Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, this process of the rule shows contempt for poor people and poor children, just as legislation also shows contempt. Welfare legislation should not demonize poor children. Yes, first we must remember that the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act is a safety net program for children, for poor children. Helping mothers to find jobs is only a means to accomplish the end of providing necessities for children. These children are a vital part of the fabric of America. History clearly exposes the fact that poor children of America have grown up to supply the majority of the foot soldiers who have been maimed and killed by the wars of this Nation. The overwhelming majority of the heroes whose names are engraved on the Vietnam War Wall Memorial are soldiers who came from families who would qualify for free school lunches, food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. If we are so unfortunate that we are entrapped into a prolonged war against terrorism and it becomes necessary to institute a draft again, the first and greatest number to be drafted will be the children from the poorest families in America. Helping children out of poverty and not harassing the so-called welfare mothers should be the goal and mission of the reauthorization of TANF legislation. After 5 years of this program, which has been labeled a great success, why are there more children living in poverty than before? Have the infant mortality rates decreased? Are children who have been pushed off Medicaid receiving adequate health care? Are there more children in juvenile delinquent detention facilities? What proportion of the prison population were teenagers on welfare 5 years ago? To bring legitimacy and humanity into this lawmaking process, these are a few of the questions that we should answer. We have rushed to declare a success without applying any basic scientific research principles. Instead, we are passing a rule tonight which facilitates a cold-blooded grab for another pound of flesh from the demonized welfare mothers. Today it is approximately 2 weeks since we passed the largest safety net under congressional jurisdiction, the farm subsidy program. Although it has a few other features, it is primarily to convey $20 billion per year to so-called poor farmers who constitute less than 2 percent of the population. This is not the only tax dollar give away orgy that we have seen recently. In the nearly $400 billion defense bill, we threw billions of dollars at several unnecessary weapon systems, such as the dangerous Osprey helicopter gadget, a missile defense system that will not protect us from terrorists, and other high-tech overweight gun monsters that the Secretary of Defense has declared obsolete. There have been other tax giveaway orgies, but the farm bill is the most relevant comparison because the farm subsidy is a safety net program. Most people do not understand; it is a safety net program. The means test for the agriculture safety net benefit is $2.5 million. If you make more than this, you are not eligible for the safety net benefits of the farm program. In any one year, you can only receive $390,000. Do farmers have to work for these taxpayer dollars? Or are they paid not to work to grow food? Farmers are important, but no more important than the families that supply the majority of the foot soldiers who fight and die in the wars of America. Poor children in America are as important as anybody else. We should not continue to demonize them. We should understand what Osama bin Laden and a number of people in the Islamic world understand. They are precious, they take them and they train them to hate; and they have become a resource to be used against America. Our children deserve the same kind of attention, not to be demonized but to be nurtured.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. That is very much a part of the pattern of contempt I have observed in this bill. We say we want to put Americans to work and off welfare, meaning the mothers of the children. Yet there is a prohibition against higher education in the present law. You cannot go into a junior college or community college to get an associate degree. That is where the jobs are, the technician jobs that pay a decent salary, offer steady and continuous work with fringe benefits, and a health care plan. But no, we will not allow a welfare mother to use, to go into a higher education program.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we have initiated the debate on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act reauthorization. I want to pick up on a point that I made during the discussion of the rule, and that is that poor people are treated with great contempt in this Congress. During the discussions that preceded the preparation for the bill, there has been language that indicated that the poor are held in contempt. Children are treated with contempt. They make the mistake of assuming, speaking as if we are dealing with welfare mothers and women who are unworthy of being helped by the government. Actually most of the aid to families with dependent children is exactly what it says, it is aid to families with children. We are helping children, and to treat children with contempt is a great mistake in humanitarian terms, in national terms and even military terms. It happens at this point in history there has been a lot of highlighting of the fact that poor children in certain countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan and a few of the Islamic nations are being nurtured and brought into schools called madrassahs, and being given three meals a day, taught to read and write, and they are taught to hate, and then shipped out to military camps which become part of the armies which are supposed to wage jihad against the West. Recently in the New York City Times there was an article which shows that the right-wing Hindus in India are doing the same thing. They are taking poor children with nowhere else to go, and raising these children up as soldiers. Observing these manifestations in the world of Islam, I began to think about what happens in this country. It dawned on me if we examine the names that are on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington, and I challenge the Heritage Foundation or anyone else who has the staff to do it to challenge me, the majority who died for the country are poor people. We know from the Civil War if you got drafted, you could pay for someone to take your place. In Korea and Vietnam, the majority also were poor people. Those were the foot soldiers. If we ever have a situation where we start drafting people again, those are going to be the foot soldiers again. Let us not treat our poor children with contempt. They are as vital to America as anyone else. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this resolution. Mr. Speaker, this resolution is far from perfect; however, in the context of an ongoing peace seeking process, this reaffirmation of America's bond with Israel is a vital step forward. God has blessed America. We are the only remaining superpower in the world. We, the people of the United States, alone have the capacity to serve as the Great Angels of the 21st Century. We can lead the way to solve the most intractable problems. The fullest possible engagement in the Mid East is now a necessity. We must now go the final mile and offer all the resources that we can muster to encourage peace. The whole world knows the self-evident truth that in our hearts and souls we are wedded to Israel. There is no formal treaty that states the obvious; however, it is understood that a threat to the survival of Israel is a threat to a piece of America. We are brothers and sisters for democracy; for freedom; for equality; for the equal treatment of both genders; for recognition and respect for all races, religious and creeds. Against the overwhelming residue of oppressive governance throughout the world, America and Israel are leaders for enlightenment and liberating progress. Who among us, if forced to make the choice, would not want his children to live in the State of Israel, instead of any one of the despotic, oppressive surrounding Mid East nations. Our world has been plunged into a war against more than terrorism. We are in a war against technologically advanced barbarism. We, too, have a tradition that believes in martyrdom, but it is not based on the reckless courage of murderers. The Christians who met Nero's lions were martyrs; the followers of Ghandhi were martyrs; the slain American civil rights freedom fighters were martyrs; suffering 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela emerged as a martyr and invited three of his prison guards to dine with him at the presidential inauguration banquet. There are millions of us who are determined to continue the fight for justice for all. But the martyrdom of suicide bombers will never bring freedom and justice. And peace can never be achieved merely with tanks and guns. ``War never leaves us thrilled/But maniacs demand to be killed.'' After we have blocked the murders of the maniacs, we must then go on to take the greatest risk. America must dare to exert a total pressure for peace. We must take the greatest risk of all. The Great Angels of America must be willing to support a formal treaty which guarantees defensible borders for Israel and guarantees an independent Palestinian state. No troops will be necessary to accomplish this feat. Our overwhelming moral force is adequate. We must just state this goal, set a deadline and make peace a reality. We shall overcome.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, our last debate today was very instructive when you combine the last debate of the day, which was a debate about whether or not our great Nation will feed legal immigrants by allowing them into the food stamps program, and you combine that debate with the debate we had earlier about making permanent a tax cut which will provide for the richest people of the Nation further tax relief. The tax cut is equal to four times the size of the budget of the entire Department of Education. It is more than three times as large as the Department of Veterans Affairs or the Department of Transportation. When you look at that combined with the fact that next week we are going to be discussing the reauthorization of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Act, that replacement of the old Aid to Families With Dependent Children, we are looking in America at sort of contradictions. Let us add to that the fact that earlier today we debated the placement of a cap on the farm subsidies act, the farm bill. The farm subsidies were created in the same spirit that the Aid to Families with Dependent Children was created. It was created in the same spirit as food stamps were created. They were created on the assumption that there are certain Americans who need help. We need a safety net for them. The safety net is there for people who need food, and food stamps were a way to administer and process our assistance to people who need food. Sometimes there are desperately poor people, most of them are desperately poor, and sometimes they are not so poor, but people who are caught in a temporary situation, where their income falls short and they are unemployed. Even some middle income people unemployed have taken advantage of the food stamp program. If they happen to be legal immigrants, however, we cut them off. In a Nation with plenty, we do not want to give food to legal immigrants. At the same time, the farm subsidy program is overly generous and has been greatly abused, and the vote we took today was a vote to put a cap on farm subsidies for farmers. Let us forget about the complications of farm corporations, the fact that the agriculture business is not a business of small farmers anymore, but there are often many large corporations benefiting from the farm subsidies. But it was not supposed to be a program to benefit anybody except those who were at risk of falling through the safety net, so earlier today we prided ourselves on voting to put a cap, to instruct the conferees who are considering the bill now to put a cap on the farm subsidies at $175,000. That is per year, my colleagues. $175,000 per year. That would be the cap. Right now there is no cap, so some get much more than that. As I progress with this statement tonight, I am going to read some of the examples of the kind of benefits that are being received by America's farmers, who are, after all, not working. They do not have to put in any special volunteer work to do this, to do anything, in order to qualify for the safety net program for farmers. The farm subsidy program is a safety net program for farmers. The food stamp program is a safety net program for hungry Americans. Legal immigrants, by the way, as one of the speakers pointed out, legal immigrants are allowed to fight in our Armed Forces, and a large number are out there in the Armed Forces right now, and more are being encouraged to enter our Armed Forces. In fact, the recruiting process of our military is such that they are making a special effort to reach immigrant communities. They have set up a large recruitment center just one block from my office in the 11th Congressional District in Brooklyn. They have set up a recruitment center at a place which is a transportation hub for immigrants. Large numbers of people who are immigrants, mostly immigrants from the Caribbean, come through this hub, and they have made an effort to reach them, in particular to get them to sign up for the military. They will reach their quotas faster, because a large percentage ever the people who are now signing up for our military are immigrants. These people can know go off and fight for America, they can go off to meet our military needs, and yet they are not able to qualify for food stamps. I think one of the speakers previously pointed out that they could not, even if they are soldiers. Some of our soldiers are paid so low that they do qualify, their families do qualify for food stamps, but not if they are legal immigrants. They are soldiers. They can fight and die, but they cannot receive food stamps. Those are contradictions which I do not think we ought to be content to live with. The American spirit ought to try to wrestle with greater fervor against some of these contradictions. We have, on the one hand, a very generous spirit, which leads us to send food throughout the world. We are feeding people all over the world with surplus American food. Certainly, long before we were able to bring the Taliban down in Afghanistan, we were delivering food to Afghanistan, and we sometimes dropped food from airplanes. We understand the need for food, the power of food, and yet the contradiction here is we are not willing to feed legal immigrants within our own borders. That contradiction will be further highlighted next week when we debate the Temporary Assistance for Families in Need bill. We approach families in need in this country with great contempt, and yet those people who are in need are certainly worthy of some help, worthy of being caught up in the safety net. They are falling in the safety net that is designed for them as much as for anybody else. I will talk a little bit about that. If we have to talk in military terms, we will talk in military terms. We are all concerned about the fight against terrorism. We are all concerned. The first line of defense is, of course, to deal with the people who have attacked us and to confront them head on and to hit them where their bases are and to break up their whole conglomeration of evil and terror, and I applaud the President for moving in that manner. I do not consider myself a hawk. I would generally be called a dove. But I think when we moved against bin Laden and the stronghold bin Laden had in Afghanistan, it was the right move. But in order to do that, we move with human beings, and many of those human beings are people who are the sons and daughters of folks that we hold in contempt back in America when we do the Temporary Assistance to Families in Need. In other words, I am saying that a large number of the people who go off to fight our wars are poor people, and for us to take a position that we have contempt for them and we want to harass them and drive them off the welfare rolls and force them to go to work for less than minimum wage through ``workfare'' programs, what we are doing is attacking the people who are providing the foot soldiers, the foot soldiers to keep America great, to keep America free, to fight our battles. I am going to talk a little later about the fact I have done an analysis of who dies in the wars, who died in World War I, who died in World War II, and who our casualties in Vietnam were. They were mostly poor, from the urban centers and from the rural areas. They were mostly poor soldiers, our foot soldier class. We do not like to think of classes in America. We say there is no class warfare in America. That is an accurate statement. There is no class warfare, because the poor do not have any advocates. They do not have anybody to fight for them, so it is not warfare. There is no warfare. The rich are in control thoroughly, and the tax bill that we passed today is just one more indication of how thoroughly they control our American democracy. Yes, you can have a democracy where the people vote against their own interests, or you can have a democracy where people act against their own interests, because those who do not vote are acting against their own interests. We know even in presidential elections, something close to 49 percent of the people do not go out to vote. If in our presidential elections, our most important elections, you only have 51 percent of the people voting, you can imagine how that falls down as you go down to the Senate, the House, local State and elected officials. Those who do not vote have nobody to blame in the final analysis but themselves in a democracy, but their actions are part of a process by which the majority interests are not served in a democracy. A democracy allows a minority to usurp their prerogatives and to act in their interests. The tax bill that was passed today is an example of that. The tax cuts represent the worst kind of priorities. What we do here in Washington and in the House is always an important thing involving priorities, how you set priorities, how you make use of available resources. When I get back to my district, like during the period where we had a long work period, in my district I am constantly confronted by people that have special questions about what are you doing down there that makes any difference to me? Why are you not doing something to relieve my particular problems here? Senior citizens are upset by the fact that in New York City now the Department for the Aging is cutting Meals-on-Wheels. They are proposing to close down some services for senior citizens, to make them pay a greater share for their lunches. They want to know what are you doing in Washington for me? Well, the problem in New York is probably partially a problem of deep budget cuts because of a great loss of revenue caused by the fact that the World Trade Center was the heart of our financial districts and the financial district was a great generator of tax money, of revenue. So the folks in New York, senior citizens, are suffering from the budget cuts because of the fact that bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorist network chose as a target a piece of America that happened to be in New York City. He was not attacking New York City or senior citizens in the communities of Brooklyn. He does not care about the senior citizens in Brownsville and in East New York or Flatbush. He does not care about the people of New York. The terrorists and the people who attacked the World Trade Center were attacking the United States of America, but the suffering is disproportionately being borne by the people of New York City at this point. Yes, we are getting a large amount of money to rebuild the Trade Center. The President has promised more than $20 billion to rebuild and take care of the reconstruction and the removal of the wreckage and to help the businesses in the financial area. But there is no program that seeks to deal with the loss of revenue. There is no program offering New York City any assistance for the great loss of revenue which leads to the cuts in senior citizens programs or the loss of revenue which leads to the cuts in education, the school budget. Now, that is not a phenomenon unique to New York. All over the country we are having problems with our school budgets. We have documented that in our Committee on Education and Workforce, that the majority of the States are cutting school budgets, cutting their aid to education, and localities are finding the necessity to cut aid to education. So, what does it have to do with us here in Washington? We could, instead of giving a huge tax cut to the richest people in America, we could give more aid to education. I just said before that the tax cut that we voted, that the majority of the House voted, I certainly voted against it, along with most of the members of the Democratic Party, we voted against it, but we are outnumbered here, so the House voted for a tax cut which is four times as large as the budget for the entire Department of Education. That is significant, that at a time when we are forced to make cuts in our school budgets, we get no more aid from the Federal Government than we get during prosperous times. One would say, well, there is the old adage about education being the responsibility of the States, the responsibility of localities, so why do you keep bringing up education as a Federal responsibility? Well, education is our number one national security issue. We are a high-tech society. Our military is high-tech. Our ability to defend ourselves and to bring down the terrorist network in Afghanistan or anywhere else depends on high technology. Even in small matters, and I do not want to invade the territory of the military experts, but even in small matters, which are not so small, I guess, even in matters which are detailed in terms of our performance on the battlefield, we are losing more men and women, more of our combatants on the battlefield, through human error in this war than we have as a result of enemy engagements. We just lost the lives of four Canadians because of human error. One of our planes fired into a Canadian group just yesterday, and, if you hear all the different explanations for it, it was really human error. The pilot was not given an order to fire, because they were checking out the area. The information his headquarters had was greater than the information he had, and he panicked and fired, and human error cost four more lives. We have lost a number of other lives as a result of human errors. It is not grounds for a detailed analysis of the war, but it is just one more indication of the fact that a high-tech army, high-tech military, will require more and more well-educated people in order to minimize human error. So even in the matter of combat, education becomes very important. But the infrastructure which produces the weapons and the whole system that keeps our economy strong and allows us to afford a first- rate military is all dependent on education. So here we are at a time when education is suffering, and we are extending the tax cut to the richest people in America; and that is a part of the great contradiction. We have what I referred to in an earlier rap poem that I read a few weeks ago; we have great angels in America who understand our particular point, our pivotal point in history at this point. They understand that we are the key to civilization, which we are. Whether civilization goes forward and realizes its full potential or rolls backward and is caught up in the jaws of people like bin Laden who say that all the folks who want to roll back history, take away freedoms, oppress women, have no use for democracy and votes. Mr. Speaker, the world is governed by more governments that are not democratic than are democratic. The world has leaders in power who have contempt for women, who have contempt for minorities. We are not in such good shape if we look over the entire Earth and we look at what is happening in terms of the leadership and the governments and those in control. We are at a pivotal point; and we are leading the charge for a more civilized world, a world where everybody has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, where we are in favor of equal rights for all. As I said in my poem, ``Let's Roll, America'' a few weeks ago, we can sing the high hallelujah note, because all of our races and women can vote. We can celebrate that. In every language of the Earth, to the country of all nations, we have proudly given birth. All of the languages of the earth, those immigrants that some people want to deny food stamps for, they are part of what we have created. We have created a nation where all languages are spoken. We have created a nation where all of the people of the Earth aspire to get here and be a part of it. I do not subscribe at all and do not have any patience for the notion that Americans are the objects of great anger, that people despise us. That is ridiculous. Throughout the world, most people, ordinary people, the vast majority of people, they envy us perhaps, and they admire us more so than despise us. There is a leadership out there that feels that it is on the spot. They do not produce for their people. They use the resources of their nations to make the rich richer. They do a lot of things that lead them to want to see America removed from the scene because we are examples of how a government and a nation can work for all of the people, all of the people. We are an example of how you create a consumer market by being just, by having fair wage laws, by having working conditions, benefits, pension plans, all of which work and really do not swindle the people and that works. There is a lot of business leaderships and military leaders and government leaders across the world who hate that because they like to see those kinds of components of a government and of a civilization not displayed because they do not want to offer it to their own people. So we are not hated in the world. The majority of the people, the ordinary people very much admire Americans because we are what I call ``great angels.'' I said in the same poem, ``Let's Roll, America'' was the name of the rap poem that I did a few weeks ago, and I said at that time that the Olympics are forever. We will win all the races. We are great angels of tomorrow, with magic mongrel faces. We are a mixture of people but, most of all, the spirit of the great angels is there. The spirit of the great angels is there in competition with the spirit of what I call the giant Scrooges. The giant Scrooges are always on stage here. The giant Scrooges are in command here in the House of Representatives. They have the majority. They can pass a tax bill which makes it impossible for Social Security to be secure over the next 25 to 50 years. They are the ones who combined, in a bipartisan move, to lock the box and make certain that Social Security would not be threatened. But what this tax cut does is threatens Social Security. Those seniors back in my district who are worried about food stamps, who are worried about their centers being closed and the lunches that they have at the senior citizen centers, the rate that they pay will be going up, and they are worried about the Meals-on-Wheels programs being shut down. They have bigger worries if the Republicans continue to insist on a pattern of tax cuts that make it impossible to balance our budget, that drive us into deficit. All of this has to be looked at together. The same Republicans who would terrorize and harass welfare mothers, the mothers of the foot soldiers who go off to fight our wars, those same people insist on creating bigger and bigger tax cuts for the rich. They are jeopardizing in the process, they are jeopardizing Social Security, something that every senior considers to be most basic. The last thing that they will tolerate from me is a statement which tells them that I am a Democrat, I cannot do anything about the forward march toward threatening Social Security, or privatizing Social Security. They do not want to hear from any elected official who says they cannot protect Social Security. And we must understand that there would be a revolution here in this Nation if we continue to threaten Social Security. The kind of incremental threats that are woven into the Republican tax cuts are hard to get people, it is hard to get people to understand. But in just 1 year, the surplus projections for the next decade have declined by $4 trillion as a result of the Republican tax plan. They have broken the lockboxes by spending trillions of Social Security and Medicare trust funds on other things. The Republicans shamelessly will try to escape blame by pretending that the war on terrorism has caused a $4 trillion loss. Simple arithmetic will tell us that it has not been the case. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the war on terrorism costs $10.2 billion this year. That is a tiny fraction of the unprecedented deterioration and the position of the budget in terms of the surplus. Where did all the money go? The bulk went to fulfilling Republican campaign promises to pass tax breaks for wealthy contributors to the Republican Party. According to the Citizens for Tax Justice, 37.6 percent of the benefits of the final tax bill will go to the top 1 percent of the income earners in this Nation. Mr. Speaker, 37.6 percent of the benefits of the tax bill will go to the top 1 percent of income earners. These are the giant Scrooges who want to more and more enrich the rich. We now know that the money for these tax breaks comes from payroll tax contributions that every worker makes to Social Security and Medicare. In the final analysis, that is where the money is. Willy Sutton used to say when he was asked, why do you rob banks, and he would say, that is where the money is. Where do you get the money to balance the budget if you are going to give huge tax cuts? You get it from Social Security and Medicare, because that is where the money is. Our Leader Gephardt has called for a bipartisan summit to work out a blueprint for how America will get itself out of this mess. As it stands, the extending of the tax cut will further raid the Social Security and Medicare trust funds which the Republicans claim not to touch. We need a bipartisan truth commission to tell the truth about what the real threat to Social Security is and how the tax cut becomes a threat to Social Security, and a tax cut becomes the problem behind the problems that the people in my district are complaining about. You cannot have some relief on education expenditures coming from the Federal Government if the relief that might have been there is being poured into a tax cut. The Federal Government, at a point in history like this, when we not only have great budget cuts in education in New York City, but across the whole country, we should have some relief for the States and for the local governments, and that relief has been proposed in our education legislation. We propose that the Federal Government take on the full responsibility for special education. If we took on the full responsibility for, not full responsibility, but that we live up to the original legislation on special education which said that the Federal Government would pay 40 percent of the cost, and right now we are paying something like 10 or 11 percent of the cost of special education. If we were just to assume the 40 percent costs for special education instead of pouring our money into tax cuts, take a portion of that, a relatively small portion and put it into special education, we would free up funds at the local level to be spent on education in some other way. Forty percent of the cost, instead of 11 percent of the cost, means that local education agency would be able to take that money and fill in some of these budget cuts that are resulting, not only in New York, which has suffered probably more than most big cities because of the 9- 11 attack which took away our taxes, our revenue to pay for education, but across the country. One gesture like that would be beneficial to education right across the board. In addition to that, the President should go ahead and fund title I. They promised to begin the process by, increase title I by adding to the title I fund in each year until within 5 years we would have twice as much funding in title I as we presently have. But right away, despite that promise, the President backed away in his budget that was sent to Congress. Two items live up to our promise to fund special education by going all the way to the 40 percent and increase the funding for title I, and we would bring a great deal of relief already to the education budgets out there that are suffering right now. So it all relates, Mr. Speaker. I hope that I am not confusing any of our colleagues. We have had a discussion about the tax cut and what the impact of that is. We have had a discussion about the farm bill and setting a cap, putting a cap on farm subsidies. We are going to have a discussion next week, and preliminary discussions are taking place right now, and all of the committees, the committees of jurisdiction, the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on Education and the Workforce are discussing the temporary assistance to families in need. We had a discussion, of course, earlier here today on food stamps for immigrants. It all relates. I think that the challenge of leadership in America nowadays is not a challenge of knowing the facts; it is a challenge of how we put it all together once we get the facts. Probably the challenge of leadership anywhere in the world is understanding the complexities of the world and understanding how one thing relates to another, and being able to provide some leadership which will make use of the existing resources so that everybody benefits. The great angels of tomorrow we are. As Americans, one side of our personality says we are great angels and we want to do the right thing for everybody, including the people in this country, and then beyond that, to provide help for other people throughout the world. That is one part of our spirit. The other part of our spirit is demonic. It is giant Scrooges. People who want to take food stamps away from legal immigrants; people who want to give welfare recipients, a family of three, I think in Wisconsin they get less than $300 a month for a family of three. That is considered a successful program for welfare recipients, aid to families in need. All of these things are related. Setting priorities and determining how does our great wealth get utilized to push civilization forward is a great question. It is there in all of these issues. They do relate very much. I want to make certain that I make it clear that the class problem is at the heart of the way we make decisions in America. We do not have class warfare, we hate to bring up the whole issue of class, but class is very much a problem. There is among the giant Scrooges, there is also contempt for the poor. The giant