Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. That is the task before us, to repeal those pieces of legislation; also to do everything possible to get laws in place which will not allow them to keep beating down the work force, to wipe out organized labor. There are a lot of things we can do right now to stop this. Our own tax laws allow the CEO's of American corporations to earn these obscene salaries. By the way, they earn the highest salaries in the world.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I think Charlie would immediately understand that welfare reform was not reform. It was an attack again on working people, on poor people, people that do not work but who are aspiring to become working people, people who are working but lose their job and they fall back into the welfare. Workers who are unemployed and need food stamps. Nobody would have to explain anything to Charlie about the devastating impact of the welfare reform. I am sure that in his last days, his knowledge of what had happened did not help at all in terms of how he felt about this country, where the country is moving. I am sure he was quite upset by the welfare reform and the fact we had this attack on the working class, attack on people in a way which really goes at the heart of survival. We cannot survive unless we have something to eat. We cannot survive unless we have a place to stay. And the attack on welfare was an attack, of course, also on children, because welfare is mainly aid to dependent children. They obscure the fact that only families with children receive aid to dependent children. That is the basic program. The food stamps was broadened so that everybody who was in need was covered, including working people who had lost their jobs and are heavily dependent on food stamps. I think he would understand that we suffered a grave defeat and setback, and as a New Dealer, a man who admired Roosevelt, I am sure it would have pained him as greatly as it pained some of us that we lost an entitlement. That entitlement, the Federal responsibility for the poorest people, where any poor person in the Nation who met the criteria or the means test and showed that they were really poor, the Federal Government said that they would have enough to eat, that they would have a place to stay. That is what welfare was all about, and it mainly said to children that they would have an opportunity to survive. That is gone. What we have now is the Federal Government participating in a program which goes to the States. But the Federal Government does not have the obligation anymore. It is a matter of giving the States the money and attaching conditions to that money. But that can all change. There is no law which says that the Federal Government has to do this. There is no law which says that any person is entitled. And many people who are poor, of course, at the State level, when the State runs out of money, they will say, ``We are out of money. People do not have an entitlement. We do not have to do it.'' The Federal Government would print or borrow more money, whatever is necessary. They would provide because the entitlement was there for everybody who needed it. So Charlie Hayes would not have been happy if he was in the 104th Congress. He would not be happy about the way the 105th Congress has started. But his spirit lives on. And we are not beggars. We are the majority. The working people of this country are still the majority. A lot of people thinking they had fled into the middle class find themselves, in a quick turn of fate economically, that they are right back in the same arena economically as the large number of working people. We are the majority. When we put all the people together, and they understand a majority, we can make laws in this country which are reasonable and fair and do not attempt to wipe out working people and the benefits that we have labored so hard to create for working people. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman for taking out this special order. It is my great delight to salute the spirit of Charlie Hayes. Regular order will go on and on, and we will all work to help keep his spirit alive.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I commend the gentleman for taking out this special order. Charlie was my friend. Charlie was, you could say, a member of our class, because I came in one year and that was the year that Harold Washington got elected as mayor of Chicago and Harold Washington was a Congressman at that time and he was replaced by Charlie Hayes the next year. So Charlie was close to our class. We called him ``regular order Charlie,'' as you heard before. He had a capacity to have a big booming voice leap up and rise up to the ceiling and come crashing back down on all of us, Republicans and Democrats, and it brought a kind of order and harmony on an instantaneous basis when he did it. Charlie was a great human being. Charlie was a labor leader. Charlie was a working man. Charlie knew it from the pits up. Charlie was probably not quite old enough to be my father, but he reminded me a great deal of my father, who was a very strong advocate of unions. And of course, my father was a working man who saw a great deal of necessity for unions in order for workers to survive with some kind of dignity. My father never worked on the job where he got paid more than the minimum wage. So he appreciated the Government. He appreciated the fact that the Government set the minimum wage because that is all he ever made. My father worked in a glue factory in the meal department where he did gluing. He had big hands like Charlie Hayes, and the hands were sort of glazed over with glue. I used to look at Charlie's big hands and they had some scars on them similar to the kind of scars my father had on his hands. Charlie, after all, did most of his life in the working world as a meat packer. Meat packing is a rough business. They might have streamlined it more now, but it was quite rough. He used to talk about people losing fingers, losing hands, losing arms. It was an area where the rate of injury was quite great. Charlie would not need anybody to tell him how important OSHA is, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, which is now under attack. And I have spent 4 hours today in a hearing as part of the attack on OSHA. Charlie would need nobody to tell him how important OSHA is. He was there in the plant, right there, and he knew how necessary it was for the Government to intervene, for there to be rules and regulations to stop the slaughter of people, to stop the limbs being cut off, stop the high rate of accidents. He understood it as nobody else could understand it. He understood it the way my father understood it. I suppose all Democrats would say that they understand what unions are all about, what working people are all about. It is like the baggage that Democrats feel they have to carry as part of their package to validate themselves as Democrats. But there are not many Democrats nowadays who have the passion, who understand that the working people of the world, working people of this country are our people. They are the people we represent first and foremost. You have to explain too much around here these days when it comes to an issue related to working people. OSHA is under attack because of the fact that there is a perception that it belongs to the unions, it is something that unions created and that unions are not very popular and that we should go out and dismantle some of the kinds of regulatory agencies that were set up to protect workers. Not only is OSHA under attack, but you have the comp time bill that is before us now that passed the House, and the Senate has to act on it. You would not have to explain to Charlie Hayes what is going on when you talk about taking away people's cash payments for overtime. Charlie Hayes would understand that readily. My father, overtime was the one time that he got above the minimum wage, when they had to pay overtime. Of course, usually in the plant where my father worked if you paid overtime 1 week or 2 weeks, down the road you were going to get laid off a long time. So you really did not get ahead of the game because the layoffs were always there. I cannot think of a single year my father worked that he did not have layoffs. And Charlie would understand that you need cash to put bread on the table. You need cash to put shoes on the feet of your children. The kind of arguments you hear now about comptime versus overtime are the arguments that are coming from upper class, middle income workers, often workers, two in a family, doing very well, who want more time off with their children and for other purposes. That is all very well. But the proposal that I put on the table here, an amendment which said, OK, let us do it, let us do something for everybody. Those people who want comptime off and they do not want the Fair Labor Standards Act to stop their boss from being more flexible in terms of giving them time off, let them have it. But that is only about one-third of the work force. Two-thirds of the work force make less than $10 an hour. The people who are making less than $10 an hour, they want cash. They need cash. The standard of living that they have will be affected greatly if they do not have the cash. Charlie Hayes would have been a passionate advocate for that. He would not have to have long explanations. It sort of took us a long time to get started on understanding how detrimental to working class people the comptime bill is. Among Democrats, they were off to a slow start. Even some of the labor leaders I do not think had been in the trenches as much as Charlie Hayes had been. Charlie made a beeline straight for the Education and Labor Committee when he came here. He and I had that in common. I found that when I got here and I wanted to serve on the Education and Labor Committee, I remember when I talked to Tip O'Neill and he said, what do you want? I said, I want to be on Education and Labor. He chuckled, because Education and Labor had many slots. Nobody was dying to get on the Education and Labor Committee. Charlie was one of the few who came in and headed straight for Education and Labor, as I did, because my colleagues who were more sophisticated in my freshman class said, why do you want to get on Education and Labor? There is no money there. We are right back to the old issue of raising money for campaigns. You cannot raise any money for your campaigns on Education and Labor. A handful of unions have to stretch themselves out. They cannot give you that much. Children and education, they certainly cannot help you very much, only two teachers unions. They explained it all to me. But I headed straight for the Education and Labor Committee. I have been there for the whole 14 years that I am here. I have never tried to get on another committee. I think it is very important. Charlie felt the same way. There was no place for Charlie Hayes to be except on the Committee on Education and Labor. The first bill he introduced was similar to the first bill I introduced. The first bill, I knew it was not going anywhere, but I thought it was very important. I introduced a bill that said that the right to a job opportunity should be guaranteed to every American, the right to a job opportunity. What is so radical about that? Why cannot this very prosperous Nation move in the direction of guaranteeing a job opportunity for every American who wants to work? And when the job opportunities are not there in the private sector, why cannot the Government step in as it did in the Depression? The WPA and the various instruments that were used by Franklin Roosevelt to create jobs are very real in my mind. Because my father never forgot, he never forgot that all those months of not being employed were ended when the WPA came along. He never forgot Roosevelt. Roosevelt was like a god in my house; and among working people, Roosevelt was like a god. Charlie Hayes looked at Roosevelt like a god. And the first bill he introduced was the reinstatement of Franklin Roosevelt's bill of rights for workers, human rights. People talk about human rights. It is not only the Chinese who say that human rights ought to mean that we always have enough to eat. Human rights ought to mean we always have employment. Human rights ought to mean that we have housing. That is not a radical idea that the Chinese Communists have to push forward. Franklin Roosevelt set it forth very early in his New Deal. He did not get all of his New Deal passed, unfortunately, so we did not have any guarantees to jobs. But of course, due to Franklin Roosevelt, we did have jobs. First of all, they created jobs for the Government; and later the war came along and the issue of jobs was taken off the table because there was plenty of work during World War II. But Charlie reinstated, picked up where Roosevelt had left off. And part of the Roosevelt set of rights was a right to healthcare. Universal healthcare is not a radical idea, and Charlie's first bill laid out all of those rights that Franklin Roosevelt had set forth. Charlie would understand right away that our failure to pass the healthcare bill here was a major defeat. And we wonder why working people turn off out there, why so many people feel desperate, feel that working hard in the political arena is futile. Nobody is even addressing their needs anymore. We have got 40 million Americans who are not covered by healthcare, 40 million Americans. And all we are talking about here is a show, we may put on a show in this Congress to cover 5 million children. Of the 40 million Americans not covered, at least 10 million are children. So we are going to show the world that we have a heart somewhere underneath all this talk about millions and millions of dollars being raised for campaigns and the cruelty of trying to wipe out OSHA and trying to wipe out unions and institute a team act and various kinds of other things that are aimed at working people; underneath all that we want to show we got a heart. So what are we going to do? We are proposing to provide healthcare for 5 million of the 10 million children. If we really care about children, why not all children? Why can we not come out of the 105th Congress with at least 10 million children covered if we cannot have universal healthcare and cover all the 40 million who are not covered? Charlie would have been angry about this deep in his bones, and Charlie would have been a great asset in moving to get this kind of healthcare coverage. Charlie would certainly be very angry about some of the bills that are before our committee right now. He sat right next to me in the Education and Labor Committee, which the name has changed now, I want the people to know. The Republican majority took over; and the word ``labor'' they hate so much, they would not even put the word ``labor'' in the committee name. It was changed to Economic and Educational Opportunities. That was the first name change. Then now this year when the Republican majority got reelected, they decided that since people out there are very upset and they want education and they have to change their whole attitude toward education, then they put education back in the title. It is Education and the Workforce now, but not labor. I think Charlie would understand the implications of that and be very upset about it. But, also, some of the first hearings that we had in the committee are hearings directed at the destruction of organized labor. That is Charlie's bread and butter, Charlie's career. He was first and foremost a leader of organized labor. He was a union man, a union executive. He probably outranks any person who has come to this Chamber in terms of his credentials as a union person. So he would be very upset that the team act now is one of the first acts that the Senate has on its agenda and the House has on its agenda. The team act says it is the employer, boss, management can go and pick the people they want among the employees to form some kind of management committee, team of management and employees; and they will do what the collective bargaining process usually does, determine the working conditions and deal with the employees. They can only do this in places that do not now have unions. Which means, if they were allowed to do that, in violation of present labor relations law, they would guarantee that those places will never have unions, independent unions. The team would smother everybody out. It is very hard right now to organize labor unions, harder than it was in the days that Charlie talked about. He used to talk about the knock-them-up-side-the-head days, where it was dangerous to organize. He used to go all over the country as food and commercial workers; and as one of the leading people in the meat cutters union, he used to go all over the country. In the South he got into a lot of trouble, and he used to talk about his adventures and how dangerous it was and he got in a lot of situations where his life was in danger.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today is April 8. We are just 1 week away from April 15, the tax day that is dreaded by most Americans. In the past, my colleagues on the other side have talked about taxes and the need to lower taxes for American families. I am one Democrat on this side of the aisle that agrees with those who want to lower taxes for American families. I agree with any of my colleagues, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, if they want to lower taxes for families and for individuals. We need to lower taxes for families and individuals in the United States. At the same time, we need to have a fair taxation policy which balances off our revenue-gathering operation by raising the taxes on corporations that have had their taxes lowered a great deal. The problem is that we are taxing families and individuals too harshly. Families and individuals are paying too much because corporations are paying too little. We need to maintain certain services. We need to maintain certain functions of Government. I am all in favor of downsizing Government, I am in favor of Government getting smaller, but there are certain basics that must be paid for and we must tax in order to do that. So let us not oversimplify and determine that we can lower taxes all over the place. We need to balance off our revenue-gathering operation by guaranteeing that corporations pay their fair share. For example, in 1943, and I have said this before, corporations were paying almost 40 percent of the total income tax burden in this country, in 1943. Twenty-seven percent of the total income tax burden in 1943 was paid by individuals and families. That is quite a difference. Corporations, as we see, were paying the greater amount. In 1983, however, the amount of taxes being paid by corporations under Ronald Reagan's administration fell to as low as 6 percent, from 1943's high of 40 percent to 6 percent in 1983. That is what happened to corporations in terms of their share of the income tax. At the same time that corporations fell, went down from this 40 to 6 percent, individual and family taxes rose from 27 to 48 percent. There was a swindle there somewhere that the American people really were not aware of. Corporations went as low as 6 percent. Today corporations are still paying only 11 percent of the total tax burden. Individuals went as high as 48 percent in 1983. Individuals and family taxes are still up there at 45 percent. We have a gross inequity. The share of taxes paid by corporations is only 11 percent while the share paid by individuals and families is over four times that amount, 45 percent. U.S. tax policy must be reset. Corporations must pay their fair share. And the special interest tax loopholes must be closed. In America, the richest country in the world, it is unspeakable that our families are forced to bear the brunt of the burden of taxation. What we need to take a close look at is how corporations got from 40 percent of the income tax burden down to 6 percent, and now are at 8 percent. What happened? Public policy made by Members of Congress. The Members of Congress did that to individuals and to families. They raised the taxes on individuals and families while they were lowering the taxes on corporations. Some people, of course, will contend that corporations should not pay any taxes or that rich people should not pay taxes greater than poor people or corporations or entities which generate profits for rich people; therefore, we are only persecuting the rich. Well, I am not going to get into all the theories of taxation, but I think that those who have the most benefit the most from Government, those that have the most gain the most from our military, our Army, our Navy, our Marines. It is all there to defend what we have, and those that have the most to defend certainly ought not be reluctant to pay a greater share of the tax burden: Those who own the most, those who have most at stake. If our society were to collapse, let us say we are not facing any threat from any outside force, we do not need the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force to protect us, the danger is not there. The danger may come from somewhere within. If the society structure collapsed, if there were no law and order, no rules and regulations, then who would lose the most? The people who are the greatest beneficiaries of law and order, of Government, of codes, of laws, they are the ones who are the richest, they would lose the most. This is not a far-fetched example or not a far-fetched statement. Take a look at the Soviet Union if you want to see a failed society. In modern times you had a society totally collapse, not as a result of any outside force. The Soviet Union was not conquered by an outside power. The Soviet Union collapsed from within. And the total of that society, the great majority of the people were losers as a result of a collapse of what they had and the failure to rebuild anything else even until today. One of the big problems in the Soviet Union right now is that they cannot collect taxes. The big problem right now is that the Government makes a budget, the Government makes policies, and the Government cannot pay the pensions of the people who deserve pensions, the old folks who I guess they would be receiving it in the Soviet Union, it is not the Soviet Union now, it is Russia; in Russia they will be receiving the equivalent of Social Security. They do not make the Social Security payments on time. In fact, they are 3 and 4 months behind on making Social Security payments and pensions to workers and other equivalents of Social Security payments. The amounts are very small, so you have people literally starve as a result of not being able to receive their money that is due them from the government because the government is collapsed. Despite the fact that they have a semblance of a government, one of the big things they have not been able to do is to collect taxes. The reason they cannot pay workers who have government jobs on time, they cannot pay the army, even their military is paid late, they cannot pay the people who are due their pensions, they cannot maintain their public facilities like hospitals, because in the collapse of the society, they have not been able to get back to the point where they can generate enough revenue to pay for the cost of running the society. It would be a terrible thing if in America we suddenly could not collect taxes, if people just decided they are not going to pay their taxes, the government cannot go and collect taxes. That would be a terrible thing, I think we would all agree. I suppose that most of the people listening to me think that is an absurd notion. How could that ever happen? Americans are obedient people who care about their government and they care about the law. We do not care about the IRS. Nobody likes to pay taxes, nobody is going to pretend that they enjoy paying taxes, but by and large Americans pay their taxes, especially middle-class Americans, especially low-income Americans. I would suggest to anybody who wants to see who the IRS works with most, go to any tax office in the area where people have been summoned down, summoned down to negotiate or discuss or to be told about the need for them to pay some more taxes, something was wrong or something is being challenged. I have been to those offices a few times and I am always surprised that they are filled up with people who are obviously poor. The poorest people are always in the Internal Revenue offices waiting to have something ajusted, waiting to have the summons explained to them, and they usually end up having to find some way to pay the small amount of taxes that they owe, relatively speaking, sometimes quite small in terms of our global economy, in terms of the income made by middle-class people, but it is a large amount for a poor person to have to pay; but they are there, and they comply with the law. The middle class complies with the law. I do not know which President said it, whether it was Nixon or Reagan, but there was a memo issued by one of the Presidents at the time when the Internal Revenue was having some problems with the staff and they wanted to show that they did not need more staff, I think, they said that Internal Revenue should not waste so much time with corporations and the very rich. They required a lot of time. You have to negotiate with them. You have to chase them down. You have to figure out very complex sets of books and records. They said, ``Go after the middle class. You ought to improve tax collection, going to bring the money in. Go after the middle class. They are obedient, they are compliant, they are patriotic.'' So the middle class pays its taxes, and I am sure that the same thing applies to poor people. You know, my father very seldom had to pay taxes. He always filed the form though. My father never worked on the job where he earned more than minimum wage, and he had eight children. So eight children and the deductions for that plus minimum wage, and often he was laid off during the year. It was a very difficult life, I assure you. Minimum wage at that time was quite low and still is relatively speaking. So we never had to pay taxes. We had to file a form. He was always terrified to make certain that the form got filed on time. The law impresses poor people, uneducated people, a great deal. They do not want to disobey the law no matter what the stereotypes might lead you to believe. The people who have most respect for the law, and there is fear involved in respect too, you know, are the poorest people. So they never disobey. If you go to one of those tax offices where people are sitting waiting to deal with their tax problems, you will see not the wretched of the Earth, but the anxious of the Earth. Some of the most anxious people in our society will be there and they are not middle-class professionals and they are not rich people, but they are poor people. So it is a serious matter. April 15, a serious matter in 80 percent of the American households, taken very seriously. I am sure that any American citizen would be appalled at the notion that there are certain people who blatantly refuse to pay their taxes, certain powerful people in powerful places in powerful institutions who just refuse to pay their taxes. They disobey the Internal Revenue Code. I think most Americans would be appalled if I said that they do it and nobody challenges them. IRS, that pursues some of my poor constituents for a few hundred dollars, has not bothered to pursue certain corporations that blatantly refuse to obey the Tax Code. What am I talking about? Well, I was here a few weeks ago to introduce a letter that I had written to the Internal Revenue Commissioner. I wrote this letter and I circulated it and I talked to my colleagues about it, and I think we have about 30 Members of Congress who have signed this letter to the Internal Revenue Commissioner, the Honorable Margaret Milner Richardson. Now I heard Ms. Richardson is leaving after the tax season is over. She is resigning, but she is still there. So we addressed the letter to Commissioner Richardson. Now that was February 12, 1997. You know March 12 has come and gone. That is a month. Now April 12 is approaching. That will be 2 months, and the Commissioner of Internal Revenue Service has not bothered to answer 30 Members of Congress. We sent her a letter which reads as follows, and I will just tell you what it is about. It is about sections 531 to 537 of the Internal Revenue Code. We want to know from the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, who will not let most Americans get away with more than a single dime out there--they will chase down people who owe taxes, and that is the way it should be. I mean we got a law, obey the law. It generates the revenue that runs the country. Nobody wants to be in a position where we contribute to the collapse of our country by disobeying the laws and having widespread disobedience that leads to the failure to collect the revenue we need to run the country. So why does Commissioner Richardson allow certain corporations to disobey the law? Section 531 to 537, Internal Revenue Code, says simply that corporations in America are not allowed to buy back their own stock except for certain stipulated purposes. If they do not use it for reinvestment, to give stock options and certain things, they just buy back their stock and store it away, hoard it. It is illegal. The corporations are supposed to distribute the dividends of their profits and not use their profits to buy their own stock. Now, they say that this originated because there were certain closely held corporations, family corporations, and they were avoiding the payment of taxes by buying back their own stock. That was where the idea originated, and for that reason the notion has been generated that this only applies to family corporations, closely held corporations, but it does not. Congress made that clear in 1984. In 1984 Congress wrote in a statement in the Internal Revenue Code which says that this provision applies to all corporations. This provision applies to all corporations. Section 531 and 537 of the Internal Revenue Code applies to all corporations. It is very interesting that Congress said you cannot do this, it is against the law. But they did not say anybody would be put in jail. After all, you are dealing with America's powerful corporations, I guess, and they are not like the little guy out there who can go to jail for not paying his taxes. Corporations will not be put in jail; there is no penalty written into law. The law says they will be penalized though; the penalty will be a stiff one: 39.6 percent of the amount that you illegally buy back you must pay to the Government. That is a pretty stiff penalty; 39.6 percent is the penalty for buying back your own stock illegally. Have they invoked that penalty? It could be that they have and we know nothing about it because the negotiations and the workings of the Internal Revenue Service are secret. They are confidential. So there may be corporations that have violated this law and been penalized and we do not know about it. But we find a pattern, a pattern in corporate America, which says to us that they are not being penalized because many, many large corporations are buying back their own stock illegally instead of distributing them as dividends to the shareholders. They are buying back their own stock. The pattern is such that we know they are not being penalized. Why would they ask for a 39.6-percent penalty? So we asked the Commissioner of Internal Revenue to tell us what is happening with section 531, 537. Dear Commissioner Richardson: My colleagues in Congress who have joined me in signing this letter are very much concerned about a major loss of Federal tax revenues resulting from the failure of the Internal Revenue Service to apply against giant corporations the unreasonable accumulation of surplus provisions of sections 531 to 537 of the Internal Revenue Code. We believe that the IRS could and should immediately assess section 531 penalties on the more than $275 billion that America's largest corporations have spent to buy their own stock in 1994, 1995, and 1996. These penalties at 39.6 percent would total over $100 billion. Total buybacks by corporations are reported to have risen from $20 to $35 billion per year in 1990 to 1993 to $70 billion a year in 1994, just under $100 billion in 1995, and probably over $110 billion in 1996. Stock buybacks by America's largest public corporations are all the rage these days according to the financial media. These enormous buybacks demonstrate that America's largest corporations are accumulating profits and earned surplus far beyond the reasonable needs of their businesses and in virtually every case they are paying dividends that are a small fraction of their earnings, often less than 20 percent. For example, in the 2 years, 1955 to 1956, IBM earned about $9 billion or $21 plus per share. Now this amount is paid out in common dividends of only $1.4 billion, which is $2.80 per share instead of $21 per share. All of the rest of what IBM profited and then some went to buy its own stock back. In 1995, $5.5 billion was bought back, $4.6 billion common, and $870 million for preferred stock, and $2.3 billion in the first half of 1996, with a 2-year total probably of $10 to $11 billion. And it is true IBM has a multibillion dollar capital spending program, but this is much more than amply covered by its huge additional cash-flow of $10 to $12 billion for that same 2 years from sale of capital assets and from items that are deducted on the earnings statement but do not involve cash outlays, principal depreciation, amortization, and deferral of income taxes. Now if you are getting bored then I can understand that, but we are talking to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and these are statements that are simplified about as much as you can simplify it in order to explain what we are talking about, and we also at the same time have to make the Commissioner of Internal Revenue understand we are serious, we have done our home work, we have done the research. This is part of a larger program of the Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus of trying to pinpoint corporate welfare. We have a lot of talk about welfare for poor children and welfare for poor mothers, and we have been outraged at the pennies that they might have misspent and we have done something about that. A lot of people feel happy about it. A lot of people out there are suffering needlessly because we recklessly wiped out the entitlement for needy children in the process, and I will not go into that in great detail. Let us just talk about what corporations are getting away with, what corporate welfare is all about, and this is just one piece in the corporate welfare setup. This is the most outrageous piece because this is a situation where you do not need any new laws. Congress does not have to go back and close some loopholes that it made. No, the law already says they have to pay a penalty if they violate the law, but they are not doing that. So we asked the Internal Revenue Commissioner, getting back to the letter, and I quote the letter: We ask you this: Is there not here and in dozens of similar cases a clear-cut case for immediate assessment of the 39.6-percent penalty on all amounts used for stock buybacks? Is there any need to get into an elaborate discussion of reasonable needs of businesses as envisioned by sections 533 and 537? To be specific, these corporations are paying very small dividends amounting to a small fraction of their earnings. Their capital spending and other cash requirements are amply covered by their nonearnings cash flow. They are spending a substantial part of their earnings, in some cases all or more than all, to buy back their own stock. Therefore, since prima facie, the surplus they have used to buy their own stock has been accumulated beyond the reasonable needs of the business, the 39.6-percent penalty should be assessed. Our study of earnings statements, cash-flow statements and balance sheets leads us to conclude that in many cases the 39.6-percent penalty might reasonably be applied to even larger amounts than the stock buyback amounts, but that would trigger an extended discussion of needs of business and other considerations. It seems to us that our suggestion has the virtue of elegant simplicity. You spend a billion dollars on stock buybacks, your penalty is 39.6 percent or $396 million. It is that simple. We expect the Commissioner could do this in a 1-page notice or a 2-page notice. It is up to the businesses to prove that they have not violated sections 531 to 537. We suggest penalties for 1994 to 1996 because it was during this period that public company stock buybacks exploded to 12 figure totals. You know, in 1984 the law was amended and made clear that you cannot do this. So we had a long period where corporations-- I am sure they have the best legal advice in the world--when they looked at the law and then decided we better not touch this--and that is true now of many, many corporations. Many of the Fortune 500 are not buying back their stock, and many corporations are not buying back their stock. The question is, If it is such a lucrative, desirable venture for some, why have they not all done it and why are they not all doing it? My speculated answer is that their legal advisers tell them it is against the law, you are going to be penalized, and they are watching to see over the years as they go by whether any of their fellow corporations, and some cases they are competitors, are going to be penalized. There is a great, great benefit to the corporation in accumulating vast hordes of cash. One of the things they do, that may also be illegal, because in the process of buying back their own stock, one could argue that they are manipulating the market. One could argue that when you buy back your own stock, you are raising the price, keeping the price artificially high, and therefore you are manipulating the market, but I will not get into that. I will leave that for others. Mr. Speaker, to get back to the letter to the Commissioner, a letter to the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, we suggest penalties for 1994 to 1996, because it was during this period that public company stock buy-backs exploded to 12-figure totals. In addition, we are not clear as to whether the statute of limitations would bar these penalties for 1993 and earlier years. Even if it does, we suspect that many 1993 and earlier corporate returns are still open while other issues are being discussed and negotiated. In this connection we ask that you take note of the fact that while the dramatic surge in stock buy-backs began in late 1994, some very large amounts were spent many years earlier. Several giant corporations have been buying back their stocks for 10 years or more, over the last 10 years or more. As you know, the unreasonable accumulation of service penalties provisions have been in the income tax law since it was adopted in 1913. It was first put into law in 1913. Despite the fact that the statute as originally enacted, and reenacted a couple of dozen times in successive revenue acts, made absolutely no distinction between publicly owned and private companies, the practice and the general understanding was otherwise. As Mr. Justice Harlan put it in 1969, paraphrasing Bittker and Eustice, and I quote from the decision, in practice, the provisions are applied only to closely held corporations controlled by relatively few shareholders. This was a decision that was rendered by a regional court way back in 1969, which noted that in practice that is what happened. However, this de facto moratorium, and that decision was never challenged in the Supreme Court, by the way, but it is of no consequence now because this de facto moratorium on applications to public companies ended abruptly in 1985. Congress, in the Revenue Act of 1984, amended the statute by adding section 532(c), and I quote section 532(c), which was added in 1984 by this body. Quote, the application of this part to a corporation shall be determined without regard to the number of shareholders of such corporation, end of quote. Please understand, Commissioner, that this is a simple request from elected representatives of the American people that your office immediately take steps to enforce the law. We look forward to an early response from the Internal Revenue Service. And it is signed by 30 Members of Congress. Now, if the Internal Revenue Service Commissioner feels she can do nothing to enforce the law, the least she can do is respond to the Members of Congress and say, ``I cannot do anything to enforce the law.'' We have gotten absolutely no response, 30 Members of Congress, in 2 months. We have gotten absolutely no response. We want to put the Commissioner on notice that we will not accept that, and I want to submit this letter again in its entirety for the Record: Congress of the United States, House of Representatives, Washington, DC, February 12, 1997. Hon. Margaret Milner Richardson, Commissioner, Internal Revenue Service, Washington, DC. Dear Commissioner Richardson: My colleagues in Congress who have joined me in signing this letter are very much concerned about a major loss of federal tax revenue resulting from the failure of the Internal Revenue Service to apply against giant corporations the unreasonable-accumulation-of-surplus provisions of sections 531-537 of the Internal Revenue Code. We believe that the IRS could--and should--immediately assess section 531 penalties on the more than $275 billion that America's largest corporations have spent to buy their own stock in 1994, 1995, and 1996. These penalties at 39.6% would total over 100 billion dollars. Stock buybacks by America's great public corporations are all the rage these days, according to the financial media. Total buybacks by corporations are reported to have risen from $20-35 billion per year in 1990-93 to $70 billion in 1994, just under $100 billion in 1995 and probably over $110 billion in 1996. These enormous buybacks demonstrate clearly that America's largest corporations are accumulating profits and earned surplus far beyond the reasonable needs of their businesses, and in virtually every case they are paying dividends that are a very small fraction of their earnings, often less than 20%. For example, in the two years 1955-56, IBM earned about $9 billion, or $21.00 plus per share. Of this amount, it paid out common dividends of only about $1.4 billion (2.80 per share). All of the rest--and then some--went to buy its own stock, $5.5 billion in 1995 ($4.6 billion common and $870 million Preferred) and $2.3 billion in the first half of 1996, with the two-year total probably $10-11 billion. (True, IBM has a multi-billion dollar capital spending program, but this is much more than amply covered by its huge additional cash flow of $10-12 billion for the two years, from sale of capital assets and from items that are deducted on the earnings statement but do not involve cash outlays, principally depreciation, amortization and deferral of income taxes.) We ask you this. Is there not here, and in dozens of similar cases, a clear cut case for immediate assessment of the 39.6% penalty on all amounts used for stock buybacks? Is there any need to get into an elaborate discussion of reasonable needs of the business as envisioned by sections 533 and 537? To be specific: (1) These corporations are paying very small dividends, amounting to a small fraction of their earnings. (2) Their capital spending and other cash requirements are amply covered by their non-earnings cash flow. (3) They are spending a substantial part of their earnings (in some cases, all, or more than all) to buy their own stock. Therefore, since prima facie the surplus they have used to buy their own stock has been accumulated beyond the reasonable needs of the business, the 39.6% penalty should be assessed. Our study of earnings statements, cash flow statements, and balance sheets leads us to conclude that in many cases the 39.6% penalty might reasonably be applied to even larger amounts than the stock buyback amounts. But that would trigger an extended discussion of needs of the business and other considerations. It seems to us that our suggestion has the virtue of elegant simplicity: ``You spent a billion dollars on stock buybacks. Your penalty is 39.6% or $396 million.'' We suspect that the Commissioner could do this in a one-page notice--or two pages at most. We suggest penalties for 1994-96 because it was during this period that public company stock buybacks exploded to 12- figure totals. In addition, we are not clear as to whether the statute of limitations would bar these penalties for 1993 and earlier years. Even if it does, we suspect that many 1993-and-earlier corporate returns are still open while other issues are being discussed and negotiated. In this connection, we ask you to take note of the fact that, while the dramatic surge in stock buybacks began in late 1994, some very large amounts were spent many years earlier. Several giant corporations have been buying back their stock for ten years or more. As you know, the unreasonable-accumulation-of-surplus penalty provisions have been in the income tax law since it was adopted in 1913. Despite the fact that the statute as originally enacted (and re-enacted a couple of dozen times in successive revenue acts) made absolutely no distinction between publicly-owned and private companies, the practice and the general understanding was otherwise. As Mr. Justice Harlan put it in 1969, quoting (or paraphrasing) Bittker and Eustice, ``In practice, the provisions are applied only to closely-held corporations, controlled by relatively few shareholders.'' (U.S. v Donruss, 393 U.S. 297). However, this de facto moratorium on application to public companies ended abruptly in 1985. Congress in the Revenue Act of 1984 amended the statute by adding section 532(c), ``The application of this part to a corporation shall be determined without regard to the number of shareholders of such corporation.'' Please understand, Commissioner, that this is a simple request from elected representatives of the American people that your office immediately take steps to enforce the law. We look forward to an early response from the Internal Revenue Service. Sincerely Yours, Major R. Owens, Member of Congress. And the following additional Members of Congress: George E. Brown, Bernie Sanders, Donald Payne, Peter A. DeFazio, Maurice Hinchey, Matthew g. Martinez, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Juanita Millender McDonald, Lynn C. Woolsey, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Maxine Waters, Corrine Brown, Dennis J. Kucinich, Carrie R. Meek, Cynthia McKinney, John Lewis, John Conyers, Jr., Lane Evans, James E. Clyburn, Melvin Watt, Ronald V. Dellums, Bennie Thompson, Patsy T. Mink, Alcee L. Hastings, Earl F. Hilliard, Elijah Cummings, Danny K. Davis, Chaka Fattah, Louis Stokes, Eni Faleomavaega, Mr. Speaker, I want to go a little further today, however, than just what we did before. We submitted this letter; we submitted a ``Dear Colleague'' letter before; we also submitted a statement which gives all the legal background for our contention that section 531 to 537 is not being enforced. All that has gone before. Now I want to go one step further and submit for the Record a list of corporations that are in violation of section 531 to 537: Many Corporations Are Using Accumulated Profits to Buy Back Stock Rather Than to Pay Dividends to Stockholders Hundreds of American corporations are using their accumulated profits, which apparently are not needed in their businesses, to buy back their shares rather than to pay dividends. It is estimated that buybacks in three years 1994, 1995 and 1996 may have totalled $300 billion or more. Many of these corporations have issued statements indicating that the purpose of the buybacks was and is to have shares available for issuance under employee stock purchase plans, executive stock options, stockholder dividend reinvestment plans and for conversion of convertible securities. This is an appropriate and valid reason for stock buybacks, but many corporations have bought back two times, or three times, or five times as many shares as they needed for these purposes. (In one case, 16 times.) We have not been able to find an authoritative and accurate tabulation of stock buyback activity, which is being conducted by hundreds of publicly-owned American corporations. Reports in the financial media indicate that buybacks may have totalled $300 billion or more for the three years 1994-1996. When the total buyback amount is reduced by subtracting issuance of shares under option and other programs, it would appear that net buybacks totalled $150 billion to $250 billion in the three years 1994-96. If the Internal Revenue Service assessed the 39.6% penalty (on accumulation of corporate profits beyond the reasonable needs of the business, as mandated by Sections 531-537 of the Internal Revenue Code) on this $150-250 billion of net buybacks, it could produce $60 billion to $100 billion of additional Federal tax revenue in 1997. The table that follows shows buyback activity by 40 large corporations, but note that these are not the 40 largest U.S. corporations. At the top of the Fortune 500 as published in April, 1996 are a number that have apparently not bought stock back yet: Exxon (#3) AT & T (#5), Mobil (#8), Texaco (#14), and Sears (#15) for example. Ford (#2) is expected to start this year according to Wall Street rumor. These figures were generally obtained from each corporation's published annual and quarterly earnings reports covering 1994, 1995 and 1996. Figures marked ``EST.'' were estimated by taking the actual reported figures for 1994, 1995 and the first half or three quarters of 1996 and adding an estimate for the rest of 1996. The figures are net buybacks; that is, the dollar amount of total buybacks has been reduced by the dollar amount of shares issued in the same year under option and similar programs.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, the AFL-CIO says there are no aspects of this bill that are truly protective of employee rights. Vote against this employer- driven attempt to rob employees of their pay and benefits in the name of family flexibility. I have a number of union organizations representing workers who say the workers do not want this revolutionary change in the Fair Labor Standards Act. We can have a less revolutionary change by adopting my amendment and giving the 20 percent of the work force that has clamored for this, let them have it, and at the same time we protect the people at the very bottom who do not want to be deprived of their right to have cash to put food on their tables, to buy clothing. They need the money. They would like to have more time with their families, but they need the money most of all. That is two-thirds of the work force out there making approximately $10 an hour or less. We can protect them. This is a win-win situation. In the name of bipartisan cooperation, let us go forward. Let us not bully the people on the bottom. That is what we are doing here. We are taking our power and we are using it as a hammer against the people on the bottom. Employers will take this cash in large amounts and invest it. They want cash. Why should they give somebody cash when they can give them comp time? We can go forward in the name of bipartisan cooperation, break the logjam and move to show America that we care about everybody, the people on the very bottom as well as those on the top. Mr. Chairman, I rise in vehement opposition to this mutilation of the Fair Labor Standards Act [FLSA]--the Working Families Flexibility Act-- H.R. 1. At a time when there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that individuals are already being exploited, oppressed, and hoodwinked in the workplace, Congress is considering a bill that would eviscerate the protective armor of FLSA. As currently drafted, the bill does nothing more than offer employers many opportunities and temptations for deregulated exploitation. Simply put H.R. 1 is a bad bill that misleads workers and the general public into believing that they will be given a greater degree of choice. H.R. 1 is an affront to the American worker; and the only way to restore some preservation of employee rights to this haphazardly drafted, antiworker bill is to protect that segment of the work force that would stand to suffer the most under this bill-- low-wage workers. My amendment would accomplish just this. This amendment would exempt workers who earn less than 2.5 times the minimum wage. This is equivalent to slightly more than $10 an hour--or approximately $24,000 a year for a full-time worker. In effect, the amendment would exclude the lowest paid and most vulnerable Americans in the work force. Tying the exemption to the minimum wage indexes the exemption to future increases in the minimum wage. Lower wage workers deserve and need the protection of this amendment for two very fundamental reasons: They are more likely to need the cash for overtime worked instead of compensatory time and they are more likely to be subjected to abuse by their employers as a result of this legislation. They should not be covered by H.R. 1. First, families struggling to make ends meet cannot pay the bills and buy food and other necessities with comptime. I challenge my colleagues to deny that most workers, earning approximately $10 an hour, need all the money they can earn more than they need time off. Public opinion polls show that families with two wage earners and comfortable incomes are in favor of more compensatory time. At the same time, the available evidence also shows that workers earning less than $10 an hour, or its equivalent, prefer and need more take-home pay. In the real world, employers would naturally reward those employees who accept comptime over cash by giving them more overtime. It is painfully clear: The employee who demands to be paid in cash will face repercussions. He or she will not be asked to work overtime. Second, lower wage workers are likely to be abused more than higher wage workers. Most employers do not intentionally violate the law; however, reports suggest that too many do. In fiscal year 1996, the Department of Labor found overtime violations involving 170,000 workers. Low-wage workers are the most common victims of this abuse. The Employer Policy Foundation, an employer-supported think tank in Washington, revealed that workers lose approximately $19 billion in overtime pay each year. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 74,514 cases brought by the Department from October 1991 to June 1995, found that industries such as construction and apparel were cited for illegally denying overtime to 1 in every 50 workers during this period. Overall, nearly 8 out of every 1,000 workers, or 695,280 employees, were covered by settlements, even though enforcement was limited. If Congress is going to tamper with FLSA, at a minimum the two-thirds of the work force making nearly $10 an hour must not be forsaken. I urge my colleagues to support this endeavor to exempt the most vulnerable workers. The opposition to H.R. 1 is fierce. The administration, labor unions, and employee associations are not the least bit receptive to this Republican notion of worker flexibility. In a letter to Congress, March 18, the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractor's National Association [SMACNA] and the Mechanical Electrical Sheet Metal Alliance state the following: Currently one of the most abused and violated federal employment laws by irresponsible employers, the FLSA would be even less of an effective federal employment protection if H.R. 1 is allowed to become law. They insist that ``H.R. 1 invites greater FLSA fraud, lowers employee pay/benefit contributions and undermines employee work time discretion.'' In a letter to Congress, March 18, the AFL-CIO emphatically states: There are no aspects of this bill that are truly protective of employee rights. * * * Vote against this employer-driven attempt to rob employees of their pay and benefits in the name of family flexibility. In a letter to Congress, March 13, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees [UNITE] explains that: The bill will encourage greater use of mandatory overtime-- because instead of having to pay a premium for overtime when it is worked, companies can stall payment and hope workers forget they have money coming to them. In a letter to Congress, March 3, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters argues that: The FLSA established the 40-hour work week, the benchmark schedule working men and women use to maintain time for their families and normalcy in their lives * * * hours worked in excess of 40 must be paid at a premium rate. * * * The overtime premium requirement also provides an incentive for businesses to create additional jobs to the extent more work exists than can be accomplished within the normal work week. that helps reduce unemployment. In a letter to Congress, February 4, the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America [UAW] states: It [H.R. 1] would enable employers to avoid paying overtime, thereby reducing the income and living standard of working families. H.R. 1 does nothing more than permit an employee to make an unsecured loan to his or her employer. The poorest workers should be saved from the privilege of having to loan their hardearned money to their employers. The exemption for workers who make less than 2.5 times the minimum wage must be accepted. Today, we are here to turn back the clock on worker protections in this country. At the very least, I challenge my colleagues to stand up for the two-thirds of the work force making approximately $10 an hour. They stand to suffer the most under H.R. 1. Vote ``yes'' on this amendment. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, as the person offering the amendment, do I not have the right to close?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, in the wee hours of this morning I was informed that my first grandchild was born, and I assure my colleagues I pursue my concern with the future of America with a renewed fervor. As a result of that, I would like to see an America that is for everybody, liberty and justice for all, and we share the prosperity. I want to make it quite clear that we can have a comp time bill that serves everybody's need. We do not have to grab for it all. We can have a bill which allows the upper middle class people who want this to have it, and the same time let us exempt three-quarters of the work force who earn $10 or less, three-quarters of the work force earn $10 or less. This amendment says we should exempt them. We just voted on a sunset provision. We can come back in 5 years and examine what happened and maybe add them then, but let us exempt them from this radical experiment in labor law. We do not need to do this. We can have a win/win situation by letting the two-thirds of the work force earning $10 an hour or less not be a part of this bill. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Texas [Ms. Jackson-Lee]. (Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

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

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Hawaii [Mrs. Mink]. (Mrs. MINK of Hawaii asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman. I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Andrews]. (Mr. ANDREWS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, our most endangered species in America is the family, and we do not want to be guilty of taking cash away from families which is used to put bread on the table, to buy shoes, and to pay the rent. This is a revolutionary and reckless change in labor law. The Fair Labor Standards Act has existed since 1938 as part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. This experiment need not be so radical and so extreme as it is constructed in this legislation. We could provide adjustments and relief for comfortable middle class wage earners who want time off at the same time that we protect low income workers who need cash payments of overtime in order to meet their basic necessities of food, clothing and shelter. This law is not enforceable. That is the problem. It will not be enforceable. There will be no choice for the people who want the cash to put food on their tables. In fiscal year 1996, the Department of Labor found overtime violations among employers involving 170,000 workers. The lowest wage workers are the most common victims of this abuse. In other words, under the present law, they are not being paid their overtime. They are being swindled out of overtime. The Employer Policy Foundation, this is an employer-supported think tank in Washington, they reveal that workers lose approximately $19 billion a year. $19 billion is swindled under the present law. This loose law here, which proposes to give choice to people, will be even worse. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 74,514 cases brought by the Department from October 1991 to June 1995 found that industries such as construction and apparel were cited for illegally denying overtime to 1 in every 50 workers during this period. Overall, nearly 8 out of every 1,000 workers, or 695,280 employees, were covered by settlements which were necessary to get their overtime pay because it was not being given to them. If Congress is going to tamper with the FLSA, at a minimum, two- thirds of the work force that makes less than $10 an hour ought to be protected. Here is a win-win situation. We could be less extreme and less radical and take care of everybody's needs.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. But what I am trying to show is that on the one hand we have labor unions under attack. This Beck decision and its interpretation is just one of the ways that labor unions and working people and laws that benefit working people are under attack, just one of the ways they are under attack. Another way is the TEAM Act. The TEAM Act allows union employers to select groups of employees that they want to form a TEAM committee with, and those employees are empowered to work with the management in order to do the things that management wants done. Well, you will never be able to organize an independent union if the labor law is pushed aside and you can have employers and management selecting people that they want to bond with among the employees. Unions are supposed to be independent; that is the whole thrust of labor law. And yet the TEAM Act would eliminate that independence by allowing the management to select who they are going to bargain with, who they going to work with and negotiate with in the plan. That is another problem. The other problem that I mentioned before is Davis-Bacon is being attacked. Of course comp time, and you know NLRB is under attack, National Labor Relations Board, being attacked. All of these institutions that were set up under Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, under attack now. You know, here we have a situation in America where when Franklin Roosevelt became President, there were people saying that you can never make America work if you have things like Social Security. You can never--America will never work if you have a National Labor Relations Board. If workers can organize and they can confront management, our whole society is going to collapse. It did not happen. We had the great sit-down strikes and the plants in Detroit, we had organized labor all over the country getting together, and they created a situation where the workers were paid decent wages, some of the best wages in the world for a long time, and because they were paid the best wages in the world they created the biggest consumer market in the world. That consumer market is still the biggest in the world. Despite the fact that we have less population than many nations, our consumer market is the biggest in the world. We are the engine for capitalism all over the world. The Chinese have a booming economy only because they have a place to sell the products. Unfortunately, I wish they were not selling their products here. I wish we had our own workers manufacturing the products that they are making in China and not having the Chinese workers making products there at very low wages and bring them here and sell them at high prices so that the people who own the factories, they make a killing. They get things produced at a very low price, they bring them here and sell them at a high price, and they are making a killing, and they are destroying our labor force and eventually they will destroy the consumers. That great body of consumers that makes the world go is here in America. The great overwhelming part of our gross national product is consumer spending. Now these are not conjectures or these are not theories of Major Owens. These are facts. Consumer spending drives our economy still, despite the fact that you have a lot of other things happening, you know, with the age of information, electronics, and you have a lot of investment in equipment and capital. All kinds of things are happening. Consumer spending still drives the economy. If you destroy the great consumer base, the masses of consumers in America--there are some people in the rest of the world that think the closest they will ever get to heaven is if they come to America, but we have it here already. Normal, ordinary people live better, eat better, have better accommodation in terms of housing. We have better clothing, drive cars. Nothing else like this has ever happened on the face of the Earth. Why do we want to destroy it? Why do we want to destroy the workers and the work force which becomes the consumers, which establishes the wealth and drives the economy of capitalism all over the world? Is there a danger of destroying it, or is this some farfetched set of assumptions that I am making here? Is there any danger if we let corporations and people with power not obey the law? We are back to the taxes. If they do not obey the law in one respect, and they do not obey it in another respect, and they have it galloping on, they buy influence either in the Senate or the House, or they buy influence in the White House, and they are able to run roughshod over certain laws and certain regulations and get things done outside of the channels of our democratic processes. Then you will have a situation where you may have a threat to this engine that drives capitalism all over the world. You may have a lopsided situation created where to facilitate the short term gains of making money in the corporations, we destroy the labor unions, we destroy the capacity of our working class to demand good wages, and we destroy our consumer market. You know, we can have that if we have a lopsided situation, if we wipe out the Government's involvement and the Government's protection of workers. One of the people who testified this morning was a professor from somewhere in Texas, and his proposal was that we follow the example of New Zealand, that New Zealand has almost wiped out all of their laws with respect to labor. It is up to the management and the unions to negotiate, and they do not have any guidelines and any parameters that are set by government, and he wants America to become that way. That would be a risky experiment indeed. That would be an extreme experiment. It would be a revolutionary experiment. We should not become so complacent that we think our great American society is not susceptible to great collapses. We have not looked at it closely enough, but we ought to take a look at the savings and loan swindle. The savings and loan swindle was a partial collapse of our economy that never has been really recognized because the forces that control that situation were so great until most Americans do not realize what happened to them. You know, about $500 billion in taxpayers' money will go down the drain as a result of the savings and loan swindle. Five hundred billion. Most people cannot comprehend that. You know it is very hard, you know. An aircraft carrier costs $3 billion. You can comprehend that maybe if you stretch your mind; an aircraft carrier costs $3 billion. But when you get up to 500 billion, it is just hard to comprehend, but when you add all the money that went down the drain in the savings and loan association that the taxpayers have to put back in because fortunately for the economy, fortunately for our system, we had a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Government regulation was in place so that people whose money was jeopardized by the savings and loan swindle, which was a massive swindle that spread across the whole Nation--never before has anything in the history of the world happened on the scale that the swindle of the savings and loan association demonstrated to us. We really do not understand yet what happened. Part of the reason we do not understand is because this country is so rich. There is so much wealth here until you can have a massive swindle like that take place, and resources and money were moved in mainly from the American taxpayers to cover it so that you did not have any massive dislocation. What if we had been in the position of Albania? Now little Albania is tiny, but I am going to use Albania as an example because it is a recent development. Most people I am certain will listen to me are not concerned with Albania. People are concerned about what is happening in Africa where the disruptions and the collapse of societies in certain places means that people get massacred. The Hutus and the Tutsis, the fight there, people massacred in large numbers, bodies floating down the rivers; it is very dramatic, and rightly so we should be concerned. People are concerned about, you know, other kinds of upheavals that have happened. In Cambodia you had the killing fields where millions were murdered in Cambodia by political forces, the Pol Pot Red Army. You know we should be excited about those kinds of collapses, and of course, the collapse that took place in Nazi Germany, the collapse of society where some people said German society did not collapse, the subways are running on time. You know, they were very efficient. You know, some of the most educated people in the world were in Germany. The German army was the most efficient army ever created in the field. All kinds of things, civilization. The German army troops sometimes sang Beethoven and Bach as they marched. So there was no collapse of society. But when you have a situation where millions of people within that Nation were massacred, and then millions of people in the surrounding Nation were massacred, and you had a barbarous war perpetrated on a scale never before seen, there was a collapse in the German society. It was a collapse. It was a failed society, and that failed society dragged a whole lot of other innocent human beings and the surrounding societies down with them. So societies can collapse that are very sophisticated. Societies can collapse that are very educated. Societies can collapse. Society of Tojo in Japan, they went like savages through China massacring people; you know, very educated, sophisticated people, very high degree of science, very high degree of education. But it collapsed. Albania is not a jungle. Albania has been suffering for years, almost 50 years, as a result of the overwhelming domination of the Soviet Union; isolated, forced to operate under the Communist hammer, but they have educated people, they have scientists, they have a structure. But Albania in the transition into capitalism has suffered a gross collapse. You know what has happened there is outrageous. The Albanians happily embrace capitalism. The government did not protect the citizens who invested their money in certain investment schemes. There was deregulation on a scale of the kind that is requested here often on this floor: Just get out of it; the government should get out of it. So the people of Albania had no government protection. They had hopes. They believed in capitalism coming to their rescue after so many years of communism. They put their savings into various investment schemes, and most of them have lost them completely. The investment schemes have blown up. Those that had some basis have just collapsed because they were unreal; others were complete swindles, and the people who took the money have disappeared. So what is Albania? Albania is now a collapsed, failed society, a collapsed society, a society that has subways, buses, government structure, parliament, that a few months ago looked like a civilized place but now there is complete anarchy. Let me just read to my colleagues from one of the items related to Albania. This is March 18, that is today's Washington Post: In Albania, the army and the police have ceased to exist and the navy and air force have relocated themselves to Italy or Greece. One leaking ship or decrepit airplane has gone at a time. The prisons have been emptied. That fellow on the corner with the newly liberated AK-47 may be your neighborhood grocer or he may be a murderer who recently liberated himself. U.S. ships are plucking desperate refugees from choppy, open seas. The anarchy that has descended on the impoverished Balkan nation just north of Greece and across the Adriatic from Italy should make us appreciate the relatively smooth transitions that most of the other nations of the formerly communist world have managed to accomplish. Albania was one of the most isolated of all of those nations, sealed off for decades by a lunatic regime that expected attack from anywhere and everywhere. It remains the most impoverished of European nations. People have risen up now with an anger that is more primal than political, a rebellion against not only 45 years of Communist rule, but also the past 6 years of disappointment and disillusion. It was only 6 years ago, after all, that 300,000 jubilant Albanians jammed their capital's central square to see visiting Secretary of State James Baker and the arrival of democracy, free markets and the West. What they have gotten instead is corruption and Mafia politics. Because the government refused to regulate the financial sector, massive numbers of people have been defrauded and total anarchy has broken out in Albania. A civilized society in the civilized sense that we usually mean, a society with educated people, a society with structure, et cetera, has completely collapsed. Let it be a warning that we are not above the same thing happening. What would have happened if the savings and loan swindle had taken place? Billions of dollars, people losing their money and when they went to the bank, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation of America was not standing behind every deposit up to $100,000. People would have gone crazy, mad in the street. They would have good reason to. But the government was regulated. The government was not only regulated, it was standing behind these banks, ensuring that people who had deposits of $100,000 or less would not lose their money. The government had resources. Massive amounts of dollars were poured into the savings and loan swindle, so we did not have any collapse of that sector of our society. In fact, there were very liberal policies put forward to save the banks because certain people felt it would lead to a collapse of the economy or a great deal of strain and dislocation in the economy, and that was the reason they gave for being so generous of the people who had stolen so much money. Mr. Speaker, if my colleagues want to know about the continuation of the savings and loan scandal, recently one of the most celebrated crooks, the most celebrated, most heinous criminals in the savings and loan swindle was released from jail. Charles Keating was told that due to technicalities he does not have to stay in jail any more, although his savings and loan association was guilty of swindling the American people out of more than $2 billion. Two billion dollars. Now, that is almost an aircraft carrier; that is a submarine; $2 billion, $2 billion by one savings and loan association. Mr. Charles Keating was responsible for that, and he went to jail originally in California because after he had gotten through swindling people via that route, he went a little further and went out, had his workers go out in the lobby and sell securities that did not have the FDIC standing behind them, had no government insurance behind them, and lots of elderly people lost their savings and they did not have any insurance by the FDIC to back up the bank failure. And on and on it goes. There have been Members of Congress involved with savings and loan associations that have gotten away. The Vice President, he was Vice President at the time, Vice President Bush's son was involved with Silverado Bank in Colorado. Silverado in Colorado also was above the $1 billion mark, close to $2 billion. Silverado was guilty of doing something that was celebrated. They actually loaned a borrower $26 million, and the borrower had come to them asking for $13 million. They told the borrower, ``We will give you twice as much as you are asking for, if you will put the extra back in the bank because the auditors are coming and we need to show we have some more money in the bank.'' So they actually loaned the guy $26 million, he only needed $13 million, and he redeposited the extra $13 million back. This was revealed as one of many crimes committed by the Silverado Bank, of which a relative of Vice President Bush at that time, and President Bush later, was sitting on the board. It reached to high circles. The savings and loan swindle; most writers found it defied description. They gave up. Most reporters were told by their editors to just cool it, it is too complicated. But, I think that it is an example of how the media, instead of going to bat to analyze events and to inform the public, obeys some forces that are unseen that control their paychecks. So the savings and loan swindle is not clearly understood. It would have been like Albania if it had not been for tight government regulation, government insurance. You would have a little bit of Albania, but we are too big to have a total collapse. But societies do collapse totally when you have a corruption among the leadership where nobody confronts the evils. If we are going to stand still and let the forces of this Government beat upon organized labor, beat upon the working people, and we are going to let a lopsided situation develop where workers have no leverage against employers, we are going to destroy capitalism as we know it. We are going to tilt the scales so much until corporations will be determining what our Government does. Everybody knows, we learn early in high school or college that we have a doctrine of laissez-faire. Laissez-faire means the Government should leave the private sector alone; that is the usual interpretation. What we need is a two-way laissez-faire. Laissez-faire, leave it alone. The Government should leave the private sector alone as much as possible, and the private sector should leave the Government alone as much as possible. These furors about contributions to campaigns that are raging now, the furors relate to the fact that people are waking up and for a brief moment we have a snapshot of how much money has gone into politics. This last political race shook everybody up. The Lincoln bedroom was up for sale, coffee in the White House. Nobody is talking about what the Republicans were doing out of sight, without a White House, but they raised 7 times and spent 7 times as much as the Democrats, so sooner or later the spotlight will fall there and we will find some very unusual things happening with the way both parties raise money. But money is in the driver's seat; money, money, money is in command. Money commands a lot that happens in the world outside of the United States as well as inside the United States. Never before has there been a Nation as rich as this. We are the wealthiest Nation that has ever existed in the history of the world. Rome was just a little colony compared to the imperial power of the United States of America, compared to our wealth that has been accumulated, that exists. God must be proud of what the American democracy has done. The combination of American democracy and American capitalism has produced something we have never seen before, and the question is, what shall we do next? What good is it all? How does it redound to the good of man, that here we have a vast population of more than 250 million people who have, for the most part, enough to eat, enough clothes to wear, and they enjoy life a great deal. When the human creatures created by God reach that point, how do they behave? Will they have compassion, and will they use their leisure time and their comfort to look out at the rest of the world, first in their own world, to make sure that there is compassion and sharing? Or do they look out at the rest of the world and say that we cannot sit next to Haiti and see the misery in Haiti without taking some ways to see how we can help? We cannot sit here because Haiti and the problems of Haiti are partially problems created by the people who live in this part of the hemisphere. We installed a regime in Haiti that endured for many decades. Our Army went in and trained the Haitian army that kept in power a mulatto class that oppressed the great majority of the Haitians, and all movement in that economy was governed by what that grand mulatto group that we protected with our Army and our diplomatic maneuvers and our threats. So what happens in Haiti now cannot be separated from what happened in the past and what we have made to happen. We recently redeemed ourselves by going in to liberate Haiti from a criminal regime, and that is to our credit. There is a collapse of government in the Congo, what used to be called the Congo, its called Zaire now. Zaire has a rebel army that is marching through, taking control from the government because the government is so corrupt the people hate the government. What is the government that the people hate so much? It is a government installed by the United States of America, the government of Mobutu. Mobutu was installed by the CIA because at that time they feared that the Congo, as it was called at that time, would fall into the hands of the Communists, under their influence. There was a poet from the post office who had made a political party and a political movement. His name was Patrice Lumumba. His son was recently in my office. He met with the congressional Black Caucus delegation, his son. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with the assistance of the CIA, and the CIA took control of that country. Billions of dollars from taxpayers in the United States flowed into the Congo, which later became Zaire, to support Mobutu. I am sure Mobutu got a lot of the money from the American taxpayers that the CIA put in. I am sure that many CIA agents put a lot of money in their pockets. But the criminals were cutting it up. Under the false notion that Zaire was a strategic country and we must keep it out of the hands of the Communists, we poured billions and billions of dollars in. We made Mobutu the strong man that he is. He has billions of dollars in European banks now. But Mobutu is mortal, Mobutu is sick, Mobutu is about to die, and all of the people that he oppressed with our help for so many years are rising up to get revenge. And we say the Congo is falling apart and Zaire is falling apart. That is one more example of how African nations cannot govern themselves. Look at what happened in Rwanda, look at what is happening in Zaire. It is proof that Africans cannot govern themselves. I want to close on a brief review of a book called ``Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,'' by Keith B. Richburg, and it is all about these failed societies, these failed nations in Africa where Mr. Richburg, who was a reporter, a correspondent for the Washington Post, and Mr. Richburg has gotten a lot of attention later because Mr. Richburg is black. ``Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,'' by Keith B. Richburg. Mr. Richburg is appalled. It is somewhat of a traumatic experience for him to have been a reporter in Africa for several years, because as a reporter he is dispatched and assigned to cover all of the developments that are violent and most gruesome, so if he lived in a state of trauma, we cannot be surprised or shocked. If he had to watch bodies flowing down the river in large numbers as a result of the massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda, I can understand the trauma of that and how that would impact on him; if he had to be in Liberia and watch the Liberian society fall apart after we had held, we had, America, had kept the regime in power in Liberia, the Tubman regime. Tubman was kept in power by the American Government, so much so that the people began to hate them and an army sergeant named Sergeant Dole took over Liberia. And he did not know what he was doing. So following Sergeant Doe was a set of rebellions that destroyed the country completely. The country went down in chaos as a result of a Sergeant Doe taking over from a corrupt regime that had been kept in power by America. Mr. Keith Richburg has watched all this over a 3-year period in which of the most violent events developed. And he has concluded that the Africans, I will read from one of the reviews where they quote Mr. Richburg and in what is a shocking statement. And I understand his shock, but what he is saying is that Africa is the way it is because the people have not fully evolved as human beings. Africa is the way it is because they have not finished the process of evolution. I find that statement shocking, that a black man would hate himself so much and hate his people so much that he would subscribe to the theory that we are inferior beings who have not yet fully evolved. That is a very shocking statement. Mr. Richburg is a journalist, and journalists are supposed to report what they see and to some degree interpret it. But in his book he becomes a philosopher, and journalists are not automatic philosophers. Most philosophers were not journalists. Plato was not a journalist, Socrates was not a journalist, Jesus was not a journalist. I mean journalists should stay in their place and understand that they are not philosophers and do not try to get too far in your conclusions. Mr. Richburg concludes that it is fortunate that Africa was raided by the slave traders. The slave traders brought millions of Africans to America. The millions of African Americans who suffered for 232 years under the bonds of slavery, another 100 years in the oppression of discrimination, second class citizenship, they are fortunate. We are fortunate that we were snatched from Africa where people are still evolving and brought into civilization. That is part of his conclusion. He saw terrible things but he came to the conclusion as a journalist and he did not have the equipment to deal with it. Because if he was a philosopher and a real thinker, he would not conclude that savagery and the failure of a society mean anything about the evolution of a people. If savagery and the killing of large numbers of people, if the bodies floating down the river as a result of the massacres in Rwanda are the result of people not having fully evolved, then what was the Holocaust all about? What was the systematic extermination of 6 million people by the Germans, the Nazis, the gestapo, what was that all about? Were they not fully evolved? When do you stop evolving? They had the world's best science. They invented rockets. We copied our rockets from German advanced science in rocketry and German scientists. The German composers and the German artists are the bedrock of certain parts of our civilization. Did the murder of 6 million Jews in gas chambers, did the burning of bodies in crematoria signify that they had not fully evolved? What happened in Cambodia in a short period of time, the Pol Pot regime in one of Asia's oldest societies, they had been around much longer than most Western societies. And yet a million people in a short period of time were murdered in the Pol Pot killing fields. Does that mean they have not fully evolved? What happened in Bosnia, in Croatia? All across the world there are examples of millions of people being slaughtered by various collapsed societies, failed nations. They have failed and been taken over by dictatorial oligopolists or dictatorial individuals, and their aims are not civilized aims and, therefore, terrible things happen. America, the taxpayers' dollars in this country have been used to support some of that. Certainly in the case of the Congress, we must bear responsibility for the collapse of society, the brutality, corruption that has existed for so many years in Zaire under Mobutu, our CIA had a direct link there. In Haiti, we had a direct link there. We have a direct responsibility for not taking steps in other places to ameliorate or to end savagery, and we have future responsibilities. Why? Because God has blessed us, we are among all nations the most blessed. We are blessed with high technology, blessed with peace. We did not endure World War I on our soil. We did not have to put up with World War II on our soil. Our cities were not destroyed. Our universities were not destroyed. Yes, we gave a lot in those wars. Some of the greatest examples of bravery that ever have been exhibited by mankind were exhibited by American troops going into World War II. The beaches of Normandy, fantastic in terms of the sacrifices that were made there and the bravery that was exhibited. America has risen to the occasion to protect the world from a total takeover by savage, well educated, scientific beasts. But we have to do more. And we have to be careful. The warning here is that we have to be careful that we do not collapse from within. America from within can collapse if we lose our sense of proportion, if we destroy certain segments of society which help balance us off and keep us going. If we destroy our workers and their working class and the workers energy and the workers contribution to the economy, we begin the downhill slope where only one class of people is in charge. We, too, might face some kind of shallow analysis in the future where conclusions are made that we have just not evolved fully as human beings. That is rubbish. We are what our society is willing to do in terms of taking what is learned from the past, taking the leisure time that we have, the information on the Web sites, the information on the Internet, all kinds of knowledge and information that are flowing to us. Let us use it in ways which expand the compassionate parameters of mankind, in ways that say, we want in our own society, in our own Nation to share as much of the wealth as possible and see to it that nobody goes hungry, that no segment of the population is oppressed unduly by another segment, that no segment of the population is pushed to the point where it is not a part of the economy, that no segment of the population has to bow down politically and not exercise its full rights in this democracy. That is step one. Step two is to go beyond our own society and say that our richness, our fortunate wealth, the fact that we are fortunately located in this hemisphere, with the right kinds of climates and a number of things that have happened, we had the land to expand on, we had the European background to help in many cases. We relied on, we had the Native Americans to help us through some critical periods and we never thanked them for that or did not treat them very well. Nevertheless, all these fortunate occurrences came together to create a great America. The great America should go forward never to take the position where they never will allow a Zaire to happen where our forces were used to oppose people. We will never allow another Haiti to happen. And we will see to it that our institutions are constantly working to improve the world without condemning the world. And never should we come to the conclusion Mr. Richburg has come to, that certain people are in certain kinds of positions and they are having trouble because they have not fully evolved. All human beings are guilty of unspeakable atrocities, and we must work to make certain that that does not prevail. Our civilization, our structures, our patterns of government, our mores, everything must operate to make sure that the best comes out in mankind and not the worst.

Mr. OWENS. I want to alert everybody to the fact that we are going to be considering H.R. 1, the bill which deals with the denial of cash payments for overtime pay work to workers. H.R. 1 is called, rightly by the Democrats, the Paycheck Reduction Act, or some of us call it the Employer Cash Enhancement Act. I will have an amendment on the floor tomorrow in connection with H.R. 1. That amendment deals with two-thirds of the American work force, two-thirds of the people out there in the work force making $10 an hour or less, and my amendment deals with trying to protect their interests. I have been given the grand sum of 10 minutes to debate my amendment. That is 5 minutes for the opposition and 5 minutes for myself to debate an amendment which impacts on two-thirds of the work force. We are going into the session tomorrow with the most important bill that we have considered thus far in this session. It is called H.R. 1 because the majority party, the majority Republicans, consider it to be so important as to give it that distinction of being H.R. 1. It is first in priority, and it deals with changing the Fair Labor Standards Act, which has existed since Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The Fair Labor Standards Act will now be changed to remove from it the mandate that when workers work more than 40 hours a week, they must be paid at a rate of time and a half. If an individual is making $10 an hour and they work over 40 hours a week, every hour over 40 hours must be paid at the rate of $15 an hour. It is that simple. This bill did not fall from heaven. The act did not fall from heaven. It was the result of exploitation of workers by employers in large numbers, exploitation in terms of low payment of wages in general and working workers around the clock, late hours each day, weekends, Sundays, Saturdays. There was great exploitation at the time this New Deal legislation came into being. It did two things: It made the workers fortunate to have jobs get better treatment and better pay; and it also made employers employ more workers. If employers were going to have to pay time and a half rate to people who were employed, instead of driving the work force that they have incessantly, they are likely to want to hire people, more people, and pay them at the regular rate. So it had both effects, that more people got jobs, and those who had the jobs had better working conditions. Now we are about to make a drastic change. It is a revolutionary change in labor law. This is no small item. It is a revolutionary change in labor law. It is an extreme measure, an extreme step to take. It is an extreme step to take and it does not have to be that way. If we want flexibility in the law, and no law is written in stone, it does not have to be forever. Things change. Each generation has the right to look at the laws that it might be bound by and change those laws. There is nothing sacred about laws made by mankind. So we can change it. But why take a great step which just happens to be a step on the backs of the people at the bottom of the economic structure? The lowest income people will suffer the most. Why do that when you do not have to? You could take some steps toward changing the law, making the law more flexible, without hurting so many people. The statistics show that two-thirds of the people who are working, fortunate enough to have a job, are earning less than $10 an hour. I propose that if you have to go forward and change the labor law, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and it looks as if the votes are there, the majority Republicans have the vote in the House of Representatives. In the other body, in the Senate, they are steam rolling forward. They have the votes. So the likelihood is that this Republican-controlled Congress will come out with a bill that they both agree on, and it will have to be negotiated with the White House. The White House is saying that they will not sign such a bill, they will veto the bill as it is. But when the White House says it will veto a bill as it is, that is a clear statement even to a sophomore in high school that what they are saying is we will negotiate. What will the negotiations be? What I am saying is that it is likely that this revolutionary change in labor law which is rolling forward, it is likely that it is going to pass, it is likely that we are going to have some change in the next couple of years. Before this session is out, something is going to change. I hope that nothing changes. I am in the same position as those who say just vote no, but I see the change coming. Just vote no is a beginning position. I will vote no. But I realize that just voting no is not enough. One of the reasons that just voting no is not enough is that there is a great deal of sentiment in certain quarters in this Nation, and I have said this before, I do not want to be redundant, there is sentiment among upper income, middle-income folks to have more flexibility in the way their employers treat them. They would like to have time off instead of having the employer being bound by the labor law to pay them in cash. There is no reason why we cannot accomplish that and relieve the anxiety or the bind that certain upper income people find themselves in without hurting those at the very bottom. The compromise that I have proposed in the spirit of this bipartisan Congress is that let us go forward and make the changes and give the flexibility to the people at the very top of the wage structure, that one-third of the work force that is above the $10 an hour. Let us have an experiment, let us do it for 2 years, 5 years. I understand that the bill the Republican majority will have on the floor tomorrow will modify the bill to say we shall have a sunset provision in the bill and in 5 years reconsider it. OK, let us reconsider it in 5 years. In the meantime, have a bill which exempts the two-thirds of the work force making $10 an hour or less and go forward with the experiment for those people at the top who want this so badly. It is a win-win situation. I did not go to the Democratic-Republican retreat. We had a bipartisan retreat, and part of the retreat's purpose was to see to it that we work together in a more civil manner, that we work together in this session of Congress in a more productive manner, that we avoid gridlock, that we avoid ideological locks just for the sake of defending positions. I am all in favor of reason prevailing. So I offer this reasonable proposal and I will offer the amendment on the floor tomorrow to take care of those people at the very bottom of the work force, those folks who make 2.5 times the minimum wage, and that formula is used in order to make certain that as wages rise we are still protecting the people at the very bottom. I say this as a repetition of what I have said before in the last 10 days. I will not go any further in that vein. I just want to spin from that, the fact that this bill will be on the floor tomorrow, to the larger issue. The larger issue is that H.R. 1 is a bill which hurts workers as it is now. What this Republican-controlled 105th Congress has done is laid on the table its battle plan for the destruction of working families. We are going to pursue a course of action very similar to the one pursued in the 104th Congress, and in many ways the signals have come clear to us that this is going to be a different Congress. Certainly in the area of education, we are going to cooperate and have some productive, forward movement on the improvement of education in America. But the signal that is being sent now for working people and the laws and regulations that govern the lives of working people, the signal is also clear, nothing is different from last year. The Speaker said that politics is war without blood, and with respect to organized labor and the things that affect working people, that still holds. Politics is war without blood, and war has been declared on working people. War has been declared on those laws. What will be on the floor tomorrow, H.R. 1, is just the beginning. There is also a TEAM Act that is in the works. The TEAM Act is similar to the TEAM Act that was on the floor last session. There is also a move to curtail the participation of labor unions in politics, the ability of labor unions to support candidates that are supporting their interests. There are also other efforts going forward to curb the Davis-Bacon law. Across the board there are things occurring which make it clear that war is still the modus operandi of the Republican Party in respect to things that affect working people. If they were happening one by one, I would not be as alarmed as I am, but they are not happening one by one. There is a clear battle plan. Part of the battle plan also extends to the failure of the other body to move forward to confirm Alexis Herman as the Secretary of the Department of Labor. The Department of Labor is without a head, no direction, no general. The troops are there, the functions of the agency cannot go forward. It is in limbo in respect to the Secretary of Labor. The denial of the Secretary of Labor's immediate confirmation sort of demoralizes the people who are in organized labor, the people who are workers. It is all psychological warfare, too. So the warfare is there, and we should take it very seriously. I am here again to talk about this because it needs to be seen in the broader perspective. I also talked last week about the fact that everybody is not paying their taxes in the way which the Internal Revenue Code defines they should be paying their taxes. Corporations are not paying their taxes in accordance with the code. The Tax Code says that corporations cannot do certain things and on a wholesale basis they are doing them. As we approach April 15, every taxpayer ought to stop and think about the fact, they try to obey the law and our society is based on the rule of law and any group that does not obey the law is automatically a threat to society. Every time the law is systematically downgraded, held in contempt, ignored, then the whole rule of law concept is in jeopardy. I want to link that up with what is happening with organized labor. On the one hand, you have this brutal scrutiny of everything related to organized labor, a brutal scrutiny. There was a hearing this morning related to the contributions that labor unions give to political candidates for political education purposes. The other party, the majority party, is very alarmed about the fact that large sums of money were spent last year by the AFL-CIO on political education that they thought hurt some of their Members, unduly criticized them, and they are waging this vendetta against organized labor by developing legislation which will curtail their use of their own dues. The dues paid by the members are now being subjected to more regulations. Labor unions already are the most regulated institution in our society. You do not find corporations being regulated in the same way. You do not find educational organizations. There are a number of other bodies, the Red Cross, all kinds of groups that exist in our society that collect money and have money, wield influence, and they are not as regulated as labor unions. But they are going to enforce, try to add to that another layer of regulation. The majority party in this House is determined to get rid of regulations. What I am saying is there is a linkage between the fact that we have this series of moves being taken against working families and any kinds of laws, regulations, rules that affect working families or help them, and on the other hand we have certain Tax Code laws being ignored, and big corporations and rich people are the ones who are ignoring those tax laws. I made the speech about the need to have the Tax Code enforced last week. I just want to link these two items up. What I said last week is there is a provision in the Internal Revenue Code which says that corporations cannot buy back their own stock. They cannot buy back their stock except if it in some way relates to their capital needs. That is, any business has a right to take parts of its profits and put those profits into taking care of certain capital needs. They have a right to put the profits into certain options for the executives. There are certain things they can do. But once they have used their profits for that purpose, they have to justify any additional purchase of their own stock and show that they are not doing that in order to, first, prevent the payment of taxes by their shareholders, and, second, they are not manipulating the stock market. The IRS is not concerned about the manipulation of the stock market. That is the SEC. But the IRS is concerned about having corporations buy back their own stock in large quantities that are not needed for legitimate purposes and their shareholders do not pay any taxes then because they do not get those shares distributed among themselves and the corporations end up hoarding large amounts of money that it should not be hoarding, it should distribute them. It is not fair to the shareholders, first. Some shareholders may not want to have their shares distributed to them because they do not want to pay the extra taxes that year, but most shareholders probably do want any profits that they have received, any dividends that have been accrued, to be distributed. The law is very clear. It has existed since 1913. It says a corporation may not do this. It is not against the law, by the way. It is interesting that the Tax Code does not make this illegal. Nobody will go to jail. What the Tax Code says at this point, sections 533 to 537 of the Tax Code, Internal Revenue Code, it says you will have to pay a 39.6-percent penalty if you do this. That is a pretty stiff penalty; 39.6-percent of what you did not handle properly, you must pay in penalties. You can see if you have $1 billion that you use to buy back stock improperly, a 39.6 percent penalty on that is a considerable penalty. That is in the code, since 1913. For a long time corporations and other people tried to misinterpret that to mean only closely held corporations, family corporations. But in 1984 the Congress, the Ways and Means Committee, made it crystal clear that this provision shall apply to all corporations. It is not being enforced. The buyback phenomenon has been taking place for the last 10 years, large amounts of stock being bought back by corporations, and it has accelerated and escalated. So what I am saying is that when it comes to the rich, nobody is looking. When it comes to corporations and their power, nobody wants the law enforced. When it comes to labor unions, on the other hand, with much smaller amounts of money, and they are operating within the regulations, they are under intense scrutiny. Now, one might say, well, the problem is that labor unions made large contributions to Democrats during the last election and they spent a large amount of money on what you call political education. They asked for trouble. I have a chart here which shows that labor unions were little spenders compared to what other groups spent on the last election, labor unions were small fry. The biggest spenders were in the area of finances, corporations, financial institutions of various kinds. This chart shows that across the board, when you look at the various sectors of our economy, if you look at agriculture, construction, defense, energy, health, law, transport, miscellaneous business, labor, you look at all of them, they all spent large amounts of money. But the one thing that stands out about labor, the labor contributions were the only ones where the contributions to the Democrats exceeded the contributions to the Republicans. All of these other categories in great amounts exceeded--the contributions to the Republicans exceeded the contributions to the Democrats right across the board. So you can see from this chart why it is that the Republicans spent seven times more money in the last election than the Democrats, seven times more, and yet we are scrutinizing, focusing a microscope only on this sector, labor, at present. We are not looking at the kinds of activities that took place in respect to corporations, financial institutions, et cetera. Are we examining their practices? Are we saying to them did you get the permission of your shareholders? Did you ask them who to support in the election? That is what we are asking labor unions. You did not get the permission of the people. They had the right to decide who their money was going to support, you should not be using their dues to support anybody that they do not agree with, that they do not themselves, each one of the members. If a union has a million members, you have got to have agreement among--all million have to support somebody. Otherwise give the people their money back. No other institution in America operates that way, but that is what is being proposed in my committee, the Committee on Education and the Workforce. The Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations had a hearing this morning where the Republican Members in the majority were saying in essence, ``You have committed a gross unethical violation by not asking your members who you should support,'' and the answer of the union members who were testifying, and there were not many of them, there were only two of them, and seven of the people there were brought in to testify against the unions, but at least they did allow us to have two witnesses in defense of union policy. What they said was, unions are democratic organizations and as democratic organizations what the majority decides the minority must go along with. I mean that is the way America operates. The majority elected the Members of this House of Representatives. They happen to give the majority to the Republicans. So the Republicans are in the majority of the House of Representatives. They rule. We have certain rights; sometimes they are violated wholesale, but we do have--we pretend to have rights in the minority and that is across America. The minority is supposed to have certain rights; the majority rules. So why are we asking unions to behave differently and allow the minority to determine what the union does or does not do? There is a set of myths that we went through this morning relating to this whole matter, how unions operate. I am not going to go a great deal, but it is called ``Separating Myth from Fact Regarding Beck.'' There was a Beck decision of the Supreme Court, the Communications Workers of America versus Beck, and it dealt with this whole problem of how unions can spend the dues of members and what kinds of activities it cannot engage in, and that is what is back on the table. The Republican majority wants to interpret Beck, the Beck decision, to mean that unions should be almost paralyzed. I am not going to read all of it because this is not really the primary topic of discussion. I would like to submit a statement called ``Separating Myth from Fact Regarding Beck.'' I ask unanimous consent to submit this statement in its entirety. It is just two pages, and I think it is illuminating at this point.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak in support of the nomination of Alexis Herman as the Secretary of Labor. Alexis Herman is facing considerable difficulties. They have slowed down the process of confirming her nomination. If you read the accounts in the press and the media, you will find they are rather bizarre. Alexis Herman is criticized for being too effective. She is criticized for being a great communicator. She is criticized for knowing the ways through the political maze. All of these that are normally considered virtues, all these characteristics that are normally considered virtues have suddenly become barriers to Alexis Herman being confirmed as the Secretary of Labor. What is going on, Mr. Speaker? I fear that when you compare the difficulties faced by Alexis Herman on the one hand and her difficulties, leaving the Department of Labor without any leadership for all this time, when you compare those difficulties with what is being offered in this Congress by the Republican majority, you might make a logical case for conspiracy. The Republican majority that is holding up the confirmation of Alexis Herman, leaving the Department of Labor without leadership, has aggressively taken the lead in terms of placing legislation on the agenda which will definitely hurt working people. The agenda of the Department of Labor is definitely under consideration here. We are proposing and will have on the floor of this House this week a bill which will change the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Fair Labor Standards Act has been in effect since the New Deal, Roosevelt, when we had abuses of labor that were abominable. And part of the way we curbed those abuses of working people where they were forced to work around the clock, on the weekend, and given the same hourly wage, one way to curb that, one way to make the employers divide up the pot and employ more workers instead of working a few long hours with no wages was to implement a Fair Labor Standards Act which says, ``You cannot work anybody more than 40 hours a week without paying them time and a half for their overtime pay. You work 40 hours a week, the wage rate must be raised to time and a half.'' Now we have on the floor a bill which will take that away. The Republicans are coming for the overtime of Members. They take away the cash payment. They want to say that employers who are now under the Fair Labor Standards Act should be taken out from under the Fair Labor Standards Act and given the option of giving comp time, time off, to workers. Oh, they say, this is going to be a choice that the employees will make. If they do not want to take time off, they want cash, they will have it. But we have statistics and we have studies which show that employers, people who employ people, are already swindling workers out of vast amounts of overtime pay. One employer study group has admitted that as much as $19 billion was swindled away from workers in cash payments last year, so they do not really have a choice. Any employer will choose to want to invest his cash, he will hold onto the cash and give the employee time off. This is going forward, it is on the floor, it will be on the floor this week. Now in addition to that very anti-working person, anti-the-working- families out there legislation, we have a TEAM Act passed in the Senate. The TEAM Act in essence says that employers may organize groups which run counter to the independent unions, actually undercut the activities of the independent unions or will guarantee that unions will never be organized; they are independent. In addition to that, I just came from a hearing this morning where an attack was being made on organized labor's contributions to political campaigns. Organized labor is being singled out, and they are being pummeled by the Republican majority because they made contributions in large numbers to Democrats. The labor unions are being told you cannot do this. They want new regulations on labor unions. Labor unions are already the most overregulated institutions in our society. The regulations on labor unions, as my colleagues know, do not compare with anything else. We do not regulate corporations as much as we regulate labor unions, but we are going to impose more regulations on them to keep them from making contributions to people they consider operating politically in their own interests. I have a chart which shows that all of the sectors of the American economy are giving large amounts of money to political candidates. The chart is from the Center for Political Responsiveness which shows what the financial sector gave, the agricultural sector gave, the defense industry, the energy industry. All of these are greater than organized labor. Alexis Herman should be put in place because we need that leadership in labor, and let us stop the attack on organized labor.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the previous discussion, I think, is really a good prelude to what I have to say, it really dovetails neatly. We have a situation in America where we cannot take care of, or we refuse to take care of, a large part of the population of our children. We refuse to take care of it, even though the gross national product is quite healthy, the profits are booming on Wall Street, we have an unprecedented period of prosperity, no recessions for a long time, and yet we are refusing to take the necessary steps to take care of the health needs of the children of America. We have already dropped any discussion of a universal health plan. That is off the board completely. Beyond the children, there are 40 million Americans who are not covered, and that number is increasing all the time. We are not even discussing it. This is an era where those who have the most are in charge. In the last election, unfortunately, large numbers of people did not bother to come out and exercise their democratic right and vote, so there is a great deal of contempt for people out there who have needs and did not bother to go vote to protect their rights or their needs. So as a Member of the House of Representatives' Education and the Workforce Committee, I would like to talk today about the state of affairs with respect to policymaking for working people in this Congress, what is ahead of us, what are the dangers, what does it mean to have the first bill introduced by the Republican majority, a bill known as H.R. 1, what does it mean to have that bill focus on the elimination of overtime cash payments. The Republicans are coming for your overtime, working people. The Republicans are coming for your overtime. They have made it their highest priority. It is the first bill introduced by the Republicans, a bill to change the Fair Labor Standards Act so that the Fair Labor Standards Act will no longer require that all employers pay overtime in cash. The Fair Labor Standards Act says you must receive time and a half for any hours worked over 40 hours per week. That is the present law. They want to change the law to say that the employers can pay you in comp time. They will give you an hour and a half off for every hour you work overtime instead of cash. That is what H.R. 1 is all about. I call it the Employer Cash Enhancement Act. It is an act which will put large amounts of money in the hands of employers that they did not have before, because really do you think there are many employers who will make the choice to pay an employee, an hourly worker or a salaried worker who is required to receive overtime in cash, how many employers would make the choice to pay them in cash if they can pay them with comp time, time that they can take off later? You cannot invest comp time on the stock market. You cannot invest it in new plant, new equipment. You can invest cash. And always the tendency will be to move toward the employee who chooses to take comp time instead of cash. The bill talks about choice and says it will be a violation of the labor law if any employer refuses to give the employee a choice, but it does not say how that can be monitored. It does not talk about the details in terms of here is the employer who holds a great deal of leverage over the employee, here is the employer who decides whether they stay on the job or not. He does not have to keep them. Here is the employer who does not have to say to them, ``I demand that you take your overtime in comp time instead of cash.'' The employer can just say, ``Who wants to take their overtime in comp time and who wants to take it in cash?'' We will suddenly find that all the people who choose to take their comp time in cash, refuse to take their overtime in comp time, are suddenly in a few weeks laid off, or dismissed. There is no reason why private employers have to keep people on, they have a lot of leeway, and they are replaced with other people. All the people who choose to take comp time, want an hour and a half for every hour they work, they are kept on. All the people who chose to take it in cash, they are gone. The message will get out there very rapidly. In fact, working people in situations without the protection of unions and even in many cases with unions, they know very well where they stand with respect to their employers. They will get the message very rapidly. So here is the Fair Labor Standards Act that was brought in by Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the New Deal because you had exploitation and oppression of workers, workers were made to work endless hours without being compensated at a rate for the overtime greater than the regular rate. This Fair Labor Standards Act has many other provisions, and it came along at a time when we created a number of pieces of labor law which still exist. And suddenly we are going to reach in and take out this piece of the labor law which says an employee must be paid in cash, the rate plus 50 percent in overtime, they are going to suddenly take away that protection in the law and leave it to the employers to work it out with the employees. Many unions already bargain and they have bargained this situation where some employees take comp time instead of cash, et cetera. That is allowed. My problem is this. We have a steamroller rolling, we are going to have this on the floor next week. It is H.R. 1. We have done a lot of playing around on the floor so far. The House has not conducted any serious business of any great magnitude in affecting the lives of the American people. This act will affect the lives of millions of Americans, and it will be on the floor next week to be voted on. In our committee deliberations we have already lost the vote. It was a foregone conclusion that the majority had enough votes to pass H.R. 1, so despite the fact that we tried to improve H.R. 1, it has passed, it has passed the committee. It is now headed to the floor and next week it will be on the floor. What we have on the floor is a situation where there are those who say we want to vote for H.R. 1, which takes away this right and does not provide any protections for the workers, and then there are those who say we are going to vote against it, we are going to vote no. The White House has said clearly to us, we will veto the bill if it comes to us in the present form. So it looks as if we have a united Democratic position versus the majority Republican position in the House, and probably the other body will have the same position as the Republicans in this House. So they have the majority. It is going to pass. Despite the fact the Democrats will loyally, vehemently, maybe emotionally say no, it is going to pass in this House. The Senate will pass their bill, which may be different in some respects, more moderate, maybe provide a few more protections, but basically what the Senate will pass will be pretty much the same as what the House has. So we are going to have a bill which has removed the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act and a bill that is in many quarters popular in America. There are many families, there are many segments of the population who would like to have comp time instead of cash. They would like to have that flexibility. They do not want to be under a law which says they must take their overtime in cash. There are families that are comfortable, with enough cash, a reasonable amount of cash, many families with two people working, making $70,000, $80,000. The time they spend with the family, their quality of life is what means the most to them, and they would like to have a situation where they have maximum opportunity to make that choice. I am all in favor of having those families make those choices. My problem is that there are other families whose quality of life depends on the amount of work, the amount of cash that the wage earners can bring home each week, each month and put on the table. You cannot put food on the table with comp time. There are many workers whose lifestyle, whose quality of life, whose survival will be affected by dropping their wages because they are working and depending on the overtime pay to be added to their regular wages. In fact, what we did was look at the statistics, and two-thirds of the work force in America are earning $10 an hour or less, two-thirds of the people who are working. We are not talking about people on welfare, we are not talking about workfare, interns, we are talking about working people. Two-thirds of the workforce are earning $10 or less. That is $20,000, approximately, a year. Eighty percent of the women working, 80 percent of the women in the workforce are earning $10 an hour or less. Now, can they afford to really give up any opportunities to bring home some cash in overtime? Has anybody asked them? No. We do not have any polls, we do not have any surveys of working people making $10 an hour or less and what they think. What we have is a general sentiment in the population of opinionmakers. The opinionmakers are higher income people, the opinionmakers are more educated people, they are a little more comfortable in terms of the dollars they bring home, and they are opting for more opportunities for comp time. I think they can be accommodated. The problem is, whenever we talk about accommodating them and separating out the folks who are making $10 an hour or less, nobody wants to hear it. None of the proposals that are going to be on the floor at this point deal with the fact that we can protect or we should act to protect those who are making $10 an hour or less by keeping them under the Fair Labor Standards Act. In fact the way we word it, and I introduced an amendment; the amendment is that those who make 2.5 times, no more than 2.5 times, the minimum wage so that in years to come, as the salaries rise, wages rise, you will have that ratio and not be fixed into a solid figure like $10 an hour. It is 2.5 times the minimum wage is the way the amendment is worded. That amendment was defeated, and the problem is that there is nothing else now being offered after we passed the committee and that amendment was offered. The only things on the floor now are: vote no, just say no, to the Republicans, or vote for the Republican majority bill because what happens is that if the Democrats are introducing a substitute, the only substitute being prepared at this point does not deal with the protection of the people who make $10 an hour less. There is a Committee on Rules meeting coming. Those of you who know a little bit about the process before we go to the floor, we will have an opportunity to go to the Rules Committee and beg to offer the amendments that we want to offer to change the bill. That is a process that is still honored, you know, in a fragmentary way in the way the Republicans have run the House in the last 2 years and for this year. They have not been very gracious about offering amendments that run counter to what they want to do on the floor, but occasionally they do. So we can have a substitute bill, and maybe we can have an amendment, but so far that is not in the program. It is highly improbable that my amendment will be allowed on the floor, and of course there are enough votes to vote it down. So why am I here? Why do I think it important to make this presentation and appeal to the common sense of Americans to go to work? Voters, Americans out there, your common sense showed the people in this capital that education was important over the last 2 years when terrible things were being proposed with respect to the Federal role in education. We appealed from this podium, we appeal over and over again to the people in America, to let the legislators at every level, let the legislators here in the House and the Senate know, let the White House know, that common sense says you ought to do it this way, you know. This protection that I am talking about, a simple matter of exempting all workers who make $10 or less, is so simple it is beyond the reach of the imagination of most folks here. They just cannot comprehend this is a simple answer to the problem. We are talking a lot about bipartisan cooperation or bipartisan compromise. They do not want any deadlock. We just, Democrats and Republicans, went away, and they had a conference, unprecedented retreat, bipartisan retreat, Democrats and Republicans face to face, talking with each other, and from all reports that I hear--I was not able to go, but from all reports I hear it was a very positive weekend. So you know some people have looked upon this as being dangerous. I think Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition says that there is a great danger in all this muddle minded moderation, and they worried about this. But I am all in favor of it. Why can we not have some bipartisan cooperation and say that no matter what goes forward, we are going to build in this protection for the workers who need it most? The people who are making $10 an hour or less will not be impacted. Let us go ahead if we have to. I am not in favor of changing the Fair Labor Standards Act at all. I am one of those people who just wants to say no because in the bill which proposes to change it, that changes Fair Labor Standards Act, they are not willing to give the protections that are necessary. In fact, at this point I will just read my opening statement, which covers more than just the matter of $10 per hour workers being protected. It talks about some other aspects of the bill. My first position is just say no, and I have letters here from various unions, Department of Labor, the President, that all say just say no. The problem with just saying no and letting it go is that it will pass the House, it will pass the Senate. In conference the House and Senate will agree. It goes to the President or the President will be called to negotiate with the House and Senate, and we are all out of it. All the other legislators, all the Members of the House, we are out of the process. The public is out of the process. I want to get the public in the process right now. You need to let your Congressman know now, you need to let the President know now, that you want protection no matter what is done. If you must go forward with this change of the Fair Labor Standards Act, you want protection for the people who make $10 an hour or less. But let us talk about why we want to say no to the whole bill as it is now. I speak as the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections. Subcommittee on Workforce Protections is charged with dealing with all of these various labor laws, including the Fair Labor Standards Act. This is my third year in that role. H.R. 1; I am quoting the statement that I made as an opening statement at the--I submitted as an opening statement at the markup. The markup is where we decide on changing the bill and putting it into final form and then passing it. That has taken place, and the bill passed with a straight party line vote. All Democrats voted against it; all Republicans voted for it. H.R. 1 is bad public policy because it will reduce the income of that large segment of the work force which has benefitted the least from the current national prosperity. Instead of leaving more cash in the hands of prosperous employers, we need legislative initiatives which will improve the lot of those whose incomes have stagnated or declined over the last 10 years. I oppose this kind of mutilation of the Fair Labor Standards Act because it is bad economics and a cruel injustice for working Americans. In addition to being negative in substance and policy, H.R. 1 is a badly drafted bill, and this loose construction makes it impossible to move toward a bipartisan compromise with integrity. You cannot use the bill that exists now as a basis for making a compromise because it is such a bad bill. The sweeping language and the excessive amount of general assumptions in this bill placed the workers at great risk and offers the employers many temptations and opportunities for deregulated exploitation. As written, it is the enhancement of the employers' accumulation of cash that is achieved. I want to repeat. As the bill is presently written, it is the enhancement of the employers' accumulation of cash that is achieved. Any movement toward a bipartisan compromise will have to first reshape the language of the bill to make it consistent with the stated intent of the bill. On the surface the bill proposes to give employees a choice. In numerous ways the language of the bill fails to support and enforce this proposition. The drafters of the bill have studiously avoided making the employers accountable. In negotiating the decision to choose compensatory time instead of cash, there is no balance of power between employer and employee. All factors weigh down on the side of the employer. We have already proposed obvious remedies for many of these shortcomings; however, there has been no movement from its hardened position by the Republican majority. If we are in an era of compromise, bipartisan compromise of cooperation, then why do we have a bill, H.R. 1, before us now which is very much the same as the bill that was introduced in the last Congress? In the 104th Congress, where the majority clearly adopted a position of extremism on many other issues, and they moderated those extreme positions, why are they coming now with the same bill that they had in that Congress? Is it a statement that on labor issues the extremism is still here? The majority, Republican majority, has the same extremist positions as it had before on labor issues. We are going to compromise, we are going to work together, and I applaud that on education. Everybody seems to be falling into a basic groove that says we have neglected our duty, we have been derelict in our duty, on education; the Federal Government is not responsible primarily for education, but it needs to do more to help the States to help the localities. I am quite overjoyed, I am quite pleased, happy. I smile all the time when I think of where we have come on matters related to education and how we can look forward to a very productive Congress, 105th Congress, with respect to education. But on labor, on issues effecting working people, we are in trouble. The extremist position of the majority is still there. It means that while we work hard to try to improve conditions for children and schools, the poor children of America will be going home to less food, less money for clothing, less money for shelter, because we are going to take away their overtime. The Republicans are still coming for your cash payments of overtime. To return to my opening statement, among the simpler improvements that could easily be achieved is the requirement for the establishment of an escrow account or some other kind of assurance device to eliminate the risk of employees losing rightfully accumulated income when businesses go bankrupt or illegally disappear. I am trying to highlight some of the problems with the bill other than the basic problem that I want to deal with tonight, and that is the vulnerability, the lack of protection, for the workers who need the income the most. There are problems for other workers. Businesses could go bankrupt or illegally disappear in some way, and the comp time people have accumulated is gone. You know, you go find it. There is a statement always that we get from the Republican majority when we make this statement: Well, if there is a bankruptcy, people's wages are first in line for payment. Anybody who has ever been involved with a bankruptcy case, you know how ironic, how ridiculous, that can become. You are first in line, but you cannot find the line in many cases. At any rate, the protection could be built in there with an escrow account. You could require the employers pay into an escrow account the comp time money, the money that people received that took their overtime in cash. So everybody with comp time would be protected. If the business goes out of existence, they can collect the cash that was due them. They will not do that. A study by the Economic Policy Foundation--this is a business group, an employers group-- a study by the Economic Policy Foundation shows that there is approximately $19 billion, $19 billion--listen--in unpaid overtime lost each year. A study by the Economic Policy Foundation shows that there is approximately $19 billion in unpaid overtime lost each year. I could not believe the figure. I said this is a cumulative figure over many years? No, this is lost each year, various tricks, machinations, maneuvers, various things done by employers to swindle employees out of overtime, and $19 billion per year is the estimate. This is a business group, a business group saying $19 billion. Reasonable penalties for employers who violate the code of negotiated choice should be written into the act, given with the fact that we know from experience, we have studies to show, we have statistics to prove that there is a problem with employers swindling employees out of overtime pay. Why do we not write into the act penalties which would threaten the employer and make them be less likely to try to swindle any of the employees? Clear language to guarantee the crediting of time worked to the pension, Social Security, and other records also must be provided. At this point there is fuzziness about if you are working and your pay is geared to your pension and geared to the amount of money you are going to get in your Social Security, there are a number of things that your actual pay in dollars drives. Those things can be corrected. The bill can take steps to make certain that there is no question about this. But they refuse to do it. You know, we have a situation where the bully is standing in front of the babies and saying to the babies, you know we going to do it my way because I have the power to rule this hour, I am going to do what I want to do. I am not going to do anything to make obvious improvements in this bill, and that is the situation we are up against. These are a few of the modifications that a good-faith negotiating process should accept. You know, the danger is that if you just say no to what they are proposing, many of these things are going to be left in there, and somewhere down the road an agreement is going to be reached behind closed doors in the conference between the Senate and the House, with the White House representatives there, and all these protections that we have requested will not be put into the bill. A few compromises will be made here and there on the surface, and we are going to end up with the work force of America, including the people who want the comp time, being in a far worse position than after the passage of the legislation than they are now. But let me get to the heart of the matter again. Beyond deceptive drafting, beyond deceptive drafting, however, there are some greater problems of substance. While public opinion polls show that families with 2 wage earners and comfortable incomes are in favor of more compensatory time, the available evidence also shows that workers earning less than $10 an hour, or its equivalent, prefer and need more take-home pay. The prevailing evidence clearly shows that workers earning less than $10 an hour or its equivalent prefer and need more take-home pay. Is it hard for us to understand? Why should that be beyond the reach of the imagination of the Members of Congress. If you are making such a little amount of money, cash in your check each week means a great deal. Nearly two-thirds of the work force is stuck in this low wage category. You are talking about two-thirds of the people out there going to work every day, and they are making $10 an hour or less. A constructive compromise would be enhanced by exempting these members of the work force, a constructive compromise. If you really want a bipartisan agreement, then exempt these people. I offered an amendment which would accomplish this by leaving all workers who earn less than 2.5 times the minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act, leave them under it. Do not touch them. They should be protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act. Leave them there. I have had inquiries saying, ``Congressman Owens, we have heard that you are ready to sell us out by cooperating with these people and proposing a compromise. You wanted to have a bipartisan agreement.'' No. I say just say no, vote no, as a first starting position. On the other hand, let me invite you laymen, working people, ordinary citizens, let me invite you into the political process. Let me invite you into the political management of this issue. The political management of this issue requires that your voice be heard now. Public opinion needs to come in right now. Voters need to talk right now to their legislators and tell them that you wanted some people protected. If you are going to have this, again, there is a steam roller coming. I will talk more about that in a few minutes, why it is a steam roller. And I am saying protect the most vulnerable. The following are some other reasonable compromises that should be considered. You could consider a 2-year sunset experiment with workers at the top of the earning scale only, an experiment which is almost what I said before. Deal with the people at the top of the earnings scale. They are the ones that want to have the choice. This could be a win-win situation for everybody. It could be a win- win situation instead of a win-lose situation at this point, a phase-in process that first includes workers at the top of the wage scale and requires Congress to revisit the issue every 2 years. That could be another compromise. It would also provide for surveys and studies which objectively measure the impact on workers and on the overall economy. A 2-year waiver of the Fair Labor Standards Act in certain segments of the job markets where objective surveys and polls show strong worker support for the choice of compensatory time over cash. There are a number of ways you can do this. There has been much said since the opening of the 105th Congress about a spirit of bipartisan cooperation. Since H.R. 1 is the first piece of legislation being offered this year, it represents the first opportunity to exhibit a true bipartisan effort. Democratic bipartisanship means that all segments of the American population must be represented in the negotiating process. No self-appointed oligarchy operating from a command and control mode behind closed doors in a conference will be able to produce an experiment in this critical area which is practical and also has integrity and justice for the workers preserved. I have voiced clearly what my position is, what my fear is. Let me make it perfectly clear that this is not the position of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Caucus did not take a position. There is a statement that most of the Democratic Party people will vote no. That is not a position beyond voting no. Beyond voting no, there are no positions on this, except a substitute will be offered, may be offered. We do not know whether that is going to be accepted by the Committee on Rules or not, and then they would vote yes or no for the substitute. At first I was in favor of voting yes for the substitute. What I am saying now is the substitute is poisoned too. If you vote yes for the substitute, you are leaving out two-thirds of the work force. As I know the substitute at this point, and I do not have a copy in my hand, the proposed substitute does not deal with exempting those people who make $10 an hour or less. It deals with a lot of other things, but it chooses not to do that. Mr. Speaker, I do not know why exempting people who make $10 an hour or less is beyond the reach of the imagination of Democratic Party legislators. I do not know why. At this point I have not heard why. I do know that the employers, the people who want this bill, the people who have given it the highest priority, they want the cash. They do not want fairness. They do not want a win-win situation for every level of working Americans, all the levels. They do not want that. They want cash. And they cannot tolerate a solution or compromise which says two-thirds of the work force should be exempted. That cash is what they are after, and that cash they will not be able to get. Mr. Speaker, the question is, why can you not accept an amendment, a compromise, which will allow the most needy Americans, the hard-working Americans making $10 or less an hour, to be protected from exploitation? Why can you not allow those Americans working and making $10 or less an hour to be in a situation where they do not have to give up involuntarily the cash that they take home in their paycheck? Why can we not have a paycheck protection act instead of this paycheck reduction act? Why can Democrats not take the initiative? Why can somebody out there not let them know? Why can the work force not let them know that we have to go beyond just saying no. Mr. Speaker, I have a set of letters here from various unions. United Auto Workers says no, no, no, even though they are one of the best organized segments of the work force. They do not want to start eroding employee income. They say just say no. The Teamsters say no. No, no, no. Unite says no. But they do not talk about the political management of the issue. After we say no and the majority in the House votes yes and the majority of the Senate votes yes, and it goes to a conference and the White House sends down its representatives to negotiate what the President will or will not veto, where are we? We are in a position where on the table the only thing they have to talk about has ruled out protection for the most vulnerable workers in America. Mr. Speaker, I could become very unpopular with people who say the virile thing to do, the manly thing to do is just say no. Do not talk about a compromise at this point. Do not propose to cooperate with these folks at all. Well, I have been around a long time. I have been here 14 years. I am not going to walk into this ambush without my eyes open and warning all of the other workers of America. An ambush is coming. An ambush is coming. I applaud the fact that the White House is saying just say no, they will not sign the bill as it is. They will not sign it as it is. But I have heard that language before. If they said I will under no conditions sign a bill that does this, this and this to workers, then I would be here with a different story. The White House is not saying what their conditions are. They have their own bill and said they prefer their own bill, but it does not deal with this problem. We want the administration to change its bill, because its bill does not say that people making $10 an hour or less should be exempted, should be exempted from any attempt to remove the protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act, or more particularly what my amendment says, people earning less than 2.5 times the minimum wage should not be involved in this process. We want the White House and Democratic caucus to take that position. American workers wake up, an ambush is coming. If you took this position now, then you would have something to negotiate. Public opinion still is in this process. But as the days go by, as next week arrives and we have it on the floor here and people feel good about voting no and what you are left with is only two, at best, you would be left with two propositions. One is the majority bill, which they are insisting that they wanted, and the other is the substitute offered by the Democrats. Even if everybody voted, if the majority were to allow the substitute to pass, the workers who earn $10 or less would be in trouble, because the substitute at this point is not dealing with their problem. So this is the message I am sending. You might say, why are we in this position? Why do we not have a strong voice in favor of protecting the most vulnerable workers in any piece of legislation? Is this setting a precedent for the coming year? As I said before, there is going to be a lot of bipartisan agreement and cooperation on education. There may be bipartisan agreement and cooperation on the environment. There are a number of areas where the signal has been given, and we are going to try to work together to come up with meaningful legislation. I applaud that. I applaud where we are going on education. I have never felt better about education and public policymaking with respect to education. I learned today my own State of New York, the legislature is proposing as much as a 50-percent increase in State aid to education. This is what President Clinton has done. This is what the bully pulpit, even though the Federal Government is not responsible for education and their expenditures only represent about 7 percent of the total expenditures for education, when the President speaks, when the bully pulpit is in operation, it stimulates what happens at the State level. It stimulates generosity. People's eyes come open. The vision of the White House, it is infectious. It contaminates people. The wonderful thing about leadership in America is when you have strong leadership they pick it up in the capitals of the States and city councils, and that is what has been lacking on the issue of education before President Clinton decided to take his initiatives. Over and over again he emphasized the fact he is making education the No. 1 priority. In his budget he made education a No. 1 priority. As I said before on this floor, I am proud of the fact that the Congressional Black Caucus budget last year proposed a 25-percent increase in Federal aid to education. People said that is absurd, you will never get that. That is pie in the sky. Well, the President is proposing a 20-percent increase this year, 20 percent. That is pretty good. An example set by the Congressional Black Caucus budget is being followed. But why now are we moving on education at such a progressive, productive way? We are going to take care of the kids, maybe, because this could all degenerate into headlines and a Potemkin village approach where it looks like they are doing something but the commitment never comes. You do not know, until the appropriation committees act, what is going to happen. Let us assume this is going to be real, we are not going to perpetuate a fraud on the American people in terms of the position of both parties here in Washington on education. Let us assume it is real. We are taking care of the children of the workers, giving them some better opportunities, safer school buildings, adequate equipment in the lab. We are going to move to really try to provide decent educational opportunities. But the same child has to go home, if their parents, as you can see, two-thirds of the work force is in this condition, and have their parents putting less food on the table because they do not have the cash. The same children will have problems with their clothing because the cash is not there to buy the clothing. The cash is not there to pay for higher rent. Cash is very important for people who are in certain income brackets. They do not have the luxury of saying I want to improve my quality of life by taking more time off to spend with my kids. They have to rush out and try to get another job and another job and another job. You are placing them in greater jeopardy. One of the things that study after study shows is that low income parents spend less time than anybody else with their children. They are often in situations where the pressure is so much greater that you generate a number of problems that would not be generated if parents had more time to spend with their children. But they have to work. They have no choice. If you take away the overtime pay that many of them depend on, then you are only complicating matters more. If a person instead of making cash on his job for overtime has to go to another job, he has the travel time. You have a whole set of problems generated by having a second job. And on the second job of course he is making regular pay, there is no overtime. There is no advantage in his skills and experience, and the labor that he puts in above 40 hours in a given week, it is not the same to have to go get another job, if the jobs are available. Mr. Speaker, I will not get into all that. But why are we doing this? Why are we changing the laws in ways that oppress and make life more difficult for the poorest people? The plain, blunt answer: in America, in a democracy, the voters determine what happens; the people who vote are always respected. The people who vote eventually will influence public policy. In the last election, we had a great disappointment. Only 49 percent of the people eligible to vote came out to vote. And of the people not voting, the largest number were in these working class categories. The people who make $10 or less an hour were the ones who did not vote. We have study after study confirming the fact that the people who vote regularly and the most are the people who have the highest incomes. The richest people in America go out to vote all the time. As you go down the income level, there is a clear correlation. The rich understand. People who are rich and have power understand that their vote is important. They think they have other ways to impact on the government. They make contributions. The same people who make those contributions never hesitate to go out and vote, because they know for them it is just symbolism. Their dollars and their contributions have a great impact on their single vote, but they understand what a democracy is all about. The people in Poland understand what a democracy is all about. Poland has a problem with its economy. Poland's budget for the government is a very meager government under a lot of pressure. But the pensioners in Poland, the people who are on social security and pensions, they are getting a far bigger bite of the budget than anywhere else in the world, almost, because they vote. They have the power of their vote over the government and their needs are being met because that government knows that they will come down. Forty percent of the electorate of Poland is involved with pensions and so forth, so they know that they can bring the government down. Americans have the same option. The 51 percent who did not go out to vote can have an impact on policy. They do not have to have the Fair Labor Standards Act gutted to their disadvantage. They do not have to have people ignoring their interests if they go out to vote. It is simple. You do not have to be a genius to figure out why there is a steamroller going to take away from the workers who need the pay most and give it to the employers, more cash to them, in the name of helping the upper income and the middle income voters who want that flexibility. People who are really in those categories, the upper income and the middle income categories, there are other ways that they can get the flexibility without this law. A few may be stuck in the situation where the employees of large corporations do not have the flexibility and they need a change in the law, but we can accommodate them. What we are going to have is a situation where pressure is being applied to every lawmaker by the people who did go out to vote and by the employers with the cash who want more cash, and they will push the steamroller, unless the working people out there wake up right now and get to your legislators and remind them that you might not have gone out to vote last time, but you have the right to vote still, and you are going to wake up and come to your senses. I despise, I have great contempt for people who do not vote. People who do not participate in the voter process, I really have no use for them, but I represent a lot of them and I am sworn to represent everybody, so I will protect your interests despite the fact that you did not vote. But that is the problem. Understand the problem. You do not have to talk in diplomatic language about this. The problem is that there is a perception in the power circles, whether it is the House of Representatives or the Senate or the White House, that they must please the people who vote, and we clearly have a situation where those who are jeopardized by this H.R. 1 did not vote in large numbers. I was once the commissioner of a community development agency, the antipoverty program for New York City, and we used to have workshops. At one point we had workshops on voting, the importance of voting. Poor people must vote. Part of poverty can be resolved, and you could have some chance of changing public policies to create better opportunities if you vote. In the workshop we had a proposal that people who do not vote should be put in jail. There was a great outcry, a great outcry about how unjust that was. I put that in there, in the trading package, because there were some countries at that time, I do not know whether Italy still does it or not, but there are a few countries in the world where it is against the law not to vote. They consider it is that important, everybody's duty and, of course, most of the democracies in the world, especially those in Europe, have a much higher voter turnout than we do. In the South African region you have an unprecedented 90 percent turnout. The disenfranchised people, in their first election we had a more than 90 percent turnout. We had a 49 percent turnout in our last election for President and other offices. So if you take voting seriously, then you will not have a great outcry about putting people in jail if they do not vote. What it demonstrated to me was, you are not serious about voting, you are worried about going to jail. The injustice of going to jail is not the question. The question is, why do you not vote? In New York City we have huge housing projects in my district where the voting booth is right there in the middle of the housing project. It takes a person no more than 30 minutes to get out of their house, go down, walk over, vote, especially since the lines are not very long. So as a result of folks year after year not doing this, you have a set of attitudes and approaches that have developed, a way of operating politically that is now based on contempt for the poor, contempt for the low-wage earners. It is not hard to figure out what is happening. The steamroller will roll right over us, so leaders of organized labor and various people who do represent these workers, those who did not vote, must join with me and understand we represent everybody, not just those who vote. Somebody must protect those who are not protected. What is happening here in the floor, or what is happening here in this process of H.R. 1 rolling past us, is that nobody is stepping forward to protect those workers. We can take care of the needs of those who are middle class, middle income, one more time for their children, we can lift the Fair Labor Standards Act for you. At the same time we can keep the Fair Labor Standards Act to protect the others. What is wrong with that kind of compromise? What is the matter? Why must we insist on beating those who are weakest? And those who do not vote are weak. The same people who do not vote certainly do not contribute to political campaigns. If they are not interested enough to go out and take 30 minutes to vote, they certainly are not going to put a dime into a political campaign. They are weak, they are misguided, they are un-American in the greatest sense of the word. Not to participate in the process, not to vote makes you un-American, but they still have to be protected. We hope to have a redeposition. Our democracy will not survive if these people continue to be alienated, outside of the system, so they must be protected. There is a pattern in other ways. I have talked about the CPI, the consumer price index, and all of the discussion in Washington: Let us tamper with the consumer price index, because the consumer price index decides what the cost-of-living increase is going to be for people on Social Security or people in a number of other jobs. The COLA's, we call them. Your COLA was in danger this time last week, grave danger. There was a lot of talk. The President said he would have to take a look at it, Senator Moynihan of New York, NY, liberal New York, Moynihan, the great defender of the poor said yes, we ought to take a look at it. There are a lot of people who want to take a look at the CPI, the consumer price index, so that we can perhaps tamper with it, revamp it and bring down the cost of living which gives people on Social Security a few more dollars every year. As the cost of living goes up, they get a few more dollars. We almost lost those few dollars or we almost had a situation where they were compromised. I am here to announce good news tonight. The badgering of the poor, the harassment of the poor will not take place through this medium. The President announced he will have nothing to do with it. He is not going to go forward with a CPI panel. They are not going to have a commission or a panel to look at the consumer price index. Thank you, Mr. President. We are going forward this year, at least, without a panel to tamper with and sabotage the consumer price index. It may happen in the future, but the pressure has been so great. Again, the steamroller was rolling. Everybody this time last week was on board, everybody this time last week empowered. The oligarchy was moving. They had made a decision that they were going to deal with the consumer price index. This week it is different, because there was a big outcry. The gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt], House Democratic leader, refused to embrace the idea, and labor stood with him. There was an outcry, even by some Republicans and conservative Democrats. They met fierce resistance in meetings with organized labor, in meetings with the American Association of Retired Persons [AARP], conservative Democrats, and even some Republicans who did not want to go forward with punishing the poor by taking away the extra pennies they get when they get a COLA as a result of the cost of living going up and being measured by the consumer price index. So we can celebrate, and I end on that note, because it is important to celebrate and understand how it happened. It did not happen by magic; there was no decree that came down from heaven. It is the public opinion process operating, despite the fact that you are not protected by the fact that it is well-known you did not go out to vote. The people who are the most vulnerable have advocates. The people who are most vulnerable have representatives who are committed to represent them, despite the fact that they did not vote. This process, we hope, will protect you for a little while longer, but the great appeal is for everybody to understand the steamroller in Washington this year will be moving again and again against the work force. Last year we had extremist proposals about eliminating certain parts of OSHA to protect workers; we had a big cut in the apparatus for negotiating agreements, labor agreements. Everywhere that labor existed they were under attack, and even now, those attacks are being readied again. Davis-Bacon is under attack again. We will talk more about that later. But as the ranking member of the committee on work force protections, I hope that all of the Members will hear my message that the people who are the working people in America, certainly those who are making $10 or less an hour, need protection. Do not let H.R. 1 pass. Do not let the paycheck ripoff act go through. We want a paycheck protection act instead.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Clyburn] for taking out this most appropriate special order to honor Arnold Aronson. Arnold Aronson represents a breed that gets lost, the people behind the scenes who do all the hard work. Often geniuses at an organization get lost. The headlines never pick them up, and history is of course filled with people of this kind, and the American dream would not be realized unless there were so many Americans of this kind out there always. They were there during the civil rights struggle in great abundance, and they are still there to some degree. They have been intimidated by some of the loud voices and intimidated by the fact that there is such cynical reporting in the media, and have not exercised their full power. But we are the majority; we are not beggars, the people who care. I call it the coalition of a caring majority, and I often talk about it as being a natural coalition. I say that almost in desperation, a natural coalition, because what we really need is a real coalition, and we have had real coalitions, well organized coalitions. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights represents a well organized coalition, a coalition that was needed at a particular time, and if it had not been there we would have a very different scenario for American history. The civil rights struggle and the results from that struggle would be very different. It is important, and I do not want to be redundant because I think his accomplishments have been cited by a number of speakers, but it is important that we send a message to our young people, young people of all groups, all races, but particularly young people who are African- American. There is so much cynicism, there are so many loud voices competing for their attention in trying to divert them from a course of coalition, that we have to take this opportunity to emphasize the fact that coalitions are the only way to win in America. Mr. Speaker, we only get the majority if we are a coalition in America, if we happen to be a member of a minority. In fact, the history of the world and the history of prejudice and of oppression shows that one of the reasons that people are oppressed is that they are in a minority. I mean there is no other reason. When we look at all of the various reasons that oppressors give, they often say that this group was oppressed because it had an inferior education, it had bad hygiene habits, bad sex mores, it had an inferior IQ, the IQ was not high enough. We get that kind of argument sometimes. But get another argument that they were too brilliant, they knew too much, they dominated too many positions in the judiciary, they dominated too many positions in the intellectual circles, and you get the same kind of oppression because the oppressor looks for a reason behind the reason. The real reason is that because they are in a minority and they are weak, they are fodder for demagogues. I think the senior Benjamin Netanyahu, who has written a book about the inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition, one of his conclusions is that the Jews were oppressed in Egypt, and he searched for all the reasons and found that for no other reason than they were the minority and they were weak and easy prey to demagogues, and the pattern of oppression against the Jews in other places was the same. They were just there, easy fodder for demagogues. Any minority in any society is easy fodder for demagogues. Therefore, all minorities should always place a high premium on forming coalitions, all minorities. