Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, again I want to thank the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, for his willingness to work with me on this legislation. I fully concur in the gentleman's view that OSHA should not adopt work performance measures that can serve to bias the inspection process. The Clinton administration also strongly shares this view. I do want to take this time to congratulate the administration and the workers at OSHA. There are few agencies that have such life and death responsibilities as OSHA. We must remember that last year more than 6,000 workers died on the job and nearly 60,000 were injured on the job. The work at OSHA remains very important and will go on. I think we should understand the difficulties that the OSHA inspectors face in respect to the inconvenience of employers versus the protection of the health and safety of employees. I therefore support H.R. 2877 and urge its adoption.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Klink).

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I want to express my appreciation to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, for his willingness to work with me on this legislation. I believe the bill before us will further the safety and health of workers, and I am pleased to support its passage. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the amendment and in support of passage of this bill. This Africa Growth and Opportunity Act is not a fast track trade bill. It does not hand out great advantages to competing economies. It does not hand out advantages to nations that prosper by ruthlessly exploiting their own people. This is a slow track bill that is long overdue. This is a bill which places Africa on the playing field of world trade. Africa has not only been left behind, Africa has been left out. This is a comprehensive bill with many positive components, and this amendment suggests one of those positive components. It is not perfect and there are pitfalls. We must not fall into the trap of throwing away programs that work as we move to initiate new components. The development needs our continued support. Instead of allowing any decrease in our commitment, we should work towards expansions and increases. I cannot emphasize too much the fact that Africa has not only been left behind by the U.S. trade and assistance programs, it has been left out of any significant involvement. Africa has not enjoyed the kind of general recognition that we have shown to Mexico or China or Indonesia. No country in Africa has its hands out for a 40 to $50 billion bailout from the United States and International Monetary Fund. Do not cut off one hand to Africa while we offer it another hand. Levels of this kind as proposed by this amendment are often set in legislation without being accused of seeking entitlement status. We should understand the difference between principles and dogma. There are certain kinds of principles we want to continue to support. I certainly wholeheartedly support the principles established by the informal caucus against the fast track caucus last November. But the principles there need to be looked at as principle and not as dogma. Let us not get into the ceremony of opposing all trade bills just because they are trade bills. Africa needs to have a chance; it needs to be put on the playing field. If we look at the statistics, we will find that Africa, as opposed to China or Mexico or South Korea or Hong Kong, in a very sensitive area like textiles, it is way, way behind. Less than .6 percent allowed textiles came from Africa last year, while China is way up there with Mexico and they have all the advantages. China, which, of course, has no organized labor laws, and China is quite ruthless in the way they handle their trade. They have 8.6 percent of our textile imports. Mexico has 11.5 percent. Mexico is right across the border. How can we compare competition between Mexico and the textile industries in this country versus Africa, which has whole oceans between us and the continents. Let me just point out that in sub-Saharan Africa, all the countries of sub-Sahara Africa and together, as I said before, have less than .6 percent of our textile trade. The per capita income of these countries is way down, around $400 a year, $400 a year; while per capita income of Taiwan, which has 8.6 percent of the trade, is way up at $12,000 a year. If there are going to be any offsets, if Africa is going to take away any of the textile business from anybody, it is going to be in these countries that are already outside the United States and already have taken jobs from our textile workers. They are going to underbid these countries because their labor costs will be lower. They are lower than anybody else, and they will be competing with these countries that have taken trade away already. If we are not going to try to balance out things and take some trade back from Mexico and China, then at least let Africa into the game. And right across the board, we have a great deal to gain because Africa is one of the last great markets in the world. We have a billion dollars in exports to Africa right now. We can greatly increase that. Let us not be dogmatic. Let us vote for a bill which opens up the playing field for Africa. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 1432, the ``Africa Growth and Opportunity Act.'' H.R. 1432 would authorize a new trade and investment policy toward the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. It is not a perfect bill; however, it represents a positive, historic, comprehensive effort to reach out to the continent of Africa and enhance and share in its vast economic possibilities. Africa, the mother of civilization, the victim of imperialism, and the beholder of natural riches, is the last region virtually ignored by U.S. trade policy. Its acceptance into the world trade arena, spearheaded by the United States, is long overdue. The arguments against opening up U.S. trade policy to Africa pale in comparison to the economic, social, moral and historic reasons for supporting the bill. Unequivocally, we must admit Africa to the world trade playing field. Contrary to the argument made by opponents of the bill, H.R. 1432 will not harm the domestic textile industry. Research has shown that workers in the U.S. textile industry will not be displaced by workers in the African textile industry. In fact, should there be any loss of jobs, it will occur in those countries that have already suffered a loss of jobs because of an expansion of trade opportunities to those areas. The countries most likely to be hurt by Africa's imminent trading status with the U.S. are those which already export the largest percentage of textiles to the U.S.: Mexico, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In 1996, Mexican textile imports represented 11.57% of total textile imports. In addition, textile imports from China represented 8.63% of total imports. Moreover, imports from Taiwan represented 6.31% of total U.S. textile imports. On the other hand, imports from sub- Saharan Africa represent a paltry 0.67%. The point is clear: The fear that the African textile industry will benefit economically at the expense of the U.S. textile industry is unfounded. Mexico is more to blame for a loss of U.S. jobs in the textile industry. And no matter how sweet the trade deal with Africa is, the continent will not be able to compete fairly with our bordering neighbor, Mexico. Again, it must be reiterated that Sub-Saharan Africa does not have the capacity to compete with any industries in the U.S. No American workers will lose jobs as a result of this bill. In the area of textiles, Africa's lower wages may take business away from China or Mexico or Hong Kong, but not from the United States. H.R. 1432 deserves the support of all members and components of the Caring Majority. The labor community should lend their support to this unique piece of legislation. Expanding trade in any area, including Africa, has been opposed by this community because of a fear that countries with weaker labor and environmental laws than the U.S. will undermine the availability of jobs here in the America. I want to make a special appeal to those who stood in solidarity with me against the ``fast track'' trade legislative process last fall: Africa must be given a chance to demonstrate its commitments to fair labor laws and to the development of internationally accepted environmental standards. China has no organized labor laws, and it is quite ruthless in its treatment of Chinese citizens. Yet, it is the country that is able to secure regularly Most-Favored-Nation trading status. The principles we all enunciated against ``fast track'' trade legislation remain sound and necessary; however, we must not allow our principles to degenerate into the dogma of a religion. We must not begin to oppose all trade opportunities blindly and ceremoniously. This is true especially of those trade bills applied to desperately poor countries in Africa and the Caribbean. Our goal is justice and a decent standard of living for workers and common people all over the world. At the hands of European and American powers, Africa has been made to suffer for centuries. It is important now to support opportunity in Africa. H.R. 1432 helps correct a situation where trade and assistance to Africa has been MIA--missing in action. I cannot emphasize too much the fact that Africa has not only been left behind by the U.S. trade and assistance programs, it has been left out of any significant involvement. Africa has not enjoyed the generosity we have shown to Mexico, China and Indonesia. No country in Africa has its hands out for a $40 to $50 billion bailout from the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund. It is high time for alarmists to put H.R. 1432 in its proper perspective. It is not a fast track trade bill which hands out great advantages to competing economies or to nations that prosper by ruthlessly exploiting their own people. It is not the billion dollar budget buster or bailout swindle for Africa. It is not a fat check from the U.S. Treasury to underwrite Africa's economic policies that will injure working people in America. Those benefits have already accrued to other countries. H.R. 1432 is a slow track bill that deserves our enthusiastic support. I urge my colleagues to say ``YES'' to ``growth'' and ``opportunity'' for Africa.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I would like the gentleman to enlighten me. When he said that if we have a floor like this for one country or one set of countries, we would have to take it from South America or somewhere else, do we have the same situation with respect to the International Monetary Fund. We are about to be asked to vote $18 billion more into the fund. We have a lot of money in there already. There is a limitation on the amount of money we put in this.

Mr. OWENS. Is there a ceiling on the amount we put into the International Monetary Fund? Do we stop somewhere?

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk today about the most important subject we have to deal with here, and that is finances, budget and appropriations. I want to talk about it in the context of financing two societies and the way we deal with two different groups. One society I would say is the international banking and investment community, which when they approach us for help it seems always to get an immediate response of billions of dollars to go into the International Monetary Fund or to bail out Mexico. Now we are talking about bailing out South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the immediate response of billions and billions of dollars. In the other society I would lump all of us together and start with my most important concern, and that is schools, financing for schools, assistance for schools. School construction at the top of that list, but everything related to education. There is a double standard with respect to the International Monetary Fund and the way it comes to the relief of the international investment community, versus the funding that we receive and the kinds of debate and deliberation that we have when we are funding education or when we are funding other vital domestic programs, or when we are funding certain African and Caribbean countries, Caribbean aid and Caribbean trade always have a second class status. They are in the same category as funding for domestic programs that help poor people. We are committed, we say, both parties say that we are really concerned about using Federal resources to help people who are disadvantaged. Low-income people should be helped as opposed to special groups, affirmative action is condemned as helping special groups, and the justification for that is condemned. I do not agree with that approach where affirmative action is tossed aside as not being legitimate, but let us suspend that argument for a while and say that opportunity programs which help all poor people are certainly desirable, and if both parties, Democrats and Republicans, want to join in doing that, let us do that. But as we debate the process, let us understand that if we are going to help people who need help, the poorest people in our society, if we are going to help the children in inner cities' education systems, the schools that need repair most, the schools that need new classrooms, the schools that need to be wired for the Internet, if we are going to help them, it costs money. So whenever we have a discussion of money, let us not retreat from the necessary resources to provide the opportunities for people who do not have opportunities. That is going to be our modus operandi. We are going to focus on providing opportunity versus providing corrections and adjustments for people who have been discriminated against. Then let us really provide the funding. Let us deal with the funding for the schools in the inner city communities. Let us deal with the funding necessary for school construction, necessary for increasing classrooms, so that as we increase the number of teachers and we decrease the ratio of children to teachers, we have the space to do it. As we pursue those objectives that have been outlined by the President for education, let us deal with the funding the same way we deal with funding for the international investment community. We have on the agenda in a few weeks a bill which will call for at least $18 billion to be added to the International Monetary Fund. The American taxpayers are going to be called upon to add $18 billion to the International Monetary Fund. Now, there are some complications about one portion of it is $3 billion and the other portion is $15 billion; it is not really going to affect the budget, and it is not really an aid program, it is a loan program, and we only contribute to it and other nations contribute; there is a whole lot of malarkey which seems to hide the fact that it is money out of the Treasury, out of the coffers, which could be going to some other purpose, and it goes into the International Monetary Fund. We are the biggest contributor there. Some people say we are approaching a point where almost 50 percent of the funds in the International Monetary Fund will be funds from the taxpayers of this country. So we are going to have that bill on the floor. We have a bill tomorrow on the floor related to Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity bill, which I think is related to the discussion, too. We are going to have, I hope, later on a bill related to the Caribbean Basin Initiative NAFTA Parity, how we deal with trade with the poor, sparsely populated countries of the Caribbean: These are all related. I apologize if I do not proceed in a way where you have a simple topic, and I move from A to B, and it is an easy straight line, and you do not strain your brain to follow me. I think it is necessary for us to understand that this is a very complex world, and that a very complex process is undertaken when we spend your taxpayers' money. I think it is also important to understand every voter, every American citizen has a stake in this process. Do not go to sleep. Do not let your eyes glaze over when I mention matters like the International Monetary Fund. It is your money. Do not make the mistake of thinking you have no stake here, and you also have no power to help make the decision. Every American voter has a great deal of power. As recent elections show, which have been very close, the election for the House of Representatives, the election for the other body, they are close enough to let you know that every vote counts, and what you think and how you vote, how you react to what we do here is very important. Your input matters a great deal. Democracy plays itself out in a very complex way nowadays, and you ought to understand that. You ought to understand that, beyond your single vote at the poll, you have another role. Every citizen has a role in shaping public opinion, because public opinion drives the decision making in this House of Representatives. Both parties have very elaborate, very well-structured processes for measuring public opinion. It leads to some amazing results because we do measure public opinion. I never get tired of using the example of the 1996 turnaround on education, how the Republicans took over the House of Representatives. They had the majority, and they began to wage war on education, and the Federal involvement in matters related to education. There was a war which was almost like, you know, take no prisoners, you know, a scorched earth policy. They called for the elimination of the Department of Education. They called for cuts in Head Start. They called for dramatic cuts across the board in education programs. At one point, the cuts that were being proposed added up to about $4 billion. Because we had a process whereby we came to the floor, the House of Representatives was meeting on a regular basis. In fact, in that first year, I think we made history in terms of the hours that were put in on this floor where the new majority pressed their Contract with America. But the fact that they were pressing their Contract with America gave the minority an opportunity to answer. In the process of the minority answering, we got a message out to the people, our message on education. We did not succeed on all matters. They did cut housing programs dramatically. They made $22 billion in cuts across the board. So they got a whole lot of their program of cuts in; some needed, and many not needed, many devastating. But on education, our ability to bring the message to the floor, to talk to the American people about the proposed cuts in Head Start, the proposed cuts in the school lunch program, our ability to make our case, shape public opinion, and win the Republicans without the measure, the public opinion in their poll and in their focus groups, they found that the public definitely was not happy with their program to move the Federal Government out of its programs of aid to education. Instead of a $4 billion cut, which we resisted and avoided in 1995, in 1996, the same majority Republicans proposed a $4 billion increase. I use this example because it is one example of the power of public opinion and how dramatically things can turn around, ideology notwithstanding, ceremony notwithstanding. People have their agendas, and they want to cling to them, but because this is a democracy, and in the end, the people at the polls will determine who has power, the majority parties saw that their power was threatened if they continued on their policies and their dogma related to Federal aid to education. They turned around. They are out now trying to sell themselves, the majority Republicans, as a party for education. We are in a situation where both parties have strong rhetoric programs about education. I say rhetoric, because I do not think either party is delivering as it should. But certainly, if we were to follow the leadership of President Clinton and the kind of program elaborated in the State of the Union address, the Democrats and the people who have good common sense would have a program for education that was far beyond rhetoric. It would be a reality. Certainly, in the area of construction, we need that reality. So I am saying it pays for the people with the power. Every American out there who votes has power. It pays for you to understand what is going on here. I wish that you would join us in spreading the word so that other people will understand what is going on here. In order for you to do that, you need to go in some processes of circular reasoning, and not just follow the simple A to B to C to D approach. We need to talk about the coming vote on IMF, which will pull out of the Treasury $18 billion; the vote on the Africa Trade bill, which is a different kind of situation from what is going to happen with the bailouts; money that the IMF will give to Indonesia or to South Korea, or to some of the other more developed economies that have had tremendous investments made there. What does it mean that we are willing to spend so much money in these highly developed societies when they go bankrupt as a result of corruption usually? Talking about school construction over a 10-year period, we may spend 20 to $21 billion. But we are going to rush to bail out these corrupt economies of Indonesia and South Korea, et cetera, and we are going to pay billions. They are talking about $50 billion in Indonesia, which means that about half of that will somehow come out of the American taxpayers' coffers. South Korea, there is about 40 or $30 billion there. A majority of that is going to come out of the American taxpayers' coffers. So what is it? Will Indonesia's corrupt or bankrupt system now get more benefits from the American taxpayers than the school children of America who need classroom space? They need safe schools. They need wiring for computers. They need computers. What does it mean to have those kinds of amounts of money flowing out of the American Treasury to these countries? I am not against IMF, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, United Nations. These are all international institutions which I support wholeheartedly. I am enthusiastically in favor of using these various international institutions to maintain peace and harmony and prosperity in the world as far as you can. We should support them. But we should not allow them to be used as instruments for swindling the taxpayers of this country and for oppressing the people of the other nations like Indonesia, oppressing them through billions of dollars that are poured in by American banks and investors. Will Indonesia get better terms than we get? We are talking about a school construction bill now that does not have any grant in it. Listen closely. There was a time when we were talking about school construction aid from the Federal Government which had grants. You give the money to the areas with the greatest need. You give some portion of it. Other portions were going to be loans. Now we are talking about a school construction initiative which are strictly loans, strictly loans. There are no grants. Now we are going to have a program for school construction. It is being finalized now, the Rangel/Lowey bill, which is the President's bill, also. It is his initiative. I am grateful for that initiative, because it is far better than anything else we have, but it is loans. It is forgiving the interest on bonds, I mean for giving a tax credit. Let me just go back. This is complicated. I am not sure I have it all straight. But you can follow up and investigate, because I think we need to begin to unravel some of these financing mechanisms and understand what is going on. We are going to have money go to schools through their States and their localities as loans. The loans will come from the private sector. The private sector will be given a tax credit in lieu of the interest. Instead of the schools, the local education agencies, the States, localities, instead of them having to pay the principal and the interest, they will only pay back the principal. That is a pretty good deal; no interest loans. But the Federal Government will finance that by giving the lenders a tax credit, which would equal the amount of interest that they would have charged. That sounds like a good deal. Over a long period of time, if the payment required of the localities, schools, school boards, if that repayment is spread over a long period of time, it is an even better deal. I do not know exactly how long a period of time it will be spread over. I do not know exactly how much of a tax credit the private sector will get in terms of the interest rate and what is going to be the going rate. You need to know that in order to compare the deal we are giving our children, our school systems to the deal that the IMF will give to Indonesia and Malaysia and these other countries. What kind of deal are they getting? In the international marketplace, what kind of interest rates will be charged on the loans that they will be given in order to bail them out, and over what period of time? Will they really be getting a better deal? They may be getting a better deal automatically because their deal is going to move fast. The schools are required and the education agencies and the State education departments are required to do a great deal of preparation and show that they have a plan to revamp their schools and to construct new schools, and that they are going to come forward with some contribution of their own. There are a lot of things that are required. Some of the States would have the greatest needs; they have the greatest low-income population that is suffering; are least concerned about their low-income population. So if they are required to make any match, any effort, they may reject it. If they are required to do this over a period of time, they may never get around to submitting the necessary paperwork. They may never get around to meeting the necessary conditions. So we may have a far worse deal being offered by the Federal Government of the United States to our school children of America than we are offering to the corrupt bankers and manufacturers and politicians of Indonesia. Let me just read for a moment what this school constructed initiative proposes to do and give you a better idea of how you should be talking to other people about the proposal. The modernized schools for the 21st Century follows what you heard President Clinton propose in the State of the Union address. In order for students to learn and to compete in the global economy, schools must be well-equipped, and they must be able to accommodate smaller class sizes. To address these and other critical needs, the President's fiscal year 1999 budget will propose Federal tax credits to pay interest on nearly $22 billion in bonds to build and renovate public schools. This is more than double the assistance proposed last year which covered half the interest of an estimated $20 million in bonds. The new proposal provides tax credits in lieu of interest payments for investors in two types of bonds, school modernization bonds, and the expansion of the qualified zone academy bonds created last year. These tax credits will cost the Treasury $5 billion over 5 years and more than $10 billion over 10 years. In other words, the tax credits that will be given to the private investors will amount to $5 billion over 5 years and $10 billion over 10 years. Over a 10-year period, the private investors are going to loan the schools $22 billion, according to this scheme, if it follows through in detail. They are going to make $10 billion back on their money. They are going to receive $10 billion of tax. It is going to cost the Treasury in tax credits. That is a pretty good deal for the private sector. How good a deal is it to the school system? I am not sure. I serve on the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. I have been there for 16 years. There was a time when I would not even undertake this kind of discussion because I trusted our colleagues on the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on Appropriations to deal with these issues. But the longer I stayed on Education, the more I realized that our problems, the way we deal with the funding for schools, the resources that schools need, the way we deal with opportunities to learn, you cannot complete the process, you cannot get what you need unless you focus on where the money is going from the Federal Treasury, unless you confront the people on the Committee on Appropriations who continually say there is not enough money, unless you confront the administration, unless you confront the leadership of the House. They insist there is not enough money. So in order to deal with the basic concern that I have of improving education in America, funding education in America adequately, I have to challenge all of the assumptions that are being made about where the priorities are, where the money is going. I think the American people, the voter out there, have to use his or her common sense in the same way. You have to look at the total picture so that when your Congressman tells you, we would like to fund schools and I am all in favor of education, but we do not have the money for school construction, we want to use the surplus that we are about to get, use that for Social Security. We are going to use it for some other purpose. We do not want to begin to go back into deficit financing; if you propose to build new schools or to renovate old schools, the problem is that you are going to get into big spending. Well, if you are going to give the International Monetary Fund $18 billion over a short period of time, right away, then is that not big spending also? How can we do that big spending, investing in the bailout of corrupt enterprises across the ocean, when we cannot deal with a faster and a more thorough response to the financing of school construction. Let us ask the question and let the experts answer it. At least we must be intelligent enough to keep asking the right question. School modernization bonds, 19.4 billion and zero interest bonds, that is 9.7 billion in 1999 and 9.7 billion in the year 2000, are proposed for construction and renovation of public school facilities. The Department of the Treasury will allocate the rights to offer these special 15-year bonds. I asked before, how long a period would they have to pay. Now we hear, they will be 15 years, 15-year bonds to States, territories and certain school districts that have submitted school construction plans to the Secretary of Education. I will not read all of this. I will include this document entitled Modernized Schools for the 21st Century. It is just a one-page explanation of the school modernization program. I think it is a good summary. Instead of reading it, I would like to submit it. School construction plans would not be accepted unless they meet certain requirements. In order to receive a bond allocation, States, territories and the eligible 100 school districts will be required to submit a plan to the Secretary of Education. As I said before, there are two types of plans. One is for construction and one is for qualified zone academy bonds, a kind of bond that has been created for certain districts where you have high poverty rates. I think the basic here is that you have 15 years to pay back the principal and the Federal Government will pay, will be responsible for the interest by giving tax credits to the private sector which issues those bonds to the States, territories and certain school districts. It may be a better deal than Indonesia will get, but I am not sure. I suspect that because Indonesia will get their money so much faster and because they are in a situation where the private market has a higher interest rate, they will be placed at a great advantage. Those corrupt people who have now gone bankrupt will get money at a far lower interest rate than they would have, than they would get if they had to deal in the private sector. It is rewarding corruption and incompetence and rewarding it quite rapidly, using American taxpayer money to do that. My question is, why do we deal with that set of people with such generosity? What have they done to earn such generosity while we are so slow? Here we are in the fourth year of our discussion of an initiative to aid school construction. It has been a no-no for so long. In the meantime, we have bailed out the savings and loan associations; $500 billion it cost the taxpayers. And we bailed out Mexico; Mexico was nearly bankrupt. And we are now about to bail out certain Asian countries, including Indonesia. I keep referring to Indonesia because it is a particularly difficult situation to swallow. It is hard to accept what is going on in Indonesia. Indonesia has an authoritarian regime headed by a man who used to be a general, General Suharto. Now President Suharto, who has been in office, I think he is going into his fifth term, five-year terms, like he has been there 25 years, he runs the country with an authoritarian hand. He is in the same category as Saddam Hussein. I called Saddam Hussein a sovereign predator. Saddam Hussein has all the power, all the authority, there is no democracy. There are no institutions free to criticize him or challenge him. He has all the power. There is no likelihood that anybody is ever going to be able to internally overthrow Saddam Hussein. He uses the power to create a military machine, manufacture massive numbers of military weapons and maintain a massive army which can be used only for destruction to keep the people under control within the country, and to also lead to promote ventures like the invasion of Kuwait. If he was not stopped, had not been stopped by the U.S., he would be probably invading Saudi Arabia and everybody around him who is weak enough to be swallowed up by the monster Iraq. So Saddam Hussein is a sovereign predator of a certain type. General Suharto in Indonesia is not a military threat. He is a different kind of sovereign predator. He has all power, too, the military, everything under his control. But he is only interested in making money for his family and himself and his cronies, and he has used his power to enhance his money. There was an article in the New York Times this past Sunday, March 8, in the Week in Review. It was called Indonesian face off, drawing blood without bombs. I was very impressed that the reporter, David Sanger, used the same comparison that I had begun to think of when I attended a meeting last week. I sat in on a meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus leadership and the head of the IMF to discuss some of the same issues we are talking about here. Why is there a double standard? I am going to talk in a few minutes about that double standard, how not only it applies to our own concerns domestically, but when the U.S. starts giving aid to countries in Africa or aid to countries in the Caribbean region, we do not behave the same way we behave with these big sovereign predators who have these big economies that require billions and billions of dollars. I came out of that meeting thinking that, hey, Suharto is very much like Saddam Hussein. He is an economic sovereign predator. He sucks in investments from all over the world and uses them to enrich his family and his cronies and pours them into phony enterprises. They have an aircraft manufacturing enterprise where, the whole world knows, they are never going to produce decent planes. Nobody is going to want to fly the kinds of planes they produce, if they ever get around to producing any at all. They have an automobile concern headed by one of his sons which is supposed to manufacture the international automobile for Indonesia, and the automobile is really made in South Korea. They bring it out of the factory in Indonesia and they give it a subsidy. If you buy one of those automobiles, you do not have to pay the same taxes you pay if you buy other automobiles because that is supposed to be the national automobile made in that nation. The owner of that factory is one of his Suharto's sons. So on and on it goes. Let us just take a minute, do not let your eyes glaze over, look at the Asian bailout through the eyes of my good friend, the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders). He wrote an article for The Hill, which I think gives a very good summary of what we are dealing with here. I quote from the article that appeared in The Hill newspaper, Wednesday, January 28, 1998. Again, Mr. Speaker, I will ask that this article be entered in its entirety in the Record. I will not have to read it all. I think it is pertinent. It is short and to the point. I would like to have it in the Record. Just quoting parts of the Sanders article, which is entitled ``Asian Bailout Is Unfair,'' it is counterproductive, and he goes so far as to say it is illegal. It is amazing to me that even as President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich tell us we have to cut back on Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' programs, affordable housing and children's needs, and perhaps even Social Security in the near future, that we can provide some $15 to $20 billion in loans to Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and South Korea. This action will only increase public cynicism. American workers have seen a substantial decline in their standard of living over the last 20 years even as they are working longer hours for lower wages. Twenty-two percent of the children in this country live in poverty. Millions of elderly people cannot afford prescription drugs. Forty million Americans lack health insurance. And there has recently been a significant increase in homelessness and hunger. For those people there is apparently no government assistance available, only the virtues of personal responsibility. That is the name of the Welfare Reform Act that plunged so many people into a new level of desperation in our society. But to continue quoting the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) from his article that appeared in The Hill on January 28: But when foreign governments, some led by corrupt authoritarian billionaires, need assistance, the United States is there in rapid-response fashion to help them out. Where are the risks for the poorly managed governments which have run their economies into bankruptcy? Where is the self- regulation of the free enterprise system for the wealthy special interests of Asia that have borrowed more money than they can repay? Where is the magic of the marketplace for the reckless investors and speculators that have made huge profits by investing and lending money in Asia, but now want U.S. taxpayers to bail them out; or corrupt dictators, like President Suharto of Indonesia, whose family is worth $30 to $40 billion and who has invested much of his money abroad in foreign currencies? Should the taxpayers of this country really be providing 19.3 billion as part of the bailout of these huge profitable banks and their overpaid executives? Is that really the way the system is supposed to work? I do not think so. That is socialism for the rich and the powerful and Darwinian capitalism for the middle class and the poor. The International Monetary Fund bailout, as currently designed, is illegal and in violation of the Sanders-Frank amendment of 1994 which requires U.S. representatives to international financial institutions to urge borrowing countries to guarantee internationally recognized workers' rights and to include the status of such rights as an integral part of the institution's policy dialogue with each borrowing country. This has not been done. In Indonesia, for example, Muchtar Pakpahan, the head of the Independent Indonesia Labor Welfare Union, is still in jail because of his belief that workers have the right to freely organize and join unions. No one believes that Indonesia guarantees international recognized workers' rights. I will conclude my reading of sections from this article at this point. The point is being made here that we have in Indonesia not only a corrupt, bankrupt system, but they are also violating the requirements that we have placed on our international monetary institutions. They are in violation of the principle that held us together, the majority of the Members of Congress, held us together against the free trade fast track. We had the fast track process being proposed last fall, and in November of last year we defeated, we did not defeat it, we let it be known that there would not be enough votes for it on the floor. So fast track trade processes did not get okayed or approved by this Congress. It never got to first base in this House of Representatives. It was not put on the floor because they knew it would be defeated. One reason we had solidarity there was that so many of us agreed that the effort that we had been waging to get standards placed into the international trade agreements, which require governments to recognize unions and to permit union organizing, were not going to go forward, that we would not have a chance to do that on the fast track. We also had concerns about environmental standards, and that is not going to be done. I hope that negotiation process is going on and that we will not have a replay of the fast track drama; that whatever new trade bills come back to this floor will have that requirement in them. We have a bill that is coming to the floor tomorrow, the Africa Growth and Trade Act, which has provisions in it to deal with the problem of the right of unions to organize. No nation like Nigeria in Africa would be allowed to participate in this Africa Growth and Trade bill since it does not have that kind of freedom for labor unions. We have written it into the bill. So we have a situation here where the kind of violations and the kind of abuses that have been permitted in Indonesia and some other Asian countries while they enjoy the benefits of the International Monetary Fund, will not be allowed in this process of trying to help Africa. Here again I want to talk about the double standard. Africa has not received any substantial aid from the United States. I think if you add all of the aid of all kinds that flow into Africa from the United States we have about a billion dollars. A billion dollars in aid the last year we have records for flowed from the United States to Africa. The huge continent of Africa got a billion dollars in aid. The Caribbean countries, the little islands, got far less than that. When we lump them all together they got far less than that. So there is an issue of a standard of operation with these needy countries, disadvantaged countries, countries that are just getting started. And by the way, these are nations that will provide far greater markets for our products than our Asian corrupted partners. The balance of trade with some of these countries that we are going to be bailing out is already skewed so that we are importing far more from them than they are buying from us. So we are not only helping corrupt investors and corrupt institutions in these Asian countries, certainly like in Indonesia, but we are also financing our competitors. American workers are being jeopardized and displaced by the cheap labor markets in the same countries we are now going to bail out. The African nations are not among these competitors. We have a very tiny trade with Africa. And by the way, the trade with Africa is in surplus in the other direction: $6 billion in the last period that is recorded. That is small compared to what we do with Japan and China and Indonesia, et cetera. Six billion dollars. But it is on our side. We sold them products worth $6 billion. The amount of trade coming the other way is minuscule, the amount that they have sold to us. So the Africa Growth and Trade bill will be opening up a great new market. It will be establishing a dialogue, and mostly it is about dialogue. There is very little money in that bill that is going to be on the floor tomorrow, and it is important that people understand that. At a time when we are considering International Monetary Fund bailouts for these overheated developing economies in Asia, we should not mix it up and get confused and say we do not want any trade bills. The Africa trade bill is an example of a great need that will benefit this country ultimately, because it opens and builds new markets. It is a great process of trade that has not gone forward which is to our advantage, and that will be opened up by the Africa Growth and Trade bill. But I hear complaints. There is tiny amounts of money that may be involved there in terms of trade in textiles, so we have a lot of problems with people saying we do not want any more competition for our textile industry. And certainly I have friends in the labor movement I have worked with for years on this problem of competition with our industries, textile or otherwise. The amount of textiles imported from Africa at this point is .6 percent. Less than 1 percent. All of the countries of Africa combined, less than .6 percent. I have a chart here that shows that on the other hand the amount that is exported from places like China, which by the way has no environmental standards and they do not allow free organization of labor unions, here is a chart called ``Comparison of U.S. Textile Imports From Major Suppliers and from Sub-Saharan Africa.'' Total imports, $19 billion. And they give some of the break-out from the various countries that enjoy a percentage of that support. At the top, of course, is Mexico. Mexico has 11.5 percent of the imports of textiles. We import from Mexico, out of our total, and they get a big share, 11.5 percent. They are right across the border, and of course NAFTA has made it possible for them to enjoy great advantages. So they are the biggest importer. Second to Mexico is the faraway country of China. The faraway country of China that does not allow its unions to organize, is not involved with environmental standards, and they get 8.6 percent, 8.6 percent of the total in our textile imports. Taiwan, 6.3 percent. Hong Kong, 4.7 percent almost. India, South Korea, Thailand. The standard of living in countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea is quite high versus the standard of living in sub-Saharan Africa, where the per capita income is $383 per year. I am sorry, the per capita income of Taiwan, for example, is $12,000 a year. Per capita income in Hong Kong is $21,000. Per capita income. That may be pretty close to our per capita income here when we break it out in terms of wage earners. South Korea is $8,000; Taiwan $2,400. But Africa's per capita income, I said $383. No, it is $460. So I am saying, again, two societies, two approaches. When we come to approaching Africa, we have been very mean, very stingy. We do not have any real trade going. Only .6 percent in textiles. And I assure my colleagues that overall imports from Africa are not much better, but we want to apply very stringent standards to Africa now. But we did not apply those to China. China is getting already a big share, and we did not apply those standards to China. We did not apply those standards to Mexico. People have approached me and said, ``I am concerned. If we let Africa have a greater percentage, and we import more textiles from Africa, will that not throw American workers out of jobs?'' And my answer is I doubt it seriously. I think if there are any people thrown out of jobs, they will be in Hong Kong or China or Taiwan, because they have the lion's share. They got that way because they had cheaper labor and they could undercut the labor cost in the United States. They do not have cheaper labor than Africa. So if we want the market processes to continue to work, Africa will take some of the textile business away from these countries that have now prospered. They have higher labor costs and they will be the ones who lose. We have already lost it. We have already lost these tremendous percentages to China, to Mexico, to Taiwan, to Hong Kong and to South Korea. They are doing very well. Now, if we allow international monetary forces to work without any interference, Africa would take some of the textile business away from these countries and not from the United States. Mr. Speaker, I wish to include for the Record at this point the chart labeled ``Comparison of U.S. Textile Imports From Major Suppliers and From Sub-Saharan Africa.''

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, there have been a lot of developments over the past 2 weeks, and I had meant to speak last week and was unable to because of the sudden adjournment that took place last Tuesday, but I think what I wanted to talk about is still pertinent. I wanted to talk about the closeout, the ending of Black History Month. February was proclaimed as Black History Month or African- American History Month for 1998. But since that time there have been a number of developments which I think are relevant to what I had to say at that time, so I am going to try to blend in some of these additional developments that have taken place with the statement that I originally wanted to make in connection with Black History Month. Some relevant developments include the conclusion of a peace mission to Iraq, which I think is relevant to what I have to say. Another development is the issuance of a report last week by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation and the Corporation for What Works. It is called ``The Millennium Breach,'' in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was better known as the Kerner Commission Report. The Kerner Commission Report was a report commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson to study the riots that took place in the sixties and to develop a set of recommendations for the Federal Government. I like to call it the Kerner-Lindsey Commission Report, because Mayor John Lindsey, who was at that time Mayor of New York, was also appointed as Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois' vice-chairman, sort of. I know that Mayor John Lindsey did a tremendous amount of work on that Kerner Commission report. So the Kerner-Lindsey Commission report stands as a report which I think is as great in the refusal to recognize as it is in its value. It has a great value, but if we had a way to measure the volume of the abandonment or attempt to ignore it, then it would be far greater than its value. From the very beginning, the Kerner-Lindsey Commission report was snubbed by the President himself. President Lyndon Johnson, when they gave him the report, he refused to comment on it publicly. He accepted it, nodded his head, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned. By that time, President Lyndon Johnson was greatly burdened by the problems of the Vietnam war and domestic issues. He had had enough in terms of their disturbing his focus on that war. Issues related to civil rights, et cetera, he had given some time and attention to, and he was upset by the fact that there was not more gratitude and that all of these riots had broken out in the summers that led up to the need to commission the Kerner Commission report. Finally, when it was given to him and the recommendations were made, he did not care to deal with it. The basic recommendation was that we were evolving toward two societies, one black and one white; that the conditions that existed in the black communities were very different from the experience that was taking place in the white communities; and that we needed a series of programs to address the fact that we were evolving into two sides. There were two different sets of opportunity, and those two different sets of opportunities were spawning different reactions and creating a situation in the black community which led to those explosions. By that time, nobody wanted to deal in a rational way with what was happening and the Kerner Commission report was tossed aside. So I want to congratulate the Eisenhower Foundation. It established a continuation committee at that time, and every 10 years they have updated and commented on what has happened since the Kerner Commission report, and this is the 30th year anniversary. Mr. Speaker, I think that their recommendations here are worth taking note of, especially in connection with the closing out of Black History Month. Black History Month this past year probably saw a greater number of observances and recognitions of the basic attempt to highlight achievements of blacks and the fact that blacks exist as a major part of the American experience than ever before. Carter G. Woodson founded Black History Month many years ago, and he would have been proud of the depth and the breadth of the recognition and the activities that took place during the past month. And every year that has been the case, more and more activities take place in relation to Black History Month. More and more corporations have advertisements which indicate their recognition of Black History Month. More and more programs are on public television, and even on commercial television they include more and more programs on black history as time goes by. So I am pleased with the observance of all of these micro items, these micro activities of black history taking place more and more. That is a step forward. I applaud that progress. Black History Month was supposed to be a month in which we bear witness to the progress, the richness and the diversity of African- American achievement. Carter G. Woodson created and promoted Negro History Week. This week was selected because it included the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. In 1976 the week became a month. It is time for Americans to reflect on the history and teachings of African-Americans whose contributions are still too little known, and that is basically what has been taking place. There are those kinds of items in the mass media and schools and churches, and Carter G. Woodson is to be applauded for having launched this, because it was launched at a time when there was a determined effort to ignore any positive achievements of American blacks, former slaves. My problem with what is happening is that it does not go far enough. I am pleased with the micro items, as I am sure Mr. Woodson would be pleased. The recognition of various people, of positive achievements of various individuals and personalities, various movements, all of that I am quite pleased with. I would like to go further and say that in future Black History Months we focus more on macro experiences and relate those macro experiences to what is happening now. In other words, I think it is important to look at macro phenomena related to black history, certain macro phenomena, and see how they have an impact on what is happening now. What is the impact of knowing more about black history on our current argument related to affirmative action? What does a greater knowledge of black history have to do with that present situation where there are clear forces lined up on both sides, some against affirmative action, and we have a movement underway to get referendums and to reject and repeal all laws, regulations related to affirmative action? What light can knowledge of black history throw on this debate? Then of course there are other people who say that affirmative action needs to go but they are ready to provide more ``opportunity programs.'' An opportunity program is defined as being different from an affirmative action program because an opportunity program would create opportunities on the basis of disadvantaged status. In other words, all low-income people, all poor people, black, white, any other ethnic group or race, would be eligible on the basis of the fact that they need the opportunity. Extra help should be given them because they are poor. Extra help should be given them because the circumstances under which they were born placed them at a great disadvantage. So there are people who are rabidly against affirmative action, who will tell us that they are all for opportunity programs. I would like to talk about how the knowledge of some basic facts and basic phenomena related to black history and the 232 years of slavery that were experienced by our ancestors, black ancestors, how that throws a light on that argument too. Because what we find is that many of the people who say, ``I am against affirmative action but I am all in favor of opportunity,'' when we confront them with a set of recommendations for opportunity programs they are quick to retreat. It becomes ``big spending.'' Opportunity programs equal big spending. In fact, we took out something called ``Opportunities to Learn.'' We took it out of the law in 1996 in the appropriations process. In 1996 we had a thing in the education law, the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act, which said that the Federal Government would encourage standards for opportunity to learn in our schools. We have standards for tests, we should have standards for opportunity to learn. We had standards for curriculum. The one standard that they took out was the standards for opportunity to learn which, translated into common-sense English, it was only a statement that the Federal Government would use its influence. Nobody was mandated to provide opportunities to learn. It would use its influence to encourage States to have certain standards with respect to opportunities to learn. Mr. Speaker, that meant in addition to setting standards for curriculum and giving tests to see if the young people lived up to those standards, we would also make certain that the young people who are taking those tests had an adequate supply of books, that they had teachers who knew their subject matter, that they had buildings which were adequate in terms of being conducive to learning and certainly safe and without health hazards. That was a frightful thing, and many governors throughout the Nation were the ones who put a great deal of pressure on both Democrats and Republicans to get rid of that language because although it was not mandatory, just to have it around, the governors found uncomfortable. The people who make decisions found it uncomfortable because it meant they would be on the spot in terms of providing resources, which means money. We have to have the money to provide the resources to guarantee that before we give a child a test to see if he has lived up to certain standards of curriculum that we have set, that we have also provided him opportunities to learn. So they backed away from it because it looked like it would cost a lot of money. It will. We have to have decent physical facilities. The President's construction initiative would cost a great deal of money, and that is necessary to provide the opportunity. If we provide telecommunications facilities for schools and we provide computers and we wire schools for the Internet, that costs additional amounts of monies. We are providing those opportunities for the poor who would normally not have those opportunities. We have the schools already in the suburbs, the schools of the future. They have the state-of-the-art communication, the computers, the Internet hookups. We have the best schools in the world in certain parts of the country. But in other areas we have youngsters who would benefit from certain opportunity standards, but we have backed away from it and they are getting less and less instead of more and more. So it becomes critical to confront those who advocate opportunity versus affirmative action, to put their money where their mouth is. Live up to it. Let us have real opportunity programs. In this report done by the Eisenhower Foundation to update us on the Kerner Commission report and where we are in relation to that report, they have a set of recommendations and some budget figures to go with those recommendations. So we are back to square one in terms of here is what is needed to provide opportunity, focusing on opportunities for minorities in big cities mostly, but the same thing is true of disadvantaged people in any part of the country, poor people. So when we confront people who say we do not want to spend that much money to take care of the needs of the disadvantaged or the poor, it will break the government, we will go broke and big spending programs have brought us to the point of disaster in our economy, we still confront people like that despite the fact that we are enjoying an unheralded, unprecedented era of prosperity. The index of the most favored stock index is above 8,000. I listened to the gentleman from Michigan talk about Social Security. Part of what he is saying is what a pity it is that people live so long. How awful that it is we are confronted with a dilemma because we are living longer and that places a burden on Social Security. People did not use to live so long when Social Security was first conceived. They had a much shorter life span. Well, Mr. Speaker, when Social Security was first conceived we did not have a stock market index up at 8,000. Unprecedented wealth is being accumulated in America. Why should we worry about people living so long because that is going to place a burden on the Social Security system. Let us make sure that the wealth is utilized to guarantee that the elderly people do not have to worry and be ashamed of living long. That is at the heart of the matter. If we cannot agree that the wealth of the Nation should be dedicated to making life comfortable for the elderly, then we can see how difficult it is to agree that some of the wealth of the Nation should be dedicated to creating maximum opportunity for all those who need opportunity. Why should African-Americans among the disadvantaged be treated with any special favors, is the way most people put it. Why are they poor in the first place? Why have they not made it? The people argue that expenditures for opportunity should not be made because they all had a chance to make it, all Americans have a chance to make it, and if they are poor it is because there is something wrong with them. Why did they not make it? As a community, why are the African-Americans so far behind the other people who came over here or were brought over here? Immigrant groups that came later than the slaves have fared much better economically and they are not so dependent. The percentage of people who are poor among other ethnic groups is not as great as the percentage of groups of people who are poor among African-Americans, we hear. There is something wrong with African-Americans. Well, let us take a look at a piece of history, a phenomenon of history, not a single achievement or micro achievement of one group or one individual. Let us look at the phenomenon of 232 years of slavery. I have talked about this before. I think it cannot be emphasized too much. For 232 years slavery denied the opportunity to accumulate wealth to our ancestors. African American ancestors, blacks, slaves who, by the way, were not immigrants, they were hostages. They were kidnapped and brought here and forced to provide free labor. By the way, also, labor for those 232 years had a greater value than labor has now. It was a labor-intensive world, a labor-intensive economy. You did not have machines to do the hard work. It took labor. So the human capital supplied by the slaves was supplied free because they were forced to give it, and they got nothing back for it for 232 years. That is more than six generations. No wealth was accumulated. But in the world, all over the world, wealth is accumulated by inheritance. It is passed down from one generation to another. If a generation, if a group of people are not able to pass down any wealth, then they have a deficit. African Americans came out of slavery in 1865 with a deficit of 232 years of not being able to pass on anything, not even a pair of pants, because they owned nothing. They were owned themselves, and whatever they had was under the jurisdiction of their masters. No capital is the primary problem in, and the lack of capital is the primary problem of impoverished African American communities. The struggle of the newly freed slaves to own homes and land received no assistance. The newly freed slaves were told at one point by General Armstrong of the Union Army, who had his own ideas about reforming and about justice, he briefly had an experiment with every slave was to get 40 acres and a mule. That is where that phrase comes from. They gave a few slaves 40 acres and a mule. And Congress stepped in and told General Armstrong to cut it out. He had to stop that before it really had any impact whatsoever. So the 40 acres and a mule promise was not realized. Slaves, even after the 13th amendment set them free, and the 14th amendment gave them equal rights, and the 15th amendment gave the right to vote, they could not participate in the land grant program, the program which provided free land to Americans and they could stake out land and from the government begin a homestead and start a new life. Ownership came from God, I guess, from God through the American Government to white people, but slaves were not allowed. There were no reparations, no 40 acres and a mule. And when the land was given out, whether it was the land rush or whatever form they utilized to give away land, blacks were not allowed to participate. As a group the deficit created for 232 years has still not been overcome. You cannot overcome 232 years of passing down absolutely nothing, no wealth from one generation to another. And if you want to go check your own family, find out exactly where did your wealth come from, your assets. Some people are not wealthy, but you do have some assets. You own a home. Often couples who own a home were given part of the down payment by their parents. How were your parents able to give you part of the down payment? Because they had accumulated some assets before. Where did they get their assets from? They probably had some help from their parents also. Of course, when you have big multiples of this and people take the small amounts that they inherit, they invest it, they use their ingenuity, and they use capital in ways that increases their wealth, you have large numbers of people become very wealthy and rich. But if you have no capital to begin with, it is almost a miracle. There are some blacks who got rich. Madam C.J. Walker was one of the first millionaires in the black community. She did not start out with anything. She had a lot of ingenuity, and she knew how to take advantage of the fact that all black women wanted to be beautiful. Cosmetics and the various things connected with hair and beauty enhancements was her business. But and there are many others who took almost nothing and made something out of it. But in general, miracles are not made. Ordinary people in any group cannot make miracles. They come through a process of slow accumulation of wealth, handed down from one generation to another, opportunities if you own a home, you can get, you have collateral so you can get a loan for a business. If you have a business and the business is going, you can get another loan or you can make some investments. We know how capital is accumulated and handled in this society. If you start 232 years behind, then you have a major deficit. It is important for every black teenager to understand that. Some of the hate that we experience is due to the fact that they have no knowledge of history. They do not really understand why their parents were poorer than others, why their grandparents did not pass anything down. They do not understand it, so they absorb some of the trash that is thrown at them about being inferior, different from other immigrants, and they begin to hate themselves, and they begin to act out in ways which are very counterproductive and antisocial because they have no sense of the fact that there is a disadvantage there all right, but it has nothing to do with them as individuals. Just the opposite is true. They should understand that the very fact that their ancestors were able to endure the Atlantic crossing, where slaves were not brought in immigrant ships, as bad as some of the ships might be. The movie Titanic showed you how the poor people were in the hold of the ship, and when the ship wrecked, they were at a great disadvantage. The kind of accommodations that they had were palaces compared with the way slaves came over. Slaves came over lying flat, to make the maximum amount of room. They had to lay flat for the whole trip, and also to control them, they had to lie flat, piled one on top of the other in the holds of the ships. And the very fact that our ancestors endured the crossing was a great achievement. The fact that they endured 232 years of slavery from one group to another, they survived with some humanity intact, that is a great achievement. I tell people, I am a descendant of an aristocracy of survivors, and every black person ought to understand, you are a descendant of an aristocracy of survivors. A great achievement just to stay alive. But in the process of just staying alive, we could not accumulate wealth. The system would not allow us to do that. You have to have something. Property owners and consumers make the economy percolate. The turnover of wealth at the local level sets off a chain reaction that accumulates significant amounts of capital. Local slave communities, what did they have to turn over? How could they have a little general store, somebody being able to patronize it and accumulate wealth by running a general store? Whatever they had, you know, accumulated very meager profits because you were in a community. It was segregated. For years after slaves were set free, the dual economy produced very little wealth, the segregated economy. That is one of the basic phenomenon of black history that needs to be reviewed more often by blacks and by whites. Understand that there is a 232-year economic deficit that slave labor was demanded, commanded for 232 years for nothing. They got nothing in return. There were no reparations. We talk about reparations. People get very angry. Why should blacks demand reparations? Reparations obviously has some validity because they do require reparations in certain activities. Our civilization now understands that justice sometimes requires reparations, but when blacks talk about reparations, immediately you get hostility. People turn off or they turn away or they turn towards you violently. So that is one phenomenon, the economic price that was paid, the disadvantage. Those who argue against opportunity programs, opportunity programs that might focus money on education programs for disadvantaged African American youth in inner cities where the poverty is piled up and still continues, those who argue against that should take a look at the fact that there is a reason why the need is there, and part of that reason relates to America as a Nation, America as a Nation tolerated slavery. America as a Nation provided the legal structure to maintain slavery for much too long. There are heroes, of course, who tried to get rid of it early, and finally Thomas Jefferson got a prohibition on the importation of slavery long before Lincoln was able to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The Congress was able to pass the 13th amendment. It was a heroic struggle, and I think I want to note that some African American youth who are very angry about it accuse white people of being responsible for it and find it difficult to relate to white people because they think they are the victims of a long-term plot and all whites are equally guilty. We cannot make alliances, we cannot integrate, we cannot become part of some caring majority activity because, after all, those people cannot be trusted. Those people did that to us, and anybody that has ancestors who participated in a thing as heinous as slavery cannot be trusted. My answer to that kind of reasoning, by young people or anybody else, old or young, is that the white people set us free. The white people were part of the process. We are indebted to our ancestors, blacks, for surviving and for enduring. We would not be here if they had not endured all of things that were done to them. But white people had the power, and only they had the power, to finally work the situation out so that we were set free. The abolitionists who were often ridiculed and not given the proper role in history, people who were motivated mostly by religion and a belief that God would not accept a condition where just because one's skin was white you had a reason to reign over another group that was black, they refused to accept that, and they not only refused to accept it, they took action and they agitated to get rid of slavery. They were mostly white. Some of the first statements against slavery in writing were made by the Quakers insisting that they would not tolerate slavery within their midst. They were white. Finally, in the woods and on the field and wherever the bloody Civil War took place, it was mostly white soldiers who fought on behalf of the ending of slavery. They fought on both sides, but there were white soldiers who gave their lives and hundreds and thousands for the cause of the Union and under the banner of Abraham Lincoln. We would not be free if that had not been the case. So there is no need to get caught up in ethnicity and simple-minded solidarity to the point where you cannot relate to the other race because they were a part of that terrible crime of slavery, that criminal institution. That closes the door and does not recognize the fact that African Americans have two sets of ancestors. We have African ancestors, and we have American ancestors. Thomas Jefferson is my ancestor; George Washington is my ancestor. I do not think it was wise, I am not proud of the fact, that a school in Louisiana decided to change the name of the school from George Washington to some other name. I think it was Charles Drew who deserved to have schools named after him, but to have children reject their ancestor, their past, because George Washington owned slaves. Yes, he did own slaves, but if he had not had a mindset different from his own ancestors, he came out of a monarchy, they came from a monarchy, they came from a society which looked at all men as being inferior classwise. You had a certain elite class, the royalty that looked down on everybody and reserved the right to command everybody and to more or less enslave everybody. If George Washington had continued that tradition, if he had not had whatever it was that he had when he denied the crown, if he had accepted a crown when it was offered to him, we would have had a monarchy. And probably that monarchy would still be nurturing slavery because you would have had a long struggle just to set the ordinary common white men, Indians, everybody else who came over here, to set them free before you got to the slaves. At least you had a group of men, nobody quite knows how the miracle of 1776 took place, how you had a group of men who were so rational and at least committed enough to doing the right thing and moving beyond just themselves to the point where they started a process by which the Constitution was able to be put in place and then enlarged, include everybody, everybody was white, and then finally set up a situation where slavery was obviously in contradiction to the principles that they had established. If the principles had not been established, if there had been no George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for whatever their shortcomings may be with respect to slavery, we would not have had a basis for later on moving to the steps Abraham Lincoln took when he said the Union must be preserved and the Union can only be preserved if we come to grips with this terrible problem of slavery. So the phenomenon of denial of wealth for 232 years is one phenomenon that needs to be looked at more. President Clinton's commission on race, I have said before, needs to set some records straight, do some thorough study. There should be an academic component of his Commission on Race Relations. Of course, his Commission on Race Relations goes beyond just relations between blacks and whites, as it should be. He has a great deal of vision. I applaud the President's vision in terms of understanding that at a time like this, when we do not have riots in the street, we do not have a crisis that is obvious between races, there is no race relations critical situation that has to be addressed on a national level, that that is a time when we should discuss race relations. We should quietly deal with the fact that under the surface there is a problem. We do have two societies growing apart, according to experts who have made studies, and we need to address that. So I applaud the fact that he has taken this step. He has it on a broad base, so relations with Asians or relations with immigrants in general, a whole lot of things, go beyond the African-American history. But that component ought to be there, and a thorough study of slavery and African-American history would throw a great deal of light on current discussions with respect to public policy. The basic public policy discussion surrounding opportunity would be very much assisted if we knew more about what the denial of opportunity has caused. The second factor that ought to be looked at in African-American history, the factor which has a great deal of bearing on public policy decision-making now, especially the question of opportunity, should we provide extraordinary resources to guarantee opportunity to the poor, to the disadvantaged, as a way to create a more just society? If we are not willing to deal with it on the basis of skin color, then just look at the fact that large numbers, the majority of people of African-American descent in this country, are poor. They are disadvantaged in terms of economics. We must look at it for another reason, in addition to the denial of the opportunity to accumulate wealth for 232 years. Let us look at the fact that for 232 years, the institution of slavery pursued the objective of obliteration. Obliteration. We had experienced a Holocaust. We experienced an obliteration. The Holocaust tried and succeeded in many cases in destroying the body. The ovens of Hitler destroyed massive numbers of bodies. Six billion Jews were destroyed physically. And it may be there is nothing worse in the world than to be destroyed physically, because without life there is no hope. The slaves were not destroyed physically, because the slaves were considered to be resources and assets. They wanted to keep the body alive but destroy the soul. So there was, for 232 years, an active effort, an aggressive effort to destroy the soul of the slaves of America who provided free labor. They started in the middle passage, when they brought them across the Atlantic Ocean. They always mixed the slaves according to tribe. They made certain that slaves of the same tribe were not grouped together on the boats. They mixed them up deliberately because they did not want them to communicate. They wanted to confuse them and prevent any efforts at solidarity. They wanted to stifle any efforts to maintain continuity. Slaves came from civilizations. African slaves were people who were taken out of a civilization that had rules and regulations and customs, religions, societies. They had tribal ceremonies. But an immediate attempt was made to get rid of all that, not let them practice them, by mixing up people from different places and guaranteeing that they had no common set of beliefs. They prohibited any religious or other customs or ceremonies or rituals. Slaves could not practice their own religion. And even later on, when the blunder was made by many slaveholders of allowing slaves to convert to Christianity, they limited the amount of time they could have worship service by themselves, even after they had adopted the religion of the master. They refused to recognize family units. And this is devastating. If we want to know the origin of some of the tremendous sociological problems we have within the African-American community, we should stop and think about the fact that there was an attempt made in the course of the 232 years, not an attempt but a successful venture was launched to guarantee that there were very few family units. Slaves were sold, children away from parents, and the unit of marriage was not recognized. Slaves had their own unit of marriage, called ``jumping over the broom.'' They considered a man belonged to a woman or a woman belonged to a man because they believed to ``jump over the broom'' in their own ceremony indicated marriage. Well, they may jump over the broom one night and consider themselves married, and the next night the husband is sold away from the wife or the wife sold away from the husband. So no family unit was recognized. Children were put in what we might call group settings. We cannot call them orphanages because they were often fed like animals. We know from recent studies of children from Romanian orphanages what can be done to a child if we deny then nurturing within the first few months of their life, certainly within the first year. If we feed them the way we would hogs, if we put their meals in a trough and place them in a room, a holding, a compound with one nanny and 50 children, and nobody gets any individual attention, we can change the brain of a child. That is what the studies found of the Romanian children who were adopted, and American parents had difficulties with them. Various studies conducted showed that the children had been treated in a way where they had been kept alive physically, but they had no emotional nurturing and they had been treated in a way where their brains had changed. And instead of being receptive and responsive to warmth and cuddling, they rebelled against it and they were hostile toward people who tried to be warm and responsive to them. This is a very real phenomenon. The whole argument about heredity versus environment is almost settled. We can change the brain of a child who might have come with one set of genes, but if we treat them a certain way, their actual physical structure changes and we have a different individual as a result of the environment we put them into. Well, slaves were put into a hostile environment. The children were treated in ways in which many of them certainly suffered and experienced that. They even promoted breeding, as if they had a factory. Breeding farms. Breeding farms were like factories of production to guarantee more slaves. They denied human nurturing and did any other thing they could do to wipe out any sense of a soul of a human being. That was the other phenomenon that we have to take a look at. Wealth accumulation, out of the question. But in addition to not allowing them to accumulate wealth, there was an active process that, if they wanted to make their slaves efficient, then they had to make them more like animals. If they wanted an efficient working animal, they had to deny them any opportunity to grieve, any opportunity to establish contacts among themselves, because they did not want a brooding slave after their son or their daughter had been sold. They did not want a rebellious slave because they had treated him in some human way for a while and then suddenly found it necessary to treat him like an animal. So it was in the system. Slavery is often called a peculiar institution. That is the polite way to talk about it. It was a criminal institution designed to dehumanize and to obliterate the humanity of the people who were in it. When we are considering the massive social disorganization that currently afflicts African-American communities, we have to consider the result of this combination of 232 years of economic denial and the torture of obliteration. The combination of the torture of obliteration and the denial of an opportunity to accumulate wealth has created a condition which still cries out for some special treatment. Oh, why does it take so long to get over these problems, one might ask. That question is often raised. Well, if we had some kind of continuum where there is some assistance, some opportunity, then we get positive results. During World War II, when everybody had a job, there were massive opportunities available for everybody, white and black, and blacks had an opportunity to earn an income steadily, over a long period of time. We had tremendous leaps forward in terms of the social organization of black communities and families. In that brief period, there was an accumulation of wealth, enough for large numbers to buy homes. And it began the dispersal of blacks who had moved out of the South into the industrial North, into different communities within cities and also into the suburbs. If we just applied a set of favorable conditions economically to the black community over a reasonable period of time, probably we could get rid of all of the social problems that seem intractable. Economics is at the heart of it. There are a number of books that have been written, and they keep repeating over and over again that the jobs that all left the cities and the places where blacks were accumulated, to fill up the vacuum of the jobs that left the drugs came in, and the crime that the drugs bred, of course, exacerbated the problem. I am saying all this because I wanted to stop Black History Month or African American History Month from being trivialized, from being celebrated with an overkill of microachievements, without getting to the heart of what we need to do and look at and study in order to have a better approach to public policy. What are we going to do about the President's proposals for school construction? Are we going to have on this floor all those arguments about we do not want big government, we do not want big spending, while out there in the inner cities they have hundred year-old schools? In New York City they have numerous school buildings that are 70 to 80 and 100 years old. In New York City we have almost 300 schools, 300 schools, which are still using furnaces that burn coal. Recently there was a series of articles in the Daily News on asthma, the horror of asthma in the city. We have one of the highest accumulations of asthma in New York City than anywhere else in the country. It really shocked me that the Daily News could write a series of articles in three stages, three different days, and discussing asthma and the high rate of asthma and how it accumulates in certain communities, and discussing asthma and how attacks often take place in schools and teachers do not know what to do. They never bothered to mention that there are 300 coal-burning furnaces in the city and they are contributing greatly to the asthma problem. It just is mind-boggling to believe that a set of reporters, journalists who are trained, could develop an article. I cannot believe that it is by accident. I cannot believe they overlooked the fact that there are 300 coal-burning schools and they spew coal dust into the air. Even the best coal-burning furnace with the best filters are going to have coal dust in the place where they are located. And coal dust accumulates slowly in the lungs of young children, who are very susceptible to the impact and the effect of coal dust. But that was not mentioned in any one of the Daily News articles. I have asked a few questions. I was told someone on the Daily News staff has gone to work for the Mayor and they did not want to do anything to upset the city government. I do not know. I hope that this is not a corrupt oversight. I hope it is an incompetent oversight. Either way, it is hard to imagine writing an article about the accumulation of asthma cases, the rate of asthma cases in the city, and not bothering to see that the 300 coal-burning schools have something to do with it. In the making of public policy and responding to the President's initiative, school construction, smaller class sizes, you cannot have smaller class sizes in most inner-city communities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, unless you build more schools or you greatly expand those that exist or renovate them. So you have got to build schools. The construction initiative of the President is directly related to any initiative you take on smaller class sizes. You cannot have an increase in the amount of computers and wiring for the Internet in the inner-city schools unless you repair or build new schools, because those old schools are not wired properly to receive the wiring or you cannot even bore holes because of asbestos in walls. They still have a serious problem of asbestos. In New York City I have been involved in a project to wire 11 schools as a pilot project. First we had to have a certification by an asbestos firm that asbestos, if it existed in the schools, was a problem with the holes that we bored, it was not too great. They had to certify that it really was not a health hazard. It is very expensive to get the asbestos firms that do the certification. Just to get off the ground and be able to get permission to bore holes to bring volunteers in to wire the schools, we had to spend money on asbestos certification. In many schools, of course, it is so great until you cannot get off first base and start the process unless they make considerable repairs and removal of asbestos. Now there is a move on to test the pipes of the schools, because large numbers of old schools of course have lead pipes. They only had lead pipes in public buildings at the time these schools were built, so those lead pipes are deteriorating, of course, and lead in the water becomes a problem, a very serious problem, for children. We are just getting around to really making a survey of the old schools and testing to make certain that the levels of lead are not dangerous. So the President's initiative on construction and his initiative to improve education, if you have children, even if they have the advantage of smaller class size, if they ingest enough lead, their brains are affected. One of the things lead does to your brain is certainly greatly decrease your capacity, your intellectual capacity. That has been clearly established in studies. The President has some other initiatives beyond the wiring of the schools for computers and the ratio of classes. Child care at an early age, more Head Start. All of those same initiatives, by the way, appear, and I do not think they are parroting or plagiarizing the President. I think this report has been under way for some time. They come to the same conclusions, that you need to maximize opportunity in ways that are very concrete and very practical. Let us take a look at what some of this Eisenhower Foundation, which is itself an update and review of the Kerner Commission report, the Kerner-Lindsey Commission report, let us take a look at some of the recommendations they are making. First you might be interested in a few items from the executive summary. For those people who are so much older than I am or younger than I am and do not remember the Kerner- Lindsey Commission report which talked about two societies, let us just review in their executive summary some of the things they say. My point here is that public policy should be guided by a knowledge of history. I went all the way back to 232 years of slavery. That history is very pertinent as we make public policy decisions, the fact that slaves were denied an opportunity to accumulate wealth, the fact that slaves were treated like animals and an attempt was made to obliterate their souls. The soul is the intellect and the heart. A whole lot of things go into a soul. Laws were made, by the way, to punish anybody who taught slaves to read. Let us come forward to 30 years ago when riots broke out in Detroit, in Newark, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. New York under Lindsey's administration managed to avoid any major riots until finally in the spring of 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated, you could not hold back the anger and we did have riots break out in New York City following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. The Kerner Commission came out with the following report that angered Lyndon Johnson a great deal: ``Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. ``What has happened in the 30 years since and where do we stand now? The Kerner Commission proposed remedies to racial, spatial and economic disparity. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s brought about improvements that helped expand an African-American middle class. It is important to recognize the achievements made possible by the civil rights movement and by individual struggles of millions of African-Americans. The African-American middle class has expanded, as has African-American entrepreneurship. The proportion of African-Americans with white collar jobs has risen. There has been an enormous rise in the number of African-American mayors, other elected officials and police chiefs. The high school graduation rate among African-Americans is rising. ``Yet in the 1970s, when technological change in the economy increased demand for high skilled and educated workers, jobs for the less skilled and educated became obsolete. The unemployed stayed behind, but more mobile middle-class African-Americans left core inner- city neighborhoods. Especially during the 1980s, labor market policies to provide training and jobs for the less skilled never materialized. In the words of Professor William Julius Wilson and his colleagues at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, `The exodus of working- and middle-class blacks from core inner-city neighborhoods enhanced the concentration effects of joblessness and poverty and removed important economic and social buffers that had softened the impact of macroeconomic changes in these vulnerable communities. During the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, conditions in inner-city ghettos went from bad to worse.' '' I am quoting from the executive summary of the report that was issued by the Eisenhower Commission, a 30-year update and review of the Kerner Commission report. That last statement which was made by a Ph.D. college professor might have been a little difficult to understand. In essence what he was saying, middle-class blacks, those who had the education and a little economic advantage, they moved away from the big cities. So you were left with a core of people in the inner city who were poor only. The least educated and the poorest were left to fend for themselves. The leadership class was taken away. The activities, in many cases economic activities, entrepreneurship activities that the leadership class of blacks provided in the inner city also was taken away. In more plain, ordinary terms, that is what Dr. William Julius Wilson was saying. To continue from the executive summary of this report: ``Today, while pundits and leaders talk of full employment, for the first time in the 20th century most adults in many inner-city neighborhoods are not working in a typical week.'' Let me repeat that. Most adults in inner-city neighborhoods are unemployed. They are not working. It is not that they are not looking for jobs, because whenever you have a job opportunity, you have lines of hundreds of people who are looking to get those jobs. I think one of the most publicized incidents was the case in Chicago when they opened a new hotel and 4,000 people lined up for those jobs in long lines in the winter all around the block and throughout that area, lined up to get a few hundred jobs. ``Former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall estimates the real unemployment rate at about 15 percent, far higher than the official rate.'' Certainly within my 11th Congressional District in Brooklyn, the 15 percent figure has been the rate for a long time. ``The Center for Community Change in Washington, D.C. estimates the jobs gap to be over 4,400,000 persons needing work. A high proportion are in the inner city. The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. When people are poor but employed they can better prevent family breakup, crime, drugs and other problems than when people are poor and jobless.'' I come from a poor family, but my father always was employed. Sometimes he was laid off for short periods, sometimes he had no work for short periods, but basically my father could find work. He never earned more than the minimum wage, by the way. No matter what conditions were, even during the war, he never earned more than the minimum wage. But a family with a father who was employed, there was a great deal of stability in the fact that he was employed, no matter how menial the work was or how low the pay. ``Since the Kerner Commission there have been other important trends.'' I want you to take note of the things that are said here. You hear them all the time. ``From 1977 to 1988, the incomes of the richest 1 percent in America increased by 120 percent and the incomes of the poorest fifth in America decreased by 10 percent during the time of supply-side tax breaks for the rich and against the poor.'' Now, you might say, well, that happened to all people. But the 10 percent decrease took place among the poorest people and in the African-American communities where you have the poorest people. ``In the words of conservative analyst Kevin Phillips, this meant that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The working class also got poorer. The middle class stayed about the same in absolute terms, so it, too, lost ground.'' This is middle class white and black, but in the black community with a great concentration of poverty. And it is not stretching the truth to say 60 percent of African-Americans can be classified as the poor, economically poor. ``During the 1980s, child poverty increased by over 20 percent.'' During the 1980s, following the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson and the progress made in the 1960s and the 1970s. ``During the 1980s, child poverty increased by over 20 percent, with racial minorities suffering disproportionately.'' ``Today, the top 1 percent of Americans has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.'' ``Since the Kerner Commission, the U.S. has had the most rapid growth in wage inequality in the Western world, with racial minorities suffering disproportionately. America's neighborhoods and schools are resegregating. Two-thirds of African-American students and three-fourths of Hispanic students now attend predominantly minority schools, one-third of each group in intensely segregated schools. ``In urban public schools in poor neighborhoods, more than two-thirds of children fail to reach even the basic level of national tests.'' Recently we had a report about American students scoring lower than European students and Asian students on tests. Well, they did not even have a large number of African-American students take those tests. They do not begin to reach the level where they can even go and compete. In our inner city schools, in the junior high schools in New York, they found in a study that none of the teachers teaching math and science in junior high school in the areas where the blacks and Hispanics live majored in math and science. They teach math and science, but they did not major in it. So here you have reaffirmed and repeated again in this report, and I am reading from a report entitled ``The Millennium Breach, Rich or Poor, Poorer and Racially Apart''. This is in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the Kerner-Lindsey Report. They do offer a bit of recent history, which, when you couple it with history which goes back before the Emancipation Proclamation, should throw some light on the decisions we have to make with respect to opportunity, the provision of opportunity. We say we want to provide opportunity, get rid of affirmative action and provide opportunity. I do not want to get rid of affirmative action, but let us forget it for a while. I challenge all of those who want to provide opportunity to put their money and their resources where their mouth is and provide real opportunity.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by saluting my colleague, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Louis Stokes). This is an annual Special Order that he has sponsored for many years, and we regret the fact that this is the last time that he will do it. We thank him very much for keeping the torch alive, and I assure him that in his memory the caucus will continue this tradition for years to come. The gentleman from Ohio goes home to Cleveland, where there is the whole public library, a brand new pace setting state-of-the-art library, named after him. Cleveland also is a place where there is a new kind of macroeconomics reaching out to encourage and embrace all business, but certainly offering a great opportunity for black businesses, African-American businesses. Cleveland is setting an example with a progressive mayor, I suppose one of the protegee of the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Lou Stokes), and the whole tradition of the Stokes family there in Cleveland. So I salute the gentleman. I think the theme of this year's Black History Month is very fitting and proper for him and the leadership in Cleveland, Ohio. I also would like to note, Mr. Speaker, that I will take only 30 minutes of the hour, since none of my colleagues are here, and I want to thank the other side of the aisle for agreeing to allow us to do this back to back to give us more time to finish the Special Order on Black History. I would like to continue in the same vein as my colleagues have proceeded before, saluting black business as a continuation of empowerment. Not a new thrust of empowerment. It is a continuation toward empowerment and it is inseparable. What is happening with the African-American business community cannot be separated from political leadership and the history of civil rights and political developments related to the struggle for freedom of the African-American people in America. We cannot separate the two. I would like to bring that perspective to my discussion of the importance of this Black History observance this year. We ought to become more economic minded. We should focus more on economics. We should understand we cannot separate economics from politics. They cannot be separated. They are inextricably interwoven in the history of this country. A lot of people have made a great attempt to separate economics from government, but that is not the case. That cannot happen. It is not true history when we try to do that. The impact of the transcontinental railroad on the economic development of America is one example of how government, assuming a very aggressive position, created a situation where the industrial and business development of a nation certainly jumped forward by leaps and bounds. If the government had not taken the initiative, if the people in Washington had not said that we will subsidize the building of a transcontinental railroad, a railroad that will link the East with the West, if they had not paid so much per mile and been willing to undertake that giant project, encouraging, of course, contracting with and encouraging private enterprise to do it, it would never have happened. We would not have had the linkage between the East and the West, which made this Nation one nation in terms of business and industry. And government, of course, has taken the initiative in many other ways, and I want to talk a little bit tonight about one of the latest initiatives. It is very small compared to the transcontinental railroad, or the building of the Tennessee Valley Authority, or the great leap forward we took when we passed the Morrill Act, the act which created the land grant colleges in every State. Those land grant colleges were very practical institutions. They had the theoretical instruction in the classroom. I say had, but they still exist. They have the agricultural experiment stations; they have county agents that take the knowledge and information right out to the farmers in the fields and practitioners. It is not by accident that America has the best fed population in the world. It is not by accident that we have the lowest cost food in the world. There was a lot of activity that took place, fostered by government. The Morrill Act is at the heart of our great agricultural success in this country. We do not have anything like that on the drawing board now, but the empowerment zones that have been created are a small extension of that kind of activity by government. Empowerment zones are designed to revitalize economically depressed areas. There are two categories of empowerment zones. One is the rural empowerment zone, and we have three of those now; and we have six urban empowerment zones, both designed to revitalize the area, but slightly different sets of guidelines for the two. We have authorized already in legislation the creation of 15 additional urban empowerment zones and 5 additional rural empowerment zones, and they have a great role to play in the development of African-American business in our big cities. We have to think of business in the context of the environment created partially by the actions of government. Government must still deal with discrimination, the kind of discrimination that denies access to loans, access to capital. Through the impetus of government, we have certain kinds of community development funds and certain kinds of pressures on banks to do more lending in African-American neighborhoods and to African-American businesses. There are a lot of activities of government that have created a situation where historic racial prejudice has played a role in depressing business activity in the African-American communities. We have heard some glowing stories here, as is appropriate, of successful businesses and successful businessmen in the African- American community. We have also praised some existing enterprises that are quite large and on the stock market and doing very well. Black Entertainment Television, BET, is one of those examples. But behind the story of BET there is an interesting situation that demonstrates that when people say that money is color blind or the investment community is color blind, it is not true. BET got a foothold, sort of, in the cable television industry because in the early days of cable, as cable came on line in our cities, there was a deliberate attempt by the entrepreneurs who were the owners of the early cable networks to avoid African-American communities in the big cities. There was this stereotyped notion that these people cannot pay for cable, they will not pay a subscription fee each month, they will not use cable the way the middle class will use it, or the white middle class and the suburban people. So they avoided and delayed wiring the inner city communities; they were some of the last communities wired. But much to their shock, because they did not do accurate surveys and they violated some of their own premises in terms of the way we plan for market, the prejudice was so great that they never looked very, very closely. Much to their surprise, they found that some of their best customers and customers who were most loyal and continue and always pay their cable bills, and right now they are at the heart of the cable income in our big cities, are the African Americans, African- American communities. They use cable in great amounts despite the miscalculation, the delayed wiring of our communities. There was another such miscalculation in the area of fast-food restaurants. For a long time the big restaurants, McDonald's and Burger King, were avoiding the opening of franchises within the inner city communities. They did not do objective market studies. It was not the fact that green is green and we can make money here and, therefore, we shall go where the money can be made; they had their own stereotypes and drawbacks that delayed the development of franchises in the inner- city communities. Now some of their highest-income-producing franchises are in inner-city communities, the fast-food restaurants. Sometimes I think it is, perhaps, not so good that so many of our young people are existing on so much cholesterol. But that is for another discussion. So we have an atmosphere that still is not free and objective. The marketplace is not without political interference and not without government intervention. The marketplace is not free and open. We also need to understand some of the dynamics that have taken place historically and are still taking place which affect and impact African-American businesses. We need to understand that dynamic. We need to understand and not let it get lost, the fact that ownership is the result of inheritance mostly. You know, people who own things can start tracing back to the fact where they inherited something from their parents, and then their parents inherited something from their grandparents; and it goes back and back and back, and the line of people being able to pass things down is one of the predominant factors in the accumulation of wealth, of capital, of assets. Now, there are some unusual situations. Bill Gates certainly is not the richest man maybe in the world because of that accumulation process. He is the beneficiary of something else, you know, the public development of electronics. The fact that the military and the Government of the United States put a great deal of investment into the development of radio, development of television, development of the Internet et cetera, laid the basis for people like Bill Gates to use their genius to capitalize on that. So those are the exceptions. Most family studies that have been done show that in families who can trace back where they are now economically there is some indication that that was the result of money being passed down from one generation to another. Sometimes it might have been only furniture that a couple inherited or got from their parents, or maybe sometimes it is just a home, one home. Or sometimes, in fact, in this day and age, it is usually a contribution toward the down payment on a house that comes from the parents to a modern couple. College graduates about to start out, large numbers get a little boost in terms of wedding presents or some other kind of gift from their parents which enables them to buy the house that becomes one of their major assets. So the accumulation of wealth relies very heavily on family generations and things being passed down from one generation to the other. Given that fact, the fact that there were 232 years of slavery where people of African descent not only could not own anything, they were themselves property; for 232 years nothing could be passed down. We cannot trace back an accumulation of assets from a present-day black family to the time that they, their parents or their ancestors were brought here in chains from Africa. We certainly cannot jump the ocean and go to some country where they had an opportunity to bring some of their wealth from their country, from their family, with them when they came. It might have just been no more than a suitcase. Many immigrants came to America; all they had was a suitcase with clothing, meager belongings, and a few valuables maybe that were passed down. But that suitcase was far more than any slave arriving on a slave ship had, I assure my colleagues. Slaves were even deprived of association with each other. Deliberately, most slave ships and most slave traders mixed up the tribes and broke down the groups so that any inheritance of a code of honor, mores and traditions, all of that was also wiped out. We could not have that because people spoke different languages, came from different groups. So we could not even inherit some sense of being and sense of order that came from the old country. Africa had societies and organizations, and it is well documented, governments of various natures which could have been passed down. But all of that was deliberately wiped out. So certainly nothing concrete, nothing physical, no assets were passed on. Imagine, 232 years, that is 7 generations, out of the loop. So when we look at people of African descent and where they are economically in the structure of America, stop and think about the fact that there is a gap there where nothing was passed down, nothing could accumulate, no assets could be transferred for 232 years, for almost 7 generations. That has an impact of where we are in terms of capital for African- American businesses today, in terms of wealth that exists among families so those families may support businesses. Of course, we are an integrated society. We are not depending on segregated communities where only African-American families will support African-American businesses. There is a bigger picture now, a global situation. Let us take a look at the global macroeconomics of today and how that impacts on African-American communities. Parren Mitchell was one of my great heroes. He sat here. Often, he sat right there. It was his favorite seat. He was the author of the set-asides which required the Federal contracts to set aside a small portion, 10 percent. It went down to 4 percent in some bills. But the set-aside principle was established by Parren Mitchell. The set-aside principle was based upon the fact that we needed to do something to compensate for the fact that those 232 years were imposed on people. The government was a party to that imposition. The history and tradition, whatever makes up a country and a nation, has to take responsibility for what happened. One way to try to work out of that situation is to deal with some special treatment, compensatory treatment. What a horrible word, a horrible concept for most Americans. They just do not want anybody to have special treatment. Well, we got special treatment for 232 years. For 232 years, we were treated like no other Americans. Even the Native Americans, who certainly have much to complain about in terms of the way they were treated, even they were not deprived of their traditions and their whole sense of family structure, as well as the right to own. Their problems are great, and I certainly think that they, too, are owed some special treatment, but we got special treatment. One way to get out of the situation that we are in now is to have some special treatment which is compensatory. Affirmative action is compensatory treatment. Nobody wants to hear that these days. They want to see everybody as being equal. In the world of business, nobody wants to talk about giving anybody any special favors, but let us take a look at this world of business. In macroeconomic terms, we are faced with a situation now where the United States of America has bailed out Mexico with the $20 or $30 billion loan to help the economy of Mexico. At present, we have contemplated a bailout of Indonesia, $50 or $60 billion. We are not going to be the sole participants in the bailout, but we are going to participate, and we will probably end up, the people of America, paying the lion's share of whatever is done to bail out Indonesia's economy, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea. They are talking about $50 to $60 billion for South Korea. We are engaged in global economics. We are showering special treatment on certain groups. There is what I call an international banking socialism where government does step in through its International Monetary Fund or a bank. Government steps into the market when the market is in great trouble. Government stepped in in this country to save the savings and loans, the victims of the savings and loan swindles. The government has stepped in in Mexico. Now it proposes to do that in South Korea, in Malaysia, and Indonesia. Billions, we are talking about billions. They have used it badly. Obviously, when you have a crash of an economy and you need a $50 billion bailout, a lot of things went wrong. A lot of things have gone wrong. Mismanagement, corruption, all kinds of things have gone wrong. How did they get the money in the first place? It is so difficult to get a thousand dollar loan if you are an African American walking into a bank in this country. How did they get billions, and they did not have competence to manage it well? How did they get billions when they had corruption? I mean, obviously corruption could not be hidden. How did all of this happen? Government was very much involved in South Korea during the war, Korean War. North Korea attacked South Korea, and the city of Seoul was destroyed several times. When I visited there, I was amazed at the metropolis that was built up. It took lots and lots of money and lots and lots of help from the outside, which I do not want to disparage at all. Generosity should be encouraged. But a lot of businesses existed. We visited steel mills and automobile manufacturing plants. What I am reading in the paper now is that those plants had nothing to do with reality. The third largest steel producer in the world is in South Korea. It did not make sense. There was no market for that much steel from that place. But they were given lots of money. Billions and billions of dollars flowed into the building of the steel industry in Korea. The cars that are manufactured, rolling off the line, they do things so beautifully in terms of the mechanics and the engineering, but evidently the financing, there was something radically wrong. How did they get from the bankers, the hard-nosed investment community, how did they get all that community, and why can't African American communities get a few billion to develop Bedford-Stuyvesant in my district, or Brownsville, to develop New York, a few billion to develop Harlem, to develop Watts in Los Angeles? When they talk about development in the inner-city communities, they start talking about a few hundred thousand here and there. Even the empowerment zone concept, which is the most generous attempt at economic development, they have limited it to six urban areas to begin with, and three rural areas. Now we are going to add 15 more urban areas and 5 rural areas. That is very much a piecemeal approach in terms of the number of communities that can participate. But even in the structure that they have set up, where there is the greatest amount of generosity in terms of the Federal Government providing tax credits so that private industry will come in and large amounts of tax credits are available in this situation, at the same time they are going to supply millions of dollars for loans and for some social program investment, et cetera. It is a great program, but it is not on the level of the kind of aid we have given to Mexico or to South Korea or to Indonesia, the kind of dollars that are flowing. Private industry is not running to get into our neighborhoods, which are very good investments, because we are operating within the context of the United States of America laws. The laws, the codes, the regulations, all the things that protect businesses anywhere else in America protect businesses in the African American community. Mr. Speaker, what I am saying is that we come to praise the fact that African-American business is moving forward at a more rapid pace. We come to praise the new opportunities and the middle class that has made those opportunities into reality. There was a great program on public television last night, Henry Louis Gates was the host of a number of interviews dealing with the fact there are two societies in the black community. One is that booming middle-class black community, growing by leaps and bounds, incomes rising, and then the other is the great majority of the black community, the African-American community, where you have tremendous suffering and the prosperity of the 1990's has not caught on there at all. High unemployment in areas like one-half of my congressional district, where unemployment has steadily been up at 15 percent for adults, and for young people it is as high as 30 percent. It has been that way for the last 10 years. It has not impacted. We must, while we salute the progress, understand that something more has to be made to happen. We have to look at economic development in new ways. We certainly would like to have an empowerment zone in our community. We are applying for one, along with the gentleman from New York (Mr. Towns) and the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Velazquez), trying to get an empowerment zone in Brooklyn, to get the kind of stimulus we need to have to encourage and develop and enhance and sustain more African-American businesses, more businesses in the Hispanic community, too. We have a situation there where hospitals are our largest employers, more than 5,000 people employed in one hospital complex in my district, and there is a danger that the politics of the situation may result in the closing down of the hospitals. The politics now are frightening us because the economic development we foresee if we get an empowerment zone, we see the hospitals being able to generate a whole set of additional businesses in our community, as they do now, they employ large numbers of people. There are cleaning services, food services, there are various other kinds of services, the people that do the repair, the x-ray machines, all kinds of services that are there that will be gone if we do not take care of the politics that are seeking to close down our hospitals and move them somewhere else. So the politics are inseparable from the economics. We hope the encouragement, the possibilities of an economic empowerment zone, will lead to less of a drive to close down the hospitals and leave a big slum in the middle of our communities. There are numerous other examples of how the politics have to be in place and have to work hand in hand. The government and political situation have to go hand in hand with the economic development. The whole area of tourism, which Cleveland understands very well, Lou Stokes from Cleveland, the Mayor there, understands the building of a Rock and Roll Museum in the heart of Cleveland is a great step forward economically. Just build the place that has a great attraction for people, and when they come, they bring their dollars and they support many other kinds of businesses. The development of our big cities is one of the most outstanding museums of African-American history, is now in downtown Detroit, and they had written off downtown Detroit 10 years ago and said it would never come back. Downtown Detroit is coming back in many different ways, and one of the ways it is coming back is the political leadership has chosen to make an investment in the downtown in many ways. One of the ways they are making the investment, of course, is the building of facilities like an African-American museum that has the highest attendance of any such museum anywhere in the country. As I close, I would like to bring to your attention the fact that I came here from a special showing by HBO of the film, Four Little Girls, a documentary film directed by Spike Lee. In that film, one of the things that I noticed right away as they depicted the Birmingham community out of which those four little girls who were murdered by the bombing in the church on a Sunday morning, they came out of very well- organized families. They came out of a community which was low- and middle-class probably, but you could see from the houses, from the neighborhood, very stable. They came out of the kind of environment that I grew up in, much poorer, we did not have brick houses, but wood houses, but there was an order and stability there, especially as the prosperity of World War II came to our communities and the prosperity right after the war. And when you have jobs and families had income, you did not have the drug problems, you did not have the disintegration, you did not have the need for large numbers of welfare. When you take care of the economy and do what is right by the economy, and spread and share the wealth, then many other problems get solved. It is amazing how many of our communities have been torn asunder that once had so much organization, so many middle-class institutions, those kids belonged to the Girl Scouts and the Sunshine Club, and all the stuff that we now have to try to recreate in our urban communities that have been torn apart by the lack of jobs and disintegration of families, the coming of drugs, et cetera. So the economics will blossom, the economics must blossom. They are key to revitalization of our communities and our people, but they cannot happen, it does not happen by itself. The market forces need to work hand in hand with government, and government needs to assert itself and understand that it should be there, more than just for multibillion dollar bailouts. That kind of socialism we do not need. It should be there in terms of stimulating the economy, as it did with the Morrill Act, as it did with the Transcontinental Railroad, as it did with the GI Bill of Rights, which created a whole work force that could step forward, an intelligent, well-educated work force, created overnight, in large numbers, from the returning GI's because we provided an education, and on and on it goes. Government and business need to work together to guarantee that there will be a continuing empowerment through business and economic development in the African-American community.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his observations.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, at a time when the Nation's attention is focused on education as a national priority and certain significant initiatives and programs have been clearly set forth by the President in the State of the Union address, the response of the committee of jurisdiction is a bill which implies that testing is the number one priority. And even worse than that, it appears that the sequence and the date for the testing and the fine print of a deal that was negotiated by a handful of people is more important than a response of the committee of jurisdiction to the agenda that has been laid out by the President. Leadership on education improvement should be regained by the committee of jurisdiction, the Committee on Education and the Workforce. We have all kinds of folks who have taken over that leadership. Most of all the Committee on Appropriations makes the most significant legislation on education nowadays. I do not think that is appropriate and it is not the wisest use of the talent here. The committee that has the institutional memory, the committee that knows the issue across the board should be the committee where the major decisions are made. We would like to get on with it. Let us have the hearings on the construction initiative. I do not agree with the gentleman from Michigan who said that local people want something to do, to keep the Federal Government totally out of it. There is plenty for local people to do. I think most localities would appreciate some help with school construction. That is rural, suburban and certainly the inner-city communities. New York City certainly needs some help just to convert coal-burning boilers in schools into more efficient and less dangerous boilers. Just a few days ago we had a situation where a school had to be evacuated because a 70-year-old coal burning boiler was leaking carbon monoxide. So we have an emergency in many ways. Certainly the infrastructure emergency, the emergency which cries out for help most is the one related to construction. Let us have a hearing, a series of hearings; let us begin legislation on that. Sequence is very important. Before you get into testing, I am all against testing until we deal with opportunity to learn. This opportunity to learn which the Committee on Appropriations took out of legislation a few years ago, that has to come first. Opportunity to learn means you provide decent, safe, physical facilities. Opportunity to learn means that you provide teachers who are trained, and you improve the teacher-student ratio. Some of the things that have been set forth by the President in the State of the Union address relate to providing an opportunity to learn. Before you drop the load on the backs of the children and say, we are going to test you, give them a chance to learn. At present there is a great need for leadership from the Federal Government in terms of leading the States and the municipalities to do more to improve these opportunities to learn. We had a deal that was negotiated by a few members on the subcommittee outside of the usual democratic process where you have a committee of the conference, a committee, a group of members in the committee. So we are sort of locked out of this process of really knowing what the agreement was except what we see in writing. Why should we proceed with that? Let us deal with the substance of the education improvement issue and not with the frills and the details of a deal that somebody thinks has gone bad but there is plenty of time to correct if they think there is correction needed. I urge a no vote on this unnecessary legislation.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I move a call of the House. A call of the House was ordered. The call was taken by electronic device, and the following Members responded to their names: [Roll No. 11]

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I also would like to compliment the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), who spoke before me, a fellow member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I found his presentation fascinating. I would certainly like to be a part of discussion on the items that he outlined there and hope that the committee itself officially can take up some of that discussion also. We will all benefit greatly from the kind of macrovision that he brings. And I salute the gentleman.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I salute the gentleman; and I congratulate him on his vision. I hope he understands also that a part of what he is talking about cannot be separated from education, what happens in our schools. He did mention the kind of training the workers will have to have, and that is what I want to talk about again tonight. Education for the next 3 or 4 months is certainly on my agenda; and I hope to put it on the agenda of most of my colleagues, especially those who are on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I hope that all the Members of Congress will not let the present discussion that has been launched by the President in his State of the Union address, a list of items that he gave there related to education, I hope that that wonderful list will not get lost. I hope that we will not have a fragmentation of the discussions about education to the point where we have all these tiny, separate discussions going on and there is no focus, no unity and no sense of priorities. I want to hold on to a sense of priorities within that education list that the President offered. Some things are more important than others. One thing is key to everything else. Unless we understand that, I think we are going to lose out in our efforts to improve the schools, those schools that need improvement; and the great majority of American schools do need improvement, some more than others. In the inner city communities, like the ones in my district and in many other big cities, inner city schools are on the verge of collapse. They have lost their education mission already. There is a ceremony going on where the kids come to school. But, for a number of reasons, education of the kind needed to prepare youngsters for the complex society that we live in is not taking place. So I really want to focus finally on that. I think that some of the other things I have to say are very much related; but, most of all, I want to keep the drumbeat going for the improvement of education. It must be kept on center stage. There is a dangerous education emergency in the inner city communities of America where most African-American students attend school, and I want to send that message to my constituents and to other representatives of African-American districts and to the people who live in these districts. We have an emergency which is far greater than anything else that exists in American education. Other schools are in trouble. There is a need for improvement everywhere. Rural schools and schools where poor children attend are probably in similar difficulties to the schools of the inner city where most African-Americans attend school. But all schools can stand some improvement. The emergency must be recognized, however, in the African American community, with leaders of the African American community. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, everybody in a position which has any influence must be made to understand that our schools are falling behind at a more rapid rate every day. The indicator of the African American education emergency, which has the highest visibility and the most obvious exposure of neglect, is the dangerous and counterproductive condition of school buildings. I focused on construction, education and infrastructure, because that is most visible. If we cannot deal with that which is most visible and most obvious, then I have no hope that we are going to deal with the more complex in a meaningful and productive way. There are a lot of people who want to micro-manage the schools and have an answer for every problem that exists in the schools. Most of the people who have all the answers never took a single course in education at any college anywhere or never read a book on education, but every adult in America has ideas on how to improve education. But it is important that all of us, leaders and laymen, experts in education, et cetera, admit that there is something obvious that has to be corrected before we go forward on any other level. We cannot improve our schools with respect to the ratio of teachers to pupils in the early grades. That is one of the items on President Clinton's list, and I welcome that item, and we all should. It just makes a whole lot of sense. It is supported by a whole lot of research. It is not the solution to the problem. Automatically children do not learn by being placed in a situation where there are fewer children with one teacher, but it does improve things a great deal. However, you cannot have a better ratio of students to pupils unless you have more classrooms. You have got to construct more classrooms. You cannot have a situation where the teacher with the lower ratio of pupils to teacher can do anything, if the classroom that she has to teach in is unsafe, if it is poorly lighted. It is counterproductive with respect to education, and you are going to have no result from the initiative to produce more teachers and smaller classes. There are many other problems which result in a denial of the opportunity to learn to inner-city, rural and poor children all over America. There are other problems, other than construction, other than the physical infrastructure problem. But the physical condition of the schoolhouse itself tells the story of inadequacy with a loud and clear example. We do not have to go into abstract reasoning. We do not have to go into syllogisms, deductive or any other kind of reasoning. We do not have to use boolean algebra. It is quite obvious when a school is 100 years old; it is quite obvious when a boiler in a school has a coal burning boiler and it is 70 years old. It is quite obvious there is a problem. It is quite obvious if you have coal burning furnaces in schools, you are contributing to a pollution problem that you are teaching children every day in the classroom should be eliminated. Some things are obvious, and, because they are obvious, it is a good place to start. So I want to start to continue the drum beat today on this theme. But before I do that, I want to talk about two other items that still relate back to the central theme of we have an educational emergency, and the place to begin to deal with that emergency is to deal with school construction and improvement of the infrastructure, to be real about it, to follow through on the President's proposal that we have $5 billion for 5 years, which is totally inadequate, but it is a beginning, to use his initiative; to call upon the President to use the bully pulpit of the White House; to call upon the governors and the mayors in cities and states where they have a surplus now, a budget surplus, to let them take the initiative at the local and state level and deal with this problem of construction and physical infrastructure. But before I add my new evidence to my argument, the evidence beyond what I stated last week, I do want to take time out to do two things. One is I want to pay tribute to Ronald Dellums. I am very frustrated as one of the admirers of Ronald Dellums, my colleague from California, who is resigning from the Congress. I am frustrated because we have had several opportunities to have statements made on the floor on behalf of Mr. Dellums, and all of those occasions, the first hour, the second hour, the extra half hour, the extra time made today, all that time has been crowded, and it has been impossible to get the statement in, because so many people from both sides of the aisle have wanted to come forward and praise Ronald Dellums. He is a magnificent human being, he is a magnificent leader, he has been a magnificent Congressman. Certainly whatever Ronald Dellums decides to do in the future, he will be a magnificent person in that arena also. He is leaving the Congress, and his life and record, in my opinion, is a profound statement, and that statement sends a message of inspiration to all ages, including school age students. If I wanted to stay on the theme of education, I could certainly do it in discussing the life of Ronald Dellums. I am by profession a librarian, an educator. As a librarian, I saw how popular biographies were with young people. Probably the section of the library most popular with young people is biographies. The fiction section, of course, is very popular. Girls, I notice, read a lot of fiction, but girls also read biographies, and boys read a lot of biographies. So, in combination, biography, the study of the life of people, was the most popular section that I saw among young people when I was a librarian. I think it is good that that is so. I have seen the development of channels on cable television which deal with a lot of biography, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, the Biography Channel, and I think they are very entertaining and a very good way to pass on knowledge of our history and our culture. The biography of Ronald Dellums is one that fascinates me. In my next career I want to be a writer, I want to write many things of many kinds, but I never was inspired to think of writing somebody's biography until the past few days when I have heard people making statements about Ron Dellums. I have learned a great deal more about him as a result of these statements and some of his responses to these statements that I never knew before. I had quite a bit that inspired me that I observed on my own, but I have learned so much more. Ron Dellums' life is the kind of life you would like to have between the pages of a book on a shelf in a library where young people come in to read. In terms of being a role model for inner-city African American youth, I can think of no better role model than Ronald Dellums, an exciting role model. His life has been an adventure, an adventure of ups and downs and taking great risk and getting pretty close to the edge of the precipice in many cases. He is a man who is an ex-marine, and young men like the whole macho nature of the Marine Corps and what that means, a guy who is a marine. He also in the crowning achievement of his career became the chairman of the Committee on Armed Services. The Committee on Armed Services is responsible for the legislation relating to the defense of the United States, the defense of the free world, the maintenance of some semblance of law and order in the entire world. That is where this marine rose to, the point that he was at at the height of his career. How fascinating that is. He recently was given a Medal of Honor at the Department of Defense, and that, too, I am sure is an exciting story for many young people. But we have learned from Ron Dellums' own mouth that he was like a lot of inner-city youth out there today, on the precipice, walking on the edge of the cliff in many cases. He was always very bright in high school and was slated to go places, and there was a chance for him to win a scholarship that would have paid for his entire college education, 4 years in college. But according to Ron, in his junior year began to slack up and become interested in girls and the kinds of things and pitfalls that many youth fall into, not only in the inner-city but elsewhere, too. But he was very bright, began to take things for granted, slacked off, and he missed off on winning that scholarship that would have paid his way to college, and his parents were very poor. So he had to begin college working. And like a lot of young people out there, it was tough to work and try to go to college, so he dropped out. There are a lot of dropouts out there, and they ought to know the story of Ron Dellums. He dropped out. He could have just kept dropping, but he wanted to make something of his life, and he saw military service as an opportunity. This relates to something my colleague was saying before, it was an opportunity to get an education. Go into the military service, and you come out using the provisions of the GI Bill, and you get an education. You can have an education paid for. That GI Bill was a revolutionary bill in the history of this country. They gave returning veterans an opportunity. They kept it going for quite a long time after that. So Ron Dellums decided to join the Marines in order, really, his ultimate goal was to go to college and get an education. When he came out of the Marines, he was true to his dream and went to college and got his bachelor's degree. While he was in the Marines, his experience there is a good example also to hold up to a whole lot of minority youth out there, African American, Hispanic, Asian, who from time to time, and I know, because I have been there, are going to face outright ugly immediate discrimination staring you in the face. Something is going to happen, and it happens all too frequently, that is going to make you seethe and boil, want to hit somebody, or give up. Ron Dellums had that kind of experience while he was in the Marine Corps. He had the highest score on a battery of tests that were given in his battalion. He came out with the highest score of all of the members of his battalion. So naturally there was interest in him. When they saw the score, people who were interviewing people for officers school, candidates for officer's school, wanted to interview Ron Dellums. Somebody had made a mistake and had not appropriately noted on the statement recommending that he be interviewed that he was not white, and Ron was told by his sergeant to go down to the quonset hut where they were interviewing candidates for officer's school, and, of course, he was thrilled and went down and reported. The officer looked up at him and said, you know, what race are you? They noticed that he looked a bit darker than most whites. And they corrected the error, the omission that had been made, and they told him, you know, we thought you were white. I am sorry, we don't need you. I am not sure they said, I am sorry. They said, we don't need you, we can't use you. That was one of those points in his life where he could have blown up on the spot and done something outrageous and gotten into serious trouble, or he could have crumbled away into a mass of suffering and feeling sorry for himself and hating the world and given up, but he didn't. That incident, and many others like that, of course, only gave Ron greater strength. So he went on, finished the Marine Corps, finished his college career. Ron Dellums came to politics in a very strange way. He was not seeking to run for office, he was just known among some young people to be a person of considerable leadership ability, and one day he was sort of tapped when they were considering a person to run for the city council, and he was a person who impressed them most as being most independent and caring the least about the glory or the patronage or spoils that might come with the job. He cared only about the fact that he wanted to speak his mind. He so impressed the people making the selection that they chose him to run for the city council, and he spent a lot of time trying to run away from that call of the people. But he finally succumbed, and he ran and he won. A similar call came later on for him to run for Congress against an incumbent in the Democratic primary, and he ran there and came to Congress as an African American from a predominantly white district. That is the way Ron Dellums came to Congress. He came to Congress as an advocate known for his stance on peace, an advocate for peace and the environment. He came as an advocate for those principles that had been enunciated in the Berkeley movement. He came and found a lot of people waiting for him with all kinds of insults and traps. His office was bugged and his phone was tapped and a number of things happened because Ron Dellums was considered a great radical. Ron Dellums came as the advocate for peace and saw that peace and the kind of life that was needed, the kind of resources that were needed to create a just society where people could live in peace and want to live in peace was being blocked by the humongous military budget and the amount of resources and dollars going into the military. So Ron Dellums did another amazing thing, contradictory, the peace advocate became a member of the Committee on National Security. The Committee on National Security had on it a peace advocate that they did not welcome so much, so he had to endure quite a number of hardships there also. I could go on and on, but there are a whole lot of things that we could write in a special book just for young people as we often write biographies and shelve them in young adult section and the children's section; there are biographies written particularly for children, particularly for young people, and there are numerous examples of the kinds of problems faced by young people today that would be very inspiring for young people if they were to read them. There are numerous things that also should inspire all of us. Adults confronted with difficulties should take a page, a few pages from Ron Dellum's book, adults who want nice, tidy lives and see things in straight formulas should understand how this man's life is so admired and has become so productive as a result of dealing with these contradictions. The advocate of peace who went on to the Committee on National Security. The advocate of peace who stayed on the Committee on National Security long enough to become a chairman of the Committee on National Security. The advocate of peace who would come to the floor and make a presentation reporting what his committee had decided and the votes of his committee, and usually the votes of his committee were overwhelmingly in favor of whatever had been decided and alone in the center would sometimes be the Chairman himself. The Chairman of the Committee on National Security often would have to vote, feel compelled to vote against his own committee's proposals on the floor. The authorizing legislation for defense often received a no vote from Ron Dellums. Ron Dellums set us free. Those of us who always saw the military budget and the discussion of military strategy and security of the Nation as being off limits to laymen and felt we were sort of dependent on the experts, Ron became an expert, an expert with the point of view of a man of peace. Ron could explain the military budget in as graphic detail as any person in America. Ron could discuss military strategy with the same kind of precision and sense of vision and understanding of what had to happen, what resources had to be matched with what forces, et cetera, in order to guarantee that America was prepared to defend itself. Ron Dellums set us free and made it clear that a person who was a proponent of peace and a person who wanted to cut the military budget in order to create more resources for the education budget or for health care or for child care, that person was not unpatriotic. He sat there and talked about the defense of America first and talked about national security in terms which did not require a lot of wasteful spending that gobbled up and devoured resources that could go somewhere else. Ron Dellums set us free to understand the Trident submarine and many other kinds of submarines and the warheads on the submarines versus the warheads on the land base, versus the warheads of the air, and when we put it all together in terms of being able to defend ourselves against anyone, and how when we start adding to that we were just adding more expensive weapons that added nothing to our defense. He made us understand and set us free from the mystery and the mystique that most people like to bring and surround the whole matter of the military defense of the Nation with. Ron Dellums was the kind of person who could come on this floor and actually change the minds of his colleagues. There are not many Congressmen who can do that. I have seen it happen over and over again. We make wonderful speeches on the floor, but we seldom change the minds of our colleagues. Ron Dellums had the capacity. Some people have said, some people that believe in democracy, who are not cynical about democracy, have said that the Representatives and Members of Congress are the tribunes of the people in our democracy, they are the tribunes. If we are tribunes, then Ron Dellums was a tribune for the Members of Congress. He would summon us to do things that we normally might not have done. He could provide leadership and he could change minds and he could make those who disagreed with him always respect him. In summary, I would say that in one single body Ron Dellums carries the capacity for great passion as well as great wisdom. He was a person who felt--he is, this is not his eulogy, he still lives. He is a person that cares about whatever he undertakes with a great deal of intensity. He cares and lives with a great deal of intensity. But he also has a great deal of wisdom behind that intensity. I can think of no more noble mixture to describe and that I think all human beings should aspire to, the mixture of great passion and great wisdom, and that is the kind of person that we have been saluting for the last 3 days here in Congress. He deserves all the accolades that he has received and many more. Ron Dellums is a model for all Congressmen and Congresswomen. Ron Dellums cared about education and he made a great sacrifice when he left the arena of education and social service. He was a trained social worker. He left that arena to go on to the Committee on National Security because there was no one else to go from the peace movement. There was no one who had the peace perspective who was willing to go, so he was a social worker, he was very much concerned about education. He wrote, authored several bills related to education as well as to health care and some other items not related to defense, and he would certainly agree with the kind of proposals that I have been making here related to our education agenda for 1998. Before I go back to that agenda directly, there is one other item that I want to also mention, and that is the fact that tonight, I came here from an exhibit called the African-American Odyssey. The African- American Odyssey is an exhibit across the street in the Library of Congress. It opened tonight and will be running for quite some time, about just that, the African-American Odyssey from the time the first slaves were brought into this Nation to the Civil War, and--not the Civil War, civil rights movement, past the Civil War to the civil rights movement. I think it is an exhibit that everybody in Washington ought to take a few moments to go over and take a look at. I think it relates very much to the President's initiative on race. The President's initiative on race is one of his farsighted initiatives where he deliberately started a discussion of race and the implications of race relations in this Nation before there was a crisis and before there was a crisis, he wanted some basic items put on the table, he wanted Americans from all walks of life and all ethnic and racial groups to talk about race, talk about relations between groups, and I think that this African-American Odyssey exhibition and items like this have a major role in this discussion. What has been absent in the discussion on race, the President's initiative so far, is a set of facts, pieces of history that everybody agrees to and understands on a just simple, factual basis. So much is not known about slavery, so much is not known about one of these raises that evolved from this discussion. Perhaps the race that is at the center of all of these discussions are African-Americans. Our relations with others, our relations certainly with the majority population is the most complex one. It has the most tangled roots, the roots are more tangled than any others in terms of history. There are many reasons why this discussion of race has to deal first of all and most of all with African-Americans and their experience here and their experience in relation to the majority, the white Americans who are in the majority. So we need to, in this effort, and I would strongly recommend this to the President, I will do it in writing soon, we need to have a grounding, a scholarly grounding as we go forward in these discussions now and for the future. The future may be 10 years, it may be 20 years. Nobody expects to solve any profound problems related to race as a result of initiating these discussions. It is where they have directed us, it is a sense of where we can go with these discussions that is most important. So I would urge the President to commission a group of Nobel Prize winners from all over the world. Maybe 10 Nobel Prize winners who would be charged with the job of laying out a study of the history of slavery and race relations starting back to the beginning of mankind and bring it right up to the rape of Africa where large levels of human beings for the first time were uprooted and hauled away. They were not involved in a war where it was a result of a war and losing a war; they became slaves. They were not involved in a situation where the conqueror, despite the fact that he was in power, respected them as human beings. They were not involved in a situation like the Romans and the Greeks where the Romans chose to learn a great deal from the Greeks, although they had the power to enslave them; they were involved in a situation where because of the fact that basically the European nations were Christian, they had to justify what they did by reducing these slaves to a category of being subhuman. The rape of Africa, the Atlantic slave trade and the fact that so many were transported across the Atlantic in subhuman conditions and the fact of exactly how many. If we try to find out exactly how many or anything close to a reasonable discussion of how many, and we read the books that are written and find that they are ridiculous. We cannot find anything which really has substance on some of these fundamental issues like exactly how many people were on the continent of Africa, not exactly, but approximately how many people were on the continent of Africa when the slave trade began. If we took a certain percentage out of Africa, what did that percentage look like? If we had the same ratio in today's population terms, what percentage of Africans were hauled away and what would the numbers be like if they were percentages of populations that exist now, so we would have a better idea of what terrible thing was done to a continent, black Africa, part of a continent. I would like to see scholars who are more or less objective, who have been cited as being great scholars by Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize process; I would like to see them be given the charge of assembling a body of people, other scholars and historians and sociologists like Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar did a study called the American Dilemma. He did it on one person and it had a lot of value at that time. There is a great deal of value having someone who is not immersed in the situation take part in a process of really trying to lay out all of the problems and having us look at the facts, the history surrounding the problems. I do not think the government should pay for this. I do not think we should get into government paying for it, because it will lead to a whole series of restrictions and political decision-making about the results and the final product that would probably jeopardize the whole project. I think foundations, and we have many rich foundations in this country and throughout the world. We do not talk much about the fact that there are a lot of big foundations in a few other countries, but certainly in this country foundations could pay whatever had to be paid to support this process. They could finance it. So if we have a combination of top scholars recognized all over the world, being able to buy the best expertise available, they could pay for a staff of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and write a total history. It may be encyclopedic and be quite long and take 5 or 10 years, but write a history that more or less every civilized human being everywhere in the world could respect because of the process that produced it. From that history we could make some deductions. We could begin to see the truth. We could see a little part of that truth by going to visit this exhibit that I just mentioned. It is a beginning of opening the eyes of a lot of people who take for granted a lot of myths about slavery and the process of slavery, the process of arriving to the point where a Civil War had to be fought, the role of the abolitionists. There are a lot of young black men who ought to know the role of the white abolitionists and other whites, including the white soldiers who gave their lives on the battlefields in the process of setting them free, of setting their ancestors free, and of standing for the principle that all men are created equal at a time that they could not do it for themselves. That is one thing ought to bring us together and lessen the animosity among young blacks who feel that they have been victimized, is understanding the history that the whole flame of freedom and the whole insistence that every man is created equal. What we see in the movie, ``Amistad,'' the principle that John Quincy Adams sets forth, it was not self-evident at all because a great deal of propaganda and a great deal of rationalization, including bringing the Bible in and the myth of Ham, and Ham being cursed by Noah and told that his descendants had to serve everybody else. All of those myths can be laid to rest if we had a really factual history of slavery from the beginning, a history of the freedom struggle here in this Nation that began with whites insisting that the institution of slavery was an evil institution. The African-American Odyssey talks about that. It is a presentation at the Library of Congress which will have parts that will go on line. We can get it on the Internet. There are certain parts of this African- American Odyssey that will go into any school, college, library anywhere in the country because they have put it on line and we can get it from the Internet. The Library of Congress is proud to announce it. This is paid for by gifts from Anheuser-Busch, the Philip Morris Company, Citibank, Fannie Mae Foundation, Home Box Office, James Madison Council, Library of Congress. In addition, a major gift from Citicorp Foundation to the National Digital Library of the Library of Congress allows this 5-year effort to transmit portions of the African-American Odyssey and some related rare and unique items from the Library's vast African-American collections to the classrooms, libraries, and community centers on the Internet electronically. I think that if we interject this profound note into the discussions that are going on as a result of the President's initiative on race, it will lift up the discussions to new levels. I am not criticizing what has happened before. There are a lot of important things happening in small ways. By the way, on the Internet there is a site called Promising Practices, and on that site one can find out what is being done in the race initiative, the President's initiative on race. They also have a section which, from day to day, lists the kinds of activities that are going on related to the initiative; and another section called Promising Practices, which delineates results that have been reported, the kinds of things they recommend all over the country. So this discussion of race and this understanding of race relations is not unrelated to my discussion of education in general. Because I am now going to conclude by discussing the collapse of the school system in New York City literally. School construction, the dangerous nature of going to school in New York right now, February, 1998, and how the danger has mushroomed and why we are in a state of paralysis because people making decisions in New York City are not the same people whose kids are in those schools. There is a difference in race. There is an element of racism combined with incompetence and bureaucracy that make its impossible to move forward on providing a decent place to study for the schoolchildren in New York City. Even when the money is available, the evidence is that they cannot move. Nobody has a sense of urgency. There are not enough people in leadership who really care, so millions of dollars are sitting there waiting for something as simple and obvious as a conversion of a coal- burning furnace to a gas-burning furnace which does not pollute. Mr. Speaker, we have 300 schools that have coal-burning furnaces. Of the 1,100 schools in New York, 300 have coal-burning furnaces. That is the statistic given to me. Some say 274, some say 284. Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings) like to speak? I would be happy to yield to the gentleman.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for his remarks and would like to certainly say that Ron Dellums used to frequent special orders when he first came to Congress and was first frustrated. He spoke repeatedly about defense issues, Armed Services issues. The things that he was not allowed to say in the committee and could not get time to say on the floor, he came to say them in special orders. So I am here because I am inspired by his record; and I hope that, on the matter of education, we will achieve the same results so that somewhere down the line we are going to make a breakthrough to the conscience of Americans and they will understand as much about the fact that education is the number one national security issue as we now understand about certain more obvious defense issues. I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings). Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to note that it is not only a national security issue, what happens with education. As my colleague, my Republican colleague, was talking about before, the workforce is going to be determined by the quality of education that we produce today. The workforce of tomorrow will be determined by that effort now. It also is important for us to understand that we are subjecting our children to conditions. And I say we because, regardless of where you live, you may have a suburban school which is perfect, but if you are a decision maker here in Congress then you are part of the problem, too. Any Congressman who does not wake up to the fact that we have an education emergency in our inner-city communities, that emergency begins with something as basic as buildings, as basic as bricks falling from school buildings and striking children. I talked about Yanahan Zhao last week. Just a week ago last Wednesday, I talked about Yanahan Zhao who was killed after bricks fell from a scaffolding that was being repaired by careless contractors who allowed that to happen. I talked last week about East New York Transit Technical High School. That is a high school building where the back wall, the whole wall, a wall that weighs 10 tons and was 500 square feet collapsed into the school yard. And the only reason large numbers of children were not injured or maybe killed was that the wall collapsed on Martin Luther King's birthday when school was out. It was a holiday. I talked about that was only the beginning. I gave some examples from across the country where other kinds of accidents are happening that are endangering children and teachers in schools, and I invited all of my colleagues to begin the process of collecting examples of mishaps that have endangered children or injured children or certainly that have taken the lives of children. There are many that never get reported. There are many that may get reported in the local paper and we may never know about nationally, but I think we do ourselves a great favor. It would be very useful for all of us to start collecting examples of where we fail children in the most basic way. We can debate a long time about whether we are teaching them reading properly. There is a great debate whether we should use the whole word method or phonics. There are debates about the importance of technology versus the importance of fewer teachers. There are all kinds of debates raging around instruction and pedagogy which will not be settled easily. But, Mr. Speaker, we can see a building where the ceiling has fallen in many classrooms. We can see the walls on the top floors of many schools. We can look at the age of many schools that are 100 years old and know the problems they are going to have. We know they have lead pipes in the plumbing and that if the children are drinking water and the pipes have not been changed and they have lead pipes, that may be a danger. We know if they have been built in the last 50 years that they have large amounts of asbestos in the walls for various purposes, not just the roof but also in the insulation. We know certain things are directly related to the age of a building, and we know that certain buildings cannot be wired with new technology because the facts are the wires will not take it. We know these things are happening. So let us document it for ourselves. Let us document it for all of those who do not believe it. The sight in New York is more obvious. We have The New York Times, which goes all over the country, which reports the most dramatic local news when children are killed by bricks falling; and the New York Times, along with other local papers, reports another incident that took place this Monday. Those who are skeptics and do not believe it, listen: Seventy-five children, three teachers and a custodian were stricken with nausea, dizziness and headaches; and 1,250 people were evacuated as carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases from a 70-year- old coal-fired furnace drifted through an elementary school in Queens. This is a report from the New York Times dated yesterday, February 3. Seventy-five children, three teachers and a custodian stricken. Every child was traumatized. They had to be marched out of the school. There were ambulances and fire trucks. Every child experienced that, I assure you; whether they vomited or fainted or were clutching their throbbing heads and churning stomachs or not, they still were affected in a very negative way by this experience. So it is impacting everybody. The cause of the fumes were still under investigation on Monday night, but the board of education suspected human error. On the morning of chaos that raised questions about the safety of coal-fired furnaces in the city's schools and about funding and priorities and rehabilitating an aging, often crumbling school system, the pupils of PS 127 and its staff of 100 were evacuated twice. First they had a terrible smell that took the kids out, but it did not smell bad enough and it was not obvious enough, so they took them back in. But on the second time when they came out, there were ambulances and fire trucks, and many had to be treated at a hospital. I talked about Yanahan Zhao as one of those heroes that we do not want to see repeated. We do not want to see any more children killed as Yanahan Zhao was killed. I do not want to see any other kid like Jodyann Sibbles, 10 years old, a fifth-grader who said that the school smelled like rotten eggs, or any of her colleagues who found themselves, her fellow students who found themselves vomiting. Francine Johnson who stood with her daughter Yolanda, I do not want to see children like that who think that they might have been killed. Her mother said maybe she was overreacting, but carbon monoxide can kill you. I do not want do see children subjected to bureaucratese of the kind that has appeared in today's paper where you have officials of the board of education using very strange language. If you want to know exactly what I am talking about, listen closely to these statements. The officials say that the incident was the result of human error and not caused by the age of the furnace or the crack in it that was discovered during the investigation. The furnace is 70 years old and fumes were escaping, and they have some explanation about a new man that was putting the coal in, left a door ajar, and that interfered with the way the fan was blowing the air, et cetera. But during the investigation they discovered that there was a crack in the furnace and they said, no, there is a crack in the furnace, but do not worry about it. That is not the cause. Why would not a crack in the furnace, where the furnace is 70 years old, not be a possible cause? These same school officials admitted that they had made a mistake last month when they investigated the school heating system, and they put in a request for funding for a heating system upgrade. They did not put in a request for a new boiler. The money is available to replace the coal-burning furnace, the boiler that burns coal. All they put in for was an upgrade of the radiators and the ventilation system, not the boiler. The spokesman for the board of education says that now they are going to put the school on the list to have a boiler replacement. What reason does she give? Parents are alarmed. It is not that they made a mistake, not that they were callous, it is not that they are guilty of child abuse and neglect, they do not care enough to use the money available in the right way. No, parents are alarmed, and since parents are alarmed, rather than just make repairs, they decided to go ahead and do the full conversion. Almost half of the students stayed home yesterday because the parents felt the school is still not safe despite the fact that it is now open again. The city council has agreed this year to fund 21 boiler conversions in 279 city schools that are still heated by coal-fueled furnaces. Those numbers continue. Another 63 conversions are being funded with State bond money and board of education funds. Not all the schools have been identified. The board of education officials say there was no serious health problem at this school, PS 127, as a result of the exposure to carbon monoxide which was three times the acceptable levels on the school's first floor. Seventy-five children, four adults were treated at area hospitals for headaches, nausea and symptoms. The board of education said there was no serious health problem. The air quality returned to normal, they said, with a level of carbon monoxide measurable three parts per million, well below the acceptable level of 34. It has not been mentioned at any time by any official of the board of education that if a furnace has a crack in it or if there is something wrong with the ventilation system, the employees make mistakes and more carbon monoxide comes up into the school than should come from the basement where the boiler is, that children may be harmed if it happens on a small scale every day, and you cannot detect it because it is not so dramatic and obvious. I would not want to send my child back to that school until the coal-burning furnaces were replaced or something happened to remove that danger. It is highly probable that if the boilers, all three of them, this is one of three boilers, all are 70 years old, that there is enough carbon monoxide or other pollutants escaping on a small scale every day to cause harm to the health of the children because children are very susceptible to pollutants. They are the most endangered. So if you have that condition, you do not have to talk about three parts per million, well below acceptable levels of 34, if you know seepage is there. I do not think any member of the school bureaucracy would want their child to go to that school. I do not think any person with any common sense would want their child to continue to go to that school. Yet this is the kind of condition which probably exists in all of the coal- burning schools. The efficiency of a coal-burning boiler that is 70 years old, and most of them are about that age, is such that you know you have the leakage. Even the most efficient coal-burning boiler is spewing pollutants high into the air which fall back and create other problems like the high rate of asthma in New York City. Let me just close my argument. These things are happening in a city that has the money to make the repairs and to convert the boilers. There are three sources of money. The school, the City Council of New York City several years ago appropriated $1 billion to start the process of converting the coal-burning furnaces to oil or gas, less polluting substances. They made the money available. The board of education has no explanation as to where the money went. We had an environmental bond issue at the State level, and part of the money raised from a more than a billion-dollar environmental bond issue was dedicated to the conversion of coal-burning boilers in the schools to updated, more efficient boiler systems. The power authority, the New York power authority, was given money even before that to start the process of converting the boilers in the schools. That money came from a consent decree which showed that one Exxon was not doing some things properly. They had to agree to compensate for it by making a lot of money available for some projects designated, related to energy. So the power authority was given the authority to spend money to convert the boilers. The money is there. For some reason they say it costs $1.3 million for the conversion of each school heating system; 1.3 million seems like a lot of money to me but I will not quarrel with that at this point. If you divide 1.3 million into the amount of money that has been appropriated, I told you a billion before came from the city council, 28 million came to the school construction authority from the State environmental bond issue in fiscal year 1997, another 50 million in fiscal year 1998, this year, and the power authority had a large amount, several million before that. With all these millions, if you divide them by 1.3, you will find that the number of schools, eight schools, they are working on eight schools, they have not fully converted any, eight schools. So I close by saying the fact that bureaucrats who do not feel any sense of urgency are in charge of the schools impedes the process of improving the infrastructure even when you have the money. Nothing is more important, and we feel that there is a state of emergency and that we do what is necessary to take control from these bureaucrats and upgrade our school infrastructure as rapidly as possible.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by bringing America's attention to the name of a young lady. No, it is not a young lady who was an intern in the White House. It is a young lady who is now dead as a result of negligence on the part of our system. Her name is Yanahan Zhao. She is a 16-year-old girl who was killed after bricks fell from a scaffolding at PS-131 in Brooklyn. I think it is very important that we note that Yanahan Zhao may not be the only student that has been killed in this kind of accident, but certainly this one we know about, it was reported. It has high visibility. Any time a child is killed in New York City, it gets high visibility. A city that often ignores the conditions under which students and children are laboring from day to day will focus a lot of attention on a child that is killed. So death was cruel, and our concerns and prayers we offer to the family of Yanahan Zhao. But I think we ought to understand that we should use her as an example of what we do not want to happen again. We do not want anywhere in America a student killed by bricks falling from the scaffolding of a school, or we do not want any one American student killed as a result of a building decaying or fixtures falling or any other matter. We do not want students killed and hurt. Yanahan Zhao becomes a motto for a school construction initiative that ought to spread all across America. We have to declare a state of emergency and assume that we have a state of emergency with respect to infrastructure, construction and everything related to infrastructure with schools. We have to listen to the General Accounting Office when they say that more than $100 billion is needed to deal with updating the infrastructure of public schools across the country. We have to listen. I have a few other examples of some outrageous things that have happened with respect to school construction or the lack of it. At East New York's Transit Technical High School, a wide swath of brick facade broke free from the building and came crashing down to the sidewalk. The only reason no one was injured is that it was Martin Luther King's birthday holiday, and the children were not in school. That is the only reason we did not have massive injuries. This wall, according to the report of the New York Times of January 23rd, this wall weighed 10 tons. The bricks in that wall weighed 10 tons, measuring about 500 square feet. That is the wall that fell from the school. Fortunately school was out and no one was hurt. According to the same article in the New York Times of January 23rd, the city construction officials had inspected that school and found it safe just 5 days before a wide swath of the brick facade fell. They said that the school, East New York Transit Technical School, had been inspected at least three times in the last 5 months, most recently last Friday. The last inspection was one of nearly 200 that had been conducted by the city's building department at schools throughout the city after debris, variously described as brick or cinder block, tumbled from a construction site atop of a Brooklyn elementary school, cracking the skull of 16-year-old Yanahan Zhao, who later died from that injury. I think it is important also to note that New York City has, of course, 1,100 schools, 1 million students. You expect things like that to happen, some people say, cynically dismissing the significance of this. But across the country, having these same accidents, that get less publicity. At Phoenix, Arizona, at a Phoenix preparatory academy, a large piece of fireproofing material tore away from the metal decking of a second floor computer room, hitting the teacher. At Blake Elementary School in Lakeland, Florida, a student was struck on the head when loose mortar fell from over a doorway. A second grade teacher at Washington Elementary School in Spokane, Washington, was hit on the head and is still suffering nightmares after fluorescent lights peeled from the ceiling and crashed in her classroom. The thousand-pound metal fixture smashed onto her desk and across a small rug where students were gathered. Fortunately the students were not injured. At Grande Hills High School in Los Angeles, California, six students and two teachers were struck by boards that fell from the roof of their building. And I am sure it goes on and on, and I would like to invite other Members on both sides of the aisle to gather up these statistics, do a survey on what is happening with the buildings in their districts. This is not a pie-in-the-sky proposition that we should spend far more money than has been proposed on school construction. I want to sing my praises for the State of the Union address. It was a great address. It offered platforms and programs that I certainly agree with. The education initiatives, I think, that were proposed by the President are magnificent. Most of the initiatives are really needed. But I want to argue here today, and the reason I am here so early in the year, I want to make the case that we keep our eye on the core of the problem, that school construction and the infrastructure of schools is central to any effort to improve America's schools. There are a lot of other things that are proposed in the President's set of initiatives that can happen if you do not have first attention and most attention directed at school construction. You cannot have a reduction of teachers, a reduction of classroom size so that you have fewer students in the classroom, if you do not have the classrooms. It is wonderful that the President proposes that the Federal Government take the initiative and provide some of the funding to reduce class size, highly desirable objective, and we must all work toward that objective, but it will not be possible in situations where schools are overcrowded and there are no classrooms. In 1990, in the fall of 1996, in New York City on opening day they did not have room or places for 91,000 students, that with more than a million students. But even in a system with more than a million students, to not be able to give a desk to 91,000 students is still an outrageous situation. When schools opened in 1997, we were in the midst of an election year, and nobody would let us see the statistics. We do not know whether the situation improved dramatically between 1996 and 1997, but we do know from observation and from surveys that have been done by my education advisory committee that in my district there are large numbers of overcrowded schools. There are some schools where the principals insist that they are not overcrowded, but you can begin to knock that assertion down when you ask the second question. The second question is, how many lunch periods do you have? How many shifts for lunch do you have in your school? And when you find out that they start feeding children lunch at 10:00 in the morning, you know they have got a radical overcrowding problem. It is out of hand. You force a child to eat his lunch at 10:00, and you stop having lunch as late as 2:30, you force a child to wait that long, you have a situation where you have overcrowding and you are punishing the children. It is really a form of child abuse to make a child eat lunch at 10:00 in the morning. So we have a problem, and the problem is not limited to inner-city schools. It may be more acute and more obvious in inner-city schools across the country, but urban schools, suburban schools all need help in dealing with their infrastructure problems. We need money to build more schools. The President's proposal, the $5 billion over a 5-year period, is a good one because it at least is better than nothing. It begins the process. But so much more is needed in order for us to generate the more than $100 billion that the General Accounting Office says we need to deal with school infrastructure. Now, the President should not be forced to bear the burden of providing all of the funds for school construction. The Federal Government should not be forced to bear the burden of providing all the funds for school construction. Traditionally, this has been left to the States and localities, and some of my friends on the other side of the aisle in particular argue that only the States and localities should be involved in school construction funding. I think we ought to share the burden, that the Federal Government should provide a stimulus and should get very much involved to more than just $5 billion over a 5-year period, but the States and localities should do their job, too. We have across the country many States that are reporting surpluses in their last year's budget, anticipating surpluses at the end of the fiscal year. New York State's fiscal year ends on March, the last day of March. The new fiscal year begins April 1st. They are predicting more than $2 billion in surplus, money that they have gained through revenue that they did not have to spend. New York City's budget, which begins on July 1st, ends on June 30th, they are projecting more than a billion dollars, too. $1.2 billion is presently being projected as the surplus in New York City budget. So I will agree with my friends on the other side of the aisle, Republicans who say that local government ought to be responsible but not totally responsible. I think the President should use the bully pulpit and challenge all of the States and all of the local governments who have surpluses to deal with the infrastructure problem, the crumbling schools and the overcrowded schools. Particularly in New York City, I think that the first use of the surplus should be addressed to the crumbling infrastructure. No more children should die in New York City. If you have a surplus of $1.2 billion, then certainly part of that ought to be addressed to school construction. The State has $2 billion. Part of that ought to be addressed to school construction. I think that we do not want to be guilty of having a civilization which cannot protect its children in school. School is a very important function of every society, and if we cannot protect our children there, what kind of statement are we making about our concern with children? We know that dramatic situation that we encounter here in Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. schools opened 3 weeks late last fall because of the fact that they had problems with roof repairs. People criticized the judge for ordering the schools to stay closed while the repairs were being conducted. It appears that that judge might have saved somebody's life because Yanahan Zhao was killed at a school where repairs were under way on the roof. And the bricks fell from the roof and struck her and a number of other students, and she was seriously injured and died. So we might have saved some lives by taking the bold step of refusing to let the Washington schools open while the roof repairs were being conducted. Of course, we had a situation also where once the Washington schools were opened and the roofs were repaired, the children had a problem because the boilers began to break down in the same schools or some other Washington schools. So you have teachers being forced to tell children to wear extra heavy clothes to come to school, and of course I think it is child abuse to make a child sit in a cold room at a school and depend on his extra clothes to keep him or her warm. So it is a challenge as to how urgent do we feel the situation is. It is a challenge as to how we really feel about children. Every public official makes speeches about our dedication to children. If you have a surplus, Mr. Mayor, if you have a surplus, Mr. Governor, then show us how dedicated you are to children by putting forth an initiative right away to let the Federal Government know that we may need help. After all, we have in New York, I said, 1,100 schools. Three hundred of 1100 schools have coal burning furnaces. They are still burning coal. Many of them are more than 100 years old. So we need a massive program, but certainly the Federal Government has a right to expect our city government and our State government to show some initiative and use their surplus in a constructive way for children. On July 28th, which is of course today, The New York Times article reports that Mayor Giuliani is expected to announce that the city will finish the 1998 fiscal year with a surplus of $1.2 billion, thanks in large part to a surging Wall Street. It will be the second year in a row of good fortune for the city, which was pummeled by the recession in the early 1990s. The city ended its last fiscal year with $1.4 billion more than expected. So we are 2 years in a row where we had a surplus. The second paragraph I want to read from this article says the following: But in contrast to the election year budget that he presented at this time last year, which called for sharply increased spending on education, children's services and other programs, the Mayor is returning to the conservative fiscal stance he took early in his first term when he pushed through some of the largest spending cuts since the city's fiscal crisis of the 1970s. If children are not important, if schools are not important, if the surplus cannot be utilized for that purpose, than what is more important? Tell me, Mr. Mayor. We have, again, as I said before, and I have a list right here, 300 schools out of 1100 schools in New York City that are still burning coal in their furnaces. Now, we might have somewhere in America, maybe many places, some efficient coal burning furnaces that do not spew pollutants in the air, but the likelihood that these old boilers are efficient and are not spilling large amounts of pollutants in the air is nil. They are polluting the air. Is it any wonder that we have a high asthma rate in the same neighborhoods where the coal burning schools are. Where we have the greatest number of coal burning schools we have the highest asthma rates among the youngsters. There is an obvious correlation there, and we are officially guilty of doing things that we would never sanction or allow the private sector to do. We are endangering the health of children in a very concrete dramatic way. So we had on the agenda on our ballot 3 years ago a State bond issue related to the environment, and in order to pass that bond issue it was clearly stated that part of the money for the environment bond issue would be used to convert the coal burning boilers in New York. It was clearly stated that part of the money would be used to convert some of the coal burning boilers in New York. That was 3 years ago. That was 3 years ago almost. As of right now not a single school with a coal burning furnace has been converted using the money from the bond issue that we passed almost 3 years ago. The sense of urgency, emergency, is not there. The concern for children is not there. The concern for students and, in the final analysis, the concern for education is not there. We must think in terms of a state of emergency and we must understand that incremental steps will not solve the problem. Incremental steps will not, in time, save this generation of children. Incremental steps are not good enough. And the President, in proposing the initiative at the Federal level, has taken the first step. I hope we can increase that, but the call on every unit, every level of government must be made with the Federal Government's leadership stimulating that response. I yield to the gentlewoman from Oregon.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, recent developments concerning the White House and the President do indeed require serious attention from members of Congress. But, unlike journalists, elected representatives are held accountable for their actions and must act responsibly. We should all register our strong resentment with respect to the juvenile behavior of the press over the last week. Media men and women have dared to instruct the Congress in their premature calls for impeachment. These same voices were much more cautious when a separate government was set up in the basement of the White House to support Nicaraguan Contras by soliciting money and illegally selling weapons to Iran. Certain analysts and television celebrities were completely silent when the banks and other savings and loan bandits stole billions of dollars guaranteed by the taxpayers through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). I am bewildered and outraged by the way reporting priorities have been chosen. Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr's strange maneuvers should not be rubber-stamped by the Congress. We know our duty. We know how to assess events with a national and international perspective. Congress knows how to back away from the brink of hysteria and avoid setting dangerous priorities: Dangerous Priorities Ken Starr's million dollar peep show Is a topsy turvy world Trivialities become high crimes And a woman becomes a girl Grown commentators babble Like hysterical babies But remember the FDIC was raped By vicious S and L whores And no special prosecutors Bothered to keep any scores The CIA was mum The DEA was deaf The FBI was dumb Bankers sabotaged the system Board room terrorists Bombed their depositors Into bankruptcy Against all taxpayers A state of war did reign But editorial writers And celebrity anchor men Never indicated public pain Ken Starr's million dollar peep show Media makes a topsy turvy world Trivialities become high crimes And a woman becomes a girl For the bailout virus No disinfectant was there Now the S and L flu Sickens Mexico Asia and everywhere Against our virgin treasury We watched high crimes of treason But purchased puritanical analyst Misplaced their penetrating reason More exciting than soap opera More dangerous than sin Those who stalked White House couches Allowed taxpayer rapists to win Ken Starr's million dollar peep show Is a topsy turvy world Trivialities become high crimes And a woman is a girl.