Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, recent admissions by the CIA and the FBI that they are in need of personnel fluent in Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages constitute a shocking revelation. On a matter so very basic as the capacity to translate and analyze enemy communications every citizen has a right to expect these vital agencies to be prepared. Arabs have been clearly identified as the perpetrators from the bombing of the barracks in Beirut during Reagan's presidency; through the barrack bombing in Saudi Arabia; the bombing of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; the bombing of the warship, Coles in Yemen. It is inconceivable that over this long period of tragedies, the CIA with a more then thirty billion dollar budget has not developed an efficient and effective operation for the translation and analysis of communications in Arabic. When this basic shortcoming is viewed against the blockbuster blunders exposed via the CIA's Aldridge Ames case and the FBI's Robert Hansen case, there is good reason to believe that incompetence is out of control in a sector where American lives are directly dependent on a high level of performance. Despite its shabby history, the CIA reauthorization was passed last week by voice vote in the House of Representatives amid the loud praises of a Member of Congress who is an ex-employee of the CIA. While exonerating the CIA, the same advocate said that blame for intelligence blunders and lapses must rest on the shoulders of the entire Government. This is a profound partial truth. Every government official must bear the burden of guilt for not being more critical of operations we could see were spinning out of control. We have treated members of the ``Intelligence Community;'' as if they were untouchables. For the new era after September 11th, every Member of Congress and every American citizen must insist that national security is everybody's business and the public scrutiny of intelligence and law enforcement agencies is our sacred duty. Smugness and slovenliness must not be allowed to jeopardize our economy and welfare. The present peril must not be allowed to continue. Blame Games Are Forbidden Smug American men Ignoring CIA sin Yawning when The FBI blunders again. Onward the peril goes, Incompetence that everybody And the enemy knows, Huge security holes. Haughty airline CEO's Crushing reform foes, Misplaced profit and safety roles. Smug American men, Incest is your secret sin; Where have all Your translators been? No blame games With Aldrich Ames; Intelligence fraternal cronies Well dressed patriotic phonies: Robert Hansen still In a suite alive, Death penalties only For bums with no information To trade and survive. Incompetence that everybody And the enemy knows, Misplaced safety roles, Huge security holes, Onward the peril goes. Smug American men Where have all Your translators been? Smug American men Intelligence family incest Is your deadly secret sin. Onward the peril goes.

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 New York (Mr. Crowley). (Mr. CROWLEY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler).

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for this Special Order. The 2 elements, the 2 items are inextricably interwoven. The airport security issue and the issue of the stimulus package really cannot be separated. They go together, and common sense would tell us this. We have just heard one of my colleagues say that the airline industry is 10 percent of the economy. If that industry does not get moving again, and timing is very important here, we are approaching Thanksgiving which is the time of the year that most people travel; if they do not pick up the habit of traveling by air again by Thanksgiving and we do not have a break in this fear of airline travel, we might have a mindset that develops that will make it difficult for the airline industry for a long, long time to come. Mr. Speaker, we cannot wait forever. There is a need for immediate action here and, of course, that need for airport security stimulates the economy, not only the airline industry, but of course we know the gaming industry, the restaurant industry, the hotel industry, the tourism industry, all of this is related to moving the airline industry so, again, airport security is vital. Airport security is not the same as it was when I traveled before September 11. There have been some changes, but most members of the public are still not impressed. They took my little fingernail clipper. I had a little clipper with a little file on it. They made me break the file off and give it to them as they searched my things. I am not impressed with that kind of new security. One of my colleagues, they took her tweezers. The same personnel that is there, the personnel that is there has not been thoroughly checked. We do not think it is important that we check people who are in these positions. Just consider the fact of the latest revelation where we have a former master sergeant in the Air Force who has just been indicted for trying to sell secrets to Libya or some other place. He is a member of the Reconnaissance Surveillance Network that we have across the world. He is familiar with that. Twenty years in the service, and he is looking for a few thousand dollars. I mean if we have people with criminal records there, it is likely that they can be bought off for a few hundred, a few thousand dollars and we might have people there who are not going to see what they are supposed to see because they have been paid off on a given day. There are a number of ways that we can deal with that situation without these weaknesses. We can never root out corruption totally, but we can at least have a maximum effort to try to keep it at a minimum and have the highest level of personnel, starting with the payment of a living wage. I serve as the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee for Workforce Protection and we are responsible for the minimum wage law. That has been pushed aside completely this year, the amount of the minimum wage. But it is very much important in terms of stimulating our economy. At least if we create some federalized airport security jobs, we are not going to pay the kind of wages that they are getting now. They are likely to get a living wage. More importantly than a living wage, they would like to get a health plan. We cannot keep loyal, competent workers unless we have some kind of decent package. The airport security proposition might take many different forms. I do not agree that it necessarily means that everybody has to become a civil servant. If the airport security is federalized, the Federal Government has many different alternatives that they may deal with, but we know who is in charge and that there is a certain level of competence and honesty and surveillance that they are going to insist on, and it will be taken care of appropriately. Certainly a living wage and a health care plan would be an offer for those workers. We would open some new and challenging opportunities for some people who have been unemployed and laid off from various other professions at this point. Mr. Speaker, it is common sense. What we are up against are ideologues, the disease of the ideologues. They say, we do not want to increase the Federal employees. That is a hard-nosed idealogical position, just as they are saying, we do not want a stimulus package which takes care of the unemployed, because that is a redistribution of wealth. Democrats favor common sense economics and Democrats favor a common sense approach to airport security. Working families are consuming families. Working families, if we put dollars in their hands, they are going to put it back into the economy and turn it over faster than anybody else. All of this is well-known. Japan, now looking back at the way their economy has dragged, regrets that they did not take a more forceful position at first to stimulate the economy by putting more money in the hands of consumers. The consumer is the engine of our economy, and by following the pattern that was laid down in the democratic package today where a great stimulus would be provided via the unemployment route, starting with the unemployment insurance and making sure that people who lose their employment are taken care of, provided with some possibility of retraining, provided with health care, and gotten back into the economy as fast as possible, that would be the stimulus that would surpass any other effort. To talk about tax cuts means investments in the economy is to put our heads in the sand. If we give tax cuts, if we put more money in the hands of the rich, they are going to invest somewhere in the world, but not in our economy necessarily. I think the oil pipelines in the former Soviet Union are much hotter right now in terms of investment. They have expanded the production and the distribution of oil and there are a number of places in the world where we can get a bigger return on our investment than we can get by putting it into our present economy. We do not necessarily get any kind of stimulus by putting more money in the hands of the rich. We are all in this battle together, and as I close out, I hope that we understand that to take care of the people on the bottom who are losing their jobs and facing the prospects of not being able to pay their mortgage or put food on the table, to take care of the people on the bottom is part of recognizing that we are all in this together. The working families are going to produce the sons and daughters on the front lines in Afghanistan. Working families are going to live through this difficult period here where we are at home fighting the anxiety of Anthrax; the working families, like the 2 postal workers who died. We are all in this together, and to take the idealogical position that we are redistributing the wealth by asking for a decent unemployment package within a stimulus package is to go the route of the ideologues. Mr. Speaker, ideologues are very dangerous. Ideologues are not the total cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is more complicated than that; but a primary cause of the fall of the Soviet Union was the ideologues were in charge. The ideologues are like witch doctors. They are obsessed. They do not look at reason. They will not accept any kind of facts. They are locked in. And we are in this great Nation at the mercy of certain people in key positions, especially in this House, who are ideologues and we must fight those ideologues. Common sense must prevail over the ideologues in order for us to go forward, both with airport security and with the stimulus package that will help our economy.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I understand the gentleman's remarks and I appreciate them. I started by saying I wanted to applaud the bipartisan spirit which we have agreed to already to address this matter another way later on. So I really am talking to a situation that I see developing. I lost large numbers of firemen from companies in my district. I lost policeman. I lost a lot of individual young people who worked in the World Trade financial system. I have gone to too many memorial services, and they are all heroes. And the sooner we embrace them all as heroes, the better for the future, and to educate our own constituency and the American people in general. If someone gets a check from the Red Cross and a check from the United Way, and later on it is going to become a part of the victims' assistance fund, if we add it all up, it will not add up to the homicide of the loved one that was lost. Let us be as generous as possible in our spirit for heroes and send that spirit out to America.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 3086. I would like to applaud the spirit of both sides in terms of an agreement to amend this concept, at least, by having a bill later on which does address the problems faced by the numerous survivors, spouses, and children of people who perished in the September 11 attack in New York. They deserve every possible consideration, and it means we really need to broaden the whole concept of heroes, and be as generous as possible with the concept of heroes, and do as much as possible for the surviving families. We cannot do too much. There is a debate that has broken out a little bit because of the fact that there are numerous charitable organizations and nonprofit organizations raising money and distributing it, as well as the various benefits that government gives. I have heard people talk on talk shows about giving too much to these families, too much compensation. I think it is a ridiculous discussion. We do not have the capacity to give too much. Until we learn how to resurrect the dead, we do not have that capacity. Even in cases where people have not died, we are sending our soldiers into a situation where there are great risks. They deserve to have as much peace of mind as possible. Their families deserve to have as much help as possible. We should not drop two burdens on every family: the anxiety of having to worry about a loved one who has gone off to fight in Afghanistan, and at the same time have to worry about the ordinary kinds of things that everybody has to deal with, such as the mortgage and the tuition, et cetera. So our concept of heroes should be as broad as possible and as generous as possible, because this is a very unusual war we are going into. The heroes will not always wear uniforms. They will wear different kinds of uniforms. Two mailmen are dead. They did not wear a military uniform, but I think we ought to recognize right now that those two mailmen are heroes in the war that seems to have no front. With those two mailmen plus another casualty to anthrax, we have lost more people here in the home front since September 11 than we have lost since the military action started in Afghanistan. We had, unfortunately, two airmen who were killed in an accident, and that is two casualties we have. But we are losing people here. We are going to lose more here, and the heroes do not necessarily wear uniforms. And we are going to have to prepare our minds and our souls to embrace all the heroes that we can.

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the horror, pain and anger of the catastrophe of the World Trade Center Towers on September 11th defy description in words. Nevertheless, in memory of the thousands who died, poets, musicians and artists of all kinds must make the effort to express our sorrow, appreciation and hope. The following RAP poem is one of the numerous attempts to call forth hope out of this unprecedented devastation. Towers of Flowers Pyramid for our age Funeral pyre Souls on fire; Monumental Massacre Mound of mourning Futures burning Desperate yearning Excruciating churning; For all the hijacked years Cry rivers, Feel the death chill Iceberg of frozen Bloody tears; Defiant orations of Pericles Must now rise Out of the ashes Jefferson's profound principles Will outlive the crashes. Funeral pyre Souls on fire Lincoln's steel will In the fiery furnace; Mound of mourning Futures burning Desperate yearning; Thousands of honored dead Perished in pain But not in vain, Martin Luther Kings courage Will scrub the stain; A new nation Will overcome its rage And for peace March forever fully engaged. Souls on fire Funeral pyre Pyramid for our age; O say can you see The monument of towers Ashes hot with anger Mountain of sacred flowers Under God Blooming with new powers.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk about three important items which definitely overlap: education, reparations and terrorism. As a member of the House and Senate Conference Committee on H.R. 1, the Leave No Child Behind Act, a major initiative of President Bush that probably will come to the floor in the next 10 to 15 days, I would like to emphasize the fact that this legislation focusing on education, which will probably set a tone and establish some basic principles and concepts and procedures and movements for the next 10 years, is very important legislation. It is still important today, despite the pressures that we feel as a result of the tragedy of September 11. In fact, after September 11, education becomes even more important in general; and specifically, as we move toward creating recovery and construction programs, education must play a major role in this process of creating recovery and restructuring and construction programs. September 11 presented us with a tragic and compelling landmark event. It said to us that terrorism will be a scourge on civilization for a long time. Modern societies are amazingly vulnerable to terrorism. The domino impact of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers overwhelms the mind. How can one event have so many repercussions? How can one event, one destructive, heinous event lead to the collapse of so many life elements of our economy and of our way of looking at certain civil liberties, and a number of other major tenets of our society? One event. During World War II when targets were picked to cripple the industrial might of Germany, they bombed the oil fields in Romania and they bombed the industrial complex in Hamburg and a number of different targets, they had definitely aimed at crippling the industrial might of Hitler, not any one target ever had that kind of an impact. But in our present society we have constructed, it is so fragile in one sense that a strike at one point can lead to the tremendous repercussions which impact not just my City of New York or the State of New York, but the entire Nation and the economy of the entire world. So I want to highlight the fact that this event let us know that we can have people with cavemen mentalities. In fact, Osama bin Laden, and I say bin Laden because The New York Times said that he pronounces it as Sadden; their pronunciation guide said it rhymes with Sadden, and I think it is ironic that it rhymes with Sadden, S-A-D-D-E-N. Osama bin Laden is supposed to live in a cave and there are people surrounding him in a cave; but, nevertheless, out of that cave, we do not get a caveman mentality, we do not get an illiterate. We get an evil genius, an evil person with totally no regard for human life who can strike at one of our vulnerable points and cause so much harm. Educated people surround bin Laden; educated people who know how to use computers and know how to communicate all over the world and who are very patient and very well organized, who know how to take advantage of every soft spot in our society; educated people who can only be corralled and only be matched by educated people. We say, well, we have plenty of educated people. We do not need to worry about that. But I want to take a few minutes to examine some of the institutions of our society. Just as my predecessor was examining INS, I think unfairly in so many ways, but just as he examined INS, I want to examine some of the institutions in our society which are constructed to protect us. Those institutions are run by very well-educated people, run by very well- trained people, scientists, specialists, maybe some geniuses are in the CIA and FBI. So where did we go wrong and what are we as citizens supposed to do? In my district, I assure my colleagues, we have lost many wonderful human beings. All human life is sacred and every soul that died in the World Trade Center was sacred. I have gone to many memorial services. I experienced firsthand a situation where my daughter-in-law, who worked in the World Trade Center on the 68th floor of the first tower, was supposed to be at work at 9:30 instead of 9 o'clock, her usual time. Because she was due at 9:30, she heard the plane hit the building from the ground. She was not in the building at that time. But for 4 hours, I did not know where she was. We did not know where she was. And the kind of anxiety that I went through, we went through, for 4 hours is just a tiny, tiny portion of the kind of anxiety that others have suffered over these last few weeks. When we finally found out where she was, I confess, I cried uncontrollably for a while. I found myself crying often uncontrollably for those others who did not get out and for various stories that I hear; and I cry when I realize that probably this great catastrophe could have been avoided. I have the same experience that every other human being has in terms of the loss of immediate people that I know, the loss of heroic firemen and policemen, and I react like everybody else. But on top of that, as an elected official, I wake up at night and I feel something else. My post-traumatic stress has another element. And I have noted in conversations with some of my colleagues that they are probably feeling the same thing. We are the Government. We are responsible. Therefore, when the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Gephardt) stood on the floor and said, we failed to keep our people safe from harm, we have to accept that, in some way, we are failing and have failed. I am going to have a series of town meetings, not memorial services. Other people are doing that very well, and I have attended those. If people who have lost relatives want to come to town meetings, they certainly are welcome; and we can take time out to deal with their concerns. But I want to have a series of town meetings that are probably very small, because I am not going to take a long time to plan them and look for a big audience; but I want my constituents all over the district to come and talk to me about