFAZIO. In fact, the Bush administration said that the huge growth in the trade deficit, the $43.1 billion last month, we are borrowing $43.1 billion from overseas to finance our purchase of goods made overseas, putting people out of work here was showing that our economy was reviving. Well, wait a minute.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Right. They want to keep doing, in fact, more of the same thing, but they want to pretend they are doing something else. And then they come up with all sorts of words. Like I said, they banned the word outsourcing at the White House. Mr. Mankiw was taken to the woodshed and beaten severely for having been so truthful about what they are doing. He is an academic; and he thought, well, I should put up the theory to show why it is what we are doing what we are doing. So they want to keep exporting America and our jobs and outsourcing, but they are going to call it something else. I think it is particularly bizarre that their new manufacturing czar, who it took 6 months to find, is over in China and unavailable for comment because he is building a plant over there. That kind of goes to the issue too.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, Mr. Speaker, let us go to Europe, which is a higher cost competitor than the United States with all the social welfare and all the other programs over there. Airbus is now exceeding Boeing in terms of production. Now how can that be? Well, all of their costs of development are subsidized by the European consortium. If you buy an Airbus plane, they will throw in goodies. Buy an Airbus. Well, there are no slots to land at Heathrow. Buy an Airbus, we have a spot to land at Heathrow, prime time. Oh, okay. So they use the laws and the rules of their own countries and the European Economic Union to further their own critical technology and high technology and high-value manufacturers like Airbus. Boeing is now going to China and Japan. It will not be long before we do not make planes in this country any more. Then what happens? So they have a much more global view and long-term view of where they want to be positioned in the world economy, and we are just engaging in laisse faire, saying, no, our highest priority is the cheapest production of a good by the cheapest unit of labor somewhere out there, and we do not care what it does to our economy or the people at home because it is good for consumers. But, again, consumers are not able to consume much if they do not have jobs.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor tonight to talk about the issue of trade. The Bush administration rolled up yet another record for the month of January, and I believe it deserves notice. It is quite an achievement. Our trade deficit widened to $43.1 billion in January. One month, $43.1 billion. Now, they have been telling us for the last year just be patient, the dollar is overvalued, it is going to drop a little bit. And as soon as the dollar drops a little bit, why then, U.S. manufacturers will become more competitive and people will start to buy our goods again. Well, I had two questions for them. I said what do we make anymore since we are exporting so much of our manufacturing to China? And will it not perhaps mean instead that Americans will buy more expensive goods that are made overseas and that, in fact, our trade deficit will widen? Despite all the Ph.D.s and experts and luminaries they have down there, apparently my concerns have been proven out and not the administration's. In terms of goods, our deficit went from 44 last year to this year $48 billion. In terms of services, we had a minor increase of about $300 million. So, the fact is we are hollowing out the manufacturing of the United States of the America. There is a new trend where we are hollowing out what was supposed to be the next generation of jobs and intellectual technology, and I will get to that a little bit later. What does the Bush administration say in reaction to this huge and growing deficit in trade and the debt we are mounting up overseas? China alone, $124 billion trade deficit last year. China is now the largest foreign holder of United States debt. And they are beginning to acquire assets in the United States of America with the huge pile of dollars they are amassing with this extraordinary trade deficit. Now, the Bush administration's answer is, well, more of the same, free trade, free trade, free trade. They are unabashed radical, knee- jerk free traders. At least they are consistent. It is good. They went on the attack yesterday saying there are only two choices: the failing trade policies of today, which are hollowing out manufacturing, our industrial base, losing jobs, outsourcing, exporting jobs to other countries, quality jobs, losing the next generation of intellectual technology jobs, jeopardizing, I believe, in the future the security of the United States as more and more critical sectors and technologies are exported overseas. Just last week in the Wall Street Journal, General Electric, there was an article about how they have sold a whole $1 billion worth of turbines to China. There was just a small price they had to pay. It is a state-of-the-art, newly developed turbine, took them half a billion dollars to develop it. The Chinese demanded, in violation of the WTO and rules-based trade, which the Bush administration is such a great fan of, demanded that they give them the technology in exchange for this rather insignificant purchase. Because the technology is going to be worth far, far more; and the Chinese admit they are going to use the technology to build competing turbines. But GE in a very short sighted way decided they would be blackmailed. They were going to give them the technology and get $1 billion worth of sales. It will look good on this year's balance sheet, but not too good 3 or 5 years from now when the Chinese are eating their lunch internationally using the technology which GE went to so much trouble to develop. But this is repeated time and time and time again by the Chinese. I have a small company in my district called Videx. They developed a new kind of scanning technology. They developed an electronic lock. They are selling in 44 countries, including, their mistake, China, where they were selling about a $1 million a year. But it turns out, they say in China if you bring in intellectual property within 24 hours it is counterfeited and for sale. And the Videx company had followed all the laws and protections, went to the trouble of getting supposed Chinese protection and patents and all that. One day they found their entire company had been cloned in China including their Web site. In fact, the Chinese, the fake Chinese Videx, had gone them one up. They had a little fake American flag waving at the top of their Web site, this Chinese company. They even copied and translated into Chinese the U.S. copyright and patents on their software. They did not make a very good product, the company found out, because they started getting product support calls from people who thought they were clients of the U.S. Videx, but were actually clients of the phony Chinese Videx. This happens time and time again. When I went to the Bush administration and asked that perhaps we could get some help, get my two Senators to join me in this for Videx, they are a totally American company, they have 160 employees in my district, they do all of their outsourcing in the United States of America, that is all their subcontracting, not in China, and employ people even in Texas to help build their product, the response, after a lengthy delay from the Bush administration, was that the United States of America will not file intellectual property complaints against China for theft of intellectual property, will not help this relatively small company Videx, because the big corporations, the multinational corporations who are exporting their factories to China would not like that because it might cause problems with the Chinese government. A pretty extraordinary statement. And that is what the Bush administration is now going to emphasize. They support these failing trade policies. They are trying to cover up the outsourcing of jobs. They have now banned at the White House the term outsourcing, job exports. They talk about level playing fields. Well, it is not a level playing field when other countries can, when their government condones the theft of your intellectual property and will do nothing about it and your own home government will do nothing about it in terms of dealing with that foreign government. But now the Bush administration says they may in the future file some minor complaints about some of the tariffs the Chinese have. They would not want to tread on the Chinese's toes here. They do not want to go after the big problem here, which is the outright theft of American technology or the blackmailing in violation of the WTO of American corporations to sell there, and other practices of the Chinese government, the things that are costing us so much productive capacity and jobs. The Bush administration says they want a level playing field. Well, if it is not going to be level there, where is it going to be level? Are they saying that they will bring up the wages of the Chinese workers, that they will see that the Chinese follow worker health and safety protections? That they are going to see that the Chinese begin to enforce minimal environmental laws? No, I guess what they mean by level playing field is in the vision of the Bush people we will drag Americans down to that level and then we will be competitive. If only Americans would work for $1 a day, they could compete with the Chinese. Because they are competing not in old crummy, labor-intensive shacks and factories, but in state-of-the-art world-class factories built significantly with American capital, multinational capital and American capital that is being invested in China to access the cheap labor, to access the lack of worker health and safety protections, to access the lack of environmental protections so they can dump the waste right out the back door. So the level playing field is a pretty phony argument. They are banning the word at the White House, globalization, outsourcing, as I said. And they are going to call people who want to call for a new trade policy, one that does not fail our country so badly. One that does not run a $500 billion-a-year trade deficit; one that is not hollowing out our manufacturing trade capabilities; one that is not seeing some of our best technology either extorted or stolen by the Chinese and other unfair traders. They have no answer to those things. They just say more of the same is going to help, and anybody who wants to do anything about that is an isolationist. Well, they are either fools or they are deliberately, as some have said, facilitating Benedict Arnolds and others who are exporting American jobs, technology and undermining this country. It is not clear which on certain days because when you see today's news, you have got to wonder what is really going on down there. Six months ago, the President announced he was going to create a job, a job in America, that related to manufacturing. That was the President's promise 6 months ago. Here we are 6 months later, and he is on the verge of creating that job tomorrow. Congratulations to the President. One job related to manufacturing. That job will be the so- called manufacturing czar, someone who is going to try to find out what is wrong. Why is the U.S. hemorrhaging its productive capability to China and other unfair traders with extraordinarily low wages? For most Americans and for me it is pretty obvious; but to the Bush administration it is not, so they need a manufacturing czar. It took them 6 months to find the right guy. It would have been good if maybe the manufacturing czar could be by the President's side when his name is released tomorrow. They will be doing this in Ohio, which has suffered horribly with the loss of productive capability. But the gentleman in question is not available. His name is Tony Raymundo, is not available because he is in China. He is in China where his company is building a factory. It is kind of like an awfully bad joke here. The Bush administration in dealing with China and the outsourcing of jobs is going to put a manufacturing czar in their administration who is over in China overseeing the construction of his own plant in China. And, no, I am not making this up. That is actually true. So the Bush administration says soon they are going to push hard, as I said earlier. They are going to ban the word outsourcing, globalization. They are going to empower the word ``insourcing'' at the White House. They are going to brand people like me who have been raising the alarm both in Democrat administrations and Republican administrations about the failing trade policies of this country. I bitterly opposed Bill Clinton's push for NAFTA, and I think that was a shameful moment in the Clinton administration and began the undoing of our productive capacity. I think it was only really facilitating Bush One and Reagan who had negotiated the agreement. But, unfortunately, Bill Clinton saw fit to jam it through the Congress. But now Bush is taking all that one step further. His newest free trade agreements, first, he wants to expand NAFTA, which promised the United States hundreds of thousands of job and trade surpluses with Mexico, which has brought us huge and growing trade deficits with Mexico and lost us hundreds of thousands of jobs, actually the reverse effect of what they have promised. But the President wants to replicate NAFTA all the way through Central and South America. The President has a proposal called CAFTA. CAFTA would expand NAFTA to all of Central and South America. Imagine how many jobs and much capacity we could export to Central and South America if the same rules applied all across that entire region. The President is right now; it is held up because the Republican majority is a little bit nervous on voting on such a gigantic expansion of a failing policy in an election year. But you can be certain if the President is reelected, we will either have a special session or at the beginning of the next session of Congress he will be jamming through this mega-expansion of NAFTA, doing what Bill Clinton did with NAFTA, 10, 20 times over. But even better, the President has shown us a model in some of his proposed free trade agreements which also certainly does exceed the problems with the Clinton administration on trade. The Chile and Singapore agreements are cases in note, free trade agreements voted for by this Congress and signed blithely by the President last year. In the case of Chile, it is the first-ever trade agreement to mandate the importation of foreign skilled labor. Yeah, that is right. It is an actual section of the bill that establishes a new category of Chilean workers to be imported into the United States to be trained in the jobs that will be exported when the companies move to Chile. It is efficient for those companies, that is true, but does not do a whole heck of a lot for the American workers left here holding the bag when their job has fled south to Chile. But that is quite an extraordinary new improvement if you think, as the President's chief economic adviser does, that exporting jobs is good. Now, I am not making that up either. Mr. Mankiw, the President's Chief Economic Adviser in the economic report to the President signed by the President of the United States, endorsed by him, says, ``Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade. More things are tradeable than were tradeable in the past and that is a good thing. Shipping jobs to low cost countries is the latest manifestation of the gains from trade that economists have talked about for a century.'' Is that not peachy. That is Mr. Mankiw, the President's Chief Economic Adviser, expressing the opinions of the President and his administration that the export, the outsourcing, a word now banned at the White House, of U.S. jobs overseas is a net benefit to our country under the theory that things will be produced more cheaply there which will be good for American consumers. Of course, a little fallacy with their logic here is if Americans cannot find jobs, and we have growing unemployment and job loss under this administration, then no matter how cheap the goods get produced in China and some other place that might even produce things more cheaply, Americans are not going to be able to afford those goods for long; and ultimately that will lead to some very severe economic problems. But they persist. They are stubborn at least. And the President is going to push for more free trade. Now, we have some research here about outsourcing, a word banned at the White House now, but that is the export of American jobs which they are no longer going to reference at the White House; and one company, Deloitte Research, predicts 2 million jobs will be exported in the next 5 years; Forester Research, 3.3 million white collar jobs in the next 15 years. Those were the intellectual technology, high-technology skilled jobs that we had heard for so long, what did they say to me when I raised concerns early on about these trade policies? They say, Congressman, you do not understand. These are the old obsolete manufacturing jobs. We do not want them anymore. I said, I do not understand how we can be a great Nation, a great power, if you do not make things anymore. They say, Do not worry about it. We will not make the things but will design them, and we will have all of the brain power. We will retrain all those workers to run computers and work in the high-tech industry. Now we find that industry is flooding overseas very quickly and expect 3.3 million of those next-generation jobs will flow overseas the next 15 years. The question becomes, what is next? They said, we do not know, but do not worry, something always comes along. That is a heck of a thing to bet your economy on. Mark Zandy of economy.com estimates 995,000 jobs have been lost overseas since March, 2001. That is about a third of the jobs that the President has lost on his watch, since he has been President, have been lost overseas. Yet he believes that our trade policy is working, and the head of his economic council says it is working just exactly as it is designed. It is exporting jobs overseas. That was the intention of the trade policy and they are standing behind that. But they will not use the word outsourcing anymore down at the White House. The Gardner Group estimates that 10 percent of jobs at U.S. information technology vendors will move offshore within the next year. IBM is exporting 5,000 jobs to India, China, and Brazil. They will save $168 million a year by doing so. This is a very, very disturbing trend. Computer programming jobs in the U.S. that pay 60 to 80,000, nice wage, but it also recompenses someone for a heck of a lot of education and training. They go for about 8,000 in China; 5,000 in India; 5,000 in Russia. So when the President says we will have a level playing field, I guess he is telling people to go to college for 5 or 6 years, get a masters degree, become a skilled computer programmer, run up 40, $50,000 in debt or more in obtaining that education, and they should work for $5,000 a year because that will give the President his level playing fields in these areas because Mr. Mankiw says it is good that those jobs are so much cheaper there. Think of how much cheaper the products will be. Of course, what most of us see is the products really are not that much cheaper, but the profits which flow to a relatively small number of people; the profits are much better. According to a recent survey of 1,091 CEOs, 27 percent planned to export jobs within the next 3 years; 20 percent, one-fifth of the CEOs polled in America expect to export jobs in the next 12 months. They say, and there is a new big business coalition that has come together about this, and like the White House, they want to ban the word outsourcing. I think that quite soon John Ashcroft is going to begin having people who use the word outsourcing arrested. But the word they want to use now is worldwide sourcing. And these business lobbyists, as it says in this article here, business lobbyists are talking to the Bush administration about adopting this language. But, of course, as we know from the article I read earlier, the Bush White House did in fact adopt that term just yesterday to emphasize, and they have of course banned any discussion of the exported jobs. We have got a few other problems. Here is Craig Barrett, the CEO of Intel. This is 1/26/04, New York Times: ``If you look at India, China and Russia, they all have strong education heritages. Even if you discount 90 percent of the people there as uneducated farmers, you still end up with about 300 million people who are educated. That is bigger than the U.S. workforce. The big change today from what has happened over the last 30 years is that it is no longer just low-cost labor you are looking at; it is well-educated labor that can effectively do any job that can be done in the United States.'' He goes on to say, this is Craig Barrett, the CEO of Intel, the company that was going to produce the next generation of jobs for educated and skilled Americans here: ``Unless you are a plumber or perhaps a newspaper reporter or one of those jobs which is geographically situated,'' cutting lawns at the estates of rich people, for instance, ``you can be anywhere in the world and do just about any job.'' Barrett was asked, Are we not talking about an entire generation of lowered expectations in the United States for what an individual entering the job market will be facing? He responded. It is tough to come to another conclusion than that. If you see this increased competition for jobs, the immediate response to competition is lower prices and that is lower wage rates. Back to what the President is talking about with a level playing field. Americans should go to college, graduate and expect, as skilled computer programmers, to work for 5 or 6,000 a year in the world of Mr. Mankiw, President Bush and the CEO of Intel, Craig Barrett. That does not sound like a tremendous bargain to me, I think, or to most Americans who I represent. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, now here is a company who does not just engage in intellectual property. They make great products. I fly on planes back and forth across the country, will be on one tomorrow, and a lot of them have GE engines. I have been to the plant they still have in the United States, great stuff, incredible product. But here is an investor meeting in 2002. When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China. You need to be there. You need to change the way people talk about it, how they get there. I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to $5 billion. Well, it has already eclipsed $5 billion. He was a little modest in his estimates. Outsourcing, that is, U.S. job exports to China with U.S. or multinational producers, U.S. capital producing jobs there, producing products there and shipping them back to the United States. Every discussion today has to center on China. The cost basis is extremely attractive, i.e., cheap wages. You can take an 18-cubic foot refrigerator, make it in China, land it in the United States, land it for less than we can make an 18-cubic foot refrigerator today ourselves. This list, I cannot possibly do justice to and read the entire list, but this is a list from Lou Dobbs on CNN, someone who formerly was a great supporter and advocate of free trade policies until he studied it a bit, until he looked at the impact on hollowing out the intellectual might of our country, the industrial might of our country, the loss of jobs. Every night now on CNN he talks about the issue of exporting America, outsourcing jobs. He has a list here of companies that are exporting America. They are companies either sending American jobs overseas or choosing to employ cheap overseas labor instead of American workers. As you can see, it is quite small print, and it goes on for pages and pages. It is available on his Web site. He has talked about it extensively, but the list is shocking, and I would urge that for reading for all Americans, particularly those who are unemployed because of these policies, have a lot of time on their hands and wonder what happened to their job. They can read this list and see perhaps where it went. Now, all this is bad enough, but guess what. We are asking American taxpayers to subsidize the export of jobs to foreign countries. It has been estimated that if we repealed any reference in the U.S. Tax Code to overseas income, that that means no taxes at all. I mean, once a U.S. company went over there, we would not even think about taxing them. We would save $20 billion a year. That is how much they are able to deduct from their U.S. income by producing overseas with cheap foreign labor. We are through some other programs actually giving direct subsidies to companies to set up manufacturing overseas. So, in terms of solutions to this problem, the first and easiest thing it seems that we need to do is stop any taxpayer subsidy for these conglomerates, multinationals and even some U.S. firms from outsourcing their jobs, a word again not allowed at the White House, to India or China or Mexico or elsewhere. Then after we do that, we need to begin to actually use the rules of trade. Remember, the President came to Congress a little more than a year ago, and he said the Chinese, really, the only way we are going to get them to clean up their act, it is true, they are violating intellectual property left and right, they are doing all sorts of things to undermine us, but the only way we are going to become truly competitive in China is if we give them what is called Permanent Most Favored Nation status; that is, we would no longer annually review, as is required of all Communist countries and they are a Communist dictatorship, their trade status and determine whether or not we would renew it. That drove some of the largest corporations in this country absolutely berserk because they wanted huge amounts of capital and produce their goods over there, and the prospect of having China lose Most Favored Nation status on an annual basis would drive them into a lobbying frenzy every year. So they successfully lobbied the Bush administration, saying we are going to make it permanent, never again will we review China for unfair trade, but instead we will shift our emphasis to the World Trade Organization, and we will have rules-based trade. I have already talked about the company in my district that has been cloned in China, illegally, copying their U.S. copyrighted and patented and even Chinese copyrighted and patented product in violation of Chinese law, U.S. law, international law, and the rules of the World Trade Organization, and the Bush administration has said they will do nothing about. In fact, every year the President's special trade representative puts out a report which documents page after page after page of intellectual property theft by Chinese firm. Again, as I said earlier, apparently within 24 hours of bringing intellectual property into China it will be copied and available on the market, sometimes good quality, sometimes lesser quality. So how many complaints has the Bush administration filed since the objective was to get China into the WTO and use rules-based trade to really teach them a lesson against China? Well, none, none, zero. How many have they failed on the issue of intellectual property worldwide? None, none, not one. It seems that it was a false promise. I am not supporter of the WTO, but we are stuck in it, and I do not think we should be in it, then we should at least use its rules that would advantage American people, American consumers, American workers, we should use it, because we certainly see it used by other countries to our disadvantage, but this administration is refusing to do that. I will give another example and it is very timely, the issue of oil. The OPEC countries have meetings every month it seems lately, and they decide on quotas and what they are doing intentionally with those quotas is restricting the supply of oil, creating artificial shortages to drive up the price, 38 bucks a barrel now, seen the price at the pump, heading up toward $2 in my State, and I hear it is even higher in other parts of the country. I bet you Memorial Day it will be pushing two and a half, three bucks in places around the country. The oil companies always tag on a little extra margin so they are doing fine. Their profits are up, but the OPEC countries obviously are getting a bundle of money from us, too. The only problem with that is that five of the eight major countries in OPEC are in the WTO, and guess what. Rules based trade, the WTO, does not allow countries to get together, producers to get together and collude to restrict supply to drive up the price. Again, this is something I asked the Clinton administration to investigate and file a complaint with the WTO on, and they refused. I have asked the Bush administration to file a complaint on this, and I got back after 6 months a nice letter from the White House counsel saying, no, they would not do that and in their opinion that it was just fine if OPEC colluded to drive up the price of oil in violation of the rules of the World Trade Organization, international law, U.S. law to gouge U.S. consumers. They really just did not think that it merited a complaint or their attention. So this whole thing that the Bush administration is now going to push after banning the word ``outsourcing,'' after calling people who are calling for new trade negotiations, for new trade rules, for rules that do not hollow out this country, the Bush administration calling people like me and others isolationists, they want to just say there is nothing but what they are doing which is failing or isolationism. I say there is another way to deal with this within the existing frameworks by pursuing complaints, by protecting American consumers, and try to keep some of those jobs home. I would go further than that. I would say ultimately we are going to have to look at managed trade because you simply cannot, as the President is saying here, asking American workers or the head of Intel to compete with $5,000-a-year engineers overseas, we cannot drive our country down that far and our people down that far, maintain our great stature and our standard of living. We should not be asking them to do that. We should not be thinking about doing that. We should not be allowing our companies to be blackmailed, to give their state-of-the-art technology to countries like China for a pittance. We have got to stand up for our own. We are essentially in a trade war. This guy wants to be the war President. Well, I tell you what. This war is a war that has some extraordinarily serious implications for the future, not only of the military security of this country, but the economic security of this country, the basis of the wealth of this country, and we are fighting right now with both hands tied behind our back and a blindfold and ear plugs down there at the White House. They do not want to hear about it. They do not want to engage in it. Well, if they do not start doing that soon, we are looking at some very, very dire implications for the future of the American economy.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, on Friday the government announced its latest employment data. Unfortunately, the news for working Americans or Americans trying to find jobs was really bad. 21,000 jobs nationally were created. Now, remember, of course, it was just 2 weeks ago that the President's principal economic advisor Mr. Mankiw, the same person who says it is good to export jobs, it helps the economy, predicted that the Bush tax cuts would produce 200,000 jobs a month. Of course, the President's former economic advisor, who was a little bit too honest about the cost of the war in Iraq, Mr. Lindsey, predicted the same thing last year and the jobs did not materialize. Well, we are in the same situation now. They predicted 200,000. 21,000 were created. Now, were these jobs created because of tax cuts? Well, actually, no, because the 21,000 jobs that were created were government jobs. They were State and local government jobs. So the tax cuts had absolutely no impact on stimulating those governments to hire more people. That is for certain. So, we now have 8.2 million unemployed Americans, 4.4 million Americans involuntarily working part-time. They would like to work full-time. They need to work full-time. They cannot find full-time work. Three million private sector jobs have been lost since the beginning of the Bush 43 administration. That is the worst job creation or destruction record since Herbert Hoover in the 1920s. 3,000 manufacturing jobs lost last month, 2.8 million lost since the beginning of the Bush administration. But just today, the President was saying he is a radical free trader. There is nothing but free trade. The alternative to absolute free trade and exporting our jobs and our industrial and manufacturing base and impoverishing the working people of America is protectionism or isolationism. Well, there is a pretty big ground between those two things. Some managed trade, something that would bring jobs or keep jobs of value here in America, might maintain our industrial and manufacturing and IT infrastructure, might not be a bad idea. But not to this President. His chief economic advisor says job exports are great. Yeah, they make a few people a lot of money: Corporate CEOs, some stockholders, but they sure do put a lot of Americans out of work and hollow out the wealth of this country long term. Now, we saw the unemployment rate stay at 5.6 percent. Sounds pretty good except the reason it stayed there is because 392,000 people gave up looking for work. There is no prospect for them out there. So guess what? In the great world of George Bush and Mr. Mankiw, they do not count anymore. Americans who are unemployed who would like to work, but who are totally discouraged and give up looking for work, they do not count as unemployed in their world. This is pretty