Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Could the gentlewoman also tell us about the Haitian community in Miami? To what extent does the gentlewoman see influences of the drug lords there from Haiti?

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 think the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Meek) represents the larger Haitian population, contrary to my congressional district.

Mr. OWENS. I thank my colleague from Florida, and I wish she could remain a minute to have a brief colloquy with me.

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. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, earlier today I was unavoidably absent and missed rollcall vote No. 19. If present I would have voted ``nay.'' Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute No. 14 Offered by Mr. Ney

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, the airwaves, the spectrum, is owned by the American people. Most of the American people do not know that we own it and that the representatives of government, including the Members of Congress, are the trustees for the American people. We need to take back our airwaves and use our airwaves and our spectrum and our media for the benefit of the people. This is not an infringement upon the rights of the broadcasters. This is a fulfillment of the capacity and the possibilities of the broadcast media. Most of the industrialized nations, the civilized nations, are providing greater access to media for candidates, far greater than we are. So we need to take this first step. The broadcasters are very anxious, upset, because they know if we take one step, it might lead to a greater realization by the public as a whole that the airwaves belong to the people. Freedom of speech has to be guaranteed some way. We cannot do it the way we do with the print media, where anybody can get access to the print. We regulate, we carefully regulate the airwaves and the spectrum. There is not enough room for everybody, so those who are regulated must bow to the regulation which puts forward the interest of the people. They must bow to certainly making our political campaigns more accessible to people. Big money will always have an advantage, as long as we leave the broadcasters in charge, to charge what they want to charge. Eventually we must reach the point where the airwaves time is mostly free. That is the point they do not want us to move toward, and any step in that direction is going to hurt. That is why we have such great resistance to this tiny step forward by having them lower the unit cost to allow everybody to be able to afford, or most candidates better afford access to the media. It belongs to us in the first place. We are not infringing on any God-given right of the broadcasters. We are returning the spectrum to the people and letting the people know it belongs to them.

Mr. OWENS. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, the gentlewoman makes a persuasive case, and I would not want to argue with the fairness, logic or commonsense arithmetic of what she has to say. It makes sense. The important thing is that Shays-Meehan makes sense as it is right now, and if this amendment is being offered as another way of tinkering with it in a way which makes it impossible to get a settlement between the two Houses, then that I would be certainly opposed to. But I cannot argue with the logic. All of us ought to understand that the American public out there, our constituents, are like the little child in Hans Christian Anderson's tale of ``The Emperor's New Clothes.'' They understand what is happening. They understand what makes sense. If we are tinkering and posturing in order to prevent anything moving forward, they can understand that. In the long run, we will have to be on the side of logic, and this amendment certainly makes a lot of sense. In fact, the campaign finance reform bill law which is in effect in New York City governing municipal elections is a very good law that I would point to as a good model.

Mr. OWENS. I yield to the gentleman from Connecticut.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I will say emphatically I support the amendment if it is not part of a process of under the cloak of good government attempting to sabotage the Shays-Meehan bill. I think it makes sense. As I said before, it is in harmony with the New York City municipal election law which has provisions similar to this, and I would certainly support it. I hope we understand that the people out there understand also when we are posturing. They want to see some real reform. They understand the relationship between Enron's contributions and Global Crossing's contributions and the fact that regulators have not regulated appropriately. It is just a matter of time before all of this is going to be clearly understood by the whole public, and we might as well move to stay ahead of the people and have real reform here. I would certainly support this particular amendment in that spirit.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Nancy Pelosi is a national political leader and has deep practical political roots, while at the same time she maintains bright, widespread idealistic wings. I can think of no better trait for leadership than to have roots and wings. She is optimistic and idealistic, but she also is a great political strategist. Last year she led the congressional delegation from California to victories which were greater than all the other combined Democratic Caucus members together. As a compassionate idealist, Nancy refuses to adopt a position that certain vitally needed reforms are impossible. We are proud to follow a great leader that has roots and wings, Nancy Pelosi.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, beginning the second half of our congressional session, there are a lot of items on our agenda. There is a great deal of talk about many issues, and I worry very much about the possibility that the American people will be confused if we let all of the various discussions of the various issues become a babble with no focus, a babble which does not prioritize and show us what is most important and what are the key items that we should focus on. It is difficult to hold the attention of the constituents, it is difficult to hold the attention of the voters, and the voters need to know more than ever what is going on so they can make intelligent decisions and defend their own interests and the interests of the country when the election comes around in November 2002. We have a lot of sensational, highly-visible problems that are getting a lot of attention; but even that attention sometimes degenerates into a babble, and it becomes confusion, sometimes deliberately so. The Enron scandal is one of the big items that has a lot of media attention and a lot of discussion here in Congress. There are several committees investigating it, and I think Enron is one of those important things that we have to address. But as we address Enron, both the details of the Enron scandal, the Enron swindle, the conspiracy, the details are important, but we also ought to look very closely at the implications of what is going on with Enron. What are the implications for our budget. That is now a number one consideration. The President will give his State of the Union address next Tuesday. Shortly after that he will be releasing his budget, and what are the implications in terms of the emphasis of where Federal expenditures go at a time when we do not have a surplus? Some cuts are necessary, and some increases are necessary. And how those cuts and increases are made and who is taken care of and who is not taken care of is very important. It is very important that we understand that in the Enron conspiracy we have some examples of the worst things that can happen in our very civilized democracy. Mr. Speaker, we have the best-run, the best-structured government probably in the world; but even within that structure, we can have bandits make off with a lot of the public's money. We saw that in the savings and loan scandal of a little more than a decade ago, which is still with us in many ways. They are still finding culprits, and they are still being prosecuted. We are still paying the debt service on the $500 billion or more that taxpayers paid out as a result of the savings and loan scandal which was less of a conspiracy than Enron. The savings and loan scandal was widespread. We ought to look at Enron as a conspiracy, and the implications of how it operated are certainly important. There are those who say Enron is not critical in light of the urgency of the present situation, and that people are suffering from unemployment and the Nation is at war as a result of September 11, and therefore Enron is a minor matter. I say that the implications and the kind of inroads that Enron made into the decision-making and the impact on our overall economy, all of that is very important; and we have to look at those implications very closely. I want to talk today about the safety-net principle that was introduced in our government during the New Deal by Franklin Roosevelt. The principle of safety net certainly might have existed before, but he made it an institutionalized part of government operations. He said that in a democratic society, government ought to at least stand by and help people out when they begin to fall into dire circumstances. Government ought to help people stay alive when they are elderly. Now we have Social Security which is the most widespread and revered safety net. Social Security did not happen automatically. It was fashioned under the New Deal. I do not think that at that particular time they got any votes from the Republican Party on Social Security; but I am certain that no party, no individual in government would dare try to take Social Security away at this point. That is a safety net, people understand. It is a very tiny safety net when you look at what it costs to live even for an elderly person versus the kinds of Social Security payments that they get; but it is a vital part of people being able to stay alive with some dignity. It is a part that some people cling to. The New Deal did many other things. It said if you have a situation where the economy is in trouble, and it was in total collapse almost at the time the New Deal was created, the government should provide jobs for people. We had the WPA which ranged across sectors, laborers digging ditches to artists who needed income, painters, writers. The WPA provided a safety net in terms of producing income. We had unemployment insurance. That came out of the New Deal, and the list goes on. We established aid to families with dependent children, welfare in short. That safety net existed for a lot of desperate people. That safety net was much maligned. That safety net did not do what some other safety nets did. It established no political clout here in Washington. We had another safety net which is a farm subsidy program which reached out and helped to build our agricultural industry grow into what it is today. When we compare the farm subsidy safety net to the aid to families with dependent children safety net, one wonders about whether we have not corrupted totally the principle of a safety net, and I am here to argue that we should return to a focus on making our safety nets our number one priority. Unemployment insurance is a safety net. It is very important for a whole lot of people, not just people who are low-income and laid off in factories. There are a lot of people who were computer programmers at this time last year, and they have no job this year. They might have been making $60,000 a year or $70,000 a year last year, but temporarily, and it is temporary, because the economy will come back, the aspects of the economy which support high-tech industries will come back strong. So they are temporarily without a job. Temporarily they do not have the money to pay the rent or mortgage. Temporarily. There is one case I know of where a woman was making $60,000 last year, and she is hysterical because she sees herself as not being able to pay the mortgage and maybe becoming homeless. There may be a few people already who were very well off last year at this time and already are in dire circumstances. A lot of people who were temporarily laid off will become homeless who are middle-income people, educated people; and they need a safety net. The one safety net that we could improve right away is unemployment insurance. Unemployment insurance is like Social Security: it is not going to give you your monthly paycheck amount, but it can give you enough to sustain yourself and begin to put other pieces together with some dignity. Unemployment insurance in many States has been eroded. The amount of the package, the amount you get, has been cut back, because we had quite a number of years of prosperity where unemployment was not an issue, and money for unemployment insurance has been diverted to other purposes, or governments have saved money by lowering the amount of money being put into unemployment insurance. We need to do something about that immediately. It should be one of our priorities for this half of the Congress. Why is it that we do not understand and cannot act in Congress on an obvious need for this safety net? At the time of the 9-11 disaster when the World Trade Center was wiped out by the terrorists, we rushed to take care of an emergency that the airline industry had. This is a safety net that was not there already. There was no authorization in law, no tradition of bailing out industries from these kinds of emergencies; but we rushed in, and we provided a safety net for the airline industry. That is unparalleled. We put forth large amounts of cash, put cash on the line, for the airlines that had suffered losses as a result of being grounded during the 9-11 emergency. Then we promised them $11 billion in low-cost loans beyond that. So never before have we rushed so rapidly and provided such a great safety net for anybody. So the airline industry stands out as the number-one benefactor of the principle of the safety net. But at the same time we passed the funding for the airline industry, we were told, and many of us fought, certainly on this side of the aisle, Democrats had a proposal in the same package that we should provide for the airline industry workers unemployment insurance, and attached to that would be health benefits, because health benefits are as important as the amount of money you take home in your salary nowadays. So we were told at the time, next week. Come back next week and we will put the package on. Well, like Shakespeare, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow; next week and next week and next week. Next week is still not here. So on the agenda of this Congress this year, a number-one item must be unemployment insurance; not just for the people who suffered specifically on 9-11, not just the people who are the victims of the terrorist attack on 9-11, but also the people across the country who are suffering because the Nation is in a recession. The Nation was in a recession before 9-11. The terrorist attacks certainly exacerbated the situation and probably created a more rapidly escalating recession. All of those are facts. But whatever the facts behind the tragedy, the hardships faced by working people, certainly the need for the safety net is there. The safety net principle is very important. We might claim it, and it is an American idea. We invented it, and it is time for us to not turn our back on a very important moral plank that was put into the functioning of government, the safety net for the elderly and Social Security, the safety net for farmers and the farm subsidy, the safety net for children who lose their parents, who are able to get Social Security payments all the way to age 18. We have always had the safety net. We have gone further with respect to what happened after 9-11. I think the Victims Assistance Fund, we also passed that in the same legislation where we bailed out the airline industry. The Victims Assistance Fund is another giant leap forward by the Federal Government in providing a safety net. It is a dual safety net. It is a safety net for the insurance industry, who could be sued forever and ever as a result of what happened on September 11. The State of New York, where the incident took place, says the airline industry is responsible for whoever the victims are, and the insurers of the airlines certainly would have to be responsible for the compensation of the victims if we did not pass legislation already, right away, immediately, that provides a Victims Assistance Fund. It is unparalleled. I applaud that. I voted for the bill because that factor was in there, and I think it is important that we work it out. There are some difficulties involved in terms of a special master who was appointed. The special master said what the results are, what the formula will be for determining what people get. I think all of that can be worked out. I do not think that necessarily we should assume the special master has all the wisdom and not make some changes in what has been proposed. One obvious change is I do not see why a person who was going to be a possible recipient of a Victims Assistance Fund has to, before they know the amount they will get from the fund, give up their right to sue the insurance companies. Why should they have to give up their right before they see what is going to be produced by the Victims Assistance Fund? Why? I see no reason why they cannot know that ahead of time. Considering all they have gone through and the complications of this whole process, I think we ought to at least certainly yield on that point. There are many other items that are being contested by the survivors of the victims; and I will not go into that because I am not knowledgeable about it, but I think that principle is very clear. Why should one have to give up their right to sue before they know the outcome of what the process of the Victims Compensation Fund might be? Let us not smear, let us not downgrade or trivialize the principle of the safety net by acting like bullies. We have got the money. We are the government. You take it or leave it. I do not think that that is a principle that should be applied here. The safety net principle has been there; and the abuses of it, the misuses of it, is what I want to talk about today, because I am very troubled by the fact that as of the end of December, December 31, we have had the results of a new welfare law going into effect. A provision of that law said that anybody who has been on welfare, anybody who has been receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, is what Roosevelt and the New Deal called it, anybody who was receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children for 5 years would be cut off the welfare rolls and never again, regardless of their circumstances, would they be eligible for welfare. That means whole families are cut off. If you have been on it for 5 years, you are off; and whatever your circumstances are, you have got to go find some other way to survive. Now, Aid to Families with Dependent Children gives varying amounts of money across the country. I think that generally my State, New York State, has been accused as being the most generous, or too generous, and that the Aid to Families with Dependent Children in New York has been higher than almost anywhere else in the country. I have a chart here that says that those ``high amounts'' that were given, amounts that were considered high, turn out to be something like a family of four would be receiving between $7,000 and $8,000 a year. Aid to Families With Dependent Children in New York, a family of four would receive between $7,000 and $8,000 a year. That is considered far too generous. In many States, I assure you, they receive much less. I think New York also has one of the largest numbers of people on welfare, and we have been criticized for that. But as we go into an era starting January 1 where all the people, 30,000 people I think were found to have been on the welfare rolls as of December 31 who had run out of their 5 years of tolerance on the welfare rolls, those 30,000 people are off now. Let us say many of those 30,000 people were in families that receive at least $7,000 or $8,000 a year. When you compare what they were receiving to the amount of money received by the recipients of the safety net in the farm subsidy program, you will find that they were receiving pennies. The farm subsidy program, which also started during the New Deal, pays thousands of dollars to families. There is no requirement that you get off of it at a certain point. There have been some efforts to phase it out, some efforts to sunset it. None of that has succeeded. The farm subsidy program is booming more than ever before. So the principle of the safety net is such where it goes on and on forever and gets larger and larger, and fewer and fewer people in the farm subsidy program are getting the benefits of that safety net. The safety net principle was a great innovation, a great civilizing step forward. We ought to be applauded for it. The New Deal was a great step forward in understanding the plight of ordinary people and providing for ordinary people and providing for anybody who was facing a problem with their survival. Later on Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society program added to that by adding Medicare and Medicaid so that the actual physical health of a person was also considered of concern to the government. Nobody should suffer and die because they cannot get adequate health care. So given this great step forward, and there are some people who are cynics, and I am not a cynic at all, some people who say, well, civilization has really not moved forward, we still have the same old wars we had before. In fact, the 20th century had more wars than any other century. In the 21st century now there are wars raging all over the world; people have less liberties in most of the world than they had before, et cetera. There are all kinds of actual disasters, governmental disasters, governance disasters, that can be cited to show that we have not really moved forward, that it is only an illusion. It is not an illusion. It is very much not an illusion. During the celebration of the Martin Luther King Federal holiday and the birthday of Martin Luther King, we talked to young people about certain kinds of things that were accomplished by Martin Luther King. They sit starry-eyed wondering how could that have ever been. How could you ever have had segregation, where you could not drink at a water fountain unless you were white; where blacks could not eat at certain restaurants, stay at certain hotels? How could you have an institutionalized government-supported system like that? They cannot comprehend it. They are too young to remember. But just yesterday in the history of our Nation, we had unspeakable injustices that no longer exist. Once upon a time we had slavery. Slavery was probably one of the cruelest crimes ever perpetuated on the face of the Earth, the American Atlantic slave trade; but that no longer exists. You can go on and on and cite the reasons why we have every reason to be optimistic about the slow, but forward, march of civilization. In the industrialized nations of the world the kinds of things I have just talked about, Social Security, Medicare, health care, unemployment compensation, all those things are features. Pensions, and Social Security is a form of pension, but we have private pensions as well as Social Security pensions. Getting back to the Enron case, one of the terrible things about Enron is it wiped out pensions for certain people, large numbers of people; and that ought to be a concern of