their reaction to what has happened. I want them to hear that I feel, as a tiny portion of the total apparatus of government, I feel guilty. I want them to hear that I feel that we as Americans have a job to do; we have a new mission in this complicated world, very complex. Our society is far more complex than any nuclear physics apparatus or any ballistic missile apparatus. The society and the functioning of the society like ours is very complex, and it must have well-tuned, well-lubricated institutions which deal with that complexity. I want to talk to them about it and I want them to hear me, and I want to hear from them. In elections, we often hear our constituents talk endlessly about what have you brought home to the district. How many buildings have you gotten, Federal buildings have you gotten built? How many grants from the Federal Government have you brought home? What benefits directly and concrete can you offer? And the orientation of most of us has to be in the direction of what can I do for my district in a very concrete way. So who wants, in this situation, to spend time on the floor of the House or in any other way confronting institutions of our government that are not functioning properly and which are not under the jurisdiction of our committees? I am on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I am willing to talk to you all day about the Department of Education and the various ramifications of what they have done or not done, but I am not on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. I am not on the Committee on the Judiciary. Often when I come to the floor and talk about those items, my colleagues do tell me that, Well, you are out of your league. Other folks know more about that. I have been sort of driven away from a discussion of certain items as a result of being reminded that I am not the expert. Well, I am not the expert, but from now on I intend to be like the child in Hans Christian Anderson's ``The Emperor Has No Clothes.'' Because I am not the expert, I am going to ask the questions that the fresh eye and fresh ear can afford to indulge in. It is very important that I tell my constituents a year from now that I asked all the questions, I sought the answers, I did the best I could, even though these things were not directly under the jurisdiction of my committee. I am going to ask some questions of the CIA and the FBI. I have done that before, I think 3 or 4 years ago. For several years in a row, several colleagues would join me, or I would join them in using the CIA appropriations as an opportunity to discuss the function of the CIA, so we would always offer an amendment to cut it by 10 percent or 1 percent. We do not know exactly what the budget is, but the New York Times consistently says it is $30 billion plus. So we used to come to the floor. It was an opportunity to talk about various problems. Mr. Speaker, our amendment got fewer and fewer votes. It was one of those items where I felt a little guilty about discussing it because I am not on the committee and I do not have the expertise, so I retreated. I have not talked about the CIA in several years, but I intend to talk about it tonight. Education, terrorism, and reparations. The last part of that is reparations. The treatment of the subject of reparations at the World Conference Against Racism in Durbin, South Africa, this past summer is evidence that freedom-loving societies are carrying unnecessary baggage as we seek a more just world. It is as much a part of the dialogue on what our role is and where we go now as we search for the terrorism network and the terrorism, the individuals who guided that network, and we do things that are unusual, and in some cases incurring collateral damage that is unavoidable. What is our moral mission here? How are we going to justify that? We can justify it only if we reassert the fact that we stand for freedom; we stand for democracy; we stand for the pieces of the Declaration of Independence that people like to push aside. We still believe that everybody has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We really believe that. We have the right to hoist a flag and march behind that flag and to deal with those perpetrators who are determined to knock down those principles. We have a right to have as much fervor and as much zeal as anyone else, but we have to understand that the lack of fervor and the lack of zeal makes us more vulnerable. We have not pursued the perfection of our institutions with the right amount of fervor and zeal. Too many of us, Member of Congress, have run away, backed down, as I did: ``The CIA is someone else's job; the FBI is someone else's job.'' Yet in this calamity that we have just begun to live through, there are critical questions that somebody must answer. The INS was being blamed by the previous speaker, my colleague on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I know all about H-1B visas and the kinds of things that he was talking about, but his overall thesis was that we were in the present predicament because there are too many people from outside the country being let into the country. That sounds like something that Sitting Bull might have said, or Chief Joseph. The Native Americans probably had real justification for making that kind of statement: Too many people have been let in the country, and it is our country. I reject any blanket statement that says that as a nation of immigrants we are at a great disadvantage. We are not at a great disadvantage as a nation of immigrants; we are at a great advantage. President Clinton has often said that diversity, diversity is one of our greatest strengths. As we seek world markets, as we seek the good will of people all over the globe, and as we seek right now these various alliances and coalitions to fight terrorism, our diversity is our greatest advantage. I recall seeing not too long ago, a few months ago, an old movie, one of those old thrillers. The movie was all about during World War II they were trying to break the German code. In order to do that, they came up with a daring plan in Washington where they went out and recruited ethnic Germans, American Germans who were all put together on an American submarine, and they were put into a situation where they encountered a U-boat. And actually were able to fool, with their tactics, the people in the U-boat, and they took over the U-boat. The point is that the whole project depended on the recruitment of ethnic Germans, people that we were at war with, but American Germans were Americans first. It is a good example of what is happening in many economic ventures. We have overwhelmed some of our opponents. The Japanese do not really know what has hit them in certain markets because they have very little diversity, but we have diversity which allows us entry into all kinds of markets and situations. Likewise, if the CIA and the FBI made use of it, that same diversity could help us infiltrate spy rings and infiltrate terrorism rings, and provide better protection for us. At least it could provide us with translators. One of the real scandals of the present situation is that the FBI was on television and the radio in my city 2 weeks ago advertising for people, they are probably still on but I just have not heard them recently, advertising for folks who could speak Arabic or Farsi. Well, better late than never, but I thought it was strange. We have been fighting an Arab-based terrorist ring for a long time. We knew that when they bombed the barracks in Beirut under Reagan. We knew that when they bombed the barracks in Saudi Arabia. We knew that when they bombed the Cole battleship. Why is it that we are not equipped with a sufficient supply of Arabic translators? I have heard from the talking heads on television, and I have read in several articles, that this is a real problem; that there were documents and communications that lay there undeciphered, unread, not interpreted, because there were no translators. There were no analysts. In this great country of ours, we ought to have groups of people who speak practically any language in the world. I went to my staff and asked, in New York City, how many colleges are there where Arabic instruction is provided? New York City has about 20 city universities, 20 colleges and city universities in the system, more than 20, and then there are other colleges; a total of about 40 different higher education institutions. We found only six, only six that had some courses in Arabic, only six. Let us not even go to Farsi, which is what some folks in Afghanistan speak, or Pashtu in Afghanistan, Urdu in Pakistan. In this great Nation of ours, with 3,000 universities and colleges, more than 3,000, there should not be a single language that we do not teach somewhere. There should not be a single culture that is not being thoroughly explored by some group in one of our great universities or colleges. But we need to understand our mission. We need to go back and understand that in this global community that we have helped to create, we made the WTO, we did Fast Track and NAFTA, we have argued that the markets of the world belong to us, and therefore we are willing to have an interaction with the rest of the world unlike any ever known before. If we are going to do that, let us use some of our magnificent resources. We have foundations that are loaded with dollars, foundations which certainly could have programs on culture and languages that they finance in our various universities. I am not talking about a government program or a government initiative; but our universities and colleges and foundations should have an initiative which guarantees that no matter where we go on this globe, we have a body of people who understand the culture and the language of those people. For the CIA, it becomes an immediate need; for the FBI, it becomes an immediate need. I will submit this article from the New York Times on Wednesday, October 3, in its entirety. I will read some excerpts from it. Mr. Speaker, this is an article that appears today in the New York Times, Wednesday, October 3, entitled ``House Panel Calls for Cultural Revolution in FBI and CIA.'' Now, I am still a little reluctant to do too much criticism of these venerated institutions here on the floor because I have had these comments from my colleagues. One colleague said to me that I embarrassed him by, at a time like this, bringing up possible inadequacies in the CIA or FBI. He was embarrassed. His naivete embarrasses me, because here in the New York Times today it shows that there are a lot of people who are members of the intelligence community, very much pro the CIA and the FBI in every way, who are embarrassed and want to see something done. This is an article by Alison Mitchell: ``The House committee that oversees the Nation's intelligence agencies has called for far-reaching changes in intelligence operations and for an independent investigation into why government did not foresee or prevent the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Reflecting the mood since September 11, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in a report accompanying a classified intelligence bill expected to be taken up by the House this week, says it is a matter of urgency `like no other time in our Nation's history' to address the `many critical problems facing the intelligence agencies.''' Now, these are people who are friends and protectors of our intelligence agencies talking. This is the committee of responsibility, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. ``The bill approved by the committee late last week would create an independent 10-member commission to study `preparedness and performance' of several Federal agencies during and after the September 11 strikes. It would also increase the roughly $30 billion intelligence budget, but the exact dollar sums the bill contains are classified.'' There are always increases; $30 billion is not enough, even though that was roughly the amount we had during the Cold War when we had the evil empire of the Soviet Union to battle. But $30 billion is not enough; we need more. ``The committee calls for a cultural revolution inside agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a thorough review of the Nation's national security structures.'' This is the House committee itself responsible for this. In the past they have been rather soft on the CIA. The man who heads the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss). He is a former CIA agent. But here is the problem. In a later paragraph in the same article, we run into the problem: ``The House committee chose its words carefully. In the report that accompanies its bill, the committee says it does not in any way lay blame to the dedicated men and women of the U.S. intelligence community for the success of these attacks.'' ``If blame must be assigned, the blame lies with a government as a whole that did not fully understand nor wanted to appreciate the significance of the new threats to our national security despite the warnings offered by the intelligence community.'' How is that for a turn of logic in terms of, no, the agency that is directly responsible is really not responsible? It is the government as a whole. Well, we are right back to me. I am part of the government as a whole. Every Congressman is part of the government as a whole. We are to blame. But we are not going to accept the blame by ourselves. We and the CIA and the FBI, the staff, the policy-making structure, we are all to blame. Do not say that the wonderful dedicated men and women of the U.S. intelligence community cannot be blamed. When we talk about reform of welfare programs, any mother who deliberately got more food stamps than she should have we put her in jail. We call for maximum responsibility. So why are we running away from maximum responsibility and maximum accountability for people who are in such a critical position? I will not read the entire article but I do want to complete just a few other choice paragraphs. ``The commission would be appointed by the President and congressional leaders; and the commission would examine the performance of several Federal agencies responsible for public safety, law enforcement, national security, and intelligence gathering. It would have subpoena powers and would report back in six months of its formation.'' I think it is important to note that our previous speaker who laid a blistering attack against the INS, the INS which brought all of these immigrants in and is not doing a good job to keep people out, he holds them responsible, they are not mentioned in this article. They are not mentioned as an intelligence gathering agency or a national security agency. In fact, repeatedly, it has been noted that in terms of processing the terrorists that have been identified, the INS did its job. But it was a failure of communication between the FBI and the CIA after the INS pinpointed the people were in the country, the failure of communication that resulted in two of them not being apprehended. ``President Bush has already ordered internal reviews of intelligence gathering.'' President Bush has already ordered internal reviews of intelligence gathering. But the committee said, ``If history serves, however, no substantial changes will occur after these internal reviews are completed. The committee believes that major changes are necessary.'' Another way to interpret that is the usual response to any embarrassment experienced by the CIA or the FBI is to have an internal review. For the 19 years that I have been here, there have been several internal reviews of the CIA and FBI. Now this committee, this friendly committee is saying, look, we will not go for this. It is not going to result in any major difference. We need the independent investigation. I agree with the committee. I applaud the fact that they are willing to tell the truth partially, but they are wrong in not assuming that we can hold accountable the CIA and FBI. Further quoting from this article, ``While the intelligence bill is not expected to be controversial, some amendments could prove to be controversial as Congress contends with how much it wants to rethink the limits on covert operations. The House committee focused in its report on the shortage of intelligence analysts and case officers with foreign language skills.'' This is where I want to end. ``The House committee focused in its report on the shortage of intelligence analysts and case officers with foreign language skills. At the NSA and the CIA, thousands of pieces of data are never analyzed or are analyzed after the fact.'' It said, ``Because there are too few analysts, even fewer with the necessary language skills. Written materials can sit for months and times years before a linguist with proper security clearances and skills can begin the translation.'' Mr. Speaker, I want to go back and tell my constituents that we have a $30 billion agency that cannot find and hire linguists and analysts, and that documents which might have uncovered this plot have been sitting there all this time, and we do not want to blame anybody. The brave men of the CIA should not be blamed for allowing a situation like this to take place? ``The committee recommended that intelligence agencies offer bonuses for language proficiency. They are considering creating their own language schools.'' We do not to create language schools. There are languages schools out west. The military uses them. They can train anybody in any language. We need to have decision-making at the top that it is important for people to learn certain languages and to send them out there so you will not have a gaping hole in the operations of this magnitude. ``The committee also said that the Nation needed to increase its frontline field officers, clandestined case officers and defense attaches. It said a fresh look should be taken at restructuring the CIA.'' Where does education come into all of this? I started by saying I wanted to talk about education. They should have no problem finding the people they need in this great Nation. But I know one of problems they encounter if they find somebody who speaks the language, they have to go through a series of checks in terms of loyalty, et cetera. They find somebody who speaks the language, they may not write English well enough or they may not use computers well enough. They may not be appropriately educated. We do not have a pool of educated people to draw from for those kind of jobs. We are headed toward a great calamity in the United States of America for a lack of educated people, people with college educations who can part of a pool from which you draw all the professionals you need. There is a teacher shortage of great magnitude. There is a law enforcement shortage. Law enforcement agencies are having trouble recruiting people. There is a shortage in the military in terms of people who are educated enough to operate very sophisticated high tech weaponry. Everywhere there is a shortage of people who are properly educated. So we are back to education. We do not need at this point to say that we have a major crisis created by September 11. And therefore, we should ignore the education bill that is being considered by the Senate and the House at that point or that we should downplay it and not give it the increases that were foreseen before September 11. In New York City, there is a rush to cut the education budget. First thing they want to cut because we have less revenue coming in, we have a lot of problems. So education is the first agency on the chopping block. That is a primitive, backward reaction and failing to understand where we are. Our law enforcement agencies, our CIA, our FBI, needs trained people to draw from, from diversified backgrounds. We cannot penetrate certain groups unless we have somebody who looks and acts and has the background and culture of that same group, but America is rich because of immigration. The immigration that has been criticized before has given us practically every religion, every ethnic group, every language in the world. We have to open our institutions to a process that allows these people to come in. The CIA was sued by women and minorities. The FBI was sued by Hispanics and African-Americans. In the last 5 years, there have been suits brought against them for their discrimination. We are back to my third subject now, reparations. The World Conference on Racism and how racism is a problem that keeps us from maximizing our resources, our human resources on our maximizing in this country because there are these layers of racism, and racism is worse in the law enforcement community than in any other sector of our society, whether we are talking about local law enforcement, state troopers or the Federal level. Racism is a major problem. We have to confront this and stop carrying the baggage of racism. We have to force the intelligence community to stop being so incestuous, incestuous, and open up so that they have the tools that are needed, the human resources. Our electronic surveillance systems are magnificent. It can pinpoint people, objects, anywhere in the world, but this incident, this tragedy shows that we have to get down on the ground, and we have to have human beings face-to-face, whether they are agents or assets or people back in the office, analysts, good librarians. I am a librarian. What they needed in many cases was good librarians to organize the information, librarians who also could speak the language, who would help them recruit