Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, on the occasion of the historic vote to launch an impeachment inquiry I have joined with the overwhelming majority of Democrats to vote for an alternative compromise. This action has allowed us to avoid destructive fragmentation and continue our united leadership of the majority of Americans. At the end of this statement I will attach my original position on this matter which remains as my present position. We are dealing with sins, not high crimes and misdemeanors. Government should not invade the jurisdiction of religion and the clergy. Leadership for a difficult and thorny national situation is the challege faced by minority Democrats who can do nothing to completely halt the abuses of the Republican majority. Despite the Democratic alternative, an impeachment process that is highly partisan and vicious will go forward. But now the Republicans can never say that they have bi-partisan support. Joining with fellow Democrats I voted for an alternative compromise in order to continue the process of cementing our position with that of the majority of Americans. I wanted to personally just say no; to drop the impeachment inquiry. Reluctantly I left the highest ground; however, the Democractic compromise call for time limits and scope limits on the Judiciary Committee process still represents high ground. On October 8th the record will show that Democrats sacrificed some credibility in order to contribute to a resolution of this damaging political crisis. Every reasonable American citizen should feel comfortable with our position of reconciliation. We could have just said no. But our leadership guidance message was: ``limit the scope and limit the time.'' The vital business of the country is waiting. Previous Statement Released on September 8, 1998 As a member of Congress I am sorry that there is an escalating hysteria that may lead to the religious lynching of a great president. President Clinton has gone further than he should have been asked to go in offering a public statement about his intimate personal life. In view of the fact that absolutely on one has charged that a national security issue is involved in this matter, all further government inquiries should be dropped. The nation has in no way been placed at risk. Certainly nothing took place which touched on bribery, treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors. For those who continue to expand their detailed probe and to pass judgement through the prism of their hypocritical Victorian values, we concede their right to wallow in their ``Peyton Place'' preoccupations. There is, however, a profound difference between crimes and sins. It is of utmost importance that we acknowledge and support the spirit of our Constitution which discourages the state from investigating private morality and affirms the right of every American, even the President, to separately negotiate his sins with his God.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, over the past few months there have been many tributes to our departing colleague, Congressman Lou Stokes. The accolades have been lengthy because there is a great deal to be said about the thirty year record of Congressman Stokes. Unfortunately, the most senior Members have been accorded the privilege of speaking first, and thus, I have been deprived of my opportunity to also praise Lou Stokes. As a Member who has worked with Lou Stokes for sixteen of his thirty years, I feel I have known him long enough to speak with authority but not so long and so close that I have lost my capacity for some objectivity. We are all familiar with the concept of the ``Renaissance Man'' with a broad array of talents. In the power arena Lou Stokes is a ``Renaissance Political Man.'' He possesses the unique ability and capacity to perform as a deal maker; as a champion for issues; as a program innovator; as a team player and institution builder. Watching Lou perform over the years has been an inspiring learning experience. As a key member of the Appropriations Committee he has repeatedly made the right deals for worthwhile programs. When the authorizing committee, ten years ago, established Title III-B for the direct funding of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Stokes did the necessary homework to obtain immediate funding for this program which has now provided more than one billion dollars for higher education. Beyond serving as a conduit or vehicle for the obtainment of dollars, Lou served as an advocate and champion for the neglected African American colleges. We have watched and greatly appreciated Lou Stokes' use of power to address complex and difficult problems. His service on the Ethics Committee, the Intelligence Committee and numerous groups that took him beyond the call of duty, has led to the acquisition of enormous amounts of respect and influence. He has repeatedly used this influence to introduce constructive innovations without lengthy legislation. Hundreds of minority youth have benefited from programs for interns and fellows originated by Lou in the various agencies of government. Despite the enormous responsibilities which have come with his accrued powers, Lou has remained a consummate team player and institution builder. The personality cult has never claimed Stokes. He has worked tirelessly to build the Congressional Black Caucus. The CBC Health Braintrust is the model for all current and future meaningful Braintrust operations. Certainly the inspiration for a strong CBC Education Braintrust has come via the observance of the Health Braintrust. More people are engaged year round in the Health Braintrust than in any other CBC activity. This organization is the primary beneficiary of Stokes' habit of doing careful homework. Without a doubt the Health Braintrust is an institution that Lou has made strong enough to endure long after his resignation. Lou Stokes, the ``Renaissance Political Man'' has not only performed magnificently in Washington, but also back home. His imprint is deeply embedded in the governance of his City of Cleveland, Ohio. Despite the fact that he still has many years left to enjoy his retirement, Lou has already been enshrined as a hero of his city. The new state-of-the-art Cleveland Public Library building bears the name of Congressman Louis Stokes. Needless to say, as the only Librarian ever elected to Congress, I find this achievement profoundly impressive. For his comprehensive, across the board performance Lou Stokes stands high above his peers. When you consider the attributes and character traits necessary for productivity and success in the political arena, most Members of Congress can claim certain areas of strength while admitting to other areas of weakness. But only Lou can lay claim to titles all across the spectrum. He is a great deal maker, a champion advocate for issues; a program innovator, a team player; and an institution builder. Lou Stokes, the ``Renaissance Political Man'' leaves very high standards for all future Members of Congress to utilize to measure their performance and their productivity.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) for her conclusion. Constitutional Issues Regarding Impeachment

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank both of my colleagues from the Committee on the Judiciary and congratulate them on the magnificent job that they are doing. I am certain they are not here tonight because they want to be here, but because they feel a sense of duty to expound and further explain this very grave matter before us. Like the rest of my Democratic colleagues, we do not think this is the most important subject in the world. We are not anxious to be plunged into the deliberations concerning this impeachment. There are many other matters, many other priorities, many other issues that are far more important. And the talent and the time and the attention of people like my two colleagues on the Committee on the Judiciary we would like to devote to addressing those problems. Our problem is that we are trapped by the will of the majority. The pinnacle of global leadership, the set of profound priorities which we should be addressing have been overwhelmed and smothered by a blanket of trivialities and diversions which the majority wishes to expand and continue indefinitely. We are supposed to adjourn at the end of this week. I suppose it might be some kind of recess instead of the usual adjournment process. But as of Sunday, we will be no longer focused on the business, the routine business of the 105th Congress. We have the appropriations process that has been stalled, and only two appropriations bills have been taken through the entire process. We are going to have a monstrous continuing resolution which cannot do the business of the Nation and focus on the priorities as we should. We have a focus instead on the Committee on the Judiciary, which will absorb the time and attention of not only the people here in Congress, but the whole American public. An impeachment is a serious matter. It is always serious, whether it is an impeachment that is based on sound reasons. If there really are some impeachable offenses, it would be serious then. It is serious even if we go forward with the impeachment process and we do not have reasons for impeachment. There are no impeachable offenses. Either way, it is still serious. The time and the attention to be put into it is the same. The diversion of the decision-making powers away from more serious matters is the same. The divisions within the American public are likely to be the same. I think we have a procedure here that is without precedent. The Founding Fathers would have never dreamed of our being in this kind of predicament. We have an intensely partisan impeachment procedure going forward, an impeachment procedure based on personal blunders. The three Ps, partisan, personal. And finally we have an impeachment procedure that has been made pornographic by the release of certain kinds of information it is highly unusual for government documents to be concerned with. So, we are going down, down, down into a bottomless pit, and it seems to me that somebody ought to seek to try to get us out of this. I hope that better judgment will prevail and prevail soon, before we go deeper into the pit. We have a constitutional procedure being used as a camouflage for extremism. The Republican credo that ``politics is war without blood'' is underway here. We can see it manifest, war without blood. That means one goes all out to destroy his opponent. Go for the jugular. You want to gut the hog. That is what is driving the process here in Washington with respect to this impeachment procedure. Future generations will look back on us and really be ashamed of the kind of performance that we are setting forth here. The procedure goes forward despite the fact that the American people and their common sense have a different opinion. Obviously, it does not agree with the intensity we feel about certain things that are being set forth here. What we are doing represents an insult to the intelligence. It is contempt for the common sense. Polls are not supposed to govern us, but I think we ought to pay attention as Members of Congress to the flood of mail, the calls, e-mail. It is very interesting, my district is unfortunately a district where I have always had a problem of turnout for votes. The number of people who are registered never turn out more than 50, 55 percent. It is a great problem, and I have labored with it for years. And it has gotten worse really over the last few years, the number of people who bother to come out to vote. And we conclude that it is because they are so disappointed because of the fact that so much that is promised and so much that is needed never happens. In my district, we have a large number of schools that still have coal-burning furnaces. That has been the case for years and years, and I have been in office for quite a number of years, and I have been highlighting the fact and working hard to try to make something happen. But the coal-burning furnaces are still there. We have 275 in the whole city and a hundred in the borough of Brooklyn and 20 or 25 in my congressional district. They are still there. So I assume people are discouraged that nothing is happening. Unemployment has always been high in my district, and it is still high. It is true that as a result of the improvement in the economy, unemployment has gone down, employment has gone up, and people are grateful for that, I am sure. But I assume by that lower turnout that they have lost faith and they are not coming out because that problem was not being solved. But, Mr. Speaker, they are, in my district, concerned about what is happening here with the process of impeachment. I have a flood of mail, unprecedented. I have a flood of phone calls. I have a great amount of e-mail. It contradicts the theory that I formulated in my own head that people have given up on government, that hope has been abandoned. Obviously, they have not given up on government. There is still some basic expectations from government that makes them concerned about what happens with the office of the Presidency, who is going to occupy the White House. They are very concerned, very intense, very angry. I hope that they will translate that anger into some appropriate conduct, political action. People in my district want an end to the preoccupation with personal misbehavior, an end to magnifying personal blunders into high crimes and misdemeanors. They can see that there is no bribery or treason involved here. They can see that there is no conspiracy of note here. Conspiracy occurs whenever a group of people get together to try to accomplish a particular end. We can call it a conspiracy. I looked it up in the dictionary to make certain that I was on sound ground. Any kind of action taken by a group of people, a set of plans made by a group of people to accomplish a certain end is a conspiracy. There are good conspiracies and bad conspiracies. Unlawful conspiracies, I suppose is what is meant by the counsel for the Committee on the Judiciary majority yesterday when he added conspiracy as a charge. Yes, I suppose he can find evidence of a conspiracy. There are all kinds of conspiracies, as I said before. When I was much younger, before I even became a teenager, I had a great love for peanut butter, and we were very poor. With a family of seven and the father is on minimum wage, you are very poor, and you have to stretch in a thousand ways to survive. Peanut butter was very important. Peanut butter was not a snack food in my house. It was the food that my mother put in our lunches. Peanut butter with crackers is good because the bread does not get soggy. And if you use graham crackers instead of regular crackers, it becomes a combination entree and dessert. It was a big deal. She had a big jar of peanut butter that she used for our lunches, and we could not raid the jar for snacks. Well, my siblings and I, we had a great love for peanut butter, so we conspired. The peanut butter was on a shelf at the top of the cabinet, and we learned very early that if we would go in the center of the jar to get our peanut butter out and not scrape the sides, our mother could not tell that we raided the jar unless she was very observant. So, together we could quickly get on a chair and get the jar down, scoop out a good scoop from the middle, and get away with spreading it and getting out of there. It took three of us to do it. It was a conspiracy. The ``peanut butter conspiracy'' is not equal to the conspiracy that took place in the basement of the White House with respect to Iran- Contra. In the basement of the White House we had a group of people who were directly involved in disobeying Congress and plotting, conspiring, to obliterate the will of Congress, to disobey it, to secretly sell guns to a power they had declared a hideous enemy. They were going to sell the guns, get the money, and use it to fund the Contras in Nicaragua against the will of Congress, after many years of deliberation had shown that Congress desired that we take that course of action. So we had a conspiracy. And when the conspiracy was uncovered, finally exposed, there was another conspiracy to help cover it up. They were actually shredding papers in the basement of the White House, and everybody knew about it for a long time before the Attorney General bothered to secure the site and make certain that evidence was not destroyed. And we had all kinds of other things that took place with respect to Iran-contra. It was a conspiracy. That is one kind of a conspiracy. We had a conspiracy when Benedict Arnold betrayed his own revolutionary army forces. He was a magnificent general, who had really performed quite well in the Revolutionary War on the side of the colonies, but he was upset and bitter and, for whatever reason, he decided to sell out. That was a conspiracy, too. Probably, unlike the peanut butter conspiracy, which had no serious repercussions, it could have had the greatest of repercussions. If Benedict Arnold had succeeded and not been discovered, it could have meant the end of the Revolutionary War. It could have been a blow that changed history entirely. So the consequences of Benedict Arnold's conspiracy were much more serious than the consequences of the peanut butter jar conspiracy, or even the consequences of the Iran-contra conspiracy. Iran-contra, if we had pursued it with vigor and had a special prosecutor who cared about what he was doing, as much as some others lately care, it would have been clearly a situation where we would have had an identification of a conspiracy. But would that conspiracy have merited an impeachment proceeding? I do not think so. I think it would have been very embarrassing, very serious, but the country was not placed at risk. The country's policy was violated, laws were disobeyed, felonies were committed, but I still think, as serious as Iran-contra was, it probably would not have merited impeachment. It was not Benedict Arnold, engaged in an activity which could have brought the country down. It certainly was not the peanut butter conspiracy. What happened at the White House with respect to the personal blunders there I will let others place on that continuum from the peanut conspiracy on one the hand to Benedict Arnold on the other. What happened at the White House, I will let others place it somewhere there and tell me if we have an impeachable offense. What the problem is here, and I do not want to go on, because I am certain that most Americans are quite tired of listening to the matters which are surrounding this impeachment process, the problem is that the people in my district want an end to the preoccupation with personal misbehavior or an end to the magnifying of personal blunders into high crimes and misdemeanors. But we cannot govern the agenda. We do not set the agenda. We are compelled by the majority in control to remain on this topic. But even though we are compelled to do that, we have a duty to place it in a larger, more urgent, and more important context. At this critical moment in history, as we approach the year 2000, the question that Americans ought to be asking is what is the overwhelming preoccupation of this indispensable Nation? What are we doing at this critical moment in history? Can we justify what we are doing in terms of what is at stake at this particular moment? There are serious matters related to race relations, and the President had the vision to appoint a Race Relations Commission. That Commission, in the final days of its deliberations, was totally ignored. Its report came out. I have already, on this floor previously, criticized that report as being weak in spirit. It represents tiny spirit, in that the people who were there had a golden opportunity. The President never intended for it to solve major problems, but it was a golden opportunity to make a statement about the profundity of the race relations problem in America. The race question, the race problem, racism in politics, demagogueing the race issue is a major issue in American politics. It sets up a situation where people who should have common interests are divided. It is part of a divide-and- conquer strategy which is seriously affecting the ability of the Nation to govern itself. We let race issues get in the way. George Wallace, who recently died, and some people have sort of chosen to forget what he did in American politics, he took the race issue, the demagogueing of the race issue, and made it a fine art that many unscrupulous politicians could later never ignore. There was a time when both the Republican Party and the Democratic party, certainly at the national level, refused to tolerate on the floor of their conventions and in their deliberations open and blatant racist proposals. There was a time when they would not accept it. Even though the Democrats had to wrestle with holding together the coalition of southerners and northerners, there was a kind of respectability that prevailed; that did not go into certain areas. That all ended with George Wallace, and people started to follow in his footsteps. Richard Nixon followed in his footsteps with his southern strategy. When Ronald Reagan got ready to run for office, he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the killing of Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman. He wanted to send a clear message to the south by going to that awful place where that awful set of murders had taken place and launching his campaign. So race became, from then on, a major part of the strategy of the Republican Party in terms of its divide and conquer strategy, and it continues to be. So race relations are very important, and we have sort of pushed that report of the Commission off to the side and it is like it never happened. There was no Commission; there was no report. The Commission itself did not live up to its potential. It at least could have been a scholarly pronunciation of what is at stake with respect to the problem. At the beginning of the Commission I had said I hoped that they would conclude that here is a serious problem which a Commission, in existence for 12 months, or 18 months, cannot resolve, but the Commission could set out a series of other steps that need to be taken. And one of the steps that should be taken is that a set of scholars, made up partially of Nobel prize winners, should be convened. And with the financing of the major foundations in this country and the rest of the world, that set of scholars should do a thorough study on race relations in the United States. And if they do not want to deal with race relations because that is too current and controversial, at least do a history of slavery and how the legacy of slavery has impacted on current race relations in this country and in some other parts of the world. Let us at least have a scholarly treatise, a scholarly encyclopedic approach to establishing what the facts are with respect to slavery and slave trade. Some of us think it is the greatest crime ever committed in the history of mankind. The obliteration of a set of people, in terms of their humanity, was at stake, and we think it deserves that kind of attention. But the race relations report did not come out with any kind of proposal to profoundly continue the exploration of the problem. They even backed away from saying that at least the country should, the official government that exists now, should foster an effort to have an apology for slavery. That is a horrible thought. Let us not apologize in America. We have had some polls taken which shows that overwhelmingly the American people are against any apology for slavery. It is a strange set of conduct when we consider the fact that apologies are breaking out all over. Every month there is some new apology. The Swiss apologizing over and over again for the fact that they swindled the poor refugees from Germany, Jewish refugees from Germany, out of great amounts of money. They are not only apologizing, they are compensating. They have set up some funds to restore. That is like reparations. That is another word we do not mention in America with respect to slavery. Reparations is a terrible dirty word. How dare we ask for reparations for 232 years of labor that was not paid for. How dare we make that kind of demand on the American people today when, after all, none of us lived at that time. We are not guilty. The Germans could say the same thing and the Swiss could say the same thing. But, recently, the Germans at Volkswagen, and Germans at another plant, without confessing that they used slave labor in their plants, the slave labor of the Jews and the other prisoners of war that resulted in an accumulation of wealth, which the allies allowed them to keep and they continued, so that wealth that was accumulated partially with the slave labor of prisoners of Jews and other prisoners during the war is still a part of that corporate set of assets. So without fully admitting it, they have started funds at Volkswagen to compensate for those prisoners and Jews and other prisoners who can be identified. They have started, I think $12 million at one plant, and since they started it there, Volkswagen followed with $12 million. So they are not only apologizing, they are compensating. They are providing reparations. In June of last year, the Pope apologized to the Jews for the Catholic church's silence during the holocaust. Last year the Japanese apologized to the Comfort Girls in Korea. Apologies are breaking out all over. So why is it that it is such a horrible thought to have the present government of America apologize for the American government's historic involvement with slavery? I really am trying to emphasize the fact that there is unfinished business here. We have unfinished business in several major places which we should be addressing in the year 1998 and at the close of this 105th Congress. As we go toward the next century, the year 2000, we are going to be greatly crippled as a Nation if we do not address these kind of problems. Another set of problems that are obvious, and probably less intense emotionally, is the mushrooming set of global economic problems. They are very serious, the problems that are mushrooming around us. We still have unprecedented prosperity. We have a budget surplus that has been recently announced. But consider 10 years ago where the Japanese economy was and where it is today. We are not invulnerable, and the things that are happening around us already are having an impact. There was a multibillion dollar investment company, long-term investment, I do not have the exact name, but a multibillion dollar hedge fund, they called it. I do not understand what hedge funds are all about, so I will not try to describe it. But the hedge fund was of no significance to me until I heard that an agency of the United States Government, the Federal Reserve Board, had helped to rescue this private bank. Now, that concerns me greatly. We ought to be concerned about a precedent being set now, which is similar to what happened with the savings and loan swindle. Not quite exactly, because the money used to bail out the hedge fund was private money. The effort to organize it was the authority and the brainpower and the intimidation power, I guess, of the Federal Reserve. So it is not quite as bad yet as the savings and loan swindle. In the savings and loan swindle we had the American taxpayers, through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and an individual who was head of the corporation, taking the initiative to bail out big banks because they were too big to fail. Now we have an investment fund, a hedge fund, that was considered too big to fail. Americans, wake up. We need to take our eyes off the impeachment proceeding and take a look at the Federal Reserve's action with respect to this multibillion dollar hedge fund. American taxpayer money is next. They have used taxpayer money already because we pay the salaries of the Federal Reserve Bank. The whole apparatus of the Federal Reserve is a government apparatus. So we have already used the resources of the American government to bail out these big private multibillion dollar funds. What comes next? What comes next? Which hedge fund will next be in trouble and when will they start using the taxpayers' money to help bail out some of these investment companies that are too big to fail? By the way, the reason they want to bail out the hedge fund is because the hedge fund owes the banks a lot of money. So we are right back to where we were with the savings and loan swindle. It is the banks, the banks that are private and do not want anybody to interfere with them and their private authority, they are private powers to govern themselves until they get in trouble. When they get in trouble, our banking system suddenly becomes a socialist system, where the taxpayers are commanded, without anything much to say about it, the taxpayers' representatives in Congress go forward to devise schemes to bail out the banks. We are in a situation now where the banks have collapsed in Indonesia, Malaysia, they are in serious trouble even in Japan. There was an article that appeared in today's New York Times on the front page that said the banks of Japan are now admitting that the amount of capital they have is far less than they have represented today. So the banks all over the world are collapsing and we are concerned with focusing on an impeachment procedure related to personal blunders at the White House and an overzealous investigation by the special prosecutor. Where are we, Americans, and what will our children say when they examine our behavior at this critical point in history? Let me just conclude by saying, there is one more set of concerns that I would like to invite you to consider. We are the indispensable Nation. We are the great global power. We have responsibilities that probably God has placed on us that no other Nation has. God has been very generous to us. Our beautiful skies and spacious plains and bountiful production of grain and food and natural resources, our long periods of peace, all the things that add up to making our Nation prosperous, we ought to be thankful to God that we have that, and try to give back something to this earth which indicates that we are grateful, we feel ourselves blessed and we want to do something for the rest of the world. We ought to be concerned. Let me invite you, take your mind off the impeachment, take your mind off the personal lives of people here in Washington and for a moment consider a report that was done by the United Nations Human Development Fund, the United Nations Human Development Report, which every year comes out and looks for new ways to measure the lives of people throughout the world, what is happening with people. This year the report put out by Kofi Annan puts aside faceless statistics like the per capita gross domestic product or the export- import figures and puts aside the report, those kinds of things, it burrows into the facts about such things as what are children eating across the world, who goes to school across the world, whether there is clean water to drink, how women share in the economy, who does not get vaccinations against diseases that go on killing people even though we know how to prevent diseases, even though we have vaccinations that prevent the diseases, they keep going on and killing people because the medicine is not available. This year the report takes its first look at what people have, from how many people have simple toilets or family cars, and what proportion of the world's goods and services are consumed comparatively by the rich and what proportion are consumed by the poor. The report concludes that the pie is huge. The world's consumption bill is $24 trillion a year. Let me repeat that. The world is consuming $24 trillion a year worth of resources. But the servings that go on from one part of the world to another are radically different. Let me repeat. I am summarizing from the United Nations Human Development Report issued by the head of the United Nations Kofi Annan. I could not get the full report in time. It was supposed to get here today but it was not here, so when I get it, I certainly, probably next year, want to quote directly from it, give you the pages and tell you where you can get it. I am sure you can get it yourself from the United Nations. What I am reading from is a summary, a few highlights. It is not a summary, a few highlights from the New York Times, the Sunday Times of September 27 of this year, 1998. The New York Times had a set of highlights with a few photographs. I am going to read a few of those so that you can come back to where we ought to be in this world, on this planet earth, where we as the indispensable Nation, the most fortunate Nation that has ever existed in the history of the world, where we ought to be contemplating what we can do about these problems and where we are here, how does it affect the future existence of our children. Are our children going to be able to survive in a world where there are such gross injustices and such great unevenness in the way resources are distributed? Are human beings, by their very nature cunning, scheming, brainy, crafty animals, are they really going to sit by in three-quarters of the world and let one-quarter of the world have everything indefinitely? Can that go on? Can you deal with that? Or should you worry about whether some future leaders of our Nation might seek some kind of final solution by getting rid of all the have-nots instead of trying to make certain that the world deals with the problems of the have-nots in a different way. Let me just read a few of these highlights that appeared in the New York Times and think about it. Put aside the impeachment characters, the Peyton Place scenario, put it aside and consider what citizens of the indispensable Nation ought to be considering at this hour in our history. The haves. The richest fifth of the world's people consume 86 percent of all goods and services, while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3 percent. The richest fifth of the world's people consumes 86 percent of all goods and services while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3 percent. Indeed, the richest fifth consumes 45 percent of all meat and fish, 58 percent of all energy used and 84 percent of all paper. The richest has 74 percent of all telephone lines, and owns 87 percent of all vehicles. The richest fifth of the world's people consume 86 percent of all goods and services. The ultrarich, the three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 48 least developed countries. The ultrarich, the three richest people, three rich individuals in the world, have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 48 least developed countries. In Africa, the average African household today consumes 20 percent less than it did 25 years ago. The average African household consumes 20 percent less than it did 25 years ago. There are more African households. There is terrible leadership. You cannot blame it all on colonialism. Twenty-five years ago colonialism's remnants were still there. People lived better. Has the leadership that has resulted after colonialism was ended decreased the standard of living? Or did resources get pulled out by the colonial powers? Whatever, the fact is that the average African household now is living much worse. They consume 20 percent less than they did 25 years ago. Consider the fact that the world's 225 richest individuals, of whom 60 are Americans, with total assets of $311 billion, have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the entire world's population. Let me repeat that. The world's 225 richest individuals, of whom 60 are Americans, with total assets of $311 billion, have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the entire world's population. Americans alone spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics. That is $2 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide basic education for everyone in the world. Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics, $2 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide basic education for everybody in the world. The have-nots. Of the 4.4 billion people in developing countries, nearly three-fifths lack access to safe sewers, a third have no access to clean water, a quarter do not have adequate housing, and a fifth have no access to modern health services of any kind. Of the 4.4 billion people in developing countries, nearly three-fifths lack access to safe sewers, a third have no access to clean water, a quarter do not have adequate housing, and a fifth have no access to modern health services of any kind. Smoke is an interesting topic in this set of highlights. Of the estimated 2.7 million annual deaths from air pollution, 2.2 million are from indoor pollution. 2.7 million annual deaths from air pollution. Of that total, 2.2 million are from indoor pollution, including smoke from dung and wood burned as fuel, which is more harmful than tobacco smoke. Eighty percent of the victims of this kind of death by smoke are rural poor in developing countries. Telephone lines. Sweden and the United States have 681 and 626 lines per 1,000 people respectively. Afghanistan, Cambodia, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have one telephone line per 1,000 people. Ice cream and water. Europeans spend $11 billion a year on ice cream--$11 billion a year on ice cream--$2 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide clean water and safe sewers for the world's population. AIDS. At the end of 1997, over 30 million people were living with HIV, with about 16,000 new infections a day, 90 percent in developing countries. It is now estimated that more than 40 million people will be living with HIV in the year 2000. Land mines. More than 110 million active land mines are still scattered in 68 countries, with an equal number stockpiled around the world. Every month more than 2,000 people are killed or maimed by mine explosions. In a world where poverty is rampant, we still are spending large amounts of money on weapons, and land mines is one of the most devastating spread throughout the entire world. Pet food and health. Consider the fact that Americans and Europeans combined spend $17 billion a year on pet food, $4 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world. $17 billion a year spent on pet food by Americans and Europeans. That is $4 billion more than we need to provide basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world. I am reading from highlights of the United Nations Human Development Report. These highlights appeared in the New York Times on September 27 of this year. I will close with the last one of the highlights. I want to leave this with you to consider over again and I will repeat it, I assure you, in the next few years over and over again and update it because it sums things up in a very dramatic way. $40 billion a year, the key figure, $40 billion a year. Remember, our defense budget is more than $250 billion a year. $40 billion a year. It is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and clean water and safe sewers for all is roughly $40 billion a year, or less than 4 percent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world. I repeat. It is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and clean water and safe sewers for all is roughly $40 billion a year, less than 4 percent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world. Take your mind off the impeachment proceeding, the diversion away from real problems, and consider the fact that a lot of these statistics have some implication even in America where people are not getting the appropriate health care. More than 10 million people are not getting or have no health care coverage. Take your mind off and consider the fact that large amounts of children still go hungry, even in America. Take your mind off the impeachment procedures and the trivialities related to it, and consider the fact that we are not focused on problems that could be solved. The most important thing about these highlights of the United Nations report is that they tell us that the problems of the world are soluble with the resources that we have available in the world right now. The doomsayers who said that the overpopulation of the world would guarantee that it would be impossible for everybody to survive, they are not correct. You can use $40 billion a year and provide for the survival and a decent life for all the people of the world, just $40 billion distributed in some kind of intelligent way. Indeed, you know, never blame God for the travails of mankind. You know, God has put on this earth a bountiful supply of resources, food, energy. You know, it is all here. You know, when you consider the fact that so much is being wasted, all you have to do is take it and distribute it a different way. God must spend many days weeping about the ingratitude of the American leadership of his Earth, of this planet. What other Nation at any time in history has enjoyed so many benefits, been so blessed by God, and yet we trivialize our role, and we ignore our destiny. We have a duty to see to it that the distribution of these resources should take place in some kind of way to relieve all this massive suffering. One thing about God is that He is not a dictator, He is not a tyrant. God does not intervene into the affairs of mankind. What a pity that He is not setting the order and forcing the distribution. What a pity that He has so much stake in the free will of mankind. What a pity that He blesses certain nations at different times in history, and He waits for them to follow through. The Roman Empire once commanded all the known world. China commanded the world that the Romans did not know much about. Those empires did not, the leadership did not behave in ways which spread the benefits of their empires and guaranteed that they would continue. We are in the same position, probably more so than the Roman or the Chinese ever were. We are the indispensable Nation now abandoning our responsibilities. We have an indispensable Nation that chooses to turn away even from domestic matters which have an impact on the rest of the world. If we were to educate our own populous, guarantee that every youngster in America had his talents fully developed, we would have a priceless resource to send out for the rest of the world. I mean we would be able to deal with these medical problems, we would be able to deal with the education problems, the sewer problems, the various problems. We alone have enough resources, human resources, if they were fully developed, if we would just use our resources to develop our own. I often talk about computers and technology in the schools, and back in my district people say that, well, you know, we think you have become some kind of aficionado of computers. You lost your bearing in terms of the importance of technology in the schools. And my answer is that when I talk about computers, I am not an aficionado. I do not even know how to handle my E-mail well. I mean I assure you nothing personal about it, computers are the way of the future. Just as the automobile created a whole culture, computers are creating a whole culture for America and for the rest of the world. When I talk about computers, I am not talking about a plaything or a luxury. I am talking about putting computers in schools so that every child has the exposure as early as possible to computer literacy, computer learning, because that is the way the world is going, that is where the jobs are going to be. That is definitely where the jobs are going to be. Already we have a shortage, and we had on the floor of this House a bill which tried to solve the immediate problem of the shortage of computer information technology working by bringing in foreigners. We are going to bring in 90,000 per year and increase that up over the next few years, and yet the Department of Labor says that the shortage will be even worse. Five years from now we are talking about more than 1 million, 1.5 million vacancies that exist. So this is not a luxury, this is not a hobby. I am talking about a culture that is being created. You know, when the automobile was being developed, I suppose all the schools in America looked at the automobile and said, do not teach any kids about auto mechanics. I mean, you know, that is a luxury, this is a plaything. You know, the automobile has a place in our culture which provides millions of jobs from the engineers that produce them, the workers in the factory, the salesmen, the mechanics; you know, from A to Z people who have high school education, some who do not have a high school education, all kinds of people are employed in the automobile industry. The computer industry will be the same in a very few years. It is moving, mushrooming, at a much more rapid rate than the automobile industry was built, and that has implications for the whole world and all of these problems throughout the world. You can educate the whole world if you were to computerize centers across the world and you did not have to depend on them creating their own teachers, locally first, but you could have physics and science and math and literature, whatever you want, piped in by long distance learning. You could do it in a matter of 10 or 20 years using the technologies that are now placed at our disposal by the computers and the Internet. You know, you could revolutionize the way the world takes care of itself. All of that is possible, you know, if you focus first on educating your own population. You know, school construction makes it possible for you to have buildings that can be wired, hopefully, for computers and be wired for the Internet. The E-rate, which was a magnificent stroke by Congress requiring that the FCC come up with a plan for providing discounted services to schools, that is about to go down the drain because of the fact that some very narrow-minded, tinny-spirited people, greedy people will not go forward and let the E-rate provide the discounts to the schools that they should provide. We are the indispensable Nation with tinny minds, major experience, and at a points where we could revolutionize and turn the world on its axis and move it in a new direction. We refuse to do it. The present quagmire. In the present quagmire our only hope is to accelerate the timetable and move out of the mud back to a set of priorities worthy of this indispensable Nation. We either move back to a set of priorities worthy of a Nation, or we can be plunged deeper down. We go into the pit with Larry Flynt who put an advertisement in the Washington Post calling, offering a million dollars for anybody who has information about an illicit affair with a Congressman or any other member of the government. That is the direction which leads to total chaos, but that is the downhill motion that we are now in. That is the direction we are going. Let us not sink deeper into the quagmire, but instead move rapidly. We are into an impeachment process. The committee has voted, the Committee on the Judiciary. The only way out is to accelerate the timetable, move it, get out of the mud, get back to a contemplation of the real problems that matter most to America, to most of our people. Listen to the American people and their common sense. Listen to the American people instead of having contempt for them. Their intelligence has risen to the occasion. Our democracy can be saved if you listen to the American people, their sense of balance and justice. Get out of the quagmire and back to the business of the indispensable Nation.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to note that we are less than 5 weeks away from the end of this session. We will probably adjourn no later than October 15. The date is still basically October 9, but the rumor is that it will be some time after that. It is certainly going to be no later than October 15 or 16. The necessities of this election year dictate that we will have to adjourn. I think that there is a full plate of unfinished business, and it is most unfortunate that most of that business is not being addressed. We did a few bills today that are significant, I guess, in terms of conference reports. We also did a bill that I think is very harmful relating to education, and I will come back to that. The rumor is also that a continuing resolution which will carry our budget into next year will be substituted for the passage of individual appropriations bills. The debate and the discussion of critical issues that will take place on appropriations bills will probably not be there unless we have a rule which allows us to have a number of hours of debate on the continuing resolution, the long one. There is a short continuing resolution that is going to take us into October, but a longer continuing resolution is being prepared. This means that we will not have a chance in the context of appropriations and budget making systematically, we will not have a chance to discuss certain vital issues. They are vital issues that are not getting the kind of exposure that they need. The American people have common sense that we welcome, we ought to welcome into this process, and we need to let them know what is going on. I want to commend my colleagues, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) and the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott), for the very thorough discussion of Social Security, what the Social Security trust fund means, how it works, what it is all about. Out of this present conflict between the majority party and the minority party, perhaps we will have a better understanding developed by the lay people in this country, by the voters, by the ordinary common people of what Social Security is all about, how it works. We may have an honest bookkeeping process developed, because right now they do smoke and mirrors with Social Security funds. They use the funds in various ways that cover deficits in the regular budget. They talk about being off budget at certain times, and they place it in budget at other times. Maybe we can have a separate accounting system for Social Security grow out of this conflict between the two parties as to how Social Security should be administered. It is a vital issue for all Americans. There are very few families that are not in one way or another touched by what happens with Social Security. Certainly, in the African American community, for some time now there have been studies showing that African Americans in smaller percentages live to be 65. The mainstream community, the white community, the greater proportion of them live to be 65 and over and enjoy their Social Security benefits. Right now a much smaller percentage of African Americans are living to be 65 and being able to enjoy the Social Security benefits. Therefore, the African American community will be very hard hit by the movement of the retirement age from 65 to 67. That is going to take place within two or three years. You are going to have to wait until you are 67 before you can receive your Social Security benefits. Already the people who need the help the most are going to be penalized by this Band-Aid approach to saving Social Security. A commission, several years ago, came up with that answer, one thing we should do is move the retirement age from 65 to 67. Now they are proposing to move it to 70 after that. It will keep moving and there will be certain groups of people who will never catch up with it, if we do not find some other way to save and protect Social Security. I think we ought to declare off limits now and forever more any movement of the age of retirement as a way to protect Social Security. What my colleagues were saying earlier makes much more sense. Let us use the money that has accumulated in these prosperous times to deal with the problem that we project for Social Security down the road. I am not going to go back and repeat their arguments. I want to congratulate the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) in particular, Dr. McDermott, who was the author of the single payer health plan here in Congress. He is still the author of it; he originated it, the single payer health plan. Dr. McDermott gave a brilliant analysis of how the Social Security fund works and how the money is accumulated. And I want to congratulate him for that statement, that presentation. Saving and protecting Social Security is something we have got to talk about more in the next few days in the context of the proposal of the Republicans that we have a tax cut. There is a surplus. Most people do not realize that that surplus is primarily money in the Social Security fund. The surplus is in the Social Security fund. Anyone who wants to take part of the present surplus and move it somewhere else will be taking it from the Social Security fund. Our position is that we must protect the Social Security fund first, protect Social Security and guarantee that the difficulties projected will be taken care of before you begin to take money out of this surplus which is mostly Social Security funds. I previously stated that I think that if there is a surplus, some part of it ought to be dedicated to education and the necessary steps to improve education. A greater investment in education is a worthwhile use of any surplus funds. But not until we are sure that we have the adequate protection for Social Security, that the money stream, the revenue stream, the projections for the future are all in place and we can see where the money is going to be left over after you make the necessary adjustments to secure Social Security. That is on our plate. We need to really deal with it. We need to broaden and maximize the discussion over the next few weeks, and everybody should be in on it. It affects us all. It is a very important program. It takes the cash straight to the recipient, to the person. It has a minimum amount of bureaucracy and layers of infrastructure. It is a check to a person who has earned it in terms of his Social Security rights. Another thing that we must discuss more in the next few weeks is the Federal assistance to education. I regret that a continuing resolution is going to cover this whole question of what are the appropriations for education for this year. Somehow we need to infuse into the discussion of the continuing resolution a discussion of what are you going to do about education this year. The despair that is felt by parents across this Nation must find some relief from the Federal Government. The Federal Government is responsible for only a small portion of the funding of education. We have gone over that before. Seven percent of the total funding for education is Federal funding. The rest of it is State and local funding. But that 7 percent that comes from the Federal Government is a stimulant. It makes the local government and the State government do certain kinds of things that they normally do not do. The Federal Government has been accused of interfering, creating a bloated bureaucracy, making red tape, unbearable for teachers. This cannot be true when only a small percentage of the funds for education are Federal funds. If the Federal Government has only a 7 percent funding involvement, then our influence is only 7 percent, and we cannot, we cannot have an authority beyond the funding. We are the scapegoats, the Federal Government is the scapegoat, but it is limited, too limited. I have always said that 7 percent is not enough. The Federal Government should at least rise to the level of 25 percent of funding for education in America. If we have 25 percent of the funding, if we provided 25 percent of the money responsibility on our schools, we still will only have 25 percent of the authority and influence. The other 75 percent of the authority and influence would still be at the State and local level. So our schools would still be State and locally run. Federal assistance to education, unfortunately, if we have a continuing resolution, may be held hostage. It is a great excuse to do nothing. The majority party would like to do nothing. They are aware of the fact that poll after poll and focus group after focus group demonstrate that the American people, the voters place a very high priority on matters related to education. And they think the Federal Government should be more involved in education in a very basic way. But instead of engaging that involvement or desire to be rescued in an honest way, the majority party chooses to play trickery and pretend it is concerned about education, while it does things like the bill that was on the floor last Friday. The bill on the floor last Friday was called Dollars to the Classroom. If you look at it very closely, it is not Dollars to the Classroom, it is dollars to the governors of the States, dollars to the governors. And the governors were given great freedom as to how they were going to spend those dollars, so fewer dollars would probably end up in the classrooms where they were needed most. The Dollars to the Classroom is just one more gimmick, part of a smoke screen that the majority Republicans have pursued to make people think that they are concerned with education when they are not. Dollars to the Classroom would have pulled all of the authority and all of the infrastructure out of the Department of Education, which would be another way to destroy the Department of Education. They do not say that anymore, but that is still the goal. We must make certain that in the process of developing this continuing resolution, there be a broader discussion of the things that ought to be in there that are not likely to be in there, if you leave it to the majority Republicans. We ought to not go another year without dealing with school construction, class size reduction or technology. I will come back to a larger discussion of this. But saving and protecting Social Security, Federal assistance to education. Minimum wage increase, it has been defeated in the Senate. It has not even been put on the floor here, but I think that they owe it to the majority, again, of Americans who would like to see a minimum wage increase, they owe it to put it on the floor and let us vote on it. But that is not likely to happen. HMO reform, greater health care coverage, HMO reform to bring the HMOs back into control. They got off to a bad start, and no one has said we ought to abolish HMOs. You do not hear any discussion of that. I think HMOs were at the center of the plan proposed by Mrs. Clinton. Most people do not realize it, that health maintenance organizations were a critical part of that plan that was ridiculed and withdrawn for no good reason, really, because it was superior to what has been allowed to mushroom and grow spontaneously, sort of. The HMOs are here to stay, so reform of HMOs is a vital discussion that has to take place. And we are in the process of doing that. The problem is we have to have a full discussion of that between both houses. Coupled with HMO reform there must be the effort to get greater health care coverage. We need to deal with the fact that 10 million, at least 10 million Americans are not covered that ought to be covered by some health care plan. Again, Dr. McDermott, who was explaining the Social Security plan, is the author of a single payer health plan which would result in the coverage of all Americans. Single payer is not popular these days. Those kinds of things are not even discussed that much, but we should keep it in the back of our minds, that Canada has a single payer system. And Canada is able to cover its citizens without going bankrupt. Canada is alive and well. Its economy has not been plunged into any kind of crisis. For years Canada has had a single payer health plan which covers everybody. Whatever we do, regardless of what form it takes, HMO reform or any other adjustments, we ought to move to cover everybody with a health care plan. That ought to be still on our agenda. There are some larger issues that also may not be legislative issues, but in this time of focus on the personal life and the intimate life of the President, we ought to be reminded that this great Nation cannot take its eye off major problems throughout the world. This great Nation has a duty to keep watching the kinds of developments that are taking place all over the world which may have an impact upon us. We ought to be concerned about the stall of the peace process in the Middle East. It is a process and a set of combatants there that we have great involvement with, both the Arabs and the Jews of Israel. We have allies and enemies on both sides. And that process can blow up in our face in a short period of time. We need to not focus so on the trivialities of a Ken Starr report and focus back on some of the pressing foreign policy issues like the Middle East peace stalemate. Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, those are items that also may blow up in our face. But even if they do not get worse and blow up, we have to be concerned about the fact that they are a drain on the American taxpayers now. The Yugoslavian conflict that we reluctantly entered and provided leadership for meaningful intervention, that conflict now has gone on for quite some time and America, the taxpayers of this country, have gotten bogged down in a process which is draining the Treasury. The amount of money available for these kinds of interventions is all going toward Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Serbia. Now they say we need greater involvement in Kosovo. We are talking about $6 or $7 billion now directed at one part of the world. I am all in favor of this country exercising its role as the indispensable Nation, providing leadership when nobody else is there to provide the leadership. It is important. But when you go into a conflict like the Yugoslavian conflict and you stay there and expend billions of dollars, then what you are doing is creating a precedent, which I am certain the American people, anybody with common sense would not want followed. We are ready to intervene, ready to become a part of rescuing people in emergency situations, but emergencies should not continue forever. We are nation-building in Yugoslavia. We are doing what we said we would not do in Somalia; what we said we would not do in Haiti. We are going to the extreme of staying much too long, and the patience of the taxpayers in terms of the next necessary intervention will be worn thin. I think we should find a way to extricate ourselves from Yugoslavia after an expenditure of $7 billion. It is a lot. On the one hand, we expend that much money in Yugoslavia, and we totally abandon Haiti. We had promised an aid package to Haiti, and that aid package only consisted of $200 million of United States funds, funds from this country. But it was part of an international package where the French and the Canadians and a number of countries were going to also contribute to the reconstruction of the economy in Haiti. Well, none of these other countries are willing to ante up and pay their portion or give their portion of the aid until the United States moves part of its $200 million to Haiti. So we are stuck. And Haiti is in a crisis now because theirs is an infrastructure that is continually crumbling. We cannot keep ignoring Haiti. Haiti is a part of the Western Hemisphere. Haiti is a part of a collection of islands and places in this hemisphere where things happen that we cannot ignore, and important developments there impact upon our quality of life here. For example, as the economies of Haiti or any other of the Caribbean islands crumbles, the drug lords move in. We have some small island countries that are now controlled by drug lords. We may be surrounded if we do not move to look at the problems of this hemisphere in a new way and deal with the problems of Haiti and the problems of the crumbling economies of certain island groups that have been hit very hard with a new set of rules that make it more difficult for them to sell their bananas in the European market. The economies that were hit hard by the hurricane just yesterday and today, economies that never were that strong and have never had any significant assistance from the United States, those economies now are sitting there as bait and targets for drug lords to prey upon. We are very concerned about drugs and the continuing in-flow of drugs and the impact that drugs have on our economy. We are going to spend millions of dollars to provide aid for police and military operations in certain countries in order to combat the drug trade. Most of that money is going to go into the hands of the very people who are part of the whole problem. Large amounts of corruption have been discovered in all of the countries that we will be giving this aid to: Mexico, Colombia. Every country. In the final analysis, when we get down to the bottom line, the law enforcement officials are involved in the drug trade, and that is a consequence of allowing the economies to decline and the standards of government to be corrupted. And we are not going to solve the problem by addressing whatever aid systems we have only to the military and to the police agencies. Much further across the world there is another problem that we ignore at our peril: The India and Pakistan nuclear testing duels. India and Pakistan both have exploded nuclear weapons. We are so busy watching Monica Lewinsky and following Ken Starr, the fact that these two nations both, in a period of less than a month, exploded nuclear weapons does not seem to bother us. We have forgotten, I think, that nuclear debris blows in the air, and nuclear debris gets into the water, the oceans, and it moves around the whole world. Every time we have nuclear explosions of any kind, we increase the amount of debris out there in the atmosphere. I was not a star pupil in physics, but in college biology we did learn about the half-life of radioactive material, how long it stays there, and the fact that radioactive material bombards our genes and our genes suffer from mutations. Some of the new kinds of diseases and microbes and viruses that we have are probably the result of radioactive bombardment and, thus, these mutations. I remember in the biology class the professor citing some experiment that had been done with fruit flies. Fruit flies breed rapidly, so they can tell from one generation to another what the changes were. And the radioactive bombardment of fruit flies had led to some astounding mutations and changes in those fruit flies. That was a long time ago, when I was in college biology. The rules are still the same. The principles are still the same. If there are bombs being exploded in India and Pakistan, then we have a problem that we ought to all be looking at. The Indians and the Pakistanis danced in the street. The ordinary people went out and danced in the street when India exploded their nuclear bomb. They thought it was a great thing. It was like a great celebration that we are now a great power. The party in power, the Hindu party, is now said to have a firm grip on the populace, and that they will probably stay in power for a long time, because they have demonstrated that they are a modern nation and can stand toe-to-toe with the other nuclear powers. So the people who danced in the street in India and the people who later came behind them and said we need one, too, they applauded their government for matching the government in Pakistan. They are the ones who are most vulnerable in terms of radioactive fallout. They do not know it, but there will be increasing cancer cases and all kinds of strange things happening to them. It is quite sad to see humanity dancing with glee, joyfully celebrating a phenomenon that is likely to have a very cruel and immediate physical impact on them in the next decade. India and Pakistan represent a very explosive situation. Something is going to have to give there. And instead of waiting until it progresses to the point of Yugoslavia, where we have mayhem and murder and, for humanitarian reasons, all the nations of the world decide they want to do something about it, we ought to try to solve the Pakistan India problem now. At the heart of it is the Kashmir crisis, the Kashmir situation, which is a long-standing crisis. When I was in high school I remember India received its independence and Pakistan was a breakaway area that, at the last moment, broke away and formed its own independent nation. Kashmir was supposed to become part of Pakistan but a deal was made with the rajah of Kashmir. And although the people who lived there primarily were Muslim, he was Hindu, they decided to go with India. He decided, as an individual. That may be collapsing too much history too rapidly, but, basically, Kashmir is a place where the greater percentage of the people are Muslims. If they are given a chance to vote, they would vote to become a part of Pakistan. If they became independent, because they are Muslims, they would have a close alliance with Pakistan. India knows this. And instead of acquiescing to the will of the people, allowing a vote to take place and having Kashmir become either independent or quasi-independent, or having Kashmir make the decision to join Pakistan, India refuses to allow a vote. There is armed conflict there. Soldiers are arrayed on different borders and real difficulties may erupt at any time. The United States has played a major role in several conflicts that have taken place over the years because the United States has basically been an ally of Pakistan. Pakistan deserves a little more help from the whole world, and certainly from the United States, because Pakistan will probably be the loser in any armed conflict with India if nobody else came to their aid. Instead of waiting for some armed conflict to develop, we ought to try to go to the aid of the situation by insisting, having the United Nations use its moral force, appeal to that element in India which still believes in Mahatma Gandhi, and appeal to India's sense of leadership in the world to go ahead and let Kashmir and the people of Kashmir vote. Let them determine where they are going to go in the standoff between armies in Kashmir and move on to a different set of arrangements. Now, this particular crisis and this particular problem did not just pop into my head. It is one that has been brought to my attention because in my Congressional District, the 11th Congressional District in Brooklyn, there is a large Pakistani community, either the first or second largest Pakistani community in the country. And like everybody else, they have brought their problems to my attention. And I am appalled at the length of time that the Kashmir-India-Pakistan crisis has gone on. It is one of the things that we should be concerned with. It is one of the things that we are neglecting, as the indispensable Nation. If there is a real bloody conflict, they are going to call on us. If there is a threat to the stability of the world, or the fishing lanes, there are all kinds of reasons why we will respond, and that is good. Just for humanitarian reasons, we should respond, and I have no problem with that, but we will not unless we are able to take our eyes off the trivial, the endless flow of trivial details about what is happening in the President's private life and what is happening with the Ken Starr Monica Lewinsky case, et cetera. We need to come back and, before this session of Congress ends, try to get serious about the fact that we are the indispensable Nation, involved in all kinds of activities that are important to the world as well as important to our own economy and our own quality of life. So I have talked about saving Social Security, the Federal assistance to education, minimum wage increase, HMO reform and greater health care coverage, the stalled peace process in the Mideast, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, and those kinds of eruptions in that part of the world, Pakistan, India and Kashmir. These are just some of the kinds of pressing problems and issues that we ought to be addressing. Finally, I would also like to conclude my little list here by talking about something much closer to home, which arouses a lot of emotions, and that is the President's Commission on Race. Recently, the President's Commission on Race made a report, and 99 percent of the people of this country do not even know they have concluded their activities and made a report. I think that some aspect of the Lewinsky- Starr pornographic drama was unveiled on the same day they made their report. Certainly in the days that followed, the headlines, the media, everything was dominated by the Lewinsky-Starr Peyton Place drama or soap opera. So the Commission issued a report, and I have not had a chance to read the report yet, but I have read some of the highlights in the press conference or the interviews with members of the Commission. The Commission made a great point of saying that it did not think that we should apologize for slavery. It did not think that the American government should apologize for slavery. Now, I wonder why, if they were not going to make a positive statement, that we should apologize for slavery, why did they bother to deal with that issue at all? I think the Commission sort of defined itself by rushing to make a statement that was a negative one. Instead of emphasizing that what it did stand for, what it did want, it made a statement which everybody picked up as wonderful. It is wonderful that the Commission on Race, appointed by the President, says that there should be no apology for slavery. Now, that is something that needs to be discussed and it, of course, is completely off the radar screen. Very little discussion will take place. But the President is to be applauded, still, for appointing that Commission. The existence of that Commission was a very important step forward. However small its budget might have been, or its staff, or however circumscribed its charge was, it was a constructive step forward by a President who did not have to do it. There was no crisis in terms of rioting in the street, there was no crisis of bombing of schools, there was no crisis of a governor standing in the schoolhouse door. All of these kinds of things were not happening. So the President had no political reason for appointing a commission to review race relations. It was a brilliant stroke to just get people to discuss it. Discussing the issue will not resolve the very serious problems that we face with respect to race relations in the United States, but not discussing it certainly will not get us anywhere and when a President uses his prestige to spark a discussion and move it forward, that is a very positive achievement and the President should be given full credit for that. The problem is in my opinion that the people on the commission did not take full advantage of the opportunity. I think the commission had some of the best minds in the field. All the people there were quite impressive in terms of their academic credentials, in terms of their experience, et cetera. I think they had very good minds. I regret that the commission, the giant intellect and the giant minds were accompanied by very tiny spirits. I think it is a tiny spirit that makes a point that we will not recommend that there be an apology for slavery and that is the most important thing that they have to lead with. We do not recommend that there be an apology for slavery. They are tiny spirits because they seem to be afraid, intimidated by certain forces that have insisted that apologizing for slavery is ridiculous or it is absurd, it is unfair to ask this generation to apologize for slavery because they cannot do it, they were not here, there were good people in both North and South, et cetera, et cetera. There are a lot of reasons that are given. However, all of these reasons, and everybody who backs away from endorsing an apology for slavery, including the majority of the members in the Black Caucus think it should not be done because it is too little and we do not want to have people have their consciences salved by taking a little step like apologizing for slavery. I disagree. I think it is symbolism and we live by symbolism. Symbolism is very important. There is a galloping symbolism that other nations are adopting. We have an apology every week just about. If you follow the papers, something is there every week apologizing for some atrocities that have been committed in the past, some injustices, et cetera. This week, today, Thursday, September 24, we have an apology with money. I am going to read from the New York Times International, Thursday, September 24, today. This is on page A-12. Siemens Creates a Fund for Nazi Slave Workers. ``Following the lead of Volkswagen,'' Volkswagen was in the paper last week. Volkswagen apologized for the enslavement of large numbers of people during the war, having them work in their plant and not only apologized, they offered $12 million. I think Siemens is following the lead of Volkswagen. ``Following the lead of Volkswagen, the German electronics giant Siemens announced plans today for a $12 million fund to compensate former slave laborers forced to work for the company by the Nazis during World War II. ``Siemens is one of several German businesses under pressure from lawsuits in the United States and threats of more at home from Nazi-era victims. ``Volkswagen last week became the first of these companies to agree to such payments when it announced its own $12 million fund--a change of heart after arguing for years that it had no legal duty to pay back wages for labor forced on it by the Nazi war machine. ``Siemens had a similar change of heart. Almost a year ago, the company insisted that it could do no more for its former slave laborers than express ``deepest regrets.'' Siemens has gone from apologizing, they did express deep regrets, they apologized. And we are saying large numbers of people are saying that this nation, America, the great nation of America should not even do that. Do not apologize for slavery. Do not have the government apologize for the horror, probably the greatest crime committed against humanity when you add it all up and look at its in its totality. But Siemens is doing that for the laborers who were forced to work as slaves during the war. Volkswagen is doing it. Siemens today, Volkswagen last week. And last week, week before last, quite some time, the Swiss, the Swiss banks and the Swiss government have been apologizing to the Jews who were swindled out of their money in various ways when they deposited it in Swiss banks during World War II. The Swiss are also on the spot in terms of their being the agents of the Nazi government, and they are very apologetic about that. So to have our Commission on Race portray themselves as heroes because they are against apologizing for slavery is most unfortunate. I think that some good can come out of the commission report. I will certainly look at the report closely and I hope that we move to act on some of the recommendations that are made by the commission. But the commission in total certainly has left a legacy of spinelessness. The tiny spirits stick out there despite the gigantic minds. An apology for slavery would be very much in order. It is very much consistent with what is being done all over the world. The Japanese apologizing to the Koreans that they forced into prostitution, the Catholics apologizing in France to the Jews for what they did to them, on and on it goes. There are apologies in civilized nations, in civilized cultures, apologies all over. So are we not able to at least take that step of apologizing for slavery, having our government apologize for the fact that slavery was legal, slavery was protected by the government. For 232 years it took place here on our continent under the supervision of legal bodies that protected it. We are not asking for $12 million for a group of slaves that might have worked one place and $10 million for another group. New York City was the third largest slave port in the country. Most people do not know that. They associate slavery with the South. But New York City was the third largest slave port in the country. There are many streets named after the great slave owners, slave holders, in Brooklyn, my own home borough. If you were to have some way to compute the amount of money that is owed in back wages to all the slaves who labored for years and years without any pay, certainly New York would have a big payout. You would have a large number of families that would be eligible for very big payouts. But we are not going to go that far. We are not going to try to do the impossible. But an apology is a good beginning. A recognition of the horrors that were perpetrated with the aid of government is a good beginning. We should have had that beginning. Now, I have covered a lot of territory, all the way from slavery and protecting Social Security to apologies for slavery. My point tonight is, these are very important items that must be kept on our agenda. These are very important items that we cannot ignore. A recent book came out about this whole matter of the slave labor in Germany. Each of the factories that were involved, Volkswagen and Siemens, they say the Nazis forced them to use slave labor. But there is a book out which is called ``The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century'' by Christopher Simpson. In that book the thesis is the companies pursued the cheap slave labor. They wanted it, they went after it, they bid on it. It was not just the government insisting that they utilize the slave labor of prisoners of war and Jews and other people that the Nazis had enslaved. ``The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century'' by Christopher Simpson. That book has come out recently. There are discussions of it. That is why I think it should be related to the apology for slavery and the commission report. All of these things relate very much to each other. All of them are important. We are a Nation now that has a leadership role in the world. We are the indispensable nation. The President calls us the indispensable nation. I agree with that term. But we are absorbed with trivialities. One way to smother this Nation and to destroy it is to get so consumed with trivialities that we cannot deal with the major basic issues that confront our economy, our Nation and the world. We are obsessed with ephemeral kinds of things that do not mean very much one way or the other. We are consumed. We are manipulated to be consumed by trivialities. The lives of the movie stars and the lives of the elected officials when they are treated like the lives of the movie stars become far more important than the critical issues of our day. We need to do something about the issues that I have just outlined. We need to do something now. We are at a pivotal period where we do not have certain kinds of pressures on us. We do not have a recession. We have a surplus that we are looking at. We need to have a real, thorough examination of what it means to have a surplus and deal with that. We also need to take a look at the context with which these trivialities keep being pushed to the forefront. The newspapers and the television stations are obsessed with forcing us to examine the trivialities related to the President's private life, for example. First you have an organ of government, the special prosecutor's office, publishing great details, exploiting trivialities in a way which will guarantee that the report gets a maximum distribution. You have an organ of government paid $40 million, the whole Special Prosecutor's office, which is putting out something which you could call a form of nonfiction pornography. In fact I think it was a statement made by Ken Starr himself that is very interesting where he said that anybody who does that kind of thing certainly deserves to be condemned. Ken Starr on 60 Minutes in an interview with Diane Sawyer in 1987 made the following statement. Quote, from Ken Starr: Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts. Our society should be purged of the perverts who provide the media with pornographic material while pretending it has some redeeming social value under the public's ``right to know.'' End of Ken Starr's quote. Kenneth Starr, 1987, 60 Minutes, CBS Television interviewed by Diane Sawyer. Let me just read the quote once more. Quote from Ken Starr: Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts. Our society should be purged of the perverts who provide the media with pornographic material while pretending it has some redeeming social value under the public's right to know. End of quote from Ken Starr. I agree, Mr. Starr. But you are the one who is guilty. We have your report which has been basically rejected by the majority of the American people. They do not like it. You overreached. Whoever acts in concert with you or that you act in concert with, they have overreached. And we have a situation where all of these publications and exposures of salacious material have not impressed the American people in a positive way. We have the common sense of the American people rising up to challenge and attempt to manipulate their minds. The salacious material, the pornography was all put there in order to distract you with trivialities and not focus on the case that is not there against the President. The President has done nothing which is an impeachable offense. One way to make you forget that is to introduce Peyton Place and soap opera instead and let you get all caught up in discussions of the details of the soap opera, Tobacco Road, Peyton Place and a whole lot of details about intimate activities that should not be published under a government imprimatur, certainly not by a special prosecutor. So the American people have rejected it. It has not worked. There has been no automatic response which says throw him out; you know, we do not have that. The polls have not done any gyrations spinning downward, and I want to read from an article that appeared in today's New York Times. Frank Newport, the editor and chief of the Gallup poll writes the following: Republicans these days do not seem to think much of public opinion polls. With a strong majority of Americans still opposed to the impeachment of President Clinton, some prominent Republicans are arguing that Congress should do what it thinks is right, not what the polls say. It is very strange to hear politicians, Republicans or Democrats, saying we should ignore the polls. We live by the polls, and, you know, when we should be ignoring the polls and providing leadership and guidance, that is seldom happens. But suddenly the Republicans have said the polls are not important. I wonder how long that is going to be in effect. Going back to the article by Mr. Newport, quote: Poll taking in an art, not a science, Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said on Tuesday. Representative Tom DeLay of Texas was more direct: I think frankly the polls are a joke. Dan Quayle, the former Vice President, sees a subtext. I think that the people are far more turned off with Bill Clinton and all of his shenanigans than all of these public opinion polls are expressing, he said in August. So, Dan Quayle, Tom DeLay and Henry Hyde all think polls are ridiculous, they are superfluous, they do not mean much. Going back to Mr. Newport's article: But Republicans should not shoot the messenger. After all polls do nothing more than summarize the opinions of the people. In a democratic society ignoring the polls demonstrates a considerable arrogance. Why should we assume that pundits and elected officials know more than the average American or that careful scientific polls do not accurately measure public sentiment? There is no doubt that Americans want Congress to listen to them. In a Gallup survey conducted this month 63 percent of those surveyed said that on the question of a possible impeachment of President Clinton Members of Congress should stick closer to public opinion rather than doing what they themselves think is best. And to date Americans do not want the President to leave office. Even after the release of the Starr Report and of Mr. Clinton's testimony on videotape the number of Americans who approve of the job Mr. Clinton is doing is 66 percent according to a Gallup poll taken on Monday. Only 32 percent of respondents favored impeaching and removing Mr. Clinton from office. Thirty-nine percent said that he should resign. The results were similar in other polls. In a NBC news poll, also taken on Monday night, only 26 percent of the respondents believe the President was telling the truth, but 60 percent did not believe the President should resign. It is certainly possible that the public can still be convinced that impeachment is a correct course. That is what happened during Watergate. In November 1973, just 30 percent of Americans favored impeaching and forcing Richard Nixon from office. By August 1974, just before Nixon resigned, more than 60 percent favored such action. The job for those who feel Mr. Clinton should leave office is to take these convictions to the public to continue to make that case. Ultimately, however, Congress should listen to the public's response, much of it measured through polling. That is the end of the quote of Mr. Frank Newport in the New York Times. I think that is today, today's New York Times, September 24 on the op-ed page. I cite that because, and I read from Ken Starr's statement before 60 Minutes to make the point that we are off into trivialities, and we are being deliberately in many cases led into trivialities, into matters of little consequence, in order to ignore the big issues. And, as a Nation, we are probably going to be subjected to this kind of activity again and again. The spin is a part of American political life now, the spin. The spin often will spin you into outer space where there is nothing but dust and there is nothing of any consequence. So I am arguing that we should exercise the common sense out there that they do not appear to have here in the Congress. Continue to focus on the issues, continue to understand that saving Social Security is an issue that ought to be discussed widely, you ought to have a role in that, you ought to go visit your Congressperson and talk to them about it. You ought to understand that an $80 million tax cut jeopardizes the effort to systematically begin the process of guaranteeing that Social Security will survive and be there fully when it is needed in the future. You ought to not allow yourself to be pulled away from the focus on that very real issue. Federal assistance to education is a very real issue. Let me just expand for one moment on what happened today. We had on the floor of the Congress today a bill which would increase the immigration quota for professional workers. That immigration quota increase is designed primarily to bring in more information technology workers into this country. Information technology workers are people who work in various ways with computers and the Internet programing and various things related to the computer culture, and there is a great demand for workers. We already have 65,000 of those workers in America. That quota was overrun back in the spring, and now they want to bring in this year another 25,000, and then every year between now and the year 2000 increase the number. What does that have to do with education in America? It says that we are going to be giving away. We have already given away 65,000 jobs to foreigners. We want to give away another 25,000 to foreigners this year, and we are going to give up to 1,000 in the year 2001; 107,000, I forget. The big problem here is that those figures do not tell the full story. If this is the way the problem is going to be solved when you have vacancies and a need for workers in the high tech area like information technology, if you are going to allow the companies to bring in people from the outside, then they are never going to be willing to fund and develop an adequate education system in America. You know, first of all there is an advantage in bringing in foreigners from the outside. They always pay them less. They do not pay them as much as they pay information technology workers who are based and trained here. So that is one advantage they are always going to be seeking. We must insist that the piece of legislation which passed on the floor today is the wrong way to go, that we ought to revamp our education system in order to be able to have a pool, a large pool of people who are in the early grades exposed to computer literacy training, and they go up to high school, and they get more training, and some kids could actually graduate from high school and not go to college and get certified; Microsoft I think certification, A-1 certification; and make between 30 and $40,000 a year. If they want to continue at a junior college or college, you know all of those opportunities are almost guaranteed to be there in the future. That is the way we are going with our economy and the technology. The jobs will be there. The Department of Labor estimates that there will be 1.5 million vacancies in 5 years in the information technology area. So, we cannot wait until this session is over. We need to do something about federal assistance to education now. Last Saturday I had a luncheon as part of the Congressional Black Caucus legislative weekend. I had a luncheon and invited 50 school superintendents to come and help us to develop a strategy or let us get together in solidarity in order to make certain that for the remainder of this session of Congress we are not ignored that the education agenda is not pushed on the back burner and left there. Thirty-five school superintendents came; I was surprised at the large number who responded. These are superintendents from what we call America's most challenged districts, the districts that have the largest percentages of poor students, students who receive free school lunches. So, you know, at that time we addressed the basic issues that they are confronted with. They want the school construction program that is proposed by the President. They want that to pass: $22 billion over a 5-year period to help with school construction. They want class size reduction. They want wiring of the schools for technology. If we do all these things, we will not have to call upon foreign nations to provide us with a work force in the next five to ten years. We want to deal with HMO reform. You know, we talk a lot about Medicare and the problems that Medicare has. The problems that Medicaid, the poorest people have, are far worse than the problems being experienced by the people who have Medicare. And there are too many problems with HMOs and Medicare already. The big problem with Medicaid is that the Governors, the States, are squeezing the capitation fees so hard, they are lowering the capitation fees for families and individuals to the point where it is hard for the HMOs to provide the kind of service they should provide. It is the Governors, it is the State apparatus that insists on squeezing more and more, saving more and more, and it has become a situation where the government has endorsed second class health care. Second class health care is deadly health care. You either have first class health care or you have dangerous and deadly health care. And when you cut corners on health care, it means that the health care is likely to do more harm than good. We are being forced into that by States that are greedy and want more and more money. So that is an important issue. Save and protect Social Security, provide federal assistance to education now, let us not wait this session. We need to act on the President's proposals. More and more people in the black community, I must confess, parents, are looking to vouchers, 56 percent according to several polls. Fifty-six percent of the parents said they are ready to try vouchers. I know why that phenomenon is taking place. They are desperate. They have given up on the public schools. The way to reverse that desperation is to show there is some reason to have hope, take some action to do meaningful things about the situation in our public schools, take dramatic, highly visible action like school construction, class size reduction and the wiring of schools in order to have a maximum use of technology. That brings hope for the public schools. It renews all that is there. We must continue despite the fact that a continuing resolution sort of blocks out a clear discussion of the issues. We must continue the discussion and try to force onto the agenda of the continuing resolution debate all of these priority programs like the saving and protection of Social Security, and the federal assistance to education, HMO reform. They cannot be smothered away by the fact that there will be no individual appropriations bills on each one of these areas. So I hope that the common sense of the American people will invade these halls in the next few weeks, we will get away from the trivialities and the pornography and return to issues that matter most in this indispensable Nation. We need to continue to make decisions that are going to carry us into the 21st century as a leader of the free world.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I cannot emphasize too strongly, and I returned to the floor to state that this is an education problem, not an immigration problem. The immigration band-aid is botching up the whole process. There is a symptom here. We have a problem in terms of a shortage of people to fill information worker jobs. As long as we patch it up with a band-aid, we are not going to deal with the real problem. We need major surgery. Instead of a DePaul University experiment, which is a laudable innovation and I have no problem with that, but it is too small. We need something on the scale of a GI bill which offered education to every GI returning from World War II. We need something that massive to deal with the coming explosion of needs for information workers in our economy and in the economies of all the countries of the world. It is that big. We are the indispensable nation. If we are going to stay ahead, our education system has to be ahead. We have to have the most educated people on the face of the earth. There is no reason why we cannot do that. We have the resources. We can finance it. We have the policies that have been proposed by the President in terms of school construction so that all of our schools can be wired in a way which allows them to have computers and educational technology in order for them to prepare youngsters at a very early age to enter into the information technology worker field. We also have an e-rate that has been proposed by the Federal Communications Commission which gives communications services at a discount to schools and libraries. The same companies that are begging for these foreign workers and will utilize foreign workers are opposing the implementation of the e-rate. The e-rate is a permanent arrangement which will lower the cost of telecommunications services for schools. That is part of a comprehensive policy that we need. We need a comprehensive approach which includes school construction and wiring of schools, making more computers available, the e-rate, information and technology training centers at the community level so that youngsters from low-income homes will have an opportunity to go in and practice on the computer like their middle-income counterparts. But since the low-income youngsters do not own computers, we need some storefront computer centers where we can keep them open late at night and on Saturdays so that not only the students or youngsters but also older workers who are being downsized and misplaced in their present jobs can get some new training. Other workers need to upgrade themselves. They do not have computers at home. There are a number of components that ought to go into meeting this massive need. It is true, we are going to need them. 1.5 million vacancies are predicted over the next 5-year period. Instead of this band-aid which if it were only temporary, I would not be here. It is not temporary when you talk about a three or four-year period. ``Temporary'' is this year or next year. But they are talking about going all the way to the year 2001 and in the process of making that journey from now until the year 2001, they are going to ask to have those quotas raised. I predict that we will be back here next year with an argument being made to increase the quota of foreign workers coming in. Why can we not be as wise and have as much vision as Bangalore, India? Many years ago they decided they would heavily invest in training their students in computers and computer programming. Now Bangalore, India is considered the computer capital of the world. Most of these foreign workers that are going to come in will be coming from India. I have no problem with them coming from India or anywhere else, but the American students ought to have the opportunity to get the training that they need to fill these jobs. American workers also will keep the standard of pay at the level commensurate with the rest of our economy. They are going to pay these workers who come in as foreigners less. There are many inducements and enticements that are involved here which will make the industries continue to pressure to have more and more of the quota increases of foreign workers. We need to train our own workers with a comprehensive education program.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would very much like to associate myself with the remarks of the previous speaker. This is a very important piece of legislation here, and one of the problems with the rule is that it cuts off debate and limits amendments that can be made on a very important job policy bill. This is all about jobs. To the American people, I say wake up. These are the jobs of right now and the jobs of the future. This is a problem of growth and prosperity, and we welcome it. We are discussing the jobs of today and the jobs that will be mushrooming in numbers in the future. Lots and lots of them will be created. Information technology workers; they are the workers of the future. This is the wrong solution to the problem of shortages though. There are shortages. They are very real. But this solution sets the wrong precedent. If we go this way, we are going to find ourselves repeatedly increasing the quota and repeatedly raising the number of foreign workers who can come in from the outside and take jobs that should be here for American workers. This bill is a negative job bill for American workers. Right now there are 65,000 foreign workers who fill up these kinds of jobs, who are in the country right now. What this bill proposes to do is this year increase it by 25,000 or 30,000 so we could have 90,000 this year. Then it is going to keep increasing, and by the year 2001 you will have 107,000 if they follow the formula that they have here. But the likelihood is that if you set the precedent, if you start now, they are not going to follow this formula. You are going to have an amendment to increase it more next year, and still another amendment. Instead of doing what has to be done to guarantee that our own workers are trained properly and educated properly, that our own education policies are changed, so that our schools will begin to generate large numbers of people who can become information technology workers we will continue to raise the foreign worker quota. 65,000 now, then 90,000, then 107,000, that is only a small part of the problem. There are going to be many, many more jobs than that. These numbers tell only a small part of the story. The Information Technology Association has done a survey that shows that right now there are about 300,000 vacancies, 300,000 right now, in information technology workers. The Department of Labor estimates that in five years we will have 1.5 million vacancies. These are vacancies that they compute after they take into consideration the number of youngsters who are in college majoring in computer science, math and other kinds of programs that will allow them to fill up the jobs. Even after you get all of the graduates out of the schools and they take these jobs, you are still going to have at least 1.5 million vacancies in five years, if you do not do anything about it. What can we do about it? We must find ways to fill these jobs which are more substantial than what we are doing here. What we are doing here is opening the spigot so that massive numbers of foreign workers will keep coming in. By the way, they pay foreign workers less, so this is highly desirable for industry. The pattern is they generally pay them less. We need a program and set of policies that train American workers, starting with technology in our own schools. We need a pool, a supply of people to draw from, people who come through the schools and have been exposed to enough computer training to want to go on to junior college. By the way, you can get some jobs after you come out of high school. You can get an A-1 certification for Microsoft just with a high school diploma and you can go out and earn $35,000 to $40,000 a year just coming out of high school. That is the kind of jobs we are talking about. But those who go on to junior college will get higher paying jobs, those who go to college and get computer programming degrees will get even more, can get $100,000 after they have been working for three or four years. We are talking about a lucrative field that is likely to keep growing, so we want to have in our schools technology, as the President called for. We want to support the E-rate. There is a direct relationship between the people who are opposing the E-rate right now. E-rate, by the way, guarantees schools will be able to have telecommunications services at a discount. It allows some schools that could not afford to link their computers up with the Internet and have those services, to have them by giving as much as a 90 percent discount to the poorest schools. The E-rate is being opposed now by some of these same companies. Many of the same companies that are bringing in the foreign workers are opposing the E-rate, which would allow us to have our schools prepared to educate a larger body of people who can take these jobs as American citizens. So we need to support the E-rate. We need to deal with the problem of school construction funding, which does not allow certain schools to be wired because they are too old and you need to renovate them or build new schools. We need store front computer training centers, not only to allow youngsters from poor neighborhoods to be able to go in at night when the schools are closed down and get some practice, but also all these workers that are being laid off. I want to say we have proposed, I proposed in the higher education legislation, an amendment which would allow colleges to combine with communities and set up store front training centers which will begin to deal with this problem. We need many innovative approaches. Why is Bangalore, India, considered the computer programming capital of the world? Why are most of the workers who will be brought in under this program coming from India? Because India decided a long time ago, they had the vision and wisdom, to have first rate computer training programs in their schools. Bangalore in particular, developed first rate computer training programs. So they have large pools of people who are feeding the computer systems of all of the English speaking world. They speak English, so that is another advantage. So we need policies that revamp our education system in order to produce the workers who can take these jobs. We do not need any more patchwork, easy answers for the big industries. They get lower paid workers and they get an unlimited flood of them without having to contribute to the effort here in America to educate our own citizens. These are the jobs of the future. Wake up. These are the jobs of the future. If we give them away now, we will never be able to get them back.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Chairman, everybody loses in this bill. This is not a bill to invest in American education, the kind of new investment we need. This is a bill to move money around. This is a Houdini bill. This is a swindle. This is a con game brought to us by the people who wanted to abolish the Department of Education in 1994. They wanted to reduce education funding by $4 billion in 1995. This is another way to do the same thing that the voters have already rejected. This is an abolishment of Federal authority in the area of education. Already the States have most of the authority. We only have 7 percent of Federal expenditures, therefore, Federal's influence and control can be no more than 7 percent. The other 93 percent of the authority to make decisions, the authority to have our education system is in the hands of the States already. If education is in a bad state, it is because the States have made it so. Giving them more money from the Federal Government will not help the matter. When World War II started, we were unprepared to fight a war. The draftees were in bad health from across the country from various States because the States had neglected them. Their health was poor. We had to have Federal intervention to deal with that. We were approaching the 21st Century, and we are not going to be prepared for global leadership because we are not allowing the Federal Government to exercise the minimal influence that it has been exercising to try to improve education in the States. This is a con game. These are Houdini experts. The public I think is smart enough to understand. There is no new money here. The people who wanted to abolish the Department of Education and the Federal authority of education have taken a different route. We need a major investment in education for school construction. We need a major investment for technology. We need a major investment to reduce class sizes by having more teachers. We need to do those things and do them right away in order for us to keep pace with the kind of leadership role that we have in the world at this point. We are at a pivotal point in our history. Yet, we are trivializing and almost making a joke of the whole responsibility that we have. My colleagues are playing around with something that is very vital to the national security. This is a swindle.

Mr. OWENS. Madam Chairman, when Europe needed to be rebuilt after World War II, we came forward with a massive Marshall Plan, $20 billion to start and much more afterwards. When we needed to educate our GIs coming home from World War II, we passed a massive GI Bill of Rights education program and it did the job. Now we need to retool our schools. We really need a massive investment in education. What we are doing is playing Republican Chinese checkers, trivializing the whole problem by shifting money around, abolishing the Department of Education's authority and playing games by promising more money when it is the same amount of money basically that we have always had. I think the seriousness of the situation is better reflected in the statement being prepared for the superintendents who will be convening here from some of the country's most challenged school districts on Saturday. They have prepared a statement which reads as follows: ``We believe that there is a great necessity for an immediate meaningful Federal increased investment in education. Funds for school construction, class size reduction, technology and communications services must be at the core of an expanded Federal appropriation for education. The E-rate must be preserved as a permanent vehicle to lessen telecommunications costs. Additional categories of increased Federal financial assistance are needed and welcome. However, there are no substitute programs for the priorities set forth above. The preservation of the public school as an institution requires a highly visible assault on the problems which serve as monstrous roadblocks to school reform progress. A safe physical environment conducive to study is an absolute necessity.'' We cannot have reduced class size unless we have more classrooms. In my district, several schools have twice the number of students they were built for. All the schools are over capacity in my district. There are several schools that still have furnaces which burn coal so the children who sit in those classrooms are endangered by coal smoke. On and on it goes. We need a total package starting with the President's school construction package at the heart of a Federal investment in education which is adequate to meet today's needs.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to the so-called ``English Language Fluency Act'' (H.R. 3892). I find it deplorable that the Republican Majority has yet again mobilized their attack on the Department of Education, legal immigrants, and multiculturalism in general. However, what disturbs me about this particular piece of legislation is that it would ultimately harm our nation's most vulnerable, the children. They have been snared in a tangled web of political opportunism and grandstanding. H.R. 3892 takes a ``sledgehammer'' approach to reforming bilingual education without retaining the essence of this vital educational program. This bill loses sight of the purpose of bilingual education which is to help students master not only language skills but a plethora of subjects ranging from history to math. This legislation is part of a larger misguided plot to strip America of her cultural richness. It is my sincere belief that this bill represents an attempt by extremists in the Republican party to revive the ``English Only'' debate. Proponents of this backwards movement wish to destroy and handicap the very thing that makes America wonderful, her diversity. I do not dispute that the mastery of the English language is an important component of attaining success in America. However, I can testify to that fact that most non-English speaking immigrants desperately want to learn English. As a matter of fact, the non-English speaking constituents of my district work tirelessly by day and night in schools and community centers trying to learn English. And to the merits of this bill, I am sad to report that I have found few. All through the Committee process Republicans continued their pitiful legacy of stacking hearings with witnesses that I found to be misinformed. They either produced reports that had been statistically manipulated or reports that had been politically manipulated. H.R. 3892 would scale back limited-English-proficient (LEP) student's access to education services. Moreover, the two year predetermined time frame mandated by this bill is unreasonably short and would effectively kill proven bilingual programs. The bill will also overturn existing compliance agreements between the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education and local school districts that had not been providing LEP students with equal educational opportunities. The result may be massive civil rights violations. And this sad list goes on and on. This preoccupation of the Republican Party with the destruction of bilingualism is also harmful to this nation's economic interests. In our present global economy diversity and the capacity to speak more than one language is a clear asset. Instead of harassing bilingual education programs we should be increasing their funding. Mr. Chairman, let us turn back the clock to a time when immigrants were openly discouraged from embracing their heritage. Let us not turn our backs on America's children. We must not rob any of our youth of the opportunity to receive a decent education regardless of their diverse background. A ``no'' vote on H.R. 3892 is an affirmation of the right of every child in America to an equal and comprehensive education.