strange. But the President says he has a solution to make his tax cuts permanent. That is, these unbelievably expensive tax cuts that would take place after the year 2010, now all the tax cuts he has already had which have put the country into the deepest fiscal hole in our history, are not creating the jobs. His free trade policy is not creating the jobs. He wants more free trade, he wants more tax cuts. Maybe it is time to think about real investments, investments in infrastructure. You create 47,500 jobs with every billion dollars you spend on roads, bridges, and highways. We have bridges and roads crumbling across America. But what has the President and the White House doing? They are stonewalling the highway bill. The highway bill has expired. And nothing is happening because they will not agree on an adequate bill. They say oh, no, we want a low-ball bill. We do not believe that building roads, bridges, and highways creates jobs. No, it does not create jobs overseas, like Mr. Mankiw thinks are great, it does not make investors rich. It does not give them tax benefits. But it puts a heck of a lot of the people in the construction industry to work, and a whole lot of small businesses to work and a whole lot of communities with some wealth and money flowing through those communities, that would do something for this country. That would put people back to work. He will not even extend unemployment benefits for those who cannot find work but want it. He says we cannot afford it. There are $17 billion in the unemployment trust fund, paid in by employers and employees sitting there. He does not even have to borrow the money. He is borrowing the money for tax cuts for rich people. He does not even have to borrow the money to extend unemployment benefits for those Americans who want and cannot find work. He just has to authorize spending down some of the trust fund. That trust fund this year is actually going to grow. It is going to grow. Of course, the money will be borrowed and given away in tax cuts to wealthy which will put people to work, he says, but it does not. Now, just one last point on these tax cuts. One of the things he is really pushing for is a permanent extension of estates worth more than $5 million from any taxation. He says that will really put people back to work in this country. That would be after 2010. That costs $80 billion a year. Money drained out of the rest of the economy, drained from other taxpayers and Social Security to benefit a very, very small percentage. This is voodoo economics at its worst, as his dad would have said.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, today and every day, wage-earning, salary- earning Americans and small business owners across the country will pay 6.2 percent of every dollar they earn up to $87,400 to Social Security, or twice that in the case of the self-employed. This is a heavy burden on the working, wage-earning, salary-earning people of America, particularly those of modest means. And again, it only falls on income below $87,400 so those who earn $3 million or $5 million a year pay a tax at a fraction of the rate of someone who earns $30,000 or $40,000 a year. The theory is that Social Security in collecting these funds will collect $180 billion more than necessary to pay this year's benefits. That money is supposed to be set aside into a trust fund to meet the future obligations of Social Security. If all those moneys that have been set aside, and they are, unfortunately, just debt instruments, but if those debt instruments were honored, Social Security would have adequate funds to pay full benefits until the year 2042 under conservative assumptions, perhaps longer, and after that it would have a 23 percent shortfall. That is a problem, and we should deal with it. But enter Mr. Greenspan, a gentleman who does not need Social Security, a gentleman who pays taxes at a fraction of the rate of average wage-earning Americans, a gentleman who does not know or socialize with anyone who needs Social Security. The fact is 20 percent of retired Americans are totally dependent on Social Security, and more than half would fall into poverty tomorrow if Social Security benefits were not there. Just 3 years ago the great Alan Greenspan said in supporting the President's reckless tax cuts which favor the wealthy, those who do not pay Social Security taxes in particular, those who invest for a living, he said that we could have it all; there was so much of a surplus, we could cut taxes on rich people, and we could still provide for Social Security benefits in the future. Well, 3 years later, confronted with record deficits created by the Bush administration, Alan Greenspan, forever consistent, says the tax cuts should be made permanent, we should continue to borrow money, which we are doing, to finance tax cuts, but we can no longer afford Social Security, is what Mr. Greenspan says. So we are going to borrow money. In fact, this year we are going to borrow $180 billion that is being paid in by working, wage-earning Americans as a surplus into Social Security, which will be immediately borrowed and spent. Some will be spent on things that are good that the government does; some will be spent to give tax cuts to wealthy people. Mr. Speaker, it is a new kind of transfer tax. We tax wage-earning, salary-earning Americans on every penny of their income. We then overtax them, supposedly to provide their future benefits, borrow that money, and then transfer it to wealthy investors who do not pay a penny in Social Security taxes. This is Mr. Alan Greenspan's world. He hears the pain of those people at the top, those who need further tax cuts, those who have done so well over the last decade. He is willing to say that we should borrow money to finance their tax cuts. He is willing to say we should borrow money from the Social Security trust fund to finance those tax cuts for wealthy people. But now, astoundingly, he says there is not enough money in Social Security to pay benefits. So he just recommends a couple of little things. First, we cut cost-of-living adjustments for seniors. Well, Social Security is already underadjusted for the cost of living of seniors. They have huge increases, in pharmaceutical, medical costs and other things, and the 2.1 percent they get does not reflect their real cost of living and many saw their Medicare or their insurance go up more than their puny increase in Social Security. But Mr. Greenspan does not know any of those people. He has never talked to them. He is not aware of them. They do not belong to the same clubs that he does. But he also said in his let-them-eat-cake mode that we should just increase the retirement age a little bit more. We are already phasing it up to 67. If Mr. Greenspan had to work for a living, work hard like a logger or a mill worker or many other professions in this country or was in a profession where he could not work forever, unfortunately he can as long as George Bush reappoints him, he would realize that it is a problem if you increase the retirement age further beyond 67. Many Americans cannot physically work that long to collect their benefits and many others will not have the opportunity to work that long. But Mr. Greenspan is not concerned about those people. It is more important to borrow the money from the Social Security trust fund, to bankrupt the system in the future to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, and that is George Bush's priority, too.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, there is one exception to free trade. People have to realize who runs this administration. There is one exception to free trade, and it is for the first time in a trade agreement with Australia. It is a prohibition on the importation or the reimportation of FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured pharmaceuticals from Australia, not because they are unsafe like the phony baloney they are giving us about Canada, but because they are cheaper there. That is in the trade agreement. What is that doing in the trade agreement if this is not all about big business and multinational corporations? It is not about making things cheaper for American consumers. If it was, why did President Bush insist on prohibiting the reimportation of FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured drugs from Australia at half the price? It is not about making things less expensive and benefiting our consumers and our society. It is all about benefiting a very privileged few.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, when I lay this out to my constituents, they say, well, certainly the CEOs and others could not support that; they would not want to live in those communities or under those conditions or see those things happen. Well, the fact is today's CEOs, where there is still a manufacturing job, earns 500 times what a worker earns. It is only a couple of decades since the ratio was only 20. They do not live in the same communities. They do not live in the same world. They live on a different planet. They live behind gates in their mansions with their servants. Now there will be a lot more servants out there for them, and probably the cost of servants will go down, so this will be a great benefit to them. Of course, under Bush we can import those, too, or maybe Americans can work for those low wages. Their kids go to private schools, so they are not worried about what the gentleman from Ohio was talking about, the support for our societal infrastructure, schools and those sorts of things. They do not really need the police. I guess we have not gone back to private for-profit fire departments yet, that is probably not far away, but they have private security so that we do not find a lot of support from them for police infrastructure or first responders, particularly not with the administration cutting their budgets under the homeland security proposal. And then when they want to go somewhere, they go to the private country club in their chauffeur-driven limousines. Or if they go further away, they go in private executive jets so they do not even have to deal with the deregulation of the airline industry, the overcrowding and all those sorts of things. But these are true international folks. They are talking about globalization and international trade and all the benefits. There are benefits for them, just not for the masses of America. Whatever happened to Henry Ford? ``My workers are going to be able to afford the product they make.'' We all did better under that system. We created the envy of the world here in the United States. We created the largest middle class. Everybody did better together. But a few people got greedy, and now they have got their hands on the levers of power, and they simply do not care about the majority. But they might find ways to distract them with wedge issues, social issues, or something else to distract them from the loss of their jobs, the opportunity for their kids, the lack of educational opportunities, or the future of this country. I do not think the American people are going to be fooled for very long. They are going to demand changes, and we have to bring about changes. This trade policy is one of the most devastating levers of power that they have to wield against the American system, against American workers, and against the wealth of this country, and they are using it ruthlessly.

Mr. DeFAZIO. To buy the products.