Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, we have heard two presentations, one by the Democrats and one by the Republicans, on the budget. We will have the budget on the floor tomorrow to vote on, and nothing is more important than the budget this week. But nothing is more important than the budget at any time. The most important decisions we make in Washington are the decisions related to the budget and the appropriations process. The budget is the opening of the process which ends with the appropriations process. People should understand that we broadly categorize certain spending goals in the budget, and then it is the appropriations process that carries them through with the detailed expenditures. I want to talk about the Congressional Black Caucus Budget, a budget for maximum investment and opportunity, which we will have on the floor tomorrow as an alternative to the President's budget and the budget of the majority Republicans. Our budget is very important, and I am going to spend half my time talking about the priorities of that budget, the six priorities of that budget. But the seventh priority is the one that I want to begin with. The mission of our budget is clearly, the Congressional Black Caucus Budget, an advocacy budget. It advocates for those that are left out and forgotten, the poor in general, and more specifically African Americans and other neglected minorities. We concur with three-quarters of the President's budget and his priorities. But we would like to emphasize certain kinds of things that get left out. So in each one of these seven areas, education, housing, health care, economic development and livable communities, foreign aid, welfare and low-income assistance, and juvenile justice and law enforcement, we have special kinds of priorities that we have within those categories. We would like to make certain that those do not get left out. This presentation will start with priority number seven, which is a very unusual priority for the Congressional Black Caucus to focus on. That is juvenile justice and law enforcement. Law enforcement. Now, I understand that in the Democratic alternative budget that is going to be presented tomorrow, there will be some recommended increases in the law enforcement budget, the Justice Department budget. But that is all about increasing at the investigative end, increases for the prosecutions in general. There are a number of things that are going to happen in that proposed set of budget increases that we are not particularly concerned with. We would like to see the Justice Department capacity increased to handle some other kinds of pressing emergencies. For example, we have an explosion of high profile corruption and malfunctioning of the criminal justice system across America. In Los Angeles, in Illinois, Louisville, Kentucky and New York, on and on it goes. Right now, we have these high profile cases that should attract the attention of all Americans. Certainly the overwhelming majority of Americans are concerned about these malfunctionings and this corruption. Certainly in the case of Amadou Diallo and the verdict of a jury there in New York State, the capital, Albany, related to a case where Amadou Diallo was standing on his front step and was approached by four policemen, and they shot him to death. Forty-one bullets were fired. He was hit 19 times, and some of the bullets show he was hit after he was on the porch. Nevertheless, those policemen were found not guilty of anything; not negligent homicide, not reckless endangerment, not guilty of anything. A survey taken a few days later showed that the overwhelming majority of the people of New York State were outraged. They disagreed profoundly with that verdict and felt that a great miscarriage of justice had occurred. But on the other coast, in Los Angeles, we had a series of revelations over the last few months indicating that the police department has been carrying out corrupt practices for almost two decades; that there are people in the police department who routinely, routinely, have planted evidence on people of drug selling, evidence of various kinds, planted guns on people, beaten people, and shot people. And the Los Angeles government now is getting ready to pay out millions of dollars in response to court suits that are being brought on these matters, as well as many, many cases that will be overturned. The lives of numerous individuals, thousands of individuals when we consider the families of the people who have been wrongfully convicted or harassed, beaten up, the lives of thousands of individuals are involved in this gross systemic ongoing set of miscarriages of justice. In the State of Illinois we have a situation where there were 25 people on death row, 25 people about to be executed. We were about to play God and take their lives. I am against the death penalty, but those who are for the death penalty certainly would not like to see innocent people executed. There was a special project conducted by some university students and they utilized the most advanced detective techniques, including DNA, to check to see whether these 25 people were really guilty or not. They were on death row. They had gone through the whole system. The district attorneys had brought cases against them, they had been prosecuted by public prosecutors, a judge had sat on the case, a jury heard the case, and now it was all over. They were on death row to be executed. Under our constitution we guaranty the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But if a person's life is taken, there is nothing else they are going to be able to do. They cannot pursue happiness. Liberty means nothing. A death penalty takes away that life. And of the 25 people who were on death row, 12 were found to be innocent. DNA evidence, about as conclusive as it gets, was used to prove that 12 of the 25 on death row were innocent. And I congratulate the governor of Illinois for acting after that, immediately, to say there will be no more executions until we straighten out this tangle. Where is the criminal justice system going wrong? How did it produce an almost 50 percent error rate in a matter as serious as taking the life of an individual for the commission of a crime? Twelve of the 25 were innocent. Let me see, I have mentioned Los Angeles and Illinois. Let us now go to Louisville, Kentucky. There was a killing of a young man by the Louisville, Kentucky, police. Two policemen were involved. The police commissioner, without telling the mayor, decided to give these two policemen a medal, awarded both of them a medal. Now, they have gone through a process, I think, of being checked out, with disciplinary hearings, and steps have now been taken, but they were given a medal and the mayor was not informed about this. They were just given a medal, two medals, by the commissioner. And the mayor, rightfully so, felt that that was an outrage to do that for something that, one, was questionable, but to do it without his approval, without his involvement, was a usurpation of his authority, and it was making a statement about his position on this kind of action that clearly was in defiance of his policies. So the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, fired the police commissioner. And right now we have almost a coups taking place in Louisville, Kentucky. The police are marching through the streets indicating that they are really in command. The police that should be under civil authority are refusing to acknowledge that the mayor is the final authority; that the man who is elected, who hired the commissioner, had the right to fire him. The problem is if we allow a police state mentality to develop in a small group, that spreads to the larger group, and pretty soon we are the victims of police state actions. I cannot remember any time that a whole police force has defied their chief executive, the mayor of a city, and gone out and thrown down the gauntlet. They are refusing to protect the citizens. They spend their time in demonstrating their strength. It is illogical to allow the criminal justice system to become corrupted. What we have in America is a small percentage of police, the extremists, the fanatics, and sometimes they are racists, who commit crimes and acts of misconduct that by themselves are outrageous but we say, after all, it is only a small percentage of a total police department. The problem that all America should be concerned with is the way the rest of the police department goes to work to cover up, to protect and to nurture the fanatics and the extremists and the racists. There is the so-called blue wall of silence, where no matter what is done they will protect them. And anybody that tells the truth will be isolated and browbeaten and harassed to the point where they will have to leave the force. The code of conduct in police departments all across the country is that the truth is not to be told if it will get one of their colleagues in trouble. So it makes the whole system corrupt. As we go up the chain of command, the officer at the top, including the commissioner, becomes involved in a pattern of cover-up. If the pattern of cover-up and protection is there, it means that the officers who are at the extreme end begin to have more and more people join them, more of their kind come on to the force because they have protection of the system. I have talked about Los Angeles, Illinois, and Louisville, Kentucky. In Louisville, Kentucky, it is the police marching to take over the city, a coups by the police department against the city government. In New York, where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated their outrage in the Amadou Diallo shooting, we now have another shooting of a young man named Patrick Dorismond, who lives in my district. He was killed. The mayor and the commissioner are behaving as if they want to stage a coups and take over the city against the majority. The majority are outraged, but they insist on behaving in ways that protect and encourage and nurture that small percentage of extremists in every police department. The mayor has made outrageous statements about the last killing. Patrick Dorismond, a constituent of mine, his family lives in my district. Patrick Dorismond was in Manhattan, leaving work as a guard. He was a uniformed guard. He left work and went to a bar nearby. He left the bar and was hailing a taxi to get home when an undercover policeman approached him attempting to entrap him in a drug sale. The undercover policeman asked him if he had some drugs to sell. He wanted some drugs. This same undercover police team had already made eight or nine arrests that night. They just wanted to bolster their statistics and make ten collars that night, so they approached one more, Patrick Dorismond. Patrick Dorismond was outraged as he was being approached and asked for drugs. An argument ensued and the backup policeman came on the scene to support his partner who was in the argument. He shot Patrick Dorismond to death. Patrick Dorismond is dead and the two policemen say it was an accident. Most unfortunate; it was an accident. And the Mayor of the City of New York, Mayor Guiliani, ordered the commissioner, told the commissioner to immediately release the criminal record of Patrick Dorismond. Patrick Dorismond, at 13, had had some kind of encounter with the police. The laws of the State of New York say that the record of a juvenile should be sealed. Not only did they disobey the laws of the State of New York and open sealed records, but they also broadcast them all over the Nation. Patrick Dorismond had had a run-in with the police when he was 13, like a lot of 13 year olds may have a run-in with the police. Patrick Dorismond had had two arrests as an adult for disorderly conduct. So happens that Patrick Dorismond wanted to be a policeman. So the two disorderly conduct arrests that he had had as an adult, plus the arrest that he had had as a juvenile, would not have disqualified him from becoming a policeman. They were not that serious. But the mayor has chosen to make Patrick Dorismond look like a criminal by putting these things together. And he has fooled no one. The whole city is outraged again. It is double outrage after the Amadou Diallo verdict. Now comes Patrick Dorismond, with the mayor and the commissioner engaging in a blatant way in a cover-up. I mean, they are encouraging and setting the parameters for the cover-up in this case. The system has gone to work to deal with some extreme activities on the part of individual policemen. There were other cases, of course, besides Amadou Diallo. There was Abner Louima, who was sodomized with a broomstick in a police precinct. Abner Louima almost bled to death. In fact, the hope was, by the policeman who had so injured him, that he would die, but, unfortunately for the policeman, he lived. Fortunately, there were complaints made by the family, and they got through to a reporter and he got to a hospital and he survived. And the whole case broke as an exposure of what had gone on in that precinct. Most of the police in that precinct would not tell the truth. The blue wall of silence went into effect immediately and nobody saw anything. Abner Louima had to endure a horrible experience, and they tried to pretend that nobody held him down while the guilty police officer committed that crime. Fortunately, the Federal Government stepped into the situation and, from the beginning, showed a great interest and prosecuted the policeman for violating the civil rights of Abner Louima. Abner Louima is not dead, fortunately. He is probably injured for life. He will never function normally again. But there was a trial and, after almost a year of denying that any crime had been committed, the blue wall of silence was at work concocting stories about Abner Louima having engaged in homosexual activity and that is how his guts were erupted or torn inside him. All kinds of concocted ridiculous stories were manufactured, until finally in the Federal trial, in Brooklyn, the perpetrator confessed that he had done it, and was found guilty, of course, by his confession. However, even after confessing, he wanted the world to believe he did it all by himself and nobody else saw it, wanted to protect his colleagues, and came back to court to testify in a second trial, a conspiracy trial. The conspiracy trial related to Abner Louima was probably more important than the trial which convicted the man who perpetrated the heinous act against Abner Louima. Because the conspiracy trial goes to the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is the fact that the colleagues of the perpetrators, the colleagues of the extremists, of the fanatics, of the racists cover up for them. They pretend they saw nothing, they heard nothing, the system, in effect, to cover up for the crime committed against Abner Louima. His relatives went to the police station the next day, and they were threatened and told to get away from there or they would be arrested. All kinds of horrible things happened before this case began to rise and surface in such a way that the police department had to admit that a great crime had been committed and they had to go to work to do something about it. But when the Federal Government entered the case early and began to question the police officers, the blue wall of silence went into effect. So they took a very important step in trying four of those officers for conspiracy to cover up. Because that is the heart of the problem. The system has to be changed. The system has to be attacked. The Federal Government at this point has also completed a study of the pattern of activity in New York City with respect to the stop-and- frisk and the way they police minority neighborhoods. What does this have to do with the budget? Let me go back for a moment and say that all those people out there who were upset about the Amadou Diallo verdict, and there were many people, there was a spontaneous set of demonstrations. High school kids, without any tutelage or planning, left their schools and demonstrated in the streets. College kids demonstrated, white and black. There was no group that did not show their outrage. Today, on the steps of New York Police Plaza, a press conference took place of businessmen, businessmen and labor leaders, rabbis, civil liberties leaders, urban league, a press conference took place where they all together condemned the latest activities of the mayor with respect to exposing the criminal record of Dorismond as a 13-year-old child and taking a position in defense of the killing of Patrick Dorismond before the facts were examined thoroughly. Our constituents in New York are very upset, outraged, demanding action from their leaders. Our constituents are demanding action against these gross misjustices. Fortunately, none of these spontaneous responses have been violent. We keep telling people it does not pay to go out in the streets and burn anything down or conduct riots. As leaders, we have been successful in making people understand that negative and unproductive set of conduct that should not be followed. However, they turn to us and say, What are you going to do? What about it? Well, I want to say it does relate to the budget here. Because in our budget, item number 7 is the juvenile justice system. We want more money put into the Federal criminal justice system, juvenile justice, adult justice, law enforcement in general. We want more money put in. We also have a bill that will require more funds in the Justice Department. That bill was put in by the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) 2 weeks ago. And I would like to let everybody know out there, the constituents, that we are not standing still, we are taking certain kinds of actions. This bill, the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act, is going beyond what we have done already. We have gone to the Justice Department. We have gone to the deputy of Janet Reno. We made our appeals there. We have gone through those motions on these particular cases, especially Amadou Diallo. And we have now gone to the Justice Department about Patrick Dorismond. In Brooklyn, the U.S. Attorney in that district, the Eastern District, now has had a discussion on that. So we are taking action at the level that we think we can take the most relevant actions. We have accreditation of the bill that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) has introduced, the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act, which will require additional funding by the Justice Department if they carry out these points. I will just quickly summarize what the bill says. The bill calls for the accreditation of local law enforcement agencies not to operate so loosely. They should have a set of procedures and standards, a training regiment which does not allow for inexperienced people to be set loose on the street with guns in their hands but make certain that they have had thorough training not only in the use of force but also an understanding of the community that they are patrolling. This bill authorizes the Department of Justice to work cooperatively with independent accreditation law enforcement and community-based organizations to further develop and refine these accreditation standards. Second point: Law enforcement agency development programs. The bill authorizes the attorney general to make grants to local States and governments to develop programs, such as civilian review boards, early warning and detection programs, which have proven effective in many jurisdictions, and many kinds of activities which would help develop a greater rapport between police and the community. Administrative due process procedures. The bill requires that the attorney general study the prevalence and impact of any law, rule, or procedure which interferes with prompt and thorough investigations of abuse. In New York City they have the 48-hour rule. The police department, the Police Benevolent Association, their union negotiated an agreement where no policeman who is involved in an excessive use of force case can be interrogated before 48 hours. Forty-eight hours must pass before they have the right to interrogate a policeman who is involved in some incident related to excessive use of force or the firing of a gun even if it resulted in the killing of an individual. Item four in the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act sponsored by the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers). It enhances the funding of the Civil Rights Division in the Civil Rights Department. It authorizes appropriations for expenses for ongoing investigations of pattern and practice of abusive investigation by the Justice Department. Item five in the pattern and practice investigations: It enhances the authority to bring private cause of actions limited only to declaratory and injunctive relief when there is a pattern and practice of discrimination. Item six: Deprivation of rights under color of law. The bill amends section 242 of Title 18 of the Code to expressively define ``use of force'' and ``nonconsentual sexual conduct'' as deprivations of rights under color of law. Item 7: The study of deaths in custody, referring back to the Illinois case. The bill amends the Code to require assurances that States will follow guidelines established by the attorney general for reporting deaths in custody. National Task Force on Law Enforcement Oversight. The bill requires the Department of Justice to establish a task force to coordinate the investigation, prosecution, and enforcement efforts of Federal, State, and local governments in cases related to law enforcement misconduct. Immigration Enforcement Review Commission. The bill creates a commission to investigate civil rights complaints against the INS and Customs Services with authority to make policy and disciplinary recommendations. It is very interesting that, in New York, several of the cases that have taken place have related to immigrants. Amadou Diallo was an immigrant from Africa, the country of Guinea. Patrick Dorismond is a Haitian American. Abner Louima is a Haitian American. I know this is only a coincidence because I have lived in New York for 42 years and there is a long list of victims of excessive force, negligent homicide, that were not necessarily immigrants. Eleanor Bumpers was a grandmother who was shot down in her living room. Claude Reece was a 13-year-old who lived in a housing project in my district. Clifford Glover was 11 years old and was shot in the back. Randolph Evans was shot point-blank by a policeman who used a defense in court called psychomotor epilepsy. I have never heard that term before; and since that case, that trial, I have never heard it since. Well, the jury found the policeman not guilty because he had had a seizure of psychomotor epilepsy and he could not stop his hand from raising the gun and pointing to young Randolph Evans's head. He walked off scot-free. So there have been a long list of deaths, of police killings and police brutality which did not deal with immigrants. But it just happens that recently the focus has been, by accident I think, on immigrants. So an Immigrant Enforcement Review Commission is very much in order. Item 10: Federal Data Collection on Racial Profiling. The bill requires the Justice, Treasury and Interior Departments to collect data concerned with personal characteristics of individuals targeted for investigation, etcetera. The bill establishes civil and criminal penalties for retaliation against law enforcement officers who in God's faith disclose, initiate, or advocate on behalf of a civilian complainant in actions alleging police misconduct and creates private cause of action for retaliation. These are 11 of the points that are emphasized in the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act. Many of them will require additional funding. My colleague the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) has added to that some other provisions that will require additional funding in the budget. She wants a budget increase to deal with the Weed & Seed program. She wants to address juvenile delinquency prevention with certain projects, a program to reintegrate great young offenders, and a program to reduce youth gun violence. So in our seventh category, juvenile justice and law enforcement, in our budget, we are addressing some of the issues that are of great concern to my constituents back in New York. CBC, the Congressional Black Caucus, wants to support these issues in every way. Tomorrow we will deal with a budget which does that. In addition to that, I think it is important to note that we are proposing and, in fact, I proposed at a meeting of the Brooklyn African American Clergy and Elected Officials, consisting of 96 members, on March 3, 2000, I proposed the following in reaction to my constituents and all those who are outraged and want some leadership, I proposed we have a declaration against surrender to this kind of activity. We will not surrender to police abuse and a policeman state mentality. We will not surrender to a mayor and a commissioner who insist on protecting the extremists and the fanatics who constitute only a small part of the police department. This declaration of surrender reads as follows: ``We, the undersigned leaders of the caring majority, pledge to unite in solidarity against continuing oppression by the extremist law enforcement establishment and the collaborating criminal justice system. With unrelenting fervor, we pledge to provide continuous leadership for the following actions and activities: (1) negotiations to achieve the 10 demands for police and criminal justice reform set forth on March 27, 1999, almost a year ago. A coalition of leaders from all parts of the city met at Local 1199 in the heart of the city, and we drew up a 10-point plan on misconduct and brutality. These 10 points cover the need for civilian review board which has real teeth. It covers the call for a special prosecutor to be appointed in cases involving police brutality or police homicide. It calls for a residency law for New York City. Most of the country requires policemen to live in the city or the county. Most of the counties in New York State require policemen to live in the city or county. But not in New York City. The legislature exempts New York City from that requirement despite the fact that the city council and the people of New York want a residency law to guarantee that they get police that have a greater comprehension of the people that they are serving and the cultures that make up New York City. On and on it goes. There are 10 demands here drawn up March 27, 1999. The problem with these demands is that for the 40 years that I have been in New York, most of these demands have been made repeatedly over and over again every time there has been some excessive use of force or misconduct among the police. The time that I have been in New York, for 40 years, there have been three commissions to investigate corruption and excessive use of force. They all come up with the same recommendation. Nothing gets done. For that reason, we are insisting that we negotiate again. We like to go to our constituents and say we are reasonable people, we are leaders who do not under any circumstances want our constituents to resort to violence. We want to proceed in a nonviolent way, in a reasonable way to try to get these so-called intractable problems that seem not to be solvable, to get something done. So we want to negotiate these 10 demands. We want to ask the mayor to negotiate again, but beyond the mayor we want the fathers of the city, we have a phrase in New York called the permanent government of the city. In a lot of the cities and towns across the country, there is a permanent government, the business people, the civic leaders, a group of people who really behind the scenes, if you do not have their approval, if elected officials do not have their approval, they cannot survive, they cannot exist. There is a combination of financial contributions as well as the press being on your side, indignation of people in high places who have the bully pulpit. They can govern in certain ways. We think that they are guilty in New York City of not weighing in and doing more over the years to rein in the excessive police abuse that continues to erupt again and again in New York City. So we want to negotiate with them as well as with the mayor and the governor. That is point one in this Declaration Against Surrender. We want to, point two, take the necessary actions to achieve intervention in the Diallo case by the Justice Department and the prosecution of the four police defendants for the violation of the civil rights of Amadou Diallo. Four policemen have already been found innocent of anything, including reckless endangerment or negligent homicide, nothing, totally innocent, just as the people who beat up Rodney King in California were found innocent. Despite the fact that you had a videotape of them surrounding him and beating him, they still found the perpetrators innocent. The Federal Government had to go in and try those same people on a charge of violation of civil rights of Rodney King. We have asked and we are pressing hard to get the Justice Department to try the people who killed Amadou Diallo on the basis of the violation of the civil rights of Amadou Diallo, a victim of police profiling. Nowhere in the history of New York City have you had a person standing on his front porch shot down by the police. Only racial profiling gone mad and seeing any black as a threat could have conjured up an image of Amadou Diallo as being a danger to society or to the four policemen who shot him in self-defense, they say, because they thought he was reaching for a gun when he pulled out his wallet. Probably, being a foreigner, he knows the first thing you do when you are confronted by the law is show your papers, show your papers and identify yourself. We think that we have a good case and that the Justice Department will move, we hope, to prosecute these defendants for the violation of Amadou Diallo's civil rights. We are trying to tell our constituents that this is a society where ultimately there is justice for all. If you cannot get justice for all at the city level or the State level, then there is finally the Federal Government which will guarantee that there will be justice for all. Our third point here is an appeal to the United Nations to secure an objective review of the violations of minority human rights in the United States as evidenced by the following. Violations of minority rights in the United States are out of control. Too many people in high places are not excited about the fact that they are out of control. Why? Because, one, there is a national pattern, a national pattern of systemic police brutality with recurring unjustified homicides. Two, death penalty laws which result in a disproportionate number of minorities executed, a disproportionate number of minorities executed and a high probability of innocent victims on death row. I gave you the case of Illinois where the death row inmates who were innocent were fortunate enough to have a local university project conduct an exercise using the latest detective techniques including DNA, and they found 12 of 25 of the people on death row to be innocent. The next point, widespread officially sanctioned racial profiling. The next point, exposures of massive long-term corruption and illegal arrests in police departments. The next point of great racial disparity in sentencing. Great racial disparity. We have several studies which show that a black person and a white person accused of the same crime going through the same similar investigative procedure standing before a judge, the racial minority will get a tougher sentence, a higher sentence. Disparity in sentencing. Finally, the imprisonment of 2 million persons, most of whom are poor and members of minority groups. In the United States there are now about 2 million people in prison. Prisons have become a major industry. You can invest in prisons. If you invest in prisons, they do not pay off unless you have inmates. You are paid according to the number of inmates. There is something grossly unjust about this kind of system. There is something grossly unjust about so many people in prison. The highest number now of any of the industrialized nations are imprisoned in the United States of America. Almost half of them are imprisoned for nonviolent offenses related to drugs. There is something wrong with the system. We complain on the floor of this House, we have many bills which have made matters worse sponsored by the Republican majority. We complain. Nothing happens. An appeal to the United Nations may be where we have to go in order to get some attention focused on these gross abuses. Finally, in this Declaration Against Surrender, we the undersigned leaders of the caring majority pledge to sponsor periodic ``Weeks of Outrage'' with citywide nonviolent actions including civil disobedience. Such Weeks of Outrage will be periodically sponsored until our just demands are met. Going back to point one, the demands we ask to be negotiated, we will not sit still and let those demands be treated with contempt nor ignored. We intend to have Weeks of Outrage starting with an April Week of Outrage which is in the process of being planned. There is a call for an April Week of Caring Majority Nonviolent Outrage. The Declaration Against Surrender continues by saying that in the last 40 years, more than 50 outrageous killings of New York citizens by the police have gone unpunished, from the children, Clifford Glover and Randolph Evans, to grandmother Eleanor Bumpers, mental patient Gideon Bush, and immigrant Amadou Diallo, the callous actions of individual policemen have been supported and excused by a collaborating judicial system, by the establishment press and media, by the power brokers and the permanent governors of New York City. We declare that the caring majority of New York City will no longer surrender to these gross injustices. Mr. Speaker, I submit the statement related to the Declaration Against Surrender for the Record. Declaration Against Surrender We, the undersigned Leaders of the ``Caring Majority'' pledge to unite in solidarity against continuing oppression by the extremist law enforcement establishment and the collaborating criminal justice system. With unrelenting fervor we pledge to provide continuous leadership for the following actions and activities: Negotiations to achieve the ten demands for police and criminal justice reform set forth on March 27, 1999. Necessary actions to achieve intervention in the Diallo case by the U.S. Justice Department and the prosecution of the four police defendants for the violation of the Civil Rights of Amadou Diallo. An Appeal to the United Nations to secure an objective review of the violations of minority human rights in the United States as evidenced by: a national pattern of systemic police brutality with recurring unjustified homicides; death penalty laws which result in a disproportionate number of minorities executed and a high probability of innocent victims on death row; widespread officially sanctioned racial profiling; exposures of massive long-term corruption and illegal arrests in police departments; a great racial disparity in sentencing; the imprisonment of two million persons most of whom are poor and members of the minority groups. Sponsorship of periodic ``Weeks of Outrage'' with citywide nonviolent actions including civil disobedience. Such ``Weeks of Outrage'' will be periodically sponsored until our just demands are met. We, the undersigned Leaders of the ``Caring Majority'' invite all citizens everywhere who deem themselves as members of the ``Caring Majority'' to unite with us in the ``Declaration Against Surrender''. Submitted by Congressman Major Owens and Approved by the Brooklyn African American Clergy & Elected Officials (March 3, 2000). 10-Point Plan on Misconduct and Brutality following are the proposals issued by a broad coalition of political leaders and community organizers in response to the shooting of amadou diallo: march 27, 1999 1. Mayor Giuliani must immediately implement the recommendations of the Mollen Commission, especially the call to establish an independent investigative body with full subpoena power that has jurisdiction over police corruption and brutality in New York City. Twice, the City Council has passed legislation creating a body to monitor corruption, but the Mayor has done everything in his power to block its implementation--first by veto and then, when the Council overrode his veto, by tying the matter up in court. The Mayor must also implement the recommendations (from both the majority and dissenting reports) of his own Task Force, that he appointed in 1997 in the wake of the shocking Abner Louima incident. 2. The Civilian Complaint Review Board must be immediately reconstituted, strengthened and fully funded so that it can effectively investigate civilian complaints of police misconduct. 3. The State Legislature must pass legislation creating a permanent special prosecutor for police brutality and corruption in New York. In conjunction with this, the State Attorney General must create a special unit on police misconduct and should issue an annual report documenting instances of misconduct throughout the state. 4. The Police Department must develop a comprehensive training program, developed in consultation with outside experts, to school its officers in racial and cultural sensitivity and must also implement a rigorous process of in- depth psychological screening of its recruits and officer. 5. The New York Police Department should reflect the makeup of the citizen population it serves--N.Y.C. police officers should live in New York City. The State Legislature must immediately pass a law mandating residency for city officers. 6. The Police Commissioner must also take specific and immediate steps to recruit more minorities and women to serve as police officers and develop a plan to increase promotion opportunities for women and minority officers. 7. The salary and benefits for police officers must be improved. Law enforcement officers are entrusted with extraordinary responsibility and they should be compensated accordingly. 8. The Police Department's ``48-hour'' rule, which delays the ability of N.Y.P.D. investigators to question police officers charged violations of N.Y.P.D. rules and regulations, must be eliminated. 