government, how did we let that happen. But we will get back to that. My point now is that civilization may move forward slower than we want it to move forward. Some folks say it is like an inch worm: it crawls forward very slowly and sometimes doubles back in circles, and it looks like it is going backwards. We have had some terrible things happen in the last 20 years. The slaughter of nearly 1 million people in Rwanda is cited as an example. The Balkan wars, going back to ethnic cleansing and Hitler doctrines, all kinds of atrocities can be cited. Pol Pot killing hundreds of thousands of people in Cambodia, and we could cite a lot of atrocities and a lot of terrible things that have happened as evidence that civilization is really not going forward. But, on the other hand, would we ever have had a situation even 100 years ago where the women who are enslaved in Afghanistan by the Taliban, who turned out to be a few thousand thugs with the guns and the tanks and the weapons to enslave the rest of their people, and certainly women in particular moved into a status which can only be called slavery, would they ever have been set free, or would they have been in that condition for 100, 200, 300 years if it had not been for a modern society responding to injustice, a modern society responding to the attack from people who had that kind of base. Barbaric people have done barbaric things and built up tremendous amounts of power and gone on to conquer more civilized people. The history of the world is not a history where people who had the best knowledge, the most knowledge, the most sophistication, the most humanity, the best governance prevailed. The Romans conquered the Greeks, and the Huns came in and conquered an Arab civilization that was very sophisticated. On and on it goes. There is no guarantee that the most humane, most civilized, best governed will prevail. Under the fabric of the industrialized nations, combined with the United Nations, combined with a morality that has come into being in most of the industrialized nations, it is less and less likely that a great oppressive nation could arise and be able to work its will anywhere in the world. No nation, including our own, should aspire to that, and if it were tempted, I think there is enough morality, enough common sense about where we have to go as a people, as a species, a species of Homo sapiens; human beings have to deal a certain way in order to survive on this planet, and it is not in our best interests to allow anybody to run roughshod over human life. So we have gone forward. The United States of America took a giant leap forward when it established the principle of the safety net. Now is the time to come forward and defend the principle of the safety net. We cannot defend the principle of the safety net if the Congress is going to stand here and refuse to pass unemployment compensation laws which upgrade the amount of money available for unemployment, unemployment compensation laws which are attached to some kind of health care benefit. The principle of the safety net has to go forward instead of backwards. We must include health care benefits as well as increase the amount of money for unemployment insurance in the package and extend the amount of time that people can be on unemployment and collect unemployment. A simple safety net. How can we defend some of the other safety nets that are being so abused if we do not operate and act on a clear and present crisis? We have a crisis in front of us. The farm subsidies are not a crisis, but they are a good example of an abuse of the safety net principle, and we cannot, on the one hand, allow that kind of abuse to go forward and ignore, on the other hand, unemployment insurance. We cannot, on the one hand, allow the farm subsidies to continue and insist that people have to get off welfare in 5 years and we do not care what happens to them after that, and the amount of money that each welfare family takes is so much smaller than the amount of money being poured into farm subsidies every day. So I want to get back to my original proposition, which is that the safety net principle is very important as we look at the total agenda for the last half of this Congress, this year, 2002, as we go forward. I have a list here from the National Conference of State Legislatures on what their priorities are and I agree very much with their priorities, and we ought to address that. Election reform is a priority. I think that the National Conference of State Legislatures are rather conservative, just as the election bill that we passed here is very conservative, but at least we go forward a few steps. Election reform will take us into exposing and taking a hard look at the procedures by which we conduct our most important democratic activity. That is the point of voting and selecting people who are going to lead us and make decisions for us. We have been very sloppy over the years in allowing our procedures to become too localized and too much left to the States, and people who are in power have been given the opportunity to maintain power by the way they operate the election process. So we shined a bright light on that. We need to focus more on it and think more about the implications, including the Electoral College, the implication of the Electoral College. Nothing is written in stone, and the fact that we established an Electoral College at the time of the founding of the country in protection of the smaller States in order to compromise and have all of the States feel that they could be part of the Union, we ought to take a look at it and see what evil does the Electoral College spawn now. It denies one man, one vote, the one-man, one-vote principle as we saw in the last election. When we do not have the one-man, one-vote principle, what other evils do we set in motion? What does it have to do with Enron? What does it have to do with the corruption of the safety net of the farm subsidy? Can getting votes out of a particular State be guaranteed by maintaining unjust farm subsidies? Is that one of the problems that we have to look at, that some of the smaller States have power out of proportion to their size because of the fact that they are able to finance a system that does protect them and part of that system is the use of Federal dollars that come from the farm subsidy? The Patient's Bill of Rights. That is on the agenda of the National Conference of State Legislatures, a Patient's Bill of Rights, including a concern with the prescription drug benefits. We must get back to a real Patient's Bill of Rights and we must take care of the prescription drug benefit. The third item on the list of the National Conference of State Legislatures happens to be a reauthorization of Assistance for Needy Families Block Grant. They want to make sure that we are prepared to deal with some of the problems that are obvious from the passage of that law. After 5 years of experience, some of the exploitation of the loopholes must be dealt with. They want a reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which the Committee on Education and the Workforce that I serve on will be addressing, and we hope to be able to address the Federal promise of 40 percent funding for the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act so that that money is released at the local and State level to go to some other educational activities. They want some relief for people who are suffering from the present recession. They want an economic stimulus, economic recovery package which makes sense in terms of bringing benefits to the people on the bottom. The Progressive Caucus that I am a member of is repeating what it said 6 months ago, that we want an economic package that is big enough to really bring some relief to the people on the bottom. We have a massive drop in overall demand, which is one of the problems of our economy. When the consumer demand drops massively, that is the factor that drives the economy and the engine of the economy is stalled. We know that. It is a fact. Nobody disputes it. So let us keep the consumer demand up by making certain that the people are the real consumers and are the ones who get the benefit of any governmental action. We will not stimulate consumption. The consumers will not come back when we give large tax cuts to people who are already rich. I assure my colleagues, they are buying whatever they want to buy at the pace that they want to buy it, and more money will only be an opportunity to use it somewhere for purposes other than consumption. I will not get into all the economics of that. I do not know what the position of the Democratic Party is at this point, but I certainly am in favor of tax cuts. The only difference is I am in favor of tax cuts starting with the poor guys on the bottom who have been paying too much payroll taxes. We need a big tax cut for the people who have been paying too much payroll taxes. We should go up from there to the medium people who need a tax cut. The problem is not a tax cut, the problem is who is the target who benefits from the tax cut? I think tax cuts ought to be welcome, but the problem with the President's tax cuts as they were passed last year and signed into law is that they go to the wrong people. They do not stimulate the economy, they will not stimulate the economy. So the Progressive Caucus calls for a package that will go to the bottom and give relief to people on the bottom. We also again are calling for a real increase, a giant increase in our unemployment benefits. One item is that we proposed a $200 billion economic stimulus package last year and probably will fashion this year something similar to that economic stimulus package. High priority programs are unemployment insurance, as I have just mentioned. First of all, extend unemployment benefits to 52 weeks, from the present 26 weeks to 52 weeks. We want to also supplement the amount of benefits available through unemployment by increasing them by $100 a week, adding $100 to the present package that they are receiving in any State, because those packages and their benefits, the amounts are far too low for the present situation. We are calling for expanding health care coverage, job training, State revenue-sharing, a close look at TANF. That is the aid to dependent children's program that was transformed into a punitive program at this point. We want to take another look at that. We want to take a hard look at the use of government funds for public works construction to generate jobs also, starting with school construction. We are proposing $10 billion for school construction. We proposed that last year, and we will be proposing it again this year. Another $10 billion for small business economic development programs at the local level. Again, as I said before, we need a tax cut for the people on the bottom, and that is again being proposed by the Progressive Caucus. Just to focus first on the safety net principle being abused and misused with respect to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, TANF, TANF has become the kind of stain on the record of our Nation with respect to safety nets that we do not want to continue. We do not want to continue to tell families who are destitute, have no other means of survival that after 5 years the government will not have anything to do with them except to find them a job, help them find a job. If they do not find a job, they are still not eligible for assistance. What do they do if they do not find a job? In an economy which is in recession, and people, even well-educated people with a lot to offer, are temporarily finding it difficult to find jobs. How will we find jobs for welfare recipients who in many cases have very poor and limited education? So we must do something to remove the stain of TANF. We need a revision of that. There is no great hue and cry in Congress, I must say, because people who are on welfare have no power. The poorest people in our society, part of the reason they are that way is because they have limited education, they have absolutely no capital, they do not make contributions to anybody's campaign, and it is their fault but they are not organized. When we look at the farm subsidy, we see the fact that the farm population of America is less than 2 percent of the population, and yet the amount of money they can demand in the Federal budget is far exceeding anything that urban communities can command with much greater populations. The fact that they are a small group does not mean that they cannot in our American democratic system command the attention of Congress, but they cannot get subsidies, they cannot get a place in the budget. On the one hand, welfare people are treated atrociously. On the other hand, we are bowing to the power of the farm subsidies and the people who manipulate those programs. Today in the Washington Post, for example, there is a long story which in my opinion we might title ``An Expose on How a Safety Net Has Been Grossly Abused.'' The safety net of the farm subsidy program has been grossly abused, and there is a discussion of that here in the Washington Post today, January 24. The article is entitled ``More Subsidy Money Going to Fewer Farms.'' They start off with a description of one man, David B. Griffin, ``a man of undeniable means, a prominent and well-respected businessman who lives in a million-dollar home, sits on the local bank board and serves as president of a tractor dealership with sales last year of $30.8 million. He is also, by some definitions, a farmer--the principal landlord of a 61,000-acre spread known as Tyler Farms.'' This is near Elaine, Arkansas. ``But Griffin did not get where he is without government help. From 1996 through 2001, records show, Tyler Farms received more than $38 million in Federal crop subsidies for its bountiful yield of cotton, rice, corn, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat''; $38 million to Tyler Farms from the government, $38 million to a man who is already a millionaire. ``Griffin's story and others like it suggest that Federal crop programs ostensibly aimed at struggling families do not always hit their intended targets.'' In another paragraph they talk about numbers telling a story of unintended consequences. ``According to the Department of Agriculture, 47 percent of commodity payments now flow to large commercial operations with average household incomes of $135,000.'' We hear people with an average household income of $135,000 are getting subsidies from the government, with a $135,000- a-year income. Here is a family in New York of four on welfare and they get $7,000, and we say, ``You are a threat to the economy of the Nation. You can only get this money for 5 years; no matter what circumstances you and your children may be in, we will take you off.'' These farms make up 8 percent of the Nation's 2.2 million farms. Sixty percent of the American farms get no crop subsidies at all. We are allowing abuses to take place which not only hurt Americans and take our tax monies in the wrong direction, but we are also hurting farmers, the little guys out there who are probably more like the welfare mothers than like the millionaire farmers. Obviously, they do not belong to the right organizations, do not make the right contributions, and they are left out. I am reading from an article that appears in today's Washington Post, January 24. Members may get it if they want the full article. I want to continue. Another paragraph says: ``But new payment limits would address only one aspect of the `Alice-in-Wonderland' system that underpins much of the Nation's farm economy--a system that Congress thought it had junked 6 years ago in favor of the free market but that has since proved impossible to kill.'' We were going to phase it out starting 6 years ago, and it has only mushroomed and gotten bigger. ``Established in 1933 as a rural antidote to the Depression, crop payments have mushroomed into a $21 billion-a-year entitlement program that almost everyone agrees is broken but that no one can agree how to fix.'' That is $21 billion a year. At the height of the welfare program, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, I think the program for the whole country was costing less than 2 percent of the total budget; and here we are talking about a $21 billion program for 2 percent, less than 2 percent of the population that would be eligible. But of that 2 percent eligible, only a tiny percentage of those are absorbing this $21 billion a year that they are receiving. ``It is a system that reserves almost half of its benefits for just six States.'' That is important, too, when we consider the Electoral College and why we maintain that, because those States have power out of proportion to their membership, out of proportion to their size, and out of proportion to the number of voters that they have. But six States are receiving most of the farm subsidies, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. ``Notwithstanding the return of budget deficits, to say nothing of its stated commitment to free trade, the Bush administration has bowed to congressional demands for $73 billion in new farm spending over the next decade. That is almost three times the $26 billion cost of the landmark education package that President Bush signed into law this month.'' That is $26 billion from the Federal Government over a 10-year period that would deal with education. Education is for the whole Nation. Education is the foundation for our national security system. If we do not have more educated people, if we have more high-tech weapons, high-tech weapons will become a joke. If we do not have more educated people to become the scientists to conduct the missions to build the missile system, first of all we are going to pay extravagant amounts of money bidding for the few scientists in the world who are able to deal with the problem, and we would probably fail, and at the same time a large number of foreign scientists will be educated to do the same thing. The antidote to the defense missile system will be in development somewhere in the world before we even get it completed; and the scientists that are used to develop the opposition will probably be educated here in America, because we have not given enough money to educate all of our population that has talent to the fullest extent of their talent and their ability to contribute to the Nation's education brain power. To get back to the article, ``More than $40 billion would go for crop subsidies, with the rest reserved for conservation, nutrition and rural development.'' But ``Congress has been more aggressive when it comes to addressing other entitlement programs.'' Congress has been more aggressive, not aggressive in terms of increasing the amounts of money, but cutting the amount of money. In 1996, Congress passed ``a massive revision of welfare that ended the 6-decade-old cash assistance program known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children. The new law also trimmed food stamp benefits, which are funded under the farm bill.'' In other words, in 1996 we committed this horrible atrocity, and that is what it is, a legislative atrocity that was committed in 1996 when we not only cut Aid to Families with Dependent Children and laid down a mandate that you cannot have more than 5 years of assistance from the Federal Government no matter how desperate you are, but we also cut food stamps at the same time. To continue: ``With prices for some crops at their lowest level in more than a decade, many farmers are in genuine distress, and even the harshest critics of the farm programs acknowledge the need for some form of government safety net.'' As an urban dweller from the heart of New York City, I say farmers should have a government safety net. We should help farmers the way we help everybody else, but we should not abuse the principle of the safety net for farmers because farm subsidy program advocates have special privileges here in our government and are able to manipulate certain forces and get large hunks of the taxpayers' money that they do not deserve. Continuing with the article here in today's Washington Post, ``Congress has been trying for more than a decade to wean farmers from the Federal Treasury. The effort peaked with the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act, which provided transitional payments to farmers with the aim of phasing out subsidies by this year.'' In other words, I was here when we debated the Freedom to Farm Act. We are all capitalists; we are all advocates of capitalism. We cannot live with the socialism that has taken over the farm subsidy program, especially since the socialism is a socialism of the rich, in many cases. Everybody wanted to do something, but since 1996 and the great speeches that were made then, we have gone backwards, not forwards. ``But a combination of factors--including worldwide recession and a global oversupply of food--pushed crop prices lower, and Congress has rushed in to fill the breach with a series of `emergency' supplemental appropriations bills.'' Now, when the NAFTA and other trade bills and world trade agreements occurred, they created a situation where factory workers were laid off, plants were closed; and we have never rushed in with a subsidy for urban workers. We have never rushed in with subsidies which would average $135,000 for a family, or $28,000 per family. We barely have been willing to give money for worker retraining. A lot of that money has gotten bogged down in the bureaucracy. ``In 2000, crop subsidies reached a record high of $22 billion. That is nearly as much Federal assistance in one year as Amtrak has gotten for the last quarter century. But in some respects, the farm subsidies have made matters worse, encouraging farmers to grow more crops without regard to market demand.'' As capitalists, we cannot tolerate a situation where we distort the free market, but we are funding at very high levels a program which distorts the free market. On the one hand, this safety net is abused greatly, all out of proportion to reality. On the other hand, the safety net set up for welfare mothers has been turned off completely. Can we as a civilized Nation live with what we have done to the welfare mothers, one? And, two, can we, as a civilized Nation and a group of responsible Members of Congress, sit here and continue the farm subsidies, which are an abuse of the principle of the safety net? ``The outcome of debate is especially important to Arkansas, where the top 10 percent of subsidy recipients--or 4,822 of the total-- received more than 73 percent of the Federal farm subsidies, with an average payment of more than $430,000 per recipient.'' Let me repeat that. In Arkansas, 4,822 farm recipients of the subsidy program, who account for 10 percent of the subsidy, received an average payment of more than $430,000 per recipient, according to an analysis of USA Data by a group called the Environmental Working Group. That is $430,000 per recipient, a safety net to help people survive and get by, $430,000 in taxpayers' money to help people survive. The principle of the safety net is wiped out completely in that kind of scandal. The Environmental Working Group is a Washington nonprofit organization that wants more money to be shifted to conservation. ``The group has caused a stir in Congress by posting subsidy data--including farmers' names and how much they receive--on its Web site.'' I invite Members of Congress to use the Web site of the Environmental Working Group: ewg.org, ewg.org. If Members want the exact names of individuals and how much they received, how much they are receiving, Members can go to this Web site and get the information by State, State by State. We can get the information on how the safety net for farmers is being grossly abused and the process is draining away billions of dollars that could be used for people who need the safety net, the unemployed, the uninsured, with respect to health care. I am not in favor of increasing the Federal budget at all. I think we have enough money in the overall Federal budget. But I am in favor of redirecting, redirecting the money in the Federal budget to those people who really need it, and here is a case where we can start taking from the abusive safety net to give to safety nets that really help people. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record in its entirety the article entitled ``More Subsidy Money Going to Fewer Farms'' in the Washington Post on January 24, 2002.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, because I had to return to my district to handle very urgent business, I missed a number of rollcall votes. Had I been present, I would have voted `yea' on rollcall votes 505 and 508. On rollcall votes 506, 507 and 509, I would have voted ``nay''.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I join my colleagues in praising this bill, and I would like to point out a few things. The conference report maintains strong civil right protections prohibiting organizations from discriminating against employee and program participants. The conference report increases funding for after-school programs by about 18 percent over the amount appropriated last year. Unfortunately, the conference report does not provide increased funding for school construction. School construction and repairs are totally ignored, and that is unfortunate. H.R. 1 increases support for teachers through increased professional development, mentoring and recruitment. However, the failure to provide greater funding does not relieve local school districts of certain burdens that would allow them to transfer funds into teacher salaries. We have a serious problem with teachers' salaries in New York City. In Middleton, Connecticut there was a strike by teachers. Members might have seen them humiliated before the television cameras, in handcuffs and prison suits. Those teachers are fighting for a decent health care plan. Teachers should not be held in contempt and treated as if they are at the bottom of the professional ladder. They need decent salaries and benefits. The testing provisions ensure that States can no longer ignore the academic performance of poor and minority children. That is a big plus. H.R. 1 improves targeting for schools located in underserved communities. The President is to be applauded for interfering with a trend that had taken place to spread out the money and lessen its effectiveness. Title I was originally intended to target poor children in poor districts, and we have returned to that. The Reading First Program is a great step forward, almost $1 billion to focus primarily on reading in K-3. The conference report includes $250 million for school libraries which shows that we mean business about reading. Mr. Speaker, this is a good new beginning. President Johnson made a great step forward in this area, and this bill follows in those footsteps. We need more funding and resources for education.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank and congratulate the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), my leader, the ranking Democrat on the committee, and thank and congratulate the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner), the chairman of the committee. They did a marvelous job of fashioning this bill through a process with a lot of creative, independent minds on both sides of the aisle, and we have arrived at a bill I think we can all be proud of. It is in the details. If my colleagues look in the details, we find a lot of hard work has been done, a lot of creative work has been done here, and we should not leave out congratulations and thanks to a job well done by a hardworking staff. I think the leadership of Sally Lovejoy in her stern, productive way, has produced some details in this bill which carry forth the real meaning of what we do in education reform. I also want to thank my staff member, Larry Walker. They spent a large part of the summer here and late nights and long days, and they are to be congratulated for producing the document which in the details we will find a lot of creativity. I also want to note the fact that this is great step forward. Lyndon Johnson took the first great step forward when he initiated the Elementary Secondary Education Assistance Act after many long years of the Federal Government insisting that it had no role in elementary secondary education, and now we are taking the next great step forward building on what Lyndon Johnson started. The President is to be congratulated for taking such divisive nonproductive items as vouchers off the table as Federal policy. He needs to be congratulated for concentrating back on the poor and the disabled, as Lyndon Johnson originally intended. We can go forward within this framework. The only problem is the problem we ended up with in the committee, a fervent plea for the funding of IDEA. If we funded special education, we would be on our way toward providing more resources for education at a level that is great enough to make a significant difference. There are increases here, make no bones about that. There are increases here, but they are not great enough. We have a situation where the Federal Government of the United States only covers 7 percent of the overall expenditure for education, and this includes higher education. It is far too little. We should move toward a more rational figure like 25 percent. We are the only industrialized Nation that has such meager support at the national level for education. It is an extreme. We are at the extreme with 7 percent. We do not want to centralize our education. We do not think there is any great virtue there, but why be at the extreme? There ought to be a medium, a means somewhere that we could strive for, where more resources are given for education to relieve the local education agencies and the States of the great burdens they have. I am proud to be a part of this effort, and we must take the next step in terms of providing more resources.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow or the next day we will have on the floor the long-awaited H.R. 1, Leave No Child Behind Act, an education bill initiated by the President shortly after he was sworn in, inaugurated. It is a landmark event. It is a history-making event. We should all look forward to it. It is an example of intensive bipartisan cooperation. It does break new ground, and we should see it as a commencement, a second commencement. Lyndon Johnson began the Federal role in elementary and secondary education more than 40 years ago when he initiated the first Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act, primarily designed to help poor school districts, poor children in poor school districts. This is a continuation of that, a reauthorization of it; but I think it has many elements which will move us forward. It has a lot of bipartisan agreement. We have moved from a situation which existed about 8 years ago where one party was calling for the abolishment of the Department of Education, and I think the Contract with America set forth by Speaker Gingrich called for an end to the Federal role in coordinating education. We had a very intense year of debate on that; and we fought an attempt to cut school lunch programs, we fought an attempt to cut Head Start. It was the depths of bipartisan conflict on education. Fortunately, the American people let their voices be heard, and they made it clear through the polls and through the focus groups that they considered education to be a high priority, and they wanted more Federal participation in education. By 1996, in the process of reauthorizing or setting forth a new budget, the end of 1995, actually, the party in power here in the House, the new party in power, the Republican Party, saw the light, and suddenly they began to support the Federal role in education. The appropriation process I think indicated that when we got a big increase, a more than $4 billion increase in education as a result of the majority Republicans responding to the will of the people. It would have been very disastrous if they had not recognized it and stopped the call for the dismantling of the Department of Education. So we are at a point now where the perception of the public, according to recent polls, is that Republicans and Democrats are pretty much the same in terms of their support for Federal involvement in education, in terms of their support for education. Whether I agree with that perception or not, that is the perception of the public. This bill shows that the two parties can reach agreement about the same thing, and it is a positive achievement. But in my opinion, it ought to be a second commencement. Now we agree on the basic role, and now we set some basic new directions where I think one of the parties can certainly distinguish itself at this point by recognizing the great need for more resources. I hope it is my party. I hope we wake up to the fact that all that we have done is important, and nobody should minimize the importance of the bill that will be on the floor, but the great flaw in the bill is that it lacks resources. It does not have the resources to do the job that has to be done. Let us just stop for a moment and consider some of the activities that are taking place in this first year of the 107th Congress. We have a monumental challenge. September 11 certainly heightened and escalated the nature of the challenge, but we had a challenge already in terms of a faltering economy. Things have been happening here which require some very difficult decisions to be made. In this democracy of ours, keeping the economy going, reacting to a new kind of threat, waging a new kind of war requires an educated population. I think governance of any modern industrialized society, that is far more difficult than nuclear physics. The governance of a modern society requires first of all an educated population. The most important resource we can have is an educated population. So the achievement of Congress, the two parties, in reaching the agreement that has been reached that will be on the floor here is not just a passing matter. Education is not just an ancillary kind of operation, off to the side, ancillary because, after all, the Constitution does specifically say that the Federal Government is not responsible for education, that it is the responsibility of the States and local governments. We have participated sort of as a stimulus and a catalyst to make things happen faster and better, but we are not really responsible. We do not understand it to be a major function of the Federal Government. I thoroughly disagree with this, and I think that in our new commencement of the Federal effort, commencement number two, in my opinion, that this bill could be, we ought to take hold of the fact that education is at the very heart of our effort to maintain our society and to move to the point where we can master the complexities of a society which is really moving toward kind of a cybercivilization, even if it did not have these threats that are very real, the organized terrorist threat that has clearly stated objectives. ``Mein Kampf'' was a statement of Hitler's objectives, and if folks had just taken Hitler more seriously earlier, perhaps things would not have reached the point, the destructive point, it reached, because he clearly said what he wanted to do today and was going to do. If there was a terrorist power that says that our society is a modern society which is a decadent society which must be destroyed, and our policies with respect to assistance and aid to the democracy in Israel is unacceptable, but that is just only one thing that they find unacceptable, they find it unacceptable that our women do not have to cover themselves up, and we are too modern in allowing women to be equal to men in our decision-making, they do not particularly like democracy because they have kings and sheikhs and other kinds of people who make the decisions, and our whole way of life is threatened, that is very real and we have to rise to meet that threat and understand the seriousness of it when it is also backed by tremendous amounts of wealth, the oil money in the Middle East which finances the whole thing. So we have a serious challenge, and in this session we should be rising to meet that challenge. September 11 in my home city of New York was a horror that no one could have ever imagined. Yet September 11 shows how vulnerable our society is, how complex it is, and how a strike at one nerve center could have a domino effect and impact on our entire Nation. The recession was already in place, so we cannot blame September 11 for the continued downturn and the escalation of the economic downturn, but it certainly had a great impact on it. Communications were disrupted, the financial center of the United States and of the entire world was almost brought to its knees, and Wall Street really shut down for a few days. So it is very real, and as we marshall our resources to meet this threat, let us not put education off to the side as being something that is nice to do, but really is not at the heart of it. Our previous speaker spoke very eloquently and forcefully and intensively about the need for a ballistic missile system: Are you with us or are you against us? Are you for a ballistic missile system or are you not? That is going to save America, a blanket to protect us. Well, Mr. Speaker, the terrorist enemies that we are up against, very clever enemies that we are up against, used airline passenger planes as weapons, and some fanatic out there has used envelopes in the mail as weapons. I am more frightened of the anthrax scare than I am of a repeat of what happened on September 11 in terms of the hijacking of four planes on one day and the ability to use those planes as weapons. I do not think that will ever happen again in America. But the anthrax threat and the ease with which somebody out there can threaten a whole system, shut down some offices in Congress, bring the postal service to a halt, that is very frightening. And so we are going to need all the resources we can marshal. We are going to need a well-educated populace. We should not ever be in a situation again where the anthrax cleanup is so slow because there are not enough specialists around to do it, especially since anthrax has been a concern of ours since the Gulf War. We began to be concerned about anthrax since the Gulf War. We even vaccinated large numbers of American troops to deal with the possibility of an enemy who might use anthrax. So I was surprised when we discovered we had a problem here on Capitol Hill and there were so few people to deal with it rapidly, and they did not know how exactly to deal with it. There were a number of blunders that were quite obvious from day-to- day on the television set which showed that we were not prepared. I would rather be prepared for that kind of warfare than to put all of our resources into a ballistic missile system and to make that the great test of whether we really care about protecting America or not. A ballistic missile system will cost billions and billions of dollars, and there is a doubt about how effective it would be. And even if it is very effective, and once it is put in place, can be expected to do what it is supposed to do, we are dealing with an enemy which can quickly see that the use of anthrax through the mail or the introduction of smallpox viruses in various ways into our society could accomplish far more havoc than a single missile can accomplish at any time, if it is done in a way which catches us off guard, if we do not have sufficient specialists and experts, and if we do not have sufficiently-staffed medical institutions that can detect and diagnose right away. There are so many areas where we need more expertise, we need more people who can deal with these problems than we have. So September 11 is a wake-up call, a vary tragic kind of wake-up call, but we need to understand the war effort is just one more example of how this Nation will not survive unless it has a better educated population to deal with all of these problems, many of which cannot be predicted ahead of time. What have we done here in the 107th Congress? In the first year of the 107th Congress, even with the war threat, I do not think we have rallied to meet the challenges that are before us. Day after day, and Christmas is just around the corner, the holiday season is upon us, and there is talk of us having to be here for the rest of the week and then come back next week just before Christmas. It looks like some kind of heroic effort is going on. After all, there is a war, and so you can understand how the calendar cannot be followed in the manner it has been followed in previous years, but it is not the war, I assure you. It is the great mismanagement of resources here by the majority party. We do not need to be here, and it is not a good use of taxpayers' resources to have us here. It is not a good use of our time and energy to have us separated from our constituents so much during this period. Many of the votes that we have taken this year, and I must say this because people are watching every Congressman all the time in relation to his voting record. And the voting record is a statistical thing. They do not really want to look into it very carefully, see the details, or what you were voting on, it is just 95 percent or 96 percent or 100 percent, 90 percent, and that is it. How many times you voted on the Journal is not considered, and how many times you took junk votes. This majority party that we have in the House of Representatives is a master at a new product called junk votes, I call them. Votes that do not matter. Somebody invented the term ``junk bonds'' a long time ago. Junk votes are votes that are really not important at all and are distracting. I guess you cannot say that they are that harmful. A resolution to reaffirm that the golden rule is a good rule to follow. That is a resolution that we would all vote for. It is not going to do anybody any harm. A resolution that motherhood is a great thing. Those kinds of resolutions have been coming all the time this year. Our suspension calendar is full of items that are really quite trivial. We could really have been spending more time at home, we could have managed the serious votes in a manner which would allow us to be here just for serious votes and we could have more time on the floor for serious debate. The most serious issues, the bills which have the most serious content are the ones we give the least amount of time. That is the way the majority operates here. I am proud to report that finally we got the conference process back operating in a democratic mode again, and the conference process for H.R. 1, Leave No Child Behind, was a model of what this institution should be all about. The Senate and the House conferees met, they met in public, they negotiated, the staff carried the process through, all the Members were involved, and it was like we were back to old- fashioned democracy. Something that has not happened much in the last 6 to 8 years since the Republican majority took over. I know we are not supposed to talk about the other body that much, and that the Chair gave great liberties to two of my colleagues before finally reminding them of that, but let me praise the Members of the other body who worked with us on a conference committee. I think you can talk about a functioning, productive conference committee. We worked very well together and we produced a good piece of legislation. But, again, I am going to come back to its shortcomings. That legislation should be seen as a good beginning, and where we go from there is what I would like to discuss tonight. But before I get to that, I just want to talk about the fact that an educated population also is a population that must be able to discern what facts are and combat and counteract the stretching of the truth. I heard two of my colleagues on the Republican majority side earlier tonight talk about the achievements of this House, and they dared to say that we have taken steps to deal with the serious problem of unemployment, we have steps to take care of the needs of workers in an economy which is in a downturn, and that we have done our work. Where are the facts to support that? Where is there a response to the rapidly increasing unemployment? In none of the legislation that passed in this House will you find it. In many of the proposals that the Democrats have proposed there was a clear effort to try to deal with the immediate problem of unemployment. We had proposals which stretched the number of weeks that you could receive unemployment payments. We had proposed to increase the amount of unemployment insurance the person could receive. We had proposals even to provide 6 months of health insurance for workers who lost their health insurance as a result of leaving. We had proposals for training. All those were rejected by the majority party, yet they stood here on the floor and said that they had taken care of business related to the intense problems faced by workers in an economy experiencing a downturn. We need an educated population which can sort out those kinds of facts which are very close to home, and no one should be able to get away with distortions of that kind without being challenged by our constituents. It is a complex world. The complexities of the world demand that we have an educated population. I think the definition of an adequate education probably in most State constitutions is similar to the definition we find in the New York State constitution. Probably not the same wording, but there is a basic assumption when the States took on the responsibility for education that they were talking about an adequate education. They do not mean providing people with some luxury education that will allow them to speak many languages and have their own set of computers and technology, et cetera. But a basic and adequate education, as defined in the New York State constitution, is an education which will allow students to become productive citizens capable of civic engagement and sustaining competitive employment. Capable of civic engagement and sustaining competitive employment. That is what a sound basic education is according to the New York State constitution. That is no small item, I assure you. To be able to have students who become productive citizens capable of civic engagement and to be able to sustain competitive employment might have been far simpler 200 years ago, when the constitution of the State of New York was written, but in order to be able to sustain competitive employment, you need to know far more than just to read and write. Why not begin with reading. We have a problem just teaching reading. But we need to understand that the education that citizens need in our democracy demands that they be able to do far more than that, and that is going to cost money. That is going to require a complex system which is accountable. And the other part of it, a productive citizen capable of civic engagement, our democracy will not survive if we do not have citizens capable of civic engagement, who understand what our decision-making process is all about and what it needs to do. Now, it is to our credit that sometimes the public is way ahead of us. The public, the constituents out there, with the education that we have offered, we must be doing something right because they consistently insist that education should be a high priority of the government. The people of America, for the last 5 to 6 years, have placed education among the top three priorities. In the last 10 years it has been among the top five priorities. So there is something about our populace which makes them understand what the people they elect are quick to forget. We trivialize education. We do not make it a high priority except in terms of rhetoric. The highest priority items receive the greatest portion of the budget. There is a correlation between appropriations and priorities in this Congress, and we are not in the same place that the American people are. They would like to have us do far more. So capacity for civic engagement may be greater than we think and may be greater than we as decision-makers for those same people who are engaging in civic activity deserve. We deserve better action here to reflect that. On the other hand, they do not understand the complexities of the world in terms of justice and peace and in terms of how our relations with foreign governments are necessary to protect us. Those things get short shrift until we have a September 11, and then we understand that we cannot go it alone; that we have to have coalitions; we have to have some standards; we have to answer the charge that we exploit the rest of the world; we have to answer the charge that our foreign policy is rampant with favoritism toward one nation or another. Why should not our foreign policy lean in the direction of supporting democracies? There are a number of ways to answer that, but we have to be able to articulate that not just as a government but the people have to understand it too. We need a population that is educated to understand the best utilization of taxpayer resources. Was it good for us to have voted millions of dollars for the airline bailout, the cash for the bailout and the long-term, low-cost, low-interest loans for the airline industry bailout? Is that industry really that critical in our economy? Well, from the looks of the tourist industry and the repercussions of the lack of airline industry functioning properly, perhaps it is. Those kinds of judgments people need to make. Some are complaining quite a bit about that. Certainly I think they have a right to complain about the fact that if the airline industry is important, we should have taken steps to take care of the workers in the airline industry at the same time we helped the management and the owners of the airline industry. Those kinds of decisions and analyses of events are necessary. There is an insurance subsidy we have now voted. Some of the things we have done here are new and monumental. The insurance subsidy is one of them. I think the airline industry bill, the same bill that bailed out the airline industry, had a compensation fund which is also breaking new ground where the Federal Government is going to provide compensation for all the survivors of the victims of the September 11 tragedy. I think it is a great step forward. We broke new ground there. Is that a good idea, really? And what is that really all about? Every citizen ought to be able to clearly understand. We are not trying to enrich anybody at the expense of taxpayers, but that is the kind of thing that government should be doing. But we ought to really understand that for what it is worth. Enron might seem like something totally unrelated to education, and why am I bringing up the Enron disaster? Most folks are not aware of the fact that Enron is a major economic disaster. Enron is the largest corporate bankruptcy ever experienced by America. It reminds me of the savings and loans phenomenon of a couple of decades ago. Anything as big as Enron was deemed, any bank that had that kind of position in the economic structure, was deemed too big to fail. The whole policy of the Congress was to step in and bail out the banks, and we did. Billions of dollars of taxpayers' money went into bailing out banks. Citizens never quite understood that, and most Members of Congress did not understand how many billions of dollars were spent. It is estimated that the taxpayers spent at least $500 billion bailing out the savings and loan industry. Is Enron something new that we are going to be confronted with? Are we going to bail out Enron? Will there be other energy companies that are too big to fail that we are going to come up with a set of legislative actions to undergird? Is that kind of swindle going to be perpetrated again? An article appeared recently in the paper about the Pritzker family bank in Illinois. That bank went under as a result of shenanigans. The savings and loan swindle was basically a swindle where people were encouraged to put their money in, and they were given very high rates for their investment because that would attract deposits. Once their deposits were in, every $100,000 worth of deposits was insured by the Federal Government. So people did not mind going where the highest rate was offered. If a savings and loan offered 15 percent, people moved their money there because they knew if they put $100,000 in, it started out at $10,000, but Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, we pushed it up to $100,000. So it became profitable for banks to call in the money. Everybody knew the money would be safe, and then those banks that gathered all of that money misused it in terms of the investments that the banks made. People stole in various ways. In the final analysis, the Federal Government was handed the bill. Mr. Speaker, are we going to get into another swindle like that with energy companies? We need a very well-educated population to deal with these complexities. The governance of a modern, industrialized society is more difficult than nuclear physics; and education is not an ancillary function on the side, not for the Federal Government or any other branch of government. I would like to return to the item that is on the agenda now tomorrow or the next day and talk in more detail about the final version of H.R. 1. It has gone through the conference process. I was fortunate enough to serve on the conference committee, and I think we did some useful things there, but my basic premise is that it is just a beginning. It is a good beginning, but it is a beginning. Now we need to go on to resources. To quote from an article that appeared in the Washington Post, many principles underlie the plan that we are going to be voting on were outlined by the President during his first week in office. He called the bill at that time his top domestic priority. It would expand the Federal Government's role in enforcement of educational standards requiring every public school student in the country to take state- administered reading and math tests in grades 3 through 8, and holding schools and educators accountable for the result. The bill also requires States to establish a minimum level of proficiency on the exams, and to make steady progress in bringing all students up to that level that they establish within 12 years. In addition, the measure would require States to report progress toward the goal by several student subgroups defined by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and other factors. A statistically representative sample of students in each State would take the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a highly regarded Federal test, to set a benchmark for the State exams. The school that fails to meet the improvement timetables would be subject to escalating assistance and sanctions, and parents of students attending failing schools would be given new educational options. In various ways the spotlight would be thrown on the people who have the primary responsibility for education, the State and the local education agencies, a spotlight which is standardized. There would be a spotlight in each State which does not vary from State to State as a way to judge progress, to make each State accountable in accordance with a set of national standards. That is the most important feature of the bill. If it does nothing else but to force out into the open the accountability process whereby States have to let it be known what they are doing, the public will know, and we will see step by step what happens. The bill would provide nearly $1 billion for a program aimed at having all children reading by the third grade. That is a good feature of the bill, an emphasis on reading. We found that reading is basic to education. You cannot have education without a certain level of reading competence, forget about math and going forward with history and anything else. If a student cannot clear the first hurdle of being able to read adequately, and yet we found in colleges where teachers are trained, there is no specialized training in most colleges as to how to teach reading. Very few people were given special instruction in reading who became teachers of reading. There are some good features in terms of what we did not do also. The President must be given credit for throwing overboard what had been a major planking in the Republican majority's platform before, insisting that vouchers, that the Federal Government get into the business of providing money to parents so parents can have vouchers to go off and purchase the education from private schools, whether private or parochial. Of course that never was a very sound proposal because the Federal Government would only be able to give the amount of money allocated for title I children which never reached more than $1,400; and no school anywhere in the country is able to function with a tuition of $1,400. Poor parents would have to make up the difference which sort of was a contradiction. If you are poor, how are you going to raise the difference between $1,400 and $4,000 or $5,000 for tuition. That was taken off the table, and I congratulate the President for doing that. The President also insisted that we go back to the original purpose of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and concentrate the funds that are available on the poorest children. Concentrate the funds available on the children with disabilities. The two functions of the Federal Government which must be given the highest priority for assistance in education are the poor and those who have disabilities and need special education. We are back to where we should have been, and President Bush should be given credit for pushing aside all of the temptations of our majority party in this House certainly to take what education funds were available and try to spread them as much as possible regardless of how much wealth a district had already. Members wanted to take something home to their district for education, and we had a great deal of pressure to take the title I funds and sort of dismantle them. President Bush has brought a halt to that and deserves credit for refocusing the resources of the Federal Government on the worst problems as the highest priority. We did have a big discussion about the need for the Federal Government to live up to its commitment which was made 25 years ago to provide 40 percent of the cost of special education funds. We passed a bill more than 25 years ago which said that we would cover 40 percent of the expenditure of each State for special education, which is called IDEA. At this point 25 years later, we are only providing 10 percent of the cost, and we wanted to move and there was a great debate in the conference committee, we wanted to move from the 10 percent to a full 40 percent funding over the next 10 years; and we were unable to get that provision accepted by the Republican majority in the House. That is still unfinished business, but that is very much consistent with my message for tonight, and that is if we had taken on the responsibility of 40 percent funding for special education, it would be a great jump forward in terms of more resources for each local education agency because it would free up the funds that they are now spending for special education. They are required by the Constitution according to the Supreme Court interpretation to provide an education for all children regardless of their disabilities. So they must spend the money regardless of whether the Federal Government gives them a portion of it or not. If the Federal Government were to meet its promise and give them 40 percent of their expenditure, that is 40 percent that they do not have to budget for in their own budget for that purpose. They could use that for some other education purpose. The bill increases Federal funding despite the fact that it does not increase the funding for special education; it still increases Federal funding by $3.7 billion. And funding for title I for the poorest children would double over the next 5 years. These are positives, and it is a good beginning and we need more. We need more to deal with the fact that we are not providing the kind of education that our complex civilization requires to enough children, to enough people, to keep pace with the need. In other words, our cyber-civilization requires a tremendous amount of brain power, and the production of that brain power takes place in our school system. Since we have 83 million children in public school, that is where most of the brain power education is taking place. If we fail to produce the brain power needs of a cyber-civilization, we are going to crumble. We are going to fall. We need enough brain power to fill the positions in our government, in our military, in our technical areas, in our school system. Right through and through there is a demand for more and more and better brain power. I am going to read some excerpts from a speech I made at the Yale Political Union on Monday, November 26. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record my speech in its entirety. It is entitled, ``Congress Should Spend More to Reform Public Education.'' Congress Should Spend More to Reform Public Education (By: Congressman Major R. Owens: Yale Political Union--Monday, November 26, 2001) There are a number of interesting appropriation dollar figures and funding facts which might serve as a useful skeleton for this discussion: The highest per pupil cost is paid by the American taxpayers supporting a public institution to educate a student at West Point. The per pupil cost is about three times the cost of educating a student at Yale. There are about sixteen thousand school districts in America. Among the diverse school districts in New York State the cost per pupil ranges from seven thousand to twenty-six thousand dollars. The gross expenditure for education in America is more than 370 billion dollars; federal dollars are only seven percent of this amount. The national governments of all of the other industrial nations are far more deeply involved. There are 4,070 higher education institutions in America; 1,688 of these are public institutions. In the year 2001, about 1.2 million higher education students received Bachelor Degrees; the projection for the year 2005 is 1.25 million graduates. There are 83 million students attending the public schools of America; the total enrollment for four year higher education institutions in 2001 was 9.4 million students. The new job openings projected by the U.S. Department of Labor for the period between now and the year 2008 for the following occupations are: 1.6 million teachers; 1 million registered nurses and health technicians; 1.3 million police, detective and other law enforcement and security personnel. Dan Goldin, the retiring Administrator of NASA predicts a ``technological sunomi'' requiring 2 million additional scientists and engineers over the next 20 years. H.R. 1, President Bush's high priority education initiative, presently being negotiated by a House-Senate Conference Committee, authorizes increases that, if appropriated, would raise the overall federal share in education expenditures from 7 percent to 8 percent within five years. This set of relevant and revealing observations could launch us on many diverse and interesting course. However, it would be more profitable if we could focus this brief dialogue on the hypothesis that the survival of the nation is inextricably interwoven with the collective initiative to reform public education. When we contend that ``Congress Should Spend More Money to Reform Public Education'', we are really insisting that Congress should spend more money on education in order to guarantee the survival of the nation. I am making this assertion at the outset, in order to make it clear that this is not a ``mickey-mouse'' session about adding a few dollars here or there to get higher public school student test scores. In addition to providing vital cement for our civic, social and economic infrastructure, our defense, safety, security; basic national physical survival is directly dependent on the amount and levels of the education of our population. If it fails to maintain its brainpower production, its public education system, in syncopation with its enormous brainpower needs, this great American cyber-civilization will fall with a momentum more rapid than the fall of the Roman Empire. The recent monumental management and communications blunders of the CIA and the FBI; the absence of translators to translate important information gathered through our multi-billion dollar world-wide electronic surveillance system; the failure of the FAA to implement decades-old proposals for the securing of airplane cockpits; the increasing amount of sloveliness or ``human error'' related to the execution of routine but critical tasks; these are examples of escalating brainpower deficits directly related to our immediate safety and security. When the most recent super-aircraft carrier was launched, it had dozens of unfilled positions because it could not find within the Navy's ranks, persons who could operate the high- tech equipment being utilized. The National Aeronautical and Space Administrator, Dan Goldin, recently announced that at NASA there are twice as many engineers over sixty than there are under thirty. Goldin predicts that two million additional scientists and engineers will be needed over the next twenty years when we be experiencing a ``technological sunomi'' From our routine and less visionary sources such as the U.S. Department of Labor are projected occupational shortages which indicate the deficits will extend far beyond science and technology: The projected number of job openings due to growth and net replacements between now and the year 2008 is 1.6 million teachers; 1 million registered nurses and medical technicans; 1.3 million law enforcement and security personnel. The Information Technology Association estimates that two million information technology professionals will be needed. When you add this same degree of need for more doctors, geneticists, pharmaceutical engineers, lawyers and MBA's; there should be considerable fear aroused among national decision-makers when we consider the fact that the number of college graduates from our 4,000 degree granting institutions will hover at only 1.2 million per year during this seven-year period. At the mouth of America's great educational funnel from Head Start and kindergarten through elementary and secondary education to our colleges and universities; at this source of our raw material there are 83 million students attending public schools. The challenges of public education reform stated in simple arithmetic is a matter of developing far more than 1.2 million college graduates per year from a base of 83 million. In addition to doubling and tripling the number of college graduates, the public eduation system must prepare millions of better educated technicians, mechanics, craftsmen and operators. The performance of the mechanic servicing an airplane is as critical as the performance of the pilot of the plane. At every occupational level, the pursuit of better quality is as important as the need to produce greater numbers. Education adds value to all who are engaged. Even the worst student exist from an education experience with some degree of improvement. The system must be designed to add as much value to every pupil as possible. Society requires increasing levels of competence from an increasing number of performers who can be produced only from a more effective ``churning'' process at the mouth of the funnel. Excellence or even basic competence is guaranteed only when there is a merit driven process continuously pushing new expertise upward to replace the burned out and to challenge smugness or stagnation. Our inability to more effectively transform the raw material represented by the 83 million public school students has brought us to a critical point where an explosion in need for more brainpower is overwhelming our processes for the production of the necessary brainpower. At other similar pivotal points in its history, sometimes by fortunate accident, and sometimes through the vision of geniuses, this nation has adopted sound practices and innovative initiatives in education. By fortunate accident the majority of the states and localities embraced the concept of public schools. As a result of the vision of Thomas Jefferson, the University of Virginia became a model emphasizing publicly supported higher education beyond the liberal arts to embrace practical science, engineering and agricultural production. Another genius, Congressman Morrill, inspired by Jefferson's model, initiated federal support for land grant colleges and universities in all of the states. Following World War II, the GI federal education subsidies provided a massive boost in brainpower pools at a time when more sophisticated mechanization and automation were creating demands for new and better brainpower. Extraordinary federal support for the higher education which qualified participants for immediate professional jobs has provided a great incentive for the expansion and improvement of the elementary and secondary public education system. Preparing students for college is the first priority of most local school districts. A more automated and digitalized commercial and industrial sector with demands for better educated high school graduates has provided an even greater and broader incentive. Despite the present drift into recession, these incentives and rewards for more and better education are firmly in place. Certainly it is possible to move a greater portion of the 83 million public school attendees into education streams that will allow them to meet the mushrooming needs of our cybercivilization. In this 107th Congress, the critical question is will a great leap forward be taken to funnel 20 or 25 percent (instead of the present 12 percent) of the 83 million upward to higher levels of competence and expertise. The good news is that the Bush proposal presently in conference does propose some small steps forward: HR 1 will authorize almost one billion dollars for a new reading program. The bill proposes to double Title I funds from 8 billion dollars to nearly 16 billion dollars over a five year period. The Senate conferees are insisting that the bill greatly increase funding for children with disabilities. The bad news is that this is authorization legislation and there are clear indications of resistance to these increases by the appropriators. President Bush is also insisting on a degree of regimentation and testing that poisons the relationship between the federal, state and local education policy makers. We may move from a 7 percent federal share to an 8 percent share; however, the heavy handed oversight offers the appearance of a federal bully instead of a federal partner. The worst news is that even if a full appropriation is achieved for the amounts authorized, this presidential initiative, which is probably all that we can hope for in the next four years will constitute only an incremental increase in funding at a time when states and localities are being forced to reduce funding for schools: The critical need for smaller class sizes and more qualified teachers requires increased funding. The infrastructure of school physical facilities needs about 300 billion dollars nationwide and this problem is not addressed at all. Computers and other technology which may hold the key to breakthroughs in the education of those most difficult to reach are not encouraged sufficiently. Appropriations for children with disabilities (IDEA) which moves in DC toward the current already authorized 40 percent of total cost is being proposed by the Senate but opposed by the President. The federal increase would free local funds for greater application toward the needs cited above. In summary, the Bush initiative, even if improved by current Senate proposals, falls far short of the significant leap forward in federal funding which the present pivotal moment in the nation's development demands. Through four administrations, from Reagan through Bush to Clinton and now another Bush, I have strongly recommended and will continue to recommend that we establish new parameters for federal assistance to education: In order to re-position the present primitive, almost freakish, insistence that the least amount of federal funding for elementary and secondary education is highly desirable, we must learn from the examples of some of the other industrialized nations. Greater federal support which moves from 7 percent toward 25 percent of the overall national education expenditure would not constitute an over- centralized takeover of education; instead, it would represent a logical mean between the extremes of nationalized education ministries and 16,000 uncoordinated independent school districts in fifty states. Immediate significant federal funding initiatives should focus on large, non-recurring capital expenditures for physical facilities and equipment. States and localities would not become dependent on Washington for their operating expenses; however, necessary overwhelming one time improvements could be realized. Priority for federal funding should continue to go to assist in the education of those most difficult to educate-- the poor and children with disabilities. Special federal funding must be made available to validate, certify and promote education innovations that work. The best programs and practices must be assisted in establishing critical masses throughout the nation. Without bullying states and localities, the Congress should continue to promote higher standards for student achievement and for opportunities-to-learn. Funding to systematically expand support for Research, Development and Dissemination must be greatly increased. It must be recognized that this is an activity almost totally neglected by states and localities. My final word is that society's fullest possible support of public education should not be viewed as a noble gesture, or a governmental philanthropic virtue, or the mere provision of a ``safety net'' for those too poor to pay for their children's education. The far wiser and more productive public policy viewpoint must assume that public education is a necessity vital for the functioning of our very complex cyber-civilization. This nation literally will not be able to survive without an adequate and continually updated public education system. Mr. Speaker, I am going to comment and read a few excerpts from the speech. I started by saying that there are a number of interesting appropriation dollar figures and a number of interesting funding facts that might serve as a useful skeleton for the discussion of a topic that we were faced with. My topic was Congress should spend more to reform public education. There were debaters on the other side who opposed this later on, and it was an interesting evening at Yale University. Number one, we should look at the following figures and funding facts. The highest per-pupil cost is paid by the American taxpayer when we support the institution which educates the student at West Point. The highest per-pupil cost is paid to educate a West Point student. The per-pupil cost of education at West Point is at least three times the cost of educating a student at Yale or Harvard. I did get the facts about 8 years ago when we had a friendly chairman of the Committee on Armed Services who twisted the arms of the people at West Point, and they got me the facts and figures. At that time the cost per student at West Point was $120,000. That did not include the field training using artillery and all of the capital expenditure for that. Just the kind of academic training that they received was estimated to cost $120,000 per student. At that time Harvard and Yale were about 30 to $35,000 per student. So we do believe in spending money to educate the best when we think it is necessary. We set a high priority on our military leadership. The very best is supposed to come from West Point so we spend a tremendous amount of money. Another fact. There are about 16,000 school districts across America. Among the diverse school districts in just one State, New York, the cost per pupil ranges from $7,000 per pupil to $26,000 in an upstate school district and most of the school districts within New York State are spending above $15,000 per pupil. $7,000 is about the lowest in the State, in New York City. Fact number three. The gross expenditure for education in America is more than $370 billion. But Federal dollars are only 7 percent of this amount. The national governments of all of the other industrialized nations are far more deeply involved in the education of their population. We have a decentralized system which also takes away the responsibility and allows the Federal Government not to be responsible for what is probably the most important task it has, and, that is, maintaining the education of the population. We only put 7 percent into the total expenditure pot for education. Point number four. H.R. 1, President Bush's high priority education initiative presently being negotiated, which is almost about to come to the floor, if every part is appropriated would maybe take us to 8 percent instead of 7 percent. This is far too little in terms of the Federal share for education expenditures. We could take quite a bit of time to discuss just those four interesting facts, but it would be more profitable if we could focus this brief dialogue on the hypothesis that the survival of the Nation is inextricably interwoven with the collective initiative to reform public education. When we contend that Congress should spend more money to reform public education, we are really insisting that Congress should spend more money on education in order to guarantee the survival of the Nation. I am making this assertion at the outset in order to make it clear that this is not a Mickey Mouse session about adding a few dollars here or there to get higher public school student test scores. It is more than that. In addition to providing vital cement for our civic, social and economic infrastructure, our defense, safety, security, our basic national physical survival is directly dependent on the amount and levels of the education of our population. If it fails to maintain its brainpower production, its public education system, in syncopation with its enormous brainpower needs, this great America cybercivilization will fall with a momentum more rapid than the fall of the Roman Empire. Do not be smug. We saw the Soviet empire fall because it turned its back on certain realities. The great American empire can fall, too. The recent monumental mismanagement and communication blunders of the CIA and the FBI, and I do think some of those blunders led to September 11, the absence of translators to translate important information gathered through our multi-billion-dollar worldwide electronic surveillance system, the failure of the FAA to implement decades-old proposals for the securing of airplane cockpits, the increased amount of slovenliness or human error related to the execution of routine but critical tasks, these are examples of escalating brainpower deficits directly related to our immediate safety and security. When the most recent super aircraft carrier was launched, less than 2 years ago, it had dozens of unfilled positions because it could not find within the Navy's ranks persons who could operate the high tech equipment being utilized. National Aeronautics and Space Administrator Dan Goldin, who just retired recently, announced that at NASA there are twice as many engineers over 60 than there are under 30. Goldin predicts that 2 million additional scientists and engineers will be needed over the next 20 years when we will be experiencing what he calls a ``technological tsunami.'' A tsunami is greater than a tidal wave, a hurricane or a tornado all put together. From more routine and less visionary sources such as the United States Department of Labor, we can find projections of occupational shortages which indicate that the deficits will extend far beyond science and technology. The projected number of job openings due to growth and net replacements between now and the year 2008 is about 1.6 million teachers, 1 million registered nurses and medical technicians and 1.3 million law enforcement and security personnel. The Information Technology Association estimates that 2 million information technology professionals will be needed. When you add this same degree of need for more doctors, geneticists, pharmaceutical engineers, lawyers and MBAs, there should be considerable fear aroused among national decisionmakers when we consider the fact that the number of college graduates, although we have 4,000 degree-granting institutions in America, the number of college students who graduate each year hovers at 1.2 million per year. Over this 7-year period where we project all those needs for new people who are highly trained, we will be graduating only 1.2 million students per year. At the mouth of America's great educational funnel, if you look at an upward funnel, a funnel where down at the bottom is all these 83 million public school students and as you go through the education process they funnel up into our higher education institutions and sometimes into 2-year colleges or sometimes into technical institutes, et cetera, from the mouth, this source of 83 million students, we should get a better return than 1.2 million graduates from college. We should double that instead. In addition to public education, students who will go to college, we should also understand that there are a great number of people who are needed as educated technicians, mechanics, craftsmen and operators. The performance of the mechanic servicing an airplane is as critical as the performance of the pilot of that same plane. We know that large amounts of money are spent to train pilots, but we should also know that at every occupational level, the pursuit of better quality is as important as the need to produce greater numbers. Education adds value to all who are engaged in education. Even the worst student exits from an education experience with some degree of improvement. The system must be designed to add as much value to every student as possible. Society requires increasing levels of competence from an increasing number of performers who can be produced only from a more effective education churning process at the mouth of that funnel which funnels them upward. Our inability to more effectively transform the raw material represented by the 83 million public school students in America has brought us to a critical point where an explosion in need for more brainpower is overwhelming our process for the production of the necessary brainpower. At other similar pivotal points in its history, sometimes by fortunate accident and sometimes through the vision of geniuses, this Nation has adopted sound practices and innovative initiatives in education. By fortunate accident, the majority of the States and localities very early in the history of the Nation embraced the concept of public schools. As a result of the vision of Thomas Jefferson, the University of Virginia became a model emphasizing publicly supported higher education beyond the liberal arts, publicly supported higher education which embraced practical science, engineering and agricultural production. Another genius following in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson, Congressman Morrill, after the Civil War, he was inspired by Jefferson's model, he initiated the Federal support for land grant colleges and universities in all the States. Later on following World War II, the GI Federal education subsidies provided a massive boost in the brainpower pools in America at a time when more sophisticated mechanization and automation were creating demands for new and better brainpower. Senator Warner of Virginia at our last meeting of the House-Senate conference committee made a very moving speech about the fact that he was educated as a result of the GI subsidies. He got 7 years of education subsidized by the Federal Government. That made all the difference in his life. Extraordinary Federal support for the higher education which qualified participants for immediate professional jobs, the Federal Government did support higher education very early and that started a system which provided incentives for students to go up and there was a clear pattern that if you got a decent education at the lower levels, you could go on to get a professional education in the colleges. Preparing students for college is the first priority that most local school districts see. That is what they are there for. A more automated and digitalized commercial and industrialized sector now demands better educated high school graduates who will not necessarily go to college. They provide incentives for them. You can go into a Microsoft program even if you are not a college graduate and take certain levels of exams and reach a point where you are making a very decent salary with opportunities for advancement as you educate yourself more. This is outside the formal education structure. Despite the present drift into recession, these incentives and rewards for more and better education are firmly in place. Our economy is going to recover. Our cybercivilization is going to continue. It is going to have greater and greater needs. It is possible to move a greater portion of the 83 million base of students that we started with into the education streams which will produce the kind of people we need. We cannot do that unless we have greater resources. In the 107th Congress, the critical question is will a great leap forward be taken similar to the great leap forward of our forefathers who were wise enough to establish a public education system, again similar to the great leap forward taken by Thomas Jefferson when he created the University of Virginia or the great leap forward that was taken by Morrill when he established the land grant colleges. Or the great leap forward that was taken more recently in the GI education programs. Can we rise to meet the challenge so that instead of getting 12 percent of our students, of the 83 million, to the college graduate level, we can double that to maybe 25 percent. The good news is that the legislation that will be on the floor takes some important steps forward. I have already mentioned that. Those steps are very important. The bad news is that what our legislation does is authorize. Tomorrow or the next day we will be voting on a bill that authorizes legislation. Each year the appropriation will have to match those authorizations if we are going to really move forward. Authorization has a problem without support from the appropriation. We may move from 7 percent to 8 percent only if the appropriation is full over the next 5 to 10 years. The worst news that we are confronted with is that we do not have the amounts of resources that we really need. The critical need for smaller class sizes has not been met. The critical need for more qualified teachers has not been met. The infrastructure of school physical facilities is totally ignored. We do not have any money that address the problem of the need for more funding for school infrastructure, for the building of buildings, repairing of buildings or the funding of technology, the installation of new technologies, et cetera. Computers and other technology which may hold the key to breakthroughs in the education of those most difficult to reach are not encouraged sufficiently in this legislation. Again, we do not appropriate the additional money which we felt was required for children with disabilities which would have been a great step forward. Through four administrations, from Reagan through Bush to Clinton, and now another Bush, I have strongly recommended and will continue to recommend that we establish new parameters for Federal assistance to education. In order to reposition the present primitive, almost freakish insistence that the least amount of Federal funding for elementary and secondary education is highly desirable, we must learn from the examples of some of the other industrialized nations. Greater Federal support which moves from 7 percent toward 25 percent of the overall national educational expenditure would not constitute an overcentralized takeover of education. Instead, it would represent a logical need between the extremes of nationalized education ministries and the present 16,000 uncoordinated independent school districts in 50 States in America. In other words, we are in an extreme position. We are at the lower end of support for our school systems, 7 percent of the total education bill, versus some countries which are at the other extreme where the education is totally run by the national government and they get some bad results as a result of that. But let us not remain at that extreme. We should move toward greater Federal participation. Immediate significant Federal funding initiatives should focus on large nonrecurring capital expenditures like the ones that I have just mentioned in terms of the physical infrastructure. Priority Federal funding should continue to go to educate the poor and children with disabilities. Special Federal funding must be made available to validate, certify and promote education innovations that work. The best programs and practices must be assisted in establishing some kind of critical mass throughout the Nation, and Federal money is necessary to allow them to do that. Without bullying states and localities, Congress should continue to promote higher standards for student achievement and for opportunities to learn. Funding to systematically expand support for research, development and dissemination of information must be greatly increased, because none of the states are engaged in that kind of very important activity. My final word is that society's fullest possible support of public education should not be viewed as a noble gesture or a governmental philanthropic virtue or the mere provision of a safety net for those too poor to pay for their children's education. The far wiser and more productive public policy viewpoint must assume that public education is a necessity vital for the functioning of our very complex cyber- civilization. This Nation, our great American Nation, literally will not be able to survive without an adequate and continually updated public education system. Brain power is our best protection for the future.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act offered by the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers), H.R. 1433. I think there is nothing more important that we are doing here in this session than this Hate Crimes Prevention Act. We are wasting our time passing junk resolutions, in many cases, and we do not address an important piece of legislation like this. More than 200 Members have signed on as cosponsors of this legislation. Mr. Speaker, I think that every legal or legislative step that can be taken to combat hate should be taken. Hate is a strong force in the world. It is a monster expressing itself in many ways. The hate monster has us by the neck all over the world, but terrorists that we are fighting in Afghanistan, bin Laden, the al Qaeda network throughout the world, is motivated by hate. Hate seems to generate more fervor than love. People who are pushing love and want to do things differently do not seem to have the same kind of motivation or energy. The people who want to destroy our democracy, they hate us because we will not cover our women in public, they hate us for a thousand different reasons, and we need to meet that with tactics and with strategies that are as strong as the hatemongers. We need to have in every way blanket condemnations of hatred, intolerance, and we need to be very detailed in this country. In this country we can get into the details of what is wrong. We need to condemn intolerance, and we need to specifically condemn intolerance that relates to sexism or intolerance that relates to race or disability. There are some people who, some men in particular, who are very adamant in terms of the workplace, and they cannot stand intolerance or oppression by the boss or management, but they will exploit and oppress women. There are some people in certain races who certainly will speak out against racial intolerances, and they will also oppress women. There are some women who will certainly defend the rights of women to be equal, but they will oppress or be intolerant of people of other races. All of these things add up to a situation that is very complex. We cannot stop it by legislation, but legislation plays a key role. We are the catalytic agent in the process of helping people to deal with hate, making our society as a whole deal with hate. Nationality or ethnic origin is certainly unacceptable for hatemongers, also; and, unfortunately, in our agencies of government, bureaucracies sometimes express a bit of intolerance and sometimes get into hate. Under the President's pressures of terrorism, as we mount our campaign against terrorism, I have seen in my own district Pakistanis rounded up because they are Muslim, and those Pakistanis when they were interrogated, they may have some immigration problems, they have been put in holding pens and jails in New Jersey outside of New York City. About 200 people in a 2-month period have been rounded up and held for 2 or 3 weeks merely because they have an infraction related to immigration but not a serious crime. They asked to go home, and, instead of being immediately processed out and sent home, they were held. One man even died there because there is an intolerance in the FBI bureaucracy under the pressure of the present situation to combat terrorism. We should not let our guard down and become intolerant of any particular group. Immigrants in general are being put on the spot. I have a large number of people in my district from the Caribbean. Through World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, they never found a single Caribbean espionage agent from Haiti or any other Caribbean nation. Why are they penalizing and putting those people on the spot and profiling them in the situation that presently exists? It is intolerant, unreasonable and from our own agencies we should not tolerate it. Let us take every step possible. H.R. 1433 is an important step. We do not need more hate in the world. We need in our official conduct as well as our personal conduct to do everything possible to combat hate.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the attempt to help New York recover speedily moves beyond boundaries, State boundaries or city boundaries. When the terrorists struck on September 11, they struck at the heart of the Nation, the nerve center of the Nation, the communications nerve center, the financial nerve center, the morale nerve center. The domino effect throughout the Nation is obvious. So we are not talking about New York. We are talking about speedy recovery for the whole Nation. In all due respect to the Mayor and the Governor of the State, I think the institutional history of this body is far wiser. In the past decade we have handled several emergencies. The California earthquake was the example we ought to follow. This body quickly committed $6 billion and later an additional $2 billion. California's whole economy was in the tank at the time, but the effort to repair and recover from the earthquake made the whole economy recover. That kind of rapid commitment and rapid implementation expenditure is what we need here now. Speed is very important. Every dollar's value is increased. If we speed the commitment of it and expenditure of it to recover in New York, we recover in the entire Nation.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a publication which strongly supports the legacy of African American Cultural Identity. For too long the living history and cultural identity of the African American community has been squelched or denied altogether. Our African cultural identity has been diminished by the American political realities of the slave trade, segregation, discrimination and racism. The historical contributions that Africans have made globally and African Americans have made to America have been shrouded by ignorance and bigotry. The majesty and the grandeur, of the African American cultural experience, can only be told by those who know it. John Johnson knows it and through Jet Magazine the Johnson Publishing Company, has shown it for more than 50 years. Johnson Publishing Company, one of the nation's largest Black-Owned businesses, has stood on the vanguard, disseminating the beauty, the strength and the pride of the African American community through such publications as: the Negro Digest; Ebony Magazine and Jet Magazine to name a few. These publications were the only source of information about the African American cultural identity for more than twenty years. Today, Mr. Speaker I rise to celebrate the legacy of African American cultural identity, Johnson Publishing Company and Jet Magazine in particular. Established in 1951, Jet Magazine has highlighted the cultural expressions and achievements of African Americans. When other mainstream publications refused to focus on the African American community, Johnson's Jet Magazine was there to chronicle our everyday lives, capturing our beauty and our cultural, educational, and professional achievements. With a circulation of nearly 1 million and a pass-along rate of 9.7 readers per copy, the weekly digest of news and information is read by more than 9 million people. God was having a good day when he created Jet Magazine. Through Jet Magazine, African Americans have been able to share their cultural identity, values and community spirit with each other and the world. ``Big Ups'' to Jet Magazine on its 50th Anniversary.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the time to maintain the status quo is over. The attacks of September 11th along with the recent Anthrax scare have left the public frightened and confused over who will ultimately take responsibility. Repeatedly the President has called on the American public to return to business as ususal; that can only happen once the House follows the Senate's lead by passing a comprehensive Aviation Security Bill. The eyes of the American public are focused squarely on this chamber. Just recently the American Federation of Government Employees commented ``Airport security, is a national defense concern. It should not be the responsibility of profit-driven companies to protect travelers, given the war-like dangers of today's world. Forprofit contractors are notorious for ``cutting corners'' on essential services.'' The key to solving our nation's aviation crisis will not simply go away by deputizing airline screeners. The American people demand a common sense approach that will restore consumer confidence by improving airline security. However, the window of opportunity is now beginning to close; now is the time to act responsibly before millions of people choose another form of transportation during the holiday season. To ensure the attacks of September 11th never occur again this House must follow the Senate's lead and pass a comprehensive bill that strengthens employee training and security background checks. We must act now to prevent future tragedies from occurring within our Nation's borders! Since the September 11th tragedy consumer confidence in the airline industry has virtually disappeared. Nearly every major carrier has announced that thousands of employees will be laid off over the next year. The American people continue to look to us for leadership and guidance during such troubling times. Unfortunately, the Republican leadership has squandered an opportunity to restore consumer confidence and continue the bipartisan effort to stabilize the aviation industry. Mr. Speaker, quite simply H.R. 3150 is a farce, a scam, a way to trick the American people into believing that the Republican leadership truly cares about workers and citizens who depend on the airline industry. Anyone who closely examines the bill will find that the Republican House leadership has chosen to protect airline industry ``fat cats'' and ignore the voice of the American people. Rewarding the same private screening companies that have continuously failed to protect the American public is outrageous. The Republican leadership can not pretend to have the interests of the American people in mind when airport baggage companies are poised to make millions of dollars through new contracts. The GOP bill does not mirror the language in the Oberstar amendment which federalizes airport screeners and transfers their day to day oversight from the Transportation Department to the Justice Department. The Democratic alternative takes a stand the Republican leadership refuses to take; we provide strong oversight and place the responsibility for the safety of the American people firmly in the hands of the federal government.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I am disturbed by the fact that in this war against terrorism, which we all recognize is going to be a long-term war, we are not recognizing that working families in this struggle against terrorism are very important. Working families in the struggle against terrorism have a vital role to play. It is important that we all recognize that role that working families play. I am disturbed because of the treatment that I see working families receiving. Since September 11, we have not behaved well toward working families. They are a vital component of our long-term mobilization to make certain that this Nation is never again subjected to the kind of attack that took place on September 11. They are a vital component of a war for the Nation, a war for the whole of civilization, really, because the kind of fanatics and zealots who attacked the World Trade Center are that kind of threat. So working families should be respected and considered a vital part of whatever we are going to do in the future. I am also concerned about the fact that some immigrants who are Americans, working families and happen to be immigrants, are being unnecessarily harassed. Particularly in my congressional district there is a large contingent of Pakistani immigrants, Pakistani Americans. They have been subjected to all kinds of harassment by the INS and the FBI. In an overzealous attempt to demonstrate that they are working hard, the INS and the FBI have arrested large numbers of people, they say more than a thousand across the Nation, in the metropolitan area it is about 250; and I know from firsthand contact that a large number of these people are innocent Pakistanis. It is ironic that the one Muslim nation that has gone the farthest out to join us in the fight against terrorism, taken a great deal of risk as a nation, is Pakistan. Why are Pakistani Americans being lumped into the whole threat to America that it is perceived immigrants represent? Why not recognize that the President of Pakistan is coming to this country this weekend. He will be at the United Nations. He is going to talk to President Bush. Pakistan again has not reneged on their offer to make some air base space available. They are way out there with us. I think that to subject Pakistani Americans to unnecessary harassment and intimidation, some which resulted in the death of one Pakistani man in a jerry-built detention center in New Jersey, large numbers of people were being detained by the INS in a facility that was being run by the local county, the county jail, and the man had a heart attack and died. There are large numbers of others who are in detention right now whose names we cannot get. There are an unusually large number of women also who are being detained, Pakistani women. These are all people who are basically working-class people. I am emphasizing this because no wealthy Pakistanis would be involved in this. No wealthy immigrants are going to be subjected to this, either. It is very interesting that those who talk about immigration never talk about the fact that in our immigration laws, we actually have provisions which encourage rich, wealthy immigrants to come in. We have incentives for wealthy immigrants. We put them at the front of the line. The assumption is made in this present situation where we are unnecessarily harassing immigrants, the assumption is made, I guess, that only the poor immigrants are a threat. Why the assumption is made, I do not know, because Osama bin Laden is a rich man. Osama bin Laden comes from a very rich class of Saudi Arabians. There are many Saudi Arabians and other people from the rich Arab world that are in this country who never get harassed and never have been harassed since September 11, I assure you. There are many who have contracts with lobbying firms here in Washington. There are some really very famous celebrities and ex-government officials who work in consultant firms for these same rich people. They are not immigrants, or in some cases immigrants. The children of these rich people are here on visas all the time. They are not subjected to this. It is another case of the mentality too much in America is a mentality which is weighed in a direction which makes working-class families suspect or second class. I do not want to fall into the trap of fomenting a class war. The people who really believe in a class war are quick to accuse liberals and Democrats and progressives of wanting to start a class war. The class war is not even a war. The people who are in control in our country who have the greatest part of the wealth and the power, they are so overwhelming in their power that they dominate the working class. It is not a war. It is just a domination, the way they push the interests of the working families around. There is no better example of that than what has occurred since September 11. Consider the fact that we passed a bill to bail out the airline industry, $5 billion in cash for them to divide up among themselves because of losses we say they suffered as a result of being grounded by the Federal Government after the September 11 attack. They were able to play with that, and they are going to get another $15 billion in loans. That is for the airline industry, the executives, et cetera. At the same time many of us pleaded that at least the airline employees should be taken care of in the same legislation, because, after all, when you grounded the airline industry, the planes, you also took away the employment of the people who work on those planes either in the base or in flight or the supporting services at the airports. So why not have a relief package for them? Because of that traumatic economic blow to the airlines, they were already beginning to lay off large numbers of workers. So we said, the workers who are laid off, let us provide for them. We got from the Republican majority an insistent no, an ideological no. There was a lot of talk about ideologues. A blunt no, we will see about them later. We even got some half-hearted promise that next week. Well, next week has not come yet. There has been no particular special relief for the airline industry employees. We are now moving through the preparation of an economic stimulus package where the same ideologues are insisting that we should not have any great amount of relief for the unemployed in general. The unemployed people are at the very bottom who are suffering greatly from this economic slump that was given a great boost downward. It was pushed downward and made more serious by the September 11 attack. We ought to stop and consider what our long-term mission is here. We have had forced upon us the need to consider what is the United States of America all about. Before September 11, we were the most powerful Nation in the world. We are the most powerful nation that ever existed on the face of the Earth. We were prosperous, very smug, and anybody who said we needed to stop and think about our relationship with the rest of the world and what our mission is as a nation and how our mission as a nation is important, because in defining that mission, we not only protect ourselves and defend ourselves and guarantee our children and our grandchildren will enjoy the same kind of liberty, prosperity and comfort that we enjoy. That is the dream I think every person has. I am a grandfather, and I look at my grandchildren and say I want them to have a world as good as the world I am, and, if possible, better. So we want a better world. We cannot do that by acting in isolation as the United States of America. A lot of us understood that before. Since September 11, most Americans are beginning to hear from the leadership that that is an impossibility, starting with the leadership in the White House. Appropriately, President Bush moved to establish a coalition, what is called a coalition, but the coalition is to deal with terrorism. The coalition spirit should be a permanent spirit. In defending ourselves against terrorism, we are coming to grips with what our Nation is all about, what civilization is all about. Because the people who have perpetrated these terrorist acts are striking at the very jugular vein of our Nation and our civilization. Our long-term mission has to be to understand that we stand for certain values, and those values are what bring about our enemies. The people who perpetrated the terrorist acts on September 11 do not like those values. We should not cry about it or spend undue time worrying about whether we are liked or not. The question is, why are we not liked, who does not like us, and what do we think of the people who do not like us? People hate our values, and we should not get into the trap of one religion being set up against another. Certainly Osama bin Laden wants to make it a conflict between Christianity and Islam. A lot of other people would enjoy having the real issue hidden under crosses and past history of crusades, et cetera. But we are not a country that accepts religion as a basis for our being. We are not a country that adopts one religion. We have a certain value system, and the value system is really what upsets our enemies most. Whether we were Christian or Jewish or any other religion, they still do not like the value systems that are defined and set forth and promulgated by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Probably more so than the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence defines what America is all about. It is not a legal definition, because the Declaration of Independence, the preamble, is not a legal matter. You do not go to court on that. The Constitution is a legal document that we have a lot of wrangling about, back and forth in the court. But Thomas Jefferson's declaration that all men are created equal and are endowed by certain inalienable rights, and among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is the core of the spirit of what this Nation is all about, the core of our democracy and what it is all about, the core of what we carry about throughout the world, the core of what the world is responding to. Anybody who says we are more hated in the world than we are liked in the world, I challenge them right away. I think we are more imitated, admired, and people would duplicate our system, if they could, ordinary people. We have leaders out there, fanatics, zealots, who would like to see this belief in the equality of all men ended. And we should stop saying all men, but say all humans, because we clearly believe that women should be equal to men. That upsets a large number of people throughout the world. Equality of men and equality of women. We do not subscribe to a system which says that you have got some people up here who can be ayatollahs or chiefs or kings or sultans or potentates that have a right to trample on the people underneath them, that the lives of the people at the bottom of the economic ladder are not as good as the lives of people at the top; that they do not deserve the same system of justice, the opportunity to improve themselves; that they do not deserve an education. The spirit of America is what the enemies of America hate. That spirit is summed up in the statement about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and all human beings are created equal. It does not matter what happens in our foreign policy today, tomorrow or the next day. If you do not back away from believing all men and women are created equal and we continue to have a democratic system, and we are going to have decisions made as fair as possible and keep trying to perfect it to make it real, we are going to offend large numbers of people throughout the world. Large numbers of zealots and fanatics are always going to be attacking us. Do not worry about whether they like us or not. We have a mission to try to go throughout the world and make people understand how important this is. We have succeeded greatly in expanding democracy in the 20th century. Just stop and think about two very sophisticated, powerful nations with influence stretching over large areas of the world who became definite democracies. Without question, Japan and Germany, after the defeat in World War II, became democracies. Whatever else they are, nobody challenges; nobody would question the fact that Germany is a great democracy now and will be tomorrow. There is no likelihood that they are going to sink into fascism, totalitarianism. Germany is clearly a democracy. We accomplished that. The transformation of Germany, some people said, well, we do not engage in nation-building. That is bad. Call it what you want. We did not exactly nation-build in Germany. They had a nation, very rigid rules and social strata. All kinds of things are happening there, and it is still happening in many cases. It is just as in the case of Japan. We did not knock down traditions in Japan. We did not turn around their religion. We did not turn around their deeply entrenched practices with respect to marriage and a number of other things. But Japan is a democracy. Germany is a democracy. Two great nations with a lot of influence are moving forward as democracies. The Soviet Union, which most of us felt in our lifetime would never be called a democracy, is struggling and moving and has operated for a number of years now, 10 years, as a democracy, a struggling democracy. A huge nation, but a very large sphere of influence. Democracy. Democracy moves on. We should not back away from that mission. India, whatever problems India may have internally, India is a democracy. The untouchables in India probably feel like blacks felt in America 20 or 30 years ago, and there are still a lot of things to be done about the way untouchables are treated in certain regions. But India is basically committed to democratic rule. They have gone through a lot of tribulations and travails, social and political travails, but they have not yielded to any temptation to lapse back into something other than democracy. So our way of life, our mission in the world, is to perpetrate that democracy. That may mean we need to go to war when it is necessary, when we are attacked. I must say that people who say that what is happening in Afghanistan is similar to what happened in Vietnam are starting out with the wrong premise. The Vietnamese never attacked us. Whatever you may think about the war in Vietnam, we were never attacked. They did not perpetrate 5,000 casualties on us in the first day of the war. A war was declared upon us. Even the Japanese at Pearl Harbor did not hit as many casualties, and they did not hit the mainland of America. So war was declared upon us via an attack on the mainland of America. As a nation, there was no choice but to accept the challenge and go to war. The nature of that war and how we conduct it is something we can debate about, but war was necessary. We are at war physically. Militarily we are at war. But we also are at war for the minds, and we understand the minds of the world, the minds of human beings all over the world are part of this war and effort. So we must, as we conduct this war and understand our long-term mission, understand that working families are very vital in this struggle against terrorism. How working families are treated, how they are included, how they are allowed to participate, how we show concern for their problems is vital to the effort to win the war against terrorism and to win the war for a democratic world, where all men and women are seen as equal, where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the values of the people who are in charge of nations. Barbarians are anyone choosing to define themselves as being against all this, who are our enemies. The barbarians are against equality, equal rights for all men and women. They are against life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as being a basic set of rights. They define themselves. We do not have to wrangle about their way of life or their religion, whatever. If you are against equality for all people, if you are against the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, you are our enemy. You define yourself, and we are committed. We must maintain a mission to deal with that enemy. As long as the enemy believes that way and does not attack us, certainly we will not attack them. It is a battle of words. It is a battle of ideas. It is a battle of moral concepts. We would like to see it return to just a battle of words, ideas and moral concepts. But since it is a hot war, a military war, engagement is taking place, working families and the sons and daughters of working families are very much involved in that war. If you look at percentages, I assure you the percentage of the people who are running the operation, whether it is the women in the rear, in the ships and the planning of the logistics or whatever, or the men who are in the Special Forces teams that landed already or are getting ready to land, you are going to find that large percentages of those people, overwhelming percentages, are from working families. How dare we ignore the needs of working families when, if you did not understand how vitally important they are before, you certainly must acknowledge now how vitally important they are? Because this is nothing new. In all the wars that have ever been fought, there are always working families, people on the bottom who make the greatest sacrifices. Their sons and daughters have been the cannon fodder in every war since the Revolutionary War onwards. Therefore, if we are wise and we want to continue the progress of our Nation and fulfill the vision of the Declaration of Independence, working families should be treated well. They are on the battlefields, wherever they are. They sacrifice, they take the great risks. They are on the battlefield domestically. They are needed very much as we try to shore up our home security. There are a lot of problems that we have just because we do not have the personnel, quality personnel, to fill jobs. I have spoken about this before, but, since then, just last week, the Government Office of Personnel launched a major campaign to get young people to come into the government. We are trying to entice people in to fill the positions. There are investigative positions, there are analyst positions, there are positions in the computer areas, and there are, of course, translators. I talked about that before. There is a great need for translators, people who can translate from Arabic, from Farsi, just as an example. So we have a great need that cannot be filled by educating just the middle class and elite children. I have talked about this many times. Our public education system, which is an American invention, public education, which sets forth the credo that all children should be educated, it is one of the great contributions to civilization. It is also one of the reasons that we are greatest Nation in the world. Step by step, when we need it, the brain power to go forward, the brain power has been there. Thomas Jefferson understood that we had to get away from educating people just to speak Greek and Latin and deal with philosophy and religion. They have to be educated in the arts of farming, engineering, et cetera. So he was the creator of the model for the land grant colleges which came later. Of course, those land grant colleges established in every State were fed by a system of public education, which, in State by State, over the years, has been very much imperfect, and there are many problems. The problems did not just begin a few decades ago. We have always had problems. But we must rush now to solve those problems by making certain that working class families, children of working class families, get a first-class education, because in addition to them being our first defenders on the battlefields of the world when there is a military conflict, they are also the ones that have to replenish the human resources that we need to run the CIA, to run the FBI, to run the INS, to take care of a very complex society. Even the airplanes and the aircraft carriers and the tanks and all of the weapons require educated people to operate them at this point. So it is imperative that we recognize the vital role of working families and we end what has happened this year in this country, this House of Representatives. What has happened this year is that since September 11 it has come out more than ever before that there is great contempt for people in the working class. Working-class families are being treated with great contempt. The majority of Republicans show again and again their great contempt for the working families of America. Minimum wage, they refuse to talk about it at all. We have not increased the minimum wage. We have not each even had a chance to discuss it. Mr. Speaker, I am making a plea to my colleagues that we end the contempt, the class contempt and the class hostility that is reflected in the way we have treated working-class families in this Congress. We refuse to discuss minimum wage, so people are mired at the very bottom and have had no movement for the last 2 years. No discussion of it at all. What has happened since September 11? There is an article that appeared in The New York Times on Tuesday, yesterday, which I think is a very thorough analysis in a very compact way of what has happened to working families. The article in The New York Times, Tuesday, November 6 is entitled: ``A Tax Hit Low Pay Jobs the Hardest. Many of the unemployed were in the service industry.'' It is by Leslie Eaton and Edward Wyatt. ``The terrorists,'' and I read a quote from the article, ``The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center may have been trying to crush American capitalism and its masses of the universe on Wall Street, but the economic impact of the attack is felling a very different group of people: cooks, cab drivers, sales clerks, and seamstresses. Workers in traditionally low pay industries like restaurants and hotels, retailing and transportation, have been hit hard in the fallout from September 11, according to a new analysis from the New York State Department of Labor. A report released yesterday by the labor-backed Fiscal Policy Institute forecasts that almost 80,000 people will have lost their jobs by the end of the year, and that 60 percent of these positions paid an average of $23,000 a year.'' That is far below the citywide average salary of roughly $58,000 in New York City. New York City has a slightly higher salary scale and standard of living. If we want to know who I am defining as working families, I am not going to get into trying to deal with expert definitions, but let us just say anybody who has a family and they are making less than $50,000 a year can consider themselves in a working- family situation. The working families income-wise. There are other features. People have to get up every day and go to work. There are some people who may get $50,000 a year from their investments in the stock market or various interest-bearing accounts or real estate, but the people have to get up and go to work every day and are making less than $50,000 a year are clearly people who belong to working families; and there are an overwhelming majority of people in America who fall into this category. Continuing to read from the article that appeared in the New York Times on November 6: ``The spillover effect hit the retail and service industries very hard in New York City, said James Parrott, the chief economist for the institute, and those tend to be lower wage jobs. A sudden decline in these jobs marks a sea change in the economy since September 11. Earlier this year while the job market was softening, the losses were concentrated among white collar workers like dot-com programmers, stockbrokers, and advertising executives. Now they are concentrated among people like Kim Daily. A single mother of two, Ms. Daily worked her way up from a $6 an hour job picking up room service trays to a $15 an hour job stocking mini bars at the World Trade Center Marriott. When the hotel was destroyed on September 11, so was her job. She has not been able to find another job. It is not for lack of trying. She stood in line for 4 hours outside a city-sponsored job fair, but never even made it to the door. She has been talking to a union, but the only position available so far was so tip-dependent, that she wondered if it would cover her $700-a-month rent. A job bank had only a few hotel positions, and none of them paid anywhere near the $25,000 that she earned at the Marriott last year. I do not want to go for less money, she said. But a changed job market raises huge challenges for the city at a time when hundreds of thousands of families have moved off the welfare rolls.'' Here is a welfare recipient who got a job for $6 an hour. She worked up to $15 an hour, and $15 an hour comes out to $25,000 a year in her pay, so we are certainly not talking about wealthy, well-to-do people. We are talking about people who are working ever day, but getting very low pay. Continuing the article: ``The changing job market raises huge challenges for the city at a time when hundreds of thousands of families have moved off the welfare rolls. The most successful of these former welfare recipients, as well as many newcomers to the country, found jobs at the hotels and restaurants, as cleaners of office buildings, and as messengers in lower Manhattan. Now that the economy has exploded along with the World Trade Center, their prospects of staying in the world of work have diminished, said David R. Jones, the President of the Community Service Society of New York, which has been helping workers who lost their jobs after September 11. His group is recommending a government-financed jobs program, he said. Otherwise we will have people sitting on stoops, getting a little check and doing nothing, he said.'' That is David Jones of the Community Service Society talking. He is more optimistic than I am. Given welfare reform, there are a lot of these people who are very needy, desperately needy, who will never get a welfare check. They will never be sitting on a stoop doing nothing, because the way the system operates now, you can almost starve. Your family can go completely mad before you get any help. Continuing the article: ``How many New Yorkers are unemployed is unclear. In a government survey taken in the week of September 11, which anyone who worked at all was counted as employed, 223,100 people in New York were looking for work. That was an increase of almost 20,000 people in a month. The unemployment rate hit 6.3 percent. The October survey will not be released for several weeks, but its results are included in Federal figures which were released on Friday. Those Federal figures show that a surge in national unemployment rose by half a percentage point to 5.4 percent,'' and we have all been reading about the fact that that surge to 5.4 percent represents the highest unemployment for the last 20 years. The unemployment rate is higher now than it has been in 20 years. ``Unemployment insurance covers only about a third of unemployed workers. The number of people applying for benefits in the city have soared. Last month, an average of 12,745 people a week had applied. A year ago, that figure was merely 5,616 a week. A special program, Disaster Unemployment Assistance, is supposed to help those who are not eligible for unemployment insurance because they work part-time or they were self-employed before. They are not eligible. But only 2,350 people are now getting those benefits.'' In other words, out of the 12,745, only 2,350 are getting those special disaster unemployment benefits in New York State. ``Almost 25,000 people told the New York State Department of Labor that they lost their jobs because of the Trade Center disaster. The analysis said that the first 22,000 of these claims found that about 16 percent worked at bars and restaurants, 14 percent worked in hotels, and 5 percent worked in air transportation. Only 4 percent at Wall Street brokerage firms.'' And many of them have been relocated to some other place. They have fared the best. ``The largest group of people, 21 percent, worked in a category called business services. Many of these were temporary workers like Lisa Mendes, a single mother who lost her job as an accounting clerk on September 12. In years past when one temporary job ended, she could pick and choose among the offerings of the agencies. Now there is just nothing there. Ms. Mendes is typical of the unemployed in another way: she lives in Brooklyn. The Labor Department analysis said that almost 26 percent of the people who said they were jobless because of the twin towers collapsed lived in Brooklyn.'' Brooklyn happens to be my home borough. The 11th Congressional District is located in the center of Brooklyn. ``Twenty-four percent of the people lived in Queens, 12 percent lived in the Bronx, and just 18 percent live in Manhattan where most of the jobs are located. Ms. Mendes, who is from Jamaica, is lucky of the many of the unemployed because she speaks English and she can use a computer. The Consortium for Worker Education, which runs a special program for people unemployed because of the disaster, and they have already counseled 3,200 people, they have 5,000 jobs in that special bank,'' for people who can handle that kind of need, I mean are familiar with computers. ``Most of them are back office jobs, data entry jobs, word processing jobs, administrative assistance, said Sal Rosen, the Associate Director of that group. ``Hotel and restaurant employment has been devastated by the destruction of the trade center and the steep drop in tourism that followed. Most restaurants are not unionized, but Local 100 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, which represents about 6,000 restaurant workers, say that 10 percent of its membership lost jobs immediately after September 11. About 200 of those, 600 have since found work, but not necessarily in restaurants. ``John Haynes has a short-term job at the Immigrant Workers Assistance Alliance helping undocumented workers. Until September 11, he cooked meals on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center for the 250 employees of Windows on the World. He said he earned $408 a week before taxes, about $25,400, and he lives in a public housing unit in the Bronx.'' Mr. Haynes is of course quite happy that he escaped death, first of all. ``The tourism and travel drought has hit many businesses in Queens, according to a new report by the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy group. Airline workers, freight forwarders, truckers and limousine drivers are all hurting.'' And on and on it goes. They also included in the same article a chart which breaks out 10 occupations that were most affected by events of September 11, unemployed after the attack. The occupation: waiters and waitresses. The estimated layoffs were 4,225 as a result of September 11 events. The average hourly wage of those waitresses and workers was $7.08 an hour. Cleaning and maintenance workers about 3,365, have lost their jobs. Their average wage was $14.90 an hour. Sales representatives (retail), 2,843. Their average wage was $9.15 an hour; food preparation, 2,284, and they made $8.90 an hour; cashiers, 2,282 and $7.36 an hour they make; housekeeping workers, 1,840, and $13.42 they make; food preparation and fast food service, 1,718 have been laid off, and $7.09 was their average wage; general managers and top executives, 1,367 have lost their jobs. Their average wage per hour was $51.34; sales supervisors, 1,183, and $22.42 an hour; service supervisors, about 1,070 have lost their jobs, and they made $16.46. This chart is for ten occupations most affected by the events of September 11. It appears in the New York Times Tuesday, November 6. I include for the Record the entire article. The article referred to is as follows: [From the New York Times, Nov. 6, 2001] Attacks Hit Low-Pay Jobs The Hardest Many of the Unemployed Were in Service Industry (By Leslie Eaton and Edward Wyatt) The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center may have been trying to crush American capitalism and its masters of the universe on Wall Street. But the economic impact of the attack is felling a very different group of people: cooks, cabdrivers, sales clerks and seamstresses. Workers in traditionally low-wage industries, like restaurants and hotels, retailing and transportation, have been hit hard in the fallout from Sept. 11, according to a new analysis from the New York State Department of Labor. And a report released yesterday by the labor-backed Fiscal Policy Institute forecasts that almost 80,000 people will have lost their jobs by the end of the year and that 60 percent of these positions paid an average of $23,000 a year. That is far below the citywide average salary of roughly $58,000. ``The spillover effects hit the retail and service industries very hard in New York City,'' said James Parrott, the chief economist for the institute. ``And those tend to be lower-wage jobs.'' The sudden decline in these jobs marks a sea change in the economy since Sept. 11. Earlier this year, while the job market was softening, the losses were concentrated among white-collar workers like dot-com programmers, stockbrokers and advertising executives. Now, they are concentrated among people like Kim Daily. A single mother of two, Ms. Daily worked her way up from a $6- an-hour-job picking up room-service trays to a $15-an-hour job stocking minibars at the World Trade Center Marriott. When the hotel was destroyed on Sept. 11, so was her job. And she has not been able to find another one. It is not for lack of trying; she stood in line for four hours outside a city-sponsored job fair but never even made it in the door. She has been talking to her union, but the only position available so far was so tip-dependent that she worried it would not cover her $700-a-month rent. A job bank had only a few hotel positions, and none paid anywhere near the $25,000 she earned at the Marriott last year. ``I don't want to go for less money,'' she said. The changed job market raises huge challenges for the city at a time when hundreds of thousands of families have moved off the welfare rolls. The most successful of these former welfare recipients, as well as many newcomers to this country, found jobs at hotels and restaurants, as cleaners at office buildings and as messengers in Lower Manhattan. ``Now that the economy has exploded along with the World Trade Center, their prospects of staying in the world of work have diminished,'' said David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York, which has been helping workers who lost their jobs after Sept. 11. His group is recommending a government-financed jobs program, he said. ``Otherwise, we'll have people sitting on stoops, getting a little check and doing nothing,'' he said. How many New Yorkers are unemployed is unclear. In a governmental survey taken in the week of Sept. 11, in which anymore who worked at all was counted as employed, 223,100 people in New York City were looking for work (after adjustments for seasonal factors). That was an increase of almost 20,000 people in a month. The unemployment rate hit 6.3 percent. The October survey will not be released for several weeks, but its results are included in federal figures, released Friday, that showed a surge in national unemployment, which rose by half a percentage point, to 5.4 percent. Unemployment insurance covers only about a third of unemployed workers, but the number of people applying for benefits in the city was has soared. In the last month, an average of 12,745 people a week has applied; a year ago, that figure was 5,616. A special program, Disaster Unemployment Assistance, is supposed to help those who are not eligible for unemployment insurance (usually because they worked part time or were self-employed). But only 2,350 people are now getting those benefits. Almost 25,000 people told the New York State Department of Labor that they lost their jobs because of the trade center disaster. An analysis of the first 22,000 of those claims found that about 16 percent worked at bars and restaurants, 14 percent worked at hotels and 5 percent worked in air transportation. Only 4 percent worked at Wall Street brokerage firms (many of which simply relocated workers to Midtown or New Jersey). The largest group of people--21 percent--worked in a category called business services. Many of them were temporary workers, like Lisa Mendes, a single mother who lost her job as an accounting clerk on Sept. 12. In years past, when one temporary job ended, she could pick and choose among the offerings at the agencies. Now, ``there's just nothing there,'' she said. ``It's scary.'' Ms. Mendes is typical of the unemployed in another way--she lives in Brooklyn. The Labor Department analysis found that almost 26 percent of those who said they were jobless because of the twin towers collapse live in Brooklyn; 24 percent live in Queens, and 12 percent live in the Bronx. Just 18 percent live in Manhattan. But Ms. Mendes, who is from Jamaica, is luckier than many of the unemployed because she speaks English and can use a computer. The Consortium for Worker Education, which runs a special program for people unemployed because of the disaster (and has already counseled more than 3,200 of them) has 5,000 jobs in its special job bank. ``Most of them are back-office jobs, data entry, word processing, administrative assistants,'' said Saul Rosen, associate executive director of the group. Hotel and restaurant employment has been devastated by the destruction of the trade center and the steep drop in tourism that followed. Most restaurants are not unionized, but Local 100 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, which represents about 6,000 restaurant workers, says that 10 percent of its membership lost jobs immediately after Sept. 11. About 200 of those 600 have since found work, but not necessarily restaurant work. John Haynes has a short-term job at the Immigrant Workers Assistance Alliance, helping undocumented workers. Until Sept. 11, he cooked meals on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center for the 250 employees of Windows on the World. He said he earned $488.80 a week before taxes, or about $25,400 a year, and he lives in public housing in the Bronx. He does not think he will be able to go back into restaurant work, he says. ``They are not hiring right now,'' he said. ``So I'm going to go for job training, either in computers or photo imaging.'' The tourist and travel drought has hit many businesses in Queens, according to a new report by the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy group. Airline workers, freight forwarders, truckers and limousine drivers are all hurting. Listen to Greg Buttle, who operates valet parking lots at the three major New York area airports: You park at these lots and workers will shuttle you to and from the terminal for about $13 a day plus tax. (They will also wash your car, change the oil, rotate or replace the tires, even pick up your dry cleaning.) Before, he normally had more than 150 cars in the lots; now, there are about 50, he said. Mr. Buttle said he employed 45 people before Sept. 11; now he employs 30. ``I tried to make sure that the part-timers who have come in most recently are the first ones to go,'' he said. ``But some of our employees have worked for us for eight or nine years.'' For more evidence of the spillover effect, look at Chinatown. Business has plunged at many of the more than 200 sewing shops below Houston Street and at least 20 went out of business in October, said May Chen, a vice president of Unite, the garment workers' union. At least a thousand of her 10,000 members have lost their jobs as stores and clothing companies have canceled orders. Others are working reduced hours. Their job prospects are not good. ``Because of the language barrier, sewing is about the only skill they have,'' said Susan Cowell, another union official. Unite also represents workers at commercial laundries; because of the declines at many restaurants, about 600 of these workers have also been laid off. With the public's attention riveted to the sad stories of the dead and the heroism of the rescuers, some workers fear that their plights will be ignored. ``No one wants to hear our stories,'' said Asmat M. Ali, a former captain at Windows on the World. ``About a busboy or the dishwasher making $250 a week and raising three kids in an apartment in the Bronx or Brooklyn. But 80 percent of the people who worked in the World Trade Center fell in that category.'' Mr. Speaker, I think this is a landmark article which clearly sets forth the basic thesis of my discussion: Working families in the struggle against terrorism are suffering greatly already in New York City. The domino effect of the World Trade Center catastrophe and the declining economy goes right across the whole country. Workers in New York City are not the only workers suffering. The pattern that I have just set forth applies right across the country in the big cities, and certainly places where tourism was important, places where the service industries are important, they are all suffering equally. These are the people who are vital to our winning the struggle against terrorism, to the saving of our civilization. They are suffering in a very direct way. We are not responding in this Congress to that suffering. As I said before, we approved a bill for the airline industries, and at that time we would not approve a bill for the airline employees who were being laid off in large numbers. We said we would do it next week. It is 3 weeks later now, and we still have not done it. There seems to be no haste at all. The airline employees, those who are unemployed, have been lumped with the other unemployed now. What does the Republican majority propose for the other people who are unemployed? Piddling, very tiny amounts of money were included in the stimulus package that has already passed this House of Representatives. We passed the stimulus package in the House without any significant aid for the unemployed and for working families. The emphasis of the bill that passed the House by the Republican leadership, the Republican majority's bill, which passed by a two-vote margin, that bill places great emphasis on more tax cuts. We are going to have more tax cuts because the ideologues say the tax cuts are necessary for investment. The ideologues say when we have tax cuts, people invest, the investment creates jobs, and it trickles down to people on the bottom. But sometimes tax cuts are not invested, they are just hoarded. Sometimes tax cuts lead to people having money which they invest in other parts of the world where they get a higher return on their investment. Taking care of big business does not automatically lead to a benefit for people on the bottom, and that has been shown again and again. The best way to help poor people, we know from social services practices, nonprofit services practices, the best way to help people is to put money in their hands. Unemployed people need money. Unemployed people, people who have working families, cannot save the money. They need the money now. They will spend the money now. It will turn over in our economy. We recognize that the engine of capitalism is consumerism. Consumers make our economy go. Why do we hesitate, then, to make provisions for people who are the number one consumers? The working families are our number one consumers. It does not make sense. Ideologues, people trapped in a vision of the world which says, no, government spending are always bad, tax cuts are always good, they have their heads in the sand in a dangerous way. So we are stalled. Fortunately, yesterday the other body unveiled an economic stimulus package that sets up a situation where we will have another opportunity maybe in the conference to fight for the unemployed. The other body's plan was drafted in close consultation with labor leaders who helped persuade key Senators to gear the package heavily to helping workers who have lost their jobs, but some elements sought by labor were trimmed back in the final hours, even though the plan is still far superior to the one that came through the House. Democrats will be able to get the bill through the closely divided Senate Finance Committee. Tomorrow it is expected, but no Republican has signed onto the plan. It is even doubtful it could pass on the Senate floor unless it is agreed that they would not have a filibuster. The House and Senate bills are almost mirror opposites of each other. The House bill devotes about 75 percent of its $99 billion first-year cost to business and individual tax cuts, while only about one-quarter of the $90 billion Senate bill would reduce tax revenue. The Senate plan also includes $20 billion for additional spending on infrastructure and security. AFL President John Sweeney said that ``Congress took care of companies'' with airline rescue legislation, and ``they continued to lay off workers. Weeks have gone by and no action was taken and the unemployment numbers rise. It's about time they deal with the unfairness here.'' One of the tax provisions, allowing companies to speed up depreciation of newly-purchased assets, would cost States about $2 billion in revenue. With State budgets already under pressure, that could lead to layoffs of State workers, county workers, city workers. We have contempt for the needs of the people on the very bottom at a time when it is pretty clear that they have to play a vital role in our war on terrorism. I hope the message goes out and all of the Members of Congress who are listening would understand the need to communicate with their working families about the unfairness of this, and about the fact that this Congress is being managed in a way in which it is almost impossible to get up enough momentum to confront the party in control. We spend a lot of time in recess. We spend a lot of time working back in the district. There is a plot, a scheme to minimize the amount of time spent on the floor of this House and people speaking in a way which might be picked up by the general public, and certainly working families. So the message has to be gotten out there somehow that working families are being treated unfairly. Working families have a vital role to play in the struggle against terrorism, and they are not being recognized for their full worth. We demand that there be some definite changes made. On another area, working families are being subjected to conditions which are going to create more unnecessary victims. We have a situation where we opened this Congress this year with a repeal of the ergonomics standards by OSHA. There was joy in the majority, great joy and celebration in taking away labor standards and standards to assist the safety of working people, working families, members who have to go out and work every day in the area of ergonomics. There was a set of standards that would have helped make the workplace far safer, less dangerous, and less debilitating for key people. On all measures that relate to worker safety, we have tremendous opposition from the Republican majority. I know because I am the ranking member of the Subcommittee on WorkForce Protections. It is my job to deal with workforce protections, and we have bill after bill and effort after effort to cut down on the safety or the government's protection of the safety of workers. Now this monster has raised its ugly head at ground zero in New York. At ground zero, we have a situation where rescue workers and other people in the area are not being protected properly, and we are going to have victims created unnecessarily. Because of the contempt for workers, the hostility towards working families, nobody is paying attention to the need for protective gear. Recently, according to an article that appeared in the Daily News on October 26, ``A Federal agency has slammed the city for not taking steps to protect rescue workers from injuries immediately after the World Trade Center catastrophe. In a sharply worded report, consultants for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences said nearly 1,000 injuries, ranging from blisters and nausea to severe burns and fractures, could have been prevented if the city had made sure workers had basic safety training and adequate equipment such as hard hats, and respirators.'' The report was dealing with very basic, elementary kinds of things, but beyond that, the report gets into the discussion of toxic chemicals and metals: `` `Toxic chemicals and metals are being released into the environment around lower Manhattan by the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and by the fires that are still burning at ground zero,' according to internal government reports. Dioxins, PCBs, benzene, lead, and chromium are among the toxic substances detected in the air and soil around the World Trade Center site by Environmental Protection Agency equipment, sometimes at levels far exceeding Federal levels, the documents show.'' This is a report in the Daily News also on October 26, an article by Juan Gonzalez. ``EPA monitoring devices have also found considerable contaminants in the Hudson River and in the water and sediment, especially after it rains. Six weeks after the World Trade Center attack, benzene, a colorless liquid that evaporates quickly and can cause leukemia, bone marrow damage, and other diseases in long-term exposure, continues to be released into the air in plumes from the still burning fires at relatively high levels.'' On and on it goes to talk about the fact that the protective gear needed is not there. The highest level of benzene recorded was on October 11, 58 times higher than OSHA's permissible exposure limit. Other kinds of extremes have also occurred. Workers' health and sometimes their lives are at stake in this kind of situation because later on these kinds of exposures lead to debilitating diseases and people die. We have a situation that has now been revealed concerning the workers who worked on the spill at EXXON, the EXXON Valdez oil spill in 1989, when an oil tanker ran aground and spilled tremendous amounts of oil. The count was 250,000 dead birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals. We know what the animal count was, but only now are we beginning to understand that when 11 million gallons of oil were spilled and people from all over the country went out to clean it up, they became victims, also. No one talks about the workers who stood in the brown foam 18 hours a day, who came back to their sleeping barges with oil matted in their hair, ate sandwiches speckled with oil, steered boats through a brown, hydrocarbon haze that looked like the smog from hell, and after the summer, some found themselves with oil traces in their lungs, in their blood cells, in the fatty tissue of their buttocks. They got treated for headaches, nausea, chemical burns, and breathing problems and went home, but some never got well. The story appears in another newspaper that this goes on and on, and many years later workers are suffering dramatically, and some people are dying as a result of not paying attention to the health of the workers. Another way the workers are being treated in a hostile and contemptuous manner relates to the contracting process at ground zero. We started off on the wrong foot. There was an article in the New York Times on October 19 which talks about the fact that they were employing people who were not being paid. Day laborers at ground zero say they are not being paid. The story as it goes here shows that illegal immigrants were brought in by a contractor from outside the city and they were not even bothering to pay the people who were working at very low wages. The treatment of workers in this situation amounts to a lockout of legitimate workers who live in New York. New York has a high unemployment rate. A few minutes ago, I said it is presently at 6.3 percent for adults. Yet, most of these workers were brought in from outside the city. Day laborers are frequently illegal immigrants who are promised payments in cash. They have no form of employment contracts. They know their employer only through a crew leader who hires them on a street corner. Officials with a cleaning company, in this case Milrose Services, Incorporated, of Freeport New York, the usual racket in which certain people in city government contract with people outside the city, and these officials of this particular company say they are not responsible for hiring and paying the laborers. They have the contract, they are not responsible. The company hired a subcontractor to do that. What is unusual here is the setting. Ground zero has just been destroyed in an act which is attributed to illegal immigrants or undesirable immigrants. They are hunting all over the country for undesirable immigrants, but the contractor brings in illegal immigrants to do part of the cleaning work at the World Trade Center, and of course, the people are so crooked they do not even bother to pay the workers, and they make a mistake, and it becomes a matter in the paper. One of the workers was named Cecilia Ramirez, but what is important here, and I would like to submit this entire article, is a documentation of the utter contempt they have for a working class that would go outside on a critical matter like cleanup work around ground zero and get illegal immigrants and bring them into New York City while other people are looking for work and these kinds of jobs. I will include this article that appeared in the New York Times on October 19th in the Record. [From the New York Times, Oct. 19, 2001] Day Laborers at Ground Zero Say They Are Not Being Paid (By Somini Sengupta) The state attorney general's office is investigating complaints that day laborers hired to clear debris from office buildings surrounding the site of the World Trade Center have not been paid, some of them for up to two weeks of work. The complaints here are hardly unusual. Day laborers are frequently illegal immigrants who are promised payment in cash. They have no formal employment contracts, and they know their employer only through a crew leader who hires them on a street corner. Officials with the cleaning company in this case, Milro Services Inc., of Freeport, N.Y., say they are not responsible for hiring and paying laborers; the company hired a subcontractor to do that. (Late yesterday afternoon, the subcontractor said she was making arrangements to pay the workers.) What is unusual here is the setting. In this case, the day laborers are at the center of the mammoth cleanup effort in Lower Manhattan. By 8 a.m. each morning, they are lined up, 100 deep, on the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street for a day's work. Escorted past barricades by police officers, they clear shards of glass, wipe soot off desks and sweep floors covered with ash and debris. They are promised $60 for an 8 hour shift, $90 if they work 12 hours, and the buildings they clean include the offices of several city and federal agencies. But in interviews at the hiring site this week, several laborers, including some men and women freshly unemployed from shops and delis near the trade center, said they had not seen a dime for their work-- some for a week, some for two. One man, Gonzalo Carmona, opened his datebook and pointed to his nine days of work, starting on Oct. 1; by his calculations, he was owed $780. A woman, Cecilia Linares, said she had worked for seven days straight; when she asked about pay, the woman who hired her, whom she said she knew only by her first name, Lumi, told her, ``Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.'' Early Wednesday morning, Ms. Linares showed up again and looked, in vain, for the woman. The complaints first surfaced when an organizer with the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health went to the hiring line to talk to workers about safety precautions; he heard an earful about how they were not being paid. Yesterday morning, lawyers from the state attorney general's office came and the workers lodged their complaints. ``They gave us very specific information about where they worked, what they were promised, what they were paid, what they weren't paid,'' said Patricia Smith, the assistant attoney general in charge of the agency's labor bureau, whose offices are around the corner from the hiring site. ``We've talked to the employer, we are investigating and, hopefully, we'll be able to resolve it.'' Officials with Milro Services said yesterday that they were surprised and dismayed to learn of the charges. But they said hiring and paying the day laborers was not the company's responsibility, but that of a supervisor, Lumi Morel, who was acting as a subcontractor. ``I don't like that this is happening, if it is happening,'' said Tom Milici, the vice president of Milro. But, he added, ``that's out of my hands.'' Late yesterday afternoon, Ms. Morel, reached by telephone, said she had been delayed in paying the workers because of paperwork. She said that she owed money to about 80 workers, and that she planned to pay them by today. Continuing in the same vein, suddenly beyond September 11 we had the crisis of anthrax. Anthrax is a very deadly substance, as we all know. I need not waste the time here to repeat what the Centers for Disease Control and the numerous press conferences over the last 2 weeks have told us about anthrax. We vacated the House of Representatives because of the anthrax possibilities, the scare. There is a Senate building which still remains vacant, the Hart Building, because of the anthrax scare. What happened when it was discovered in the post office where working people work? What happened when it was clear that there was a danger to workers? We have two deaths, postal workers, two deaths that I consider to be totally unnecessary. If we had acted faster, if information had moved faster, if the people in charge of combating the anthrax problem had moved faster, with more purpose, these two men would not be dead, in my opinion. I think triage was practiced. The intention was focused on the important people. We have Congressmen, Senators on Capitol Hill, and given the fact that we were not prepared, we have limited people who know how to handle this problem, which is most unfortunate and a little unforgivable because anthrax has been a clearly recognized problem since the Gulf War. They even, at one point, ordered all members of the Army to be vaccinated against anthrax. If we became worried about anthrax during the Gulf War and we have had a situation where at one point all the members of the Army were ordered to be vaccinated against anthrax, why is there so little expertise in the country when an anthrax outbreak occurs in Washington, so little expertise that we do not have enough to take care of the situation at the post office, at the same time we take care of the situation on the Hill in Senate and House buildings? They did not move fast enough. Information did not flow fast enough. Our hospital system has been under pressure for the last 20 years and certainly will see no relief because of the ideologues in this Congress who insist that we continue to cut local facilities, hospital facilities unnecessarily. Of course, in the Washington, D.C., area they closed down D.C. General Hospital. We watched the spectacle of two postmen who went to a hospital and because the hospital was so badly informed, because of their own pressures, they were turned away, and when they went back the next day, they were already dying. Here is a triage setup, and here is a setup which flows out of the inadequacy of our basic health system. We should have a health system which is not just prepared to combat terrorism, but one that makes certain everybody gets equal and rapid treatment. It did not happen. Joseph P. Curseen is dead as a result. Thomas Lee Morris is dead as a result. Then we have the spectacle of the D.C. General Hospital being used as a major headquarters for the process of dispensing the antibiotic and giving out information. D.C. General Hospital has been closed. The same economic forces, the same pitch on our health care facilities that has gone on throughout the country has forced the closure of D.C. General Hospital. But because there was no other place, the emergency center had to be set up at the D.C. General Hospital. The working class had to do with a closed hospital, a jerry-built situation to take care of a major problem. Joseph P. Curseen is dead. Thomas Lee Morris is dead. They were postal workers at the bottom of the heap, and we are not taking care of our working families when we allow that kind of system to take place. When decisions are made, triage decisions, some people are more important than others. It is important we go forward with a health care system that serves everybody. That health care system would certainly be ready for any kind of bioterrorism in the future, and workers' families would be treated in the same manner as any other families. There would be no priority set for anybody. Everyone would have the same service. I conclude by saying that working families in the struggle against terrorism are as important as any other component. They may be the most important component in our struggle against terrorism.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and I rise to congratulate my colleague, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Fossella), and the other sponsors of this bill. Mr. Speaker, on the floor before I have mentioned the fact that I am intimately acquainted with the World Trade Center Towers. I was in New York when there was just a hole there and the debate was raging about what those buildings should look like and how high they should go, et cetera, et cetera. As a member of the New York State Legislature, I visited there many times, because the New York State executive offices were located in the World Trade Center Towers. I have now gone to numerous affairs at the restaurant, the Windows on the World, and been in numerous conferences in the World Trade Center. So the memories are not difficult to conjure up when I think of what happened that day and the flames raging. I do not want to remember, I want to forget, and I try hard to forget. But there are some things we must remember, and I think that this bill calls upon us to remember what I stated here on the floor before; that parents should tell their children about the bravery of the New York City firemen and policemen who went in to stop the spreading inferno while others were rushing out to safety. They should tell their children that hundreds of policemen and firemen died performing their duties, and that there were many other acts of bravery and courage by many other individuals. This is a time for mourning, it is also a time for rage. Very well organized devils have done this ghastly deed. We are face-to-face with evil geniuses and cold-blooded murderers. They must be surgically exposed and driven from the face of the Earth. Without declaring war, war was launched. We were attacked and lost thousands of casualties. This is not just a war that should be framed as the opposition has chosen to frame it. It is not a religious war, and those who claim it is a religious war are using that as a cover for a war of fanatics and zealots who have really no base, no human base of any significance. This is a war against a way of life. This is a war against what they call modernity. This is a war against a Nation that believes that all men are created equal. It is a war against a Nation that believes all women are created equal. It is a war against a value system that says we should make decisions democratically, with no high- level chiefs imposing themselves and their will on low-level people; there should be no high-level chiefs declaring that others should martyr themselves by the thousands in order to achieve the goals of a jihad. It is a very serious war, and there is no one thing that we can do here or there, no negotiations that will end this war. These zealots, these fanatics must be met head on. And I think the act of remembrance that should take place once a year, as required in this bill, the act of remembrance on a national basis, will only help us to fortify our resolve that we too have fervor, we too feel strongly about certain principles, we too are willing to die. Not suicidally, not murderously to take other lives, but we are willing to die in defense of our beliefs. We too have heroes, we too have martyrs, and we would like for a concrete demonstration of this to take place at least once a year. For a long time, I am sure that from day to day and week to week there will be ways in which people will recognize and remember what happened on September 11. I have gone to a number of memorial services every weekend. I would like to see them stop, but they will not stop, I know, and it is very important that they take place. But to guarantee that Americans never forget, this bill and this remembrance ceremony that is called for here is very much in order. I welcome it, I congratulate the sponsors again, and we should all step up and joyously vote for this resolution. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis).