Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I hope that this amendment sponsored by the gentleman from Vermont is not just another ceremony where we are talking to the wind. I think that the American people, the polls have shown the American people are gradually beginning to understand where the waste is in government. The waste is in the defense budget and we are not doing anything to help national security. National security right now, the primary component of national security is education. How well-educated our Americans are will determine where we go in the future with respect to our military might, our commercial might, right across the board. A better educated population is what is needed to guarantee that America will be the leader in all areas for the future. Mr. Chairman, $13.5 billion, we are talking about. Let us stop for a moment and consider the comparative costs. Five percent of the defense budget comes out to $13.5 billion per year, $13.5 billion. One can buy a lot of computers for schools for $13.5 billion. One can wire all the schools in America for $13.5 billion. We have shown that one of the goals of Congressional Black Caucus budget is to have every child eligible for Head Start, actually be able to go into Head Start by the year 2002. Well, we could get there right away because it would only cost $11 billion to cover every child eligible in America for Head Start. We have a paltry sum of $5 billion that the President proposed for construction, renovation and repair of schools, $5 billion over a 5-year period. The paltry sum of $5 billion was booted out of the budget agreement. It is too much. Now, ask the American people to take a look at comparative costs. Five percent of the defense budget is $13.5 billion for 1 year. We cannot afford to have a construction initiative sponsored by the President, $5 billion for 5 years? There is something radically wrong. We are blind men and women of the Congress continuing to go down the same road. If we put military in front of something or behind something, we are all for it, but it really has nothing to do with national security. National security means better education for America's future, and for that you have to spend money.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, there are 80,000 jobs, high-tech jobs, that cannot be filled right now that are available in America; 80,000, and the number is growing. Our weapons are very sophisticated. If we do not pay more attention to education, we are going to have to call in the Chinese and the Russians to man our weapons, because they will be too sophisticated for our operators to run them. Education is the number one component of defense and security.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today there was a little bit of history that meant a great deal to me. The last bill we passed was a bill sponsored by the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Watts], called the Joint Resolution Celebrating the End of Slavery in the United States. I think it is a small gesture, maybe, but it is a very important one for me. 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 who was present voted against this joint resolution introduced by the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Watts]. It is a joint resolution celebrating the end of slavery in the United States. It reads: Whereas news of the end of slavery came late to frontier areas of the country, especially in the American Southwest; and Whereas the African-Americans who had been slaves in the Southwest thereafter celebrated Juneteenth as the anniversary of their emancipation; Whereas their descendants handed down that tradition from generation to generation as an inspiration and encouragement for future generations; Whereas Juneteenth celebrations have thus been held for 130 years to honor the memory of all those who endured slavery and especially those who moved from slavery to freedom; and Whereas their example of faith and strength of character remains a lesson for all Americans today, regardless of background or region or race; Now, therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that, one, the celebration of the end of slavery is an important and enriching part of our country's history and heritage; two, the celebration of the end of slavery provides an opportunity for all Americans to learn more about our common past and to better understand the experiences that have shaped our Nation; and, three, a copy of this joint resolution be transmitted to the National Association of Juneteenth Lineage as an expression of appreciation for its role in promoting the observance of the end of slavery. I want to congratulate the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Watts] and the cosponsors of this resolution. It does not appropriate any dollars for anybody. It does not command or mandate anybody to do anything. It just calls attention to the fact that there are a large number of people in the country who have been celebrating the end of slavery on Juneteenth, they call it. Even I as someone born and raised in the South, went to school in the South, did not know much about Juneteenth because I was in the wrong part of the South. It is the Southwest and farther out West that they celebrate it because they got the news last. They learned last that the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued and the people were set free. They did not learn it, they did not hear about it and celebrate it until late June in that part of the country. I learned about it when I moved to the Northeast and there were groups that made an issue of having a ceremonial observance on Juneteenth, so I learned about it then. I think it is an interesting phenomenon to have the Congress recognize it, that this has been going on in certain parts of the country for 130 years. The Emancipation Proclamation, of course, was issued by President Abraham Lincoln, and later on the Congress of the United States passed the 13th amendment which in the Constitution ended all slavery forever in this country. This resolution was passed as the last item of business today. As I said before, not a single House Member voted against it; everybody voted for it. I want to thank all the Members who voted for it, and I want to thank the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Watts]. It ushers in a spirit that is a good spirit and it does not cost anybody anything. It is happening at a time when there are a couple of other developments that have caught the attention of the American people. The President has issued a statement that he is establishing a new initiative on race relations in the country. He is appointing a Commission on Race Relations, and that has caused some discussion, as he wanted it to. The primary purpose of the commission is to stimulate discussion, to promote dialogue, to have more people talk about race relations in America. I think that is commendable, a commendable act on the part of the President. At the same time, our colleague the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] has called for a resolution which would apologize for those who suffered as slaves under the Constitution and laws of the United States until 1865. The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] is a colleague. We all know the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] as being a person of sterling integrity. The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] has never been a person who ran for any limelight and wanted to get attention. The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] has been the kind of hard worker, behind the scenes, that has dedicated himself to issues like hunger where very few people get headlines. Hunger; making efforts to feed hungry children in America, efforts to feed hungry children across the world. The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] picked up the legacy of Mickey Leland. Mickey Leland, who had made an issue of traveling all over the world in an effort to bring relief to hungry children, was unfortunately killed in an airplane crash on the side of a mountain in Africa. The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] was Mickey Leland's successor, and Tony Hall has dealt with that issue in every way you can possibly deal with it, on an international level, national level, locally here in Washington. The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall] has worked to see to it that the very basic need of people for food was met. So Tony Hall, you know, is a kind of person we all admire and love and appreciate. We are grateful for the kind of work Tony Hall does. I do not know why Tony Hall decided to sponsor this amendment to apologize for slavery. I got a copy of his ``Dear Colleague'' order, ``Dear Colleague'' invitation, to join, and I certainly would like to have my name added to his resolution. If it has not been already added by my staff, I would like to have my name added. I want to congratulate Tony. His resolution is a very simple one, but it is relevant to the President's commission and to the Juneteenth resolution of the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Watts]. The Hall resolution is a resolution apologizing for those who suffered as slaves under the Constitution and laws of the United States until 1865. It reads simply: Resolved by the House of Representatives, the Senate concurring, that the Congress apologizes to African- Americans whose ancestors suffered as slaves under the Constitution and laws of the United States until 1865. That is the simple Hall resolution. He introduced it on July 12, and when he introduced it he sent the following letter to those Members of Congress he was asking to support it: Dear colleague, Generations have passed since the end of slavery, and in that time Congress has done much to address the effects of that legacy. But there was never an official apology for the horrible wrong. Today we are introducing a resolution in which we, on behalf of the United States Congress, apologize to African-Americans whose ancestors suffered as slaves. Our resolution will not fix any lingering injustices resulting from slavery. The reconciliation begins with an apology. We hope this apology will be a beginning of a new healing between the races. No one alive today is responsible for slavery. However, as Americans we share a common history, which includes a long era when slavery was acceptable. Therefore it is fitting for the Congress, as a representative of the American people, to offer this apology. This apology is long overdue, but it is never too late to confess that we were wrong as a Nation and ask for forgiveness. On the reverse side of this letter is a copy of the resolution, and he asked that anyone who wants to cosponsor it do so. I think it is very commendable, and I thank the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hall]. I congratulate him on his wisdom. Tony Hall is not an African-American. Tony Hall is not a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Over the years some of us have cosponsored or sponsored legislation asking for the appointment of commissions to study reparations, and some of us have sponsored or cosponsored bills which have called for reparations to be provided by the descendants of African slaves. Some others have called for various kinds of programs, programs to be initiated which are compensatory in nature to understand the legacy of slavery. And therefore they would, by doing certain things through public policy or through public programs, compensate for some of the evils and horrors of slavery. Now I do not think that either one of these items, the Juneteenth resolution of the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Watts], which was passed already, or the Hall resolution which has been introduced and sponsored but has not been passed, and already some Members of Congress have indicated that they think that the Hall resolution is a bit too much. It is emotional symbolism, the Speaker said over the weekend, emotional symbolism, and therefore it is undesirable. Well, let me agree with the Speaker. It is emotional symbolism. So is the Juneteenth resolution that we passed today. The emotional symbolism is very important. It is very important to have emotional symbolism. Symbolism is very important. Symbolism is a beginning of a process, can be the beginning of a process, that has very concrete results. The women of Korea who were subjected to enforced, mandated prostitution, they were forced into prostitution by the Japanese; they were called comfort girls or comfort women, and they are insisting to this day that they get an apology. You know, yes, the Japanese government agreed to pay some people, some of them could be identified, et cetera, but they still are not satisfied that they have not gotten a full-scale apology from the Japanese Government. This whole matter of apologies has become, you know, a major issue with certain nations who feel that they were wronged by other nations. You know, perhaps more than apology will be asked for or is being requested, but the process begins with the apology. You know, why is it painful to apologize? And of course there are people who say, well, and I got calls in my office this morning. Some people said: ``I did not do anything to anybody, I have never enslaved anybody, I would not enslave anybody; so I feel insulted by this request for an apology.'' Well, No. 1, I have not requested an apology from any individual, and I will not request an apology from any individual. I think it is a little silly to request any individual to make an apology for slavery. It is an apology that is being requested on behalf of the Nation, on behalf of the Government and everything else that makes up a nation. I am not sure what makes up a nation. I am not sure they must fully understand what makes up a nation. When we stick out our chest and say we are proud to be Americans, what are we talking about? When we say we are proud to be American, are we going to dismiss the history or we stick out our chests and say we are proud to be Americans, or are we very much concerned with history? We are proud of the Constitution. We are proud of the Bill of Rights. We are proud of the bravery and the courage shown by the men who died on the beaches of Normandy, you know, unexcelled courage and unselfishness, thousands of miles away from their own land. They did things that are unbelievable on behalf of the liberation of people they did not know. They were Americans, you know. We are proud of that. When we say we are proud to be an American, we call ourselves Americans. We are claiming that. We are claiming the good things that Americans have done. The Marshall plan, which was celebrated last week, and we discussed that as being unprecedented, too, in terms of unselfishness. You know, this Nation reached out to the war-torn nations of Europe. There are cynics who say, well, we only wanted markets for our products, and we are only looking for a way to relieve capitalism of its excess equipment and materials, whatever. It was an unprecedented unselfish act, and we reached out to war-torn Europe. Billions of dollars flowed from America to Europe, and we rebuilt the continent. We rebuilt Western Europe. And, yes, we stopped communism in the process. But one thing that people have not acknowledged or realized, and I did not realize it until recently, is that the Marshall Plan was laid out there for the Russians, too. When the Marshall Plan was conceived by General Marshall under President Truman, they made it available to the Soviet Union and all the countries of Europe. The Soviet Union could have been a part of the Marshall Plan. All the war-torn countries were given the opportunity to be a part of the Marshall Plan. You know, no other nation has behaved that way. When we say we are Americans, and we talk about America, you are claiming and bringing in all those unparalleled feats of national heroism, of national unselfishness, of national implementation of the Judeo-Christian tradition in a monumental way. So if you are taking all the good, then we cannot turn our backs on the things in the Nation's history which are also not so good. We cannot say we are Americans, but we have nothing to do with, we do not want to even hear about, the fact that the Native Americans were swept off their land in large numbers. They were not compensated justly. They were treated very badly, and the Native Americans still have not been compensated for all that happened to them. We cannot turn our backs on that, say that is not part of America. We cannot turn our backs on slavery which lasted for 232 years on the North American Continent; 232 years it lasted. It was part of America. It was part of the process of a nation becoming what it is. Yes, slavery did contribute to the economy, it contributed to the building of a frontier America, it enriched the Nation. It did a lot of things that were good for America, but it was a heinous institution. There is nothing probably in the history of mankind which parallels 232 years of enslavement of one people by another, dragging them from their homes, sailing them across the oceans and dropping them into a new world where, in order for them to function efficiently and for them to carry out their task and be profitable, they had to be dehumanized. There had to be a policy of cutting them off from their traditions of making them not speak their language, of not allowing them to form families. And I use the word families, you know, with emphasis. Families are very important in the history of mankind. The most important institution probably that He has ever created are families. But slaves were not allowed to maintain families. They could not be a part of any family brought over. They could not be a part of any group that came over and keep the traditions and the mores and the ceremonies of that group because part of the preparation of the slave to be an economic force that paid off was to break him loose from his past and not let him associate with the people who spoke the same language, not let him associate with the people who had the same tradition. So right away they were set adrift with no institution, no traditions, no past, and then they were not allowed to create anything new. Slave families were not respected. There was no such thing. In fact, the largest slave owners discouraged the forming of slave bonds. Slaves struggled to put together their own sense of some kind of family. They had a custom for getting married, and since their marriages were not recognized and nobody would issue them a marriage license or recognize the marriage, they started a custom of jumping over the broom. To get married 2 people jumped over the broom. Well, they could jump over the broom, and maybe they would be allowed a few weeks together. Maybe they would stay in the same place for a few years. But the masters and their owners had no respect for the fact that they were man and wife in their own eyes, so they might be sold away at any time from each other. Of course the bond between mother and child was also not respected. Very young children would be snatched from the bosoms of their mothers and sold away. The whole purpose of slavery was to obliterate the humanity of the African, obliterate. You know, the Nazi Holocaust, you might say, was crueler, more cruel in the sense that Hitler and the Nazis actually murdered and cremated the Jews. They destroyed them totally, and there is nothing worse than being destroyed totally when you are a human being because you are no more. You cannot have any hope. You cannot have children who might get free in the future who might have a better life. You are gone. So to be obliterated, to be completely incinerated, destroyed, is the worst thing that could happen to human beings. But also there might be a second worst thing, and that is to have your humanity obliterated, for the masters to want to keep you alive because you are a machine or a work animal, a burden of beast. They want to keep you alive. They do not want you to recognize, to have a wife or family. They do not want any bonds between two people. They do not want mothers to have recognition of their children, and bonds to exist. All that had to be destroyed. Slavery was a heinous institution. It did not only happen in America. There was the African slave trade that also went to South America and other places, but for 232 years we had slavery in America. We cannot be Americans embracing everything that is good about America and not embrace or recognize that the other negative things are also part of America. When the apology is made, it is not your apology. I do not know how you deal with those things. Maybe it is an apology that goes up to the ages, across eternity. Maybe it is an apology that only God can hear, but it is an apology; thank you for the apology, if we receive it. Do not be afraid to apologize. Do not be afraid of the process of reconciliation, which begins with an apology. Reconciliation, the healing process, is something that we have begun to learn more about from strange places. The healing process through reconciliation, it is probably being exemplified and illustrated, implemented, in no better way than it is in South Africa. South Africa and Nelson Mandela are showing us the way to deal with reconciliation. Instead of revenge, you have reconciliation. Where you had a situation where a population of 20-some million people was oppressed by a population and a minority of between 4 million and 5 million people, the whites were about 4 to 5 million people, the African-Americans were between 24 million and 29 million people, they were the majority. They were oppressed by the minority for years. They were the original occupants of the area, the territory. The white minority came in with superior technology, et cetera, and subdued and oppressed them. They had to fight a violent struggle. It was not a non-violent struggle like the one we had here in the United States during the sixties. The South Africans had to go to violence. Everybody predicted that you would have fire and blood at the end of this process, that it could not end, you could not reverse the situation and have the black majority in charge and the white minority be allowed to live in peace with the black majority. But South Africa under Nelson Mandela has proved that this is not the case. South Africa is moving forward peacefully. Whites are not fleeing in large numbers because they are white and afraid, because they are in the minority and afraid. They are building. One of the reasons they are doing this is because they set up a thing called a truth and reconciliation commission. They went so far as to say we will not even punish a murderer, if he was involved in murder during the violent episodes that took place. A murderer on either side will not be punished if they come forward and if they tell the truth. And let us get the record straight, including those people who were part of the official South African police, and they were in charge of the systematic murder of large numbers of people, they were allowed to come forward. And if you confess, automatically your confession means that you will not be punished. A lot of people on the side of the African-Americans said this is ridiculous, this is not justice. But what they were saying is that reconciliation is more important than justice. That has a familiar ring to anybody who is a member of the Christian religion. If you are a Christian, you heard that before. It is hard to believe that business about turning the other cheek, and if a Roman soldier asked you to carry his bag for a certain distance, then offer to carry it further. All this philosophy of reconciliation, love overcoming hate and good overcoming evil has been a hard struggle for people who say they believe in Christianity. How can it be that a Nation can operate on that principle? Here is what is happening in South Africa. The Nation is saying it is more important that we have love and attempt to bond with you in order to overcome the past than it is to have justice, which means somebody ought to be punished. We will forego that. So here we have all these developments taking place, and there are people in the country who are upset because we may follow the suggestion of the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Tony Hall and his recommendation. We may end up voting an official apology for slavery. That upsets some people. Please do not let it upset you. It is a good beginning. It is consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition. It will not cost anybody. There will be no appropriation. Taxpayers will not have to pay anything. You individually are not placed on the spot, because you do not have to admit guilt before you apologize. It is the Nation, the Nation, whatever constitutes a Nation, the good and the bad, everything that has happened in America, that is the Nation, the Nation apologizes. This administration, this Congress, may apologize on behalf of the Nation. Beyond that, the President's Commission is a good step. Some people have said, well, if it does not do anything except talk, if it does not do anything except set up dialogue, then what good is it? Dialogue is good. In the beginning was the word. Words are important. Discussion is important. Human beings are very much influenced by what they hear and what they say. Let us not underestimate the power of the word, the power of discussion, the power of study. Study may produce some new facts. Even Ward Connelly may come to agree with the gentleman from New York, Mr. Major Owens, if the facts are really laid out. If he understands what the legacy of slavery has meant in terms of African-Americans and how the legacy of slavery makes affirmative action necessary, Ward Connelly might understand. Or maybe in the dialogue I will finally be convinced by Ward Connelly that he is right and that affirmative action is an evil. But let us have a dialogue. The President's Commission is a first step. In case Members do not know, the President announced that he has appointed a 7-member advisory board, which some people are calling the commission. Hecalls it an advisory board, because commissions in the past have been notorious for being ignored by Presidents. So his advisory board is closer to him. It is kind of a personal thing. The advisory board will provide advice and counsel to the President to improve the quality of race relations. The board will advise the President on the means to promote a national dialogue on race issues, to increase our understanding of the history and future of race relations, to identify and create plans to calm racial tension and promote increased opportunity in child abuse, housing, and health care and to address crime and the administration of justice. President Clinton is determined ``to improve the ability of all Americans to realize their full potential so we can, as one country, equal and indivisible, move forward into the 21st century.'' The advisory board members will reach out as surrogates for the President to create and implement solutions to improve race relations. Among the advisory committee members are the chairman, John Hope Franklin of Durham, NC. He is a retired historian and educator, a very famous historian, the last word on the history of slavery in America. Dr. Franklin has once received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is kind of one of the most respected scholars of history in the country. Along with Dr. Franklin there are six other people. William F. Winter of Jackson, Mississippi, is a former Democratic Governor of Mississippi. He was born and raised in the South, Governor of Mississippi. Linda Chavez-Thompson of Washington, DC is executive vice president of the AFL-CIO. Robert Thomas of Corte Carza, CA currently serves as president and CEO of Nissan Motor Corp. Angela Oh, O-H is the last name, of Sereno, California is an attorney with the Los Angeles law firm of Bente, Corson, Daley, Berera and Oh. They specialize in State and Federal criminal defense. Ms. Oh received a B.A., and she is a lawyer. Suzan D. Johnson Cook of New York is a senior pastor of the Bronx Christian Fellowship in the Bronx. I served in the legislature with Ms. Cook's brother, and I have heard her preach on a couple of occasions. She is one dynamic minister and a very deep and profound person. Thomas H. Kean of Madison, NJ, is a former Governor of New Jersey. The Governor is held in high esteem by both Democrats and Republicans, of course. As a consultant to this group is Christopher Edley of Cambridge, MA, who is a well-known professor at Harvard Law School since 1981 and a codirector of the civil rights project. Mr. Speaker, this advisory board has become the target of a lot of journalists and other people who have already talked about a do-nothing advisory board, because most commissions and advisory boards do not do anything. I think that the President has not laid out lofty goals for it. It has a very practical agenda. It should be given a chance to do what it can do, and that is to stimulate discussion and dialog. It is an embryonic enterprise. It is an embryonic enterprise, and it does not depend on what the President does for it to develop and grow into a full-bodied enterprise. It can be a full-bodied enterprise if all of the rest of us take a positive approach to it. In the private sector, the legislators and various other leaders across the country all can decide on other ways to do what the President is trying to do. This is a time when we do not have demonstrations in the street. There is no reason why the President should take on this task. He does not need it to calm down the waters, to meet a crisis. This President certainly cannot be accused of using this commission to try to change public opinion so he can get reelected. He is not running for reelection. It is a noble cause, a noble exercise. It is not going to be easy. There are going to be obstacles. He is not going to win a popularity contest by promoting a commission or an advisory board to deal with race relations. But his sights are much higher than what the commentators and the columnists are saying. His sights go beyond a dialogue about race as it affects African-Americans. The President's sights go beyond the concerns of the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Tony Hall and an apology for slavery. I am all in favor of the apology for slavery. I support the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Tony Hall. It is a positive step. I do not agree with Jesse Jackson. On Sunday he said on television, he trivialized it. It is wrong to trivialize it. It is a good step for us. Let us not make it into something that it is not, though. Nobody expects any miracles from it. But it is a good first step, the apology for slavery. But the President is looking beyond. The President is looking at the whole diversity problem in America. At the core of the diversity problem in America may be relationships between African-Americans and other Americans, but that is only a small part of the bigger problem. The bigger problem is diversity. We are a very diverse Nation already. We are becoming more diverse. As he said before, by the year 2050 there will be no majority in America. No one group will have a majority. There will be many components to make up the total population of America. We have to learn to live with that. We ought to be proud of that fact, as the President is. He has referred to it many times. Even in my district, in New York, I used to say it was good to live in New York because if you wanted to see samples of all kinds of people, you could just take a trip up to the United Nations, which is located in New York, and you could go to the United Nations and you would see all kinds of people from all parts of the world. I also said the United Nations had a school. If you want to send your child to a school and have them exposed to young people from all races, religions, nationalities, let them go to the United Nations school. There are schools in my district which do not have all the nations of the world represented, but they have a good, good sample, I assure you. We have Cambodians, we have Pakistanis, we have Koreans, we have Laotians, we have a whole array of people from the West Indies, we have the South American countries. It is amazing to go into a school in my district, and the range of nationalities that you will find in a district just in the center of Brooklyn. It is not near the United Nations, but almost anywhere in New York City now you have a wide range of people who are from many different backgrounds, ethnic groups, countries, and religions. America will have to run to catch up with New York City, but you can go to California and find another range of people equal in diversity maybe from different backgrounds, many coming from more Asian countries, but eventually all of America is going to look this way. We ought to be proud of that. The President said it offers opportunities of many kinds. He is proud of it. That is what he is looking at, the future. We ought to try to stay with the President's vision. Of course, none of this is unrelated: The President's vision and his advisory board, the resolution of the gentleman from Oklahoma, Mr. J.C. Watts, the Juneteenth resolution; the gentleman from Ohio's, Mr. Tony Hall apology for slavery, none of it is unrelated to what we are doing here in the Congress. None of it is unrelated to the basic business of this week and this month. The taxes and the budget and the appropriations coming, all of it would be better served if we had had better dialogues in the past on the issue of race and diversity, certainly on the issue of slavery and the implications of slavery, the legacy of slavery. Large numbers of people who were victimized by slavery never got off the plantations. They had to settle and become sharecroppers and live in a system which was not as bad as slavery but in many cases, in the early days after freedom, they could not afford to leave because there were armed guards that forced them to stay on the plantations. They did not know where to go. So you had large numbers of people held in bondage in the South for a long time until World War II, when the need for large amounts of labor in the cities of the North allowed them to come in large numbers into the cities of the North. So you have a large number of people who moved directly from the worst rural situation in the South to the crowded cities of the North. As long as the war was on and the factory needed labor and you had work for everybody, in many cases lots of overtime, they prospered and they did well. They did like other Americans. They married, had children. They moved in some cases out of the cities into the suburbs. They bought homes. All kinds of great things happened. But then the cities economies collapsed and you have, as a result, numerous problems related to the massive unemployment that resulted, problems in terms of disintegration of society, where you do not have jobs and you do not have income. I am oversimplifying a little bit, but jobs and income are at the heart of all the problems in the African- American community. If you had jobs and income on a regular basis, you could revitalize those communities and end all the other problems and all the other controversy, the welfare controversy, the controversy about children, girls having babies out of wedlock. There are a whole lot of things that would fall in place. The appeal of drugs as an escape mechanism, all that resulted from the collapse of the economies of the inner cities. So what we do with respect to the tax bill and the budget and the appropriations bill does relate to the legacy of slavery; our refusal to recognize that the inner cities have a special problem, our running away, we have run away from the problem for several reasons which I will not go into. One of them is that we have the other body that is made up of people who are elected by statewide office, and they do not have an allegiance to the people of the cities who are congregated in the big cities in large numbers. We have neglected the cities, and we still are. I am very concerned about an economic empowerment zone for central Brooklyn. An economic empowerment zone for central Brooklyn has to be part of the legislation before the Committee on Ways and Means. It is part of the tax package. They have to create more economic empowerment zones before we can compete for one, and in that discussion it looks as if they are jettisoning any discussion of new economic empowerment zones. That is a big blow to the hope that I have raised in my community about the possibility that they will create more economic empowerment zones and we can compete with other cities in order to get an economic empowerment zone which combines government grants with private sector tax writeoffs. It was supposed to be a model that was approved and recommended by both parties. It has not so far emerged in the deliberations on the tax package. So what is going on on the floor this week, next week, for the rest of the summer, between now and the time we adjourn is very much related to the situation that we are discussing with respect to apologies for slavery, discussions of race relations, et cetera. It is important that we understand that an apology can indeed be positive. It can indeed drain a great amount of emotion from the issue of slavery. For young Americans on both sides of the fence, the descendants of slaves and the nondescendants of slaves, to hear a national apology discussed may have a great effect on their attitudes, because there is a lot of tension. The younger generation does not get along better than the older generation. There is a lot of tension out there. There is a lot of bitterness among African-American youth about the fact that they are in the position they are in, and they blame slavery. They need to know more about the history of slavery. They need to know that if you really discuss slavery, you also have to discuss the heroics of white Americans in the abolitionist movement who brought an end to slavery. You have to discuss the heroics of the soldiers of the Union Army who fought to set slaves free. White soldiers, white abolitionists and white soldiers, the freedom of black Americans was in the hands of whites. Abraham Lincoln was white. Any African-American youth that wants to hate all whites needs to know and reflect on the fact that slavery was created, yes, by the worst elements of the white society and community, but slavery also was ended by the heroic efforts of whites. The commission, if it does no more than to begin the discussion among ordinary people of these kinds of things, it would be very useful. If I was President, I would do it another way. I would not go this way. But this is the President's idea. Since he originated this idea, I applaud him for doing it any way he deems necessary. I am convinced that he will take it and move forward with the results after the commission or the board advisory group ends in a year. So I applaud the President for this use of the bully pulpit. He could use the bully pulpit, the high visibility of the White House, he could use it for a number of purposes. He could line up a whole list of issues instead of the issue of race relations, but he has chosen this one and I applaud that. Compared to what is needed, the President's commission is a minuscule effort, just a beginning, but little marbles make big boulders roll. They can even set landslides and earthquakes in motion. Let the chain reaction begin. Any open discussion, I think, is a step in the right direction. The power of the White House bully pulpit is about to be displayed in dimensions that we have not seen since FDR's speeches during World War II. This highly visible process of dialogue, debate, study and reflection on race relations and diversity in America could have a monumental impact on the next few years and the opening years of the 21st century. It was W.E.B. DuBois who warned that race and color would emerge as a major problem of the 20th century. We now know that DuBois was right. However, DuBois did not go far enough. Not race or color alone but the inability of human beings to cope with diversity, ethnic differences within races, religion, language and regional differences, diversity is the major problem now and diversity will continue as a gigantic challenge for the 21st century. Racial diversity is the largest and most obvious challenge of the Homo sapiens species, we human beings, the deeply rooted and instinctive animal fear of outsiders, strangers, of different ones is manifested most directly and abundantly in the reaction to racial differences. We say that children have to learn hate, but we are oversimplifying a bit. Children are subjected to this discomfort in any situation where strangers appear. So it is natural that strangeness creates discomfort among animals. They do not associate with strangers. They identify, they are familiar by smell. Among animals they do not associate with animals that do not look like them. Even among cows, tests have shown that brown cows stay with brown cows and white-faced cows stay with white-faced cows. If you leave them alone in a normal situation, the immediate reaction is always that you are worried about what is different. So let us understand that differences are a danger. People instinctively react to differences in a negative way. All the more reason why we should make certain that those early reactions of discomfort are not translated into hate. They have to be taught to hate, yes. To translate that discomfort into hate, they have to be taught that. And we have to make a concerted effort to see that the opposite happens, that they understand that people who are different are going to rouse some feelings of discomfort and, therefore, they have to work at overcoming discomfort. Civilization is a process of confronting these deeply rooted instincts. Civilized men and women wrestle with their primitive and base instincts every day and in many other ways. If we get hungry and we pass a place which is serving food and we do not have money to buy any food, we do not reach for the food because we are hungry. Civilization restrains us in numerous ways, our instincts, our appetites are restrained. Our instincts with respect to strangers and people who are different have to be restrained and guided. Civilized men and women wrestle with these problems and they will solve them. What the President's initiative will do is call upon us all to struggle harder to control and redirect our fear and discomfort with racial differences. To confront racial frictions and tensions, the systematic attempt to promote greater understanding and tolerance with respect to race is merely the first step. This is an obvious first step and it may be the easiest first step. But we ought to take this first step. I think clearly we can see all around us that some of the bloodiest conflicts since World War II have not pitted one race against another. We can understand in Korea, Cambodia, the Gulf War, Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Angola, Liberia, Rwanda, Zaire, Sierra Leone, the world has witnessed people who appear to be of the same race but they get locked into intense conflicts. Perhaps the war between Israel and the neighboring Arab countries could be classified as a war between different races, however it is not so simple. The problems of space, land, water, history and religion far outweighed the physical differences between Israelis and Arabs. Only in South Africa can you easily identify the scene as one of clearly racial conflict. Racial conflict is what occurred there with Caucasians against the original Africans or whites against blacks. But ethnic differences among black Africans sparked the massacres in Rwanda, ethnic differences among people who are of the same color, same race. Ethnic and religious frictions exploited the demagogues who also continue to fuel conflict in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. Ethnicity and tribalism still threaten the unity in the Congo. Ethnicity and tribalism are at the heart of the Congo instability and the oppression of Nigeria. Even South Africa lingers under the deadly shadow of tribalism while it struggles for reconciliation between the two races. The problem of reconciliation between whites and blacks in South Africa is not nearly as difficult as some of the struggle between tribes that are taking place at this point. So the President has his eye on the whole problem of diversity in the world. The President has said that America is an indispensable Nation. We have to provide leadership in many ways. He does not mean just leadership in the area of military security. He wants to provide leadership in terms of where the world should go on this whole issue of how we live together. The problem of the 21st century will be intolerance to diversity and the President wants to provide leadership on that problem. We want to be a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and politically diverse America, and we want to serve as a role model. That is what this President is saying. I applaud him for his ambition. I applaud him for attempting to leave this kind of legacy. Let me quote the President in his own speech at San Diego. A few quotes will bear out what I am saying. Consider this: We were born with a Declaration of Independence which asserted that we were all created equal and a Constitution that enshrined slavery. That contradiction was there. We fought a bloody Civil War to abolish slavery and preserve the Union, but we remained a house divided and unequal by law for another century. We advanced across the continent in the name of freedom, yet in so doing we pushed Native Americans off their land, often crushing their culture and their livelihood. Our Statue of Liberty welcomes poor, tired, huddled masses of immigrants to our borders, but each new wave has felt the sting of discrimination. In World War II, Japanese Americans fought valiantly for freedom in Europe, taking great casualties, while at home their families were herded into internment camps. The famed Tuskegee Airmen lost none of the bombers they guarded during the war, but their African American heritage cost them a lot of rights when they came back home in peace. To be sure, continuing to quote the President's speech in San Diego, To be sure, there is old, unfinished business between black and white Americans, but the classic American dilemma has now become many dilemmas of race and ethnicity. We see it in the tension between black and Hispanic customers and their Korean or Arab grocers; in a resurgent anti-Semitism even on some college campuses; in a hostility toward new immigrants from Asia to the Middle East to the former Communist countries to Latin America and the Caribbean, even those whose hard work and strong families have brought them success in the American way. We see these tensions continuing. First, we must continue to expand opportunity. Full participation in our strong and growing economy is the best antidote to envy, despair and racism. We must press forward to move millions more from poverty and welfare to work; to bring the spark of enterprise to inner cities; to redouble our efforts to reach those rural communities prosperity has passed by. Most important of all, we simply must give our young people the finest education in the world. The President proposes remedies and the commission, we can see, is headed in a certain direction. On many occasions I have stood right here talking about the answer, one of the key answers to the problems of the inner city, which generates large numbers of people who are forced to go on to welfare, which generates large numbers of babies being born out-of-wedlock, which generates a large amount of unemployment. Even the jobs available, they are jobs that people cannot qualify for. One of the answers, of course, is education, and the commission certainly is probably going to end up recommending a great deal about education. I would like to go further than the President. I think some of my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus would like to have this commission aiming its sights higher. We have talked in past years about reparations, and I want to join my colleague, the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. John Conyers, who is the oldest member of the Congressional Black Caucus, join him again this year in sponsoring a bill which calls for the commission to study reparation proposals for African-Americans. He introduced this in January of this year. This is the description of the Conyers Commission: This legislation forces the United States to acknowledge, after over 100 years of silence, the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American Colonies between the years of 1619 and 1865. The legislation requires that an official inquiry be made into the lingering negative effects of the institution of slavery on living African-Americans and on the United States larger societies. A commission will be established to examine the institution of slavery, studying the impact of subsequent and continuing discrimination against African-Americans resulting directly and indirectly from the institution of slavery, not only during that time in which it was legal and Government-sanctioned but during the periods of reconstruction, desegregation and to the present date. The commission will make recommendations, among others, as to methods of recompense for the descendants of slaves. This is a bill which is out there. It has been introduced. The gentleman from Michigan has introduced it every year since November 1989, and it is part of the dialog. We could go that far. I think reparations, in terms of individuals, is out of the question. There was a time when, shortly after the Civil War, General Armstrong, a Union general, proposed that every slave family be given 40 acres and a mule, and he actually started the process and gave out a few mules and acres. Of course, the Congress, under Andrew Johnson, came behind him and said ``No, you cannot do that.'' So 40 acres and a mule was promised. If we were to take the promise of the 40 acres and a mule, which was to compensate people that had been slaves for 232 years, and if we take the value of 40 acres and a mule and try to translate that into what it means now, we would have some very wealthy descendants of slaves. That is impractical. We are not looking for cash handouts, but we could have ``opportunity to learn'' standards in schools, so that every school had a first class school building. We would not have the problem of asbestos and lead poisoning and broken windows and roofs that are leaking and boilers that still burn coal in the inner city where descendants of slaves go to school. We could compensate by guaranteeing a first-class education in terms of facilities, in terms of the best teachers, in terms of the right amount of equipment, in terms of the supplies that are needed. Just take the inner-city schools and make them the way the suburban schools look and act and operate. Give them the same that they have, and we would compensate for the past by guaranteeing equality of opportunity through education. There is a great argument for affirmative action, and the President challenged everybody who does not favor affirmative action to come up with something different. Well, opportunity to learn is the answer. If we really provided everybody with an opportunity to learn, we would not need affirmative action. It would clearly not be necessary in future years. But we will not do that. Our schools are in worse shape now in the inner-city communities than they were 10 years ago, and there is nothing on the horizon to make them any better. We just took out of the budget bill the $5 billion for construction. So this discussion is relevant when we talk about the legacy of slavery, apologizing for slavery, and we look at the inability and refusal of the Congress and the Government apparatus to come to the aid of children in the inner cities just in terms of providing them with decent schools. We can see where the two things are not unrelated. Let us understand that we have a long gap there. If we study slavery and look at what happened in the breeding farms, what was a breeding farm all about, where young ladies were required to have babies? They did not eat if they did not have a baby. Were the breeding farms regulated by the States? Were females in breeding farms below the age or 13 protected from having to produce babies? How many months of rest were females given before they were required to get pregnant again on breeding farms? Were there any regulations? All these kind of things, the horror of it. There were day care centers on plantations. They deposited babies in huts with the oldest slaves who could not do anything else, and they took care of babies in large numbers, the same way they did in the orphanages in Romania. We found that the kids in the orphanages in Romania, because they had no constant contact with human beings, their brains had actually atrophied. Their brains had shrunk. They took photographs of the brains of the Romanian children brought over here who had problems, and they found their brains had shrunk. They could not establish human contact in a certain way because of what had not happened to them in terms of human interaction. So millions of slave babies over the years were put into hovels with a few human beings caring for them. What did that do to their brains? These are some of the things we should look at as we study slavery, as the commission looks at the past and connects the past with the present. What about property inheritance? A slave could not inherit. Did any State allow slaves to inherit anything? When a slave died, the few belongings they had, could they pass them on to anybody? They could not even recognize their own children, so they did not know any children they had. So where did their little bits and pieces go? When a slave died, he could not pass anything on. The primary way in which wealth is accumulated in America, or anyplace, handed down from one generation to another, no matter how small it is, a few pots and pans, a wagon, a mule, the little house, maybe an acre, maybe a big farm, things that had been handed down over the years were not there to be passed down. For 232 years nothing could be passed down. So is it any wonder that African-Americans are the poorest people in America, even poorer than the immigrants that came over, who brought some tools with them in a bag, who brought some know-how with them, who brought contacts? They had contacts with relatives who lived here. They had more than the slaves ever had. All of that can be put in perspective if we really begin to talk about it and look at it, and we will see there is a need, there is a need to treat African-Americans and maybe native Americans different from the way we do other people, to try to make up for what did not happen in the past and for some of the negative things that happened in the past. All of this should be put on the table and examined. We do not want the equivalent of 40 acres and a mule. Forty acres and a mule might translate into, the mule might be, in 1997 dollar terms, that might be a jet plane by now. One might have enough money to buy a jet plane. The 40 acres might be the size of an airfield. So we are not going to deal with those kinds of solutions, but we ought to think about our inability to formulate a policy which provides opportunities to learn for all children; our inability to get a construction program going, $5 billion is all the President asked to stimulate construction which would help inner-city communities; our inability to pass a Ways and Means bill which would provide for the establishment of a lot of empowerment zones in cities. All these are directly related to the fact that we have no sense of the past and no sense of where we can go in the future. We are the richest Nation that ever existed on the face of the Earth. We have a lot of options and opportunities. We have a lot of wealth. We helped Europe a great deal with the Marshall plan. Billions of dollars. We should help the inner-city communities where descendants of slaves live in large numbers with the same kind of generosity. We should put it all together. The President is on the right track, and I hope we will all step in line and be positive about race relations and what it means in the context of today's America.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we have had two important pieces of legislation in the past few days, one related to disaster. As the gentlewoman from Texas has just related, we had a bill to deal with the disaster relief. I think the whole bill is about $8 billion, and $5 billion of that was for disaster relief for places that are very much in need of help and they need it now. We recognize in this Nation and repeatedly the Congress comes to the aid of any States, any communities that have natural disasters. Today I want to talk about the continuing education disaster that many of my colleagues, Democrats as well as Republicans, who just do not believe that we have an education disaster raging in our big cities, our inner city communities, and New York is just one, but Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, all over, you have a problem that cannot be resolved or solved with business as usual. We have a disaster. It is a man-made disaster, but it is a continuing disaster in that we are not providing education of the kind that is needed in order for young people to cope with the 20th century demands, let alone to go into the 21st century. We talk a lot about the need for computer education, computer literacy. We applaud the fact that telecommunications are being introduced, and now at an affordable rate in schools. Recently we had a landmark action by the Federal Communications Commission where they followed the mandate of legislation that we had passed, and they created a universal fund for schools and libraries so the schools and libraries can get at a 90-percent discount in the poorest areas the wiring for telecommunication services, computers, even just more telephones, and they can have a 90-percent discount indefinitely. They will be able to pay a telephone bill that costs $1 with 10 cents. That is what a 90-percent discount means. The poorest districts in America will have a 90-percent discount, and even the wealthiest districts in America will have a 20-percent discount. That is a major piece of government action that creates hope. But in the big city school systems there is not enough in place at this point to take advantage of this new revolution in the provision of assistance for telecommunications to schools and libraries. The education disaster is there now, the education disaster grows worse because of demands on our school systems and the need for education and the complexities of the kind of education needed are increasing while our schools are falling further and further behind. I want to speak in particular about New York City because we have just returned recently from a recess where I had the opportunity to get closer to problems in my district, problems that I thought I understood very well before. I find that they are even worse than I have imagined, that there are problems with dimensions that shock even myself, and I have been in Congress now for 15 years. Before that I was an elected official in the New York State Senate, and before that I was an official in the New York City government. But the magnitude of these problems in New York City education are staggering, and an experienced observer is shocked by some of the things that happen, and I want to talk about that. Just first a footnote on the two important pieces of legislation that passed this past few days. One, the budget conference report that passed today where the Senate and the House now agreed on a budget, and basically I think the White House has agreed on most of the elements of that budget too. It is important to note that that budget agreement does not have to go to the White House for the signature of the President. Budgets do not have to go to the White House. They are agreements between the Senate and the House. The President started the process with his budget. In this case, the President sat in with the representatives of both Houses and they reached an agreement. I did not vote for that agreement because there were a lot of things missing there that I felt ought to be there. One of those things, of course, is the $5 billion for construction initiatives for schools which was proposed by the President to help stimulate construction of new schools or to renovate existing schools or to rehabilitate existing schools, to remove the danger of safety hazards from schools. If schools have asbestos problems, if they have lead pipe problems, any of those problems could have been taken care of in this $5 billion initiative. Now, the President initiated this, and we thought that in the budget agreement this would be a major item that would emerge intact. But unfortunately, Members of Congress, either in the House of Representatives or the other body, insisted that the $5 billion initiative for school construction be taken out. They were adamant, and the President finally yielded. Many of them insisted it should be taken out because they want to make the argument that local governments, the cities, the States, and the citizens of the States must be fully responsible for school construction. I want to just quickly note that they would still be mostly responsible, no matter what the Federal Government does. A $5 billion initiative to help with school construction would be just a tiny portion of the amount of money needed. The General Accounting Office estimates that we need $135 billion to bring our schools into the 21st century, $135 billion. So if the Federal Government is responsible for just $5 billion, it will not begin to solve the problem, but it will be a stimulant, and evidently, because we continue to fail to make the necessary promises at the State and local level, we need this Federal stimulant. So it is unfortunate that the budget conference report that went forward today does not have that $5 billion for school construction. We will not cease the fight, we will not give up. We are not elected to give up, we are not elected to stop the fight. Between now and the time that we adjourn sometime in the fall, we will continue to fight. The members of the Congressional Black Caucus have made this a priority item. We appeal to all of our comrades, all of our colleagues, to make certain that they keep sight of the fact that this is a major item of the budget. There is a bill that has been introduced by my colleague, the gentlewoman from New York [Mrs. Lowey], and 190 signatures were on that bill to carry forward the President's $5 billion construction initiative. So we think there is enough support to keep this item on the agenda. We think that it is not incompatible with the budget agreement that has already been made. Within the context of that budget agreement there is room for the school construction initiative to be revitalized. In the area of capital gains tax reductions, maybe corporate tax credits, corporate tax writeoffs of some kind could be used as a device to return to some kind of school construction initiative of an appropriate magnitude. We also passed the supplemental appropriation that I just mentioned before, which contains the disaster relief for communities that are suffering from floods and from exorbitant amounts of natural disasters that have occurred in the last 6 months. We think that is very much in order, but as I said before, disaster relief of another kind is needed in our big cities. Mr. Speaker, I have no problem with voting for disaster relief. I voted for $8 billion for California with its earthquakes and mud slides. I voted for $6 billion when we had to give money for the hurricane that took place in Florida, and $6 billion for flood relief in the Midwest several years ago. We apportion large amounts of Federal resources into helping people who need help. Of course, Mr. Speaker, New York does not have earthquakes, it does not have floods. We have not had any mud slides. So New York is a donor State. We continue to pay more into the Federal Treasury than we ever get back, so we deserve some consideration, and probably most of the big cities deserve some consideration in terms of another kind of disaster relief. First of all, of course, our colleagues here in the Congress have to recognize that it is a disaster. What is happening in our big city schools is a disaster. I had a discussion with one of my Democratic colleagues just yesterday who insisted that we should not have the Federal Government involved in school construction. It is a disaster. We find no other way to relieve the disaster. Bad decisions have been made, the wrong decisions have been made by local officials in some cases and by State officials. We have unfortunately allowed a situation to develop which is so far out of hand now that it has to have help from the outside, we must have help from the outside. Most of the help, as I said, will not come from the outside, but we need the stimulus. We need every public official at the city level, county level, and the Federal level, every public official should be put on the spot by having the Federal Government say, ``Here is part of the money, a small part of it. If you will just match it, if you will show some incentive, some initiatives, then we can go forward and provide the additional share to accomplish the task.'' I am not apologizing at all for local officials or for State officials. The mayor of the city of New York cut the school budget by more than $1.5 billion over the last 3 years. Part of the cuts that took place there were cuts that had an effect on the budget for renovation and for repairs and for school construction. So decisions being made by local elected officials are part of the problem. The State has not come forward with any great new initiative on construction in a long time. Decisions being made at the State level are part of the problem. Recently we had a State environmental bond initiative on the ballot, and the Governor came out and campaigned for that, identifying with the environmentalists, whom he had previously called beatniks and in various ways ridiculed, but suddenly the power of the environmentalist vote led the Governor to come out and campaign. The Senator from that State came out and campaigned, and they all are now on the environmentalist bandwagon. We are happy about that. We passed the bond. I was happy to note that in that bond issue they specifically said that they would give some small amount of the environmental cleanup money to New York City so that New York City could get rid of its coal-burning schools. Coal- burning schools in New York City. We still have coal-burning schools. They said in the brochure that urged people to come out and vote that funds would be available for 30 schools to change their boilers from coal-burning boilers to gas or oil boilers, eliminating the coal dust in the air that is perpetuating and increasing epidemic asthma and some other respiratory diseases. So we were proud of the fact that specifically they had mentioned relieving us of coal-burning furnaces. Despite the fact that I have been in New York a long time, I thought well, that would be the elimination of a major problem, 30 coal-burning schools will be no longer there. I did not know it at the time, but throughout the city we have almost 300 coal-burning schools, almost 300, and 30 means that we are going to eliminate 10 percent with this environmental bond issue. I know the numbers, when we start talking about New York City, always people's eyes glaze over or they just lose track because the numbers are so great. We have 1,100 schools in New York City, 1,100 schools serving nearly 8 million people, so the numbers are great. But out of that 1,100 schools, we have some which are way back in the previous century. They burn coal, and that coal in a city of 8 million people living in a relatively small space, we can see how the coal dust alone is a major environmental hazard being perpetrated at a place where young kids congregate on a regular basis. So we are creating a major problem. It is a disaster. If one will not accept the general condition of the school system as a disaster, then at least accept the fact that when it comes to safety and health, we have a disaster in 300 schools that burn coal. In our Federal construction initiative, if nothing else, the Federal construction initiative should set us free from those coal-burning schools, but that is not the case. We have in the budget conference report a proposal for tax cuts, and some colleagues have said well, since we did not get the President's initiative in terms of the budget as an outright item, then let us look at the tax cuts that are proposed in the budget agreement. There is a provision for 85 billion dollars worth of tax cuts over a period of 5 years, $85 billion in tax cuts are part of the agreement, and $35 billion of that $85 billion are related to education, related to tax credits for tuition, to merit scholarships, to a number of items that are important, and they belong in there and they should be in there. However, in addition to that, we ought to have at least $5 billion more of that tax cut dedicated to doing something to deal with the construction crisis, the school facility crisis, the safety and health crisis in our schools with respect to the big cities. Fifty billion dollars in tax cuts, somehow there ought to be created an imaginative way to get corporations and businesses involved to the tune of $5 billion in tax writeoffs or tax credits, or some way to have $5 billion of that $50 billion in tax cuts contributed toward solving the construction problem, the facility problem, contributed toward being a stimulant to solving the construction and facility problem in our school systems. Construction is a major kingpin in the whole effort to improve our schools. Construction is at the core of it in the sense that if we do not have buildings that are adequate, then nothing else that we do will have the proper impact. If children are in overcrowded schools as they are in New York City, we had a finite, very dramatic example of what the problem is last September, when on the day the school opened 91,000 children did not have a place to sit. Now, it did not mean that we did not have 91,000 seats, but it meant we had a lot of the 91,000 with no place to sit anywhere. No matter how much we adjusted the system, transferred the schools from one community to another, busing youngsters further away, we still had large numbers who had no place to sit and places had to be found in hallways, places had to be found in storage rooms, places had to be found in corners of cafeterias, in assembly halls, all kinds of places that were not classrooms. In addition to that, we had to increase the size of the classes. Even if we had the money for additional teachers, we did not have a place for the teachers to teach, so the number of children in each class had to be increased. So all of the classes in certain areas of our city have more children than they are supposed to have according to the agreed-upon contract with the teachers. Instead of 26 at certain grade levels, you have 35. That is a big difference in terms of the quality of teaching. So just the magnitude of the problem that you see in numbers and in overcrowding creates a situation that makes it harder for the teacher to do their job. But of course if you add to that the safety hazards, the asbestos that is a problem that we still have not dealt with in many of the schools, and we add to that the lead poisoning, lead being in some of the pipes and the paint. We add to that of course the fact that some schools are so old that the top floor, they have two floors, if one goes up to the second floor one will find that the walls of the classrooms on the second floor are continually shedding off because of the dampness, and the roofs that have been repaired over and over again no longer can be repaired to keep the water out, it just keeps coming in, or the money needed to properly repair the roofs and the walls is just not there. So we have manifestations of a physical problem that directly impacts upon the children in the school. If the walls of the room are damp, there is a health hazard and a distraction. If windows are knocked out and not replaced right away, that is a distraction. If the lighting of the school is improper, that is a distraction. We know what good schools look like. We can travel from New York City to the suburbs and find what good schools look like. Even within the city we have a two-tiered system. There are some neighborhoods that have excellent schools that would pass muster anywhere, but there are too many that have schools that belong to another century. Instead of carrying us forward to the 21st century they are still lingering in the 19th century. So we have right now a window of opportunity to do something about education in general, and the effort to improve education in general has to start specifically with the physical facilities, or the physical facility improvement becomes symbolic of what we really want to do. If we are not willing to do the basics, if we are not willing to give a child a comfortable place to sit, a place to sit which is conducive to learning, then the other efforts become a little ridiculous. We talk about all third-grade children should learn to read and be reading on third-grade level when they get to third grade. We talk about the fact that we want all students when they graduate to be able to measure up to certain standards. We want to be first in math and science. We have six goals that became eight or nine goals. They are all laudable goals, but how do you recognize these goals when you cannot provide a safe place to sit? How do you talk about a national curriculum, we would impose a national curriculum, where every subject of five or six subjects will be more or less taught the same way and have the same outcome aspirations, the same attempt to get to certain levels? When we talk about that in the context of falling schools, walls crumbling down, leaking roofs, and asbestos in the wall, you begin to generate cynicism and hopelessness. We have a revolution going on with telecommunications, but if you cannot bore a hole in the wall because when you bore the hole the asbestos comes out, then we cannot wire the schools that have the asbestos problem. So construction becomes a symbol. It becomes a kingpin. Construction of facilities, if they are not proper, then we usually find that other matters are not being taken care of either. Where we have construction problems, when we start asking questions, we find we have other problems. If we do not have school facilities that are proper, then usually those same schools do not have adequate supplies. The same schools have broken machinery or broken equipment. The same schools do not have quality teachers. In my district, one of the districts that we have, they have the largest number of substitute teachers in the city, teachers who are not really certified teachers. The requirement is that you be certified, or the requirement is that teachers have to meet certain standards, but if they are not there and you have to hire substitutes, you take people who are not well trained. This problem takes place in the same places where you have the space and facilities problem. It is symbolic. Communities that do not take care of their schools physically are not doing other things that are necessary to promote opportunities to learn. Opportunity to learn standards, as I said before on this floor many times, is a set of standards that nobody wants to talk about. Everybody wants to talk about new curriculum standards, all across the Nation to have the same set of curriculum standards. They want to talk about new testing standards, where we test students across the Nation and compare their achievements. But in order to have students master the new curriculum, in order to have them pass the test, we need to create an opportunity to learn. It is simple common sense and simple logic. Part of the creation of an opportunity to learn, of course, is they have to have a safe place to sit, a place that is conducive to learning. So cities are neglected. They are neglected partially for racist reasons. Large numbers of minority groups are congregated in cities. Cities are neglected partially because of income numbers. Large numbers of poor people are congregated in cities. Poor people do not vote in the same percentages as other people. It is a political problem. It is a problem that local officials and State officials have neglected. How do we break out of it? Large percentages of our population live in cities. Large percentages of our population that are the work force of tomorrow are not being appropriately educated. We have an anti-city bias in this country. The anti-city bias is played out in the compromise that we have to make on the Constitution. The Constitution appropriates Representative's seats by population, so that is a one man-one vote ratio. Places which have the most population get the most power, the most votes in the House of Representatives. But the great compromise was that each State should have two Senators. No matter how small the State is, they have two Senators, so we have Senators in large numbers who are elected by rural and suburban constituencies and they do not have big city populations, and the policy-making in this country has gone that way over the last 50 years: more and more neglect of big cities by the Federal Government, and the same pattern is played out often at the State level, where you have Governors being elected by non-city populations also. So we have a problem that cries out for resolution. We have a disaster that needs attention. We have a window of opportunity now. I am standing here because I will not give up. I hope my colleagues will not give up. I appeal to everybody out there with common sense to understand this magic window of opportunity. The cold war is over. We do not have to dedicate large amounts of resources to fighting the evil empire of the Soviet Union anymore. We have a President who wants to be known as the education President. He has put forward a very progressive, a very comprehensive program. We have the leadership of the majority in the House of Representatives stating that they are committed to the improvement of education in America. There is a disagreement on how we should approach it, but we can resolve that disagreement probably sometime in the future, maybe, but the important thing is that both parties, both houses of Congress and the White House, are committed to improving education. We have a window of opportunity. There is a need for people to come to this floor and talk specifically about how we take advantage of that window of opportunity. There is a need for us not to allow a Potemkin Village approach to be taken to education; that is, we have a few outstanding examples of what is happening that is progressive and positive in the country, and we hold up those examples and say, great, we are doing a great job, and we fool ourselves and we fool the American people in general, and make them think that we are really progressing and we have an appropriate education system. Any system of education in America which does not educate most of the population is a failure. We cannot exist, we cannot survive if the total population is not educated. The elite education may be the best in the world, the education of the graduate students and the scientists and technicians at the very top. The Ph.D. degrees in our higher education institutions, they may be the very best education in the world but they are educating a very small percentage of the total population. The world does not run on the basis of Ph.D's, top scientists, or top technicians. The world runs only when people all up and down the scale have some degree of education. The example I have used before is when you get on an airplane, do not worry about the pilot. The pilot has the best training in the world. I think we spend more to train pilots than we do any other occupation. Pilots of airplanes in America especially have the best training that you can get, the most up-to-date training. They have rigorous standards imposed upon them. We may complain about the FAA not being tough enough on airlines in terms of certain safety requirements of the planes and certain equipment failures, et cetera, but nobody ever complains about inadequate training of pilots. So they are well educated. But when you get on a plane, you had better worry about the guy who put the oil in the oil pits. You have to worry about the man who put the gasoline in, if he read the meters right. You have to worry about the mechanic who tightened the bolts, and a whole array of people who did not go to graduate school, who did not receive very expensive and thorough training. All of them, too, they have to be educated. It is true of our total society. There is hardly an operation within our society where we do not have people all up and down the scale who need more education in order to do the job well. If they do not do the job well, then we may have some disasters resulting. Serious things happen when people who do not necessarily have high education credentials do not have the education they need to do their job at whatever level they have to do it. We have serious consequences when the productivity of the total society goes down, because the people who are needed for those production jobs at various levels are not there. We cannot exist and compete as a Nation if we neglect large numbers of our students in our inner-city communities. We need an across-the-board approach where the suburbs, the cities, everybody is keyed to being given the best education possible. Opportunities to learn and opportunity to learn standards have to be important to everybody. I want to describe the comprehensive approach that we talked about when I was the chairman of the Subcommittee on Select Education. We reorganized the Office of Education, Research, and Improvement. We said, you have to take a comprehensive approach. I am talking mainly about construction and the need to address ourselves to school facilities and provide a safe environment, a healthy environment as step one. But we have to have an overall comprehensive approach. That is basic and that is No. 1. The comprehensive approach means that every aspect of the problems related to education have to be examined. A comprehensive approach means that Americans should stop oversimplifying what is necessary to educate our children. Everybody is an expert on education. They think they are experts in education. While it is important that everybody be in on the dialogue, because the dialogue means that maybe they will wake up to how important it is, and when the time comes to vote for elected officials, the time comes to select the people who are going to educate our children, we are aware; everybody needs to be aware. But let us not assume that everybody is qualified to determine how our schools should operate. We should not oversimplify. We do not oversimplify in the area of defense and armaments. We know experts are needed. All of us have a stake in what happens in terms of the protection we receive from the Department of Defense, but we do not oversimplify and assume we can do it. We should not oversimplify in education. We should understand everything across-the-board, and that is one point we tried to make when we reorganized the Office of Education, Research and Improvement. We called for certain institutes: an institute for the education of at-risk students to deal with some of the problems that our inner cities face with our students. We called for an institute for early childhood education. More and more we are learning that early childhood education is critical, because children learn more in their early years than we imagined, and what happens in those early years can set the tone for the ability of a child to learn for the rest of their lives. We called for an institute for curriculum improvement. We also called for an institute for governance and management. I am going to talk a bit about governance and management of schools, because I think that governance at the macrolevel, governance at the level of the Congress of the United States, means we ought to make decisions here about education which are really going to promote the improvement of education. Governance at the microlevel means that down at the local education level, the superintendents of schools, the school principals, we have to have the best governance and the best management there, too. Although improving facilities and physical environments is critical, there are other problems. One of those problems I stumbled upon when I was in my district for the past district work period that surprised me greatly. We have a space problem in New York, as I said before. There were 91,000 young people that did not have a place to sit when school opened last September. As a result of that space problem, one group that I worked with, the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission, which is dedicated to improving education in central Brooklyn, that group decided to join with me in making a survey of the schools in my congressional district. We wanted to make a survey to find out who are these schools, which schools still have a major space problem, which schools have overcrowding to a degree that is unacceptable. As we started to make the survey, we started by checking written documents and found that they were of little use, because people were not telling the truth. You would have a situation where a school would state that they had no overcrowding problem, but when you went to the school you found out that they had three lunch periods. One school had five lunch periods. Why do schools have three lunch periods? Because they are overcrowded, and they cannot get the students a lunch period in a reasonable amount of time. So instead of having one or two lunch periods, there are so many children they have to have three. I found one school that had to have five. Most people cannot comprehend this because even I find it hard to comprehend. I discovered in my district a school where children start eating lunch at 9:45. They have to eat lunch at 9:45 because the school is so crowded that is the only way they will get lunch served. The last ones are served at 2:30. The first lunch period begins at 9:45. It is that overcrowded. So no matter what they say on paper about not being overcrowded, you can tell by just asking how many lunch periods do you have. But then you can walk around and find groups of kids sitting in the halls. You can find storage rooms which have groups of kids, obvious things are happening when you walk around and look that you see that indicate that you still have a major overcrowding problem. There is one overcrowding problem, there is one aspect of this problem that really shocked me that I could not see with my own eyes, and that is in one of the districts, district 23. I do not want to bore anybody, but in New York City we have 32 school districts which are subunits of the local education agency. The board of education comprises the local education agency for New York City. It is broken down into 32 subdivisions. Each one of the subdivisions has a superintendent. And the overall board of education has a chief executive officer who is called the chancellor. So in my district I have parts, in my congressional district I have parts of five subunits, five local school districts. These local school districts are all shaped by natural neighborhood boundaries so they are not all the same size. But if you have a situation in a city as a whole where overcrowding is taking place, the last thing you expect is to find any district that does not have an overcrowding problem. You certainly do not expect to find a district that has empty classrooms, that has a situation where construction is not the problem but governance and management are the problem. And because of the governance and management of this particular district, because of its problems, you have overcrowding increased in the surrounding districts. And I am talking about district 23, which covers an area that became famous in 1967 and 1968, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville District. Ocean Hill-Brownsville became famous because it was one of the first experiments of community control and the local community control effort clashed with the teachers union. And we had a long strike in New York City that got national and sometimes international attention. So Ocean Hill-Brownsville is the place, a district that comprised the district boundary of district 23. Our overcrowding survey led to this discovery: that district 23 does not have an overcrowding problem but a shrinkage problem, where despite the fact that districts all around it are overcrowded and getting worse in terms of their population increase, the number of pupils going to school at district 23 is shrinking. It was a phenomenon which I decided to look at in far greater detail, and you cannot examine the overcrowding problems in this district without knowing some of the history. Ocean Hill-Brownsville had national attention when they had the great teachers strike, but then it moved off the front page when peace came. There was a settlement. Unfortunately that settlement included a takeover by the local political club, the assemblymen of the local political club politically moved in in an election and they gained control of the local school board. And you had peace, but the peace was a peace with corruption, a peace with violence in the schools, low attendance. The district became known as a place which was an extension of the patronage system, the local clubhouse. It did not matter whether people did their job right or not, as long as they were approved by the local clubhouse. It took a long fight to get rid of the political takeover of district 23, Ocean Hill-Brownsville. I was a part of the struggle to set the district free. We finally freed it of political control, and one of our rallying cries was, stop political interference and let the educators educate. As the State senator for that area, I certainly worked hard to make certain that other elected officials would not get involved anymore in hamstringing the quality of education within the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district. The problem is that that was a stupid position to take. Politicians, public officials should never say that they are not going to be involved in local schools or education at any level. Yes, public officials should not interfere. They should not seek to use schools for patronage, but district 23 is a perfect example how when the public officials back away, they are no longer looking, leave it to the educators, terrible things can happen. What has happened in district 23, because we took it out of the spotlight for 14 years, minimum political scrutiny, certainly no political interference, a superintendent was selected 14 years ago. And that superintendent has been there 14 years in a situation which is very unusual in New York City. Most school superintendents do not survive, do not stay in one place for 14 years. So we have a superintendent of this particular district who has been there 14 years. The district is so bad, however, parents are fleeing the district. They have no overcrowding problem because parents have decided they do not want their kids to go to the school, to the district schools. So large numbers of schools have empty space in a city which is racked by the problem of overcrowding. District 23 has no overcrowding problem. The parents are pulling their kids out in great numbers. The same district, the State has been observing the quality of education there. The overall citywide school board of education has been observing and several schools are under probation to make it simpler. They call them cert schools, schools which are under review. At least five schools are under review. Two schools recently were taken over by the chancellor for the overall school system. And the chancellor has what he calls a chancellor's district where he has created a district out of the 32 districts. Any long time, low performing schools are taken and put into a special supervisory situation where the chancellor's office oversees these schools. So two schools have been taken and at least three more are on the list in district 23. I am giving you a case history related to governance and management and how governance and management in this particular case exacerbates our space problem. The parents have made a decision. They know what is going on. Instead of fighting to improve the school district, they are just pulling the children out. Parents voted, nevertheless, to get rid of the old school board. They voted out the old school board. So in addition to understanding what is going on to the extent where they refuse to let their children go to school in the district, they also put forth an effort to get rid of the old school board and voted a new school board. The new school board now decides that the district superintendent who has been there for 14 years has had an opportunity to prove that he can educate children and can run a decent system. He can meet the challenges of that particular district or he cannot. They assume he cannot. Things have steadily gotten worse. District 23 is now at the very bottom of the list in terms of math and reading achievement. They have citywide tests, and you compare the scores from one district to another, this district is on the bottom. So it is pretty clear that the superintendent cannot, who has been there 14 years, cannot do the job. The new school board votes not to renew his contract. Instead of him gracefully admitting he cannot do the job, this particular superintendent has decided to wage war against the new school board. They voted not to renew his contract. That is the procedure. You start advertising for other superintendents and they are in the process of doing that. But in the meantime the present superintendent is using the resources of the school system, the children, the parents to fight against the policy decision of the present local school board and he is determined to stay there. They are now reviewing resumes of people who want to become superintendents in the district. Among the resumes the old superintendent, who has been there 14 years and failed miserably, has submitted his resume. The old superintendent, still the present superintendent until June 30, also recommended five principals for tenure. As he is going on, he recommends principals for tenure. Once principals are recommended for tenure and receive tenure, they cannot be fired. According to the way the system operates, tenure means you are there and you cannot be moved. Three of these five principals that were recommended were from these lowest performing schools. Again, the new school board decided to meet the challenge. They challenged the superintendent's recommendation of the five principals for tenure and said these are people who have failed and the failure is illustrated dramatically and documented by State records and by the chancellor's own criticisms of the district. Nevertheless, because of the arcane laws that relate to tenure, they will receive tenure, five failed principals will receive tenure. That is the way the law is written. If the superintendent recommends you, all the years that you have been there he has given you a satisfactory rating, there is no way to deny tenure. So we are saddled probably with five principals who have created a problem by overseeing the lowest performing schools. The majority of the teachers in this district are also substitute teachers, because the word gets around that it is not a good place to be and it is hard to get good teachers to come in. Those old teachers who were there, were the best, lured out to other districts or they were even encouraged to retire because part of the mayor's reduction of the budget for the board of education in the past 3 years has been an incentive plan to encourage the most experienced teachers and administrators to retire. More experienced people make higher salaries. If you get rid of the experienced people with the higher salaries, you lower your budget. But nobody bothered to use common sense and said, if you get rid of experienced people, you also lower the quality of everything there: administration, teaching. So we have a massive failure that is exacerbated by the fact that the city and the State are encouraging experienced people to leave the system and new people coming in have no mentors, no way to be trained. We have one element after another which piles on this disastrous situation within district 23. Most of the teachers who teach math and science in junior high schools did not major in math and science in junior high schools. You have a situation where there is a total collapse. There is a total collapse. Education is not taking place in district 23, Ocean Hill-Brownsville; 11,000 children go to school here. Again, the figures in New York are very grandiose figures. This is one of the smallest districts in New York City. Each school district is supposed to comprise no less than 15,000 youngsters. They only have 11,000 because so many have fled. They have fled the disaster. The district right next to it, district 17, has 30,000 pupils. District 18 has 20,000 pupils. They have an overcrowding problem in that district because the parents do not want their children to go to school in district 23. You have a situation where education is not taking place in district 23. There has been a total collapse. But nevertheless the superintendent, Michael Vega--I am using his name because I think it is outrageous what is happening there--Superintendent Michael Vega is still insisting that he should remain a superintendent. He is waging war against the school board that is trying to remove him. He is using the resources of the school, sending notes home with kids to parents. He has parent-teacher associations that he has cultivated over the years, very small groups, only a handful of parents involved. But they are the ones who get involved so they are elected. They are the officers. He has cultivated them and they are assisting him as he wages war against the district to try to remain in the district where he has been for 14 years, failed totally. The district has collapsed all around him and we have a war going on. For that reason, Michael Vega becomes a parasite. Michael Vega in that district becomes the enemy of education. All the parents need to understand, he is the enemy of education. We have a situation where moral indignation is appropriate from every level. We should have moral indignation by every elected official in the area. The chancellor of the whole school system was given new powers by the State legislature just this year in early January. No, late last fall, he was given new powers, and he can move in and do things that he could not do before in local districts. So the moral indignation of the chancellor is needed. The chancellor has criticized the system for its failure. Nevertheless, Michael Vega continues to move in ways which might result in him being reappointed as the superintendent. We have a commissioner of education for the State. The moral indignation of the commissioner, the powers of the commissioner should be brought to bear to get rid of a situation with respect to governance and management which is totally unacceptable. We have a powerful United Federation of Teachers, a union. They should weigh in against this immoral situation. The mayor should weigh in against this situation where because of our arcane procedures and laws, a superintendent who has been there 14 years, failed, and an attempt is being made by the newly elected board to move him out, he still feels that he has the power. And he is still using the resources of the taxpayers, the resources of the district to fight the decision to be moved. I have given this case history example, because I want to admit that all of the problems of our schools are not going to be resolved by any action by a government at the Federal level or by action at even State level. There are problems at the local level that have to be taken care of, and we have to deal with them as elected officials by confronting our own constituencies with the problems. I served as a commissioner of a community development agency in New York with responsibility for the community action program, and we were major proponents of community control. We pushed hard for community control. And when the law was changed to set up community school districts, we were the major advocates and major proponents of community control. What we have witnessed is that when we put local people in control, parents of the students in that area, poor people who live in the neighborhood, we can have some dramatic results that we would never expect. Corruption is not limited to middle class or rich people. Corruption takes place quickly also among people who are poor and who are local and who have something at stake in the system. We were shocked to find that we could have a situation where one job, maybe pays $15,000, to get one job secured, a member of a school board will move to ruin the lives of 15,000 youngsters. They do not care. They logroll with each other about jobs and they put in people who are not responsible and they allow all kinds of horrible situations to go on when their kids are in the schools and their neighbors' children are in the schools. It is shocking. And for that reason, of course, I supported reforms which allowed the chancellor to have the power to step in. Well, superintendents, like Michael Vega, chief executive officers, they are paid very well. They are supposed to make certain that laymen do not get away with these kinds of excesses. But instead of being the force that makes certain that professional education goes on, many superintendents become part of the problem. The corruption is driven from the office of the superintendent, a kind of corruption which we cannot arrest anybody for, a corruption which is an acquiescence to low standards, an acquiescence to mediocre, incompetent people in order to gain friendships. For this superintendent, the most important thing is that he maintain friendships with enough people to get the votes he needs in order to continue there. And since the votes were taken away and the old school board that supported him was thrown out, he now is attempting to go to another level and get the power of the parents in each individual school, those few that he has nurtured along, and will promote a little revolution to maintain himself in power. We should not let this exist, and I am taking this opportunity to give this case history here because I want to sound the alarm for people back in the 11th Congressional District, those who live in the District 23 area. The people who live in District 17, which is next to District 23, this is their fight too because their district is overcrowded as a result of kids fleeing from District 23. People whose children go to school in District 18, their district is overcrowded because children are fleeing from District 18. It is a ridiculous situation, because throughout the whole city we have a shortage of places to sit, of classroom space, and District 23 has a surplus because nobody wants to go to school in District 23. We must deal with that situation. We have a window of opportunity to really improve education in America. From where I stand, from where we are placed in the hierarchy of decision-making, the Members of Congress are not to take lightly this opportunity. We have a window of opportunity where the Nation is not faced with any great crisis, the Nation can focus its attention on education in a way it never could before, starting with the Federal Government. We are not the major players in the education scenario. At best, we have only a minor role, but that role is important. The Federal Government is the stimulant. The Federal Government pushes things. The percentage of money spent by the Federal Government on education at most is about 7 percent. States and local governments provide the rest of the money for education, but despite this small percentage, Federal participation in education, through title I, through Head Start, through various programs at the higher education level, Federal participation has a stimulant effect that is a very positive one. We would not have certain kinds of standards that exist in our school settlements if it had not been for the impetus of the Federal Government. The education of children with disabilities, special education programs, would not exist if it were not for the Federal Government. The States and the localities are paying a greater percentage of the money, but the standards are being set and the high quality of education is being driven by the fact that the Federal Government is involved. We have an opportunity to take advantage of certain historical events that have occurred recently. The fact that the Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and in that act they mandated that the FCC should find a way to give some kinds of special attention to schools and libraries with respect to lowering the cost for telecommunications by having the providers pay into a universal fund, that has happened now. It has come to pass. On May 7 the Federal Communications Commission voted to establish a universal fund for libraries and schools. That universal fund will provide the necessary funding at a 20-percent discount for the richest schools and a 90-percent discount for the poorest schools. That is an opportunity we should not pass up. We have an opportunity in that there is agreement between both parties that the Federal Government has a major role in education, and in this Congress, the 105th Congress, there is a greater possibility that we will have some positive steps taken on a bipartisan basis than ever before. So let us not fail to understand how serious it is. We have a disaster out there. It may not be in all our communities, in the suburbs, in the rural areas, but we might want to take a look and accept the fact that in the inner cities of our Nation we have a disaster. We have a disaster that is not unique to New York. It exists in practically all of our inner-city communities. We need help. We need disaster relief. We do not have floods, we do not have earthquakes, we do not have mud slides. God did not do it directly, it is a man-made crisis, and partially it is made by bad decisions that have been made at every level, bad decisions by the Governors, bad decisions by the local mayors, and of course at the local level the school boards often make bad decisions also, but the Federal stimulus is the best thing that we have to offer, and we should make certain that from where we are we continue the Federal stimulus to assist education, starting with a revival of the construction initiative that the President put forth before. Let us not give up. We need the $5 billion construction initiative in the Federal budget.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I want to thank my colleague, the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Millender-McDonald], and say that she is ready to fight. And I want her to know there are a number of other people in this country who are now quite alarmed by what is happening and they, too, are ready to fight. There has been a recent set of mobilizations proposed by the religious community. They think this is immoral, that we cannot talk about welfare reform, meaning the people must go to work and we start defining jobs as something less than a job. When we operate in America, we operate under the Fair Labor Standards Act. A job must pay minimum wage, must provide benefits, must protect you from discrimination, it must give you safety. Everything under the Fair Labor Standards Act must be there in order for a job to be a job in America. And the people are upset. A coalition of 18 of the Nation's most prominent civil rights, labor and welfare and civil advocacy groups have urged President Clinton to grant welfare recipients rights to a broad array of legal protections against discrimination and unjust treatment on the job. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and 17 other groups asked President Clinton in a May 15 letter to make the civil rights and economic security of low-income individuals and families a higher national priority as States implement the new welfare law. The Lutheran services in America have issued a proclamation that in none of the various organizations where they employ people or that they are affiliated with that employ people may any organization pay welfare recipients less than the minimum wage or provide less than fringe benefits that are provided to other workers. So we should sound the trumpet. I think the Congressional Black Caucus have made it quite clear that we intend to appeal to our colleagues in the Democratic Party here in the Congress, we intend to make appeals to the entire Congress, Members of both parties. Remember that the minimum wage was a very popular issue in the last Congress, that there were people that said they would never permit it to pass, that it would only pass over their dead body. But the American people let it be known, they thought it made sense. They thought it was the right kind of morality for America. They thought it was fair and just. Eighty percent of the American people said they wanted an increase in the minimum wage. We got an increase in the minimum wage. Mr. Speaker, I think what has to happen now is the American people, the workers out there, the people who belong to the caring majority and believe in doing the right thing, even though they are all right by themselves, they do not want to turn their backs on other people who ought to have a fair opportunity to earn a living under right working conditions with a minimum wage. All that is in motion now, and I think we should go forward to see to it that nothing is passed on the floor of this House that begins to roll back the clock, that takes away the right of workers who happen to have been or are present welfare recipients. A worker means that you are under American FSLA, Fair Standards Labor Act, under all the added discrimination laws, under the OSHA laws for safety. That is what it means to be a worker in America.

Mr. OWENS. I think the fact that the British economy in general was performing very well, they say we have prosperity. What the common ordinary people in Britain understood was that more and more people at the top were getting more and more of that economy, and they were getting less and less. The great shock was they swept overwhelmingly, they swept out a party at a time when prosperity, so called, was very much in motion there.

Mr. OWENS. And suburban peasants.

Mr. OWENS. I thank my colleague from California and my colleague from Illinois for joining me. Mr. Speaker, in closing, let me just say there is an effort to divide and conquer welfare recipients who are put over here and workers who are put over there. The workers of America must understand this is a threat to all of us. If you did not understand it before, I hope you understand it now, that whatever happens to one group of workers, welfare workers, is going to have an impact on the quality of life and standard of living of all workers. We must fight to protect all workers by stopping this effort to make welfare recipients work in conditions that are not conditions acceptable to other American workers.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to make it clear that my colleagues are welcome to stay. The issue I am about to discuss is quite relevant and related to the previous issue. Mr. Speaker, we are in a situation where, as I said before, there is a drive on to drive the workers' wages down to the lowest levels, and the process of globalization is being used to do that, where corporate powers are moving the jobs and their manufacturing processes to the areas that have the lowest wages, and there is a continual search that goes on and on perpetually for the lowest wages. At the same time, we have a situation in our borders here in America where every effort is being made to destroy organized labor, to take away the power of the workers to speak for themselves and to drive the work force here down to lower levels at the same time you are taking away their jobs and forcing them to bargain for lower wages because of the globalization. We have with the welfare, so called, reform. It was not welfare reform. It was welfare liquidation. We destroyed the entitlement, for that has been in the law for 65 years, that was not reformed. That is elimination, liquidation. We gave to the States certain powers, and we give them money, but the right for a poor person to expect his government to help to keep him alive is gone. The welfare reform was driven by a call to put people to work. Work was a necessity in order for human dignity to be encouraged. Work was desirable and work was available. We insisted that the work was available in spite of the fact that we had high unemployment in all of those areas where you had a large welfare case load, large numbers of people are on welfare in the areas where you have the biggest unemployment problems. So now we have a situation where we have pushed and are pushing people off the welfare rolls. We are insisting that there are jobs, and as we mobilize to put more and more people to work, what is happening is that we have created a situation where people are being forced to work for less than the minimum wage. And when accusations are made that this is a movement toward slavery, people are upset. They say how dare you use the word slavery. Let us stop for a moment and consider the fact that on the plantation everybody had a job. There was no unemployment on the plantation. You might have great varieties in terms of fringe benefits in terms of housing provided or decent food, but everybody had a job. You can have a situation where everybody has a job, and you can take away the dignity of people through the job but not paying them a decent wage, you can drive down the wages to the point where we have a new class of people, what you might call urban serfs or suburban peasants. Mr. Speaker, they are in a situation where they are locked into accepting whatever is given them, but it has nothing to do with the relationship with what they need and what the standard of living is in our particular society. So we are driving down wages now by introducing into the labor market a new class of people, putting them in jobs and paying them less than even the minimum wage which is totally inadequate. We have had previous discussions about how inadequate the minimum wage is. It is going to go up to 5.15 an hour, it is now at 4.75. If you look at what it takes to maintain a family, you can make the minimum wage and work every eligible hour during the year, and still you are in poverty according to our own standards. So I want to open the discussion in terms of the new threat, the additional threat in addition to most-favored-nation status for people for countries like China in addition to NAFTA and in addition to GATT. We now have a drive on within our own society to finish the job and it is not unrelated, what is happening to welfare recipients and workfare and the movement to try to force people to work for less than the minimum wage is not unrelated to the total Republican attack on organized labor. Unprecedented, an unprecedented attack has been launched in this Congress, the 105th Congress, a Congress that prides itself on seeking some new bipartisan options and wanting to be more civil. In no way is it acting civilly or behaving in a civil way toward organized labor. They have come out pushing very hard to destroy organized labor. There is a thorny campaign on to promote union democracy which would take away the rights of labor unions to finance the political education of their own members. There are new ambushes of Davis-Bacon, the prevailing wage requirements, new ambushes that are being prepared, riders on bills unrelated to work force issues. There is the whole cash for overtime swindle where, instead of giving people cash for overtime, they are going to take it away and give them time off at the boss's discretion and convenience. There is a continuing drive to gag the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. There is a continuing refusal to recognize ergonomics, what that means in terms of repetitive motion disorders to workers. There is a new drive to pass the union busting law called the Team Act, which allows the bosses almost to hand pick the shop stewards. And there is a new slashing of the budget for the National Labor Relations Board which is being threatened. And they are harassing the National Labor Relations Board. And then there is NAFTA, GATT, most-favored- nation treatment trading status for China that we have been talking about here previously. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders], who might want to comment on this, which is a continuation of what we were talking about before, the drive to push the wages of labor, of the working class down to the very lowest level.

Mr. OWENS. We have traded places with Great Britain where the gap between the rich and poor used to be the greatest. We are now, democratic America has now the greatest gap between the rich and the poor. It is the phenomenon that has taken place. It has nothing to do with capitalism per se. The argument about capitalism and what it does to an economy is an argument, I think, that is just about over. It appears that humankind prefers a capitalist system. It seems to be compatible with the way human beings are built. We are not talking about capitalism automatically creating this kind of condition. Capitalism can be compassionate. Capitalism can be more creative. They have a capitalist system in Sweden. They have a capitalist system in a number of other places. Norwegian workers do very well. There are a number of places where they choose to use their resources in certain ways and they choose to throttle the runaway spirit of greed which creates more and more billionaires and multibillionaires. We ought to see ourselves differently. Mr. Speaker, President Clinton has said that America is the indispensable Nation in today's global society. I agree. I think capitalism has, in fact, demonstrated that perhaps capitalism is an indispensable economic system of humankind. There are all kinds of capitalism. Chinese capitalism uses slave labor in prisons, and we are buying into a system with China where we are willing to buy the products of slave labor. More and more of those products are flowing into this country. We have an enormous trade deficit with China. It took over a very short period of time. The Japanese deficit grew slowly over the years, but the deficit, by deficit I mean we are buying so much more from China than China is buying from us. If you want to know what these deficits are about, a trade deficit is when you are buying so much more from one country, from a country than they are buying from you. We are buying many products that should be manufactured in our own country. We are buying products that our workers here used to make. We are buying those products from the Chinese. We are doing all of that in terms of the globalization that we talked about in the previous hour, driving down the wages by moving from one country to another to find the lowest wages. But here in this country the attack on organized labor is an attack which seeks to drive down the wages of the workers. And the latest development is the fact that we have had new low-wage workers introduced into the labor pool via welfare recipients. In my city of New York, workfare they call it, is expanding. We have one of the biggest workfare programs in the country, where welfare workers go to work for city agencies. Now, we also have one of the biggest reductions in the number of workers on city payroll at the same time. They say, well, this is being done by attrition. After all, the mayor of the city is running for reelection this year. He is not laying off anybody. But they are not hiring anybody. They have not hired anybody for the last 3 years. And they had a process of encouraging workers to retire in various ways, pressing them to take packages to retire. So the civil service work force in New York has been reduced while the workfare work force has gone up. The workfare people, who are welfare recipients while they are on workfare, are working for less than minimum wage. They have to work a certain number of hours in order to get their grant. And if we divide the number of hours into the grants, we will find the amount of money per hour is lower than minimum wage. Add to that that there are no fringe benefits attached to that work. Of course, they are still on welfare so they are fortunate enough to be able to continue to get Medicaid for health care. So we have a situation where from within the country pressures are now on to drive down the wages by forcing more and more low-wage workers into the market. The White House has reached to call for a minimum wage in workfare plans. They say we must pay welfare workers a minimum wage. That set off a whole chain reaction. That chain reaction, we understand, may culminate in a bill on the floor of this House very soon. There is one rumor that Ways and Means is preparing it now, which will make it clear that by order of this government, people must work for less than minimum wage. We are going to put that into a law. There is a great deal of alarm about it. We have been meeting today among members of the Congressional Black Caucus. We want to call this to the attention of our fellow members of the Democratic Party, we want to call it to the attention of all of the Members of the House and to the attention of the American people. We want to sound the alarm right now, let us not sit here in Washington and make laws which will create a new class of workers, urban serfs, suburban peasants, whatever we want to call it, people working for less than minimum wage. Minimum wage is already inadequate. We will not accept anything below the minimum wage. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Vermont.

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentleman. The story is that we are the wealthiest nation that ever existed on the face of the Earth. The wealth of America is constantly increasing and the wealth of wealthy people throughout the world is constantly increasing. There is no reason why minimum wages cannot be provided. There is no reason why health care cannot be provided for everybody. There is no reason why we cannot have a totally different kind of society even within the structure of capitalism. There is no reason why it cannot happen. It is the blindness, the shortsightedness of the people in power and that have the money that continues this condition. And the fact we went to great lengths to push people off welfare and with the myth that there were jobs out there, and now we are pushing them into the work force to undercut the lowest paid workers and compete with those that have jobs. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois.

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentleman from Illinois and I yield to the gentlewoman from California.

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentlewoman from California. We do not know how late the hour is really. We may have on the floor this week or early next week an attempt to codify the denial of the payment of minimum wage and other worker benefits to welfare recipients.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to point out that the problem of putting people to work on welfare and the problem of providing decent jobs and wages for workers is not unrelated to the overall scene here in this House. The budget drives everything. We have certain developments in the budget which automatically take away job opportunities. We have a great decrease in the amount of public housing construction and repair. We have a great decrease in terms of money available for school repair and renovation. In fact, they took the whole Presidential initiative of $5 billion, which would have gone into repair and renovating and building new schools, providing jobs for people in inner cities. We had a big fight over the transportation bill which in the inner city communities would provide jobs for people who work for mass transit and for the construction and repair of subways and bus systems, et cetera, as well as provide jobs for people who work on highways. So the job creation part of the budget is given away to tax cuts. We have large tax cuts to the same categories of people that the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders] was talking about earlier. They are already the richest people in America. Our budget is dedicated to giving them more to take capital gains cuts and inheritance cuts. They will get more, while at the other extreme we are cutting down on the transportation budget that would have provided jobs, on the school construction budget that would have provided jobs, and we are cutting programs like Medicare and Medicaid. So our common sense here has gone out of the window. It is up to the American people, the voters out there, to bring back the leadership, bring the leadership here back to their senses. That budget was negotiated at the White House. I guess we have got to bring the President back to his senses too and have him stand up to that kind of negotiation, not agree to make those kinds of cuts in areas which create jobs, which take care of people, and at the same time you are bolstering the pocketbooks and the bank accounts of the people who need it the least. We got it all topsy-turvy, and that is why this country is the country that has the greatest gap between the rich and poor. Great Britain, with all its lords and aristocracy and very rich people and very poor people in the slums of London and various great cities, Great Britain used to be the place where you had the greatest gap between the very rich and the very poor. Now it is America, the home of the brave and the land of the free, the place where everybody assumed they had the opportunity to make it, and a lot of the creation of the world's modern economy was built on the backs of consumers, ordinary people, who had the money to go out and buy refrigerators and buy cars and buy homes. All that is being slowly squeezed to death by catering to the very people at the very top. It begins right here at the House of Representatives. At the same time they are taking the money away from those who need help the most from their government.

Mr. OWENS. I think it is important to point out that we are not alone, as the gentlewoman said before. The churches are mobilizing to take the facts to the American people and to try to get people to understand the unfairness in this whole attempt to push people out there, make them work for less than the minimum wage, with no benefits. The Washington Post and the New York Times and a number of other newspapers have come out in support of the President's position. I just want to read a couple of paragraphs from the Washington Post editorial that appeared on Monday, May 19. ``Wages of Welfare Reform'', it is called. The President was right to order that welfare recipients put to work under the terms of last year's welfare bill be paid the minimum wage. The objecting governors and other critics are likewise right when they say that his decision will throw the bill even further out of whack than it already was. What the President basically proved that in doing the right thing on the wage was how great a mistake he had made in caving in to election year pressures, some of them of his own making, and signing the bill to begin with. The problem with the welfare part of this legislation as distinct from the gratuitous cuts that it also imposed in other programs for the poor is the mismatch that exists between its commands and the resources it provides to carry them out. The basic command is that welfare recipients work, but that's not something that can be achieved by the snap of a finger or the waving of a wand or it would have happened long ago. A lot of welfare recipients aren't capable of holding down jobs without an enormous amount of support. Nor in many cases are there jobs enough in the private sector to accommodate them even if they could hold those jobs down. That is just a section from an editorial that appeared in the Washington Post. There was one also similar in Newsday in New York which called for supporting the President as he attempts to enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act in respect to welfare recipients. I think I said before that one of the churches that has set an example is the Lutheran Church where they say that they will not allow any of their units that employ people to engage welfare workers for less than the minimum wage. There is a statement they issued on May 1, at the Workfare Media Conference of the Lutheran Services in America. I will quote just a few sections from that: The Lutheran Services in America organizations spend $2.8 billion serving 2 million people and includes over 3,000 locations across the United States. We employ workers at all levels and seek to serve those who are in need. When Congress passed welfare reform legislation which was signed into law on August 22, 1996, we all knew that we would have to move beyond the rhetoric of personal responsibility to work opportunity and responsibility by the employer. If welfare reform is to happen in this country, then work opportunity that includes at the very least the minimum wage must happen. Rather than pitting personal responsibility and structural change against one another, we realize that both kinds of efforts are needed. As employers, our umbrella alliance of service organizations has endorsed the fair work campaign so that workers have both sufficiency and sustainability in their lives. We know from our experience that work that is a job must include sufficiency which means adequate levels of income support so that people can live dignified lives. It must also include sustainability. Workers cannot live in fear of taking other people's jobs nor be treated differently than others by wages, benefits or personnel policies. Without sufficiency and sustainability, welfare legislation becomes nothing more than rhetoric. Lutheran Services in America organizations face the same issues that every nonprofit and corporate employer in America faces. We are working within a budget and providing services for our clientele. We are well aware of what it means to be an employer and because of this we believe that workfare recipients need positive learning and training experiences as well as new jobs and that workfare recipients perform important work that should be valued fairly. We in Lutheran Services in America challenge other employers to join us to be involved and become responsible in the opportunities we give to workers. It is reform for all of us and it requires all of us to become a part of this if we ever intend to see the face of poverty change. I think that is a forthright statement by the Lutheran Church and it is a challenge to all other religious organizations and nonprofit organizations and to corporate America. If we want to really move people from a situation of dependency into the mainstream and provide jobs, then let us define a job as being a thing that pays the minimum wage and has all the other benefits that go with being a worker in America.

Mr. OWENS. I am sure that both of my colleagues know well that phrase that they have heard repeated often, that in slavery everybody on the plantation had a job, because a job was then defined as work that the master wanted you to do. You did not get paid for it. For 232 years there was free labor. You did not get paid for it, but people had jobs. They were on the plantation and they had jobs. In order to satisfy those who again move out of racist motivations, when you say people should go to work and you create a situation through a bill you call welfare reform that pushes people off welfare and help from the government into situations where there are no jobs, no effort is being made to create those jobs. No effort is being made to create real jobs. So they want to push people into situations where they will work for something that is not a job. They will work for less than minimum wage. They will work under extraordinarily harsh conditions to do something that other workers were being paid to do before. So we are not only not creating jobs for welfare recipients, we are displacing workers who had jobs before. As I said at the beginning, this is happening in no more evident way than it is happening in New York City. We have a large workfare program. The workfare program as it expands, we see the city employees, the municipal payroll, decreasing at the same rate as the workfare program is increasing, a definite correlation. You take away the jobs from the people who were being paid to do them before, with fringe benefits, with a retirement plan, all the things that go into a real job, you take that away and you put people to work who have nothing except to work off the cash value of their welfare grant, you get a lot of work done for very little. If you can institutionalize that and get it going full steam, you are back into a condition which is close to slavery because you are forcing people to work in a situation where it has no relevance to really what they need, you are not paying them, they are involuntary servitude. It is that bad. We are not exaggerating when we say that that is where you are going. If you rule out paying people what we call minimum wage and providing the benefits that we call a job, then you are creating something that is not a job. You are creating servitude and forcing people into that pattern of servitude.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would just like to comment briefly, because I think I have an hour after this where I will be continuing the discussion of the downgrading of the wages of American workers, but I want to thank the minority whip and my colleagues for continuing this crusade to educate the American public, to educate American workers. We have just seen the majority of the masses of France sweep out a government that wanted to take care of the economy on the backs of the people at the bottom. We have just seen in Canada the same kind of phenomenon where the people on the bottom said ``No, we're are not going to take it any more,'' and they swept out, they almost swept out a government that insisted that the only way they could make the economy work was by putting one more burden on the people on the bottom, taking away their benefits, lowering their wages, a worldwide movement to press down wages. We always favored globalization and thought of taking the American standard of living to the rest of the world. We were going to raise the standard of living of the world. We did not know that globalization meant that we were going to have wages brought down to the lowest common denominator. We can measure this process in the trade balance, the deficit with China, in terms of trade, the deficit with Mexico. We can measure the amount of jobs they are taking, the dollar value and the amount of jobs they are taking. It is not so subtle. Our folks need to begin to understand this, and unfortunately we evidently are never going to have the help of the mass media, so we have to keep the crusade to educate the American public going on. Mr. Speaker, I will stop at this point because I want to talk about a new factor that has entered into this process, and that is, you push the welfare recipient into the labor market and they are supposed to work at less than minimum wage. So that is a new pressure, in addition to telling the worker, ``If you don't shape up, if you join a union, if you do anything I don't like, I'm going to take your job to Mexico.'' These are to welfare recipients at less than minimum wage, so that is a double threat.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the corporate greed we are seeing has absolutely no common sense. What history has clearly demonstrated over the past 50, 75 years is that the locomotive, the engine of the locomotive that drives the economy of America, and the American economy drives the economy of the whole world, is the middle-class consumer. Who are the middle-class consumers but the workers who earn decent wages in the factories? Henry Ford did not automatically understand it, but he got around to understanding that folks need to have higher wages in order to buy my cars. It is only a matter of time. Nobody believes that what we have in motion is going to kill our economy, but it is only a matter of time when, as the rich get richer on top and they take away the power of the consumers in the middle and the bottom, there will not be anybody to buy these products and the great engine of the locomotive will go dead, and we will all be in a morass in terms of the economy. The common sense of the American people has to come into this situation. Millionaires want to be billionaires. Billionaires want to be multi-billionaires. It is greed totally out of control and greed that is going to be self-destructive. They are going to destroy themselves as well as the whole American economy.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, again, the Congressional Black Caucus budget has demonstrated that we can balance the budget, and we can balance it without pain. Our budget shows how we can cut more corporate welfare and balance the budget without cutting Medicare and Medicaid. We can balance the budget and still increase funding for education. One of the big problems with this budget is that the deal that was made has taken out some vital parts. One of the parts taken out was the construction initiative that the President proposed for schools. The construction initiative is very important. It is a pivotal kingpin issue with respect to the improvement of education. We cannot go forward and really improve education unless we have safe places for children to sit, unless we take care of the enormous amount of disrepair that has taken place over the years in our schools. We cannot have telecommunications going forward if we cannot wire the schools properly because they are too old to take the proper wiring. We cannot institute a national curriculum and national tests if we do not provide safe places for children to sit or conducive places for them to study. None of the education improvements are going to prevail if they do not have a conducive setting in which to operate; construction is very important. Early in the discussion the Republican majority introduced the controversy of Davis-Bacon with respect to its impact on school construction. That was false, a red herring. The issue was raised to divert attention away from the real issue of the need for construction. Davis-Bacon is not a problem. Where Davis-Bacon prevails, where prevailing wages are paid, schools are built at a lower cost than in States which do not have a State prevailing wage and where there is no utilization of the prevailing wage of Davis-Bacon. The Sheet Metal and Air-Conditioning Contractors National Association has sent me a copy of a study that was done. They can prove step-by- step, State by State, that it is cheaper to build schools under the prevailing wage requirements of Davis-Bacon. That is not at issue. We should go forward with school construction. This is a fight we should not give up, despite the fact that it is not in the present agreement.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, in 1 minute I can only summarize the essence of Function 500, the education and job training component of the CBC budget. It continues the tradition of assigning the highest priority to education. We applaud the fact that the President has also saw fit to assign the highest priority toward education. Speaker Gingrich and Republicans in the House as well as the Republicans in the Senate have seen fit to emphasize education, but they are making a great mistake by not continuing to press for the construction initiative. At the heart of the opportunity to learn is a safe place to sit, conducive to learning. We do not have that in most of our inner-city schools. New York has 300 schools that still burn coal in their boilers, and they pollute the air in addition to providing other kinds of problems for children in those schools. I urge that we get back on track and really go to the core of providing opportunities to learn. We want to have a national curriculum. We want to have national testing. We need national standards in terms of the opportunity to learn. At the heart of the opportunity to learn is a safe place to sit, conducive to learning. We need a construction initiative. This Congressional Black Caucus budget insists on adopting a construction initiative. Mr. Chairman, I rise in overwhelming support of a budget that genuinely reflects the vision and hope of the Caring Majority: The Congressional Black Caucus Fiscal Year 1998 Budget Proposal. This is the first budget resolution of the 105th Congress (fashioned by the President and Members of the House and Senate) and is nowhere near the mean-spirited, devastating cuts proposed in past budget resolutions (in the 104th Congress). Despite its improvements, the budget agreement still fails to acknowledge the role of the United States as an indispensable nation capable of adequately providing for all Americans, especially the most vulnerable. In 1997, we are making decisions which will have monumental effects on the generations of the 21st century. Accordingly, we must accept the pivotal role that this generation plays. With courage, compassion and sound fiscal policy, the CBC embraces this challenging role and pledges the nation's abundant resources to invest in America. In Function 500 (Education, Training and Social Services), the CBC Budget ensures that every child from Head Start to College and beyond will be sufficiently prepared to compete in the world. In fiscal year 1998, funding for education and training programs would amount to a $28.2 BILLION increase (compared to FY97 levels) over the White House- Republican budget agreement's increase of $4 billion. Similar to the priorities outlined in the agreement, the CBC Budget includes the President's America Reads Challenge, Hope Scholarship Initiative ($1,500 tax credit to college students), and increases in funding for significant job training programs, including Job Corps. However, the CBC Budget represents an all-out, comprehensive and determinative effort to prepare the next generation for 21st century learning. By the year 2002, America's students will be empowered by several milestones: 100 percent of those children eligible for Title I compensatory education will be able to receive it; every single eligible 14 to 21 year old who desires work and is unable to find a summer job will gain employment through the Summer Youth Employment Program; all 2 million 3-5 year olds currently eligible for Head Start will be able to participate in the program; 100 percent of the 3 million children classified as limited English proficient students would be served by bilingual education; and low-income college students will be eligible for a maximum Pell Grant of $5,000, the amount that the grant would be if it kept pace with inflation. Unlike the White House-Republican budget agreement, the CBC Budget does not abandon the much needed emergency School Construction Initiative. Undoubtedly, learning will not take place when the schools that our children attend are literally collapsing around them. The CBC Budget provides $5 billion in interest subsidies over a 5-year period to stimulate new construction and renovation projects in school districts with severe facilities deficiencies. In addition, the CBC Budget provides an additional $20 billion (over a 5-year period) for the Education Infrastructure Act (P.L. 103-382) which was never funded. This would provide emergency grants for the repair, renovation, alteration, and construction of public schools, school libraries and media centers. It has been well documented that over 60 percent of schools in the U.S. need major repairs. Approximately 25 percent of schools are too small and suffer from severe overcrowding. And 40 percent of all schools, especially those in the inner cities with a large minority student body, cannot moderately accommodate science labs or technology such as computers and cable. Finally, the CBC Budget would fund a $20 million new program to establish at least 200 Community Computer Centers for families in both rural and urban economically depressed areas. The CBC Budget recognizes that school construction initiatives and telecommunications initiatives must be implemented in tandem. These programs should not be treated as bargaining chips that are mutually exclusive and subject to sacrifice. In fact, rumors are being mounted which state that labor protections such as the prevailing-wage requirements of the Davis-Bacon Act may result in a ballooning of costs to renovate and construct the nation's schools. The Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors' National Association (SMACNA) has submitted evidence showing that school construction costs in prevailing wage States were lower per square foot than in States without prevailing wage statutes. We must dispel the myths that deviously seek to derail policies that help America's children. Recently, we applauded the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) decision to grant discounts to schools and libraries for telecommunications services, Internet access, and internal connections. At a cost of more than $2 billion per year to implement the universal service provisions of the Communications Act of 1996, public and private schools could qualify for discounts ranging from 20 percent to 90 percent. Although media outlets did not grant the FCC's decision recognition and much fanfare, it represents a monumental achievement. Yet, without the school-construction initiative, many schools will not realize the benefits of this Federal action. Schools across the country still suffer from asbestos problems. One third of the schools in New York City still burn coal for heating. Many schools across the country are more than 100 years old. Pentium computers, high-speed modems, and fancy satellite hookups will be stockpiled in many school basements because their buildings are too old and incapable of accommodating the technology necessary for 21st century learning. Opponents of the CBC Budget, deficit hawks and fiscal conservatives, will undoubtedly argue that the accomplishments outlined in our budget are too good to be true. On the contrary, the CBC budget is a realistic budget that turns the myth that America is on the brink of bankruptcy on its head. The CBC Budget rids the nation of billions of dollars in wasteful spending: corporate tax loopholes, and unnecessary defense expenditures. The White House-Republican budget agreement increases revenues to the U.S. Treasury by extending the airline tax, phasing in increases to contributions to the Civil Retirement and Disability Trust Fund, guarding against fraudulent Earned Income Tax Credit claims, and auctioning spectrum. On the other hand, the CBC Budget is the budget which would abandon the Federal Government's guaranteed annual payments to corporate coffers which allows businesses and wealthy individuals to enjoy more than $70 billion a year in corporate subsidies and loopholes. This alternative budget cuts $195 billion in corporate pork that is clogging the arteries of America's future. Revenue options in the CBC budget call for an enforcement of sections 531-537 of the Internal Revenue Service Tax Code that prohibit corporations from accumulating illegal profits and then buying large amounts of their own stock to avoid paying out dividends, thus, avoiding the payment of taxes by shareholders. It is estimated that enforcement of this section of the code will generate at least $70 billion for the United States. Other revenue options include the elimination of the largest of all corporate tax loopholes: the accelerated depreciation allowance enabling companies to write off the costs of their machinery and buildings faster than they actually wear out. This allowance is worth over $100 billion over a five-year period. Reforming the taxation of income of multinational corporations is another example of a revenue option. At a cost of approximately $70 billion (over a 5-year period), foreign-owned corporations doing business in the United States typically pay far less in income taxes than do purely American firms. These practices must be stopped. Instead of attacking corporate welfare, the White House-Republican budget agreement simply encourages the creation of a Corporate Welfare Commission and expresses the sense of Congress that the ``corporate sector should bear its share of the burden.'' To add insult to injury, the budget agreement includes tax cuts that would benefit the richest few, including a capital gains tax cut. It is estimated that more than \1/3\ of the net tax cut of $85 billion during the next five years as proposed in the agreement would benefit the top 1 percent of all households (those with annual incomes of more than $350,000). Moreover, 50 percent of the tax cut would benefit the top 5 percent of households (those with annual incomes of more than $100,000). At this pivotal time, America does not need another Commission to study corporate welfare. Our children, our sick, our poor, our women, and our families need an assault on corporate welfare today. Yes, the White House-Republican budget agreement represents an historic agreement that moves in the right direction toward promoting the country's values and priorities; restoring lost benefits to certain disabled legal immigrants; establishing additional empowerment zones and enterprise communities, and funding the Jobs Challenge to move millions of people from welfare to work. However, as the pivotal generation building that bridge to the 21st century, our work is far from being realized in the White House-Republican budget agreement. The CBC Budget recognizes that the United States is the richest nation in the world, the indispensable nation. We can provide health insurance to all 10 million children who are without health insurance, replace substandard and deteriorated public housing units; increase funding for crime prevention initiatives; and fully invest in our children's future. I challenge my colleagues to dispel the myth of the economy that compels us to oppress the neediest in our society. America can afford to assign a high priority to the funding for vital social programs and still preserve the free enterprise that this country so proudly praises. Vote ``yes'' on the CBC Caring Majority Budget Proposal.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this is an amendment on the Summer Youth Employment Program. The committee's work has been repeatedly congratulated. I hope that it is as good as we think it is because, in this closing of this century, jobs and employment will become a No. 1 issue. With workfare and downsizing and various other activities under way, jobs are going to be critical for those who now have jobs. They will not have them, a lot of them in the future. And for those who are being driven from the welfare rolls, all of it is going to come together. The way we handle our jobs will be critical. The fact that we are handing over this power primarily to the Governors of the States is applauded by many but I find it a bit alarming. I wanted to talk about one aspect of the jobs program, that is the part that deals with disadvantaged youth. I have a chart in front of me which shows that programs for disadvantaged youth have been treated with great hostility over the last 4 or 5 years, certainly the last 3 years. Among the programs for youth, disadvantaged youth, the Summer Youth Employment Program has been zeroed out of the budget a couple of times, and we have had to fight like mad to get it back into the budget. We have to appeal to the voters out there, public opinion to come to our aid, because we seem to have no aid here on Capitol Hill anywhere. This is basically an appeal that I make to the common sense of the Members of Congress, and I am asking Members of Congress to listen to their constituencies, Summer Youth Employment Programs are very important. If we fold them into a category called disadvantaged youth programs and that is all there is, no mandate which drives the summer youth employment programming funding, then we are likely to have a fading away of the Summer Youth Employment Programs. What is happening with overall disadvantaged youth programs is they have gone from $676 million in 1993 to $608 million in 1994, down to $126 million in 1995, and now we are proposing $126.7 million for programs for disadvantaged youth other than summer youth employment. The essence of the amendment is to keep current language in the bill which first clearly delineates the Summer Youth Employment Program as a separate program and, second, applies the same formula that exists now which drives the allocation of the formula within the State. Within the State they must follow the criteria of the amount of unemployment, the amount of poverty. This drives it down to the areas where the greatest need exists. If we do not do that, we leave it to the discretion of the Governors. I think the proposal in the en bloc amendments is to give the Governors 30 percent off the top for their discretion, which means we are reducing the amount of money for summer youth employment by giving that discretion to the Governors. The Governors already have discretion in the handling of other funds in this particular bill. I wanted to maintain the level of Summer Youth Employment Programs that we have now. I wanted to not only maintain the level of funding but maintain the application allocation of that funding to the poorest children in the urban areas which are not highly regarded usually by Governors in most States. That is what this amendment does. It is important to understand the background is that hostilities toward youth programs is such that they have been drastically reduced. In this very bill, the one exception made in the consolidation process is dislocated workers. Programs for dislocated workers are given a separate line. If they can make that exception for dislocated workers because those are most favored programs, for whatever reason, that is the program that has been increased the most in the last 3 years, they went from $571.6 million to $1.2 billion, so we know that there is a set of political policies operating here. We do not wait a minute to have disadvantaged youths in the cities in the summer to be the victims of their own politics. I urge that this amendment be adopted and save the Summer Youth Program. Mr. Chairman, I rise in tacit support of this legislative effort to streamline the nation's Federal adult and youth job training system. The debate concerning H.R. 1385, the Employment, Training and Literacy Enhancement Act, is not nearly as contentious and radical as the debacle that characterizes last year's ``CAREERS'' legislation. In the spirit of bipartisanship, the Chair of both the Committee on Education and the Workforce and the Subcommittee on Post Secondary Education and Lifelong Learning have worked extremely hard with my colleague, Ranking Member Dale Kildee, to move this bill in the right direction. In fact, as late as last night, efforts were being made to modify the bill to address some outstanding concerns of Members on both sides of the aisle, including myself. However, my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, the progressive caucus, and the urban caucus have great reservations about the fate of the Summer Youth Employment Program--a highly successful program that has come to be relied upon by the nation's cities who welcome an opportunity to put disadvantaged young people to work. The Owens-Martinez amendment would address such concerns. Job training funds must be distributed on the basis of economic need not political clout. As a result of the manager's en bloc amendment that was passed earlier, H.R. 1385 would grant the governors a good deal of discretion in determining the within-State formula which sets the amount that cities, that is, local work force development boards, receive. The Owens-Martinez amendment would maintain current law which ensures that those cities which are the poorest and have the highest unemployment rates receive the funds, rather than those cities that exert the most political clout. This amendment would not abdicate the Federal Government's prescribed within-state formula. Current law requires States to distribute funds to local areas based on a three- part formula: the number of unemployed, the number of excess unemployed, and the number of economically disadvantaged. This Federal formula ensures that funds get filtered down to those local areas that are the poorest, with the highest rates of unemployment. Thus, the Governor would not have the power to establish a formula that may have more to do with politics rather than economic need. The manager's en bloc amendment would require that State distribute 70 percent of applicable funds to the localities according to the current formula. The other 30 percent would be distributed to localities according to a formula determined by the Governor. It is my understanding that this represents a compromise that was reached among the Nation's Governors, mayors, county executives and State legislatures. While this agreement is an accomplishment, it is not the best formula for those cities in dire economic straits. Congress should not be giving the Governor the authority to distribute 30 percent of the funds as he or she very well pleases. The manager's en bloc amendment also included a clause that would make the Summer Youth Program a required activity, rather than an allowable activity as under the Committee-reported bill. This too, is a substantial improvement that could go further. The Owens-Martinez amendment would separate the Summer Youth Employment Program from its block grant and create a separate funding stream. Therefore, Congress would be required to pass an appropriation for the Summer Youth Employment Program, as in current law. Members would be able to ascertain exactly what money is being provided for the Summer Youth Employment Program. Under the bill, the Dislocated Workers Program is separated into a special category. Similar provisions must be made for the Summer Youth Employment Program. Some of my colleagues may question the need for a separate appropriation and a federally driven within-State funding formula. History is the answer: repeatedly, the Summer Youth Employment Program has been a target of elimination by the majority. In 1995, the House-passed Fiscal Year 1996 Labor-HHS-Appropriations Act (H.R. 2127) would have eliminated the program. $0 was appropriated for a program that is needed by 4 million young disadvantaged people, but only able to accommodate nearly 600,000. For this reason and various others, this bill was deadlocked in the Senate. Six months after the start of fiscal year 1996, after 2 Government shutdowns, and after more than 10 continuing resolutions, the Fiscal Year 1996 Omnibus Appropriations Act (H.R. 3019/PL104-) was enacted and provided $625 million to the summer program--thus supporting the same number of jobs as in 1995. In 1996, the House-passed Fiscal Year 1997 Labor-HHS-Appropriations Act, would have frozen funding for the summer program at the 1995 level--thus supporting a record low of more than 440,000 youth, although nearly 800,000 youth were supported in the summer of 1992. Fortunately, the Fiscal Year 1997 Omnibus Appropriations Act (H.R. 3610/PL 104-208) was passed and enacted which granted an additional $246 million--for a total of $871 million--for the program--the same amount that the President requested. The threat to the Summer Youth Employment Program continues--now to attack the program through the authorization process. The program must remain a Federal priority; this means from the intrastate funding formula to the interstate funding formula. Congress must reestablish its commitment to preserve the Summer Youth Employment Program and to target funds to those areas that are most in need. Fiscal constraints preclude 100 percent participation in the program; at the very least we ought to ensure that children in those areas that exhibit the greatest need are protected. The Ownes-Martinez amendment accomplishes just this. I urge my colleagues to vote for this amendment.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. OWENS. I agree with the gentleman.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I want to ask the gentleman if he was aware of the fact that the CRS figures which show the funding pattern for the youth training programs other than summer youth, which we were talking about before, which was badly needed, and the gentleman said they were badly needed, and I agree. But they have been reduced by almost three- quarters, from 676.7 million in 1993 to the present proposed funding of 126.7 million. They have been reduced steadily. At the same time, because we came on this floor and we fought for the Summer Youth Employment Program, even though people in government, State governments, did not consider it important, they have raised the amount of funding for some youth employment. So what we are going to have is the unpopularity of the summer youth training programs year- round, resulting in not having adequate funding. So they will take the funding away from summer youth. That is the simple problem we worried about, that they are going to drain the funds from the summer youth because the discretion is going to be in the hands of people. We do not care about summer youth in our cities; they will find somewhere else to spend them in the States.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will continue to yield, which means that summer youth will be reduced from the amount that it was last year?