9. The weapons, ammunition and tactics used by the department must be assessed and periodically reviewed, not only to measure effectiveness, but to protect the safety of innocent New Yorkers. The use of hollow point bullets should be discontinued immediately. 10. Congress must call on the Justice Department to honor its commitment to monitor and issue annual reports documenting instances of police misconduct throughout the country. This promise was made in the wake of the Rodney King incident and has yet to be acted upon. Demands Cited in the Major Owens Declaration Against Surrender Declaration Against Surrender--Congressman Major Owens Call for an April Week of Caring Majority Non-Violent Outrage the declaration against surrender In the last forty years more than fifty outrageous killings of New York citizens by the police have gone unpunished. From the children, Clifford Glover and Randolph Evans, to grandmother Eleanor Bumpers, mental patient Gideon Bush, and immigrant Amadou Diallo, the callous actions of individual policemen have been supported and excused by a collaborating judicial system; by the establishment press and media; by the power brokers and the permanent governors of NYC. We declare that the Caring Majority of NYC will no longer surrender to these gross injustices. the targets and the goals --The Caring Majority Must Be Empowered To Realize How Strong They Are --City Hall Must be Made To Understand The Ultimate Power Of The Caring Majority --The Police And The Power Brokers Must Be Made To Understand The Limitations Of Their Control --Reasonable Demands Must Receive A Respectful Response, Serious Negotiations And Meaningful Legislation Action Our primary goal is to provide leadership for the following: Negotiations to achieve the ten demands for police and criminal justice reform set forth on March 27, 1999. Necessary actions to achieve intervention in the Diallo case by the U.S. Justice Department and the prosecution of the four police defendants for the violation of the Civil Rights of Amadou Diallo. An Appeal to the United Nations to secure an objective review of the violations of minority human rights in the United States as evidenced by: a national pattern of systemic police brutality with recurring unjustified homicides; death penalty laws which result in a disproportionate number of minorities executed and a high probability of innocent victims on death row; widespread officially sanctioned racial profiling; exposures of massive long-term corruption and illegal arrests in police departments; a great racial disparity in sentencing; the imprisonment of two million persons most of whom are poor and members of minority groups. Sponsorship of periodic ``Weeks of Outrage'' with citywide nonviolent actions including civil disobedience. Such ``Weeks of Outrage'' will be periodically sponsored until our just demands are met. The list of the ten demands set forth on March 27, 1999 are attached at the end of this Call Statement. strategy and tactics Using non-violent principles and techniques the purpose and mission of the ``Week Of Outrage'' is to provide every outraged citizen with an opportunity to publicly express that outrage and bear witness to the fact that the ``Caring Majority'' of New York City will not surrender to the oppression of the police establishment and the collaborating criminal justice system. For each of five days in all five boroughs Action Groups shall simultaneously assemble at several strategically selected protest sites within each borough for a citywide total of no less than fifteen sites. The non-violent soldiers at each site shall rally, march, conduct civil disobedience or engage in any other pre-planned non-violent activity. The absolute necessity is that citywide actions take place simultaneously in order to demonstrate the lack of capacity of the police to control citizens who are righteously indignant and organized. New York City belongs to the people and each day's coordinated mass actions will deliver the message of this forgotten truth. In order to maximize citizen participation and conserve resources the primary strategy for the assembled Action Groups shall be to march through key streets and intersections in ways that take command of the thoroughfares and public places. Civil disobedience with pre-planned arrests shall be carefully targeted. Most of each operation will be merely the assertion of the right to assemble--and for this activity no one can be arrested. The decision-making structure for the ``Week Of Outrage'' shall be lean, decentralized and flexible. There shall be an overall ``Caring Majority'' citywide Coordinating Committee and each borough shall have a Borough Coordinating Committee. Each Action Groups must choose its own Captains and Marshals. Action Group must have representation at all planning sessions and must accept a set of Caring Majority Non-Violent Principles and Procedures; however, approval of specific and detailed action plans will not be mandated. The Week Of Outrage War Plan To drive home the self-evident truth that the City belongs to the people and that the police and the power brokers can only operate with ``the consent of the governed'', five days of coordinated citywide actions are necessary. On Sunday prior to the first day of activity Meditation and Evaluation Rallies will be held in each borough to finalize the week's master-plan. On Monday the important first day of action must be launched on a test scale in order to pinpoint problems and weaknesses. On Tuesday an attempt will be made to raise the level of activity and to maximize the repetition of the most effective actions. On Wednesday the peak of participation will be reached. On Thursday and Friday variations and innovations in activity will be maximized. The Daily Outrage Action Schedule In accordance with the Daily Outrage Action Plan that has been agreed on during a Meditation and Evaluation Rally on the night before, Action Groups must assemble each morning at the designated protest sites. At the designated sites actions must begin simultaneously throughout New York City. Morning Actions must be conducted in ways that maximize participation by local residents. In selected neighborhoods within each borough, demonstrators must assemble without notifying the police in advance. Transitional Activities must move the masses to a designated citywide central protest site in Manhattan. This means that local morning actions should end by 1 P.M. in time for the citywide high visibility action of the day to begin by 3 P.M. Afternoon Action will be conducted at a designated site of high visibility and great traffic vulnerability in the heart of the City. Without engaging in civil disobedience the number of participants must be great enough to stop the business-as-usual activities of the business community. Evening Meditation and Evaluation Rallies shall be conducted in each borough. A review of strengths and weaknesses must take place and clear directions be given for the next day's Outrage Action Schedule. the weapons and resources A non-violent crusade must be an organized mobilization which understands how to best utilize its weapons and resources: Mobile Cell Phones must be available in large numbers to maximize communication at all times. A set of vital numbers will be compiled. Cameras of all kinds must be recruited to record incidents, especially the actions of the police. Each Action Group must have a Camera Unit responsible for coverage of the action from the periphery out of the reach of possible confiscation by the police. Bull Horns must be spread through each large group. Marshalls and Captains must be thoroughly trained to keep order, and to contain and isolate the agents of sabotage. A Legal Unit with at least one law student or paralegal must be attached to each Action Group. An Emergency Unit with at least one person capable of administering first aid must be a part of each Action Group. the cease fire and evaluation At the end of the ``Week Of Outrage'' a cease fire will be called for an indefinite period of time while the following factors are evaluated: --Has the pressure of the week's actions forced the Mayor, the Governor and the other significant power brokers to respond to the stated demands? --Has the one week crusade raised the level of awareness and strengthened the resolve of the ``Caring Majority'' to fight for justice? --Are the ranks of the ``Caring Majority'' expanding in all segments of the City's population? --Can future similar ``Weeks of Outrage'' be sustained with existing resources? --What strengths and weaknesses in the operation have thus far been identified? --What are the adjustments in structure with respect to decision-making and leadership which need to be made? --Can the one week crusade be effectively turned off with the capacity to resume at a later date? Mr. Speaker, the rest of my presentation is also concerned with the budget. I wanted to deal thoroughly with point seven. Point seven is juvenile justice and law enforcement. This is our seventh priority in the Congressional Black Caucus budget. Let me go back and deal with item one. Housing, health care, economic development, livable communities, foreign aid, welfare, low-income assistance, those are all important, but item one is education. In the remaining time I have, I would like to talk about our emphasis on education. The caring majority budget begins with the following introduction. We call our budget the Congressional Black Caucus Budget, a Budget for Maximum Investment and Opportunity. ``Carrying forward the great Democratic Party traditions of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry Truman's Marshall Plan and health care proposals, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society that produced Medicaid and Medicare. As advocates for the Democratic Party mainstream philosophy, the Congressional Black Caucus sets forth this budget for maximum investment and opportunity. ``As we prepare the year 2001 budget, we are blessed by the long warm rays of the sun of a coming decade of surpluses. Compassion and vision are no longer blocked by the specter of budget deficits. The conservative estimate is that there will be a $1.9 trillion non-Social Security surplus over the next 10 years. Using simple logic, we should be able to program about $200 billion for year 2001 as this window of opportunity opens.'' Program it means it may be in some tax cuts. It might be in investments in education. It could be in increases in jobs and training for welfare workers. There are a number of ways it can be programmed. I was pleased to hear that the Blue Dog budget, I do not know why they call themselves Blue Dogs but the conservative Democrats they are, the conservative Democrats are almost in agreement with what we are proposing on education. I will get back to that in a few minutes. ``Investment for the future must be our first priority. Maximizing opportunities for individual citizens is synonymous with maximizing the growth and expansion of a U.S. superpower economy. It is the ``age of information,'' stupid. It is the time of the computer and digitalization. It is the era of thousands of high level vacancies because there are not enough information technology workers. With enlightened budget decisions we can at this moment begin the shaping of the contours of a new cyber-civilization. ``If we fail to seize this moment to make investments that will allow our great Nation to surge forward in the creation of this new cyber- civilization, then our children and grandchildren will frown on us and they will lament the fact that we failed not because we lacked the fiscal resources but our failures, our very devastating blunder was due to a poverty of vision. ``We are the custodians of unprecedented wealth in a giant economy. But midget minds and tiny spirits have seized control and the only big sweeping idea being generated during this budget discussion is the negative Republican proposal for a monster tax cut for the wealthy. At a time when positive generosity is possible, such a proposal maximizes great selfishness.'' Let me just repeat that. ``We are the custodians of unprecedented wealth in a giant economy. But midget minds and tiny spirits have seized control and the only big sweeping idea being generated during this budget discussion is the negative Republican proposal for a monster tax cut for the wealthy. At a time when positive generosity is possible, such a proposal maximizes great selfishness.'' I want to criticize my Democratic colleagues. They have no sweeping, big proposals when that is what we need at this time. In the area of education, we need a big, sweeping proposal. It is pretty clear that education is the key to the future of this Nation. It is the key to our building a cyber-civilization. Mr. Speaker, I submit the introduction of the Congressional Black Caucus budget consisting of an introductory statement and a statement of a set of principles and assumptions for the Record. The Congressional Black Caucus Budget: A Budget for Maximum Investment and Opportunity Carrying forward the great Democratic Party traditions of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal; Harry Truman's Marshall Plan and Health Care Proposals; Lyndon Johnson's Great Society that produced Medicaid and Medicare; as advocates for the Democratic Party mainstream philosophy the Congressional Black Caucus sets forth this Budget for Maximum Investment and Opportunity. As we prepare the year 2001 budget, we are blessed by the long warm rays of the sun of a coming decade of surpluses. Compassion and vision are no longer blocked by the spectre of budget deficits. The conservative estimate is that there will be a 1.9 trillion dollar non-social security surplus over the next ten years. Using simple logic we should be able to program about $200 billion dollars for year 2001 as this window of opportunity opens. Investment for the future must be our first priority. Maximizing opportunities for individual citizens is synonymous with maximizing the growth and expansion of the U.S. superpower economy. It is the ``Age of Information'' stupid! It is the time of the computer and digitalization. It's the era of thousands of high level vacancies because there are not enough Information Technology workers. With enlightened budget decisions we can at this moment begin the shaping of the contours of a new Cyber-Civilization. If we fail to seize this moment to make investments that will allow our great nation to surge forward in the creation of this new Cyber-Civilization then our children and grandchildren will frown on us and lament the fact that we failed not because we lacked fiscal resources, but our failures, our very devastating blunder was due to a poverty of vision. We are the custodians of unprecedented wealth in a giant economy. But midget minds and tiny spirits have seized control and only the big sweeping idea being generated during this budget discussion is the negative Republican proposal for a monster tax cut for the wealthy. At a time when positive generosity is possible such a proposal maximizes great selfishness. The preparation of this Budget for Maximum Investment and Growth was guided by the set of principles and assumptions set forth in the statement below: 1. We accept the general direction of the President's Budget and the House Democratic Caucus. ``Families First'' is a motto we wholeheartedly endorse; however, more resources must be directed toward working families and the unique problems of African American families. 2. We view the projection of a 1.9 trillion dollar surplus over a ten year period as an overriding factor for the basic decisions to be made for the FY 2001 Budget. Common sense dictates that we approach this first year of the decade of budget surpluses with proposals for the most advantageous uses of one-tenth of the projected surplus. 3. Investment in the CBC designated priorities shall be our number one concern. We support a moderate plan to pay the national debt; however, the President's blueprint moves too far and too fast with debt reduction at the expense of investment. 4. The protection of Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are among the highest priorities of the CBC; however, investments in the education and training of the present and future workforce will provide greater guarantees for the solvency of Social Security and the sound financing of health care than any other policies or actions under consideration. 5. In budgeting for each function, the CBC accepts the principles of a balanced budget, however, increases in CBC priorities must not be inhibited by present budget caps and conventional assumptions. We assume that there is waste in several key areas which may be transferred to enhance better investments for the future. We also assume that there are excessive revenue expenditures to continue corporate welfare which may be eliminated to increase funding for our designated priorities. And finally, we assume that one-tenth of the projected ten year surplus must be factored into the development of this budget for maximum opportunity and investment. 6. The CBC accepts the basic thrust of President Clinton's proposal for the distribution of the surplus; however, the CBC will insist that the emphasis in priorities must be shifted. At least 10 percent of the surplus should be devoted to investments in programs for education and a second 10 percent should be allotted for investments which benefit working families and for safety net programs. 7. Tax cuts, which must be taken from the 80 percent of the surplus which remains, are not a high priority of the CBC; however, since the current political power equation dictates the inevitability of a White House approved tax cut, the CBC must insist that the tax cuts not exceed the percentage of the surplus which is allocated for CBC priorities. 8. Within the priorities earmarked by the President's budget, in each function, the CBC will strive to target some portion of the proposed allocations to the special needs of working families, the poor and the African American Community. New market opportunities and minority contract set-asides must apply across the board--and special units should be funded to implement and facilitate the targeting of CBC designated constituents. 9. Budget allocations for necessary programs that currently do not exist are encouraged. The proponents must also later develop legislation for authorization as part of the process to sell the ideas and convince the President to place the item on his priority list at the time of the end-game negotiations. Proposals for new methods of proposal solicitation, peer review, technical assistance, etc. are also in order. 10. The currently stated CBC FY 2001 Priorities are: Education, Housing, Health, Economic Development and Livable Communities, Foreign Aid, Welfare and Low income Assistance and Juvenile Justice and Law enforcement. Some additions or subtractions from these categories are possible; however, they will remain as the basic frame-work for CBC Budget and appropriations demands for the entire session of the 106th Congress. Members preparing budget functions should also consider promoting tactics and strategies which support the CBC's ongoing advocacy of these dollar allocation positions. To focus specifically on the most important item, education, everybody agrees that it is the number one priority. I wonder why everybody agrees. Every elected official agrees because we all read the same polls. We have been reading the polls for some time now. For the last 5 years, education has ranked among the top five priorities of the American people. Finally this year it has been the number one priority. Above concerns about Social Security, above concerns about crime reduction, the number one concern of the American public is education. So every party, every elected official has responded. Why is the response so feeble when the demand is so great? There are 53 million children out there in our American public schools. Yet the response is so feeble to their needs that we have up to now in the last 5 years appropriated not a single penny for school construction. Why is our response so feeble on a basic item like school construction? Is there a need for school construction? Our own General Accounting Office said 6 years ago that we needed $110 billion at that time, 6 years ago, in order to just maintain a physical infrastructure for the students in school at that time, without projecting what was coming. There have been tremendous increases in the number of school children who are attending public school in the last 6 years, so the problem has been compounded. But our feeble response has been on the Republican side, the Republican majority, zero, zero for construction. There is some kind of inbred instinctive reaction against the word ``construction.'' I hear many of my Republican colleagues say well, the Federal Government is not responsible for education, should not be responsible for school construction. The Federal Government is not responsible for roads and highways and sidewalks, but we have appropriated, we have approved, authorized $218 billion for roads and highways and mass transit over the next 6 years. There is nothing in the Constitution that says we should deal with highways and sidewalks and mass transit, but we are doing it. The highway system was not projected in the Constitution but we did it, we are doing it. Many other activities undertaken by the Federal Government are not mandated in the Constitution. It is a need we feel the Nation has and we rise to meet that need. We have great concern with defense. In all the budgets other than the Congressional Black Caucus budget there are proposals to increase the amount of defense. The President started with a huge increase for defense, and beyond that the Republicans want to add $17 billion more for defense. The Democratic Blue Dogs, conservatives, want to add money for defense. What will it gain us if we spend billions of dollars to perfect and to create more of these high-tech military systems if we do not have the people who can run them? The last great aircraft carrier that was launched in the United States was 300 personnel short. They had places for 300 people more and they could not find them because the high-tech systems on that aircraft carrier required a certain level of intelligence that would allow one to be trained in a certain way and a certain amount of exposure to previous training related to computers and the digital world. The world is going that way and we are rapidly pushing it that way. We are in the leadership. Our military technology is in the leadership above all. Who created the Internet? It was the American people who financed the Internet through the Defense Department. Our military created the Internet. There would be no Internet if it had not been for the genius of the people in the military who saw the need for that kind of system and began that system. So how are we going to operate this 21st Century military fighting machine unless we have more young people who have the appropriate training and education? No matter where one goes, they are going to find a need for more and better trained people. One cannot accomplish that if they refuse to construct decent schools, renovate schools. It is not just a matter of wiring the schools so that they can have computers and maybe hook up to the Internet, taking advantage of the fact that we have a thing called the e-rate which will give them a discount on the use of the Internet. It is not just a matter of that. It is a matter of they cannot even achieve in the basic areas of reading, writing and arithmetic if they are in schools that are unhealthy, unsafe and not conducive to learning. In New York City we have 200 schools that still have furnaces that burn coal. We subject children in New York City to the fumes of a coal- burning school to pollution in the air. We also have an asthma epidemic in New York City that goes on year after year. Is it surprising that we can take a map and the asthma epidemic is at its greatest in the areas where there are the coal-burning schools? One coal burning school has 500 students, and 100 of those students have serious respiratory illnesses and asthma, and half the teachers in the school also have serious respiratory illnesses, those who chose to stay. A lot of them left the school, which brings us to another problem. We are focused on the fact that there is a great teacher shortage looming. It is already in effect in New York City. One-third of the teachers are not certified because they cannot get certified teachers so they have to use uncertified teachers. So we have a problem already. Many other big cities have the same problem but it is going to get worse and the cities and the suburbs and everywhere will be without teachers unless we do something to make up for this great coming retirement of massive numbers of teachers. There are all kinds of programs being proposed but the simple matter of creating working conditions where those who are teachers will stay in the profession and those who are not teachers will look at what is going on and come in is a first step. One must have a decent place to work. Why should a teacher, a young person, want to study and become a teacher when he has other alternatives that are safer? Why go into a school where they have a coal-burning furnace? Why go into a school where the top floor has been abandoned because of the fact that it leaks so and the walls are crumbling; no matter how they try to fix it, it is just not going to work? They need a new school. Why go into a school where there are 35 students in a classroom where classes are being held in the hallways and closets and in some cases they have converted the boys' and girls' rooms into classrooms? Why teach under those conditions? Why work under those conditions? Why ask any young person to have that kind of dedication in the United States of America, the richest country that ever existed on the face of the earth? We are able to provide. There is no reason why we cannot provide decent school buildings. But school construction, as I said, meets a zero when it comes to the Republican majority. The President over the last few years has proposed a program which was zero in appropriations but at least it was a program which proposed that a setup be created whereby school boards and local education agencies or State governments or local governments could borrow money to build schools, up to $25 billion nationwide, and the Federal Government would pay the interest on the bonds. That was the President's proposal, to pay the interest on the bond of $25 billion and the Federal Government, if that program went into effect, over a 5- year period and all the $25 billion was spent, the Federal Government would be contributing over a five-year period $3.7 billion to school construction, to the problem of school infrastructure. Now, the General Accounting Office has said in 1995 we need $110 billion just to keep our present schools going. We are proposing in the Congressional Black Caucus budget that we spend $10 billion this year, next year and for the whole 10 years in this decade. Ten billion dollars would be $100 billion for school construction. If we have a $1.9 trillion, let us round it off, about $2 trillion expected in surpluses above and beyond the Social Security surplus, if we have $2 trillion and that is a conservative estimate, then we are proposing that only 5 percent of that be used for school construction. Is that an unreasonable proposal in a nation where the people have indicated again and again that they view education as a highest priority? Is that an unreasonable proposal when some of the surveys and polls have gone even further to ask people, among the priorities within education, what do they think is most urgent? One poll showed overwhelmingly people said fix the schools, we need to fix up the schools. Fixing up the schools means in some cases repairing existing schools that can be fixed. Fixing up the schools in some cases means modernizing the school, dealing with asbestos problems and being able to wire the school so they can have computers and get on the Internet. Fixing some schools and some problems in areas means they want new security measures taken and they need to have some capital items taken care of in terms of security. In most cases, fixing up schools means they need to build some new schools. Ten billion dollars per year is proposed. I have a bill which would authorize that by using provisions in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We will be marking up the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the rest of it, next week, I am told, in our committee. I am on the Committee on Education and the Workforce and the chairman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce is one of those people adamantly opposes spending a dollar for school construction, but he is in favor of education being cited as a number one priority. The Republican candidate for President, Mr. Bush, is in favor of education action by the Federal Government because he understands it is a number one priority. He is going to have a great education program but he has ridiculed the idea of spending money for school construction. In fact, in a very strange dialogue, I heard him say on television we should not spend money on school construction; bricks and mortar are not important. The Democratic candidate, Al Gore has said he is willing to mount a program of $115 billion for education reform over the next 10 years. He is moving in the right direction. How much of that will be committed to school construction? That is my question. I have here a hard hat that I carry around as a symbol of where we need to go. We need to let the builders of America take over to end this number one problem. One cannot solve any of the problems in education until they deal with the problem of physical infrastructure. We are winning, though, because the President moved beyond his proposal for bonds and interest and he put $1.3 billion in the budget for immediate repairs. We are winning. I understand the Republicans have also agreed to the bond proposal. We are winning. They need to hear from the American people that not only is education a priority but number one in education is school construction.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that my name be removed as a cosponsor of House Resolution 396, expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that a biennial budget process should be enacted in the second session of the 106th Congress.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, common sense and logic dictate that we should build into our economic policy a simple way to share in the great prosperity that this Nation is presently experiencing. A minimum wage increase is the way to share our great wealth with the people on the bottom. At this time of great prosperity, the gap is growing ever wider between rich and poor. In New York where the rich are richest, the gap between rich and poor is greatest. The infant mortality rate in New York is greater than anywhere else in the country. The Democratic substitute proposes a simple $1 increase over a 2-year period, a simple $2,000 increase in the annual pay. The best way to share the wealth and help the poor is to increase the amount of money in their paychecks. If my colleagues care about family values, common sense dictates that they support this small increase in income. If the new compassionate conservativism is not just phony public relations, then grant this measly $1 increase over a 2-year period. We need improvements in all of the social safety net programs: child care, health care, more public housing, decent schools, and educational opportunity. I support more funds and more programs to deal with these very serious problems. But the best way, the most efficient way, and the most effective way to help the poor is to put more money in their paychecks. Conservatives, step forward and show your compassion at a time when millionaires and billionaires are having their income doubled in a year, surely you can afford to give a $1 increase over a 2-year period to the poorest people in the country. Working families should not have to live in poverty. They go to work every day, and still they are in poverty. Even with this increase to $6.15 an hour over a 2-year period, we will not reach the $8 that is necessary to get out of poverty. Working families need higher paychecks. Compassionate conservatives, step forward and show your compassion.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably absent on a matter of critical importance and missed the following votes: On H.R. 2952, to redesignate the facility of the U.S. Postal Service in Greenville, South Carolina as the Keith D. Oglesby Station, introduced by the gentleman from South Carolina, Mr. DeMint, I would have voted ``yea.'' On H.R. 3018, to designate the U.S. postal office located at 557 East Bay Street in Charleston, South Carolina as the Marybelle H. Howe Post Office introduced by the gentleman from South Carolina, Mr. Clyburn, I would have voted ``yea.'' On H.R. 1827, the Government Waste Corrections Act, introduced by the gentleman from Indiana, Mr. Burton, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today was a historic day; and I join my colleagues on the other side in celebrating the passage of the Senior Citizens' Freedom to Work Act. It is a great achievement. We all should be quite proud of it. I congratulate my colleagues. It was a bipartisan achievement, and we should all celebrate it and also take the next step. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle said we should take steps to reduce the Social Security tax as soon as possible, so I hope that that is going to be somewhere in the proposed budget proposals and appropriations proposals, that we will begin to take back, roll back, the increase in the payroll taxes. The payroll taxes represent the largest increases in taxes over the last 2 decades. So we heard our colleagues on the Republican side say they think it ought to be rolled back. We want to endorse that wholeheartedly. Let us roll back the payroll tax and lower the taxes that people pay for Social Security. The immortal words of Thomas Jefferson kept ringing in my ears as I listened to the debate today, ``life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'' the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In affirming the fact that we want to take care of our senior citizens, we say we want to have more life, longer life, and we are all in favor of that. Life is sacred; and all over the world I think there is no ideology, no political philosophy at this point and no religion that condones irreverence for life. Reverence for life exists everywhere. No political party anywhere in the world openly says that some people should be destroyed and others should be kept in existence anymore. Reverence for life is there. We hope that the reverence for life, although there might be a debate about when life begins, how early it begins, whether there is life as we know it in the womb, or afterwards, all of those debates are debates where we respect each other's opinions and ought to work that out. But certainly once a human being is here, reverence for that life ought to exist. As we practice law enforcement, as we practice law enforcement we must all bear that in mind, that no one can be careless about another human being's life. I am going to be on the floor discussing the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget. I have said before that everything that we do in this Congress relates to the budget, and certainly the Social Security and the rollback of taxes is one item that we shall propose in our Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget. We will be dealing with many other subjects, education, housing, health, health care, economic development, livable communities, foreign aid, welfare, low- income assistance, juvenile justice and law enforcement. This last item, juvenile justice and law enforcement, was placed in the top priorities of the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget preparation process by the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee), who said it may not be a big budget item, she is not sure what form it is going to take, but we should address in this budget, which sets the tone for all that we are going to do this year, it will set the tone for the way the appropriations come out. We are spending money, and in spending money we show what is most important to us. We ought to deal with the juvenile justice and law enforcement system, certainly from the point of view of African Americans and other minorities, because there has been a series of eruptions in the last year that have made it quite clear that America has a very profound problem when it comes to law enforcement for minorities. The recent verdict in the trial of the four policemen who shot and killed Amadou Diallo is an indication of how profound that problem is. The verdict is not only outrageous because of the fact that it allows four armed policemen who shot down an innocent man standing in a doorway in the vestibule of his own home, it also is an outrage because of the fact that to cover up for those four men, a whole system went into place. The judicial system, the criminal justice system, collaborated in a coverup. We had very strange things happening. This is a problem. There are rogue cops. There are extreme elements in the law enforcement profession. We see them all the time, from Waco to the Amadou Diallo shooting. We see it in Los Angeles, where policemen are confessing about 2 decades of placing evidence on people and pretending they are guilty, convicting them, and also beating them up and sometimes shooting them. All kinds of things are being confessed and uncovered in the Los Angeles Police Department. We saw it in New Jersey, when finally the New Jersey State Police admitted they had an official policy of racial profiling. In Philadelphia some years ago we had the same problem of policemen who confessed after they were exposed of wrongfully placing evidence and people being convicted as a result. We see it tragically in Illinois, where in Illinois the governor said there should be no more executions until we take steps to straighten out law enforcement and the criminal justice system so that innocent people are not placed on death row. Why did he do this? Because of 25 people who were on death row, indisputable evidence was generated to prove that 13 were innocent, 13 of 25 were innocent. That, said the governor, is more than he can take; and he decided he would no more be a part of the possibility that innocent people would die. So we have in the whole Nation a pattern. We have 2 million people in prison in this Nation, and some people are proud of that. We are the only industrialized nation that has that kind of large number of people in prison. Most of those 2 million people in prison are people who are minorities. We have a problem that is nationwide. Amadou Diallo's case is not a New York case, and for that reason I come to the floor of the House to make certain that it gets the appropriate attention here in this forum. Mr. Speaker, the polls are showing in New York State that the overwhelming majority of the citizens of New York think that there was a miscarriage of justice in the verdict on the Amadou Diallo trial. Black and white together demonstrated in the streets of New York against this outrage. Criminally negligent homicide was obvious, if not manslaughter. After all, 41 bullets were fired, 19 entered the body of Amadou Diallo, and some of those bullets were fired after the body was on the ground. There were bullet holes in his feet, indicating that he was lying prone and they were still shooting. This problem of miscarriage of justice in the criminal justice system unfortunately is a nationwide problem, as I have just said, not just a New York problem. For that reason, we must insist that this Nation address the issue at this level. We are violating human rights on a massive scale. The situation deserves the immediate attention of the Congress of the United States. Acquittal of the officers who slaughtered Amadou Diallo is an outrageous miscarriage of justice, and it is a profound abuse of human rights. The leadership of the Caring Majority now has a sacred duty to set forth and carry out for as long as necessary a comprehensive plan for justice for Amadou Diallo and all the related people who are victimized by an oppressive criminal justice system. We want a permanent end to systemic police oppression and criminal justice system conspiracies throughout the entire Nation. Such a plan must include mass demonstrations, because only through mass demonstrations do we offer all citizens the opportunity to show their outrage. But beyond the direct action, there must be long-term legal, legislative and international diplomatic efforts to address this human rights abuse. The criminal justice system in America allows itself to be contaminated by the extremists in law enforcement, by the extremists in the police profession. The rogue cops and the rogue agents are abetted by the fact that the system will not expose them. When the rogue cops and the extremists commit crimes, or even violate ordinary procedures, immediately a coverup system goes into motion. An entire police department goes into motion to cover up the actions of a few, automatically, regardless of who they are. Several of these police who shot Amadou Diallo had a record of being brutal and using excessive force. That record was not allowed to be discussed in the trial, one of the problems with the trial. Several of them had been involved in incidents that were of a racist nature. None of their past history could be discussed. But all of it is relevant when you are seeking to determine which elements of the police department, which elements in the law enforcement system, are extreme and ought to be exposed. But instead of exposing them, respectful cops, people who are decent and know better, people who have a guilty conscience for years afterwards, go into motion. They call it the blue wall of silence. Automatically say nothing, do nothing to hurt your fellow policemen, and, in some cases, tell a lie, cover up. One of the reasons Amadou Diallo was shot so many times was the fact that there is also an unwritten code which says that if you have an extreme situation like that, every cop must be involved who is on the scene. There were four, and, even though he was down and dead, all four had to shoot, because that way you had a situation where there was no innocent witness. Nobody could be innocent and be a witness to what happened against the others. That is an unwritten code, which results in many times excessive shooting by police, large numbers of bullets being fired. The public is baffled, why did they do that? They did it so everybody would be culpable; nobody could be a witness. When these extreme situations occur, judges become part of the process of coverup, district attorneys become part of the process of coverup. The rigged American criminal justice system has once more in the case of Amadou Diallo massacred the human rights of a powerless minority person. Amadou Diallo was, first, a hate crime victim of deadly profiling. Policemen going through a minority neighborhood see a man on the steps of his own home, in his own vestibule, and decide he might be a criminal. If that is not racial profiling, I do not know what is racial profiling. It never happens in white neighborhoods. It never happens. We have not had these outrageous extreme cases in white neighborhoods. Amadou Diallo was a victim of police profiling. He was, secondly, the victim of a desperate police coverup, a coverup conspiracy which began when the police officers, who knew he was already helpless, all fired bullets into his body in order to guarantee that all four would be defendants and there would be no innocent witnesses. Like the blue wall of silence, this multiple assault technique is part of an unwritten code of coverup. Additionally, Amadou Diallo was a victim of the government's failure to appoint a special prosecutor to try a unique case involving a police department which routinely works in collaboration with the Bronx district attorney's office. Now, we have made demands for years that in cases involving police corruption, police misconduct, a special outside prosecutor who does not work with those police on an ongoing basis ought to be appointed. For the last 40 years we have made that demand, and it still goes unheeded. The prosecution's case in this trial, and the whole world saw it, and I want to congratulate the judge for at least one thing, he was willing to allow the trial to be on TV. Everybody could see the ineptness of the District Attorney's presentation. Now, we cannot believe that it was by mistake. Finally, Amadou Diallo was a victim of bold manipulation of other vital components of the judicial system. A judge who was known for his predilection to defend police officers, known for that, who was ignorant of and insensitive to the civic and social environment in which Diallo was killed. The New York City environment, this judge in Albany, the capital of New York State, knew very little about it. And then they recruited, in this change of venue, moving from New York City, the Bronx, to Albany, they recruited a jury that was definitely unfamiliar with the New York City factors, and large numbers of Upstate people are hostile to the whole complex set of problems that New York City faces, hostile to New York City's complex problems. Is that a jury of peers of the police? I do not think so. They do not live in Albany. Is it a jury of the peers of Amadou Diallo? Certainly not. But not by accident did all of this happen: The venue was changed, and a judge is selected who constantly asks the jury to see the case through the eyes of the police. When we take the charge of the judge to the jury, we would have a classic case of a jury being assaulted repeatedly with statements which push them to a decision that was an unjust decision and a miscarriage of justice. Given the negative structuring of this case, its outcome was predictable. Nonetheless, the caring majority of our community and the entire Nation, the shock, we are not evil enough to believe there is not a level of decency below which common sense and self-evident truths will not allow even the oppressive criminal justice system to sink. There might have been subtle factors that could be twisted to confuse a jury. However, manslaughter or negligent homicide were certainly one or two obvious crimes which they should have been convicted for. There are difficult days and months and years ahead, but the leadership of the African-American community and other endangered minorities, because the same problem in New York City is a problem in the Hispanic community, it is a problem in the Asian community, these other minorities are equally endangered. All decent, caring citizens must not allow this outrage to continue. For as long as necessary, we must unite to persevere and unite to push for justice. Let me just pause for a moment before I ask my colleague, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Meeks), the gentleman from Queens (Mr. Meeks), to join me. Let me just pause and repeat what I said before. There are a set of demands that were made in connection with the Amadou Diallo killing. On Saturday, March 27, 1999, that is a little less than a year ago, a group of people in New York City met about the Amadou Diallo case. They drew up a set of demands at that time. I am going to read those demands, those 10 demands. As I said before a few minutes ago, these ten demands which were set forth on March 27 of 1999 were demands, most of which had been repeated over and over again for the last 40 years. The characters change. There is a different mayor now, but previous mayors have been approached in the same way. Mayor Giuliani in this case was asked to immediately implement the recommendations of the Mollen Commission, which existed for a long time. They called a long time ago for the establishment of an independent investigative body with full subpoena power that had jurisdiction over police corruption and police brutality in New York City. Twice the City Council of New York has passed legislation creating a body to monitor corruption, but the mayor has done everything in his power to block its implementation, the present mayor, first by veto, and then when the Council overrode his veto, by tying the matter up in court. The mayor must also implement the recommendations from both the majority and dissenting reports of his own task force that he appointed in 1997 in the wake of the shocking Abner Louima incident. Abner Louima was a Haitian immigrant who was lucky that he did not lose his life after having been grossly abused in the police station. Only the hard work of a hospital which was able to deal with the damage done to his internal organs saved his life, and he at least is alive today, but there are probably few police brutality victims who have lived after experiencing such horror. The second demand made this time, and it has been made for the last 40 years, was that a civilian complaint review board be immediately appointed. We had one that was dismantled by this present mayor; that it be immediately reappointed, that it be strengthened and fully funded, so it can effectively investigate civilian complaints of police misconduct. The civilian complaint review board has been on the table for 40 years. For 40 years this reasonable proposal has been frustrated and distorted, and we have had enough. There are members of our community that we have appealed to, not to get irrational, not to be emotional, do not become violent, do not do anything outrageous, that would injure and harm individuals or groups or the image of our city or the image of our neighborhoods. Let us all be rational and reasonable. Let us understand that we are all disciples of Martin Luther King, and nonviolence is the way to work out these kinds of problems. They are waiting for us to work them out. We have made these reasonable demands for 40 years, and for 40 years we have not been able to make any headway. The third demand, the State legislature must pass legislation creating a special prosecutor for police brutality and corruption in New York. In conjunction with this, the State Attorney General must create a special unit on police misconduct, and should issue an annual report documenting instances of misconduct throughout the State. This was a reasonable demand made by reasonable people, and they have ignored it. Only under great pressure, only under great pressure did the last Governor, Governor Cuomo, appoint a special prosecutor in the horrifying Griffeth case, where a man was chased to his death on a highway, but that was an exception to the rule. Why not as a rule do what is rational and reasonable; understand that the District Attorneys cannot effectively prosecute the police? They work with the police every day. They are not in a position to prosecute the police. There is a gross conflict of interest that we cannot overcome. Item four, the police department must develop a comprehensive training program, developed in consultation with outside experts, to school its officers in racial and cultural sensitivity, and must also implement a rigorous process of in-depth psychological screening of its recruits and officers. I can only tell the Members that I know police officers who say that when this effort was made, under pressure, with one of the two teams that they pretended to introduce comprehensive training related to racial and cultural sensitivity, that it has been a big joke. The police force has laughed it into oblivion. They do not take it seriously because the command from the top does not make themselves take it seriously. This is a reasonable demand. Demand number four is a reasonable demand. Why is it not met? Why do they not respond to reasonable demands? Demand number four, the New York Police Department should reflect the makeup of the citizen population it serves. New York City police officers should live in New York City. The State legislature should immediately pass a law mandating residency for city officers. This is a reasonable demand. I ask Members, anywhere in America, is this an unreasonable demand? In most of our counties and cities throughout the United States there is a requirement that police officers and other civil servants live in the community. New York City is the exception. New York City is the exception even in New York State, where most jurisdictions require that their local police live in their jurisdiction, that they live in the city or county that they serve. Why is New York City an exception? Because the power brokers in New York are such that they were able to force the State, to get the State legislature to pass laws which exempt New York City. They cannot do what other places in New York State can do. They cannot require a residency law. The City Council of New York City has on several occasions passed laws which require police to live in the city; not to disrupt the lives of existing police officers and say, if you are a police officer now you have to move back into the city. No. It has been very generous, and they only require new recruits to. Anybody coming into the police department as a new recruit must live in the city. The City Council passed it, it has gone to the State legislature, and it refuses to pass it. One of my close colleagues, Assemblyman Al Vann, has recently offered legislation again in the New York State Assembly. It has no chance of passing by the Republican-controlled Senate or being signed by the Governor. This is a reasonable demand. This is the way it is done in most of America. Why cannot the power brokers, the mayor, the Governor of New York city and New York State, respond in a reasonable way to reasonable demands? Demand number six, the police commissioner must also take specific and immediately steps to recruit more minorities and women to serve as police officers and develop a plan to increase promotion opportunities for women and minority officers. This is a reasonable demand, that we have recruiting programs to get more minorities. The number of minorities in the police force has gone down over the last two decades instead of up. The number of minorities, Hispanic and black, are less now in the upper ranks than they were 10 years ago. We have obviously not had a sincere effort by the police department and the city administrations to meet this kind of reasonable demand. Demand number seven, who can disagree with demand number seven, that the salary and benefits for police officers must be improved? Law enforcement officers are entrusted with extraordinary responsibilities and they should be compensated accordingly. Traditionally, New York City police officers have certainly not been underpaid when compared to the surrounding suburbs, but now their pay is falling behind. We think that the recruitment problem of high- quality people, whether they are white or African-American or Hispanic, the recruitment of high-quality people is enhanced by maintaining decent salaries and benefits, and certainly the members of the police department do not disagree with us on that one. However, we see no special effort to package the police benefits and salaries and the recruitment program in a way to attract more minorities to the present police structure. Demand number eight, the police department's 48-hour rule, which delays the ability of the New York Police Department investigators to question any police officer charged with violations of New York Police Department rules and regulations, must be eliminated. They have 48 hours in which they cannot question a police officer in New York. If something goes wrong, he has 48 hours to get his story together. We cannot question him until the 48-hour period has elapsed. Demand number nine, that weapons, ammunition, and tactics used by the department must be assessed and periodically reviewed, not only to measure effectiveness, but to protect the safety of innocent New Yorkers. The use of hollow point bullets should be discontinued immediately. That is point number nine. I must congratulate the mayor and the city administration for responding to point number nine. After the death of Amadou Diallo, at least there has been a restriction on the use of hollow point bullets. So we have ten demands, and one, there has been a reasonable effort made to try to comply with it. Point number 10 is addressed not to the mayor of New York City, but to the Congress. Congress must call on the Justice Department to honor its commitment to monitor and issue annual reports documenting instances of police misconduct throughout the country. This promise was made in the wake of the Rodney King incident, and has yet to be acted upon. The Justice Department is still too timid in its approach to the violation of civil rights and human rights of citizens across the country by police and the criminal justice system. These are reasonable demands, and when we tell our people in our districts, be reasonable, do not get too emotional, we are going to resolve this problem through nonviolent, legal, rational means, we are going to negotiate it through, as leaders we would like some response from the other side of the table. The other side of the table not only includes Mayor Giuliani, in the case of New York City, not only includes Governor Pataki, but the whole power structure of New York, the businessmen and what we call the permanent government of New York. Certain organizations and institutions sit there year after year as we make these demands and they put no pressure on to make certain that reasonable responses are made to reasonable demands. They are as guilty as the public officials who year after year, administration after administration, ignore these reasonable demands. At this point, I would like to yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Meeks), my colleague from Queens, who is also a member of the Task Force on Police Brutality of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from the 10th Congressional District in Brooklyn, New York (Mr. Towns). He mentioned Randolph Evans as an example of the police slaughter that has gone on over the last 30 years. Randolph Evans was a young man standing in a crowd on the grounds of a housing project. There was some kind of disturbance. The police officer walked up, he put a gun to his head, and shot him in front of a whole host of witnesses. There was no defense for that. So they came up with a defense at the trial that the police officer suffered from psychomotor epilepsy. Psychomotor epilepsy. I have never heard the term since then. But he was acquitted as a victim of psychomotor epilepsy. He had taken the life of a young man, and he was acquitted. This shows my colleagues why we were so outraged many years later to find 41 shots being fired at Amadou Diallo. The gentleman from the 10th Congressional District of Brooklyn and I also share another problem. In the New York Times yesterday there is a report of ``High Infant Mortality Rates In Brooklyn'' and how they mystify experts. In Brownsville, which is in my district, in Bedford- Stuyvesant, which is mostly in the district of the gentleman from New York (Mr. Towns), there is an alarming increase in the number of babies who are dying at birth. While all across the Nation there seems to be a decrease, there is an alarming increase in these two communities. It so happens these two communities are communities that have the largest number of welfare recipients in New York City. The third community suffering also is in the Bronx, a large number of welfare recipients. The enforcement of the new Welfare Reform Act in New York City by Mayor Guiliani has been harsh and brutal. There is no mystery here. Mothers are suffering because of the harsh and brutal way in which the Welfare Reform Act is being implemented. They are suffering from the lack of care. They are suffering from the fact that it is more difficult to get housing. It is more difficult to get help for their children. They are suffering because there is not enough day care. So I started this discussion by saying that, whenever I come to the floor, I want to discuss the budget that we are getting ready to prepare, because the budget sets the tone for everything else we do and is important here in the House of Representatives. The budget will guide the discussion leading to the appropriations process. The way we spend money tells the world what we think is important. We must spend money on better health care for these youngsters so at the beginning of their lives they have a chance. We have a problem at the end, a problem with respect to young people like Amadou Diallo, Randolph Evans, and others. We do not want them to be cut down in the prime of their lives by irresponsible and reckless police officers. The rogue police officers, the extremist police officers must not be aided and abetted by the police department and the mayors and the governors and the judges. They must expose and isolate these rogue extremist elements within the application and law enforcement area throughout the Nation. Thomas Jefferson said, ``You have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'' I congratulated the Congress when we started. Today we took a great step forward. We moved the cap on the earnings of senior citizens. We recognize that a long life should be rewarded. Every step should be taken to make that long life as pleasant as possible. But at the end of life or in the middle or in the beginning, it is all important and equal amounts. We want to, all three of us, declare that for all those people in our districts and the rest of New York City and throughout the State and anywhere else in the country, we want to know what action you are going to take. We have told you we call for these demands to be met. We are appealing to the Justice Department to intervene. We are going to take the case in some form to the United Nations. There was a demonstration on Saturday before the United Nations. That is just a beginning, because there are gross violations of human rights throughout the entire Nation. We also are going to call for an activity and an action in which everybody can participate. We are going to call for an April week of caring majority nonviolent outrage. We had a day of outrage once in New York City. They know what that means. We are calling for an April week of caring majority nonviolent outrage where all of the citizens of New York, black and white, can express themselves. That effort will be followed by demands that the negotiations be met. In the last 40 years, more than 50 outrageous killings of New York City citizens by the police have gone unpunished. From the children, Clifford Glover, and Randolph Evans, to grandmother Eleanor Bumpers who was killed in her own living room, mental patient Gideon Bush, and immigrant Amadou Diallo, the careless actions of individual policemen have been supported and excused by a collaborating judicial system and by the establishment press and media, by the power brokers, and the governors of New York City. We declare that the caring majority of New York City will no longer surrender to these gross injustices. We are going to take action until they yield on our reasonable demands. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the article in the New York Times that appeared February 29, 2000, which talks about the ``High Infant Mortality Rates In Brooklyn Mystify Experts'' as follows: [From the New York Times, Feb. 29, 2000] High Infant Mortality Rates in Brooklyn Mystify Experts (By Jennifer Steinhauer) In central Brooklyn--where storefronts are boarded, housing projects stand in defiant opposition to the boom times, and the hospitals are more or less broke--babies are dying at rates that the city as a whole has not seen in nearly two decades. And they die, in some cases, at a rate double what the federal government has set as the infant mortality goal for the nation. Often, they die months before they were meant to be born, their bodies a tangle of minute bones and skin, weighed in grams rather than pounds. Some never see their mother's faces; they are gone right after birth. Others leave the hospital with a shopping bag of drugs and a mother overwhelmed by her own myriad problems, and do not make it to their first birthday. While the infant mortality rate in New York has fallen steadily in the last decade, it has fallen much more slowly in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville, neighborhoods with considerable populations of new immigrants. In New York City in 1988, babies less than a year old died at a rate of 6.8 per 1,000 which is slightly better than the national average, 7.2. Bedford-Stuyvesant, however, has one of the highest rates in the country, 14 per 1,000, a 20 percent increase over 1997. The last time the average rate of infant mortality was that high in New York City over all was 1983. That the number is on the rise at all is startling. It stands against the national trend even in cities with severe social problems, like Washington, where the rate is 12.5 per 1,000. In Brownsvill, the story is much the same; the rate slides up and down each year, averaging about 10 deaths per 1,000 babies in the last five years. While the disparity between children of black and white mothers has always been stark, there is evidence that the gap is closing elsewhere in the city. The infant mortality rate in the Tremont section of the Bronx, for example, is 8.1, a 54 percent decrease from 1988. The figures have so concerned the city's health commissioner, Dr. Neal L. Cohen, that he has made reducing infant mortality one of his top priorities for this year. There seems to be no clear answer to why the same neighborhoods stand out year after year, and why some would buck the downward trends. Experts seem to agree that even when the resources exist--prenatal care at low cost, hospitals willing to deliver babies, government-subsidized infant formula and food--it is still profoundly difficult to get many pregnant women through the doors. ``It is perplexing question,'' said Dr. Katherine La Guardia, who runs the ambulatory obstetrics and gynecology clinic at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center in Brownsville. ``A huge amount of effort has gone into improving prenatal care, but we still don't know how one reaches the most unreachable.'' Those are the mothers who are addicted to drugs, who are H.I.V. positive, unemployed or living in New York as illegal immigrants. Women who fit those descriptions often avoid going to see doctors before they give birth out of fear, experts said, that their babies will be taken from them or that they will be deported. Others are discouraged by family members, who do not believe in prenatal care or are suspicious of the entire medical system. ``The question is, how do we make women less afraid to get care,`` Dr. La Guardia said. Other mothers want prenatal care but cannot get it because they live too far from a health clinic or hospital, or have small children and no one at home to care for them while they make the trek to the doctor. There are also anomalies that cannot be readily explained. For instance, neighborhoods with a high concentration of immigrants from the Caribbean seem to report the highest infant mortality figures. ``What is interesting about Bedford is that 42.1 percent of the women are foreign-born,'' said Dr. Tanya Pagan Paggio, an associate professor of medicine at the City University of New York. ``This is important because when you look at other places in the city where there is a high level of foreign-born, infant mortality rates are closer to 6 percent,'' Dr. Paggio said. ``In Bedford, there are a lot of Caribbean people. And we know that Jamaican women have a 9.4 per 1,000 rate, Haitian women have about 11 per 1,000 and rates among women from Trinidad and Tobago are also high. You have to wonder if these women have access to service they need.'' Robin Bennett is desperate not to let her baby become another sad statistic. At 23, she is pregnant with her fourth child, a baby with a heart condition. One son is in foster care, and the other lives with her mother. Her daughter, who is 18 months old, lives with Ms. Bennett in a government- subsidized apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Her problems are as complicated as they are numerous: her apartment is full of bugs that bite her baby, she said, adding that one of her children was a result of a rape. Her mother, who has AIDS, is her main line of support. ``Sometimes I cry at night because I wonder if the stress in my life gave this baby her hole in her heart,'' Ms. Bennett said. She finds herself gravitating to Brooklyn Perinatal Network, an organization that tries to keep babies like Ms. Bennett's from dying by shepherding women into prenatal care, advocating for them on housing issues and giving other social support. In fact, a lack of access to housing, nutritious food and adult support may contribute to infant mortality as much as poor medical care, many experts say. ``Prenatal care has probably been overstated,'' said Dawn Misra, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and an expert on infant mortality. ``If you look at a program like Healthy Start, you see it is a broader initiative with resources like food, social support and other things like smoking cessation clinics, which is import because smoking may lead to low-birth-weight babies, and low birth weight is the leading cause of infant mortality.'' When Bedford-Stuyvesant lost a majority of its financing in 1997 for Healthy Start, a federal program intended to help poor women have healthy babies, the infant mortality rate shot up, said Ngosi Moses, who runs the Brooklyn Perinatal Network. `'When resources became scarce, those rates rose,'' Ms. Ngosi said. ``This shows you when money is put into the community, good things happen, and when the money is pulled out, they go out.'' The $6.8 million that was spread over 22 programs in the early 1990's now has to cover 94 programs. Brownsville is a neighborhood that a decade of economic expansion seems to have left untouched, where Healthy Start does not even exist. Rows of private homes are boarded up, and stores are scarce, save for a few of the dollar-bin variety. The number of people, especially women, who are infected with the AIDS virus is ``astonishing,'' Dr. La Guardia said. In most hospitals in the city, it is almost a given that a mother will leave the maternity ward with a healthy baby in her arms. In Brownsville, it is often just short of a victory. Dr. La Guardia and her boss, Dr. Martin Gimovsky, who heads the obstetrics department at Brookdale, spend their days trying to unravel the histories and medical problems of the poor women who come through its clinics and labor and delivery floor each day. Many have never had a day of prenatal care. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, during Dr. Gimovsky's clinic for women with high-risk pregnancies, dozens of women crammed into a waiting room. Almost all of them had had children before, including the recently homeless woman with AIDS who did not know her due date and had had virtually no prenatal care. ``You've gained weight,'' the resident said reassuringly. ``Well, I'm living somewhere now, so I am much more relaxed,'' said the woman, who would not give her name. Cynthia Martinez, who has three children and is pregnant with a fourth, still calls her first baby, the one who was stillborn, by her name, Cynthia Michelle. ``She is 10 now,'' she said. The baby stopped moving at 7 months, and by the time Ms. Martinez delivered her, the doctors told her she was dead. Distraught, Ms. Martinez said that she grabbed the baby of the woman she shared a room with when it was brought in for a feeding and refused to let her go. ``I just kept saying, `You can't take this baby from me,'' Ms. Martinez, 24, said, ``I guess I thought she was mine. My mother told me that God had taken one from me but would give me more.'' Few patients at Brookdale, one of the city's most financially strained hospitals, pay the full price of their care, if they pay at all. Many are covered by the Prenatal Care Assistance Program, a state-financed program for poor pregnant women. ``We work with the patients no one wants,'' said Dr. Gimovsky, a plump and congenial doctor, who jokes easily with the teenage girls who fill the cramped clinic space. He recruited Dr. La Guardia by likening her work to that of the Peace Corps. ``You don't make any money at this,'' he said cheerfully, ``but this is what I want to do with my life.'' Although the infant mortality rates in Brownsville are historically lower than in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the March of Dimes earmarked the neighborhood for a $152,000 program to try to get more services to women. It is also pushing legislators in Albany to raise the maximum income women may earn and still qualify for prenatal care. Dr. La Guardia has been at Brookdale for only a few months. Unlike Dr. Gimovsky, she is businesslike, almost stern, and deeply weary over the hospital's dire fiscal situation. ``I am still in shock,'' she said. Money would permit the hiring of more doctors and nurses. Ultrasound machines, standard equipment in any Manhattan obstetrics office, are scarce. A portable ultrasound, the latest in technology, is unheard of. ``Clearly, there are more dollars that need to be funneled into this area,'' Dr. La Guardia said. ``You wonder if there is any hope.''

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Meeks), who is also cochair of the Congressional Black Caucus Task Force on Police Brutality. I just want to repeat for all, before I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Towns), my second colleague from New York, I want to repeat that the fact that we are talking about the verdict that the majority of New York City and New York State citizens consider to be a miscarriage of justice. We are talking about the fact that 10 reasonable demands that have been made for the last 40 years which, if they had been heeded, would have gone a long ways toward preventing what happened in the Amadou Diallo case. We are talking about the fact that there are extremist elements in police departments, in law enforcement agencies. The rogue cops and the extremist elements, however, are aided and abetted by the cover-up procedure that takes place, from the commissioner and the mayor on down, when something goes wrong. The criminal justice system goes into motion to cover up these cases. Our appeal is to meet those 10 demands in the case of New York City. We will go a long ways toward seeing to it that this never happens again. We also appeal for national action. Tomorrow, members of the Congressional Black Caucus will be meeting with the Justice Department to talk about their duty to intervene in this case, to follow through on the legislation that already exists, which enables them to investigate whether or not the civil rights of Amadou Diallo were violated. If they were violated, they can prosecute these same four policemen on the violation of the civil rights of Amadou Diallo. We also would like national action in this Congress. My colleague, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Meeks), has said that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) will be introducing a bill which is called the Law Enforcement Trust Integrity Act of 2000. We would like to see a response from the entire Congress. This is a matter for the caring majority. All decent citizens should want to see to it that there are no further miscarriages of justice; all decent citizens who want to see to it that the rogue cops, the extremist elements of law enforcement, are isolated. Mr. Speaker, beyond that, we want to let it be known that we are going to organize and appeal to the United Nations that the pattern of the violations that exist throughout the entire Nation, which ranges from Amadou Diallo's killing to the Los Angeles Police Department's confessions of gross brutality and miscarriages of justice to the fact that we have 2 million people in prison, most of whom are minorities, to the police profiling of the New Jersey State troopers, on and on it goes. And we would like to raise this debate to a higher level and have the rest of the world look at the violations of human rights in America. Already Amnesty International has said that New York City has a pattern of police oppression which violates human rights. I would like to yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Towns) who is from the 10th Congressional District.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the polls are showing in New York State that the overwhelming majority of the citizens of New York think that there was a miscarriage of justice in the verdict on the Amadou Diallo killing trial. Black and white together are demonstrating in the streets of New York against this outrage. Criminally negligent homicide was obvious. Forty- one bullets were fired; 19 in the body after the body was on the ground. This problem of miscarriage of justice in the criminal justice system, unfortunately, is a nationwide problem. It is not only a New York problem. In Los Angeles, the police are continuing to confess to 20 years of planting evidence on suspects and convicting people wrongly. In New Jersey, they have admitted to systemic racial profiling. Illinois has just stopped the death penalty from moving forward because 13 of 25 inmates on Death Row were found to be innocent. Two million people are in prison in this Nation. Most of them are minorities. Justice for minorities is a national issue. Justice for minorities is also an international human rights issue. We are violating human rights on a massive scale. This situation deserves the attention of the Congress of the United States.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we passed a bill today which deals with black history. Black history is being featured this month, the month of February. A number of my colleagues said they might join me to go further in the exploration of important aspects of black history tonight. I welcome them. I also think that what I have to say tonight about the budget and the proposed Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget is very much related to our concerns with black history. There is an opportunity here with this budget this year and the budgets that come for the next 10 years, an opportunity to deal with an overriding question that ought to concern more Americans, and that is what does one do about the impact and the long-term effects of the 232 years of slavery, the 232 years which denied one group of Americans the opportunity to own property and to gain wealth and, therefore, all of their descendents are behind the rest of the American mainstream population because they did not have any people to inherit anything from; and it appears that for some reason that is related to them individually or genetically, that they just cannot keep up economically with the rest of America. If we look at it without looking at history and without examining the fact that 232 years of slavery denied the right to own property and to accumulate wealth, then one cannot explain the phenomenon. So, as we look at the preparation of the budget for this year in a time of great surplus; we are projecting a surplus over the next 10 years of $1.9 trillion. We will have more in revenues than we spent, even after we take out Social Security surpluses and Social Security surpluses are put in a separate so-called lockbox, we still have, after preserving all of the surpluses in Social Security, we still have $1.9 trillion projected over the next 10 years. It is an opportunity to deal with some deficiencies that have been on the books for a long time. It is an opportunity to emphasize the need for programs or the initiation of programs for people on the very bottom. We passed a bill today related to Carter G. Woodson and Carter G. Woodson's role in keeping the whole idea of black history alive. I am going to try to show tonight that we have an opportunity by examining black history, examining the history of African Americans in the United States of America, we have an opportunity to understand some greater truths and to understand how we can utilize the present window of opportunity in terms of a budget surplus of unprecedented magnitude which can allow us to take steps to make some corrections of some of the conditions that are highlighted when we examine black history, some of the injustices that are highlighted. Carter G. Woodson never emphasized the concept of reparations, but at the heart of the matter of the concept of reparations is that somehow this great crime that took place in America for more than 232 years ought to be rectified. There ought to be some compensation. Every year, every session of Congress, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) for the last 10 years has introduced a bill which deals with reparations. I want to relate how the passing of the legislation related to Carter G. Woodson and the study of black history is related to the reparation legislation that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) introduces every year. I want to go beyond that and show how it is also relevant to a recent book published by the head of TransAfrica, Randall Robinson. It is called ``The Debt;'' D E B T, ``The Debt.'' Then I want all of that to come back and be applied to our development of the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget. As I said, I will be joined by some colleagues of mine who will talk about various aspects of black history. I had a history professor when I was at Morehouse College who had great contempt for the whole idea of celebrating or in any way highlighting black history. He thought that when we pull out separate facts and dates and heroes from one set of people and we magnify that and make it more visible and try to build history around that, it was the wrong way to proceed; that scholars like himself always saw history as a complicated, interwoven set of developments, and we cannot really have history that highlights certain basic facts about one people or another. Well, I think that the scholar of history has a point there. We understand that when we are dealing with history as a matter of the record to be read mainly by other scholars and journalists and various people who have a great interest with dealing with history at that level, where it is most accurate, most comprehensive, there may be an argument. But in terms of popular education, the fact is that those same scholars and historians over the years were leaving out, totally leaving out consideration of any developments that related to African- Americans or to slaves or the descendents of slaves, and that Carter G. Woodson wanted to let African-American children and adults know that here is a history that they are part of in the most constructive way. So he started by highlighting positive achievements of Negroes in America, positive achievements of the descendents of slaves and of slaves themselves. He highlighted the fact that Benjamin Banneker was involved, very much so, in the layout of the city of Washington. He was part of a commission. Benjamin Banneker was a black man. He was part of a commission that determined how Washington would be laid out. With the architect, L'Enfant, L'Enfant, he was there. Some parts of the plans were lost at one point, and Banneker restructured the plans from his memory, and played a major role in carrying out the grand design that we all see in Washington here in terms of the way the Capitol was laid out and the White House is placed in a certain place, and the Mall and the streets and all, that was part of the original grand design for Washington. There was a black man, Benjamin Banneker, involved. Nobody bothers to note that. So Carter G. Woodson was the kind of person, a historian, who felt that those little facts that are left out become important; the fact that Crispus Atticus was the first man to die in the Boston massacre, and the fact that he was black was not properly noted until people like Carter G. Woodson brought it to our attention. The role of blacks in various inventions and various other developments was completely left out until Carter G. Woodson brought it to our attention. I think Randall Robinson wants to go much further. His book is new and has just come out. He is raising the study of black history as part of American history to a different level. He sat in the Rotunda of the Capitol and looked at all of the friezes that are carved around the Rotunda today. He begins his book, his introduction, by discussing the fact that in that frieze and in that set of depictions that are carved, we find no black people. He notes that fact as he ponders how the stones got to the Hill here, how the stones were lifted up. We had no cranes and no machinery. He notes the fact that to build the Capitol there was a request that was sent out for 100 slaves, 100 slaves to begin the work of the Capitol. That is how it started, those 100 slaves. Their masters were paid $5 a month for the work of those 100 slaves. That is a fact that we will not find anywhere in any of the books that the Architect of the Capitol has and the Capitol historian. They do not have those facts. We have to go hunt for them somewhere else. So the study of black history as part of overall American history becomes very important, either when we look at the details one by one, the accomplishments, heroes people overlook, or when we look at the broader issues of labor, economics: Who built this country, whose sweat, whose labor built the country. When we look at the facts there, there is an important lesson to be learned. There are some unpaid debts. That is why Randall Robinson has chosen to call his book ``The Debt.'' Before we get to those kinds of concepts, and I often have young people ask me, why do not you and Members of the Black Caucus place greater emphasis on fighting for reparations? Why do you not throw down the gauntlet and demand that there be reparations for the descendents of slaves? The reparations idea is now very much accepted in Europe, and maybe the Japanese will accept it soon. They are holding back. They will not even apologize for the way they ravaged China, let alone concede that some reparations are owed. But in Europe they have accepted it. The Germans, the German industries, have now agreed that during the war we had Jews and other folks who were committed, forced to do slave labor in our factories, so the private sector has come together under the tutelage of the government and decided they are going to give $5 billion to the living persons who can be identified as having been part of that slave labor. I think they ought to do something for the descendents of those people, too. I think the reparations also have to be spread to the people who died in the concentration camps. The government of Switzerland, along with the private banking system in Switzerland, has decided that they will establish a fund of more than $2 billion to admit that they swindled the Jews who were fleeing Hitler and came to Switzerland, and they wanted to hide their money. They swindled the descendents of those people by refusing to recognize that they had the money, and that they knew how to identify who it belonged to. All these years they have refused to do that, for more than 50 years. Now they are ready to give $2 billion in reparations, $2 billion to compensate the people who can be identified for what has been denied them. So the whole concept of something is owed, not by the Swiss bankers who are there now, because those who actually took the money and hid it are probably dead, but the banking system, the banking system feels it owes it; not by the corporate heads who were running the German companies at the time that they had the slave labor and people were forced to do slave labor in their factories, but the companies themselves have descendents, and the wealth they accumulated is part of the wealth that was accumulated during the time of the forced slave labor. Therefore, they are willing to contribute; reluctantly, but they are willing, coerced by the government a bit, but they are willing to contribute $5 billion in reparations. If reparations is acceptable in Europe, it ought to be acceptable in the United States, also. We ought to take a hard look at the concept. We have had one example in this Nation where we recognize the need for reparations. We did not exactly call it that, I think it was called compensation, or some other word, of the Japanese who were imprisoned during World War II. We voted, I voted, since I have been here, on a bill which provided compensation for those who were still alive who were people involved in that horrible situation where they were swept up from their homes on the West Coast and thrown into concentration camps. I think $20,000, if I remember correctly, per person was allowed. Many of these people are quite old and feeble and many have died, but we actually appropriated around $20,000 per person for the Japanese who were interned during World War II. So the concept of reparations is certainly not totally foreign to this Congress or to the United States culture. I am not going to dwell on that, however. I say to the young people who are insisting we should focus on reparations and have a showdown on reparations, I am as indignant and concerned as they are, but the practical thing to do is to try to get as close to some policies in the United States government that will have the same impact and the same overall effect. Therefore, opportunity should be emphasized. In this budget that we are going to prepare as a Congressional Black Caucus alternative, I want to emphasize maximum opportunity as a way of dealing with the descendants of slaves who are in various ways disadvantaged and left behind mainstream Americans because they did not have the chance to accumulate wealth in the past. Let their children have maximum educational opportunity, but going beyond their children, I say, let all poor children in America. Income should not be a barrier to attaining the best possible education. Every child born in America should understand that one way or another, he is going to have the opportunity to go to college, or go as far as he wants to go in attaining the education which will allow him to set himself free economically. Education is at the top of the list for the Congressional Black Caucus because reparations, the reparations opportunity can be delivered most effectively and most rapidly through education. There are many other items that we have on our list. We have housing, health, economic development, livable communities, foreign aid, welfare and low-income assistance, juvenile justice, and law enforcement. All of those items are part of a budget that is going to seek to rectify shortcomings of the past, and also to highlight the fact that in the present budget these same items, same concerns, have not been dealt with effectively. We endorse a large part of the budget that has been submitted by President Clinton. We endorse a large part of it, but we also would like to highlight a lot of omissions, a lot of deficiencies. We would also like to say that we do not think that that budget goes far enough in providing maximum opportunity, and we want to deal with that in the Congressional Black Caucus budget. I want to pause at this point and yield to my colleague, the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee), for her to make any observations she wishes to make with respect to black history. This is Black History Month, and as I said at the beginning, I think everything we are doing can be sort of woven together. The knowledge of black history in the past throws a light on what we have to do at present, and gives us some vision for where we have to go in the future. The details of black history are as important as the broad concepts that we need to guide us as we learn the lessons of black history. All of it is very important, and I think that we should have more than one month to deal with it. But we like to look at the month of February as just a time to highlight and to raise up the visibility of the relevance of black history, and that the rest of the year people would understand how it also has to be interwoven with our current concerns, as well as those current concerns being taken care of against a background and backdrop of past history. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Meek) for her kind remarks. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald) for her comments. I would like to close with quotes from the book by Randall Robinson, The Debt. No race, no ethnic or religious group, has suffered so much over so long a span as blacks have, and do still, at the hands of those who benefited, with the connivance of the United States Government, from slavery and the century of legalized American racial hostility that followed it. It is a miracle that the victims-weary dark souls long shorn of a venerable and ancient identity have survived at all, stymied as they are by the blocked roads to economic equality. At long last, let America contemplate the scope of its enduring human-rights wrong against the whole of a people. Let the vision of blacks not become so blighted from a sunless eternity that we fail to see the staggering breadth of America's crimes against us. Solutions to our racial problems are possible, but only if our society can be brought to face up to the massive crime of slavery and all that it has brought. Step by step, in every way possible, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus are seeking to force the issue of having America face up to the need to compensate, the need to have special policies and programs which understand and recognize this long history of deprivation that was perpetrated against the people. The Congressional Black Caucus budget is relevant, very much relevant, to all that black history lessons teaches. We will overcome.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, Skip Gates, we may in the future be proposing legislation around him. Today on the floor, I want to commend the people, the Members of the House, more than two thirds of the Members of the House voted for this bill, which calls for the Carter D. Woodson National Historic Site Study Act of 1999. It was introduced last year, and we passed it today. Mr. Speaker, let me just indicate what it proposes to deal with. Congress finds the following: Dr. Carter G. Woodson, cognizant of the widespread ignorance and scanty information concerning the history of African Americans, founded on September 9, 1915, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, since renamed the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The association was founded in particular to counter racist propaganda alleging black inferiority and the pervasive influence of Jim Crow prevalent at that time. The mission of the association was and continues to be educating the American public of the contributions of black Americans in the formation of a Nation's history and culture. Dr. Woodson dedicated nearly his entire adult life to every aspect of the association's operations in furtherance of its mission. Among the notable accomplishments of the association under Dr. Woodson's leadership, Negro History Week was instituted in 1926 to be celebrated annually during the second week of February. Negro History Week has since evolved into Black History Month. The headquarters and center of operations of the association was Dr. Woodson's residence located at 1539 9th Street, Northwest, here in Washington, D.C. Mr. Speaker, this bill proposes that not later than 18 months after the date on which the funds are made available for the purposes of this act, the Secretary, after consultation with the mayor of the District of Columbia, shall submit to the Committee on Resources of the United States House of Representatives and the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources of the United States Senate a resource study of the Dr. Carter Woodson home and headquarters of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The study shall identify suitability and feasibility of designating the Carter G. Woodson home as a unit of the national park system. It shall also include cost estimates for any necessary acquisition, development, operation and maintenance and identification of alternatives for the management, administration and protection of a Carter G. Woodson home. This would be, in our opinion, a vital, small first step in recognizing the fact that this Capitol ought to contain many more resources related to African American history. Mr. Speaker, we are able to get two thirds of the Members of Congress to vote for this, and it moves us forward. We hope, and we will continue to fight to get passage of John Conyers' bill on reparations. He calls for the commission to study reparation proposals for African Americans. That bill has been here for many, many years and not been able to get passed, but this bill proposes to, quote, acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States under the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865, and to establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequently de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies and for other purposes. Mr. Speaker, this bill is vital. We are only calling for a commission to study proposals for reparations. It relates as much to African American history as any item we could put forth. I am going to close with a discussion of The Debt, the book by Randall Robinson which picks up the theme of reparations. I am going to show how that relates to our Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget. Before I do that, I would like to yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Meek).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the remarks of the gentlewoman from Texas, (Ms. Jackson-Lee), of course, were pertinent in every way in terms of the three items that I have put forth here tonight. The gentlewoman has mentioned the juvenile justice and law enforcement problems that we have had for a long, long time in America, whether the law and the government became the arm of injustice and inequality in so many ways, and the gentlewoman recommended that in the Congressional Black Caucus' Alternative Budget we put in items and we address it in terms of making certain that there are funds there to deal with the problem of continuing injustices, profiling and abuses of the law. I commend the gentlewoman for that. Mr. Speaker, I also would like to highlight the fact that the gentlewoman said Dr. Gates, Skip Gates, who is now I think the Encarta Africana, is on disk, and our encyclopedia is on the Internet. He might be called the modern father of African American history taking after Carter G. Woodson.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably absent on a matter of critical importance and missed the following votes: On H. Con. Res. 247, expressing the sense of Congress regarding the importance of organ, tissue, bone marrow, and blood donation introduced by the gentlelady from Florida, Mrs. Thurman, I would have voted ``yea.'' On H. Con. Res. 76, recognizing the social problem of child abuse and neglect and supporting efforts to enhance public awareness of it introduced by the gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Salmon, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, today's agenda for the Congress was quite a small one. I think it is one item that we ought to pay close attention to, that is the creation of a bicentennial commission for Abraham Lincoln to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birth. Madam Speaker, I think it is very important that we pass the bill today. We are going to have a chance to take a look at the age of Lincoln, the man Lincoln and all the things surrounding Abraham Lincoln. Our country owes a great debt to the wisdom and the courage of Abraham Lincoln. There are people who try ranking the greatest Presidents, always starting with Lincoln, then they debate who the second, third and fourth might be. But Lincoln and Washington are clearly ranked first. I think that the Lincoln discussion would lead us into some very profound considerations of issues that need to be discussed that normally are not discussed. The President had a commission on race that was created for just one year, a very limited budget; and they unearthed a few important items and just got started and then they had to stop. I think a discussion of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, the considerations of what went into holding the Union together and why it is considered such a moral high point for America needs to be thoroughly discussed. There was a time when people stood for great principles, and I often talk to young people of African American descent who are always looking for the negative side of things who want to declare that Abraham Lincoln did not really care about black people, Abraham Lincoln was not our friend, and you would have a chance to show them how ridiculous that was. The same people say that white folks never are concerned with the welfare of black folks or white people in power are never concerned with other people at all, that principles of Judeo-Christian heritage and all that is a big laugh. We will have a chance to examine that. We will see how white people on one side had great principles and cared a great deal about fighting slavery, while others, of course, took advantage of it and enjoyed it; but there were some who had great principles and who were not themselves affected. White people, who were not slaves, were the people who determined that America should not have slavery. It is important to understand that in the battle of Gettysburg, the crucial battle in the Civil War, almost no blacks participated. They were not allowed in the army of either the Union or the Confederacy at that time so it was not their fault; but it was a battle that really decided the war and it was white people fighting white people on the basis of principle, principle on the basis of understanding, some understanding, that the Nation would never be able to be a great Nation if half are slave and half are free. At one point there were States that declared themselves slave States and other States that were free States and there were bloody clashes among the border States, the free States versus the slave States and all that history has gotten lost and nobody needs to hear and understand that history more than young African Americans. All Americans need to hear it and understand it, but young African Americans need to understand there are principles that have been fought for and large numbers of people died for them who did not have a vested interest. They could have all made a deal and if they did not stand for principle, if the Judeo-Christian ethic was not in place in the hearts of so many, the status quo would have prevailed. So I think we cast a very important vote today and I would just like to note that in passing. The real big issue of the day, however, is the budget. The budget was released by the President yesterday and there was a big hearing in the Committee on the Budget today; and I think that that is an item that not only is the biggest item for this Congress but also it may be the biggest item for the next 10 years, for this decade. The way we handle this budget this year may set the tone for the whole century. Consider the year 2000. We are about to discuss a budget of the last and only superpower in the world; and unquestionably, the United States of America is a superpower, an economic superpower, to begin with. We cannot debate it. We are an economic superpower as a result of an appreciation of science and technology and genius and the art of government. We have governed in a way to maximize the advantages of science and technology. Our systems have allowed us to emerge at this particular time as the richest nation ever in the history of the world, by any relative standards, any way we want to try to create a scenario. Rome, at the height of its greatness, was just a village compared to the wealth and might of the United States of America at this point in history. So our budget is a budget for a people, a nation, that is at the very center of the globe in terms of power and decision-making. Our budget is a budget for people who probably are at the center of the universe. I also happened to read today that some of the leading scientists have reached agreement and have concluded that there is no other life anywhere in the universe. There cannot be any life similar to the life on Earth. They may continue to debate that and theories of physics and theories of the universe have changed over time but right now all the evidence points to the fact that in this whole universe, which is so much larger than we ever imagined, with all kinds of galaxies and black holes and billions of stars, overwhelming in this great thing that exists there are no other living creatures, certainly nothing approaching mankind. So we are not just at the heart of the globe but this Nation, the United States of America, at this point in history, is at the heart of a whole universe. The way we make decisions, and what we do can greatly determine the course of where mankind in the universe goes. That is an awesome, awesome thought, and I think that we trivialize where we are. We play it down. In the State of the Union address, the President certainly was broad and encompassing in terms of the agenda for America; and also it addressed some issues in terms of the entire globe but it was really not looking at the fact that we are at the center of the universe and this is the beginning of the 21st Century and that not only is this Nation the last superpower, well governed with a tremendous economy but also all of that put together has created an enormous amount of wealth. The amount of wealth that the government is able to make decisions about is just a tiny part of the total wealth of America. But that tiny portion of the wealth that becomes revenue and comes under the decision-making powers of the Congress and the White House, that amount itself is still an enormous amount of money. We are talking about a budget past a trillion dollars; and more important than the budget that has passed a trillion dollars, we are talking about a budget surplus over the next 10 years which will be, by very conservative estimates, $1.9 trillion. Over the next 10 years, the surplus, after we factor out Social Security surplus, the Social Security surplus will be in a locked box. Put that aside. In addition to the Social Security surplus, we have a $1.9 trillion anticipated surplus of revenue above expenditure. That is an awesome position to be in, to be able to look, as a Nation, at a situation where money is not the problem. The problem is our capacity to make decisions about investments, our capacity to act in the most humane and compassionate way, at the same time we act in a most practical way. The Romans, at one point in history, they did not earn it through science and technology and good government; they earned it through their savage conquests. Their savage conquests produced a lot of wealth. They had so much booty and treasure they brought in from the rest of the world until the Romans decided at one point that we are all so rich until every man in Rome shall not pay taxes, we shall give every man in Rome a certain amount of money every year. The government will give them a big amount of money because the treasury is so full. That turned out to be an unwise way to invest their wealth because all of the surrounding countryside moved into Rome; all of the people in the surrounding countryside heard about the goodies in Rome. They began to move in, and of course the Romans were overwhelmed by having to pay out more and more money, and they had to bring that to a stop. The great Roman empire would do it for a long, long time. They thought it would go on forever. Maybe there is a God, and he does look down on Earth. There are periods where certain people, he smiles upon and chooses them to try to lead us and create the kind of Earth, the kind of world below heaven that he would like to have. The Romans might have been selected for that purpose. They failed. Before the Romans, there were the Greeks. Maybe God was smiling on them and hoping that they would do it. Maybe this God does not like to get involved. The joy of God is to watch us and see what mankind individually does or mankind collectively does. Maybe he smiled on Greece, the great age of Greece being celebrated now on public television. The Greeks were great people in every way: in science, in literature, in architecture, militarily. They defeated opponents who had many more soldiers and far greater resources militarily. The great Greeks, the people we know so very well: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, all three came right together. Aeschelus, Sophocles, Euripides, the great dramatist, and on and on it goes in medicine, architecture. There is a Greek related to the beginnings of western civilization, the great Greeks, and do it for a long time. Then they got fascinated with military conquests under Alexander who had studied under Aristotle and understood some very important things that Aristotle taught him. Alexander started his conquests. The great secret of Alexander's ability to keep conquering was that the people that he conquered he looked upon as human beings, he absorbed them into the Greek culture. He tried to. He did not have to occupy the places that he conquered because the people became allies and friends. But as his ego mounted, as his conquests increased and his ego rose, he forgot the secret of his success and became a cruel and inhuman tyrant, and eventually he spread out the Greek resources and Greek empire in such a way that, upon his death, things began to fall apart. So Greece failed. Rome failed to live up to the possibilities of mankind, to spread their great civilization throughout the world. Greece failed. Before that was Egypt. Egypt, we are still now digging up new tombs. Egypt, Nubia, as you move toward black Africa, they are discovering more and more pyramids, more and more tombs. They are discovering that Egypt's Egyptians were as black as they were brown. As they dig up these tombs, they find new and more splendiferous treasures, gold and jewels and all kinds of things that evidently Egypt was, at that time, a place of unparalleled wealth. They had an organized society. Something was wrong, though, because the society chose to focus on death more than life. One can imagine how many millions died creating those pyramids and tombs and creating the treasures that went into those tombs. They had an obsession with death. They had an elitist culture. They had people who, despite their great wealth, had no vision. Egypt failed too. So here we are, the United States of America, unprecedented in terms of wealth and power. The great advantage we have perhaps over Egypt and Rome and Greece is that we have a modern democracy. Greece had a democracy. They did not have television. They did not have the Internet. One could not click on and give one's opinions. There is a whole lot that we have now that they did not have. They did not have an ability to make wealth multiply as rapidly as Bill Gates is able to multiply his wealth or Ted Turner is able to multiply his wealth. They did not have this great contradiction where there were people in one part of the world who still do not have running water and who live on a dollar a day, and there are other people in the Fortune 500 who have millions and millions of dollars, more money than they will ever be able to spend. The United Nations has put out a report and calculated that one could provide enough decent water, one could provide vaccinations and medical care for children, one could provide an elementary education, one could provide a way for youngsters to get a start in life with educational opportunity, one could provide a package for the poor and downtrodden of the world for $40 billion a year. All of the developing countries, all of the dirt-poor countries like Haiti, like the countries in Africa whose life is bleeding away from disease. All of those things could be brought under control with $40 billion of expenditure per year. We have just proposed a budget of more than a trillion dollars just for the United States of America. We anticipate a surplus of $1.9 trillion over a 10-year period. Bill Gates, according to estimates, is worth at least $40 billion. That is several months ago. They talked about $40 billion, one man whose net worth is $40 billion, and because it increases geometrically, it is far beyond that probably now. That estimate was made a few months ago. So with all of that, we approach the budget for the year 2001 that is going to be debated and discussed here in the Congress and here in Washington. We are the dawn of a digital age. America is leading the world very rapidly at an ever-escalating speed into what I call a cyber-civilization. What drives the wealth of Bill Gates and new millionaires, the new billionaires is a cyber-civilization. It is the age of the ``e,'' the age of the dot. If one watched the Super Bowl, one knows what I mean. Most of us watched the Super Bowl. It is not something which is elitist, esoteric. The ``dot'' is here. The ``dot'' is here because the great United States of America invested in the kind of science that produced the Internet. It was the people of the United States through their military that created the Internet, just as the people of the United States through the military created radio, mass broadcasting, and television. If one looks at the history of all these great developments, they belong to the people. They would not exist if it had not been for a government that chose to make investments. Yes, they chose for military reasons. The Navy wanted to develop radio. For military reasons, we developed the Internet. The defense system needed to meet certain needs. Whatever the reason, American taxpayers' dollars invested well, created the possibilities for the great cyber-civilization which we are contemplating now. Now, what does all this have to do with the figures and the numbers, the priorities and the proposals released by President Clinton today as we start the budgeting process? The President released his budget. The President is a Democrat, so the Republicans in Congress in the majority received it with a statement that it is dead on arrival. That is the way the budget was treated last year, the year before. When we had the Republican Presidents, the Democrats in the Congress used to say the same thing. We need to get away from that cliche, ``dead on arrival.'' Nevertheless, that is the way we start, dead on arrival. That means we are going to have a great debate. I am trying to take a few minutes to appeal to my colleagues to get beyond the trivial, to get beyond the immediate and the myopic approach. We all are held very closely to reality. We all know as Congresspersons that, when we go back to our districts, people expect us to have our feet on the ground. They do not want to know about the possibilities of a cyber-civilization. They do not want to know about the fact that we are at a point where the Romans first once stood and the Greeks once stood and the Egyptians. We are now the pivotal Nation, what President Clinton called in his inauguration address a few years ago, we are the indispensable Nation. Once Rome was the indispensable nation. Once Greece was the indispensable nation. Once Egypt was the indispensable nation. Now the United States is the indispensable nation to determine the future of the world. Is that too ambitious a vision to project? I do not think so. There was a time just a few years ago when people were predicting that the little island of Japan, because it was moving so rapidly in technology and overtaking the other industrial nations, that we would all be trailing in the wake of Japanese economic power. There was a time when we looked at Europe and the wonderful and very much appreciated unifying factor there, the uniting of Europe, where, instead of wasting their resources and their genius on war, now they are uniting in economics and politics that they would surely be leading the world, and we would be following in their shadow. But history has not developed that way. The fact that we are at the point that we are now is more than just luck. Some great decisions have been made, some immediate decisions in 1993 made by the Democrats on the floor of this House and in the Senate, and some long-term decisions made in terms of the investment in items which not only include the Internet, radio, television, but also the science that produced wonder drugs. We keep people alive longer, they are able to produce more scientific miracles. Wisdom, the longer one lives the greater the wisdom in general, and one is able to take advantage of that. Just an item like that on the side, wonder drugs and the things that have helped people function throughout their lives for longer periods, all of it comes together, all of it is American, all of is part of what we have created by maximizing freedom and allowing all flowers to bloom, allowing the innovations and the ideas to come up from the bottom. All of this has led us to the point where we now have the prospects of a $1.9 trillion surplus over a 10-year period. And we have a President who has proposed a budget of more than $1 trillion. The Congressional Black Caucus has asked me to serve on the committee to develop an alternative budget, and I welcome the opportunity. In previous years I have helped to develop an alternative budget and found it to be an exhilarating experience, to take the President's figures, to take the parameters that are set by the White House and set by the majority party and to try to operate within those parameters. Last year the Republicans were so parliamentary cruel that they banned other budgets from being offered on the floor. I hope that they will become more civilized and that we will go back to the tradition of the House of having alternative budgets offered by various groups. Let the Blue Dogs offer their budget, let the conservative Republicans offer their budget, let the moderate Republicans offer their budget, let the Congressional Black Caucus offer its budget, and the Hispanic caucus, and let us see what the alternatives are. We would like to combine with people who are not just African American but people who care about others; what I call the caring majority. There is in America a caring majority. The caring majority is made up partially of people who are suffering from oppressive policies, who are suffering from the blindness of leadership, who are suffering from the blunders of leadership, from people who are not necessarily cruel but who do not understand what it means to force a welfare mother to go to work instead of taking care of a young child. We have a whole bureaucracy related out there to putting that welfare mother to work and complicating the life of both the mother and the child because they like the idea of people going to work. In the process of creating the order to go to work, they have to create a decent day care center. And a day care center will not exist unless we have funding for that. But we do not provide decent funding for the day care centers, so we have inadequate salaries and people in day care centers who are going to be a negative influence on the children because they do not know what they are doing and they are bitter about their low wages. We create bureaucracies and take away a child from the one most beneficial thing that they have: a parent. That is the kind of blunder that a lot of decent people fall into. That is the kind of reasoning that seems to be straight and logical but which is very, very crooked and harmful. So we have the opportunity to seriously debate these parts of the budget and reach some conclusions that we should spend money in a way which allows what Thomas Jefferson stated in the Declaration of Independence to become a reality; that people really have not just the right to pursue happiness but the opportunity to pursue happiness. The right to the pursuit of happiness is important. Do not interfere with that, but let us also in the great America of the year 2000 create opportunities to pursue happiness. We have had great debates over the past few years about race-based legislation; race-based programs. Some people have sweated, turned all kinds of colors at the thought of doing anything that is race based. I have said that if we are talking about race-based programs in the abstract, yes. But if we are talking about programs to compensate for the fact that for 232 years one group of people were held in a cruel bondage, where no wealth could be created, where laws were made which made it illegal to teach them to read, where all kinds of cruel things were done and now the descendants of those folks are behind the mainstream, it is not really race based, it is justice based to talk about scholarships just for African Americans, to talk about policies which force the end of gerrymandering which creates districts that keep African Americans out of power so they cannot help themselves, and on and on it goes. So the so- called race-based phenomenon is offered as a first step towards some kind of justice. Reparations is something we do not want to talk about in connection with American slavery. The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission will probably rule out any discussion of reparations for the descendants of African American slaves, rule it out of order. Oh, yes, we can discuss reparations for the Japanese who were interned during World War II in America, and we did discuss that and we did pass some legislation. I certainly, along with other members of the black caucus, welcomed that legislation and supported that legislation. We supported recognition that a government has responsibility, a present government has a responsibility for what past governments have done. The Japanese day in and day out are fighting that notion. They refuse to apologize for what they did to the Chinese. They refuse to apologize for what they did to the Koreans. But let us applaud the fact that the Swiss have finally owned up to the fact that they swindled desperate people out of billions of dollars. The Swiss have finally said that, yes, we did take the money from the Jews fleeing the Germans, we did put their money away and refuse to allow anybody to claim it later, refused to come forward, so we will pay. The Germans are now creating a $5 billion fund, reparations for all those people they forced into slave labor in the industries. And maybe they have some kind of compensation for all those who died that they can pinpoint. I do not want to get into details. I do not know the details. I just know that the concept of reparations, that a present government has a responsibility for what past governments did; that the people of a present Nation have a responsibility and should bear some responsibility for what the people did in the past. That has been established everywhere. What does this have to do with the budget the President sent to Congress today? Throughout this budget there are opportunities to do things which would greatly facilitate the correction of some of the injustices that were done to the forefathers of African Americans. There are great opportunities in this budget to go forward and create programs which not only help the descendants of slaves but also help all poor people. Yes, we have had this great debate. We have lost it. Those of us who wanted reparations, those of us who said we needed to have affirmative action, we basically lost ground. We have lost ground in the Supreme Court. The Voting Rights Act is being diluted. We have lost ground in the universities. They have ruled out giving scholarships on the basis of race. We have lost ground. Let us switch the concepts. If we have lost ground on the basis of reparations and the need to correct past injustices, let us talk about opportunity. Let us go for an opportunity budget. In the President's budget we should create maximum opportunities not only for the descendants of slaves but for all people who are disadvantaged; for immigrants who came here from dirt poor countries who have problems assimilating, for other people who in some way have been disadvantaged, for the Native Americans who were driven off their land and treated cruelly. They fell for the trap of segregation and separated themselves out and have not been able to get a foothold in the power structure and, therefore, are suffering more than any other group probably of disadvantaged people in America. Let us have an opportunity program which looks upon every child that is born. Let us not focus so much on what happens in the womb, let us focus on what happens after the child gets here. Let us say we will guaranty an opportunity that every child born in America will have an opportunity to get an education which maximizes their God-given talents; that no child shall be hungry from the time he is born until the time he gets to be 18 years of age or 21 years of age, finishing college; that every child should have an opportunity to go to a school which is a school that physically is better than his home. It does not threaten his health because at the school there is a coal burning furnace spewing fumes into the air which may ruin his lungs and create a situation where asthmatic conditions develop in that child. Let us not send a kid to school which is so crowded that it forces him to eat lunch at 10 o'clock in the morning, which ruins his digestive system and his whole attitude toward eating because he just had breakfast. Because of the bureaucracy of the school and the fact they have so many kids to feed, in a cafeteria that was built for one- third of the number that they have to feed, they have to have three lunch periods and they have to start early. The children who eat lunch early at 10 o'clock are forced to eat lunch before their breakfast is digested. The children who eat lunch late are hungry, unusually hungry, and their systems are damaged. Let us not have an America that allows that. Let us have an America that with a $1.9 trillion projection over a 10-year period decides to invest heavily in opportunity in various ways. Opportunity may involve health care or opportunity may involve housing. There are very few housing programs any more that are being driven by Federal initiative. We are barely hanging on to the programs that were created by the New Deal and by the Great Society. So we need to create decent housing for every child born; an opportunity not to have to live in a cold house that makes it difficult to sleep at night for a child or creates the possibility of many more illnesses so they will miss many more days of school and also develop many kinds of childhood illnesses which create difficulties later as an adult. On and on it goes. An opportunity to be free of that. Why not look at the budget in the year 2000 as being an opportunity to get rid of all those impediments to children; an opportunity budget as we go into the great cyber civilization. The cyber civilization needs brainpower. Brainpower drives America right now. Those nerds, those kids that everybody made jokes about in high school and in college, they now are in command. They are in command. They are the ones who drive the computers and the Internet and the e-commerce. It is not a passing phenomenon. We are going to need more and more of them. The projection is that right now we have 300,000 vacancies that are going unfilled in information technology? These are cyber technicians, people who can create the Internet; programmers, people who can merge a sense of the culture with what is possible in the digital world and come out with a product that is very useful and also very profitable. All of these developments require brainpower. We know that. If brainpower drives the future, then let us invest in activities which create more brainpower. So the opportunity approach is not only the ethical approach, not only the moral approach, the opportunity approach is the most practical approach. If we want to keep America great, if we want to keep this economy going, if we want our military to remain the greatest military, the most effective military in the world, we have to have recruits that go into that military who are exposed to the digital revolution, who have come in understanding a great deal and can be trained to use our high-tech weapons. There is no sector in American public life that is not affected by the digital revolution. Madam Speaker, I began by saying that two great things happened today. One was that we voted to create a bicentennial commission in honor of Abraham Lincoln, and that commission and all the activity surrounding that is very beneficial to the American Nation as we examine where we are at the beginning of the 21st century. I also said today we launched the most important budget in the history of the United States of America. I also said I think it is most unfortunate that we are casually launching this budget and trivializing the significance of this particular moment in history, that we are downplaying the fact that we have a $1.9 trillion budget surplus progression over a 10-year period. We are trivializing the fact that this budget will definitely not have a deficit if we are going to have a budget that is certainly balanced, and we can do that without having to cut large numbers of programs. The challenge before us is, when we have this kind of opportunity, when this kind of wealth exists unparalleled in the history of the world, when we stand at the pinnacle of the rudder system that guides the world, and maybe we are the gyroscope that guides the entire universe at this point, that great responsibility will be taken seriously enough to utilize this budget for the sake of the entire world, starting with our own people who need health care, who need a greater investment in education and opportunity. Why be too cautious? Why be cavalier? Why be uncaring? If we are cautious, cavalier, and uncaring at this moment in history, we may lose our opportunity, the way the Romans lost theirs and the way the Greeks lost theirs and the Egyptians and maybe the way the British Empire lost its opportunity to provide leadership that would create a heaven on Earth, a place where all human beings have an opportunity and a right to pursue happiness. It is possible. The United Nations has said, as I repeat, that, with $40 billion expenditure per year, you could end most of the greatest hardships of the world, you could vaccinate children all over the world, you could provide a primary school of education, you could provide decent water for everybody in the world. It may be that they are off by a few billion dollars, but the fact that they have come up with a quantification of what the world needs is a great beginning. I salute Ted Turner, the great American billionaire, when he decided that he would devote a billion dollars to helping people throughout the world. That is the kind of action that individual Americans with wealth can take, and we are probably going to see more of that. Let us applaud that. I salute Bill Gates and his magnificent set of foundation projects, one of which is a billion dollar grant to the United Negro College Fund. The United Negro College Fund has been given a billion dollars to provide scholarships for students over a 10-year period. For college students, they are going to pay the entire college expense for 4 years. These students who are fortunate enough to be chosen will have their college expenses paid for 4 years. That is Bill Gates, the billionaire. There are other billionaires and other millionaires who have various kinds of projects of their own. That is American. This is very American. Never in the history of the world have we had this kind of foundation approach to the utilization of wealth by individuals. I do not think the Greeks had any foundations or the Egyptians or the Romans. There is no evidence that they had centers of philanthropic operation run by ordinary citizens. The governments did have certain programs, but probably the Greeks failed because they did not educate enough Greeks. It was an elitist process. The academy that was run by Aristotle probably only took the elite. Probably the Egyptians failed because the priest and the whole religious society of an elitist ran the culture and eventually ran the whole nation. On and on it goes. Let us not make that mistake. We have a great democracy now. Let us invest in education so that the maximum number of people will be able to be fully developed and make their contribution. The greatest natural resource in the universe is the human mind. That is not just a flowery phrase. It is reality. With the human mind, you open up vast caverns of possibilities and scientific miracles that have produced the technology and the medicine and the kinds of things that are happening in today's world. It all came out of human minds. If you put to work twice as many human minds in 10 years as you have working now in the area of science and math and agriculture, producing music, drama, the kinds of things that create a culture, we take advantage of the opportunities that are created by technology and science. Because the human being is molded a certain way. One of the problems with the Romans is that even while they were building vast architectural empires, they invented concrete, they were the geniuses in military strategies, at the same time the Romans had the coliseums. If you have ever been to Rome and been to the Coliseum, a fascinating thing to behold is that underneath the main arena are all these pits where the animals were kept, big animals, like lions and tigers. They were kept there because they are what they threw the Christians to. And Christians were not the only ones sent to the lions. The Romans sat in these huge coliseums while watching animals eat people and watching gladiators kill each other. They were a culture out of sync with compassion and humanity. Even though they had the greatest military inventions and strategies and created Roman law and logic, the breadth of the Roman empire was so impressive they liked to watch people get eaten by animals. That lack of development, that cruelty streak, whatever you want to call it, probably played a great role in the fall of the Roman Empire, the lack of compassion, the inability to make use of all their great wealth for everybody. So we would like not to be an American people who watch the Super Bowl in millions. We would like not to be an American people who find that phoney wrestling on television is the most popular cable television programs, phony wrestling, watching people do crazy things to each other, knowing very well it is all staged. Our culture, our minds are being shaped by that. Where might we be in 10 or 20 years if more of that keeps going on? Our science, our genius, our government all may not be able to save us if our culture is watching phony people throw each other around in the ring. That is our entertainment. Our minds may get affected and shrink as a result. I am laughing, but I really do not think it is funny. If we enjoy that kind of cruelty, we may institutionalize cruelty. And we have to some degree institutionalized cruelty. We have vast expenditures by the Federal Government and by State and local governments in a prison system which now is the largest in the world. No industrialized nation has more people in prison than the United States of America. Is that where we want our wealth to go, to build more prisons? We build a prison and keep a person in prison for no less than about $20,000 a year. The price to keep a man in prison costs a minimum of $20,000 per year. In the New York City school system, people complain about the fact that we spend $8,000 a year per child for an education. But yet, we are willing to send that same child to prison and spend $20,000 a year. That is the kind of thinking that probably led to the downfall of the Roman Empire. I am talking about the President's budget today. You might wonder why I am not reciting figures. You are going to hear a lot of figures. You are going to hear a lot of numbers. Let us take time out to salute President Clinton for the fact that he has placed a great deal of emphasis in his budget on education, not enough, in my opinion. But where else in Washington, where else in the world will you find more emphasis being placed on education? Where else in the context of the American government systems, the States, the cities. There are cities like New York City that have surpluses and had a surplus a year ago of $2 billion. The amount of revenue collected was $2 billion greater than expenditures. And yet New York City would not spend a single penny to remove the coal burning furnaces in its schools. There are more than 200 schools in New York City that have coal burning furnaces. New York City spent several million dollars on an asthma project to educate school kids and their parents about asthma to try to do something about an asthma epidemic. Asthma is growing as a problem in New York City. And in the course of that asthma project, which got high visibility for city hall and the mayor, they did not mention a single time that the city, the Board of Education, was responsible for 200 coal burning furnaces spewing pollutants into the air very close to where young children were being educated. If a child is sent to school from a house that burns oil or gas and the school is burning coal, that means that at school he is placed in jeopardy in a way that he is not placed in jeopardy at home. Going to school becomes harmful to children who at an early age are put into a school that is burning coal. When I bought my first house, it was a coal burning furnace. We got a bargain. I could not afford it otherwise. And we tried very hard with filters and we worked very hard to keep it clean. But no matter how hard you work, those tiny particles of coal dust get into the air and eventually in the lungs of young children. We were glad when we could convert to gas, I assure you. Coal is used for many purposes but it should not be in a situation where children are being exposed day in and day out to the fumes and the dust that comes from coal. But in New York City, we had $2 billion and not a single penny was spent to get rid of a single coal burning furnace. In New York City, $2 billion and not a single penny was spent to build a new school. The mayor squirreled all that away. That is the kind of cruel and blind decision-making that we do not want to be guilty of in this budget. The President has proposed, and I want to salute him for this breakthrough, the President has proposed in the area of school construction we go beyond what has been proposed in past years. He has proposed for the past few years that the only Federal involvement in school construction would be limited to a $25 billion program where the Federal Government would participate in the program where localities and States could borrow up to $25 billion across the country, the total would come to that much, and the Federal Government would pay the interest on the bonds. And if that whole program went into motion and the whole program was utilized, the Federal Government would be paying $3.7 billion in interest and, therefore, its contribution to school construction in the entire country would be $3.7 billion. Now, the General Accounting Office has said that in 1995 we needed $110 billion to repair and build schools in order to keep up with the population at that time. Without projecting additional children who would be going to school and therefore needing more classrooms, $110 billion was needed in 1995. Bob Chase, who is the President of the National Education Association, made a speech at the Democratic Caucus retreat this weekend where he said that now we need $300 billion in order to stay even, that in order to have a decent school and classroom for every child that is going to school, you need to bring it up to $300 billion. But the President is proposing, and he is way out ahead of everybody else, the Republicans propose zero, the President is proposing $3.7 billion to pay the interest. We need at least the amount that the General Accounting Office projected in 1995, more like $110 billion dollars. I have a bill which, based on the General Accounting Office progression in 1995, proposes that we spend $110 billion for school construction, repair and modernization over the next 10 years. The President has at least gone beyond his $25 billion borrowing scheme and made a breakthrough in thinking in this administration and he has announced a new school construction initiative where $1.3 billion will be directly appropriated, directly appropriated, not borrowed, no interest, no principal, the Government of the United States will directly appropriate $1.3 billion for emergency school repairs. Mr. President, we thank you for that great breakthrough in logic. We thank you for joining the commonsense Americans. We have made a first step. In fact, I sent out a ``Dear Colleague'' to all the Members saying we are winning. We are winning. This is a great step over where we were 2 years ago. We are winning because the commonsense logic of the American people is beginning to prevail. The American people in survey after survey have indicated education should be the highest priority. When you ask them in great detail to tell you what items within the education budget need the most help, they say fixing schools. School repair, construction, renovation, security, all of those items relate to infrastructure, and rank highest in the minds of the American people according to several key polls. Why do I single out school construction? Why do I walk around with this hat as a symbol, a trademark, to keep it in people's minds when we are talking about it? Why do you care about education and care about schools? I have been on the Committee on Education and the Workforce now for my 18th year. I care about education. I asked to be placed on the Committee on Education and the Workforce when I came here, Education and Labor it was called then, because I saw education and jobs, education and employment, as being inextricably interwoven. You cannot separate them. If I was going to do anything about the high unemployment in my district, about the opportunity for the poor people, I needed to be on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. So education has been the one thing that I have considered most important in my life for a long time. Why do I single out school construction among all the other items that relate to improving education? Because school construction, the physical infrastructure, they are so dilapidated, so rundown, such obvious symbols of a lack of commitment in certain areas. Not just the big cities, but even when you get outside of the big cities, you have schools in the suburbs with trailers all over the place, indicating that the commitment to build schools is not there, that the trailers were put there instead. They are supposed to be temporary. Some places have had trailers for 20 years now. The trailers do not have indoor toilets. When the weather is bad you, you have to go out to the real building for that. Trailers are not symbols of education commitment to children. So why do I see the physical infrastructure as being so important? If I am an intellectual, why do I not care about the books, the curriculum, the standards? Why do I not care about testing? Why do I not care about whole school reform? I care about it all. It is all very important. I think it is dangerous to try to separate out any one part and say we do not need it all. We need it all. But there is such a thing as a core need, a kingpin need, a critical need, which, if it is not addressed, all of the attention to other needs is folly. For example, let us consider school reform and investment in education as we would approach a patient that is very ill in a hospital. The patient is delivered to the doctors in the hospital and they are told that this man has heart congestion. Because of the heart condition, if something is not done about the heart very rapidly, very quickly, he is going to die. But he also has infected feet. He also has strange sores growing all over his skin. He also has some damage to one of his internal organs. Which shall the doctors address first if they care about keeping the man alive? The school systems are no different. In order to keep the patient alive, you have to address the heart congestion first. If the heart stops beating, none of the other illnesses matter. If the heart stops beating, trying to cure the infected foot is a waste of time. If the heart stops beating, trying to cure the damaged organ internally is a waste of time. If you do not address the school buildings, the infrastructure, which provides the place for the library and the laboratory, the physical symbol of commitment, if you do not address that, then the children will pass judgment immediately. Walking into a dilapidated school with a sagging roof, water dripping through the roof on the top floors, window panes out, coal burning furnaces. I went to one school, I had a town meeting, 7 o'clock in the evening, and under the chairs in the auditorium where we were holding the town meeting, mice were playing. No extermination was taking place, no effective cleaning services were taking place in that school. What does that tell the children? What does that tell the teachers? It tells the children and teachers that there is a lack of commitment by the people that make decisions about the budgets to provide a decent education to those children. We have gone from blaming the children, change the curriculum standards, test the children, blame the children, now we have come down to blaming the teachers. This is the year of blaming the teachers. We have dealt with curriculum standards out there. We tried to institute national testing. Some of us fought that. We said ``do not test the kids until you have more resources so they have a chance to learn before you test them.'' Now we have gone to focus on the teachers. If only the teachers were better prepared, if only more teachers were certified, if only more teachers understood what they are doing, then we could reform the school system. Not for one moment will I disagree that we need quality teachers. We need systems that provide certified teachers, qualified teachers, right across the board. In my district, one-third of the schools in my district, where the poorest children live, half the teachers are not certified. Each school has at least 50 percent not certified teachers, 50 percent unqualified teachers, because they have been given a chance, in some cases, 9 or 10 years, to get certified, and some have not wanted to care. Recently the United Federation of Teachers, the teachers union, said to the uncertified teachers, if you want to go back to school, we will pay your tuition. We will make it possible for you to get certified. They were shocked to find that the majority of the people they were addressing turned it down. When they turned it down, they said to the union people, ``This school system needs our bodies. We cannot be replaced. We are not worried about losing our jobs. You need our bodies.'' Mr. Speaker, I want to end by saying that at the heart of education reform, education investment, which should be the heart of this year's budget, should be $110 billion over a 10-year period for construction, because that is the way we show our commitment for education as we go into the 21st century as the leaders of the world and as the leaders on this whole globe. We ought to take this budget seriously. We ought to make the decisions that will carry our Nation forward, and not make the error that the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians made when they were at the pinnacle of power and had the world in their hands.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably absent on a matter of critical importance and missed the following recorded votes: On H. Con. Res. 244, authorizing use of the rotunda for a Holocaust memorial introduced by the gentleman from California, Mr. Thomas, I would have voted ``yea.'' On H.R. 2130, the Hillory J. Farias Date-Rape Prevention Act introduced by the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Upton, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding to me. I, too, would like to congratulate him on launching Black History Month in the very appropriate way that he is launching it. For years we have seen Black History Month take on different meanings for different people and great emphasis has been on the factual reciting of various achievements by blacks, people of African descent because of the fact that in history books and in the popular culture all of the facts of our positive achievements have been left out, and in the schoolbooks they have been left out. I, as a librarian in the Brooklyn Public Library, working with many teachers to try to get together a united effort to get the Board of Education of the great City of New York to have a more inclusive curriculum with respect to black history, just to get the facts out was always so difficult. Facts are just the beginning. And, of course, the facts are very important. The details of some of the kinds of things that the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Watt) has just recited are still unknown. The details of the development of the whole movement is not known. I did not know that 400 to 500 students eventually sat down in Greensboro and made the whole city of Greensboro respond across the board, the hotels and stores, everybody. I did not know that fact, and I followed it pretty closely. The important thing that I would like to add to the dialogue tonight is the fact that what those students did and what the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis) did as a member of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee did was to set in motion a process which was the real legacy of the civil rights struggle and of the people of African descent in the United States that ought to be highlighted and carried forward during every Black History Month, and that is the legacy of resistance, you know, resistance to oppression. The victims resisted and they resisted nonviolently and they resisted en masse. And there was a whole chain reaction of events that led to successful resistance that the whole world now has copied. We do not realize how unique it was. I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, raised in a city right between Arkansas and Mississippi. The brutality of the oppressive class at that point, the oppressive white leadership at that point, the brutality that you confronted when you tried to do anything, the danger of being lynched, the danger of being brutalized was so very real until most people do not realize what those students did when they went up against established order. They had to summon up a great deal of courage, and my colleague, of course, repeatedly had to summon up a great deal of courage against very violent attacks. The violence and the brutality was such that when I graduated from Morehouse College in 1956, I left the South defeated, feeling that nothing much was ever really going to change. I am so happy that those who came after us just 4 years later in 1960 were proving that that was not the case, that if students stood up, they could set in motion a whole series of events which not only electrified a mass movement in Greensboro, in Nashville, all over the South, but it came north. I was an old man with kids in 1963, but as a member of Brooklyn CORE, we led a movement which had 800 people get arrested protesting discrimination in the employment industry. And of course, it went all over the country. And beyond that, we must realize it went all over the world, that when the Berlin Wall fell, they were singing ``We Shall Overcome'' in the streets of Berlin. When the Czechoslovakian people celebrated the withdrawal of the Soviet troops, they were in the street are singing ``We Shall Overcome.'' The whole pattern and whole message has gone out to the whole world. Victims do not have to accept it. The victims can resist. The victims can resist with nonviolence, and they can organize in such a way to prevail. That is the greatest legacy that the descendants of the American slaves have left to the world, the legacy that the victims can resist, the victims can overcome. Singing ``We Shall Overcome'' is quite appropriate. When we do it with nonviolence, when we resist, we are able to overcome. I salute the gentleman and all of my colleagues for getting this Year 2000 celebration of Black History Month off to a great start, emphasizing that legacy which is so important and which we have contributed not only to ourselves and to this Nation but to the entire world. We shall overcome.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the emotion of the previous candidate, the previous speaker, and I think that it is altogether fitting that we not come to the floor and waste the time of anybody unless we do feel strongly about what we have to say, and I certainly feel strongly about the remarks I intend to make at this point. We are nearing the end of a session, it is a matter of hours now, and I think all of us feel very strongly about what was or was not accomplished during this first session of the 106th Congress. I think we should look forward to the second session of the 106th Congress with optimism. I am optimistic about the second session of the 106th Congress, and I am going to talk about the reasons why I am optimistic. I regret greatly the fact that we have not dealt with very crucial issues. We did not even put the minimum wage increase on the floor for a discussion. We refused to have a dialogue and to share with the American people the concerns of many of us that in a time of unprecedented prosperity, when great amounts of money are being made by the top 5 percent of the population, the population with the income in the top 5 percent, we are not willing to give an increase of $1 an hour over a 2-year period to the people who are at the very bottom earning a minimum wage. I regret that greatly. I regret the fact that we have not done an HMO patients' bill of rights. I regret the fact we have not dealt with campaign finance reform. This House at least passed a bill, and the other body did not deal with it. I regret the fact that we are still refusing to come to grips with the magnitude of the problem with education. Everybody talks about education, but we have just been allowed to play around at the fringes by the Republican majority this year. We did at least deal with reauthorizing Title I, which is the most stable Federal participation in the elementary and secondary education process. We did at least tinker around with that. We tried to make it worse by reducing the amount of funds being directed to poorest children. There are some problems there. But at least we put it on the table, we brought it to the floor, and we dealt with it. We have not dealt with school construction. We have not dealt with the magnitude of a kingpin problem. If we do not deal with the physical infrastructure of the public education system, we are sending a message that we really do not care about the system. All the other things we do will not matter if the physical infrastructure cannot carry out the task that we have set for our public education system. But I am optimistic about that. I am optimistic about the fact that we will come to grips with the problem of school construction and the large amounts of resources that are going to be needed for that. The fact it is going to require billions and billions of dollars is no reason to back away from it. Because we are able to come up with billions of dollars for an interstate highway system and the continuation of the highway program. We authorized $218 billion in the last session of the 105th Congress. We saw the problem as being big. And despite the fact that nobody wants to be tagged with the label of being a big spender, that highway bill certainly spent large amounts of money to deal with a monumental problem. We should look forward to the second session of the 106th Congress with optimism. Because the fact is that the public out there clearly has made it obvious what their priorities are. And eventually the Republican majority is going to respond to what the public is saying through the polls and through the focus groups and understand that next year's election cannot go forward with a record of ignoring what people are saying over and over again about education, about Patients' Bill of Rights, about the minimum wage. All these things have to be dealt with. I am optimistic about the year 2000, our first year of the 21st century and the second session of the 106th Congress. I am optimistic about it because of the fact that it is a presidential election year. Presidential elections are always pregnant with surprises. I am optimistic that we are going to have some positive surprises. We can have negative surprises, too. We do not want another presidential election year where a Willie Horton commercial surfaced and the whole spirit of that Willie Horton commercial pervades during the campaign and the electorate is treated to an appeal to go down to the lowest common denominator and racism becomes an overriding factor in the election. Or the election that Ronald Reagan kicked off at Philadelphia, Mississippi. When Ronald Reagan ran for President, he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, the place where three civil rights workers had been slain; and he kicked off his campaign there sending a message, which later was communicated in terms of the new position of the Republican party. They abandoned the civil rights partnership that they had up to that time with the Democrats, and they became the party which promoted anti- affirmative action and a whole series of things that led downhill, to the point where when Ronald Reagan left office and George Bush became President, there was a burning of churches throughout the South. We had generated that kind of spirit at the time. I hope that we do not have those kinds of surprises. I hope that we will be able to not spend all the time fighting a rear-guard action, a defensive action, and can focus on positive matters. We could have some positive surprises. We could have some positive surprises which create a dialogue in this election which allows American people to really take a hard look at where we are now and where we can go in the 21st century. The first year of the 21st century can be seen as a gateway into a new way of governing, a new way of dealing with the problems, an intellectual and mental opportunity to set our sights differently; and it could end up with some real positive achievements as a result. First of all, I want a positive and adequate response to the number one concern of the American people. And that is education. We want a real adequate response, not a tempered nickel-and-dime response. The response has to include not only the obvious problems that we need with respect to more funds for more teachers, more funds to deal with computers, but also the tremendous amount of funding that we need in order to deal with infrastructure problems, the construction repair, modernization, making schools more secure, et cetera. The polls indicate a demand for this kind of action, and we are going to have to respond. There can be some other positive surprises that are taken which redound to the credit of the whole process and the American people could benefit. Every presidential candidate, and there are more of them now, and as we get more presidential candidates, then we have more ideas introduced. I do not think that this is a bad thing. I think each presidential candidate may be good for one idea. I want to disclose the fact right away that I am an early Al Gore supporter. I am not going to hide that from people listening. But I think that the other candidates can have some good ideas. I think Mr. Buchanan is a candidate I can never live with because Mr. Buchanan has declared that American should be a white Christian country, which means that he really does not think there is a place solidly for me and my children and my grandchildren; and he says a lot of other things that I could never agree with. But Mr. Buchanan should be applauded for his idea on trade, that this American Nation occupy a kingpin position, where we can almost dictate the terms for world trade, has given in over and over and over again to demands and rules that tie the hands of American workers. We have negotiated our trade policies for the benefit of their top 5 percent, the top income bracket. They have done very well on the kinds of things we have negotiated with world trade. Now we have a new agreement with China, which compounds the problem and we go on into the same abyss. I cannot agree more wholeheartedly than any Buchanan supporter with that particular aspect of his platform that trade is a bit of a sell-out for the American worker and we must do something to stop that. He has that one good idea. I would like to identify with that. I would like to identify with Mr. Bradley's proposal that the Federal Government should be about doing things that are big and all encompassing. That certainly is something I would like to see Mr. Bradley develop in more detail. I do not want a health care plan of the kind that he proposes where he wants to get rid of Medicaid. I think that is ridiculous. That is being big and stupid. That is being big and destructive. This is a big idea that could really cause a lot of suffering among people who are on the very bottom and among many of my constituents. If you get rid of Medicaid in the process of trying to improve health care, you are going backwards and not forward. So I do not agree on that with Mr. Bradley. But I hope he has some proposals on school construction and what the Federal roles should be in education, which are comparable to the role that they would be playing in a thing as important as education. I hope that Mr. Bradley will challenge the other candidates to come forward with big ideas. We had a big idea when we decided to build the Transcontinental Railroad. The Federal Government built the Transcontinental Railroad, not private industry. We subsidized it. It was a big idea when we decided to create the land grant colleges and universities. Big idea. The Federal Government pushed that and created it. Big idea with the GI bill that offered education to every returning GI after World War II. Those big ideas paid off. Medicaid was a big idea. Social Security was a big idea. All these big ideas, by the way, have been pushed and sponsored mostly by Democrats. And Democrats again should step up and provide the big idea at present. We have to look at the school construction problem as being in the same category as the Transcontinental Railroad, as the interstate highway. We have to move in that way. Mr. Gore, of course, has many ideas that I identify with. Mr. Gore has been there as we have had this transition of our government taking a very active role in the transition of our society into a sort of cyber-civilization, a new kind of civilization based on the Internet and computer and all the things related to that; and they have made proposals that have been very worthwhile for education and for our school system. I would like to see that continue. And even bigger things should be made to happen by a person with Mr. Gore's background and experience and record. The track record is that the E-rate, which provides a 90 percent discount to the poorest schools for telecommunication services, was a product of this administration, which Mr. Gore is part of. The whole wiring of the schools and certain technology, literacy programs, have all come out of this administration that Mr. Gore has been a part of. We want to continue that kind of massive transformation of education and of society in general. So I was talking about positive surprises that we may see in this election year, new kinds of activities to create a more dynamic dialogue, new ideas. And I have covered Mr. Buchanan, Mr. Bradley, Mr. Gore. And finally we come to Donald Trump, who recently made his entry into the presidential race. I want to applaud Mr. Trump for producing an idea. I certainly am still a Gore supporter, but Mr. Trump has an idea which deserves examination. Mr. Trump has an idea which really is a blockbuster, it is revolutionary, it is sweeping, and it deserves to be considered. Mr. Trump's idea is not so authentic that I can say that nobody else has thought about it at all, but he goes much further than most of us have gone. Certainly his idea that we should have a greater amount of tax on the richest Americans. Mr. Trump wants to impose a tax on the people who have assets above $10 million. Now, stop and think how many people do you know would be affected by that kind of tax. He wants to tax only people who have assets above $10 million, and he wants to tax them one time at a rate of 14.5 percent and use the money realized from that tax to pay off the national debt. And then he wants to take the money that was being used every year to pay the national debt and funnel that into the system to cover the needs of Social Security; and there would be additional money left over, of course, for the safety net, Medicare, schools, education. It is an idea which is quite broad and sweeping and has received quite a bit of ridicule by the people who have reacted immediately. However, before we dismiss it as being ridiculous, I think we ought to take a hard look at it. I certainly find that it is compatible with a bill that I introduced a few months ago, H.R. 1099, a bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide more revenue for the Social Security system by imposing a tax on certain unearned income and to provide tax relief for more than 80 million individuals and families who pay more in Social Security than they pay in income taxes. Now, I did not go as far as Mr. Trump did. Mr. Trump wants to tax unearned income assets. He wants to tax them far more broadly than I have proposed. And he wants to do that in order to get rid of the national debt. I only propose a slight increase in taxes of people who have great assets, unearned income; and I wanted enough to be able to have that 80 million group of individuals and families who are paying now more Social Security tax than they are paying in income taxes. Over the last two decades, the biggest percentage jump in taxes has been the payroll tax. The Social Security tax, the Medicare tax, combined, they have created a larger percentage increase in taxes than income taxes have increased. That means that the people at the very bottom who have no choice but to pay the payroll taxes are paying a greater percentage now than they were paying 20 years ago. They got the biggest percentage increase. We need to have some relief for those people. That was my concern when I introduced H.R. 1099. I said the way to deal with that is to tax the unearned income, the assets of the richest people in order to get enough money to provide the relief for the poorest people. Mr. Trump says he wants to provide relief for the middle-income people as well. If you have a 14.5 percent tax on the assets of all people who have more than $10 million in assets, his economists calculate that would be enough to pay off the national debt. And once the national debt is paid off, you can use the interest we pay each year on the national debt in order to certainly make Social Security more secure and also to provide additional money for the safety net programs, including education and Medicare. He wants to demand some things for that. He wants to get rid of the estate tax and do a few other things. But one should not lightly dismiss his proposal. Some people have said already, why do 14.5 percent one time? If it is a good idea, maybe you could do it over a 10-year period less, and it would not be such a shock to the economy. That makes sense. But the principle is established. The principle he is establishing is that the richest people in America can afford to come to the aid of the economy and the country and set a whole new standard, a whole new pattern for the way we deal with the budgeting in America. It is as revolutionary almost as Thomas Jefferson. The King of England thought Thomas Jefferson was a nut when he proposed that all men are created equal, that that was ridiculous. The one time that Thomas Jefferson had a chance to have an audience with the King of England, the King of England turned his back on Jefferson. He would not even talk to him. That revolutionary idea that all men are created equal was considered ridiculous in 1776. Now Trump says all rich people should step forward, and he is rich himself. He says that he is worth $5 billion, that his assets total $5 billion. He says that he would have to pay almost $700 million in this new tax that he proposes. And he is willing to do it. He says there are many other rich people who could do it, too, and never know that they lost that amount of money. They would never know it is gone. I heard on a talk show in New York City yesterday, a couple of other rich people called in and said that they do not mind some version of this, they would not mind paying more taxes if it will help provide for decent health services and decent educational services. It is something that the rich can ponder. They would be indeed history-making. Never before in the history of mankind have those with wealth and means come forward and said, we will make a revolution from the top, from the top we will begin to deal with a problem of the redistribution of the tax burden. We always talked about the redistribution of the wealth and it would scare the hell out of people. They say you are a Communist if you talk about redistribution of wealth too loudly. But here is a rich man who says, let us redistribute the tax burden, let us have the people who are mega-millionaires and billionaires, making so much money now that it is hard for us to comprehend. What is Bill Gates worth? Every day it jumps by billions. At the end of last year, I heard he was worth $40 billion. But he agreed to give away $40 billion a few months ago. He must be worth $60 billion now, some people estimated yesterday in the talk show. I do not know. I doubt if he knows. Because of the nature of wealth creation, it is not dependent on oil in the earth, the number of barrels that can be pumped, it is not dependent on mining gold, it is dependent on intellectual capital, people buying intellectual products, his software, his various other ventures. It is mushrooming all the time. Of course if you get a trade agreement with China, with more than 1 billion customers out there, a certain percentage of those are middle- class, well-educated, they are going to use computers too, and software, et cetera, et cetera. There is no end, it is infinite, the possible wealth of Bill Gates and the people in the various information technology industries, Cisco, ITT, it goes on and on. Wealth being created on a scale that we cannot even comprehend. If we are at this point in history accumulating wealth at that scale and most of the wealth, a large percentage of it is redounding to the United States population, 1 percent, 5 percent, the people at the very top, then is it not in order to stop and think about the fact that these people can never spend it, that it would be no harm to them to pay a greater percentage of this money than they now pay in taxes? The Roman Empire at the point when its armies were bringing in large amounts of booty, large amounts of treasures were won by war, violence. They brought back the treasures, they made Rome rich beyond anybody's comprehension at that time. The Roman Empire leaders decreed that all the citizens of Rome should be paid. Because they had so much money, they got rid of all the taxes and they said they should be paid a certain amount of money every year, every citizen. They had that much money. And the citizens of Rome were defined in a small category. As soon as they started that policy, all the suburban Romans and all the rural Romans and everybody nearby moved into Rome. Of course it went bankrupt. It was a policy that was doomed to failure because if you define citizens of Rome as the people who live there, more people are going to come in to live there, and the booty, the treasures that they brought back from their violent conquests was not infinite. There was not a Bill Gates Windows 95, Windows 98 and other software products which as long as there are human brains and there are human brains out there working together, they will keep producing intellectual products for sale. There is a limit to how much violent conquest can produce. So the Roman policy failed. But it was a revolutionary kind of policy, to think that the treasury of a government is so great that we will give every citizen some part of it. What Donald Trump is saying now is that we have such prosperity now and the people in his class, the billionaires and the mega- millionaires, are making so much money until they would not really miss it if you were to tax them 14.5 percent of their assets and get rid of the national debt overnight and use that interest you pay on the national debt for other things. I think you can see now that an idea like that arouses great optimism in me. I am optimistic if that is going to be interjected into the debate in this presidential election. All we have been hearing so far about taxes is the flat tax, and everybody that I know, every honest economist has said that that is a Steve Forbes rip-off, that the flat tax will produce definitely more money for the people who have the most money already. Unfortunately, the other candidates have not talked loudly about taxes at all because the word ``tax'' is something we politicians try to avoid. Just by itself the word ``tax'' arouses great animosity among voters. Here is a man who announced his candidacy by talking about taxes. I think it is so significant that it should not be ignored. We should use it as a key for a new kind of discussion. It should set the tone for a new kind of discussion. Mr. Speaker, I am going to submit for the Record the article that appeared in the New York Times on November 10 which discussed Mr. Trump's launching his presidential career by proposing a new tax. I am going to just read a few excerpts from it before I submit it. This is an article by Adam Nagourney on November 10, 1999, in the New York Times: ``Trump, describing the first proposal of his exploratory presidential campaign, said the government should impose a one-time 14.25 percent tax on the assets of individuals and trusts worth $10 million or more. That would raise $5.7 trillion, he said, enough to pay off the national debt in a single year. And eliminating the debt, Trump explained, would save the Nation $200 billion in annual interest payments, money that he said could be used for tax cuts and ensuring the stability of the Social Security system. ``The New York developer chose an unusual forum to unveil what he describes as a policy cornerstone of his prospective campaign: a rolling series of radio and television interviews.'' In a rolling series, he will deal with these proposals again and again. ``Trump's plan met a response that ranged from incredulity to ridicule from a number of economists Tuesday. They suggested that a 14.25 percent tax would be impossible to get through a Republican- controlled Congress that has previously championed a $792 billion tax cut this year. Beyond that, they said that even if it passed, it would be problematic to measure net worth and then to tax it.'' And on and on it goes. There could be many objections made to this proposal. Mr. Trump said himself that his own net worth is $5 billion and that under his plan, he would owe $750 million in taxes in this one year. But he would profit, it says in parentheses, because a part of his plan calls for a repeal of the 55 percent estate tax. I mean, there are some pieces in there where you are going to be trading off for this plan. Now, why am I trumpeting it here and do I think it could ever occur? I do not think so, but why not a modified version of this? Why not take a hard look at the assets of the billionaires and the mega- millionaires? I think Germany already has an asset tax, an asset tax of, I think, 1 percent. So an asset tax is not out of the question. But can we change the dialogue? The dialogue now says we will never have universal health care. We cannot even have a decent patients' bill of rights because it costs too much money. The dialogue now says we can never have all the money we need for education. Even the improvement of education in small ways costs so much money that we are retreating from that. They wanted to move away from the President's proposal to give more teachers for the classrooms and to bring down the ratio of children in the classroom to the teacher. After agreeing to that last year, they now want to bring it down very low, and with the recent proposals that have been discussed in these budget negotiations I understand have been concluded, they will honor the pledge and we will have that program restored at a slight increase, $1.3 billion I hear instead of $1.2 billion but they are going to have a proviso that allows them to take part of the money and do other things with it. Mr. Speaker, $1.3 billion is a lot of money. I do not take lightly sums of money when they get to the million dollar mark. It is hard for me to conceive of a million dollars. I am the son of a poor factory worker who all his life worked for minimum wages. So it is all important. It is all big. But when you look at the needs that are there and you look at the needs that are there in education in modern terms, 50 years ago we would not think of spending $3.5 billion on an aircraft carrier. Fifty years ago nobody would have thought of an F-22 system, a series of planes that would cost billions and billions of dollars, or a B-1 bomber. You would not have 50 years ago talked about being able to conceive of a CIA, a Central Intelligence Agency which costs $30 billion a year to run. So in modern terms to spend $110 billion over a 10-year period to build schools is conservative, not radical. We need that kind of money. And if we happen to get that kind of money by having new taxes, the only taxes we should think about are taxes on the people who can afford to pay more taxes. I am optimistic that the debate cannot be avoided. I am optimistic about the fact that each presidential candidate's campaign will have to step up to the plate and talk in new terms about the way we fund our government and offer new kinds of excuses about not being able to provide a decent health care system as well as a decent education system. I include the entirety of this article for the Record, Mr. Speaker. [From the New York Times, Nov. 10, 1999] Trump Proposes Clearing Nation's Debt at Expense of the Rich (By Adam Nagourney) Preparing to embark on his first trip as a prospective candidate for president, Donald J. Trump Tuesday presented a plan that he said would pay off the national debt, bolster Social Security and slash taxes by billions of dollars. Trump promised to accomplish all this at no cost to ordinary Americans, by forcing the rich to pay for it. Trump, describing the first proposal of his exploratory presidential campaign, said the government should impose a one-time 14.25 percent tax on the assets of individuals and trusts worth $10 million or more. That would raise $5.7 trillion, he said, enough to pay off the national debt in a single year. And eliminating the debt, Trump explained, would save the nation $200 billion in annual interest payments, money that he said could be used for tax cuts and ensuring the stability of the Social Security system. The New York developer chose an unusual forum to unveil what he described as a policy cornerstone of his prospective campaign: a rolling series of radio and television interviews. The proposal comes a week before Trump is to fly to Florida for a series of campaign-style events in Miami,the first of three such trips planned for the next month. ``The phones are going off the hook,'' Trump reported, as he combined a discussion of his economic ideas with a description of what he described as the public's giddy reaction to his foray into economic policy-making. ``I've never seen anything like this. Do you make Page 1 with this one?'' As a matter of politics, Trump's proposal--simple in its concept and framed in populist terms--seems aimed directly at the people who have supported the Reform Party since Ross Perot first called it to arms with, among other things, a call to wipe out the national debt. Trump, should he run, said he would seek to become the Reform Party's candidate for president. It also had the advantage of lessening any liability Trump might believe he could suffer because of his own reputation as a man of wealth. The developer put his own net worth at $5 billion, and said that under his plan, he would owe $750 million in taxes (though his estate would ultimately profit if another part of Trump's plan were enacted: the repeal of the 55 percent estate tax). Trump's plan met a response that ranged from incredulity to ridicule from a number of economists Tuesday. They suggested that a 14.25 percent tax would be impossible to get through a Republican-controlled Congress that championed a $792 billion tax cut this year. Beyond that, they said that even if it passed it would be problematic to measure net worth and then to tax it. ``I don't think the plan makes much economic sense,'' said Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. ``The fact is that most people's wealth that has been built up over 10, 20 or 50 years is wealth that has already been taxed.'' Trump's main opponent for the Reform Party nomination, Patrick J. Buchanan, offered a harsher assessment of Trump's plan. ``This is serious wacko stuff,'' Buchanan said by telephone from Albany. Buchanan predicted that Trump's plan would cause the wealthy to move their holdings beyond the reach of the Internal Revenue Service. ``I can't think of a better idea to cause capital flight out of the United States,'' Buchanan said. Trump said he had come up with the idea on his own and worked out its details with some private economists. He declined to name them. He rejected criticism of his idea, demanding: ``Where is Gore's plan? Where is Bradley's plan? Where is Bush's plan? They don't exist.'' Still, it was clear that some parts of Trump's proposal remained unformed. For example, of the $200 billion in interest costs that would be saved, he said he would apply half to the Social Security system and the rest to tax reduction. Trump said that $20 billion of that would pay for eliminating the inheritance tax. Asked how he would allocate the rest, he responded: ``All different taxes across the board. That would be determined and worked out.'' I also want to just backtrack a minute and say as we close out this session, I talked about a number of things that I wish we had covered that we did not cover. I was delighted when this morning I saw them put on the calendar a bill which dealt with something which I was concerned with some time ago and never saw any action on. Suddenly I got a notice that we had put H.Con.Res. 128 on the calendar, and that is a resolution to express the sense of Congress regarding treatment of religious minorities in Iran, particularly Members of the Jewish community. Now, I said to my staff, I want to go over and speak on that. I have been waiting for that. Back in August, on August 28, I read an article in the paper and it talked about the fact that 13 Jews would not be tried in Iran as spies for Israel, and I talked to some people on the Committee on International Relations, and they said yes, we are going to bring up a resolution to deal with that, and it never happened. In August of this year, we were still very much preoccupied, of course, with Kosovo and ethnic cleansing. One article I read, not the one I read in the paper, but a larger article in a magazine, it talked about the fact that in Iran and Iraq and the Arab countries, there was massive removal of Jewish communities going on for the last 25 years. Large numbers of Jews in large Jewish communities in these countries had been moved. Nobody ever brought forth an international outcry about ethnic cleansing, but ethnic cleansing of that kind has been going on for a long time. Now we only have tiny Jewish communities, very small amounts of Jews still in countries like Iran and Iraq, and here is a situation where a small group has been singled out for persecution. On August 28, the article reads as follows: ``Iran's courts are prepared to try 13 Iranian Jews on charges of spying for Israel. Israel has repeatedly denied any link to the 13 who face a near certain death sentence if convicted under a 1996 law punishing spies for Israel or the United States.'' The case took on a new gravity after an official was quoted as saying ``the accused belong to a spy network directly linked to Israel and that they were spying for the United States.'' Quote, ``This regime was definitely involved in the spying,'' end of quote, an unidentified official said in today's issue of the conservative Tehran Times, which is close to Iran judiciary and intelligence services. The newspaper said the official had also alleged that the 13 were spying for the United States. The official was also quoted as saying ``an unspecified number of Muslims had also been arrested in connection with the case. The charges mean that the defendants are likely to be tried in one of Iran's hard-line revolutionary courts.'' That was August 28 of this year. Today we put on the calendar a resolution regarding the treatment of religious minorities in Iran, because I hear that those 13 are still awaiting trial and the trial will take place soon. I do not know why we took that off the calendar. It is very important now because this week we have had to see the phenomenon of the joyous approval of an agreement with China, World Trade Organization agreement; China is going to be admitted to the World Trade Organization, and all of the persecutions of the Chinese Communist government and all of the things that they have done, suddenly they have been pushed in the background. Mr. Speaker, I would hate to see the day arrive when we are going to allow Iran to join the World Trade Organization and we are going to negotiate a trade agreement with Iran and not deal with all of these problems. Today there is an article in The New York Times about the wartime accounts found in Swiss banks. Instead of them being a small amount that Swiss banks agreed to, they said they only had 755 accounts of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust; yet it turns out that they have 45,000, 45,000 accounts that they now admit were accounts of the Jews in the Holocaust. Are we going to talk about prosecutors and Swiss bankers at the world court tribunal the way we are considering the prosecution of people who are responsible for the massacres in Kosovo and Bosnia? Mr. Speaker, I just think that as we close out, there should be room on the calendar, and I hope that if there is going to be any more business unrelated to the budget, but certainly we will bring back that resolution as we close out and let the world know that the ethnic cleansing, we do not have to send bombers and we did not send bombers a long time ago to bomb Iran and we have not advocated that activity and I certainly do not propose that we do that, but our moral authority should be brought to bear another kind of ethnic cleansing that Jews have been doing in all of these Arab countries, especially in Iran, and now the continuation of it in such a bold way certainly ought to be brought to the attention of the American people and the Congress ought to weigh in and give its own moral opinion. Mr. Speaker, I want to continue the train of thought that I set forth before that we are closing out the first session of the 106th Congress with great disappointment, but I am optimistic that the second session will be very productive, because I think the stage for a second session which is more productive will be set by the presidential debates and the presidential contests, as well as the contest for a new Congress. I do not want to imply that I do not think that the contest to elect a new Congress is less important than the presidential election. We intend to have a Democratic majority, and that Democratic majority will be based on the fact that the people look at the lack of achievements of the first session of the 106th Congress and begin to demand a change and vote for a change. It is certainly of great need in my district, New York City. It seems that the newspapers and the powerful people that control decision- making have suddenly discovered that the board of education in our city is on the verge of collapse, and that education, the educational deficiencies that we have talked about for many years are true. All of this is being brought to a head by a class action suit that is now going forward in the Federal court at 60 Center Street in New York. The Federal court is hearing a case brought by a group called the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, and the case is being brought against the State of New York because the conditions in the city schools are partially that way because of the lack of fair State aid, or fair distribution of State aid. New York City, with 38 percent of the children in the State, receives only 35 percent of the State aid money; and that is a great improvement over the way it was 5 years ago. Over the years, the gap has closed. There was one point where we received far less in State aid where communities outside of New York City and upstate received a far greater percentage of State aid per pupil. The court case, the plaintiffs are charging, and rightly so, that we do not get enough money to live up to the requirement of the State constitution that all children be educated adequately. We need more money in order to provide adequate education. They have gone further and said that the schools that are suffering either in New York City or in the big city of Buffalo, big cities like Buffalo and Syracuse are in some of the suburban schools. Those schools are all schools that have minority youngsters, either African American youngsters or Hispanic youngsters, so that there is a racial component. The suit is charging two things, not only that the State has failed to provide the funds necessary for an adequate education for all children, but the State is also discriminating, because the pattern is that the places that are getting less money per pupil, per child, happen to be places where we have concentrations of minorities. Now, that court suit has generated more attention from the press to the great problems that exist in New York City schools. As a result, one day last week we had the New York Post carry articles about the fact that the cafeterias of certain schools in the poorest areas had rats and roaches, signs of rats and roaches in the cafeteria. The same day there was a big article in the Daily News about the fact that in those same schools where the minorities are concentrated and of course youngsters are concentrated, up to half of the teachers are not certified to teach. Where we need the best teachers we have the worst teachers because of the problem of the lack of certification. The problem of certification of teachers goes on as being discussed, and I welcome that discussion in the newspapers. We cannot really take full advantage of the President's fight that I think now has been won, the battle has been won, to provide more teachers to the classroom who are qualified if we do not have certified teachers. So it is imperative that the unfinished business of this Congress be followed through next year by providing more funds and more programs to generate more teachers. We have to have a greater pool of teachers because we are in a situation now where because there is a great shortage of teachers, the best teachers, the teachers who passed the tests and are certified, they leave New York City and go to the suburbs, and we are left with those who are unqualified and are not certified in large numbers. This is just one of the many problems. The New York Times has an editorial which talks about the bidding for teachers. Now, am I laying this problem solely on the doorstep of the Federal Government? No, I am not. But bidding for qualified teachers requires more funding. Most of that funding would not come from the Federal Government. So I would like to add that it is very important for the Federal Government to continue its role as a stimulus. The Federal Government's role in education is a very small one proportionally. We only provide 6 or 7 percent of the total education funds in this Nation, and that includes higher education. So the other 93 percent of the funding for education comes from the States and from the local governments. We must set standards for the States and local governments in certain critical areas and force them to spend more of their money on education. In my own City of New York, last year they had a surplus of $2 billion, more revenue was collected, $2 billion more than was spent. But the mayor of the city and the city council has to bear part of the blame for this also, chose not to spend a single dime on education. We cannot blame the Federal Government for that. These problems that are being unearthed with respect to lack of certified teachers, poor conditions in the cafeterias, et cetera, they must be approached from the city level as well, and the State level; the State Government had a $2 billion surplus also. These are very prosperous times, and we had surpluses. The New York State legislature, both the legislature and the assembly, passed a bill to spend $500 million to repair schools, for schools that need repair most. There are schools that still have coal-burning furnaces; there are schools that have asbestos problems; schools that have lead in the pipes. They wanted to deal with some of those problems, but the Republican governor vetoed a bill to provide $500,000 for that. So we cannot blame it totally on the Federal Government, but the example has to be set by the Federal Government. The role of the Federal Government in education, as small as it is, has been a very positive one because they have stimulated new standards at the State level, new kinds of competencies. We never had State education plans before the Federal Government got involved under Lyndon Johnson. We never had standards, discussions about standards in curriculum. There are a whole set of positive things that have happened in education as a result of Federal leadership. Federal leadership provided the impetus, and that is as important as any other thing that the Federal Government does. If we make them, expose them to their own constituencies, the States and cities will spend more money for education, but we can only do that if the Federal government takes a greater initiative. I have always said that at the dawn of the 21st century we should see ourselves as creating a new cyber civilization. That cyber civilization demands that there be more brain power. Brains are going to drive the next century. Everybody agrees on that, and if that is the case, we should give our highest priority to the development. No individuals in America should be left in a situation where they do not have the fullest opportunity to develop their brain power. To do this, we need to launch a highly visible effort to revamp the infrastructure of the school systems of America. H.R. 3071, a bill I have introduced which calls for spending $110 billion over a 10-year period, is the kind of adequate response that we need to the problem of decaying infrastructure. Me and my colleagues who were here 2 hours ago speaking on the floor talked about the atrocities with respect to overcrowding in their schools across the country. We can only deal with that if we have a massive Federal intervention which, in addition to providing the funds needed to build some schools, would stimulate the States and cities to also participate. I am optimistic about next year. For those people who called me and said, well, they are closing out the year and you have no money for construction, are you not sad, no. I never expected this year to end with new money for construction. Even H.R. 1660, offered by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel), which all members of the Democratic Caucus support and we have been pushing, even that token response was not allowed on the floor. I am not surprised. Next year the Republican majority will have to respond. Next year the candidates for president will have to respond. The American people want and demand that our education systems be revamped. We have to start with a substantial action like school construction and repair, and new school security. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I am optimistic about gun safety passing, and it is because of the gentlewomen here. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. McCarthy).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for joining me.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, on Sunday, November 21, 1999 at the Bridge Street AME Church the Members of the Brooklyn Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. will celebrate 50 years of Public Service to the Brooklyn, New York Community. The achievements of this very dedicated group deserves recognition from the wider ``Caring Majority'' community. In observing it's 50th Anniversary, the Brooklyn Chapter will celebrate a history that began with it's charter in November, 1949 as the Delta Gamma Sigma Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. The first meeting was called by the late Soror Catherine Alexander. Other sorors in attendance were Pearl Butler Fulcher, Ann Fultz, Dorothy Funn, Rhoda Green, Mary Hairston, Willie Rivers, Vennie Howard, Llewelyn Lawrence, Arneida Lee, Agnes Levy, Fannie Mary, Dorothy Paige, Olive Robinson, Ruth Scott, Gwendolyn Simpson, Carrie Smith, Helen Snead, Frances Van Dunk, and Edith Mott Young. These twenty dedicated and committed sorors set out to organize programs to enhance the education and cultural life in the Brooklyn Community. As the years passed, the chapter membership grew as more and more sorors in the area began to take notice of the contributions being made by the Brooklyn Chapter. Today the chapter is comprised of over 200 women dedicated to fulfilling the aims of Delta's National Five Point Program. The activities of these dedicated women provide immediate benefits for local constituents. The example set by the Brooklyn Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. should be viewed as a ``POINT-OF-LIGHT'' for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that my name be removed as cosponsor of H.R. 2420.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, yesterday I was unavoidably absent on a matter of critical importance and missed the following vote: On the agreement to the amendment to H.R. 1714 introduced by the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Dingell, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I am again here to talk about the education crisis and the failure of our elected decision-makers to respond to that crisis. I have been asked by people, why do you continue to come back and talk about the same subject? Well, I do that because the American people have made it quite clear in poll after poll and focus group after focus group that education is their number one priority. No matter how we approach it, and I know ABC has now a series on it, because of the fact that they have recognized and want to pay tribute to the fact that continually the American people say education and the problems related to education should receive the highest priority when it comes to government assistance and the attention of our decision- makers in the Nation. A poll was recently taken for the State of Ohio, and it came up 90 percent of the people said education is the number one priority. No matter how we approach the problem in this democracy, the people speak with one voice, that they understand what the most important priority is. What is amazing, what I cannot comprehend, is why in this democracy elected officials do not respond to that clearly-designated priority. How many times do the American people have to say it? How many ways do they have to say it? Well, there are some people who say we are responding to the priority, and I want to talk about that mistaken assumption. I think that there is a lot of activity, a lot of rhetoric, related to education as a result of understanding that the general public, the overwhelming majority of the American people, want some action of great significance on education. Instead of acting, there is a lot of rhetoric. There is a lot of posturing. I think we might call education the most trivialized priority in the history of political dialogue in this country. Education is the most trivialized priority. That is the response of a collective elected official community. Too many of our elected officials are like the group of whales that were documented recently. There was a documentary where a group of whales were filmed beneath the ocean tossing a bloody baby seal around as sort of a game. I suppose eventually they ate the seal, but they tossed it around for a long time, and played with it. When we look at what is happening with education, the political functionaries who have the power to do something of great significance, the Governors, the mayors, the Congressmen, the White House, everybody seems to be willing to toss the bloody baby seal, instead of dealing with the problem. Now, there are some of these whales, and whales come in many species, some whales are truly without vision. They do not understand how to deal with the problem. Some whales do not care. They understand the problem. They do not care about the public school system. Public education in America is like a baby seal bleeding and they do not care whether it bleeds to death or not. They do not care how long they play with it. They really do not intend to do anything about it. Then there are some other whales that are too cautious, too frightened. They understand the problem but they do not dare venture out and talk about a real solution to the problem. So the bleeding baby seal keeps dying, and we keep tossing him about, but nothing is happening of great significance. The public school system needs to be saved. We need to do it with some kind of activity comparable to the kind of activity exhibited by Thomas Jefferson when he decided he would purchase a territory which was larger than the United States at that time, it was a big, significant action; or when they decided to build the transcontinental railroad. The transcontinental railroad was built not by private industry, as most people think, it was built by the government subsidy. The government hired private companies to do it, but the money came from the taxpayers. The initiative came from the government. The transcontinental railroad which linked the East and the West Coast was a monumental undertaking. The Morrill Act, the Morrill Act which established land grant colleges in every State, it took Morrill a long time to get the idea across, but finally he did. That was a huge undertaking which transformed the American education system in very important ways. Especially, it gave to the agricultural industry a scientific engineering base that has made agriculture in America something that no other Nation has ever been able to get close to, agricultural production in America. We have undertaken the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan was no small, trivialized step toward the rebuilding of Europe. It took billions of dollars. If we look at the Marshall Plan dollars in terms of today's dollars, it was fantastic. Somebody could have been sitting in the corner saying, look, we cannot solve the problem of the revitalization of the European economies by throwing money at it. Let us not do it. Europe would have probably gone Communist in a few years if they had not moved in a dramatic fashion with an overwhelming amount of aid. So we know how it is done. There is an American way of approaching the problem if we really want to solve it. But when it comes to education, we seem to think that the American public will soon get tired. There is no issue, there is no phenomenon which maintains and holds onto the attention of the American public indefinitely. There is always the hope that it will go away, that the concern will cease. I hope not. That is why I make the trip here as often as I can to remind the voters that they are right, and the elected officials and their failure to respond places them in a situation where they are wrong. The American people are right. The American voters, they are right. Their common sense is on target. Do not give up. Do not stop demanding. At the focus groups when they call you on the phone, keep saying, we want government to provide some significant assistance to education. We want to go on in some overwhelming way and deal with the problem, instead of playing games with it. There are a lot of things that are happening in the area of education which we have to look at. It is such a complex problem until, like the blind men feeling the elephant, you can get a part of it and tell the truth. If you feel the trunk, you may describe the elephant one way. If you feel the tail, you describe him another way. It is a complex problem, education. I do not want to belittle any aspect of the problem. They all deserve attention. We have to deal with reading, we have to deal with science laboratories, we have to deal with libraries, we have to deal with certification of teachers, we have to deal with standards, testing, and most of all we need to deal with what I call the opportunities to learn. We have had some great strides in the establishment of new curriculum standards. We have had some great strides in the area of testing. It is the area of opportunities to learn which seems to be the area where we lose vision, and that is the most important area of all. The opportunity to learn involves what are you going to do. The question is, what are you going to do to make certain that the students in the schools have what they need to deal with the curriculum that we have established and to be able to pass the tests that we are establishing. I have served on the Committee on Education and Labor, and what is called now the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I have served on that for the entire time I have been in Congress. On the occasion of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act 5 years ago we had a great debate about this whole matter of establishing curriculum standards and establishing testing standards. We were, in the case of a group of Democrats on the committee, afraid that if you established curriculum standards that are national, although States have the freedom to deal with their own standards but they do not have to be dragged into it, but if you established models that are replicated State by State and then you established the testing standards and that became some national testing standards that were going to be used all over the country, if you did all of that, there is a danger that you could ruin the lives of youngsters by having these high-stakes tests circulating all over and determining who gets pigeon holed for the time that they are in school and college or for determining their ability to get a job. There were a number of reasons why we were afraid of testing, but those of us who were afraid of a national testing policy to accompany a national set of curriculum standards agreed that we would accept national testing standards and national curriculum standards if you also had a national opportunity to learn standards. Opportunity to learn standards was the third set of standards. We called it a troika for education reform. And after many weeks of debate, finally we got that passed into the legislation. It was added to the legislation. Of course, Democrats were in control of the House at the time. We had the majority and we were able to prevail, and the opportunities to learn standards are included with the curriculum standards and the testing standards. The problem now is that our schools are not going forward. We are not getting results, because we have eliminated a part of the troika. Actually, in a back-room deal, the Committee on Appropriations which had no authority to do it but all parties agreed, the administration agreed, both parties agreed, they took out the opportunity to learn standards, and we are zooming forward with the curriculum standards and with the testing standards. Every State, every local education agency is now dealing with ways to tell the students that you have to measure up to certain standards. The curriculum is going to be tougher, but what the States and local education agencies are not willing to deal with is we are also going to provide you with the opportunities to learn; that what you need, we are going to provide you with whatever you need in order to be able to measure up to these standards; pass the tests. We are going to provide you with decent buildings, decent libraries. We are going to provide you with laboratories. We are going to provide you with necessary books. We are going to provide you with teachers who are able to teach what they are assigned to teach in the classrooms, certified, competent teachers. Those are the things we backed away from. In New York, you have a new set of tests. All students have to pass certain regents tests. Otherwise, they do not get any type of paper. There was a time when you get what you call a general diploma which said you were sitting in the seats when you were in high school and you attended, you met certain minimal standards, so here is a general high school diploma. That is being eliminated. You have to pass certain tests. I have no problem with the tests. I have no problem with the curriculum standards, if only we can add some opportunity to learn standards. We do not want children who have to sit in classrooms that are still threatened with asbestos. We do not want children to have to sit in classrooms that have the pollution from coal-burning furnaces. We do not want children who have to sit in overcrowded classrooms where there are too many in there. We do not want children who have to eat lunch at 10:00 in the morning because the school has twice as many students as it was built for. In order to cycle them through the lunchroom, you have to have three different lunch periods or four different lunch periods. The first lunch period has to begin at 10:00. The last one ends at 1:30 or 2:00. So the children who eat last are very hungry excessively and the children who eat first are being force fed after they have already had breakfast. We do not want these atrocities to go on. You have to deal with opportunities to learn by guaranteeing the right kinds of facilities and the right kinds of materials and conditions. If you take New York as a case study, and I think that whenever I talk about New York I later on get comments that are e-mailed or faxed or come over the telephone where people indicate that it is not unique to New York. You have got similar problems in many other places. There are other places where children have to eat lunch at 10:00 in the morning, I found out. There are numerous places where the overcrowding has reached a point where it is almost impossible to conduct classes. Even after the trailers are added and the kids have to walk through the snow to get to the restroom from the trailers, or even after you add trailers in order to bring down the class size, the conditions still continue to be detrimental to learning. It is not just New York. It is not just big cities. The reason we keep getting the polls which show that the American people want education to be treated seriously, as a high priority item from all over the country, is because the situation does exist in most parts of the country; but New York is a good case study. Whatever I discuss with respect to New York is applicable elsewhere in the country. I got a letter from some people who were working very hard in New York about some of the comments that I have made previously. In essence, a very respected retired judge, Thomas Russell Jones, who is a retired judge who works very hard to try to improve education, he is the president of an organization that he and his wife established called the Children's Times. The Children's Times continues to work away at the problems. To carry my analogy of the ocean a little further, they are not whales tossing a bloody baby seal. They are people who desperately at the bottom of the sea are searching for pearls, polishing those pearls and trying to in every small way do something significant to help improve education. I applaud all of the efforts, no matter how small they are, to try to come to grips with problems related to our educational system. I don't mean to say that those people are not serious. I am talking about public officials with power, Members of Congress, governors, mayors, people with power are the whales who are playing with the bloody seal. We can do far more, and I suppose what Judge Jones was saying to me is that he would like to see me stop talking so much and do more. I agree with the judge's comments in the letter he wrote. He says of my October speech, he criticizes me for not proposing any real solutions. He must not have listened to the very end because I always propose solutions. The solutions that I propose are not small ones, however. They are not nickel and dime solutions. They are solutions that are worthy of government action, certainly Federal Government action, but I will just quote a little from Judge Jones' letter. Dear Congressman Owens, your October 12 speech to the House of Representatives as the designee of the Democratic minority informs the American people about a number of problems with education. You inform us that 81 percent of the American people favor placing computers in the classrooms of all public schools. You inform us that students in our country are going to have to seek jobs in a world where if one cannot use computers and use them effectively there is little hope for them to make a decent living. You have said that, quote, ``black parents do not have any faith left in the public school system. They have given up hope.'' The Children's Times' directors agree with your findings and conclusions. We congratulate you for focusing attention on the findings of the Washington Post poll released on September 5, 1999, which reports that the American people place the immediate improvement of public schools at the top of their agenda year after year. Your statement, however, does not present any concrete, practical proposals to guarantee a modern education to 1.1 million children who attend public schools in New York City. The Children's Times petitions you to address the critical deficiencies in the elementary schools of New York City with respect of computer equipment in the classrooms and the effective closing of libraries in all public schools. I respectively request that you publicly endorse the statement of United States Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered to the U.S. Senate on July 29, where he reported that the teacher shortage has forced many school districts to hire uncertified teachers or ask certified teachers to teach outside their area of expertise. Each year more than 50,000 underprepared teachers enter the classrooms. One in four new teachers do not meet standard certification requirements. Twelve percent of new teachers have had no teacher training. Students in inner city schools have only a 50 percent chance of being taught by a qualified science or math teacher. I agree with all of these observations by Judge Jones and his son David Jones, who as the head of the Community Service Society some years ago was responsible for a survey which showed that in two-thirds of the schools in the city, those schools that were serving Hispanic and African American children, practically all the teachers who were teaching science and math had not majored in math and science in college. So, Judge Jones, you have laid out several different aspects of the problem. I will not belittle any of them. Everything that you point out is correct. I applaud the Children's Times for staying on the case, but listen carefully. I do propose solutions. I propose solutions at all levels. On several previous occasions I said that New York City had part of the solution to the problem in its hands. New York City had a $2 billion surplus last year. Their budget had $2 billion left over after they met all city obligations, and the city could have moved to begin to deal with some of these problems without Federal assistance. New York State had a $2 billion surplus last year and New York State not only did not do anything about the problem, when the State assembly and the State Senate finally reached agreement that they would appropriate $500 million of that $2 billion for school repairs, the governor of the State vetoed that part of the budget. He would not use $500 million out of the $2 billion for school repairs all across the State. So these problems deserve attention, and I am a Member of Congress and am here to represent my constituency at the Federal level. The Federal Government must lead the way because that is where most of the money is. All taxes are local. All the money in Washington came from the local level, and we should not flinch or hesitate to send some of that money back to deal with basic problems like the public school system. I also received a letter from Mrs. Jones, Bertha Jones, Judge Jones's wife, who is a secretary of the Children's Times, at a later date, and she is talking about our libraries. The Children's Times Associates has launched a campaign to reestablish functioning libraries in the elementary schools of the City of New York. The facts, the New York State Department of Education Division of Library Development, the State agency which supervises public school libraries throughout the State, informed the Children's Times Associates by a written memorandum dated August 23, 1999, that 550 elementary schools out of a total of 672 schools report a shortage of 550 certified librarians. The memorandum adds that many public school libraries are presently staffed by teachers who have no library or technological training, or by para-professionals who lack expertise of any kind. I would not say para-professionals lack expertise of any kind, but certainly they are not qualified to run school libraries. The United States Department of Education statistics reported recently that the New York City School System has hired fewer than one library media specialist for every 1,042 students. Library media specialists are trained to provide local media and telecommunications materials and access to experts whose advice and instructions teach children how to prepare classwork and homework on their own. The Children's Times Associates predict that if children do not learn to read and do basic arithmetic by the fourth grade, they will be playing a losing game of catch-up for the rest of their academic lives, which may not be very long. When libraries are reestablished in all elementary schools in New York City, under the supervision of library media specialists, in compliance with the New York State education law and the commissioner's regulations, 533,695 students will have access to the instructions and technology they need to work for their livelihoods as adults in 2000 and beyond, and that is signed by Bertha Jones, the secretary of the Children's Times Associates. Again, as a former public librarian, my profession is library science, I have a master's degree in library science, I wholeheartedly agree that this is a very devastating report of a blind spot in the public school system. Libraries have always had to fight to exist in elementary schools. It looks as if we are losing that battle in New York City. Nothing is more important than what goes on with respect to libraries and the processes that children learn there about how to learn on their own, how to use the great fountain of knowledge that exists to take care of their own needs and to facilitate ways to educate themselves. Nothing is more important than encouraging youngsters also to do as much reading as possible. I wholeheartedly agree with Mrs. Jones. I talk a lot about computers. I talk a lot about the need to bring our students to the level where they can run a cyber civilization, where they can deal with the fact that the world is now being more and more digitalized. It is not computer literacy, it is computer competence. The ability to work with imagination dealing with computers and web sites and the whole telecommunications revolution requires very well educated people. I have talked a great deal about that. But do not misunderstand me. I know that begins with reading. Nobody learns how to deal with the information technology if they do not know how to read, if they do not know basic arithmetic. It all begins with the basics, and I do not want to ever appear to have down played that. In response to the Children's Times Crusade to provide libraries for the schools in New York City, let me say that I have joined with my colleague in the Senate, Jack Reed, and Senator Jack Reed was a member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce when we passed the last Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act, and we placed in that act the opportunity to learn standards. So he knows very well that one of the things we have to do if we are going to improve education in America is to go beyond curriculum standards, go beyond national testing, and deal with providing opportunities to learn. So Senator Reed has already introduced a bill, and I have introduced the same bill, companion piece October 4, a few weeks ago, which provides for amending the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, to provide up-to-date school library media resources and well- trained professionally certified school library specialists for elementary schools and secondary schools and for other purposes. This bill's number is H.R. 3008, H.R. 3008 in the House. The companion Senate bill is S. 1262. Now, I have just recently put out a Dear Colleague letter asking all of my colleagues to join me on this particular piece of legislation. Going beyond the statistics which Mrs. Jones cited for New York City, let us talk about the whole country. Looking at libraries in the whole country, we are talking about almost one-third of the U.S. public schools lack a full-time school library media specialist. The national average is one library media specialist to every 591 students in American elementary and secondary schools. The ratio of students to school library media specialists varies widely from one school library specialist for every 287 public school students in Montana to one library media specialist for every 942 public school students in California. A 12-State U.S. study found that funding for school library materials annually vary from $15 to $58,874 for elementary school libraries and $155 to $100,810 for secondary school libraries. In other words, the funding for some elementary school libraries as low as $15. For others, for some high school libraries as low as $155, this funding for school library materials. But in some schools, it was as high as $58,874 in some elementary schools and as high as $100,810 in some secondary schools. So the disparity is obviously there. It is one of the problems which the Federal role in education has always sought to address, the great disparity between the richest districts and the poorest districts. Reading further in terms of the findings that make this school library bill important, the median per pupil expenditure by school library media centers in America in the 1995-1996 school year was $6.73 for elementary schools. The per pupil expenditure, the median was $6.73 for elementary schools, that is all, and $7.30 for middle schools, $6.25 for senior high schools. In a Nation which is enjoying unprecedented prosperity, we can do better. Mr. Speaker, I will not read further from this Dear Colleague letter, but I include for the Record, as follows: Congress of the United States, House of Representatives, Washington, DC, November 3, 1999. Dear Colleague: Almost one-third of U.S. public schools lack a full-time school library media specialist. The national average is one library media specialist to every 591 students in American elementary and secondary schools. The ratio of students to school library media specialists varies widely: from one school library specialist for every 287 public school students in Montana to one library media specialist for every 942 public school students in California. A 12-state U.S. study found that funding for school library materials annually varied from $15 to $58,874 for elementary school libraries and $155 to $100,810 for secondary school libraries. The median per pupil expenditure by school library media centers in America in the 1995-1996 school year was $6.73 for elementary schools, $7.30 for middle schools, and $6.27 for senior high schools. School libraries have become the heart of the learning experience for students being prepared to enter the Twenty- First Century, the age of almost unlimited information access available at a touch. But many of those children will not be ready for the demands of the third millennium if something is not done to make access to that information equally available to every student in America. As the numbers above show, there is a lot to be done to make that a reality. That is why I have introduced a bill that will provide the technology and the expertise to all elementary and secondary public schools across the country. H.R. 3008, The Elementary and Secondary School Library Media Resources, Training, and Advanced Technology Assistance Act, which is a companion bill to S. 1262 introduced by Senator Jack Reed, will provide funding for media resources for elementary and secondary school libraries as well as well-trained, certified library specialists for students. Through the establishment of the School Library Access Program, these resources will be available to students during regular school hours, during after-school hours in the evenings, on weekends, and during school breaks. Schools with the greatest need will receive priority funding consideration, as will local educational agencies with a high level of community support, coordinated services, and non-school hour activities for students. The bill has been endorsed by the American Library Association and retired New York State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Russell Jones, now Chair of the Advisory Committee for CHILDREN'S TIMES Associates. If the quality of America's future leaders is as important to you as it is to me, please join me in being a cosponsor of the Elementary and Secondary School Library Media Resources, Training, and Advanced Technology Assistance Act. Together, we can help to shape an even stronger, more vibrant nation and maintain America's cutting leadership in the field of information technology. Please contact Beverly Gallimore in my office by Monday, November 15, at 5-6231 to be a cosponsor. Sincerely yours, Major R. Owens, Member of Congress. Mr. Speaker, again, I want to congratulate the Children's Times and what they are doing in New York City. As I have just illustrated, the problem is not a New York City problem only. The case history of New York City is relevant for numerous local school districts across the country. New York State is a good case study, though, in many ways. We are having a problem that many other States have faced. We have a problem. We are attacking that problem in a new way. Many other States have done the same thing. The political situation is such that the whales who play with the baby seals do not play with all the seals in the same way. The whales provide to let some seals go free while others bleed and die. In numerous States, one has drastic unevenness between the funding for certain schools. Some States like New York, the difference may be between $17,000 or $18,000 per pupil funding compared to they say $8,000 in New York City. But in New York City, there are 32 school districts. Within the city, the funding for some school districts is as low as $3,000 per pupil, which means that some districts in the city are getting far more than they should be receiving. When one averages it all out, it is going to be $8,000 to $9,000 per pupil. That is another problem I am going to deal with in a minute. But in numerous States, rural schools and big city schools face the same problem of not being funded equally with State aid. In New York City, the problem has been a serious one for a long time. They have many devices that result in some parts of the State getting greater aid per pupil than others. One of the archaic and most devastating devices is the hold-harmless formula where no school district gets less money one year than it got way back 20 years ago. Each year, the hold-harmless formula says that, no matter what happens, you do not get less. That means that, if the school district gets a reduction in the number of pupil they are going to be receiving as the district, the same amount of money they received when the pupils were much higher, the amount per pupil will go for that reason. There are many other devices used to produce a result where New York City per-pupil expenditure is about between $450 to $500 less than the per-pupil expenditure average in the rest of the State. A group called the Campaign for Fiscal Equity has brought a new court suit. We have had a few suits over the last 30, 40 years where court actions, litigation has attempted to try to correct this problem of unequal funding throughout the State. The new one has been launched by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. I want to congratulate the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. They are doing something about the problem. The trouble is that what they are doing, as noble and as necessary as it may be, it is still dealing with how are we going to, in a fairer way, divide up the pie that exists already. I say the pie that exists already is grossly inadequate. We must address both problems, how to divide it up so that you do have equitable funding. But the biggest problem at this point is also how do we use the resources of this Nation in a more creative way, in a more generous way to deal with the problem of funding for schools. Campaign for Fiscal Equity is suing the State. The trial is under way now in Federal court. In the past, these battles have been fought out in State court because the State has primary responsibility for education in New York State, as is the case in most States. But the campaign for Fiscal Equity is arguing on the basis of a violation of civil rights, unequal protection under the law. This is going to be a landmark case. What they are also using now that they did not have before is a definition of what an adequate education is. The State has always in the past argued that, even though one school district may get far more money from the State than another get per pupil, the State is only responsible for doing an adequate job; and that the student receiving the lower amount of money is still getting enough money to provide an adequate education. How does one define adequate education? Well, prompted by the Federal Government, prompted by our legislation, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the States have moved to define adequate education. They have established standards. Now we can hold the State to its own standards. The State of New York has established some curriculum standards. The State of New York has established testing standards. They have said no student in this State will receive a high school diploma unless they measure up to certain standards. They must pass the test to a certain level. So we have a way to measure what is an adequate education. The next question is: If this is your definition of an adequate education, what does one need, what kinds of materials, what kinds of facilities, what kinds of teachers do you need in order to meet that standard, in order to provide that adequate education. You cannot play with it anymore. If you are saying that every student has to pass a math test at a certain level, you cannot continue to provide uncertified math teachers in junior high school and high school who did not major in math. Nobody, no matter how smart they are, is going to be able to adequately teach math in junior high school and high school if they did not really major in math in college. You cannot pretend you are doing that if you are saying that every student, before they get any kind of diploma must meet certain math standards. You provide the teachers who can produce that. You cannot say that, if you say that every student must meet certain science standards, display certain kinds of knowledge with respect to science, if you do not provide any laboratories in the high schools, if you do not provide adequate laboratories in the high school to deal with what you are going to have on your test. As I said before, great strides are being made in the establishment of curriculum standards. Great strides are being made, and a lot of this is being driven by elected officials, politicians in testing. We want to hold everybody accountable. I am sorry not everybody. We want to hold students accountable. We do not want to hold the school system accountable. We do not want to hold the State accountable for funding. We do not want to hold the city accountable and say that you should not have neglected to spend some part of your $2 billion surplus on education. We want to hold students accountable. Everybody is focusing on the student and dumping the load, the burden of changing the education standards and system on the students. New York City recently, and this is an article that appeared in the New York Times yesterday, New York's new curriculum guides set up standards grade by grade. In an effort to help parents hold schools accountable for what children learn or do not learn, the New York City school systems has produced a series of guides to what every child should know from kindergarten through 12th grade. Wonderful. The guides being distributed to teachers and parents beginning today decree that a fifth grader multiply with speed and accuracy, understand exponents, write a report using three sources of information, and know how to punctuate with quotation marks, commas, and colons. ``A kindergartner should be able to count to 10 and tell a story using letters, drawings, scribbles, and gestures.'' I do not know enough to know whether those are reasonable standards or not, but I applaud some kinds of standards. The school's chancellor, Rudy Crew, said yesterday that the new guides are intended to be so clear and so simple that all parents can understand these guidelines and became partners in their children's education. He said that they would give parents the tools to hold schools responsible for what their children learn and whether they learn it. Dr. Crew said the pamphlets, one for every grade, are intended to at least implicitly establish a common curriculum. Although he talked about ensuring that children throughout the city are learning the same thing every day, every week, every month, he cannot ensure that; but the guides do set goals like ``write daily for extended periods,'' but not specific content. They do not list books that all children in one grade should read or math problems that they all do. But for the first time there is a consistent framework of student achievement across the whole system regardless of the borough, the district, or the classroom, Dr. Crew said. ``In the last few years,'' again New York is not alone, and I am reading from a New York Times article which appeared yesterday, November 2. ``In the last few years, many states, including California, New York, and Virginia, have tried to take a stronger hand in dictating curriculum after years of giving schools and districts control. Indeed, Dr. Crew, at a news conference at the Board of Education Headquarters in Brooklyn, said that New York City is actually entering the game rather late, a decade after the movement to tie curriculum and standards together actually began in California and other states. ``The project was also clearly intended to fend off lawsuits, one has already been filed, challenging Dr. Crew's plan to end the automatic promotion of failing students. In New York, Florida, and other states parents have argued that it is unfair and even illegal to hold back children if they have not been clearly told what is expected of them and if the curriculum does not reflect the standards. ``In June, thousands of children in New York City were held back based on test scores alone, setting off a lawsuit by some parents who contended that other factors like attendance and classroom work should be considered. Until now, Dr. Crew said yesterday, curriculum was set by a combination of state and city standards, which he criticized as too vague, as well as standards of the textbook publishers. ``Because this is the first year of our new promotional policy, it is very, very important that parents understand what is acceptable grade level work said Judith Rizzo for instruction.'' And on and on it goes. Everybody is in harmony with establishment of these standards. The questions that are not being considered in this article are, what are we going to do to make certain that you have the teachers, the materials, the libraries, the science laboratories which allow the children to measure up to these standards? Diane Ravitch, an old colleague of ours here in Washington, has certainly pinpointed one the problems. Diane Ravitch, in this same article, says, ``the new goals would only be effective if teachers were trained to use them and tests were designed to measure them. ``The board released guides covering English and math in kindergarten through grade 8 yesterday and will add grades 9 through 12 shortly, the officials said. It also plans to issue social studies and science guides. The officials said the guides will be sent home with students in time for parent-teacher conferences this month and will be available in several languages.'' I applaud the work of the Board of Education and Dr. Rudy Crew in coming to grips with the need for curriculum guides. Now we can take the curriculum guides and create another column, a column next to each set of measurements for the curriculum standards, and lay out what is needed in order to meet that standard. If you are teaching science, then we can ask the question, does the school have science laboratories? We can ask the question, does the school, if you want children to read at a certain level and be able to write reports, do they have a library, can they get access to books and be able to be stimulated to read more and learn how to write reports? On and on you can go. Once you have established standards and curriculum, now you certainly have tests which are serious. Because if children do not pass the test, they are not going to make the next grade. No social promotion is a policy that everybody has jumped on board. It is a great wonderful policy, no social promotion. We will have a problem with no social promotion because one of the things that happens is you increase the over-crowding in schools. The schools that are already overcrowded are going to be even more crowded. Classrooms are going to be even more crowded if you do not have social promotion, and you will have to deal with that problem. But the other problem is too often the primary determinant as to whether a youngster is promoted or not is the test. And the test, as administered by the New York City Board of Education last spring, as scored by the firm that they hired to do it, the tests had 20,000 youngsters labeled as being not eligible to move on to the next grade because they made mistakes. In the computation of the test scores they made mistakes. And large numbers of children had to sit through summer schools in hot buildings that had no air conditioning. They had to go through torture of summer schools when they had not failed, they had passed, and the blunders of the bureaucracy had placed them in this situation. So it is a high-stakes game. These tests determine what happens grade by grade, and these tests are going to determine what happens in the life of the students that have to go through it. If we are going to have these standards, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Incorporated, that has the trial going at Federal courts is on target. If you are going to have these standards, then you have to provide the resources starting with the provision of State aid to the City of New York at the same level per pupil that you have provide to the rest of the State. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the article that appeared in the New York Times, November 2, 1999, ``New York's New Curriculum Guides Set Up Standards.'' [From the New York Times, Nov. 2, 1999] New York's New Curriculum Guides Set Up Standards, Grade by Grade (By Anemona Hartocollis) In an effort to help parents hold schools accountable for what children learn--or don't learn--the New York City school system has produced a series of guides to what every child should know from kindergarten through 12th grade. The guides, being distributed to teachers and parents beginning today, decree that a fifth grader multiply with speed and accuracy, understand exponents, write a report using three sources of information and know how to punctuate with quotation marks, commas and colons. A kindergartner should be able to count to 10 and tell a story using letters, drawing, scribbles and gestures. Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew said yesterday that the new guides are intended to be so clear and simple that all parents can understand them and become partners in their children's education. He said that they would give parents a tool to hold schools responsible for what their children learn, and whether they learn it. Dr. Crew said the pamphets--one for every grade--are intended to at least implicitly establish a common curriculum. Although he talked about ensuring that children throughout the city are learning the same thing every day, every week, every month, the guides set goals, like ``write daily for extended periods,'' but not specific content. They do not list books that all children in one grade should read or math problems that they all should do. ``For the first time, there is a consistent framework for student achievement across the system, regardless of the borough, the district or the classroom,'' Dr. Crew said. In the last few years, many states, including California, New York and Virginia, have tried to take a stronger hand in dictating curriculum, after years of giving schools and districts control. Indeed, Dr. Crew, at a news conference at Board of Education headquarters in Brooklyn, said that New York City is actually entering the game rather late, a decade after the movement to tie curriculum and standards together actually began in California and other states. The project was also clearly intended to fend off lawsuits--one has already been filed--challenging Dr. Crew's plan to end the automatic promotion of failing students. In New York, Florida and other states, parents have argued that it is unfair and even illegal to hold back children if they have not been clearly told what is expected of them, and if the curriculum does not reflect the standards. In June, thousands of children were held back based on test scores alone, setting off a lawsuit by some parents who contended that other factors, like attendance and classroom work, should be considered. Until now, Dr. Crew said yesterday, curriculum was set by a combination of state and city standards, which he criticized as too vague, as well as standards of the textbook publishers. ``Because this is the first year of our new promotional policy, it is very, very, very important that parents understand what is acceptable grade-level work,'' said Judith Rizzo, deputy chancellor for instruction. Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said the idea was ``terrific,'' but that the union believes it will not be complete until the school system has a ``much more thorough and really core curriculum.'' The union is working on such a curriculum, to be unveiled next school-year. But some parents said yesterday that the learning standards were too vague to be useful and feared that the pamphlets would be used to blame children and parents if students did not measure up. Sylvia Wertheimer, the mother of a fifth grader at Public School 41 in Greenwich Village and an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, said the goals articulated in the pamphlets sounded just like the goals that her school already uses in its report cards. She also fretted that teachers and administrators would be defensive if she tried to use such standards to confront them about their shortcomings. ``More gibberish,'' she said. ``I feel like they want the parents to do everything, whatever deficiencies children have. Why don't they just teach them?'' Diane Ravitch, an education historian, said the new goals would only be effective if teachers were trained to use them, and tests were designed to measure them. ``Al Shanker always used to say, `Does it count?' '' Dr. Ravitch said, referring to the former president of the American Federation of Teachers. Despite his vision of 1,200 schools doing the same thing at the same time, Dr. Crew's plan would not be as regimented as, say, the French school system, where if it is 10 a.m., children everywhere are learning ``Phedre'' by Racine. Neither Dr. Crew nor his aides were able to explain how they would enforce the new learning standards in a system as complex as New York City's, where local districts and schools have historically enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. For each grade, the new guides describe how the standards will be used to determine whether children go on to the next grade or are held back, and warn that no decision will be made based on one factor alone, like a test score. The board released guides covering English and math in kindergarten through grade 8 yesterday and will add grades 9 through 12 shortly, officials said. It also plans to issue social studies and science guides. Officials said the guides would be sent home with students in time for parent-teacher conferences this month, and will be available in several languages. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity is a noble attempt, I said, to deal with the fact that the amount of resources available are not being distributed appropriately. A lot of the activity and energy that has been put forth surrounding education in this House of Representatives for the past few years has dealt with the same problem of no new resources; let us argue about how we use what we have. One of the big issues that was on the floor of this House a few weeks ago related to the passage of the title I funding out of the committee that I serve on was, shall we take what exists already, title I funding, nearly $8 billion for the whole Nation, shall we take that and change the original target. The original target for that funding under the original law was that the poorest children in America needed the most help. The school districts where the poorest children resided were not capable of giving the kind of help that they should give, and the Federal Government intervened, just as the Federal Government intervened before in school lunch programs to make sure that every child gets nutritional care in terms of food, and a number of other ways the Federal Government has over the years intervened. By the way, it even intervenes in the case of highways. We have a national highway system which is fantastic because the Federal Government intervened to provide a highway system. So when we have had needs, the Federal Government has intervened. A lot of people say, well, there is nothing in the Constitution that makes the Federal Government responsible for education. There is also nothing in the Constitution that makes the Federal Government responsible for railroads, but we built the transcontinental railroad. There is nothing that says the Federal Government is responsible for highways, and yet we spent billions of dollars for a highway system. And recently we authorized $218 billion over a 6-year period to continue to build and refine our highway system. So the Federal Government, under Lyndon Johnson, decided to intervene and provide education for those schools that need it most. Title I funding is for the poorest schools and the poorest youngsters. The formula for title I is driven by poverty. The measurement for poverty is the number of youngsters who qualify for free school lunches provided by the Federal Government. We have had situations where the intent of the law, the target population, has been circumvented. Too many districts that did not have poor children were going to receive title I funds, or only had only had a tiny amount. We dealt with that when the law was reauthorized 5 years ago, tightened it up. But then we had a situation where they wanted to define which schools are eligible to have schoolwide programs. And when you determine who is eligible to have a schoolwide program instead of focusing on individual children, we had a figure of the number of percentage of children who are poor as a factor to decide whether or not they could have a schoolwide program. If you had 75 percent of the children who were poor, then we could have a schoolwide program that did not have to focus on individual children, but the whole school could benefit from the dollars that the title I program provided. It started out at 75 percent. Then it was reduced to 50 percent. One of the battles we had a few weeks ago on the floor was the fact that the present majority, Republican majority, decided they wanted to reduce that further to 40 percent. One of the members on the Committee on Education, Republican majority member, also even wanted to go to 25 percent. Well, if a school qualifies with only 25 percent poverty, you could see how you then have to cover more schools. And many of those schools, with only 25 percent of the children being poor, would absorb dollars and help fewer poor children. So you could describe it accurately as the Robin-Hood-in-reverse approach. Instead of appropriating more money if you want to reach more children, we were going to take money from the poorer children and give it to the children who were better off and the schools that were better off, circumventing and undercutting the intent of the law. Well, that is going forward. On the floor of this House there was an amendment offered to keep it at 50 percent, where it is now, and that amendment lost. So the legislation that went to the other body contains in it the 40 percent figure. And probably if the Republican majority had their way, they would eliminate any percentage, because they came on the floor shortly after the title I bill was passed with another bill called the Straight A's act. The Straight A's act says, let us give all money related to education to the governors and the States and let the governors decide how to spend the money, and they probably certainly will not use any 50 percent formula. The history of the States is that they operate in a way which satisfies the most powerful elements in the State, and poor people are seldom the most powerful elements in the State political arena. Right now you have large numbers of States that have surplus funds for welfare. They are not providing the funds that they should for day- care and for other kinds of services to welfare recipients, even though it is Federal money. They have saved it in various ways, and they are supposed to provide that money to help train and provide jobs for welfare recipients and day-care services. New York State is a place where there is a tremendous need, large waiting list for day-care services. There is a surplus now, and the governor and the State have moved so slowly, until you have a surplus but large numbers of unserved families who want day-care and need day- care and cannot get it. The likelihood is that, the more discretion you give to the State, the fewer poor people would get service. History has demonstrated that the States will not take care of the poor. The Robin Hood approach is to not provide more money but to spread it out. We have a situation in New York City where the number of poor children drive the formula, determine the amount of money that comes into New York City. New York City is composed of five counties; and in the distribution of money in the counties, we found that the children in some counties were getting far more of the title I funds than others. And we corrected that 5 years ago by changing the formula to make it similar to the formula that applies to the rest of the Nation. The formula says that money must come to New York City by county, so that the poorest county, the county with the largest number of poor children, Brooklyn, found that it was getting far less money than it should get if you use the straight formula as was used in the rest of the Nation. So we had a battle and we had forces lined up to challenge that and try to fight again for the pile, the limited pile, how to divide that was going to become a fight. I hope that that fight does not materialize. I would like to join all my colleagues in New York State, certainly from New York City and take a look at how we can deal with the fact that the city as a whole and the State as a whole does not get the kind of funding from education that it should be receiving per student. We should have a unified effort to try to bring in more funds instead of dividing up the pile. The Robin Hood approach at the local level is no more desirable than the Robin Hood approach at the Federal level. We do not want to have title I formulas distorted. We do not want to have favoritism in the bureaucracy determining that children who are poor in one part of the city will get far more than they deserve while other children are robbed of their fair share of title I funding. We want to deal with that. There are many positive solutions that we can go forward with while we are waiting for reelection by the levels of government that have real power. The Federal Government, State government, governors should stop playing games. I go back to the analogy of the bleeding baby seal. We should stop tossing the bleeding baby seal about and having fun with it, pretending we are going to do something about education while the bleeding baby seal dies. We should do big things to deal with a monumental problem. Education is a monumental problem. It requires a big solution, a big approach. I understand there are some candidates running for President who say that it is the duty of the Federal Government to deal with big problems with big solutions. The Marshall plan is one example I told you. The Transcontinental Railroad, the Morrill Act which established land grant colleges, the GI bill which provided education for all GIs after World War II. We have numerous examples of how we have dealt with big problems with big solutions. I want to close by reading a letter I sent to the President to appeal to him to offer leadership in this area. I think that as I have said many times, there are many components of the problem of education reform, many components. They are all important. But the kingpin component is what are you going to do about facilities, what are you going to do about the infrastructure, how are you going to send a message to all the students that we really care about public education by letting them see the highly visible changes that we can make to improve education? I wrote this letter to President Clinton on October 13, and I want to read parts of it. First I am going to read a part which does not relate to education but relates to my great appreciation of President Clinton because I think we need to reestablish a perspective on the man we are dealing with. I do not agree with all the people who seem to say that he has no legacy. I think he has a legacy already, but I would like to see the legacy improved upon. ``Dear President Clinton: ``Let me begin with an expression of my deeply felt admiration of your leadership in a period cluttered with many more political perils than most citizens have realized. Your leadership has been the vital defense against an unprecedented right wing assault on the unique institutions and programs which extend the benefits of our democracy down to the ordinary men and women of our Nation. When all others were traumatized by the Republican blitzkrieg, your maneuvers held their forces in check. Despite the petty problems highlighted by the partisan impeachment effort, Mr. President, you have already established firmly an impressive legacy. For many millions, you already have the unwavering loyalty and heartfelt appreciation that you deserve. You have preserved the conscience of the country. That is a legacy that historians will eventually be compelled to acknowledge. ``But, Mr. President, there is one more vital request we must make on your unique ability to fuse the practical with the idealistic. Now is the time for you to crystallize, solidify, concretize your legacy as the Education President with actions that will catapult our Nation forward. I strongly advise, urge and plead, Mr. President, that you launch an omnibus, cyber-civilization education program to guarantee the brainpower and leadership needed for our present and for the expanding future digitalized economy and high-tech world. ``At the heart of such a comprehensive initiative, we must set the all-important revitalization of the physical infrastructure of America's schools. These necessary brick and mortar creations will long endure not only as highly visible symbols of your overwhelming commitment to education but they will serve also as practical vehicles for the delivery of the kind of high-tech education required in the 21st century. To the working families who depend on public schools, it would be a resounding message that a vital segment of our Nation's children have not been abandoned. ``The message will also state that we are willing to make an overwhelming investment in a workforce which will help to guarantee the viability of Social Security. We are willing to make an investment in a massive student pool that provides the military with the recruits needed to operate a high-tech defense system. We are willing to make an overwhelming investment in a massive body that can produce the full range of geniuses, scientists, engineers, administrators, managers, technicians, mechanics, et cetera, necessary to launch and maintain a cyber-civilization. ``In other words, Mr. President, it is of vital importance that you carry your own movement to a highly visible apex. Please consider the fact that it is not by accident that the most brilliant American President, Thomas Jefferson, chose a message for his tombstone which only noted that he was the founder of the University of Virginia. If there had been no first model State university established by Jefferson, there would have later been no Morrill Act to establish land grant colleges in every State. ``The America of the year 2000 requires from you, Mr. President, a comparable pioneering act to guarantee its brainpower leadership in the world.'' Mr. Speaker, I submit the entirety of this letter for the Record. House of Representatives, Washington, DC, October 13, 1999. Hon. William J. Clinton, President of the United States, The White House, Washington, DC. Dear President Clinton: Let me begin with an expression of my deeply felt admiration of your leadership in a period cluttered with many more political perils than most citizens have realized. Your leadership has been the vital defense against an unprecedented right wing assault on the unique institutions and programs which extend the benefits of our democracy down to the ordinary men and women of our nation. When all others were traumatized by Newt Gingrich's blitzkrieg your maneuvers held his forces in check. Despite the petty problems highlighted by the partisan impeachment, Mr. President, you have already firmly established an impressive legacy. From many millions you already have the unwavering loyalty and heartfelt appreciation that you deserve. You have preserved the conscience of the country. That is a legacy that historians will eventually be compelled to acknowledge. But, Mr. President, there is one more vital request we must make on your unique ability to fuse the practical with the idealistic. Now is the time for you to crystallize, solidify, concertize your legacy as the Education President with actions that will catapult our nation forward. I strongly advise, urge and plead that you launch an Omnibus CYBER- CIVILIZATION Education program to guarantee the brainpower and leadership needed for our present and expanding future digitalized economy and hi-tech world. At the heart of such a comprehensive initiative we must set the all important revitalization of the physical infrastructure of America's schools. These necessary brick and mortar creations will long endure not only as highly visible symbols of your overwhelming commitment to education; they will also serve as practical vehicles for the delivery of the kind of hi-tech education required in the 21st Century. To the working families who depend on public schools it would be a resounding message that a vital segment of our nation's children have not been abandoned. The message will also state that we are willing to make an overwhelming investment: in a workforce which will help to guarantee the viability of Social Security; in a massive student pool that provides the military with the recruits able to operate a high-tech defense system; in a massive body that can produce the full range of geniuses, scientists, engineers, administrators, managers, technicians, mechanics, etc. necessary to launch and maintain a global Cyber-Civilization. All of the most brilliant and visionary education achievements of your administration may be merged and focused through these vital physical edifices: The NET-Day movement for the volunteer wiring of schools; The Technology Literacy Legislation; the Community Technology Centers; the Distance Learning pilot projects; and the widely celebrated and appreciated E-Rate for telecommunications. The lifting of standards, the improvement in school curriculums and the support for smaller class sizes are also initiatives that require the additional classrooms and expanded libraries and laboratories that school modernization will bring. In other words, Mr. President, it is of vital importance that you carry your own movement to an ultimate highly visible apex. Please consider the fact that it is not by accident that the most brilliant American President, Thomas Jefferson, chose a message for his tombstone which only noted that he was the founder of the University of Virginia. If there had been no first model state university established by Jefferson, there would have later been no Morrill Act to establish land-grant colleges in every state. The America of the Year 2000 requires from you a comparable pioneering act to guarantee its brainpower leadership in the world. You have the opportunity to bequeath a new system for public education. Highly developed human resources are clearly the key to power and prosperity in the century to come. To minimize the crippling waste of human potential there must be a broad sweeping public school system forever striving toward education excellence. The kingpin for the education improvement effort, the temples for the promotion of excellence are our school buildings. Mr. President, an adequate and landmark modernization and construction program requires that we move beyond HR 1660, the Rangel Ways and Means payment of the interest on school bonds (3.7 billion over a five year period). For New York and numerous other states which require that voters approve all borrowing for school construction, this legislation will provide zero funding. I strongly urge that you revamp your position and support HR 3071, my bill which provides direct funding at a level commensurate with the magnitude of the problem of school wiring, security, safety, modernization and construction (110 Billion dollars over a ten year period). On a trip to New York more than a year ago, as your guest aboard Air Force One, I had the privilege of chatting with you about education issues and problems. When you asked my opinion of the growing endorsement of vouchers among African American parents, I replied that our public school reforms were moving too slowly and sometimes even lurching backwards with the results that large numbers of parents have lost hope. Mr. President, the trip was much too short and when we ended our brief exchange you invited me to forward a more thorough statement of views and vision on the education challenge. Although I have had the pleasure of speaking to you in group meetings since that discussion, I have not until now attempted to offer a thorough summary of my position on the need for an overwhelming campaign to greatly improve public education in America. A massive school construction initiative must be placed at the core of this campaign for a CYBER-CIVILIZATION Education Program. Sincerely Yours, Major R. Owens, Member of Congress.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, since its inception in 1974, the Women's Education Act has had a tremendous impact on gender equity issues throughout our nation. While women have progressively made gains in the classroom, they are still not properly represented in most Fortune 500 companies. According to a report by Congressional Research Service, women in today's labor market typically earn between 73 cents and 76 cents for every dollar earned by men. In addition, while the government has attempted to address the wage gap differential through various forms of legislation, it appears that women are still disproportionately hired for lower tier jobs with limited access and proper training for middle and upper management positions. In a nation where women now represent more than 46% of the workforce, (up from 33% in 1960) we must continue to close the wage gap by supporting the reauthorization of WEEA. As we move into the new millennium, this nation and a number of it's multi-national corporations are attempting to recruit workers from outside the United States to fill key Information Technology (IT) positions. This trend could be halted if more elementary and secondary schools would mentor and convince young women to take more math and science classes with a stronger emphasis on critical thinking and logical reasoning skills. Moreover, according to the American Association of University Women (AAUW) 65% of all jobs in the year 2000 and beyond will require technological skills, yet women are still being encouraged to take data entry courses. These kinds of statistics are alarming considering that still only 17% of students who take advanced computer science tests are young women. As Americans, it is our responsibility to ensure that women throughout our nation are given every opportunity to strive for academic excellence. Gender equity in the workforce cannot be achieved if we don't continue to cultivate young minds by supporting female interests in jobs that have traditionally gone to males. Lastly, the impact WEEA has had in the private and public sector is quite evident. More women than ever are being encouraged to take challenging course work while attempting to shatter corporate America's glass ceiling. However, programs such as WEEA are now under attack from political pundits who believe women have caught up and even surpassed men. Clearly, nothing could be farther from the truth. The truth is that while women have made significant gains in corporate America they still trail men in the areas of science and technology. Although gender equity issues are now at the forefront of American politics, programs such as WEEA provide critical research that continues to identify important need areas. The WEEA Equity Resource Center, which serves as a depository for issues and programs deemed sensitive to the needs of women, provides companies, universities and athletic programs with information on recent policy briefs and studies which impact how women are treated in the workplace. For this reason, I encourage my colleagues to support the reauthorization of WEEA as we send a clear message across this nation that women are our most indispensable resource.