Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. We should establish a war crimes tribunal so that these people know that they are going to be brought to justice in the end. We want to send a message to people like the dictators in Nigeria right now that we are not going to sit by and tolerate them having sovereign immunity to do whatever they want to do. The whole world should have some kind of standard that is clear out there and we ought to move in the direction of supporting that kind of thing through the United Nations and the World Court and make it clear that you are not going to get away with it. By doing that, we would prevent a lot of the kind of genocides that are taking place, too many have taken place, we have this one that happens to be the biggest one, but we are leaving out Cambodia and Yugoslavia and Serbia. They were about to destroy one of the oldest cultured cities in the world, Sarajevo. So it could break out anywhere. We have got to send a clear message that the world will not tolerate it. Part of the reason that message will be accepted as meaningful is that the United States stands behind it, with its force and its power, stands behind a doctrine which says we will not tolerate sovereign predators wiping out whole groups of people or doing other kinds of things that really are just not acceptable in this civilization.

Mr. OWENS. Again, I hope that the committee that the gentlewoman sits on will seriously push for some remedies that would help avoid these situations in the future that they would never happen again with the United States sitting on the sideline, that we would have a clear way to intervene and we send a clear message that President Clinton has called us an indispensable Nation. One reason we are is that we have the economic power and the military power. We will use our power in concert with the rest of the world to guarantee that there will never be any millions of people being killed while the rest of the world sits by and watches without intervening.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote, and pending that, I make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this amendment seeks to deal with the omission which I cited earlier. There is a problem, there is a crisis, there is a great need for more information technology workers. There is a crisis that will be met with legislation from this House of Representatives in the 105th Congress. There are a number of different committees looking at the problem, and this committee should do its duty and address the problem. Government analyses, industry reports, media headlines, and lobbying activities from businesses point to a crisis in the American education system and the workplace. There are not enough workers to fill 200,000 to 400,000 current vacancies in various categories of information technology jobs. It has been reported that ``a major factor affecting the short supply of information technology workers is a mismatch between what universities teach and what industry needs.'' One industry executive likened the current situation to ``running out of iron ore in the middle of the industrial revolution.'' While I commend the chairmen and ranking members of both the committee and the subcommittee for fashioning a palatable bill, H.R. 6 does not comprehensively address the anchor role that our higher education institutions could play in eliminating America's newest deficit of high skilled technology workers. The Information Technology Partnership Amendment which I am offering here would correct this gross oversight in H.R. 6. This amendment would authorize a competitive grant program for colleges and universities to establish and oversee information technology education recruitment projects. Higher education institutions would be expected to expand existing resources to establish computer training centers off campus. Priority would be given to those colleges and universities that enter into partnerships with community-based organizations such as after-school centers and nonprofit cultural and educational organizations and even churches. Many of my colleagues in Congress understand the severity of the shortage of workers with the necessary education to compete in this new millennium. Several reports have documented this crisis: The Commerce Department report entitled ``America's New Deficit''; reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; another Commerce report entitled ``The Emerging Digital Economy''; and a report from an industry trade association called ``Help Wanted: A Call for Deliberative Action for the New Millennium.'' These analyses draw a dramatic conclusion about the gross shortages that will exist now and into the year 2005. Because of the crisis, the Information Technology Association of America has pledged its support for this amendment. As the trade association that represents information technology workers and businesses, ITAA documents how businesses are themselves complaining for assistance. Mr. Chairman, I submit a letter from ITAA which supports this amendment:

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I too rise in support of H.R. 6. I want to congratulate all of those who made it possible. We are grateful for the fact that there are no extremist and radical proposals in this bill, no radical proposals to roll back the Federal role in education of the kind we had in the 104th Congress, so we are grateful for that. We are grateful for the good housekeeping that has tidied up certain parts of the Higher Education Assistance Act. We are grateful for the important administrative changes that have been made. It is all good. We have some incremental increases, also, that we are grateful for. However, I want to voice my dissent in terms of what is not here. We have missed a great window of opportunity that will not be open again until 2003. We only reauthorize this act once every 5 years, so we are going into the 21st century and we have a status quo bill that we have polished up, it is great, but at a time when the economy is booming and the information technology revolution is underway in industry, we have neglected our duty to set priorities and make projections and target to meet critical needs. Two critical need areas we have neglected, one is we have neglected to address the information technology worker crisis. Right now there is a shortage, 300,000 vacancies across the country, and it is going to get worse. Only the Committee on the Judiciary is addressing the problem. They are going to bring in more foreign professionals to fill the gap. Instead of training our own, we are going to bring in foreign professionals. The other critical need is in the area of more opportunity needs to be provided. We have a very complex society that we are in already and it is going to become more complex. We need more Americans to go to college, more Americans to be in college. Fifteen million is not enough. Fifteen million may seem like a lot when you consider the junior colleges and the senior colleges, but 15 million is less than 10 percent of the total population. In the complex world that we are looking at, we need more. We need to address this problem and provide more opportunities. Instead of quarreling about affirmative action, we need to open up the gates and let more people in. That is an affirmative way to proceed to provide the kind of human capital that we need for the future.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today is April 28. Tomorrow will be April 29. A major event will take place on the floor of the House of Representatives. Tomorrow we shall begin the consideration of the Higher Education Assistance Act, the reauthorization of the Higher Education Assistance Act. I think that I would like to proclaim to the American people, to the public, to everybody who cares in this Nation, that this is no small event. Reauthorization of the Higher Education Assistance Act is a major event. We only do it once every 5 years. And the role of the Federal Government in higher education has been no small one. It is very important. In fact, it is quite unfortunate that there has been so little discussion and so little debate up to this point. We should have had more dialogue, more interaction with the people who are involved, students, faculties, presidents of colleges. It has been a very quiet reauthorization process. I have been here now for 16 years, and this is the third reauthorization I have gone through, and I have never seen it so quiet. It is part of the process that has been forced upon us by the leadership, the Republican majority leadership here in the House, that everything is kept at a low profile, everything important is kept at a very low profile. This session, this second year of the 105th Congress, the art of forcing the low profile, the art of forcing a low visibility for important issues has been perfected. Never before have we been in a session where we have had as many recesses as we have had this year, as short a workweek as we have had this year. A decision was made by the ruling Republican majority that the less visibility this Congress had, the less the people of the United States see their Legistature at work, the better. So we have minimized a very important discussion on education, as we minimize all discussions. We are in a situation now where we have not even passed a budget. And I suppose one is being prepared in secret like everything else. It is a process where most things go on behind closed doors, and very little participation is encouraged. In the case of the Higher Education Assistance Act, I found it very difficult as a member of the committee, I am a member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, and I found it difficult to find out how things were moving as the preparation of this very important piece of legislation took place at the committee level. I have heard my colleagues in other committees complain about the same process. Even the Members of Congress are not invited to participate. We have to sort of force our way into the dialogue. Therefore, it is not surprising that the same ruling majority here does not provide opportunities for the public to know very much about what is going on, the voters. I suppose this is a result of what happened in the 104th Congress in terms of a very well-publicized, highly visible agenda in the form of the Contract with America. We had maximum debate. The Democratic Minority had a chance to answer the proposals put forth by the Republican majority. We had out on the table the intentions of the Republican party, especially in the area of education. They clearly had intentions that were in confrontation with the majority of the American people. They wanted to abolish the Department of Education. They wanted to drastically cut certain education programs, even cut Head Start, school lunches. It was a situation where we appreciated the honesty of the majority. The majority was honest. They put their cards on the table; and the American people, in their wisdom, rejected them. They knew that these ideas had been rejected as we approached the election date in November of 1996. They knew that with respect to education, they had miscalculated, and they ran very fast and used their power to make amends. At the last minute during the appropriations process, the Republican majority increased the budget for education programs by $4 billion. Whereas they had been threatening to cut as much as $4 billion in the previous year in 1995, in 1996 they increased it by the same amount, $4 billion increase, instead of a cut. So they understood, they understood through the focus groups, they understood through the public opinion polls all of the barometers that we use to measure opinions and to determine where the voters are. They understood that the common-sense wisdom of the American people was not with them. Education is a high priority, and anyone who threatens to abolish the Department of Education and greatly cripple the involvement of the Federal Government in education matters has to pay the price for that kind of position. Fortunately for them, and unfortunate for the Democratic Minority, they changed radically at the last minute, and they went out, after giving us a $4 billion increase in education, they went out as the friends of education, as the champions of education. Unfortunately, in this 105th Congress, that is not the case. The kind of last-minute conversion did not carry over. We are back to business as usual when it comes to the Republican majority. First of all, they have the old proposals for school vouchers and privatization of education on the table with greater gusto than ever before. Block granting and vouchers and all of those old items that did not sit well with the American people in the last Congress have been resurrected. We do not hear any more of the talk of the abolishment of the Department of Education. The extremism is not there anymore. They do not put it out on the table. If they feel the Department of Education should be abolished, then that is a covert matter; they do not talk about it in public. If they feel that Head Start should be cut, that is a covert matter. They actually have been very civil in this process of reauthorizing the Higher Education Assistance Act. The Higher Education Assistance Act has come forward. It will go to the floor tomorrow from the committee. And the Republican majority on that committee is to be commended, I suppose, for not proposing any drastic cuts. There are no drastic cuts in the previous higher education programs. We should rejoice. We should applaud this. Let us give credit where credit is due. The jackals of the 104th Congress that wanted to cut everything have left, basically, higher education assistance alone. We should be rejoicing. And I do rejoice. On the other hand, as I said, on the occasion of the markup of this important piece of legislation, it is most unfortunate that given the fact that we reauthorize higher education assistance acts only once every 5 years, in a 5-year period, whatever we legislate tomorrow, whatever comes out of our House tomorrow and goes to the Senate and conference and signed by the President, that will be in effect for 5 years. It is unfortunate that a bill which is going to carry us through the next 5 years into the 21st century and beyond is really a status quo bill. We can applaud the fact that they did not cut anything, we can applaud the fact that there was no attempt to roll back history, but we cannot applaud the fact that there are no innovations in the bill tomorrow, there is nothing new, there is nothing that looks at the 21st century and says that our thrust should be different, our commitment to higher education should be enhanced, we should meet some of the problems that have surfaced and are clear on the horizon, we should meet these problems in this Higher Education Assistance Act or project a way to begin to deal with them. This is a status quo bill. I complained at the level of the committee and I will complain again tomorrow that it is most unfortunate that at a time when we are enjoying the greatest prosperity the Nation probably has ever known, at a time when there is no war to absorb resources, at a time when the window of opportunity is wide open, we cannot come up with some more creative and imaginative proposals as to how we are going to proceed to educate the population. We have a lot of problems below the level of high school graduation. But certainly we have always committed ourselves and always been praised by for the fact that higher education in America is exceptional. We are ahead of most of the industrialized nations when they begin to make comparisons between the higher education systems among the countries. Not so with our elementary and secondary school systems. But at a time like this when we are ahead and it is clear that our higher education system has played a major role in our ability to quickly take advantage of the scientific revolution and to apply science and technology in many areas of life, including, of course, in the military area where the American people invested billions and billions of dollars in the military research and development, a situation which is very relevant because right now the kind of prosperity we are enjoying is partially fueled and pushed by the revolution in information technology. The companies that are newest and making the greatest amount of money on Wall Street are information technology companies, Intel, Microsoft, you name it, the newest companies, by the way who are not dependent on defense contracts or government contracts, they are all information technology related. That information technology that they have chosen to make great profits off of did not happen overnight and it did not happen by magic. It did not come directly from God. Everything comes from God indirectly but it did not come as a natural resource. It is not like an oil well, striking it rich with a diamond mine or a gold mine. Information technology and the state of the art right now is a direct result of the investment of the American people in great amounts of research and development for military purposes. Information technology was really developed by the American people through their military services seeking ways to accomplish the jobs that they have to accomplish. The Internet was created by the American military forces. The Internet was created to assist and aid and speed up the exchange of information throughout the world, scientific information. The Internet is the creation of the American people through their military services. Something called the Defense Technical Information Center, another way for saying the world's greatest system of libraries, was created by the Defense Department. One of the by- products of that tremendous system for research and for development was the Internet. We are the beneficiaries of a system which was produced and financed by the American people which was conceived and operated and all the details have been put in place by American science and technology. Yes, we might have had some foreign scientists participate, we will not take that away from them, but basically the technicians and the scientists, the theoreticians and the philosophers who put this great technological revolution together in terms of information technology were products of our education system, mainly our higher education system, our higher education system which is still like all other higher education systems in the world basically an elitist system. Only a small percentage of people go to college. Only a small percentage of people totally still enjoy higher education opportunities throughout the world. That group and what they do and how they do it is critical to the advancement of our society and the continued prosperity that we enjoy. So if we are authorizing a piece of legislation called the Higher Education Assistance Act, then we ought to look at it in terms of this is a critical piece of legislation which will have a great impact on what we are doing in the future, how can we make this a better piece of legislation. My first concern was that the legislation did not take advantage of an opportunity to increase greatly the amount of opportunities for Americans to go to college. The opportunities need to be increased for many reasons. We need more educated people. It is clear that there is a correlation between the number of educated people and our progress. If that is the case, then there should not be any question about having more people who have college education or higher education opportunities. Maybe some of them will only go to community colleges for 2 years but the principle of the value added, education adds value to everybody who participates, higher education adds very extensive, very great value to anybody who participates in higher education. A person coming out of a higher education institution is going to earn income and really pay back the investment that society has made in them. The person who comes out of a higher education institution is definitely not going to be dependent on subsidies. They will contribute to the process instead of absorbing any resources. We know all of this. It should not be difficult to conceive of the necessity of increasing the number. However, there are some people who balk at the idea that we need more college graduates and we need more college students. There is some notion that always runs throughout deliberations about higher education that, hey, you may get too many educated people and if you get too many educated people, you will drive down the standards and the salaries and the quality of life of the people who are educated. That has been a stream running through decision-making in America for a long time. It is not new. Fifty or 75 years ago they were talking about the possibility of having too many educated people, but it has never happened. We have never yet reached a point where we have too many educated people. People with college degrees may have some difficulty in the job market nowadays or they may have always had some difficulty, but generally they land on their feet, and generally people with college degrees do not end up being dependent on society. It is true now, it was true 25 years ago, it is going to be true in the year 2010. Right now we are seeing an explosion of the need for people in the information technology sector. Information technology involves work with telecommunications apparatus, computers. It involves a lot of things which require higher education. Most people do not know it, but it also requires imagination, it also requires people who have some conception of spatial relationships, not just in terms of engineering but also in terms of artistic presentations. If you look at Web sites and you look at the kind of things that they are doing with Web sites, you know that these are not just mathematicians, these are not just physical scientists. The successful Web sites are being generated by people with imagination. They have imagination, they have some background beyond math and science or they are working in teams, so a person who is in drama and who is in art illustration or in just social science, understanding psychology of people, they may be on a team of people, some of whom have math and physics backgrounds, to produce what has to be produced in terms of software or in terms of Web sites, et cetera. We do not know, we cannot pick exactly who is going to be most successful in this area. But we should assume that all education can be fitted in somewhere. The psychologist may be as valuable as the physicist. We should have as much education as possible across the whole spectrum. We understood that briefly when the Russians outpaced us in space. The Russians put up Sputnik and began to put up one space rocket and one space satellite after another. We went to work in this country to deal with the fact that you can only compete in that arena if you have more and more people in the area of science. They did not all have to be geniuses and Einsteins. Some were theoretical scientists, some were applied scientists, some were technicians and technologists, some were good mechanics. The entire array of people needed to produce the kind of military hardware and the military processes that matched the Soviet Union and eventually made it spend itself to death in the area of military technology, that was produced through the education process. We understood it then. We are facing now a situation where there is a survey that tells us that information technology workers are in great shortage. This new revolution, these information technology companies that are producing such great profits on the stock market, these are the places where we have vacancies appearing at a great rate. There is some debate about it but some pretty thorough and credible surveys have been done which shows we are talking about 300,000 people in this area right now who are needed and are not there, 300,000 vacancies exist out there now. That will only get worse, because the reading of the survey of where students are in college, how many are majoring in the appropriate fields, generally what the education pool is in our colleges and universities, that survey leads the information technology experts to project that you may have a million vacancies 5 or 6 years from now trying to cope with an expanded enterprise, not only in business. Right now the great investment is in business. Profit-making businesses want to be on top of the latest technology, information technology. The state of the art is always being sought by these profit-making businesses that have lots and lots of money to spend because they are making great amounts of profit, so the money is being spent now in the business arena. They have not even started yet to really apply information technology en masse to higher education institutions, and further down the public schools which the President, President Clinton and Vice President Gore certainly have seen the vision to include in this information technology revolution. The public schools are way, way down the chain. Even in some places like California where they led the country in showing us how to get schools wired using volunteers and put schools on the Internet, even there we are talking about a situation where every school that was wired by volunteers on a Saturday afternoon, we called them wired if they wired the library and five classrooms. The library and five classrooms was the extent of the wiring. There is a lot more to be done even in the places where we have been most successful. But in my hometown, New York City, and home State, the big cities in New York have nothing close to anything like 10 percent of the schools wired. We have a project going in our area where it has taken us almost 2 years to get 22 schools wired using our volunteers on Saturday. Even with the cooperation of the Board of Education, Bell Atlantic and a lot of private sector people have participated, it is a slow process. Of course in the suburbs surrounding New York City, they have dealt with the process. They have not depended on volunteers. They have wired their schools. They have state of the art media in some of those places. Where the largest number of poor people go to school in the inner cities, we are way behind. In this Higher Education Assistance Act, my point is we have not taken into full consideration the fact that right now there are tremendous amounts of vacancies in the information technology sector, 300,000 vacancies right now, and a projection that there will be many more, these people have to go through higher education even if it is only 2 years of college in many cases. We have not taken that into consideration. Just to meet that need, we should have special programs in colleges and universities at increasing the number of students in the pool. We have to replenish the number of doctors and lawyers and MBAs. You know, there is a whole society demanding more and more educated people. One of our biggest exports is not goods but services, the services supplied by experts, and these are experts that come out of our colleges and universities that export services around the world. There will be a more greater demand for services from highly educated people in the future. Mr. Speaker, let me just recapitulate. I do not want anybody to get lost. I am talking about the fact that there is a great demand for people with higher education, and the demand will increase, and we should have taken that into consideration when we considered this Higher Education Assistance Act. The act that we will be considering tomorrow on the floor of the House is a status quo bill. It maintains things pretty much as they are. And while we applaud the fact that there are no drastic cuts, it is unfortunate that we have not taken advantage of a window of opportunity to go forward and deal with needs that are obvious in our work force. I also complained about the fact that, at the time that we considered this bill in our committee, about the fact that the great debate right now with respect to affirmative action and the problem of trying to provide diversity on higher education campuses by taking into consideration certain matters that go beyond just the scores on the SATs and the averages in courses in high school and that great debate, which is escalating, and certainly in California, has led to some real disasters in terms of the policy changes made by the board of regents of California. You have a drastic reduction in the number of Hispanics and African American students who are in the higher education freshman class. You have an even more drastic reduction in the higher education graduate institutions. Texas has had a similar problem, and across the country there are more discussions and referendums and policy changes now in process with respect to ending efforts to promote diversity by considering the ethnicity of a particular student and the need to achieve balance in the student body. If we are going to go that route, and there are people who argue that affirmative action is not good, but if we have proposals and programs that seek to provide more help for people who are disadvantaged, people who need help because they are poor, well, that is across the board. You know, consider race. You do not consider ethnicity, you just consider the fact that they are disadvantaged, they need help, that that is the way to go. I have heard proponents of ending affirmative action. The people want very much to end affirmative action, including the Speaker of the House. They argue that we do not want any consideration on the basis of ethnicity. Let us forget about the 232 years of slavery and the descendants of slavery who did not have a chance to accumulate any wealth, and if you did not have a chance to accumulate any wealth, the whole family structure and the whole supportive atmosphere that breeds, that creates, middle-class people who are more successful in the formal education structure, forget about that they said. Let us just consider everybody equal and take care of those who happen to be unfortunate economically all across the board so that white poor and the African American poor and the Hispanic poor are all treated equally. I do not concede that affirmative action is not important. I do not concede you should forget about 232 years of slavery and the impact of that on the descendants of slaves, the impact of a hundred and some years of oppression as second-class citizens that followed the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. I do not concede that, but let us for a moment lay it aside. Let us consider the arguments that are made by these people who want to get rid of affirmative action. They say they are ready to be fair to everybody. If you are honest about that assertion, then you will create more opportunities. We should be considering how the Education Act, which had a tremendous increase in the amount of money available in order to create more opportunity for more people regardless of their race, creed or color. We should have the Pell grants greatly increased. They are increased somewhat, but the Pell grants should be greatly increased in terms of the number of people covered. The amount for Pell grants, the number of people covered should be greatly increased. We should have great increases in all of the loan programs, in the TRIO programs and every program that is designed to promote higher education. Because we should anticipate a great increase in the number of students coming in who have been denied an opportunity because of the fact that they are poor. That requires money, that requires appropriations and commitments. In the authorization of this bill, we have not dealt with that. Oh, yes, there is a lot of money involved here, but it is status quo, you know. It is taking into consideration the fact that we are throwing out affirmative action programs and, therefore, the affirmative action programs ought to be replaced with greater opportunity programs. There should be more opportunity programs. You know, consider the constellation that we are dealing with here. In America now, there are roughly about 15 million students in college and universities, 15 million students in colleges and universities. That includes the community colleges and senior colleges. In America right now, there are about 3,688 institutions of higher learning, community colleges, senior colleges, et cetera. Right now, the expenditures of the State and local governments for higher education is approximately $89 billion per year. These may seem like big numbers, but the cost, the amount we are spending per student in our public institutions supported by State and local governments and by the Federal Government, the Federal Government expenditure I think is around $38 billion for cash, programs receiving cash directly, and another $40 billion if all the tax credits and various new programs that have been established are utilized. You are talking about $38 billion, $40 billion. That is a lot of money, a lot of commitment. $38 billion, $40 billion, you know you are talking about nearly $80 billion of federal assistance, $89 billion is expended by State and local governments. I suppose that comes to, you know, $169 billion, a lot of money. But what is our defense budget? How much money do we spend on defense? It is way, way up there at $200 billion, almost $300 billion. Combined events in intelligence, you are talking about $300 billion on defense and intelligence. So you can only compare. These figures will drown you. You will get lost quickly if you do not make comparisons. You can only compare, determine the value of what is being spent and get some perspective if you look at what modern costs are in other areas. What are we spending in defense? Close to $300 billion. $89 billion at the State and local level for higher education and another $80 billion probably at the Federal level. It seems like a lot of money, but in terms of modern costs it is not a very great expenditure. How much does the cigarette industry make in billions of dollars per year? I mean, in terms of modern costs, our commitment to higher education is, I assure you, nothing staggering. City University in New York, City University of New York, which probably has one of the best bargains in education, we educate students in City University for less than $20,000 per year. I think that the recent budget cuts, they have had steady budget cuts for the last 20 years. This is a university that has been squeezed and pushed and manipulated and very badly treated by the people who appropriate funds over the last 20, 25 years. City University, the cost of educating one student is about $20,000, and you might say $20,000 per year to educate a student. Well, Harvard and Yale is the Ivy League. Students are above $30,000 and climbing, and you might say those are large amounts of money, but compared to what? The taxpayers of America spend $120,000 per student to educate students who go to West Point. Let me repeat that figure so you will understand what I said, and I had it checked and double checked, and this is not the military training. Military training takes it up to the $200,000 range. Just the academic training of every student that goes to West Point costs the taxpayers of America $120,000. Now get the perspective in place. I would say that we are spending much too much to educate a student at West Point, but I would say at the same time we are spending much too little to educate a student at City University, or maybe it is not relevant unless you look at how the money is being spent. City University has 200,000 students. You know, the economies of scale would allow you to do things cheaper, but City University also has students jammed into classrooms and college classes with 40 and 45 students; you know, are not conducive to learning. City University has an antiquated infrastructure. Only recently, last 10 years, did some of the colleges get phones, push-button phones. You know they had rotary phones. In many cases the buildings have, the academic buildings, have only a few phones, let alone lines that could connect computers to the Internet. The higher education establishments and City University are way, way behind the state-of-the-art higher education institutions in respect to computers and information technology. They need a great infusion of capital just for that purpose. I am not saying that New York State and New York City should spend $120,000 per student as they do at West Point. But I think that, instead of the present rage that is being promoted by certain editorials in certain papers and certain of our political figures, the rage against City University for trying to educate too many students and having too much remediation and needing to raise its standards by locking out large numbers of students from the opportunity in higher education provides all of that is going in the direction which is counter to where we ought to be going as we move toward the 21st century. So I want to reemphasize the fact that it is probably one of the most important bills that we consider in this Congress. The Higher Education Assistance Act that we will be considering tomorrow is probably one of the most important bills that we will consider. We only do it once every 5 years. There are very real problems out there related to affirmative action and the way opportunities for higher education are being cut off, smothered in our various States, the Hopwood decision in Texas and the City University of New York. If they end remediation, they would be accomplishing what California has accomplished through a back-door means. They do not talk about affirmative action, but it is large numbers of poor students, beginning with the poor students who are African American, the poor students who are Hispanic, but large numbers of white students also who are poor will be cut out of the opportunity to go to a higher education institution, that kind of opportunity provided by City University. At a time when we ought to be considering how to have more of a pool of people upon which we can draw to meet the challenges of the 21st century, we are going in the opposite direction. There are some midget minds at work; there are some timid spirits that are moving things, and people that have power do not have any vision about where we are going. Governor Rockefeller, who was a Republican, laid out a vision for the university systems of New York's SUNY and CUNY, which catapulted them into a whole new stratosphere in terms of the kind of activities they are involved in now. Now we are under a Republican Governor going in the opposite direction in terms of that vision and understanding of the role of higher education at a time when we should be going in the opposite direction. Consider the history of higher education in this country. Consider the fact that if we had not had visionaries who understood the importance of education in the overall achievement of prosperity in this country, in the establishment of circumstances which would allow our people to pursue happiness, if that vision had not been there, we would be in serious trouble. We do not realize how much education and the initiatives taken by a few legislators, people in power, has meant over the years. First, Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia. It probably did not become the model he wanted it to become, but it certainly planted the seed at the University of Virginia as a State institution and as one of the first of its kind in terms of being established and run with public funds, not being burdened with the necessity to heavily weight its courses, courses related to theology and philosophy, et cetera. There is nothing wrong with theology and philosophy, but the mission of the University of Virginia was to learn everything that they could learn about everything that was useful. Maybe it did not achieve that, but it planted a seed. A man named Justice Smith Morrill, M-O-R-R-I-L-L, the Morrill Act, people who have tossed off that term, the Morrill Act, the land grant colleges, Justice Smith Morrill was a Congressman from Vermont, first as a Member of the House of Representatives, and then he became a Senator in 1862. He was here during the period of the Civil War and the period shortly after the Civil War. He served in the Senate until 1898, and he came forward several times with proposals to establish institutions that would go beyond the usual parameters of education at that time, the agricultural and the mechanical colleges which would deal with a scientific approach to farming, a scientific approach to the practical matters of our Nation, and eventually Morrill was able to prevail, and we established land grant colleges in every State in the Union. The land grant colleges came out of the Morrill Act. It was later on improved and doctored by other actions by Congress, but the whole conception that the government should participate in the process of educating the population was institutionalized in the Morrill Act and the land grant colleges that flowed from that action. The kind of education provided by the land grant colleges proved to be the greatest thing that ever happened to America in terms of the production of people who understood how to apply learning and knowledge and science to farming, to engineering, and a whole core of people were created who moved us forward. In the area of agriculture in particular, they moved us forward in a way that no other industrial power, none of the leading nations in the world, have ever been able to match. We are way ahead in terms of production of food at low cost for the population as a result of the Morrill Act and the land grant colleges. Mr. Speaker, we need that kind of vision now. We need an innovation, an initiative now which would match the Morrill Act initiative. It has to go in a different direction, but it is not so different. Information technology alone offers a challenge just to move so that our colleges and universities are the premier agents for the development of the human capital. Information technology demands human capital. We do not have to have oil or gold or natural resources, coal, but we must have human beings who have been very well-educated. We should have some initiative which understands that and applies it across the board to all of our institutions of higher learning so that they can begin in a systematic way to meet the needs. Mr. Speaker, we had another innovation that took place in 1944. The GI Bill, which established the right for every returning GI, every veteran of World War II, to receive an education, was signed first by Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 22nd, 1944, called the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944. During the past five decades the law has made possible the investment of billions of dollars in education and training for millions of veterans. The Nation has in return earned many times its investment in increased taxes and a dramatically changed society. The law also made possible the loan of billions of dollars to purchase homes for millions of veterans and helped transform the majority of Americans from renters to homeowners. But the education part of it, the fact that returning veterans were able to go into colleges and universities and come out with the kind of training and know-how put us in a position after World War II to mount the kind of industrial revolution that we have now, the information technology revolution, the research and development revolution, and the military which led the way, allowed us to bring the competing Soviet empire to its knees. All of that could not have happened if we had not had a Morrill Act, a GI Bill of Rights, and the subsequent opportunities that that provided. The American Legion is credited with designing the main features of the GI Bill. These ideas are not radical, they are part of a consensus that has been developed in America, and Republicans and Democrats have participated. The American Legion is credited with designing the main features of the GI Bill and pushing it through Congress. The Legion overcame objections that the proposed bill was too sweeping and could jeopardize veterans getting help at all. At the time Congress had already failed to act on about 640 bills concerning veterans. Members of the American Legion met first in Washington on December 15, 1943, and by January 6 had completed the first draft of the GI Bill, and on and on the story goes. The bill was another one of those landmarks in American history that produced a great leap forward, a great leap forward in our society. The GI Bill, the Morrill Act, they are the kinds of actions that have propelled us forward, and they ought to be celebrated and understood. It is a pity that at a time like this, when probably the Members of Congress are better educated than ever before and understand more about the dynamics of our society and the need for some kind of comprehensive approach to where we are going in the next century, it is a pity that those forces are all, for the moment, either paralyzed or oppressed or lulled to sleep or blocked, and that we have the Higher Education Assistance Act which makes no great steps forward. This Higher Education Assistance Act, as I said before, is at least not a bill that is going to take us backwards, but it really is pathetic in terms of its understanding of the need for the next 5 years as we go into the 21st century. The bill that we will be considering on the floor tomorrow reauthorizes Federal student loans, Pell grants and other student financial aid programs for 5 years. It resolves a controversy over cutting interest rates on student loans, which took us a lot of time. Banks were accused of trying to make a killing off student loans, and that was resolved. Pell grants in this bill, the bill authorizes an increase in the maximum Pell grant award. It stands at $3,000 in the current academic year, and it will go to $4,500 in the year 1999-2000 academic year. It is a slow, incremental set of increases, not keeping pace with the cost of living, but at least nobody proposed that we cut it out or back. It authorizes annual increases of $200 until the 2003-2004 academic year when the authorized maximum amount would be up to $5,300. So it is an incremental movement forward in the area of student aid, which is the hallmark of the bill in terms of providing opportunity for the poor, the Pell grants. The bill makes a number of changes to the formula used to calculate how much financial aid students receive. The bill denies Federal student aid to those convicted or possessing or selling illegal drugs, an amendment which had a great deal of discussion. I do not approve of cutting off opportunity for young people so early in life. There is one factor that must always be considered is that children are children. They are not adults. The aging process, anybody who is as old as I am, I am almost 62, one understands that one just could not know at age 18 or 20 or 22 what one knows later on. One cannot make the same judgments. And practically every young person is in danger of at some vulnerable moment making a mistake of some kind that is quite serious, but we should not set up situations where that mistake becomes a trap that is eternal for that person. Not to be able to get a college education because one made a mistake is a little too harsh, but that is part of the legislation at this point. Of course, I think it will be debated on the floor to some extent, but the majority has prevailed thus far on that matter. It has many other good features before I talk about the negative. It does have loan forgiveness for people who teach in low-income communities; it does have a number of features that are improvements, slight improvements over what was there before. There is a provision related to the whole matter of affirmative action that will be on the floor tomorrow. Again, we will have to debate this whole matter of no efforts whatsoever can be made to diversify campuses, and we will have to deal with the fact that more stringent national standards will be applied; there will be an attempt to apply stringent national standards that are similar to the California antiaffirmative action program. Of the amendments that have been noticed, there will be an amendment offered by the gentleman from California (Mr. Riggs), an amendment to prohibit any institution of higher education that participates in any higher education program from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any person or group in admissions based on, in whole or in part, on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. The amendment exempts from its ban any private institution of undergraduate higher education that traditionally and continually from its establishment admitted students to schools on the basis of sex. The amendment also specifies that it does not prohibit or limit any institution from encouraging or recruiting qualified women and minorities from seeking admission, provided that such recruitment and encouragement does not involve granting preferential treatment in selecting any person for admission based, in whole or in part, on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. This is an amendment which, in very nice language, coats the fact that what it is saying is that we do not want any effort to encourage and promote diversity on a campus. The world is diverse. The United States is diverse. The number of people who are minorities, the proportion keeps increasing. To have diversity on campus, of course, is only to have students live on campus in a world that is very similar to the world outside. But this language, however civil it may seem on paper, seeks to wipe all of that out in one stroke. It would do what the University of California has done across the Nation. Because practically every higher education institution does receive some Federal funds, every higher education institution would have its hands tied in terms of promotion of diversity through its own affirmative action programs. So the Riggs amendment will be debated, and I hope that we will prevail and not have the Federal Government participate in the blocking of opportunities for large numbers of deserving students who need to go to college. Unfortunately, as a New York City resident, a New York State resident, I will be participating in the argument knowing fully well that an effort is being made in my own city and my own State to accomplish the same action, to accomplish the same ends through the back door. We are going to close off opportunity to large numbers of people. And whereas I started by saying this Higher Education Assistance Act fails to increase opportunity by increasing the amount of funds and resources available so that poor people, no matter what color, race or creed they may be, will be able to take advantage of the higher education process, we do not have that. Yet we are going to have to debate an attempt to throttle even further that which exists already. At City University of New York proposals are being made that they raise the standards of the senior colleges using SAT scores and cut off the admission of large numbers of students who cannot measure up to those SAT scores, although they are graduates of the schools in New York City. They also want to greatly reduce the amount of remediation done in the senior colleges and in the community colleges, two-year colleges. What this will do, if we reduce remediation, if we require students to make remediation before they enter college, we will greatly reduce the number of students because remediation is needed by large numbers of students. Eighty percent of the students have some form of remediation that they participated in during the course of their time in college. Remediation are courses in effect across the country. Most colleges and universities have some remediation programs. What we have learned about the human mind and the learning process ought to tell us that remediation is a natural thing to have in higher education, because genius and talent is not comprehensive. It is not across the board that every student who is very good in English is also going to be good in math; those who are good in science are also going to be good in foreign languages. Remediation helps to balance out a process that nature has started, and we only rule out genius if we start insisting that remediation courses should be eliminated. Mr. Speaker, I made the following statement, and I want to close with this statement. I did want to talk a bit about one other amendment that we will have on the floor tomorrow connected with information technology, the need for information technology workers. I will have an amendment to provide for information technology partnerships between colleges and community-based agencies in order to provide more opportunities for young people to get exposure to computers and be able to determine whether or not they want to go into computer technology. They will have a chance to practice and a chance to get excited by it, and then apply it to a community college and a college to go into a program. The college would run these local centers where students would have these opportunities. Mr. Speaker, I just want to close with my statement before the City University Board of Trustees. I thanked them for the opportunity to testify and then I mentioned that all over the world the education of masses of youth emerging from educationally deprived backgrounds is a vital challenge to the process of building a new global society with abundant supplies of indigenous leadership. If we meet this challenge of educating those who arrive in our college classrooms with inadequate preparation in the City of New York, in the City University, if we can take freshmen from impoverished backgrounds with enormous skills deficits but who have normal brains and great potential, if we can take this kind of raw material and create productive and independent citizens able to take care of themselves and also serve as leaders, if we can seize the situation which we presently confront, then we will have a system that produces a priceless global product. Using this method, the methods established in New York, with our great and enormously diverse population, we will have developed a blueprint, a model for higher education which would be applicable anywhere in the world. The world market for such a service is almost unlimited. It would be a product of highest value. In other words, the challenge is to take the people who have the deficits educationally for whatever reason. The New York City public schools are inadequate now and they have gotten worse over the last 10 years, so students with good brains and great potential may have skills deficits, and the only way to deal with those skills deficits is when they get to college. What is happening in New York City is a tragedy, however. At a pivotal point in the life of the city, as we approach the dawn of the 21st century, there are confused but powerful forces in the city which are turning a time for triumph into a time for tears. President Clinton has rightfully referred to America as an indispensable nation. It is not exaggerated to state that in this indispensable nation, New York City is the indispensable city. In order for this city to maintain its rightful place and fully realize its destiny, an open, thriving, creative City University of New York is an indispensable institution. City University of New York is the jewel in the crown of our unique urban civilization. This is a moment at which we must truly rally our better instincts, our common sense. We must rally our well-cultivated logic and our receptivity to the evidence provided by well-known studies. Such studies show that the record of CUNY is a laudable one. City University of New York has a laudable record. Consider the fact that the cost to educate a single student is so much greater in Harvard, and even greater at West Point, $120,000 per year per student. Despite the shoestring budget of the City University of New York and repeated fiscal harassments, City University of New York has endured over many lean years. City University of New York still stands in the ranks of the greatest in its production of outstanding scholars, Nobel laureates, scientists and international prize winners. The City University, as I said before, is indispensable to the life of the city. Any university anywhere in the country, all of our public institutions, following the tradition of the Morrill Act, following the tradition of the GI Bill, all of these have a great deal to offer as we go into the 21st century. We should look at the Higher Education Act tomorrow as being inadequate but at least a start, and find ways to improve and expand on the Higher Education Assistance Act which will come before us for deliberations on the House of Representatives floor tomorrow morning.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Inc. (CACCI) and the honorees of the 13th Annual Entrepreneur of the Year Awards Gala. The special event will be held in Brooklyn, New York on April 23rd, 1998. Mr. Roy Hastick, Sr., President and CEO of the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Inc.; Mr. John Imperiale, Dinner Chairman; Mr. Richard Jackson, Chairman of the Board for the Chamber; and other organizers of the event have tirelessly dedicated themselves to developing an event that will celebrate the accomplishments of a few outstanding entrepreneurs in New York City. The CACCI is a statewide, not-for-profit organization incorporated in the State of New York in 1985 to promote economic development among Caribbean-American/African-American and other minority entrepreneurs. During the many years of dedicated service to the business community, the Chamber of Commerce, Inc. has aggressively and compassionately pursued opportunities to ensure the survival of Caribbean/African American and other minority entrepreneurs. The Chamber's contributions to the economic development have increased their level of influence in today's competitive business climate. Over the past several years, the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Inc. has received numerous awards for its strong advocacy role. In 1998, the Chamber of Commerce was awarded the National, New York State, and New York City Small Business Advocate of the Year awards. More recently, the Chamber received the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award, the Ronald H. Brown Business Service Award, the U.S. Small Business Administration Award for Distinguished Service, and the New York State Federation of Hispanic Chamber of Commerce ``Chamber of the Year Award.'' I salute the fifteen honorees who have made significant achievements in their respective professions and who deserve recognition for their devotion to our Caribbean-American/African American community. The individuals that will be honored at the special event include the following: Denzel Bacchus, President of Exotic Caribbean Products; Clifford P. Charles & Kenneth A. Charles of Charles and Charles Certified Public Accountants; Grace Claxton-Johnson, President of Johnson Home Care Services, Inc.; Julia Lystra Collis, Owner, President and CEO of Aristocrat Manor; Ricot Duputy, President of Radio Solliel D'Haiti; Rosner Jean George, President of Irvington Manor Catering Hall; Dick Gidron, CEO/Founder of Dick Gidron Ford; Herman Hall, Publisher of Everybody's Magazine; Lowell Hawthorne, President of Golden Krust Bakeries, Inc.; Daniel Passrello, General Manager of Kings Plaza Shopping Mall; Balfour Peart, Manager of Worldwide Sales; Ellis Watson, President of ETS Air Shuttle; Zamal Sanker, CEO of Caribbean Daylight; and Josephine Infanti, Executive Director of Hunts Point Local Development Corporation. The honorees of this year's awards dinner represent national and international models for the promotion of economic opportunity and leadership in the business community. They have displayed a level of determination and commitment to economic development that must serve as a source of inspiration in other cities. These community leaders represent an unwavering commitment to job creation by recognizing the positive impact that equal opportunity in employment has on the quality of life for many residents of the city and the State of New York. It is these unique and special qualities as individuals and business professionals that warrant their recognition. I am proud to be involved with such an accomplished group of individuals. I am certain that my colleagues will join me in honoring these remarkable individuals. I commend the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Inc. mission to ensure diversity in the American business sector. I further commend the Chamber for their impressive showcase of professional excellence. Mr. Hastick, Mr. Imperiale, and Mr. Jackson have committed their lives to developing closer political and economic ties between persons in New York and in other nations. I look forward to broadening and deepening my friendship with the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Inc. in the years ahead for the benefit of the people of Brooklyn and New York.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we have just returned from a recess, the Easter recess, and I think the period between now and the 4th of July will be a very busy period where the Congress has some business that has to be conducted, and I hope that we will be able to make room on this very busy agenda for some items that I think are of great necessity. I hope that in the next few months we can see an end to one feature of this Congress that is highly undesirable, and that is the attack on working-class families. The attack on working families must cease. It is counterproductive. It does no good. It is out of step with the present situation in America where we are enjoying unlimited prosperity. The stock market, the Dow Jones average has jumped to the 9,000 level. It is double what it was 2 years ago. Unprecedented prosperity we are enjoying, and yet at a time like this, the war on working families has been intensified by the Republican majority. I can speak from intimate experience about this war on working families, because I serve as the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. So we are having hearings; we are having markups; and I know intimately how this war is intensifying, and it has become a kind of a microguerrilla warfare. The Republicans did a very strange thing in 1994 when they authored a Contract with America. It had nothing in there about attacking working families. It had nothing in there about attacking unions. There were no antilabor platforms parts of the contract. That was the overt contract. Obviously, they had a covert contract, because immediately after the Republicans won the majority, in addition to pushing their overt Contract with America, there was an attack started in 1994 on the working families, a steady attack. That was an attack which was sort of open warfare, out in the open, and with heavy armor. The public could clearly see what was happening; the workers could see what was happening clearly, and we rallied our forces against those people who wanted to end, at one point wipe out the Department of Labor, and then wanted to wipe out the National Labor Relations Board. They wanted to bring OSHA to a standstill. There were numerous kinds of activities that were undertaken in 1994 that were beaten back. They basically lost their first set of assaults. But now we have a kind of microguerrilla warfare where they are going to chip away at the foundations of the protections for the working families of America. They have come with all kinds of camouflaged attacks. Now, frequently we have bills that only take one small part of a major piece of labor regulations and law and begin to attack that, chip away at that, in the hope that they will be able to slowly erode and maybe gain some momentum later on for bigger attacks. So I think that it is time to call a halt to the attack on working families. It should cease at this point. You lost the first phase of the war in the last Congress, so why not let that be a lesson. The new strategy of tactics, I do not think it will work, because if we maintain an open society, if we continue to debate the discussion, the common sense of the American people, the American voters will rise up and pass judgment on those who insist on repeatedly attacking working families. In this atmosphere of prosperity, where unprecedented amounts of money are being made, and certainly the people in the top 10 percent, the top 20 percent, are doing very well, why even allow ourselves to be consumed with a discussion of how to make the pie smaller for working families? How to oppress working families in terms of their working conditions? How to block benefits from working families? Why do we not have a more expansive attitude by both parties. Let us have a bipartisan initiative whereby we seek ways to spread the prosperity that we now enjoy to all of the American people, including the workers? We have got the wrong war going, the wrong set of energies being expended at this point. We should focus our energies on how to spread the prosperity, how to use this to make a better, a fairer playing field for workers. We need a terrain where everybody in America can reasonably pursue happiness, the pursuit of happiness that is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. It should still be our goal, and everybody should not just have the right to pursue happiness, but we ought to have a fair playing field, a terrain that allows that to happen. We can do it. It is possible now. No society ever in the history of the world has enjoyed the kind of resources that we have at hand now. So instead of attacking working families, let us look at working families as being a major resource. Our human capital is our major resource. In this very complex, modern society of ours, it is what happens to the human capital, the people and their minds, and the way they operate, which will determine where our society goes. So I want to talk tonight about the attack on working-class families and how that ought to cease, and we ought to direct our energies instead towards spreading the resources to guarantee that working families participate in the present prosperity. There are a number of areas in which the attack on working families does continue. It is quite obvious not too many weeks ago, a few weeks ago, we had one bold initiative brought to the floor here, the Paycheck Protection Act. The Paycheck Protection Act is one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation ever introduced in America. It has not been talked about in the proper context. What the Paycheck Protection Act is seeking to do is to cut the throat of the working families, cut the throat, the voice, end the voice, completely shut them out of the dialogue, circumscribe our open society, which is so invaluable. One element, one very strong element, the labor movement, the organized workers, would be destroyed if the Paycheck Protection Act was passed. The Paycheck Protection Act boldly states that we are going to put unions in a position where they will not be able to function. We will give them so much democracy they will choke to death. Now, I am going to take some time to talk about this, because it seems to have appeal to some people, whereas the chances of it going anywhere here on Capitol Hill, we would beat it back and the likelihood that it would get passed here is slim. But the effort by the Republican majority has taken a guerilla warfare approach and spread out, and it now comes through all the States. Many States have introduced legislation very similar to the Federal legislation that was introduced here in Washington, paycheck protection, meaning silence the unions. We can summarize it by saying it is a bill that says unions have to consult with all the members before they make major decisions. They have to have the approval of all the members on every decision. That kind of democracy is a democracy of death. Even in a small unit like the family, if you told the person who is going out to shop for groceries, you will need to get approval from us on how you are going to spend this week's grocery money, on all the decisions, you would wipe out the process of being able to have anybody do the shopping. It is that simple. If you want to destroy America, tell the voters that they have a right to demand from every congressman that they once a year check with them and no decisions can go forward, no actions can be taken, unless they approve it a year in advance. Any institution can be brought to its knees that way. That is not honoring democracy. That is not exalting democracy. That is using democracy as a weapon. That is going to extremes in order to destroy it. That is basically what the Paycheck Protection Act says, that unions, unlike corporations or any club that you ever belonged to, there is no institution that operates in a way where it has to get the approval of its members ahead of time for any basic decision. It is impossible to function that way, and yet unions are going to be required to do that. Unions are already under great restrictions in that they have the Beck decision which, in essence, says a union member has a right to demand that his money not be spent on activities other than those connected with collective bargaining and the benefits that they receive and the administration of those benefits. So they can demand that their particular dues money be separated out in a way which allows it not to be spent for anything except the direct activities related to collective bargaining. Already, that is almost impossible to administer. There is a whole lot of paperwork. Most unions, of course, are doing that already. To go one step farther with a Paycheck Protection Act which demands that they lay out their plans, and certainly any positions that they are going to take with respect to public policy must be taken ahead of time, the union members have a right to do that. So we have that bold step taken which is going for the jugular vein of the union movement, which is an example of how that attempt to oppress working families has taken a new turn. It is more intense than ever. There are still great problems with Davis-Bacon being still a candidate for ambush behind the scenes. In every major bill related to construction expenditure, on Federal funds on construction, you have the Davis-Bacon ambush waiting, an attempt to put into law something to curb Davis-Bacon or even not allowing certain things to go forward and move. One of the problems with the school construction initiative is that there are too many of the Republican majority who would, rather than see no schools built, if they have to be built under the Davis-Bacon provisions, they would rather not go forward. It is really a blind approach, like the woman who came before King Solomon claiming to be the mother of a child, and yet she was willing to see the child cut in half. And Solomon, of course, immediately identified her as not possibly being the mother of the child. How can you be the mother of a child and want to see it cut in half? How can you care about education and worry about the problem of using Davis- Bacon regulations in the construction of schools? We have a minimum wage problem that nobody wants to discuss. We passed a minimum wage bill 2 years ago. Some people said it would be over their dead bodies, but we managed to do it, and nobody died. Nobody in the Congress had to pay that final price, give the last measure. It passed. Nobody died. We have gone two steps now. It is unto $5.15 an hour. It is time to increase the minimum wage again, if for no other than reason than to share the wealth. But there are much better reasons because, as far as working people are concerned, the minimum wage still has not caught up with the years of inflation. We are still behind in terms of the buying power of the dollars that workers receive, so the minimum wage needs to be increased just to bring us one step closer to where the buying power of the dollar is today. There are some moderate proposals on the table to increase it merely by 50 cents per year for the next 2 years, which would bring the minimum wage up to $6.15. Most workers are way ahead of that already. There are a good number that still need the floor of the minimum wage, but most are ahead of that already. It is only fitting and proper in a time of great prosperity that we increase the minimum wage. At least we can do that. There are many, many ways to share the present prosperity we enjoy. We could go for a universal health system, a universal health system which guarantees everybody a decent health plan, and stop this kind of approach that we have now, a piecemeal approach which in the end may be costing us more, giving us worse health care and costing us more, to really having a universal, single-payer health plan. That is one way we could spread the prosperity and help us to guarantee the pursuit of happiness on a fair playing field for everybody. But if we do not want to go that far, the minimum, the least we can do, is to guarantee that working people receive a little more money for the hours they put in. So the minimum wage, Davis-Bacon. We should stop the war on occupational safety and health issues. That still goes on. OSHA is being attacked every day from new angles, chipping away. The attempt to sort of bring OSHA to a standstill and paralyze the agency completely failed. They did cut the budget. They have a trophy. They drastically cut the budget. They cut the budget of NLRB. They have some trophies to take home in this dangerous war against working families, but it still exists. OSHA is there and needs to be left alone to provide more safety for workers. We still have a problem of more than 6,000 workers dying in the workplace. We still have a problem with more than 50,000 workers being injured in the workplace. It is not moving rapidly enough. Preventable deaths are still happening as a result of inadequate occupational safety and health procedures. Migrant and seasonal agricultural workers, they are still trying to chip away at the small protections that they have. I came back today for a hearing at 2 o'clock related to migrant and seasonal workers, where they are trying to take away the very measly, minimum protections that we have there. Those are the most exploited workers in America. The fact that they do not give contributions to any party, the fact that a lot of them are immigrants as well as migrants, also lessens their political effectiveness. But a great country does not worry about human beings' capability of making contributions; a great country seeks to protect all of its citizens. I am certainly glad that Abraham Lincoln did not worry about the fact that the slaves did not have any PACs. They could not give any contributions. The slaves had no political influence. In fact, the career of Abraham Lincoln might have been guaranteed as a rosy career, going on and on with the least amount of stress, if he had just forgotten about the slaves. I am glad there was something in his American blood that made him care about those who could do nothing for him politically, and he set the slaves free. Migrant workers and a lot of people at the bottom of the rungs deserve that kind of protection, as do all of us. The Federal Employees' Compensation Act, like Workmen's Compensation at the State level, we have a Federal Employees' Compensation Act which is not very different, but there are assaults on that as being too expensive and too costly. We had a hearing on that about a month ago, the Federal Employees' Compensation Act; FECA, it is called. What came out of the hearing? That there are large amounts of payments going to workers who have now retired. Twenty-five percent of the payments are going to them, and a large part of that expense that is disturbing so many people is going to the older workers. Why are there are so many older workers who are getting FECA? Because they had no occupational health and safety provisions years ago when those people were in the workplace, and large numbers became injured with serious injuries. Preventive measures taken many years ago would have saved us untold numbers of dollars, millions and millions of dollars. But instead of taking those steps years ago to implement the kind of occupational safety and health procedures in the Federal workplace that we should have done, we did not do it, and we have these people now, and we want to prey upon the weak. We want to take away some of their benefits. We want to get very technical and talk about the fact that they should not be getting the money they would have received if they had not been injured, and a whole number of arguments are offered which run against the grain of the American legal system. If each one of these people who were injured in the Federal workplace had been able, because there was no workmen's compensation, no restrictions on them, been able to go and sue in court, they would have gotten far more money for these injuries, probably far more. They do very well in these cases. Many are open-and-shut kinds of cases, because the Federal Government has not been so generous. They challenge people who say they have injuries, and they challenge people who have disabilities, and it is not easy to get the compensation. But that attack on old workers who have gone out of the work force, who worked for the Federal Government, that attack is one of those attacks that is most despicable, but it goes on. So I am here to talk about that, and I mentioned the Paycheck Protection Act first because it is important that we understand what is involved. They are able to oppress the workers and squeeze them tighter, although why we should squeeze workers more I do not know. Now with unprecedented prosperity, a Dow Jones average of 9,000, and the stock market roaring ahead, why we are preoccupied with squeezing workers? But whatever facets of human nature are driving this effort to oppress working families, it is there. In order to do that, they feel they have to have a closed society. They have to get rid of the one voice out there that is able to keep pace with the Republican contributors. The Republican contributors are predominantly corporations, big business, people who may be misguided enough to believe that they have to squeeze more out of the workers. How do the workers get to be the enemy, when the evidence and the facts show that the workers are not the enemy, they are part of the success of the American system? Why that cannot get through, we do not know, but that is the case. They want to silence the one element that in the last election was able to stand up and challenge the multi-billion dollar electioneering process of the Republican party. Only organized labor could produce money out there to put issue ads in front of people and make them think about what was happening with Medicare, Medicaid, the minimum wage or any vital issue that had to be discussed in a way which required maximum visual exposure on television or radio. It was organized labor that was the one opposition voice that across the country could be mounted against the Republican majority's open-ended expenditures. So the decision has been made to go after them, to cut off their voice, to end our open society. The debate will be far more one-sided than it is now. Even with labor, organized labor, able to expend $1 million to get the other point out there, it is still a lopsided argument. The expenditures of soft money with respect to the Republican party versus the Democrats, who were supported by labor unions, was at least more than 20 to 1, the soft money. The rest of the money, it was like between 7 and 10 to 1 on the hard money. So it is way out of kilter in terms of the kind of money being spent. They want it to go even further. Let us wipe out any well-financed opposition totally. George Soros, who happens to be a billionaire, and I commend him because I do not think that this discussion has to be stratified in terms of here are the rich here, and the poor over here, and all rich people are foolish enough to believe that they have to wage war against working people. I do not think all rich people are foolish enough to believe they have to wage war against working people. I do not think all corporations are foolish enough or misguided enough to think they have to wage war against working people. In fact, the biggest corporations that make the most money have unions. They have not gone to great lengths to prevent the formation and continuation of unions. Unions are shrinking in size, and it is interesting that the American economy now, you know, is more and more a smaller set of entities. The businesses are in smaller units and that is part of what is happening with respect to the decreasing number of people who organize. We also have not kept pace with our labor laws and our National Labor Relations Board. It is too difficult to organize in these smaller units, and there are various reasons that I do not want to go into tonight why we have fewer unionized workers, but certainly we do not want a situation where the kind of opposition and strong national voice that unions can mount will be silenced. George Soros talks about nothing is more important at this point in American history. We are so prosperous and so successful and there is no competing superpower. Nothing is more important than keeping an open society, whatever has to be done to keep an open society where we have a large number of newspapers and we have got a voice there, we have voices there that compete with each other, we have voices on television and radio that compete with each other. We have a society where the dialogue is not all forced to go one way. Of course, we say we have freedom of speech. That is part of the Constitution. So why are we worried about that? It so happens that despite freedom of speech and despite the Bill of Rights, if one does not have money or resources, constitutional rights begin to get very weak. The fact of modern society is that we are going to have to take a look at the relationship between money and resources and rights, and one of the rights is freedom of speech. George Soros says one of the great problems in totalitarian societies, and certainly in the case of the Soviet Union, was that it was a closed society. The Soviet Union has probably a higher literacy rate than America and most countries in the world. The Soviet Union, which put Sputnik up before we had a thing up there in space and put up a space station and had great rocket power and the power to land ballistic missiles, we think to mount intercontinental missiles and have them land, be deployed in Russia and land here, all of that great, very well-organized, very competent, scientifically competent society came crashing down. It came crashing down. I agree with the analysis that says it is primarily because it was a closed society. Even if there are brilliant people, if they are making decisions in a closed circle and something goes wrong, and they all begin to go in the same direction and there is nothing to come in from the outside to make them get the perspective or correct it, then there is a problem. Certainly when political decisions are overwhelming everything else, the scientists begin to look stupid. The financial masterminds, they are overridden. No matter what science, evidence, reason says, if the decision-makers at the political level are going wrong and there is nothing to correct them, no force will make them correct themselves, then that closed society becomes the engine for doom because the blundering and the decision-making will carry them downward and downward in a faster spiral. Ridiculous things were being done, and still are to some degree, by a great Soviet society, a closed society. I will not say whether it was communism or socialism that brought them down. Closed capitalist societies suffer the same problem, and we have totalitarian societies that have also been closed, and some still are. They are capitalists but they are Fascists or they are totalitarian. They suffer the same problems. And we have some semi-democratic societies. There is a rash now of problems in the Asian countries. The great Asian economic miracle, there is a problem now. Part of it is because they have so many dictators and patriarchs and old ways of doing things that will not allow other voices to come in which could challenge that closed society. So labor should not be silenced. We are an indispensable Nation, the President says, and I think in order to remain an indispensable Nation with great resources we are going to have to keep the society open. And the last thing we want to see is a Republican majority victory over labor which puts the voices of the working families in chains. We are an indispensable Nation and we must see workers as being indispensable, an indispensable part of our indispensable Nation. This term ``indispensable Nation'' was used by President Clinton, and I heartily agree that America at this point is an indispensable Nation. We have to make up our minds about how we want to behave as an indispensable Nation. But the Roman Empire was merely a village compared to the American colossus. What we are now would make the Roman Empire look like a village. The American colossus is something that has never existed before on the face of the earth. It is a totally new phenomenon. We do not have an empire which we maintain with bullets and guards and tanks. We are not oppressing anybody anywhere in the world in order to make them accept our influence, our systems. We have a great deal of influence without that. Our popular culture probably is the most widespread phenomenon on the earth. That has no bullets and no tanks behind it. The American colossus as a successful economic system is now being emulated and imitated. And because it is so successful, and not all of the things that have been done would I endorse in this process of being successful, but it is a successful economic system compared to the other economic systems now, so dollars are going to flow at greater and greater rates into the American coffers. Our stock market is up primarily because we are not demanding tribute from the rest of the world. The nations of the rest of the world, at least their investors and their capitalists, are bringing their tribute, are bringing their dollars to invest in our economic system. The Wall Street phenomenon, the stock market rise, the Dow Jones average increase, all of that is being driven by large amounts of money flowing in from all over the world. All roads used to lead to Rome. All roads now lead to Wall Street and the stock exchange, All money and all investment, because this is the place to put it. That is one part of our prosperity. This American colossus ought to become for the working families a new phenomenon where we can guarantee that everybody will have a right to pursue happiness on a terrain that is reasonable. We do not want a worker's paradise. We do not want to use terms like that. When the rhetoric gets carried away by politicians and economists or we jump into the Bible, beware. Do not listen to anybody that says they are going to create a paradise. We are not going to create heaven on earth through a secular process. We are not going to create a paradise, but the least we can do is have a playing field where working families have a chance to make it. We are a pivotal generation with an abundant supply of resources, and we ought to be thinking in terms of how can we use those resources to guarantee the most good for the most people. We could mount big initiatives of many kinds. I do not have a list of initiatives that I would propose, but one thing I would propose is that we at least consider how can people who go out to work every day get a greater share of the pie? How can people that go out to work every day be rewarded for their labor in a way commensurate with the kind of money being made at the top, with the kind of prosperity being generated by the overall economy? The Romans, and I have heard this example used at least twice over the last weekend. I think somebody has written a book on taxes and I do not unfortunately have the name of the person. I apologize to them. But they use an example in the book that the Romans at one point had so much tribute being paid to them, that Rome decided that they had so much money coming in that they would just give a certain amount of money to every Roman family. They did not include the immigrants, maybe. They had to be a real Roman, and every Roman family got a set amount of money regardless of what they did. They did not have to do any work for it, and there was something like 200,000 Romans at that point who lived in Rome and who qualified for the money and they distributed it. It was like a positive subsidy program. It could not be called welfare because it was a considerable amount of money. They did not have to work anymore. I suppose they had servants and slaves and others who were not Roman citizens. But according to this example, the Romans in the surrounding countryside heard about Rome giving out the money and they began all to come into Rome and demand similar subsidies, and that broke the bank and broke the system. But it is kind of an example used to ridicule subsidy, ridicule the distribution-of-wealth theory, ridicule any kind of social system which sought to spread the prosperity of the Nation to the most people. I do not think it is ridiculous. I do not think we should give subsidies to people and tell them every family deserves this money and they can take it and not have to work. I think the Saudi Arabians had so much money that that kind of thing was happening in Saudi Arabia. I do not think that is a wise step, but we certainly could spread the resources some other way. We could spread it through universal health care, and certainly through minimum wage increases, and we could stop oppressing workers in their working conditions. The Romans also were great builders. They invented the science of engineering and they invented concrete. They were also depraved in many ways, and one of the great concrete monuments that they built was the Colosseum, which was built as a place where animals fought human beings. Gladiators fought each other and that was too boring, so they started having animals devour human beings, and there was something sick there. We know about how a society can be very advanced on the one hand scientifically and be very savage and backwards in many other ways. We saw what the very well-organized and scientifically equipped Wehrmacht of Hitler did. We saw what a very civilized group of people, civilized in the usual sense of the word, did in World War II, and we have seen many examples of that in many places before. The fact that they were great builders and engineers did not mean that they knew how to make choices about the fact that they were indispensable and get a sense of mission that would make them rise above certain weaknesses. Building for them was an indispensable activity, and our public buildings also will be the first evidence that we have for future generations to measure us by. We may have great poets and dramatists, but in the future the thing that is going to be most highly visible is our buildings and our public buildings are very important. Which brings us back to the fact that it is a great shame that the war against working families leads to a situation where there is such a preoccupation with trying to prevent Davis-Bacon regulations from being utilized that we are stifling and inhibiting the process of building more public schools. There are a lot of other public buildings we need, but public schools we need most of all. $120 billion, according to the General Accounting Office, $120 billion is needed to just bring the infrastructure of public schools across America up to date. The fact most of those buildings at this point would have to be under the Davis-Bacon regulations if they had Federal funding leads many Members of the Republican majority say, no, we will not do it. We would rather have no schools than to have them built under Davis-Bacon regulation. It is very interesting that the Republican majority wages war on Davis-Bacon, and I have said this before and I must use it again and again to remind the Republican Majority of how ridiculous what they are doing is. Davis-Bacon is a Republican creation. Davis-Bacon was enacted, was really sponsored and supported by the Hoover administration. And that is one of the ironies. Just to refresh the memory, Davis and Bacon were both Republicans. It was in 1927, in a time of economic prosperity, particularly in the construction industry, when representative Robert L. Bacon, who was from New York, a Republican from New York who was also a former banker. Davis-Bacon originated in the head of a banker. He introduced the forerunner of what would become the Federal Davis-Bacon Act. Alarmed by increasing incidents of cutthroat bidding for Federal contracts by itinerant contractors, itinerant contractors using low- wage labor and as a result producing shoddy construction, Robert Bacon moved to protect Federal construction contracts. At that time shoddy construction was a major threat to a massive Federal building program that Members of Congress had just authorized. They had authorized a massive building program. And it was not the workers, the only thing they were concerned about, the wages of the workers at local level was a concern, that being undercut by the itinerant contractors, but also shoddy construction. Remember that. With the help of Senator James Davis of Pennsylvania, a former Secretary of Labor under three Republican Presidents, James Davis, Senator James Davis had been a Secretary of Labor under three Republican Presidents, the bill was passed. And in 1931 Republican President Hoover, Herbert Hoover signed the Davis-Bacon into law. Convinced of the law's benefits, Congress went on to incorporate Davis- Bacon labor standards into more than 60 Federal statutes. That is where it all originated. There was a time when the Republican Party did not feel a great compulsion, some kind of blind passion to wage war on workers. There was a time when this was not the case. At this point in history, it is not the case. Every piece of legislation which has an opportunity for Federal funds to be appropriated for building is immediately subjected to scrutiny, and the possibility of a Republican ambush. School construction, as I said before, is one of the casualties. School construction has been used as an example. It costs more to build schools if you use Davis-Bacon, if you build them under Davis-Bacon, which requires prevailing wages. Prevailing wages are not necessarily union wages. Prevailing wages, in some instances, in some States, are really minimum wages. It has gone down to that in a few States; that the minimum wage in cases of some people, beginning laborers and even bricklayers in one State, were close to the minimum wage. That was the prevailing wage. So it is not something fixed in stone. It is not something unreasonable and irrational and wasteful, but Davis-Bacon does maintain some kind of standards. Two sets of studies done by a professor at the University of Utah quite a number of years apart have come up with the same results; that Davis-Bacon regulations prevailing wages, whether the prevailing wages are under Davis-Bacon Federal statutes or under local State prevailing wage statutes, they do not drive up the cost of school construction. What they found is that when you take away the prevailing wages statutes, whether you, at the State level they have taken away, several States have repealed their State prevailing wage statutes where if State money was being utilized and no Federal money was being utilized, they would not be subjected to the prevailing wage requirement. That has happened. What has happened is that the workers wages have always gone down. But the cost of construction has either remained the same or gone up. What you have is the contractors walk away with a bigger profit. That is what the great war against Davis-Bacon is all about. There are contractors, large numbers of them, very powerful who want to make quick kills. They want to go in and make as much money as possible and get out. They know that untrained workers, people who are not receiving Davis-Bacon prevailing wages, often do shoddy work, but they do not care. They are willing to take their chances on litigation. There has been so much of that, so many contractors out there who fight Davis-Bacon; who fight prevailing wages; who want a jungle. They want to be able to go in a wild situation, and be able to work their will and get maximum profits. So many of them out there have ruined the atmosphere and the environment for construction to the point where there are now large numbers of business people, including the Business Roundtable, who have concluded that they would rather deal with Davis- Bacon contractors. Davis-Bacon contractors who work under Davis-Bacon regulations and are willing to do it, not fighting it, they have set up systems for training workers. They have done more to combat discrimination in the construction industry than any other set of forces or laws have done. Yes; there is still construction industry discrimination in many places. I will not argue there is not. But the Davis-Bacon workers, with their training programs working with the government, stabilizing situations have made a great number of gains in terms of ending discrimination for people who are in those training programs, and allowing them to rise through the ranks, as well as creating a well- trained, stable force. We are going to find ourselves in a situation where we do not have enough trained sheet metal workers, plumbers and bricklayers. We are going to find ourselves in a serious situation if we do not do a better job of training. Of course, the contractors, the itinerant contractors, the guys who want to make the quick kill, they do not care about the future. They only care about making a quick kill. We have had buildings fall down, school walls fall down as a result of sloppy work. New York City, we had, in the middle of the city, we had enormous traffic jams for almost a month because the bricks were falling off the side of a building. The quick-kill artists, the itinerant contractors had done such a good job of covering up who they were, they could not find out who was responsible for the bricks that were falling out so they could sue them or make them put it back up. It was just the whole game that certain parts of the contracting industry play; whether they go out of business, go bankrupt, appear under some other name, all the games are easier to play when you are not among the more responsible contractors who are willing to participate in the Federal program that is going to train workers and cooperate with Davis-Bacon. So the Business Roundtable came to the conclusion that they were going to consider, even though they were private contractors and not obligated to use Davis-Bacon contracts, they were going to consider setting the standard whereby as they bid on, they put out the bids, they were going to call for contractors to be participating in the Davis-Bacon program. Each construction project should be considered a monument for the future, not so much because we are worried about being in the future generations looking back on us as Greeks or Romans and praising us for our great buildings. But the buildings have to be safe; they have to be functional. There are many large residences, co-ops, condominiums where people have had to pay large amounts of money, big prices and still find themselves suffering from leaking roofs and plumbing that does not work, all kinds of phenomena that arise as a result of the wild cat, quick-kill contractors who have no standards. But the Republican majority refuses to accept the evidence. They want to make war on Davis-Bacon and they continue. We have had hearings in the last 2 or 3 years, several hearings on Davis-Bacon. We had an attempt to smear Davis-Bacon as an inevitably crooked operation. Take the Oklahoma example and make it apply all over the country. We have refused in our hearings, I will not say we because I am just a Democrat. The Republican majority, which controls the subcommittee and the committee, they refuse to listen to responsible representatives of the contracting industry. Yes; of course they will not listen to workers. They do not want to listen to unions. They want to silence unions. But here are businessmen, the Mechanical Electrical Sheet Metal Alliance is one of them. They begged our committee to allow it to testify; let us come and talk to you. It did not happen. In fact, I have a letter here which I would like to enter into the Record, and it is a letter from the Mechanical Electrical Sheet Metal Alliance where they say, on behalf of the Mechanical Electrical Sheet Metal Alliance, a coalition of more than 12,000 construction contracting corporations in the specialty sector of the construction industry, I want to propose a number of administrative improvements to the Davis-Bacon Act. We believe these administrative initiatives, if implemented, would significantly improve the quality, accuracy and timeliness of the prevailing wage determination process. The Mechanical Electrical Sheet Metal Alliance is a coalition of members of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America and the National Electrical Contractors Association and the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors' National Association. It represents more than 12,000 construction contracting firms nationwide which exclusively employ more than 540,000 union trades people with state-of-the-art technical abilities. I will include this letter for the Record: The Mechanical Electrical Sheet Metal Alliance March 20, 1998. Mr. Bill Gross, Employment Standards Division, U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, DC. Dear Mr. Gross: On behalf of the Mechanical Electrical Sheet Metal Alliance, a coalition of more than 12,000 construction contracting corporations in the specialty sector of the construction industry, I want to propose a number of administrative improvements to the Davis-Bacon Act. We believe these administrative initiatives, if implemented, would significantly improve the quality, accuracy and timeliness of the prevailing wage determination process. The Mechanical Electrical Sheet Metal Alliance is a coalition of members of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America (MCAA), the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) and the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors' National Association (SMACNA). It represents more than 12,000 construction contracting firms nationwide which exclusively employ more than 540,000 union trades people with state-of-the-art technical abilities. Alliance contractors hold a growing market share of more than 60 percent of the nation's non-residential construction activity. Alliance contractors annually train over 90,000 apprentice and journey persons upgrade training at a cost exceeding $175 million. These union contractor firms and their local association chapters sponsor over 1,000 local training programs staffed by approximately 5,600 instructions utilizing equipment and facilities owned by the training programs valued at more than $500 million. The Alliance fully supports Employment Standards Administration (ESA) efforts to improve the wage determination process and the quality, accuracy, and timeliness of the wage rates. We support efforts to find new ways to administer the process with greater efficiency so that the resources saved can be used on increased compliance measures. Mechanical Contractors Association of America, Inc., National Electrical Contractors Association, Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors' National Association, Inc. One example of business and labor, business and working families who are not afraid to work together, and as a result of working together under a government regulation, a government regulation which, by the way, was constructed by Republicans, Herbert Hoover, Bacon, Davis, all Republicans. It made sense then; it makes sense now. Republicans, call off your war on Davis-Bacon. Do not make war on Davis-Bacon. It does not make sense. It is out of step with reality. It is out of step with the present situation where we have unprecedented prosperity, and we should be seeking ways to spread that prosperity. Republicans, call off your war against the minimum wage increase. Let us go forward and get behind the more, the most reasonable bill. I really think we should increase the minimum wage to the level of the livable wage. In New York, we have a provision now for all people who contract with the city of New York. They must pay a livable wage, which is above the minimum wage. We ought to go for that, but the realities of the situation are that the President and Senator Kennedy in the Senate and Mr. Bonior, minority leader here, they all agree that we can take, and it is doable now, more modest steps at 50 cents an hour in two steps over the next 2 years. So 50 cents an hour increase on January 1, 1999, is proposed, and another 50 cents an hour increase on January 1, 2000. That means that in the year 2000 workers will be earning $6.15 an hour. In this indispensable Nation where the Dow Jones average is at 9000 and philanthropists are making billion-dollar contributions now, why can we not at least without too much discussion or further delay and more fighting by the Republican majority go on to increase the minimum wage by a dollar over a 2-year period? Three polls taken in January of 1998 show that the American people overwhelmingly support an increase in the minimum wage. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Peter Hart research poll showed support for raising the minimum wage ranging from 76 to 78 percent. Seventy-eight percent of the American people want an increase in the minimum wage. It is political; you cannot lose, Republican majority. Join us for a minimum wage increase. The last increase in the minimum wage has not cost jobs. According to a new study released by economists David Card and Alan Krueger, employment in the fast food industry in eastern Pennsylvania actually went up by 11 percent after the 1996 minimum wage increase. The Economic Policy Institute recently released a study entitled, ``The Sky Hasn't Fallen,'' which determined that employment was not adversely affected by the last increase. They had a study, Pennsylvania did not have a State minimum wage higher than the Federal minimum wage. New Jersey had a minimum wage already, a State minimum wage higher than the Federal minimum wage. When the Federal minimum wage went up, New Jersey was not affected because it was already above that level. But Pennsylvania, the industries in Pennsylvania had to raise their minimum wage. They studied the fast food industry in Pennsylvania and the fast food industry in New Jersey, and they found that Pennsylvania industry did not suffer any loss of profits at all compared to the New Jersey situation where they already were there. It was equal. There was no difference. Pennsylvania did not suffer as a result of having its fast food workers begin to earn more pay via the minimum wage. Consider the fact that today a single mother with two children working full time at a minimum wage job earns $10,700 a year. That is $2,600 below the poverty line as defined by the Federal Government. An increase of $1 an hour only partially restores some of the lost buying power of this person. On and on it goes. There are studies that show that the minimum wage does not hurt the economy even in times of normal economic growth. In a time like this when our GPI, the other measures of prosperity, Dow Jones average, leaping forward, surely we can at least spread the wealth by increasing the minimum wage. There are many other labor issues, which I mentioned before that should be considered as we call upon the Republicans to end what I call now a microguerilla warfare. They are chipping away behind the scenes. Remember in January of 1997, we passed a bill on this floor which took away cash overtime. Fortunately, it has not gone any further. The other House has not considered it. But it is out there. This Congress passed it. It is still alive in this session. We took away the overtime and replaced it with comp time. That war on workers may hurt most of all, and people cannot get cash. I remember I offered on this floor an amendment which said, okay, if you want to compromise, let us offer your compromise where people who are in the highest strata earning salaries, and they want more time to spend with their kids instead of more money, let them. Those who earn a certain amount of money above the minimum wage level, I think the figure was something like $11,000, everybody who earned less than $11,000 a year should be exempt from that requirement that they take their overtime in comp time instead of cash because they need the cash. Can you consider people making $11-$12,000, how much they need the cash? That exemption made so much sense, but it was not permitted. It was voted down on the floor and we passed the bill anyhow. It is out there somewhere. The guerilla tactics means that one day as the session approaches the end, we may have the Republican majority offering that again here on the floor. I close by saying that that is just one of the many microattacks; that is one of the many ambushes we have to fear. The bigger attack is still proposition 226 in California. That is what is similar to the Paycheck Protection Act here. California has the Paycheck Protection Act out there in a proposition. California has done a lot of damage with propositions lately. And the referendum proposition 226 will require unions to get annual approval of individual members before they can use any dues money for political purposes. If approved, the California proposal will become law in July and will greatly limit labor's role in November's pivotal gubernatorial election. Here is the political process directly being affected. If that proposition passes, labor gets crippled. Backers of the California initiative said they plan to spend at least $10 million. Polls show that 70 percent of the voters support the proposal. A lot of people are misguided and think this is democracy. They think we should have more democracy, unions should be more democratic. I say this is the kind of democracy that we choke on, this is the kind of democracy designed to destroy and kill organizations. Similar proposals have been introduced in 30 other States and are actively being pushed by conservative and business groups. Supporters say these groups expect to spend $20 million outside of California this year. This is the threat. This is the guerilla attack now coming up through the States. They will not win here this year. But if they can generate enough momentum through the States, we will have in the not-too-distant future a bill which gags working families. The voice of the working family would be shut out of the dialogue and the debate. America would no longer be an open society. It would be an endangered society.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the inaugural celebration of Caribbean Theatre Week. This unique week was made possible through the diligent efforts of persons at the Daily Challenge, and WLIB Radio, special community leaders and performers who have tirelessly committed themselves to developing events that celebrate the entire spectrum of Caribbean creativity. Caribbean Theatre Week, which will be held in New York on April 5-12, 1998, is a magnificent forum for presenting the significant artistic contributions made by Caribbean performers. In reviewing the history of the Caribbean, one can ascertain the importance of theatrical production in the Caribbean region. The advent of the Caribbean theatre contributed to the increase in national independence in the Caribbean islands. The theatre often served as a powerful tool for political communication that both defined and reflected the island's culture and identity. Caribbean Theatre Week is the brainchild of Mr. Dawad Philip, a poet, artist, and editor of the Daily Challenge in Brooklyn, New York. Mr. Philip and other organizers had the vision to develop an annual arts performance week that would bring a sharper focus on the depth and scope of this burgeoning theatre movement. They hope to bring the natural beauty of the Caribbean islands and the rich variety of cultures in the Caribbean islands to the theatre audience. The event was developed more than two months ago with just one event. Caribbean Theatre Week developed a momentum of its own, resulting in a week of culture-driven events and activities. WLIB Radio and the Daily Challenge have convened an impressive gathering of Caribbean playwrights, actors, producers, writers, and performance artists-- representing the English, French and Spanish Caribbean--to help celebrate the week-long series of events. Such a fascinating spectrum of the arts and theater during Caribbean Theatre Week will help the residents of New York deepen their appreciation for the vitality of the Caribbean island traditions. The organizers of the event have created a multi-dimensional showcase of Caribbean culture. Caribbean Threatre Week will showcase a Children's Storytelling Festival, Oral Folk Tradition, a Poetry Festival and poetry reading, a celebration of Caribbean dance, a symposium examining the state of Caribbean theater in New York, and Caribbean Street Theatre. The event will conclude with the grand finale, the New York Premiere of ``Jean and Dinah,'' performed by the Lord Street Theatre Company of Trinidad and Tobago. As we approach the new millieum, the ties that bind nations globally are becoming more apparent. Evens such as Caribbean Theatre Week serve as the perfect vehicle to understand and embrace the various cultures of the world. I applaud Mr. Dawad Philip, WLIB Radio and other organizers of Caribbean Theatre Week for celebrating the beauty, culture, warmth, and diversity of the Islands and its people. I also salute the artists and performers; their work exemplifies the wide range of talent in the Caribbean community.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, this Paycheck Protection Act provision is one more step in the oppression of working families by the Republican majority. If they are interested in stopping people from involuntarily contributing to political campaigns, then they should single out the corporations that can outcontribute the Democrats, the unions, by 20 to 1 in soft money. How many of the millions of shareholders in America were consulted or asked their opinion as to what position these corporations took when they contributed that soft money on which candidates they endorse? We are talking about many millions more than unions spend. Unions are under the control of the Beck decision. They have to do a lot of reporting. Each union member has certain rights in terms of the positions taken by the union, but what rights do shareholders have? Thomas Jefferson has been misquoted here several times. Certainly Thomas Jefferson will be in favor of equal oppression and equal repression if the government is going to oppress anybody. Why do we not do the same for corporations that we do for unions?

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, what we are saying is that we want working families to live by a different set of rules. We want two Americas. Working families and the people who represent working families have to live by a different set of rules. We want a loyalty oath for a worker going into a business; they must take a loyalty oath. We do not ask people going into management to take loyalty oaths. We do not ask consultants who come to work for a company to take loyalty oaths. They might be spying on you, industrial spying might take place by an outside company. Nobody asks them to take some kind of loyalty oath and prove their intent. What would happen if Bill Gates was to say to all the young people who are information technology workers that if you want to come in, that you have got to take a loyalty oath that you are not going to use your experience here to develop some business later? Half of them who go in go into the larger enterprises for the purpose of learning the ropes, then they go out and they develop their own entrepreneurial activity. That is the American way. It is that way for businesspeople. Why should it not be that way for people who represent working people or working people? You want a different set of rules. This is part of the Republican assault on working families. We had it in 1994. There was a Contract With America. In the Contract With America, they said nothing about attacking working families. But suddenly when they arrived, we found that they had a covert plan to attack unions and working families. They launched it. It was like Pearl Harbor. They launched a massive attack against unions and working families. The unions were not docile. They did not sit still and remain silent. They refused to take it. They fought back. Now we have a regrouping. Speaker Gingrich uses the metaphor often that politics is war without blood. Now you have the regrouping of all the forces. This Congress, they are now launching a new assault on working families. This is the first salvo of a new assault. There is coming later the Paycheck Fairness Act; they have got a whole line of things in respect to OSHA. Working families are still the target. This time it is going to be the Battle of the Bulge. They are going to go all out. The Paycheck Protection Act seeks to strangle, smother or stab unions in a way that they never would be able to recover. This is the opening salvo. We have got a whole series of bills like this designed to create an America for working families and their representatives which has nothing to do with the America the rest of us live in. I appeal to the Republicans to call off their war against working families. Let us not go through it all over again. We went through it in 1994. All the salvos against OSHA, we beat them back. NLRB, you wanted to kill before by going through the appropriations process and lopping off half the budget. You had one attack after another that failed in the last Congress. Now you are launching a desperation attempt because unions would not take it, they fought back, and they are vocal, they are defending the interests of working people. Now we have unheard of restrictions on activities that are designed to balance off the interests of the business class. Right wing, extreme business folks are demanding that you go through with this attack, you continue this attack, and we have a series of bills that now are clearly out to destroy the rights that everybody enjoys in the name of trying to protect us from unions that are extreme and subversive. Why should organizing a union be subversive? Why should a person who goes to work for a business be automatically suspect because they are a worker? Why should the NLRB now be reformed when it existed under the Bush and Reagan administration for many years and it took them forever to come out with decisions. The NLRB, OSHA, anything that relates to working people is under attack. This is the first salvo. I think we should understand it and get ready for it. Davis-Bacon, all of the kinds of things that have been set up over the years, sometimes by Republicans. Davis and Bacon were Republicans. But Davis-Bacon is under attack, too, the prevailing wage law. There is nothing that benefits working families in America that will not be attacked in the next few months as the new Battle of the Bulge is launched to try to get even with the unions for defending their own interests. You had Pearl Harbor. We suffered a terrible attack at Pearl Harbor. But remember who won the war. The unions in fighting back have only done what they are supposed to do in terms of representing the interests of workers. For representing the interests of workers now, they are told you are going to have to give reports; you are going to have to let every member vote and decide on any position you take. Corporations spend billions of dollars of shareholders money, but they never have to make reports. Corporations spend large amounts of political money, millions in soft money; they outspent the unions by more than 20 to 1 in soft money in the last election, but corporations will not have to make the same kinds of reports to their members. They will not have to have their members vote on every decision they make. This is clearly an attempt to create two societies in America, one for working families and one for everybody else. I think that we should understand this assault and stop it right now.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this is not a fair and balanced bill. This is a bill filled with dirty tricks. The tricks are pretty obvious. This bill to restrict workers from organizing is radical and extreme. The bill is part of a larger plot to create a separate America for working families and their representatives. We want workers to abide by rules that we are not making for anybody else. We do not require loyalty oaths for any other category of employees. Only the workers are required; middle management will not be required and technicians will not be required to take loyalty oaths. If the bill did that, of course, we would place businesses at a great disadvantage. Mr. Chairman, as I said before, if Bill Gates of Microsoft required that every young person coming into his company must take a loyalty oath that they are there to be ``bona fide''; They are never going to be entrepreneurs on their own; they are not going to walk away with certain secrets; they are forever loyal to the company; then he would destroy his own company. Mr. Chairman, this bill is just one of about 10 more bills that we can expect which constitute a battery of assaults in the 105th Congress on working families. It is a renewal of the assaults that took place in the 104th Congress. Labor unions have been good for America. The Republican attack is violating a commonsense bond, a commonsense covenant with the larger society. Labor unions are responsible for a lot of good things that have happened, including their drive and their willingness to take the case for the minimum wage to the American people, resulting in public opinion being changed in ways, marshaled in ways which the Republican majority could not ignore last year. Last year, NLRB destruction was attempted. In 1994, the assault was to wipe out the effectiveness of the NLRB by cutting its budget drastically. Now they are proposing that they speed up their deliberations. I think a lot of workers and unions would love to have NLRB speed up also. But are my colleagues on the other side of the aisle ready to say that they are willing now to give additional funding for NLRB and do what is needed to make it effective? The Reagan and Bush years almost destroyed the effectiveness of the NLRB. Let us restore the effectiveness by restoring their funding and let them serve the interests of both workers and business.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I have no additional speakers and I, too, yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Greenwood), the sponsor of H.R. 3096, and the Inspector General of the Department of Labor who recommended that we make this correction to the statute. The statute as presently drafted and the parallel language in the Federal Criminal Code differ, creating a discrepancy in the law which could have been interpreted to allow persons to receive FECA benefits on the basis of fraudulent information. The legislation before us makes a minor technical correction, changing an ``a'' to an ``or.'' This will ensure that persons who commit fraud and the receipt of FECA benefits would lose their entitlements to such benefits. I am pleased to support this legislation and again I commend the sponsor, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Greenwood), for bringing it before us. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. We share the same sentiments, but I think you are aware of what is taking place in the African American community, that there are large numbers of parents who have given up on the system and they want, they say they want vouchers. The polls show this. What is happening is our Republican colleagues, by the way, they know that in their districts their constituents do not want vouchers. Their constituents want continued improvement in public schools and they think they have good public schools so their own constituencies are not interested in vouchers. They are going to go out and advocate for the African American parents that they should have vouchers and they are using them as guinea pigs, they are whipping up all of these false promises about what vouchers may produce. And as I pointed out before, when you come to the point where you have the places in the private schools that are all too few and nevertheless they keep pushing the idea that vouchers are the answers to school improvement in America. It is a dogma. They seem blind to the reality and to reason. They go right ahead. But they are parading, there are parading African American parents out to support that argument. Our first duty is to get to the African American parents and leaders, and it is hard to tell them not to give up on the public school system because they have gone through so much and, as I said before, New York, things are getting worse in the public school system. But we have no choice. We have to drive it home. We have no choice. Most of our children are going to be educated in the public school system. We must improve the public education.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman. I think most people understand that I am not a fanatic. I am not an extremist. I am not coming repeatedly talking about the same subject because I have some kind of mental infirmity. I just think that our children, our grandchildren will be very disappointed in us if we do not take advantage of this opportunity we have at this moment in American history. We have no evil empire to fight. We have the highest prosperity levels that we have had in this century. If we do not invest in education now, when will we do it? Are we going to let these opportunities that are opening up go by without making an effort to have a match between the opportunities and the youngsters who are in this country right now? I am going to hasten on, and instead of doing the entire set of excerpts that I was going to do from Mr. Garibaldi's presentation, I am going to just read his abstract and go on to the other points I want to make. As I said before, this is a presentation to deal with the ``State of African American Education.'' I am reading from Dr. Antoine M. Garibaldi, Provost, Howard University, who gave this lecture on November 5th, 1997, at the 18th annual Charles H. Thompson lecture, and it is going to be published in the Journal of Negro Education. I heard him give his summary comments at a breakfast forum sponsored by the National Commission for African American Education at Howard University. To quote from Mr. Garibaldi, ``Even though significant progress has been made in attendance and degree attainment in elementary and secondary schools, college, graduate and professional schools, data shows that there has also been a pattern of regression with respect to African Americans' educational attainment and achievement over the last four decades. This mixed assessment, however, must be placed in an appropriate context and be used to improve further those conditions that are impairing the performance of African American students. ``Additionally, the presentation will highlight positive trends such as high graduation rates from high school, improved performance on selected tests on educational measures, successful school programs, successful students, the continued contributions of historically black colleges and universities to baccalaureate, graduate and first professional degree production, and to the preparation of African American teachers, to name just a few. ``Specific recommendations are also offered to raise the level of student performance, i.e. more rigorous curricula, higher educational standards and higher expectations for students, higher expectations by teachers, increased involvement by parents and the vigorous support of communities and nonprofit organizations. ``Many challenging issues and questions are also cited to demonstrate that serious work is needed to reduce the many inequities that still exist in the schools attended by African American students.'' Now, Mr. Garibaldi is an ex-professor. He was a professor at Xavier University at one time. He has been in the field for a long time, and he has accumulated quite a bit of firsthand experience, but he also uses very good sources, as he demonstrates in this presentation, in his thorough knowledge of the state of African American education. I am going to ask a lot of this be introduced into the Record without my reading it all, because the time is going rapidly. But I do want to begin by just pointing out that under elementary and secondary educational attainment, Mr. Garibaldi notes the following: ``Over the last four decades, African Americans have made tremendous gains in elementary and secondary educational attainment, and significant increases in high school completion rates began in the 1970s. In 1975, high school completion rate for 18- to 24-year-old African Americans was only 64.8 percent compared to 83 percent for whites and 80.8 percent overall. In 1995, however, 18- to 24-year-old African Americans' high school completion rate was 76.9 percent, which was a 12 percent increase over the 20-year period. But the high school graduation data for African Americans are even better for 25- to 29- year-olds between 1975 and 1995; in 1975, 71 percent graduated from high school compared to 86.5 percent in 1995.'' He goes on in a later passage to say, ``While African Americans' high school completion rates provide one barometer of educational attainment, performance on national assessments are needed to determine how much learning has been actually achieved. Thus, the best collection of national comparative data is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, a congressionally-mandated project of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. Since 1969, NAEP has periodically assessed students' proficiency in academic achievements in science, reading, mathematics and writing in public and nonpublic schools, with the specific purpose of evaluating the condition and progress of education in the Nation.'' He goes on to talk about performances in mathematics and reading and writing of African American students and students overall, showing that there have been some impressive gains by African American students, but they still fall far short, especially when we come to the SAT scores over the years. There is still a great gap between the achievements of white students and African American students who take the SAT test. There is a section which I think is important to bring to my colleagues' attention in this presentation which talks about the impact of poverty on urban schools: ``Earlier in this article great concern was expressed about the increasing segregation of many of the Nation's public schools. Of special significance here is the fact that most of the schools attended by nonwhite youth are located in urban areas. While this has been known for some time, numerous perceptions about the quality of these schools are fueled by unsubstantiated anecdotal comments. But a July 1996 report by the U.S. Department of Education on how poverty relates to the characteristics of students in urban, rural and suburban schools in the 1980s has made several notable comparisons in describing the students' school experiences, their school achievement, the expectations of their parents and other related factors. ``In this study, which is entitled Urban Schools, The Challenge of Location and Poverty, the methodology controlled for the extent of poverty and three types of school locations. The school locations that were examined included urban, suburban and rural areas, and the level of poverty in each school was defined by the percentage of students who received free or reduced-priced lunches. Thus, more balanced comparisons were able to be made on each factor even though more low- income students attended urban schools. ``The following highlights of the study's major findings show more clearly how factors of school location and the level of poverty in those schools directly and indirectly affect school performance. Urban, suburban and rural public schools with high poverty concentrations, 40 percent or more, were more likely to have larger minority student populations than schools with low levels of poverty. Additionally, urban public schools with higher concentrations of poverty enrolled larger numbers of minority students than high-poverty rural and suburban schools. ``Sixty-nine percent of students who attended high-poverty urban public schools, for example, were minorities, compared to enrollment of 26 percent minorities at low-poverty schools. Similarly, at suburban schools, 56 percent of the students in high-poverty schools were minorities, but only 10 percent of students at low-poverty suburban schools are minorities. Additionally, high-poverty rural public schools enrolled 35 percent minority students compared to only 9 percent at low-poverty schools. ``Thus, most African Americans and other minority students not only attend urban schools, but the schools also have the highest concentrations of students from families with low economic backgrounds.'' In other words, to summarize, no matter where African American students go to school, they are usually attending schools with a large poverty population. There is a correlation. The percentage of African Americans who are poor is quite great. It is much greater than the percentage of the overall population who are poor. I am not going to read any further, but I do want to submit for the Record additional pages from this lecture, which is entitled Four Decades of Progress and Decline in the Assessment of African American Educational Attainment. In the section that I just read, they mentioned poverty as a correlation with low achievement. I want to take a few minutes to talk about the scores of the students in the public schools of New York City, the elementary schools. There was a report, as I said before, in all the newspapers. The New York Times did something which was unusual. They took the poverty level of the school in the same manner in which the study that was cited here in Mr. Garibaldi's presentation. They chose the number of students who received school lunches as an indicator of the poverty of the school. Therefore, the prosperity of the school is indicated by just the reverse, the number who do not qualify indicate the income level. They chose that figure, and in their presentation of the results of the reading and math tests for New York City Schools, they added the income for each school, the income level, meaning the number of students who do not qualify for school lunches. If the income was 2.5, that meant that all of the other students did qualify; 97.5 percent qualified for school lunches. So the income level after 2.5 means that 97 percent of the students were poor, and in certain districts you have this tremendous concentration of poverty. The New York Times also went one step further and they chose to measure the performance of schools with a certain poverty level in New York City with schools who would have the same poverty level than the rest of the State, the same income level, not just poverty but those with high income were measured, too; and they have put another column in here called Reading Performance. And just certain quick observations. One of the highest income areas in the city, Staten Island, happened to be one the lowest performing areas. When you compare the performance of the students in Staten Island, which has an overall level of 58.9 million, meaning 58.9 percent of all of the students in Staten Island have incomes which disqualify them for school lunch programs, many of the schools have income levels which rate as high as 84 and 85 percent, I think 86 percent, very high income levels; and, nevertheless, it was one of the areas that scored lowest when you compared the performance of the students in those schools with the performance of students at the same income level in other parts of the State. So Staten Island I might note, as I have before, has a serious problem. And this barometer is a very interesting one that brings out the fact that we may have some serious problems in the way administrators and teachers and the system is conducting itself beyond poverty. However, poverty is still the major problem in the majority of the districts in New York City. The correlation between the reading scores and poverty is there in school after school except, in every district, one or two schools, despite the low poverty level, they stand out as having extraordinary performance. Which means that despite the fact that there is a close correlation between poverty and low performance, it can be overcome. And it is important that an attempt be made to overcome it and pinpoint at the schools that are performing well, we should pinpoint what factors allow them to overcome the poverty. I am going to just deal with District 23, which is one of the school districts. We have 32 districts in New York. District 23 is located in Brownsville, a large concentration of low-income housing projects. The overall income level in District 23 is the lowest in the City, just about, 8.3. Only 8.3 of the students have incomes so high that they do not qualify for school lunch programs. That means that 91 percent of the students are poor, they qualify for the school lunches, and a great deal would have to be done to overcome that. Finally, I am running out of time so I want to mention that, in dealing with the problems faced by areas like Brownsville District 23, we are going to need teachers in large quantities. We are going to have to do something unusual. The Higher Education Assistance Act that we are discussing tomorrow needs to focus on teacher training and ways to deal with that problem, just as it needs to focus on information technology workers. We have a TRIO program which has been over the years a program that works very well. The TRIO program produces students from low-income areas who were able to qualify for college admission, and they have a record of outstanding achievement. We need to look at the TRIO program in terms of the authorization level. We need to double, go so far as to double the authorization. Because from one end of the spectrum to the other, both sides of the aisle agree that the TRIO program, which consists of upward-bound programs, talent search programs, and some others, they work. If they work, we need to consider doubling the amount of appropriations and doubling the size of those programs in order to deal with the problem of poverty and the poverty relation to education if we are going to get students come out of the poverty areas and able to go to college and qualify to get the jobs that are available. Finally, we certainly do not want a crusade against remedial education in our colleges in New York. Education adds value to everybody who gets it, and remedial education as a part of the process will add value to the people who are in our City and enable them to go on to qualify for some of the jobs that are available and become productive in our society, thus lessening the kind of expenditure you have to make to support them. Mr. Speaker, I insert the following for the Record: [Pre-publication manuscript to be published in the Journal of Negro Education, Spring 1998] (Antoine M. Garibaldi, Ph.D., Howard University) The State of African American Education--A Presentation to the National Commission for African American Education (By Antoine M. Garibaldi, Ph.D., Howard University) abstract This presentation \1\ is based on an assessment of African American educational attainment--from the elementary grades to first-professional degrees--over the last four decades. Even though significant progress has been made in attendance and degree attainment in elementary and secondary schools, college, graduate and professional schools, data show that there has also been a pattern of regression with respect to African Americans' educational attainment and achievement over the last four decades. This mixed assessment, however, must be placed in an appropriate context and be used to improve further those conditions that are impairing the performance of African American students. Additionally, the presentation will highlight positive trends such as higher graduation rates from high school, improved performance on selected tests and educational measures, successful school programs, successful students, the continued contributions of Historically Black Colleges and Universities to baccalaureate, graduate, and first-professional degree production, and to the preparation of African American teachers, to name just a few. Specific recommendations are also offered to raise the level of student performance, i.e., more rigorous curricula, higher educational standards and expectations for students, higher expectations by teachers, increased involvement by parents, and the vigorous support of communities and non-profit organizations. Many challenging issues and questions are also cited to demonstrate that serious work is needed to reduce the many inequities that still exist in the schools attended by African American students. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Footnotes at end of article. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- These ``re-segregated'' enrollments have not occurred by accident; rather, they are partly the result of the out- migration of whites from urban to suburban school districts and the ineffective implementation of court orders designed to increase school integration in the late 1960's and 1970's. In spite of the 1954 Brown decision, it is discomforting to realize that in 1997 many of the schools attended by African Americans are still ``inherently unequal.'' elementary and secondary educational attainment Over the last four decades, African Americans have made tremendous gains in elementary and secondary educational attainment; and significant increases in high school completion rates began in the 1970's. In 1975, the high school completion rate for 18- to 24-year old African Americans was only 64.8 percent, compared to 83 percent for whites and 80.8 percent overall. In 1995, however, 18- to 24- year old African Americans' high school completion rate was 76.9 percent, a 12 percent increase over the twenty year period.

Mr. OWENS. Well, I think we are going to have that opportunity. I thank the gentlewoman for her comments.

Mr. OWENS. I think the gentlewoman might be aware, because, after all, she is from California, and that is where Silicon Valley is, she must be aware of this tremendous shortage of information technology workers. And she has probably heard we are going to have on this floor a proposal to amend the immigration bill by the people who were so harsh on immigrants and wanted to keep out immigrants. They are now going to have proposals here asking us to amend it, to bring in more immigrants who have high-technology experience, information technology workers. They are going to try to solve the problem of the shortage of information technology workers not by increasing the educational opportunities for the people in this country, they are going to bring in immigrants to do that. These anti-immigrant Republicans are going to be leading the fight to get more people in here to take those jobs instead of educating people here already to enable them to qualify for the jobs.

Mr. OWENS. Maybe it is because they have excellent leadership in an educator like you. They understand better.

Mr. OWENS. I think you have said public education. I just wanted to make a note here that large numbers of parents in the African American community, when they are interviewed for polls have been indicating that they want to send their children to private schools. The majority party, the Republicans are offering vouchers and scholarships, et cetera, to go to private schools as an answer, a solution to this problem. However, I have no problem with parents who want to send their children to private school if they can get them in. We have the mayor of New York with a scholarship program which provides spaces in private schools for 1000 youngsters. There are 1,120,000 plus youngsters who go to school in New York. So when they put out the indication that they want applications for the 1000 places, they got 22,000 applications, 22,000 applications for 1000 places. Here in Washington I understand they had a situation where they put out the same thing. There is a scholarship fund that has been set up by the private sector and they got 7000 applications for 1000 different places. Suppose they had more money and could give more tuition scholarships, how many private schools are there that can absorb the youngsters who are attending our public schools? How many are there and how quickly will they run out of space? Many of them have waiting lists for people who can afford to pay. They do not have room for them, let alone people who are coming in on the scholarship basis. So most of our children are going to be educated in public schools. I am all in favor of charter schools and experimenting with charter schools, but the reality is that in the next 10 years most of the children of America, certainly 95 percent of the children who live in the inner city who are African American are going to be educated in public schools. We have to improve public schools. That is the only real solution that is going to help African American students and parents.

Mr. OWENS. I am pleased that the gentlewoman has brought these statistics. You are talking about all students. We are talking about the mainstream. I am going to focus on just the African American community, but it is bad in many other places outside the African American community, suburbs and rural as well as in the inner cities.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about the continuing state of emergency in African American education. I have come here many times to talk about education, and I may seem repetitious, but I only come because I do not see enough movement among the decisionmakers at any level to deal with the emergency that we confront in the African American community. I do not see enough movement at the Federal level, I do not see it at the State level, I do not see it at the local level either, and I think that it sort of contradicts the intense feeling of the American people about education. They really want us to make some movements in a more rapid and a more positive way toward resolving some of the problems that our schools face. Despite the fact that the polls continually show that the American people rank education as a priority problem, there is this slow movement, and the problem faced by the mainstream community is serious enough. However, the problem faced by the African American community, where most of our young people who are school age are concentrated in the big cities of America, in the inner-city communities, they are staggering. The schools in many of our big cities are literally basket cases, and that is no exaggeration. I do want to punctuate my remarks before I go into a more thorough discussion of the emergency in the African American community, the education emergency, I want to punctuate my remarks with some good news. There is some good news that I would like to share with the people out there whose common sense has helped to make this happen. The common sense of the American people keeps bubbling up and getting to some of our top decisionmakers, and I think that it is finally breaking through to our top decisionmakers that construction, school construction, is at the heart of any effort to improve our schools. School construction and school repairs and things related to the simple matter of physical safety, and adequate equipment in the schools, those matters are central to any improvement efforts we make. One cannot really seriously talk about reducing class sizes and having a better ratio of students to teachers unless we also build additional classrooms. These are common-sense matters, but there are people who want to move on to reduce the sizes of classes, but they do not want to talk about construction. That costs too much money. They want to deal with a nonsolution. If we do not have the classrooms, and we talk about funds for more teachers, then that is a nonsolution. More teachers cannot decrease the ratio of students to teachers if they do not have a classroom to go into to teach those students. So the good news is that at the meeting this afternoon, Vice President Gore announced that on April 8 there will be a national forum on the whole issue of school construction, a national electronic forum. We are going to have a big event here in Washington that will be broadcast all across the country, and various groups will be meeting, and satellites will tie in some of the discussion. It is a very important development because it means that as far as the President is concerned, as far as this administration is concerned, they are not slacking, they are not hesitating to go forward with their push to get something accomplished that is significant in school construction in this year. I was disappointed that it fell off the radar screen last year. Somewhere the negotiations between the President and the majority party in the Congress, construction got lost and was taken off the table. It is quite clear that the President does not intend to take it off the table this time, and one indication of the commitment of this administration to a construction program is the fact that on April 8 there will be a national forum, a national discussion. Everybody is invited to do something at their own local level. I think Congress at that time will be on recess, but we are invited to do things back in our district, and I certainly plan to make certain that we do something of high visibility in my district to link up with the administration's effort to put construction, school renovation and things related to providing safe physical facilities for our children on the front burner in everybody's mind. We need to raise the level of awareness still of the voters and the average citizen, but I think they may already be ahead of the decisionmakers in our city councils and the decisionmakers in the State legislature and some of the decisionmakers here in Congress who are still not aware of the fact that this is crucial. Construction and everything related to physical facilities is crucial. The President's proposal is for $22 billion in loans. The loan program that was proposed last year has been made better by the fact that the last year's proposal talked of low interest rates and the Federal Government subsidizing so that those low interest rates would be there for the districts that chose to borrow to build schools. This time, the proposal says that there will be no interest rates. In other words, no interest will be charged. The principal is all that the locality will have to pay back. They are going to subsidize through tax credits. The lending institution, a variety of institutions that are going to participate in this process, the lending institution will receive a tax credit which will cover what they would normally be charging in interest, and the Federal Government will be responsible for that tax credit. This is a proposal that still has to pass. It has the support of the administration and in large part of the Congress, certainly the Democratic Members. I hope that we can keep a focus on this common-sense agenda. It is a simple matter on the one hand; it does not take a Ph.D., a very high IQ, to understand that we cannot improve education unless the place where the children come to learn is properly equipped, it is safe, conducive to learning, the laboratories have equipment for science courses that are held; there is a library. There are all kinds of things that need to happen. We need to also consider educational technology, telecommunications equipment, computers and video equipment. All of that is not a luxury anymore. That should be integrated into the whole process of improving our instruction, and those are capital items that ought to be in the fiscal facilities' budgets. Let us keep the common sense on target. Let us support the effort on April 8 and use it to further pressure our elected officials to move on school construction. They can move in New York City. They have more than $1 billion surplus. They expect $1 billion surplus from this year's budget. That surplus should be dedicated partially, certainly, to some aspect of school construction. Maybe New York can show that it cares about its children by first dedicating part of that available $1 billion surplus to the elimination of coal-burning furnaces. We have almost 300 schools that have coal-burning furnaces, and we could move to eliminate those coal-burning furnaces. Maybe on April 8 in New York City, we need to highlight this whole matter of the coal- burning furnaces as a way to get it started. New York State has more than $2 billion in surplus, and that surplus, some part of that could be dedicated to the elimination of the coal-burning schools. There is no reason why the combination of the city surplus funds and State surpluses could not be used right away to eliminate the coal-burning furnaces. We do not have to wait for the Federal Government, but I am grateful that the Federal Government, under the leadership of President Clinton, is going to remain on target. I hope that out of shame the localities like the State of New York and the City of New York, local governments and State governments all over the country will be shamed into getting out there and taking the lead before the Federal Government comes to our rescue, and I hope that the Federal Government's insistence that something must be done will certainly wake up the citizens to push and pressure and demand that we get some action on this matter of school construction. School construction is at the heart of any improvement, but there are many other things that have to happen. Tonight I do want to talk about some of the other things that must happen in order to really improve education in general and, specifically, education in the African American schools, schools where most of our African American students are educated. They still are, by and large, segregated in big cities in the North and far West. The patterns of housing are such and the dwindling commitment to integration is such that most of them are still going to school in segregated schools. I do not plan to deal with the virtues of segregation versus the evils of segregation, or the virtues of integration versus the evils of integration. I do not care to deal with that tonight. I think that the fact is that the way things have developed, we have large numbers of African American youth in inner city schools, and those schools are in terrible shape. I want to talk tonight from the base of a lecture that was given by an expert on this subject. I want to use excerpts from that lecture to pinpoint the kinds of things that are happening in African American education across the country. I heard a presentation by the author of this lecture. I heard the presentation on February 25 at Howard University, where we had a breakfast forum sponsored by the National Commission for African American Education and CRESPAR. CRESPAR is a program funded to help students placed at risk by OERI, the Office of Education, Research and Improvement. A combination of CRESPAR and the National Commission for African American Education sponsored this forum. This is the first of three forums. There is one each month; and one is going to be held on March 25, also at Howard University; and another will be held in April. The subject was the state of African American education, and the presenter was Dr. Antoine M. Garibaldi, who is the provost of Howard University. Dr. Garibaldi had previously given a lecture, the annual Charles H. Thompson lecture, on November 5 of last year. This lecture was used as the basis of his excerpts and his summary presentation at the February 25 breakfast forum sponsored by the National Commission for African American Education and CRESPAR. The contents here, what I am about to read some excerpts from, this total presentation will appear in the Journal of Negro Education in the spring of 1998. I do not know, they do not give the exact publication date, but the contents of this presentation will be there in full. The Journal of Negro Education will have this lecture entitled, ``Four Decades of Progress and Decline: An Assessment of African American Educational Attainment.'' So I am going to read some excerpts from this presentation, which I think is a very good summary. I also want to utilize the recently published test results from the New York City school system. The New York Times and the Daily News and some other papers carried the results of the reading and math tests for the elementary schools, and this past week they had the results from the middle schools and the high schools also. I have with me the results. I am going to confine my remarks to the elementary schools and the test results and what that means. I think New York City and the education system in New York City is an excellent place for case studies, or one big case study. We have a system with 1,100 schools and 1,100,000-plus students, more than 60,000 teachers. It is a fantastic laboratory for education. All kinds of things are going on there. It is a central-policy-making body, but it only makes general policy. They have 32 community school boards, and they differ in the policy- making bodies that they have. Therefore, the policies and the emphases differ, even though they are under one basic chancellor and one board of education. These differences are very interesting to behold. There are patterns that apply throughout the city to communities that are similar in terms of income and demography, and there are patterns sometimes that are broken, suddenly. When you see schools that break out of a pattern, it seems to me a good example to go study and find out why you have a high-performing school in an area of great poverty, when most of the schools in areas of great poverty in New York perform very poorly. The results of the reading and math tests, the test scores, in summary say to me that we have a basket case of a system in many of our districts. Many of our district's education has almost ceased to take place. The scores are so low that you cannot say you are educating anyone. Too many of the districts have those kinds of reading and math scores. I think that I could venture safely to say that the school system of New York City today, in 1998, is much worse than the school system of New York City was 10 years ago, in 1988. In 1998, it is much worse than it was in 1988. Ten years have been 10 years of decline. One major reason for this, an obvious reason, is that we pulled the leadership out of our schools. Responding to budget emergencies in the school system, we encouraged the most knowledgeable people, the people with the most experience, to leave the system. To save money, we wrecked the system. No corporation when it downsizes is as foolish as the New York City school system was. I will not say the school system was foolish. I do not think the teachers and administrators who made those decisions were foolish. It was the city hall and the budget crisis that motivated and pressured the system into taking these tremendous cuts by encouraging the most experienced staff to leave because they had the highest salaries. They had advanced up the ladder and those were the highest salaries. You can save a lot of money if you get rid of high-salary people and you bring in brand-new people to start at entry level. The problem with people starting at entry level, they have no experience as to how to run schools, as to how to teach. They need people with experience on top. That one action, which was really driven by budget considerations, it was the wrong decision. They should have done something else, somewhere else in the budget. The last thing that should have been done was to encourage the leadership to leave the schools. So we have schools that were not good 10 years ago that are far worse now as a result of many forces, but the major factor is the fact that they pulled out the leadership. They pulled out the best teachers and the best administrators. We cannot blame this on the top administrator, because we have had three or four top administrators in the position of chancellor in the last 10 years. The present one has been there 2 years, and we cannot really hold him accountable for what has happened. A chancellor in New York City would have to be around for 5 to 10 years before we could really hold him accountable. I hope we can maintain some kind of continuity and the present chancellor will be around long enough to see if that leadership has some continuity and will be able to stabilize the system and stop it from going down more rapidly and also to improve the system. I also want to speak about some observations that I have in the pending markup of the Higher Education Assistance Act tomorrow. I want to talk about the impact of higher education and what is happening in our colleges, on what is happening in our African American elementary and secondary schools. I am talking about the state of emergency in African American education. The emergency goes right through with higher education. The number of students in higher education is nothing to brag about. We have an increase, and I am going to talk about that number of African American students in higher education, the number who have graduated, the number getting masters' degrees and Ph.D.s. Those are increasing, but far too slowly. The number who are going into teaching, who come out of college, is decreasing. The number of African Americans who go into teaching and the percentage of African American teachers in the schools where the greatest number of African American students attend has declined over the years. It has gone down. That is part of the problem. I want to make some observations about the fact that we are considering the reauthorization of the Higher Education Assistance Act in a markup tomorrow in the Committee on Education and the Workforce. The Committee on Education and the Workforce will be considering this piece of legislation, which is only reauthorized once every 5 years, so it is a critical piece of legislation. As we go into the 21st century we are making a statement about the role of the Federal Government in higher education. I am not pleased with the kind of openness of this discussion up to now. I am not pleased with the breadth of the inclusiveness of this discussion. I have been here in Congress, this is my 16th year. I have gone through two reauthorizations of the Higher Education Assistance Act, and the other two were under our former colleague from Michigan, Representative Bill Ford, who later became the chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, and Bill Ford was noted for his inclusiveness in the decision-making. The way he approached the reauthorization was a whole year in advance he began the process. He started the process by sending out the old bill, the existing law, and asking for comments on existing law. A widespread request went out to all the people in the higher education community, asking them to give us their input as to how they would like the existing law changed. He started this process a whole year in advance of the markups. We had a process where people were involved. We had hearings at the regional level. We had hearings in Washington. We had all kinds of discussions going on in the higher education community, and when we finally came to the process of markup, there was a thorough understanding of what the issues were, a thorough understanding of what was being proposed. Then the markups went on sometimes for quite a long time. The higher education markup never concluded in one day. It is too great a burden to bear to rush through this process, and I hope we do not rush through it tomorrow. I think as we approach the year 2000, given the fact that the country now is enjoying one of the greatest eras of prosperity that we have known in this century, given the fact that we do not have to worry about deficits anymore, given the fact that there is no Cold War, given the fact that there are places where there are large numbers of vacancies, job vacancies, especially in the telecommunications and information technology area. The information and technology area requires higher education beyond high school, generally; and there are a great number of vacancies. They estimate there are as many as 300,000 vacancies. I get a different number every day, but it keeps climbing. There are 300,000 vacancies now, and the projection is that this is going to go on for the next 10 years. We are going to need more and more people who are trained and well- educated with respect to information technology. We are going to need people who are not so well-trained. For every genius, we are going to need some assistance. For the designers for web sites and computer systems and software, we are going to need their helpers. We are going to need technologists, mechanics, aides in the schools. We are going to need a whole bevy of people to make educational technology work. If you saddle a teacher with the burden of having to take care of her own educational technology program with no help, the likelihood is they are going to be overwhelmed. So they need technologists in the schools. They need aides in the schools. They are going to need all kinds of people. I do not think that they have taken into consideration all of the places we are going to need technology workers. It is one item that should be considered as we consider a Higher Education Assistance Act. I will be offering an amendment tomorrow which deals with this. Finally, I want to end my comments on the continuing state of emergency in African American education by discussing a situation in New York City at another level. We had a problem with our elementary and secondary schools. We now have a problem with our higher education institutions. The City of New York, CUNY, the City of New York University system, the CUNY system has more than 200,000 students. There are all kinds of junior colleges, senior colleges. It is a huge enterprise; and a large number of the colleges, community colleges and senior colleges, have remedial education programs. For some reason, the mayor and the Board of Higher Education has declared war on remedial education. Suddenly, remedial education is being treated with great contempt. They have remedial education courses all over the country. I do not know why suddenly in New York remedial education programs are being treated with such great contempt. It is a great mistake. There is a crusade against remedial education, blindly lashing out and saying it does not belong in the schools and threatening to extract them and put them at the institutes. There is a whole lot of heat being generated about something without very much light. I am going to talk about that as part of my total discussion on the continuing state of emergency in African American education. I am pleased to see that I have been joined by my colleague, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald), who I yield to for a statement.

Mr. OWENS

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