Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I think it has been clear that the intent of the Republican majority is to eliminate the Federal role in education. They do not question, however, the ability of the White House and the Office of Management and Budget to analyze the content of legislation. I want to read from the President's letter on this bill: H.R. 1995 abolishes a dedicated funding stream for class size reduction and replaces it with a block grant that fails to guarantee that any funding will be used for hiring new teachers to reduce class size. Moreover, the block grant could be used simply to replace State or local funding instead of increasing overall investment in our public schools. If the Congress sends me H.R. 1995 in its current form, I will veto it in order to protect our Nation's commitment to smaller classes and better schools. There are some speakers who keep insisting that there is nothing wrong with the bill in terms of protecting the reduction in the classroom size initially, but definitely this leaves it wide open. It pushes the Federal priority aside and leaves the decision open for local education officials. As my colleagues know, most local education officials will seize the opportunity to spend the money as they want to spend it.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of this amendment. I urge that we consider some future request for additional funding to accomplish this. I think that we are all aware of the fact that there is a great deal of shortages in the area of information technology workers. The estimate now is that there are about 300,000 positions that are going unfilled, and that within 2 or 3 years, that number will pass a million because the number of young people who are in college now majoring in computer science is so small that it will never fill the gap. There is a need to broaden the base of the pool. Many more youngsters need to be going into computer science or pursuing an education which will place them in the information technology world somewhere. Maybe they will be placed as mechanics, maybe as technologists. Maybe they will go on to computer programming at some other level. So our teachers have to supply that pool from which we draw our future computer programmers and computer technologists and people in the schools who are teaching others how to use technology to the best effect for education. But it cannot be done unless we have some more funding. We cannot talk about it alone because the necessity to purchase the computers, the necessity to make certain that our schools are wired so they can make use of technology; all these items, we cannot ignore and expect this to happen. It costs money. We had, fortunately, a policy from the Federal Communications Commission which created the E-Rate. The E-Rate pays for the ongoing cost of using technology. It also helps to wire the poorest schools. It provides up to 90 percent of the cost for wiring the poorest schools. But they still do not supply the computers, and they cannot supply the salaries for the teachers. So we need to, again, return to the consideration of the fact that nowhere are we proposing additional funds. We are not attacking the problems of education in a 21st Century manner by understanding that they require more resources. Again, I cannot stress too much, we have a golden opportunity; the door of opportunity is open, because of the fact that there is a surplus. Other committees are talking about making demands on that surplus. We have to make demands on that surplus and say that education is an investment that ought to be made. Some portion of that surplus ought to be devoted to areas where it is expensive to operate like the area of technology. The digital divide is great. Recently a report was released by the Department of Commerce which showed that sinking further and further behind are the children in the poorest areas, because they do not have access to computers at home. The only other place we are going to be able to close the gap of the digital divide is at school. We cannot close it at school unless they have the money to buy the computers and to pay for the salaries of teachers. We need more funding to make this a reality. I think the gentleman has brought attention to the matter, and he deserves support for that reason.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, since the American public in poll after poll has indicated that Federal assistance to education is a number one priority, every major education bill which comes to the floor should come with an open rule. The opportunity to discuss education policies and programs should not be constricted and oppressed as they are in this rule. The opportunity to let the voters hear a full debate must always be encouraged. What the Republican majority is doing is supporting this antidemocratic, piecemeal approach in the hope that they will accomplish the ultimate attempt of the Republican majority to move us to a situation where the role of the Federal Government in education is abolished. They are really still pursuing the goal of abolishing the role of the Federal Government, and a block grant is their desired result. This is the second beachhead for the block grant. Ed flex was the first one. This is the second one. By eliminating the President's initiative for a reduction in classroom size, it is one more step to move the Federal Government out of education and allow for a total block grant to go to the States with the Governors having an opportunity to use the money as they see fit. This rule is crafted to limit debate, maximize confusion and vigorously promote the perverted Robin Hood mentality which will take resources concentrated in our present Federal policy toward poor schools and spread it for other purposes while authorizing no significant new funding. Our committee does not demand new funding to take care of the education needs that have been identified by the American voters. Educationally, this is a Robin Hood operating in reverse. It is going to eliminate Federal priorities, throw away accountability, and it will pilfer the money from the poor. It will take from the poorest schools where education policy presently directs money and spread it out and not provide any new resources. We have a budget surplus now. Why do we not make a demand on some portion of that surplus for education instead of robbing from the poor to take care of needs that are definitely there? We need to modernize our schools, we need to secure our schools, we need money for school construction; across the board all of the efforts to improve education are honorable, but they need resources. You do not solve the problem by taking resources from the areas where you have the greatest need. The core of the festering problem in education is in the poorest schools in rural areas and in big cities. What we are doing with this bill is moving toward a maneuver which will rob those schools in favor of spreading the money and making it appear that we have done something for education here in Washington. This is not the appropriate move. It is going to lead to a block grant where we lose Federal involvement altogether. The Federal Government is only involved to the tune of 7 to 8 percent at this point. It is not injuring schools in any way. Let us keep the Federal Government involved by protecting the President's class size initiative in this bill. Vote ``no'' on the rule. Vote ``no'' on the bill.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this amendment goes to the heart of the problem of trying to get quality teachers. We have had a series of motherhood and apple pie amendments that we all agree on. They would be good, but here is one that costs money, and the very fact that it costs money gets opposition. For every other profession, the legal profession, the medical profession, airline pilots, tremendous amounts of money are spent to train and retrain people in these professions. Lawyers make enough money, the law firms make enough money, they pay for their own training, but there is ongoing training. Doctors make enough money to pay for their training, but they are always being trained and retrained, and tremendous amounts of money go into it. Once every 10 years to give a sabbatical and pay those costs that were quoted by the chairman of the committee; that is not too much, if we are serious about achieving a pool of people where we can maintain quality. The quality problem is a problem not only of attracting new people into the teaching field, but the problem is to hold those that are already there. A person with educational credentials teaches a few years; other professions and other entrepreneurial enterprises are seeking their experiences, and large numbers of people are leaving. We are addressing the working conditions when we talk about the President's initiative on small class sizes. If we had smaller classes, a large number of the young people who have gone into teaching; at the elementary school level would not have left. Everybody knows people who have gone into teaching, elementary schoolteachers who confront a classroom full of children, 25 to 30, and in a year or so they are gone. They cannot take it anymore. There are options and they take those options. So we are addressing a serious working condition. This is an incentive. A part of the package ought to be an incentive that after 7 years, 10 years, whatever, they should be able to get the kind of training they need to keep up with some of the educational technology we talked about before, and many other changes are happening. This incentive is needed. If we want quality teachers, we should support this. We need to pay for the continuing education of quality teachers if we want them.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, today we consider a very important education bill. It is important because the Republican majority made it important. It is important because it is all that we have. In a year when we expect to be reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act, we have been denied that opportunity, but pieces of the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act have been put forward. The Ed-Flex Act is a piece of it and now this piece on Teacher Empowerment Act, H.R. 1995, which was considered today. The consideration of this bill today, which was kind of rushed to the floor and it was hoped that they would get enough votes to send a message to the White House that it cannot be successfully vetoed, but, of course, they failed in that effort. The President has promised to veto this bill because at the heart of the bill is an attempt to derail the President's initiative on more teachers for the classroom, especially in grades 1 through 3, where there is a need for smaller class sizes. We did get a bill approved, an appropriation approved last year, which would permit the beginning of the process of hiring more teachers for the classroom. Virtually 100,000 teachers would be hired under this legislation; and 30,000, the process has started as of this month. So in order to derail that for some reason the Republican majority is against smaller class sizes and they want to take away that priority, take away the targeting and they came up with this Teacher Empowerment Act, which is not a bad idea. The thrust of the bill is to provide a special initiative for the training and professional development of teachers, to improve the quality of teachers. By itself, that is a lofty goal and who could not subscribe to having better prepared teachers in our classroom? We want quality teachers; but for some reason to get quality teachers, the Republican majority chose to sacrifice the more teachers for the classroom. The act that is designed to lower the class sizes in the first three grades has to be sacrificed, put on the chopping block, in order to take care of meeting teachers' professional development needs and training needs. I think that for the Republican majority, it was more important to derail the initiative to have smaller class sizes than it is really to train teachers. The training of the teachers and the opportunities for professional development is secondary for them. They are pursuing an agenda, and this bill was a part of that agenda, to reach a point where all of the influence and direction from the Federal Government is wiped from the education sphere. They want to abolish the education role of the Federal Government and this, of course, takes them one step closer. If they can take the President's initiative on class sizes and get rid of that, it is one more step toward reducing the Federal Government's role in education. So that bill was on the floor today. The Republican majority had the greatest number of votes because they are the majority. They passed the bill, but the number of defections by Democrats was not as great as they expected and the President's threat to veto the bill certainly can hold. The bill can be vetoed until something more reasonable is done about the class size initiative of the President. There were a lot of good things in the Teacher Empowerment Act. By the way, it is called Teacher Empowerment Act; but all the teacher organizations, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Grade Schools Group, all of the various education groups opposed it because they saw it as a sabotage operation designed to wipe out the reduction of the classroom size initiative. Now, that bill was on the floor today. Tomorrow the major bill on the floor will be the tax cut bill, and I want to talk about the importance of dealing with the education initiative. The education investments should come before big spending tax cuts. Education investments should come before big spending tax cuts, and it is very important to note that during the whole discussion of the so-called Teacher Empowerment Act today, the one thing that the Republican majority refused to allow any discussion of was additional funding. No new money is involved in their initiative. They want to take the money that has already been appropriated for the class size reduction and the money that already exists in various other teacher training and professional development programs and use that in a different way, mainly throw it out there to the States, let the governors decide how they want to spend that money on education. That is the thrust of what the Republicans want to do. It takes us one step closer to their long-term objective and that is to block grant all funds available for education to the States. By block grant, I mean take away the Federal guidelines, take away the Federal priorities, take away the long-term Federal commitment to the poorest districts and the poorest schools out there. The Federal thrust in education, since 1965, since the first Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act, in the era of Lyndon Johnson, has been to focus on those areas of greatest need, to target the Federal money to help with the problem that the States were not able to deal with and chose not to deal with and that is provide a decent education for the poorest students in the poorest schools in the poorest districts. So that initiative by the Federal Government is targeted by the Republicans. They want to take it away. Their long-term goal is to wipe out the Federal Government involvement in education. In 1995, my colleagues will recall, the Newt Gingrich program went head on in a direct attack on the Department of Education. They called for the abolishment of the Department of Education. They pursued that for a while. It turned out that the American people did not think that was a good idea. The voters did not think it was a good idea. They retreated, and now we have no more talk about abolishing the Department of Education. What we have is, instead of the direct assault, we have a great deal of warfare going on where they snip away at the powers, they attack at small beachheads that they establish, and they find every way to cut into the power of the Department of Education and into the Federal role in education. The Federal role in education, of course, is already limited. They make it appear that the Federal Government is responsible for all that is wrong in education. It is a very limited role already. Less than 8 percent of the education funding in this country, that is including higher education funding, less than 8 percent of that is provided for by the Federal Government at this point. But that is what we had on the floor today, another assault on that small role, that less-than-8-percent role fiscally. If one got 8 percent of the funds involved across the country, then I think that the influence of the Federal Government is probably no more, also, than about 8 percent. Control is vested in States and local education agencies for education already. But that is targeted. First, they wanted to get rid of it all together. Now they want to block grant it and turn it over to the governments. That is what was on the floor today. No item which talked about additional funding was received in an amicable spirit by the Republican majority. In fact, the only amendment that called for fresh funds, new money, new initiative with new money was the amendment offered by the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Mrs. Mink). The gentlewoman wanted to offer grants, some help for sabbaticals for teachers. If one is talking about training, then in order to hold certain people into the career path, in order to make certain that they have an opportunity for growth, somewhere they ought to encourage and help to finance the sabbaticals which already are offered in many local education systems. It is an area that was not new, but the gentlewoman from Hawaii wanted to give more help and called for more money for that. That, of course, was voted down by a large margin and condemned by the chairman and the Republican majority. No new money is the credo of the leadership of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. The Republican majority insists that we never discuss authorizing new funding. But tomorrow, we will be discussing on the floor an expenditure of $864 billion over a 10-year period for tax cuts. We cannot talk about money when we are talking about education. No new money. The government is broke. We cannot make investments in education, but we can have big spending tax cuts. That is obvious. It is a huge, monstrous piece of big spending, $864 billion, and there is no room anywhere for an investment in education. I think my colleagues have heard the previous speaker tonight and they heard the previous set of speakers from the Democratic side talk about this tax cut. While I am not prepared and do not intend to go into it with great deal, I associate myself with most of the remarks made by the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) and his associates. Their plea was that we not go forward with this monstrous $864 billion tax cut, that we look at other kinds of things that ought to be considered at the same time. We cannot separate, in my opinion, the discussion of the tax cut, however, from the discussion of education. They did not do it. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans that talked tonight really placed education on the table for discussion. Within the parameters of the conventional wisdom here in Washington, and that sometimes includes the White House, when we talk about large amounts of money, they do not want to talk about education. It is a direct insult to the voters. We have poll after poll which shows that education ranks as one of the number one priorities over the last 5 years and recently moved to the very top. Before Social Security, before defense spending, before all of the other priorities which are usually considered, education ranked as number one. Why are the voters being ignored? I do not know. They can ask their Congressman. Why is it that, when my colleagues discuss education, they insist that they cannot discuss new money? Additional resources. Why is it that the American public repeatedly says, we would like to see more Federal assistance for education, but they are only answered with rhetoric about new kinds of changes in the reform programs, but none of those new changes have any resources behind them? With the acknowledgment of the existence of a huge budget surplus, and I do not want to get into an argument about how much the surplus is or what it is going to be over the next 10 years, I just know that it is foolish for us laymen who are not involved directly in the calculation process to sit still and watch our leaders talk about huge sums of money that they are going to negotiate on and we question whether it really exists. I have some friends who went to a meeting today to hear someone lecture about the fact that there really is no budget surplus, and we should stop discussing it. I heard that, in 1996, when we were on the eve of an election, and we had gone through 2 years of the Republican majority insisting, not only that there was no money for an increase in funding for education, but that education should be cut, and we had proposals in 1995 that education be cut by almost $4 billion, but, in 1996, something miraculous happened. Both parties agreed in the negotiations at the White House that there was additional money available somewhere, and instead of cutting education by $4 billion, because we were approaching an election where the polls showed that the public wanted more Federal assistance for education, and the party that stood in the way might suffer and might lose seats, suddenly there was agreement. The Republican majority agreed to an increase in education funding of $4 billion. Instead of a $4 billion cut, we got a $4 billion increase. They found the money somewhere. Now, I remember the argument at the time was that we would get the money from sales of the spectrum, the spectrum auctioning. The auctioning of the spectrum was going to create that money. It was not in hand. But since both parties of the negotiation agreed, it suddenly became a reality. The $4 billion that was appropriated, it has been spent. Since 1996, they have been spending the money. So I assume that whatever assumptions they made, they lived up to those assumptions one way or the other. I have not checked to see if we have auctioned off enough of the spectrum to add up to $4 billion, but when it came time to make the decision, the reality was what the two parties agreed upon. If both the White House and the Republican majority leaders are saying now that we have a huge surplus that could accommodate, over the next 10 years, an $864 billion Republican tax cut, and the President has said, well, he will entertain some kind of tax cut, not that much, I assume the surplus is real, and the tax cut possibilities are real, and they are going to go forward. It would be ridiculous for us to sit out the process and not get involved. Education ought to be put on the table so that it becomes a part of the discussion. The doors of opportunity are open for education to be discussed in terms of new resources and new appropriations. If the blind men who are in charge here insist that they do not see that as a possibility, some of us who are not in charge must sound the alarm. We must tell the American people, do not sit still and accept a big spending tax cut while there is no new investment in education. I hope that my party will rally behind me soon and that they will see the folly of allowing a huge amount of surplus over the next 10 years to get committed to something, and it is going to happen. There are going to be some commitments of that surplus over the next 10 years. We sit still, and we let education be left out. At this point, the forecast for education being included is quite dismal. We have a bill which has been set forth by the administration for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act. In their reauthorization proposals, they do not propose any great increases in the funding for the ongoing programs. In fact, there is sort of an understanding that we are going to live within certain budget guidelines. There are ceilings that have been set. The budget caps, as they call them, will not be taken off. That may all be true in conventional wisdom, but if the surplus exists, it is folly to assume that they will not in the final analysis be negotiations of some part of the surplus being committed to programs. Certainly, it would be folly to sit still and not commit any part of the surplus to programs and let it all be used for big spending tax cuts. The forecast for education right now may be dismal; but if we put on our thinking caps, if we sound the alarm for the general public, the people who in, poll after poll, show that they think education is important, if we let common sense enter into this matter, then we can go forward beyond the Republican plot to have Ed-Flex and Teacher Empowerment and other kinds of block granting drain off the funds, and we would not make any progress in terms of new resources for education. There have been some dramatic changes now in the fiscal environment. Those people who said there was no money available 2 months ago cannot insist that there is no money available now in light of the facts that have been revealed. Even the budget agencies, the Congressional Budget Office, they all admit there is a surplus. There is an argument about how much of the surplus is from Social Security funds and ought to be reserved only for Social Security, the lock box theory. There is an argument that there are certain amounts of money available and will be available beyond the Social Security surplus and that that should be budgeted. Either way, either set of assumptions that are accepted, there is an acceptance of the fact there is going to be additional money available. Why not put education on the table? Why must we accept what the Republican majority has offered us on the Committee on Education and the Workforce and on the floor today? What they offered us today was a perverted Robin Hood operation. They were going to take only existing funds and scramble them and use them for other purposes instead of having any new funding. When they do that, what they are doing is taking money away from the traditionally targeted programs, which are designed to help the poorest students in our poorest schools, and redirect that money away from the poorest schools, stealing, pilfering from the poor to take care of other sectors, and making that the hallmark of their education reform program. Going to the public and saying this is our answer to their request or their demand for more Federal assistance. We give them the same money in new forms, and we hope that they will be fooled by it. But I hope that common sense will not allow us to be fooled, that we will insist that education appropriations be put on the table alongside any tax cut spending, alongside any spending for shoring up Social Security, alongside spending for health care. Probably there is going to be a package which contains all of those elements. Now, on May 26, I introduced a bill which deals with one aspect of education which I think is critical. In the light of the large amounts of money that were being made available in the surplus, now is the time to discuss it. Not all the problems of education will be solved by new construction and modernization of our schools, although that was on the agenda today. We did discuss the need for more technology in our schools and the need for teachers to be trained to utilize technology and how important that was. It, the modernization process, requires that we have money to repair the schools and take care of the old wiring and make certain that they can be wired. In some cases, some schools cannot be rewired. They are going to have to build new schools. So construction and modernization ought to be a part of this agenda. It was totally ruled out before because of the budget caps. And if we take the ongoing budget as it is, common sense and conventional wisdom says there is just no money. But if we accept the fact that there is going to be a surplus, and we talk about large amounts of money, like $864 billion for a tax cut, then we can also talk about taking this opportunity to plan to spend over the next 10 years, or 5 or 10 years, money that is necessary to provide adequate schools, safe schools, schools where there are no health hazards, as well as schools that can be modernized to the point where they can make use of modern technology. Schools can take advantage of the fact that we have an E-rate, which provides a reduced rate for people who make use of technology on an ongoing basis. The on-line services, the telephone services, 90 percent of that in the poorest of schools would be paid through this E-rate fund provided by the Federal Communications Commission. A lot of things are happening that we need to catch up with by providing more funds for construction and for modernization. Now, on May 26 I called on my colleagues to join me in the cosponsorship of H.R. 1820, which is an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act. And this amendment would be germane certainly, because there is already a provision, Title 12, under the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act, which calls for money for repairs and construction. So we can add, if we ever get around to reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act, we can certainly add that to the package. Or if we do not get around to reauthorizing the entire act, it is in the law. It is the law right now. We can amend it to provide for this injection of necessary funding for school construction. I am just going to read from my own letter to my colleagues, and I have a big heading on top which says that, ``In the Year 2000 We Launch the March Towards a New Cybercivilization. We are spending $218 billion on highways and roads in 6 years. Let us invest half this amount, $110 billion, in 5 years, to build, repair and modernize schools.'' Let me repeat that. ``In the Year 2000 We Launch the March Toward a New Cybercivilization.'' A cybercivilization, meaning the digital world is taking over. The computers are taking over. They are everywhere, infused in our life, and they are probably going to have a greater influence and a greater presence in our lives as we move on. Recently, there was a lot of discussion of the fact that one individual now, his net worth is $100 billion. This tops all the millionaires and billionaires throughout American history. The name of that individual is Bill Gates. Now, Bill Gates is worth, they say, at least $100 billion, and his company is worth far more. Now, Bill Gates does not own any gold mines, he does not own any oil wells, he does not own any uranium mines. All the kinds of things that used to make people rich are not associated at all with Bill Gates. What does Bill Gates have that allows him to accumulate $100 billion as an individual and a company worth far more than that, Microsoft? Well, Bill Gates is where he is and has the kind of gigantic assets that he has through the application of brainpower. It is all about the brains that were used to develop the software in harmony with the computers and then to capitalize on the Internet. He has been accused of some unscrupulous actions and so forth, but that is irrelevant in terms of the basic thrust of what happened here. What happened here is that brainpower, marshaled repeatedly, directed, concentrated on certain objectives produced results. And the same thing is happening over and over again in numerous high-tech companies. We are ahead of the rest of the world because we did not have any central committees making rules which said that we can only focus our brainpower on natural resources. We are only going to concentrate on mining and oil wells and so forth. People who had the know-how to launch the cyberrevolution went ahead and launched it, very young people who are in charge. The guys who used to be called nerds, or probably similar people are still called nerds in high school and college, the nerds triumphed with brainpower. It is all about very educated people concentrating their resources and being able to generate wealth. So there is a direct association between brainpower and wealth. We are definitely moving into a cybercivilization, and it is ridiculous for us not to recognize that and to shape our public policy in a way which accommodates the fact that we are moving into a cybercivilization. There are some nations, like India, who recognize this. And public policy has produced in India large amounts of people, personnel, who are in the computer programming arena, who are in various stages as computer programmers and document technologists. Out of proportion to other similarly situated nations, India is producing people in the area of information technology with information technology expertise. But let me just get back to the appeal to my colleagues that I sent out on May 26. ``In the year 2000 we launch the march toward a new cybercivilization. We are spending $218 billion on highways and roads in 6 years. Let us invest half this amount, $110 billion, in 5 years to build, repair and modernize schools. Please join me as a cosponsor for H.R. 1820, an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act which mandates a worthy Federal investment in education for the children of America. ``Public opinion polls consistently show that our voters consider Federal aid to education as the Nation's number one priority. We must now move beyond paltry pilot projects in our response to this long-term public outcry. H.R. 1820 commits the Federal Government to make the contribution most suitable to its role. ``Through direct appropriations we must make capital investments in school infrastructures, offer leadership in the building of schools, and then leave the details of the day-to-day operations to local and State authorities.'' I have no problem with local and State authorities being in charge of the implementation, but the resources need to come from the Federal Government because most States and local governments cannot commit the kind of resources necessary to modernize our school systems the way they should be. ``H.R. 1820 proposes to help all schools by authorizing, on the basis of school-aged children, a per capita distribution of the allocations for the purposes of modernization. Security, by the way, should be added, repair, technology and renovations, as well as new school construction. ``H.R. 1820 deserves national priority consideration for the following reasons: One, the best protection for Social Security is an educated workforce, able to qualify for high-tech jobs and steadily pay dollars into the Social Security Trust Fund. ``Two, the effective performance of our military in action, utilizing high-tech weaponry, requires an educated pool of recruits. ``Three, the U.S. economy will continue to be the pace setter for the globe only if we maintain a steady flow of qualified brainpower and updated know-how at all performance levels, theoretical, scientific, technical and mechanical. ``Invest in education and all other national goals become reachable.'' Invest in education and all other national goals become reachable. Invest in education and we have a great possibility, a greater possibility. I do not think Social Security is about to go bankrupt. There are a lot of scare tactics applied to discussions of where Social Security funds are now and where they will be 50 years from now. But one way to assure that Social Security funding will be there is to have a workforce out there paying into the Social Security fund. Whatever else we do, and I do not rule out having general appropriations for Social Security, but whatever else we do, we should keep the payment of funds into the Social Security treasury from working people, people who are working. And if we do not have people who can qualify for the jobs that are going to be available 20, 30, 40 years from now, if we do not have people that have the know-how to do the high-tech jobs, the likelihood is that we are going to contract out a lot of our work to other countries that do have the population and the workforce with the know- how, and they are going to pay money into their Social Security fund, and we will have our Social Security fund deprived of the payment by workers into the fund. That is the first source. So the best protection for Social Security is an educated workforce. We ought to have a discussion of education on the table when we consider what to do with the huge surplus that is anticipated over the next 10 years. Instead of being a projected $864 billion in tax expenditures, we should say some portion of that money should go for education. In this particular piece of legislation, the bill I have introduced, I only want $110 billion out of the total that is projected. Even if we have to take the $110 billion away from the tax expenditures, that is $110 billion from $864 billion. The parameters for the discussion have been set by the majority party. They have said we can talk big money, we can talk in billions, we can talk $864 billion, so let us use that as a reference point and say why spend on tax cuts the full $864 billion? Let us negotiate at least $110 billion over a 5-year period to build schools and to modernize schools. Invest in education. There may be additional money we will want to invest in whole school reform, which, despite the fact that the authorizing Committee on Education and the Workforce did not come up with the program for whole school reform, we get high praise for some of the whole school reform efforts that are going forward. There are many other places where we may need some investment in education, but a large capital expenditure is needed for school construction and modernization. And a capital expenditure of this kind is only a one-time expenditure. It is not something we would saddle the budget with forever. It would not be ongoing. We would take care of the problem, we would invest in building schools, and then we will have a result from that investment, a return on that investment later on. I think any businessman, if he had a surplus and there was clearly identified needs in the area of capital investments, would make those investments in order to be able to realize that return in the future. The General Accounting Office told us in 1995 that we needed $112 billion at that time. That was 4 years ago. We needed $112 billion just to keep the infrastructure at a level which would accommodate the amount of schoolchildren attending school at that time. We now have many more children attending school. I think we have close to 53 million children out there in schools, and what I have just projected, an expenditure of $110 billion over a 5-year period, would be only an expenditure of $416 per year per school-aged child. An expenditure of $416 per child per year over a 5-year period. So we are talking about a relatively small amount of money to invest in education and guaranty the workforce that we need for tomorrow. And that is an appeal I made to my colleagues on May 26 to cosponsor. And I recently developed another appeal in light of the changed circumstances; that we now know that there definitely is additional money available. I projected it before and I said we should get ready for it and we should put on the table a reasonable package which includes school construction. I am all for the President's call for an expenditure of a part of the surplus on Medicare. I am all for his call of an expenditure of the bulk of the surplus on shoring up Social Security. I am not against that, but I think it is a great mistake, a great blunder by both Democrats and Republicans not to put education on the table and make it part of the package. But circumstances recently have changed so favorably until I do not see how we can ignore the great window of opportunity that is now open. So I prepared another letter which I have not sent out yet, I will send it out tomorrow, I start with the following heading. ``Democrats must respond to the overwhelming change in the fiscal surplus negotiating environment.'' I repeat. ``Democrats must respond to the overwhelming change in the fiscal surplus negotiating environment.'' ``Republicans have now ratcheted up their demands for a mega-billion- dollar tax cut. The Democratic President has now indicated that he will entertain a tax cut at some level.'' So it is definitely on the table. ``Missing from the end game negotiating table is a Democratic scenario for school construction and modernization.'' At this moment, that is not on the table. None of the speakers tonight have talked about education being part of the mix. I heard discussions of defense, additional expenditures for defense that ought to come out of the surplus and a few other items, but no one talked about education although education if you want to consider the national security of the country as being important, the first item you ought to look at is the quality of our education, including such practical and immediate problems as the workforce required by the military. The military requires recruits that are highly educated, people who must have had enough prerequisite education in order to be able to go into the military and learn how to deal with a high-tech military, high-tech equipment, procedures, et cetera. You need well-trained people in the military as much as you need them in the area of information technology. So the first step toward shoring up our military should not be new expenditures for equipment like aircraft carriers and B-2 bombers and smart bombs but to make certain that the people who guide those smart bombs and who prepare the maps and the intelligence before you drop the bombs do not make a mistake of the kind we made with the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. Or you have people who are smart enough with their high-tech equipment not to be fooled the way we were fooled with the Yugoslav dummy equipment, wooden weapons and all kinds of things that made us believe that we were bombing their military into ineffectiveness when actually we were hitting very little of their military equipment. I do not know why we fell for that trick because we pulled that on Hitler when we were projecting openly exposing equipment in the south of France to make it appear that we were going to launch an invasion of the mainland of Europe from the south, toward the south of France, instead of at Normandy, and the Germans fell for that and we are proud of the fact that we pulled that off. Why we would let Yugoslavia pull the same kind of trick on us with respect to equipment that we thought we were bombing, I do not know, but it points up the need to have better training and a better educated military, set of military personnel from the bottom to the top. Let me continue. As I said before, ``Missing from the end game negotiating table is a Democratic scenario for school construction and modernization. H.R. 1820, an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act, authorizes a direct appropriation which is only one-half the amount authorized and appropriated for transportation. Not $218 billion but $110 billion, or $416 per child per year for 5 years. All of the Democratic proposals for school reform and education are worthy, but nothing proposed is equal to the number one priority ranking that the voters have assigned to education. A construction and modernization initiative of this kind fills the vacuum.'' This kind of initiative is a response worthy of what the voters have demanded. In poll after poll, you have said education should get more assistance from the Federal Government. You do not want to hear an answer that we are going to have a Teacher Empowerment Act which takes old funds away from poor schools and redirects them, spreading them out over the whole country to train teachers better but no new funds are going to be allocated. You do not want to hear that kind of response to an overwhelming demand that the Federal Government play a greater role in providing assistance to education. Here is a response worthy of it. Lay these responses alongside of the $218 billion that we approved for highway and transportation last year, $218 billion over a 6-year period. That is about 50 some billion dollars a year for the next 6 years. We approved that. The authorization committee came forward with it. It was not the Appropriations Committee. The Appropriations Committee was driven by the energy of the authorizing committee. Today we had the authorizing committee, Education and the Workforce, refusing to even ask for additional funding and take to the Appropriations Committee the priorities that have been set by the American people. So we are asking for a worthy response, $110 billion over 5 years. Lay that aside the highway and transportation bill of $218 billion over 6 years and then lay that aside of the new request from the Republican majority for $864 billion over 10 years. If you get dizzy considering billions of dollars, I can understand but at least let us look at the comparisons and understand the framework in which we are operating. I have had people say to me, ``When you talk about $22 billion a year for school construction over a 5-year period which all adds up to $110 billion over 5 years, that is mind-boggling.'' It may be mind-boggling, but we live in a mind-boggling era and we are a country of more than 250 million people. There are more than 16,000 school districts out there, and there are 53 million children out there. When you look at the number of children and you look at the amount spent per child, we are talking about $416 per child per year. Maybe that can help you understand the mind-boggling figure of $22 billion per year over a 5- year period which adds up to $110 billion. And then lay the $110 billion alongside $218 billion for highways, lay that alongside $864 billion for a tax cut, and you are able to comprehend maybe what is going on in Washington. Do you want to stand by and let your government leaders make the blunder of a tax cut expenditure of $864 billion while schools receive zero from a surplus that does exist, or we assume exists? Democrats risk also being upstaged on this because I do not think the majority party is as dumb as some people consider it to be and I do not think this whole process is going to go forward without the majority party waking up to the fact that the people out there are still demanding that the Federal Government do more for education. Between now and the next election in the year 2000, I expect some movement on the part of the majority party, and I hope the Democrats are not going to be victimized by an October surprise like the one we had in October of 1996 when the Republicans agreed to an increase in education funding of $4 billion. After the Republicans had gone for a period from 1994 to the fall of 1996 calling for the abolishment of the Department of Education, wanting to cut school lunches, they attacked education vigorously, they cut Head Start, they cut title I, they went into 1995 and shut down the government because the President would not agree to those kinds of cuts, after all that had happened, in the fall of 1996 they decided to appropriate $4 billion more for education and they went out and told the public, ``We are the party which supports education.'' And they had enough people to believe that to win back the majority. I am convinced that that was a major item, a major part of their winning in 1996. ``Democratic refusal to support a meaningful dollar investment in school construction and modernization could weaken our ties to our labor allies and leave open an opportunity for Republicans to capture more labor union support.'' I have talked before about the way we treat the working people in this country. People look at requests for new money for education, for items like school construction or items like whole school reform or any items related to education, they look at it and say, ``Well, that's for minorities, that's for people in the inner cities,'' but most of the working families in this country cannot afford to send their children to private schools. So we are talking about the public school system. And a refusal to direct funding into school building repair and modernization is an abandonment of the public school system and working families are out there who are going to suffer as a result. ``We cannot emphasize too much the fact that the fiscal negotiating environment has undergone a rapid, almost revolutionary sea-change since the announcement of the long-term multi-trillion dollar surplus. To adapt to this change and at the same time respond to the number one priority of the voters, we urge you to review your position on H.R. 1820 and sign up for cosponsorship now.'' I am trying to get this new letter out. I have some sponsors that we did not have before. The minority whip the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior) now is a cosponsor of this bill. The gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) on the Appropriations Committee is a cosponsor. We hope that we can have new momentum that will be generated among those skeptical Democrats who did not want to be associated with an appropriation figure which seemed unreal. It is not unreal anymore. I hope I do not have to repeat why it is not unreal. I think that every one of my colleagues, Republican or Democrat, can see that $110 billion alongside $864 billion is not an unreal projection of what should be available for school construction. Now, one final specific item about this particular bill, H.R. 1820. We propose to appropriate the money on the basis of the number of school aged children in each State. This is a bill that would not be targeted, means-tested and that the utilization of it would have great flexibility for security purposes, for repair, for modernization, for technology, for construction, for renovation. There would be great flexibility and it would be appropriated according to the number of school aged children. If you look at it in terms of the blanket call for $110 billion, it may seem kind of irrelevant to you, but let us look at what each State will get if you take the number of school aged children projected for that State for this year and you apply that to the formula. Alabama would receive $341 million for school construction per year. This is the first year. Each year for 5 years, Alabama would receive $340 million. California would receive $2.7 billion a year for 5 years. Florida would receive $1.1 billion. Hawaii, $92 million. Iowa, $233 million. It would be money which is real enough to deal with the problem that the General Accounting Office has cited. We are talking about expenditures which would make a big difference in terms of school construction and school modernization and repair, et cetera. We are talking about an investment in education which would be a capital investment, the value over 30, 40, 50 years, versus the $864 billion projected for a tax cut expenditure over a 10-year period. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record these two items, my Dear Colleague letter of May 26, 1999, and my Dear Colleague letter of July 14, 1999 in their entirety: In the Year 2000 We Launch the March Toward a New Cybercivilization--We Are Spending 218 Billion Dollars on Highways and Roads in Six Years let us invest half this amount--110 billion--in five years to build, repair and modernize schools Dear Colleague: Please join me as a co-sponsor for H.R. 1820, an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act which mandates a worthy federal investment in education for the children of America. Pubic opinion polls consistently show that our voters consider Federal Aid to Education as the nation's number one priority. We must now move beyond paltry pilot projects in our response to this long-term public outcry. H.R. 1820 commits the Federal government to make the contribution most suitable to its role. Through direct appropriations we must make capital investments in the school infrastructures. Offer leadership in the building of schools and then leave the details of the day to day operations to local and state authorities. H.R. 1820 proposes to help all schools by authorizing a per capita (on the basis of school age children) distribution of the allocations for the purposes of modernization, security, repair, technology and renovations as well as new school construction. H.R. 1820 deserves national priority consideration for the following reasons: The best protection for Social Security is an educated work force able to qualify for hi-tech jobs and steadily pay dollars into the Social Security Trust Fund. The effective performance of our military in action utilizing hi-tech weaponry requires an educated pool of recruits. The U.S. economy will continue to be the pace setter for the globe only if we maintain a steady flow of qualified brainpower and updated know-how at all performance levels-- theoretical, scientific, technical and mechanical. Invest in education and all other national goals become reachable.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, progress for African trade and growth can never take place unless there is first a recognition that Africa has as much promise as any other region in respect to long-term trade and commerce possibilities. Developing economies in Africa are natural markets for U.S. products and services. Recognition of Africa as a significant part of the global economy is long overdue. One of the principles advocated by the great radical organizer Saul Alinsky was that an aggrieved, neglected or oppressed group or nation must first command recognition before hope for progress can be ignited. For the 17 years that I have been in Congress, there has been no significant attention focused on African trade. Like many of my colleagues, I am the cosponsor of several additional measures related to Africa. Unfortunately, other than the foreign aid appropriations, this bill is probably the only African relevant bill that will reach the floor of the House in the 106th Congress. Let me note the fact that some have charged that this legislation is as devastating as NAFTA. Nothing could be further from the truth. I urge the full support for this landmark piece of legislation. Progress for African trade and growth can never take place unless there is first recognition that Africa has as much promise as any other region with respect to long-term trade and commerce possibilities. Developing economies in Africa are natural markets for U.S. products and services. Recognition of Africa as a significant part of the global economy is long overdue. One of the principles advocated by the great radical organizer, Saul Alinsky, was that an aggrieved, neglected, or oppressed group or nation must first command recognition before the hope for progress can be ignited. For the seventeen years that I have been in Congress there has been no significant attention focused on African trade. This long overdue bill stands alone--and despite its imperfections and incompleteness, this legislation deserves our full support. Hope for Africa begins with today's recognition of Africa as a deserving trade partner. Like many of my colleagues I am the co-sponsor of several additional measures related to Africa. Unfortunately, other than the foreign aid appropriations, this bill is probably the only Africa relevant bill that will reach the floor of the House in the 106th Congress. Let me also note the fact that some have charged that this legislation is as devastating as NAFTA. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the much highlighted textile industry the Sub-Saharan African countries have less than one percent. On the other hand, China has almost 10 percent of the U.S. textile market. In the seventeen years that I have served on the Education and Labor Committee no union has yet complained to me about losing textile industry jobs to China. Just transfer one percent of the textile trade from China to Africa and you will do nothing to hurt American jobs--you merely maintain the status quo. Why are the same people who are yelling about trade with the infant economies of Africa so wimpish or silent on trade with China. In the final analysis we have a problem here similar to the one faced by King Solomon when two women claiming to be the mother of one baby came before him. There are some who are proclaiming that, never mind the pleas of the African leaders, it would be better to vote this bill down and do nothing for Africa. Following the wisdom of King Solomon, it is clear that these negative opponents do not understand what is best for Africa. I urge a yes vote on this landmark legislation.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor Reverend Booker T. McCollum, an individual who has tirelessly dedicated his life to making society better. This individual has made a lifetime commitment to the church and to the community. His vision, generosity, and devotion have empowered Reverend McCollum to not only spread the word of God but to uplift all those he has encountered. Reverend Booker T. McCollum is a great ``Point-of-Light'' whose work has not gone unappreciated or unnoticed. Although his roots are in Mississippi, Reverend McCollum began his ministry in Brooklyn, NY. After relocating to New York, he joined the Friendship Baptist Church in Brooklyn and faithfully served as assistant church clerk, chairman of the trustees and deacon boards, and later as assistant to the pastor. In 1964, Reverend McCollum accepted the call to preach. By 1966, the reverend became an ordained and licensed Baptist minister. He continued to work diligently at the Friendship Baptist Church until he was moved by God to pursue his vision of starting a new church mission. The vision would materialize as the St. Anthony Baptist Church located at 425 Utica Avenue, Brooklyn, NY. Reverend McCollum adopted the philosophy: ``St. Anthony Baptist Church is the church where everybody is somebody and God is over all and where there are no big I's and little U's.'' This philosophy has helped what was once a gathering of a few faithful members at the home of Mr. & Mrs. James Parker become a pillar in the Brooklyn community. Reverend McCollum was educated at Cornell Labor College of Law and the Baptist Education Center. His professional career includes employment with The United Furniture Workers Labor Union, Local 140 where he held the position of secretary/treasurer. He served in a religious capacity as president of the Evangelical Minister's Union, and he is the recipient of countless awards and citations. In addition to serving God and his community, Reverend McCollum served his country with distinction in the U.S. Navy. Reverend Booker T. McCollum married ``Grace Barnes'' in 1943. There were happily married for more than 50 years and had three children: David, Gloria and Russell. His distinguished life marks one of dedication to community, to God, and to family. Reverend McCollum is a great ``Point of Light,'' not only for people of his New York community, but for all of the people of America.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, recent violent developments in Kashmir, the disputed territory between Pakistan and India, have highlighted a very dangerous blunder of neglect in U.S. and international diplomacy. The failure of the world community under the auspices of the United Nations to demand a self-determination referendum for Kashmir has resulted in a festering stalemate with very serious potential consequences for that region and the entire Earth which would have to absorb radioactive contamination from any full scale war between two recently declared nuclear powers. Now, before the temperature rises any further, it is imperative that we maximize the effort to achieve a nonviolent solution to this crisis that has persisted for much too long. The honorable and civilized solution is a very simple one. Let the people of Kashmir vote to determine their own destiny. Pressure both Pakistan and India to allow for a Democratic solution, the ballot box and not the gun--or nuclear bombs. It is a well-known fact that India refused to accept a self- determining referendum. The nation that has proclaimed itself as the world's largest democracy has doggedly refused to permit the Kashmir people to vote. To placate India it has been proposed that a referendum be held which does not offer the option for Kashmir to become a part of Pakistan. A vote would be for statehood within India or for an independent Kashmir nation. The speculation is that Indian officials fear that the predominantly Muslim population of Kashmir will not vote to become a state within the predominantly Hindu nation of India. It would indeed be ignoble for the international community to allow India to continue with this inhumane, anti-democratic stranglehold on Kashmir because it fears the outcome of a vote for self-determination. A studied neglect of the Kashmir question by the world powers is no longer possible. The recent outbreak of warfare demonstrates the impossibility of the two nations of India and Pakistan ever resolving the issue through bilateral negotiations. The Chinese who have borders with both countries and a direct involvement in the Kashmir dispute will also not be very helpful in resolving the conflict. The problem of Kashmir must be immediately placed on the high priority agenda of the United Nations Security Council. Surely the Kosovo tragedy has shown the citizens of the world who are not indifferent to human suffering that the failure to pursue aggressive nonviolent actions and intense diplomacy will result in an inevitable catastrophe.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, abolishing the Federal role in education will produce a long-term monumental disaster for this country. I open with that statement to make it clear what I want to talk about tonight. Abolishing the Federal role in education would produce a long-term monumental disaster for this country. I want to make it clear what I am speaking about because I have had a couple of people, interns in my office and constituents, say that I ramble a bit, and they are not sure what my basic subject is about because of my examples that are far-reaching, et cetera. It is about education. I am here to talk about education again because it is important that we not allow education to get off of the radar screens of the people who make decisions here in Washington. Members of Congress and the White House must understand that it is a subject that the voters have indicated in poll after poll that they consider to be the number one priority. They want the Federal government to do more in the area of aid to education. That is a priority, and they are on target. The common sense of the voting public is more on target than the priority-setting here in Congress. Education is the number one priority. The reaction of the political leadership here in this city, in Washington, has been not to deal with education in a straightforward way which recognizes the need to provide more resources for education. No, instead we are avoiding the issue with rhetoric and trickery. I am here tonight because the latest active trickery deserves immediate exposure. On Tuesday, June 22, the Republican majority, and this includes the majority in both Houses, let it be known what their basic thrust is going to be with respect to education. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act per se has been put on the back burner, but it is being preempted by an obvious assault on the Federal role in the process of education. The same Republicans who came to power in 1995 and said they wanted to abolish the Department of Education are now pursuing that same goal through a different route. They have found that the American people did not approve of a frontal assault on education which talked about abolishing the Department of Education. That was unacceptable. Instead of a frontal assault, now we are going through a different route, through the back door, and waging guerilla warfare against the Federal role in education. On Tuesday, June 22, Republican leaders, and I am reading from an article in the New York Times, page A-18, Tuesday, June 22, ``Republican leaders in Congress today unveiled an education bill that builds significantly on their previous efforts to give State and local governments even broader discretion over the spending of Federal money.'' I appreciate the wisdom of the writer of this article, Mr. Frank Bruno. He starts out with an indication of exactly what is happening: ``It builds significantly on their previous efforts to give State and local governments even broader discretion over the spending of Federal money.'' The article continues, ``Under the proposal, a State could opt out of the current Federal financing system which allocates money for specific purposes and instead use most of that Federal aid as it wishes, provided that the State first enters into a 5-year contract with the Department of Education that holds the State to certain performance goals.'' The trickery here is that this proposal follows the same course as the Welfare Reform Act, where there were supposed to be contracts and specific plans made, and most States have reneged on their contracts already. The Federal government seems to be paralyzed and unable to monitor them properly or to enforce those welfare reform agreements. Now we propose to follow the same course with education. The same people who wanted to abolish education in 1995 are not saying we should abolish the Department of Education, but instead take all the money, give it to the States, and let the Department of Education monitor it. However, we will hear them shortly after that saying that the Department of Education is a swollen bureaucracy, and therefore, we should cut the administrative costs by cutting the size of the Department of Education. The staff to monitor these programs I assure the Members in a few years, they will not be around at all. Right now they are all too few. Continuing in the New York Times article, ``The plan, which would apply to more than $10 billion in Federal money nationally, faces an uncertain fate. There is not yet a timetable for its procession to the floor of either the House and Senate, and Democrats in both chambers denounced it as a reckless experiment.'' The Democrats who have been quoted are the same Democrats who voted against the Ed-Flex bill, which is the forerunner for this present, broader block grant approach. The Ed-Flex bill was taking a portion of the existing Federal funds and allowing States to use that as they saw fit. That was quite popular and a large number of Democrats voted for it. My fear is that despite the recklessness of this and the extremism involved here, large numbers of Democrats are going to be caught sleeping, and the idea is going to look very attractive when the Governor calls and the State Department of Education people call and say, yes, we would like maximum flexibility. Give it to us. They will have an immediate targeted approach to the Members of Congress while the public is still out there wandering in confusion about the meaning of this kind of flexibility. The meaning of this kind of flexibility is that the States, which have traditionally and presently always had the power to forge education policy to improve schools and to get better results, the States that have failed to keep our education systems up to par and promote the kinds of education systems which are able to keep up with a world that is rapidly moving towards a cyber civilization, demanding more and more education of workers, a high-tech civilization where those who do not have a first-rate education will find it difficult to find employment, the States have failed to do that, and they have had 93 percent of the responsibility. In another part of the same article they point out, the writer, Mr. Bruno points out the fact that ``Overall, the Federal government provides only about 7 percent of the education budget.'' I cannot emphasize this fact too much, because the core of Republican propaganda about education insists that education has been ruined by Federal intervention. The Federal government intervenes to the tune of 7 percent of the total allocation, the total appropriation for education. The States and the local governments are responsible for the rest, 93 percent. They have 93 percent of the funding authority and responsibility. They have 93 percent of the control. So this preoccupation with grabbing the 7 percent from the Federal government has no basis in any rational philosophy of trying to improve education. It is just a grab for more money, and it is an extremist act. It is extreme because it will push the Federal government completely out of the process of trying to improve our schools and to reform education. This is the last big amount of money the Federal government has invested, or the only significant amount it has invested to date. So if we push the Federal government out, then we only have the States left, and we have an extreme system. Our system already is weighted in terms of local control and State control. Unlike any other industrial democracy or industrial Nation, democracy or otherwise, we have decentralized policy-making, decentralized control of our education system. We are way at the other end of the spectrum from those nations that have total control in a central education ministry like Japan and France, and Great Britain has decentralized to a great extent. Basically all of the European countries have strong central roles for the development of education policies and practices and procedures, enforcement of accountability, et cetera. We have always been out there as the most decentralized system, and we are not apologetic about that. There is a lot to say about the American decentralized approaches to education. It started with Thomas Jefferson opposing a central national university, but he was the first to establish a university at the State level, and many other States followed suit. The Morrill Act created land grant colleges in all the States, and we have had a decentralized system in terms of elementary and secondary education as well as higher education for the life of this Republic. However, there are weaknesses in a system which is so extreme that it only involves the States and local governments. We discovered those weaknesses in a big way in World War II, and even more so later on when the Russians challenged us in the scientific race for new high-tech weaponry and the race into space, et cetera. The Russian challenge led to a great intervention by the Federal government in the form of incentives and new ways to stimulate science education, math and science education in our local schools. The involvement of the Federal government has been there to some degree since then. Later on under Lyndon Johnson, of course, we created the Title I program, which seeks to provide greater aid for the poorest school districts, the poorest schools in the poorest school districts in the country. But total involvement, even after the Federal intervention, is minuscule compared to the involvement of other Nations in terms of their central government involvement with education. So we have a system which is at one extreme already. We are going to make it even more extreme by pushing the Federal Government totally out of the process. There is a great deal to be said about the present involvement in the Federal Government. I think it is far too little. It should be more. But even if we increase the Federal appropriations from 7 percent of the total to 25 percent of the total, we still would only have a minor role, a secondary role being played by the Federal Government. The States and localities would have 75 percent of the control. That would be a greater balance. The check and balance approach that we have found very useful in our overall national government, the check and balance approach is good in a number of different kinds of activities and enterprises, the check and balance approach where one does have some participation by another body to help to sort of balance off the kind of extremes that are negative on one side at the same time not take over and not smuggle the process. We need a check and balance of the Federal Government with respect to the State and local governments on education. There is nothing negative about having some ideas and some initiatives, innovations, research, statistics gathering, comparative analyses, sharing of information from one State to another, a number of things that the Federal Government does and does very well that it will not be able to do if it is pushed out of the process. It has to have a role which is significant, and the fact that it actually makes funds available to States and local governments gives it a role of some significance, however minor it may be. But to totally eliminate that is extremism. It is the kind of Republican extremism we heard in 1995. It is just more subtle now. Instead of screaming that we should abolish the Department of Education, they now propose a rational reallocation of the dollars that the Federal Government provides for education. It is like Marie Antoinette, when they said they have no bread, the poor have no bread, she said let them eat cake. The Republican majority, answering the call of the common sense of the voters who say we should have more Federal aid to education, they say let us just scramble the resources we have now. No more resources. Nothing new is going to be offered. We are going to scramble the existing money that is being provided in federal aid to education and make it appear that we are doing something great by giving control of all of the Federal funds to the States, which have done a bad job, I will not say bad, but inadequate, they certainly have not been able to keep up, and their resources are dwindling while the Federal resources are increasing. It is an extreme position. The bill which both houses of the Congress are praising as their new approach to education, they call it the Academic Achievement For All Act. They have already got a good nickname called the Straight A's Act. Their public relations people have done a good job. That is very, very effective, Academic Achievement For All, Straight A's Act. But it is only scrambling the Title I money primarily. We already have Title I funds. We already have a few other funds. They are going to take that, put it in a pot, scramble it, give it away to the States, and will claim that they have done something new for education. Let me just quote again from the article, ``But the extraordinary fanfare with which it was introduced suggested the extent to which Republicans in Congress eyeing next year's critical elections have decided to seize education as an issue and make local control their battle cry. ``Education is number one on the Republican agenda, said Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, at an early afternoon news conference just outside the Capitol. Mr. Lott was joined by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois. They stood with other lawmakers in front of a yellow school bus brimming with fresh-faced students. Dozens of other students fanned out around the lawmakers, clapping and cheering their assent to each policy point, no matter how arcane.'' I am quoting from the New York Times article Tuesday, June 22. ``Mr. Hastert described the bill which Republicans have titled the Academic Achievement For All Act and nicknamed the Straight A's as a historic step. Democrats said the direction of that movement was backward. Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said it was unclear from the Republican plan how accountable schools would be. Mr. Miller also said States would be able to shift money from poor districts and children to wealthier ones. Communities will be pitted against each other to lobby their State Capitols for school money, he said. ``We know how that fight will turn out. Education Secretary Richard W. Riley issued a statement denouncing the bill along similar lines. The bill is a far-reaching extension of the philosophy behind the Education Flexibility Partnership Act, or Ed-Flex, which Congress passed with broad bipartisan support this year and President Clinton signed the bill into law.'' Let me repeat that last paragraph. I quote from the New York Times article, ``The bill is a far-reaching extension of the philosophy behind the Education Flexibility Partnership Act, or Ed-Flex, which Congress passed with broad bipartisan support this year and President Clinton signed into law.'' I reread that because I want to make it clear that I am not an alarmist. I am not here upset and frightened for no reason. What was done before on a bipartisan basis, with large numbers of Democrats participating, was a precedent-setting action. It is the forerunner of what is about to come back to us in the form of a take-it-all flexibility-for-all-of-it, meaning take everything that the Federal Government has invested in education and give it to the States. Democrats, beware. Democrats, do not fall into this kind of appeal for local control reasonableness. The local control is already 93 percent. Why not let the Federal Government remain in the process with its measly 7 percent? Continuing to read the article from the New York times, ``The law authorizes States to grant waivers to local school districts that want to spend Federal dollars in ways differ slightly from the specifically intended purpose. ``The new Republican bill whose chief sponsors are Representative Bill Goodling from Pennsylvania and Senator Slade Gorton of Washington would allow precisely that kind of reshuffling. Republicans said the safeguard preventing any particular area of education or school district from neglect would be the performer's contract which would oblige States to prove that achievement was not suffering.'' The performance contract, the same kind of thing that they have in the welfare reform bill. The States must show that they are doing certain kinds of things, only they have not bothered to do it, and no one in the Federal Government has been strong enough to force them to live up to the contract. Thus, it will be with education. Once the States have the money and the Department of Education has less of a reason to exist, less staff, less budget, who will go out to enforce the contract? No one. This is a rip-off, a grab for the 7 percent of the Federal dollars that are now devoted to education by the States, who have, as I said before, done a very poor job up to now. Democrats contended that many students could fall by the way side before the Federal Government was able to determine that a State had fallen short of its goals. Like Ed-Flex, the new bill would affect slightly more than $10 billion of Federal money, largely the same pool of money to which Ed-Flex applies. That represents most of what the Federal Government spends on primary and secondary education. So we are about to make a monumental mistake. It is on extremist's proposal that will be clothed in sweet reasonableness, and a lot of people are going to be caught off guard and fall for it. Why have total control, total involvement only by States and local governments and leave the Federal Government totally out of the picture with respect to the effort to reform education and improve our schools? There was a time when States were totally responsible for housing, States and local governments, housing for the poor. Nothing ever happened. Only the Federal Governments intervention provided decent housing in areas for people for whom there was no other answer. There was a time when health care was not a Federal responsibility. Federal Government did not get involved with health care. We had a monumental disaster across the Nation in terms of health care later. Later on, the Federal Government, through Medicaid and Medicare, through Lyndon Johnson, began to play a greater role. Whatever my colleagues may consider wrong with our health system at present, I am certain that my colleagues would not try to take away Medicare. Medicaid, they are trying to take away, but even Medicaid, one would have great resistance in taking that away from the American people. Senior citizens and retirement and care for people who are aging was totally neglected by the States. We had the poor houses. We had all kinds of bizarre ways in which they made a token effort to help aging people. But only Social Security, a Federal program saved senior citizens from abject poverty and suffering. The States had the ball, and they would not run with it. The States traditionally are controlled by people who have not bothered to govern for everybody. The temptation and the tendency of the States is always to govern for the powerful, and to do as little as possible to please the majority, and let the minority go completely. Triage systems. Do not provide health care at all. Do not provide housing at all. Social Security. Do not provide anything for the aging. It is the Federal Government that has made the effort to close the gap and provide the safety nets. In education, that has not been the case. It is still primarily a State responsibility, a local responsibility. So why move to the extreme position of trying to make it a total State local responsibility using Federal funds? I spoke last time about the fact that the Federal Government, in its intervention, redistributes funds in ways that have aroused a great deal of opposition in certain quarters, because if one distributes funds according to the population, the big cities are likely to get a larger percentage of the funds than other areas, the States that have large populations. For some reason, that is considered to be undesirable. If one distributes funds according to population it seems to me the fairest way in the world to distribute them. But that is undesirable. There was a move afoot last week to try to cut back on the mass transit funds received by California and New York because the mass transit funds were going a larger percentage to California and New York. Well, that is where most of the mass transit is. That is where the people who ride on subways and buses live. So why was there a great outcry about the fact that they got a larger proportion of the mass transit funds than most other areas? Highways and road were getting large amounts of money in areas where the per capita utilization of the highways is minimal. If one had to give highway and road money out on the basis of how often the roads are used, then the large population centers would get more highway money because, actually, the number of people utilizing the highways and utilizing the roads are far greater in the areas where the people live. People are there, therefore they should get from the Federal Government a proportional share of the resources that are available. But this has not happened; and for that reason, I use an example which several people called me about and said, well, what does that have to do with education? What does it have to do with justice for the big cities? Why are you reverting to reciting statistics about who died in all the wars? It just seems to me a very graphic way to try to bring home the point I am trying to make. The resources for education, the resources which involve helping people, should go where the people are. The fact that we are abandoning public schools means that the largest concentration of public schools and the largest concentration of people voting in public schools are in the big cities and the States that have the big cities. Why do we want to abandon them with respect to education and leave them in a situation where they will not be able to get decent employment in the future? We are going to create an uneducated underclass, an inadequately educated class or half educated class or poorly educated class. Whatever title we may choose to give it, it is a class of people that will not be able to qualify for the high-tech jobs. They will not be able to participate in the cyber civilization that is coming. That will be a great tragedy. And if we do that, we are generating a great unjust situation against a segment of the population which repeatedly has been called upon to defend the country. In all the wars, the largest number of casualties have been in the big States and the big cities where most of the people live. I used that example before and I will repeat it again. I think it is important to recognize that the demographics of the war dead, the demographics of heroism. These are heroes. Everybody who gave their life is automatically a hero. They gave all they could give in defense of this country in World War I, in World War II, in Vietnam, in Korea. The demographics stand out. But the people who died in the greatest numbers came from the places where people live in greatest numbers, where the population is. They might have had other factors that contribute to the heroism, but it was there. Even the battle of Gettysburg. On the Union side, the largest number of soldiers who died were New Yorkers. Because New York was probably clearly the State which is most densely populated at that time which furnished soldiers and troops for the Union's cause. That is certainly one of the biggest factors. And there might have been other factors. But the greatest number of soldiers on the Union side who died were from New York and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, the States with the largest population. In World War I, New York and Pennsylvania again are way up there ahead of everybody else; 35,100 casualties, 7,307 combat deaths from New York in World War I. Pennsylvania 5,996 combat deaths. Illinois 3,016. These are the big cities of New York, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago. California was just beginning to boom in population, and they had far fewer deaths. But later on, California, where the people live, where the population is, they are the people who send the largest number of soldiers to the wars and they died in great numbers. Eighty-nine thousand casualties in World War II from New York State. Twenty-seven thousand of those, almost 28,000, were combat deaths. Why should we quibble about the portion of Federal funds that New York receives for mass transit or that they receive for education or for Medicaid? That is where the people live. California, big jump in World War II, 47,000 casualties. Seventeen thousand died. But even then, it was less than half of New York, which was still the largest population center during the Second World War. Where the people live, that is where we have the casualties, that is where we have the heroes, and that is where we have the public schools that are being abandoned now. Those are the people that we call upon and order to go to war. But in peacetime suddenly they become a nuisance. We have a philosophy that is sometimes weakly expressed, and sometimes there are high-powered people who come right out and say it: We do not need poor people. There was a member of the editorial board of the New York Times more than 15 years ago who used the phrase, ``planned shrinkage,'' that instead of trying to rebuild poor communities, instead of trying to take care of the poor, let us just plan for the city to shrink in size and population. Planned shrinkage sounds like a perfectly respectable, acceptable term. Now, that was long before anybody ever talked about ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing you would say cannot be equated to planned shrinkage, and I would agree. But it is on the way. Low-income cleansing is what happens when you have plan shrinkage, low-income cleansing. Let us make life difficult for people who are poor and maybe they will move away. Let us make life difficult and hostile and they will solve the problem for us by moving away. We do not really need people. We only need people in times of war. We only need people when the Vietnam War takes place, and out of our cities comes a larger percentage of combat deaths than any other part of the Nation. In the big cities we will have the names on the Vietnam Wall Memorial. Go look at the names. And I am glad we have such a memorial, as I said before, because it brings war home in a very human way. We are not talking about unknown soldiers. We are not talking about tombs for unknown soldiers. We are talking about human beings that lived and breathed and they lived and breathed in the big cities. That is where the soldiers came from. They died in large numbers. Their names are on the Vietnam Memorial. They are the soldiers whose families and friends and neighbors still in those big cities that we should make a pledge to provide first-class education. The Federal Government should participate in provisional education because those people are very important to our Nation. I hope I do not just have to use that example, but that example is a graphic which brings it home. What about the future of the Nation if we do not educate the people in the big cities, we do not educate the folks who go to our public schools large numbers? There are a couple of other items that appeared recently in the paper that I think are significant. I am here repeatedly to talk about improving education and improving schools. I talk about the need to have a massive construction program, a school construction program, which not only deals with the problem of overcrowding in our big cities and in rural areas, replacement of schools that are falling down, replacement of the trailers that are inadequate in so many places, but also school construction which would provide for the wiring of schools so that we can get more technology in schools. They need new computers to do the construction. They need to be hooked up to the Internet. That is where the world is going. We have thousands of thousands of jobs. I think now they talk about right now there being 300,000 vacancies. There are 300,000 vacancies in the information technology industry. They expect the number to climb to 1.5 million in 2 or 3 years. And these estimates are based on the fact that they look at the number of youngsters who are taking computer science in our colleges and they say that number is totally inadequate. We need more youngsters going into college. We need more youngsters at every level, not only the colleges where they can get the computer program training, but the junior colleges where they are going to become computer technicians, or even high school where they get enough training to become computer mechanics or in some way assist. Because the world is going in that direction. The age of cyber civilization is going to be here sooner than we realize. And in order to participate in that and hold a job, they have got to have the education necessary. Let me just highlight this report that appeared yesterday in the New York Times. A report was issued by the Commerce Department which describes the economic benefits from the Internet. The economic benefits from the Internet have greatly benefited our economy. Our overall economy is fed by a new kind of phenomena which requires a highly educated work force. The article was in the New York Times on June 23. It reads as follows: The financial benefits of the Internet and high technology extend beyond the quick riches they have brought high-profile entrepreneurs and investors in recent years to the Nation's economy as a whole, a new Government study shows. The information technology industry, which includes everything from the Dell Computer Corporation PC's to the Microsoft Corporation's software, to Cisco System, Inc.'s routers, generated at least a third of the Nation's economic growth between 1995 and 1998, the Commerce Department said in a report released today. During that period, the gross domestic product rose 22 percent, to $8.7 trillion. The Internet as a force in our economy did not exist 20 or 30 years ago. But between 1995 and 1998, it expanded to reach the point where it is now third. Internet related activities are a third of our economy. Those goods and services also got cheaper and allowed businesses to become more productive, cutting inflation by seven-tenths of a percentage point in 1996 and 1997, the report says. ``The improvement in technology, in productivity, is what has made the economy so incredibly attractive in the last couple of years,'' said William J. McDonough, president of Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Today's Commerce Department report, the second in a series of three on technology, does not provide figures measuring total spending on high technology. Instead, it focuses on growth of on-line businesses and companies that cater to the technology industry. For example, it says almost half of all American workers will be employed in high-technology industries or at companies that rely heavily on technology by 2006. I repeat. The report says, ``Almost half of all American workers will be employed in high-technology industries or at companies that rely heavily on technology by 2006.'' I cannot say that too often. Because as I move through my own district, which has very serious problems with respect to resources that schools have, most of them are not appropriately wired, they do not have enough computers, and many of those who have computers are not wired to the Internet. I move about among people who say that I am talking about a luxury. ``Let us get enough books, enough crayons enough blackboards. Let us deal with the basics,'' they say, ``and then you can come back to us and talk to us about computers and the Internet.'' No, we cannot wait because we are galloping forward and if half of the people employed, if half of the American workers in the year 2006 are going to be in the high-tech industries, our youngsters in the schools in my district, unless they have more exposure to computers and there is an effort to interject and interweave the Internet and the kind of things it can do, computer literacy, computer competency, we will not be able to qualify for those jobs. The unemployment rate is already very high in my district. It is already very high. There is no hope for it going down even if the number of jobs increase, as they have in New York City. We have a large amount of vacancies in the high-technology industry in New York City. But the unemployment rate among the young people in my district is still up around 20 percent. They cannot qualify for the jobs if they do not have the education. That is a simple fact, and we have to understand that. I cannot speak too often or too long or too forcefully about education when we are talking about the livelihood of these young people. They have no future if they do not get the education that they need. Workers in information technology have been at least twice as productive as other workers from 1990 to 1997 and earn 78 percent more than other workers, the report said. The report ``provides fresh evidence that our Nation's massive investments in these sectors are producing gains in productivity and that these sectors are creating new and higher-paying jobs faster than any other,'' Commerce Secretary William M. Daley said in the report. Meanwhile, those who invested in high technology have reaped rewards that outpaced the market as a whole. The Standard and Poor's High Technology index rose more than five times since June of 1994, while the broader S.&P. 500 stock index tripled. Spending on information technology has quadrupled over the last decade, rising as a share of all business spending on equipment to 53 percent from 29 percent, according to the Commerce Department in a separate report. ``Internet activity is driving deflationary boom conditions,'' said Ed Hyman, an economist for the ISI Group in New York. ``It's official.'' Mr. Speaker, I ask to enter the article which describes the report from the Commerce Department on the impact of high technology and information technology in its entirety for the Record. [The New York Times, June 23, 1999] Commerce Report Describes Economic Benefits From Internet WASHINGTON, June 23 (Bloomberg News)--The financial benefits of the Internet and high technology extend beyond the quick riches they have brought high-profile entrepreneurs and investors in recent years to the nation's economy as a whole, a new Government study shows. The information technology industry--which includes everything from the Dell Computer Corporation's PC's, to the Microsoft Corporation's software, to Cisco Systems Inc.'s routers--generated at least a third of the nation's economic growth between 1995 and 1998, the Commerce Department said in a report released today. During that period, the gross domestic product rose 22 percent, to $8.7 trillion. Those goods and services also got cheaper and allowed businesses to become more productive, cutting inflation by seven-tenths of a percentage point in 1996 and 1997, the report says. ``The improvement in technology, in productivity, is what has made the economy so incredibly attractive in the last couple of years,'' William J. McDonough, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in a speech in New Jersey today. Today's Commerce Department report, the second in a series of three on technology, does not provide figures measuring total spending on high technology. Instead, it focuses on growth of on-line businesses and companies that cater to the technology industry. For example, it says almost half of all American workers will be employed in high-technology industries or at companies that rely heavily on technology by 2006. Workers in information technology have been at least twice as productive as other workers from 1990 to 1997 and earn 78 percent more than other workers, the report said. The report ``provides fresh evidence that our nation's massive investments in these sectors are producing gains in productivity and that these sectors are creating new and higher-paying jobs faster than any other,'' Commerce Secretary William M. Daley said in the report. Meanwhile, those who invested in high technology have reaped rewards that outpaced the market as a whole. The Standard & Poor's High Technology index rose more than five times since June 1994, while the broader S.&P. 500 stock index tripled. Spending on information technology has quadrupled over the last decade, rising as a share of all business spending on equipment to 53 percent from 29 percent, according to the Commerce Department in a separate report. ``Internet activity is driving deflationary boom conditions,'' said Ed Hyman, an economist for the ISI Group in New York. ``It's official.'' Mr. Speaker, it cannot be said too often, if we do not educate our young people in our big cities, a whole segment of the population will be out there wandering in the wilderness, nowhere to go, in terms of employment. I will not begin to postulate on what the consequences will be. I just know that a just America, which seeks to have a continuation of law and order, of promulgation of the right to pursue happiness, is an America which will not shut down the public school system and cut off the opportunities for the young people in our biggest cities and the poor people in our rural areas. That is what will happen if the Republican Academic Achievement for All Students Through Freedom and Accountability Act goes through. Because all it does is take the Federal initiative, the Federal dollars, scramble them up and put them in the hands of State and local governments who have not been able to measure up to the job, to the requirements, up to now. How can we improve education by giving more money, throwing more money, taking Federal money which exists now, throwing it into the State and local coffers? What is the great automatic, obvious advantage of local control? Why is local control sacred? There are many examples of local control degenerating into complete corruption. There are more examples of local control being stagnant. For long periods of time school systems did not move off dead center in terms of improving the performance of their students. This is not just true of low-income areas but large numbers of middle-income communities had stagnation. When the Federal Government intervened shortly after the Russian Sputnik triumph in space and began to offer greater incentives and offer greater amounts of money and money for training and for leadership to promote more science and education, better science and education teachers, the public schools began to do a better job in science and math. The effect of that was to create something that has continued. We have a large number of very good public schools in the Nation. In areas where you have low performance overall, there are schools that stand out. We have some of the best schools in the world in New York City. Some of the high schools have repeatedly taken the largest share of science prizes whether it is Westinghouse or some other science prizes. If you move into the area of debate, any other area, you find other high schools who stand out there. So we have individual schools that have done a magnificent job, but the system overall is lagging. The system overall that seeks to educate 1 million children in New York City has many, many problems. A majority of the youngsters in these schools are receiving an inadequate education. Some of them have never been able to sit in a classroom with a teacher of science or math who majored in math or science in college. In our junior high schools a survey was done which showed that in the areas where most of the African Americans and Latino students live, the poorest students in the city, most of the junior high school teachers teaching science and math had not majored in science or math in college. They were people who were thrown in there and had to try to do a job because no other bodies were available. This is a chronic problem. It was not just for that year or the year after, it still exists. There are some schools that lost their physics teachers, high schools, several years ago. They still do not have a physics teacher who majored in physics and has some expertise in the area 3 or 4 years later. The problem is acute. In an area where larger salaries are paid in the suburbs surrounding the city, they attract off the best teachers and you have a situation where the ones who need the greatest amount of help and the most expertise, the most creative, the most imaginative teachers, get the least from the teachers. The shrinking teacher pool, the number of teachers available, the fact that it is becoming more and more difficult to find good teachers, is part of the larger problem. Because of the fact that we have not appropriately funded the education system, we have not appropriately insisted on accountability, you do not have enough youngsters going into college, you do not have enough coming out. So those who are graduating from college, they choose other professions in large numbers and the number of students who go into teaching as a percentage of the professions chosen, that number keeps shrinking. We need more youngsters going into the college from high schools, youngsters who are qualified to do college work, who can come out of college and become those good teachers which would back up the system's effort to teach those who need help most. Nothing of that kind will happen if we take away from the big city schools the title I funds that go in large amounts to big city schools. This Academic Achievement for All Students Through Freedom and Accountability, Straight A's Act, that was described by the Republicans the day before yesterday is an attempt to move in a direction where the ultimate, the final result would be that States would have the power to move the money that the Federal Government appropriates now for the poorest schools, they can move it anywhere. We know from past history they will move it to the areas where they are seeking votes, where the greater number of votes are. They will move it to the areas where the people have the most political power. Those who have political power now have the best schools now already. In New York State, we have some of the world's best schools, best outfitted high technology schools, schools who have had computers, that the ratio of students to computers has been very good for years and they have been hooked up to the Internet for years. They have not had problems of wiring their schools because there is an asbestos problem. We cannot wire a lot of schools because asbestos still exists and when you start boring holes just to put wires in, that is a big problem. They have not had the problem of appropriations being too small for books so that the teachers and the principals do not even want to ask for additional appropriations for computers. They have not had those kinds of problems. They have not had the problems that there is no room to place the computers even if they were given to you because the schools are overcrowded. There are a number of schools in my district that are operating at a capacity of twice the number of students that they were built for. An elementary school built for 500 students has 1,000. A high school built for 2,000 students has 4,000. They go from 7 in the morning until late in the afternoon. Many schools have three lunch periods because the lunchroom cannot accommodate all of the students so they have to have lunches in shifts. That forces some elementary school students to eat lunch as early as 10 o'clock in the morning. That is child abuse, to force a child to eat lunch at 10 o'clock in the morning. It happens in large numbers of schools. So without the Federal help, the first opportunity to learn factor, a decent building, a place where you can go and feel safe, a place which is adequate, adequate and conducive for learning, a place which nowadays would be able to accommodate technology and allow computers which are not a luxury anymore, wiring to the Internet which is not a luxury, to allow all of those factors to be involved in the education process, it is impossible to achieve that without more help from the Federal Government. The greatest emphasis that I have placed on my role as a member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce is to focus on the basic problem of school construction. We may talk about a lot of other factors, and I do not want to minimize the need for more research, I do not want to minimize the need for more teacher training and teacher accountability. All of these problems, all of these factors are important. But before anything happens, we need to have a massive school construction program which says to the Nation that we have not abandoned the public schools. The fact that schools are literally falling down sends a message that is highly visible and highly symbolic, that we do not care about public education anymore. We talk about improving the teaching of reading, computer literacy and computer competence, but when a child walks into a school with a coal-burning furnace, the risk to that child's health is greatly increased, it would be better off if at a young age they stayed away from school because the more you are exposed to certain fumes, the greater the likelihood that you are going to have asthma or other respiratory illnesses. Why should we have children go to school and have their health jeopardized, be placed at risk because they go to school? If a child goes to a school which still has paint that had lead in it, and they are first graders or kindergarten children, they play with the paint and they get some of that in their system, their health is greatly threatened. We still have those kinds of problems. We still have asbestos problems, but the greatest problem is, of course, the overcrowding, where you cannot teach 40 children in one room, especially when they are children who need a great deal of attention. You need the space before you can use the additional teachers. I am very proud of the fact that President Clinton forged an initiative on increasing the number of teachers per classroom, especially in the early grades. That was a $1.2 billion initiative in last year's budget which was not easily gained. It took a lot of hard negotiating. The Republican majority resisted it all the way and they are still resisting. They want to convert that into something else. But it is important that we made the effort, we recognized the need to have a ratio of students to teachers, especially in the early grades, which is better than the kind of 35 to 40 ratio of students to teachers that exist in some schools now. But in New York, the truth is where they need the teachers to relieve the burden of teachers having too many students, they do not have the classrooms. You cannot put a teacher with 20 children in the front of the room, a teacher with 20 children in the back of the room and expect to really have education among young children. It is not going to happen. That is too many kids in one room. The fact that there is another adult, another teacher, will not solve the problem. You need space. You need a classroom. You need a well-lighted classroom. You need a classroom that does not have the threat of coal dust from a coal-burning furnace. You need a classroom that is properly ventilated. You need new classrooms in many of these situations. The Republicans claim in their new initiative that the way to solve the problem is to give it all to the States and let them solve the problem, let the States and the localities have the Federal money, that measly 7 percent that we provide for the overall education budget, give it to the States and that is the solution to the problem. Well, the States, some States have large surpluses at this point. In fact, quite a number of States have surpluses. The prosperity that has benefited the Federal treasury has also benefited State treasuries. In New York State, the State had more than $2 billion as a surplus in last year's budget. The Democrats in the legislature sought to get a measly $500 million of that to provide for school repairs and school construction in the areas of greatest need. The governor vetoed the $500 million out of the $2 billion budget. At the city level, New York City had a surplus of at least $2 billion, and the mayor of the city of New York did not bother to appropriate a single penny to relieve the overcrowding in schools, to get rid of more coal-burning furnaces, to deal with asbestos problems, not a penny went out of that surplus. Are we going to give more money to the mayors and the governors, are we going to give the Federal money and expect an improvement in the situation when their behavior has indicated that they do not themselves care about their public schools? They are abandoning public schools. The great talk of vouchers and charter schools, et cetera was designed to deflect attention away from the fact that you need to invest heavily in public schools. I introduced, on May 14, a bill, H.R. 1820, to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to provide grants to improve the infrastructure of elementary and secondary schools. Title XII already exists in present law. This is a very germane approach. There is no need to depend only on the Committee on Ways and Means to provide loans for school districts as a means of dealing with the problem of construction. We have a massive need for more school construction. We might recall that last year, we authorized $218 billion over a 6-year period for highway construction. I do not know why the Federal Government has to be so involved in highways and roads, but $218 billion was authorized for highway construction. I was not against that. I think that is a proper use of public dollars. But I am proposing in this bill, H.R. 1820, that over a 5-year period we spend $110 billion on school construction, $22 billion a year. The $110 billion is close to the $112 billion that the General Accounting Office said in 1995 we needed in order to, at that time, revamp, repair and keep our public school inventory at its present level, in proper condition. They did not talk about the expanding enrollments which now require probably, if we were trying to meet the need, about $200 billion for school construction all across the Nation. H.R. 1820 is based on the fact that there are certain findings we cannot turn away from. There are 52,700,000 students in 88,223 elementary and secondary schools across the United States. The current expenditure of the Federal Government for education infrastructure is only $12 million. The present federal expenditure per enrolled student for education infrastructure, any kind of physical facility, is 23 cents per student, and appropriation of $22 billion a year would result in a federal expenditure for education infrastructure of only $417 per student per fiscal year, $417 per student per year compared to the present 23 cents. That is what I am talking about. Let us not be overwhelmed by the big numbers; 22 billion a year sounds so great, but when you look at the number of children involved, we are talking about spending $417 per year. My bill, H.R. 1820, proposes to provide, to distribute, the money across the country in accordance with the number of school aged children that each State has. Therefore my use of the statistics of the number of students divided into the amount of money is correct. I do not propose to try to make judgments on priorities. We just proposed to address the problem. Some schools will spend majority of their money on building new schools, some may spend the funds on repairing existing schools, in some cases schools will choose to use some of the money for improving their schools for technology. Those are the options that they would have at the local level, but we must understand that there is a need to move and not to leave this up to the local and State governments that are obviously not going to deal with the problem. Overcrowded classrooms have a dire impact on learning. Students in overcrowded schools score lower on both mathematics and region exams than do students in other schools. We must meet the challenge of a cyber civilization by educating all of our children. The Republican approach which proposes to end the federal role in education is the wrong one; we need more help, not less, for our public schools. The article I referred to is as follows: [The New York Times, June 23, 1999] Bill Offers States Leeway on Education Aid (By Frank Bruni) Washington, June 22.--Republican leaders in Congress today unveiled an education bill that builds significantly on their previous efforts to give state and local governments ever broader discretion over the spending of Federal money. Under the proposal, a state could opt out of the current Federal financing system, which allocates money for specific purposes, and instead use most of that Federal aid as it wishes, provided that the state first enters into a five-year contract with the Department of Education that holds the state to certain performance goals. If the state failed to meet those goals, which the Secretary of Education would have to approve, the state would return to the old system of financing. The plan, which would apply to more than $10 billion in Federal money nationally, faces an uncertain fate. There is not yet a timetable for its procession to the floor of either the House or the Senate, and Democrats in both chambers denounced it as a reckless experiment. But the extraordinary fanfare with which it was introduced suggested the extent to which Republicans in Congress, eyeing next year's critical elections, have decided to seize education as an issue and make local control their battle cry. ``Education is No. 1 on the Republican agenda,'' said Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, at an early after news conference just outside the Capitol. Mr. Lott was joined by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois. They stood with other lawmakers in front of a yellow school bus brimming with fresh-faced students. Dozens of other children fanned out around the lawmakers, clapping and cheering their assent to each policy point, no matter how arcane. Mr. Hastert described the bill, which Republicans have titled the Academic Achievement for All Act and nicknamed Straight A's, as a ``historic step.'' Democrats said the direction of that movement was backward. Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said it was unclear from the Republican plan how accountable schools would be. Mr. Miller also said states would be able to shift money from poor districts and children to wealthier ones. ``Communities will be pitted against each other to lobby their state capitols for school money,'' he said. ``We know how that fight will turn out.'' Education Secretary Richard W. Riley issued a statement denouncing the bill along similar lines. The bill is a far-reaching extension of the philosophy behind the Education Flexibility Partnership Act, of Ed-Flex, which Congress passed with broad bipartisan support this year and President Clinton signed into law. The law authorizes states to grant waivers to local school districts that want to spend Federal dollars in ways that differ slightly from the specfically intended purpose. But the districts can deviate only so much; money meant to combat substance abuse can be shuttled from a program specified by the Federal Government to one that is not, but the money cannot be used, for example, to improve reading skills. The new Republican bill, whose chief sponsors are Representative Bill Goodling of Pennsylvania and Senator Slade Gorton of Washington, would allow precisely that kind of reshuffling. Republicans said the safeguard preventing any particular area of education or school district from neglect would be the performance contract, which would oblige states to prove that achievement was not suffering. Democrats contended that many students could fall by the wayside before the Federal Government was able to determine that a state had fallen short of its goals. Like Ed-Flex, the new bill would affect slightly more than $10 billion in Federal money, largely the same pool of money to which Ed-Flex applies. That represents most of what the Federal Government spends on primary and secondary education. Over all, the Government provides only about 7 percent of the education budget for the nation's public schools and education experts have said that even striking changes in Federal policy have limited impact.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I am very surprised and disappointed that this amendment is being introduced today. What this action represents is a kind of back-door ambush of children with disabilities. It is a violation of a covenant of the community of people with disabilities, because we had a lengthy dialogue with them. We had hearings, we had long discussions when we were considering the refunding of IDEA. At that time we took it through the process of conference committees with the Senate and House together. We voted on the floor. We all came to the conclusion finally that we did not want this provision in the legislation. So here we are today, unprepared. The community of people with disabilities certainly did not know this ambush was going to take place. The majority party, which always appears or wants to appear to be in harmony with the goals of the community with disabilities, comes through the back door with this kind of amendment. The call that I have heard from the other side to get violent children out of schools implies that children with disabilities are violent. Where does that information come from? Generally children with disabilities are not violent and do not deserve to be labeled as being violent. The equation of this being a move to make schools safer by getting violent children out, when the amendment is addressed, it is getting out children with disabilities. The evidence is that the violence is originating from those who are not disabled. All of the most dramatic incidents that have taken place recently do not involve children who have been identified as being children with disabilities. Some might have disabilities, but they were not identified as such. They would not have come under the purview of this amendment, anyhow. Why have a special rule for children with disabilities, I have heard the question asked. That is what the legislation was all about that we developed years ago. We said they need special attention, that they are vulnerable. All children are vulnerable, but children with disabilities are more vulnerable, and because of the way they have been treated in this country, we had to have a Federal law to make sure that they were getting equal treatment. Equal treatment required they had to have some kind of special attention. This is accepted generally when children have physical disabilities. It is accepted you are not going to require a child with a physical disability to go to the same physical education classes. It is accepted that they can use certain kinds of procedures in entering and exiting schools. A lot of things are accepted. The problem is that there is a great prejudice against children who do not have physical disabilities being put in the category of children with disabilities. That is what this is really all about. The mentally retarded, the mentally ill, they look physically normal. Somebody has just described them on the other side as being marginal. That is the source of the great controversy. There is a great pressure from school boards and pressure from people who appropriate money at every level to get rid of all of these children who have non-physical disabilities which are obvious, get them out of the situation where they require extra funding. If that were not so, then the solution to this would be that if Members are really fearful of children with disabilities in the regular classroom setting, and we remove them from the classroom setting for some reason, then we provide an alternative. But no, this amendment will not accept or mandate that there be an alternative. We agreed in the committee that all right, if you have to do this, you must provide alternative education for children with disabilities. But that does not solve the problem they are really after. They want to cut costs, the costs of providing alternatives, which would be even greater than leaving the child in the classroom, so they do not have the cleansing operation for the so-called mentally retarded and the mentally ill and those who are marginal. We are always questioning whether they really belong there or not. We have said children with disabilities are vulnerable. All children are vulnerable. We have special rules and we make special rules at the Federal level and other levels for children for that reason. These are the most vulnerable children, and these are children who should be treated with great care. The mission and thrust of the Federal law is to deal with the special situations. The fact that so much of it happens to be mental and not physical is something we are going to have to live with and be able to pay the cost for. Fairness and common sense was mentioned a few minutes ago. Fairness and common sense demand that we have more evidence that there is really a problem. I have not heard the evidence that our schools are under siege by children with disabilities bringing weapons to school. Where is the evidence? I have heard the statement made, but there is no evidence. We do not have a problem. This amendment is fixing a problem that does not exist.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, in response to the gentleman who has just spoken, I would like to say that I would be happy to join the gentleman in perfecting an amendment similar to one that I offered in the committee, which was not accepted, which would deal with the problem of mislabeled children. If that is what the gentleman wants to deal with, that children are labeled as being disabled who are not disabled, do not have disabilities, that is another kind of problem which is a serious problem. Why do we not address that problem, instead of addressing the problem through the back door this way, saying that those who do have disabilities, that is what this amendment says; those who do have disabilities, bona fide disabilities, those who have been through a certification process and, there is no question. You are saying that they should be kicked out. If the gentleman wants to raise questions after the incident occurs, if there is a weapon and a student has been charged with not being really a disabled student, let us have a process by which they are again reviewed and there is another recertification process. Those are things we need. We need to wade into that. I would be happy to join the gentleman in an amendment for that effect.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to congratulate an extraordinary community activist, social worker, safety net administrator and public policy strategist. From micro issues involving school practices, neighborhood priorities, and area action plans to macro policy concerns and visions for improvements in City, State and Federal benefits programs, she has accumulated an inspiring record of achievements. On the occasion of her retirement I am honored to salute Evelyn Abelson as a Point-of-Light for our community and for all Americans. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Ms. Abelson came to Brooklyn with impressive training as a Social Worker and significant political experience. Her compassion for the poor and the powerless is great; and her passion for organizing people for their own empowerment is equally remarkable. Always the professional competence of Evelyn Abelson is thoroughly blended with her personal dedication and integrity. As Director of a Mental Health Program in Brownsville, a community composed primarily of low-income housing developments, she changed the lives of many individuals; however, her work with families and groups had a widespread and lasting impact on the entire community. The Abelson lectures on family relationships attracted a large grassroots audience. Through her work with individuals and the general community Ms. Abelson established a base of trust which made her a very influential and productive force in the embryonic Brownsville anti-poverty program. Evelyn convened the Brownsville Professional Group composed of a cross- section of professionals who worked in the community. The blue-print for the Brownsville Community Action Plan was launched when this group convened a body of local leaders who formed the Brownsville Community Council. Mr. Speaker, as a local Branch Librarian of the Brooklyn Public Library and later as a Library Community Coordinator, I worked with Ms. Abelson to develop the Brownsville Total Action Plan which began with the election of a Board of Directors for the Brownsville Community Council. For that first election and for many others Ms. Abelson was a one woman Election Commission whose results were never challenged. Ms. Abelson later established a Community Mental Health Clinic in Brownsville. While her professional work expanded and provided greater support for many more families, she continued in her role as a guiding community activist and policy advisor. In my changing careers from Library Community Coordinator, to Brownsville Community Council Executive Director, to Commissioner of the New York City Community Action Program to New York State Senator and finally to the United States Congress I have steadfastly relied on Evelyn Abelson's unique ability to maintain one open ear for the voice of the people on the bottom while the other ear listened and interpreted the sweep of local, national and international developments. For this rare mixture of personal warmth, abiding compassion and generosity, as well as a penetrating mind anchored by experience and wisdom, it is appropriate that we honor Evelyn Abelson as a great American Point-of-Light.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that my name be removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 1604.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, why are we obsessed with Haiti? If there is going to be a standard for spreading our generosity, and we are the indispensable Nation, we are the last superpower, I think it is important that we should help out wherever we can in crises throughout the world, but why not have a single standard? Why do we not establish a standard? Where we have been in Bosnia, I do not think it has been $16 billion as I heard before, but at least we have spent $8 billion in Bosnia. We have been in Korea forever. Korea has a strong economy. They could support their own defense. We have been in Europe with bases for a long time and in Japan. We are spread out all over the world in places spending billions of dollars over long periods of time. Why would we not help a nation in this hemisphere, and the commitment there is relatively pennies now compared to the kind of commitments we have with the bases in Europe and Japan and Bosnia. I am not saying we should pull out of Bosnia overnight, but I think there ought to be some kind of formula whereby we go in to help, we spend a preestablished amount of money, we do it with some kind of standard equally throughout the world. If you pick out Haiti alone and you go after Haiti, then the only conclusion we can come to is that it is because Haiti is a black nation. Why else are we obsessed with Haiti?

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we hope and pray that the war in Kosovo will end within a few days, sooner rather than later. Slobodan Milosevic has been indicted as a war criminal and we look forward to a trial someday that will send a clear message to other similar sovereign predators throughout the world that genocide under any name will no longer be tolerated by the civilized world. Unfortunately there are many honorable Americans who do not see the actions of the Yugoslav regime as genocidal. They quibble about the numbers and imply that there are not enough victims. Certainly ``ethnic cleansing'' is not the same as Hitler's massive marches of victims into the gas chambers and the ovens. However, it is clear that only the intervention of the international community has saved thousands of humans driven from their homes from starvation and death by fatigue and cold. What if the refugees had all been left to survive on their own? What then would be the death count? In this year 1999 we have been presented with a clear challenge. Instead of waiting to mourn for the corpses, we have fought the savage oppressors. Many mistakes have been made and we have demanded a more flexible and inclusive approach to leadership in this crisis. Minimizing ``collateral damage'' in this crusade against genocide is as important an objective as any other. But no concerns should fester into paralysis. Indifference is the greatest crime we might commit. Fear of taking risks could lead to a situation where we ``just let the refugees naturally die.'' Let the Refugees Die Just let the refugees die Don't hear their hungry children cry Masked men treat families real mean But no gas chambers on the scene Bayonets pierce a few unruly eyes But only NATO bombs Force humans to flee like flies Just let the refugees naturally die High honors confer on them Collect millions for a giant museum Great poet muses will be fed By memories of these pitiful dead Editorials express awesome regret We pledge never ever to forget Just let the refugees naturally die Their camps are not outrageously sad Surplus U.S. food tastes not too bad War crime standards must be high Why make an international nuisance Until millions undeservedly die Tall tales insist Hitler has returned But piles of bodies have not yet burned Torched villages are carefully planned But Auschwitz ovens are loudly banned Sacred sovereignty you can not deny Genocide is a bloody NATO lie Homeless helpless savage rebels Don't hear their hungry children cry Just let the refugees naturally die.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the working families of this Nation are still being trampled on by this 106th Congress. They are being grossly mistreated in two basic ways: One is indifference and neglect on certain key issues, and the other is active oppression in certain ways. Indifference and neglect is reflected in the fact that we are not concerned about a minimum wage increase. There is a rumor that the leadership of the majority party has decided that it will agree to a minimum wage vote and that it will take place sometime later rather than sooner, and they are delaying because they want to make sure we get close to the election and be able to say, well, we voted for a minimum wage, or we allowed it on the floor and let the Democrats vote for it, so we did our job. And, of course, there is a rumor also that the minimum wage being proposed by the majority is 25 cents a year for the next 4 years. An increase of 25 cents per year for the next 4 years means in 4 years the American worker would have a dollar increase instead of the two-step increase being proposed by the Democrats. But there is no hurry. We have an unprecedented prosperity in the Nation. We have a situation where the value of the stock market in 10 years has grown by $10 trillion. We had the assets and the value of the stock market in 1989 at $3 trillion. Now it is $13 trillion. With a $10 trillion increase in the value of the stock market, we can see that there is a great increase in the wealth and prosperity in America at certain levels. Why not share that with the working families? Why not in the most basic way make certain that the wealth of the Nation in some small way benefits the entire Nation? A minimum wage is just one tiny part of that effort. Being willing to finance or support more generous health care is another. The President is proposing soon a new benefit in Medicare, should be in Medicaid also, a new benefit which would cover prescription drugs. In this time of great prosperity, the least we could do is to make the miracles of science available at a cheaper cost to all the people who need them in terms of health care. Prescription drugs ought to be covered by Medicare and Medicaid. We talk a lot about Medicare and we forget that Medicaid is designed to serve the very poorest and they deserve to have the same kind of increase. We should not have two tiers of health care in America. Second class health care is inadequate health care. There should only be one class of health care. But we are refusing to deal with that in a forthright manner on a timetable that is meaningful because we just do not seem to care. There is an indifference, an indifference to the poor, an indifference to the plight of the working families who are not sharing the great boost in our wealth. That great jump from $3 trillion in 1989 to $13 trillion in 1999 is not felt by a lot of people who are still out there struggling to make it. So jobs, health care, investment in education are all obvious kinds of actions that should be taken by the government. This Congress, acting in concert with the President, should make certain that we take advantage of this boom in prosperity to take care of some of our problems. But there exists in this Congress an attitude which goes in the opposite direction. It is stubborn, it is unyielding, it is wrongheaded, but it keeps going on. Take, for example, what happened in the vote on the supplemental budget, or the development of a long- awaited supplemental budget, which included the President's request for $6 billion for the Kosovo war, a war which I think is very necessary, a war which I think we could not afford to have not conducted or been a part of. I do not think we could have walked away from the genocide being committed by the Yugoslavia regime and held up our heads. We have seen it happen too many times already in this century. What Hitler did was on a grander, more massive scale. They had gas chambers and ovens and millions died, but the numbers are not as important as the action and the kind of thing happening in Kosovo. Certainly if it only means thousands dying, it is still significant and it is happening over and over again. We have seen it happen in Cambodia, we have seen it happen in Rwanda. It is about time that we did something to send a message to the dictators and the sovereign predators that exist throughout the world that somewhere the civilized nations of the world are willing to take a stand against this kind of murderous activity against human beings. We have done that in Kosovo. So we needed our participation in that effort. The $6 billion was requested by the President. But instead of that bill moving ahead with $6 billion plus the emergency aid requested for South America, for Central America as a result of the floods and the extra aid that was needed for the weather disasters that took place in the Midwest, we had a whole lot of other things piled on top of it and a $6 billion request became a $15 billion request, a $15 billion request most of which came out of the surplus. It was deemed emergency funding and the surplus which is around $100 billion, I think, about the same, a little more maybe in the coming fiscal year, it is going to be about the same amount; the surplus was used for most of it. They could have used the surplus to cover it all, but to make a point the majority decided to offset $2 billion, take away from other programs $2 billion worth of money to cover part of the spending. Now, the emergency in Central America, the emergency in the Midwest with the tornadoes and storms, et cetera, those were emergencies. They clearly rank as emergencies. Why did we have to make the point that they have to be offset? The point that I want to make is that in the process of the offset, who did they go after? The poorest people in America. The bulk of the cuts for the offset came from domestic accounts, including $1.25 billion from the food stamp program, and $350 million from Section 8 low-income housing programs as well as $22.4 million from the Labor Department contingency fund related to unemployment insurance. They reached into the programs that serve the poorest people, programs that may benefit the working families on the very lowest levels, and they took out the money to offset and make the point that they want to make cuts in social programs. There is a coming need, according to the budget that has been promulgated by the majority, a coming need to cut further, maybe $20 billion out of the domestic budget. Some of it could come from defense if they wanted to, but it will probably come out of the domestic budget; $20 billion will be cut and the preview of coming attractions we have seen already. The way the supplemental budget was handled tells you they are going to get it from the people who are the weakest, the people who have no power, working families, poor families, poor people who are not even working, the elderly, those who need Medicaid as well as Medicare; they will suffer as a result of the coming $20 billion cuts or more that may be proposed. Certainly they are not proposing investing any more money in education. Education, most of which would go into our public school system, is the place that you benefit working families most. Working families' children need an education. There is no way to survive, there is no way for them to take advantage of the prosperity that keeps growing and growing as a result of high technology. The jobs that are available are jobs that require education. You are not going to be in on it, it gets worse all the time, the demands are greater and greater. I was at a job training consortium in New York City yesterday and they were telling me about the fact that we just need mechanics. In addition to the known need for information technology people, 300,000 vacancies in information technology, they need mechanics. They could hire 30,000 mechanics in the metropolitan area if they could find them. Why do they not have mechanics who would work on trucks and tractors and some of the machinery that industry needs? Why do they not have them? Because the demands have gone up educationally. There are computers and various devices being employed now in trucks and cars and various vehicles that require a little more education than a mechanic had to have 10 years ago or 5 years ago. So we have a problem, a creeping problem of people in basic areas, as basic as mechanics, auto mechanics, that cannot survive because they do not have the personnel to do the job because the education system is failing to produce that pool of people which is educated. A broad pool of people educated, you can reach in and pull out all kinds of people. The range of people with various kinds of skills and know-how would be great. You would get the technicians, the mechanics, the theoreticians, the scientists, the geniuses. That certain percentage of people would come out if you have a broad range of people in the pool because we are educating the masses. Mass education is needed more now than ever before. But working families who need to have free education in the public school system, free but first rate, it cannot be education in facilities that are falling down, it cannot be education in situations where kids are afraid to go to school because of threats to their health and safety. It has to be the kind of education that everybody wants for their child here in this Congress. I know large numbers of Members of Congress send their children to private school. It is most unfortunate that they have given up on the public education system, but as public officials, whatever choice they choose to make privately, it is disloyal and dangerous to have public officials give up on our education system. So when you consider what happened in our $15 billion supplemental appropriation, you can see how trampling on working families is a problem. And there is going to be more trampling on working families. It is not just neglect. It is also active oppression to take the money out of the programs that benefit the poor the most. It is even worse than that. The active attack, the oppression which is very aggressive, continues to go on in the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I serve as the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections. As the ranking Democrat on Workforce Protections, I will be the first to tell you that the name of the committee under this majority Republican administration ought to be changed. It is not workforce protection that they are concerned about. It is workforce persecution. It is workforce oppression. Because every bill that is introduced by the majority on that committee is an attempt to make life more difficult for working families. We have three coming up very soon we have just passed recently in the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, and now it is going to go to the full committee, and they are a continuation of what was started in the 104th Congress and continued in the 105th Congress, and now it is done on a sort of a guerrilla warfare basis. It is not talked about as much but it is still the same agenda. They are attempting to take away rights that workers have won over the last 50 years. There is a bill, H.R. 987. It is an attempt to block the implementation of any ergonomic standards, standards which relate to the fact that there are jobs which require repetitive motions that end up in injuries and debilitation of people's muscular faculties; they cannot function. Carpal tunnel syndrome is one of them. Back injuries are a large part of it, people who have repetitive kinds of activities that strain certain parts of their bodies. That is the broad topic of ergonomics the majority on the committee do not even want to have discussed. They do not want to allow the Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under the Department of Labor to do what they have been doing for years, establish a set of standards to relate to these workplace injuries, workplace dangers. So they have H.R. 987 which ironically the Republican majority on the committee calls the Workplace Preservation Act. It is an attempt to make the workplace more dangerous by blocking an effort to deal with a clear and present form of injuries that we have been discussing for the last 15 years. So H.R. 987 is one of those examples of an attack on working families through a reduction in the safety provisions in the workplace. There are more than 6,000 people who die every year in our workplace situation, and then many, many others who are injured. This attack on the workers continues by the Republican majority. They have another one, H.R. 1381. It is an attempt to sabotage overtime payment rates by excluding bonus income. H.R. 1381 is ironically called Rewarding Performance in Compensation Act. But they have a way of reaching in to take out the income that is figured in the bonus in order to reduce the rate of hourly pay so that that is not included when you pay a person overtime. It is a little guerrilla trick, it is almost something you would not see or not respond to if you were not very alert. But it is an attempt to sabotage overtime payment rates by excluding bonus income. H.R. 1381, another attempt to reduce the benefits of working families. H.R. 1439 is another one. That attempts to undermine the OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration's enforcement by misusing the self-audit process. We have a self-auditing process that we encourage. We want to make a partnership between government and industry. But they want to allow industries to audit themselves and then not allow the result of the audit, which determines whether or not they have certain hazardous conditions in the workplace, in the plant, in the garage, whatever unit of employment this is. After they complete the audit, if they identify things that are wrong, they are allowed to keep it secret and we are saying, ``No, you have to reveal what is there.'' The self-audit process would be misused if you made your survey and audited yourself, identified hazards, and then refused to correct them because, of course, it might cost a great deal, but you keep them secret, nobody else knows about it. Of course you would fire any employee who also knows about it and then would report it. So we have H.R. 1439 which again, an ironical title, is described as the Safety and Health Audit Promotion and Whistleblower Improvement Act of 1999. The Safety and Health Audit Promotion and Whistleblower Improvement Act of 1999 is an attempt to do just the opposite. It is going to make the workplace less safe. We have another bill, an alternative which we will offer at the final markup of the full committee which is entitled ``The Whistleblower Protection Act.'' That is H.R. 1851 which I introduced as a countervailing force against the phony H.R. 1439. But I give you examples of concrete bills, the business that is going on here in this place. We are moving at a very slow pace. Things that ought to be done and ought to be on the agenda are not on the agenda. But the guerrilla warfare against working families, against workers in the workplace, the guerrilla warfare goes on. We ought to come to grips with the fact that this is wrongheaded, stubborn, unyielding, and at a time like this very dangerous in America. We should be investing in our workers in every way instead of oppressing them and neglecting them. In another area, education, which I talk about often, education reform is still rhetoric. We are talking, always when we talk about education about nickels and dimes and lots of words. Everybody has adopted some kind of education platform, everybody is in favor of improving and reforming education, but nobody wants to spend significant amounts of dollars. Words instead of dollars is the order of the day with respect to education. Education reform is rhetoric, too much rhetoric in the area of the majority; and in many cases, in the minority, too, there is too much rhetoric and too little commitment to real dollars for education. School construction is one of the tests of whether or not we are only concerned with rhetoric and only going to play word games with the voters. Or are we really going to do something significant about education? The voters have given us a mandate. As my colleagues know, it is one of the few times in history where we have the focus groups and polls, everything keeps repeating the message over and over again. The voters of America want the Congress of the United States, and the President and the entire government to significantly take steps to improve education, to give Federal aid to education in the process of trying to improve education. Now, because the voters are saying that we will get plenty of rhetoric from both sides, but there is contempt for the whole public education process that is expressed in many ways. They express it in ways which relate to neglect and abandonment and indifference, but also it is sometimes expressed in a very active way. As I said before, there are actions taken which are aggressively against working families and things that working families need. Education and investment in education by the government is one of the things that working families would benefit from greatly, and they need it. We saw on the floor of the House today a vote which demonstrates great contempt for education, a great contempt for the whole research process. It happens to be an agricultural appropriations bill, and the agriculture appropriations bill, in the hassling back and forth for reasons that I do not clearly understand, the majority knows what it is doing; but for reasons that certainly are not noble and reasons that are not reasonable and were not laid out and described to the Members of Congress in any respectful details, a huge across-the-board cut in agricultural research, something like $100 million cut in agricultural research. Now, agricultural research is at the heart of America's great food production system. As my colleagues know, agricultural research, the research, the educational part of it, the egghead part of it, that draws great contempt obviously from the majority party members. Instead of them dealing with subsidies which may be wasteful or the Farmers Home Loan Mortgage Program, and there are a lot of wasteful programs in agriculture just as there are in some other places in the government, but because they have constituencies and because the ol' boys network demands that they be protected, they are protected. But academia and research, the people who are on the cutting edge of improving agriculture and responsible for the fact that Americans enjoyed the best food production system in the world, we get the best food at the lowest prices, and everything happened by accident. There is a long history involving education and research starting with the Morrill Act which created the land grant colleges. The model for land grant colleges was Thomas Jefferson, and the University of Virginia was the first State university. It was a very wise move by Thomas Jefferson who made, of course, numerous wise moves and set certain standards for our entire country that we still should be very grateful for and set us on a course that has proven to be very positive. Jefferson was not in favor of a national university. He did not want one big, huge university in Washington similar to the Sorbonne, to the Oxford chain in London. He wanted each State to have its own university, and Virginia, of course, was the first example, and later the Morrill Act established land grants for every State. The Federal land grant colleges were established, colleges and universities were established; and going beyond just the establishment of land grant colleges, they were given a mandate for practical education, practical education starting with an assumption that agriculture could be improved greatly if it benefited from science and education. So applied science in the area of agriculture became the driving force that took our farmers, long before farmers anywhere else in the world, into a whole new realm of production, greatly improving the yield of the land, greatly increasing the kind of production that resulted in our having a tremendous amount of surplus products, as we still do in many areas. This agriculture research, as my colleagues know, the experimental station, the theoretical base in the universities, the county agents to take it out to the farmers and show them how to apply it, it is one of the great things we should be very proud of, dissemination system for knowledge. As the knowledge was generated in the universities and the experimental stations, it was taken out to the farmers; the farmers applied it, and you got a result. That is all based on agricultural research. It begins with the research. So we just walked onto the floor today and found an amendment to wipe out $100 million worth of agriculture research. Is that responsible legislation? Are working families going to benefit from a crippling of our agriculture production system? There are always problems, as my colleagues know, in terms of new kinds of bugs and viruses and various kinds of things that go on and on that can wipe out gains that are made over the years if they are not researched, if they do not keep up with them. So even in the area of agriculture where we have such a sterling record of performance, today we found the reckless attitude towards the things that matter most to ordinary Americans take hold and in one fell swoop we wiped out some basic parts of our agriculture research system. Then, as my colleagues know, I think that a lot of this preoccupation with the reduction of programs that benefit working families, that benefit people who are in greatest need in our Nation, a lot of this preoccupation and obsession is based on the fact that eventually we are going to have a proposal on the floor for a huge tax cut, a huge tax cut for the people who are benefiting most from the prosperity that we have generated already. I said before that the stock market value has gone from $3 trillion in 1989 to $13 trillion in 1999. So do the rich need a tax cut? Do they need some help? As my colleagues know, why are we preoccupied with making the budget safe for a tax cut? Why are we willing to cut food stamps and willing to cut low-income housing in order to make the budget safe for a tax cut? But that is what is coming. The Republican tax cut crouches in the bush like a wounded lion. It is there, it is not going to go away. One of the problems we have is that the people who represent and care about working families, the great majority of our Nation, of course, made up of working families, those people do not have a tax program for working families. Working families have suffered the biggest tax increase of any group in the last 20 years, the payroll tax, Social Security and Medicare. Those payroll taxes have jumped more percentage- wise than any other taxes. They hit the people on the very bottom. Nobody is proposing to relieve them. I have a few proposals that I would like to offer, and I will offer them in a few minutes. As my colleagues know, my point is, you need a whole platform, I guess, for working families, and we do not have it. My friends in organized labor, as my colleagues know, they have things that they care about that they are always telling us about, and those are the right kinds of things that working people need; but it all comes in bits and pieces. We need a whole platform which lays out the need for working families being given their fair share of the great American prosperity in many ways. The Republican tax cut should be answered by a proposal for a tax cut for working families as well. Between now and Election Day in November 2000 we must lift up a meaningful platform for working families. The showdown will come sometime in the fall of the year 2000. The pattern has been the same for the last, and it will probably be the same as it has been for the last 4 years in the conflict between a Republican-controlled Congress, a Democratically-controlled White House. The really important measures are going to come down to a negotiation session at the White House between the majority in the Congress and the White House, the President. The really big decisions are going to be made then. What we do with this surplus is really going to really be determined then. Whether we are going to allow working families to have a share of the wealth of America through programs that benefit them will be determined then. So we have a scenario. We have time, but we have to start now visiting a platform for working families which has all of these components; and you know we have to come to grips with the fact that there is a mind-set in this Nation maybe among powerful people that they do not have to be concerned with the poor. The poor are poor because they did not make it, they are poor because they deserve to be poor. They are not wealthy, they are not able to take care of themselves without some help because that is the way it is, and that is the way it deserves to be, and why should the Nation care? As my colleagues know, we have whipped the welfare mothers to death, and they are becoming a nonentity in the political discussion. They have been whipped so often and so much, until they almost just disappeared. They may be still aching out there, there may be situations where we are causing more harm than good because we are putting families in a bind, and the children are suffering, and those suffering children are going to create great problems in the future for our health care system, our education system, our corrections system, prison system. As my colleagues know, we may be generating a lot of problems. Right now, they are invisible. We beat them to death, and now we are going after working families in the workplace, take their overtime, take away safety provisions, et cetera, because there is no ethic which says we have a responsibility to these people. Let me just take the conversation in a new direction. Because of the war in Kosovo, I think we ought to stop and think, as my colleagues know, and it certainly brings to mind it is one more situation where we are at war, there is no threat to the United States, and there are a lot of elements there that do not fit the description of the war against Hitler. As my colleagues know, World War II was a war where there was a real threat to the whole Western world, and it was just a matter of if we stood in line, if we did nothing, our time would come. So between, as my colleagues know, Tojo and Hitler we had to act, and it was a war which definitely was a war to save our own way of life. There may be doubts about other wars, but we had the same rationale in the Korean war and in the Vietnam war, and we always made the assumption that, you know, you had to do this, the domino theory of fighting the Communists; if you do not stop them there, they will keep going. I do not want to get into all of the various arguments, pro and con. Let us just accept war as a fact of life. Let us accept the fact also that the most any citizen can do for their country is place their lives at risk in a war. I mean, I do not know of anything greater that any citizen can do for his Nation, whether they are drafted and forced to go or whether they volunteer, that they are in a situation where they are on the firing line, their lives are at risk, than they are offering this supreme price. And of course, if they are injured and become casualties, they pay a great price, and of course, if they are killed in combat, they die. That is the supreme price, as my colleagues know, to have to give your life. So I do not think there will be any disagreement. Let me just point out the fact that, mind you, and I got these figures on casualties from the Pentagon, from the Archives, which got them, of course, from Pentagon research, so they are sound figures. Who dies in the wars? Who dies? There is a lot of contempt always directed at our big cities, our inner-cities, where the poor live mostly. One of the things that is coming out over and over again, and some Democrats are as guilty as Republicans, is they do not want to do anything about the public school system, because if you had legislation which appropriated large amounts of money for school construction and you did it on the basis of need, where the oldest schools are and the needs are and they do not have libraries and laboratories, buildings are more than 75 years old, if you did it on that basis, most of the money would go to the big cities. They have the greatest need in that area. Just like we have an insane argument now that is being promulgated by the Committee on Transportation, I think in the Senate, in the other body, that need relates to the fact they say Los Angeles and New York are getting too much transit money, too much mass transit money. Los Angeles and New York are the places where you have most of the mass transit. New York has more than 30 percent of all the mass transit in the country, of the riders, and yet we do not get 30 percent of the funding. The amount we get, however, has aroused the ire of certain people and they want to cut down the amount New York gets or Los Angeles gets in transit money. That is where the people are. Why do we have large amounts of casualties come out of the big cities in every war. World War I, World War II, the Korean conflict, the Vietnam conflict, where did most of the casualties come from? The big states with the big cities. New York has always led in casualties, even back to the Gettysburg battle. The largest numbers of casualties at Gettysburg were soldiers from New York State. They did not break it down by city, but I assure you most of them were poor immigrants out of the cities. But I will not go back to that. I am not interested in discussing the fact that valor and willingness to fight and all kinds of conditions are in motion to generate casualties. But the fact is that the casualties come out of the places where people live, where the population is. That is where you are going to have the people to put their lives at risk, the people who died, who paid the supreme price. They will be the people that come from the areas where the most people are. It is simple arithmetic. New York in World War I, there were total casualties of 35,100 official casualties. Out of those there were 7,307 combat deaths, those causalities, larger than any other state. For some reason California in World War I was very low. I think maybe because it was not as highly urbanized and the poor were not as concentrated then as they are now. Whatever the reason, New York. Pennsylvania had 29,576 casualties, 5,996 deaths in World War I. By the way, Pennsylvania has Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the big cities. Illinois has Chicago, Springfield, big cities: 15,000 casualties, 3,000 combat deaths. Ohio, Cleveland and Cincinnati, big cities, 14,487 casualties, 3,073 deaths. Massachusetts, with Boston and a couple other big cities, 11,455 total casualties, 2,253 deaths. Michigan, with Detroit, 9,000. New Jersey, a small highly urbanized state, 8,776 casualties. There is a pattern. The pattern is the same in World War II. The casualties went up a great deal. New York, 89,656 total casualties, 27,659 deaths in combat from New York State. Why? Because they were braver than anybody else? Maybe. I do not know. The important thing is that is because that is where the people are. Larger numbers came from New York, because that is where the people are, first of all, and probably that is where the poorest people are who were drafted in larger numbers, and they went off and fought and died for their country. Why do we treat that class of people with great contempt now? Pennsylvania, 81,000 casualties, 24,000 died in combat. Illinois, where Chicago is located, 54,000 casualties, 17,000 died in combat. Ohio, 49,000 casualties, 15,000 died in combat. They came out of the big cities where the people lived. California in World War II, more urbanized, 47,000 total casualties, 17,000 died in combat. Korea, New York had 8,780 casualties, 2,249 combat deaths. Pennsylvania, again, second, Illinois, third, Ohio, same pattern. Vietnam, the same pattern: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, Michigan, California. Simple arithmetic. The point is, the people who die, who pay the supreme price for their country, come out of the big states and the big cities. Therefore, we have every right to treat them with great respect. We should honor the dead from these areas by making certain that the living always are given the fullest possible benefits the government can offer. Why are we abandoning the big city school systems when so many ancestors of the present children in those systems paid such a high price to create and maintain the America that we have now? Think about it. Think about it. The people who died, who paid the highest price to keep our Nation going, deserve to be respected at all times, not the present attitude, the wrong-headedness, the unyielding stubbornness toward poor people and working families that has taken hold among decisionmakers, not among the voters. The voters say we want education to be the number one priority of the government. The decisionmakers in Washington say all right, we will play games with you and pretend it is number one, but if you look at the appropriations process, we are not appropriating that kind of money for education. We had a bill last year which authorized $218 billion for highways and transportation, $218 billion. There was money for mass transit in there. That is part of what is being appropriated this year. They are having a big debate about taking away some of the mass transit funds from New York where the riders live. Where the people are, for some reason, our hearts and our appropriations do not go. There is some flaw maybe in our whole system. The grand compromise that our forefathers made when they established the Nation, that they had to make because the states existed before the Nation, the grand compromise of giving two representatives to every state created a powerful body which represents a minority, and that body has over the last 20 to 25 years essentially been anti-urban, anti the population centers of the Nation, anti-policies that would benefit the great masses. So we have a reversion kind of thing going here in our great democracy, and our great democracy, one-man, one-vote, is being diluted and distorted in a way which results in policies and power which hurts the great majority. The places where the people live are getting the worst attention or the least attention in terms of their needs. Education is a clear area of great need. In Kosovo we have had zero casualties, so far have zero casualties, but if ground troops had been needed they would have come from the same places that they always come from, in large quantities they would come out of the big cities. Go and look at the Vietnam Wall. I love the Vietnam Wall as a monument because it broke the pattern. No more ever will we have tombs of unknown soldiers. Tombs of unknown soldiers mask the great tragedy of war. The fact that the Vietnam memorial lists the names one by one, they are all written there, they are all honored for what they have done in terms of paying the supreme price for their country, they stand out as individuals. I have seen many people cry at that wall because it comes home personally. That is the way war ought to be depicted. It is a very personal kind of set of tragedies. ``Saving Private Ryan'', Spielberg's great movie, starts out and is based on the premise that a whole family has contributed a certain number of sons and the last son ought to be saved. I think that in the beginning of the movie when they drive out to the house to meet the mother, it is a very poor family, relatively speaking, a poor family that has given those sons. That is a pattern of World War I, of World War II. Why do we have contempt in our policies for the people that we expect to die for America? Madam Speaker, I will submit a little summary that I made called Big State, Big City Casualties, which lists some of the things that I have just said about where the casualties are, in which states, and the statistics are by state, and also indicates the cities located in those states. I have, of course, a bigger record that is more complicated. It lists all the states. In the case of the war in Vietnam they even list the casualties by race. You find that the black casualties there are greater than the proportion of blacks in the population. In Vietnam certainly, when they kept statistics by race, some of the same people were treated with great contempt as we abandon our school systems and abandon our safety net, health care services, welfare. Those same people paid the supreme price for our country in large numbers. Let us stop and think about the pattern of exploitation, negative, abandonment of working families in America. We need a tax plan which addresses itself to the needs of working families. Not only are we in a situation where the only targets for cuts, for taking away benefits that have existed for years, are programs that benefit working families and poor families, the poor who do not work, the elderly, the disabled, a lot of people who are not working who benefit from these programs, we are not only targeting the cuts for them, we are targeting the benefits of government policy to the rich. We have got tax proposals that are going to be brought out and put on the table between now and the end of this appropriations process, and, of course, they will be pursued again next year in the final showdown that takes place in this Congress, this two year span. There are going to be tax cuts on the table and a bargaining process, and we are probably going to end up with some kind of tax cut. All those people who are benefiting from the great increase in wealth, the jump from $3 trillion to $13 trillion, a large amount of that is what you call unearned income. Unearned income is a term I did not invent, but it is all the money you make that does not come from wages directly. Wage earners provide the principal support for the Federal Government. Almost two-thirds of Federal revenue comes from income and Social Security taxes that are paid by workers, people who earn wages. They are the ones that provide the taxes. It is taxes on earned income. By contrast, income taxes on unearned income, stocks and bonds and that kind of thing, produce only about 12 percent of the total Federal revenue. I propose, and I think that the working families platform that ought to be adopted by working families and organizations that are supposed to represent them, I propose a massive shift in the burden of the taxes from the earned income of working people to the unearned income of those who are getting the greatest increases in wealth. Ten years ago, the early 1989, as I said, the value of all U.S. stocks was about $3 trillion. Now it is about $13 trillion, a $10 trillion increase. That is the opportunity. You can get new revenue from that increase and the people who are continuing to earn without any pain being caused. The great political position that we need a tax cut is not related to pain and the reduction of pain; it is related to a wrong-headed, unyielding, stubborn policy which defines ``them'' and ``us'' and disregards the fact that there is a place, there ought to be a place, for working families to share the great wealth of America. I introduced on March 11 of this year H.R. 1090, which I call the Social Security Protection and Tax Relief Act of 1999. It cuts the Social Security tax rate from 7.65 percent to 6.4 percent. This will give a tax cut of $15 for every $10,000 of earned income to all working families and to the rich as well as the poor, if the rich are working and earning wages, and whether or not they pay income tax, of course, they will benefit through the various devices in place in the Tax Code. So cuts of the social security tax, payroll taxes, where the biggest increases have taken place over the last 20 years, and where the people on the bottom are taxed at the same rate as the people on the top, those cuts would be a great benefit for working families. My H.R. 1099 imposes a new 12 percent social security tax on all taxable unearned income to offset what you would lose from reducing the taxes on people at the lowest levels. We propose social security taxes on all taxable unearned income. I also on April 12 introduced another bill, H.R. 1390, the Income Tax Fairness Act of 1999. That cuts all income tax brackets by 3 percentage points, all income tax brackets, from the highest to the lowest. The present rates in the 5 brackets are 15 percent, 28 percent, 31 percent, 36 percent, and 39.6 percent. The new rates would be 12 percent, 25 percent, 28 percent, 33 percent, and 36.6 percent. I am not on the Committee on Ways and Means, and I know most people would consider it inappropriate that I should be here talking about taxes and changes in the tax policy. The Committee on Ways and Means is an exclusive committee. For the benefit of people who are not close to Washington, we have a caste system in the Congress. There are exclusive committees and there are other committees for the peasants. I am not on an exclusive committee. The Committee on Appropriations is exclusive, the Committee on Ways and Means is exclusive, the Committee on Commerce and the Committee on Energy are exclusive. Some of the wrongheadedness and anti-democratic attitudes that are generated come out of the structure itself. It is all wrong to say that education is a lesser committee. The Committee on Education and the Work Force is not an exclusive committee. However, what is more important to the Nation at this point than the education system which brought us to where we are and will take us into the future? At any rate, I am not on the Committee on Ways and Means, but I think every Member of Congress has a right to speak out and offer the best wisdom that they can offer to stimulate the discussion. Hopefully we will develop a platform which all the people who consider themselves advocates for the average American, the average taxpayer out there, the working families, will also get involved in the debate. Steve Forbes and the various other conservatives should not be the only ones who are concerned about tax reform. There ought to be a tax reform program that comes from working families and their advocates. H.R. 1390 cuts deductible depreciation on nonresidential buildings from 2.6 percent per year, and it is based on an estimated useful life of 39 years, et cetera, et cetera, some other details that I think we need not go into. The estimate is that this tax program that I offer will be either revenue-neutral or a revenue-plus. Total Federal revenue, income and social security taxes, will be reduced by between $190 to $200 billion per year and increased by the same amount or more, $200 to $250 billion a year by the mechanisms in these bills. I am also convinced that the great social security problem we all talk about, and we have good reason to worry about, the great social security problem could be dealt with if we were to place a social security tax on all unearned income. In addition to the tax on earned income, let us put it on all unearned income. That is the area of greatest growth. That is the area where the ratio of people in the workplace does not determine what goes into the social security coffers. Let us have a social security tax on unearned income for the first time, and that will save the social security system for at least two generations, and I suspect will go even beyond that and solve the problem once and for all. In other words, I think working families deserve a platform, a program of their own. I hope the candidates, certainly the candidates in the Democratic Party for president, will break out of the mold, will break out of the conventional wisdom, and move forward and talk in more direct and affirmative terms about programs which benefit the great masses in America. Finally, I want to conclude on the program that I think benefits the most people, and all of us, but certainly working families in dire need of the public education system that is able to deliver the kind of education that is needed as we go into the new millennium. As we go into the 21st century, we need the best schools in the world. We are not going to be able to maintain our lead economically if we do not have the best educated populace in the world. We are not going to be able to maintain our strong military if we don't have the best educated populace in the world. Already we have great shortages in the Navy. I understand the last great super aircraft carrier that was launched was short of personnel by 300 people. They could not find 300 people to staff it. There are other shortages throughout the Navy and other services, shortages of appropriate personnel. Are there shortages of bodies in a Nation with more than 250 million residents? There is never a shortage of bodies. They are talking about a shortage of people who have the capacity and the prerequisite training to be able to deal with a high-tech military. The Navy needs people who have some kind of education which prepares them to learn how to operate high-tech weapons. The Air Force needs the same kind of people. The Army needs the same kind of people. Even in the military, we need the best security effort that we can launch, which would be a better educated population through a revamped public education system, everywhere we go, economics, foreign policy, globalization, military, and even social security. If we are worried about social security, what is the great worry about social security? The number of people who are going to be on social security as we progress into the 21st century, the ratio of people who are earning or drawing money from social security will be far greater than the number of people who are in the work force paying into social security. That is a simple understanding that is correct. We are going to have fewer people paying into social security than are getting benefits from social security. Then we have a situation where if we do not find new sources of revenue, it is going to run out of money. I have just indicated part of the solution may be to look for other revenue sources for social security. But even if we stay with the primary revenue source of wage-earners paying into the social security fund, if we have an education system which guarantees that the jobs that are created in this Nation will be there and the people who are in the Nation can qualify for them and earn wages and pay into the social security system, we are helping social security. So education helps to keep us strong militarily, it helps to keep us strong economically. Education is the best investment we can make in social security. The problem now is that because already we have not been able to fill many of the jobs in the high-tech industries, corporations are contracting out to other nations. Bangalore, India, is called the computer capital of the world because in Bangalore, India, they have numerous contractors from this Nation who are contracting with firms in Bangalore to provide computing services. And because of our high-tech communications facilities, we can do that kind of thing. In addition to large numbers of corporations contracting to firms located in Bangalore, and the people in Bangalore, of course, pay their social security into the Indian system, not the American system, we have also large numbers who come to this country as foreign workers and improve their skills because they are hired in the jobs that cannot be filled by our corporations. They go back and make the computer and other high-tech industries of their Nation even more efficient and effective as competitors. So wherever we look, we find the need for greater investment in education. There are many ways we can invest in education. We have talked about a lot of them. I do not think that I would rank reducing the classroom size over construction or construction over reducing the size of the elementary classes, but I would like to say that a school construction initiative which is meaningful would send a message to the whole Nation and the whole public education system. If we believe in a religion, then the first visible commitment of that religion is manifested in the kind of church they build or temple they have or synagogue they have. The physical facility is not at the heart of what the religion is all about, but the physical facility is a visible manifestation of a commitment. If we abandon the public schools of this Nation, and we have a situation similar to the one we have now, where we are spending only 23 cents per child on physical infrastructure in the elementary and secondary schools, the Federal commitment, the Federal portion of the commitment to the physical infrastructure right now is about 23 cents per child. We have 53 million children in school. When we look at the amount of money the Federal Government is spending, it is about 23 cents per child. I propose a bill, H.R. 1820, which I have already introduced and am seeking cosponsors, where we would spend $417 per year per child instead of 23 cents per year per child. For $417 per year per child, we could deal with the crumbling, dilapidated schools, schools that endanger the health of youngsters because they have coal-burning furnaces, lead pipes, some have serious problems in terms of the roof. No matter how many times you repair it, the water seeps into the walls at the top and it keeps coming down. Lead paint, lead is in the paint. There are all kinds of dangers. Many buildings are just so old. We have a lot of buildings in New York City that are 75 years or older, many that are 50 years old. This is not unique to New York City. All of the big cities have the same problem. Many rural areas, of course, have even worse problems. They never had sound buildings. We need a construction effort. I conclude by saying that investment in the public education system is one of many of the steps we need to take to end the oppression of working families and provide benefits, and have them share in the wealth, instead of being objects of our contempt. Madam Speaker, I include for the Record the following information on World War II:

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, Washington is bloated with rhetoric about education reform. But when we examine the actual programs and projects being proposed there is a tremendous shortfall between the giant needs and the tiny proposed solutions. Our nation's children are being denied adequate Opportunities-to-Learn. The opportunity to learn begins with a safe, conducive school building. But the federal government is spending almost nothing to improve the education infrastructure of school systems across the nation. We we neglect and abandon school buildings we send a highly visible signal to our children and their parents. The message is that Congressmembers only want to play word games about education. The situation is serious, however, and requires a significant appropriation of dollars. For a mere 417 dollars per student per year we can turn the current downward trend upward. If we do less than this minimal effort we are stumbling into a process where our cities will be doomed to paralysis and deadly shrinkage. The following RAP poem sums up the looming possible fate of our neglected cities. Also, attached is a Dear Colleague letter requesting co- sponsorship of H.R. 1820, an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Schools Assistance Act. H.R. 1820 provides adequate direct federal appropriations for school construction, modernization, repair, technology, security and renovation. Urban Cleansing Forget all Godly rules Go strip them of their schools Leave neighborhoods naked Ethnic cleansing is now banned But urban shrinkage is still planned Budgets will be raped Streets left uncertain Cops mandated to act real mean Forget all Godly rules Don't pay for education tools Go strip them of their schools Ethnic cleansing is now banned But urban shrinkage is still planned.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Sanders amendment. Mr. Chairman, I think the last speaker was correct when he said we need to revamp the CIA. I think what the Sanders amendment says is that revamping should not involve additional money. The CIA budget is estimated to be somewhere around $30 billion. We are only spending about $23 billion on elementary and secondary education. It is important that it be revamped. And I am not sure that the intelligence community that exists now is capable of revamping it. We need an independent commission of some kind to revamp the CIA. It needs to be improved. It needs to have accountability. The long history of blunders in the last 10 years are such that it is obviously a defunct, incompetent, decaying agency. Something needs to happen. I am not sure the President is in charge, either. The President's first choice for CIA Director was not accepted by the intelligence community. The intelligence community protects this incompetence. Our history with respect to Haiti was that the CIA was determined to get the duly-elected President of Haiti, Jean Bertrand-Aristide. They did everything they could to smear him. All kinds of false things were generated out of the CIA. When they were later proven to be untrue, nobody later apologized, nobody was held accountable. In one of the major diplomatic moves made by the envoy to Haiti, where we had a delegation going in with Canadian police and a number of other things to start a process of peace in Haiti, there was a big demonstration on the docks in Haiti which turned all that around and threatened the U.S. Embassy personnel with gunshots; and it turned out that that demonstration was financed by the CIA. Emmanuel Constanz, the head of the organization that staged the violent demonstration was on the payroll of the CIA. We cannot fully get the story of all the things Emmanuel Constanz had going with the CIA because they refuse to give us the records. They will not let the nation of Haiti try Emmanuel Constanz for the crimes that he has committed. Then there is the Aldrich Ames affair, where the man in charge of the Russian spy operation managing our assets was on the payroll of the Soviet Union. He was on the payroll of the Soviet Union, and he exposed those assets. At least 10 of the people who were working for this nation were executed as a result of Aldrich Ames, the guy who was in charge at the CIA, having sold them out for quite a number of millions of dollars. And now we have the blunder at the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia. It is not funny at all. It is not humorous at all to me. I heard some Members in the elevator say, ``Do you want to establish a special map fund for the CIA?'' I do not think this is funny at all. These people have life-and-death power over large numbers of people, and to talk about a mapping error which could have been corrected by a tourist map, a mapping area that was reinforced by somebody on the ground. They said they had assets on the ground. Was the asset on the ground drunk? What kind of operation is this? And when are we, as American people first of all, going to get to see what the budget is? But more important than that, an independent commission to revamp it? And before that happens, there should not be a single additional penny spent. Throwing money at the CIA is certainly not going to solve the problem. And money is not the problem. They have far more than they need right now. My colleagues will recall several years ago that the CIA accountants lost $4 billion in their budget. They could not find out where $4 billion had gone. They just could not. We know it was not spent. They lost it and kept applying for, of course, new funds every year. And we never got a full explanation as to what happened to lose $4 billion in the budget of the CIA. So we very much need to have a better accounting of this life-and- death powerful agency. The incompetence is deadly. The incompetence of the CIA is deadly. The incompetence of the CIA is such that it destroys the foreign policies of the United States. My constituents were all in favor of supporting the President on the actions taken against Slobodan Milosevic. But now, the war has been conducted in such a sloppy manner. And with the Chinese Embassy bombing, there seems to be a turnaround in public opinion in my area because they do not want to be a part of anything that is as sloppy as this, a life-and-death operation, that tells us that they bombed an embassy that has been existing for several years because the maps were not correct. The CIA should be revamped, and we should start with all new people in the intelligence community. If intelligence community means members of the committee, then maybe members of the committee ought to take a hard look at themselves and say, we need some fresher voices. If the committees in the House and the Senate are going to be advocates for the CIA, we need an objective committee that will be an oversight committee to really look at the CIA and revamp the CIA. But, certainly, do not spend an additional dime on the CIA until that happens.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. (Mr. OWENS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on the previous set of speakers and talk about the Kosovo burden, the Kosovo burden and decision-making in the 106th Congress, how it impacts and will impact on everything we do in the rest of this Congress. I might begin by stating that I previously stated already that Kosovo is, in my opinion, a campaign of compassion. I think that it was important to confront Slobodan Milosevic. He gave the civilized nations no choice. I think this war is a necessary evil. All wars are evil, necessary evils, but the word ``necessary'' becomes very important. ``Necessary'' is a vital word that many of my constituents are questioning, and like the gentlemen before me, I have gotten many letters and many comments, and I welcome those comments and those letters, both those that agree with me and those that do not agree with me. It is important that we discuss and have a dialogue about whether or not this war, like all other wars, it is an evil, but is it a necessary evil? I think it very important to note that I, too, have had a series of town meetings, and in three or four town meetings, the first three, unanimous agreement when I asked do they support the present actions in Kosovo. Ninety-five percent of the people in the audience raised their hands. One meeting I had 200 people. I was shocked to see that kind of percentage. When I got to the fourth meeting already, less than half of the people raised their hands. That was on April 27. So it is obvious that the conduct of the war, the implementation of the war, has a great deal to do with the opinions that people now have of the action, and I would like to separate the blundering conduct of the war from the cause, the fact that we are confronting what I call a sovereign predator. Slobodan Milosevic is a sovereign predator who has given us no choice, if you want to accept a new kind of morality in the world. The old morality was you never, you never interfered with the internal affairs of a country. If they want to do things within their boundaries, then you do not get involved. You let them destroy their people if they want to. I suppose, as my colleagues know, following that reasoning, Adolf Hitler, as long as he was murdering Jews in Germany, the world had no basis for condemning him or no basis for challenging him. As my colleagues know, as long as you do things within your borders, the sovereign Nation can do whatever it wants to do. That is the old morality, international morality. I like to believe that in the Kosovo action that is now underway we have challenged that old morality and said you cannot do whatever you want to do to people within your borders and not have the condemnation of the international community, and beyond the condemnation they may take some action in some cases and have taken action in this case. So I welcome and applaud the actions of my colleagues who are questioning how we can get out of this mess. I support what the President is doing. I support the initial action. I certainly do not support all the blunders that have taken place. But despite my support for the action, I also welcome and applaud the actions of many of my colleagues in Congress, those who have taken upon themselves to initiate their own kinds of diplomatic initiatives. This is an unprecedented action, and so I think the dialogue and the debate and the methods ought to also be unprecedented. I think that the journey that the Members of Congress took to Vienna was a remarkable initiative, especially since it was led by the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) and the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie). As my colleagues know, they are two Members of Congress which everybody generally would acknowledge are different ends of the spectrum with respect to ideology, if you can still put old labels on people in terms of who is conservative, who is liberal, who is progressive, and who is militaristic, and who is a dove and who is a hawk. The joint delegation led by Mr. Abercrombie and Mr. Weldon certainly defy all of those descriptions. I think it was a great initiative. I do not know the details of it. I have heard the reports that were made on the floor, and I applaud what they did. I think we should always bear in mind what Robert McNamara has been saying for the last decade. Robert McNamara was the Secretary of Defense under President Johnson during most of the time of the Vietnam War, and McNamara has come out with some revelations and confessions that are really astounding. We ought to pay close attention to the unfortunate experience and the grieving of Mr. McNamara, who has now spent a lot of time in Vietnam, of all places, talking to the Vietnamese who were in charge of the war in Vietnam and, through that dialogue, trying to leave a legacy for mankind so that we will not make the same kinds of mistakes in the future. In this particular war, in this particular situation involving Kosovo, it would be good if we were to take many of those things into consideration. One of the things Mr. McNamara said was that both sides greatly misjudged the intensity of the others in terms of their conviction and what they were willing to do in order to prevail, and I think that it is important, if we are going to get out of this present situation, that that be remembered by both sides. We should not have any more slaughter, any more deaths than are necessary, and maybe we have already had too many and more than are necessary, but we still have a situation that there is a basic moral problem here, and, unlike the behavior of nations in the past, the NATO nations have chosen to take a moral action. Agreement with the basic moral thrust does not mandate that we blindly obey the total policy, although we blindly submit to the total policy or to the implementation and execution of a policy, but I think it is important to discuss thoroughly the basic moral thrust of what we are doing in Kosovo. All the NATO nations, and, as my colleagues know, we are talking about very mature nations who have citizens who have elected their leadership in a democracy, and, as my colleagues know, they are not taking reckless actions, they are not the kind of nation that would trivialize what they are doing; as my colleagues know France, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, you know the NATO nations, are civilized nations with histories of seeking justice, they are democracies, and they have to answer to their people. So, if they are taking an action with these dimensions, then we ought to stop and seriously consider what they are doing, why they are doing it before we proceed any further and discuss the unfortunate execution of the war, establish whether or not we really think it is necessary. I have been disappointed by the fact that certain kinds of things, actions that I assumed would take place or had taken place have not, did not take place before the bombing began. I was shocked to learn that economic sanctions and the oil embargo were not thoroughly considered before we started the bombing, that that came after the bombing. As my colleagues know, I would expect that that would be the kind of actions that would have been put in place and we would have tested whether that would have an impact on the actions of Mr. Milosevic and his warlords or not. I had the experience of being the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Task Force on Haiti during the time when we were trying to return the democratically-elected President of Haiti to Haiti, and you had at the head of the Haitian government two sovereign predators of the type of Milosevic, as my colleagues know, and they were not budging at all. These were Army men who had taken over the government with tanks and guns after Mr. Aristide, Bertram Aristide, won by an overwhelming landslide in a democratic election. They took over the government, and with guns and tanks they were intending to stay there forever. Now we did try sanctions, we tried an oil embargo, we tried a number of things. Over a 3-year period we tried a number of things that did not work because these sovereign predators did not understand anything except the language of force, and only when the troops were in the airplanes and on the way to Haiti did they agree to sign an agreement to step down and return Haiti to democratic rule. But we had tried every possible diplomatic maneuver. They had agreed several times to do things and then reneged on those agreements. I assumed when we started the bombing in Yugoslavia that all diplomatic maneuvers had been exhausted. It is unfortunate that that was not the case, and I felt a bit betrayed to find that only afterwards did they consider an oil embargo and economic sanctions. I thought we had done that already. I am also baffled by the failure of the NATO powers and the U.S. to charge Mr. Milosevic as a war criminal. Why are we going to war, taking such extraordinary measures, bombing a nation, running the risk of killing large numbers of civilians, as we are doing, a very serious matter? War is hell. There is no way to avoid the hell of war. Once one gets into it, things go wrong. Most modern wars have found that it is the civilians, innocent civilians, who die in the largest numbers. In most modern wars, the innocent civilians die in the largest numbers, and it is the most unfortunate. It is one of the other reasons why we should at all cost try to avoid war. Here we are, in a war action, and the head of the nation, Mr. Slobodan Milosevic, who was there 10 years ago when the breakup of Yugoslavia started, the ethnic cleansing started, the massacres started, the rape, the pillage, all of the things that they are doing in Kosovo they have done it before already in Bosnia. Sarajevo, one of the great metropolitan cities of the world, was almost destroyed. We saw on television the bombardments. Then after we finally got some kind of peace agreement and outside forces went into the territory, all of the charges that had been made before about massacres and rapes and so forth was confirmed. It happened. We were not the victims of propaganda, as Mr. Milosevic would have us believe now that it is really not his forces that are driving the people of Kosovo out of the country but it is our bombing that is doing that; that they were quite content to stay before. All of it is a little ridiculous, but a lot of people are believing it, so we must address it. We have already heard from this same man and his regime in Yugoslavia the same tales which he tried to paper over and camouflage barbarity on a mass scale, modern barbarity backed up by tanks and machine guns. Milosevic has done it already. Why did not we go ahead, as a nation, this Nation and the other members of NATO, and call him a war criminal, brand him as a war criminal and begin to move in the world as if, no matter what he does in the future, he will be punished in some way? Certainly, locked out of any kind of recognition and unable to travel in any other nation in the world and try it in The Hague. Whether we are going to fight our way into Belgrade or not, certainly let the whole world know what we are dealing with. I think it is unfortunate that NATO and the U.S. have sort of taken a fuzzy-minded approach to the menace of a sovereign predator. He is a sovereign predator, a killer, a murderer, with the authority of a nation behind him, and there ought to be a new way to deal with these people, at least label them clearly as to what they are. If we are going to take a drastic and extreme step like bombing the nation, then we ought to clearly let our people understand why we are doing it, and one of those ways to communicate the necessity of war is to clearly describe who the instigators are. I think that there is room for creative intervention by the Members of Congress as a result of some of these unfortunate gaps and lapses in our own foreign policymaking and even though there are very experienced people involved in the diplomacy, there are the diplomats of France, the diplomats of Great Britain, the diplomats of all the European nations, as well as we have the diplomats here. I do not think the kind of criticisms that have been leveled at Madeleine Albright are justified. They are right there in the middle of a very difficult situation. The question is, are we going to stand by and allow the massacres to take place so that in the future we can tell our children, well, it did happen, it was most unfortunate but never again? Do we want to be able to boast never again when now we have the opportunity to make certain that it does not happen right now? The challenges, why do we not make certain that it does not happen now? Let us not be in a position of repeating the slogan, never again. We sat by and allowed 6 million or more Jews and other people to be massacred by the Nazi powers and now we say that is most unfortunate. We build museums, we have films made, and we write books, and we look at the horror that was perpetuated while civilized nations stood by. Some of it could have been prevented. Finally, the civilized nations, of course, united; and the Hitler regime was defeated in order to stop what was going on. Even then, it took some actions which if we had CNN on the scene, if we had the kind of press coverage now that we have of wars, where the enemy, that is propaganda-wise, allows one behind the scenes, I do not know whether we would have prosecuted the war that defeated Hitler in Germany the same way and it would have come to the same conclusion. We might have negotiated a peace with Hitler and he might still be around if we had CNN filming the cities of Hamburg and Cologne and a number of other places in Germany that were bombed to rubble because Hitler refused to surrender. The bombing of Germany was one of the ways that was undertaken to break the back of the resistance of the people who followed Hitler. That was most unfortunate. War is barbaric, but if we had been able to see the large numbers of civilians die then, would we have decided, no, let us make peace with Hitler at any price to end the carnage? There is room for creative intervention here, and I think we ought to understand that the intervention ought to be creative, that when we interject ourselves and try to influence the foreign policy of our Nation we ought to be thorough about it, we ought to think deeply about what we are doing. The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) and the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) were very serious, the discussions that they had with the Russians in Vienna. I hope the White House takes it into consideration. I think that perhaps some things behind the scene are moving now, and the diplomatic initiatives that are going on now with the Russians certainly may be helped by what our Members of Congress have done. We should not stop, but we should reflect deeply on what we are doing. We should remember that it is up to us to try to interpret to our constituents whether or not this war is necessary. When is it necessary? What kind of new morality are we willing to undertake in the definition of necessary? I welcome the initiative of Jessie Jackson; and I think it is great that three men, three soldiers who were captured illegally to begin with, are now back home. No amount of technicalities and diplomatic protocol violations should be accepted as an excuse for not doing everything possible to get those soldiers back. We got them back, and I congratulate Jessie Jackson and that initiative, the ministers who went with him and the whole delegation. I do not think that we should allow that kind of action to let us minimize or trivialize the evil of the Milosevic regime. I do not think we should let Milosevic score a propaganda victory because he releases three soldiers who should not have been kidnapped in the first place. I do not think we should let Milosevic appear to be a reasonable, peaceful guy, willing to talk, when he has been on the rampage for all of this time and continues to be the guiding force behind a brutal war machine, killing and pillaging and destroying whole villages and driving people out of cities. Ethnic cleansing is not exactly as bad perhaps as the gas chambers of Hitler. Many people are allowed to get out with their lives in the case of ethnic cleansing. They are not systematically destroyed, but large numbers are destroyed, and it is systematic, and it has the authority of the government behind it, and Milosevic is the government. In other words, what I am saying is that diplomacy should not be business as usual. This is a situation which is very difficult. It is like a snake pit in the midst of quicksand in a mine field. Everything complicated and dangerous that one can imagine is involved in this situation. The fact that the implementation of the war has gone so badly certainly has destroyed a lot of support for it in areas where there should be support. I do not want to be in a position of making excuses for the blunders of the military. I do not think we should drop bombs in areas where there is a danger that there is going to be a tremendous amount of civilian collateral. I do not think we should take those chances. I certainly do not think we should trust the CIA to do our targeting for us if they do not have maps and cannot discern an embassy building that has been there for some time. They say they had people on the ground who double-checked that site as well as whatever we are using in terms of satellite guidance of our bombing attacks. There is no excuse for that. I have been on this floor many times during the reauthorization and the appropriations process for the CIA, and I have criticized the CIA for its waste of a $30 billion budget. They have Aldrich Ames who was in charge of the counteroffensive against the Russian spy agency, and we found that Aldrich Ames was on the payroll of the Russians, and at least 10 of our agents were executed as a result of Aldrich Ames sitting there as the head of the CIA counterspy operation against Russia. We had other people who defected from various positions who showed that the CIA is quite a shabby organization. Why the President has not dismantled the present CIA and reorganized it totally, I do not know. There is certainly a good basis for it, even before the bombing of the Chinese embassy by using the wrong maps. It is a ridiculous explanation to have to offer to the world. The CIA is a multibillion dollar agency. Their budget is probably more than $30 billion. Surely they can find a building on the map and pinpoint it properly if they had any kind of integrity. The CIA in Haiti was my first close-up experience with the CIA and why I moved from the position of questioning the CIA's existence on the basis of the fact that it could not tell that the Soviet Union was collapsing. Senator Moynihan once made a speech and I thought it was very interesting because he was on the Intelligence Committee, and he should know. He said that the CIA never informed them. They had no idea that the economy of the Soviet Union was collapsing. With all of the agents, the money and analysis, et cetera, the CIA was caught by surprise when the economy of the Soviet Union collapsed. The whole government of the Soviet Union sort of collapsed, and we were caught by surprise. I thought that was startling. Then up close, as the chairman of the task force, Congressional Black Caucus Task Force on Haiti, I saw how the CIA worked against the policy of its own government. During the course of our negotiations with Haiti, we reached the point where we thought we had an agreement where the military junta in charge of Haiti would allow us to begin to take some steps toward normalizing the situation by allowing the delegation to come into Haiti. One part of the delegation would be a group of Canadian policemen who would help work with the law enforcement agency in Haiti and some other people who were going to do some other things, and they were all on a ship going to dock in Haiti. And on the day they were supposed to disembark from the ship, there was a huge demonstration on the dock in Haiti, and guns were fired. The American embassy personnel were threatened, and a number of things happened that caught us by surprise. It made the President withdraw the people who were supposed to be part of that contingent. It turned out later that the people who organized that demonstration against the delegation sent by the President of the United States to begin to normalize the situation in Haiti, those people were on the payroll of the CIA. Emanuel Constant was the head of the organization funded by the CIA. He was on the payroll of the CIA. We do not know the full story yet because they refuse to release all the documents and papers connected with Emanuel Constant. They refused to allow him to be tried by the present government of Haiti. So the CIA is an animal that we ought to take a close look at. It may be obsolete, extinct, and begging for retirement. It ought to be done away with and something new should be organized using somebody different, because the blunders continue. They become more and more dangerous. I think that our government and the NATO alliance is now in an almost untenable position, having bombed the Chinese embassy and giving the Chinese, who opposed the action in Yugoslavia all along, giving them an excellent excuse to take us to the United Nations and to raise the actions of NATO up for the whole world and indignantly protest the fact that they were victimized. It is totally unnecessary. A CIA that would do that needs to be certainly examined closely. Some heads ought to roll. I agree with the Chinese, somebody ought to be severely punished for what has happened. But the CIA, of course, is a very political animal. It is an agency of government which professes it has nothing to do with politics, of course. They are there for the national security. They report to the President. But during my sojourn on the task force for Haiti, I learned different. There are people in Washington who belong to something called the intelligence community. The intelligence community protects the CIA. There are a number of characters in the CIA who can almost do anything they want. We saw some of them do almost anything they wanted to do in Haiti, and there was no accountability. There were CIA reports that were total lies. They had the duly elected president of Haiti, Mr. Aristide, almost a drug addict, a psychopath. All kind of things were charged. When we examined the basis for their charges, there was nothing there. He was placed in hospitals for psychiatric treatment that did not even exist, and all kinds of fabrications we found that had been accepted by the CIA. The prosecution of this war just brings to light the fact that we have some serious problems in a very expensive governmental operation. The gentleman who preceded me was talking about waste in government and the expenditures, and how so much of our tax money goes into wasteful government. I assure Members, there are many places where there is waste, but I never hear the majority party talking about the real waste. In fact, we saw last week that when we had a bill on the floor presented by the President calling for $6 billion to conduct the activities related to the war in Kosovo, the majority party added to that and the $6 billion price tag was raised to $13 billion. We saw before our very eyes in bold relief an example of how the waste gets accumulated. Most of what they were doing was going to go into weapons systems and activities that are not related to the Kosovo war, but they do make for very high profits in terms of the productions of certain weapons systems, some of which are questionable. One of the things that the Kosovo war maybe brings into bold relief, again, is the fact that our high-tech weaponry has a lot of shortcomings. The precision bombing, precision bombing turns out not to be so precise. Strange things are happening with our helicopters. The Apache helicopters were coming, and the way the press played up the helicopters, they did them a great injustice, because they kept hyping, the Apaches are coming, the Apaches are coming. One got the impression from hearing over the news day after day that the Apaches are coming that the Apaches were going to turn the situation around and win the war. I do not think that the Army had asked for that kind of publicity, but for some reason, there it was. Even Ted Koppel on several shows had people dealing with the way the Apache functions and how the pilots think. It was all this hype about the Apaches, the Apaches. Now two Apaches have crashed in training sessions. It is just one more reason why the public, the voters, the American citizens have real doubts about this war, when we have blunders of that kind which are placed under a magnifying glass and raised to a level of visibility that destroys the effectiveness of whatever we are going to do afterwards. The Apaches are there now. It looks as if the Apaches are going to work no miracles and make no great differences, but they are high-tech weapons. We have learned these high-tech weapons are so loaded down that they cannot fly over the mountains. They have so much on them until they have difficulty flying over the mountain ranges, and Yugoslavia has mountain ranges. Every night that I listened to the discussion of the Apaches I was appalled at the kind of facts we pick up in terms of why our high-tech weaponry fails. Now is the time for every Member of Congress, and indeed, every American citizen, to think seriously and deeply and thoroughly about the activities that are going on. Kosovo and the burden of the war in Kosovo will impact on all the decisions we make in Congress for this 106th session of Congress. We are going to be saddled with discussions about the fact that $13 billion was appropriated when only $6 billion was requested by the President, and many of the same people on the majority side who advocated and voted for those appropriations are going to tell us now that we have no money for education, we have no money to deal with prescription drug benefits for people on Medicare. They are going to tell us we have to have tremendous across-the-board cuts in any program that is a domestic program that is nondefense. We should expect all of this and get ready for it because of Kosovo becoming an excuse for certain people who have always wanted to cut back drastically on the spending by the Federal Government to help the people in America who need help the most. Mr. Speaker, I have tried to think deeply and thoroughly about all of it. I greatly regret that now, in my pursuit of greater funding for education, of greater funding for school construction, that I am going to have to deal with the Kosovo burden. I deeply regret that. I think all American citizens regret that, in a situation where we have a tight budget already, we have to also now deal with additional expenditures for Kosovo. I have thought deeply about this. I understand all the implications. I would like to invite my constituents who disagree with me about why, despite all this, I still support the actions of the President and the NATO alliance, I would like for them to follow my thought processes for a moment, those among my constituents who disagree. The first consideration is my experience with Haiti, the experience with Haiti. At least 3 years of negotiations brought me face-to-face with an example of a sovereign predator. There were two of them, Raoul Cedras and Michel Francoise. We looked at their faces in negotiation after negotiation and they seemed like rational, reasonable people at the time, when you were negotiating, but they went back on agreement after agreement. They broke agreements. They were determined to squeeze from their country as much as they could for themselves. Haiti had a thriving drug-running business. Drug transshipments were feeding the coffers of the same men we were negotiating with. They did not mind the deteriorating conditions of the economy, the misery. They did not mind that. They added to the misery by killing large numbers of people every night. The total went up to about 5,000 people killed during that 3-year period. Negotiations, discussions, diplomacy, sanctions, embargo of oil, none of it worked. It was not until a determination was made to pursue a course of military intervention in Haiti that we got some real action. As we know, we did not have to fire a shot. There was just the threat of the troops, the understanding that they were on the way, that led Raoul Cedras to step down. Force, however, had to be the threat to do that. We had to be willing to do it. In the case of Saddam Hussein, I was against the Gulf War, I was against bombing, I was against the ground war, and I watched as Saddam Hussein allowed his own people to be pulverized, his own armies to be destroyed, and he stubbornly held on. The bombing did have a great effect in the desert. It was a place where you could impact greatly upon the armed forces. His forces were ravished. They were destroyed long before the ground war began, but he was a sovereign predator who did not care about his own people, and not until the ground war started and the tanks were rolling did we see Saddam Hussein willing to yield. He played some tricks, and at one point there was an announcement that he was trying to seek asylum in another Nation. For that reason I think the calculations of the Bush administration were thrown off and they did not pursue Saddam Hussein's army to the point of destroying the army. That is most unfortunate. This sovereign predator still sits there, like the sovereign predator in Yugoslavia. We had an encounter with him, but we did not go any further. We did not go far enough to destroy him and his powers; not the Nation, but a single person surrounded by his own cronies, who becomes the perpetrator of large-scale dislocation and death in the world. Stop to think of it for a moment. When we add up all the people in the last 50 years, and let us take the last 100 years, because World War I was in the last 100 years, World War II, all the hurricanes, tornadoes, the earthquakes, if we add up all the people who have died in all the natural disasters in the last 100 years, yet it will come nowhere close to the people who have died in wars perpetrated by the Adolph Hitlers and Saddam Husseins of the world. Millions died in World War II as a result of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime, millions died. The authoritarian totalitarian regime in Tokyo, millions died; in China, millions died. They were ready for more millions to die if we had to invade Japan. They were going to hold on at all costs. Too many died in Okinawa, too many died in Iwo Jima. The sovereign predators do not yield, and they are the cause of more death than nature or God has ever caused. It is a serious consideration. It is a serious thing to think about. Should they be allowed to wreak havoc? In Rwanda, the Hutus who were in charge of government went on the radio and used all the methods of communication to raise their own population, the Hutus, who were the vast majority of the population, to a high level of anger, and they went out and savagely slaughtered at least a half a million people. Some say it approaches a million. We saw the bodies on television. We saw the churches full of people hacked to death. We saw the people, bodies floating in the river. The sovereign predators of Rwanda were demagogues who wanted power. It is all about a demagogue who wants power, becomes a sovereign predator, because the best way to achieve that power is to use the tribal, ethnic, or racial card against his own people to throw them into turmoil. Maybe there are some ancient instincts that make us all distrustful of each other, but people do not attack each other in large groups. We do not have ethnic wars, tribal wars, automatically. They are instigated by somebody. The demagogues instigate the wars for the purpose of their own power. Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister or president, I am sorry, of Israel right now. His father wrote a book about anti- Semitism and the ancient origins of anti-Semitism, the history of anti- Semitism. And in the discussion of anti-Semitism in Egypt, he talked about the fact that for so long there was a peaceful existence there. Jews existed along with everybody else, and there was no problem. Antisemitism arose. And studying the origins of that antisemitism and using his ancient sources and analyzing it, he came to the conclusion that that antisemitism that arose out of Egypt and led to the Exodus and the kinds of cruel things that preceded the Exodus is similar to a pattern that takes place in the world whenever these things happen. That is that a minority is always at risk because a minority by simply being a minority is in a position to be victimized if a demagogue finds it convenient to use the fact that that minority is there to incite the majority and get the majority into a mode of thinking which supports the demagogue. So demagoguery by sovereign predators has caused more death and destruction of the world than any natural calamities, all the natural calamities put together. Think about it. Here we have a demagogue, Slobodan Milosovic, like the demagogues in Haiti, the sovereign predators, demagogues that become sovereign predators. They become sovereign predators because they have the authority of the government and they can command the guns and the tanks. Although the majority of the people may be against them, they have no way to counterattack against modern weapons so the demagogues prevail. It may be that sometimes they have the majority of people on their side after they have captured all of the propaganda machinery and they are in the control of the mass communications. They brainwash people to the point where they do sometimes, maybe many times, command the majority. But the sovereign predators are in charge, and something has to be done to counteract them. My framework for thinking was shaped by this development that I saw up close in Haiti. When one is dealing with a sovereign predator, force is the only thing that they understand. War, force becomes the necessary evil. It is necessary. I want to get back to the point. It is a necessary evil. The burdens we bear as a result of the war in Kosovo are a necessary evil. The framework for thinking of all of us are also being influenced by giving due recognition to World War II and the phenomena of World War II. One man was the driving force behind World War II; Adolf Hitler and his ambitions. Of course he had a German war machine that he made good use of, and it bowed to his will. It is a complicated situation. People who argue that one man did it all are in danger of oversimplifying, but if Hitler had not been there, you know, like Alexander the Great, would Alexander the Great have died as generals began to fight among themselves. The great war machine that Alexander the Great had created fell apart. Without Hitler I imagine the great war machine and all that went with that war machine, the propaganda machine, the organization of the whole nation, it would not have been the same without Adolf Hitler. So the sovereign predator of Hitler and I think that the Hitler syndrome we can see in Slobodan Milosovic, like we can see the Hitler syndrome in Saddam Hussein, as I saw the Hitler syndrome in Raoul Cedras and Michel Francois in Haiti. There is a Hitler syndrome where they do not care, they reach the point where they have some kind of sense where they are the most important creatures in the world, and they have the power to make the world bow to their desires and their will, and nothing can stop them but force. So in World War II, we saw it happen right before our very eyes. We later on got a lot of documentation. It was not propaganda that millions of Jews were being put to death. We now have the documentation. We saw the bodies. We saw the gas chambers. We have the files. We have a museum here in Washington which if one does not believe it, one can go look at the documentation and the evidence with one's own eyes. It all happened. It all happened. Do we respond to that lesson in history by saying that Yugoslavia is a sovereign nation and therefore we should not meddle? Do we respond to that by saying we should not break international law and international tradition by intervening in Yugoslavia. We did that. In the case of Hitler, of course, he was challenged when he went across borders and started war. When he attacked the nations in Europe surrounding him, he had already annexed a couple of nations before that and some territory. We took it as long as we could, and finally Hitler was challenged. Slobodan Milosovic does not represent a threat to the United States as Hitler did. He had world ambitions. He moved in a way where, as he destroyed the nations of Europe and brought them under subjugation, he was building a foundation which certainly could have been the basis for challenging any part of the world. He had his counterpart in Japan. For a while, he had his allies in Italy. It was a movement that threatened all parts of the world. Certainly it was a situation different from the one we see now. We are not threatened by Yugoslavia in that same way. They will never attack America. They will not send missiles here. We are not in a situation where our national interests are at stake. I think that previous speakers who made that point over and over again were correct. I agree. Our national interests are not at stake in Yugoslavia. We are in no way threatened by Slobodan Milosovic in terms of our own national security. There will be no military threats, no military problems as far as this Nation is concerned. That makes it even more important, even more noble the fact that we have gone into a conflict where we do not have a vital interest, we do not have our national interest threatened. This is a moral crusade. This is raising morality to a new level, as I said before, a new level of morality when one engages one's troops, one's resources, one's political destiny. Because anybody who starts a war in America runs a risk of paying a high price politically. Any party that is a part of starting and executing a war will pay a high price, will teeter on a precipice. The politically expedient thing to do in the case of Kosovo would be to stay away from any conflict that might place the Democrats in a difficult position in the year 2000 as we go into those elections. The politically expedient thing to do would be to negotiate forever, even negotiate away principles, but do not do anything which jeopardizes one's power. Criticism I hear of the President, criticisms of this administration, but the gamble they are taking is a noble gamble. The risks being taken here are noble risks for noble reasons. The fact is that our interests are not being threatened. There is no oil. We went to war in the Gulf. The Gulf War, I think there was some principles were involved. One nation was invaded by another, but I do not think that is why we went to war in the desert. We went to war in the desert because the price of gasoline was threatened. The supplies of oil in the whole world were threatened. There was a clear vital national interest. Is that the only reason we should ever go to war? I think this action taken by this administration by the NATO alliance is saying there ought to be another reason to go to war, especially in a situation where one has been dealing for 8 years, one has been negotiating for 8 years with the sovereign predator, one has been trying to resolve the situation for 8 years, especially a situation where the European nations all agree. They reached agreement about the horrors of what is happening in Yugoslavia. Is it not time to take some action? My framework of thinking is shaped by what I understand of what happened in World War II with Hitler. My framework of thinking is shaped also by my experiences with Haiti up close. My framework of understanding of what is going on here is shaped also by my preoccupation and concern and understanding of the war to end slavery in America, the Civil War, the War Between the States, whatever you might want to call it. If ever there was a war that was fought as a moral crusade, then that was a moral crusade war. The war to end slavery was a campaign of compassion. The large numbers of men who fought and died in that war, and more Americans died in that war than have died in all the wars combined. Certainly I speak for the Union soldiers who fought to end slavery. Some people say it was not a war about slavery. But if ever there was a war that had a clear purpose, then this war had a clear purpose. The war to end slavery was a war for a high moral principle. If Abraham Lincoln had been a better politician, he would have done what James Buchanan did in his latter part of administration, avoided a confrontation at all cost with his confederates. The war to end slavery would not have taken place if there had not been a principled politician who was willing to take risks in support of that principle. Yes, there were abolitionist forces in the North who had a great role, and I do not like to see the abolitionists portrayed as fanatics. The abolitionists were people who wanted to end slavery. The abolitionists were people who thought slavery was unjust and that one had to take steps to rid the Nation of that great abominable crime. There were forces at work that certainly wanted to confront the people who were trying to extend slavery forever. The Confederates wanted to create two Americas. If they had succeeded, we would have had two Americas; one built on slave labor, probably a formidable economic power. When one has free labor, certainly during that period where the agriculture needed free labor, but when the first industries were formed, if free labor had been available for industries on one-half of the North American continent, and the other half did not have free labor, probably the part of the continent that had free labor would have become the economic power over the part of the continent that did not have free labor through slaves. So I mean there were many, many possible ramifications of a situation where slavery was allowed to continue because the political powers in charge chose to negotiate and to compromise. Many of my close, young friends who talk about slavery and the state of African Americans now in America are often unaware of how close we came to a situation where there were two Americas instead of one. The entire strategy at one point of the Confederacy was to prolong the war in order to force a compromise, a negotiated settlement. The pursuit of the war, the Civil War, required a great deal of serious consideration of the cost. The cost in lives, as I said before, was tremendous. More Americans died in the Civil War than all the wars together. General Ulysses Grant was called a butcher because of his tactics and the number of men that he delivered up in order to win. If we had CNN covering the Civil War, they would have filmed the burning of Atlanta and some of the other things that were done by General Sherman as he marched across the South and called it barbarity and maybe label Sherman as a war criminal. But, again, it was similar to what happened in Germany. They had to bomb the cities of Germany in order to break the back of the Hitler war machine and the people's resistance, their support for a demagogue who refused to surrender. In the case of the South, the prolonging of the war was the strategy. And the terrible things that happened as a result of that, the large numbers of civilians, who, if they did not die in those days from the firepower of modern weapons, they died from hunger, deprivation, et cetera. It was a nasty war, a war for a moral purpose. There would have been no Emancipation Proclamation. There would have been no 13th amendment, no 14th amendment, or no 15th amendment if the bloody war had not been won. So I say to my constituents who insist that this is a terrible thing we are doing because civilians are dying, it is a terrible thing when we have to bomb cities, it is a terrible thing that we are using our military might to try to get a solution to a problem, but the choice is not ours. The demagogue who is a sovereign predator has determined what the situation should be. We have been given no choice in the matter, if we care about moral principles, if we are going to lay aside the conventional morality which says that whatever a nation does within its borders, it is their business; that whatever a nation does, no matter how horrible it may be, it is not the concern of the rest of the world. We broke that tradition when we went into Yugoslavia in the first place. We have been in Yugoslavia a number of years. More than $7 billion have been spent there by this country alone in helping to maintain a peacekeeping force. We are involved. So, therefore, the moral crusade that we are mounting in Kosovo is a continuation of a new kind of morality that we have established. We are saying that never again will the civilized world stand by and allow people to be destroyed by sovereign predators without intervention. Sometimes that intervention, most of the time, it will be diplomatic condemnation. Diplomatic condemnation of genocide will always be a certainty, I hope, from now on when that happens. But sometimes military confrontation will also be possible, and it will happen in protection of a principle. I hope that all the other sovereign predators of the world will take heed that they will not be allowed to exist without being labeled war criminals. General Pinochet, who is now sort of trapped in England, I hope we have seen the last of those people who think they can kill and maim and destroy people and then rise up and travel around the world as ordinary citizens and enjoy their old age. There ought to be a condemnation of the sovereign predators, if we cannot go to war with them, do whatever is necessary to make certain they never live among men again as normal people. So I appeal to my constituents, I appeal to people everywhere to do a thorough analysis and remember the Hitler syndrome. Never again, the phrase we used in connection with the millions of Jews who died, must not be an abstract slogan. It must not be a slogan that our generation uses in the future because we sat by and let things happen and we feel bad about it and say we will not let it happen next time. This is the time. This is the time to stop it. Each one of us has a duty to take a forceful position, to be thorough in our thinking and to support the most intelligent effort possible to end this war as fast as possible. But we should, in the meantime, be proud of the fact that this indispensable Nation of ours has both the will and the power to reinforce the foundations of a compassionate civilization. The Roman Empire only dispatched their allegiance to achieve greater conquests and to bring home the booty. This American indispensable Nation has deployed its armies in an unprecedented campaign of compassion.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, as soon as the tax abatement run out for many of these companies, they are going to leave the gentlewoman's State and go to Mexico or somewhere else. This is a great argument; of course, I do not like to see the Federal Government be forced to assume new responsibilities, but it is a great argument for the Federal Government assuming more responsibilities for school construction, because the wealth is in the country. It is not in the counties, as it was before, but it is somewhere in the country when we see the $13 trillion stock market value. Let the Federal Government take part of that wealth and use it to build schools across the country. It did not apply 20 years ago; it was not necessary 20 or 25 years ago, but it is necessary now. What is wrong with safeguarding the national interests by seeing to it that we have adequate schools and school construction is one of those areas where it is most intense in terms of capital. School systems are struggling for operating budgets to keep the right number of teachers and suppliers and all of the other expenses going. Surely, a one-shot expenditure on a massive scale to deal with the fact that the General Accounting Office says we need about, in 1995, we needed about $110 billion just to repair schools that needed repair and to build, to keep up with the current enrollment in 1995, and now we need much more. So we need a massive injection, similar to the highway bill injection. When we need big money for a purpose that people see day-to- day in having some applicability, then let us spend the money there instead of wasting it in other places, and school construction is one of those places where it is needed. I think the Federal Government expenditure right now for elementary and secondary education is about $415 per child per year. That is our involvement. Most of the cost of education is still borne by State and local governments. We could afford to have an infusion, a one-shot, one-time set of expenditures for construction and let the Federal Government then get out and leave it to the States on an ongoing basis. I sympathize when some people say the Federal Government should not interfere with education at the local level. Well, if we build schools, we are not interfering with curriculum and procedures and processes, we are just helping to build schools and then getting out and leaving it to the local government. That is an area where we should be involved. Of course, as I said before, most of those schools are for working families who cannot afford the alternative in terms of private schools. No matter how we play around with that, most working families are going to have to send their children to public schools. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for bringing more light on this subject. The minimum wage right now is $5.15 an hour. That comes out to $10,000, $10,300 for a worker who works 50 weeks in a year, $10,300 per year. Let that sink in and let people understand that two-thirds of the workforce makes less than $20,000 a year. I did this research when I was fighting the bill which required people to take time off instead of receiving overtime. Two-thirds of the workforce is at the level where they are making only $10 an hour. Two-thirds of the workforce in America are making only $20,000 a year, twice the minimum wage at this point. That is two-thirds of those who earn a living as wage-earners. The Fair Labor Standards Act of course was amended, and the minimum wage, on September 30, 1996 it was raised to $4.75 an hour, and then September 1, 1997 it was raised to $5.15 an hour. That was when we had the last increases. Of course at that time we also had to bear an amendment which was called the Opportunity Wage Provision. The Republican majority insisted that workers under age 20 can be paid $4.25 an hour for the first 90 consecutive calendar days after they are hired. That was a compromise that I did not care for, but we had to make that in order to get the bill passed. Now, people say that well, most workers are already above the minimum wage; they do not have to worry about that. But 1.6 million workers were paid by the hour at hourly wages of $5.15 in 1998. Madam Speaker, 2.8 million workers were making less than that. Some workers are paid below the minimum wage because, as I said before, because of the provision for youth workers, and then there are small businesses that are exempted from the minimum wage, very small businesses exempted. Over the last 30 years, how has the minimum wage kept pace with inflation? I just said before that in 10 years, the stock market value went from $3 trillion to $13 trillion. Now, do we have any kind of overwhelming increase like that with the minimum wage? No. From 1961 to 1981, the real value of the minimum wage was above $6 an hour every year but one. During that period, it fell below $6 an hour one time in 1973. Since 1981 the real value of the minimum wage has stayed below $6 an hour. President Clinton's proposed increase would restore hardworking minimum wage families' purchasing power to the level that it held for almost 6 years, almost 20 years, way back. It did hold, with the cost of living and inflation, for a 20-year period, but now 20 years has gone by since it was at the level of $6 an hour. We would be going to that level if we increased the present minimum wage in two stages, $5.15 and then, 35 cents one year and 50 cents another year up to the point where it would be $6.15. People say that most of the minimum wage workers are young people in fast food joints and odd jobs after school, and it does not matter if they make the minimum wage, but the statistics and the studies show that 65 percent of minimum wage workers are adults 20 years or older. Sixty-five percent of the people who earn the minimum wage are adult workers 20 years or older. Some people say it does not help women and minorities because as we raise the minimum wage, employers lay off people, and a lot of women and minorities who would benefit from more jobs lose jobs as the minimum wage forces employers to cut the number of jobs. Well, women would be helped by increasing the minimum wage. Most minimum wage workers are women right now. Almost 1 million women are paid $5.15 an hour. An additional 5.8 are paid wages less than $6.14 an hour. Fifty-nine percent of all who would benefit from the increase are women. Nineteen percent of all hourly paid women would benefit from the increase. Seventy four percent of female low-wage workers are adults. Five million of the women are age 20 years or older. They are paid these minimum wages. Raising the minimum wage would provide a modest pay raise to the poorest working women, many of whom are raising children. Over 15 percent of those who would benefit from an increase are African American women, and 18 percent are Hispanic women. Together they number 3.8 million workers. The question was asked, is the minimum wage targeted to help poor people? As I said before, the myth is that as we raise the minimum wage, we have decreased the number of jobs because employers lay off people, or they cut the jobs in order to increase their profits. That is not true. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute on the impact of the 1996 50-cent increase in the minimum wage, the benefits of the increase went primarily to low-income working families. The minimum wage can provide a foothold into the middle class. A family with two full-time workers who work all year round would earn $25,000 a year with a $6.15 minimum wage. Increasing the minimum wage will help these workers to make up for lost ground due to inflation. It will help make work pay. Some other facts are, people always argue that the unskilled jobs and the disadvantaged workers are not going to be benefited, again because the number of those jobs will be decreased if we raise the minimum wage. But between September, 1996, and March of this year, 1999, the unemployment rate for high school dropouts has declined from 8.2 percent to 6.1 percent. The unemployment rate for African Americans has dropped from 10.6 percent to 8.1 percent. The unemployment rate for Hispanic Americans has dropped from 8.3 percent to 5.8 percent. The unemployment rate for teens has dropped from 15.7 percent to 14.3 percent. The unemployment rate for black teens has dropped from 33 percent to 31 percent. We would like to see all of these drops be more dramatic, but the fact is that the arguments that we do not help the poorest people or we do not help teenagers or we do not help minorities when we raise the minimum wage are totally discredited. No study has shown that this is true. When we talk about welfare recipients, a major problem of welfare recipients who entered the labor market so far is not their inability to find a job, but the fact that the earnings are very low. Increasing the minimum wage would increase the earnings of former welfare recipients and make it really worthwhile for them to be working instead of on welfare. Starting wages of welfare recipients in the job market average about $6.50 an hour, with significant fractions of recipients earning $5 and $6 an hour. Quarterly earnings of welfare recipients tend to be about $2,000 to $2,500 per quarter when they work, and just about $1,500 to $2,000 for high school dropouts. These low earning figures reflect the low wages as well as the high turnover rates in these jobs. Two problems, the low wages, and these jobs do not usually last for all year round. They are sporadic. There are periodic layoffs, and people do not earn money 50 weeks in a year. Virtually all research on minimum wage increases show little or no effects on the employment rates of young people. The vast majority of studies also show that minimum wage increases do reduce poverty rates, and no credible study has shown anything different, as I said before. Minimum wage workers benefit more and sooner if we raise the wages, as we did before, 50 cents per year. So the present proposals that are being floated by the Republicans, where some call for increases of only 25 cents per year, do not propose to move fast enough with enough money to make it significant. It is not sharing with workers, when we have a $13 trillion economy, to talk about we will give them a minimum wage increase of only 25 cents per year. Minimum wage workers benefit more and they benefit sooner under the proposed Kennedy-Bonior proposal than under any of the Republican proposals. The Republican proposals would take money out of the minimum wage pockets. For example, in the first year of the Quinn bill, a full-time minimum wage worker earns nearly $200 less than under the Kennedy-Bonior bill. In the second year, the Republican bill gap rises to $571 less than they would make under the Kennedy-Bonior bill. There is a Shimkus proposal also, and the wage gap is worse under the Shimkus proposal. If the minimum wage increases by 25 cents in 1999, a full-time minimum wage worker earns $487 less in real terms than they would earn under the Kennedy-Bonior proposal. A second 25-cent increase in 2000 leaves workers even further behind, with a $951 gap between the Kennedy-Bonior proposal and the Shimkus proposal. In the first 2 years, the Kennedy-Bonior bill would benefit more workers than the Quinn proposal, which is 11.4 million workers compared to 7 million. The Quinn bill does nothing for over 4 million needy workers and their families. The Shimkus proposal helps even fewer low- wage workers. As I said before, the President's proposal is a simple 50-cent increase on September 1, 1999, and a 50-cent increase on September 1, 2000. As I said before, that would bring the minimum wage earner from the $10,000 a year up to $12,000 a year if they worked 50 weeks in a year, still much too low but an important improvement. Congress did raise the minimum wage by 50 cents in 1996 and 40 cents on September 1, 1997, and this time we propose to do it, through the President's proposal, a little better than that. The minimum wage is still low in historical terms. The value of the minimum wage reached its peak in 1968, when the value in real dollar terms was $7.49 in terms of dollars, dollar values in 1998. We were up that high, $7.49 in 1968. During President Reagan's 8 years in office, the real value of the minimum wage went down by about 25 percent. Today, even after the 90- cent increase that President Clinton pushed through Congress, the minimum wage is only $5.15 an hour, and the new proposal would increase it by another $1 in two steps. This last increase in percentage terms is in line with previous ones that helped low wage workers without adversely affecting the economy. Both this proposal and the last one increased the minimum wage by about 20 percent. I could go on and on, but I do not want to talk more about facts related to the minimum wage. I think the point is made, that no studies have been brought forward to show that the economy is in any way harmed by an increase in the minimum wage. Workers certainly are not harmed by losing jobs. Unemployment now is much higher than it was when the minimum wage increase started 2 years ago. States have minimum wages. A few of them have minimum wages larger than the Federal Government minimum wage, but some States, of course, have no minimum wage, and often do not abide by the Federal minimum wage. They have a lot of jobs that do not pay even the minimum wage. I think Texas, if we want to look at the largest number of people earning the minimum wage, Texas has 211,000 in its State, and 4.2 percent of the work force is earning minimum wage. They have another 838,000 people who earn between $5.15 an hour and $6.14 cents an hour. That comes to 16.6 percent of the work force at very low wage levels. So we need to share the wealth. If we have $3 trillion, if we move from $3 trillion to $13 trillion on the stock market, there is no sound argument for not raising the minimum wage. Of all the ways to share the wealth, the best and easiest way, the most direct way, is to increase the dollars in the pockets of the workers. Working families need more money. So I appreciate the fact that we are not openly attacking workers, as we did in the 105th Congress. I appreciate the fact that the first bill on the agenda was not a bill to take away overtime, as we did in the 105th Congress. I appreciate the fact that we are not any longer waging war on labor unions, to take away their ability to speak for their workers by having a so-called Paycheck Protection Act, which throttles the voices of unions. I appreciate the fact that there are no loud voices being raised to try to end Davis-Bacon for Federal contract jobs. But the truth is, in all of these areas there is still a guerilla war going on. The guerilla war is more subtle. The guerilla war is designed to hoodwink working families. Davis-Bacon is being attacked behind the scenes. Davis-Bacon is being again used as a scapegoat for not approving a massive school construction appropriation. They are saying that Davis-Bacon drives up the cost of school construction, despite the fact that there have been several scientific studies which show that Davis-Bacon does not drive up the cost. Mr. Peter Phillips has made several studies showing that if we remove Davis-Bacon, the cost may remain the same or go higher, but what happens is that the wages of the workers go down and the profits of the contractors go up. That is the only thing we accomplish when we remove Davis-Bacon from contracts. State Davis-Bacon laws, similar State Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws have been changed in certain Midwestern States. They have seen that it does not lower the cost of school construction, it only raises the profits of contractors. So Davis-Bacon should not be an issue. However, in the circles of Congress there is still talk of blocking any appropriation for school construction because of Davis-Bacon, or holding school construction appropriations hostage by saying that we will do it only if you get rid of Davis-Bacon. I understand the Committee on Ways and Means has made some steps forward in terms of the Democratic leadership over there. The ranking Democrat on the Committee on Ways and Means recently announced in a session of the Congressional Black Caucus that he would certainly support the continuation of Davis-Bacon on the school construction bill proposed through Committee on Ways and Means. That is the President's proposal that we borrow $25 billion, and the States and local governments would be helped by the Federal Government, by the Federal Government paying the interest through a tax credit vehicle on the $25 billion for school construction. So I hope that the guerilla warfare will cease. We had some problems recently in the subcommittee on Workforce Protections, my subcommittee where I serve as the ranking Democrat. We had a problem with an attempt to get rid of bonuses as part of the computation of the rate of pay for a worker. If we remove the bonuses, then the hourly rate of the worker goes down, and we can have the worker work overtime and he gets less money if the bonus is not computed as part of his hourly pay. That is what we call a bushwacking, an ambush of the working families, to try to take away their overtime through a much less visible approach. H.R. 1 was a highly visible direct assault by mandating, it called for mandating the use of comp time instead of cash payments for overtime. So we would like to see working families not have to fight so hard to get their share of the wealth. I would like to even go further and say that the problem of Social Security, problem of health care, we should look at taxing unearned income. Unearned income may be the source of the solution to the Social Security problem. If we would put a Social Security tax, as I am proposing, on unearned income, we would guarantee Social Security for an infinite number of years in the future. At the same time, we could lift the tax off the backs of the workers. Working families have had the biggest tax increase over the last two decades through the payroll tax. Most people do not realize that because they do not look at taxes in that way. But the payroll tax increase has been not a progressive tax, but a regressive tax, and fallen on the backs of wage earners. At the same time, we have had this tremendous increase in wealth for the people who have unearned income. I did not invent these two terms. These are economic terms that have been around for a long time. Earned income is the income of working people, the people who earn wages. Those dollars are called earned income. Investments and income from rent and other sources are called unearned income. I do not know why we discriminate against earned income and all the taxes are just on earned income. Only 11 percent of unearned income is taxed. We ought to take a look at a tax reduction policy for working families. That is another issue that should be considered. But, first of all and foremost, I think that the current consideration is the need for a bipartisan approach to the passage of a meaningful increase in the minimum wage, a meaningful increase. We do not want a bipartisan increase. The bipartisanism forces us to sacrifice the reality of it. The reality is that no less than $1 over a 2-year period is acceptable. We need so much more than that. Consider the $13 trillion versus the $3 trillion, and my colleagues will see the kind of magnitude that our wealth has increased by. No less should happen in terms of the various programs that we, as the policymakers here in Congress, approve for working families. We need to help working families through health care. We need to help working families by providing health care plans and health care systems that take care of everybody. We need to help working families by increasing Federal aid to education, first of all building more schools and better schools and repairing schools and modernizing schools and equipping schools with the technology that they need. Finally, we need to help working families first of all, most immediately and most directly, by passing immediately an increase in the minimum wage.

Mr. OWENS. So large profits are reaped by somebody, and that is where the $13 trillion has been accumulated, a $10 trillion increase over the last 10 years. That is obscene when we look at the fact that 40 million people are not covered with any kind of health care and we are nickel and diming our education system in terms of support from the Federal Government, and on and on it goes. Mr. Greenspan insulted all working people previously by saying that unemployment is good for the economy, and the last thing we wanted was to have full employment. It is ridiculous to allow these icons to go on unchallenged, but as the gentlewoman and I know, we are lucky that lightning has not come down and struck both of us for criticizing Mr. Greenspan. The power structure wants Mr. Greenspan. The President keeps reappointing Mr. Greenspan, the majority of Republicans want Mr. Greenspan. Mr. Greenspan is no friend of working families, and there is a philosophy, and a lot of people in decision-making positions who are not friends of working families. We are missing a golden opportunity in America to have the working families share the prosperity, and it would be good for the entire country to have them share it.

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate the gentlewoman from Ohio joining me because she has studied this situation very closely over a long period of time and has a great deal of knowledge and institutional memory as to how we have progressed to the present situation. I think the gentlewoman will sympathize with me when I say any country which is earning in its stock markets $13 trillion in 1999 versus $3 trillion in 1989, has seen a $10 trillion increase over a 10- year period, why are they worried about the economy faltering and why must that keep going on the backs of workers? We certainly have no danger; if we raise the minimum wage or if we were to pay workers better and create more jobs, that $13 trillion cannot be threatened, or if it wavers a bit and goes down to $12 trillion, what is the difference? So I had to restrain myself because when I began, our colleagues from the other side had just finished talking about Mexico and the drug trade, and NAFTA came to mind right away. We should have disapproved of NAFTA just for the reason that the Government of Mexico is overwhelmed by the drug trade and that any kinds of laws that we try to enforce there are impossible. We cannot enforce laws that require trade unions to have freedom. We cannot enforce laws on the environment. We cannot enforce laws which would maintain decent minimum wages and working conditions. Then, when we move to China, China overnight has an overwhelming balance of trade with us, and it is obscene, the amount of the surplus with China in their favor at this point. They not only employ people at low wages, they use prison labor. I heard just this past weekend a manufacturer of toys who openly said that it is manufacturing in the prisons of China. We do not want anything to do with that; do not ask me any questions about it. I do not care what it manufactures, we get a much cheaper price. So the workers here are directly threatened by that kind of activity in Mexico and in China, and of course the people who benefit are the ones who reap tremendous profits by bringing the very cheap goods in here and selling them at prices that are more consistent with our standard of living and reaping the profit. That is where the $13 trillion versus $3 trillion has been accumulated.

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, I would like to talk about the need to share the current wealth and prosperity of America with working families. In 1989, the value of the stock market was $3 trillion. Ten years later, today in 1999, the value of the stocks in all the exchanges is $13 trillion. From $3 trillion to $13 trillion, that is what the increased value of the stock market has been. That is quite an overwhelming increase in wealth. Madam Speaker, we enjoy unprecedented prosperity today, so I would like to talk about how this prosperity and wealth should be shared with workers. Instead of attacking working families, we need to find ways to reward working families and to share this wealth. There are many ways to share the wealth and prosperity of the Nation at this point. Certainly I do not propose that we do what the Roman Empire did. At one point the Roman Empire was so wealthy as a result of its conquests, its taxation policies on its oppressed victims, defeated nations around it, that it had so much money that it decreed that every Roman citizen would be paid each year a certain amount of money out of the Treasury. That was real sharing. I do not think it succeeded for very long because once the word got out that every Roman citizen could share in the booty and they would pay them part of the accumulated wealth of the Nation, all the people in the surrounding countryside moved into Rome. In large numbers, they filled up Rome, and that policy was brought down by the sheer weight of numbers. Madam Speaker, I do not think we should ever try to repeat anything of that kind; however, I think that we can share the wealth of the Nation with working families by improving health care and making certain that every American citizen has decent health care. I think we can share the prosperity and the wealth of the Nation by making certain that education is available for every American citizen. The children of working families, for example, are the children who go to public schools. They have no alternative. So our public system of education which, by the way, has 54 million enrolled pupils, that system should be given as much help as possible by all sectors of our economy, governmental and private as well. So education, health care, I think if you improve those things, it would be two ways to share the wealth with working families. There is another very concrete and direct way to share the wealth with working families, and that is to share the dollars. The best way to help somebody who is poor is to give them money directly. Dollars in the hands of the poor are the most efficient and effective way to deal with poverty. So, instead of attacking the working families, as some of our present Republican legislation is seeking to do, let us have a bipartisan coalition on helping working families by raising the minimum wage. Let us raise the minimum wage and put some dollars in the pockets of working families, and they can put food on the table, better clothes, better housing and take care of themselves. We do not have that spirit here in this Congress. I appreciate the fact that we do not have a situation similar to the one that existed just a little more than 2 years ago in the 105th Congress. The 105th Congress started out with a set of direct assaults on working families. We had direct assaults, and we came on with the very first bill of the year. The very first bill in the 105th Congress was H.R. 1, which was designed to take away the cash overtime payments from working families. Madam Speaker, that may seem like ancient history now, but it was on a roller coaster in the first debates of the 105th Congress. It was on a roller coaster because it had support from the White House, it had support from the majority of the Democrats, a bill which said we will not pay workers any more in cash overtime, we will force them to take comp time, and the comp time has to be taken at the discretion of the employer. I pointed out, in fact, that what the workers needed was the cash, extra cash that the overtime provided, more than anything else. An argument was offered that, well, there are a lot of professionals and middle-class people who would like to have the option of having time off instead of more cash. I pointed out at that time that we in no way, the Fair Labor Standards Act does not really interfere with people having time off instead of cash. There are ways to deal with that if people prefer that voluntarily. But what they were doing by mandating that the Fair Labor Standards Act be changed was mandating that every worker had to accept the situation where time off would be at the discretion of the employer and no cash. I pointed out at that time that two-thirds of the people in America who worked for a living, wage earners, two-thirds made less than $10 an hour, less than $10 an hour, and I said: Let those two- thirds who make less than $10 an hour be exempted from your proposed legislation which would mandate time off instead of overtime. And it did get a few votes on the floor, my amendment, but it did not pass. However, thank God, the forces of common sense were at work all the time, and what seemed like a steamrolling proposition in the early days of the 105th Congress petered out. The labor unions got moving, the common sense of the average worker out there got moving, public opinion became involved, and the whole concept of forcing a change in the Fair Labor Standards Act to require comp time instead of overtime and cash just disappeared. I am very appreciative of the fact that we do not hear any more about it. There are some other frontal attacks on working families that we do not hear about this year, and I am glad we do not hear them any more. There were frontal attacks on OSHA to merely wipe out the agency, reduce the budget by two-thirds. OSHA takes care of the health and safety of workers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is there to take care of providing safe workplaces. There were attacks which said that OSHA was threatening American industry, that business could not survive if OSHA continued to exist. These attacks persisted despite the fact that many of us pointed out the fact that OSHA staff had been so reduced that in my lifetime it was not likely that a business would be visited. It takes a cycle of more than 100 years for the inspectors to get around to visiting those businesses out there to examine the conditions to see if they meet OSHA standards. So OSHA was not a gestapo like agency with numerous staff members to come down on business. That was not true. That frontal attack has ceased, and we are grateful for that. There was also an attack on the unions and their ability to use their funds for any political purposes. It was called the Paycheck Protection Act. The Paycheck Protection Act was really going for the jugular vein. Wipe out the ability of unions to speak for their members, cut it off completely and if it could not be won at the Federal level there were also movements in the States fomented and encouraged by the leadership of the Republican majority here in the House. The Paycheck Protection Act is no longer being discussed this year. We are grateful that working families do not have to worry about losing their voice in the political arena. That is no longer a problem. Then there were the attacks on Davis-Bacon that came loud and frequently. Davis-Bacon was being attacked relentlessly, although as I often point out Davis and Bacon were two Republicans who devised a system for protecting workers in situations where large Federal contracts were involved. They did not want the wages of the local areas to be eroded by having these large contractors come in and bring outside workers in to do the work at lower wages. So it was common sense built in all the way from the beginning. These frontal assaults, the constant unrelenting attempt to batter down the protections for working families, are not happening here in the 106th Congress. I serve as the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee for Workforce Protections of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, and I know that at the committee level and the subcommittee level we are getting a guerilla attack. Guerilla ambushes have replaced the frontal assault. Not the same amount of noise is being made. They do not rush these items to the floor and expect immediate endorsements and passage, but there is a slow chipping away at the protections for working families. Working families are still in danger in this Republican controlled Congress. Working families still have to fear a bush whacking, a quiet assault, an ambush, in a number of areas. I say that I want to call on this 106th Congress, where all of us, most of us, subscribe to the notion that we are more civil and would like to have a bipartisan approach to certain issues, let us have a bipartisan approach to rewarding working families. Working families make up the majority of America out there. Working families need better health care. They need decent education. They need more help from the Federal Government for education. First of all, working families need dollars in their pockets, and we can do that by increasing the minimum wage. Increasing the minimum wage is what I want to talk most about. It is all integrally interwoven. We need to increase the minimum wage and the minimum wage is where there are entry level workers who are now making $5.15 an hour. We have proposed to raise that by fifty cents in one year. That is the President's proposal, fifty cents in one year and then another fifty cents another year, which means a dollar increase over a 2-year period. It will not make anybody rich. People who are making $10,000 a year would be making a little more than $12,000 a year after we raise the minimum wage. A lot of people have a lot of questions about whether the minimum wage really is important because, after all, most Americans are not making minimum wage. I am going to show some statistics, recent statistics, in a few minutes, to let everyone know that quite a number of Americans still make minimum wage and there are a lot who make below minimum wage, that are working every day for wages below minimum wage because minimum wage is not mandated for the smallest business. There are a number of situations where minimum wage does not impact. So instead of attacks on working families, I propose that we move forward in a bipartisan effort to reward working families by increasing the minimum wage. At a town meeting that I had just last night, where there were quite a number of people who came out, people are very concerned about a number of items, a number of Federal actions that are being taken. At the top of the list, of course, is Kosovo and what is going to happen with Kosovo and the intervention of our American forces along with NATO; will we send in ground troops or will they appropriate more money for the effort and in the process of appropriating more money for the war effort will we downgrade the efforts to improve Medicare by having something added to Medicare which will cover prescription drugs; will we downgrade our efforts to improve the education system and say that we have no money because this war effort is going to absorb all the resources? Those are very important questions and people are very concerned about that. By the way, I asked for a show of hands in an audience of about 200 people as to was there support for the present actions in Kosovo, the bombing of Kosovo, to stop the dictator Milosevic, Slobodan Milosevic, which I call a sovereign predator, responsible for unspeakable horrors in that area of the country, was there support for the present action that the United States was taking along with its NATO allies. Practically every hand in the house went up supporting it. The overwhelming majority, 95 percent of the people, supported taking action. However, I might point out that when I asked how many would support escalating the combat effort, escalating the effort to the use of ground troops, I had just the opposite reaction. Only about 5 percent raised their hands. I think that is very informative. To get back to today's subject, their primary concerns, or I might not say primary but equal to Kosovo were concerns about Social Security and concerns about Medicare and concerns about education. These are all things that are very important to working families. When we help to improve education, we are improving a lot of working families. The public school system that is being attacked by a lot of people in the majority, the Republican majority, they want to replace the public school system with a privatized system. They want vouchers to replace Federal aid to education. They want to give up on the public school system. As I said before, there are 54 million students in the public school system. Fifty-four million students are enrolled. Only a small percentage of our population of school-age students attend private schools today and if we were to make some kind of effort to greatly increase the funding for private schools, it would still be a very slow process of moving more and more of our youngsters into private schools. So just logistically and statistically, not much help is going to come in the near future from a private school effort or from giving vouchers and sending working family children off to find a private school. So any attacks on public education are also attacks on working families. One might want to know that the Federal Government does not do very much for these 54 million children out there in public schools. Our expenditure for elementary and secondary education presently is about $22 billion a year. The annual expenditure for elementary and secondary education is about $22 billion. Our current expenditure for highways and transportation is $51 billion, to let everyone see what the contrast is. We are spending only $22 billion for education but $51 billion for highways. I use that example because a lot of people continue to confront me with the issue of local control and say that it is not the Federal Government's business to worry about education. It is not the Federal Government's business to be involved in education. They ask, why would I want to saddle the Federal Government with responsibilities in the area of education? Well, let me ask this: Is it the Federal Government's responsibility to be involved in roads and highways? That was always a local responsibility. Highways and roads were for States and local governments to take care of. Nothing in the Constitution gives the Federal Government the responsibility for maintaining the highways and the roads, but now we are at the point where we currently are spending $51 billion. Last year we had the biggest expenditure in history for highways and transportation approved. That expenditure will be about $218 billion over a 6-year period, $218 billion over a 6-year period. Contrast that with what the President is proposing to spend for school construction. Over a 5-year period he is proposing to spend $3.7 billion to pay the interest on $25 billion worth of loans that the local governments and the State governments will have to make for education. So the contrast is overwhelming. These are children of working families who go to the public schools. School construction would be an initiative to help working family children. People say that inner cities do not deserve to be given priority for education funding and we should take away the Title I money and put it into ed-flex and let the governors and the local decisionmakers spend the money for anything they want to related to education. Do not concentrate on the original purpose of Title I. The original purpose of the Federal Government's involvement in education was to help the poorer communities. Forget about that. They do not deserve that. There are Democrats who say that we should not have a construction bill, a school construction bill which gives first priority to the cities. Well, we give first priorities to the inner cities because that is where most of the children are. Most of the population of America lives in the big cities. When it comes time to fight wars, most of the people who go off to die are the young people from big cities. If one goes to the Vietnam Memorial wall they will find that the wall is full of people who come from the big cities and it is full of the children from working families. Children from working families went out to die in World War I and World War II and children from working families died in Vietnam. If we have a war in Kosovo that expands to a ground war, the majority of those who would die in combat will be from working families in big cities. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).

Mr. OWENS

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