Scrooges are people who have contempt for poor people, just as Scrooge did in Charles Dickens' novel. They have great contempt for poor people. The giant Scrooges of America have a lot of racism also woven into that. The harshness with which we treat people on welfare, the way the law is formulated, is partially due to the perception that this is thought that this is a program mostly for minorities. If we treated farmers in the same manner, we could say, well, it is people who want to make certain that the taxpayers get their money's worth; people who are frugal, who have respect for the taxpayers and want to make certain that we spend money wisely. If that was the case, then why do we not apply the same standards to farmers or to the farm subsidy program that we apply to welfare recipients? We will be reauthorizing the temporary assistance to families in need, and in that bill we say nobody, no matter how needy, they can only have assistance from the Federal Government for 5 years. The 5- career limit has been imposed. We say it has been very successful. It has made people more conscious of the fact that they need to go to work and get off welfare. There may be some truth to that. Why do we not impose a 5-year limit on the farm subsidy program? Why did we not impose a 5-year limit on the farm subsidy program a long time ago? Why do we have unlimited amounts of money being paid out in the case of the farm subsidy program when we have very paltry amounts being paid to families who are in need under the TANF, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Act? If we are considering frugality and the best use of taxpayers' money, what motivates us to pay $20 to $22 billion out to the farm community when less than 2 percent of the people of America are farmers? What is going on as we set our priorities? And why do we pay 40 percent of the farm subsidy money, why do we pay most of the farm subsidy money to 40 percent of the farmers, so that 60 percent of the farmers get nothing? Family farms who are really poor in that 60 percent get zero, while 40 percent of the agricultural businesses, I will not call them farms, in America are receiving most of the money. If we are only concerned about the best use of our taxpayers' money, why do we let the farm program continue to rob us blind? In addition to the subsidies, there are also farm home loans, special loans for farmers, disaster loans for farmers. Less than 2 percent of the population walks away with a great part of the budget. What is going on in terms of our priority-setting? If we are great angels of tomorrow, as I think some of us are, the great angels would want to make certain that we use our resources across-the-board to help the greatest number of people. Why can we not have a prescription drug benefit for senior citizens, and save some of the money from the abuses in the farm subsidy program in order to finance a program for prescription drug benefits? What is going on here? Why do we let the Scrooges prevail? Evidently, the same Scrooges, giant Scrooges who are in charge of our tax cut program, are also funneling money to a small percentage of the farming businesses. I might not object to the farm subsidy program if we could guarantee that it went to the poor farmers, but we admit that it is going to farmers who are getting large amounts of money. In fact, we consider it a victory today that we voted for a motion to instruct the conferees that was prepared by the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith). The gentleman's motion was to instruct the conferees who are considering the farm bill now to put a cap on the program, accept the Senate proposal for a cap; that is, an amount, a limit on the amount of money that farmers can get. We, I think, voted for a cap of $175,000 per year, $175,000 per year. That would be the cap. We consider that a victory. How wonderful it is that we have put a cap of $175,000 on a subsidy that farmers can get. It is a safety net program. It is a handout, if we want to get into the slang that is used by the Scrooges when they are considering giving $300 to a family of three on welfare; it is a handout. They hand it out with great contempt, and they complain about it, and they look for ways to push a person off the welfare rolls who is maybe getting $300 a month. We can see how much that adds up for a year. The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith) wrote a letter to all his colleagues. If we want to talk about bipartisan cooperation, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith) is a Republican. ``Dear Colleague: You have received letters from many Members supporting limitations on farm subsidy payments. Some farms now receive millions of dollars. On Wednesday, I will offer a motion to instruct House conferees on the farm bill, H.R. 2646. It will direct them to accept the farm subsidy caps added to the legislation in the Senate. The caps will limit farmers to $225,000 in subsidies per year; if they have a spouse, $275,000 per year. ``The purpose of subsidies since the beginning has been to protect family farmers. Unfortunately, about 82 percent of all subsidies now go to just 17 percent of the farmers. By providing unlimited subsidies, we have encouraged huge corporate farm operations to get bigger and bigger, squeezing out family farmers. ``You may have heard from some farm and commodity groups in opposition to this idea, but make no mistake about it, they do not speak for the majority of farmers and ranchers. Last year, 27 of the Nation's land grant colleges from all the Nation's regions came together to poll farmers and ranchers on their opinions of the farm bill. ``On the issue of farm payment caps, there was enormous consensus: Nationwide, 81 percent of farmers and ranchers agreed that farm income support payments should be targeted to small farms. Limiting subsidies to any particular farmer will help traditional-sized family farms. ``Please consider supporting the motion to instruct on Wednesday,'' et cetera, et cetera, by the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith), Member of Congress. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record this letter from the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith) to his colleagues. The letter referred to is as follows: Congress of the United States, House of Representatives, Washington, DC, April 15, 2002. Protect Family Farms! Cap Farm Subsidies! Dear Colleague: You have received letters from many members supporting limitations on farm subsidy payments. Some farms now receive millions of dollars. On Wednesday, I will offer a motion to instruct House conferees on the farm bill (H.R. 2646). It will direct them to accept the farm subsidy caps added to the legislation in the Senate. The caps will limit farmers to $225,000 in subsidies per year ($275,000 with spouse). The purpose of subsidies, since the beginning, has been to protect family farmers. Unfortunately, about 82% of all subsidies now go to just 17% of the farms. By providing unlimited subsidies, we've encouraged huge, corporate farm operations to get bigger and bigger, squeezing out family farmers. You may have heard from some farm and commodity groups in opposition to this idea, but make no mistake about it--THEY DO NOT SPEAK FOR THE

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the high school sophomores of America are disgusted with this conversation, I am certain. I am sure they are asking themselves why the Members of the House of Representatives and the other people who are elected to protect their rights allow this situation to exist for so long; but they are certainly not happy with the majority party standing up to applaud themselves for taking a few significant steps toward greater financial security with respect to the pension funds of the employees. We have taken a few steps. Why not maximum reasonable security for all of the people who have their money in these pension plans? Why not go further than the plan that the majority has? Does it cost the taxpayer any money to do a little more as reflected by the Miller substitute? Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Miller substitute. What would it cost to have immediate disclosure whenever a top executive sells a large amount of stock? Would that cost the taxpayer any money? Would it really cost us any money to have greater checks and balances? Would it cost us any money to have more democracy where the employees have a representative actually watching their funds sitting in a high place where the decisions are being made? The people in Europe and the other industrialized democracies do not think it is such a great problem to have an employee representative sitting on the board. Why not maximum reasonable security? Why not go one step further? Everybody knows from past scandals, savings and loans swindles, the bigger the party is, the more corruption there is going to be. We have enough history as a human race to know that whenever we have large amounts of money or large amounts of power, corruption is inevitable. Human beings are going to behave that way. That is why the system of checks and balances exists. Let us go all the way with maximum reasonable security.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a Tribute to Firefighter Gerald L. Baptiste of Ladder Number 9, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory of Americans, and; Whereas, more than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances, and; Whereas, more than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, we deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in a variety of forms and ceremonies. Now therefore be it Resolved: That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representatives of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and to offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a tribute to Captain Vernon Richard of Ladder Number 7, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the Record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory of American, and; Whereas, More than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, Members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Policy Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances, and; Whereas, More than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and; Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, We deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in a variety of forms and ceremonies. Now therefore be it Resolved: That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representatives of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and to offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a Tribute to Firefighter Keithroy Maynard of Engine Number 33, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the Record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory Americans, and; Whereas, more than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances, and; Whereas, more than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and; Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, we deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in a variety of forms and ceremonies now, therefore, be it Resolved: That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representatives of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a Tribute to Firefighter Leon Smith, Jr. of Ladder Number 118, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the Record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory of Americans, and; Whereas, more than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances, and; Whereas, more than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and; Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, we deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in a variety of forms and ceremonies: Now therefore be it Resolved: That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representatives of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a tribute to Firefighter Andre Fletcher of Rescue Team Number 5, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the Record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory of Americans, and, Whereas, More than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, Members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances, and, Whereas, More than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, We deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in variety of forms and ceremonies. Now therefore, be it Resolved, That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representative, of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and to offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a Tribute to Firefighter Karl Joseph of Engine Number 207, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory Americans, and; Whereas, more than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances; and Whereas, more than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, We deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in variety of forms and ceremonies: Now therefore be it Resolved: That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representatives of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and to offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a Tribute to Firefighter Tarel Coleman of Squad Number 2 a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the Record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory of Americans, and; Whereas, more than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions; and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances, and; Whereas, more than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and; Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, we deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in a variety of forms and ceremonies: Now therefore be it Resolved: That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representative of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and to offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk about a very important aspect of the kind of war against terrorism which I think the United States should wage. I would like to talk about a dimension of that war which is very seldom discussed. We are in the process now of preparing for our budget. The vote on the budget may come as early as next week. In that budget, the largest increase is $48 billion for the military and for homeland security, items which are designated as part of the war against terrorism. I want to talk about that in terms of its being utilized in a new way, of being expanded so that it has a greater impact against terrorism than the present administration foresees. The emphasis of the present administration is too much on the military and too little on foreign aid and other kinds of necessities that are needed, both at home and abroad. I think the discussion before on Social Security is relevant here, also, but today, earlier, we took some steps which I think weaken our war on terrorism. A bill was passed which erodes the ability of the American citizens to bring class action suits. For some time, since the Contract With America and the majority was taken over by the Republican Party, we have had an effort to erode the rights of citizens in our civil courts. Certainly the effort to end class action suits as we know them has been going on for some time. That bill was passed today, by a narrow majority, but it was passed; and it is one more example of how we are restricting and oppressing, with a light hand, and swindling our own population. Every time we do that, every time an act takes something away from the American people, the citizens, who must be at the heart of fighting the war on terrorism, we are weakening our war against terrorism. One thing this war needs is every American enthusiastically involved. Every American must understand that the war is going to be a long war and the war is a war for people's minds across the globe. It is a war to show our compassion. It is a war to help educate the rest of the world. There are a number of items, of components in this war against terrorism which require massive help by our entire population. When we make our own population a little less comfortable or disgruntled, we move in ways which are going to restrict the rights and freedoms of our own population; we are weakening our effort in the war against terrorism. When we refuse to appropriate adequate funds for education, we are greatly weakening the ability to fight a war against terrorism. And over what? In the most elemental concrete way, the ability of our military to fight a war with high-tech weapons, very complex weapons, is dependent to some degree on the quality of the education of the personnel involved. I am not a military expert; but the large number of accidents that have occurred, the large amount of human error and the number of casualties that were the result not of hostile fire but of our own mistakes, indicate that the quality of personnel could be greatly improved. I am mindful of the time when, just a few years ago, we launched a new super aircraft carrier, the largest and most complex machine on the water, about 3 years ago was launched by the Navy, and they said that they were short 300 personnel. They could not fill 300 positions on that aircraft carrier because they could not find within the Navy the enlisted men who could do the things that were necessary, could operate the complex high-tech equipment. It was just one example of how education directly relates to our ability to fight a war. In this example it is obviously quite concrete and related