Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this Sabo amendment will save the District of Columbia from being another experimental ground for a bad piece of legislation. Davis-Bacon saves money. There is a study by Peter Phillips, a professor of the University of Utah, which showed that Davis-Bacon actually saves money on school construction. Davis-Bacon has many other benefits. Davis-Bacon provides programs for apprentices and training in a way that no other construction programs do. Davis-Bacon has been around for a long time. It operates to the benefit of construction industry workers. I submit this for the Record to answer the lies about Davis-Bacon: District of Columbia Appropriations Bill Davis-Bacon Act Provisions Section 363 of the D.C. Appropriations bill would allow the D.C. Contracting Officer for Public Schools to waive Davis- Bacon prevailing wages for workers on school construction and repair projects. Despite a 1995 Congressional Budget Office scoring indicating that repealing Davis-Bacon would not produce sizable savings, opponents continue to assert that if you do away with labor protections on school construction projects, the taxpayer will save money on construction costs. Repealing or waiving Davis-Bacon will not save money on school construction. Peter Phillips, a professor in the university of Utah Economics Department has prepared a report for the legislative Education Study Committee of the New Mexico State Legislature which tests the proposition that eliminating state prevailing wage laws will lower school construction costs. For the period of 1992-1994, he compares the average square foot cost of construction for elementary, middle and high schools in 9 Intermountain and Southwestern states--5 states with prevailing wage laws (New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Nevada) to 4 states without prevailing wage laws (Utah, Colorado and Idaho). These results show that if anything, square foot construction costs are lower in states with prevailing wage laws to those without these laws: for elementary schools, average square foot new construction costs are $67 in the states with prevailing wage laws and $73 per square foot in the 4 states without prevailing wage laws--a real difference of $6; the 76 middle schools built in the prevailing wage law states cost an average of $66 per square foot while the 28 middle schools built in the 4 states without prevailing wage laws cost an average of $77 per square foot; and similarly, the 31 high schools built in the prevailing wage law states cost an average $70 while the 22 schools in states without prevailing wage laws cost an average of $81. Furthermore, more new public construction took place in the 5 states with state prevailing wage law compared to the 4 states without prevailing wage laws during the period under study (1992-1994). There will be long-run cost to the construction industry. The basic conclusion of this study is that there is no evidence to suggest that the repeal of the state's prevailing wage law would save substantial costs in the construction of public schools. Lower wage rates for construction workers will not reduce costs, particularly in the long run. Peter Phillips finds that prevailing wage laws encourage the apprenticeship and training programs that have created the skilled construction workforce that has resulted in higher labor productivity. In the long run, repealing state prevailing wage laws will result in a migration of trained workers out of construction and a decline in the training of new construction workers leading to lower productivity, thereby canceling out any savings from lower wages. It is clear that without Davis-Bacon the use of low-wage untrained workers will degrade the quality of public construction. Section 363 will discriminate against D.C. construction workers. Allowing prevailing wages to be waived on school construction and repair projects in D.C. construction workers who are largely minority. Workers on school construction projects in Maryland, for example, will continue to be paid the prevailing wage. The inequity will also invite fly-by- night contractors from other areas to come into D.C., using lowered wage for construction workers to ``low-ball'' school construction contracts in the District.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to address two major issues tonight. They are related in the long run. One is, schools and education are still in a state of crisis despite the fact that the American people have indicated that education is one of their number-one priorities, probably the number-one priority by the majority of the American people. This first year of the 105th Congress session of Congress is coming to a close, and we are not dealing with the crisis. We have done nothing which really addresses the crisis in the manner that it requires. Certainly, the crisis in our inner-city schools, where most of the African American children attend school, where the poorest Americans attend school in the inner-city schools and crisis in the rural schools is not being addressed. We are still going backwards in New York City, for example, in terms of addressing the education crisis. So I want to talk about that. I also want to talk about an issue that would seem unrelated, but it is related, and that is the present preoccupation concern with the Internal Revenue Service. The Internal Revenue Service is important. I said before that people who are part of a care majority, liberals, progressives, whatever you want to call them, people who care about campaign finance reform and they really want it, there are a number of different elements, what you might call the caring majority. The people want to see an American system that operates fairly, democracy that is not distorted by big-money contributions. All of those are part of the caring majority. The caring majority, in general, neglects revenue, neglects issues related to revenue. So the IRS and the taxpayer concern issues are likely not to get that kind of attention from that side of the aisle, this side of the aisle, that it deserves. And I would like to see that not happen. I would like to see my colleagues pay close attention to the debate that is shaping up on the IRS, Internal Revenue Service, and to take that debate and discuss it at a new level. Let us not talk about how to beat up on IRS clerks and the agents. Let us talk about broad policies that are handed down from the very top, from Congress and from the White House, policy direction which leads to situations where large amounts of money that should be collected from corporations, those amounts are not collected. It leads to situations where we have to beat up on middle-class taxpayers in order to get the kind of revenue that is expected because the IRS is being directed not to spend too much of its time or to wade into the complex situations presented by corporate financing. I am particularly concerned about section 531 to 535 of the Internal Revenue Code. I have talked about that before. That is the section which prohibits corporations from buying their own stock except under certain conditions. Stock buy-backs are big business nowadays, multi- billion-dollar business. Yet, there is a section in the Code that nobody wants to explain to me why it is not being enforced. I have talked to quite a number of important people in the tax structure and have not been able to find out. If they were to collect that revenue, that is one of the areas where, if that bit of corporate welfare was ended, that is one of the areas where we gain additional funding to deal with some of the problems related to school construction and other problems that require money and education. In other words, I do not really think we have a real problem with no money for school construction. Yes, I do think it is a problem. I think we lack the will to deal with school construction to spend the money that is necessary. We could get it if we wanted to, but we throw up a roadblock with the fact that there is no money. And, of course, the same problem is occurring at the local level and at the State level. The argument is made that there is just not enough money to provide decent education. We are wasting money in many different ways. And not until the full wrath of public opinion and the wrath of the voters and not until the common sense of the voters comes down harder on public officials have to make these decisions, we have an understanding that we cannot just talk about education, we have to put some real dollars behind the effort to reform education and make it adequate for people at every level of our society. Let me start by talking about schools first and education, because they were on the agenda of this Congress this week. They were on our agenda right up until the very last minute today. In fact, I think our last vote taken today on a bill was on passage of the D.C. appropriations bill. And that contest, that vote, it was a very close vote. It was a situation where the time had to be broken by the Speaker of the House, it was that close, where many of us felt the House of Representatives had gone far in the direction of extreme control of local government and extreme control of decision-making that should be taking place at the local level. We were shocked to see that the Republican majority which has consistently emphasized local control, local decision-making, which has made a great deal out of ending mandates by the Federal Government on local government, we were quite shocked to see to what extent the Republican majority in the House is willing to go with respect to mandating local control of Washington, D.C., going right into the school system and telling them what they have to do in terms of how to take care of their ongoing problem. There is a very serious problem in the education in D.C. The District of Columbia spends more than $9,000 per child and has some of the worst education in the Nation. The problem has to be addressed. The people of the District of Columbia made a decision last year. Little more than a year ago, I think, they made a decision, had a referendum on whether or not they wanted vouchers, and they voted that they did not want vouchers as part of their solution to the school problem. We had local citizens involved in seeking a solution to a problem, and they rejected one possible approach. The D.C. voters said, ``No, we do not want vouchers.'' On the other hand, D.C. voters decided they would like to try an experiment with charter schools. The charter schools are a good alternative to vouchers, even among those people who insist that we have to have vouchers, for the purpose of shaking up the public school system, the bureaucracy, we need vouchers in order to provide competition for the public school system; to show innovative approaches, we need vouchers to provide an alternative. Well, charter schools provide an alternative, and the residents of the District of Columbia voted, ``We want the charter school alternative. We do not want vouchers.'' Yet, here we worked until late this afternoon pressing to push, the majority was pushing, and they finally won by one vote a solution on the people of D.C., which requires that they experiment with the voucher program for the next 5 years. Now, I hope that that does not prevail, because the other body has already acted on this matter. The President says he will not accept a bill, he will veto any bill that forces the people of the District of Columbia to experiment with vouchers. So I hope it does not prevail. But it did pass this House. So here we were in a situation where the majority party, which has pushed for maximum local control, was trying to force it down the throats of the people here. We had another problem today in our Committee on Education and the Workforce. I serve on the committee, and we had a Reading Excellence Act that was on the agenda for markup today. The Reading Excellence Act is designed to replace the President's proposal for America Reads. The President's proposal has great emphasis on volunteers being used to tutor young people, students, to read. And the Reading Excellence Act takes a different approach and moves in the direction of teaching teachers to teach reading better and have teachers do the coaching of the reading and having professional groups contracted to provide the tutorial services. Now, it is an interesting approach. There may be grounds for some kind of compromise. I hope so, because I would not like to see this first year of the 105th Congress end without doing something positive about the problem that clearly has been identified as a major problem. If children cannot read, they cannot advance in school, they are bound to fail. That is well established. Everybody agrees they must learn to read. So the emphasis on teaching students to read as soon as possible and as thoroughly as possible is an appropriate emphasis. It is a place where there is no debate. Surely, in an area where we do not have any debate, we ought to be able to go forward in this first year of the 105th Congress. Surely, we will not leave here with nothing being done in terms of a new Federal initiative when the President started the year with the State of the Union Address proposing an initiative, the America Reads was proposed. And now we have the Republican majority in the Committee on Education and the Workforce proposing the Reading Excellence Act. We did not get to it today because we were on another bill. But in that Reading Excellence Act, there was another one of those mandates to the local level. It even goes beyond the local government right into the classroom. There is a mandate that they must use the phonics method. Never before has the Federal Government gone so far in a matter that relates to education as this Reading Excellence Act proposes to go. That is to mandate, if you are going to get these funds and be a part of this program, phonics has to be used as a method of teaching reading. We are going to go right into the pedagogy instruction processes and we, the Federal Government, are going to put our finger on a method that has to be used. That is one of the serious drawbacks of the Reading Excellence Act. I hope some other features of that act can be combined with the President's America Reads program in the next 20 days or 15 days, whatever we have left here, that we do reach some agreement on some kind of program to push some new initiative in the area of teaching children to read. We did not get to the markup of that bill because we spent a lot of time on a bill to encourage expansion of charter schools, which was proposed by the majority. But I voted for it because I think it is a small step forward in the area of the Federal Government encouraging the development of charter schools. It is a small step forward. It is woefully inadequate. I hope that we come back next year and that we do something which is far more thorough with respect to charter schools. I worry about charter schools in several respects. The first is that we are playing around the edges of educational reform with this whole matter of charter schools. We have about 700 charter schools now and 86,000 traditional public schools. If we want to really experiment with charter schools, we have got to have enough charter schools in enough different situations to be able to really study whether they are of any relevance or not. We also cannot leave charter schools out there on the fringes so that elite groups only will be experimenting with charter schools. We need a greater variety of groups. We also cannot let charter schools become little pet projects of people who want to play around with education for a few years. Maybe it is parents, while their children are in a particular school, they want to have a charter school. But when that is over and their children graduate from that elementary school, the interest dies down and the school collapses. We have to safeguard against creating problems in education. We ought to have some kind of Federal encouragement of the States to develop sound systems for regulating and developing charter schools. There is a serious problem out there. If public funds are going to go to a group, they ought to be a stable group, ought to be a group that has some kind of promise of continuity, ought to be a group that is going to do a thorough job beyond just their individual or family interests. So we cannot have charter schools that are set with just a handful of teachers and a handful of parents and their immediate interests taken care of, and that is all. We need a more soundly grounded effort where we have a board of directors of some kind of group that is going to continue and really build an educational institution. We should not waste funds on dilatory experience. That is one problem we are really going to have to come to grips with. The Federal Government cannot do it, but we can encourage States to do it by conditioning the funding of, Federal funding of charter schools for those States that take different approaches to the regulation of charter schools, to the development of accountability standards. They can take different approaches. We would not dictate the approaches, but take a sound approach to guaranteeing accountability, have a sound approach to guaranteeing longevity. Do not leave children to be victimized by dilatory experimentation. I think all of this happened in one day with respect to education, and it is altogether fitting and proper that we should be that preoccupied with education on the floor and in the committee. Education is a number one issue for the majority of people and that is the way it should be. Common sense dictates that we ought to be more concerned and involved. I do not think there can be too much discussion of education matters. I do think that we have to understand that no one person has the answers, and that the danger of fads and the danger of powerful people pushing through their particular remedies is always there, so we have to have the broadest possible participation and decisionmaking, and legislation ought to be based on some kind of set of fundamental principles. Reform, in my opinion, ought to go forward across the board where we have a lot of different components of the effort to reform our schools. Charter schools are just one component. Whole school reform is another. There are many different components that ought to be there so that we can have a good look at what works and what does not work, and as fast as possible move on to institutionalize those things that do work. Schools are very important back in New York. We have education in schools as a number one issue in the mayoral campaign. We have a great debate there as to what has happened to our schools and who is to blame. We had a situation where the schools were radically cut, the budget of the school system was radically cut under the present mayor, and now that it is an issue, there is an insistence that it was not really cut, that the cut did no damage, and that it is a figment of everybody's imagination that our schools are overcrowded. Mr. Speaker, 91,000 children in 1996 could not find a place to sit. I understand it went down to about 80,000 in 1997. When school opened, they were that short of places, decent places for children to sit. A desk of their own was not there for large numbers of young people, even in this election year, and strange things are happening to make the problem disappear before the eyes of the citizens of New York. There are efforts being made to keep one candidate out of schools. Ruth Messinger was not allowed to go into certain schools, or if she went into the schools, the press was not allowed to accompany her. That is unusual. In all previous mayoral campaigns, the schools have been open to candidates. We have had here in Washington in the last few days Members of Congress attend a school and go into the school to announce a program. The Republican majority went into a school just before they announced a new initiative on education. So the fact that the present mayor has maneuvered to ban his opponent from schools is very unusual. New York is, unfortunately, not up in arms about this, even in the city university system, at the college level where college students certainly are able to determine, make up their own minds about the truth or falsity of a situation with respect to candidates, and they certainly ought to have the benefit of the maximum open debate. However, certain colleges have refused to allow the mayor's opponent to speak there. So education is such a hard issue, until there are some oppressive, totalitarian tactics that are being developed to keep the issue at a certain level and to avoid confronting it fully. A few days ago we had a school in Harlem closed also because of the fact that it was a newly renovated building and the fumes were so strong in the building that they had to evacuate the students. Now, that is a building that used to be a dry cleaning plant, it is a building that was renovated to make it a school, and before it was purchased for renovation, the board of education was warned that it was on the site of a dry cleaning plant. Even after, as it progressed and they made some renovations, tests were done and the fumes were detected. They were warned again, but the bureaucracy pressed on. I do not want to place the blame on the mayor's office; the mayor's office certainly was not involved with this, it is bureaucracy that might be corrupt or may not be corrupt. It may be that somebody paid somebody off to guarantee that the test of the fumes was not anything alarming, and the children could be put in there. But now they are in there, and the tests show that the fumes are too strong to keep young children in the building. These are fumes that could very much affect the development of young people in various ways and they should not be subjected to this. But this is the bureaucracy. This is one of the reasons why in a school system as large as New York, no matter what we do, there is a need to have some way to shake up that bureaucracy. Competition is one way. Alternative schools, charter schools, some ways must be found to show them that we do not have to do business this way. We do not have to have situations where somebody in the bureaucracy for some reason allows a building which is unfit for habitation to be renovated, paid for by the board of education, and actually march youngsters in there and start having classes and then to have to evacuate. It is one more example of how a system of 1,100 schools and more than 1 million children and more than 60,000 teachers is kind of unimaginable, certainly in its present form, and something needs to happen to come to grips with the fact that time goes by, reforms come and go, and we still have these horrendous problems such as the occupation of a building that costs millions of dollars to renovate for children and they are exposed to deadly fumes. There is some good news in New York. On November 4 there is a referendum on the ballot which will deal with $2 billion for school construction. So maybe we will have the kind of school construction funds which will allow for the construction of new buildings, and we will not be renovating old dry cleaning plants in the first place. We will not be renovating some other sites that are undesirable that have been called to my attention, schools near dumps and schools in just other predicaments. With a $2 billion initiative for school construction, maybe New York City will be a part of the State which gets priority and we can eliminate more than 250 schools that still have furnaces that burn coal. There is a great deal of alarm about youngsters being exposed to dry cleaning fumes. Well, dry cleaning fumes are pretty pungent and can be identified easily, but when we have furnaces burning coal in an area, it spews its filth into the air, it pollutes the air all around, and we have come to accept it as almost normal, those little granules out there. The things that make up soot that poisons the lungs of young children and increases the asthma rate are not alarming enough people. The whole sense of urgency and emergency is not there when it comes to dealing with furnaces in schools that burn coal. In other words, there is a state of crisis certainly in big city schools, and I am not privy to the facts, but I am certain that New York is probably not the only city still with schools that burn coal in their furnaces. Asthma is a problem in a lot of other cities, as well as New York City, but we certainly are not moving with dispatch in New York to deal with something as obviously unhealthy as coal-burning furnaces in schools. I have also talked before about the fact that I think it is child neglect and child abuse to force children to eat lunch at 10 o'clock in the morning because schools are overcrowded and they have to have several different rounds of feeding in the cafeteria, and in order to feed all of the children in an overcrowded school they have to start feeding some lunch at 10 o'clock. Ten o'clock is when they have just had their breakfast, and some do not eat lunch until after 2 o'clock when they are getting ready to go home for supper. All of these things go on and on, and they are accepted as normal. My problem is, they are accepted as normal at the local level, and even in this mayoral campaign there does not seem to be much alarm about the fact that it continues this way. They accept it as normal at the national level. The school construction initiative, which made a lot of sense, has now been put on the back burner. Nothing will be done about it this year. Our only hope is that with the gentlewoman from New York [Mrs. Lowey] and the cosponsors of that bill growing every day, almost all the Democrats are now on the school construction initiative, we will have some action on school construction in the next half of the 105th Congress. However, if we have a child in school, we know that they only live one life. Postponing these urgent matters is serious business. Postponing school reform or saying that we will get around to it and eventually in 5 or 10 years schools will be better, that is not enough. Our children go through the process only once, and in the African- American communities across the country the anger and the frustration is moving toward panic. The panic results in a cry for vouchers in many cases, without really knowing the full story as to how vouchers are going to work. Anything that is offered becomes a cure when we are in desperate need of some relief, and parents see their children as going through a process that they will only go through once, and nothing of any great momentum has developed to change the way public schools in our big cities are being administered. We have to have a greater sense of urgency and understand that there is an emergency that has to be addressed. America's concern for education is on target, but the sense of urgency is not great enough. We do not have at this point real momentum behind the Federal school construction initiative. I hope we will get it next year. We must work harder to bring some relief by having a Federal stimulus. The Federal Government cannot do it all. If we start it, the States are more likely to pick up on it and the local governments also. Budget cuts at the local level are still devastating schools. This year, an election year, the mayor of New York has put computers in junior high schools and restored some funds cut, but the budget cuts that were instituted a few years ago still have a devastating effect on schools. The devastating impact is still there because they encouraged the school system to cut its budget by laying off, encouraging the retirement of the most experienced principals and administrators and teachers. We have lost our most experienced principals, administrators and teachers as a result of the encouraging of those people to retire, because they are at the high end of the salary scale and we save money. When a teacher in the system for 20 years, 25 years, retires and a new teacher comes in, we save a lot of money. But in the process of saving money, we cut radically into the quality of education and administration. Money is always there. Money is a great roadblock to making even the most obvious kinds of changes. Education reform, a lot of controversial items are involved but some are not so controversial, and one is construction, and that requires money. The purchase of equipment for laboratories, the purchase of books, a number of education reform items are clear of any controversy. They do not require debate. We know they are needed. Money is the obstacle. Which brings me to the second part of my discussion today. Money is the obstacle, and it has been always thrown up as a reason for not taking action. The reason we do not have a construction initiative is because in the process of the negotiation of the balanced budget, that was on the table, and the Republican majority decided they did not want to support it. The President, in the process of negotiation, he had to take some of his items off the table. He took off the school construction initiative. We do not have the money, we say. We give the impression to the American people that this is an almost bankrupt Nation and that we cannot afford to reform our schools. At the same time, there is a tremendous amount of waste. I want to go into a discussion of where all the waste is. Obviously, there is plenty of it in the military budget, still. The President vetoed some items that were sent to him recently in terms of military construction. There are a lot of items in that military budget that have not been vetoed and are not even being discussed. NATO is still our primary responsibility, while very prosperous nations in Europe do not shoulder their part of the burden. We still are spending far more for weapons systems than we need to spend. In an era when the cold war is no longer existing, there is no great sense of need for emergency development of weapons systems. There are a number of places where we could cut the budget, Mr. Speaker, but I am not going to talk about that tonight. I want to talk about the revenue side, and the fact that one area that we have been pursuing is the fact that corporate welfare takes many forms. One form of corporate welfare is the refusal of the IRS to enforce the Internal Revenue Code against corporations. Corporations enjoy corporate welfare in many ways. The list is very long. We have heard discussions of it. We have taken some steps to lower the amount of corporate welfare. There have been some reductions in the agricultural subsidies, there have been some reductions in the overseas advertising budgets for American products. There have been some reductions in a number of different items that were identified as corporate welfare 2 years ago. But there is still a great deal left to be done. In the area of reforming the Internal Revenue Service, we ought to take a hard look. The whole discussion and debate about the Internal Revenue Service should not go forward as a debate dominated by the right, by people who want to change the Tax Code in order to make it easier for people who are wealthy to hold on to more of their wealth, a greater percentage of their wealth than poor people do, or to take advantage of the marvelous economic system that we have and not pay back to that system. Corporations in particular, if they are not subjected to what Congress has decided in the Tax Code should be done in terms of taxation, then they are, in a way, being subsidized. Every time we refuse to carry out one of the items, one of the sections of the Internal Revenue Code Congress has put in there, we imbalance the whole situation, because each part of the Tax Code was put in to realize a certain amount of revenue. I am very concerned about an area that was identified by a friend of mine who works with an agency that prepares corporate taxes, that led me to inquire of the Internal Revenue Service why it was not being enforced. Sections 531 to 537 of the Internal Revenue Tax Code was called to my attention by a friend who noticed that large amounts of buy-backs of stock are underway by corporations. Some corporations have been buying back their stock for many years, and there has been an escalation in the number of big corporations that buy back their stock. The question was raised, and I have talked about it on the floor here before, as to why are they violating sections 531 to 537 of the Internal Revenue Tax Code, which says that you cannot do that except for certain specified reasons. This friend of mine did further research, and a staff member of mine helped to do research also, which identified that the buy-backs which are made in order to distribute them as stock options to the employees, buy-backs which are made in terms of specific things that are being done in that particular financial game plan, they are all legal and they are there. But then he subtracted those kinds of purposes for buying back stock from the non-stated purposes, and he had a big amount left. Billions of dollars have been bought back by corporations for no reason, other than that they are stockpiling their own wealth, which raises some serious questions. I guess Congress must have been concerned when they passed 531 to 537, that section, they must have been concerned about the fact that when corporations buy back their own stock it does set up a situation where you could manipulate or seem to be manipulating the market, because they are in a position to sort of keep the prices up artificially by buying back their stock. But I do not want to go speculating. I am not an expert in taxes. That direction is not the direction I want to take tonight. I merely want to say that if it is on the books, if there is a clear prohibition against buying back stock, except for certain stated purposes, then why is it being allowed in such great amounts? Why is it escalating? If we want to get more revenue, then instead of the Internal Revenue Service pursuing middle class taxpayers with such fervor, instead of going overboard to guarantee that they squeeze every penny out of taxpayers who do not have the wherewithal to hire expensive tax lawyers and accountants, who get frightened by the fact that they got a letter from the IRS, instead of pursuing that course, which is reflected in the fact that over the years, since 1944, more and more of the tax burden has shifted from corporations to individuals and families. I have talked several times about the fact that families and individuals pay an inordinate amount of this burden of the income tax, up to about 44 percent. They used to pay somewhere down near 28 percent, and the corporations paid the greatest percentage. Now corporations pay around 11 percent, and individuals are still up there and families are still up at 44 percent. So it could be attributed to the way Congress has written the law. That is part of it. The laws have been written to favor corporations. There are laws, as we have noted before, which really amount to corporate welfare. Part of the Tax Code does that. There may be another factor. As we pursue the reform of IRS, as we pursue hearings related to what the Internal Revenue Service is doing to families and individuals, let us bear in mind that the question ought to be asked, what are they not doing to corporations? Why are they, in a very zealous manner, pursuing middle class taxpayers and families and individuals, while they are not pursuing certain clear aspects, certain clear items of the Tax Code with respect to corporations? I sent a letter to the commissioner of IRS, Mrs. Richardson at that time, and she has resigned since, I think, and I asked about the enforcement of sections 531 to 537 of the Internal Revenue Tax Code, and why is the section, called unreasonable accumulation of surplus provisions, why was that unreasonable accumulation of surplus section not being enforced. I never got an answer from the then commissioner of IRS. It was sent to one of her agents, who then sent it to his secretary. I got an answer finally from a person who identified themselves, it sounds as if they were a low-level clerk. They really had no title of any great significance. That is the kind of answer I got, and it was not a letter that I wrote alone, but there were 30 Members of Congress, 29 Members of Congress, who joined me. So 30 Members of Congress wrote a letter to the IRS requesting, and I read this letter before on this floor, requesting that we get an explanation as to why sections 531 to 537 of the Internal Revenue Tax Code were not being enforced. I got no letter back from the commissioner. I got an answer back from a low-level person who, in part of the letter, implied that it is too difficult to pursue these cases. That statement, that it is too difficult to pursue these cases, certainly runs parallel to a statement that I had heard made in one or two previous administrations. It was either the Nixon administration or the Reagan administration. A statement was leaked out that the word had come down from the White House to the Tax Commissioner at that time that they should stop wasting so much time pursuing corporations, that corporations had lawyers and accountants and it was very difficult to get them to pay their taxes properly, so revenue collection was lagging. In order to make sure revenue collections did not lag, they were being advised from the top to pursue middle class taxpayers more vigorously and leave corporations alone. The answer that I got sort of implied that that is pretty much the strategy that is used. If we are going to have hearings, then let us ask that question. If we are going to have hearings on reform, then let us include in the reform some kind of reporting system which tells us how many audits are being done of corporations, and in what ways; why is a provision like sections 531 to 537 not being pursued? It has a penalty built in, but it is not unlawful. In other words, if you do not follow sections 531 to 537, they are not going to put you in jail. However, if you are caught you pay a very stiff penalty. It is a very interesting part of the tax law. We know there are many provisions in the tax law which say if you do not comply, you go to jail. If you do not file, you are at risk of going to jail. There are a number of items that are pretty clear. You can be jailed if you do not do them. Yet, here is a provision which has no threat of jail, but it says if you are caught, you pay a penalty. The penalty is a very stiff penalty, 39 percent. If you are caught violating that section of the law and the amount of buy-backs is $1 million, say, then 39 percent of $1 million is the penalty. That is in the law. It is clear. It used to be fuzzy as to what the target was. They said at one time it was written only for closely-held corporations, family corporations, but in 1984 they clarified that. There is a section in the law, in the revision of the Tax Code in 1984 or 1987, 1984, Congress in the Revenue Act of 1984 amended the statute by adding section 532(c) which reads, ``The application of this part to a corporation shall be determined without regard to the number of shareholders of such corporation.'' So not small, closely-held corporations only, but all corporations are subject to sections 531 and 537. If we are going to have hearings, the Committee on Ways and Means, and certainly I serve on the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, and we are now having hearings on campaign finance reform, I hope we can go to some more productive hearings related to the IRS and the IRS's methods of targeting people for collection; why corporations are not being given the same kind of scrutiny that individuals and families are given; why are we letting corporate welfare take place by not enforcing the Tax Code? There are some good articles that have emerged over the last few weeks related to the IRS, and there is one I would like to quote from, here, related to what needs to happen at the IRS. This is written by a gentleman who used to be an IRS commissioner. His name is Fred Goldberg. He was IRS commissioner from 1989 to 1991. Mr. Goldberg agrees with me in one very important area. That is, ``The buck stops at the top. When things go wrong in any organization, the temptation is to blame the workers. Don't. What's missing is top- down focus on what we want from the IRS, and the expertise, continuity, and accountability to meet those expectations. That's why the restructuring commission recommended sweeping changes in IRS management, governance, and oversight. IRS commissioners now have no set term. Most serve for only a couple of years. They have neither the tenure nor the tools to build a management team and hold that team accountable. Give the commissioners a 5-year term and the power to reward employees who do the job and fire those who don't.'' Instead of wildly fluctuating budgets, give the IRS stable, long-term funding that will let them get the job done. Require coordinated, ongoing congressional oversight that focuses on broad strategic issues. I repeat, I am quoting from an article that appeared in Newsweek magazine, October 13, an item written by Fred Goldberg, a former commissioner of the IRS from 1989 to 1991. ``Require coordinated ongoing congressional oversight that focuses on broad strategic issues.'' I cannot emphasize that too much: Broad strategic issues. Yes, we ought to deal with the fact that people had their homes taken away from them. Mistakes have been made in arithmetic that have led to endless anguish. Papers were lost and records confused. All kinds of things have happened which require attention. But we need to focus on the broad strategic issues of what is the IRS here for and why should it be in the business of fervently pursuing middle-class taxpayers who are easy to pursue, while it neglects corporations that would yield a far bigger dividend if they were made to obey the law? Mr. Goldberg continues by saying, and I quote, Mind what you measure, because that is what you will get. Congress and the administration talk a lot about fair and reasonable treatment of taxpayers. But at present, the primary IRS performance measures are limited to raw enforcement data like how much money the agency claims taxpayers owe after audits . . . Congress, the administration, and senior IRS management make the rules. When they start measuring and rewarding fair and reasonable treatment of taxpayers, that is what we will get. In other words, I sent the letter asking the question about section 531 to 537 to Commissioner Richardson. I got no answer from her. I got an answer from a low-level employee. I sent back another letter asking her to provide me with a better answer and please do it herself. I got no answer. I sent the letter to Secretary Rubin. In the structure of the Federal Government, the IRS is under the Secretary of the Treasury. The Secretary of the Treasury is under the President. Now, I am not going to blame the Democrats or the Republicans for what the IRS does, because despite the fact that this is a Federal agency, it is part of the executive branch of government, and the IRS commissioner does report to the Secretary of the Treasury. The Secretary of the Treasury does report to the President. It is a huge institution of 100,000 employees, and only a handful of them are appointed through any political process. So the vast majority of IRS employees have been there through Democratic and Republican administrations. We cannot move them politically. It is not a political problem. There is a management problem, there is a philosophy problem, and there is a problem of administrative philosophy. Congress makes the laws, and the administration is supposed to enforce the laws. If there is a section 531 to 537 and nobody from the top is willing to even reply to Members of Congress who inquire as to why they are not enforcing it, then we have a problem. Do not blame the IRS clerks, do not blame the agents who are in that system who are going to respond to the pressure from the top. Ask the basic question: What is coming down from the top? Mr. Goldberg talks about how important it is to make any reform effort bipartisan. The IRS would be a fat political target, but we should not fall into partisan politics. In this present effort since we have focused a lot of attention, begun to focus a lot of attention, on the IRS, let us have a bipartisan effort to reform the IRS. Let us have a bipartisan effort on behalf of the average ordinary taxpayer out there who wants to be treated fairly. Let us have a bipartisan effort, because in the whole scheme of collecting revenue, which, again, as I said before, liberals and progressives, people who make up the ``Caring Majority,'' have traditionally ignored the revenue side of the fiscal operation of government. We have not paid attention enough to what happens in terms of how revenue is collected. We have only campaigned for improvements in expenditures. We have campaigned against waste. We campaigned in favor of setting new sets of priorities. The priority we set in education is constantly being pushed aside and frustrated by the claims being made that the Nation is too poor to afford expenditures for programs like education that are needed. The effort is being made to balance the budget as a top priority, and we cannot balance the budget unless we stop all new programs. The school construction initiative is considered a new program. That is one of the reasons why it is receiving such stiff opposition from the Republican Majority. No new programs unless we identify the source of the money we are going to get to pay for it. So, Mr. Speaker, that is why I am here. Being primarily concerned about education, I am here talking about revenue because we must wade into that side of the equation and prove that without unbalancing the budget, without affecting the present move toward a balanced budget, we could, in addition to cutting waste elsewhere, we could improve the revenue side without hurting the average American citizen out there. There is revenue to be collected by enforcing the Internal Revenue Code in a way which is impartial and does not back away from the enforcement of the Code with respect to corporations. We are going to have a new tax bill next year. Probably in this 105th Congress there will be a different kind of tax reform. Since I have been here, I have gone through the Reagan tax reform and gone through the Clinton tax improvements, reforms, and they all dealt with the ways we deal with the brackets and new deductions, and there are a number of things that have happened which most of the reformers are claiming are complicating the Tax Code even more. This kind of reform is being proposed to deal with some items that certainly should have been dealt with before. It is unthinkable that we have not had more oversight hearings on the Internal Revenue Service. During the 15 years that I have been here, I have served on the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. It used to be called Government Operations Committee, but it has the same mission. Never has there been a thorough review of the Internal Revenue Service. We have dealt with a lot of issues which I consider trivial, but we have never dealt in a serious way with looking at the IRS and its major role in the life of every American and deciding that we want a first class agency administratively, we want the most modern equipment, we want procedures that are second to none. In a Nation which prides itself on the most advanced computers in the world and the most advanced business procedures, certainly the IRS should lead the way. The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Portman] has an article in this week's Hill newspaper, the Wednesday, October 8, issue of Hill under the Opinion section. Mr. Portman talks about the fact that there will be new legislation proposed and it is called the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1997. He is cosponsoring that with the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Cardin], and Senators Bob Kerrey and Charles Grassley, one Democrat and one Republican in the Senate. They are sponsoring a bill which will deal with these very vital fundamental issues related to the administration of the IRS that is long overdue. They point out the fact that we recently had to pay a $4 billion bill, if we want an example of government waste, we had to pay $4 billion for a failed computer modernization effort at the IRS. A failed computer modernization effort cost us $4 billion. They are going to have to redo it. The IRS requires that we file accurate returns, but they have never balanced their own books. We have an outrageous situation like this in Federal agencies, and recall that the CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, lost $4 billion in their petty cash fund. That was on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, yet most people just do not believe it happened. They reported it, and finally there was a statement made that the Agency had discovered, rediscovered, $4 billion that it did not know it had. So in big government agencies that do not have oversight, these kinds of problems would occur. It is up to Congress to take a more vigilant role in terms of oversight. In the process of exercising oversight, my point, as I come to a close here, is that we should do more than dwell on the clerical, administrative problems. They need to be resolved. We need the best information technology. We need customer service that flows out of the IRS that is the best in the world. We need to show that we have a great concern for the people who pay taxes at every level. There is no reason why we cannot get from the IRS service as good as we get from our local bank. After all, all taxes are local, and they come from ordinary people, and they deserve to be treated with great respect. All of that needs to be done. But, Mr. Speaker, we also need to address ourselves to the question of, what are the priorities and how is the Tax Code being uniformly enforced across the board? Who is the beneficiary of special treatment? Are we using the IRS, the Tax Code, for corporate welfare by choosing not to enforce certain portions? What corporations benefit, and how much? By choosing not to enforce certain portions, how are we placed in a situation where more pressure has to be applied on the middle-class taxpayer because we are not reaping, not collecting, the kind of revenue that was projected and predicted when Congress developed the codes in the IRS, in the Internal Revenue Code? All of that should be on the table. Why is it that over the years since 1944, the amount of taxes collected, the percentage of taxes collected from corporations, although corporations have been booming, we have had unparalleled prosperity, why is the percentage of the income tax burden that they bear, why has it gone down while the percentage of income tax burden borne by individuals and families has gone up? Why can the IRS give us some statistics without divulging individuals', and I am sure they can, categories? They can tell us exactly what kinds and how much revenue was produced in each section of the Code. There are ways to analyze without getting into individual discussions of corporations and individuals. All of that can be done, and it will give us a fairer system. The time we spend on the IRS will be far more productive. We will do more than give our constituents a joyful feeling that finally somebody is going after those guys. It is long overdue. But we should also get to the root of the matter. Why are they pursuing, relentlessly pursuing, the average taxpayer, the families and individuals, when there is so much that they are not doing with respect to corporations? And when they do make the revenue collections, we can identify the fact that there is money available for the priorities that we have identified in education. We want to know where the money can come from. It can come from corporations paying their penalties for the violations of section 531 and 537. That section alone will produce all the money we need for school construction over the next 5 to 10 years. The two are very much related. Education is very important. The IRS review is very important. Both parties in a nonpartisan, bipartisan way should pursue both of these objectives, and I would certainly hope that we will spend part of the remaining weeks of the first year of the 105th Congress doing this. But in the 105th Congress in the second year, we will give our full attention to a bipartisan effort to collect the taxes that are not being collected in the corporate welfare and divert the money that we raise that way into the coffers for the improvement of the public schools across America, starting with a new school construction initiative.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, on Friday, September 26, 1997, at the Brooklyn Society For Ethical Culture, the New York community saluted Etheline Dunbar Dubin as a Point-of-Light for her neighborhood, her city, and for all human kind. Etheline was a model for numerous other unsung heroes and heroines spread across our land. She was one of those thousands of citizens who are dedicated enough to work tirelessly behind the scenes and never request an ounce of glory or recognition. In the early sixties when I first became involved in civil rights and political activities, Ms. Dubin was one of my mentors. She seemed to know everything about everybody in local public life. She was an invaluable civic guidebook for a newcomer from Memphis, TN, treading his way through the byzantine politics of New York City. Unselfish in her personal life; unselfish with her family; and unselfish for the community in many causes, Etheline Dubin was the kind of leader who was needed in elected office. But she never threw her hat in the ring and announced that she was running for office. Etheline Dubin was a Point-of-Light but she never craved high visibility; her ego never needed bolstering; she had no great hunger for political power. She was not a wimp with weak convictions. Etheline Dubin was consumed by a passion to do the right thing. From her first civic activities to the very end she raged against evil. She was the unsung champion of the people on the bottom who had no one else to fight for them. One of the last indignant complaints that Etheline registered directly with me was a complaint against a candidate who was running for judge: ``That man owns two houses that have hundreds of housing code violations. He is running for a judgeship but that man is a slum lord.'' The civic and political history of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brooklyn can be written against the backdrop of Etheline Dubin's indignation against evil and her feisty willingness to fight for whatever is right. Etheline and Marshall Dubin almost instinctively bounded to the right side. No one ever had to plead with them to go to the front line in a battle for a just cause. When Bedford-Stuyvesant decided that it wanted more than one token representative in the NY State Assembly, Etheline was there in the fight to elect Tom Jones as the first real Bedford Stuyvesant people's representative. In the fights against discrimination in employment and against discrimination in housing, Etheline was there. In the middle of the controversy which erupted when community planning district boundaries were drawn, Etheline was there. Etheline's long years of work on community planning board eight might be described as her anchor achievement in the community. From her base on planning board eight her concern for all aspects of community life could radiate outward. From the battle to keep the Franklin Avenue shuttle running to the detailed monitoring of the quality of life near her home on the corner of Eastern Parkway and Washington Avenue, Etheline made her presence felt. We all enjoy the benefits of a better neighborhood and a better Brooklyn as a result of the efforts of Etheline and her partners on community planning board eight. Etheline Dubin was a solid brick, a golden brick in the foundation of what is best about our American democracy. Most of us in decisionmaking positions realize that the hope of our system comes from the bottom up. It is the integrity and the tenacity of the brothers and sisters who are never awarded medals and big prizes; these qualities keep our society moving forward. President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was shaped by the unrelenting demands of the strikers on the picket lines, the demonstrators in the streets, the activists in the endless meetings. President Lyndon Johnson was moved to push aggressively for voting rights legislation by the marchers who were beaten on a bridge in Selma, AL. We still do not know the names of the majority of the heroes who fell that morning under the clubs, bayonets, and tear gas. Just this past week we have witnessed commemorations in Little Rock attended by President Clinton to remind us of the heroism of nine children and other members of the Little Rock African-American community when they braved the threat of mob violence to integrate Central High School. Those ordinary people inspired President Eisenhower to send troops in to enforce a Supreme Court decision. Etheline Dubin lived in this tradition of unusing heroes doing what had to be done. Now she has departed leaving behind her husband, Marshall and two sons: Jonathan and Jason Dubin. Today we do not have the resources and the power to erect a statue for Etheline. But the memorial service was more than just a moment of reflection, meditation and grieving. She is one of our last heroines. We must celebrate our heroines and heroes. We must erect monuments in our minds that will never crumble. We must let Points-of-Light shine that will never go out. We must rededicate our lives to the spirit of unselfish activism in memory of Etheline Dubin.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we have had a bit of a reign of pettiness over the past few weeks in the House of Representatives. Certainly it would appear to the general public that pettiness was in command, and much of the previous presentation that we have had was in that same spirit of pettiness. I would like to talk about a different kind of American spirit, American approach, and commend to my colleagues in the Congress a different approach for the rest of what remains in this session, this first year of the 105th Congress, and to go forward into the next year of the 105th Congress in January with a different mind-set. Instead of the pettiness and the small-mindedness, we should look to inspiration from our past American heroes who have done things in a much bigger way. I intend to talk about some very practical problems under this big theme of going forward in a spirit which reflects the America of today that should be. I think we ought to heed the call of President Clinton when he called for us to behave like an indispensable Nation, that we are the indispensable Nation, and we ought to behave that way as we go into the 21st century. The previous discussion was an appropriate one in that it focused, to some degree, on the subject of campaign finance reform, but it was on petty terms. This is one example of how we fall off into pettiness. Pettiness prevailed yesterday as we were about to adjourn for the religious holidays, shouting back and forth on the floor about certain kinds of procedural items. It was generated by a bigger kind of pettiness that prevails as a result of the majority's insistence that an election was won in California by my colleague, the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Sanchez], that that election has to be investigated and reinvestigated despite the fact that she had a marginal 1,000 votes in that victory. Never before in the history of the House have we allowed this kind of petty investigation, subpoenaing of records and all kinds of harassment tactics to take place in connection with a disputed election. So that pettiness generated pettiness from the other side in terms of motions to adjourn and motions to rise, out of frustration on the minority's side to vent its anger through these methods. So we reduced to that, one sort of pettiness forces another. When it comes to campaign finance reform that my colleagues were discussing before, we must realize that the campaign finance reform issue is an appropriate issue and ought to be discussed in a profound way. We ought to look at the reform of campaign financing in the most profound way. Do not call for a special prosecutor for one individual or one candidate or for the Vice President or for the President. Let us call for a thorough investigation of the whole campaign financing, the raising of money, the spending of money, by both parties, because I think the American people, in their wisdom and their common sense, understand that both parties have gone too far in raising funds for elections and that the real problem at the bottom of all of this is whether our democracy will be able to survive. Can a democracy survive as a compatible partner with capitalism? Will capitalism inevitably overwhelm the capitalist economic system and inevitably overwhelm the Democratic governmental system? In other words, if we have capitalism and we have freedom in the marketplace and we allow unbridled profits, and people become powerful in proportion to the kind of profits they make and the kind of money that they accumulate, if they are going to restrain themselves and not use that power to take over the governmental apparatus, can we have capitalism in a Democratic society and capitalism not move to take over? Can we have the rich not using their wealth to distort the democracy? That is a profound question underneath all of this. Let us deal with it. Republicans and Democrats are guilty. Yes, the Democrats at this point are being exposed, there is more in the paper about them, because the focus is on the White House, a highly visible President and Vice President, but the pettiness of the arguments is being dismissed by the common sense of the American people. They are not impressed. They are not impressed with discussions with telephone calls and who made what telephone calls from where. They are right not to be impressed, because in the final analysis it is a little absurd. Every Member of Congress knows that they have gotten telephone calls in their offices about fundraising. If they did not make them, somebody else made it to them. You cannot cut somebody else who calls you to talk about fund-raising. Every Member of Congress knows that they go home and they make a lot of telephone calls from home. That is perfectly legal. Now, why do we not advise the President and the Vice President to go home to make their calls? If they do that, are they not still on Federal property? Does that not make the President and Vice President different and special? They are always on Federal property. They are home. They cannot make calls at home without being on Federal property. It is a little ridiculous to insist that the President and Vice President have to be subjected to some kind of standard which is as stupid as that in terms of where you make a phone call from and insist that we should appoint a special prosecutor to focus on that. We need an investigation. We have commissioned an impartial commission to look at campaign financing, the raising of the money and the spending of the money across the board. We might want to even consider privatizing that and giving a contract to Common Cause to take a thorough look at the whole thing, to pinpoint where some people have broken the law, the present laws, and to make sweeping recommendations for reform that the Congress might want to bind themselves to and on a fast-track basis. We do trade treaties on a fast-track basis. We say we are going to accept the recommendations on an up-and-down basis, we are not going to amend it. Let us have a commission, either a private commission or an appointed commission, to look at the whole of campaign fund-raising and expenditure of funds. Let us look at the relationship between Archer Daniels Midland and one of the candidates, the fact that a candidate's wife earned $1 million in speaking fees the year before. There are all kinds of things to be examined that a commission could look at fully. If we focus on Republicans, we are going to find the same kind of problems that have been already exposed among Democrats. The process is tainted by the need to raise millions and millions of dollars, and we need to get away from that. Underneath that, we need to find a way to deal with the problem of how we keep the capitalistic system which we all know is the system of the present and the system of the future. Capitalism is the only economic system that seems to work in the world, so how do we live with it, adjust it so that it does not take over? We have laissez-faire, laissez-faire rules; a government will not interfere with the economy, a government will not interfere with the marketplace. We do not have reverse rules, which says that the marketplace and the rich, the corporations, will not interfere with the government. That is the problem. We need some kind of way to guarantee that money will not be used to run our democracy, money will not be used to distort the democratic process. That is the profound question underneath of all of this. Let us think big. In thinking big, I am drawn to the very stunning announcement that was made a couple of weeks ago by Ted Turner. I think it is a positive note to begin on. Ted Turner announced that he was going to give $1 billion over the next 10 years to the United Nations, $1 billion. That is a capitalist who has succeeded, and there is a capitalist who thinks in terms of the American approach to problems, and certainly the America of the 21st century. He opens the door to a new way of having people and corporations with big money behave. He has thrown down a challenge. I think it is a great thing that Ted Turner has done. A lot of cynics will say, well, he is not really giving cash, it is stock and the earnings on the stock, it is spread over a 10-year period. Cynics can always find a way to tear down an idealistic gesture. Some people say, well, he is just looking for headlines. Well, OK, maybe he is, but that is a great way to get headlines. If the United Nations gets the money or the profits from the stock and kids in Bangladesh get vaccinations, and Rwanda, they get a decent meal, if things happen all over the world as a result of him getting publicity, then that is great. If he was unconcerned about publicity, of course, we know he could have taken the Dick Morris approach. Dick Morris says, when you do big things, do them in small pieces at a time, teaspoonfuls. Ted Turner could have announced a $100,000 grant every week for the rest of his life and gotten plenty of headlines, it seems to me, if that was all he wanted. He did things in a big American way. He did things in a way which is an example of the best spirit of the American approach to problems. It was the kind of spirit that an LBJ and an FDR and General Marshall of the Marshall plan were capable of, in their own sphere, not in the sphere of giving away money, philanthropy, but in their own spheres. We have had Americans do things in a big way, a profound way, that no other Nation or no other group of people have really been able to emulate. Mr. Speaker, we have a Morrill Act that most people do not even know about or appreciate. The Morrill Act was the act by a Congressman named Morrill, M-O-R-R-I-L-L, because most people do not know about it, that created a land grant college in every State of the Union. The land grant colleges were created with a specific mission, to provide practical education to the citizens, and it set in motion the whole set of agricultural experiment stations, local county agents to carry out the results of the experiments. It set in motion all of the activities which generated an American agriculture industry which has still not been surpassed by anybody in the world. We feed cheaper, we feed more people cheaper, than any other nation in the world as a result of that base that was laid by the Morrill Act. But, of course, it did far more than establish agriculture as an enterprise worthy of study, worthy of scientific nations. Those land grant colleges have become major centers of intellectual activity in all of the States. So the Morrill Act was one of those big acts. Ted Turner acted in the spirit of Morrill when he did that. I do not know which Congressman was responsible for the Transcontinental Railroad Act. A lot of people do not know that the transcontinental railroad, linking up the railroads from the East to the railroads from the West and establishing that line right across the whole country, that was not done by private enterprise, it was done with the money of the taxpayers. The taxpayers paid private contractors to build that transcontinental railroad. It was a monumental activity, a monumental kind of action taken on by the Government, that resulted in linking the east coast with the west coast and establishing this Nation as one whole Nation in a way that could not have been done without that transcontinental railroad linkage. Then we had, of course, the New Deal by Franklin Roosevelt, which was a sweeping plan which looked at the problems that we were experiencing economically and said, we have to approach these problems in a way to try to get at solutions, and we have a New Deal which transformed the role of the Federal Government totally, and later on the Great Society of LBJ which established Medicaid and Medicare. We are debating about the cost of Medicaid and the cost of Medicare, aid to elementary and secondary education. All of that came under LBJ, who thought in the vein of an FDR and a Morrill and moved in a way which came to grips with big problems, enormous problems, and had ideas and concepts and legislation which were big enough to take care of those problems. Then we had the Marshall plan, George Marshall. His conception of how we get Europe out of economic chaos and save it from communism was an unparalleled plan, unparalleled generosity on the part of the American people in terms of giving of their tax dollars to help to rehabilitate the economies of Europe, big, sweeping activities that were conceived by Americans who thought big. So when President Clinton calls for us to behave as we are citizens in an indispensable Nation, he is in harmony with a tradition that has already been established. I was very impressed with the President's State of the Union address, and I entered a piece in the Congressional Record on February 4 which I am going to read at this point before I talk more about the spirit of Ted Turner and how that spirit needs to be applied, the spirit of the big American approach, the willingness to seize the issue and to move with an overwhelming game plan to deal with it. One billion dollars to the United Nations by Ted Turner is a big act dealing with a big problem that has repercussions and will generate positive by-products throughout the whole world. First positive by-product of Ted Turner's gesture is, of course, it shows up the American Congress as a very petty body. We owe the United Nations $1.2 billion. One or two people in the Congress have held up the payment of our dues to the United Nations. We are blackmailing the United Nations into doing what we want to do by holding up our dues, and here is a man in one fell swoop is willing to give a billion dollars. Why can the Nation not pay past dues of more than a billion dollars? Why do we have to insist that they reform first, when we know that any organization that has more than 100 people is going to have inevitable administrative problems? We have an IRS that has problems. We have a CIA with big administrative problems. They lost $4 billion dollars in a petty cash fund. We know that mankind is not an automatically administratively efficient animal. We have trouble administrating things. Administration is always a problem. Every agency and bureaucracy, every large construct will inevitably face problems. So we should not put the United Nations in a category by itself and say we want them to reform all of their structural problems, we want them to solve all of their structural problems, we want maximum reform and then we will pay our dues. The world would not be able to run at all and would come to a standstill if we said that everybody had to be administratively efficient, every agency and department of the government must be efficient and effective before we allow the taxpayers' money to keep it running. It is ridiculous. Mr. Speaker, Ted Turner's action to give $1 billion to the United Nations, the first by-product is to show how petty our behavior is with respect to the United Nations. When I was a kid, we collected nickels for the UNESCO and the United Nations was a great hope for the future, and now we have Members on the floor of Congress maligning the United Nations, which still is the hope of the future in terms of spreading the benefits of peace and prosperity throughout the world. So in harmony with the President and in appreciation of the President's State of the Union Address on February 4, I read the following into the Congressional Record. I made a statement and then I entered one of my rap poems to go with it: Mr. Speaker, President Clinton's inaugural address was not a State of the Union speech obligated to provide substance for general proposals. Appropriately, the President used his second inaugural statement to set a tone for the next four years, the prelude to the 21st century. America is a great country blessed by God with wealth far surpassing any Nation on the face of the earth now, or in the past. The Roman Empire was a beggar entity compared to the rich and powerful Americans. God has granted us an opportunity unparalleled in history. President Clinton called upon both leaders and ordinary citizens to measure up to this splendid moment. The President called upon all of us to abandon ancient hatreds and obsessions with trivial issues. For a brief moment in history we are the indispensable people. Other nations have occupied this position before and failed the world. The American colossus should break the historic pattern of empires devouring themselves. As we move into the 21st Century we need indispensable leaders with global visions. We need profound decisions. Then, Mr. Speaker, I ended with the following rap poem: Under God, the indivisible, indispensable Nation. Guardian of the pivotal generation. Most fortunate of all the lands. For a brief moment, the hold world we hold in our hands. Internet sorcery, computer magic, tiny spirits make opportunity tragic. We are the indispensable Nation. Guardian of the pivotal generation. Millionaires must rise to see the need, or smother beneath their splendid greed. Capitalism is King, with potential to be Pope. Banks hoard gold that could fertilize universal hope. Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, King, make your star-spangled legacy sing. Dispatch your ghosts to bring us global visions. Indispensable leaders need profound decisions. Internet sorcery, computer magic, tiny spirits make opportunity tragic. We are the indispensable Nation. Guardian of the pivotal generation. With liberty and justice for the world, under God. We are the indispensable Nation, and we ought to behave as leaders in the Congress like we are leaders of an indispensable Nation. Pettiness should be pushed to the background. We have problems before us which demand the best minds operating in a manner which seizes the moment and implies broad overall approaches and plans which get real solutions. The President proposed a board on race relations. He tackled a huge problem which needs a lot of profound light, less heat and more light thrown upon it: The problem of race relations in America. It is a huge problem. The board that the President has appointed has an opportunity to deal with the problem like they are profound leaders of an indispensable Nation, or they can allow it to crumble away into pettiness and small talk. They can get caught up in running away from controversy to the point where they run away from relevance. That race board is a good idea that needs to think in more profound terms about what it wants to do. We have a problem with our Internal Revenue Service which has been highlighted in the past 2 weeks. The Internal Revenue Service is a necessity to have someone collect the taxes, and it is most unfortunate that Congress has over the years not applied and used its powers of oversight on a more regular basis. The oversight powers of Congress have really not been used in monitoring the executive branch of Government in general. It has always been a political thing, where one party in charge will zero in on just those items and those agencies which give them some political advantage from year to year. They neglect an ongoing master plan to oversee and look at what the Government is doing everywhere. The IRS is long overdue for some critical examination. The problem with the present examination is that it is moving toward triviality. It is not trivial to deal with the problems in individual taxpayers' experiences with the IRS. Everybody who has faced the tyranny of IRS and found themselves being victimized deserves to have some relief and deserves to have the attention of Congress. But what we have to understand is that the systemic problem, the systemic problem generates the specific problems, and nobody wants to deal with the systemic problems of IRS; that the system itself is based upon the assumption that we can collect more taxes, gain more revenue, please bosses at the top, if we go after small people who do not have defenses, if we collect from people who cannot hire corporate tax lawyers and who cannot bring in reams and reams of files and books and overwhelm us. The IRS agents can quickly show that they are doing something. Each agent, each department can collect taxes faster from individuals and families than they can from people who have the real money, corporations and the very rich who have the networks of investments. We have had in the past, at least on two occasions, I think, administrations which have sent memos and they have been allowed to leak or we found out what they were saying, which in essence said: Go after the middle class. Tell the Internal Revenue if the collections are down, it is because they keep wasting time with the corporations. Go after the middle class because we get a quick return. They have the money and they are not going to put up any defense, so collect most of the taxes from the middle class. Mr. Speaker, the systemic problem is the problem we ought to be dealing with. What is the result of that kind of approach of collecting most of the taxes from the middle class? We have in America a clear pattern. I used to bring a chart here. I do not have it today, but the chart showed that in 1944, corporations were paying a far greater share of the taxes than individuals and families. Corporations were paying almost 40 percent of the taxes and individuals and families were down much lower, 27, 28 percent. Over the years, that has reversed and corporations now pay, I think, 11 or 12 percent now of the overall income tax burden, while individuals and families are paying 44 percent. Now, that is the result of a systemic problem, the problem of the philosophy of the IRS to collect money where it is easy to collect money. It is easier to collect money from the middle class than it is from corporations. Mr. Speaker, we need to go after the systemic problem. Let us approach the IRS and the revamping of the IRS a profound way. What we are doing now is having a process where we intimidate the IRS and we highlight their activities in a way that only forces them to do more of what they have always done, and that is they will continue to try to avoid controversy by going after those who are most vulnerable. They will only come up with some public relations schemes now to hide the fact that they are doing it. Corporations at this point are paying a smaller share, not only because of the way the tax laws are written but because of the way the IRS collects taxes. We have highlighted on this floor a profound problem that nobody wants to deal with. I have written to Mrs. Richardson, the previous tax commissioner before she resigned. I have written to Secretary Rubin. We talked about section 531 and 537 of the Internal Revenue Code. That section, to summarize, says that if corporations buy back their own stock illegally, that is, the Code says they cannot buy back their own stock except for certain purposes, and if they buy back the stock for purposes other than that, they have to suffer a penalty, and the penalty is something like almost a 39 percent penalty. It is on the books. Mr. Speaker, I am not on the Committee on Ways and Means. I did not help write it and I do not help to monitor it at this point. But I am fascinated by the fact that we have corporate welfare in this country in several forms. One form is that corporate welfare flows through the IRS. The IRS, in its attitude and its refusal to enforce the Internal Revenue Code with respect to corporations, provides a subsidy to corporations that individuals do not get. Individuals are put on the spot more because the IRS is not doing the job it should be doing with the corporations. Mr. Speaker, that is not an idle charge. We can back that up with some statistics which I will not go into now. I have admitted it into the Record before. I have put a whole set of arguments into the Record. I have listed corporations that are buying back their own stock in ever greater amounts. And when a corporation buys back its own stock, it does two things. It is violating section 531 and 537 of the Internal Revenue Code, which nobody seems to care about because they are afraid of corporations, but it is also denying the shareholders the profits. By making the decision to buy back the stock, the corporation hoards unto itself the wealth. If it were to pay in dividends the money that it uses to buy the stock, then individual shareholders would benefit from that. I wonder what the mutual fund groups really think about this and why they are allowing it to happen year after year. What it does is keep the prices of stock up. If corporations buy back their own stock, that guarantees that there is a fund there ready to swoop in the minute the stock begins to go down and buy the stock so that the price goes up again. Mr. Speaker, that, in my layman's mind, borders on manipulation, and that is part of the reason why the law was made the way it was made, to forestall excessive manipulation of the market. I wonder how much of the market's soaring prices is due to the fact that corporations have a fund ready always to buy stock as it goes down, and then it goes back up. But in the meantime, what does that mean for the shareholders who are in it for the short-run, long-run, it does not matter. If shareholders do not get the dividends, they are deprived of the choice of spending their money and their profits some other way. As we investigate the IRS, the IRS ought to be investigated with greater profundity than I hear now being exercised. The Committee on Ways and Means of the House is about to start its own investigation, its own hearings. Let us ask the question: Why have receipts from corporations over the years gone down drastically, while receipts from individuals and families have gone up? Explain that. Tell us how it is done. We know the IRS cannot share with us the records of individual taxpayers or individual corporations, but they have statistics which show, and that is how we are able to say this, there are statistics that show that corporations paid a far smaller proportion of the overall income tax burden than they paid in 1944. We had a switch, so why did that take place? Mr. Speaker, let us approach this like leaders, profound leaders in an indispensable nation, and deal with a systemic problem of a system so we correct the system and move it toward a more just method of tax collecting, instead of wild charges being made about abolishing the IRS, going to a flat tax system, doing all kinds of things which will make the rich even less vulnerable to taxes while poor people will be saddled with greater taxes. The flat tax, all the schemes that we have seen, they let the rich off but they do not do much to help middle- class taxpayers. So in the area of tax reform, the IRS, let us move in the spirit of Ted Turner instead of the spirit of Mickey Mouse. The Mickey Mouse spirit is gnawing away at the agenda in this Capitol. Everybody wants to do things in a small way, and then blow them up with headlines and get a lot of credit for having done something. It is not important that we highlight the fact that individuals are being abused unless we deal with the system and corrections of the system. I have talked about campaign finance reform being dealt with in a most profound way so that we have an investigation that runs across the board and deals with the problem and comes back with real recommendations that Congress agrees to enact, recommendations which will protect the American democracy, the democratic form of government from our capitalistic economy. There is a simple problem. If there are rich people in a society, are they going to use their wealth or be allowed to use their wealth to distort the democratic process? That is the problem and that problem has to be dealt with. I have also talked about the President's Race Relations Board. Is the Race Relations Board going to deal with petty problems of attitudes that people may have and names that people may call each other and a lot of things that are going on from now until the world comes to an end or are they going to take this initiative to really provide us with some background information on what it is all about? What is race relations all about in America, the core of race relations, the race relations between African-Americans and mainstream Americans? That is the most sensitive problem. That problem has its roots in a thing called slavery. If the Race Relations Board is not going to deal with some factual analysis on the history of what slavery was all about, of what 232 years of economic denial, of not being able to own anything, for 232 years the ancestors of slaves were not able to own anything, they could not own property. They could not pass anything down from one generation to another. So we descendants of those slaves ended up without having the benefits. We are unlike any people anywhere in the country because we did not have anything to bring over from the Old World with us. They did not allow us to do that. Then for 232 years they exacted labor from the slaves without paying them, without allowing them to own anything. If you do not establish what that means, if you do not really use your resources to delve into that and to make the American people understand the consequences of a people being deprived for 232 years of livelihood and being able to pass it down. The wealth of America and the rest of the world is primarily inherited, it is passed from one generation to another. If you interrupt the flow of wealth from one generation to another for 232 years, what does that mean? So much is attached to income and wealth. There is a correlation between income, wealth, and education. There is a correlation between income, wealth, and the ability to cope with the problems of our modern society. There are correlations that cannot be ignored. If you do not have the wealth, you are not allowed to pass down even modest amounts of money from one generation to another. What is the consequence? So the Race Relations Board appointed by the President needs to attack that in a big way. Then I said the IRS and the investigation of the IRS needs to be put in a new light and approached in a more profound way. Now I would like to conclude by focusing on the most important subject of all, and that is approaching education in a way which is consistent with the spirit of Ted Turner's billion dollar gift to the United Nations, approaching the education problem in a way which is consistent with the New Deal, the Marshall plan, the Great Society, the Morrill Act, the transcontinental railroad. I forgot to mention the latest act which I consider on a plane worthy of being compared to the Morrell Act or the New Deal, and that is the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Communications Commission establishment of a universal fund for schools and libraries. The Federal Communications Commission established a fund for telecommunications at schools and libraries that will begin with $2.2 billion per year to go to schools and libraries in the form of discounts for services. The discounts will range from 20 percent for the richest school districts and schools to 90-percent for the poorest school districts. In other words, in my district many of the schools who have large numbers of poor students who receive school lunches, they qualify for a 90 percent discount. If the telephone bill is part of the plan, they would only pay 10 cents on every dollar, a dollar's worth of telephone service they use. If they are on the Internet, whatever the charge is on the Internet, they would only pay 10 cents on the dollar because of the fact that this fund, the universal fund established under the order of the FCC, will take up the balance. The universal fund was mandated by Congress. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandated that the Federal Communications Commission must establish some way to help schools and libraries. That was a great act of Congress. It was one of the acts worthy of an indispensable Nation, worthy of the leaders of a Nation going toward the 21st century. So finally, the universal fund for schools and libraries fits into the whole school reform effort that ought to be moved up to a higher level. We are talking about school reform now again in very trivial terms. The approach to school reform has lapsed into pettiness. Pettiness, headline grabbing is what generated the stampede into testing. We stampeded a proposal for national testing, leaping over agreements that had been made by Congress that we should have three approaches, where the Federal Government was involved in education reform in three major ways. They were to deal with the national curriculum, deal with national testing standards, voluntary standards. Not a national test, but national testing standards were to be developed with the leadership and input of the Federal Government, and we had opportunity to learn standards as a part of that. Of course, because it grabs headlines and it does not cost very much money, testing has gotten pushed out of proportion to everything else. It is that kind of pettiness, refusal to look at the problem in terms of the 21st century approach and think big about education reform. Education reform is a great challenge that we face now, probably the greatest challenge the Nation faces. We know there are things that are radically wrong and they can be corrected, we have the resources to correct them. We must go forward to deal with those corrections. We should not hesitate to apply the great wealth and the great know-how of the American Nation to the problems of education. I talked before about Ted Turner, but there are a couple other examples of acting on a big scale that I would like to mention also before I conclude with the discussion of education. There are some other people other than Ted Turner who understand what the 21st century, as we go to the 21st century, how we should behave. Ted Turner set a new standard for billionaires, but not by himself. There is a guy named George Soros who also is a billionaire. He is funding several projects that are very critical in terms of analyzing what can be done about certain kinds of problems and in terms of allowing certain approaches and solutions to go forward so that they can be studied, and many of them are controversial. George Soros moved from Eastern Europe, where certain governments have kicked him out completely, to controversy here in America with the drug problem and the problem of what to do with our cities, a problem of anti-immigration attitudes, lawmakers and a few others. So George Soros, even beyond Ted Turner, is using his billions to get involved in controversy, to take on what other foundations have always backed away from; that is, using their dollars in areas of great controversy. There are areas of controversy which need the help of most. Solutions to the problems that are considered controversial are solutions that are needed most. But we have not had the benefit of corporate money and foundation philanthropy because of the fact that everybody was afraid. So George Soros, in that new area, moves in a new direction. In the area of education, we recently had an announcement by the Democratic task force on education which I want to applaud. It is a step forward in terms of clearly outlining what they are recommending that the Democratic Caucus members do. As such, it is a recommendation for all people in America interested in education reform. My problem is that it does not go far enough. It is not petty. It is profound, but it falls short of some problems that we are facing. The Democratic Caucus plan includes the following set of principles. I applaud these principles. They call for first-class public schools that emphasize academic excellence in the basics. They call for well- trained, highly motivated teachers to help children achieve high standards. They call for the use of public dollars to improve public schools rather than private school vouchers and at public expense of a Federal role in education that supports local initiatives for strong neighborhood public schools. They call for the empowerment of parents to choose the best public schools for their children, and they say that every child should have access to a safe, well-equipped public school. They expand that, in the area of every child should have access to a safe, well-equipped public school, by focusing on the problem at the heart of all the problems of school reform; that is, they call for relief for crumbling and overcrowded schools. They call for a replacement of crumbling, overcrowded schools with schools with well- equipped classrooms and the kinds of resources that all children need. Five billion dollars to repair crumbling schools and provide new construction to relieve overcrowding and reduce class size, and they call for the assisting of schools to wire classrooms so that they are able to make use of the funds that I talked about before, the FCC universal service funds for schools and libraries. I applaud the Democratic Caucus task force on education for what they have done. I think it is great that they have focused on one practical thing that is doable. The President proposed a $5 billion construction package and then in the negotiation process it got lost. It is well- formulated. It is in a bill. I think more than 90 Members of Congress are on the bill. It is a practical piece of legislation. It is a practical proposal that could move in the 105th Congress. Maybe not this year, this year of the 105th Congress, but early in the next Congress it could move. I think it could move better if it is part of an omnibus education program. We should not hesitate to come forward with an omnibus education package in the next year. We should spend the rest of this session at least in outlining some of the things that ought to be included in that package, but at the core of an omnibus education package there should be a construction initiative because construction is at the heart of school reform. In my district when I talk to teachers and principals about we want to wire the schools for the Internet, make use of the universal fund that has been established by the FCC, they look at me, it is funny, it is a joke because they have a problem of roofs leaking and walls crumbling on the top floors of the schools. They have a problem with enough chalk. They have a problem with old blackboards. They have a problem with lack of repairs of the seats in the school. They have a problem with too many children. The schools of New York are still overcrowded. We are in the midst of a mayoral election and you would not know it because everybody in the press and the media, working very hard to reelect the present mayor, so all of a sudden the problem we had in the fall of 1996 where 91,000 children did not have a place to sit--we have a school system of a million children and it boggles the mind when you start talking about the New York City school system, but there are a million children, more than a million children, 1,100 schools, 60,000 teachers, and it is overwhelming. But the system has failed to keep pace with the enrollment and you have last fall, in 1996, an admission of the fact that 91,000 children did not have a place to sit when school opened. This year it is an election year, and all of a sudden the problem seems to have gone away. The press and the media refuse to acknowledge we still have a massive overcrowding problem. There are schools which will tell you, we do not have an overcrowding problem, yet they have now 1,500. If you were built to hold 700 and you have 1,500, you have an overcrowding problem. They say they do not have an overcrowding problem. And you say, how many lunch periods do you have? They will tell you we have three. Some kids in some schools are forced to eat lunch at 10 in the morning because they have so many youngsters the cafeteria will not hold them all and they have to move in relays. When you have to make a youngster eat lunch at 10 in the morning, you have a crisis. The last youngsters to eat lunch eat at 2. You have a crisis on both ends. It is child abuse, but those things are going on. In the New York school system there are still almost 300 schools that have furnaces that burn coal. In the middle of a big city you have school furnaces burning coal. That is a crisis. We have the highest asthma rate in the country, one of the highest. The children are directly affected by the inability of the system to provide adequate facilities. They not only have to live near those furnaces burning coal, they have to go and sit in classrooms in the schools where the coal is being burned. We have a crisis. We have a crisis, and it is not just New York City's crisis, not New York State's crisis alone. The State, at least, has bellied up to the problem to the tune of placing on the agenda for a referendum vote a bond issue which will raise $2 billion to build schools, build, repair and renovate schools. That is a first step forward. I applaud my colleagues in the New York State legislature. They have taken the first step. New York City, of course, the mayor, in this election year, has found funds to do repairs here and there. Everywhere we go we have some visible signs of the mayor's office, which cut the schools by $1.5 billion in the past, now discovering that education is important and producing funds and results. Over the summer we had junior high schools throughout the city each receiving computers. I am glad we are having an election year because education is getting the attention in New York City that it should get. But we need a more profound response. The State of New York, with its bond issue, needs help. Even a well meaning administration who really wanted to do something about education in New York City needs help. Why not get the help from the Federal Government? That is where most of the money is. The Federal Government has a responsibility, which is a moral responsibility. It is not in the Constitution that the Federal Government is responsible for education. Most States have that in their State constitution. But it does not matter, we have the money and the resources. The money does not come from Federal sources because there are no Federal citizens in America. Maybe the citizens of Washington, DC, who have now been taken over again by the Federal Government, are Federal citizens. But the rest of us are citizens of States and we are citizens of cities and towns. We pay income tax from those cities and towns and States into the Federal Government. So the money comes from the local level, all of it does, and there is nothing wrong with having the money go back to take care of crisis situations. The crisis now in America is not just in New York City but, according to the General Accounting Office, we need $120 billion for the infrastructure and repair programs of school systems throughout the whole Nation. It is not a local problem. So at the heart of this education effort of the Democratic Caucus, I am glad to see they place school construction as the most specific area that they are approaching. The caucus also has focused widely on well-trained teachers. I think there is agreement among Republicans and Democrats that we need well- trained teachers. I think there is agreement among Republicans and Democrats that we need to have more effort to wire the schools to make use of telecommunications and technology. I think there is one other area of agreement, which I am afraid the Democratic task force did not mention, and that is charter schools. We have backed away from any mention of charter schools. Now, why are charter schools important? Charter schools are important because of the fact that there is agreement on charter schools among Democrats and Republicans. There is agreement that both unions, both big national unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, both have agreed charter schools are a good idea. We are going to be debating on this floor next week a bill concerning the D.C., District of Columbia, appropriations, and there is a very controversial item in that bill. That bill has an item which deals with the D.C. schools being forced to implement a voucher program. The D.C. schools in that bill are going to be forced by Congress to implement a voucher program. Now, vouchers have not been implemented anywhere else in the country as a result of Federal funding or Federal intervention. This will be the first case. This would be Congress exercising its overwhelming powers over the District of Columbia to bully them into accepting vouchers. It does not matter to the people who offer this amendment to do this that citizens of the District of Columbia had a referendum. They had a referendum, and they voted that they did not want vouchers. The citizens specifically voted not to accept vouchers. They do not want vouchers. It was put to the test in a democratic election. They voted that they do not want vouchers. They are embracing charter schools. The District of Columbia has taken steps to embrace charter schools in a way no other locale has. The District of Columbia has established a board for charter schools. They have called for applications for 20 charter schools. Now, here is a point of agreement where the Democrats agree and the Republicans agree, AFT, UFT, that charter schools are not a bad idea. I do not think charter schools will ever overwhelm the traditional public schools. I think the future of good schooling for most of America's children, the future is in the public schools. The public schools, however, need to have a stimulant. Some people say they need competition. And the bureaucracies that I have encountered, certainly the bureaucracy of New York City, does need competition. We need ways in which we shake up the smugness among administrators and principals and superintendents by showing them that all the things they say cannot be done; there are some people who can do them using the same amount of money that they have. Charter schools are public schools. Charter schools would take the same amount of money per child that the traditional public schools have, and the charter schools would use that amount of money per child to provide an education in accordance with the accountability standards established by the State. They would have to meet the same standards as the traditional public schools. The difference between charter schools and the traditional public schools, however, would be the governance and the management. They would have more flexibility and more freedom because they would not be a part of a hide-bound bureaucracy. They would do things that we cannot do in a bureaucratic system, which insists everyone has to do the same thing everywhere regardless. They would do things without having to run up a chain of command for approval. They could take some risks, and they would probably have some failures as a result, but they might have a lot of successes. At any rate, they could tackle the big problems. They say in the public schools that they cannot have disruptive children, they cannot have children coming from certain kinds of backgrounds, with problems at home, et cetera. Let us throw that child into a charter school and tell the charter school board of directors, who should be a group of people who come together and are pledged over a long period of time to work with the problem of schooling, and not a fly-by-night operation where somebody wants to experiment for a little while, maybe while their child is in the school, and then they will drop it. We need a solid board of directors for these charter schools, and they ought to tackle some real education problems. At any rate, the District of Columbia has made its decision. The District of Columbia has a charter school board. They are calling for the establishment of 20 more charter schools. Next week, as we debate the appropriations provision which will force them to install vouchers, we should look at charter schools as an alternative. We should tackle the whole problem of education, at least. It requires a movement on a broad base. There are a lot of components of education reform, but there are several components of education reform which now we can move forward on them because it is possible to reach agreement. There is agreement that we need more training for teachers and that the resources ought to be provided partially by the Federal Government. There is agreement on that. We ought to be able to move forward there. There is agreement that technology and wiring for the Internet will greatly improve education in our schools. We have a universal fund established for that. We should move forward on that. There is agreement on charter schools, that charter schools are a good idea. Right now, in America, we have less than 800 charter schools. We have 86,000 traditional public schools. So when we look at 86,000 versus 800, we know charter schools are not about to overrun traditional public schools. Even if we had 10 percent, it would not overrun traditional public schools. So traditional public schools are not threatened by charter schools. Charter schools represent an experiment that we ought to try. Charter schools represent an experiment which is far superior to vouchers. Vouchers carry us into another realm of private education where people who accept public money can tell us that they are not going to do things except their way. They have our money, our taxpayers' money, but they are going to do things their way. They are honest enough to tell us that up front. They are not going to change their curriculum. They are not going to change their culture. They are not going to stop giving religious instruction, if they give religious instruction. That is what they are set up to do. They are honest enough to say that if we give them the money, they are not going to change or let us dilute their integrity. So private schools or religious schools will operate as they have always operated. So let us not give them public money. Public money should go to public schools, and charter schools are public schools. I want to conclude by saying that nowhere is the need greater than in the area of education, that we understand that we are leaders in an indispensable Nation. We are leaders in an indispensable Nation. We are the pivotal generation. If we are petty at this point, when our resources are greater than ever before; if we are petty at this point, when we do not have any global crisis, there is no world war, there is nothing attracting the attention of the American leaders and American resources as much as education should; if we at this point will not shift the tremendous amounts of dollars that we have spent on the cold war and on military defense, shift some of that money into education to meet the recognized crises in education, then we are petty leaders in an indispensable Nation, and the great indispensable Nation will lose its place in the world. I have said before that compared to the United States of America, Rome was a little village. The Roman empire, with all its splendor, was nothing compared to the kind of colossus that America has at this point. But the minds of the American leaders are not measuring up to the size of the Nation and the mission of the Nation. We need a generation of profound leaders who act in a way that this indispensable Nation requires. Ted Turner, in the area of billionaire philanthropy; George Soros, in the area of billionaire philanthropy; they have shown the way; Reed Hunt, at the Federal Communications Commission, has shown the way in the new guidelines for universal funds. There are many places where there are Americans who think like FDR and LBJ and they know we have to tackle big problems with big solutions. And in the area of education, we need to understand that we have a big problem that needs big solutions. Part of that solution should be the training of teachers; part of that solution should be the upgrading of our schools with technology; part of that solution should be charter schools. And underneath that whole set of those subparts, there has to be a massive program to build schools. The construction, the bricks and mortar, comes first in this particular case, but in this indispensable Nation, we need an indispensable school system with universal quality education for all.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to salute Prof. William H. Pease, Jr. as a Point of light for the citizens of New York City and for all Americans. Professor Pease is a teacher, a former engineer, and a forceful advocate of the study of African-American history. Tomorrow, October 2, 1997, Professor Pease will be 76 years old. He presently serves as professor emeritus, professor of electrical engineering and assistant dean of instruction at Suffolk Community College in Selden, NY. In his own right, William Pease is a Point of light; however, he would proudly acknowledge the fact that he is also a reflection of the flames left burning by two of his mentors, Rosetta Gaston and Carter G. Woodson. In addition to all of his other labors, the promotion of African-American history has always been a passion of Professor Pease. He was a teenage pupil of Mother Gaston who first introduced him to the work of Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. It should be noted that Dr. John Hope Franklin, the current chairman of the President's Advisory Board on Race, was also a disciple of Carter G. Woodson. Professor Pease's great passion for the promotion of African-American history increases his effectiveness in his work with youth. Wherever possible, he is always ready to assist youth-serving programs. Together with his daughter, Denise Pease, he has sponsored a scholarship awarded through the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission to student winners of essay and art contests. As a teacher and a counselor he has directly inspired young people. In his quite and forthright presentations, he keeps the spirit of Frederic Douglass and Martin Luther King alive. Professor Pease is a graduate of Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and Fordham University. Prior to assuming his position at Suffolk County Community College, he was a senior instructor at RCA Institute and a microwave engineer at Tungsol Electronics. At Suffolk, he has served as the director of the educational opportunities program and the facility advisor of the Black Students Organization. Numerous organizations has previously recognized William Pease as a great Point of light. He won accolades as the Tuskegee airmen welter- weight champion in 1945. He was the first African-American president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. Over the years he has received awards from: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History; the New York University Weekend Tutorial Project; the Professional Achievement Award of the Brownsville Association for the Study of African American Life and History; the Teacher of the Year Award from the New York University Outreach Program for Mathematics and Science; the Mary McLeod Bethune Award for the motivation of black youth; and a proclamation from the Suffolk County Executive for outstanding service and leadership. Hundreds of the students and disciples of Professor Pease occupy leadership positions throughout the city and the Nation. For his community and for all Americans, Prof. William H. Pease, Jr. is a great point of light.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, also, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights has opposed this fast-track national testing initiative. They have given very sound reasons for opposing it. To help the children of America, a bipartisan school reform package with substance is needed. We do not need gimmicks, we do not need block grants, we do not need national testing. Vote ``yes'' on this amendment to prohibit the usurpation of the powers of the Congress.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of this amendment to prohibit the expenditure of funds to develop a national test. We need opportunities to learn before we mandate national tests. In the overall, comprehensive effort to improve our schools, there is a place for a national testing program, but it is counterproductive and oppressive to launch a fast-track stampede for a national test without simultaneously implementing other desperately needed Federal initiatives. Our national campaign to promote opportunity-to-learn standards ought to come before or in concert with the push for a national test. Testing without opportunity-to-learn standards or other reforms is merely a measurement of the status quo. We know what the tests are going to tell us before we give them. When there is no effort to improve school facilities or to provide adequate libraries, laboratories, computers, and other learning necessities, the burden of improving education is dumped solely on the backs of the pupils. Under this condition, with gross sins of omission, national testing with high stakes and scores that will remain with students for a lifetime become the instruments for the abuse of students. We need a moratorium on testing until other school improvement components are implemented with greater vigor than they are now being pursued. The Federal school construction initiative, the construction initiative which will provide safe facilities conducive to study, must be placed back on the political track. Adequate physical facilities do not automatically improve learning; however, they are at the heart of the opportunity-to-learn standards. Since local education agencies throughout the Nation are experiencing overcrowding and infrastructure decay, school construction is a universal priority. National testing is not a priority. National testing is a highly visible device, but at this critical point the campaign for educational reform deserves more than a dramatic, headline-grabbing gesture. Instead of this piecemeal, isolated gimmick, we need a more balanced and inclusive approach to school improvement. America's children will be best served by returning to the working compromise that was reached in the 1994 Elementary and Secondary Educational Assistance Act. At that time it was agreed that a three- part Federal initiative would be launched to promote national curriculum standards, national testing standards, and national opportunity-to-learn standards. This agreement was violated when, through a back door rules-violating Committee on Appropriations deal, the section of the law related to opportunity-to-learn standards was repealed in 1996. States and local governments are no longer exhorted to voluntarily raise their opportunity-to-learn standards. Only the students now have the burden placed on their backs. They have been abandoned by the Federal advocacy process, and they are being loudly challenged to meet new accountability demands that their local education agencies are not being exhorted to develop, and also the States are not being held accountable. We now have a window of opportunity, since Americans do think education is a high priority and have made that clear, we have a window of opportunity, and we can offer American students a better deal than more tests with less opportunities to learn. We can do more than just test students. The American people clearly want better schools, and public officials who are able to deliver a machinery for it are desired also by the electorate. It is not an exaggeration to contend that at this particular moment a bipartisan educational achievement of great magnitude is possible. Both Democrats and Republicans agree on enough components of education reform to forge ahead in this session of Congress. Both parties agree that charter schools offer a way to experiment with governance and management which would provide competitive choices with a minimum loss of public control. Both parties agree that increased resources for teacher training and retraining is a need we jointly recognize. Encouraging the maximum use of technology to aid education is also an approach approved by both parties. It would not be difficult to produce a bipartisan school package with substance. At a time when there are no absorbing global crises and very few national emergencies, the deliberative powers of both the executive and legislative branch could fashion a program with minimal intervention and a well-focused targeting to stimulate a chain reaction of State efforts to forge continuing improvements in education. The most productive Federal role is to challenge the States and enhance the programs that work, and that can be implemented and managed at the State and local levels. A national school reform effort means that all levels of government must make their appropriate contribution. On the scale of priorities for reform, testing is way down on that list of priorities. Both the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Leadership Council on Civil Rights opposed this.

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we are already in the process of debating the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriation. We have spent most of last week on that debate, and that debate will continue tomorrow. I think it is very interesting some of the kinds of amendments that have been introduced with respect to using funds from other places to assist various programs in education. While I am all in favor of increased funding for education, I did not support amendments that sought to take funds from Health and Human Services or to take funds from labor programs, programs related to working people. I think we should take this opportunity that has been presented to us. Education is now clearly on the minds of a lot of people, including the decision-makers in the 105th Congress. We have listened to the common sense of the American people. They have clearly made education a high priority over a long period of time. Education as a priority has not gone away. Prior to the last election, there was a clear, highly visible concern about education which both parties responded to. We had a sudden increase of $4 billion in funding for education just before the last elections in 1996, last year. That was an indication that both parties had gotten the message. They funded time honored programs, like Head Start got an increase and title I got an increase, and we had several other increases which were very much needed. We are still in a situation where the public is demanding more, and rightly so, from elected officials at every level for education. They are demanding more of people at the local level and State level and here. We have an unprecedented window of opportunity to do something of great and lasting significance about educational reform in this country. We can start our schools on the road to improvement, a road to improvement which will have a continuum. It will not be a stop-and- start sort of situation, but it can be a road of steady improvement. But we cannot do that unless we understand that the window of opportunity that we have now requires a comprehensive approach to reform. It requires that we not vulcanize our attempts to improve education. We understand that it is good to have so much concern at every level; all Members of Congress concerned, parents concerned, people in general concerned about education. That is wonderful. It is also a fact of life that everybody in America who is an adult considers himself to be an expert in education. Everybody has their own set of pet theories about how education can be improved and what should be done. Everybody has their own theory and approach to instructions on how to raise kids and how to handle young people in the school system. Lots and lots of people are involved in the process, and that is good. We should not try to turn that off. It is good that millions and millions of people care about education and they care about school reform. I would like to, however, caution those of us who are in power to understand that although it is good to have everybody involved in the process, there is a danger that any one person who thinks he has the truth can do a great deal of harm if he also has a lot of power. Those who are concerned, who have a lot of power, who want to put their pet theories into practice can wreck the process, or certainly throw it off track for a long time. Let me just use the story that we have heard repeated often about the blind men who were describing the elephant. Each blind man who felt a part of the elephant, the tail, the trunk, the leg, the body, each blind man who felt a part of the elephant proceeded to describe the elephant, and they felt they had the true situation, the true perception of the elephant. They described the elephant in terms of the parts they felt. They were blind, however. We cannot blame them. They were not lying. They were sincere. They really believed that, according to what they felt, they had a good description of the truth of what an elephant is. We have millions of blind men and women, I am one, blind in different degrees, who are involved in trying to reform education and improve education. We should stop and think of ourselves as blind people groping to try to come to some kind of ongoing, continual improvement of education in America and have a little more humility. The blind men should understand that you cannot hand down the truth here, that education and reform, improving our schools, is as complicated as nuclear physics. It is more complicated than building an atom bomb or building a hydrogen bomb. It is more complicated than putting a shuttle in orbit. It is more complicated than building a space station, putting a rover on the surface of the moon or Mars. These things are very difficult, we know, but they are all in the realm of the physical sciences, and in physical science, properties, things do not move and change and vary in the ways that they do when we are dealing with human beings. Education is a human enterprise. It has many different sciences involved. Education should be respected for being complicated. There are no simple solutions to the improvement of schools in America. There is no one solution. There is a need to approach the problem of school reform on a comprehensive basis and try across the board to deal with the various problems. There are problems that will not go away in the area of physical facilities. We need schools that are able to provide conducive settings for children to learn. We cannot back away and ignore the fact that the General Accounting Office says we need about $112 billion to really revamp the infrastructure of elementary and secondary schools across America. That includes in some cases we have just got to build new schools. There are areas where the large population growth of young people necessitates the building of new schools. There are areas where the old schools are just not sufficient, and they have to be replaced. We have to build new schools there. There are other schools that have to be drastically renovated. There are other schools that need various repairs in various degrees. So $112 billion just to do it with physical facilities. We cannot ignore that, no matter what we try to do in terms of improvement of instruction, training of teachers, new forms of governance and management. Charter schools are very popular. Charter schools represent a new form of governance and management of public schools that has a lot of agreement. Both parties, a lot of people on various sides of the issue think that charter schools are not a bad idea. But even before you try to deal with charter schools, the problem of physical facilities is a major problem. One of the reasons we have so few charter schools starting up is that they cannot find a place to start. The physical facility problem stops them, also. So physical facilities cannot be ignored. Testing is on the other end of the priorities scale, and I think testing is important. I think assessment in various forms, testing standards are very important. Testing is important, and that cannot be ignored. But you cannot stampede the situation. You cannot insist that you have to have testing, and testing is the most important thing, and generate a debate, a long, prolonged logjam or debate, on testing while you ignore the fact that physical facilities are important. Training of teachers is important. New materials and technology are important. We want to wire our schools. We want them to have the best capability to make use of the Internet, video, computers, et cetera. All of these things are important, but there are some that in sequence are more important than others. You cannot have a computer without a mouse. The mouse is a very important piece of the computer. Most people have forgotten that it did not exist 10 years ago. It is a recent addition. Computers existed for some time before we had the mouse. A mouse is very important. But to talk about focusing on the mouse and forget about the fact that the chips, the basis for the computer, the chips had to be perfected first, if there were no chips there to form the basis of the whole computer technology, the mouse would be insignificant. To leap to testing, to emphasize testing over everything else is that kind of absurdity. We are going to come back to that, but I want to not move into a detailed discussion of the testing debate without first making the case for an approach for school reform. We have a window of opportunity. Stop and think about the fact that the American people can focus on education more now because there is no more cold war. There is no hot war going on. There are really no global crises of a magnitude to take a lot of the time and attention of the leading thinkers of America, to the leading decisionmakers in Government. We can take time to really take a long, hard look at education from a lot of different points of view. That is what the lack of global crises allows us to do. We have few national emergencies. There is a fire out of control in California, but I do not know whether it is going to become a national emergency or not. No earthquakes, no floods, nothing right now is of a magnitude to require a lot of time and attention. So if we have this kind of time and attention as a sort of a surplus at this point, then let us focus on education in a deliberative manner. Let us focus on the totality of trying to improve education in a deliberative manner. Let us not bully the process from the bully pulpit of the White House or from the bully pulpit of the Appropriations Committee. If the blind men that I described before have power, any one of those blind men have power, they can force an interpretation of what the elephant looks like, and we have to buy it for a while. But, of course, if they do not have the truth, it will only distort things and make a fool of everybody, because the blind man who had the tail had power, and he insisted that the elephant looks like a tail of the elephant. He describes it as a long, stringy thing. We go off for the next few years trying to deal with elephants as a long, stringy thing, and that is not the truth. Education suffers in the same way. If powerful people on the Committee on Appropriations have their own pet theory and they push it forward, then they are going to mess up things for a long time to come. If the President and the White House have their own pet theory and they push it forward, ignoring how it fits into the totality of the comprehensive strategy, then we are going to have a mess. We are going to have some real problems. I hate to compare education reform and trying to improve our schools to war, but it is a good analogy in this sense. We do not go off to fight wars and let each powerful person in Congress or in a State legislature have his own little pet theory to guide how the war is fought. We won World War II and we won other wars because we have taken a comprehensive approach. It is understood that if you are at war, it takes a total effort. You have to look at manpower recruitment as well as the materials manufacturing, the tanks and the guns and the bombs. You have to look at the psychology of the country. You have to raise the bonds to finance the whole enterprise. You have to have a spy apparatus as well as the Army, the Navy, the Marines. We understand that it is a complex operation, and we prepare for it in an across-the- board, comprehensive way. Education deserves the same treatment. Let us look at it across the board. We do not have quite the urgency of war. People are not dying. There is no threat to our liberties directly. But it is important enough to take a comprehensive approach, and because of the fact that the urgency is not a matter of guns and bullets and dying, we can take a little more time to be more deliberative. The history of this body, of the House of Representatives and the Senate, has been that education has been dealt with in the past in a very deliberative manner. The Committee on Education and the Workforce, once called the Education and Labor Committee and now called the Committee on Education and the Workforce, the Education Committee has been the place where we have had the deliberations on education, and the bills have developed out of there and been brought to the floor after they have gone through the committee process. That has worked very well, in my opinion. I may be prejudiced because I am a member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I have been on the Committee on Education and the Workforce now for 15 years. I have seen it change names quite a bit. I have seen it change its form of operation, also, which is unfortunate. There is less deliberativeness now. There is more secrecy even on the committee. The majority does not share with the minority exactly what it is doing. We get last-minute bills put in front of us, proposals. That is most unfortunate that the deliberative process is treated with contempt even at the committee level. Is it any wonder that when you reach the House floor, you have a process which treats the whole Committee on Education and the Workforce with contempt? You have more important legislation being proposed through the Committee on Appropriations, more important decisions being made through the Committee on Appropriations than we have through the Committee on Education and the Workforce. That is treating the people on the Committee on Education and the Workforce and the whole process and the function of the Committee on Education and the Workforce with great contempt. That is unfortunate. It started in the last Congress. Now it has reached proportions where it may generate a major disaster. I know we are not supposed to talk about the other body, but news is news. I will read from the Washington Post editorial so that we are not in a position of breaking the rules and criticizing the other body, but the Washington Post has an editorial which talks about a wrong move on education. It really is focusing on the fact that by a 51 to 49 rollcall vote in the other body, it was voted to take all the education programs and put them into a set of block grants. The Committee on Appropriations made this proposal; not the Committee on Education and the Workforce, the Committee on Appropriations. The Senate voted almost casually. I am reading a quote from the Washington Post, Monday, September 15, today's Washington Post. It is called ``Wrong Move on Education.'' The Senate voted almost casually last week in effect to abolish most of the current forms of Federal aid to elementary and secondary schools for the year ahead by merging them into two block grants to school districts. The 51-49 roll call after only perfunctory debate seemed mainly meant to score a political point--that Republicans, all but four of whom supported the amendment, favor local control of the schools, while Democrats, all of whom opposed it, would have the Federal Government dictate school policy. But the issue is phony. Democrats no more than Republicans favor anything like Federal control of the schools, of which there is scant danger--and the schools deserve better from the Senate than to be used as political stage props. The Federal Government pays only a small share of the cost of elementary and secondary education, about 6 percent. This is their figure. I think it is not exactly correct. It may be even less than that. The total Federal involvement in education may be about 8 percent, and that includes higher education, which has a far larger percentage of the Federal fund part than the elementary and secondary education. But let us use the Washington Post figure. Only about 6 percent. The rest is State and local. The Federal role thus never has been to sustain the schools, but to fill gaps and push mildly in what have seemed to be neglected directions. About half the Federal money--some $6 billion a year--has been aimed since the 1960's at providing so-called compensatory education for lower-income children. The block grant amendment, by Senator Slade Gorton, would have the effect of converting this into general aid. The requirement that the money be spent on poorer students would be dropped in favor of letting school districts spend it as they deem appropriate. That's more than just a shift to local control; it's a shift away from a longstanding sensible effort to concentrate the limited Federal funds on those in greatest need. Does Congress really want to reverse that policy? Most other Department of Education programs--though not such popular ones as aid to the disabled--would be bunched in the second block grant. As in most departments, a pretty good indication can be made for such bunching. Some programs are always floating around for which the original rationale was weak or has faded and that are too small to warrant separate administration. But that is true of only some, not all, of those Mr. Gorton would dispatch. Example: The Senate voted Thursday in favor of a compromise version of the national testing program the President supports, but in voting for the block grant, as Education Secretary Riley observed, it then voted to eliminate the funding for this purpose. Other special purpose programs in aid of particular groups or in support of reform likewise would disappear, the secretary said, including several the President has touted as evidence of his commitment to education. The President and Democrats generally have made effective political use of the education issue in the past few years. Block-granting would leave them less of a stage from which to do so. The Gorton amendment would be only for a year, at which point the appropriations bill to which it was attached would lapse, and the issue would have to be fought all over again. That's another reason why, even if mainly for show, it was the wrong way to do business. Mr. Riley was authorized to say it was ``unacceptable'' to the administration, meaning presumably that the President would veto the bill if the amendment were to survive in conference. He'd be right to do so. That is the end of quote from the Washington Post editorial. Mr. Speaker, I will submit the entire Washington Post editorial for the Record. While we fiddle about national testing, there is a basic crisis being created by a proposal that we block grant all of the education programs. The Washington Post has amnesia in one area, and that is they do not point out the fact that the great debate on Federal involvement in elementary and secondary education that took place over a number of years reached the conclusion by deciding that the Federal Government should enter elementary and secondary education only to come to the aid of special situations, like impact. If military bases have an impact on the area, there should be Federal aid. The other place was aid to disadvantaged students. The poor, aid to the poor, was a primary thrust of the Federal intervention, Federal involvement, and the Federal initiatives with respect to education. The Johnson administration, which led the way for title I, they made a case on the basis of poverty. The Office of Education, Research and Improvement, in the charter which establishes it, talks about improving education, first in the area of disadvantaged children and children in poverty. The whole thrust of the Federal Government's involvement in education, which is primarily a State function and nobody debates that, the whole thrust has been to help the poorest districts, to help where it felt it could come to the aid of States and local governments in trying to deal with a problem that was clearly seen. We saw it in World War I and World War II when they started recruiting youngsters for the draft. They saw gross inequities. We saw it at the time of Sputnik, when the Russians jumped ahead of us in space technology, and they did it because they had a superior apparatus in materials of education, which produced not only the general uses at the top, but the technicians and all the people up and down which are necessary for a complex society to produce the kind of technology we have in this space age. We understood that. So we have had a history of the Federal Government's rather limited involvement, very limited. People blame the Federal Government for what is not right with education, but they forget that the Federal Government's involvement in terms of dollars in all education is no more than 8 percent. When you include higher education, the heavy involvement of the Federal Government in college aid now, it is 8 to 10 percent. It has never gone above 10 percent. If even all of that 10 percent were in local elementary and secondary education, let us hypothetically say you have the whole 10 percent in elementary and secondary education, if the whole amount went to local education, it is still only 10 percent. The other 90 percent comes from the States and local governments. The control, if control is followed by dollars, they say if you have Federal Government involvement, if they are paying part of the money, if they are paying for it, they are going to call the tune. Their influence would be, at the greatest, 10 percent. Ninety percent of the influence and decisionmaking, 90 percent of the power to run our schools, still rests with the State and local governments. Let us be reasonable. You cannot control the situation with 10 percent of the funding. We talk about title I and all these other things that have failed. Well, they were only the icing on the cake, maybe the raisins in the bread; very, very tiny, but important elements. We think they are important because they are considered like the yeast in the bread. They have a vital role. They can be stimulants, like the catalysts and enzymes in our bodies, that do nothing except speed up certain operations or make them work properly. Like the oil which lubricates the machinery, there are a lot of things that can be done by a small quantity of something which is placed in the right way and serves the right function. That is the way the Federal Government's involvement in education has been. Maybe too little of it. I am not one of those who fears that there is too much Federal intervention. I really think personally we should move toward a 25 percent involvement of funding, that the Federal funding in local education should go as high as 25 percent in order for us to get out of the present rut we are in with respect to infrastructure, materials and teacher training, the new technology. It is unfortunate that we have these myths that get caught on. They hold on to these notions that somebody else is to blame, that local governments have done a bad job, that local school boards have done a bad job in terms of measuring up to the world standards. Before Sputnik and the Federal Government got involved in promoting science and math education, we were way behind. We are in many ways failing to meet the challenges of the final years of the 20th century and the 21st century in terms of education, which provides young people can step out of high school and take the jobs that are available in the areas of media, computer, and a number of areas where we have jobs that are going begging because there is nobody qualified to handle those jobs. That failure is not a Federal Government failure, it is a local and State failure. I am not here to lay blame, I am here to call for unity. I would like to see some unity, Federal, State, local governments, in terms of a comprehensive, deliberative approach to educational improvement. Instead of going off on headline grabbing, highly visible ventures like national testing or uniforms or block grants, which will hand to the schools a pot of money, and say we do not care how you spend it, forget about the disadvantaged youngsters that we originally intended this money for, those kinds of things will wreck the system, instead of facilitating the construction of a school improvement effort that will go forward and serve future generations. I am sure every parent and grandparent is concerned about their child being able to have first rate schools now, and not to wait. There is a bright light in terms of when I was the chairman of the Subcommittee on Select Education with the Office of Education, Research and Improvement under the jurisdiction of that committee. We did push for the formation and reorganization of the Office of Education Research and Improvement, and developed a National Education Research Policies and Priorities Board. That does exist. I hope they take into consideration that priorities part. They are not only supposed to set the research agenda and project that 5 or 10 years ahead of time, but also supposed to help set priorities. With all due respect to what is going on now with the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, I want to appeal to them to understand that the priority setting is getting out of hand. Other people are setting the priorities. We need to hear from the National Education Research Policy and Priorities Board. This document they produced, the first report called ``Building Knowledge for a Nation of Learners: A Framework for Educational Research, 1997,'' talks about what the parameters are and what the elements are for a good, long dialog and discussion with all facets of the American Nation of people concerned with education. Everybody is concerned. Teachers, policy-makers, government people, they want to have a dialog. They talk about this dialog, and that is good. They put a great deal of emphasis on teacher training and putting teachers at the center of the process. That is good and generally agreed upon. There is no debate between Republicans and Democrats about the role of teachers in the process or the need for greater teacher training. The problem with the document is the sense of urgency is not there and the next deliberation, the next document, the next outreach, the next initiative by the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board has to take into consideration the fact that we are moving very rapidly. There is a lot of concern, and we need from them a greater sense of urgency to help pull in all of these various proposals that are being made. All these blind men out here groping for the truth, sincerely, the blind Republican Party, the blind Democratic Party, the blind members of the Committee on Appropriations, the Committee on Education and the Workforce, we all need to take those parts that we can see and feel and are strongly advocating and put them into a framework for an ongoing comprehensive reform policy. Now, that is not an easy order. Education is as complicated as nuclear physics, as I said. Reform in education is as complicated as building a nuclear submarine or hydrogen bomb. It is a complicated process and we should not belittle the difficulties. But there is agreement, and I want to emphasize, we have a window of opportunity not only because the American people have made it a high priority, but because there is a great amount of agreement among the people who are most concerned about education, about certain very important items. There is a great deal of agreement between Republicans and Democrats on certain important items. The first elements of our accelerated reform effort, a reform effort which moves with a sense of emergency, a reform effort which acts more like you are fighting a war, and it is across the board and you have to deal with it. You have to deal with governance of schools or boards of education, you have to deal with management, the quality of administration and direction we are getting. You have to deal with the teaching apparatus. You have to deal with the physical facilities, construction, repair, renovation. You have to deal with the new technologies. You have to deal with the need for materials. We have library books in New York City libraries which deal with geography and history, and they are 30 years old. That is distortion of education. That is miseducation. You should throw them away even if you have empty shelves. But what do you replace them with? You have to deal with that. Opportunities to learn. We have to focus on opportunities to learn and what that means and the Federal role in opportunities to learn. Opportunities to learn is a very simple concept, and I want to repeat, we have agreement in 1994 when we passed the Elementary and Secondary Schools Assistance Act, which also contained Goals 2000 as a part of it, we had agreement, a working compromise. Some people did not like the idea of national testing, the Federal Government being involved in developing testing standards, liked the idea of a national curriculum, and the others liked the idea of national testing that did not like the idea of national curriculum. There were some of us that did not think either idea was that good unless you combined it with something else, and that was called a national set of opportunity to learn standards. We had a compromise. In the legislation passed in 1994, the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Assistance Act, there was a three-pronged attack in terms of the Federal Government pushing national standards: National standards for curriculum, national standards for testing, and national standards for opportunity to learn. Now, where there is disagreement, and the unfortunate thing that happened was in 1996, the all-powerful Committee on Appropriations took out, they repealed, the opportunities to learn prong of the three initiatives. Opportunities to learn was taken away, leaving just testing, national standards for testing and national standards for curriculum. I say national standards for testing. It was not a national test. They are moving beyond that when they called for national test. We will get to national testing in a few minutes. But opportunity to learn, I regret, does not have the kind of agreement we need. So let us put it on a back burner for a while and look at the places where we do have agreement. We have agreement there is a great need for teacher training and more involvement in the Federal Government in trying to facilitate teacher training that should take place. We have agreement that we need more technology in our schools and we should harness the advantages of the Internet and computerization and prepare our children, students, for the jobs that are to come in the future and for the transformation of society with the computer and the technology of the Internet and telecommunications playing a major role. This Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which had in it a mandate that the FCC had to develop certain procedures and a program to provide aid to schools and libraries. They have done so. The FCC has passed a set of regulations which will provide $2.2 billion a year, $2.2 billion a year, for telecommunications services to schools and libraries. That is going forward. Coupled with that is the Technology Literacy Act that is also getting an increase in funding. There is agreement, Republicans and Democrats across the board, local level, State level, and Federal level, on technology. So that is a second place where there is great agreement. Teacher training, technology, the uses of technology for education, a new initiative, improved initiative for technology in schooling is going forward. The third is charter schools. The charter schools, there is still some controversy lingering with respect to charter schools and not everybody is on board, but there is great agreement between Democrats and Republicans that they are a good idea. There is a great agreement. Even the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, they have approved the concept and are willing to go forward to experiment. Charter schools are no cure-all or miracle for anything. Charter schools can be added as one component of the whole reform effort. Across the board you have these various attempts to improve schooling. The whole school reform, the whole school approach to reform that was advocated by a member of the Committee on Appropriations, that is important. It ought to be in there in terms of the overall running of schools. I think that is a very good idea. I have always advocated that. There are a number of other approaches in terms of reading, there are approaches in terms of the way you use technology. All those things should be in there across the board, in that across-the-board strategy. One important component would be charter schools. Charter schools are very important because they deal with governance and management. At the heart of some of our problems is the failure of governance. While we praise local school boards and some Senators and Congressmen want to push more money down to the local level, some of the worst and most corrupt decisionmaking processes in the whole area of schooling has taken place at the local school boards. Patronage problems, corruption, all kinds of things have happened in the area of local school boards, and it is just a fantasy, a romantic ideal without any basis to talk about local control being the Godsend that can handle everything. Local control often is very poor, very backward, and even when it is honest, as in the case of 90 percent of our school districts or more, most of them are honest, hard-working people, they are slow to pick up on national trends. They are slow to pick up on international trends. They are slow to pick up on innovations. They need some help in terms of understanding what the possibilities are. So governance and management, new ways to approach that, is found in the area of charter schools. When you have a charter school, which is a public school, the funding for the charter school is public, the whole idea is that the amount of money spent per child in the traditional public schools or localities, that same amount of money would be spent per child in the charter school. The charter school would have a different governance. They would be bound by certain State rules and maybe certain local rules, but they would be able to get out from under the local apparatus, the bureaucracy that runs the local traditional schools in the area. They would be able to experiment and do some things without having to have a level of improvement within the bureaucracy or without being bound by tradition. They could have innovations without seeking approval, and they would be held accountable, the same accountability mechanism, the same tests that you apply to local schools. The same whatever judgments you are going to make or criteria you will use to evaluate what the traditional local schools are doing, you would use that on the charter school. You would have the flexibility. They could breathe. Teachers who complain all the time about being stultified by the bureaucracy, the rules, all the other things they have to do other than teaching, all the kinds of problems that teachers present, some could be ameliorated because they would have a way to get command of those rules and those processes and those procedures in a charter school setting. Charter schools do not have to be a little red schoolhouse. It should not be limited to 100 kids or 300 kids. Charter schools can take many forms. I hope we have some charter schools which deal with disruptive junior high school and high school students, and take on the challenge. That is a major problem in the cities, complaining all the time about disruptive students and what they do to other students. They imply that they cannot be handled in the classroom, that the regular traditional apparatus cannot deal with them. If that is the case, let us have some charter schools which seek to deal with disruptive youngsters, and lay out a plan of people who are dedicated and went to do that. They are in charge in terms of they are the board of directors, they make the policies, they determine who the managers are going to be, the principals, the rules for the faculty, the structure; if they went to a different structure from the traditional structure of one teacher in a class of 25 or 30 kids; maybe they want to infuse more technology, more kinds of approaches to squad learning, and techniques used by the Army to teach. There are other things that they would be free to do without having to get approval from the whole system. I have no quarrel, and I am not criticizing local education agencies as being inevitably stupid or inevitably hidebound. Local education will for a long time be all we have. Even with charter schools, it is the local education agency that is going to have to get things done. But a local education agency has to stop and think about what it is doing in terms of many different entities before it can make a move. They are inevitably forced to be more cautious and move slower. So let us welcome on the fringes, and I do not want to use the word ``fringes,'' but let us welcome a component which can move with greater freedom and flexibility within the strictures, really, of the local education system. Charter schools are not a threat to the public schools, I assure the Members. Charter schools at this point, according to the Office of Educational Research and Improvement review, it said there are about 600 charter schools in the country now, 600. Charter schools, as I said, are public schools. There are 86,000 total public schools, 86,000. That is 16,000 local school boards; but actual schools, 86,000 schools. Six hundred charter schools are no threat to 86,000. In fact, by the end of this year they expect maybe we will have 800. Eight hundred are no threat to 86,000. It is far too small. We need enough charter schools to be able to measure what is going on. If we do not do something to improve the environment that charter schools exist in, they are going to drop off the radar screen. They do not want to lose them as part of this experiment, or I do not want to see them not become a part of the experiment. We ought to have enough charter schools to measure how they perform against the public schools. A lot of people insist that the competition is needed. As Members know, the Republican platform for some years has insisted that we need competition with traditional schools through vouchers, that vouchers provide competition. It allows parents to make choices and take their kids to some better school, and the competition with the school that receives the vouchers, between the school that receives the vouchers and the school that has a traditional education, that competition is going to help improve education overall. That is the argument made. We differ on vouchers, but on the competition I agree. Competition in the schooling process, competition within the whole environment of school reform, will be very good. We need competition. We can get the competition through charter schools. Publicly funded charter schools can give us the kind of competitive situation which would allow us to compare what the traditional schools do with what a group of people who are free to innovate and freer to do things in many ways. Let us understand that Republicans agree that charter schools are good, Democrats agree that charter schools are good, the National Education Association agrees that they are willing to try charter schools as part of the experiment. The American Federation of Teachers and numerous other organizations that care about education and are involved deeply in education have approved the concept. If the concept is approved, this is one of those areas of agreement where we can move forward in this comprehensive approach. We do not have all the pieces there, but we have teacher training, technology, and charter schools. Let us not lose this window of opportunity quarreling about block grants, which would wipe out the focus of the Federal Government on special needy targets, or quarreling about testing, or quarreling about uniforms. Let us understand what the priorities are. Those things may be important. There is one thing that we do not agree on, and that is construction. The President's construction initiative would propose $5 million over a 5-year period for school renovation and repair. We need that, because these other parts will not work, the charter schools and the technology will not work, if we do not have some relief in the area of physical facilities. The teacher training will have limited impact. Teachers are laughing at us when we talk about education reform and we have children who are in crowded schools, so crowded that some of them have to go to school or have to study in the bathroom. That is not a fiction. There is a great controversy in New York now about an ad that was used in the mayoral campaign by candidate Ruth Messenger when she told the truth. She had a picture of the kids in the bathroom. Twenty-five percent of the schools at one time or another have had to use their bathrooms for the overflow. Many of them regularly use hallways. A large percentage, probably the majority, are using their cafeterias and their gyms as classrooms. There are schools in New York where children must go to lunch at 10 o'clock in the morning, and one at 9:45, because there is so much overcrowding that they cannot go to the cafeteria except in relays. So the first children are forced to eat at 10 o'clock, the last children eat at 2 o'clock. In my opinion, and I have made it quite clear that I intend to do more about this in pursuing it, this is child abuse. To make a child eat his lunch at 10 o'clock, that is child abuse. I do not know why the health department would tolerate this, and we are going to push on this. But it is done in a large number of schools because of overcrowding. There is a major problem. So the teacher will be very cynical when you say you are interested in reform and you want to bring in new technology, computers, the Internet, while you are not relieving the problem of overcrowding. The teacher will be very cynical if you talk about charter schools being a good idea but there is no money to buy a building for a charter school or renovate an old building in order to have a charter school take place. Charter schools have indicated, or people who are concerned about charter schools have indicated that their No. 1 problem is facilities. They cannot find the facilities, so construction is important in our across-the-board comprehensive approach. There are many pieces that I have not talked about, and there are some that I do not even know about. But let us recognize with humility that we are all blind men. There is one piece, though, that we ought to have in there in order to make the three pieces work that we agree on, the three components that Republicans and Democrats agree on: teacher training, charter schools, and technology. Those three will be made more operable and meaningful if we have the initiative for construction. The construction initiative is a very cautious one, limited one, conservative one: $5 billion over 5 years. That is all we are talking about. New York State has already, I think, been inspired by the President's direction. The President did announce in his State of the Union Address that he was going to push for the $5 billion. The President did put it in his list of items in the nonpartisan budget negotiation, so I think that the very fact that in the budget the President took the initiative and made a trial has inspired some other States and localities. So New York State has a bond issue on the ballot on November 4 to provide $2.2 billion for school construction. It is very much needed. I hope that we go back, before this first year of the 105th Congress is over, so that we can do something about that construction initiative that was knocked off track for the whole country. It was only a stimulus; $1 billion a year over a 5-year period, would only stimulate the local and State governments, but the stimulus is very important. It helps to promote an idea for a population that is generally suspicious of any new initiative to spend money. We expect in New York State that this bond issue will pass. The voters in all parts of the State feel the pressure of aging physical facilities. There are some communities where they are concerned about the infrastructure. They have fairly decent schools, but they are 30, 40 years old, and they see problems arising in terms of new wiring for the computers, new kinds of things happening, plus the aging factor is there. And the question is, Is it more important to repair very old buildings or try to build new ones? Or if we are going to repair the old ones, that will cost a great deal, too. So we have, I think, a universal need. Probably in every school district in America there is some need for renovation, repair or construction. So we ought to get back to it. This window of opportunity where the people of America have clearly shown their concern about education, the window of opportunity should not be lost. They deserve more from their elected officials at every level. Certainly they deserve more from the Members of Congress. Members of Congress should try to respond to the demand of the people, of the voters, in a more responsible way. Let us not just throw them gimmicks, let us deal with items of agreement, teacher training, charter schools, and technology, and understand that those three cannot work unless we have a Federal initiative in construction. The Congressional Black Caucus has some other initiatives that they have proposed in terms of computer training which should be extended beyond the schools, and in order to have youngsters who are disadvantaged and do not have computers at home to have places to practice outside the schools. So we are proposing storefront training centers, computer centers, and a few innovations of that kind. But let us agree on the basics. At least get the technology into the local schools and get charter schools in a position, if it is a good idea, where they can have the money they need for the facilities and be able to go forward. Where does testing come into all this? We will have a debate on the floor on the President's proposal for national testing. I am on the side which opposes national testing at this time. I was a member of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities when we passed the Elementary and Secondary School Assistance Act in 1994. We had this great debate. We went through a deliberative process on the committee. We debated for months. And after we passed it out of the House of Representatives we debated with the Senate, because they did not have the same thing we had. In the conference process we worked back and forth with the Senate for another 3 months. The deliberative process was in place and a compromise was reached where we had a three-pronged approach: National standards for curriculum, national standards for assessment and testing, and national standards for opportunities to learn. I am against the testing at this point because in 1996 they pulled out the national standards for opportunities to learn. If we do not have the Federal Government using its influence, its clout, its bully pulpit, we cannot make the States do anything. And all this is voluntary. But when the Government speaks up and the President speaks up, people listen and the local elected officials at the State and local level must respond. When the President talks about opportunities to learn in terms of construction that will provide new facilities; when the President talks about opportunities to learn in terms of science laboratories where kids can really studies science, with appropriate science equipment; when the President talks about opportunities to learn in terms of teacher training, we do not have a situation like the one we had in New York a few years ago. A survey was done by the Community Service Society and they found that two-thirds of our schools, where the African-American and Latino youngsters go to school, in those junior high schools, two-thirds of our junior high schools in the city, and we have 1,100 schools, and I do not know how many junior high, but within the context of 1,100, that many schools, that two-thirds of the junior high schools did not have any teacher who had majored in math and science teaching math and science. Math and science was being taught by teachers who had certification in other areas. That was 3 or 4 years ago. It is worse now because, since then, we have had campaigns by the city to encourage older teachers to retire. In order to save money, older teaches are encouraged to leave the system. The science and math teachers were some of the first to go because they had jobs waiting for them outside in private industry or in other school systems in the suburb. We have a steady drain on the brain, the best teachers and the most experienced teachers. Even without encouragement from our Government, they are steadily moving out from New York City to the various suburban areas which pay higher salaries. That is always a drain. So the likelihood that the situation with physics, chemistry, general science teachers, biology teachers is going to improve is zero. Any reasonable analysis of the situation will show us that it is not going to get any better under the present conditions. Math teachers. We are not going to have the teachers. We have to have some new form of teaching to deal with that. Opportunities to learn must be provided somehow. We have to come up with something. I emphasize technology, new technology, which will have videotapes and commuter instruction and Internet instruction to help back up the few math teachers we do have and have some kind of way to approach it by getting the best of help through distance learning and these various techniques where we can bring high quality teachers into any classroom in America and provide a lesson or demonstration on a video which can illustrate a principle in physics or some part of biology in ways in which we could never do it without the new technology. So the new technology is not a luxury, it may be the only answer to solving the problem of decent math and science teachers in inner city schools where we have lost them and we are not going to get them back any time soon. So opportunities to learn means we address that kind of problem. When they pulled out the opportunity to learn standards during a Committee on Appropriations conference, and I questioned the legality of that because appropriations committees are not supposed to legislate, but in this case, in 1996, the Committee on Appropriations repealed a part of the Elementary and Secondary School Assistance Act. When they pulled it out, they left us with just the two prongs, national curriculum standards, which I am still in favor of, but national testing standards, which I do not want to see go forward without the opportunity to learn. They must balance off each other. If we do not have the opportunity to learn, I know what the tests will tell us. We know who will fail. We know who fails now. They will fail on the national test if they do not have the opportunity to learn. Testing without the opportunity to learn is abuse of students. We are abusing the students by saying the burden of school reform, the burden of school improvement is on their backs. We are not going to give the students a decent place to sit, a safe place to learn; we are not going to give them decent laboratories or decent library books, we will not give them the kind of science equipment and materials they need, but we are still going to test them and put a score there where they will be stuck with that score for a long time to come. A national test is being proposed. That was not in the legislation. The National Government was not supposed to be involved in testing standards, setting standards so that States and localities would have a similar set of standards and be able to make comparisons. Now we propose a national test which, one of these days, might not be a bad idea. I have no problem with a national test if it is done in conjunction with the opportunities to learn. Our problem is that presently the national test represents an easy way to fool the American people that are clamoring for improvements in education and make them believe that they have accomplished something significant when they have accomplished nothing. The national testing is a decoy, a diversion. A diversion. It really should not come at this time. It diverts us. There are other people that have other reasons for opposing national testing. I support not the generally stated conservative reason of we do not want any more Federal intervention. I do not agree with that. William Bennett does not agree with that, Chester Finn does not agree with that. They want a national test. They are Republicans. I think national testing is not a bad idea eventually, but the national testing at this time, under these conditions, we are being stampeded into doing a national test, and that is wrong. It should go back to Congress, as an amendment on the floor tomorrow would propose, that Congress should have the opportunity to deliberate. Back to the deliberative process, where the blind men have a chance to confer with each other and come up with something where all the very important is taken into consideration. I use the analogy of the elephant and the blind men, because I think it is very important that we make the point that very powerful blind men can do a great deal of harm. A blind man who happens to be in the White House, a blind man who happens to be on the Committee on Appropriations can do a great deal of harm, because they insist that they have the truth without consulting with the others of us who are groping the same elephant, and we can do some things that will set us back in the process of education reform. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is opposed to testing, and they give a set of good reasons, which all relate to the fact that we are moving too fast, being stampeded. They said the administration proposal allows school authorities to exclude or refuse to accommodate students who have limited English proficiency or who have disabilities. They say also that the administration's proposal fails to provide safeguards against the invalid and inappropriate use of test results. They fail to hold school authorities accountable by requiring public reporting of results so that parents and others can take informed action. The administration's proposal does not take even modest steps to identify details of critical educational resources that have a significant impact on test results. That is the primary point of my concern. Critical educational resources, opportunities to learn, have an impact on test results. And we can say ahead of time who will fail and who will score high by looking at the kind of resources that are available to our students. The administration must take the necessary steps to assure that the laws and policies according to the rights of equal educational opportunity will be effectively enforced. That is the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. NAACP Legal Defense Fund had some of the same kinds of concerns. Tests will be used for high stakes decisions about students' futures and under the present conditions it is not fair to do that, and on and on it goes. I hate to conclude on the note of tests because my plea, my major concern is that we operate together on the points where we are in unison. We do agree that teacher training, charter schools and technology are important. Democrats and Republicans should join hands and respond to the public demand for improvements in education in a positive way by moving on these areas of agreement in a comprehensive reform approach. Mr. Speaker, I include the Washington Post article for the Record. [From the Washington Post, Sept. 15, 1997] Wrong Move on Education The Senate voted almost casually last week in effect to abolish most of the current forms of federal aid to elementary and secondary schools for the year ahead by merging them into two block grants to school districts. The 51-49 roll call after only perfunctory debate seemed mainly meant to score a political point--that Republicans, all but four of whom supported the amendment, favor local control of schools, while Democrats, all of whom opposed it, would have the federal government dictate school policy. But the issue is phony. Democrats no more than Republicans favor anything like federal control of the schools, of which there is scant danger--and the schools deserve better from the Senate than to be used as political stage props. The federal government pays only a small share of the cost of elementary and secondary education--about 6 percent. The rest is state and local. The federal role thus never has been to sustain the schools, but fill gaps and push mildly in what have seemed to be neglected directions. About half the federal money--some $6 billion a year--has been aimed since the 1960s at providing so-called compensatory education for lower-income children. The block grant amendment, by Sen. Slade Gordon, would have the effect of converting this into general aid. The requirement that the money be spent on poorer students would be dropped in favor of letting school districts spend it as they ``deem appropriate.'' That's more than just a shift to local control; it's a shift away from a long-standing sensible effort to concentrate the limited federal funds on those in greatest need. Does Congress really want to reverse that policy? Most other Department of Education programs--though not such popular ones as aid to the disabled--would be bunched in the second block grant. As in most departments, a pretty good case can be made for some such bunching. Some programs are always floating around for which the original rationale was weak or has faded and that are too small to warrant separate administration. But that's true of only some, not all, of those Mr. Gorton would dispatch. Example: the Senate voted Thursday in favor of a compromise version of the national testing program the president supports--but in voting for the block grant, as Education Secretary Richard Riley observed, ``It then voted to eliminate the funding for this purpose.'' Other special-purpose programs in aid of particular groups or in support of reform likewise would disappear, the secretary said, including several the president has touted as evidence of his commitment to education. The president and Democrats generally have made effective political use of the education issue in the past few years. Block-granting would leave them less of a stage from which to do so. The Gorton amendment would be only for a year, at which point the appropriations bill to which it was attached would lapse, and the issue would have to be fought all over again. That's another reason why, even if mainly for show, it was the wrong way to do business. Mr. Riley was authorized to say it was ``unacceptable'' to the administration, meaning presumably that the president would veto the bill if the amendment were to survive in conference. He'd be right to do so.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I am sorry. I did not know that we cannot quote from publications.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the Roemer-Riggs amendment, and I congratulate my colleagues on the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities for submitting this bipartisan amendment, and urge all Members to look closely at what we are considering here. We need a more deliberative process and, really, we need a bill out of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, which deals with charter schools in an appropriate fashion. But, Mr. Chairman, in that process there are certain facts we start with. The one gentleman who spoke before said that there are 16,000 schools in the country and about 600 charter schools. The gentleman was not correct. There are 16,000 school districts, approximately, in the country. There are 86,000 schools, approximately, in the country, 86,000 public schools, and only 600 charter schools. According to a study recently released by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, there are 600 charter schools and probably by the end of the year there may be 800 charter schools. So, Mr. Chairman, we might have at the end of this year 800 charter schools out of 86,000. Mr. Chairman, charter schools are a reasonable experiment. Charter schools represent an approach that has been adopted by a number of different people on both sides of the aisle. Both parties have endorsed charter schools. The President has endorsed charter schools. We have the National Educational Association and in my State the United Federation of Teachers. There are a number of groups that have endorsed the idea as being no danger to public schools. And, yet, we have only 600 at this point. The experiment will drop off the radar screen if we do not have more just in terms of trying to have an orderly, balanced approach to educational reform. If we have a good idea, an idea that so many approve of, then why not have it increased to the point where we can study it? We cannot even really study it, it is so small now, the tiny number of charter schools. Mr. Chairman, the push is coming from people who are very angry and upset, who will at all cost try to push to get a charter school established and people who want to experiment and get out from under the bureaucracy. But, basically, these people are in the fringes and we need to bring this in and have more groups consider starting charter schools. Charter schools represent a change in the governance and management of public schools; the governance most of all. The governance is removed from boards of education and big bureaucracies and placed under small groups closer to the school. I do not want it always to be a small group. I do not think only 100- or 200-pupil schools should be charter schools. I think we should have some high schools and we should have some schools that look at the problem of students with discipline problems and really have a board of people from the private sector and education experts, as well as teachers and parents, and come together to try to solve some of these problems that the public schools find intractable. They always complain about disruptive students and where can we put them. Let us have some charter schools to try to attack that problem. Already, in the area of the technology literacy, we have a substantial amount of money there. I do not like taking money away from that. I am very much a proponent of technology in the schools. We have this week the Congressional Black Caucus, and I have a whole 3-hour forum on technology in the schools bringing together the private sector with the public sector and trying to make it work for the inner-city sector as well as it works in other places. But, Mr. Chairman, consider the fact that $2.2 billion a year is to be made available to help this process through the new ruling by the FCC. That is a result of congressional action. When we passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, we mandated the FCC should develop a way to provide a universal fund for discounted or free service to schools and libraries, and they have done that. I can get a 90 percent discount in most of my district, where we have the poorest children, a 90 percent discount on telecommunication service. That has given impetus to the development of more and more technology, even in the communities where we have a great deal of poverty. The private sector now is involved not only in my community and my city, but all over the country. So we have a great deal going for telecommunications and for technology. If we take $25 million from that, it will not slow that down at all. But, Mr. Chairman, on the other hand, if we do not give charter schools more, they are going to fall off the radar screen. We need a critical mass in order to be able to study what we are doing. That is all we are asking. Give charter schools a chance. It is a good idea. And if it is a good idea, it deserves the support in an orderly way of the legislators and the people in policy-making positions. It should not be something that gets pushed from the bottom because the public demands it. We have to run to stay ahead of the public in this critical area. So charter schools should be supported with this transfer of funds.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment. I understand the frustration of the people who have offered this amendment, because this is an appropriations process, and more and more during the appropriations process, we seem to be legislating and taking away the function of the authorizing committee. Some members of the authorizing committee have spoken in favor of this legislation, and they know very well that we have been having hearings and discussing OSHA and various OSHA reforms for some time now. I wish they would be kind enough to yield today and take this amendment off the floor, and go back to the authorizing committee to continue that debate, because this is a dangerous game. It is guerilla warfare. They are ambushing OSHA from the floor on an appropriations bill, but it is a very serious place that they have chosen to conduct their ambush. OSHA saves lives. We do not want to improve the education of children at the cost of their parents coming home in some way crippled or even coming home as a corpse. The figures speak for themselves. The American Medical Association recently had a study which confirmed the figures we have been quoting for some time now. We have an estimated 30,000 people with various illnesses every year that are contracted in the workplace. We have another 20,000 who suffer from various cancers that are related to the workplace. That is more than 50,000 people. Then we have 6,588 deaths. Members might dispute the other two figures I mentioned, but we have the proof, we have the corpses, we can document it with dead bodies, 6,588 in 1994. That is generally what the level has been for some time now, large numbers of deaths in the workplace as a result of unsafe workplaces. This is a very serious business. If Members want to attack organized labor, if they want to go after the American workers, as they have been for the last 2 years, then I do not think OSHA is the place to do it. There are a lot of people out there, in fact, the vast majority of people out there, who benefit from OSHA. They are not members of labor unions, they are ordinary American people, workers who do not necessarily belong to unions, as well as those who belong to unions. They need the protection. Members have been giving one anecdote after another, one isolated anecdote after another, about the horrors of OSHA and what they are doing to the American people. Why do these Members not level with the American people and tell them how many inspectors there are, and what the ratio of inspectors to job sites would be in their particular State? I think the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Clay] mentioned that in the State of Missouri, it would take the number of OSHA inspectors, when applied to the number of job sites in the State of Missouri, it would take them 339 years, 339 years, to inspect each job site once. If we go to the State of Indiana, they are a little better off. The ratio of inspectors to job sites is such that the OSHA inspectors would inspect once every 50 years. And of course the greatest extreme is in Kansas where the ratio of OSHA inspectors to job sites would require that we have 421 years, 421 years would be necessary to inspect every job site. Mr. Chairman, does this sound like a hoard of inspectors, highly paid Federal employees, swarming over the American business community making life difficult for them for no reason, when we have this kind of ratio? Yes, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle can have their isolated anecdotes, but they are isolated when we consider the number of inspectors available versus the number of job sites out there. OSHA's record, of course, has been a tremendous one, especially in those areas where we had the largest amount of injuries before OSHA was created. In the construction industries, and industries where heavy duty equipment is used, there is an outstanding record in reducing the number of deaths. Mr. Chairman, since 1970, when the OSHA Act was passed, the rate of workplace fatalities has been cut in half; over 140,000 lives that would have been lost were not lost. Workplaces where OSHA inspected and penalized employers for violations has an average of 22 percent reduction in injuries. They were not frivolous; they saved lives. Mr. Chairman, let us stop the game playing with the lives of the American workers. If my colleagues want more money for vocational education, we can take it from the B-2 bomber. It does not fly when it rains.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today, July 29, is being celebrated as a day when a bipartisan compromise reached its climax in the 105th Congress. We have agreement on a tax bill, an agreement on an expenditure bill, and probably before we recess on August 1 we will vote on those two agreements, and there is a great deal of joy in both the majority and minority camp about this. I am not certain that I join the celebration wholeheartedly. There are some great disappointments. But nevertheless, it does demonstrate that it is possible to achieve a bipartisan consensus on some very complex matters. We must remember that the majority party closed down the Government in 1995 over the matter of the budget and the tax package. The Speaker's statement that politics is war without blood was on everybody's lips at that time. We went to war. So we have achieved by negotiation instead of political war a great compromise; and whereas that compromise leaves some of us disappointed on some things like the school construction, which has been left out completely, the President's initiative for school construction was a measley $5 billion over a 5-year period, nothing like the $120 billion that we need across the country to replace infrastructure in schools, but it was a beginning. Even that small beginning of $5 billion over a 5-year period was left out, and I am disappointed by that. I am heartened by the fact that at least empowerment zones for inner- city communities was left in, is left in. I do not know the details at this point. I would like to see the details before I rejoice too loudly, but that is in. So there is reason to applaud a negotiated compromise. I would like to appeal to the majority party to follow suit and let us have a negotiated set of processes related to the way organized labor is treated. The one place where there appears to be no hope of negotiation, no hope of civility in this 105th Congress is when it comes to the attack on organized labor and working families and the means that working families have to fight for themselves. Nothing has changed since the last Congress. The 105th Congress is as bad as the 104th Congress. I would like to make an appeal that we lay down our guns and stop the war, and let us come to some kind of way of dealing with the working families and their needs, as we have with the tax package for the rich and some other important items that have recently been negotiated. Mr. Speaker, I sit as the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protection, so I am on the firing line with the hearings and the preparations for more wars and the attack on the Department of Labor. I am right there where I see that the 105th Congress' strategy is the same as the 104th Congress when it comes to labor. We have seen already a passage of the TEAM Act, we have seen already passage in this House of the bill to eliminate overtime, cash payment for overtime. There is a change in the Fair Labor Standards Act, a radical change, taking away the dollars that working people need and offering comp time instead, and giving the power certainly to the employer to decide whether you get paid in comp time or get paid in cash. So that was certainly a blow to working families. Fortunately, that has not passed in the other body yet. We hope it will never pass, or if it passes, the President will veto it. But that is out there. It was the first bill that they led off with in terms of an attack on working people. Of course, since then there has been a new threat in terms of a large amount of money; $1.4 million was voted to investigate labor unions. There was some other language used to describe what was intended, but out of a slush fund that we always objected to of $7.5 million, I think, more than $7 million was set aside in the legislative budget to take care of emergencies. It turns out that the definition of one emergency was an effort to go after labor unions and restrict their political activities. We know what that means because we had at least two hearings already, which have demonstrated that the majority party wants to place restrictions on labor unions that are not placed on other organizations in America. No other entities are asked to do the kinds of things that they are trying to make labor unions do. We do not ask corporations to do the kinds of things with respect to their political positions that we are now demanding that labor unions do. The thrust of it is that no labor union will be able to take a political position and use the funds that are at their disposal without having the approval of every member of the union. Each member would have a chance to withdraw his money if he disagrees with the position taken by the leadership of the union. What other organization in America operates that way? You have majorities, you have votes, you have leadership elected, you have positions taken, and the minorities in organizations have to abide by those positions. So why should labor unions be treated any differently? The thrust of this special fund for investigation of the labor unions will be to find ways to penalize them and intimidate them to backing down on taking a strong political position. That is just another battlefield that they will not leave in peace is the effort to destroy the Davis-Bacon Act and all the benefits that the Davis-Bacon Act has brought to us. Davis-Bacon was attacked in the 104th Congress. There was a relentless war waged against Davis-Bacon. We hoped it sort of would not flare up again in the 105th Congress. We hoped that something had been learned about working people and what you have to do to support working families. Part of what you have to do to support working families is to hold onto legislation and protections like the ones that are provided in the Davis-Bacon Act. But no, the attacks have come again and there is an attempt to go after the Department of Labor, the way it enforces Davis- Bacon, as an attempt to saddle the Department with numerous burdens related to the Davis-Bacon Act. At the same time they are cutting the budget and reducing the number of employees. They generate a crisis and then they take advantage of the crisis generated by having an evaluation of the situation, an accounting, an audit, finding things wrong, and then blaming the system and the act itself as the generator of the things that have gone wrong. We have a case in Oklahoma being blown out of proportion. Very few fraud cases have ever been found during the history of Davis-Bacon, but now we have a case that is being taken as a cause celebre and blown up out of proportion to make it appear that all of Davis-Bacon is corrupted. That is not true at all. Davis-Bacon was enacted in 1931. It is a simple act requiring that contractors on federally funded construction projects pay their workers no less than the wage rates that prevail in the local area on the same type of construction. The act does not require contractors to employ the local work force, and it does not require that the work force be paid in accordance with local labor standards. It does what it says. It requires that they be paid at wage rates which are in keeping with the wage rates that are paid at the local level. Davis and Bacon were two legislators who were both Republicans. They were Republicans seeking to do what all of us claim we think is important, is a priority. That is, protecting our working families. Davis-Bacon developed the legislation because they saw workers moving about from one part of the country to the other, following big Federal contracts and employing labor gangs to maximize the profits of the contractors on these big Federal jobs, and they threw out of kilter the wage structure at the local level when they did that. They drove down the wage structure of the local level. They threatened workers and families. They threatened the stability of certain communities. So these middle-class legislators, Republicans, developed a sensible law to stop the exploitation of the big Government contract by greedy contractors. The same goal that was realized in 1931 is the goal that Davis-Bacon still realizes when it is applied in 1997. Repealing Davis- Bacon would result in lower wages for half a million Americans. The attempt now is to repeal Davis-Bacon. One of the reasons that the school construction initiative had a problem here in the House of Representatives was that certain people attacked the school construction initiative through their attacks on Davis-Bacon. They charged that any new school construction would be out of proportion, would be higher costs than necessary because if it was federally assisted, they would have to use the Davis-Bacon Act to cover the workers, and that will drive up the costs. We have studies that show that that is not the case at all. There is no proof that the cost of building schools goes up as a result of paying prevailing wages under Davis-Bacon. In fact, there is some evidence that shows, some studies, that show that the cost is less when you use Davis-Bacon prevailing wage workers. You get a different quality of workers, you get a different productivity, you get a different efficiency, and as a result, the cost actually sometimes goes down. Nevertheless, there are those who said, we want to repeal Davis- Bacon, and they make it appear that construction workers who are covered by Davis-Bacon are earning large sums of money, out of proportion to their worth. The truth of the matter is that construction workers who have some of the most difficult jobs in terms of just hard labor, in terms of danger, they are the ones who have benefited most from the establishment of OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The safety factors have changed radically as a result of Federal intervention in the workplace to establish certain safety standards, so construction workers are much safer today than they were before, but it is still a risky job. Construction workers, they work on risky jobs, they work on dirty jobs, they work on jobs that have not benefited a great deal from automation. On a hot day when they have to go out and work in the construction industry, there is no way you can press a button and have a computer take the place of a human being in that hot sun. There is no way you can press a button and have a computer take the place of a worker that is called upon to make a difficult haul into some tight quarters and deliver some kind of heavy load. There are all kinds of situations in the construction industry that probably never will be automated. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the danger still persists, the wages have gone down. The stagnation of American wages at the lower levels, workers have experienced stagnation, and it has impacted on construction workers a great deal. So they do not earn any more money than they did 10 or 20 years ago. Relatively speaking, they have lost. They will lose even more if we repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. It is estimated that more than one-half million construction workers in the United States have received prevailing wages under the Davis-Bacon Act. Because the Federal Government must put primary emphasis in awarding contracts on the lowest bid, market forces would put contractors to lower wages in order to try to make the lowest bid, driving wages down, if you did not have the Davis-Bacon regulations. A study by the University of Utah indicates that repeal of the Davis- Bacon Act would lower the wages of construction workers, which in constant 1982 dollars have been on a downward trend anyhow since 1972. They would be lowered by 5 percent if we repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. All construction workers would go down. For construction workers who have annual average earnings of $27,500, this could result in the loss of nearly $1,400 in income annually. Construction workers have an annual average earning of $27,500. This means that when we lump the bricklayers, plasterers and the sheet metal workers and all of them together, that is what they come out with, an average of $27,500 annual earning, which is very low considering the kind of work they are called upon to do. It is quite low. They have not moved and kept up with the inflation rate as it is. And if we have a further impact on those wages, they would go down even further. Davis-Bacon has brought some stability but it has not really been a factor which has led to some kind of increase in the wage rates of the workers. At least the stability is there, to some degree, and they have not been eroded further. There are those who say Davis-Bacon is a discriminatory act which certainly has hurt minorities a great deal. This is a widespread belief among the minority community, that Davis-Bacon has some impact on the problem that minorities have had in the construction industry. Minorities have had problems in the construction industry, that is true, for various reasons that should be dealt with one by one. There is a long history of a fight to get justice in various construction unions, and that is one fight. Davis-Bacon really did not contribute to that very much. Davis-Bacon was designed to stop traveling labor gangs who would underbid the local workers. Many of those traveling labor gangs were not minorities. The notion they would bring in minorities is not true at all, because bricklayers and steam fitters and a number of other crafts and trades were not even allowed to practice in the South. A black could not become an electrician, so black electricians could not go north and underbid white electricians. It was not a black-white situation that was corrected or held in check by Davis-Bacon. It was a situation where underbidding was taking place without regard to race. So Davis-Bacon did not exacerbate or contribute at all to discrimination in the construction industry. What it has done over the years has been a positive benefit, often a positive benefit to minorities. The intent of the Davis-Bacon Act was to protect workers and employees by giving local labor and local contractors a fair opportunity to obtain Federal construction projects. Davis-Bacon benefits minority workers by seeking to ensure that all employees, regardless of race, shall be paid at least the locally prevailing wage. According to former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall, the workers most often victimized by unscrupulous contractors are minority workers. Davis-Bacon is an integral part of ensuring a decent life for the hard working men and women in the construction industry. I do agree that minorities are the ones who are victimized the most by unscrupulous contractors, and the most unscrupulous contractors are those who are fighting to get rid of Davis-Bacon. They are also fighting to get rid of unions at the same time. Davis-Bacon also lessens the exploitation of unskilled and semiskilled labor, of which 35 percent are women and minorities. It ensures if these workers are paid less than the prevailing wage, they must be enrolled in an apprenticeship or training program that will help them develop their skills and increase their marketability. According to former Secretary of Labor John T. Dunlop, formal training programs are essential to recruit and train minorities for the construction industry. If Davis-Bacon were repealed, contractors would have less incentives to enroll workers in training programs. I cannot stress that too much. I know of numerous situations where unions that were closed 10 years ago to minorities in New York City have been open for some time through their apprenticeship programs and now they actively recruit minorities. In fact, I think there is a bit of a boom on right now and they cannot find enough apprentices. If Davis-Bacon were repealed, contractors would have less incentives to enroll workers in training programs. In fact, there are other studies that show the contractors that do not want Davis-Bacon, who really would like to have a free-for-all, the contractors who are most anti-union are the ones who have phony apprenticeship programs. They either have no apprenticeship programs or they deliberately enroll people as apprentices and do not bother to provide any training. When they do not provide training, the apprentices drop out and they just hire more people and exploit them also. The enactment of some 60 related statutes since the passage of the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 provides strong evidence that Congresses and Presidents of both parties believe that the Davis-Bacon Act provides beneficial and nondiscriminatory protections. Historically, as I said before, this was a Republican initiative, has been supported by Democratic Congresses, Democratic Presidents, and we would like to get back to having the majority party understand that in their war against labor, maybe they should cease the whole war, but certainly there are certain battles that should not be fought, and the battle against Davis-Bacon is one of those battles that ought to cease immediately. Available data simply refutes the argument that Davis-Bacon operates in a manner that discriminates against minorities and women. In fact, there is no difference in the employment of minorities and women by Federal construction contractors and contractors which do not do Federal work. Davis-Bacon does not have any impact on the number or the percentage of minorities employed by contractors. By the way, Davis-Bacon has been endorsed by various civil rights organizations, including the NAACP. Now, Davis-Bacon also represents something that the majority party repeatedly claims they want to see happen. They argue in the TEAM Act, the TEAM Act, in my opinion, is an attempt to establish company unions, but in the opinion of the majority Republicans the TEAM Act is an attempt to get better labor relations between management and labor. They argue for that in the case of OSHA. Instead of OSHA being an enforcement agency which hands down decisions about safety on the workplace, they want the relationship between employers and their employees to be paramount in deciding what is safe and what is not safe, how it is reported, what is enforced. They want a partnership with OSHA in working out these kinds of agreements. And it all seems quite reasonable, and it has some merit, but when it comes to recognizing that Davis-Bacon has achieved a harmony between workers and contractors, and we have a situation now where here is a Federal program which is supported by both contractors and the workers, it is supported by both contractors and the unions. One intent of the Davis-Bacon was to ensure that local contractors have a chance to obtain Federal construction work. So contractors understand that they are put in a better position. This is contractors who really want to do the right thing; contractors who care about workers, contractors who care about their local neighborhoods and their local communities, contractors who want to establish stability, contractors who want to do quality work and who want to make certain that their reputations are not ruined by slipshod work or maybe dangerous kinds of construction. These kinds of contractors have a chance as a result of Davis-Bacon regulations. If Davis-Bacon did not exist, many local contractors would not be able to compete with outside contractors who use less costly labor from outside of the community, and they are able to underbid them. They did come in and do often shoddy work or less credible work, but that is only known afterward. In my community there is a parkway which runs down almost the center of my district, and Eastern Parkway, in the renovation and the rebuilding of Eastern Parkway we had the streets dug up at least three times. One contractor did such shoddy work, he had to go back and redo it. And in the process of trying to redo it, he went bankrupt and we had to get a third contractor to come in and actually complete the job. It went on and on for three times as long as it should have gone on because of the fact that we had this contractor coming in who did not know what he was doing. This was a situation which was compounded by the fact that the contractor and his workers were not qualified. If Davis-Bacon did not exist, many local contractors would not be able to compete. And in certain kinds of situations, this would be happening all the time. At congressional hearings on the Davis-Bacon Act, we have had in the past year many contractors who expressed support for Davis-Bacon. They say that Davis-Bacon leads to high productivity. For example, one contractor stated that he found that the Davis-Bacon Act, By eliminating wages as a competitive factor, creates a level playing field in which to compete for government contracts that provides an opportunity for companies like mine to compete with large and small contractors on the basis of our management ability and high productivity. I think that I have established the fact last year in discussions that we have a positive union worker-management relationship fighting to keep a program that provides better construction for us in America. It really is something to consider. I think we also better consider the fact that the quality of the labor force has been hard hit by this drop in construction wages relative to other wages that have gone up. We may have a crisis created soon if we do not have Davis-Bacon contractors who are stabilizing the situation, mainly by their relationship to their apprentices and training programs, and are serious about developing people who can take the places of the journeymen and being able to continue high quality work. The Davis-Bacon Act does not automatically increase the cost of construction for the Federal Government. This is a myth that goes on and on. And as I said before, studies have shown this has not happened. Lowering wages does not necessarily lead to lower costs. The people who underbid the Davis-Bacon contractors are the contractors who do not mind Davis-Bacon and who are in many cases using union labor. They come in and they are able to employ people at lower wages, but they end up having to employ more people or they end up having to redo the work that they did and they end up creating situations which are more costly. Equating wage reductions with dollar-for-dollar savings is inaccurate because it fails to take into account other factors that may affect cost, such as the relationship between productivity and wages. This is a crude methodology at best. The Congressional Budget Office states that higher wage rates do not necessarily increase cost. If these differences in wages were offset by hiring more skilled and productive workers, no additional construction costs would result. So the people who fight Davis-Bacon, the contractors who are well organized in trying to at this point get a repeal of Davis-Bacon, are people who use the crudest kind of cost savings, employing low-cost workers, but they end up having to pay more anyhow in other ways; redoing the work or hiring more workers, et cetera. Davis-Bacon does not require payment of union wage rates. One charge that the majority party is making, one charge that we have to deal with on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections repeatedly is that Davis- Bacon contractors and the unions are in cahoots with the Labor Department, and this all is designed to keep up high wage rates as a part of a union conspiracy. Davis-Bacon wage determinations apply to over 3,000 U.S. counties and they apply to four types of construction: building, heavy, highway, and residential. And of the 12,500 wage schedules issued by the Department of Labor, only 29 percent require Federal contractors to pay collectively bargained rates across the board; 48 percent of the wage schedules establish minimum rates that are all nonunion, and some are a mix of union and nonunion rates that make up the remaining 23 percent. Perception that the Davis-Bacon rate is usually the union rate is a carryover from the days more than a decade ago when the prevailing rate was set based on the rate paid to 30 percent of the workers of a classification. Since 1983, however, union rates are found prevailing only when the rate is paid to 50 percent of the workers in a particular classification. These are myths that are deliberately continued. I am repeating myself from last year because in a new Congress they continue to try to push these myths forward. The myth that the Davis-Bacon Act requires that all contractors must pay union wages even when the average wage in an area is below the union rate is a myth that is deliberately kept going and they know it is false. Of the 12,500 prevailing wage schedules issued, only 40 percent of the wage schedules are non-union. Mixed schedules are 23 percent, as I said before. There is also another myth, that the Davis-Bacon Act is inflationary, it adds billions of dollars to the Federal budget. The payment of prevailing wages does not inflate costs. It does prevent costs from being cut at the expense of the employees' wages. The director of the Congressional Budget Office, as I said before, has stated that higher wages do not necessarily mean higher costs. A 1992 study commissioned by the International Union of Operating Engineers compared the average cost per mile of highway and bridge construction in five high-wage States to five low-wage States and found that the construction costs per mile were actually lower in the high- wage States. This is a 1992 study. There is another study that was done in 1994 in New Mexico which talked about the charge that school construction costs are driven up by Davis-Bacon, and I am going to discuss that study in a minute. It shows the same thing that the highway studies showed, that it does not drive up the cost. The school construction study actually shows that the cost under Davis-Bacon was lower in many cases, and they give square footage costs that are pretty dramatic. The Davis-Bacon Act is poorly administered and the wage determinations are woefully out of date. That is the latest and strongest charge that the Department of Labor is kind of under siege to change its method of doing its studies, and probably there is room for a lot of improvement. The biggest improvement would come if we had more funds devoted to the wage and hour administration and they can hire more staff. The same majority party that is attacking the Department of Labor, driving down its budget wants more and more improvements in the way they do carry out all of their functions. But in this particular function in particular, certainly they do better if they had better staff. There are some attempts underway to reengineer the way they do the studies. At the same time, there is consideration that the Bureau of Labor Statistics may take a greater role in this. All of that is positive. Why not let it take place without having it take place under the pressure of the war against Davis-Bacon? Let us negotiate. Let us have a truce. Let us have a period of a couple of years to work out these matters and not use a battering ram to try to force the repeal of Davis-Bacon by highlighting every little detail that has gone wrong in the administration of it. The wage and hour administration made a number of improvements in the administration of the Davis-Bacon Act over the last few years, including making wage determinations available on line through Federal World, a computerization of the wage determination updating system, and improved training and outreach efforts of wage and hour would like to be able to conduct more surveys. However, the resources are limited. Thus, the survey program is carefully planned to target those areas where the most Federal construction is planned and where there is evidence that wage patterns have changed. They have to pick and choose carefully because they have limited resources. One way to deal with this problem is if you are really concerned about updating and making more effective and efficient the wage and hour approach to setting the Davis-Bacon wage levels, then you should provide more funding for this activity in the Department of Labor. To the extent that wage rates are out of date, that usually results in wage rates that are too low rather than too high. We are moving on all the time in determination of the cost of living. When we do not do these studies that set the wage rates on a regular basis, then what we are doing is hurting the workers and not driving up the cost of production. We might be helping the profits of the contractors. Wage and hour explore new ways to reinvent the process to make it work even better. The purpose for the Davis-Bacon Act is as great today as when the act was first passed. The competition for working in the construction industry remains intense. The aftermath of the Los Angeles earthquake, for example, construction workers and contractors from outside the area sought to bid for the extensive work by offering lower rates. Unlike private industry, the Federal Government and most Federal assisted entities must place primary emphasis in awarding construction contracts to the lower bidder. And it is difficult, if not impossible, for an agency to award to the contract slightly higher because the contractor does better work. The Davis-Bacon Act encourages contractors to compete based on efficiency and equality rather than the one who pays the lowest wages. As I said before, if you link all of this attack on Davis-Bacon and the attack on labor unions to some of the developments that are taking place here in the Congress today, then I think that one of the best linkages would be the failure of the school construction initiative that the President puts forth to pass a mere $5 billion over 5 years did not make it in this present package. And one of the reasons was that there was a great attack on the school construction initiative because of certain powerful groups charging that Davis-Bacon regulations would drive up the costs of school construction. A study done completed in 1994 by Professor Peter Phillips of the University of Utah Economics Department shows that it is not only not true, just the opposite may be true. This study compares public square foot construction costs in five southwestern inter-mountain States that have State prevailing wage laws with four other States in the same region that do not have State prevailing wage laws. For example, the five have-law States that do have prevailing wage laws are New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Nevada. At the time of this study, Oklahoma still had a prevailing wage law at the State level. The four no-law States, these are States that do not have State prevailing wage laws, obviously, I guess you know that if it is a federally assisted project, then it would have to have the Davis-Bacon Act, the Federal prevailing wage laws applies. But many States have their own laws; and Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and Colorado are States that at that time did not have such laws. These States, often used by New Mexico, which is one of the have-law States in making other kinds of comparisons in their education system. For example, teachers' salaries are compared with these States. So they decided to compare the physical facility cost. During the time period of the study, which ended in 1994, they found that elementary schools cost $6 per square foot less in the five States that had prevailing wage laws, the elementary school construction was $6 per square foot less. Middle school construction cost was $11 per square foot less in the States with prevailing wage laws. And high school costs were also $11 per square foot in the States with prevailing wage laws. Warehouse costs, they noted, I suppose in connection with schools they need to have warehousing for equipment, et cetera, warehouses $35 per square foot less in the States with prevailing wage laws. This is a summary of what the study found. It is a very thorough study which talks about various aspects of the Davis- Bacon law as it was applied in these situations. And I think it is important to note, because those of us who feel that the school construction initiative was important are not going to give up. We have to come back and wage the war to get these school construction initiatives back into the Federal budget. Now, of course, the Federal budget should not take care of the building of schools at all levels. The Federal Government should not foot the total cost, and nobody has said that at all. States and localities will have to pay the bulk of the school construction costs. Right now there is consideration in the New York State Legislature of a bond issue, it probably is going to be on the ballot in November, to build schools. It has popularity throughout the entire State, both the big cities and the rural areas, and upstate, downstate, throughout New York State there is a feeling that we have got to have some help in constructing some new schools, repairing some other schools. The process cannot go forward unless we have a new infusion of money. I think $1.5 million is the amount that is going to be on the ballot in New York State. Across the country, other States will have to take initiatives. Localities will have to take initiatives. But there is need to have help from the Federal Government, also. The initiative proposed by the President of $5 billion over 5 years was a small one but it was a stimulant and it would encourage. Because the way that was going to operate, part of it required that you have matching funds at the local and State level. There was some hope that part of it would be an outright grant that big cities like New York, Philadelphia, big inner-city communities with horrendous problems in their facilities would be able to get some outright grants. However it is fashioned, the Federal initiative is still needed. And it is a great tragedy that part of the reason that an initiative was left out of the budget and has gone down temporarily is the fact that charges were levied at it, that it would be very costly to have schools constructed with Federal money involved because Davis- Bacon prevailing wage regulations would apply. That is not true. It would not drive up the cost of school construction automatically. In fact, one of the few studies, thorough studies on record demonstrate that that is not the case. This is the study that I am reading from by Professor Peter Phillips of the University of Utah. And I quote from a section of Professor Phillip's work where he quotes another professor's summary of a study done at North Carolina State University by another professor, Steven G. Allen, who is published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, an article entitled Unionized Construction Workers Are More Productive. In this study, Mr. Allen is quoted as follows: ``Apprenticeship training in hiring halls probably raise union productivity compared to non-union workers, while jurisdictional dispute and restricted work rules lower that same productivity. Using broad methodology, and union productivity measured by value added employee is 44 to 53 percent higher than non-union.'' Let me repeat that. ``Union productivity measured by value added employee is 44 to 53 percent higher than non-union.'' The estimate declines to 17 to 22 percent when estimates of inter-area construction price differences are used to deflate the value added. Basically, there is an increase in the value of the productivity of the union workers over the non-union workers. In other words, prior to adjusting for differences in regional cost of living and differences in regional construction material cost, union construction labor in the 1970's, which was the period of the Allen study, was roughly 50 percent more productive than non-union labor. The wage rates and the material costs of the BLS in regional cost study were not altered to factor in the effect of differences in regional cost of living. Thus the, BLS study is quite consistent with Allen's work and their conclusions are similar. Wage rate differences are 50 percent across regions with differences in productivity and cost of living may not alter labor costs as a percent of total cost. Within a region such as New Mexico, for example, or inter-mountain west, where the cost of living and the material cost of construction are similar, 20 percent differences in wage rates and construction can be offset by differences in productivity between union and non union labor. Union contractors have greater economies of scale. This gives them a cost advantage in large commercial office buildings. But in school and hospital construction, non union contractors have lower cost at all output levels. Despite the cost differences, profits of non-union contractors and school and hospital construction are no higher than those for union contractors because the burden of higher contractor costs have shifted. There are some other quotes in here about training. In the study done by Professor Phillips. He says that because of the non-union employer prices, new hands, and discounted wages that shield the employer from investing in human capital of new workers, the employer does not screen new workers extensively to forestall subsequent turnover. ``Failure to preselect new workers for aptitudes and attitudes consistent with a long-term attachment to construction work adds to the turnover among nonunion construction apprentices. In contrast, the joint apprenticeship boards of unions and union contractors do considerable preselection for both aptitude and attitude before letting a candidate into an apprenticeship program. This is because both the union contractors and the unions will invest in the union apprentices' training. Not wanting to lose their up-front investment, they seek to eliminate exit once the apprenticeship is begun. ``In the nonunion sector, workers may also leave apprenticeships if it becomes apparent that the employer offering training at a discounted wage is not delivering on the training that he promised to provide. Because employers are able to discount wages of apprentices below their current worth to the employer, it is tempting to engage in bait-and- switch tactics whereby training is promised but not delivered. Unscrupulous nonunion employers and contractors regularly do a bait- and-switch tactic by promising training and not delivering it. By saving on training costs, the employer can earn an additional profit from employing green hands at discounted wages. In the union sector, because employers and union journeymen invest in the training of apprentices, bait-and-switch tactics are less attractive. Because the apprentices' wage is not discounted as much below what they can earn elsewhere, the apprentices are not tempted to leave. Thus, economic theory predicts the observed pattern whereby the nonunion sector must begin training five apprentices to graduate one journeyman while the ratio in the union sector is close to one to one. Their investment can be as low as one to one. ``In basic terms, nonunion contractors have difficulty training because, one, the relationship between the contractor and the construction worker is often brief. This leads to a free-rider problem. Why should I train you when you are likely to go down the road and work for my competitor? I would just be helping him out and not myself. And, two, without an apprenticeship coordinator, there is no one policing the training to insure that on-the-job training takes place and is of decent quality.'' Thus, some contractors are tempted into what I said before was bait-and-switch, where they swindle apprentices out of their labor. Let me just conclude my quotes from this study with this last statement on plausible savings on total construction costs. I am reading from a study that relates to Square Foot Construction Costs for Newly-Constructed State and Local Schools. I am reading from this because of the fact that the charge has been made that Davis-Bacon will inflate school construction costs and that charge was made so effectively until it helped to defeat in the negotiation the President's initiative on school construction funding. That initiative would have provided $5 billion over a 5-year period. Let me just quote from the study on plausible savings on net total construction cost. ``A plausible scenario is to assume that generally on public works projects, total compensation as a percent of net total construction costs range somewhere between 20 and 30 percent. That is total compensation, wages, no higher than 30 percent. If you repeal the prevailing wage laws, you would probably drive wage rates down by around 10 percent. On the face of it, this would result in a 2 to 3 percent total cost savings on a public works construction. However, as total compensation declines, the crew mix is likely to shift to a less skilled labor force. Now it takes more workers to complete the same job. Indeed, some proponents of prevailing wage law repeals make that argument explicitly.'' Some people say that it is better to have more construction employment by not having prevailing wages. But that backfires in terms of the quality of the work. ``Because crew size will rise as wage rates fall, net total cost savings will not fall as the wage rates fall.'' The important point they are making here is that ``the true potential cost savings will be much smaller than the fall in the wage rates, and it may be negligible. The only way to know is to measure in practice comparative construction costs under legal environments with and without prevailing wage laws, controlling for other factors such as building type and regional differences in cost-of-living.'' But the basic statement here is that it is not true. Wages are only between 20 to 30 percent of cost of construction of schools. Period. If you attempt to lower those costs by eliminating Davis-Bacon, all you do is lower the wage rate for the workers without really lowering the costs any more than 3 percent, if at all. What you do is run the risk of shoddy construction. I would not want my children to go to a school that was built by a greedy contractor using nonunion labor, cutting corners, and not only having to use more workers but using workers who are basically careless and do not particularly care about what they are doing. I think that the danger of things happening with that building, that school building, are far greater, of dangerous kinds of accidents happening, faulty connections with the wiring, the water system being poorly connected. There have been cases where we have had the system in the bathroom connected to the drinking water; all kinds of mishaps have happened because of unscrupulous practices of contractors trying to save money by using the lowest paid labor. What I am saying is that the war against organized labor, the battle against Davis-Bacon certainly should be waged without destroying the school construction initiative. I think we should cease the war, we should have a truce. Just as we have come to some kind of bipartisan agreement on taxes and on the budget, let us come to an agreement that working families are not going to be put under the gun by the majority Republicans. Working families are not going to have to face situations where already stagnant wages in the construction industry are going to be pushed down further by the assault on Davis-Bacon. Working families should not have to face the assault on OSHA where the safety in the workplace, including construction workers, is lessened because of the assault on the Government agency responsible for enforcing safety regulations. There was a study done, released a few days ago by a totally objective, highly credible body, the American Medical Association, which shows that 70,000 people were killed or injured in the workplace last year. Seventy thousand people were killed or injured in the workplace. Those figures are very close to the figures that are offered by the Department of Labor. The figures offered by the Department of Labor through OSHA are disputed. The majority Republicans on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections insist that these figures are not valid, and they want to discount them. Here we have somebody totally out of the loop. I do not think the Department of Labor is biased toward unions or biased toward anybody. They are Government civil servants who do a good job and their figures are always accepted as being as close to the truth as you can get. However, here is another body, the American Medical Association, that has come up with a set of figures which is even greater. I think the Department of Labor statistics were still in the 65,000, 68,000 range. Here the American Medical Association has published figures which show 70,000. Their figure is about $110 billion was lost in the workplace as a result of safety problems and health problems. This is the American Medical Association, not the Department of Labor, not the AFL-CIO, they have their own figures; but the American Medical Association. Let us stop the war on OSHA. There are good reasons to stop the war on OSHA. Let us stop the war on Davis-Bacon, stop the war on OSHA, stop the war against workers' overtime. Let us have a truce and let workers be paid in cash, those that want to be paid in cash, and if you want to go for upper middle income or the upper income, and they want time off, we can arrange to give them time off without jeopardizing the overtime payment in cash for people who are lower down. We can stop the war on labor by not going forward with this $1.4 million slush fund that has been set up to investigate labor unions. Let us stop the war on labor in terms of trying to drive them into a situation where they have to go to their membership and get approval from every single member before they can take a political position. The political positions do relate to the welfare of the workers. If they are in a union and they vote to elect officers and the majority rules and whatever the majority decides to do, then that majority ought to be supported; or at least you cannot have a revolution of a minority of a few people dictating what positions that the majority takes. We do not do that in corporations, we do not do that with any other organization in our society; churches. Nobody is required to have total unanimity on positions before they can take a position, political or otherwise. We should stop the war on Davis-Bacon by blowing up out of proportion a few incidents that relate to fraud and abuse. We have an Oklahoma case as I mentioned before, a single incident in Oklahoma is being used as an ongoing investigation to condemn an entire system based on an investigation involving only three possible fraudulent wage submittals. These allegations of widespread fraud have no single shred of proof. They have not been able to document any widespread fraud. It is important to note that since the inception of Davis-Bacon, approximately six cases of fraud have been alleged and brought to the attention of the Department of Labor. During the last 33 years, prior to the new Oklahoma allegations, not one fraud-related survey case was brought to the Department of Labor for investigation. Since 1992 only one formal request for reconsideration of a wage decision has been received by the Department of Labor. A recent GAO investigation showed that there have been many mistakes made in the surveys done by the Department of Labor but none of them were done intentionally. They have no evidence of fraud. By the way, many of the mistakes were made by employers who had payrolls and payroll sheets in front of them and they were supposed to get data from those sheets, and they made mistakes in submitting that data, not the unions and the workers as has been alleged. Let me conclude by saying that it is unfortunate that the war against Davis-Bacon and the war against working families resulted in a casualty in the budget, the School Construction Act. There is a cause and effect there that I insist exists, that the overwhelming sentiment among the American people is that they want to do things for education. They would like to see schools revitalized. A flimsy charge that the cost of school construction would be driven up by Davis-Bacon and therefore we should not have Federal assistance with school construction would not survive unless it was pushed very intentionally, prosecuted and pushed very intentionally by the majority. Let us have a truce, let us do what we have done in the case of taxes and the budget and have a bipartisan approach to working out labor-management problems. Let us end the attack on labor, let us retire the slush fund and use it for some better purpose, and by all means let us not continue to perpetrate the myths that Davis-Bacon is an evil, that Davis-Bacon has not benefited not only the workers in construction but also the communities where they work as well as the American people as a whole.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and others of my colleagues that saw fit to hold this special order as a tribute to Justice Brennan. His funeral was held today, and I think that the tributes to him will go on for a long time to come. I think it is important to note that one of the people who spoke at his funeral today said that his passing represented an end of the era, that the era of liberal government and liberal court opinions was over. I do not agree. I think that one important thing about this tribute is to hold up and let the general public see in a highly visible manner what that era was all about through the opinions of Justice Brennan. Justice Brennan has not really been given due credit for a number of things that he has accomplished, and many people do not realize the scope of his opinions. They are very much in harmony with the basic beliefs of Thomas Jefferson, very much in harmony with the very dramatic gesture of Abraham Lincoln in setting the slaves free, very much in harmony with the belief that individuals have certain inalienable rights. He struck at the heart of an attempt to corrupt that process by refusing to go along with the States' attempt to cling to power for rural areas, unpopulated or slightly populated areas, and use the compromise that had been made at the time of the founding of our own Constitution. Our Constitution is based on a compromise. We had a Senate and House of Representatives, the House of Representatives based on population and the Senate was a compromise. That body established that any State, no matter how small the State was or what the population of it was, any State would have two Members. And State legislatures were using that kind of reasoning to justify various formulas for holding on to power without a one-man, one-vote situation. And of course, Justice Brennan, kind of late in the life of our Nation, I think it was 1966, that late in the history of the Nation, he applied the common sense of the Constitution that if we are really equal, then we cannot allow a situation to be perpetuated at the State level where the balance of power was maintained by a minority through this kind of playing with the notion that we could have two Houses and State legislature and one could not follow the rule of one man, one vote in terms of population. So he had the guts to deal with it in 1966. And somehow no one has bothered to challenge it since then. The power of the common sense of it, the harmony of it with the thinking of the Founders and the whole thrust of our Constitution was so great, that has not been challenged. The one-man, one-vote theory definitely is there and in place. There is another very fundamental decision that he made which very few people have talked about and very few people may even know that he had anything to do with it, but I think it is very much indicative and relevant of our present era, where we tend to put people down. All men are created equal. All Americans are equal. But, somehow, lately we have been looking at welfare recipients or poor people, or people who have not made it, as not being exactly equal. And there is a raging debate right now about WEP workers, people who are on welfare, people who must go to work in order to work off their welfare grants, them not being equal enough to be able to have representation. They cannot have an organization and that organization talk to the people in Government who put them to work. They cannot have an organization which says we need gloves if we are out in the park picking up all kinds of trash and we need some kind of gear on our heads if we are out there in the sun or we need some brightly colored jackets if we were working in areas where the trash is heavy, we need the same things other workers need. Nobody can even have a conversation in the New York WEP program because they are not allowed to organize and they are not allowed to have spokespersons, because, after all, they are not protected by the labor laws. We just had a fight here on the floor, not on the floor but we had a fight here via negotiations, where an attempt has been made to take away the protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act and take away the minimum wage, or any of the things in our labor law which applies to workers is going to be denied to welfare workers who have to go to work. We have just beaten that back temporarily. I understand it is taken out of the budget bill and the tax package that we will be voting on in a few days. But it is very interesting that Brennan ruled, in a case which has not been that celebrated, he ruled that if you are going to take away the welfare benefits from somebody, you have got to give them a hearing. That is not known. In 1970, as late as 1970, an opinion for the court in Goldberg versus Kelly, a case little known by the general public. In that case he declared that it was a violation of the 14th Amendment guarantee of due process of law for a State to cut off a welfare recipient's benefits without a hearing. Something as simple as a hearing, an individual deserved. As a prescription for governmental behavior, the holding in Goldberg versus Kelly appeared modest enough, but the opinion proved to be a watershed of constitutional interpretation, a key building block to what came to be known as the due process revolution. A series of decisions that followed erected a constitutional shield for the ordinary citizen against the arbitrary or standard misuse of governmental power in many contexts. In 1987, in a New York speech which he entitled ``Reason, Passion and the Progress of the Law,'' Brennan talked about the importance of a simple requirement that government officials meet a citizen face-to- face before taking adverse action. I end with this quote by Justice Brennan: ``Due process asks whether government has treated someone fairly, whether the individual's dignity has been honored, whether the worth of an individual has been acknowledged. If due process values are to be preserved in the bureaucratic state of the late 20th century, it may be essential that officials possess passion: The passion that puts them in touch with the dreams and disappointments of those with whom they deal, the passion that understands a pulse of life beneath the official version of events.'' His opinion in Goldberg versus Kelly, he said, can be seen as injecting passion into a system whose abstract rationality had led it astray, and he applied those same principles to the death penalty. To the very end he was opposed to the death penalty because that individual on death row also deserved the same kind of passion, the same kind of interaction with society as a whole, as an individual who deserved equal treatment.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, it has been a messy day here in the House of Representatives. Today is July 17. We are certainly midway through the work of this first year of the 105th Congress, and it was most unfortunate that we started the day by pulling a bill which would have reauthorized vocational education assistance, and stopped the forward movement of that bill because there was an amendment on the bill which called for a retention of provisions in the bill which would have encouraged local governments and local education agencies to continue to emphasize vocational-technical education for women. It was most unfortunate that with the overwhelming support that that amendment seemed to have, which merely wanted to continue what was going on already, that it led to the majority suddenly pulling the bill from the floor and refusing to let the House work its will on a bill which would have provided fair treatment for women in vocational education and technical education programs. In an era when technical education is very much in order, and women certainly can do as well as men in some of the high tech areas that offer the most opportunities for the future, the highest pay, we are not willing to have our own Vocational Education Assistance Act reflect the fact that we want maximum opportunities for women. So that was an unfortunate start of the day. It has been an unfortunate week in that same manner. Two days ago we refused to allow the House to work its will on a vote, up or down, on the National Endowment for the Arts. The National Endowment for the Arts seems to upset a small band of Members in the House of Representatives. They insist on harassing and pursuing the National Endowment for the Arts, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the American people support the National Endowment for the Arts and support the National Endowment for the Humanities, overwhelmingly. And the Members of Congress, if given a chance to vote yes or no on the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, would certainly keep its funding at the present level. We were not allowed to do that. This is a week that the majority chose to use its overwhelming powers, because it is the majority, to manipulate the process, and by one vote we lost on a procedural vote that would have given us the opportunity to vote up or down on that important matter. Later on today we also experienced the intense annoyance and anger of the minority, the Democrats in the minority of the House, because in the agricultural appropriations bill that was about to come up, the same kind of treatment we had received in some other bills this year and in the NEA vote was being manifested. The ranking member of the agriculture subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, the ranking Democrat was not allowed by the Committee on Rules to present an amendment that she had requested. The power of the majority is certainly great enough to stop on this floor most of what they want to stop and to promote and push what they want to push, past it, but we ought to at least have the opportunity to go on record on certain votes, and we are being denied that. So we had a very messy end to the day, at a point where really we do not have much time left before we adjourn on August 1st. We are moving to pass appropriations bills. Appropriations bills are the most important bills, probably, that we pass, in that they are the ones that provide the funding to keep our government activities going, and we are going to be rushing through those things in the next 10 working days of Congress. We also have in the background negotiations going on which are very important, vitally important negotiations on the expenditure plan that was passed by both Houses, negotiations on the tax package. That is ongoing. We know that those important processes are in the works, and worry about the fact that we are going to be pushed against the wall and stampeded at the last minute on those packages if we do not change the way this House operates. The majority does not, again, respect the will of the minority. There is another problem also beyond the procedural questions, and that is, I lament the fact and a number of my colleagues lament the fact that the tax and expenditure package, the appropriations bills, as they come up are zeroing out or refusing to even discuss and consider certain important matters that ought to be on the agenda. In this 105th Congress, when we enter a situation where we started out with a lot of talk about bipartisan cooperation, especially in the area of education, I suppose one of the most disappointing absences is the fact that the education initiatives that have been proposed have been watered down so and some are not even on the agenda. The most important, disappointing absence, in my opinion, is the one related to the school construction initiative. That is not even in the tax package or the expenditure plan which the President and the two Houses are negotiating now. We are grateful for the fact that the President at least has kept the school construction initiative alive by listing it among his priorities. The trouble is that the President has a long, long list of priorities, and we wonder how high on the list the school construction initiative will be. We also wonder about the fact that the empowerment zones which mean so much to our urban areas, since nothing else has been offered in the last 10 years to deal with very pressing problems in our urban areas, the empowerment zones were considered to be a reasonable answer because both parties would support it since it was a combination of the private sector, the government sector and there was a lot of talk about this is the way of the future, but empowerment zones are not in the package either at this point, except for the President's priority list. So I guess we will have to be grateful for the President at least keeping these things in the discussion. They are not in the House bill or the Senate bill. Therefore, they would not be on the conference table. So the fact that the President has tax incentives for school construction on the list of items for his tax cut proposals, and he has deductions for K through 12 computer donations on his list, and he has brownfields empowerment zones and enterprise zones, expansion of these in his package, we are grateful for that. We are holding on by a thread. These are very important matters and I think to shift to the most important area, that is the area of education, not only the most important but the most universally approved area, the area that everybody agrees we need some forward movement on by the Federal Government, that area also has been pushed into the background. It is almost a certainty that very little is going to happen except in the area of higher education, because the President has made that his highest priority and certainly something very new, however inadequate it might be, is going to happen with respect to higher education. Our concern for K through 12, however, grows greater because we see less and less discussion or talk about how to move to provide more Federal Government encouragement of the improvement of schools, even in the area that the President, this administration has staked out great interest, and that is telecommunications, education technology and computers. Even in this area the present movement is kind of feeble. They are going to allow deductions for K through 12 computers. The President has in his list an allowance for deductions by corporations and businesses for K through 12 computer donations. About $300 million is proposed to be allowed over a 5-year period. That is a far cry from what is needed in this area. In other words, education, I had great hopes for because there was great agreement between the two parties that education should be a priority. So I thought the fact that education is considered a priority by both parties would mean that it would be reflected in the tax package and also in the expenditure package, and it really is discouraging to find that that is not the case. Maybe we should not give up hope. In fact, I will not say maybe. I want to urge all of those who care about education, which is the overwhelming majority of the American people, not to give up hope, because we were in worse shape, probably in July 1995 when proposals were being made that the Department of Education be totally abolished. At that time proposals were being made to cut certain federally funded education programs by as much as almost $4 billion. So we held on, we persevered, we insisted that the will of the people, that the polls showing the will of the people be honored. And finally, in the election year 1996, there was a turnaround and education did get a great deal of attention. Instead of the $4 billion cut that had been proposed in 1995, there was a $4 billion increase in 1996. Some people might say, if they are listening, that they have heard me say this many times before. I cannot say it too often. It was an amazing feat that the party in power decided in an election year, but before the election of 1996, to increase funding for education by $4 billion. It was an amazing feat because it represented the triumph of common sense. We had been talking all along about the fact that we needed to give more attention and more funding and more support for education. The polls had shown it all along, but the leadership, those who were in charge, refused to recognize it until they were faced with the possibility of losing an election. And, of course, it is to their credit that they understood that at the last minute they had to turn around. So we had an increase of $4 billion for education programs in the fall of 1996, which leads me to encourage my colleagues to hold on. Because in the fall of 1998 we may witness the same kind of resurrection of an understanding of what the priorities are. We may witness the Republican majority being born again in 1998. In order to do that, we have to be diligent. We have to persevere. We never let up in 1995 and 1996 on the issue of education. We followed the issue right through the proposals to cut the school lunch programs, all the way down to the various proposals to cut Head Start, to cut title I. We brought the issue to the public again and again in order to let the public know what was happening, and they responded with common sense that got through to the majority and they turned around. Let us stay on the message of the need for a school construction initiative. Let us stay on the message that it is a small amount compared to the total need. Five billion dollars is what the President proposed. Five billion dollars was under discussion for school construction, mainly in loans, low-interest loans that go to localities and States. It was not adequate, but it was at least a beginning. To have that beginning snuffed out is not acceptable. So keep it in mind. It is a matter of common sense that the deteriorating schools represent one of our greatest problems. The physical deterioration of schools is not just a New York problem. I have talked before about the fact that in New York it is astonishing that we still have almost 300 schools that burn coal. They have coal furnaces, and the coal is spewing smoke and substances into the air, which are toxics, of course, and New York has a high rate of asthma among young children. We have a clear correlation between something that is being done by government-owned buildings, and in this case government-owned buildings that are a part of a program to help children, which are very detrimental to the health of children. We have at least 300, almost 300 of 1,000 schools in New York that still have coal-burning burners. There is an initiative, which I have just read about in the New York State Legislature, which I want to applaud, to float a bond issue for school construction. I hope that that moves beyond talk in the legislature. It is not as much as is needed, but it may be that the States can prime the Federal Government. We cannot go it alone. Most States and localities cannot go it alone. But if there are some initiatives at the State level, it might embarrass the Federal Government, it might embarrass the majority here in the House and Senate in order to make them begin to reconsider and move forward. But the public, the voters, the people with common sense must continue to hold on and understand the seriousness of the situation. There are schools, of course, that have lead poisoning problems, there are many schools which have asbestos contamination, and there is a great space problem, which I have enumerated many times here in connection with New York City. And what happens in New York City is not so different from other big cities. The fact that these things are pushed aside is very disturbing, because it is not a matter of it costs too much money. The $5 billion over a 5-year period, when compared to other programs, does not amount to much money. They are almost not even arguing the issue of it is too much money anymore. There are philosophical arguments offered, like the fact that if the Government gives help to States and localities for school construction, it is an unprecedented intervention and an intolerable intervention into the local and State government matters. I think that is ridiculous. Education is not merely a local and State government matter. Education impacts on everything, including our national security. We have gone through those arguments, and we have had a great deal of involvement of the Federal Government in the jawboning about school improvement. It is time we continue to increase the resources that are provided by the Federal Government. There is no need to worry about the Federal Government taking over education. At this point the Federal Government only spends between 7 and 8 percent of the total expenditure for education overall. That includes higher education. So the percentage of the Federal Government's involvement in local education is less than 5 percent. And if it was increased greatly, even to 15 percent, it certainly would not mean that the Federal Government could control what happens in terms of decisions, or even up to 25 percent. I advocate strongly that we move in the next 5 years toward a 25- percent involvement of the Federal Government in education funding. That would be a radical increase, but it is necessary. Even if we had 25 percent of the expenditures, and 25 percent of the funds were provided by the Federal Government, it still leaves 75 percent to be provided by the States and the local governments. If we want to divide power along the lines of money, that means that the State and local governments would still have 75 percent of the power to make decisions. If they have 75 percent of the power to make decisions, they would not have to worry about anybody else. So I do not think the argument that the Federal Government's involvement in providing resources means that they would take over or be a detriment to decision-making at the local level holds any water at all. What it is, unfortunately, at the other end, is kind of an abandonment of the issue of the problem of education, abandonment of schoolchildren, while, at the same time, we are spending enormous amounts of money for other kinds of things that are far less necessary. For example, the B-2 bomber. One of the votes that took place last week, which would be upsetting to most of us, common sense would dictate that we did the wrong thing, was a vote on the B-2 bomber. The B-2 bomber is not needed, according to the President. The B-2 bomber is not needed, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The B-2 bomber is not needed, according to the head of the Air Force. The person in charge of the Air Force says we do not need it, the President says we do not need it, the Joint Chiefs of Staff say we do not need it. Still, we come to the floor and disregard all of that and vote to keep funding a B-2 bomber, the cost of which will escalate as they move into production, and it increases. My colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], stood on the floor and outlined how we are talking about $28 billion that will be needed more in the budget in future years at a time when the budget will be set. And if we are to balance the budget, that means that $28 billion worth of other programs would have to come out of the budget in order for the B-2 bomber to be accommodated. Despite the fact that we clearly understood the mathematics and the arithmetic, the B-2 bomber was voted for continued funding. So it is not a matter of money, it is a matter of attitudes. And those attitudes are what we have to confront. The attitudes have nothing to do with common sense. The attitudes have nothing to do with scientific reasoning, certainly. They have nothing to do with logic. Logic would dictate we do not continue to build bombers that military authorities do not want. But of course there are some Neanderthal considerations, like the fact that contracts are given out to factories and manufacturing firms and so forth who produce the B-2 bombers and they have spread around the production of the parts in various States and localities. Everybody sees themselves as having a piece of the pie. Whether the pie is good for America or not, they have their piece so they vote to continue the funding of the B-2 bomber, while we do not fund or refuse to provide even a measly $5 billion over a 5-year period for school construction. Two weeks ago, I think it was June 28, there was a documentary on television. It was not national, unfortunately. I think it was a local television station in New York, Channel 7. I wanted to congratulate Channel 7 on that excellent documentary. It was just a 30-minute documentary about Class 104. Class 104 is in some school in New York, an actual school. I want to congratulate the board of education for letting Channel 7 come in and film what was going on in the school. It is a first grade class that is overcrowded, 42 children in a first grade class, and they were documenting the dilemma or the problems faced by a teacher of 42 children in a first grade class. Just to move around the room was a problem. And then, of course, they very sensitively zeroed in on three children, to talk to their parents, and to get an example of what does it mean to be in this class with 42 children competing for the attention of one teacher. And it was an excellent production and I urge that my colleagues contact Channel 7, which is an ABC affiliate in New York, and maybe they will send a copy of the documentary on Class 104 and what it means to have children in an overcrowded situation who are that young. There was one very sensitive young man who was totally lost and beginning to hate school despite the fact that he had a high IQ, very intelligent. He was off to the wrong start and beginning to hate school. There was another young lady who was very aggressive, and she was only becoming more aggressive because of the fact that in order to get the teacher's attention she had to be aggressive and do things that forced the teacher to pay attention to her. She was doing much better than the sensitive young man who was not aggressive. Children should not be put into a position where they have to fight for the attention of a teacher. That kind of abandonment represents a kind of institutionalized brutality, a child abuse that is institutionalized. We know if we put 42 children in a first grade class it means that children will be kind of brutalized and yet we do it. I want to make a connection here at this point with another issue, and that is the issue of the apology that I talked about some time ago that received a lot of very intense response. The apology that was proposed by the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] in a resolution that the Congress apologize for slavery. It caused a lot of furor. These issues that are taking place right now in terms of appropriations and budgeting, of tax expenditures, the abandonment of certain areas, certain populations, the abandonment of certain programs, the willingness to run and vote for a B-2 bomber while we cannot find it possible to vote for school construction, while we cannot find it possible to vote for empowerment zones. It all relates to the fact that we have sort of stumbled and lost our way at this point in America. There is a connection between the furor, and there was a lot of upset people about the proposal by the gentleman from Ohio that we apologize for slavery, that Congress apologize for slavery. I have connected the two. And I was shocked to find that a poll cited on ``Nightline'' stated that more than 60 percent of whites were angry about the idea and said there should not be an apology for slavery. At the same time more than 60 percent of the blacks said, yes; it was a good idea. Even though it was not originated by blacks and the Black Caucus is not the sponsor, it is the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] and a group of well-meaning individuals, who deserve to be applauded for what they have done. It is not a power play, but a very sensible kind of approach to providing healing and reconciliation in a situation that needs more healing and reconciliation. But it set off a furor. And the fact that 60 percent of whites in America, their first reaction, and I hope that that reaction will change, I hope that was the first reaction and that they will stop and consider and that that will not be the reaction a few weeks from now, or certainly a few months from now, after more thought is given to the power of the apology exercise. But the fact the initial reaction was that way is part of the problem in terms of decision-making here in the Congress. This is a reaction which tells me that people are ready to move to forget anything related to a special sector of the population. Anything that you attach to the descendants of slaves, the African-Americans, anything you attach to them gets hostility. And that is an even greater argument for having the apology exercised, for having a discussion of it, because we still are getting this automatic, almost instinctive hostility: Why should we do it for the blacks, for the African-Americans? Why should we have a school construction initiative which is primarily going to benefit the inner-city communities where African-Americans go to school? It may not be the indication, but that is the reasoning. Why should we have a welfare program which really provides jobs and training and moves people along the road to establishing some dignified connection with the mainstream economic system? Why should we have that if it is going to blacks? That is the underlying current there that needs to be dealt with, that we still think that there are deserving Americans and undeserving Americans. And anything that relates to African-Americans, the first reaction is that they are undeserving Americans; they do not deserve empowerment zones, they do not deserve school construction initiatives that might benefit them in education, they certainly do not deserve an apology. Apology means we have got to recognize the problem. The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] did not talk about reparations or anything complicated, just a apology. But the instinctive reaction means that they understand the apology needs recognition, they recognize that there was a problem, and if they have a problem, they might have the obligation to seek a solution. Well, so be it. Apology does mean that we recognize that there was something that happened in the past that ought to be recognized as a problem. The impact of that on people in the present is something we can debate. As we debate it, we may come up with an obligation to seek a solution to the fact there was a great impact. Two hundred thirty-two years of slavery had an impact on the descendants of slaves. I mentioned before that the first impact is that none of them could inherit anything. Two hundred thirty-two years, from one year to another, one generation to another, nothing was handed down. We know from studies that have been documented that most wealth is accumulated from inheritance. Big millionaires and lucky guys who find gold mines and oil fields, that is something else. Most wealth in the world is generated by one generation passing on to another, handing them down, sometimes in small amounts. Small amounts accumulate. People have capital and then invest it. But if we go back in the genealogy, trace economic genealogy of people, we will find that those who have the benefit of this, which is just about all Americans except two categories, they have been the beneficiaries of inheriting property, inheriting pots and pans, of accumulating enough to use that as a jump-off point for something else; and that is the way wealth in America has moved, and most nations have, moved in the same way. It is passed down from one generation to another. The native Americans, of course, who owned the land when the Europeans arrived here, that is not the case. It was kind of a reversal. The land was taken away from them in many cases and they could not pass it down. Certainly the African-Americans whose ancestors were born in chains against their will, and then they were forced into labor and the accumulation of wealth, none of that wealth was shared with them. They were not paid for their labor. So nothing was passed down for 232 years by African-Americans, the descendants of a people who, in the long chain of the Nation, could not pass down that kind of wealth. So it means that we arrive at this point in history with a deficit that has to be recognized. All these kinds of complicated issues would not be put on the table if we recognized that there was a great criminal enterprise called slavery and it generated these kinds of problems. We can have a search for a solution now, however, in an atmosphere which is not so tense and stressful. We could not propose such an apology after the end of the Civil War. We could not propose it even 100 years later as we moved into the fight to end legalized segregation and Jim Crow. But why can we not propose it now? Why can we not entertain a discussion of apology for slavery and the implications of it at this point of history? We are sort of at a pinnacle right now. Consider what is happening right now in 1997 in America. The stock market, Dow Jones Industrial index at 8,000, unprecedented activity on the market. The dollar is stronger than ever before against the yen and mark. We are rated against our competitors economically, doing much better. Our economy is outperforming. We have licked inflation. Employment is moving forward despite the low inflation. We are on a mountaintop. America is on a mountaintop. We do not have an evil empire to fight anymore. Peace might exist for many decades to come or maybe even for hundreds of years. This is a point in our history where we should not be squabbling about the NEA's funding or about vocational education not having a provision which takes care of women and peculiar problems that they have had in the vocational education area. We should not be squabbling about those things. We should not be passing legislation which obligates us for billions of dollars for B-2 bombers, while we at the same time cannot conceive of the fact that we should have more money available for education in the form of school construction. We ought to be able to relax, to use our reason to its maximum. We ought to be able to relax and have the leaders in Congress listen to the people. The polls out there show that the people, with their common sense, still think education is the high priority. I do not think that they have defense as high as education at this point on the polls. Nobody is more familiar with the polls than the people who are in the political leadership here, or we politicians in general. We know what polls are all about. We listen to polls. And yet the polls that clearly show the popularity of education and the Federal Government's involvement in education are being ignored systematically all the time. Only at election time in 1996 did they bother to listen in order to save their skins at the polls. Now that we are a year and a half away from an election, nobody wants to deal with the problems of education that the rest of the American people overwhelmingly want to deal with. So we are at a pinnacle, we are at a very advantageous spot. Why can we not listen to the polls, listen to the mind of the American people? Why can we not entertain and even invite a discussion of very controversial issues that might open the door for reconciliation and healing? The whole matter of the apology for slavery is one of those things that might open the door that takes us forward into the 21st century with a new kind of mind-set. The present mind-set, as I said before, is unfortunate when we have 60 percent of whites who automatically think it is a bad idea. It is all right for the Germans to apologize to the rest of Europe for what was done in World War II. It is all right for the Swiss to apologize to the Jews for their conspiracy with the Nazi government to take their gold and their deposits away from them. It is all right for the Japanese to apologize for what they did in Asia. But suddenly the idea of apologies upsets us a great deal. I want to just drive this home by reading a very disturbing article that I read, by a top-flight columnist for the New York Times. I have read other columnists who also thought the idea of the apology was ridiculous and attacked it with great passion and vehemence. Mr. Russell Baker's column of July 1, 1997, in the New York Times follows in the same vein. Mr. Baker is a brilliant writer, and although I often do not agree with him, his writing is always entertaining. Mr. Baker is extremely competent, intelligent, knowledgeable; and that is why his article is even more disturbing. I am just going to read a few quotes from Mr. Baker's article about apologizing, because I find it very, very interesting about these people who get upset and outraged by the notion that they are being asked to apologize. I do not know what kind of family values they have or what kind of upbringing they have. But I remember very well my mother once told me, after I had stepped on a little girl's foot as I was rushing to get, I think it was a church picnic and they had ice cream. I was rushing and stepped on a little girl's foot and she started crying. I hurt her foot, and my mother said, ``Go apologize.'' Well, my first thought was, apologizing is something that is not going to help her. I stepped on her foot. It is hurting. My apology will not help her at all. I said to my mother, ``I'm sure she's all right. Why should I apologize?'' She said, ``Go apologize.'' If I had not gone and apologized, I probably would have been sort of slapped across the mouth or roughed up a little bit, because my mother would want her child to acculturated in that way to understand apologizing is part of the process of being a civilized human being. It is not a time to get into the logic of apologizing will not help her foot, apologizing will not ease her pain. But here arguments are saying apologizing will not ease pain, so it is ridiculous. Do we raise our children that way? But the argument comes across from a number of columnists that it is ridiculous because it cannot go back and undo the hurt. Anyway, let me just do Mr. Baker the honor of quoting from his article, straight from the New York Times, July 1, 1997. It is entitled ``Sorry About That,'' which is already a little sarcasm introduced. It is arguing that apologizing for slavery would show great sensitivity. ``Why anyone would propose such an aimless exercise, except to demonstrate great sensitivity, is hard to say.'' Now, if I had said to my mother, ``Why should I go back and apologize? All I am doing is demonstrating great sensitivity,'' she would have thought that she made a great error in the way she raised me, or she would have thought it was time to get to work disciplining me to show great sensitivity, part of being a human being. Why do we want to say it is an aimless exercise? But that is what Mr. Baker says here. ``Why anyone would propose such an aimless exercise, except to demonstrate great sensitivity, is hard to say.'' To continue quoting Mr. Baker: ``Both parties to the slave and owner relationship being long dead, there could be nothing more grotesque than the generation of white yuppies apologizing for the sins of long- buried ancestors.'' I do not know where he got the ``generation of white yuppies.'' The U.S. Congress is not a generation of white yuppies. We are the government. We are representatives of the government. Everybody is the government, but we are the spokespersons for the government; the government that was there in 1776, however different it might have been; the government that was there in 1865, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. I mean not the Emancipation Proclamation, when the Civil War ended. This government was there when the 13th Amendment that freed the slaves was passed. We are still part of the same government, so I do not know why we suddenly have become white yuppies. But to continue quoting from Mr. Baker: ``Surely, no sensible descendant of slave forbearers look on such a spectacle without disgust for the hypocrisy of it.'' Again, ``Surely, no sensible descendant of slave forbearers look on such a spectacle without disgust for the hypocrisy of it.'' Well, Mr. Baker is clearly wrong. Sixty percent of the descendants of slaves said they thought apologizing was a good idea. According to the polls that had been reported, 60 percent of the slave descendants, I being one, see nothing wrong with apologizing. We do not look upon it with great disgust. We do not consider it hypocritical. But continued Mr. Baker, ``No sensible white American could countenance it without feeling embarrassed by its shabby theatricality.'' He may be right, because after all I just told you 60 percent of white Americans said we should not apologize. I do not know whether they were worried about shabby theatricality or something else, but he says it is shabby theatricality that they are worried about. To continue quoting Mr. Baker, ``Apologizing for the country's past can only gratify the apologizer's desire to feel good about himself. It invites the audience to compare his moral tone to that of his ancestors, so derelict in their respect for humanity, and come out a winner.'' I do not know what is wrong with having anybody feel good about themselves if that is the only benefit. I think there are many other benefits but feeling good about yourself is a first step toward feeling good about others and reacting to others in a positive way. I have no quarrel with people feeling good about themselves. Continuing with Mr. Baker's article, ``It not only enhances the apologizer's self-esteem, it doesn't cost him anything. This is an important consideration nowadays when government's chief goal is to avoid spending money on life's losers so the rest of us will have more to spend on ourselves.'' I agree with Mr. Baker wholeheartedly. Apologizing does not cost anything. All the more reason of why we should not hesitate to do it in my opinion. But he is saying that because it does not cost anything, we should not do it. There is a lot of contradiction and conflicts here. We should do things that do cost money. The whole Congress is running away from doing things that do cost money. I suspect that a lot of people are afraid to apologize because they think the next step is that somebody will want some compensatory programs or reparations or those kinds of things, but not Mr. Baker. If all we did was apologize, of course, it would be kind of hypocritical, but why not take the first step and we will take our chances. Let the Congress go forward with the resolution of the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] and vote to apologize. Let there be a first step. It would not hurt. Continuing with Mr. Baker's article, ``Like every country, the United States has a lot of history to apologize for. After apologizing for slavery, we could move ahead to apologizing for what our forebears did to the Indians.'' I am quoting Mr. Baker. I agree, Mr. Baker, why not go ahead and apologize for what was done to the Indians? Who would it hurt? ``Was it genocide? No, the word hadn't been invented until it was all over,'' according to Mr. Baker. ``The words that had Americans spellbound back then were `manifest destiny.' Destiny had given us a continent to populate. The Indians were in the way. Destiny demanded their removal. Such was the argument, anyhow. With that nasty history now far behind, would an apology not be civilized? Would it not show modern Indians how much nicer than our forefathers we are?'' ``Sorry, folks, for the brutality of our morally inferior ancestors. If it had been us in charge with our enlightened new age sensitivity, instead of those immoral old-timers, it would never have happened.'' ``Couldn't we garnish the apology with some substance?'' ``Come on, guys. Be reasonable. It's too late to give it back. Anyhow, we gave you a legal crack at the gambling rackets.'' He is talking to the Indians now. ``Few will quarrel with the government for apologizing to Americans of Japanese ancestry who were put in concentration camps during World War II. Since many who had suffered this monstrous assault are still alive, the apology was not just another piece of posturing.'' In other words, he has introduced the idea of apologizing to the Indians. Then he ridicules the idea of apologizing to the Indians because, after all, the people who did the terrible things to the Native Americans are now dead and we have at least given them a crack at the gambling rackets through the casinos so why do we not just forget it. I think it is most unfortunate that Mr. Baker in this little three paragraphs is ridiculing the whole idea of diplomacy and negotiations, the fact that our ancestors might have taken a different route. There was plenty of land and plenty of everything. The Indians, the native Americans did not have to be treated the way they were in order for America to be great. Maybe there is a lot that would have been different if we had the same sensitivity then that we do have now. Let us not trample or trivialize our present state of morality and our sense of what is right and what is wrong, how different it is now from then. Unfortunately, it came too late in the case of the slaves. It came too late in the case of the native Americans. But understand that there was a different option, a different route and the fact that our ancestors did not follow that route is something that might be worthy of apologizing for. We can apologize, however, for the Japanese and the concentration camps because some of them are still alive. That is kind of weird reasoning. These things stay alive in the conscience of a people forever. They never go away. I am going to point that out in a few minutes from his own examples. To get back to quoting Mr. Russell Baker, ``Many others are still alive who lived in that time and admired Franklin Roosevelt, the man who authorized those camps.'' My father thought Franklin Roosevelt was the greatest man in the world, that ever lived, except for Jesus Christ, I guess, and I almost place Franklin Roosevelt in a similar category. I still think he is a great man, the greatest of all American Presidents. But he made some mistakes. That was one of the mistakes that he made. Anybody who had to make so many decisions for such a long period in such a critical and stressful situation would make mistakes. Franklin Roosevelt made a mistake. We should apologize as we did officially apologize to the Japanese Americans for what happened in World War II. That, we can be proud of. ``For those of us who in 1942 patriotically accepted the camps as necessary for the country's defense, the apology forced us to admit that even we can be terribly wrong when being tossed around by the storms of history.'' That is the kind of reasoning that Mr. Baker applies to the apology to the Japanese for the concentration camps in World War II. Why can we not take the same logic and the same argument and apply it to any mistake that is made in history and that we as a matter of hindsight can see was a mistake? What is wrong with saying that slavery was a grave mistake, a very costly mistake, a very dehumanizing mistake, a very deadly mistake, but it was a mistake that is worthy of at least an apology. Going back to Mr. Baker, ``Where history is concerned, saintly judgment is rarely possible until a century or two has passed.'' Again I agree with Mr. Baker. ``Where history is concerned, saintly judgment is rarely possible until a century or two has passed.'' Now he is contradicting himself in a wholesale manner, because if saintly judgement is only possible after a century or two has passed, then you can only apologize with integrity, with great vision, after people are dead for a while. He began his argument by saying why apologize for something that people did years ago and all of the victims and all of the oppressors are dead. Now he says you can only judge after a century or two has passed. A century or two has passed. Slavery lasted for 232 years but it has been over for more than a century, almost two centuries. Now it is time to reflect and to look at the mistakes and to look at the residue of problems that were caused by the mistakes and to deal with it in a forthright, scientific, logical, reasonable manner. But he says that on the one hand because everybody is dead, why deal with it and on the other hand, you can only pass reasonable judgment until they have been dead for a century or two. ``England may be infected, too, with the apologizing fad.'' Now he is back to his sarcasm and his reductio ad absurdum. Apologizing now is going to be a fad. ``England may be infected, too, with the apologizing fad. There is talk there of apologizing for Britain's indifference to starvation in Ireland during the 19th century potato famine.'' Why not apologize for the indifference of a government? The government made a mistake. A lot of people suffered and died as a result. So why not apologize. ``Tony Blair,'' according to Mr. Baker, ``the new Prime Minister has suggested something of the sort might improve relations with Ireland. Yes, it sounds ridiculous. Northern Ireland is a place where one of the most passionate events of every year is the celebration of a battle fought in 1688 between Protestants and Catholics. The Protestants won and have never for an instant dreamed of apologizing. Ireland seems an unlikely country to relinquish its hatreds after a dose of feel-your- pain sensitivity.'' In other words, he is saying if Tony Blair, the new Prime Minister, should decide to apologize to Ireland for the conduct of the British Government during the potato famine, then it is ridiculous because the Irish would never accept it. They do not believe in apologizing. That is why in Northern Ireland the Catholics are at the necks of the Protestants and this conflict between Protestants and Catholics rages on and on. I would take the opposite approach and say maybe we can break the cycle if Mr. Blair would apologize first and if it would encourage the Catholics to apologize to the Protestants or the Protestants to apologize to the Catholics, maybe you would end this bloodbath in Northern Ireland. Maybe you would begin to have healing and reconciliation in the place of violence. Ireland defies all logic. Northern Ireland defies all logic. All these people are white and they are at each other's throats. All of them are of the same nationality, they are all Irish, and they are at each other's throats. All of them belong to the same religion. They are Christians. Why does the fighting go on and on in Northern Ireland? Probably because no one has dreamed of apologizing. Probably because the old Neanderthal caveman reaction that you must forever and ever consider your enemy an enemy, you must get revenge, you must seek justice, probably because that dominates the thinking of the leadership so much that they cannot entertain another approach. In South Africa, 25 million blacks were dominated by 4 or 5 million whites. The blacks have now taken over. They are the majority. They have control of the government. They chose a different path. Instead of trying to punish, instead of seeking justice and retribution, they have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Their society is taking a very positive movement forward because they are refusing to go for the old Neanderthal caveman reaction of I must punish those who did wrong to me. The whole Judeo-Christian tradition of moving in a different manner has been accepted in South Africa but not in some other places, like Northern Ireland. In Haiti, they have chosen not to go for revenge and justice but to go for reconciliation. Therefore, Haiti is not adding on top of its other many economic problems the problem of a new kind of violence between those who had the upper hand before and those who have the upper hand now. To get back to quoting Mr. Baker, to end his article, ``Apologies for slavery, famine, the Indian wars, can these have any purpose beyond asserting, in a smugly self-congratulatory way, that we are better people than our ancestors? They surely cannot undo the past. A lot of every nation's past is terrible, atrocious, barbaric, but there it is, inescapable, monumental, the work of our dead ancestors many of them no doubt hateful, a few perhaps almost as genteel and high-minded as you and I. Apologizing for them would be as useless and absurd as shaking a fist at the Atlantic Ocean. It is painful to see them patronized by the pious sensitivity crowd.'' Anybody who wants to apologize is now a part of a pious sensitivity crowd. The pious sensitivity crowd is engaged in a fad of apologizing. This does not take us anywhere but back into the caves. It does not move our civilization forward at all. Reconciliation is more important than revenge. That is the lesson that they are learning and South Africa is illustrating. Haiti. In Bosnia we will not have any forward movement until they also accept the principle that reconciliation is more important than revenge. Reconciliation is even more important than justice. Revenge and justice usually require more conflict and more bloodshed. Reconciliation and healing require that victims and injured parties accept the losses of the past and the present as a way of fertilizing the future with promise and hope. Of course in the case of slavery, if we do not recognize anything was done wrong in the past, we cannot complete the healing process. There is an understanding that is not stated in our culture, in our national life, that accepts the fact that slavery was wrong. We fought a great Civil War, and the lives of many white men were lost in the process of setting the slaves free. We recognized that it was wrong and that Abraham Lincoln, under his leadership and those who fought in the Civil War, we have corrected that great national wrong. But on the surface we still need to have greater recognition and discussion of it and not just bury it in our subconscious. If the descendants of the victims of injured parties can accept their losses, then certainly those who were the oppressors ought to accept it and move toward healing and reconciliation. Surely the descendants of oppressors who inflicted the injuries and the atrocities should be able to move on to seek reconciliation and healing. Let me just conclude by saying when Jesus of Nazareth declared that if a man strikes you on one cheek you should turn the other cheek he introduced a radical formula for human behavior. Many Christians insist that this is one instruction they find it hard to follow. It is unnatural, it is a demand or a command for extreme discipline. Turn the other cheek is an acceptance of suffering that mutilates one's masculinity. It destroys one's normal concept of dignity. This is exalted advice that must have come from outside the Earth, for it requires that honor and common sense be surrendered, traded in for a profile of pacifist courage which will probably be labeled as cowardly weakness. The man strikes you on the cheek, then turn the other cheek; we are not asking that kind of activity, that you engage in that kind of activity and you have to suffer when you apologize. It is far easier to apologize than to suffer being struck on the cheek or to carry someone's bag an extra mile when they ask you to carry baggage the extra mile. Instead of Mr. Baker's opposition to apologizing, I propose that in the style of a Vietnam Memorial Wall we should erect a wall that is called the International Monument of Apologies. In the past we have glorified great warriors and conquerors. Now let us lift up and pay homage to all those who apologize. Let us usher in a new era of civilization with ceremonies of apologies. Yes, it is true that most of the apologies will be emotional symbolism. However, symbols and symbolism are life and death matters among human beings. Perhaps at the top of this International Monument of Apologies the Greeks, who have left us so many other symbols, could lead off with an apology. Let the Greeks begin by apologizing to the ghost of a Trojan nation that no longer exists. The Greeks assembled vast war mongering states, and they marched into Troy, they wrecked the place, and when they could not win the battle, they abandoned all international conventions and standards of diplomacy and they tricked the Trojans into getting inside the wall, and then they massacred the women and the children, especially all the males, and they ought to apologize for that. It may be only mythology, it may be fiction, but still it would symbolically lead off the apologizing. Let the Italian Government apologize for the destruction of the ancient land of the Jews and dispersal of their population by the Romans. Let the Italian Government apologize for what Nero and the citizens of ancient Rome did to the early Christians. Let the Spanish and Portuguese apologize for their initiation of the Atlantic slave trade, African slave trade. Let all the nations who participated in slave trade apologize. Let the British apologize for the open war against the Chinese. Let the Japanese apologize for Pearl Harbor. All the nations of ages. You know, why not go forward and build a new kind of civilization on apologizing? There is nothing wrong with having a great wall of international apologies for us to come and contemplate what our Governments have done in the past and are willing to own up to in the present. Let us take our civilization to a new dimension. We readily go to Mars and we land on Mars and applaud the technology and science and how radical that is. Let us in the area of human behavior strike in a new direction. Let us follow the precepts of Judeo-Christian religion. Let us look at that turn the cheek proposition. Let us look at it and build on it and understand that reconciliation and healing are more important than revenge and justice. Let us understand what the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] is trying to do. He is trying to open the door a little wider. Apology comes first, and after that acknowledgment, recognition, more reconciliation and more healing. Our society as a whole and our whole decision making process are on social issues and critical educational issues will all benefit if we recognize that nothing is lost by beginning with a process of apologizing. We have conquered overwhelming external enemies, and now it is time to grow again in America. The stock market and the evidences of prosperity are at an all time high. This is a time for us to strike out for a new moral high ground, a new moral high ground which would be beneficial to all of us in America and to the whole world.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation, I would like to urge the majority to withdraw its opposition to this amendment. This is a very conservative amendment seeking to hold onto the status quo. We are only asking that you continue to do what we were doing before. The chairman before talked about the high-technology world that we are into already and how it is critically necessary that we be able to train people for this high-technology world. Here is a whole pool of people out there who can qualify, that we are ignoring in the traditional approach to vocational education, and too many people at the State and local level are still trapped in the traditional approach. They will not look at the pool of females who are available for some of these areas. It has been mentioned that we ought to open up blue collar jobs to women, and that is good and well, but we do not need to go that far. We have a massive number of jobs being opened every day in the world of the Internet and the world of computer repair and computer maintenance, technicians, mechanics. We have a revolution going on in our school system that we are not fully aware of, that will require large numbers of new kinds of personnel. I have an article that was in the New York Times today about teachers being trained, we need to spend more money to train teachers, and another article about training teachers how to make use of educational technology, computers, and telecommunications apparatus that may be available in the future. We have a $2.2 billion universal fund that is going to allow for discounts to go to schools so that more schools can get telecommunications services and be wired for the Internet. We have a whole category of people out there that this bill really did not take into full consideration. I appreciate the fact that the subcommittee chairman did incorporate language that would recognize the fact that we have a telecommunications and technology revolution underway. We should be doing more to recognize that in this legislation. It really did not do that. And certainly in opposing this bill, which seeks to keep open a new channel that has been opened already, to allow us to take full advantage of the great pool of people out there who are being ignored for these various technician and mechanical applications of high technology that are being opened, and we are going to ignore it if we do not do that. We do not have much monitoring of anything in education anymore. If my colleagues have been out there, they know that nothing is being monitored and enforced. If my colleagues take a step backwards and do not keep this provision in there, it will be a sign to the traditionalists and to the sexists to continue doing things the way they were doing them before we had this provision put into law. So we need to keep going forward and understand where we are in this revolution. I was visiting a Citibank processing center several years ago, where they process their paperwork and bills and so forth, a massive center of people doing high-technology computerized processing, and I noticed most of the people in there were women. They pointed out the fact that women, particularly those who did not have college educations, who are intelligent but do not have a college education, were the best employees for that kind of repetitive job which required a high degree of focus and accuracy. They did not want college-educated women because they got bored, their minds wandered. There is a certainly category, the kind of people we are talking about here, who could fill those jobs if they were given the opportunity, but if we do not open up the vista, if we do not have the people in charge of vocational and technical education. I want to emphasize that vocational education does not mean what it used to mean. We are not talking about automobile mechanics, we are not talking about plasterers, we are not talking about various kinds of people only. We are talking about the full range of jobs that are opening up in our society, which is a high-technology society which requires people who are good technicians, good mechanics, and they have good pay in these areas also. My son is employed in the computer area, and the industry is training people at improvising all along to meet its needs. The jobs pay very well, and women can do those jobs as well as men. But even in this new area, most of the people that are there are men because there is a mind-set that starts with vocational education and career guidance in the schools that we have to break. The Mink amendment breaks that mind-set. The Mink amendment wants to continue what we started before to break that mind-set. We want the traditionalists to understand that the Federal Government is not taking a back seat. We see things from the national and international level that local people do not see. They deserve to have our vision projected. The mandates are really often ways to open up their minds to see new vistas. We see a global economy. We see the great need. We know that there 80,000 jobs out there already not being filled, related in some way to computers and telecommunication and technology. We should provide more leadership by maintaining what we have already. Let us vote positive for the Mink amendment.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, one speaker has implied that we are not serious when we offer this amendment because we know it is not going to pass. I regret that it will not pass. We are reduced to a ceremonial action each year. Once again we are here to impose what I consider a civilized and reason-based ceremony on a very primitive Congress, which goes through a ritual of blindly authorizing more than $30 billion for a CIA that should have been streamlined and downsized at the end of the cold war. By the most conservative estimate in the New York Times, this is $30 billion that we are talking about. We ought to take 5 percent of that, which is $1.5 billion; $1.5 billion may seem like a small amount compared to the overall CIA budget, but our entire proposed initiative by the President on school construction was merely $5 billion over a 5-year period; $5 billion over a 5-year period, which means we could fund the school construction initiative out of this cut and still have $2.5 billion left over for other matters, like the empowerment zones in poverty areas. So we are talking about money that could do a great deal that is probably being wasted in a CIA that is unaccountable. The very basic but baffling instinct and superstition of this congressional village is to insist that tampering with the secret budget of the CIA is taboo. The CIA is untouchable. There is fear that dangerous, invisible demons will rise up and destroy our village if we disturb this almighty Washington wizard. It is not reasonable, what we do here. Downsizing, streamlining, and restructuring are vitally necessary for this Federal agency, just as it was useful in other Federal agencies. The era of big government is over. We are proud to keep repeating that the era of big government is over. The era of the big unaccountable CIA should also be over, but nobody wants to touch the big, unaccountable CIA. We have just heard more than 1 hour of general debate which did not grapple with the following taboo subjects. They did not talk really in the general debate about the failure of the CIA to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, the greatest failure of all. They did not talk about the dangerous and costly interference with administrative diplomatic initiatives, policy initiatives, in Haiti. Somebody just said a few minutes ago that the CIA is the President's secret army. It certainly did not behave like the President's secret army in Haiti, because the President authorized one policy and took one set of initiatives and the CIA was funding the organization in Haiti called FRAPH, which had a big demonstration of wielding pistols, shooting guns, and stopped a peaceful initiative to bring some police officers in to help train the Haitian police. We later had to have a costly military operation in order to deal with the criminals in Haiti. The CIA did it. Emanuel Constanz, who headed that organization, was on the payroll of the CIA. He was arrested for a while and then set free. He is out there free somewhere now. The CIA has never explained their relationship with Emanuel Constanz and the FRAPH organization. The loss of $40 billion in petty cash funds. It was written in the New York Times that the petty cash funds of the National Reconnaissance Agency somehow lost $2 billion first, and later on they said no, it is $4 billion, lost and later recovered, of course. The Aldrich Ames affair. His name has not been mentioned during general debate at all. Aldrich Ames was very dangerous. At least 10 agents, 10 operatives of the CIA, by their own admission, lost their lives, yet Aldrich Ames is alive and well now, and he intimidates the CIA with interviews that he gives from prison. He makes fun of the CIA. Aldrich Ames was said to receive $2 to $3 million for his treason. Harald Nicholson, another highly placed CIA person recently was given 20 years; he will be out in 10 years, for betraying his country, for selling secrets. First it was for $120,000 and later on they said maybe it was $300,000. Who knows how much it was. But this pattern in the CIA occurs at very high levels. Aldrich Ames was a very high level person in charge of the Eastern European and Soviet operation; very high level people are selling out for dollars. Something must be wrong somewhere. It was $7.5 billion that we talked about over a 5-year period. Surely we can use it and put it to better purposes than have it go on existing in this unaccountable agency. If we start with a 5 percent cut, maybe next time it will be a 10 percent cut and maybe next time we will go to the real purpose of restructuring, restructuring the CIA to fit its mission in the present time. Common sense, combined with scientific reasoning, should be allowed to prevail over the primitive kinds of instincts that are employed when we have discussions of the CIA. It is not rational what we are doing, not scientific, not based on reason, not based on the evidence that exists. The CIA budget was increased to deal with the evil empire. The evil empire no longer exists. The evil empire gets aid from us, and they use some of that aid to pay our agents. Russia pays our agents out of some of the aid we give them. Ridiculous.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in vehement opposition to H.R. 2014, the Budget Reconciliation Tax Act. It is appalling that just 1 month ago, Republicans enjoyed photo opportunities and media blitzes in which they celebrated an historic agreement between the White House and the Republican leadership. Unsurprisingly, the parameters of this agreement have begun to unravel and H.R. 2014 represents the consummate slap in the face to everyone who was told that this agreement was honorable and genuinely beneficial to all of the children, women, and men of America. It must be exposed the H.R. 2014 is a moral and economic sneak attack on people who are not lucky enough to be rich, realize capital gains, utilize a corporate depreciation allowance, work on a job that provides real benefits. At a time when individuals are bearing a larger share of the Federal tax burden, H.R. 2014 includes changes to U.S. tax policy which would overwhelmingly benefit the corporate wealth. H.R. 2014 would reduce the capital gains tax and modify the estate tax structure. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the top 20 percent of the U.S. population would receive 87 percent of the benefits, while the bottom 60 percent of the population would receive a paltry 4 percent of these tax benefits. In fact, the wealthiest 1 percent of the population would enjoy a rise in after-tax income of approximately $27,000. And more than half of the benefits of the Republican tax plan would go to the wealthiest 5 percent--people making an average of $250,000 a year. Moreover, H.R. 2014 would deny the highly publicized child tax credit to working-class families. Some families would be able to benefit from the $500 per child tax credit. However, those lower income families who receive the earned income tax credit [EITC] and have no Federal tax liability would be declared ineligible for the child credit--15 million families. Under H.R. 2014, the child tax credit could be nonrefundable and reduced by amounts received by families under EITC or the dependent care tax credit--which pays a portion of child care expenses. This means that a family with two children earning $25,000 per year would not receive the child credit. Republicans argue that the credit is not for families who have no Federal tax liability. Unfortunately, this shortsighted argument presents only half the picture: These families still pay payroll taxes, State taxes, and local taxes. As such, they deserve relief. The Republicans further contend that families already receive a credit [EITC] and should not benefit from another one. This argument is laughable given that the majority is prepared to repeal and scale back the alternative minimum tax [AMT]--a tax that was first levied in 1969 and strengthened in 1986 when it was discovered that corporations took advantage of hundred of billions of dollars' worth of tax breaks and ended up paying no income taxes at all. The scaling back and repeal of AMT is expected to cost U.S. taxpayers an abominable $22 billion over a 10-year period. Because the Tax Code is rife with more than $70 billion in tax breaks, deductions, and credits--corporate welfare--billion- dollar corporations can end up owning $0 in taxes. In despicable disregard for the nonwealthy American worker, Republicans have included a provision in H.R. 2014 that would expand the definition of independent contractor providing employers wholesale freedom to change the classification of their workers from employees to independent contractors. No one prepared the American people for another assault on the average worker and this provision was definitely not apart of the White House-Republican budget agreement. If a worker is classified as an employee then he or she is protected by a myriad of laws regarding minimum wage, overtime pay, workers' compensation, and health care and retirement benefits packages. However, if a worker is classified as an independent contractor, the employer can deny this worker these very basic protections and benefits. It is estimated that millions of workers would be affected should this provision be enacted into law. Finally, H.R. 2014 would provide small tax incentives to economically depressed areas in the District of Columbia--a laudable goal at first glance. However, given the overall economic hunger in many U.S. cities, including our Capital City, the crumbs in this bill are grossly inadequate. The bill would designate a number of areas in the District of Columbia as enterprise zones for 5 years--four specific areas and any census tract where the poverty level is at least 35 percent. However, the Democratic substitute bill would expand the number of current empowerment zones from 9 to 29--and the number of enterprise communities from 20 to 100. Empowerment zones receive a combination of tax incentives and Federal grants in order to enhance employment opportunities and encourage community development in blighted areas. In 1994, when the first round of Federal EX's and EC's was completed, out of the 500 applications, only 29 were awarded. There are hundreds of cities in the United States with double-digit unemployment rates and high poverty rates and the Republicans wish to focus only on the District of Columbia--a city where a great deal of media attention is concentrated. We cannot be satisfied by this pittance when the overall need is so dramatic. The Children's Defense Fund, Public Citizen, National Low-Income Housing Coalition, AFL-CIO, the National Education Association, and two dozen other organizations have circulated a letter to Members of Congress in collective opposition to the regressive tax cuts that are included in H.R. 2014. They state unequivocally, We * * * urge you to oppose significant tax cuts for our Nation's wealthiest citizens. * * * The budget accord diverts important resources to tax reductions * * * we hope you will focus on moderate tax cuts for low and middle-income Americans, not tax subsidies for the wealthy that have little economic rationale and blow a hole in the deficit. I challenge my colleagues to declare the Republican crown jewel null and void. Send it back to the drawing board and bring the American people and this Congress a bill that is fair and genuinely poised to provide the economic relief that is needed by all of our communities and families. A great injustice is taking place. Vote ``no;; on H.R. 2014.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the students of Clara Barton High School of Brooklyn, NY. They have not been celebrated as sports heroes. They are not entertainment celebrities. But a tradition has been established in academic excellence at Clara Barton High School. These students have tirelessly dedicated themselves to achieving academic excellence. Clara Barton High School recently won fourth place in the ``We the People * * * The Citizen and the Constitution'' competition sponsored by the Center for Civic Education. This national competition is organized to encourage young people to learn more about our Constitution and how our Government works. In this competition, students demonstrate their knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights before simulated congressional committees composed of constitutional scholars, lawyers, journalists, and Government leaders. Students compete as classes after completing a comprehensive course of study on the Constitution to qualify for the competition. The national finalists must win congressional district and State competitions to advance to this point. This is the second time Clara Barton has placed fourth in the contest and the sixth time that they have made it to the national finals as State champions. It is quite evident that something great is going on at Clara Barton High School. I congratulate the members of the team from Clara Barton High School in my district in Brooklyn. My hat goes off to you. I want to congratulate each student because I think this is part of the process of creating an environment in America where education is exalted, where academic and intellectual activities are raised to a new level. We must create an atmosphere where our students are inspired and given incentives to strive for excellence. These are the students who strive for excellence in understanding the Bill of Rights and the Constitution: Nicole Aljoe, Munira Basir, Letricia Bennett, Michelle Bennett, Katherine Bernard, Slahudin Bholai, Dafina Westbrook-Broady, Keusha Carrington, Shakira Chang, Calvin Coleman, Dean Douglas, Nirva Dube, Iesha Etheridge, Jonathan Ewars, Migdalia Feliberty, Sean Forde, Sharkara Godet, Oslen Grant, Moshesh Harris, Rochelin Herold, Christopher Hubbard, Sonia Hurble, Tiffany Jefferson, Generva John, Anthony Marin, Anisah Miley, Travis Moorer, Calistia Nanton, Franchelica Nunez, Damian O'Connor, Ayo Ogun, Emmanuel Onasile, Tamara Osbourne, Charlene Palmerm, Carolina Perez, Natalie Pierre, Raquel Rivera, Tanisha Simpson, Camille Sinclair, Vysaisha Singh, Vijay Sookedo, Sharon St. Hill, Karrien Stone, Naquida Taylor, and Andrea Telford. The students at Clara Barton High School come from very diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. It was the most diverse team to appear at the national contest. The diversity of my district is reflected in the names of these children. My district has Cambodian, Chinese and Pakistani residents. There are a whole array of people from all of the islands of the Caribbean including Haitians. It is a wonderful mixture, and represents a part of America's rainbow. I wish to congratulate Dr. Leo Casey who was the teacher and coach of the Clara Barton team. Thanks to Dr. Casey such a winning tradition at Clara Barton High School has been established. This clearly shows his talent for nurturing the academic achievements of the students. I also want to congratulate Mrs. Florence Smith, a former high school teacher, who served as the volunteer coordinator for my office. If Members want to talk about volunteer services in harmony with the great conference recently held in Philadelphia here is an example of the kind of volunteers that we have in America. There are committed people who retire and, in some cases, spend more time in volunteer activities after retirement than they did when they were working. Congratulations to all the people who made it happen. In my congressional district, the Clara Barton High School team is sponsored not only by my office but by the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission. In fact, the money raised to first send this team to Albany and Washington, DC was gathered by the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission. There are some other organizations that have also become sponsors. Children's Times is a publication on education. Judge Thomas Jones and his wife have been very instrumental in encouraging the young people at Clara Barton High School and in raising money to make certain that they were able to go to Albany and Washington, DC. So it has become a group enterprise of great magnitude. It is one of those activities that we should see more of nationwide. I salute the Clara Barton High School championship team from the 11th Congressional District of New York for their outstanding performance. I would also like to congratulate all the schools and all the youngsters across America who are champions in intellectual and academic activities.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to the Budget Reconciliation Spending Act (H.R. 2015). Nothing is more important than the discussion of the budget. Our Nation's values are all locked up into the way it proceeds with its budget. What we really care about we should discover by watching what is included in the budget and understanding that what is really important to this Nation should be reflected in its budget. H.R. 2015 contains numerous modifications to entitlement programs--programs that are the last resort for many of America's children, women, and families. While Congress is moving forward in the budget process, my colleagues must be reminded that our starting point--the White House-Republican budget agreement--was insufficient, especially in the area of education. We should have a budget which is not apologizing for the amount of money in it for education. It is crucial that we bring 21st century technology into our 19th century schools. The GAO estimates that we need $135 billion to rebuild our Nation's schools. My colleague from New York, Representative Lowey, introduced a bill to forward the President's $5 billion initiative to stimulate funding to rebuild America's schools. These funds were not included in the White House- Republican agreement. Without the school construction initiative proposed by the President, many of the schools that have the greatest needs will not have the buildings to provide a safe and decent place for children to learn. The second area, is Head Start. There are an estimated 2.1 million children eligible for the Head Start Program. According to an analysis by the National Education Association, $11 billion is required to ensure that all of these children have access to early childhood learning, a crucial component in their developmental process. The funding necessary to serve these future American taxpayers again was not a part of the historic agreement. What message are we sending to the Nation by not funding this vital program for children 4 years old and under? Today, we enter the stage in the budget process where permanent spending priorities are being proposed under H.R. 2015. The entitlement programs with the largest reduction in this bill are Medicare--$115 billion--and Medicaid--$11 billion. Why do we continue to cut Medicare and Medicaid? We do need to address Medicare and Medicaid in a new way, and stop the assumption that these programs are where most of the money is, and therefore justify proposals to cut Medicare and Medicaid. The savings that Medicare will yield will come from cutting payments to providers, $102 billion, mainly hospitals and health care plans, as well as $12.9 billion in increased premiums in Medicare part B to be paid by the Medicare beneficiaries. That was yesterday's language. Today, the Republicans tell us that the increased premiums will be paid by some beneficiaries. These beneficiaries are described by their income percentage of the poverty level. For example, beneficiaries with incomes between 100 percent and 135 percent of the poverty level will not have Medicare part B premium increases; but, for those with incomes between 135 percent and 175 percent of the poverty level, the measure will cover that portion of the premium that is attributable to the transfer of home health services from Medicare part A to part B. Who will decide whether those with income at the 135 percent of poverty level be considered in the free category or premium increased category? Why are we being forced to move in a way which will penalize our elderly and our poor people? The bill includes $16 billion over 5 years for a new child health assistance block grant. While $16 billion is better than nothing, it is estimated that the plan is far short of reaching one-half of the 10 million children who are without health coverage. Why has this funding for children's health care been changed to a block grant? Under the block grant concept, funds would be distributed to States based on the State's share of uninsured children, and then adjusted for the average cost of health. This appears to be a ball of confusion to me. We were grateful for the small step forward when we asked for funds to insure one-half of the uncovered children. Yet, the Congressional Budget Office recently released figures that indicate as few as 500,000 children would benefit from the block grant proposal. 500,000 is a mere drop in the bucket and embarrassingly short of the dramatic health care needs of this country's children. Just a week ago, I welcomed the joint resolution celebrating the end of slavery in the United States. I thought that it was a small gesture. However, it is an important one for a lot of Americans, both black and white, and I was pleased to see that not a single Member of the House of Representatives voted against this joint resolution introduced by the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Watts]. But today, when I see certain provisions included in the Welfare-to-Work Program, my pleasure is gone. The resolution that passed last week was simply a nonbinding, politically correct bill. Yet, today we are considering a bill that could become permanent law and would resort to a declassification of workers in the Workfare Program. I see benefits that every American in the workplace share not included in the welfare program. These workers, because they receive temporary assistance for needy families, would not be considered employees and would be deprived of protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. These workers, both white and black, would be treated as second-class citizens. They would not be covered by the Equal Pay Act, title VII civil rights protection's SHA, or the family leave laws. Because they receive temporary assistance for needy families they are not protected against sexual harassment as other workers. This regulation states that ``women subject to sexual harassment on a welfare-to-work assignment could be required to seek redress from the very agency that employed them.'' H.R. 2015 contains no appeals rights, and no court redress for workfare participants. Where is this Nation going? Where are our values? We have laws that protect all other workers from sexual harassment in the workplace. Are we sending the message that it is alright to sexually harass poor or needy women? This sounds like slavery all over again. In direct breach of the so-called budget agreement, H.R. 2015 would sanction the discrimination and gross mistreatment of workfare participants. Yesterday, the New York Times documented a tragedy in which a 50-year-old Workfare participant in New York died on her job. Apparently, this individual suffered from coronary heart disease and was not able to work. Yet, the individual's well-documented medical history was allegedly ignored. The Times revealed that many workfare workers have complained about genuine health problems, and were still forced to work in conditions inimical to their health. And Congress' unconscionable answer to this is to ensure that wronged workfare workers have no Federal protections. Moreover, H.R. 2015 reneges on the White House-Republican budget agreement's promise to restore benefits to legal, disabled immigrants who face termination from the SSI program in October. H.R. 2015 would ensure that those immigrants who received SSI before the date of the welfare reform bill's enactment, August 22, 1996, will continue to receive them. However, no provisions are made for those elderly, legal immigrants who were in the country by August 22 and became disabled after this date. At best, the omission of this protection reveals a distorted understanding of an agreement. At worst, it indicates a careless, despicable disregard for our legal immigrants who lack the ability to secure the resources needed to sustain a minimum standard of living. Undoubtedly, this bill still needs more work. This Nation's budget must reflect our values. Our values do not rob the poor and our children to provide for the rich. We must educate our children, all ages. We must build new schools. We must provide child health care for all needy children. We must keep freedom alive for all citizens. And we must do all of this without cutting Medicare and Medicaid, thereby, penalizing our elderly and our poor. I urge my colleagues to reject this shameful budget bill and vote ``no'' against H.R. 2015.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I suppose I would really be continuing the dialog that was began more than an hour ago by my colleagues in the Democratic Party and was just continued by two of my colleagues in the Republican majority. Nothing is more important than a discussion of the reconciliation package that will be voted on tomorrow, we hope, and the tax package that will be voted on. The budget and appropriations and taxes are the meat of government. Nothing is more important than what we do with the money of the taxpayers, and we cannot discuss it too much. I hate to be redundant, but I think we have to give due attention to that which is most important and hope that the American people understand that the final decision is in their hands. It is a matter of common sense as to what we want to do with our money. It is the American taxpayers' money. The taxes do belong to them, my colleagues in the Republican majority are correct, and they ought to have more of their money to spend. The taxpayers should have their money. It is very interesting, though, that my colleagues that were talking a few minutes ago from the Republican majority about guaranteeing that future generations will not be saddled with debt, guaranteeing that we will reduce the large size of government and the size of the budget, they voted for the continued funding of the B-2 bomber. We just had an historic vote yesterday on the floor of this House where the B-2 bomber, which at a minimum will absorb about $27 billion away from domestic programs in future years, and force us to keep the budget at a higher level than it really should be, force us to give less money back to the American public, the B-2 bomber was discussed, debated on this floor for several hours. It was pointed out that the President says we should not spend our money on the B-2 bomber. The Joint Chiefs of Staff said we should not spend our money on the B-2 bomber. The Air Force says we should not spend our money on the B-2 bomber. The goals, the objectives that would be met by the B-2 bomber program can be met in cheaper ways. We have B-1 bombers, we have other ways to accomplish the same purposes. All of it was stated quite clearly. But nevertheless, a majority voted to continue spending money on the B-2 bomber, the same people who said they want to save our children from having to live in a world where the Federal debt burdens them unduly. We have contradictions here. Everything that is said here relates to everything. We cannot separate the statements about protecting children from future debts from the almost phenomenal intent to continue funding the defense budget at levels which are almost as high as they were in the cold war. We are spending more than all of the other nations put together for defense, and that certainly is driving a situation which denies a greater amount of tax relief for the American taxpayer. On the matter of tax relief, we saw a clear statement here when my Democratic colleagues were on the floor. They had charts here which were really compelling in their simplicity. They say one picture can say more than a thousand words. Well, those two charts said more than 1 million words. They had two charts here, one which showed the nature of the Republican tax cut package, and the other the nature of the proposed Democratic tax cut package. You would think you were looking at some piece of modern art by Andy Warhol or some other experimental artist, and that some kind of trick was being played when you looked at those two charts. The two charts were mirror images, mirror images of each other. The figures 91 and 19 stick out, 91 million and 19 million. If you look at the Democratic chart you can see a large chart on one side which says that most of the Democratic tax cut, as opposed to the tax cut package, most of the money goes to the 91 million Americans who are in the middle class. The 91 million who are in the middle class will receive most of the tax cut proposed by the Democrats. Only 19 million of the richest Americans would benefit greatly by the Democratic proposed tax cut package. When you look at the Republican tax package, it is just the opposite. Nineteen million of the richest Americans would receive two-thirds of the tax cut, and 91 million in the middle class will receive only one- third; one-third, two-thirds, mirror images. For the Democrats two- thirds of the tax cut goes to the middle class, one-third to the richest Americans. The Republicans, two-thirds goes to the richest Americans, one-third to the middle class. We could not get a more dramatic contrast than that. We could not get a simpler contrast than that. The contrast is obvious. The difference between the two parties, if you want it in summary form, you can see it in summary form right there without going into the details. But of course, there are more details to go into in terms of how do we spend that. That is how we get the revenue. The tax package talks about revenue that will be no longer be collected. On the other hand, we have a reconciliation package which includes the expenditure side: How should we spend the money that will be spent in this year's budget. Again, we get a display of the difference between the two parties. But I am not going to be redundant and repeat all of the things that have been said by the previous speakers in the previous 2 hours, but I do want to make it clear that what I have to say is related. It is related very much to it. I have a hodge-podge of concerns tonight. One is the fact that today, in the New York Times, there were photographs of two very important African-American women, photographs of two very important African- American women. Both are related to very sad occasions. We are saddened by the death of Betty Shabazz, whose photograph was on the front page of the New York Times today. Betty Shabazz was the wife of Malcolm X, and her life in the last 10 years or perhaps her life since the death of her husband has been like a Greek tragedy. She saw her husband gunned down in front of her eyes while her daughters were sitting there with her, in the great assassination that took place in Harlem when Malcolm X was killed. She has seen a lot of adversity since then. Finally, the adversity reached its climax when she had received third degree burns over 80 percent of her body. She fought for her life for the past few weeks, and finally she gave up. It is most unfortunate. It is like, as I said before, a Greek tragedy. You would not believe it if you did not see it unfold before your very eyes, the incidents that led up to Betty Shabazz' final death related to her grandson and her daughter. I will not go into all the details there, but she was a great lady. We will hear a lot about her in the coming next few days and weeks. The things that will be said about her by other people are not quite the same as the things that I have said. She was a great lady because I saw her in a lot of places where there were no cameras, places where she got no credit, no glamor. There was no glamor there. I saw her in places where very few people bothered to go, for good cause. If there was a good cause there and she could do something to help, she showed up. Little people relied on her to do certain kinds of things, and she was always there. You can praise people for their intelligence, for their education. She had a Ph.D. She educated herself after her husband's assassination. She raised her daughters, a model mother and all that. You can praise people for many reasons: intellect, education, integrity. There are a number of things you can praise people for. I am impressed by all of those, but most of all I am impressed when people are good, basically good at heart. She was the kind of person who was basically good at heart. Deep in her fiber she wanted to do the right thing. You do not meet many people like that. Her motivation was to do good. She was a good person. Say all else that you want to say about her to glorify her, and there are many good things you can say, but underneath it what I appreciated most about Betty Shabazz is she was a good person. There was another photograph of a black woman in the New York Times today. Nobody knows her name across America or in New York City or in the neighborhoods. I had just heard of her for the first time. Her name is Marsha Motipersad. Marsha Motipersad was a workfare worker. She was a workfare worker who died on the job at 50, a 50-year-old workfare participant who had a heart condition. Everybody knew it. She had formerly been a secretary at the Children's Aid Society, and she had to leave her secretarial job in 1994 because she had had two heart attacks, two heart attacks. Here is a middle-class lady with skills in the work force who, for health reasons, was driven out of the work force, and I do not know what complications took place that led her to the point where all she could get was welfare. She ended up on welfare. The workfare programs come along, and despite her condition they said she had to go out and go to work in the parks department. With her heart condition and all the stress, et cetera, she dropped dead. I want to talk more about her later, but it is interesting that on this day the New York Times has photographs of two African-American women. I thought that was worth noting. I would also like to note some good news. On this day there was an announcement that Bill Gates, the millionaire, billionaire, multi- billionaire owner of Microsoft, announced a plan to give $200 million to libraries. He has already given money to libraries. In fact, one in my district in the Flatbush area is the recipient of one of Bill Gates' early grants, the Microsoft early grant. Bill Gates clearly wants to build on the example set by Andrew Carnegie. Everybody knows that Andrew Carnegie built libraries all over America. More than 2,000 libraries were built by Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Corporation. Many are still standing. The legacy of Andrew Carnegie goes on. Bill Gates wants to take one more step and bring those libraries into the age of cyberspace, and put computers and software in libraries. I can think of no more daring and productive innovation than that, to really put them in public libraries where everybody will have access to them. I am particularly proud of that because I am a librarian by profession, and I worked in a public library. I spent my first 8 years in the work force in the Brooklyn Public Library. The Brooklyn Public Library is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. It all comes together. We go off into cyberspace training, and the complexities of trying to get low-income people in areas like my district the kind of training that they need in the area of computer literacy and computer utilization, nothing is more important than that, than that they are going to be able to be in a position to improve themselves. We need computer literacy in order to be employed, to gain promotions, and to go up in the work force today. What Bill Gates has done is a very practical thing, so it is good news. I want to tie them all together, Mr. Speaker, the death of Marsha Motipersad, the good news that Bill Gates has, tie it all together in my discussion of the plan outlined by Speaker Gingrich on June 18. The Speaker responded to the President, who was taking a new initiative on race relations in America. The President's initiative has been criticized as being hollow and of little meaning because it is all talk. But as I said last week, in the beginning was the word. Words are very important. Words set in motion a chain reaction. They do not necessarily lead to productive action always, but no productive action takes place without words. There is nothing more practical than a good theory, nothing more practical than an idea. Ideas often take shape and they do not get any fulfillment, they never get realized, but you do not get anything realized unless it starts first as an idea, so words and ideas are very important. I applaud the President's initiative in launching a discussion of race relations. By discussing, we may solve some problems. By discussing, we may get some new perspectives on the race relations problem in America. Discussion may stimulate some new visions, and certainly the President is to be applauded, because look at the results. Right away you get a reaction and a response from probably the second most powerful politician in America. There is the President first, and then we have Speaker Gingrich. He responded. So you have the President launching the discussion and now Speaker Gingrich responding, so we have a focus and a discussion on race relations that could not have been achieved in such a short period of time in any way, any other way. So I congratulate the President. He is off and running, and I suppose if he has started the discussion and Speaker Gingrich has responded, no other significant elected official and national leader can afford not to talk about this now. They cannot afford not to be part of the discussion. Not only did the Speaker choose to respond, but the Speaker set forth a 10-point program, a very fascinating program. I agree with more than 50 percent of it, at least, at least 50 percent of it. The Speaker's 10-point program is worthy of discussion, and it relates directly to our vote tomorrow on the tax package, on the reconciliation package, on the expenditure part of the reconciliation package. It has a direct relationship. There is a direct relationship to our vote yesterday, the vote on the B-2 bomber, the vote which failed. I voted against the continuing funding of the B-2 bomber. The B-2 bomber drains money out of a budget that now we are trying to balance by the year 2002. If the B-2 bomber stays in the budget, it is going to offset and push out expenditures for education. It will push out expenditures for health care. It will force the party in power to play tricks with the budget the way the majority is playing tricks now with expenditures. They say that we have a $16 billion program to provide health care for 5 million children. That was the agreement of the White House. But the way they are playing with those dollars, we have been told now on good authority that only 500,000 children would be covered, and we are not sure of that. Because of the way they choose to pass out the money to the States and the Governors, we cannot be sure that even 500,000 children will be covered by the program. So those kinds of tricks and that kind of preoccupation with distributing money for political gain, or to reward your friends in your class, in your class, your category, they talk about class warfare, we are passing out money to certain classes of people all the time. Who are the people benefiting from the B-2 bomber? Why did we have a majority of people on this floor vote to keep funding a B-2 bomber that nobody wants in Government? The President does not want it, as I said before, and the military people do not want it. It all relates. The Speaker's 10-point program cannot be divorced from what is happening here on the floor. He is the leader. He has command of the majority of the votes. Very interesting that the New York Times' account of the Speaker's 10-point program states that he gave the program at a meeting related to a foundation to help orphans. I will read from the article. It appears in the Thursday, June 19, New York Times, if anybody is interested in the entire article. I will begin at the very beginning. It is an article by Stephen Holmes, and I quote: In the Republicans' first major response to President Clinton's recent speech on race relations, Speaker Newt Gingrich tonight sketched out a 10-point program to promote racial healing and black achievement that he said relied more on specific steps and less on theory, talk, and affirmative action. The Speaker has taken a very ambitious step. He is going to promote racial healing and black achievement. I applaud that. That is a positive step forward. Let us join the Speaker in his attempt to promote racial healing and black achievement. I do not debate or doubt his sincerity. How are we going to get there, is what I would like to see in his 10- point program. He lays out how he wants to promote racial healing and black achievement. Let us talk about that in detail in a few minutes. Let me read more of the introduction. In his remarks, Mr. Gingrich sought to outline an upbeat, can-do approach to solving the country's problems of race and poverty by focusing on individual achievement and not necessarily the advancement of any particular group. Mr. Gingrich's speech came 4 days after President Clinton used a commencement address at the University of California at San Diego to call on the country to engage in an honest conversation about racial issues. By announcing his 10-point program, the Republican leader sought to paint a contrasting portrait between his remarks and the President's speech, which was largely devoid of specifics, aside from a defense of affirmative action and the announcement of a blue ribbon Commission to study race relations and make recommendations. I am reading from the New York Times article of June 19. I continue. We thank the President for wishing to continue the dialog on race last weekend, Mr. Gingrich said; but frankly, there has been much talk on this issue and very little action of the sort which will dramatically change people's lives. Later in an interview, Mr. Gingrich said he hoped to meet with the President's Commission soon and that he would urge its members to focus their attention on what he termed barriers to minority advancement. I think that is also a very ambitious goal, a very ambitious statement by the Speaker. I applaud that. I certainly would like to do everything to help him accomplish that. He wants to meet with the Commission, just as I would like to meet with the Commission, a lot of other people. And I hope we will have the opportunity and pour out our recommendations to the Commission, but the Speaker is there first. I applaud his timeliness. To continue quoting from the New York Times article, this is a quote from Speaker Gingrich himself, what they really should design over the next year is, let us look at the specific pragmatic real changes and real barriers to participation. He said, if we could then knock down the barriers, as people participate, concerns about race will dramatically decline. I am reading from the New York Times article. That was the Speaker's statement. To continue to quote the Speaker from the article: What I said last year was that we have to put in the context of a broader solution of affirmative outreach to individuals any effort to eliminate quotas and set-asides, he said. And I spent the past year, frankly, working to develop a program that was comprehensive. In other words, Mr. Gingrich's 10-point program is his alternative to affirmative action, his alternative to affirmative action and his proposal to do things, I am sure, beyond affirmative action. So the Speaker is to be applauded. He is on board. The President is to be applauded for initiating this activity. Let us all run to catch up with the Speaker. Welfare reform is on the Speaker's list of 10 points. He proposes, in his 10-point program, that we should take the next step in welfare reform by fostering and promoting innovative local job training, welfare-to-work and entry-level employment programs to move welfare recipients into the work force. We have talked about welfare reform for, this is our third year of discussion. Unfortunately, we passed, the Congress passed, I voted against it, but Congress passed welfare reform legislation and the President unfortunately signed it. We are off and running. We are off and running now. And I do not find anywhere any details of any innovative local job training program. The assumption was there are jobs out there. You move people from welfare to work. If you are moving them to work, then work is there. We have a great debate now here in the House and in the Capitol about whether these people who are moved from welfare to work are really employees. Can you imagine? We have talked for years about they should go to work. Once they go to work, we say, well, they are not really employees. Are we moving them from welfare to work, or are we moving them from welfare to some other category, something in between work and welfare? We did not know there was anything that existed. If they are going to work, they are employees. Why are certain people insisting that they not be considered employees? Because if they are employees in the United States of America, there is a law called the Fair Labor Standards Act. Fair Labor Standards Act says if you are an employee, you have to be paid the minimum wage. If you are an employee, there are certain working conditions that you are entitled to. You fall under the OSHA provisions, Occupation, Safety and Health Administration. If you are an employee, you have certain rights with respect to discrimination in the workplace. You have certain rights with respect to sexual harassment. Employees in America have certain rights. Part of the definition of being an employee in America is that all that is there to help protect you. The workplace is a place of privilege. The workplace is a place, as a result of the New Deal and all of the legislation that we formulated over the years, the workplace is not just a plantation. The workplace is something we try to make a place of fairness, a place where workers have a chance to earn a living without being oppressed and without being in any danger or harm and also being paid some kind of reasonable wage. So welfare reform is off and running. Large numbers of people in New York City are on workfare. They are being moved out of welfare. They are already working. People who are adults without children have been forced into a program called WEP, the Work Experience Program. The Work Experience Program refuses to pay minimum wage. This is a program that Marsha Motipersad was in before she died, Marsha Motipersad, a secretary of the Children's Aid Society until she had two heart attacks. She had to leave her job in 1994, and eventually she had no resource except to go on welfare. So she died, working in the Work Experience Program, 22 hours a week. The requirement was that she work 22 hours a week to cover her cash and food stamps benefits. The cash and food stamps benefits that she received are equivalent to $250 a month, according to the New York Times article of Tuesday, June 24. I have not calculated this myself. I find it hard to believe, I find it hard to believe that we would require a person to work 22 hours a week for $250 a month; 22 hours a week means, that is 88 hours for the month, 88 hours for the month to earn to be eligible for $250. So Marsha Motipersad, who dropped dead on her job, was being required to work 22 hours a week for food stamps and her cash benefits, which totaled $250 a month, according to the New York Times. This is the welfare reform that we have at present. The Speaker proposes in his 10- point program that we have a real program, innovative job training, entry-level employment programs. Where are they, Mr. Speaker? How fast can we move? How rapidly can we put them in place? How many more Marsha Motipersads are out there? How many people have died already? Is there something wrong, Mr. Speaker, with requiring a person who has had two heart attacks to go to work for her food stamps? In the richest country that ever existed on the face of the earth, can we not have some provision to avoid having a woman who has had two heart attacks go to work for her food stamps? Let me read to you from this article of June 24 in the New York Times. Quote: A 50-year-old workfare participant with heart problems died on the job, prompting questions about the city's ability to determine whether some of its workfare laborers might be too sick to work. The worker, Marsha Motipersad, whose heart disease had forced her to leave her job in 1994 as a secretary with the Children's Aid Society after 17 years, died of a heart attack on June 17. Ms. Motipersad, who had first been categorized as not employable, she had first been called nonemployable by the Human Resources Administration because of her health problems, but she was recently recharacterized as employable and ordered into the city's Work Experience Program. Mr. Speaker, here is one reason we need to hurry and get a real system in place so we are not brutalizing people and making these kinds of mistakes. What we have is makeshift things happening out there. We rushed the welfare reform program into place so rapidly, it could have been made effective a year after the date of enactment. It could have been all kinds of things to phase it in. But we cared so little about the people on the very bottom, poorest people in America, that we rushed into a program that was bound to generate blunders and hardships of this kind. Henry Stern, the City Parks Commissioner, reading from the article that appeared in the New York Times, Henry Stern, the City Parks Commissioner, said that Ms. Motipersad has been assigned to light duty and had worked as a timekeeper in the office, but that he had ordered an investigation into what work she had actually been doing. In a blundering makeshift system, maybe somebody did do the right bureaucratic thing and note that she should not be given the hard work, but it is a blundering new system. People are thrown into the parks department where workers who are there, paid civil servants, are resentful of the fact that workfare people are being brought in to replace their colleagues. The parks department has been downsized from 7,000 jobs to 4,000 jobs; 3,000 people who were full-time civil servants at one time are no longer there. And they have these thousands of people coming in as workfare participants, welfare recipients, working for almost nothing. So some of the people who are there, they resent these people. So she probably was deliberately not assigned a light job because there was resentment there that she was even there. He ordered an investigation, the commissioner, into what work she had actually been doing. Others, including the woman's son and some of the workers that she worked with, said Ms. Motipersad had talked of having to occasionally pick up garbage on the beach and the boardwalk, and she said she told them she feared for her health as a result. She had to go out and work like the other workers in terms of picking up trash on the beach and the boardwalk, even though there was a notation in her file that said she should be assigned light duty. Her son said, I told her not to do it, that I would help pick up the slack with the money; and she said she could not stay at home because she had to pay her rent. Evelyn Selby, a neighbor and WEP worker with Ms. Motipersad in Coney Island, said that they both had to rise at 4:30 each morning and they used to take three buses to get to their assignment. Quote: I would have to wait for her as she climbed the steps and such. She was always behind. This is what her friend and companion says about Ms. Motipersad, who had had two heart attacks. She had to get up at 4:30 in the morning. By the time she gets to work catching three buses, she is already so stressed out until it is amazing that she did not die in the first few days with this kind of forced activity. Officials with H.R.A. said that Ms. Motipersad had within the last several months been reevaluated by a doctor with Health Services Systems, a privatized agency that had a contract from the city agency to evaluate these people to see if they were really sick when they said they were sick. The official said that Ms. Motipersad had been denied Federal disability benefits, known as Supplemental Security Income, SSI, because she was not deemed disabled. Now, what is our Supplemental Security Income for? If a person who is 50 years old, has had two heart attacks is not eligible for disability, then who is? A person who is a secretary and was forced to give up her job as a secretary because of a heart condition, if she is not deemed disabled, then who is? So the Federal bureaucracy has a role in failing Ms. Motipersad also. ``She had some health problems but was deemed stable,'' says Renelda Higgins, a spokeswoman for the Human Resources Administration. ``Life and Health Issues are not static.'' I am quoting the bureaucrat, Ms. Higgins. ``Life and health issues are not static. Individuals are reevaluated. She was on medication and she was taking her medication.'' She had two heart attacks and she was taking her medication. And they sent her out on the beach to pick up trash. I had heart bypass surgery, and I do not want to go out on the beach and pick up anybody's trash. I know what would happen to me. I never had a heart attack, but I had a situation where I had heart bypass surgery. And I would not risk my life on a beach on a hot day picking up trash. But she was evaluated by this bureaucrat who said she is taking her medication, let her go to work. Others, including her family and lawyers representing workfare participants and Acorn, a nonprofit group that is working with unionized workfare laborers, called into question both the adequacy of the health evaluation done by the city's contractor, the private contractor, as well as the wisdom of forcing Mrs. Motipersad to work for her benefits. Mrs. Motipersad, according to Mr. Stern, worked 22 hours a week for her cash and food stamp benefits and they total about $250 a month. The city requires welfare recipients up to age 60 to work for their benefits. It says medical evaluations are done of all recipients in workfare who have a history of health problems. Part of the rationale for making such people work for benefits, city officials have said, is to obtain a straightforward return for their expenditure. The city, in fact, has created a subcategory of welfare worker. It is called employable with limitations. Such recipients are supposed to be assigned office work. What recipients of workfare have said from its inception, they have complained that the city has hired doctors who did not seriously investigate real and formidable health problems. People with asthma have been told of being put to work in office basements. And others talk of 3-minute examinations by this city- employed health evaluation agency without any acknowledgment of their own doctors' evaluations. The Legal Aid Society has filed suit on behalf of recipients who were categorized as ``employable with limitations,'' but nonetheless, they were sent to sanitation garages and the like. Mrs. Motipersad was forced to give up her job at the Children's Aid Society, as I said before, in 1994, after two heart attacks. She briefly collected disability benefits, and her son yesterday produced notes from doctors recommending that she not work because she had coronary artery disease. Here is an individual whose photo would never have appeared in the New York Times, otherwise a plain and simple person, a member of the middle class, worked 17 years as a secretary in a reputable agency and, because of circumstances related to her health, wound up in the workfare program. She was kicked off. She was told she would be kicked off of welfare, she would not get her $250 a month if she did not go out and work for the Parks Department. So point No. 1, Mr. Speaker, welfare reform. Take the next step in welfare reform by fostering and promoting innovative local job training, welfare to work and entry-level employment programs to move welfare recipients into the work force, a systematic well-structured program to deal with trying to help poor people move from welfare to work. We are all in favor of that. But the job has not even begun, Mr. Speaker. I urge you to use your power to implement your recommendation. It is here. It is part of your 10-point program. This is based on a list of the 10 points in the New York Times as excerpts of the prepared text of a speech by the Speaker. Point No. 2: Civil rights. The Speaker says, ``We should clear the existing backlog of discrimination cases at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission by enforcing existing civil rights laws, rather than trying to create new ones by regulatory decree.'' Mr. Speaker, I wholeheartedly agree with you. We should clear the existing backlog of discrimination cases at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. You have the power. You have the power over the appropriations process. The fact that they have a backlog is due to the fact that they have been downsizing, the number of employees have been cut. A proposal from this House could help to solve this problem right away. I agree with the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Gingrich], we do not need to talk about race relations. Let us go ahead and do something practical to promote race relations. Clear up the backlog at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. It is a statement of the second most powerful person here in Washington, DC, the gentleman from Georgia, Speaker Newt Gingrich. Get on with the business. We will support the Speaker 100 percent. The Speaker says we should have more home ownership, ease the path toward home ownership by giving local communities and housing authorities the flexibility and authority to more effectively efficiently house low-income Americans. We must also expand faith-based charities, such as Habitat for Humanity, which grow families as well as build homes. I agree with the Speaker a hundred percent. We would like to ease the path toward home ownership by giving local communities and housing authorities the flexibility that they need. They also have to have increased funding to take care of the repairs, renovations of existing public housing. And we also have a shortage of housing in many cities. The fact that large numbers of people are homeless can be related to the fact that we have built very little public housing over the last 10 years. As the rate of construction of public housing and the availability of opportunities and publicly subsidized housing went down, the number of homeless people increased. It is also more expensive in many areas to obtain a home either by rental or home ownership. So this is on target, Mr. Speaker. Let us get on with it. You have the power. Recently we passed a bill here on the floor of this House related to public housing which went in the opposite direction. They reduced the funds available for public housing. And it gave a lot of power away to local housing authorities, but it gave them no new tools to work with, no new appropriations to help with the appropriation. You proposed to dump the problem on localities that are already burdened and could not provide any funding to deal with plugging the gaps in housing in their localities. Another point, the fourth point made by the Speaker: Violent crime. Make our cities safe and secure places to live and work through community policing, through tougher sentences for violent criminals, and innovative anticrime programs. Dramatically expand the community- based antidrug coalition efforts and create a victory plan for the war on drugs. We are a thousand percent behind you, Mr. Speaker. Innovative anti- crime programs. Many Members of the Republican majority have ridiculed any discussion of crime prevention programs. We call them crime prevention programs. You call them innovative anticrime programs. I think that, in the final analysis, those people that have expertise in this area would tell you they come pretty close to each other. If you are talking about innovative anticrime programs, you are going to end up with programs that focus on young people, because that is where the greatest volume of crime is. The crime prevention programs that we proposed focused on young people. Let us have a meeting of the minds right away. If you want to move forward, you have the power, Mr. Speaker, to deal with violent crime in the way you stated should be handled here, you have our full support. A fourth point made by the Speaker: Economic growth. Expand economic opportunities for all Americans by promoting continued economic growth with low inflation and rising take-home pay through tax cuts, tax simplifications, litigation reform, less regulation, overhaul burden of Government and small businesses. All in all, for welfare to work to be successful, work needs to be available. That is the point we made on this floor over and over again; work needs to be available. Expand economic opportunities for all America by promoting continued economic growth with low inflation, rising tax, take-home pay, et cetera. We are all in favor of that. Let us go forward. Urban renewal is another point. The Speaker says create 100 renewal communities in impoverished areas through targeted program tax benefits. Regulatory relief, low-income scholarships, savings accounts, brownfields cleanup, and home ownership opportunities. That sounds very similar to a program that the President talked about a few days ago when he talked about helping to revitalize our cities. The Speaker and the President seem to be using the same language. I hope they are on the same wavelength. They as the two most powerful people in Washington ought to be able to make things happen in the area of urban renewal. I certainly hope that in this area of 100 renewal communities in impoverished communities we can move off dead center and get an economic empowerment zone for central Brooklyn. We are busily at work trying to focus on putting together all the necessities to make an application for a new urban economic empowerment zone. But the economic empowerment zone has been left out of the budget agreement at the White House. We were brokenhearted, disappointed, to find out when that agreement was completed, there was no discussion of any additional economic empowerment zones. Economic empowerment zones experiments that were proposed by my colleague from New York, Mr. Rangel, many years ago, after he and Jack Kemp had worked on it for years and some other people had worked on it, it finally got down to a package that was passed finally which had nine empowerment zones only, six in urban areas and three in rural areas. So we have right now in America nine empowerment zones, six on urban areas and three on rural areas. Most of them are deemed to be successful. I know of no great failure. If there is a failure, it is not being discussed. So if the economic empowerment zones have been successful, then why do we hesitate? Let us go forward. The President now, in his speech a few days ago, proposed an additional 15 economic empowerment zones. I heard legislation that was proposed and many more was being drafted by certain people on the Committee on Ways and Means, but all of it has been put on hold, nothing is happening at this point. An idea that combines government grants with private sector involvement seems to be the ideal that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on. If Republicans and Democrats agree that economic empowerment zones are good for the Nation, then why can we not have more of them? Why can we not in Brooklyn, have one in central Brooklyn, which encompasses my district, have an economic empowerment zone? We have 2 million people. At least half are poor. We have the space. We have need to revitalize commercial areas, industrial areas. All of the conditions that are necessary, that are required for economic empowerment zones are there. But there is no legislation here. The nine that were created are all given away. We want to compete for whatever new number there is. I hope it is more than 15. But if there are 15, then no neighborhood, no community needs an economic empowerment zone more than central Brooklyn. It is one of the Speaker's points. He has the power. Let us make certain that the President's 15 economic empowerment zones are combined with the Speaker's 100 renewal communities. And together we ought to, all who live in big cities, be able to get something out of the two packages that are proposed. What I am talking about is the 10-point proposal of the Speaker designed to deal with race relations. He made the speech on June 18, and I am quoting from an article in the New York Times which talked about his speech. The Speaker proposes to move ahead of the President. He just does not want to talk about these things. He has a program. The President has appointed a commission, what he calls an advisory board. An advisory board will come back within a year with recommendations. The Speaker says you do not need to move so slowly. He sketched out a 10-point program to promote racial healing and black achievements. And he says he relies more on specific steps and less theory. He relies less on talk and less on affirmative action and his 10 points. I have talked about welfare reform that he proposed. Innovative job training is part of his welfare reform. It is not happening. But he proposed he can make it happen. He has the power. The economic growth, attacking violent crime. Promoting home ownership, promoting civil rights, promoting urban renewal. And he has learning here as one of his 10 points. Learning. And I will read that part of his speech: ``Create better opportunity for all children to learn by breaking stranglehold of teachers' unions and giving urban parents the financial opportunity to choose the public, private, or parochial school that is best for their children.'' I am quoting the Speaker's speech. I want to do justice to what he had to say. Whereas I have agreed with all the points I mentioned before, basically I have agreed with him, I do not agree with his proposal as to how we should promote learning. I applaud the fact that he has put learning on the list, creation of better opportunities for all children to learn. The way he proposes to do it is, of course, what the Republican majority keeps insisting has to be done, that you have to have vouchers and private school choice. I am not going to even discuss that at this point. Let me just challenge the Speaker if he wants to create better opportunities for all children to learn, why not go in the direction where both Democrats and Republicans agree? Why not promote charter schools? Both the President, the Democrats in the House, the Democrats in the Senate, the Republicans in the House and Republicans in the Senate all agree that charter schools are a good idea. So while the great debate about vouchers goes on, why do you not accentuate the positive, Mr. Speaker? Why do you not come forward with an innovative, meaningful program to promote charter schools? The idea is out there, but we only have a handful of charter schools in the country. Only half the States have laws which allow charter schools and in those States that have charter schools, we have very few actual charter schools. It is a very embryonic kind of experiment that is going on. It will take another 20 years to evaluate whether it has any significance or not. There are a lot of innovations that need to take place. I have been on the Committee on Education and the Workforce now for 15 years. The institutional history of what we have tried, what is proposed, what the researchers say is all very much ingrained in my mind. There are a lot of innovative approaches to education which make sense. A lot should be going on right now. I say across the board we should have a comprehensive, overwhelming attack on the problems related to education. Reform and efforts to improve our schools ought to go forward on a massive basis. Maybe in 5 years we can look and sort out what really works best and begin to institutionalize what really works best to develop a first-class system, not a national system but systems which have similar components across the country of things that work. But if we are going to take an idea like charter schools, where everybody agrees that we should have charter schools and then we are going to have only minuscule testing of it, only a few here and a few there, in many States which allow charter schools, there are so many restrictions placed on them until we will not have many developed at all over the next 10 years. There is a need for somebody, and the Federal Government probably is the only entity that could do it, to break it loose and try to give incentives for experimentation on a scale large enough to be significant. We need a critical mass. Charter schools cannot be evaluated as to what impact they can have on the overall education situation unless we have a critical mass. We need enough. One of the versions of charter schools is supposed to be that they will give competition to the traditional public schools. What is the difference between charter schools and traditional public schools? It is not the funding base, because they both are supposed to be funded by taxpayers' money, fully funded. Charter schools are to receive a per capita amount, which is the same as the local education agency pays for their children. The only difference between charter schools and the local education agency's traditional schools would be in the governance and management. They would have to abide by all the rules and terms of any State requirements, requirements for integration, requirements for curriculum, everything would still be there for the charter schools. It is a matter of how they are governed and who is in charge of the management and what kind of things can you do if you are out from under the local bureaucracy and how much freedom for innovation will lead to real improvements, real change, and how much your freedom to govern as you see fit and manage as you see fit can allow you to do the things that have to be done to improve the schools without the burden of having to get approvals from people in the hierarchy on top of you. The great challenge is governance and management. Let us go on at the Federal level to create some incentives. Let us have a piece of legislation which provides incentives for charter schools. If the Speaker wants to do something about creating better opportunities for all children to learn, there is one area which there is agreement, charter schools, why do we not do something about it. Opportunities to learn also involve, of course, children having a decent place to study. It is most unfortunate that the Speaker is concerned about creating better opportunities to learn for children and yet in the budget agreement that was made with the President at the White House, the initiative for construction of new schools and renovation of unsafe schools was taken out. $5 billion over a 5-year period. That is all they proposed. $5 billion over a 5-year period to help to renovate and repair and actually construct new schools. It would make a big difference in terms of opportunity to learn for all children. Because across America, according to the General Accounting Office, the GAO, $120 billion is needed for school construction in the next 10 years, to rebuild the infrastructure of public schools. We are not talking about colleges and universities. Just elementary and secondary schools. Why can we not have in a situation where we are adding billions to the defense budget, and yesterday we voted to continue the B-2 bomber, while we refused to reduce the budget for the CIA even though the cold war is over, why can we not have $5 billion over a 5-year period for school repair, renovation and construction? If the Speaker agrees and if he has on his list of 10 things that need to be done to promote race relations, to provide opportunities for individuals, then why can we not have an agreement to put back into the budget the $5 billion initiative for school construction? Another point, and I want to finish the Speaker's points and do justice to his points. Small business. Set a goal for tripling the number of minority-owned small businesses. I agree, Mr. Speaker, let us triple the number of minority-owned small businesses. He wants to bring successful small business leaders together to identify and then eliminate the government imposed barriers to entrepreneurship. That is what he says is the cause of the paucity of small businesses in the minority community. I agree with the goal. We need to triple the number of minority-owned small businesses. I do not agree with his concern about government-imposed barriers. I live in a community where small businessmen struggle all the time. I do not get any complaints about government barriers. The government does more to help than anything else. The complaint is against the private sector capital. They cannot get capital. Or they have to pass scrutiny that other businesses do not have to pass. All kinds of problems I hear about, I do not hear that the government has imposed barriers. That is an ideological blind spot that the Speaker is off into. It is not a minority business problem that we have too much regulation or government barriers. I have heard the speeches a thousand times about what is wrong with America. That has nothing to do with what is really impeding small business development in the minority community. In summary, I think I have covered all the Speaker's points. His 10 proposals to improve race relations are to create better opportunities for all children to learn, to develop more minority businesses, to create 100 renewal communities, to clear the existing backlog of discrimination cases at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He wants to make America a country, and I missed this one, he wants to make America a country with equal opportunity for all and special privileges for none by taking away all preferences, set-asides, and government contracts. We disagree on that one. That is clearly one we disagree on. I do not have time to explain why. The background of the history of the descendants of African-American slaves has to be considered when we talk about set-asides and special government programs for minorities. Racial classification is another he added here which I find very strange in this set of proposals. Racial classification. A first step should be taken to add a multiracial category to the census. He thinks that is very important to improve race relations in America. I have no problem adding a multiracial category to the census. I do not know how it is going to improve race relations, because in the history of America, they have always insisted that anybody who had one drop of black blood was African-American. If you had one drop of black blood, you were deemed African-American. So these race classifications seem to me to be no solution. In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, I applaud Speaker Gingrich for his rapid response to the President's challenge. We need more discussion on race relations. We certainly need powerful people like Speaker Gingrich to make proposals as to what it is we should do, what we should do concretely. There are people out there who are dying because we are not acting fast enough. The death of Marsha Motipersad is just one example of how there is needless suffering because we have rushed into public policies and programs that are harmful to people. It is more than race relations. It is human relations, it is human rights, it is concern for human welfare. All this goes together. I want to end on a positive note. Overall, I applaud the Speaker. I hope he will continue the dialogue and he will go and meet with the Commission the President has set up and I will come right behind him. I think that there are many areas that we agree on and that the President's initiative has shown that it has paid off already. The dialogue has begun.