people who speak the language. Arrangements could have been made to set up a first class translation system if the decision-makers on the top had considered it important. So one of the questions I asked, which embarrassed one of my colleagues, the CIA and the FBI, do they have decision-makers who understand the cultures of our enemies? Is there anybody in the high place in the CIA or the FBI who understands the culture of Islam? Or who have a pool of people relating to them that they can rely on to give them up-to-date firsthand ongoing interpretation of what is happening? Simple questions. I do not think I in any way endanger national security by asking the questions, and I said to myself, well, I may not push anybody to answer it because that might endanger national security, but now, since newspapers and talking heads and everybody is asking the same question, why do we not have people who understand the cultures, people who speak the language? We are asking the obvious questions. Education would give us a pool of people who are in a position to be trained to take these positions. We cannot ever eliminate racism, but if we had less racism we could develop those diverse groups. Whether it is people who speak Islamic or different colors, whatever, if there was less racism we could make use of our great advantage of diversity which President Clinton so often talked about. The conference on world racism which talked about reparations was hijacked by some selfish Arabs who forced the issue, twisted the issue and made it part of the conflict between Israel and Palestinians. So there was no real discussion of the ramifications of reparations, but reparations is something that we have to get off the table, an apology for slavery, something to get off the table. We ought to go on and do those things, apologize for slavery, just as the Japanese were asked to apologize and the Germans apologized to the holocaust victims. There have been a lot of apologies to people who have been wronged. Let us apologize for slavery. Let us talk about reparations in some sensible way. It may mean just the creation of an education system which guarantees the descendents of slaves who were economically disadvantaged will always have the opportunity get the first class education, and by helping them get the first class education, we help to enlarge the pool of people we need. There was a time when I heard frequently when I was younger in high school, I heard people say that the society only needs so many educated people, and therefore, if you educate too many people, there will be no jobs for educated people. I heard that at one of the colleges. I heard it as early as 10 years ago. People feeling that we have got enough educated people, but the needs have been mushrooming. One of the characteristics of this very complex modern world of ours is that it needs so many more educated people. You cannot get educated people, of course, by giving more scholarships and fellowships at the college and university level if you do not have the raw material coming up from elementary and secondary schools. Our problem in this country is not the opportunity for people who make it to college. There are all kinds of benefits, all kinds of opportunities for people who qualify to go to college. The problem is that there are too few among certain groups that are very much needed in this society who are able to qualify for entry into college. So education, the kind of bill we are considering now, what President Bush chose to call leave no child behind becomes as vital as anything we are doing. The terrorism bill is not more important than the education bill. The stimulus bill that we are talking about, a package to help boost the economy at a time like this, it is not more important than the education bill. In order for all of these things to work, we have got to have a continuing flow up from the pool of people with good education. H. G. Wells said, and I often get the quote wrong, I am not sure I have it right, that ``civilization is a race between education and chaos.'' I think I came close to what he said. ``Civilization is a race between education and chaos.'' And it is even more true as our society becomes more complicated. There are people who can wreck our computer systems and our whole cyber-networks, and we need people who are as smart as they are who are constantly able to have a counteraction and monitor these things. We need large numbers of young people with those kinds of minds. Large numbers. What happened at the World Trade Center showed how vulnerable an attack on a physical facility can be; but Y2K, which I understand, I do not know the details, but I understand we must give credit to the CIA and FBI for stopping some plots related to the sabotage of our whole computer system at the changing of the century. The Y2K problem that we were so concerned about. Education is relevant today just as it was a few weeks ago. We have just completed a Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Weekend where we come together from all over the country and we talk about certain issues and problems. I serve as the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Education Brain Trust. I am going to just read a statement that I made at the opening of our brain trust: ``As we assemble on this historic legislative weekend, we must all resolve that no emergency situation or special event will be allowed to lessen the priority we assign to the education emergency in the African American community. The nature of the critical problems that we presently face reemphasizes the need for America to have the most diverse and best educated population possible. In order to improve their operations and to achieve greater efficiency and excellence, every profession needs more and better educated recruits. Law enforcement and military agencies have a mushrooming need for personnel with information technology know-how. Unless we create and maintain a rapidly expanding pool of high quality students, the effectiveness of the military as well as intelligence operations will continue to be inadequate. ``Our Nation's needs for digital expertise will increase for a long time in the future. Activities similar to the recent terrorist act and other pressures on America will last into the next decade. Our school system has a new challenge and thus will need new resources. Advocates for education must focus intensely on current legislation at every level beginning with President Bush's 'Leave No Child Behind Act,' which is now under consideration. As America marshals its resources to fiercely fight new threats to our way of life, our greatest weapon remains our educated citizens. We shall overcome.'' Our educated citizens are our greatest weapon. This bill is not just any other bill. President Bush has led the creation of landmark education legislation. The bipartisan effort that went into this legislation is unprecedented. There are pieces that I do not like. I do not like the fact that it has a great deal of emphasis on testing. I do not like the fact that it calls for a testing program for students in grades 3 to 8 every year; that there must be a testing program and the results of those tests will be used to judge the effectiveness of the schools. If a school is not doing well, after 2 years it will be put into a probationary program. After 3 years they may choose to reorganize the school, wipe it out and start something new, or send the kids off somewhere else. It has some real harsh measures. Three years is not long enough. We do not really pass judgment on most projects at 3 years. A school and the process of education is very complicated. In the conference committee we are now trying to ameliorate some of the harshness. But basically that is a feature I do not like. I do like the fact the President proposed that we double title I funding. Title I funding in 5 years is supposed to go to $17.2 billion. That makes the bill worthwhile. We have some problems between the Senate and the House in terms of overall funding authorization. I like the Senate figure of $32 billion versus the House figure of $23 billion. We can do so much more with the $32 billion in terms of meeting the education crisis that we face. I propose that we support efforts in this bill to double the funding for school renovation. Unfortunately, the House bill had zero dollars for school repairs, construction or renovation. The Senate bill had $200 million for charter school construction. But since the item of construction is included, it is fair game for discussion, and I am proposing that we accept the charter school construction. But there is another construction item that we have in operation at this point, and that is a program that is underway, which most Members of Congress do not know about, and that is the program to repair and renovate schools with $1.2 billion that was included in the omnibus appropriations bill last fall. President Clinton signed it on December 21. H.R. 4577 had a provision for $1.2 billion for school renovation and modernization. I am happy to report, and most people do not know about it so I am taking this time to talk about it, because I want the children of America to celebrate with me, it is a hidden victory, but I am happy to report that the distribution of the $1.2 billion for school repairs and renovation is going forward. I have a list of the amounts of money that each State will get. New York will get $105 million. You can build a few schools with $105 million. California, of course the largest population, gets $138 million. On and on it goes. It is a small amount of money, $1.2 billion, because we need about $200 billion to rebuild our schools across America; but this was a breakthrough. We persisted. We said our institutions are not working properly. The Department of Education did not support school construction. We took our case straight to the President. And finally, in his last month, we got the President to approve $1.2 billion. It is a good example of how citizen scrutiny, citizen push makes a difference. Just like the Mothers Against Drunk Driving, MADD, made a big difference with regard to policies on drunk driving. The Million Moms March started us on the road to more reform toward gun safety. We need a citizens group that is watching our law enforcement agencies at the national level. Citizens, ordinary people, should be asking questions about the way the CIA operates and the way the FBI operates. The fine-tuning of these vital institutions, the lubrication, the guarantee that the very best that we can get is occurring in these agencies is a life and death matter. It is a life and death matter. Another item in the education bill is increased funding for IDEA, special education. The Senate has taken a position that we need to have the funding for special education as a mandatory expenditure off the budget, not competing with other budget priorities in education. I wholeheartedly support that. The Congressional Black Caucus wholeheartedly supports mandatory expenditure of IDEA; that the special education programs should be covered with mandatory expenditures and not part of the regular budget. We insist that the Federal Government pay for any costs of these new tests. I do not like the test, but if we are to have the tests from grades 3 to 8, the costs should be paid for by the Federal Government, which mandates them. We support the inclusion of two very effective programs that we helped to create, Community Technology Centers and 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which have after-school components and Saturday workshop components and summer school components. We support funding for Teaching Quality Grants, Troops to Teachers, which is a program which allows people in other careers to become teachers with a minimum amount of red tape. We support HBCUs. Historically Black Colleges and Universities should be involved in these teacher recruitment programs, teacher training, teacher orientation, so that there are more minority teachers brought into the education field. We also support the funding of a special initiative by the information technology industry and the computer industry to assist in establishing functional technology programs in schools. During this period of slow activity within that industry, such goods and services should be provided at a discount rate. An authorization program of this nature, if we authorize it in the education package, it will be eligible for additional funding in the economic stimulus package. I think it would contribute greatly to closing of the digital divide to have those high-tech agencies in the computer industry, in the software industry, who have a lot of idle workers and who are going through a crisis, to have them at this point bring all of our educational institutions up to date at cut rates. Let them do it at very low rates as a contribution, but it also would give them work. Returning to the Congressional Black Caucus weekend, on Saturday we had a special tech fair, and I talked about the digital divide: ``Closing the digital divide, building schools first must be a continuing priority for all of us who welcome the new cyber- civilization and who are determined to rescue the communities and students that are being left behind. Partnerships to promote school construction and education technology are absolute necessities. Uniting labor unions and underserved schools and communities to gain repairs, wiring, and new schools is one kingpin goal of education. Fostering private sector partnerships to assist in carrying the initiatives of the Federal Government forward to practical utilization is a high priority of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Annual Legislative Weekend. ``One of the boldest and most vital proposals of the Congressional Black Caucus during the 106th Congress involves the heart of the national debate on education: funding for school construction. Time and time again, poll after poll, the American people have identified education as our number one priority. And during a recent debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, more than 70 Members of Congress endorsed the caucus's alternative budget that called for a $10 billion increase over the President's budget for school construction. In a period of unprecedented wealth and opportunity, the caucus believes that this amount should be taken from the $200 billion budget surplus. ``I believe an investment for the future should be our first priority. Maximizing opportunities for individual citizens is synonymous with maximizing the growth and expansion of the U.S. superpower economy. It is the age of information. It is a time of computer and digitalization. It is the era of thousands of high-level vacancies because there are not enough information technology workers. With enlightened budget decisions, we can, at this moment, begin the shaping of the contours of a new cyber-civilization. If we fail to seize this moment, to make investments that will allow a great Nation to surge forward in the creation of this new cyber-civilization, then our children and grandchildren will frown on us and lament the fact that we failed, not because we lacked fiscal resources, but because our very devastating blunder was due to a poverty of vision.'' At our decision-makers lunch we had as a guest the honorable Dan Goldin, who is the administrator of NASA. Dan Goldin has visions for where we should go in space. And unlike any other administrator in government, Dan Goldin understands that in order for us to realize our ambitions and our dreams for outerspace, we must have a firm foundation of education which is constantly creating new pools of recruits to go into our various professions. Dan Goldin pointed out that at NASA there are twice as many people over 60 as there are under 30. The space program faces a critical shortage. If that agency faces a critical shortage, imagine all of our other priority projects and industries where that must be so. In conclusion, it may be that these three topics do not really relate, but I think that it is time that we put forth the energy to make it merge. We must merge them and understand the complexity of our society. My message is our institutions are vital. But to keep them functioning properly, they must have the scrutiny of the American people at all times. They must be kept in good tune, well tuned and well lubricated, to do the job they are set up to do. If they do not do that, it is a life and death matter, and we have just experienced an unfortunate matter where thousands of people died because we in the government could not keep our people safe from harm. Mr. Speaker, we feel guilty about that, but the important thing is to look forward and make certain that it never happens again.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, due to an emergency in my district I unexpectedly missed two votes yesterday. If present I would have voted yea on rollcall vote Nos. 349 and 350.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to urge all of my colleagues to join us in taking this step that Members of Congress can take. There are a lot of things we cannot do. I am proud of the fact that so many Americans have responded in doing the things that they can do. They can give blood, and they are giving blood from all over the country. You can do that. There are some things that we can do in Congress without having additional information, without a great deal of planning. We can make it easier for those who have paid the supreme price, for the families of those who have paid the supreme price, to at least know certain things are taken care of while they contend with their own grieving. The stories are numerous of eyewitness accounts. One that stands out in my mind most is the one, and I have been riveted to the television and heard many of them, the account of the young man on the 85th floor who came down the steps. He said that the biggest difficulty they encountered was at the 34th floor when they encountered firemen who were coming up and who were so exhausted because of the gear they were carrying until one of them almost passed out. They stopped to help the firemen. They were going out. And I think that those who gave those accounts got out safely, but I am certain that the firemen they encountered are among those firemen who perished there. That kind of heroism, we should all salute and support by taking the steps that we can take here in Congress to make life as easy as possible for their families.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, this is a time for mourning. No one should be ashamed to cry. We are all united as one with the numerous victims of this attack on American civilians. My daughter-in-law was due to work at 9:30 a.m. on the 68th floor of the World Trade Center. She had to drop my grandson off at a nearby day-care center, and with her baby in her arms, she watched in horror from the street as the first plane struck the first tower. How fortunate I am that it only took 4 hours to find out that the two of them were safe. All decent people are touched, but this intimate brush with death so close in the family brings tears to my eyes each time I hear a story of another unfortunate soul who was consumed by this catastrophe. I have heard some parents say that they do not want to tell their children about this horror. Let me fervently urge these parents to tell their children about the brave New York City policemen and firemen who went in to stop the spreading inferno while others were rushing out to safety. I ask them to tell their children that more than 200 firemen and nearly 70 policemen died struggling to save others. This is a time for mourning and this is 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 then driven from the face of the Earth. National security is now the business of every Member of Congress. My constituents do not want to hear me explain that I am not a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. They want to know how could this happen, and what is being done to guarantee that it never happens again. The Intelligence Community that scored vital successes in the war against Nazi Germany and in the Cold War may now be woefully inadequate. In memory of all the dead and for the peace of mind of those who are living, the structuring of the world's most effective intelligence network must now become the business of every American. The obliteration of this conglomerate of evil is the duty of every American. I am pleased to join my colleagues in support of this resolution.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I requested of the author of H.R. 2273, the National Bank Offshore Activities Act of 2001, to permit me to lend my support for this legislation. Let me tell you why H.R. 2273 is so important. As one member who is interested in relations between Asian nations and the United States, I would whole-heartedly endorse the purpose of H.R. 2273 in closing a major loophole in the United States' supervision of the national banks it charters. My office has been in receipt of numerous press accounts about the treatment of a vitally important corporation in Thailand, Thailand Petrochemical Industries, Inc. (TPI); the second largest business in the country, by a ``workout specialist'' assigned to act as what we in the United States would call a ``trustee in bankruptcy'' This ``workout specialist'', Effective Planner, an agent of the accounting firm Ferrier Hodgsen, from Australia, has, with a Thai bankruptcy court approval, become the agent of the United States chartered banks to whom the debt is owed. What should concern us here in the United States is the activities of the Effective Planner. These questionable actions include the diminution of the value of the company (TPI), by the use of questionable accounting procedures and poor business practices, the expenditure of millions of dollars to a bodyguard company which is either not in existence or is not appropriately registered as a legitimate corporation, and the initiation and ultimate culmination of a ``debt for equity swap'' which was done in an offshore Caribbean Bank in the British Virgin Island. This ''swap'' has permitted the U.S. chartered banks to own approximately three-fourths of the entire TPI stock. The manager of Effective Planner and several of his associates were arrested in Thailand for violation of the labor laws of that country, and have reportedly even removed themselves to Singapore to manage this Thailand company. It is the stated goal of our foreign policy to assist our allies and friends around the world during difficult times. The Asia Debt Crisis, like the Mexican Debt Crisis several years ago, has presented a number of nations with difficult choices. Thailand is no different. It is for this reason that our private sector financial institutions should not be permitted to work against the interests of our country with respect to our relations with other nations. Certainly, no bank in the United States could be placed in control of a trustee in bankruptcy with the trustee being left to their own devices in acquiring control of a U.S. business without at least some supervisory or consultative authority, such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) or a court, being capable of reviewing their activities. If alleged criminal and actionable civil activities were reported, surely the OCC would at a bare minimum, conduct some oversight of such actions. It should be no different for U.S. chartered banks doing business in friendly foreign country. Our principal banking regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Treasury (OCC), continues to believe that it has little or no power to act against U.S. chartered banks implicated in illegal activities abroad, even when such activities may involve crimes such as embezzlement, money laundering, and establishment of secret accounts in offshore tax havens. This position makes H.R. 2273 even more important. In this global economy, banks chartered and regulated by our government must maintain the highest legal and ethical standards wherever they operate. Simply put, our vital system of banking regulation and our confidence in our financial system is compromised when a U.S. chartered bank or its agents are implicated in criminal activities anywhere in the world. In fact, allowing our banks to enjoy a double standard harms our good relations with our trading partners and allies everywhere in the world. This major loophole in our banking regulation is dramatically evident in Thailand, a staunch ally of our country and victim of the recent Asian economic crisis. Thailand actually stands to lose its domestic ownership and control of a key public company to foreign interests, including a group of banks chartered by us, through the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. As I stand here today, ownership and control of Thai Petrochemical Industries, or TPI has been transferred to a group of U.S. chartered and foreign banks by an equivalent of a bankruptcy trustee hired, supervised and controlled by those same banks. That trustee, Effective Planner, a foreign company that purportedly specializes in bankruptcy reorganizations, stands accused by TPI's shareholders of embezzlement, money laundering, and other crimes. Incredibly, that same trustee, supported by those same banks, stands accused of sending payments from TPI's own bank account to two of its business associates who have been indicted, convicted, and imprisoned in Laos for embezzlement, destruction of records, and tax evasion. Unfortunately, instead of stopping such practices and terminating their relationship with the accused trustee, U.S. banks chartered and foreign banks licensed by our government have allowed the trustee to use countless sums of TPI funds to mount a public relations effort to defame TPI's founder and former CEO, who built TPI into one of Thailand's largest employers. The family who built the company has mounted a lonely crusade to prevent the trustee from disassembling TPI and feeding it to the banks for which the trustee works. Clearly, if those banks had no concern about the legality and fairness of their activities, why would they want their stock owned through a secret, offshore trust account? Mr. Speaker, the involved banks and their trustee may have an explanation for all these troubling facts. If they do, they should report to the OCC the activities of the trustee for whose actions they must account. That is precisely what H.R. 2273 would require. I would ask my colleagues to join me in seeking passage of the bill.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the Norwood amendment to H.R. 2563, the Bipartisan Patient Protection Act, aka, the Patients' Bill of Rights. The deception being debated here today is quite reminiscent of Orwell's novel when each day citizens wake up to a new reality. Yesterday, we left the Hill and Mr. Norwood was one of the leading proponents of a significant and fair Patient's Bill of Rights that was truly bipartisan. We arrived today and the Patients' Bill of Rights has been transformed into a HMO Bill of Rights, stripping both patients and states of the right to hold these ``sacred cows'' accountable. The extent to which the American people are being counted upon to ignore the details and simply ``don't worry, be happy'' that something was done is shameful and frightening. A system of checks and balances is only fair and just. Why should the patient and their family members be left without recourse in the event of a tragic error simply because they belong to an HMO. This is a government of, by, and for the people, not HMO's. Our responsibility is to ensure a patient's right to sue health plans for injuries sustained as a result of a delay or denial of medical care. If anyone deserves a privileged status when involved in or affected by medical decisions it should be the potential victim. A patient's right to recourse is an important check and balance in a system that must balance profit margins with patient needs. To take such an important protection away from American citizens is wrong. To further limit a state's right to protect its citizens from self serving decisions made by HMO's may be unconstitutional. To abandon our commitment to a meaningful Patient's Bill of Rights for political expedience is unconscionable. Mr. Norwood conceded too much. The Ganske/Dingell Bill offers us a chance to pass a true bipartisan Patient's Bill of Rights that is fair and just. Mr. Chairman, to preserve states' rights and consumer rights; and to block one more path toward the corporate takeover of America, I urge my colleagues to defeat this poison amendment, and pass a fair Patient's Bill of Rights. Mrs. CHRISTENSEN. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the Bush/ Norwood amendment and I urge my colleagues to oppose its passage. I agree with the American Medical Association, which oppose the Norwood amendment for four very good reasons. First, the Norwood amendment overturns the good work that states like Texas and Georgia have done in protecting patients. It reverses developing case law that allows patients to hold plans accountable when they make decisions that harm them. Second, the Norwood amendment takes away states power to set the standards by which HMOs can be punished with punitive damages creating a one-way preemption of states rights in favor HMOs. Third, it gives HMOs an unfair advantage by raising the bar making it harder for patients to make their case in court. Finally, and most troubling, the Norwood amendment provides patients protections on the one hand but does not allow them to enforce those same protections in court. Mr. Chairman, the Norwood amendment and all of the amendments offered today, are nothing more than poison pills designed to kill the meaningful Ganske/Dingell patient protection bill by forcing a conference with the Senate. I urge my colleagues to oppose the Norwood amendment, which is nothing more than a gift to the HMO industry. The American people want us to give them a real Patients' Bill of Rights with real enforcement provisions and real protections.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. (Mr. OWENS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, everybody says that they want to do things for young people. They recognize they are a special problem. But when you have a perfect program like YouthBuild, we have a great deal of difficulty getting it continued and expanded. YouthBuild is the perfect program in terms of maximum participation and use of resources by the people who are being helped and minimum bureaucracy, minimum overhead. I have a YouthBuild program in my district, and it functions in the poorest community in my district, in one of the poorest communities in the United States. Brownsville is a community that has many indices that run parallel in a negative way. No matter how you look at it, the number of young people who are in juvenile delinquency programs, the number of AIDS cases, the low level of education, the low reading levels, that community has every strike against it, and young people have a rough time. But the YouthBuild program has a director who came aboard several years ago and said, ``If you want to be in this program, no alcohol, no drugs. You have got to be here on time, and you have got to be here frequently. One or two absences, and you are out.'' Yet the program has a long waiting list. Young people see the program as having a concrete and immediate consequence. They see themselves being able to get a job. They also are required to get a high school diploma at the same time. You have some other features in this program which run parallel to some of the kinds of things that are being talked about at great length nowadays, the faith-based initiatives. The program that runs in my community would not be there if it was not for the Episcopal Diocese working in cooperation with the community. A large investment was made by the Episcopal Diocese. They have helped to keep the program going and develop it, and now the program has been able to get funding from other sources. YouthBuild on a national level has been able now to attract funding from foundations and from private industry. It is the model of a kind of partnership program that we should all be striving for. But let us not let the willingness of the private sector to invest or the willingness of foundations to invest be a cop-out for the Federal Government. Why should we bow out of a program that costs very small amounts of money, and I think we are talking about a $10 million increase here? Every year we have asked for very small increases, and the money is definitely directed into the activities and the programs which help the young people. It has a double impact, of course: the training for the young people, and then they actually do renovation and reconstruction of housing that poor people are able to go into. So I would like to have us send a message out there, that we are no longer going to continue the present trend of backing away from the sponsorship of meaningful youth programs. In the Department of Labor, we have moved away from the Summer Youth Employment Program. Programs for young people have been relegated to the States to continue. The Summer Youth Employment Program, which was so vital, some States are doing a good job, some are not. But we backed away from that vital program. In general, the funding for youth programs has gone down in the Department of Labor, job training programs of the type offered by YouthBuild. At the same time that we are backing away from job training programs, the programs that are meaningful in terms of providing occupational development for young people, shortages of all kinds keep developing. We are being told now that school construction in New York City is costing too much because they have a shortage of skilled craftsmen. We do not have enough carpenters; we do not have enough sheet metal people in the construction industry. We are having a problem of being overpriced because of the great pressure where the demand is greater than the supply in terms of skilled personnel. Some years ago, we backed away from vocational education in New York City and the Federal Government. And we also ratcheted up the effort to provide vocational education to a new category we call technical education, and we got so technical until it got away from the education of youngsters who could go into some trades that pay very well and that are in demand. Youth Build brings us back to the reality that there are large numbers of young people who will not stay in school they will not go to college, but they are serious and they will respond to an effort where they see a concrete benefit at the end. Youth Build offers a concrete benefit at the end. They have a job doing something in the neighborhood, doing something that not only pays well to begin with, but it promises to pay more and more, and they are encouraged to go into the apprenticeship programs of the various trades. So for $10 million we get $1 billion worth of response in terms of helping young people. I urge a yes vote for this important amendment.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to appeal to the conferees to please hold the course and not water down this bill any further. There is an education state of emergency in many American communities. There is an education state of emergency in the African American community in inner cities and in other inner-city minority communities and in rural poor communities. We need all the help we can get as fast as we can get it. The reading scores show there is a state of emergency, the SAT scores show it, the dropout statistics show it; but also there are other indicators that we ought to take a look at. The number of uncertified teachers are clustered and concentrated in these state of emergency communities. The number of unsafe, unhealthy buildings are concentrated in these communities. The lack of science laboratories and lack of physics teachers and chemistry teachers, they are all concentrated in these communities. Libraries with the oldest books are in these communities. So we need to maintain the focus and the concentration of this bill and not let the bill that came from the other body water it down and make flexible the funding so that it does not have the same concentration as the President's bill. The President is to be congratulated for focusing on where the greatest need is. The bill does do that. The focus on title I as a major component to be expanded in the authorization, the move towards an increase of title I funding to $17.2 billion in 5 years, that is very important. That authorization must be maintained. We must unite with the other body to get higher authorizations in some other areas, and we must understand that the conference committee holding to these authorization levels is the first step in a larger strategy to guarantee that the appropriations will equal the authorizations. We have a need for education reform everywhere in the country. I know that everybody is concerned about the fact that our children scored lower than youngsters in other nations, the best; but that need for concern should be understood in terms of there is a need for emergency- targeted funds that go straight to the areas of greatest need. In other words, what I am saying is let us make certain that we do what we have to do and can do at the Federal level so that we will hold accountable the States and hold accountable the local education agencies to deal with the state of emergency and guarantee that the opportunities to learn create safe schools, guarantee certified trained teachers, guarantee science laboratories, science equipment, guarantee science and math teachers. We must take the first step, and also we must act in a way which guarantees that the appropriation will match the authorization in this Congress.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, because I was unavoidably detained, I missed the following rollcall votes: Rollcall vote No. 229--S. 360; rollcall vote No. 230--H. Res. 195; rollcall vote No. 231--H.J. Res. 36 and rollcall vote No. 232, final passage of H.J. Res. 36. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall vote 229; ``nay'' on rollcall vote 230; ``yea'' on rollcall vote 231, and ``nay'' on rollcall vote 232.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today we concluded the appropriations debate and passed an agricultural appropriations bill for $74.6 billion. I think that it passed with a minimum amount of discussion and controversy. I think we had an overwhelming vote from all the members. I voted for it myself, even though in the past I have been wary of agricultural bills that have large amounts of subsidies for farmers for crops that no longer need subsidies. But that is not a point that I want to expand on. I want to say that we have passed a bill for $74.6 billion, the Federal Government's involvement in agriculture, and the farmers of the United States are less than 2 percent of the population. We take good care of our farmers and they give us good return. We are the best fed Nation in the world, but we certainly take very good care of them. Any people among those farmers and that particular group that continues to talk about not wanting the help of government or complaining about big government, telling government to get off their back, et cetera, it is hypocritical because the government is very much involved in producing the best agricultural system in the world. It is a monument to the achievement of government and education. The Morrell Act which created the land grant colleges in all of the States set off a process which created agricultural engineering and science, an approach to implementing new theories rapidly, the county agents, and a number of different innovations that still survive to this day. There are still committees in every county that relate to the Department of Agriculture. The system has been very productive. The system is, however, a system that we oversee as the Federal Government, and it is fed and kept alive by the Federal Government. Most people do not know it, but the department of government in Washington which has the second largest number of employees, second only to the Pentagon, is the Department of Agriculture, although we now have less than 2 percent of the population which are actually farmers, bodies who can be called farmers. Mr. Speaker, we take good care of agriculture and as a result, we get good return. There are 53 million children in the public schools of the Nation. That is far more than 2 percent of the population. If we want to put the same kind of investment into education, we would reap greater and greater returns, I assure my colleagues, on education. As I said before, the productivity of our agriculture system is directly related to the fact that we understood the role of education in agricultural production very early in the life of the Nation. Land grant colleges were not established to teach theology or philosophy. They were established to bring a new approach to teaching engineering, agriculture and biology in all kinds of things that were very practical and productive. So the great system for feeding America which feeds a large part of the world is based on a step taken by the United States government in the area of education. One of our monumental achievements in the area of education was the Morrell Act which established the land grant colleges in all of the States of the United States. The Morrell Act, of course, was inspired by Thomas Jefferson's genius when he created the University of Virginia, a State-based university. He took the first step and Morrell followed through, and every single State benefited from the same vision, an extension of the vision of Thomas Jefferson. We need the same kind of vision as we look at the 53 million children that are in our public schools. We need to understand that a large part of what we have been able to accomplish as a Nation is based on the fact that we have subscribed from the early days to the philosophy of universal education. The Federal Government has not played the first role, but the Federal Government certainly has never interfered with the States, and every State accepted the responsibility. It is the ethic of the American people which lead to the creation in the constitution of every State the responsibility for education. The Federal Government discovered in World War I and World War II that it had to go beyond that in terms of the development of its youth population, its scientists and technicians, and so it began to play a greater role in higher education in general. Now following the genius of Lyndon Johnson and the great society era where he established the first Federal support for elementary and secondary education, the Federal government has been a partner. We are weak partners. We do not have a major role in terms of funding. We actually only fund about 7 percent of the total education budget for the Nation. It is the State and local governments that fund the rest of the education budget, but we are involved. We recognize the necessity for that involvement and I think every State education official and local education official, and certainly teachers and principals throughout the Nation, will indicate that since the Federal Government got involved to the present there have been improvements. The Federal Government's role in education has been a very positive role, a role that we can be proud of. I am here today to sort of remind us that we should not allow this lull in the attention being offered by the Federal Government, by the people here in the Congress and the White House to education, do not let this lull allow us to take for granted what is going to happen next in the area of education in terms of this year's legislative agenda. We have passed a bill here in the House of Representatives, Leave No Child Behind, the President's bill, and the bill has passed in the other body. It is now waiting deliberation by conference. I read in the paper that the other body has appointed its conferees, the people who will sit on the conference committee. We have not done that in the House, but I assume that we will do that fairly soon. It is likely this process will go beyond the August recess, and that the climax will take place in September when we return from the August recess. In the meantime, I want Members to still be aware of the fact that the last word has not been stated, it is not over yet by a long shot. We have a major dilemma. We have to confront a major dilemma with respect to the bills that have passed in the House of Representatives and the other body. The dilemma is this. We have authorized in both cases amounts of money to implement the Leave No Child Behind education program, amounts of money that are far greater than the amounts of money that have been reserved in the budget, the budget which has been passed in this House and in the other body, does not allow for the implementation of the most important provisions of the Leave No Child Behind legislation. For example, one very important piece, Title I, Title I has been the major instrument for granting and providing public assistance, Federal assistance to education agencies across the country. It is about $8 billion. Title I in the Leave No Child Behind legislation is supposed to double in the next 5 years beginning with increments which will go into effect this year. So in this year's budget, there has to be the first increment for the movement of Title I forward. And in a 5-year period, it will reach $17.2 billion, according to the authorization. It is hypocritical to have all of the powers that be, the White House, both parties agreed on this, and then to have the authorization sitting there without an appropriation to back it up. There is no room in the budget at this point. So it is going to have to be negotiated through some extraordinary effort. We are going to have to break the budget or greatly shift some items around in order to accommodate the authorized amount. We certainly want to make certain that the priorities are such that this authorized amount will be honored before some other items may be honored. In order to do this, we cannot leave it to the processes here in Washington. The same processes that have generated this movement forward, however small it may be, and I am not pleased with the fact that Leave No Child Behind is inadequate in so many ways. It is inadequate because it has no money, not a single penny, for school construction. The Leave No Child Behind legislation that passed the House of Representatives did not allow a single penny for school construction. There is some hope because the other body did place $175 million in the budget for charter school construction. It is very interesting, in an era where the majority party has insisted that it would not move forward on any school construction appropriation because it is not the job and the duty of the Federal Government, they do not want to get involved, the same leadership of the same party put in $175 million for charter school construction. I am all in favor of leaving the $175 million in there for charter school construction, but I would like to see it expanded so that we can at least get back to the $1.2 billion that the previous administration had appropriated for emergency school construction across the board, not just charter schools but all schools that had need. So we have work to do. There are inadequacies and some of those inadequacies cannot be addressed in the appropriation process. They require new authorization. But some of the inadequacies can be addressed. The one that I have just given as an example can be addressed. And since there is $175 million in the budget for charter school construction, then it is in order, it is certainly in order, to expand that school construction money to move it to encompass more than just charter schools, and I certainly will be intending to offer an amendment to that effect when the bill comes back to us. If you cannot offer an amendment, I certainly will seek through the conferencing process to have the conferees consider moving from $175 million just for charter schools to a larger amount which would deal with school construction emergencies across the board where they are needed. There are many other items that they can deal with also because they are in the authorization language and we can move in that respect. I think that the other body had a set of authorizing figures, the amounts for authorization, in a number of areas that are higher than the authorization figures in the House of Representatives bill. So there is hope there that in the conferencing process, we can move in the direction of the amounts of money that have been established by the other body and be able to deal with some of the inadequacies that are left. I think the important thing is the public must realize that the fact that education is on the agenda at all, the fact that it was one of the first items the new administration placed before the Congress is due to the commonsense pressure that is being applied from the bottom. It is the public opinion that keeps consistently stating to the elected officials that education has to be one of our priority items. It seems that we are always running away from it. Elected officials have not really engaged the education agenda the way they should. Considering the fact that for the last 5 years, it has been among the top item and for the last 2 years it has been number one on the agenda of the public opinion polls, we should have done more. We should have done more. But our engagement has been of a shadow boxing approach where we engage in it with rhetoric, there is a lot of talk about education, there is a lot of discussion, and then when the authorizing and the appropriation process takes place, there is minimum effort. In the Leave No Child Behind legislation, we do not have maximum effort, we have minimum effort. It is important for the public to remember that. Whatever we are going to conclude with this year is still far short of where we should be in terms of the Federal involvement in education. People say, ``Well, it's really a local and a State matter.'' Yes, it should primarily remain a local and State matter. In terms of support for education, financing of education, funding of education should remain primarily a State and local matter. But that does not mean that the Federal Government cannot be more involved than 7 percent. Seven percent leaves us a lot of room. Why do we not shoot for 25 percent? There are people who fear that greater Federal involvement will mean a loss of local control, a loss of State control of the schools. With 7 percent involvement, and the local government and State government have 93 percent of the funding, then certainly you cannot control anything. If you have 93 percent, if the other party has 93 percent, you cannot control it with 7 percent. Let us not kid ourselves. If we increase it, the Federal share, from 7 percent to 25 percent, we still are not in a position to control, and that is a bogeyman that should be shot down and forgotten. We should be moving toward more Federal funding in terms of a greater percentage of the bill for education should be paid by the Federal Government. All taxes, all revenue comes from the local area, anyhow. All politics is local, all revenue is local. The money we print in Washington is symbolic, it is symbolic of the taxes that are flowed in here from the States and the localities. So give it back to them in ways which promote the item that the American public has indicated is the number one item. They would like to see more Federal involvement in education. Let us keep the debate going, let us continue to talk in terms of what is needed, instead of merely settling for the parameters that have been established by the Leave No Child Behind legislation. I want to take the opportunity today to talk about two groups, two statements of vision that have come to my office very recently. One is a book that is written by Dwight Allen who is an education professor at Old Dominion University and William Cosby, Bill Cosby. Most people do not know that Bill Cosby has a Ph.D. in education and that he has always been interested in schools and in children. Cosby wrote several books on children and families that were best sellers some years ago. This book is a combination with an education professor friend of his. The title of the book is ``American Schools, the $100 Billion Challenge.'' The $100 billion does not refer to $100 billion over the next 10 years, Mr. Speaker, it refers to $100 billion per year that ought to be added to the Federal effort in education. It is interesting that they would think in those terms, when a second presentation by the Children's Defense Fund, the Act to Leave No Child Behind as a bill that has been introduced in the Senate, S. 940, and in the House as H.R. 1990. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut is the sponsor in the Senate and the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), the highest ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce in the House is the sponsor. They are talking about $100 billion, also. It is very interesting. What can we make of this and should I waste your time with utopian proposals for the Federal involvement in education? Frankly, I do not believe they are utopian. Because we operate within the parameters of political practicality, I have not offered an amendment to the effect of levels of funding as high as proposed in these two documents, but they make sense. Their proposals make sense. Their proposals talk about moving away from incremental, nickel-and-dime approaches to reform and let us do the things that are really necessary on a scale that is necessary to move us forward. What has America got to lose by having a greater Federal investment in education? And what does it have to gain? I think that the gains in investment in education are tremendously geometric. The gains are fantastic in terms of what you invest and the educated population that you get as a result, what they produce. What are we producing in America now? We are way ahead of the rest of the world. Agriculture is just an old-fashioned basic example. We got way ahead of the world by investing heavily in education in agriculture. We are way ahead of the world right now in terms of digitalization, computerization and anything involving science and the application of science. Our pharmaceutical industries, our medical. Why are we there? Because in addition to the Morrill Act which established the land grant colleges, on several occasions the Federal Government has acted with broad and thorough funding powers to boost education. The GI bill. When the men who fought in World War II came back, every single one of them was given the right to an education financed by the Federal Government, from A to Z. There are some who went to barber school, some who went to business school. Many went into our universities. Our universities had never had such an enrollment. Enrollment was doubled and tripled in many of our universities as a result of the GI bill, a Federal bill that paid the bill, paid the expenses for men, veterans, to become educated. What came out of that? Large numbers of men who would never have gone to college, who would never have become technicians or never have become scientists, they entered the workforce and entered our economy at a time when automation was taking place. The great jump forward, the great leap forward after World War II was automation in our plants. We had the technicians and the mechanics and the people to do that because of this tremendous investment that this Nation made in education. We have not looked back and really thoroughly examined what we have done. The institutional memory of the American citizens in terms of what we have done in education and what we have reaped as a result is not there automatically. You have to talk about it. But we got a great boost. The fact that we are ahead in computer science is not by accident. We filled our universities and the great expansion that took place in education following the GI bill, once the GI bill recipients were out of college, every university that was publicly financed found its enrollment still going up, because through that experience, they expanded greatly, and they made it possible to have lower tuition and more and more young people could go to college and the age of the computer, digitalization, communications improvements, and all the kinds of things that we take for granted now were made possible by the crop of technicians and scientists who came forward through that process. It is likely that if we were to invest $100 billion in education every year for the next 10 years, we will reap 10 times that much incrementally, it will probably be geometric, to heights that we cannot conceive. Most people cannot conceive the need for that many educated people. They say that you do not need that many educated people. When I came out of college, there was a raging debate in certain places about do we need more people, more educated people? They will only take the jobs of those who now have the jobs. Do we need more teachers? There was a limited supply of teacher jobs. We would have a pressure on the professions that could not be met by educating all these new people. What has happened? We have gone through a process where now there is a tremendous shortage of teachers. Let us take teachers, because teachers outnumber lawyers. Teachers outnumber doctors. That is a profession that has large numbers of people involved, large numbers in school who come through the process and become teachers, and we used to take for granted, if you could not do anything else, you could teach and therefore you would always have a large number of people who on the way to some other profession would teach for a while first and then for various reasons teaching was a profession that we had no shortages. Women who were not allowed to get into corporations to the degree that they are today and many other professions had sort of walled them off, medicine, law, sort of hemmed women in, they kept them in teaching and nursing. All those barriers have fallen now and we have a tremendous shortage of teachers right now at this very moment and the shortage is increasing geometrically. It is increasing right now greatly. New York City had 4,000 teachers who resigned or retired over a 2- year period 2 years ago. In this last year, they had 4,000 teachers in one year. They expect to have 6,000 retire next year. We are into a situation where they can see the number of people qualified in terms of years spent in the system and the other pressures will lead to a tremendous drain on the number of teachers. There is a great shortage of teachers in New York City right now. We are not able to get trained, certified teachers to fill all of our classrooms, and many other big cities have the same problem. The other pressure, other than just not having the bodies that come out of the process of education, is that the surrounding suburbs, which usually are more wealthy sometimes in other States, in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, New York is surrounded by suburbs that can pay much higher salaries for teachers. So they have shortages in those areas and it speeds up, it escalates, the drain of teachers in New York City. I am told that one of the big problems we have with school construction is that school construction has now hit a problem because the construction industry certainly in the New York area has sort of over booked. They have more than they can handle because the construction industry has a great shortage of skilled personnel, carpenters, sheet metal workers. The people who make construction go are in short supply. So we have a skills problem in the area of construction. We have a problem recruiting policemen. There is a difficulty. There is a big debate. They have lowered the standard for policemen. Whenever you move in search of some skills that go beyond just a high school education, there are shortages developing in big metropolitan areas. I am certain that the experience in Los Angeles and Chicago and Detroit and some other areas is not going to be so different. There is unemployment at the lower levels where you have no skills and no education, but in the areas where the people are semi-professional or professional, the shortages have already shown up. So just to fill the shortages, just to fill nurses, nurses is another area which we are hearing more and more about every day. I have heard some 1-minute speeches on the floor of the Congress. I have seen items in the newspapers repeatedly about hospitals not having enough nurses and other medical personnel. So that is another area of skilled and professional people where you have a shortage. Just to fill those traditional positions, just to take care of the careers that we are all familiar with, you need more people who are educated. But when I talk about a great geometrical increase in the benefits that you get from having an educated population, I mean more than just replacement of the usual professionals, I am talking about professions that we have not even conceived yet that are just shaping up. The people in the area of genetics, a large numbers of people in the field of genetics, who were not there 10 years ago, it is an exploding field. People in biotechnology, on and on it goes in terms of the kinds of research that if you have the personnel, if you have the people who have the scientific know-how and have been trained, you can move much more rapidly to unearth new discoveries in science. Whether you are talking about discoveries in biotechnology and microbiology, in physics, all kinds of discoveries, telecommunications, can take place in direct proportion to the number of people who are educated. All of the forward motion in terms of technology and science can also move forward without the costs being so great. The greater the supply of professionals and technicians, the less the costs. We have some high cost scientists and some high cost scientific projects because there are too few scientists available. In the area of computer technology, it is kind of a recession, a correction, they say, in the dot com industry. Computer specialists were in high demand. Information technology personnel is in high demand and I am told this is only a blip on the screen, that pretty soon the demand for information technology personnel will be as great as it was before. So an investment in education pays off geometrically. If we spend a billion dollars more per year on education for the next 10 years, it will give this society benefits which are worth far more than we invest. If you have to state everything in terms of dollar value, trillions and trillions of dollars would be realized because we would develop, we know that there are secrets out there waiting to be unlocked in biotechnology alone, that if you put more people to work there is a correlation between the ratio of people put to work and the benefits that you would achieve. The same thing is true in certain areas of digitalization, computerization and those areas. They reap benefits, what they call in economic terms productivity. American productivity has greatly increased, and one of the downsides of the great increase in productivity is that it puts out of work a lot of people who did mundane tasks but at the same time it creates a need for a different kind of employee and personnel with much more know-how. We want to have the personnel with the know-how available to take the jobs. So our investment in education has a dual effect of moving us forward to an era where more will be unlocked at a faster and faster pace, new technology, new medical benefits, new ways to decrease the energy employed to produce items and all other so-called seemingly unsolvable problems, problems that cannot be solved now, seemed they cannot be solved. You can solve them if you get more personnel, if you get more trained people. The training process, the education process from the first grade to graduate school and beyond graduate school, is such that you are only going to produce a certain number of geniuses, but you can rest assured if you put a certain number of people through that process there will be geniuses discovered. The world is not run by geniuses. Geniuses are regular people who serve with partners with them, other scientists and theoreticians, and the theoreticians and scientists have to have technicians to work with them. The technicians have to have mechanics. All up and down the line of the funnel you will have developed people breaking out in their own capacity. If you give them the opportunity, they will develop to their fullest capacity, which means that everybody will be improved and everybody will be able to make a contribution that they could not make if they did not have the education. We should not hold back and hesitate as most of our political leaders are. The governors and the mayors and the people who are in charge continually become an obstacle in the forward movement of the appropriation of the adequate sums of money for education. They are the ones who prefer to talk about education without really improving education. We have a problem in New York City with the receipt of State aid over the years has been clearly unfair. They have not given the city pupils the same kind of support from the State that the other pupils have gotten outside of New York City. A court suit was mounted and a judge came to the conclusion that, yes, it is true. The State has not been appropriately financing the schools in the city and the State should take corrective action. The governor of the State has appealed that decision, and one of the things he said in his appeal is quite frightening. The firm that was hired by the State of New York, which is the firm that has been used in a lot of school segregation cases in the south, that firm has based its defense, its appeal on the following theory: That city students failed in school because of their poverty. No amount of money, whether to raise teachers' salaries, to build more schools or to install science labs, would make a difference. That is what the States attorneys are saying, that poverty is the cause of the failure of the school system; the inability of the children to learn is due to their poverty. Now, we know that there would be a revolution if the governor had dared to say due to their race, due to their ethnicity or due to their religion. That would be clearly discrimination. Clearly, he would get a reaction from right across the country about that kind of approach. But it is a hidden statement. Most of the poor children in New York City are minority children, either Hispanic or children of African descent and they are being told in this defense that the governor has put up that poverty is a problem. It is not the lack of funding. I do not want to go into that too far. I just want to point out that it is a frightening notion. If you move in that direction and do not challenge that kind of theory, the problem is that in 10 years you would end up with a clear statement by policymakers in the State that the State does not owe any children universal education because if they are too poor to learn then we should not invest the money trying to make them learn. The implications of assuming that poverty blocks learning, poverty dooms the school system, the implications are devastating and we hope to deal with that argument right away. I got something from one of my constituents about a new proposal about reparations. There is a young man that has caused a stir by putting out a pamphlet about reparations, makes a statement about 10 reasons why reparations for blacks is a bad idea for blacks and it is a racist idea also. Reparations become suddenly not only a bad idea and something that we should not talk about but it is also a racist notion for any group to say we may be owed reparations. I can see 10 years from now if you let the governor go unchallenged with poor students, whether they are African American or Hispanic, being told it is a bad idea for you to demand a universal free education because, after all, we have tried and we could not educate you because you are poor. I do not want to go too deeply into the implications of that kind of argument. My point is that the governors and the mayors and the people who are blocking the way, and people in high places, of course, in the Federal level, blocking the way in terms of the appropriations of ample resources for education, they are refusing to respond to the public outcry for improvements by dealing with basics. Basically, you need whatever it takes to provide certain physical facilities that are safe, physical facilities that are conducive to education. You need to provide basic instructional assistance by having trained teachers, teachers who are certified and know what they are doing. You need to have decent equipment, decent supplies, decent sized laboratories. You need a library at every school. The basics are not there. Before we move to more theoretical kinds of considerations of accountability and testing and blaming the teachers, let us put the basics in place. The basics are not there, however. These people who talk about $100 billion per year are on track because instead of proposing utopian ideas, Dwight Allen and Bill Cosby are proposing ideas that make a lot of sense. Senator Christopher Dodd and the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) in the Act to Leave No Child Behind, S. 940, H.R. 1990, are making some sound proposals. I must point out that the Act to Leave No Child Behind is not just an education bill. This is about children. It goes beyond education, to health, environment, nutrition, housing. This is about a program for children. In terms of the dollar figures, they come out at the same point as the cost by proposals, but nothing proposed here is outlandish, outrageous, utopian. It is all very sound and very on target. But we have lost sight of that. In the deliberation of the education bill, I offered a motion to instruct which was related to construction. Now, because of the atmosphere, we were tempted to compromise and to try to win votes by watering down the original amendment that I had made. We came all the way down from an amendment that I made which would have appropriated $10 billion a year over a 10 year period for school construction, to $1.2 billion, the amount equal to the amount appropriated by the outgoing Clinton Administration for school repairs, mostly emergency repairs. So even though the need clearly is up at the point where you need at least $10 billion a year just for school construction, and that is based on several studies that have been conducted by the General Accounting Office and conducted by the National Education Association showing that you needed about $320 billion. The National Education Association study, if you combined school construction and repair with new technology, you need $320 billion. New York State had the highest need of about $44 billion in order to bring the schools up to par to a level where they could serve the present population appropriately. So my estimates and my figures on school construction were not pulled out of the air. They were already a compromise. But on the floor here I offered a motion to instruct which was watered down to $1.2 billion per year. Of course, that failed. It got a party line vote, and we failed to pass it. But it was a far cry from the need. We have to do that. As people who are trying to compromise and get something done, we have to sacrifice our vision of what the need is. But I do not want the people out there who have had the common sense all these years to keep the pressure on elected officials to lose sight of what is needed. We do not need $1.2 billion for school construction, we need $10 billion a year for school construction. We need the kind of figures that are stated in this book, American Schools, the $100 Billion Challenge. I am going to read a few examples from this $100 billion challenge which Bill Cosby and Professor Dwight Allen put forth. I am going to read these, as I said before, not as a politician, an elected official offering these as suggestions that I intend to put in legislation tomorrow, but as mind-stretching exercises. Let us stretch our minds and try to look at education from the point of view of these experts. They are both Ph.D.s in education, they are both very concerned about it, but they are outside looking into the governmental process, and some of the conclusions they come to would be very instructive. We did not hear from these people in hearings before we passed the Leave No Child Behind legislation. Nobody was interested in hearing these kinds of statements. But here is a vision that is worth consideration by all that really care about education. In the section $100 billion for teachers, a summary of the listing, they start out with $6 billion regular in-service training on the Internet for all teachers. Now, we have pages and pages of discussion of teacher training and teacher improvement, but I do not think any one of our legislative proposals dealt with anything of this nature, certainly not with that kind of figure. I think our total amount for training of teachers is something close to $4 billion for all training, and in-service training and upkeep for teachers. Here, in this proposal, just to read a few examples, $6 billion for regular in-service training on the Internet for all teachers. Compensate every teacher in America $2,000 per year extra to spend 2 hours a week on the Internet upgrading their knowledge of his or her subjects, their teaching methods and of the newest research. We all agree that lots of teachers are out-of-date in their knowledge of both content and method of teaching. Current methods are hit and miss and often not valued by teachers who receive such training. The Internet offers a dramatic new potential. Developing and presenting new content and methods in a systematic way for all teachers can now be routine and cost-effective in a way never before possible--$6 billion they propose to spend on regular in-service training on the Internet for all teachers in the Cosby-Allen proposals. Another area that they propose expenditures which I found to be interesting was the expenditure of $2 billion to train a corps of master teacher mentors. Provide a trained corps of clinical master teacher mentors for each teacher in training and for beginning teachers. There would be several concomitant benefits of paying mentor teachers $2,000 to $5,000 stipends each year. This is above their salary. First of all, well-trained mentors would provide better supervision and guidance for new teachers, and if the mentors are well paid, they will be encouraged to provide more and more and better assistance and they will stay in the school system, instead of moving on to higher paying jobs elsewhere. Another item, $5 billion, $5 billion, this is one I have never seen before, for a corps of $100,000 classroom teachers. Listen closely, $5 billion for a core of $100,000 classroom teachers. Pay 5 percent of all teachers, pay 5 percent of all teachers, an added $50,000 per year to attract and hold a share of the brightest college and university graduates as master teachers. In other words, you get master teachers who would be making up to $100,000 a year. Pay 5 percent of all teachers $100,000 a year. We need to break the mold of a single salary schedule for all teachers. Just as the dream of a NBA million dollar contract does energize sandlot and school basketball all over the Nation, realistic aspiration of $100,000 stipends per year for even a small percentage of teachers would energize applicants at all levels and increase the recruitment pool. We are a Nation that responds to financial incentives. Another item, $10 billion, $10 billion, for teaching assistance and other support staff for teachers. Now, I would wholeheartedly endorse this one as being practical, being necessary, and we ought to write it into our legislation right away. Teaching assistance and other support staff for all teachers. Build the concept of a teacher and his or her staff with clerical and technical support in the classroom, including teaching assistants and interns. Teachers are now required to do it all. Teachers are self- contained in their classrooms. Sporadically they may have teaching assistants or some volunteer support. If we are to make the most efficient use of our most valuable resource in education, well-trained teachers, we must begin to provide them the support that is routine for all other professionals. I think we ought to stress that. Real professionals, every other professional, whether you are talking about lawyers or doctors or engineers, they have staff; they have staff assistants, they have people at various levels of support. Teachers deserve the same kind of support, and you would actually have a more efficient and more effective classroom, a more effective use of your highest price personnel, if you were to have each teacher being seen as part of a unit, where they are the head of the unit, directing the unit, but they are not weighted down with a lot of tasks that are not professional, not productive and do not involve learning. So I would wholeheartedly endorse that proposal as being a very practical one and one we should have moved on long ago. We talk a lot technology in the classroom and about the use of technology in the classroom, computers in the classroom. I do not think teachers should have to learn how to make computers do new things in terms of their curriculum and opening the eyes of youngsters with more creative approaches to teaching. They should not have to do all that and also learn how to fix the machine when it breaks. When computers are on the blink, they should not have to be the ones to fix them, the servicing of the computers, the servicing of any equipment. There is a whole array of things that teachers should not have to do, and if you had that built in a system, that taken care of by a unit, you would have more people staying in teaching instead of resigning and retiring as quickly as they can. Another item they have here in the Cosby-Allen proposals is a $1 billion item, challenge grants for teacher initiatives for educational reform. Teachers should be encouraged to examine their own practices and to try new initiatives. A series of challenge grants should be established, with teachers from other states making a judgment about the priorities of which initiatives to fund. The whole debate on education and the production of the Leave No Child Behind Act in both Houses of the Congress, the people who were consulted least were the teachers. We talk a lot about what teachers should do, we have prescriptions in here for their training, we even talk about teacher preparation institutions, penalizing them if they do not graduate teachers who can pass the certification tests. We are deeply into education and the molding of teachers and the use of teachers, but very few teachers were consulted, I assure you, in this process. Because of the pressure of public opinion, we politicians, we elected officials, have gotten involved, but we have left out the most important ingredient, and that is the input, the advice and consultation of the teaching profession and the teachers themselves. So this $1 billion challenge grant would recognize that teachers have initiatives and teachers are sometimes the best teachers of other teachers. Teachers should be encouraged to examine their own practices and to try new initiatives. Another item, $6 billion for 6 years of pre-service training for teachers. Provide $10,000 per year for 6 years of universal teacher training for 100,000 teachers each year. There is a wide consensus that we need to attract a share of the brightest student to the profession of teaching. They propose 6 years of funding, an incentive to increase the time of training profession and to raise the standards of the teaching profession generally. There are all sorts of variations possible. For example, funding can be in the form of loans that include one year of funding forgiven for every year as a teacher. We have had those proposals offered in terms of forgiving loans, but we have not had any proposals that talked about $10,000 per year in order to allow students to get a 6 year education. Another item, $3 billion, one-year internship for teachers after professional training. These are items which coincide with some practical proposals that have been made in legislation already. $1 billion for higher salaries for more teacher educators. Increasing salaries of $10,000 teacher educators by $25,000 to $75,000 per year. Again, the same principle, to attract the brightest graduates into teacher education. Another $1 billion is proposed for the development of teacher training materials. Then technology, $15 billion proposed for technology for all schools, the purchase, maintenance and replacement. And on and on it goes, into a budget which concludes with $100 billion per year for education, American schools. Again, I have been talking about a vision offered by Bill Cosby and Dwight Allen. Dwight Allen is a noted Professor of Education Reform at Old Dominion University, and Bill Cosby has a Ph.D. in education and has been interested in education for a number of years and has written several books on children and families. In conclusion, I have offered these two visions which are outside the usual discussion that takes place here on the Hill. It just so happens that they come at a time when there is a great need to keep the dialogue going. We cannot sit still and wait until the conference committee acts. We should not sit still and wait until the final negotiation takes place, probably at the end of September. We need to keep the pressure on. The public needs to remind each one of us in the Congress that they have made education a priority, and making education a priority, there is a need to have resources behind the rhetoric. The dilemma we face is that we have two bills that have passed, one in the other body and one here in the Congress, and both have authorization figures much higher than any provisions that have been made in the budget. We need to solve that dilemma in a positive way. We need to have the pressure applied from those who care about education to make the appropriations figure measure up to the authorization figures as a one first positive step. At least the Leave No Child Behind legislation should not be hypocritical, it should do what it says it is going to do in the authorization bill. That is the first step. The other steps require the kind of vision to go forward that is indicated in these two visions, one from the book written by Bill Cosby and Dwight Allen, and the other from the Leave No Child Behind legislation which deals with more than just education, and is sponsored really with the backing of the Children's Defense Fund. We are going to hear more about this as we go toward September. The important thing is that we should understand that the door is not closed, and the final decision has not been made. There is room for an appropriation which measures up to the authorization and all of us should dedicate ourselves to the proposition that we will fight to have the appropriation measure up to the authorization for education.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we are about to enter our July recess for the 4th of July holiday, and it must be noted that this Congress has completed two major legislative developments to date. One of those, of course, has been fully completed: the tax bill. That is fully completed, signed into law, and checks will begin to move soon. Those checks will be going to the people at the very bottom of the rung as a result of legislation which was first proposed by the Progressive Caucus that every American should get some benefit from this tax cut. That did not exactly happen, but every taxpayer is getting a small benefit as a result of the action taken early in the session by the Progressive Caucus. The idea got out there and kept moving until finally it was incorporated in another form in the tax bill. So people at the bottom are going to get some small amount of money from the tax bill. That is real. It is completed. The other piece of legislation that has almost been completed is the education bill, the leave-no-child-behind legislation of the President. The new President, of course, made this a high priority; and we have moved in both Houses, with both parties cooperating extensively, to pass the leave-no-child-behind legislation separately in the House and in the Senate. But there has been no conference, and the bill is now on hold. I think it should be noted that there are rumors that the bill will be held deliberately until we have a chance to negotiate the major question of financing for the education bill. Education is on the legislative back burner right now; but in the hearts of the people who are polled out there, legislation is still a number one concern. Education has to remain on the front burner. The fact it is being held here is a good development in that the critical question in the legislation that passed the House versus the legislation that passed the Senate is the amounts of money that are appropriated to carry out the features of the bill. The amounts of money are critical. We do state in the legislation that passed the House that there will be an increase in an authorization for an increase in title I funds of double the amount that exist now in 5 years. In 5 years, in other words, we will have twice as much funding for title I as we have today. It will move from the present amount to about $17.2 billion in 5 years under the authorization. Authorization is there. That does not guarantee that the appropriation, of course, will keep pace. The Senate bill has even more money earmarked for increases, but they do not have a commitment from the White House that the appropriation is going to follow the authorization. The big question is will the authorizations be honored. We had a great deal of effort to get bipartisan agreements. I reluctantly voted for the education legislation because of the fact it did two things: one, it got rid of the consideration of vouchers for private schools as a Federal policy. And I think to clear the board and have vouchers off the discussion table was good for Federal legislative policy. However, the critical question of will we have more resources was also addressed. And the fact that the bill does promise to double title I funds, which are the funds that go most directly to the areas of greatest need, impressed me to the point where I voted for the bill, even though there were some other features, which I will discuss later, which I do not consider to be desirable. The critical point is, are there more resources? The need to have resources to maintain what I call opportunity-to-learn standards is a critical point that I have been trying to make for all these years. Opportunity to learn is the most important factor if we really want to improve education and have more youngsters who are attending our public schools benefit from the process. What we are trying to do, however, is force a process of accountability, insist that schools measure progress by the tests that are taken by the students and the scores on the tests, and that that is the way we should measure accountability. A school system is held accountable for improved test scores. On the other hand, the opportunity-to-learn standards are ignored completely. Opportunity to learn means that before the test is given we must guarantee that the student will have an adequate place to learn; classrooms that are not overcrowded, libraries that have books that are up to date, laboratories that have science equipment. The opportunity to learn means that we have the right equipment, the right facilities. It means that we have certified teachers in the classroom. It means that all the resources that are needed are there before we start the testing. But the process that we have pushed here is a process which tries to ignore the opportunity to learn as a major factor. So we need to hold the education legislation because that vital component is missing. Let us hold it until we can negotiate an increase in the resources, an increase in the amount of money we use to purchase resources, and those resources will provide the opportunity to learn. It may be that it will be end-game negotiations all of the way to the end of the session. Education legislation has benefited greatly over the last few years through the end-game negotiation process, right down to the very last hours of the session. When the White House and the Congress came together and they had their priorities on the table, education has fared very well. Mr. Speaker, I hope that by holding the legislation this time until we get to that end-game negotiation, we will get the kind of funding necessary to make the legislation that we have passed have some real significance. If we do not get some additional funding for the Leave No Child Behind funding, then it is a fraud. It has no substance if it is not going to provide additional resources. There is a need to refresh ourselves and come back to an understanding of the fact that we have passed these two pieces of legislation in the House of Representatives and the Senate. There is no reason to rest on our laurels. We still have a basic problem of that bill that passed having great gaps in it, and those great gaps are not going to be closed in the end-game negotiation unless the people that we represent, our constituents, understand where we are and why there is a great need for more Federal involvement in the improvement of education. I want to use as an example a series of articles that have appeared in the Daily News in New York City to talk about the New York City school system, and I want to use New York City as a negative model. It is not the way it should be, but it is the way that it is in most of our large cities. I would not bore my colleagues with a discussion of what is going on in New York City unless I did not think that it was applicable all over the country in other big cities, and it is also applicable in rural areas. Yesterday we voted on a bill to establish a commission to plan for the anniversary, 50th anniversary, of the Brown v. Board of Education. That anniversary relates to the question of segregation in public schools and whether or not it was legal. The Supreme Court struck down the fact of segregation and clearly made it illegal. Our concerns with segregation have begun to fade as far as segregation by race is concerned. The phenomenon we face now is a more subtle phenomenon. We have segregation in another way; not by race, but segregation of the people who have no power away from those who do have power. It turns out in many cases that the people who do not have power in the big cities are people who happen to be minorities also. In the rural areas there are large numbers of whites in scattered pockets throughout the country; these are poor people who are in the same position because they have poor schools as a result of having no power. Folks who have money, who have power, always guarantee that their children get the best schooling possible. People with money in larger and larger numbers are sending their children to private schools; and, of course, there are not enough private schools even if everybody had money to afford them. There are not enough private schools to accommodate 53 million children. Others who have power and are in control of their schools and of the budget-making processes of their counties or cities or their school districts, they make certain that they have good schools. Where they have the power to do that, they have done it for their children. We have a problem, however, because many of the people who have power, who have control about the decisionmaking over the budget are not involved to the point where their children or grandchildren are in the schools. The people who have the power, the people who have the most influence do not care about public schools enough to follow through on guaranteeing that you have the best schools possible. We have a serious situation where we have schools that are stuck in a time bind. One of the greatest problems of our schools is that physically so many of them are so old. When one looks at the physical age of the structures, one gets a good visible manifestation of the way in which education and schooling are viewed in that area as a whole. New York is in that kind of bind. I am going to make it simple by reading from an excellent editorial that appeared in the Daily News which accompanied their series on the New York City school system. I think it was a magnificent series. It pinpointed the problem and was forthright in dealing with the exposure of rampant waste and corruption and inadequacies. At the same time every day this series sought out uplifting models that could be replicated, and it sought out models which contradicted the general notion that the poor cannot learn, the notion that poor neighborhoods cannot have good schools. There were examples all over New York City which prove this not to be true. But in the end the Daily News pinpoints the fact that the school system is in great trouble. In terms of service to the majority of the children attending the schools of New York City, we are failing at a faster and faster rate, and it is likely that school systems in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, a number of big cities, are failing in the same way, at the same rate, for the same reason, and that is why I want to bring to your attention what this Daily News series has pointed out, and how the implications reach across the Nation. Reading from their own editorial page, ``This week in a Daily News special report entitled Save Our Schools, you have been reading about the meltdown of the New York City educational system. As documented in chilling detail in more than 20 articles, the crisis has reached critical mass.'' Now, Daily News is not a radical newspaper. They very seldom use extreme words like ``meltdown.'' When they say ``meltdown,'' you have to consider that they have been shocked, and this is truly a serious situation. ``This laboratory of failure, this culture of catastrophe, puts 1.1 million school children at risk. It must end. That is why the Daily News has launched a campaign, no, a crusade, to rescue what was once a world-class system that created opportunities for millions.'' I think it is important to point out that the New York City school system was once considered a world-class system. It gave a lie to the notion that any big system, any bureaucratic system is automatically a wasteful system and a nonproductive system. The New York City school system produced the young people who went on to city colleges and who created a record of achievement and higher education in science and you name it; every scholarly endeavor that you can mention were the products of the New York City school system and of New York City publicly financed colleges. At one point City University had the highest percentage of Ph.D.s of any college in the Nation. This was a system that was once a world-class system, and I submit it was a world-class system at a time when the people who were in charge of the system also had children who were attending the schools in the system; when the power, the power to make the system work was in the hands of the people whose children were attending the system. We have lost the kind of concerns and the kind of scrutiny and the kind of effective application of resources because of the fact that the people who are in charge and the people whose children are in the schools are not the same. Continuing with the statement in the Daily News, ``How abysmal is the situation? Sixty percent of the students in public elementary and middle schools cannot read at grade level. A third are functionally illiterate, and 70 percent lack proficiency in math. Nearly 50 percent finish high school in 4 years. In the original class of 2000, 19.5 percent dropped out before graduation, a 12 percent leap from the class of 1999.'' This percentage who dropped out before graduation represents a 12 percent change from the class of 1999. A mere 35 percent of the kids take the Scholastic Assessment Test required for college. A mere 35 percent take the SAT, versus 73 percent of the rest of the children in New York State who take that same test. Only a broken system produces such a rock bottom number. It is appalling. Just 44 percent of teachers hired last year for city schools had credentials, down from 1999. Meanwhile, 16 percent of all teachers are uncertified, the most in a decade. Ten percent of parents did not bother to pick up their kids' report card. Fifteen percent do not know what grade their child is in, and the PTA at one school has only two members. Oh, yes, they say in passing, ``The buildings are falling down. Eighty-five percent of schools need major repairs.'' I am going to repeat that paragraph because herein lies the story of denial of opportunities to learn. How can the children of the New York City school system score well on the series of tests that are being proposed? The Leave No Child Behind legislation pushed by the White House and now passed by both Houses has a testing regimen which starts in the third grade. From the third to the eighth grade, children will be tested. If you test children who are going to school under these conditions, I can tell you now without looking at the tests, most of them will fail. Here are the conditions that the school, the children in the schools of New York will be facing as they take the tests. I am repeating this paragraph because herein is the story of the denial of opportunity to learn by the children in the schools of New York. ``Consider more numbers: Just 44 percent of teachers hired last year for city schools had State credentials, down from 59 percent in 1999.'' If you talk about meltdown, you are in a terrible situation at 44 percent hired last year, or only 44 percent have State credentials, are certified. The fact that that is increasing at a rapid rate lets you know that you are in a much worse situation than just the fact that only 44 percent hired were certified. That is down from 59 percent the previous year. If you look at the year before that, I am sure that we had many more who were certified. We are rapidly losing all the qualified teachers needed in schools where the best teaching is needed. ``Meanwhile, 16 percent of all teachers are uncertified, the most in a decade. As for parents, 10 percent didn't bother to pick up their kids' report cards. And 85 percent of schools need major repairs.'' What they do not tell you is that of this 85 percent, quite a number of these schools are 100 years old and should have been replaced a long time ago. There are honeycomb success stories among the failures. They give examples of public schools that are doing a great job. Continuing to read from the Daily News editorial statement of June 22: ``Unfortunately, such efforts are but seeds of real reform. To truly transform education, activist moms and dads must team up with better trained teachers and with principals who don't double as building managers. Schools must no longer be fettered by the United Federation of Teachers' crippling work rules and its lifetime protection program for inept instructors. Finally, the Board of Education must be abolished so that accountability--and mayoral control--can reclaim the system. ``Those 1.1 million kids deserve a genuine chance to become beacons for the city's future, a chance they will have only if New Yorkers unite to save our schools.'' I disagree with the remedies. The New York Daily News set of articles clearly states the problem and is to be applauded for that. It leaps to conclusions that have no basis in fact or experience as to remedies. To abolish the board of education is to throw away any opportunity for this generation of New York children to get an education. It would take more than a generation to rebuild anything that is half as good as what you have already. The board of education obviously has serious problems at present, but most of these problems are problems which are directly related to a lack of resources, the denial of the resources. We have just gone through a situation where a clear statement was made by a judge after months of considering a case that was brought against the State of New York in terms of its allocation of resources to the City of New York. That case sums up the need for opportunity to learn in a way which is far simpler than I could state it elsewhere. But it is important that we understand that nothing would be more beneficial to the well being and progress of the Nation than the provision of the opportunity to learn that I am talking about. Opportunity to learn for all would mean that we understand that brainpower is the greatest need of the Nation and the world. Education for all, including the least among us, is a vital investment in the future of the Nation. Economic power, technology power, the power of cultural influence and even military power is directly dependent on our reserve of brainpower. About 2 years ago, we launched the last super high-tech aircraft carrier that we launched and the Navy admitted at that time that it was about 300 crew members short because they did not have the necessary trained personnel. There was a lack of brainpower. There was a lack of young crewmen who had the aptitude to be trained to run the high-tech equipment on the aircraft carrier. I am saying again that New York City schools are examples of what is happening all over the country. They are frozen in time in terms of providing a basic education. They do not even do as well as they were doing 50 years ago. But here is the challenge that faces us in terms of going into the future, where the challenges are much greater and the education system needs to be equipped to do a far better job. Brainpower is the key to where this Nation is going. Unless we have a system that can educate all of the young people and guarantee that there are pools of trained personnel to draw from, then our entire society is in serious trouble. We do not just have a shortage of scientists, we do not just have a shortage of trained computer personnel, information technology personnel, we have shortages right across the board. Half of the graduate students in our big universities are foreigners. More than half of the graduate students studying science at the highest levels are foreigners. Whether you focus on chemistry or physics or engineering, or all of the technical and scientific pursuits, more than half are foreigners, which means you have a problem in terms of theoretical and scientific know-how. When you come down to the next level of technicians, there is a great shortage. If you look at any area, whether you are talking about auto mechanics or sheet metal workers, even carpenters, there is a tremendous shortage of people who can do the ordinary jobs in our society because those jobs have become more and more complex. They need more and more skills. I visited a sheet metal training facility in Queens more than a year ago, and I was surprised at the use of computers. They make extensive use of computers in the training of sheet metal workers. Obviously, sheet metal workers use computers a great deal. There is almost no area where the skills required, the knowledge required is not far greater now than it was 25, 50 years ago. That is the other problem. The first problem is to have a basically sound school system that is functioning at minimum level. The bigger problem is to have a school system which is able to cope with the challenges of the 21st century. New York fails on the first rung and cannot continue to exist as a school system unless it moves rapidly to the second rung, because that is where the soul of the city lies, in the production of brainpower. To solve this brainpower crisis in the information technology industry, for example, corporations are using foreigners more and more. But we cannot use foreigners to run our aircraft carriers. We cannot use foreigners to run the armed services. We cannot use foreigners to vote intelligently for our elected leadership. The survival of our constitutional civilization is directly dependent on the pools of brainpower we develop and maintain inside the Nation. Our complex society is doomed without adequate checks and balances. This goes far beyond the executive, judicial, and legislative units of government. The press and media, the nonprofit organizations, the private corporations, these are also vital parts of the system of checks and balances. Without constantly increasing brainpower reserves and replacements, these institutions will diminish and lose their potency in the collective decision-making process. In other words, I pointed out the crisis in science. It is not only in the area of science but in the area of writers, in the area of social workers. Wherever you examine the need for trained people, there is a shortage; and the shortage is increasing. The police are having difficulty recruiting qualified candidates. The fire department is having difficulty recruiting qualified candidates. A more complex world demands people who are slightly better trained, and as a result we do not find them in the pools of manpower and brainpower that we have now. We presently have a growing shortage of teachers and educated supervisors and administrators. That is the most critical shortage. This will greatly hamper any meaningful education reform. But similar shortages, as I said before, are appearing among numerous other categories of professionals. Right now there is a great negotiation taking place in New York City in respect to teachers' salaries. It is seen as a collective-bargaining problem, and really it is far beyond a collective-bargaining problem. The salaries of New York City teachers is a major public policy issue. The kingpin of the school system is the leadership, the quality of the teachers and the principals, the assistant principals and the other personnel. If we do not get higher salaries for the people who are running that system, considering the fact that we are competing with salaries in all the surrounding suburbs and cities and towns who draw off the best personnel from New York City, then the rapidity, the speed with which we are losing the best teachers and administrators, will greatly increase and it will be totally impossible to change the system. When you talk about meltdown, nothing will speed the meltdown of the system faster than the failure of the present negotiations to greatly increase the salaries of the teachers and the education personnel in New York City in order to allow it to keep pace with the personnel salaries in the surrounding areas. We have pinpointed that one of the most important opportunity-to- learn standards, opportunity-to-learn factors, is the provision of qualified and trained teachers. That is number one. Without the leadership, without qualified trained teachers, without principals and administrators, the system does not go anywhere. No study and experimentation will be necessary to understand what maximum opportunity to learn means. To provide an adequate and basic elementary and secondary education, we already know what works. There is no need for a great deal of discussion and controversy. There is a need for more resources. We need the money to pay the teachers decent salaries, we need to raise the standards, raise the morale, stop the brain drain and improve in all the other opportunity-to-learn areas, like the physical facilities, the equipment, the books, et cetera. Before we begin to search for the most suitable pedagogical approaches, we must first put in place this set of opportunity-to-learn standards. The physical environment of the class, the building, the library, the cafeteria, laboratories, all of these must be safe and conducive to learning. The first negative by-product of overcrowded classrooms and hallways is usually an exacerbated discipline problem. Constantly we hear complaints about discipline problems. There are no silver bullet solutions for discipline problems; but one thing is certain, if you have overcrowded classrooms and overcrowded schools, the hallways, the cafeteria, the auditorium, then certainly you are going to have greater discipline problems. And, of course, you cannot honestly lower the pupil-teacher ratio unless you have more classrooms. Right now we have a situation in New York City where we cannot honestly make use of the funds that were appropriated by the efforts of the last administration. We did get some movement in terms of funds to lower the pupil-teacher ratio in each class. We got a movement in the right direction, many teachers were employed; but the honest truth is that in New York City, instead of them having a lower pupil-to-teacher ratio in the classroom, they put another teacher in a crowded classroom because there were no classrooms. If you do not build additional classrooms, then you cannot have a lower pupil-teacher ratio in the classroom. They added a teacher to a crowded classroom which is not what the legislation was all about in the first place. We have done some creative maneuvers to get the money and use the money; but actually the benefit sought, a classroom where you had fewer pupils per teacher in order to be able to maintain greater order and give more attention to the students at a younger age, that did not happen and it is not happening in many cases. This is a self-evident requirement, that you have trained teachers and you have trained supporting personnel. We refuse to take our children to untrained, uncertified dentists or pediatricians, so why not pay and seek the best teachers? Why should any child be subjected to the fumbling, makeshift efforts of an untrained teacher? We do not normally expect successful outcomes when unqualified staff are in charge. It is an unfortunate factor in big-city school systems that the substitute teacher, the unqualified teacher who could not pass the test, who is not regularly on the rolls, who is not paid fully and who does not get full benefits, that substitute teacher becomes the teacher that children see the most often in the worst neighborhoods. In other words, in the poorest neighborhoods where other teachers do not want to teach, it is the substitute teacher, the unqualified teacher, that is usually brought in to fill the classrooms. In one of my sections of my district, District 23, at one point they had more than half of the teachers who were not certified, who were substitutes, teaching in the schools. This was an area where the reading scores were very low and they needed the very best teachers. What I am attempting to explain is summarized with shocking simplicity at the end of the court order just handed down several months ago by Supreme Court Judge DeGrasse in New York State. The New York State civil judge heard the case that was brought which challenged the fact that the State of New York had been shortchanging the City of New York in terms of education funds. The court case went on for almost a year, testimony was heard, and the judge finally made a decision. I will read just a few excerpts from that decision. Quote, and this is Judge Leland DeGrasse, New York State Supreme Court, this court has held that a sound basic education, mandated by the education article, that is the education article of the constitution, consists of the foundational skills that students need to become productive citizens capable of civic engagement and sustaining competitive employment. In order to ensure that public schools offer a sound basic education, the State must take steps to ensure at least the following resources which, as described in the body of this opinion, are, for the most part, currently not given to New York City public school students. Number one, sufficient numbers of qualified teachers, principals and other personnel; two, appropriate class sizes; three, adequate and accessible school buildings with sufficient space to ensure appropriate class size and implementation of a sound curriculum; four, sufficient and up-to-date books, supplies, libraries, educational technology and laboratories; five, suitable curricula including an expanded platform of programs to help at-risk students by giving them more time on task; six, adequate resources for students with extraordinary needs; and seven, a safe, orderly environment. Now, these items laid out by Judge Leland DeGrasse, in the opinion of the New York State Supreme Court against the State of New York, accusing the State of not supplying these items, there is an exact parallel to the opportunity-to-learn standards, which I have been discussing. These are statements in another way of what opportunity to learn means. You are not provided sufficient teachers, qualified teachers and principals. You do not have appropriate class sizes. You do not have adequate school buildings. You do not have sufficient supply of up-to-date books, libraries, educational technology and laboratories, and as a result, your curriculum is not suitable. You do not have a safe, orderly environment. All of these are stated in the court decision. I might add that the judge gave the State of New York until the first of June, I think, to come forward with some kind of plan to respond to his decision. That has not happened. I might also add that the Governor of New York appealed the decision of the court, and the Governor in essence stated what the lawyers had been arguing for the Governor all along, and that is that in New York City the children are too poor to learn. The poverty is the reason they cannot learn. There is a condemnation out of which there can be no solution; that is to say, children cannot learn because they are too poor, and, therefore, we should not put resources in to try to teach children who are too poor to learn dooms the children forever. It is like condemning slaves for being illiterate, nonfunctional when they came out of slavery after having a series of laws in every confederate State which made it a crime to teach a slave to read. It is a crime to teach you to read. At the same time, of course, there was a big contradiction there because slaves were considered inferior, not quite human, and, therefore, why did they have to worry about teaching them to read? Evidently they were human enough, smart enough to learn how to read, so much so that laws were made. In every Confederate State there was a law that said it is a crime to teach a slave to read. Now we have a situation where a Governor of one of the most advanced States of the Union, the great Empire State of New York, is arguing that the problem of education in New York City is that the children are too poor to learn, and, therefore, do not expect the State to solve the problem by providing more resources because they are too poor to learn; more resources will not help the situation. It is a State where we spend $25,000 per year for an inmate to be kept in prison. In New York City we spend only $7,000 per year to educate each student. You can see the direction of the reasoning of the Governor. If you cannot educate them, and most of them end up in prison, they are going to cost far more later on, but I suppose there are some profits to be made in the prisons that we do not know about. Anyway, I can think of no more confused and hopeless reasoning than for a Governor of a State to say we cannot solve the problem because the children are too poor to learn. In the course of reforming the school finance system, a threshold task that must be performed by the State to the extent possible, the actual costs of providing a sound basic education in districts around the State has to be decided, but certainly you are going to have to ensure that every school district has resources necessary to provide opportunity for a sound, basic education. Taking into account variations in local costs and all the other things, the State should be in a position to provide what is necessary. The New York Daily News article does not pinpoint the Governor's position, the fact that the Governor is now spending State funds to appeal the decision of the court, which called upon the Governor to provide more funding for New York City. The New York Daily News article does not finger that as one of the great reasons why we have the problem. We have a meltdown in New York City schools. A meltdown is taking place right now, and the meltdown is primarily due not to the fact that children are too poor to learn. If that was the case, then New York City would not have produced some of the greatest scholars in our Nation. The City College, the city universities, would not have turned out so many Ph.Ds. They are spread all over the world. Poor youngsters who came out of the ghettos of New York in the past have learned and performed well. The poverty is not the problem. The problem is that the people in charge of the system have allowed the system to degenerate and not provide the opportunities to learn that should be provided. One great controversy raging right now is around the opportunity-to- learn standard as reflected in school construction. School construction and the provision of adequate facilities is a major part of the problem. It is highly visible, and when you provide for adequate school facilities, you make a statement about the importance that you attach to education. If you refuse to provide for adequate facilities, you are also making a statement, and the continuing refusal to provide adequate schools is a statement that the people who are in power have made over the last 10 years. The Daily News recognizes the problem, but they do not pinpoint the fact that the mayor of the city of New York has been a major problem. The decision-making process at city hall has been a major problem in the provision of adequate school facilities. We have a problem now where it is another Catch-22. They are saying that the high cost of construction in the year 2001 is so great that we cannot go ahead to begin to remedy the problem of overcrowded schools. We have to wait. We have run into a situation where the money projected to build schools would not go as far as anticipated because the cost has gone up. Some people are proposing that we call a halt and not build any more schools, not repair any more schools because the costs are too great. Eight years ago there was a major confrontation between the present mayor and the chancellor of schools at that time because he proposed a $7 billion capital funding program. He proposed $7 billion, and the mayor said that was unreal, and there was such a clash until they drove that chancellor out of town. A few years later a second chancellor proposed an $11 billion capital expenditure program, and there was a clash with the mayor, who said that was unreal, and the clash became so heated until that chancellor was forced to resign. Now we are at a point where we are finding that because of all of these delays and all of the roadblocks that have been placed in the way of the decisionmakers at the board of education in terms of going forward with a meaningful capital expenditure program and building the schools at a time when it probably would have cost less, we now have a logjam, and the prices are going up. The cost of construction has gone up. Well, is the cost of construction really up all over the Nation? Are we in a recession? Are we going toward a recession? Has the economy not slowed down? If they want to solve the problem of school construction in New York and keep the costs from rising, can we not appeal for some Davis-Bacon unionized contractors from all over the country to come in? We have no problem if they are willing to abide by Davis-Bacon. They can come into New York City and take the contracts and go ahead and build schools there. There are a dozen ways to solve the problem, yet there seems to be a willingness to point the finger at the board of education, at the current chancellor, and to play the kind of game that city hall has played all along; in other words, poor decision-making, incompetent decision-making, decision-making by people whose motives are questionable. After all, this is a mayor who has said that the school system, the board of education, should be blown up. The best way to get better education in New York City is to destroy the board of education. If you want to take that attitude, then it would be a contradiction for you to provide money for the board of education to build schools. The mayor has been consistent. The question is why have the leaders of New York allowed him to be so consistent? Why have the members of the city council not challenged the mayor? We at one point had $3 billion; just 3 years ago we had $3 billion in surplus. New York City had a $3 billion surplus. Not a single penny of the surplus funds were used to repair schools or build schools or to do anything else for education, for that matter. So we have a situation again which has clearly been delineated by the Daily News. If you live in New York City and you are interested in education, then I urge you to read the Daily News articles. If you do not live in New York City and you want to see what big cities all over America are facing, you might want to read the same series of articles. It is a magnificent series of articles that pinpoint all of the things that have gone wrong and can go wrong and what the consequences are. Sixty percent of elementary and secondary middle school students cannot read at grade level. That is quite an indictment. Seventy percent are not proficient in math. Thirteen percent of this year's high school seniors, that is about 4,100 students, failed the math Regents test. More than 13,000 students from the class of 2000 dropped out between the 9th and the 12th grades. That is 19.5 percent of the class. Between 1996 and 1999, 30 percent of New York City students took Scholastic Aptitude Tests, a standardized exam for admission to most colleges. Seventy-three percent passed statewide and scored 40 to 50 points higher than the New York City students. Sixty percent of elementary schools and 67 percent of high schools are overcrowded. Sixty percent of elementary schools and 67 percent of high schools are overcrowded, and the board of education's master plan for the year 2003 concedes that 85 percent of the schools need major repairs. Deterioration is occurring at a rate faster than we can save the systems, the board documents revealed. I think that that physical deterioration is the best visible manifestation of what is happening in general. When you talk about meltdown, look at the physical deterioration. I quote: Deterioration in the actual school buildings is occurring at a rate faster than we can save systems, the board documents reveal. In recent years about half of public school students have completed high school in 4 years; 9 percent have graduated later, by the age of 21; and the rest have been lost completely. Is this an example, a model for where we dare go in terms of education in America? I am using the New York City school system because it is an example of where our big cities are. Now, there was a lot of praise for Chicago, and Chicago was being used as some kind of magic model for the improvement of big-city school systems. Now, I understand the tests have shown that Chicago is again in serious trouble, that there has been a lot of hype and a lot of public relations, but underneath the improvements have been minimal, and the improvements have been minimal because, again, the opportunity-to-learn standards have not been addressed sufficiently. They have not provided the kinds of quality facilities, trained teachers, adequate supplies and equipment, laboratories for science, library books and libraries. It is so simple, the opportunity-to-learn standards, but it is the area where nobody wants to engage in a discussion. Yes, we have two new pieces of legislation, one in the Senate, one in the House, which are professing to be the last word on education reform. A lot of people are already applauding the legislation before it is finalized, and before the President signs it. It is not the final word, I hope. If that is the final word, we are in serious trouble. The final word has to be dictated by the insistence of the American people out there, who have made education the number one priority for the last 5 or 6 years. When you ask the question, what should Federal dollars be used for, where is the most Federal assistance needed, education continues to score right up there with other concerns like crime and Medicare and Medicaid. Usually education is ahead of them all. So the public is way ahead of the leadership. We must run to catch up with the leadership. What is happening right now gives us an opportunity to do that. As long as the bill is being held, as long as we do not go to conference, as long as we do not have a final signature by the President, then there is room for negotiation, as long as we are dealing with the appropriation process and it is understood that the glaring inadequacy of the present education legislation is in the area of resources, there is not enough money being guaranteed. Oh, yes, the money is authorized. There is a reasonable amount authorized. If you are going to double the title I funding from the present amount to $17.2 billion in 5 years, that is a great increase. That is an increase worth voting for. But at the same time the authorizing legislation says we can do that, the appropriation and budget process says there is no money. I started by saying we have had two great legislative developments up to now in this session of Congress. One was the passage of the tax legislation, and the other was the passage of education legislation by both Houses, although the education legislation is not complete. They do relate to each other. The passage of the tax legislation has put us in a situation where, despite the fact we have authorized more money for education, and the other body, the Senate bill authorizes even more than the House bill, we cannot actually get the money and the resources unless there is a change in the appropriation process. Somehow between now and the end of this session, more money has to be found in that budget; some new device has to be developed to increase the revenue; some changes have to be made, decreases in expenditures and other areas that are less important. Somehow we have to continue to press forward and make the case that brain power is the number one need for this Nation at this time. Brain power and the pools of people produced to qualify to run a more and more complex society are at the heart of where we are going. Nothing else is going to move forward unless we have the appropriate brain power. Therefore, brain power should be number one. If budget cuts have to be made somewhere else, we should make those budget cuts, or if we have to find some new source of revenue dedicated to education, then that has to be the case. We must save our schools, not only in New York City, from a growing meltdown; but we must understand that the same process, the meltdown process, is occurring elsewhere, and only Federal funds can be utilized to stop it.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as the nation of Guyana celebrates its 35th Independence Anniversary, I would like to salute an outstanding Guyanese American, Ed Ahmad, as a Point of Light for all Americans. Ed Ahmad is a successful entrepreneur who owns and operates many businesses. He is currently the broker/owner of Century 21 Ahmad Realty, Inc. and Ace Mortgages, Inc. He is also the CEO/President of the Chateau Royale, Inc. A Guyanese immigrant, Mr. Ahmad arrived in the United States in 1983. He came in search of prosperity for himself and his family. He worked hard and obtained a Bachelor of Science Degree from The City College of New York in 1988. he is a licensed real estate broker, mortgage banker, and insurance broker. Mr. Ahmad is very versatile; he is knowledgeable in all office, data based and modern business products. He is experienced in all facets of business, from training to budgeting and advertising. His personal awards include a Gold Medallion, and Certificates of Achievement for exceptional sales in real estate. Century 21 Ahmad won first place in Queens County and was ranked third in real estate in the Northeast Division. The Chateau Royale won first place for best in design and architecture from the Queens Chamber of Commerce in 1997. Mr. Ahmad is an active participant in community and political affairs. He is the founder of the New Concept Democratic Club. He supports and donates to many community organizations. Mr. Speaker, I am proud to salute Mr. Ed Ahmad as a point of Light for all Americans.