to the military. On a larger scale, we need all the people we can to help educate the populations of certain nations, to help educate the leaders, to be able to spread the constitutional civilization that we enjoy, how you operate under a constitution, to be able to spread the economic system that we enjoy, the legal system that goes along with economic system. Capitalism cannot exist without a legal framework. There are a number of things that are not so simple that the rest of the world needs to learn, and one of the ways we are going to be able to win the war against terrorism is to have more and more people, ordinary people in the nations of the world, understand these complex processes. So educated people in America will help not only increase our own level of prosperity, the ability of our own Nation to function, but also we are going to be needed to help spread democracy across the world and help democracy take a firm hold, to help improve the economic systems take hold. The nation building that is going to have to take place in Afghanistan is just one example of a large number of people of all walks of life, technicians, mechanics, scholars. All kinds of people are going to be needed to help rebuild the nation of Afghanistan. We are not going to do it all. The United Nations is responsible for the nation building in Afghanistan, and that is the way it should be; but we must make a great contribution. The larger war is one that we must understand how serious it is, the projection of a larger threat. It is not the kind of threat that we have faced before with the Soviet Union, the possibility of nuclear annihilation overnight, the possibility of them having more nuclear warheads than we had, the Soviet Union having better rockets than we had and the necessity to keep monitoring what the Evil Empire was doing. The Evil Empire, on the other hand, was monitoring us constantly. We are in a different kind of situation, and the threats we face now are not as easy to describe or to imagine as they were before. But one thing that September 11 taught us is that we are vulnerable. There is this great Nation, we are not an empire, call us the American colossus, with all of its strength in so many ways, which is very vulnerable, like any other civilized society is vulnerable. We did not know that on September 11 to the degree we know it now. We are very vulnerable, because if you hit one nerve center, and in the case of September 11 they hit the financial center of New York, a communications center, two buildings. Large numbers of people died, but a lot of other repercussions took place as a result. It was a domino impact. A domino impact helped to make the recession worse, not only in New York City and New York State, but it had an impact right across the Nation. We were vulnerable in that a relatively small group of people somewhere in the world, and they were based in Afghanistan, we have assumed, I think correctly, a small group of people struck down all the airplanes of the skies of the great United States of America. They were empty for a few days as a result of the actions of these few people. So we are vulnerable, because the Internet connections and the television broadcast connections at the World Trade Center meant a lot of people found themselves without television service, and communications in New York is very much still affected by the fact there were telephone switching stations and complicated operations located near the World Trade Center. So in a number of ways a very complex, modernized society is vulnerable. Now terrorists know it as well as everybody else; and we have to recognize that, sooner or later, the possibility of these things happening again is there. We will have other kinds of attacks. We seem to be quite vulnerable here on Capitol Hill, when one letter going through the post office and then to Senator Daschle's office led to an anthrax scare. Appropriately, that shut down the whole Senate building. One-third of the Senate offices were shut down; employees were terrorized to some degree. Two postmen lost their lives as a result of the anthrax just passing through the post office machines, and all of us saw our mail brought to a halt. We did not receive mail for a couple of months. Our mail has to go through an irradiation process now. A lot of complex things happened as a result of the relatively small anthrax attack. We are grateful for the fact that whoever perpetrated that attack did not send 10 or 20 envelopes through the mail at the same time. So we are vulnerable now. We know we are vulnerable to an anthrax attack; and just as anthrax was sent through, you could have other kinds of biological attacks, very potent diseases. The smallpox virus, all kinds of things could be done in similar ways, through the mail and various ways dropped in areas where you have a dense population in our big cities. There are a number of ways that we can discern that we could be attacked by faceless, nameless, nationless people. We know that now, and so do a lot of other people out there know it. How do we make ourselves safer? I do not have all the answers, nobody has all the answers; but we are evolving answers. One answer is to reduce the number of people in the world who would cooperate with terrorists, reduce the number of people in the world who would become terrorists, reduce the number of people in the world who would aid and abet terrorists. That is one way to begin to make a safer world. In doing that, we have to have a foreign policy and domestic policy which put people first. I am not speaking as a pacifist. I am a follower of Martin Luther King, I believe in non-violence, but I also recognize that we have to, in some cases, go to war. The only way to stop certain kinds of threats is with violence matching violence, and that is what our military is all about. I said the last time I was here in a small poem that I wrote that wars never leave us thrilled, but there are some maniacs who demand to be killed. Wars never leave us thrilled, but there are some maniacs who demand to be killed, and we would indeed be quite stupid not to recognize that after a long history of dealing with these maniacs. Adolph Hitler was a maniac that could not be stopped any other way except with violence against violence. We had to have a military force to match his overwhelming military force. We thought after Hitler you would have a decrease in those kinds of maniacs. He was thoroughly punished as a result, and the nation that followed him was punished as a result of his activities. That did not stop Pol Pot from arising. That did not stop Slobodan Milosevic from trying his hand. On and on it goes. These maniacs will come. Saddam Hussein is another one of those maniacal creatures that exist. We cannot put our heads in the sand and pretend that they are ever going to be able to be stopped if you only have a nonviolent approach to them. However, there are also the nameless, faceless groups out there that have not even formed yet, that can be dissuaded, stopped, if we remove the fertile ground for terrorism that exists among those groups. I am a child of World War II. I was just a grade school student during World War II, and we lived with the possibility that the Nazis would prevail. In school we were told they wanted to take over the world. In black schools they were told they hate black people, and one thing worse than the Ku Klux Klan is the Nazi SS storm troopers. The terror of the Nazis we lived with until they were defeated. Then we lived with the terror of the Cold War, the Russians are coming, the Evil Empire. At school we used to have drills and have to go under the desks because the Russians now had the atomic bomb and we might have nuclear war. So we lived through that. Even up to the time of my children in school, they still had drills and were very much conscious of the need to be afraid of an attack by the Soviet Union. All of that was horrible; and all of that, of course, left quite an impression on a lot of us. But none of it was as horrible as 9-11. Even the attack on Pearl Harbor, we lived with the knowledge that the Japanese were very sneaky and they might attack, coming over California and into the heartland of America. That was another one of the nightmares that young people used to have. But the attack on Pearl Harbor, of course, brought the war home closer than any other war we had ever realized from a foreign nation; but at Pearl Harbor, at that time Hawaii was not even part of the United States, so it was a little more distant, and, of course, most Americans who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor were at least military people. It was not until 9-11, nothing compares, nothing we experienced in World War I or World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, nothing compares to the attack on America that took place on September 11. It brought home the fact that we are in a different kind of world. The Evil Empire, as the Soviet Union was described, and I am sure they had descriptions for us that were similar, no longer exists. Russia and America now have generals and officers stationed in the missile sites, and we closely monitor each other and the number of nuclear weapons we promised to reduce. Certainly the rockets and their trajectories have been altered, and there are agreements that make us all feel secure that the Soviet Union and the United States will never go to war. We are the only nations with the capability of delivering long-term nuclear weapons. We are not happy and secure about the Chinese or North Koreans, but even then there is a nation to negotiate with; and America has negotiated with the North Koreans. Despite the fact that the President called them part of an ``evil axis,'' we are still in negotiation with North Korea. It is a nation. China, our relationship with China, there is a multiplicity of contacts and relationships. Capitalism has invaded China; and China has invaded our consumer markets, for good or ill. We are not that afraid that China is ever going to pull a sneak attack on us. But those unknown, unnamed forces out there, in small groups, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden is just one that we have profiled, a high profile, we understand. Who knows how many other there might be out there. But certainly al Qaeda gives us a good example of the kind of danger we face from stealth, stealth attacks, stealth violence, S-T-E- A-L-T-H. The world ``stealth'' is what every civilization has to fear from now on. We have come to the point where weaponry is so complex and so powerful that small amounts of explosives and small bombs or small packages of lethal viruses or small packages of powder, like anthrax, can do tremendous, tremendous harm. We are threatened by stealth from possible terrorists in the future. So they are and could be as numerous as the stars. We cannot ever be able to stamp out all of those possibilities out there. The one way to guarantee that they are kept at a minimum and the one way to guarantee that they have an atmosphere and a milieu and an environment to operate which is hostile to them and protective of us is to try to make a world which includes justice, peace and compassion; a world where all the babies receive enough to eat; a world where young people are allowed and encouraged and supported to get an education which will allow them to look beyond hate. A great deal has been said about the madrassahs in Pakistan. The madrassahs are schools in Pakistan which have come into great prominence and merited a great deal of attention and discussion because Pakistan as a nation abandoned its public school system. A very limited amount of money is appropriated in the Pakistan budget. This year they have done much better. Before 9-11, very limited amounts were being appropriated for education, huge amounts for the military, and other expenses; and parents seeing their children abandoned were happy, quite pleased that they could send their children to religious schools which not only gave them an education, it taught them to read and write, but also provided some hot meals each day for them. So large numbers of children, especially males, were spent to the madrassahs and the madrassahs, we know now, taught them to read and to write, but only a limited amount of reading and writing, not a broad education about the whole world, a limited amount, and taught them to focus on hatred for the West and hatred for certain religions and taught them to dedicate their lives to the eradication of what they call the Evil Empire, the decadent West and Christianity and a number of other kinds of things they were taught to hate. So many of them went off to the camps in Afghanistan to become a part of the Taliban and a part of the army of the Stealth Army of Osama bin Laden. So we have that example that we are watching. It is a case history. Pakistan is an interesting case history for the United States, because Pakistan as a nation has always been an ally of the United States. From its inception, it has been a friendly relationship. The United States has rattled its sabers and flexed its muscles a few times to protect Pakistan from India, and in wars that India could have won easily if they had continued. I can remember the United States making veiled threats and telling them they needed to back down, and that has happened. On the other hand, Pakistan was a loyal ally during the Cold War. While India was far closer to the Soviet Union, Pakistan was very close to this Nation. Of course, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the key to the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by American-led Stealth forces supporting the Afghan people was Pakistan. Pakistan was the avenue through which the United States funneled its aid, its weapons, its military power. And it defeated the great Soviet Union as a result. Pakistan, in alliance with the United States. But each time we have an engagement with Pakistan, each time Pakistan serves as our ally, we have not rewarded Pakistan. We did not reward them for the great service they did as a result of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. We did not reward them for all of the years that they served as our loyal ally during the Cold War. Pakistan was sort of left to drift when we got through with using them. So we missed a golden opportunity. A nation of more than 160 million people is no small nation. Compared to India with 900 million, 160 million may seem small, but among the nations of the Earth, Pakistan ranks among the top 10 in population. Having deserted, left Pakistan alone, not rewarded Pakistan in any way, the establishment of a closer alliance with military aid, no Marshall Plan for Pakistan, no Marshall Plan, no continuing relationship, aid was very meager, and then when Pakistan, as they have had unstable governments, each time there was a coup, we punished them by taking away something. They had given us the money to buy planes, we kept the money and did not give them planes. We had a meager amount of aid going to them, and we cut all of that off through A.I.D. Nothing happened as a result of punishing them for their own instability in their own government. For various reasons, Pakistan could be very disgruntled. However, Pakistan has risen to the occasion and was one of the first nations to respond to President Bush's call for allies in the war against terrorism. Considering the fact that Pakistan has a huge border with Afghanistan, Pakistani response, the Pakistani support for the war on terrorism was crucial. We could not have reached the point that we have reached now in terms of pretty much containing the violent situation, the capacity of the Taliban to wreak violence on its population or anybody outside without Pakistan. We could not have reached the point where Osama bin Laden is on the run somewhere or hiding somewhere or maybe dead; we could not say that we have dealt a critical blow to terrorism if it had not been for Pakistan. We owe Pakistan a great deal. I want to applaud our own administration. For once they have responded by rewarding the nation of Pakistan. There is a package that is part of President Bush's war against terrorism of $500 million or $600 million in aid, and some of that aid is earmarked for education. It is earmarked for education. More than $100 million is earmarked to be spent only on education. There are other moves that have been made to aid education in Pakistan at the same time we are giving other kinds of aid. So Pakistan is an ally that we are taking care of. The rest of my speech I want to dedicate to the proposition that there are allies in the western hemisphere that we continue to ignore and take for granted at our peril. In a world where we face terrorism threats, where we face threats from unknown groups, some of them not even established yet, but we know the conditions that give birth to these kinds of terrorist groups, in that kind of world, we are at risk in our own hemisphere. We are ignoring the Caribbean Islands. We are ignoring the threat from the South American countries. We are ignoring the role that Haiti could play in a positive way or in a negative way. We are ignoring the fact that these nations in this hemisphere, close to us, have one great advantage and they can impact in a more meaningful way on our lives because they are so close, just because they are so close. We are ignoring the fact that for years now, we have been fighting what we call a drug war, and the drug war has involved our deploying operatives to all of these nations of one kind or another related to the war against drugs. Not just the island nations, but the nations joined to us at the southern tip of Mexico. Mexico and the island nations of the West Indies and Haiti, all have had serious problems with respect to either the growth and processing of drugs or the transshipment of drugs. If we ignore the fact that these nations already have a problem and that that problem may lead to a situation where the governments are forced to succumb to drug lords; there are some things worse in the world than the Taliban. The Taliban at least had religious rationale. It may be a phony religious rationale, but it was a religious rationale. The drug lords do not attempt to pretend to be moral in any way. The primary problem between Haiti and the United States during the Clinton administration or during the last, for the last 20 years has been the fact that forces in Haiti, certain forces in Haiti were being financed by drug lord money. The problem of the President of Colombia is that Colombia is at the point where there is a danger that drug lords will take over the entire nation. Most Americans do not know that we spend more than $1 billion in this little country called Colombia in South America. This is $1 billion being spent in the war against drugs and we are continuing to invest. Unfortunately, it is a military war. We are giving aid to fight a guerilla army which is financed by drugs. We are giving aid to fight a population which has no other means. They see themselves as having no other means to survive, so they are part of the process of growing drugs and processing drugs. Colombia is just the beginning. Colombia is right next to Panama, and Panama now is an independent nation. The canal is owned, operated; it is part of Panama, not America any more, and they are right next to Colombia. Drug lords could take over Panama sometime in the future if we do not understand that that kind of war is as important as a war against terrorism. In fact, it is a kind of terrorism, and it certainly could become a part of an income-producing empire for terrorism in the future. We have not talked very much, we have not heard much about the role of drugs in Afghanistan and how the Taliban and all of the forces in Afghanistan have been involved in selling drugs. Heroin, the poppy from which heroin is made is the number one product of Afghanistan, and the control of the heroin trade by these factions, including the religious Taliban, was one way in which they financed their operations, selling drugs. So it is not farfetched to say that the drug war in this hemisphere will become a major problem in the war against terrorism in the future. We need to look at all of the nations in this hemisphere in terms of what is our relationship to them, why do we continue to take them for granted, why can we not have a Marshall Plan for the western hemisphere on a scale similar to the Marshall Plan which saved Europe after World War II? Why can we not have a Marshall Plan which develops an economy, helps to develop the economy of the Caribbean Islands? It would not cost very much. Why could not we have approached Colombia with aid for economic development and other kinds of things, rather than only aid for the military? I am sure if we spent $1 billion for economic development in Colombia, we would get a better return on our investment than we have gotten for the dollars that we spend on military aid in Colombia. They are fighting a guerilla group, a guerilla operation which could not exist if it did not have the support of a large percentage of the population. Why does it have the support of a large percent of the population? Because a large percent of the population make their living growing cocaine, the coca leaf, and that is where they have an affinity with the lawlessness of the drug lords. What would happen if in the future in this hemisphere we are surrounded by all of these nations and they are taken over by drug lords, they run the governments? That means that drug lords have a vote in the United Nations. There are a lot of small nations in the Caribbean Islands that are right now directly threatened by drug lords. There is one island where the chief law enforcement officer was murdered by a local drug lord. Everybody knows who killed that person. Everybody in the islands is afraid to participate in the process of apprehending and prosecuting the murderer. That is just a small island and one dilemma which foretells the future of a lot of others. There are some larger islands which have recently had violent outbreaks in certain parts of the island, and Jamaica is one, where the battles were fought in Kingston, where the police were outgunned by modern weapons that the criminals had. How do criminals in a small island get such modern weapons and are able to outgun the local police? Through the financing of the drug trade. There are some islands where drug lords are known and despised by the population; but if a drug lord gives a birthday party, your top officials of government go to the birthday party. You are eroding slowly the respect for the civilian governments, you are eroding the authority of governments, and you are saying to the population, that process is saying to the population that drug lords are all powerful. It is like in our neighborhoods in New York and some other big cities where powerful people demand a lot of money and forces, and young people begin to look up to them because they have money, they drive the big cars, and they have the best wardrobes, et cetera. In the island nations, we have the same development of powerful forces that may get out of hand. If we really want to fight terrorism, and we have $48 billion in the present budget, I am not way out in left field, I want to stay on the subject, if we have $48 billion in the budget to fight terrorism and for homeland security, then a portion of that money ought to go to looking at this hemisphere and what we can do in this hemisphere at a much lower cost now than we would have to pay in the future if we had to fight empires of drug lords with votes in the United Nations and all kinds of influence in the future. I want to use Haiti as a case history, because I am quite disturbed, and we have good reason to be disturbed, by the present policies of the United States Government toward Haiti. Haiti has a long history of being a loyal ally of the United States, just like Pakistan, way back when, when Haiti was the second nation in this hemisphere to gain its freedom. The United States became an independent country in 1776. Haiti came second in this hemisphere as an independent nation. When the British tried to undo the Revolutionary War and to subdue the infant nation of America in the War of 1812, Haitian soldiers fought on the side of American soldiers. Haitian soldiers were sent or came to this nation. Throughout the history of Haiti and the relationship between Haiti and the United States, the Haitian people have never raised their hands against the United States. They have never been disloyal. Yes, we have done some terrible things to the Haitians. We occupied their country for more than 30 years. But the Haitians have never done anything to subvert the United States. Neither Hitler nor Castro nor Osama bin Laden has been able to drive a wedge between the Haitians and the people of the United States. That ought to stand for something. We ought to be interested in rewarding Haiti. Haiti would be a good example to hold up to the rest of the countries in this hemisphere as to what it means to be a friend and ally of the United States. Let us take care of our friends at home, as well as seek to make new friends across the world. Vice President Cheney is on a tour throughout the world to build up alliances, to get alliances for the American-led war against terrorism. That is probably altogether fitting and proper. He should do that. But in the meantime, the nations in this hemisphere are being treated very badly, and I begin with Haiti. Haiti is at the point right now where it may cease to exist as a nation. Haiti may implode or explode and just fall apart completely because of the hostile policies of the United States. The key to the death of Haiti would be the policies of this nation. Haiti does not deserve to die. The second oldest independent nation in this hemisphere, the nation of Haiti has been driven to the brink of chaos and dissolution by a hostile U.S. foreign policy. Seven years ago, the U.S. reneged on a $200 million development fund promised to Haiti. Now the U.S. is presently blocking humanitarian aid in order to bolster the position of a destructive opposition in Haiti. For petty political reasons, Haiti is being strangled to death, but Haiti does not deserve to die. Haiti is being cruelly smothered by a small group of petty, but powerful, decision-makers here in Washington. Long before the recent Haitian election controversy, and there is now a controversy in Haiti about the last election of people, and we are using the fact that that election was not a perfect election as an excuse to hold up aid to Haiti and to block aid to Haiti from other sources. That election in Haiti probably was far more reasonably executed and implemented than the election in Florida. But we are using that as a way to deny aid to the present administration. But long before that, long before the Haitian election controversy, for personal, ignoble, and irrational reasons, a noose was tied around the neck of President General Bertrand Aristide's first administration. As the democratically elected president was returned, with the support of the U.S. military, President Clinton and the international community promised Haiti an economic aid package vital to the survival of the country. The start-up and kingpin donation was to be $200 million from the U.S. That was going to be the start-up, and the other nations, using that or recognizing that $200 million, would create an infrastructure, an administrative infrastructure, which would allow Haiti to make use of additional aid. They promised to give additional aid. Other nations, Canada, France, Japan, they promised to follow the lead of the U.S. with a sum total of more than $1 billion. In other words, let me make it clear, if the United States had followed through on its promise to give $200 million, the rest of the nations of the world would have chipped in and the amount of aid that Haiti would have gotten 7 years ago was $1 billion or more. But the U.S. did not follow through on its promise. There were certain powerful people in Washington who said that Haiti would never get a dime from the United States because they personally would see to it that it did not happen. There are a few people in Washington who are just that powerful. Unfortunately, certain power brokers within our midst counted themselves as close friends of the old oppressive ruling class in Haiti, and they thus became sworn enemies of President Aristide. The president of Haiti who was elected with an overwhelming democratic vote of the people was targeted by the U.S. right wing for punishment. What was the U.S. right wing? Certain people in high positions in the Congress of the United States were part of it; certain people in the CIA were part of it. They had all surfaced during the years that Aristide was in exile and had spoken against Aristide in various ways. We know who they were; we know who they are. Despite the fact that Aristide's administration was in no way corrupt, and Aristide obeyed his own nation's constitution and he stepped down at the end of the 5-year term, the U.S. allowed a ruthless and shortsighted few to condemn Haiti to death by neglect, death by abandonment, death by the denial of vital aid for survival. Let me repeat: Aristide's administration was in no way corrupt. We could find no fault with Aristide. Aristide returned after being in exile for 3 years. He was elected, and the army staged a coup, and they forced him out of the country. He was in this country for 3 years. He went back. He had only 2 more years to serve in his term. He had a right to make a claim that he had been exiled and was not able to fulfill the wishes of his people, and he had a right to say, ``I should be allowed to stay 5 years.'' But no, he accepted the constitution and wanted to promote the authority of the constitution, and he stepped down after serving for 2 years, 3 years in exile and 2 years after he went back. We asked him to do that. The United States Government wanted that to be done. He did everything we asked; but nevertheless, a ruthless and shortsighted few decided to condemn Haiti to death by neglect, death by abandonment, death by the denial of vital aid for survival. We descendants of Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King should no longer tolerate the lynching of a nation before the eyes of all who can see in this hemisphere and the rest of the world. That is what is happening: We are lynching the nation of Haiti. We are strangling a nation to death. We are assassinating a nation. That is the charge I make, and I think that the facts will bear it out. The policies of the United States Government at this point are destroying the nation of Haiti. Haiti does not deserve to die. As I said before, in the War of 1812, after the vengeful British had burned the White House and were threatening to recolonize the fledgling American Republic, Haiti sent troops to aid in the defense of our new nation. Since that time, Haiti's hand has never been raised against this land. Neither Hitler nor Castro nor Osama bin Laden could break the bond that exists between the U.S. and the people of Haiti. Haiti does not deserve to die at the hand of the United States foreign policy. Mr. Speaker, today I am inviting all of my colleagues to unite with the Congressional Black Caucus to rescue a Haiti that is being unjustly subjected to cruel and inhuman torture. Haiti is being unjustly subjected to cruel and inhuman torture. The denial of humanitarian aid to Haiti right now is being used as a political sledgehammer. We are coupling humanitarian aid, aid that is designed to help people, aid, most of which would not go to the government, it would go through nongovernmental organizations, we are denying that aid as a way to force Haiti to do some things we want done which would benefit the opposition in Haiti, the opposition that has been favored by the right- wing forces in the United States since the very beginning of Aristide's term. I am asking my colleagues in the House to join us in an appeal, asking both Houses of Congress to join us in an appeal to the rest of our colleagues to try to save Haiti. Join us in the appeal for a special initiative by President Bush and Secretary Powell. We want to ask them to review and reconsider the Haiti policies that they are presently promulgating. The President showed great animosity towards Haiti, even during the campaign for his election. Haiti was singled out in two of the debates as being the kind of place that President Bush felt we should not have given aid and help, so we know that there are problems in this administration. Secretary Powell recently went to a CARICOM conference. CARICOM is an organization of the island nations of the Caribbean. He went to a conference and talked about punishing Haiti further by denying or continuing to deny aid. This administration should immediately deliver, this administration should immediately deliver to Haiti, first of all the $200 million that were promised in 1994, or promised several years ago. After that, it should follow up with the humanitarian aid that is being denied right now. I would like to say to my colleagues that if our own Nation will not yield, if our own Nation insists on pursuing this course of destruction of Haiti, yes, it is an assassination course, we are assassinating a nation, I can think of no terms that would be too harsh for what we are doing, if we continue to pursue this assassination course, then I would like our colleagues to consider joining us, the Congressional Black Caucus, in an appeal to the United Nations. Why not ask the United Nations to try to bring some sense back to the situation? A very small group of very powerful people in Washington is using power to destroy a nation of between 7 million and 8 million people. Something should be done. I would like to ask our colleagues to join the Congressional Black Caucus in an appeal for help. If the United Nations will not do it or is slow, an appeal for help from some of the other more moral nations of the world. Why can we not appeal for help to Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark? Somewhere, someone on this globe should be able to understand the situation and come to the aid of Haiti. I recall that Norway, a very unlikely place for the solution to be worked out in the Middle East, but Norway took the leadership in developing a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians. The peace process that was started and later brought to fruition by President Clinton, which led to Arafat and Rabin shaking hands in the White House garden, was started by Norwegians. So maybe we can appeal to the Norwegians or the Swedish or the Netherlands or Denmark or some other nation, some other decent, civilized nation, Germany, to help, because our Nation is locked in a position which is inhuman and disgraceful and murderous for a whole group of people. Perhaps we should follow the moral example of Australia. Australia sent their soldiers to stop the bloodshed in East Timor. At the request of the United Nations, Australia sent their soldiers to stop the bloodshed in East Timor, and the Australians did not leave and say we are not going to engage in Nation building the way certain people insisted we leave Haiti: The United States should not stay in Haiti; we should not have to help to build a Nation; we restored