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we just returned to Congress from a recess. We have 5 weeks of working time left, unless there is some extended Congress before the election. I doubt that very seriously. I also have heard the news today that the Ken Starr report has been delivered to the House of Representatives, and a process is going forward by which the Committee on Rules will determine what will happen to that report and how it could be handled. I am sure that is going to absorb a large part of our time. There are items on the agenda that have been on the agenda all year long and all during this session of Congress that I hope will not get lost. I think it is very important that the American people, in their commonsense wisdom, understand that there is no need for us to suddenly go on holiday with respect to the pressing issues that face the Congress. There are still overcrowded schools, schools with coal-burning furnaces. There is still a need for some kind of relief from every area of government, including the Federal Government, for school construction in our big cities. There is still a need to have money to lower the ratio of students to teachers. There is still a need for the wiring of our schools for technology, to bring them up to the point where they can train young people for jobs that do exist. There is still a need for increasing the minimum wage. There are a lot of things that mean a lot to ordinary people, and we should not put them in the deep freeze in order to spend all of our time on the one issue of the President's private life and the Ken Starr report. I have been asked a couple of times today why the black community so solidly supports the President. In poll after poll, no matter how you ask the question, whether you are talking about the job performance of the President or his personal life or any other matter related to the President, you generally get a high approval rate in the African American community. Certainly I think one of the reasons for that, and I do not pretend to know all of the answers, one of the reasons for that is because we are oriented toward the issues and the problems, and we would like to see the problems and the issues dealt with. We would like to see some of the problems solved and resolved. Additional polls of African American parents in big cities have shown that large numbers of African American parents are now supporting vouchers for education as an alternative to the public school system. I think that the two kinds of responses are related; that the large numbers of African American parents supporting the vouchers in the school system, it is evidence of a kind of desperation, a kind of fatalism that has set in, that they do not believe anything is going to change in the public school system. They do not think the supporters are there among elected officials. In New York City we had a surplus of nearly $2 billion in the budget, and not a penny was spent to deal with the pressing problems of school construction, including removal of coal-burning furnaces. At the same time, in New York State they had a similar $2 billion surplus, and the Governor turned down a legislative request or vetoed a legislative request for $500 million for school construction. So wherever parents in inner city communities look for some relief from the conditions, it appears that government officials are not interested, or have decided to deliberately abandon or ignore the needs of children in our inner city schools. We are talking about millions of children. The same conditions that exist in the crowded New York City schools exist in many other big cities. Children are forced to eat lunch at 10 o'clock because there are so many, they have to have a relay in the cafeteria, and they have to start early in order to get three or four teams in, three or four sessions in the cafeteria where youngsters eat. Coal-burning furnaces are definitely a threat to every child's health who sits in the school, because the dust that you do not see is still getting into the lungs of young children. Things that bad are not being addressed by our elected officials at various levels. The despair about change relates to the support for President Clinton. The one person who has articulated and set forth a program which would address these issues, if he had the cooperation of the Republican-controlled Congress, is President Clinton. Across the board, when affirmative action was threatened, and hysterical forces surrounding the President were counseling him to abandon affirmative action, it was President Clinton who came up with the statement and the strategy that we should mend affirmative action and not end it. In very serious matters that affect peoples' lives, including the minimum wage, which does not cost the government anything, an increase in the minimum wage would not cost the government anything, the President supports an increase in the minimum wage. Most of the people in my district would appreciate very much the government taking that step, which will not cost the government anything, but recognizes that the prosperity that we enjoy should be shared. We could pull up a very good list of concrete reasons why African American people, who the large majority of them are poor, or poor people in general, support this President. We want to see a focus on the duties and functions of government, that government has certain duties and functions, and we would like to see a decrease in the obsession with the private life of the President. I issued a statement this afternoon to get on the record, since I see a lot of people want to get on the record, and I suppose it would be prudent to back out now, since the Starr report is here, and wait and see what the Starr report has to say, but I choose not to do that. I very strongly feel that government has invaded an area of individual privacy here, and some of us should marshall all of the energy and resources at our command to fight this kind of intrusion by government, because if they can do it to a President, there is no other individual in this Nation who is not also subject to that kind of intrusion into their private life. The statement I issued sums it all up for me: As a Member of Congress, I am sorry that there is an escalating hysteria that may lead to the religious lynching of a great President. President Clinton has gone farther than he should have been asked to go in offering a public statement about his intimate personal life. In view of the fact that absolutely no one has charged that a national security issue is involved in this matter, all further government inquiries should be dropped. The Nation has in no way been placed at risk. Certainly nothing took place which touched on bribery, treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors. For those who continue to expand their detailed probe and to pass judgment through the prism of their hypocritical, Victorian values, we concede their right to wallow in their Peyton Place preoccupations. There is, however, a profound difference between crimes and sins. It is of utmost importance that we acknowledge and support the spirit of our Constitution which discourages the state from investigating private morality and affirms the right of every American, even the President, to separately negotiate his sins with his God. This intrusion on the President's private life bodes ill for the future. Every politician is fair game. It bodes ill for ordinary people if government at this level is allowed to move in a way which really knocks down the separation of church and state, because the church, the religious institutions are responsible for private morality and for sin. If we are going to invade that domain and become the arbiters of who is sinful, who has done what wrong, and who should be punished, then we are on our way to something similar to the Taleban government in Afghanistan. The extreme of what we are doing now can be seen in the way the Taleban behave. You get on that course of giving government the power to interfere, to regulate, to get into the minute details of individual lives and determine who is sinning and who is not, then we can get into a situation where a government like the Taleban government is justified. They determine. They decide women should not only cover themselves in public; they should not go out in public too much. They determine that women in Afghanistan could no longer hold positions of any kind in the government. They determined all that on the basis of their concept of what is moral. The government and the religion are one. That is the way we are headed in a country which prides itself on separation of church and state. Why is the state spending millions of dollars in order to pursue what is probably someone's sin? Not probably; we have reached the point where the President has admitted, apologized, et cetera. It is a fact. A sin was committed in accordance with the standards of this Nation and the standards of the President himself. So sin is what we are talking about. Where are the high crimes and misdemeanors? Where is the bribery or treason or anything of that kind? I would like to certainly see the Starr report as soon as it is available to Members of the House. I certainly will read it and I will be looking for a statement on bribery, treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors. Where is it in that Starr report? Why are we even going to bother with the report if it does not contain charges of bribery, treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors? I think that in 5 weeks it is expected that the President will become paralyzed, that nothing of substance will be done. I am hoping that the common sense of the American people will send a message to this Congress and send a message to the commentators and the reporters, the media, and the press. They have driven this thing very hard. They have looked at the response of the American people and decided they will not accept it, that they are going to change it. So the press and the media have become a force for changing people's minds. They are going to make us believe that this is the most important issue in the world. One reporter, one veteran reporter who covers the White House, said this is the most important story because it is a human story. There are a lot of human stories. Jerry Springer has a lot of human stories on every day. Pulp magazines are full of human stories. If we are going to consider human stories to be stories about sex, then there are many of those human stories. I do not think the intimate sex lives of human beings are particularly the kinds of things that define human beings. Animals of all kinds have sex. Why does the human story have to be related to a sexual relationship? Why can the human story not be about the fact that the human beings in Northern Ireland cheered the President as a hero? They cheered the President as a hero because they have faced life-and- death issues. They have faced life and death. They have died. They know this President went out of his way, an uncommon procedure of an American President, and became intimately involved in the negotiating of the peace that Senator Mitchell brokered, that led to the present situation. They know this President has been intimately involved in a life-and- death matter and lives will be saved, important things are going to happen as a result of his intervention. They understand what President Clinton meant when he called this Nation an ``Indispensable Nation.'' And I think the President in certain situations has seen himself as the indispensable person to make things happen. In the case of Northern Ireland, this was the case. In the case of the rescue of Haiti from a bloodthirsty, armed occupation by its own army where people counted bodies every morning when they came out to go to work, the President, against public opinion, public opinion was running two to one against intervention in Haiti, on the floor of the Congress two-thirds of the Members of Congress were against intervention, but the President made a decision and he freed the people of Haiti. He took the bloody yoke off of Haiti. That legacy will stand. As a result of his actions in Haiti, the President, I think, found himself and understood the kinds of decisions he would have to make in the future. It was possible, because he made a definite, right decision in Haiti, it was possible for him to follow through in the case of Bosnia and Yugoslavia and make similar decisions. The public opinion polls were running two to one against intervention in Bosnia, intervention in the whole Yugoslavia-Serbia-Croatia situation. But the President felt that we were the indispensable nation, the indispensable element that had to become involved, and he made that decision. The children dying while they were running to go to the well, all the horror stories that we saw in connection with Sarajevo, the genocidal death pits, all of that would be going on still if it had not been for the fact that this President made a decision that as an indispensable nation and as the indispensable leader at this point that he was going to take action, and he led us into Bosnia. It so happens that I disagree with the length of time we have spent there and the amount of money that we have spent there, but the decision was vital in order to turn the situation around. So Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, all of those elements are still struggling. Mr. Speaker, I do not think the United States should stay there forever to help them put things together. I think the horror is gone and they will never go back to the horror. I think all the fighting factions there are glad to be relieved of the need to perpetrate one horror after another against one another. This President, he has a legacy there that no one can take away. Mr. Speaker, I think that those who press the issue of destruction of the legacy of the President by his personal actions, it is one argument being used by the press and the heavy-handed commentators that seem persuasive to a lot of people. How can he go down in history? How can he salvage anything for the next 2 years with all of the present exposure of his personal life? Well, I think we ought to go way back in American history and recognize some things that people do not like to talk about. One of the greatest American Presidents, I certainly would place him in the top three or four American Presidents, was challenged in his first term by the press and a journalist that actually had been a friend of his, named James Calendar. He wrote a story and started a whole series of stories about the life of Thomas Jefferson and the fact that Thomas Jefferson had a slave mistress who had several children by Thomas Jefferson. This is not a rumor. There are newspapers and cartoons and factual evidence. It happened. James Calendar made the charge in the article. The other papers picked it up. The cartoons ridiculed Jefferson for his black bride. All kinds of pressure was brought to bear on Thomas Jefferson in his very first term. This is a President who served 8 years. In his first year, these were the kind of pressures that were unleashed on Thomas Jefferson. Without going into an argument about whether they really were his kids or not, or whether he was really involved with Sally Hemings as charged, the pressure was there. The story was there. The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, who was a distant relative of Jefferson's and did not like him, he chimed in until one of the newspapers stated that the Chief Justice had several children by slave mistresses also, and then he backed away. But it was a big scandal. I am not going to go into much greater detail. It just so happened that there is a very interesting ending. The woman, Sally Hemings, who was supposed to be Jefferson's mistress, stayed at Monticello when Jefferson left the presidency. She stayed for 30 years. Sally Hemings and the President were in the same house. Only Sally Hemings was ever fingered and pointed out to be a mistress of Jefferson. But the important thing is that Jefferson went on to effect the Louisiana Purchase. Where would the Nation be if there had been no Louisiana Purchase, the opening up the direction of the West, the removal of Spain and France who were lingering around the edges of the United States, dying to establish some kind of beachhead? All of that was swept away in one fell swoop. The Louisiana Purchase, which was engineered by Thomas Jefferson almost alone, because there was no great debate about what to do, he outmaneuvered Napoleon. Napoleon wanted Jefferson and the United States to get involved in the war in Haiti and expected the United States to come to his aid. Jefferson refused to do that. Napoleon lost the war in Haiti and he expended a great deal of funds in the process and was broke. So he sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States at a very, very bargain price. But Jefferson maneuvered all of that, despite the fact that he had been put under great pressure in his first year. They went away. The charges and the people who attempted to ridicule him finally shut up. Throughout the course of the entire ordeal, Thomas Jefferson refused to comment at all. He never said a word one way or another. The American people at that time, the ordinary people out there, the innkeepers, the carpenters, and the various ordinary workers out there, who adored Thomas Jefferson, were never that concerned. It was always the press, always the cartoonists who pressured and pressed to get answers about the private life of Thomas Jefferson. So, Mr. Speaker, he was one example. I can give many others where the legacy, the individual legacy is not injured by the personal life. The ability to achieve things is not injured by the personal life of public people. It is quite amusing to hear people talk about a legacy being destroyed because of private behavior. We would have legacies destroyed right down through American history of quite a number of other presidents. I heard the other day on National Public Radio an irate listener call up and said somebody tried to tarnish George Washington, was smearing George Washington in order to protect Bill Clinton. I do not think it is a smear of George Washington to point out that there was at least one factual account of an extramarital relationship and rumors and some historians talk about other things. Remember, this is a George Washington who refused to be crowned the king. This is the George Washington who would not run for a third term. Nobody can take away from George Washington the nobility and the greatness of those kinds of actions regardless of what the historians pinpoint. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is among the greatest of the three or four greatest Presidents. The man who probably has to be credited with stopping Adolph Hitler from ruling the world. Very few intellects, very few imaginations, very few courageous spirits can match Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yeah, he made a few mistakes here and there. He interned the Japanese at the beginning of World War II. Every President makes mistakes. He did not move fast enough, as fast as he could have, to integrate the armed forces. There are a lot of mistakes. But when you measure the mistakes against the achievements, there is no question about the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will ever be taken away. Nobody can ever deny him his place of one of the greatest American Presidents. But it is a fact that he had some extramarital relationships in his public life, more than one. It is a fact. They are not disputed. It did not mean that he could not meet day after day and night after night with Winston Churchill in the early days when the United States declared war on Germany and Japan when Churchill came over here. It did not mean he could not rise to the occasion whatever his personal life was like, whatever he was doing in his personal life. It certainly did not mean that publicly he could not perform. This notion that they go together or the human story must be told because the human story tells us what a person is all about is a soap opera notion. It is soap opera. I think the private domain sometimes can be legitimately invaded. I think Presidents ought to report on their health correctly. I think the French are right and that Francois Mitterand, when it was disclosed that Francois Mitterand, the President of France, had cancer before he died, he died of cancer, the French appointed investigators to find out when did he know that he had cancer, how serious was it. They felt it was an important thing to know. Was he incapacitated and unable to carry out the business of the state. That is all they wanted to know. They did not want to know about his mistress and his children by his mistress. But they thought it was important to know what kind of person with what kind of mental capacity was, or physical capacity was in charge of the state. There are some things a state should know. There are things that the state may also disapprove of. But the fact that the state disapproves of certain kinds of private behavior does not mean the state should become the prosecutor, the arbiter. I mean, where is the church, where are the priests, where are the ministers, where is their function if we are going to have the state become the agency for monitoring sin and regulating sin? I want to read some excerpts from a column that appeared in the New York Times yesterday by Anthony Lewis. And I think the very strong statement here is one that I certainly would agree with 100 percent, and I invite you to get a copy of the Anthony Lewis column of September 8, 1998. It starts as follows: Senator Joseph Lieberman struck a cord in the country because of the way he criticized President Clinton's behavior. He ground no political ax. He was not holier than thou. He gave us no prurient sanctimony. Simply and directly, he expressed what most people feel: Sadness and outrage. But on one point he went too far when he said that no President today can have a private life. The reality is it is in 1998 that a President's private life is public, Senator Lieberman said. Contemporary news media standards will have it no other way. I am quoting from an article by Anthony Lewis. Must every President from here on live with a press driven downward by competition and morbid curiosity? Beyond that, can no President ever again be assured of confidence in his talks with advisors? Must every President look at his Secret Service guards as potential witnesses? I cannot imagine any ordinary person who wanted to live under such conditions. Total exposure or the fear of it would put an intolerable strain on us. Privacy is an essential ingredient of civilized human existence. The reason was explained in a superb article last month in the London Times Literary Supplement by Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law of New York University. I am still quoting from Anthony Lewis' column. To quote Professor Nagel, ``each of our inner lives is such a jungle of thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and impulses that civilization would be impossible if we expressed them all or if we could all read each other's minds. Just as social life would be impossible if we expressed all our lustful, aggressive, greedy, anxious, or self-obsessed feelings in ordinary public encounters, so would inner life be impossible if we tried to become wholly persons whose thoughts, feelings, and private behavior could be safely exposed to public view.'' Professor Nagel correctly saw the destruction of Presidential privacy as part of a larger trend, quote, ``a disastrous erosion of the pressures but fragile conventions of personal privacy in the United States over the past 10 or 20 years. We are in the age of letting it all hang out and of rewards for exposing others.'' We can't limit the choice of political figures to those whose peculiar inner constitution enables them to withstand outrageous exposure or those whose sexual lives are pure are simon-pure, Professor Nagel wrote. It is important to understand that the Clinton case is special. Last February, I wrote, to quote Anthony Lewis, President Clinton was on notice, years of notice, that his sexual behavior was in issue. If he ignored the warnings and then went on television to deny the truth, he will be judged by the American people in those terms, and should be. But in general, we as a country are better off not knowing about the private lives of our leaders and not lusting to know. Would America be a better place if the supposed sexual adventures of John F. Kennedy lately retailed had been reported at the time? If the press, which in those days was far more restrained, had published the material leaked by J. Edgar Hoover about Dr. Martin Luther King's sexual straying? The great Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello in the play ``Right You Are If You Think You Are'' showed the price of community pays when it is driven by gossips to find out the truth about people's private lives. It is not an accident that both Linda Tripp and Kenneth Starr justify their relentless behavior as demanded by the truth. We should not ferret out the secrets of private lives; least of all should we do so by the terrible power of the criminal law. My hope and belief are that, however the Clinton story ends, the country and Congress will see to it that never again will a prosecutor thus damage the Presidency. For the good of the country, a President needs what Justice Brandeis call the right to be let alone, the right most valued by civilized men. This is the end of the quote from Anthony Lewis in the New York Times on September 8. I invite you to get a copy for yourself. I think it is a brilliant statement there of what the present situation means in terms of overall civilization and our values in this civilization. I am not a lawyer or a legal scholar, but I really would like to hear a legal discussion of what the present situation means in terms of separation of church and state. If the state can invade the personal domain and personal behavior and charge itself to deal with people's sins, where are we going in terms of separation of church and state? I have heard all kinds of speeches made in the name of raising the flag of morality in America. There have been numerous reporters who have stated that the country's values have gone downward, and we have degenerated in terms of morality over the last 25, 30 years. I challenge that. I challenge that very much so. I challenge it first in terms of the fact that the private lives of several Presidents I mentioned, John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, private lives of those people and the things that we might not approve of that happen in their private lives were known to members of the press and members of the establishment here in Washington. They were not so secret that they were not known. The fact that no one felt so morally compulsive as to come forward and make a public issue out of the private life of Franklin Roosevelt or the private life of John F. Kennedy, what does that mean? They were less moral? Maybe they were. Maybe our indignation and the fact that the press feels it has a right to discuss these matters and to pass judgment and to wage an editorial crusade to change the mind of the American people and make them prosecute the President for his sins, that is new. It evolved, as Professor Nagel said, in the last 10 or 20 years. Does that mean that we are more moral because we lay those issues out on the table? I heard a commentator on a C-SPAN show who spoke very forcefully about this moral issue, how we have to deal with saving the morality of America, how the children are watching, and we must set the best examples, all of which separately make a lot of sense. I think we should set the best possible examples as public officials. I think this scandal is very damaging. But the same commentator was asked a few minutes later, have you discussed this with your teenage children? He wants to save America. He wants to guarantee that the moral standards of the President and the public officials are the highest. But when he was asked have you discussed this with your teenage children, he said no. He said I have not. I am a little afraid to tackle that. I am afraid of what they might say. I am afraid. Here is a man who wants to save America, but he will not talk to his own children. If there is a moral problem in America, then the moral problem is parents who will not talk to their children about something they consider so important that they take very intense public positions about. He is a afraid. Is afraid that they might say we do not think it is that important. He is afraid. Let me not put thoughts in his mouth. I do not know what he is afraid of. But certainly the refusal to talk to your own children about it says a great deal about your convictions as to the morality of them. Are we afraid because children understand that people tell lies all the time? And when they hear adults railing about how awful it is to have a lie, a lie about something you have done, children, by the time they are teenagers, they are ahead of us. They have gone through the discovery that there is no Santa Claus. They know that storks do not bring babies, or you do not pick babies up in packages at the hospital. There are all kinds of little lies that have been told them that have been exposed. I assure you they are way ahead and listening all the time for those kinds of untruths, as innocent as they may be. Children may know what was recently stated by a priest in a contest that was held. It was a big contest held about America's wisdom, and a priest was in the contest with three other contenders and he won. The question was: Is it always important to be honest and tell the truth; must we always be honest and tell the truth? And the priest was selected as having the best answer because he said it is not always important that we tell the truth. And he laid out a whole series of situations where innocent people would be hurt if we were to tell the truth. There is no absolute standard which says we must always tell the truth and that any lie is equal to any other lie. Goebbels' lying about the concentration camp is equal to somebody lying about their personal behavior. Moral standards are something that always relate to sex or relationships between men and women. Adolf Hitler would not allow his picture to be taken in short pants because he thought it was indecent. Adolf Hitler, responsible for more murders and more death and more suffering and more horror than this planet has ever experienced. No matter how far we go back, the scale of Hitler's murderous ventures cannot be matched, and yet he would not have his picture taken in short pants because it was immoral, obscene. Charles Keating, head of a savings and loan association out in Arizona which cost the taxpayers more than $2 billion when it went under, Charles Keating is a crusader against pornography. And yet he swindled the American people. Through the schemes related to the savings and loan association, he swindled us out of $2 billion. And when he could not get any more through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, he went out into the lobby of his bank and sold securities to people without any Federal deposit insurance, and they lost everything. This is the kind of monster we are dealing with. Morality in America. Where was the press, where were the reporters and the editorials when the savings and loan swindle was exploding? I could not believe the degree to which the press, the media, ignored a swindle of the magnitude that the world had never seen before, the savings and loan association swindle. And there were other banks involved, too. The whole process by which they used the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to cover for the draining of billions of dollars from the banks was never treated by the press the way the private behavior of the President is being treated now. There was never any passion in the editorials. There were long stretches of silence. There were books that were written that suddenly disappeared. And even now it is difficult to get hard facts that are clear as to exactly how much money did the American taxpayers lose. The estimate is $500 billion by some economists at Stanford University, that the savings and loan swindle in the end will cost the American taxpayers $500 billion. Now, the savings and loan swindle was the beginning of something which continues today. The savings and loan swindle was based on crony capitalism and banking socialism. The socialism part came because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the American taxpayers' money, insured every depositor who had placed $100,000 or less in the bank. So it was a kind of socialist protection. The cronyism came because banks did not follow the regular procedures of lending. They lent millions of dollars on the basis of friendship. Cronies. The crony capitalism and the banking socialism pattern that started with the savings and loan associations of America is exactly what happened in Mexico, only they did not have the safeguards of a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to the degree we have, so individuals in Mexico lost much more. It is the same pattern of Indonesia crony capitalism, where there are no real standards or real requirements for collateral or a sound business plan or all the things we would confront if we went to the bank to ask for a $10,000 loan or a $20,000 business loan. We would have to fill out reams of paper and go through a whole process. Well, there is a stratum in the business world where they do not do that. It is on the basis of friendship that loans are made. And the pattern that the savings and loan associations established, Mexico picked up on it, Korea was run the same way, Indonesia, all across the Asian Tiger countries we have this pattern of crony capitalism and government now stepping in to help bail the situation out, because government in these areas played a major role in providing the capital to the banks that did the lending to their cronies. Overnight, economies like Korea and Malaysia, boom. I visited Korea for a week and was in Seoul, the capital of Korea, and I was astonished at the number of office buildings. We visited about three office buildings, high-rise buildings, beautiful buildings on the outside. Inside the buildings, most of the offices were empty. They got the money to do the building and whatever the financing was, but they did not need the buildings. Just as during the savings and loan swindle days they had all these developments in Texas that the builders had gone and borrowed the money, made the first effort of digging foundations, doing a few things, and therefore it qualified for the loans. They were scot-free. They said that the developments failed for economic reasons. Nobody was convicted in most of these cases. They just walked off scot-free. That kind of crony capitalism, backed up by banking socialism, was never attacked as being immoral; the kind of day-after-day, relentless pursuit. On ABC, Cokie Roberts has been around for a long time. She has seen a lot of things happen in Washington. She ought to know better when she talks about this being one of the most important things in the world morally. Where were their voices during the savings and loan swindle? Immoral, costly, a lot of criminality took place, the Mafia made a mint, and the response morally was not there. Let me just sort of sum up what I am saying. A nation that cannot identify what is morally most important, cannot set priorities, cannot see that it is immoral at a time like this, when we have a budget surplus, to keep sending children to unsafe schools and overcrowded schools. It is immoral to send them to schools that have coal-burning furnaces. That is immoral, not to have the leadership being willing to invest in safety and health. It is immoral not to take this opportunity, when the money is here, to invest in education in greater amounts. A nation that cannot see that, a nation that prefers to spend $30,000 or $40,000 a year on a prisoner, a prisoner in a prison cell, and will not do anything about the expenditure of less than $5,000 a year on children who go to inner city schools is immoral. That is an immoral act. There are all kinds of judgments that need to be made about what is important and what is not important. What are we here for, for 5 weeks? Should we not do things that make a difference for people in the Nation or people anywhere in the world? For 5 weeks the power is here to do a great deal if we were to see ourselves as President Clinton described us in his inaugural address, if we were to see ourselves as an indispensable nation. We have all kinds of problems throughout the world. The economies are in serious trouble. That is obvious. The global warming now is pretty much a fact with a lot of implications. And with the tumultuous kinds of weather we have been having recently, if global warming is going to make that worse, we are in serious trouble. There is a whole lot of planning and a whole lot of leadership needed. We are the indispensable nation. We are the ones who at this point are economically most secure. We are the Nation that the world looks to. They value our leadership. The American colossus does not rule with armies, does not have to administer colonies. It is the goodwill of America. It is the fact that American men died on the beaches of Normandy to defend the concept of freedom. Our homes were not immediately threatened by Hitler. Those great sacrifices were made in the Battle of the Bulge and on the beaches of Normandy by people who had some idealism. And the country was driven by idealism. We get a return on that. The whole world, despite what we hear here and there, the whole world looks to America for leadership, admires America. We have terrorists who will hate us just because we are admired. We have many enemies, but to be admired means we are going to have enemies. So this great America of ours is at the pinnacle of its power and it is an indispensable nation and we ought to behave like an indispensable nation. Instead of being preoccupied with Peyton Place-type activities, we should look to where are we now and what can we do with our enormous power and wealth to make the world a better place for our constituents, to deal with some immediate problems. I do not want to have to go back to my constituents and say, look, we have no hope. The relief of the overcrowding schools, the coal-burning furnaces, these are relatively small things, but we are not going to get any help with them. I do not want the despair which drives people to choose vouchers, which is a ridiculous way to go because only a handful of children can ever be served through that method. And vouchers to private schools, there are just not enough out there. It is the public school system that will continue to educate most of our children and we have to stay with the public school system. We can experiment more with charter schools, which are public schools, there are a number of things we can do to try to improve the schools, but we cannot spoon-feed the process or put Band-aids on. We really need to do something dramatic about guaranteeing that every youngster has a clean, safe school with an atmosphere that is conducive to learning; that every youngster is in a classroom where the teachers are not overwhelmed because there are so many children. There are a lot of very small things that a mere stroke of the pen on some appropriations bills could put in place. But yet we choose not to live up to the calling or the responsibility that history has thrust upon us. I want to read, in closing, a statement that I made on February 4, 1997, following President Clinton's inaugural address and I put it in the Congressional Record. Mr. Speaker, President Clinton's inaugural address was not a State of the Union speech obligated to provide substance for general proposals. Appropriately, the President used his second inaugural statement to set a tone for the next 4 years, the prelude to the 21st century. America is a great country blessed by God with wealth far surpassing any nation on the face of the Earth now or in the past. The Roman Empire was a begger entity compared to the rich and powerful Americans. God has granted us an opportunity unparalleled in history. President Clinton called upon both leaders and ordinary citizens to measure up to this splendid moment. The President called upon all of us to abandon ancient hatreds and obsessions with trivial issues. For a brief moment in history we are the indispensable people. Other nations have occupied this position before and failed the world. The American colossus should break the historic pattern of empires devouring themselves. As we move into the 21st century we need indispensable leaders with global visions. We need profound decisions. I conclude with a poem of my own. ``Under God The indivisible indispensable nation Guardian of the pivotal generation Most fortunate of all the lands For a brief moment The whole world we hold in our hands Internet sorcery computer magic Tiny spirits make opportunity tragic We are the indispensable nation Guardian of the pivotal generation Millionaires must rise to see the need Or smother beneath their splendid greed Capitalism is king With potential to be Pope Banks hoard gold That could fertilize universal hope Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, King Make your star spangled legacy sting Dispatch your ghosts To bring us global visions Indispensible leaders Need profound decisions Internet sorcery, computer magic. Tiny spirits make opportunity tragic. We are the indispensable nation, Guardian of the pivotal generation With liberty and justice for the world Under God. Instead of being preoccupied with a soap opera and the human story of one man's fragility, we should look to our role as the indispensable nation, we should look to our role as the generation within this indispensable nation that has a golden opportunity to turn things around. I started by saying that in the African-American community there is strong support for President Clinton despite all of the revelations. And I certainly know from firsthand information gathered in my district that it is very strong. I made it my business to question ladies of the church and find out where they stood. And I think there have been many reasons that have been said before why blacks support this President. We are afraid of what happens when he is no longer there. We appreciate the fact that he has stayed with the issues that matter most. But I think, also, there is a wisdom in the African-American community by these church ladies and other people who have been raised on the Bible. They know the legacy of King David is not wiped out by his weakness in connection with Bathsheba. They know that Sampson is still a symbol of strength despite the fact that he had a weakness and was vulnerable. They looked over the whole pattern of history and they know that the good that men do often dies with them, and it is not fair. We are in a situation now where trivialities may smother America, trivialities. We have opened Pandora's box. If a President's life can be invaded by the government, trivialities will smother us all. Who will be next and how many dramatic human stories will television have to play with along the way? I hope that for the next 5 weeks we can turn away from preoccupation with the personal life of one man and deal with preoccupation with the life of the Nation. We are an indispensable nation. We ought to behave like people who are a pivotal generation within this indispensable nation.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, we have a situation here where they are requesting overwhelming, extraordinary powers, and whereas sometimes that might be appropriate, for example, when Oliver North in the basement of the White House was committing treason by disobeying the laws of Congress and selling weapons to an obvious enemy of America. Then that was time to use these kinds of powers, and I think those kinds of powers were assumed, and we had an appropriate investigation. When the savings and loan swindle was under way, we should have used those kinds of powers, but we did not. We had Silverado Bank in Denver, Colorado, where the directors told the client, ``You need $13 million, we'll give you $26 million, and you deposit half of that back into the bank so that when the auditors come it will look good.'' Not a single director on that bank's board went to jail, and half a trillion dollars the taxpayers were out of as a result of the swindle by the savings and loans banks. We did not use those kinds of powers. Here we have a situation where, yes, some wrong deeds have been committed. As my colleagues know, the Teamsters' elections are important. Irregularities in elections are not to be sneezed at. They are important. But we do not need these kinds of powers to deal with election irregularities. Teamsters have a long history, and there was a time when millions of dollars were being stolen. Dave Beck, Jimmy Hoffa--Jimmy Hoffa ended up being convicted and sent to jail, and later on he disappeared and it was assumed that he was murdered. Some terrible things have happened. Ron Carey came in as a result of reform that this government supported, and if he has done something wrong in respect to elections, he deserves to be punished. He does not deserve the mobilizaton of these kinds of overwhelming powers. Madam Speaker, this is a partisan grab for power because they want to use it in a very partisan way. They want to continue what they have been doing all along, trying to destroy the unions in America, the labor movement in America. Working families have a lot to fear from this kind of abuse of power because it is going to be used in a very one-sided way, as it has up to now. They are not going to use this power to get to the bottom of the situation in an objective manner. We know from past history that that is not what is going to be happening. So it should be denied. We should not let these kinds of overwhelming powers be utilized by a committee that has already demonstrated they only want to use it for very bipartisan purposes. This is not Oliver North in the basement of the White House committing treason.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, without excessive repetition, I would like to join my colleagues in the House to pay tribute to Officer Jacob Joseph Chestnut and Detective John Gibson, who gave their lives dutifully protecting this hallowed institution. These two heroes were great points of light for all Americans. It is important that we all come together across party lines and across all other differences to pay homage to these two heroes. As we pay tribute to the dead, let us also honor the other police and protective forces and other staff members whose reverence for this institution is no less than and sometimes even greater than the reverence of elected members. In paying tribute to our defenders, we reaffirm the fact that this House of Representatives and the democratic process, this government, belongs to all of the people. We reaffirm the fact that we are the guardians of a sacred process that takes place within the halls of this Capitol. This democratic process cannot survive without institutional support. This process and the institution have become inseparable. This is the great democratic process that guarantees our freedom and guards our national progress. It is the process that inspired the bravery and the courage on the beaches of Normandy. It is the same process that applauded and rewarded the returning World War II heroes with more than merely marches and medals. This Congress, this institution, passed the G.I. Bill, that offered unprecedented educational opportunities to every veteran. This is the democratic process and the institution that followed the leadership of the assassinated President, Abraham Lincoln, and passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, ending slavery and guaranteeing equal treatment and the right to vote. This is the process and the institution that, while mourning the death of John F. Kennedy, accepted the wise and forceful guidance of President Lyndon Johnson in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. This is a sacred place and a sacred process. They must at all times be protected and defended. Officer Chestnut and Detective Gibson instinctively understood the nature of our mission. The workings of this institution are more complex than the wiring or gadgets of any nuclear submarine. The impact of the results of what we conclude here has more explosive power and long range consequences than any space rocket ever fired at NASA. To keep this institution relevant and capable of meeting the challenges of our rapidly changing and demanding world, we need the elevator operators, the cleaning staff, the receptionists, the analysts, the secretaries, the directors, chiefs of staff, coordinators, counsel, information specialists, administrative assistants, and yes, we need the detectives and the police. All are vitally necessary. A complicated world demands an intricate governmental infrastructure. The democratic process within this infrastructure must be protected because the twin monsters of insanity and violent savagery are always scratching out there at the door. In the last 50 years, the bullets of assassins have dramatically altered history in America. Some victims were President John F Kennedy; Martin Luther King, Junior; Robert Kennedy; and the almost-murdered President Ronald Reagan. Against the twin monsters of insanity and savagery, we must do more than merely mourn the loss of our heroes. Most Americans can only grieve with the families of J. J. Chestnut and John Gibson. We 435 Members of Congress can do much more. In paying tributes to these heroes, we Members of Congress should seek a solidarity across party lines and beyond the usual philosophical and ideological agendas. In defense of this great institution and to protect all vulnerable Americans, we must unite and act as one. Let this be a time of new reflections, new insights, and new resolve to find ways to disarm the proliferating number of insane and savage assassins. The second amendment was designed to make us safe from tyranny, to bolster our sense of security. No well-regulated militia should allow the rampant and random distribution of firearms among the populace. In the name of our Capitol heroes, Officer Jacob Joseph Chestnut and Detective John Gibson, and for the sake of the families of all similar victims, let us resolve, as powerful decision-makers, as Members of Congress, let us resolve to end the escalating terror of handguns in America.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, without excessive repetition, I would like to join my colleagues in the House to pay tribute to Officer J.J. Chestnut and Detective John Gibson who gave their lives dutifully protecting this hallowed institution. It is important that we all come together across party lines and across all other differences to pay homage to these two heroes. And as we pay tribute to the dead, let us also honor the other police and protective forces and other staff members whose reverence for this institution is no less than and sometimes even greater than the reverence of the elected members. In paying tribute to our defenders, we reaffirm the fact that this House of Representatives and the democratic process, this government belongs to all of the people. We reaffirm the fact that we are the guardians of a sacred process that takes place within the walls of this Capitol. This democratic process cannot survive without institutional support. The process and the institution have become inseparable. This is the great democratic process that guarantees our freedom and guides our progress. It is the process that inspired the bravery and the courage on the beaches of Normandy. It is the process that applauded and rewarded the returning World War II heroes with more than merely marches and medals; Congress, this institution passed the GI Bill that offered unprecedented educational opportunities to every veteran. This is the process and the institution that followed the leadership of the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln and passed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. This is the process and institution that, while mourning the death of John F. Kennedy, accepted the wise and forceful guidance of President Lyndon Johnson in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. This is a sacred place and a sacred process that must at all times be protected and defended. Officer Chestnut and Detective Gibson instinctively understood the nature of our mission. The workings of this institution are more complex than the wiring and gadgets of any nuclear submarine. The impact of the results of what we conclude here has more explosive power and long range consequences than any rocket ever fired at NASA. To keep this institution relevant and capable of meeting the challenges of our rapidly changing and demanding world we need the elevator operators, the cleaning staff, the receptionists, the analysts, the secretaries, directors, chiefs of staff, coordinators, counsels, information specialists, administrative assistants; and yes, we need the detectives and the police; all are vitally necessary. A complicated world demands an intricate governmental infrastructure. The democratic process within this infrastructure must be protected because the twin monsters of insanity and violent savagery are always scratching at the door. In the last fifty years, the bullets of assassins have dramatically altered history in America: President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr.; Robert Kennedy; and the almost murdered President Ronald Reagan. Against the twin monsters of insanity and savagery we must do more than merely mourn the loss of our heroes. Most Americans can only grieve with the families of J.J. Chestnut and John Gibson. We, 535 Members of Congress, can do much more. In paying tribute to these heroes, we Members of Congress should seek a solidarity across party lines and beyond the usual philosophical and ideological agendas. In defense of this great institution and to protect all vulnerable Americans, we must unite and act as one. Let this be a time of new reflections, new insight and new resolve to find ways to disarm the proliferating number of insane and savage assassins. The second amendment was designed to make us safe from tyranny, to bolster our sense of security. No well regulated militia should allow the rampant and random distribution of firearms among the populace. In the name of our Capitol heroes, Officer J.J. Chestnut and Detective John Gibson; and for the sake of the families of all similar victims, let us resolve as powerful decision makers, as Members of Congress, to end the escalating terror of handguns in America.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose H.R. 4250, the Republican so-called Patient Protection Act and to voice my enthusiastic support for H.R. 3605, the Patients' Bill of Rights Act. H.R. 4250 was conceived in the back room of the Speaker's special 15-member Task Force on Health Care and unveiled just last week. Although the bill was referred to several committees, in a transparently desperate political maneuver, the Republican leadership has put the bill on a fast-track basis and side stepped the traditional deliberative process. I am pleased, however, that many of the provisions that are included in several Democratic bills, including my own bill (H.R. 1191, the Patient and Health Care Professional Protection Act), have been included in today's Patient Protection Act. Yet, this bill, H.R. 4250, falls disgracefully short on ``protections'' for patients and health care workers. The authors of H.R. 4250 took great care to ensure the protection of the owners of the commerce of health care--managed care companies. At a time when the health care industry is completely re-engineering itself and a record 160 million Americans have fallen susceptible to the cost-saving strategies characterized by too many managed care plans, we must not support this phony ``Patients' Bill of Rights.'' We wish to note also that irrational Medicaid rate reductions by state Governors are also jeopardizing the health of patients. Disappointingly, most of the new Federal protections in H.R. 4250, would cover merely 48 million Americans in self-insured, employer- sponsored health plans that fall under the purview of ERISA (the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974). However, there are more than 160 million Americans who have private health insurance. Congress must act to ensure the protection of a broader range of health care consumers, including Medicaid recipients. In addition, H.R. 4250 contains a bogus grievance mechanism for patients who my have disputes with their HMOs. Under the bill, a so- called internal and external appeals process would be established, Upon first glance, it appears that H.R. 4250 adequately provides for a fair process whereby patients can appeal any denials of care. However, upon a closer look at the bill language, it is clear that the so-called external process is not very independent of the HMO with whom the patient is in dispute. H.R. 4250 would stack the cards in favor of the HMO from the onset. An independent medical expert would be required to examine the dispute on the merits of whether or not the HMO followed its own rules. The independent medical expert would not be authorized to determine that the medical procedure is indeed, necessary. To add insult to injury, the bill would permit health plans to charge up to $100 to a patient who pursues the external appeals route. Unlike the Democratic substitute (H.R. 3605 sponsored by Representatives Dingell and Ganske), H.R. 4250 would not allow patients to sue their health plans. (Currently ERISA does not permit patients in employer-sponsored plans to sue their health plans.) Republicans have demonized the right to sue as some kind of payoff to the trial lawyers of America. On the contrary, the right to sue is an appropriate remedy which allows for maximum enforcement against health plans, especially when great injury or death results from their cost-cutting decisions. Any true patient protection bill and patient advocacy language would arm the patient with this basic tool of American civil rights. Moreover, H.R. 4250 contains no protection for the very individuals who are on the front lines of the health care delivery system--nurses, doctors, and other health care professionals. The bill does not have whistleblower protections for health care workers who are in the best position to witness and report patient safety concerns. The Service Employees International Union, the organization that represents the largest number of health care professionals in the country (1.3 million members) states, ``In a recent national survey of health care professionals, nearly 1 out of 4 reported that `employees are penalized for, or afraid to speak up about problems in their workplace' '' Yet, H.R. 4250 ignores this fact by not protecting workers from discharge, demotion, or harassment when they decide to stand up for patient care. It should be noted that my bill, H.R. 1191 which was originally introduced in the 104th Congress and reintroduced on March 20, 1997, addresses these issues and accomplishes the following: Provides strong whistleblower protection for nurses and doctors; ensures that managed care plans mandate that adequate staffing guidelines are implemented in every hospital across the country (This would stop the current practice of replacing registered nurses and licensed practical nurses with unlicensed aides.); mandates the compilation of public, uniform, national patient-outcome data collection and analysis; assures than no patient is denied care for non-medical reasons; establishes a Federal mechanism for the emergency investigation of egregious hospital cases involving death or life-threatening situations; and establishes well- funded, consumer-dominated, non-governmental genuine health care advocacy groups in each state. Finally, H.R. 4250 would prematurely expand access to medical savings accounts (MSA). MSAs are tax-exempt savings accounts which may be used to pay for medical expenses. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-191) authorized a limited number of MSAs (750,000) under a demonstration program beginning on January 1, 1997. Many Members and consumer groups were vehemently opposed to the demonstration program, citing that MSAs work for those that are more healthy and more rich. The vast expansion of MSAs under H.R. 4250 is reckless and extreme given that the impact of the 1997 demonstration program has yet to be studied. Health care is big business. Spending for health care totals approximately $1 trillion every year in the United States. Competition within the health care industry is fierce, and Congress has the unequivocal role in assuring that cutting costs and increasing one's profits are not priorities at the expense of patient care quality and safety. When I recently convened an extensive health care empowerment conference in my district, my constituents demanded reform. The 11th Congressional District Advisory Committee and the HMO Consumer Advisory Committee called for the formation of an ``HMO Certification Council'' to give a seal of approval to managed care plans. The conference participants stated their desire for greater access to doctors. The conference participants also called for the passage of state legislation that would hold managed care companies accountable and permit wronged patients to sue these companies. And when a group of nurses visited me two years ago and conducted a rally at the Capitol, they demanded protection for themselves and their colleagues and freedom to advocate on behalf of their patients. I urge my colleagues to carry out the will of the American people, and not the wishes of greedy American businesses. Vote ``no'' on H.R. 4250, and vote ``yes'' on H.R. 3605, the Democratic Dingell-Ganske substitute.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably detained earlier today and missed several roll call votes. Had I been present, I would have voted in the following manner: 1. H. Con. Res. 301--A resolution regarding U.S. Commitment to Taiwan--roll call #300--Yea. 2. H. Res. 392--A resolution relating to the importance of Japanese American Relations--roll call #299--Yea. 3. H. Con. Res. 208--A resolution expressing the sense of the Congress regarding access to affordable housing and expansion of home ownership opportunities--roll call #298--Yea. 4. H.R. 3874--``The Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Amendments Act''--roll call #297--Yea.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the massacre of the infant E-Rate continues. Certain greedy corporations have chose to persecute and betray the children of America by denying them vital access to education technology in their schools and libraries. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996 enriched these giant corporations by removing certain regulations and allowing an unprecedented increase in their profits, MCI and others have chose to renege on the deal. The telecommunications corporations gave their word that they would support an earmarking of a portion of the Universal Access Fund just for Schools and Libraries. Now corporations and misguided political leaders have forced the Federal Communications Commission to cut the original funding goal by fifty per cent. On behalf of the 30,000 schools and libraries that applied for funding, and all of the children of America we demand that full funding for the E-Rate be restored immediately. The children of America have a message for corporations like MCI:

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the House is galloping toward recess and adjournment. The Republicans have had a very clever strategy this year. We have spent a lot of time in recess and very little time in deliberations. That is not by accident, it is a way to guarantee that important things are done rapidly, that there is a minimum of deliberation, that the party and the minority does not have an opportunity to bring issues to the public. It has worked very well. You know, we have had a lot of very extreme things accomplished in a few days using this technique of minimizing deliberations and maximizing action while we are here. So, I suspect the process of galloping is going to continue between now and the time we go out on the August recess, and, once we return from the August recess, of course the galloping is even going to even move faster. The Republican schedule is part of the whole strategy, and what it does is it turns our democracy into a form of distorted law making, which is not good for the country. It means that a handful of people in conference committees will be making the biggest and most important decisions while the rest of us, the other Members of the 435, are forced to just vote up or down, yes or no, on important matters. It gives maximum power to the smoke-filled room the way the Republican majority is conducting the House. It is most unfortunate, but it is important that we understand that process, that there will not be the usual deliberative process long enough for even the Members of the House to understand the issues, certainly not long enough for the members of the public to understand what we are deliberating on. I want to speak today about one of the casualties of this process. One of the casualties is the working family. We should share our great prosperity now with working families. You know we are enjoying unprecedented prosperity in America. Never before have we had this kind of stock market boom. At every level you feel the surge of the economy. People who are rich and who have some investments are getting richer at a faster and faster rate. It has even produced a surplus in the government. The amount of revenue being collected now greatly exceeds the planned expenditures for the coming budget year. So we are going to have a surplus; it is almost guaranteed, but we are not sharing this prosperity with working families. And I want to make a case for sharing the prosperity with working families, and the way we begin to share the prosperity with working families is to begin with an increase in the minimum wage. We need an increase in the minimum wage. You know, the increase of the minimum wage will not cost the taxpayers one penny. An increase in the minimum wage is not a budget and appropriations item. It is a matter of public policy which takes into consideration the fact that we have a very prosperous economy, and one way to share the benefits of that economy with the working family is to increase the minimum wage. If you want to help families, and everybody professes to want to help families, both the Republicans and the Democrats argue that they are pro-family. What is wrong with America is that there is assault on the families; we all agree. What is wrong with America is that as families are falling apart. You know it has greatly impacted on our young people. The best you can do, the first thing you can do, for families is to give them more money, more income. More income needs to go to those people out there who are making minimum wage, and it is a large number. More than one-third of our working force is making the present minimum wage. Present minimum wage is $5.15 an hour, $5.15 is the present minimum wage. We need to take steps immediately to raise the minimum wage. It has fallen behind over the years. The cost of living has increased far faster than the minimum wage, so the minimum wage has never caught up and is still far behind the cost of living, and I am going to talk about that in more detail in a few minutes. This 105th Session of Congress, instead of the majority consistently taking actions which are hostile toward working families should take actions which are going to help working families. You know we should share the prosperity instead of at every step limiting the amount of help that the poorest people get starting with the fact that we have a surplus. You know we are faced with an unprecedented situation. For the last three decades we have not had the kind of surplus that we have now, and the only discussion we hear about the surplus is that it should be utilized to give a tax cut to the rich. Now I am in favor of tax cuts. I am not sure where my party stands at this point. The Democrats last year produced a very good proposal and went to the floor with an alternative to the Republican tax cut which I think is still applicable. I have not heard much talk about it lately, so I am not sure why we do not have it out front. That tax cut was skewed so that the people on the bottom, those who need the help most would get the first and the biggest tax cut. So we should have a tax cut, but it should be aimed at helping working families. The combination of a raise in the minimum wage and a tax cut to working families is a kind of action needed to share the prosperity with those who are not at this point sharing that prosperity. The democratic message is there. We have in our platform, as we go toward the November elections, a share-the-prosperity message. We have a message that includes the raising of the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage is one of the priorities of the democratic package at this point. The problem is it seems to fall off the radar screen with respect to media attention. Members of my party are not saying much about the raising of the minimum wage. It is there, it is part of our platform, it is part of our set of priorities, but not much is being said about it, and that is most unfortunate. We ought to talk about the minimum wage. We ought to make a drive between now and the time the Congress closes to take advantage of this great window of opportunity we have in terms of prosperity. We have the prosperity now. We should share the prosperity by increasing the minimum wage. We should share the prosperity with working families by jointly, in a bipartisan agreement, supporting a tax cut for families who make less than $50,000. Let us have a tax cut. We have already given a tax cut to the richest Americans. Just before we went on recess for the Fourth of July holiday we passed a bill which gave benefits, capital gains benefits, to the people who were fortunate enough to have big capital items that they want to divest. You know the capital gains tax was altered in a way which allowed them to take advantage of faster movement of their capital gain assets. That is a brake for the rich. Now let us have one for the poor, maybe 1 or 2 or 3, so that the poor can catch up. We need a tax cut, I support the idea of a tax cut, and I think, if the Democratic Party in this House goes back to where we were last year, we had a proposal for an alternative tax cut which made a lot of sense and gave the help to the working families. We need also to help working families by investing heavily in education and job training. We need to move away from the present Republican majority position that we do not want to invest any more in education except really want to invest more; that is one item. We want to take the money we have now and move it around so that instead of title I money going to the poorest schools to improve public schools, title I money should be used for vouchers to go to private school. So we are not only not willing to invest more in education for working families, we are also ready to take away from the working families a program that exists already. We recognize that there is a great need for information technology workers, yet the Republican proposal on the table which already passed the other body states that we are going to solve the problem of the shortage of high-tech workers by bringing in more foreign professionals. Foreign professionals will come in and take the jobs we ought to be training our American citizens for. That is the answer of the Republican majority at this time. The President said he might veto such a bill, and I hope he definitely will, and put the emphasis on solving the shortage of workers in the area of high-tech, on the area of training the people in the country right now who need the training. The Republicans have also proposed to cut the Summer Youth Employment Program. They have zeroed out this program in the appropriations bill that will be coming before the House next week. The Labor-HHS appropriations bill has zero in it for the Summer Youth Employment Program. I think the program is up at about the level of $600 million. You are going to take $600 million away from the poorest young people in America, at a time when the Nation is prosperous, at a time there will be a surplus in the budget. The Republicans are also proposing to cut LIHEAP. LIHEAP is a program which provides heat for people who do not have enough money to heat their homes in the winter. Mostly elderly people benefit from the LIHEAP program. It also provides air conditioning, by the way, in certain areas of the country where there is extreme heat and they need air conditioning for the protection of mostly elderly people or sick people. In fact, in some parts of the country now there is a great heat wave on, and public action is being taken to protect certain categories of people from the heat. But the biggest problem is the cold in the winter. LIHEAP has been around for a long time, but the bill that will be before us next week, pushed by the Republican majority, which cuts the Summer Youth Employment Program and cuts LIHEAP. The majority Republicans in the 105th Congress are very hostile toward working families. They say they care about families, but most of the families in America are working families. The overwhelming majority of families are working families. I am going to make an appeal to the religious right, and I apologize, because it is putting a lot of people under the umbrella in a kind of crude way, but I want to make an appeal to those people who say they care about families and say they should join us. We could make a great caring majority. Join us in calling for a tax cut for working families. Join us in calling for an item that will not cost the government one penny, and that is an increase in the minimum wage. The religious right, the religious left, the religious center, let us have a caring majority movement toward bringing relief to working families, because the best way you can help families, of course, is to give them more money. There is no complicated bureaucracy needed. Increase the minimum wage. The employers out there will have to pay a higher minimum wage, and the families that need it most will benefit from that increase. There is nothing complicated involved in a tax cut for the working poor. We probably should look at Social Security payments, the payroll taxes. That is the area where taxes have gone up most for working people. The great increase has been in the payroll taxes that everybody pays, regardless of income. There are some people that say now that the surplus is primarily a surplus generated by Social Security revenue. If you take away the amount of money generated by the extra Social Security revenue, you would have a deficit, they say. That is a little late, that argument, because we have been calculating our budget and discussing the national budget for years now on the basis of the fact that the Social Security revenue was included in the budget. To suddenly now say, well, we really do not have a surplus because most of that money is Social Security, if you do that, then you are wiping out the possibility of using the surplus in some type of constructive way, which I will propose later on. I think the surplus is real. It is primarily generated by Social Security revenue. So if we have a tax cut, then let us recognize the fact that the extra revenue comes from Social Security, the payroll taxes. Let us reduce first the payroll taxes of the poor when we give a tax cut. So I want to again repeat that what I am talking about is an agenda that we ought to follow as we move toward the close of this session, right now, as we gallop forward, instead of the backroom deals being made on the Committee on Appropriations, which lately has taken to making legislation, authorizing legislation more and more, violating the rules. The rules do not exist anymore. We had a tax package that came back from conference, the IRS reform package. It was IRS reform when it left the House, it was IRS reform when it left the Senate. Neither the House nor Senate had any item in there related to changing the capital gains tax computation. Yet it came back with that change in it, and some other changes in it, written by the conference committee. Neither House had included certain items related to tax reform, yet they got in the IRS reform bill. We were left on the floor with no alternative: Vote for it or vote against it. Who wanted to vote against a tax cut without an alternative? So most of us voted for it, of course. We would like to have had a chance to deliberate. We would like to have had a chance to make some alternative proposals. We would like to have had a tax package not written by 10 people. The children of America out there think that they have a democracy, that we have representatives who are elected, and those representatives have an opportunity to make the laws. We have this little booklet we give out to the classes that come to visit us that says we have a bill introduced, a bill goes through committee, the committee passes it to the floor, the floor deliberates on it and votes, the floor sends it to the other body, the floor of the House and the floor of the Senate, there is a conference committee, the conference committee deliberates, the conference committee sends it back to the floor, the floor votes. It sounds as it if it is a great democracy and we always do it that way. More and more, the strategy in this House, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, is that we want to do as little democracy as possible. When you have the conference committee writing the legislation, it means the rest of us are puppets, rubber stamps, or something worse than that. I think all the Members of the House of Representatives are very talented people. You do not get here without being very talented and competent. We might disagree on policies and ideology, but I respect every member. You do not get here unless you have a lot to offer. I think we should be utilized. We should not be a parts of a fraud or a sham with respect to our constituencies. Our constituencies want us to participate and make laws. We should not sit still and allow the rules to be violated and a handful of people to make the laws, whether you are dealing with tax cuts for the rich or education policies for public schools. Mr. Speaker, I want to go into greater detail on the minimum wage, because I am saying in essence that at the heart of the process of sharing prosperity with working families is the increase in the minimum wage. The good news about the minimum wage and the irony of it is it will not cost the taxpayers a single penny. So can we not move to increase the minimum wage between now and the time the 105th Congress adjourns? Let us put it on the radar screen. Democrats, I call on you to cease the silence. It is on our list, but we need more activity. We need to put it on the radar screen, we need to put it on the television screens, the radio and the press. The poor, the working families of America, need an increase in the minimum wage. A lot of people say, who makes the minimum wage anymore? Most people are above the minimum wage. No, that is not true. More than a third of the workforce is still making the minimum wage. The people who are working out there, the bread winners for working families, are affected by the minimum wage, even if they are making more. The minimum wage has become the starting point, the bargaining point, for many negotiated collective bargaining agreements. When the minimum wage goes up, everybody else's wage rises. All tides rise when the minimum wage rises. In terms of income, everywhere it goes up. So we need people making more than the minimum wage at this time of prosperity. They need more money and should have more money, because the negotiated wages ought to go up as the minimum wages go up. The minimum wage has stagnated, as I said before, for a long time. We started out in the New Deal with Franklin Roosevelt and the first enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act. It was 25 cents an hour, 25 cents an hour in 1938. Well, that was like a godsend, because you went from zero to 25 cents an hour. That was a great increase. Before that the employers of America had the working families at their mercy. They could pay what they wanted to pay, and there was no way to make them pay more, because the labor market was full, plenty of people. If you did not like the pennies you were being paid, you just would step aside and somebody else would take the job. So we were undercutting and eroding the basis of family life. There were people who worked all night and all day, on the weekend, kids who never saw their fathers, yet they were making very little money because the hourly wages were so small. Twenty-five cents an hour was passed October 24, 1938. We have come a long way since 25 cents an hour was passed. By January of 1976, we had a law which raised it. We had gone step-by-step all the way to $2.30 per hour. In January 1976 we increased it to $2.30. Now it is at $5.15 an hour. You might say, what a great march forward over 25 cents. It started at 25 cents, and now we are up to $5.15 an hour. But here is what the facts show. The working families have lost ground because the increase in prices, the cost of living, has gone so much faster than these increases in the minimum wage. I cite a booklet here that all of us receive as Members of Congress, it is called Minimum Wage and Overtime Hours under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It is a report to the Congress required by the Fair Labor Standards Act from the Secretary of Labor. It is a booklet that every member of Congress should scan, if not have his staff read, and understand the dynamics of the minimum wage. It is great that we have a law. It is great we have a Fair Labor Standards Act. But the facts are not good at all. In spite of the recent minimum wage increases, the real value of the minimum wage remains below the 1960s and 1970s level. I am reading from a page of the booklet that I just cited. By the way, this booklet was issued on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act which established the minimum wage, so for 60 years we have at least had government policy involved with the hourly wage of working families. But in spite of the recent increases and the fact it has gone to $5.15 an hour, between 1966 and 1997 the real value of the minimum wage declined by 17 percent. Between 1966 and 1997 the real value of the minimum wage went down by 17 percent. Workers ended up making 17 percent less per hour when you calculate the value of wages as computed in terms of the cost of living. When you consider how high the cost of living has gone compared to the wages, then we have suffered a decrease, a decline of 17 percent. The family size supportable by the minimum wage at the poverty threshold fell, went down, from close to four in 1968 to just over two in 1997. Listen carefully. The family size supportable by the minimum wage, the number of people who can be supported on a $5.15 an hour minimum wage, dropped by half. The old minimum wage could support in 1968 four people. The present minimum wage in 1998 supports only two people at the poverty level. That means that they do not eat steak, I assure my colleagues. They have minimum housing, minimum clothing, minimum food. Only two people can now be supported on the minimum wage. We have gone backwards by 50 percent. In the 1950s and the 1960s, the minimum wage averaged 51 percent of average hourly earnings. That measure fell to 46 percent in the 1970s and to an average of 40 percent thus far in the 1980s and 1990s. Average hourly earnings means that when you calculate the earnings of people that are not making minimum wage, making above that amount, and figure it in with the people that are making minimum wage, the average has gone up, and the minimum wage workers have not kept pace, a 40 percent drop in the 1990s. With regard to the Fair Labor Standards Act's requirement to measure the ability of employers, with regard to the requirement of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which is the act of Congress which created the minimum wage, along with a number of other conditions under which the minimum wage is administered. With regard to the Fair Labor Standards Act requirement to measure the ability of employers to absorb wage increases, since 1966, annual percent gains in business sector productivity, productivity, output per hour, has outpaced increases in real hourly compensation three-fourths of the time and for each of the past 10 years. Over the entire period, the change in output per hour grew by two-thirds, while compensation grew by only one-third. In other words, we are getting two-thirds more out of a worker now than we got in terms of productivity. It is no wonder the profits are so high, that prosperity is so good for the owners of the factories and the owners and investors in the various enterprises, because the productivity of each worker is so much greater, while the amount of money paid to the worker has gone down a little more than one-third, gone down instead of up. The ratio has only increased by one-third, which means that the pace is way off for the wage increase versus the productivity. Real corporate profits per hours worked have recovered from a recession low in the 1980s. Profits per hour in 1997 exceeded the previous peak level recorded over the last three decades, while average profits per hour over the past 3 years is the highest such average in 30 years. Average profits for each hour worked is greater now than it has ever been in the last, than it has been in the last 30 years. This is why we have such a tremendous boom on Wall Street, great earnings by corporations, because the profit for each hour of work is so much greater than it has ever been. Average real retail industry profits per hour worked over the past 5 years have been the highest in 25 years. In 1996, 79 million wage and salary workers were covered by the minimum wage provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Overtime protections applied to 74 million workers. Mr. Speaker, this is a great majority of our work force is covered by this act, so we are not talking about a handful of people when we talk about increase in the minimum wage and the resulting additional raise in wages that is caused by the increase in the minimum wage. The majority of workers not protected by minimum wage, and overtime provisions were classified as executive, administrative and professional. Let me just conclude this section of the booklet by saying that the Small Business Act that Congress passed, the Small Business Job Protection Act, which was passed on August 2, 1996, under the Republican majority in the last Congress, it was signed into law by President Clinton, provided two minimum wage increases over the 2-year period. An initial increase from $4.25 an hour to $4.75 an hour, went into effect on October 1, 1996. That was the first minimum wage gain since April 1 of 1991. The second increase was effective on September 1, 1997, and that took us to the level where we are now, $5.15 an hour. One barometer of the adequacy of the minimum wage over time is the degree to which the purchasing power, the wage law has changed. A declining real value of the minimum wage suggests that minimum wage workers are worse off, while a rising real value of the minimum wage signifies improvement in the status of these workers. In order to gauge the relationship between prices and the minimum wage, three indices were constructed. Over the 3-year period, the minimum wage increased 312 percent, while the implicit price deflator and the Consumer Price Index, we know more about the Consumer Price Index than we do the other one, the Consumer Price Index rose 338 percent to 395 percent respectively. Using the Consumer Price Index, the real value of the minimum wage per hour in 1997 dollars has declined from a high of $7.38 per hour; the real value of the minimum wage in 1968 was $7.38 per hour. When we compare the minimum wage with the cost of living, a worker was earning as much as $7.38 an hour, but now, with $5.15 in 1997, they are earning much less per hour in real value. Another indicator of inadequacy of the minimum wage is the extent to which it allows workers to live above established poverty thresholds. I just mentioned that a few minutes ago. For individuals, those not supporting families, the minimum wage has consistently exceeded poverty level incomes. On the other hand, for an individual trying to support a family, the minimum wage has lost some of its ability to generate a standard of living above the poverty line. In other words, there are people that go to work every day, and there is no way they are ever going to get out of poverty earning the minimum wage. In 1968, a full-time worker earning the minimum wage was able to support a family of four slightly below the poverty threshold. In 1968, though, they could support a family of four at the level of the threshold of poverty, which means that they at least could provide the basics, food, clothing and shelter. However, by 1980, the falling real value of the minimum wage reduced the family size supportable at the poverty threshold to three, only three people, and then by 1984, the family size that could be maintained was reduced to two persons. I just cited that before. At present, the minimum wage will support a family of two instead of a family of four. We need to share the prosperity that we are enjoying in America with working families. We need to share the prosperity, and the way to begin sharing the prosperity is to increase the minimum wage. It is a simple step; that is, a simple public policy process. We do not need to raise taxes on anybody, we do not need to take away from one program to give to another; none of the problems that we find in the regular budget and appropriations