the President, let us get out. No, the Australians stayed under the supervision of the U.N., and they have helped to build a nation in East Timor. East Timor is today being celebrated as a new democratic Nation. Pretty soon East Timor will take their place in the United Nations as an independent nation. It could not have happened without those outsiders, those white Australian troops, going to the aid of a nation in distress and committing themselves under the supervision of the United Nations to a moral and very civilized venture to save human beings, to restore a government of the people, and to help to build a government of the people in that far-flung corner of the world. It is a decision of the Congressional Black Caucus that we send out pleas throughout the whole globe in search for some nation that will help us to aid Haiti, if our own government will not. We are going to appeal first to those Members of the Congress. We are going to appeal to President Bush. We are going to appeal to all the forces in this Nation to take a hard look at what we are doing and to back away from a foreign policy. If that does not happen, we intend to go to the United Nations and to the civilized nations of the world. Haiti does not deserve to die. If we fervently seek it, then somewhere in the civilized world there must be enough compassion and mercy to save the long-suffering people of Haiti. Haiti does not deserve to be strangled at the hand of our government. Haiti does not deserve to die. This is a very strong language. I have lived with the problems of Haiti for a long time. My district has the second largest concentration of Haitian Americans in America. Miami has the largest concentration. The congressional district of the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Meek) has the largest concentration of Haitian American; I have the second largest. Together, we in the Congressional Black Caucus have sought to try to establish a new relationship between the United States and Haiti since the days when Haiti had democratic elections and President John Bertrand Aristide was elected by something like 80 percent of the voters. Because he did not follow its precepts and was not a puppet of the oppressive ruling class, ruled for a long time, the Army staged a coup and Aristide barely escaped with his life. He spent 3 years in this Nation, in Washington here, while we tried to get a negotiated return of Aristide to his rightful place in Haiti. However, because the people in power, the army leaders who staged a coup, were so well financed by drug lords that they did not have to worry about economic sanctions, that they did not have to worry about their own income, they would not budge. They would not yield. There were several negotiations with them which almost came to the point of reaching some agreement, but it turned out they were just leading us on and had no intention whatsoever of ever letting Aristide back in the country. All the way, they had their lines into the drug lords. Haiti was a major transshipment point for drugs. Raoul Cedras, the commander of the Army, his second in command Biamby, Michel Francois, they were all on the payroll, well financed by drug lords. Michel Francois was later indicted by the United States for his role in drug transshipment. So the long history between the United States and Haiti has not been a good one from the time that the occupying forces left Haiti. First of all, we occupied Haiti for 32 years, which is most unfortunate. I will not go into the circumstances that led to that, but after we left Haiti, we left in charge and had bonds between a ruling class that had the benefits of an army which was trained by the United States. The Haitian army and the ruling class that had been very oppressive for the rest of the Haitian people ruled for a long time. Francois Devalier was elected as president. He made a bond with the ruling class and the Haitian army and created his own army called the Ton Ton Macoutes, which was a civilian militia, death squads that were feared by the people, and the combined balance of the Haitian army and the Ton Ton Macoutes kept Haiti in a state of terror for more than 40 years. Finally, they got a decent election under pressure from the United Nations and the United States. They had a fair election and President Aristide was elected, and of course, I have told my colleagues before, the army immediately overthrew the elected president, forced him into exile. He barely escaped with his life. President Clinton, responding to the repeated request of the Congressional Black Caucus trying to shape a decent Haitian policy, after many, many attempts to negotiate with the leaders of Haiti, decided to restore John Bertrand Aristide to power in Haiti through the use of military intervention. Our troops went into Haiti, and as I told the President, he does not have to worry about the people fighting the United States troops. The people will welcome the United States troops with open arms. They will cheer the troops as they come in. Exactly what I predicted and told the President would happen, happened. The Haitian army was made up of 4,000 folks who were thugs and cowards, and they ran to hide when the army came in, and the people cheered the United States forces. Aristide was restored to power, and the leaders of the Haitian army were sent into exile. Military leaders like Cedras and Biamby were exiled to Panama on October 13, 1994. The U.S. provided an airliner which shipped them out of the country. Michel Francois had escaped. We believe he went to the Dominican Republic, but he was later convicted in exile of drug transshipment and of murder. However, I have a brief chronology here which I will quickly go through as a backup for what I have said before of our relationship with Haiti. On 15 October Aristide returned to Haiti, and Aristide, at the part of the United States Government, called for reconciliation and an end to violence. He did not call for retribution. He did not call for trials to punish the traitors. He followed the example of Nelson Mandela and the leadership of South Africa, and he sought reconciliation with the opposition forces. On 11 October, Aristide moved to reduce the army. Already most of them fled, but he reduced the army to 1,500 troops from a strength of 7,000, and he offered the soldiers of that army that had deposed him jobs within the community and preference for new positions in the government. On November 4, Aristide appointed a new prime minister in accordance with their constitution and the parliament approved that new prime minister. On December 17, Aristide, by presidential decree, established a commission on justice and truth to investigate crimes committed by military regime. The commission on justice and truth is the exact same name that was used by Nelson Mandela and the people of South Africa and Bishop Tutu as they sought to unravel the relationship between the oppressive whites of South Africa and the new black-dominated government without bloodshed, with a minimum of bloodshed. February 9 of 1995, the multinational force of the United Nations collected 20,345 weapons, including 5,853 grenades and 1,736 machine guns from the remnants of the Ton Ton Macoutes and the Haitian army. January 30, 1995, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution which extended the United Nations mission in Haiti until July 31, 1995. March 31, 1995, President Clinton made a trip to Haiti, the first President to set foot on Haiti since Roosevelt; and President Clinton went to oversee the transition ceremony which reduced and established the pattern for the pullout of all the United States forces and handed over the multinational transition of Haiti Government to the multinational forces of the United Nations. On April 28, Aristide did the most important thing of his career. He dissolved the Haitian army. If he had not dissolved the Haitian army at that point, we would not be standing here, about the point that he was not reelected after he gave up his presidency; and he is now the president of Haiti, but he is hated by right-wing forces in this nation, and we determined that he will not let Haiti die.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a Tribute to Firefighter Vernon Cherry of Ladder Number 118, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory of Americans, and; Whereas, more than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances, and; Whereas, more than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and; Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, we deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in a variety of forms and ceremonies: Now, therefore be it Resolved: That on this 1Oth Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representatives of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and to offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a tribute to Firefighter William L. Henry of Rescue Team Number 1, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the Record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory of Americans, and; Whereas, more than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances; and; Whereas, more than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, we deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in a variety of forms and ceremonies: Now therefore be it Resolved: That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representatives of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and to offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a Tribute to Firefighter Ronnie Henderson of Engine Number 279, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the Record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory of Americans, and; Whereas, More than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, Members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances, and; Whereas, More than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and; Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, We deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in a variety of forms and ceremonies. Now therefore be it Resolved: That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representatives of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and to offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a Tribute to Firefighter Shawn Powell of Engine Number 207, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory Americans, and; Whereas, more than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic, efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances, and Whereas, more than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, we deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in a variety of forms and ceremonies: Now therefore be it Resolved: That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representative of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and to offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this 10th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as a tribute to Firefighter Keith Glascoe of Ladder Number 21, a member of the Vulcan's Society and one of the fallen heroes of September 11th, I would like to insert the following proclamation into the Record: Whereas, September 11, 2001 was a day of horror and tragedy that will forever live in the memory of Americans, and; Whereas, more than 3,000 people from many occupations, nationalities, ethnic groups, religions and creeds were brutally murdered by terrorists, and; Whereas, members of the New York City Fire Department, New York City Police Department, Port Authority and other Public Safety Personnel, through their valiant, courageous and heroic efforts saved the lives of thousands under unprecedented destructive circumstances, and; Whereas, more than 300 New York City Firefighters lost their lives in the effort to save others, and; Whereas, Congressman Major R. Owens and the people of the 11th Congressional District salute the bravery and dedication of all who gave their full measure of devotion, and; Whereas, we deem it appropriate to highlight the courage and valor of individuals and groups in variety of forms and ceremonies: Now therefore be it Resolved: That on this 10th Day of March, Two Thousand and Two, Congressman Major R. Owens, and representatives of the people of the 11th Congressional District, pause to salute the sacrifices of these honored men, and to offer their heartfelt condolences to families of these African American Firefighters who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That the text of this resolution shall be placed in the Congressional Record of the United States House of Representatives. Given by my hand and seal this l0th day of March, Two Thousand and Two in the Year of our Lord.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, in harmony with the theme that the 1-hour presentation on Black History Month has set forth, is there a color line, is there racism, emphatically, yes, there is. This does not prevent us from noting the positive achievements that have taken place and the progress that has been made. We are quite pleased that there are now 39 Members of the House of Representatives who are African Americans. We have gotten back what we lost certainly after the Civil War. There were some 30 representatives elected, some in the Senate as well as the House. All that was lost. Step by step we have seen gains wiped out over the years during reconstruction, and for about a hundred years before the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King we were steadily going backwards and every achievement that was accomplished was accomplished without the help of the mainstream population, just about every achievement. Many of the achievements were accomplished despite a great deal of hostility and animosity from the mainstream population. I sit on the Committee on Education and the Workforce and, of course, am very interested in all aspects of education. The historically black colleges and universities, fortunately, are in the spotlight and have been the recipients of quite a bit of Federal attention from both parties in the last year or so; and in the last 10 years the Federal Government has stepped up to the plate and provided special assistance to the 113 historically black colleges and universities. They were established and they achieved a very important role, have come to a very important role, achieved a very important place in African American society by educating those who could not get an education anywhere else. Many of our leaders of today still are graduates of historically black colleges and universities. But the history of those institutions is a history where they got very little help from the mainstream society, and they received a lot of hostility and animosity from the local communities. The southern communities were often very hostile toward the so-called intellectuals who were in the black colleges and universities. Even after the Morril Act, the Federal act which established land grant colleges in every State, even after that Act was amended to establish a parallel land grant college in the segregated States where blacks were not allowed to attend the land grant colleges, even after that happened, there was tremendous discrimination. The amount of money received by the land grant colleges which blacks attended, were allowed to attend, were allowed to set up and provide a faculty for, et cetera, was much smaller. The amount of money was much smaller. That historically was the case, and even today those same land grant colleges established by the Federal Government are receiving less funding from the States than the land grant colleges that serve primarily the mainstream population, traditionally white land grant colleges. So every step of the way there have been impediments. Is race a factor? Yes, unfortunately, it is. All over the world you have racism, and certainly you have racism in the United States. But the important thing is to note that we must operate and act and work constantly to make certain that the negative impact of racism is not used to make other people suffer. We must alleviate as much racism as possible, counteract as much racism as possible, pass laws which keep racism in check. That is the best we can do. History has shown us that the only way we can guarantee that you will be able to make the progress that these institutions have made and be able to cite the positive accomplishments is that some group has to work against the prevailing, ongoing racism. We have had in America a golden opportunity to do that. What makes America great is that it provides the room, it provides the leeway, to fight; and we have fought and accomplished a great deal, despite the racism. I would like to look forward to the day when an American President could say that he wants to apologize for slavery and receive the overwhelming support of the American people. Unfortunately, when President Clinton implied that he might want to do that in the last year of his term, he was criticized; and there was a poll taken and the majority of white Americans, 70 percent, said no, there should be no apology for slavery. We can apologize for the Holocaust. The Germans can apologize for the Holocaust, and the Japanese asked to apologize to the Chinese and Koreans; but there should be no apology for slavery, the majority of American people said. That is unfortunate, because the opposite of not apologizing is covering up. It does not mean I refuse to apologize; but it means I will cover up, and we will continue to cover it up. The only way we can break the back of racism and guarantee that racism will not be harmful is to recognize it and jointly, black-white, all minorities, work together to try to alleviate the harsh impact and effect of racism, so everybody in America has an equal opportunity to go forward. Black History Month is a time to celebrate those positive achievements; it is also a time to remind everybody that we cannot achieve unless we recognize the truth of racism and attempt to combat it.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Does the gentlewoman have any immediate recommendations for action that she thinks we could take? I know there will be a CODEL visiting Haiti soon. Are there any other things she thinks we should do right away?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, at Congress the highs are very high, and the depths can be very low. We certainly ended the session last night on a high note. It was 2:30 in the morning with you, but we finally passed a campaign finance reform, a piece of legislation that is likely to survive in concert with the other body. And also I think that there is a rumor the President may sign it. So I think the American people have a lot to applaud along with the Members of this House for our work this week. We go into Valentine's Day, a day of love of all kinds. I hope everybody feels many different forms, kind of love and is willing to exhibit that love and compassion. Unfortunately we sank to a new low on Valentine's Day by refusing to pass a stimulus package which addressed the sufferings of working families in America. It would have been so easy for us to celebrate this day by addressing the immediate problem of the unemployed workers. Whether they are unemployed because of the fact of the tragedy on September 11, or they were unemployed because of the creeping recession that was on the way before, we still should have addressed those problems. We should have addressed those proposals that were made by the Progressive Caucus that were made for some 3 or 4 months that not only should we have increased the amounts of weeks that unemployed workers can receive unemployment insurance, but we should also increase the amounts of money available, because in many States they have reduced the amount of money available in the unemployment insurance payments. We also suggested that, pushed hard for a combination of health benefits to go along with the unemployment insurance benefits so that workers losing their jobs temporarily, we hope it is temporary, would be able to maintain for 6 months a health care plan which would carry their families during that period. These are very compassionate and humane considerations, and it is a pity that on Valentine's Day, in the process of playing games with a stimulus package, what we call a stimulus package, we would not address the needs of working families in America. It might be noted that we still have not addressed the needs of the immediate airline workers who were laid off as a result of a constrictions within the airline industry. We addressed the industry and the executives and their needs. We appropriated billions of dollars for immediate cash to make up for any losses they might have experienced as a result of the September 11 tragedy, and we also set up an $11 billion low-interest loan fund. We did a great deal for the airline industry, and the executives will profit a great deal, and the shareholders will profit a great deal. We made a promise that we will come back and take care of the airline industry workers who were laid off, the estimated number being about 100,000. We have not made good on that promise either. It would have been great if on Valentine's Day it could have been made good on that promise. I want to talk today about the matter of failing to show compassion and sympathy to the Americans who need it most, those people who now need a safety net, that failure of compassion and where it fits into a number of different issues and problems that we are considering now in the country as a whole. I want to talk about a conversion of issues, and this issue of compassion for those who were on the bottom, compassion for those who need safety nets is a key at the heart of the discussion of all of these other items that I want to mention. I want to include the fact that in this conversion of issues, that it is important that we have here on the Hill today the President of Pakistan, President Musharraf. President Musharraf was here as a major ally in the war against terrorism, a country which certainly had to think for a long time and think hard before joining the alliance against terrorism because it had a great deal at stake has come down firmly on the side of those of us who care about democracy, those of us who care about liberties and freedom, those of us who care about women being treated equally. They have come down on the side of a coalition which was proposed by President Bush. They are taking great risk; the President of Pakistan and his government are taking great risk. They are right on the border of Afghanistan. They are right in the heart of two nations that are Islamic. They are threatened on the other hand by India that is hostile for various reasons. I will not go into all the of them at this point. They are in a precarious position, but once again, Pakistan has come to the aid of the United States. They have always done this. During the Cold War they were there. When the Russians attacked Afghanistan, they were there. We have always relied heavily on the goodwill and participation in an alliance by Pakistan. Unfortunately, we have not rewarded Pakistan when the need for their services has been over. We have too often neglected to follow through and show our appreciation. In fact, today as I met with the Committee on International Relations in their session with President Musharraf, President Musharraf used the phrase that he said somebody had mentioned yesterday he was not so familiar with that term, but he assumed what it meant. Somebody said, Are you worried about when the United States will again dump Pakistan; will they dump Pakistan again? He assumed that this meant abandon Pakistan, and he is correct. But ``dump'' somehow is a more poignant word which gets to the heart of the matter. We have repeatedly dumped Pakistan after using Pakistan. I hope it does not happen again, but that significant attempt is a convergence of issues I want to talk about today. Our success against the Taliban in Afghanistan would have not been possible without the help of Pakistan. They have gone to great lengths to provide maximum help to the United States in that fight against the Taliban. The success against the Taliban is something we ought to take a look at and understand the implications of that. Why were we so successful so swiftly? I think at the heart of that success is the fact that the Taliban never had the population of Afghanistan on their side. It relates very much to another issue that I am going to discuss later and that is Haiti. The Taliban was an example of what happened in Haiti. We have a group of 4- or 5,000 armed thugs who have command of the tanks and the guns and the bullets. They can take over a nation, and they can rule that nation, although they are only a tiny percentage of the nation. It happened in Haiti with its 7 million people, and we had to work for 3 years in order to get back into Haiti the democratically elected President, and in the final analysis it took troops. President Clinton had to have the guts to order the troops to go into Haiti to restore democracy. When our troops landed, not a single shot was fired. If we think the Taliban was easy in Afghanistan, remember Haiti. Not a single shot was fired. No lives were lost. We went on for quite a long time before even a soldier was killed by accident in Haiti because the people of Haiti were not in favor of the government they had. The people would not stand against it. The so-called military were cowards, and they would terrorize the people, but once they were confronted, they melted away. That is the lesson we ought to bear in mind as we look at the Taliban and the implications of the Taliban. We are now concerned about now that the Taliban have been defeated, what are we going to do in terms of helping Afghanistan become a strong nation, let Afghanistan become a strong nation so that never again will a bin Laden or someone like that attempt to take over the country and use the country as a base for terrorism. The whole concept of nation-building, which was much maligned just a few years ago, has now become a positive concept as it always should have been. Nation-building should not be a dirty phrase, and we are beginning to understand that, and beyond nation-building we ought to take a look at the possibility of nation preservation. The nations that already exist who are on wobbly legs, who are in deep trouble, deserve some help in being able to maintain legal, constitutional, democratically elected governments, which brings me to another issue that I want to put in this mix of issues. That is the war against drugs in Colombia. Colombia was allocated a billion dollars for the war against drugs there. It is a military war. Military expenditures and military wars are the most expensive ways to fight drugs, to fight for the integrity of a country. We could have done so much more with less money if we had given economic aid to Colombia 5 or 10 years ago, but right now Colombia is a nation very much like Afghanistan. There is a back and forth with guerrillas, and the guerrillas may take over and they may become friendly with a government that is not necessarily threatening America with terrorism, but with a more steady flow of drugs and with relationships with other nations in the hemisphere, small islands in the Caribbean, Haiti. The Colombian drug trade has the potential to spread its tentacles out with such enormous amounts of money at the command of the drug lords that it will impact among many nations in the hemisphere, and we may find ourselves surrounded by a circle of nations run by drug lords which will be a far greater threat to America than the Taliban in Afghanistan. The growing influence of drug lords in the Western Hemisphere is a major problem we should be concerned with, which brings me to the questions in Haiti. Haiti, at the time that the Army of Haiti staged a coup and kicked out the lawfully elected, democratically elected President, kicked him out, he had to run for his life. At that time the drug lords were very much in control in Haiti, and for a long time, the people in charge, Michel Francois and Raoul Cedras were the beneficiaries of an inflow of drug money from the drug czars so that every time one went to the bargaining table with them to try to get them to be reasonable and accept the democratically elected president returning to Haiti, they were very strong because they had a source of money, so far as income, which kept them well-heeled despite the fact that we had imposed an economic embargo on Haiti. And we were certainly making the people of Haiti in general suffer, but those guys never suffered a day in their lives because they had an influx of money from drug lords. The same thing is happening now in Haiti. The drug lords are becoming stronger and stronger every day because since the return of a democratic government in Haiti, the policies of the United States have been very backwards, hostile, mean-spirited, hateful. There is a small cabal of very powerful leaders in America who literally hate the Government of Haiti at this point. They hate President Aristide and all he stands for. I have never seen such personal venom directed to a nation or its leader, and we are making foreign policy toward Haiti on the basis of those powerful people who will not live up to promises of aid. They have promised $200 million in aid as a kingpin part of a package, that was supposed to be the kingpin and lead to a domino effect that was positive, and other nations like France and Canada and Great Britain, everybody was going to contribute to an effort that depended on being started by the $200 million the United States would supply. Powerful forces here in Washington, sometimes single individuals, have blocked the flow of that money to Haiti, and then Haiti has experienced a great deal of suffering. The people who had such high optimism for their democratically elected government have now begun to sink into a great deal of despair, and the old problems are coming back in terms of more and more violence. That appears to be the only answer for those who really want to weigh out and want to take shortcuts. So the strangling of a nation is taking place right before our eyes in this hemisphere with respect to Haiti. We need a global policy with immediate focus on this hemisphere, global policy which deals with Haiti first, a policy which deals with the fact the drug lords may have a great deal of influence in the nations surrounding us in the Caribbean islands other than Haiti, a policy which deals with this hemisphere in terms of something better in Colombia than the present military war which we are losing, and, even if we win, will not lead to any permanent eradication of Colombia as a major base for drugs. I forgot to point out that the Taliban in Afghanistan were primarily funded through the movement of drugs, just as their people who helped us to liberate the population from the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, also depend heavily on drugs and the flow of drugs, the drug trade, to finance them. Drugs are a major problem in our fight against terrorism. It may not be so overt at this point, but if countries are eventually controlled by drug lords in this hemisphere, they will not necessarily have an agenda of hate against the United States for political reasons or religious reasons. They have their own selfish reasons for doing whatever they do, and they certainly would be available and for sale for enemies with bigger agendas, or they themselves would be an enemy that we should fear a great deal because of the way they would allow drugs to flow into our country with greater and greater ease and lower and lower prices, addicting more and more of our population. All of these problems are inevitably interwoven. I am going to yield in a few minutes to a colleague of mine who particularly wants to discuss the problems in Haiti and the kinds of needed emergency that we are faced with here and the fact that the Secretary of State Colin Powell, who himself is of Jamaican descent, visited with the members of Caricom. Caricom is an economic organization consisting of all the various Caribbean governments, and he visited with them, and they had a long discussion, and one of the great problems that was put forth by the heads of Caribbean states was that they are being overwhelmed by a great number of Haitian refugees. We have in the Clinton administration boatloads of Haitian refugees directed at this country and coming in at large numbers, ships sinking at sea, and finally we had to interdict and carry people off, and at one point we had 19,000 people at Guantanamo Naval Base, Haitian refugees, the problem was that big, until President Clinton finally moved to ease the pressure by restoring democracy in Haiti. People went home and they stayed home because they had hope. Now that hope is being lost, they are not coming to this country again because probably the Coast Guard is out there very aware and very, probably very effective in stopping the movement of boats in this direction, maybe deadly so. We do not know, but they know the problem because they had it before. So instead of coming into this country, the refugees are going to targets which are easier to get into, and that is the other countries of the Caribbean. I want to yield to my colleague from Florida if she would like to speak on the issue of Haiti at this point. As I said before, all these problems are inevitably interwoven. We have a need for a vision and a comprehensive policy to deal with these problems, and human affairs is as complicated or more complicated than nuclear physics. So a complicated policy which understands how these issues relate to each other is needed; some vision is needed by this administration. We have but one enemy out there to fight, and that is the enemy that is against democracy or against liberty and against our constitutional civilization. These enemies, whether they come in the form of drug lords or Taliban spouting hatred on a religious basis, they are still enemies. Haiti is a particular case where an elected government, democratically elected, is being harassed, ignored, neglected and abandoned by our own policies here in this country, and we need to move to deal with putting pressure on our administration to move in a more humane manner in order to save a nation. We do not have to build a nation in Haiti. We have to preserve a nation. I yield to my colleague, the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Meek).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Meek). I would like to emphasize a few points, and that is that Haiti is a democracy right now. They have the most democratic government that Haiti has ever had since Haiti was founded. In this hemisphere, Haiti was the second independent nation after the United States became independent. Haiti wanted its independence. The only slave revolt in history that was successful in keeping the oppressors out and establishing their own nation, but it was not democratically run for most of the years of its existence, including the 32 years that the United States Government, the United States Army occupied Haiti. Then came Francois Duvalier and his son Baby Doc Duvalier, and they were dictators of the worst kind, and yet our government cooperated with them for almost 40 years. Now we have a democratically elected government, and because of a technicality related to some of the precincts and some of the things that did not go right in the election, we are using that as an excuse for withholding $200 million that was promised 8 years ago when Aristide was first restored as the President of Haiti. That promise was there. And the failure of the Western powers, the United States in the lead, to act has meant that hope has been lost and despair has set in, and now we have an erosion of the faith of the people in constitutional and democratic government. People are desperate, and they are taking out on the high seas to find another place and putting a great deal of pressure on other nations within the hemisphere. We have not been noble at all in our conduct toward Haiti. The whole United States of America, the great country that it is, has allowed a number of people which I can put on one hand, less than 5 people are responsible for the bottlenecks that have blocked any aid to Haiti. Their own hatred and hostility have held up aid to this nation because of the hostility and personal peeve of a handful of powerful Americans. Haiti came to our aid in the War of 1812. And throughout the history of Haiti, World War I and World War II, nobody has been able to use Haiti as a base for sabotage to harm the United States. Like Pakistan, the President used the term that he heard from an American, are we going to get dumped again? Pakistan has had a history of certainly being loyal to the American cause, supporting us in alliances, and the great question is are we going to be ignoble in our behavior towards Pakistan. President Musharraf has good reason to be concerned. We have done some terrible things to Pakistan. We have held up funds that they had paid for certain fighter airplanes. We did not give them the airplanes back or the money back. They still have not resolved the issue of getting the money back. We should do one or the other. That is a well- known contemptuous act toward the Government of Pakistan that ought to be corrected. In a broader sense and a more important sense, we have abandoned Pakistan's legitimate request that the question of Kashmir, the territory between India and Pakistan, be settled in accordance with a United Nations mandate. The United Nations called for elections where the population of Kashmir would have the right to determine what they wanted to do, whether they wanted to be an independent state, annexed to India, or annexed to Pakistan. That is a United Nations mandate that is more than 50 years old. Pakistan is still willing to abide by that mandate. They are willing to take their chances, take the risk of their interests not being dealt with appropriately, but they are willing to have internationally supervised elections. India is not, and our United States of America has abandoned the legal, moral position of asking India to live up to the United Nations mandate. We are willing to leave the issue on the table and let it be silent. We are not raising it or demanding that something be done immediately. So we have an escalating problem in that area of the world which throws Pakistan off base and keeps it in a position where it has to spend a far greater amount of money on its military than it should be spending; and at the same time, it threatens now the possibility of a nuclear conflict. Instead of waiting until there is an explosion and something that forces us to pay greater attention to it, why not be noble and moral, why not call for an implementation of the United Nations mandate of supervised elections in Kashmir and take Kashmir off the table as an explosive issue in that area of the world. Pakistan has a lot of problems. We hope that we are sincere about the aid that is now being designated for Pakistan. I understand that it is between $800 million and $1 billion, which is part of a package related to fighting terrorism, Pakistan's role in our effort to fight terrorism, which is a key role. Without Pakistan's help, I am certain that the present defeat of the Taliban would not have been accomplished with such low cost in terms of human life and American sacrifices. So Pakistan deserves to be rewarded. We have the package of between $800 million and $1 billion. Are they really going to get it, and are we going to make certain that it flows in a timely manner? The government needs to be boosted right now. The general is here and he is saying, we need economic aid. We need to have something to hold out to our people so that the fringe elements, and there are elements that are very strong. Pakistan is an Islamic Nation. General Musharraf stressed today that it is not a theocracy, but it is an Islamic nation. It has pressure on it from the rest of the Islamic world. A question was raised with President Musharraf about the fact that the madrasahs, those schools in Pakistan that are run by the clerics, are they going to continue to exist in large numbers, because at those schools we have evidence that the Koran and the basics of literacy are taught, but the only other subject that gets any attention is hatred of the West, and many of the people who ended up in the Taliban camps came out of the madrasahs at an early age in Pakistan. The madrasahs fill a vacuum in Pakistan. I was in Pakistan for a week because I have a lot of Pakistani American population in my district, and they had asked me to visit Pakistan for some time. I spent a week there. I visited Kashmir as well as several cities in Pakistan. I was primarily interested in visiting schools and observing what is going on in education. We visited the Ministry of Education and a number of different areas where education policy was made. I must truthfully report that the first and obvious observation is that the Pakistanis use a very small percentage of their budget for education. Education has traditionally suffered in Pakistan. The military gobbles up almost 60 percent of the budget. For many years before that, there was a lot of education on the books that really does not exist by admission of the authorities themselves. They have what they call phantom schools and teachers who were sent checks by the government, but they were not teaching. They have a lot of problems. They have to come to grips with those problems. For the aid that we give Pakistan, we should get assurances that a large part of that aid will go into education, because the future of the country lies with the improvement of the education of the population starting with literacy, but certainly beyond literacy they have to acquire high-tech skills in order to exist in this modern-day world. So Pakistan deserves to have as rapidly as possible a deliverance on the aid that has been promised. Pakistan deserves to have as much assistance from the United States Government as we can give. It deserves not to be hidebound and roadblocked by an obsolete approach of AID. AID must take a new approach and be able to be more creative and accept some improvisation. The President himself pointed out that a Pakistani group outside the country has put together a trustee fund, a fund that will be overseen by private trustees, and that fund is for education. His fund has put 2 billion rupees into that fund, and the fund will be transparent. The public will be able to see how the funds are being spent on education. I would like to see our government contribute to that fund, regardless of how unorthodox that may be. They should move immediately to try to meet the Pakistanis halfway and try to move the issue of education forward as fast as possible. The challenge is not nation-building in Pakistan, the challenge is nation preservation. The President of Pakistan has committed himself to moving forward with elections in October. He said this morning that he would not be a candidate, which removes a great deal of tension from the process, but they will have elections in October. The preservation of democracy in Pakistan would go a long ways toward meeting the objectives of this country in terms of fighting terrorism, and, beyond that, creating a more just, a more civil, a freer world where greater numbers of people have opportunity is the best way to guarantee our own freedom, our own security. The tragedy of September 11 certainly demonstrated to us how powerful a small group can be in this complex, modern world of ours. You can hit a nerve center like the World Trade Center, and one can cause all kinds of havoc in terms of immediate lives that are destroyed and telecommunications disrupted and impact on a whole business area that may never come back again employing thousands of people. There is an impact on a city in terms of taking revenue away so that New York City has a budget shortfall of at least $4 billion. With one hit, a small group was able to accomplish all this. We want to minimize these threats. We will never get rid of all of the fanatics in the world. We will have to go to war at some points. We had no choice but to go to war after the attacks at the World Trade Center. Violent war, military war is the only way to deal with fanatics. But we can do so much more to eliminate the possibility of such groups arising either in the international arena or at home, and we are at danger at home of having psychofanatics, people like the bomber of the Oklahoma Federal Building who had no reason that we can clearly see except his mind was all messed up. Psychofanatics do a lot of harm, or we can have small groups that have political agendas or religious agendas out on the fringe who can do a great deal of harm. We want to minimize the number of people like that. We want to deny those kinds of fanatical groups a breeding ground by having large numbers of people who are positive, who see themselves as having a piece of the American dream, by having unemployed workers who know that their government will not fail them, will come to their aid at a time when they are needed with unemployment insurance, with health benefits. You can remove a festering environment out there where these diseased movements and groups may take place and do it at a low cost. The war in Colombia is a very expensive war. Americans should pay attention to it. We have appropriated and talked in terms of $1 billion. If you will take a couple of hundred million and move it to Haiti right now, you could avert any possibility of Haiti ever degenerating to the point of where you would have to go remove drug lords in Haiti with military force. There is Jamaica, a large nation, one of the largest nations in the Caribbean after Haiti. They recently had gun battles on the street. The drug lords supplied criminals with weapons, and they were able to drive the police off the street. They had more modern weapons. They had submachine guns and various weapons that frightened the police. You have that kind of situation. You had another Caribbean nation that despite the fact that the man was a known drug lord, he threw a birthday party and all the top officials of the nation went to the birthday party of the drug lord. He obviously invited them to make a point and he made the point. There is another small nation where a drug lord was responsible for the death of a sheriff. Everybody knows who did it, but they cannot get a jury together. They cannot get a group together to really deal with an indictment and punishment. The coming power of drug lords in this hemisphere is so great until it deserves special attention and ought to be put on the agenda as we consider a global policy for guaranteeing freedom, justice and constitutional democracy all over the world. It is the best way to fight the Taliban types, the Taliban syndrome. The Taliban syndrome exists in many more places than in Afghanistan in one way or another. It exists in places other than Somalia. It exists in places other than Iraq, in the ``evil axis'' that has been named. It is only in small quantities now, it will grow, and it need not be. They always depend on chaos that results from people having no more hope, from people refusing to bow in allegiance to any authority, any government. We know the formula. The formula for fighting the Taliban syndrome is to provide more of our aid and assistance in every way possible short of the military. The military is to be the last resort. Mr. Speaker, I want to conclude my remarks with a piece that I had written to be placed in the Extension of Remarks in case I did not get this opportunity today. I had written it sometime ago, just finally finished it. It is based on a phrase that President Bush used in his State of the Union address. That phrase has not really been picked up that much. I would like to see it looked at in new terms. Mr. Speaker, President Bush included several memorable lines in his State of the Union address; however, the phrase which I found most impressive was one that has been largely ignored by the conservative media. He said, ``Let's roll. Let's roll. Let's roll, America.'' I hope that we can all recognize that this is the cry of the lead hero on the passenger jet where unprecedented bravery was exhibited by ordinary Americans. Remember, there was a jetliner headed for Washington; and the passengers counterattacked against the hijackers, and they forced the plane as a result of their counterattack to crash in a wooded area near Pittsburgh instead of crashing into the White House or maybe the Capitol. We were not sure where that plane was on course for in Washington. At a critical moment, ``let's roll'' was a call to action by a courageous young and modern American mind. I think the phrase ``let's roll'' was captured on the cell phone that that young man was on at the time they made the decision to move against the hijackers. President Bush was quoting that. I think it went over the heads of a lot of people. I think the symbolism of it is very important. In his address, the President made a broad and sweeping interpretation. He was summing up all that he had said before in his speech when he got to the ``let's roll'' part. You could take everything he said and put it together and say, ``Let's roll on all these fronts. Let's roll in all these areas.'' The tragedy of September 11 has forced America to a crossroads where we must assume the role naturally bequeathed to us as the most powerful Nation that has ever existed. We have recognized now as never before that our way of life, our democracy, our constitutional civilization cannot remain secure unless we address the problem of freedom and justice throughout the world. As much as it is a military call to action, ``let's roll'' must also be a call for rolling our know-how and technology across the world along with the investment of our enormous amounts of surplus capital. And we must roll our megatons of grain across the world to feed the hungry. By striving to become the most compassionate Nation ever to exist, America has the opportunity to grow and lead mankind forever. I have condensed my strongly felt sentiments on this matter into an appropriately titled rap poem which I would like to recite. It is called ``Let's Roll America.'' Let's roll America! Set the tracks of destiny straight, Don't look back But close the gate, Toast the past But change the cast. In every language of the earth To the country of all nations We have proudly given birth. At the Olympics of forever We will win all the races; We are Great Angels of tomorrow With magic mongrel faces. Let's roll America! Into the grand canyons Of great deeds to come, Up to the Sierra's highest peaks; Be generous philanthropy geeks, Be fanatic democracy freaks, All the Founders dared to seek; Sing loud the hallelujah note, All our races and women can vote. America, let's roll! Stand navy out to sea, Off we go flying to stay free, War never leaves us thrilled But maniacs demand to be killed. Saddam Hussein Satan's tutored underboss-- Hitler minus the crooked cross Gleefully calculates the victim loss. Patrons of peace permitted no breath, Ayatollahs eat dinner with death, Bin Laden is the monster of stealth. The spirit of Gettysburg calls -- Forward to the Normandy walls; Descendants of John Brown; Fascists under any flag We swear to drown. War never leaves us thrilled But maniacs demand to be killed. Let's roll America! Let kindergartners take a poll, Full baby bellies Is our favorite goal, Usher in the age of soul. Toast the past But change the cast; Come register for the test-- Only the next generation can rest; God is our honored guest. Don't look back But close the gate, Greed is not great -- Hang the blacksmiths of hate. Resolve globally to be kind Leave isolated arrogance behind. The Romans did fail Cause their hearts went stale. Let's roll America! Full baby bellies Is our favorite goal, Usher in the age of soul. Sing loud the hallelujah note-- All our races and women can vote. Let's roll America! Rev up the freedom of Internets, Focus food cargo on speeding jets, Roll under dangerous skies With great grit that never dies. Volunteer saturation funding With wasted wealth rotting in locked accounts, Fortunes mushrooming toward infinite amounts, Carry capital deep into jungles Where only Bibles once bothered to go; Insure the risks of toiling mothers; Time to help schools and clinics grow, Pay off some debts that we don't owe. Compassion tells a star spangled story, Grandchildren will applaud a new brand of glory. Let's roll America! In every language on the earth To the country of all nations We have proudly given birth. At the Olympics of forever We will win all the races; We are Great Angels of tomorrow With magic mongrel faces. Let's roll America! Everywhere children at tables smiling Is our non-negotiable goal, Usher in the age of soul. America let's roll!