process is necessary in a public policy change which says, raise the minimum wage. That is the law. We have to raise the minimum wage. I want to congratulate my colleagues who are concerned about this. Democrats have introduced several bills this year on the raising of the minimum wage. The gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez) has introduced H.R. 182, a bill to provide a minimum wage for employees on the Federal contracts worth more than $10,000. A full-time worker would be paid either the amount of the official poverty level income for a family of four, or he would be paid $7.50 an hour, whichever is greater. This is what we call a living wage, which is different from the minimum wage, and some cities and States have enacted laws which require that living wages be paid to workers who are working for companies that have government contracts. The living wage in this case that the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez) advocates is $7.50 an hour. The gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Vento) has a bill, H.R. 370, which provides for the wages paid under a Federal contract in a business that has more than 15 employees, and it requires that the wages must be greater than the local poverty line, which means that from one part of the country to the other, one would have a different minimum wage. One starts with the minimum wage, but in areas where the poverty line, the cost of living is calculated as below the poverty line, we would have differences. It would go up above the minimum wage. The gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver) has H.R. 685, a bill to raise the minimum wage in steps that would take it up to $6.50 an hour by July 1 of the year 2000. The gentleman from California, (Mr. Dellums), before he left, had a bill to establish a living wage for all jobs. The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior) has a bill to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to raise the minimum wage in steps to $7.25 per hour by September 1 in the year 2002. The gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) has a bill which would raise the minimum wage in one step, just one step. Immediately he wants to raise it to $6.50 an hour. The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior) has another bill to raise the minimum wage in steps to $6.65 an hour, to reach $6.65 an hour, by September 1, 2000. Many of these bills have an indexing provision, which means every year automatically, as the cost of living is going up, the wages would go up, too, and you reach these levels. Of course, we have the gentleman from Michigan's (Mr. Bonior) bill, which is in harmony with the President's proposal, and that is a bill to increase the minimum wage by 50 cents in two steps, 50 cents in two steps would mean a dollar increase, to bring up the minimum wage level to $6.15 by January 1 in the year 2000. All of these, by the way, would still mean that the minimum wage is behind the cost of living. We would never catch up even if any one of these generous bills were enacted. Senator Kennedy, in the other body, has similar legislation. The legislation that all Democrats have subscribed to as a party, of course, is the President's proposal to increase the minimum wage by 50 cents in two steps, fifty cents in two steps, to take it to $6.15 by the year 2000. It is a simple proposition, but why is it not enacted? Because the Republican majority is hostile to working people. Working families are viewed with hostility. It is not a matter that they want to save money. Money is not the problem. Money becomes a problem in their hostility in other areas. In the area of education, they are hostile toward working families so they do not want to improve public schools by even giving decent places for children to study. Construction, new school construction, the wiring of schools for technology, a basic investment in the school system is not supported by the Republican majority. They do not want to give a tax cut. They want to give a tax cut, but not to the working poor. So we have money. The hostility of the Republicans toward the poor people is reflected in money issues, and the policies related to budgets and appropriations, but the minimum wage is not a budget appropriations issue. It is a matter of public policy which says we are in charge. We want a public policy which says that the present prosperity of America, where the Dow Jones average is above 9,000, where people who have investments are realizing 20 and 25 percent on their investments, it is unprecedented and we are all proud of it. It is wonderful. The riches of America and the kind of empower we have economically now would make the Roman Empire look like a village. We have unprecedented wealth, and the wealth is getting greater, and probably it is going to go on for a little while longer because as the economies shrink in other parts of the world, instead of them dragging down the economy of the United States, most people have not thought about the fact that the economy of the United States will go up, because every rich person in every country that is having economic difficulty will want to invest their money in America. They will want to come to the stock market here and invest their money. So you are going to have a boom for quite a while as the people who have capital to invest run away from the difficult problems of other nations and they run to this country. So we have prosperity that is probably going to continue for some time. We want working families to share in that prosperity. Mr. Speaker, I want to shift gears at this point and say that the working families should be included in the deal that is going to be made at the end of this session. I have talked about public policy first, raising the minimum wage, and public policy as reflected through the budget and appropriations process means that you invest in education, public education, because that is where working families get their education. You invest in the summer youth employment program. You invest in LIHEAP because you keep poor working families alive during the wintertime when they need money. Certain families do not have enough money to buy fuel for their homes, and we established this a long time ago, so why is Republican majority going to take heat away from elderly families in the wintertime; why at a time when we have a budget surplus that is going to be quite a significant amount of money? By the way, the budget surplus, according to the latest pronouncements of the Congressional Budget Office, on July 15, 1998, a couple days ago, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the Federal budget for fiscal year 1998 will record a total surplus of $63 billion. They were very conservative at the beginning of the year, when the President made his State of the Union address. There was a conservative estimate that we may have an $8 billion surplus, there may be $8 billion more revenue than projected expenditures. Now we have gone from $8 billion to $63 billion. That is what we are looking at now. These are still conservative estimates. As I said before, they point out that a large part of this surplus is due to the Social Security fund, that people paying into Social Security have increased that fund greatly, and that is why I said that the first tax cut ought to be a cut in payroll taxes for poor people. But this is clearly established, the Congressional Budget Office figures have to be accepted by both Democrats and Republicans. The President and the White House must accept it. The majority in the Senate and the House, the minority, we are talking about $63 billion. Working families must be included in the coming end-of-the-session deal where they decide how they are going to handle that $63 billion. There is a lot of sham taking place right now. People are saying, well, that money should not be touched. Some people are saying it should not be touched because Social Security needs the money in the future so we should hold it as a contingency fund for Social Security. We should see what is going to happen with Social Security. We have a lot of things to work out. There is a commission. The commission has come up with a proposal that we extend the retirement date, instead of people retiring at 67, used to retire at 65, in a few years 67 is going to go into effect, they want to extend it to 70. That is the worst thing that could happen. A lot of poor people who work all their lives and pay into Social Security, you will not ever see your Social Security. Certainly in the African American community, the statistics show that a large percentage of our workers never reach 65. They never get a chance to enjoy their Social Security right now. If you move it to 67 and then 70, you are taking away from the people who need it the most. I am not in favor of that proposal that I hear out there on its way to move the date, the age for which you are eligible for your Social Security back to age 70. I think it outrageous. That is more hostility toward working families. Let us come closer to home. There is going to be a deal made before this session ends, before we leave here, there is going to be a deal made between the White House and the majority in the Congress in the House and Senate, it is a pattern now, you do not have to be a genius to figure out what is going to happen. We have a situation where now there are disagreements between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Democrats have some power because we have the White House controlled by a Democratic President. He has veto power. The Republicans, of course, control both the Senate and the House. They are going to pass these very regressive bills which penalize working families. They have already started. I just gave some examples. We are not going to be able to stop them from passing a bill next week which cuts the summer youth employment program. We will not be able to stop the majority from passing a bill which cuts the LIHEAP program, takes away the fuel for elderly people in the winter. We will not be able to stop them from passing a bill which refuses to appropriate any money for school construction or to lower the school class sizes. They have a hokey report that just came out which accuses schools of wasting money, and they want to consolidate it with a flat grant, a block grant. They are ignoring the public on matters of education. The Republicans have chosen just to ignore the public completely. The public opinion polls, which we take under consideration for so many other issues, the public opinion polls clearly show that the top priority of Americans is Federal involvement in education. The Federal Government they want to set, they want to set education as a top priority. They want participation by the Federal Government. They have these problems that they recognize in public education, private education, too, higher education, elementary, secondary education, these are problems which affect the whole Nation, and the voters are already much wiser than the Members of Congress. They are wiser than the leadership of either party, because neither party is really proposing the kind of education reform that is needed. The education system that we ought to have is not on either agenda. Democrats have a better agenda and that is all we have at this point so let us get behind it. But we need a massive program to revamp education. Massive program to take the first step and guarantee that every child has a physical facility that is safe, free of hazards and conducive to learning. Just construction, a one-time expenditure does not mean you put a local school board on the dole and they will be always looking for the Federal Government. You make a one-time expenditure to build a new school or to enlarge a school, to modernize a school, to get rid of the asbestos that threatens the health of the kids, to take out the coal burning furnaces. We have 285 coal burning furnaces. I think they reduced it now, coal burning furnaces in the schools of New York. Those furnaces are health hazards. Let us take them out. It is a one-time expenditure. So we need to make that expenditure, and voters out there are saying, when you take a poll, yes, the Federal Government should do this. We are not afraid of the Federal Government controlling our schools. We want more Federal participation to solve problems. They are saying this, but we are responding as Democrats, in my opinion, with a Mickey Mouse response. We are not emphasizing enough the President's $22 billion construction proposal. We are ready to settle for less. That is a fraud. To settle for less means that you are saying we want to increase the number of teachers so that the ratio of teachers to students will be better. One teacher will not have to have so many students. We want to improve reading. We want to do a lot of things step one, two, three. But if you do not have new construction, modernization in New York and some other big cities, you cannot decrease the teacher/student ratio. You cannot make a better ratio. There is no-where for the classes to go. In order to have smaller classes, you need classrooms. You need to build some more classrooms. Overcrowding is a major problem in the big cities and in some rural areas the schools are literally tumbling down. They are unsafe. We have problems which a one-time expenditure on the order of what President Clinton has proposed, I would like to see it be more, $22 billion, that is really a loan program. I think we need a grant program to go along with that loan program. And between now and the time the deal is made in October, we ought to really raise the level of the voice of the voters so that they will hear us. The voters are saying it, but they are not saying it loud enough. The voters are saying they want education assistance of great significance, but the message does not seem to be coming through our elected officials who are on this floor and the other body. We must all unite behind an effort to make certain that when the deal is made, when the President vetoes the appropriations bills that are hostile to working families, they come back to the House, they do not have enough votes to override the vetos, there will be negotiations. This pattern has taken place for the last 10 years, when President Bush was in the White House and President Reagan, you had Democrats controlling the Congress and you had a Republican President the under Bush and Reagan. Now we have Republicans controlling Congress, and you have a Democrat in the White House. The only way to resolve the differences will be negotiations where the President and the White House, leaders of the Congress, the elected minority leaders, too, but sometimes they do not, they will be there negotiating. The deal will be made about differences in the appropriations bills. There is another deal that is going to be made at the same time. What we do with the $63 billion surplus. Here is a window of opportunity, $63 billion. Let us talk now to the President and to the leaders of Congress about how we want the deal to go down. We do not want a deal made in a smoke-filled room at the last minute and working families end up being left out. We must all unite behind an effort to make sure that when the deal is made as to how to spend this $63 billion, and it is going to be done, the Republicans have made it quite clear, they want a tax cut. They want a large part of that to go for tax cuts. They are not saying they want it out of the surplus. They just imply it. The President has said most of the money should go to Social Security. I agree. If you had only $8 billion, Mr. President, if you had only 8 billion, then let the $8 billion that you have projected in the State of the Union address go toward continued support for Social Security. But we have more than $8 billion. We have almost eight times that much. So if you have $63 billion, why can we not follow a formula? Why can we not have a deal in October and talk to the American people about the deal now, where one-fourth of the surplus goes toward a contingency fund for Social Security. After all, Social Security revenue is generating most of the money, one-fourth goes toward a contingency fund for Social Security, one-fourth goes toward a tax cut, and the tax cut should start with a tax cut for the people who make $50,000 or less, families that make $50,000 or less, a cut in the payroll taxes. Then one-fourth can go toward school construction and related matters like technology, wiring the schools. And one-fourth can go for other education purposes, including higher education, because in the higher education bill that we passed, there is no modernization for the infrastructure of college campuses, the E rate which we have at least come up with as a concept. It has not been implemented fully yet, but the E rate which discounts telecommunications fees for elementary and secondary schools and libraries does not apply to colleges. Colleges need to have help in training our workers for the future in information technology. So let us unite behind a four-way split, a deal which we will call the caring majority of appropriations priorities for working families. That deal means, first, I said one part does not cost it anything, an increase in the minimum wage. The rest of the deal is a tax cut for families that are working, an insurance marker for Social Security, school construction program, an investment. School construction will help us to provide the classrooms which will enable us to have smaller class sizes, and part of that school construction program should be in grants, not just loans, $22 billion in loans. The Federal Government paying an interest rate is a good deal for localities and States, but not good enough. Big cities, places where you have emergency situations ought to also be recipients of some grants, and those grants should be right away. So we have a package which we can call the caring majority appropriations priorities package for working families. I call on the black caucus, I call on the Hispanic caucus, the women's caucus, the blue dogs, I call on all of the Members who care about people to take a look at this appropriations priorities package for working families. Between now and the time the deal is made, let us push in the appropriations bills to get a high visibility for these expenditures that are needed. And when that fails and the vetoes take place and the deals are being negotiated at the White House, let us keep up a steady drumbeat with the public so that the deals are deals which help working families. When they come out of the negotiations, we will have an agenda, a set of expenditures in this year of 1998, 105th Congress, that benefits working families. We will not have this opportunity in the future very soon. We will not have a surplus like this for a long time. We will not have our chance to make the investments now in education that are needed now. We need to jump start the education reform process by giving some real Federal aid and stop playing games with it. Last time the Committee on Appropriations came up with $145 million for a school reform package, $145 million. Now, even if that school reform package was successful, it is still a drop in the bucket. It will not do very much in terms of reforming education. The $145 million is being accused by the Republican majority as if it was a $50 billion program. The same criticisms, the same attention has been focused on it. So we do not need, appropriations committee members, the message to them is, we do not need another whimpish little piece, bone, crumb thrown to education. We need a significant effort to reform education, and that requires Federal dollars. Look at the voters, look at what the voters are saying, and you will find that I am not standing here as a New York left wing radical or somebody who is way out of touch with the people. I am in touch with the voters. The voters say education comes first. This year, this 105th Congress has an unprecedented window of opportunity. Before we adjourn we should act to share the prosperity with working families. We have a Dow Jones average which is above 9,000. Unprecedented. We have unprecedented money being made, returns on investments. Let us take advantage of that. In education we can create a partnership with the States to address the crumbling and overcrowded schools. We can help communities reduce class size by hiring and training new teachers. We can help schools integrate technology into the classroom and train teachers in using that technology effectively. And we can assist high poverty, urban, and rural school districts that are serious about carrying out standards- based reform plans to improve student achievement levels. We can also refund the summer youth employment program so that summer youth will have employment opportunities, those who need it most. This is only for low-income youth. The working families out there need some help in terms of their kids getting summer jobs. We should refund the LIHEAP program for our poor elderly people in the wintertime, who are members of working families also and should be included in the benefits of our prosperity. There is something called earned income versus unearned income, and we ought to take a look at that. That phrase was coined by economists a long time ago. Earned income is the income that people get from wages and salaries. So most of the working families in America, they have what we call earned income. Do my colleagues know that earned income is taxed at a greater rate than unearned income? Again, these are not my terms. Economists have been using these terms for years. Taxes on earned income, wages, salaries and retirement pay, produce 85 percent of all personal income taxes, but only 15 percent brought in by taxes of unearned income. What is unearned income? That is the taxes on the income that we earn with our stocks and bonds, investments, especially capital gains. Capital gains stocks have skyrocketed from $5 trillion in 1994 to $12 trillion in capital gains, and most of those capital gains, that $12 trillion, will never be taxed unless the tax laws are changed. So the unearned income out there is not being taxed, but we are still taxing earned income. That is why I said one of the pieces in this package, the Caring Majority Appropriations Priorities Package for Working Families, has to be a tax cut for the poor. Taxes on earned income, income and Social Security is what I call earned income, brings in over 70 percent of all Federal tax revenue compared with only 9 percent for unearned income. For every dollar of tax revenue produced by earned income, unearned income, income from investments and stocks and bonds, et cetera, brings in only about 13 cents. Why? Because every dollar of earned income goes on the tax return and it is fully taxed. It goes on our returns and we cannot escape having the tax. The only exceptions, of course, are some low-income people who are given an earned income tax credit. By contrast, there are all kinds of huge loopholes, exceptions and special provisions for unearned income, especially for huge capital gains being made in the stock market right now. If we eliminated or cut back these huge loopholes that favor unearned income, especially capital gains, then we could cut everybody else's taxes. We could cut the working families' taxes by taking a bigger bite out of the unearned income taxes. I want to conclude, Mr. Speaker, by saying that we only have a few days left. Let me start where I began. Between now and the end of the first week in August, when we go in recess, there will be numerous appropriations bills passed. Most of those appropriations bills indicate great hostility toward working families. One item after another. We are debating right now the HUD-VA bill. Public housing over the last 5 years under the Republican majority has suffered more than any other Federal program. Public housing has been devastated by the Republican majority. They have no mercy with respect to housing, and housing is where our family begins. If a family does not have a decent house, a decent home, they are in serious trouble. Housing is one of the problems with education. Many of the teachers complain that the poor families are constantly moving because they are seeking better housing. They have problems with the housing that they have. So housing is bedrock to families. If we care about families, then we have to care about housing. And what we are doing right now on the floor, and we will continue next week when we come back, is to continue to devastate the supply of housing for the poor. We will follow that with education. Next week I understand the Labor and HHS appropriation bill will be on the floor, and that is where we have the denial of the opportunity to invest in education. We must all unite now behind a Caring Majority Appropriations Priorities Package for Working Families. Every Member of the House who cares about families, and everybody says they care about families, I hope they will open their eyes and see what helps families and what hurts families. It hurts families not to have a decent minimum wage. It hurts families not to have as much help as possible from the government to guarantee that their children get an education which would allow them to move out of poverty. It hurts families when emergency help from programs like LIHEAP, the provision of fuel for the elderly, is denied, because that means that the family somewhere else has to make some sacrifices to take care of the elderly people. We must all unite behind the Caring Majority Appropriations Priorities Package for working families. End the hostility and let us promote working families.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I pay tribute to an exceptionally dedicated and benevolent spiritual leader--the Reverend Robert O. Simpson. Reverend Simpson will be honored on Saturday, June 27, 1998 at a gala concert celebrating his 25th anniversary of service to Janes United Methodist Church. Reverend Robert O. Simpson is a great Point-of-Light who has changed the face of Janes United Methodist Church through his moral guidance and unwavering commitment to the community. ``Rev. Bob.'' as he is affectionately called by his parishioners, was appointed as minister of Janes United Methodist Church on July 1, 1973. During his tenure Reverend Simpson has seen significant change in the church. Through it all, one thing remains the same--his enduring dedication to the church and its members. His commitment to the mission of outreach has brought several distinguished men and women to join the church. Since 1973, under the ministry of Reverend Simpson, the active membership of the Janes United Methodist Church has tripled. Reverend Simpson's greatest challenge as pastor was the rebuilding of Janes United Methodist Church following the November 10, 1984 fire that destroyed the 100 year old building. Through his dynamic leadership, the support of the Janes congregation, and many members of the community, the new Janes Church was built and consecrated in April 1991. The story of Janes' rebuilding was the basis of Reverend Simpson's post-graduate work and dissertation in ``Church Administration and Liturgies'' at New Brunswick Theological Seminary. As a minister, Reverend Simpson is in a unique position to touch the lives and to help mold so many futures. Because of this enormous responsibility, he has initiated a number of programs which contributed to the growth and development of the church and the Bedford-Stuyvesant community. During his pastorate, Reverend Simpson has developed the church's Community Outreach Program, a tutorial program for school aged children; the Senior Citizens' Friendship Club; the Voter Registration and Information Project; referral programs; a Meals-on-Wheels Program; and ``God's Sheltering Arms,'' Janes' ministry to the homeless. Clearly Janes United Methodist Church is in a better position because of Reverend Simpson. Reverend Simpson's remarkable climb was accompanied by an ever- increasing group of civic, religious, and philanthropic organizations in which he participated. He served the wider community as a member of Community Planning Board #3, District 16 Community School Board and New York Methodist Hospital Board of Directors. He has worked diligently in numerous positions within the United Methodist Church denomination to strengthen the church infrastructure. He has served as Treasurer of the New York Annual Conference Board of Trustees, Chair of the Episcopal Committee, and member of the Council of Finance and Administration. Reverend Simpson began his formal education in the nursery school at Janes United Methodist Church, the church he would eventually pastor for 25 years. He attended both public and private schools in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from Yale Divinity School in June 1993 with a Master's of Divinity. In a recent sermon on ``Buried Talents,'' Reverend Simpson emphasized the importance of using all of the gifts and graces God has entrusted to us. His leadership and pastoring of the church is an excellent example of the strength, fortitude, faith and perseverance needed for an effective ministry in the church or any other leadership position. Reverend Simpson has made Janes United Methodist Church a landmark for families to worship and a dramatic force for good. We salute Reverend O. Simpson and the accomplishments of his ministry. He is a great Point-of-Light for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.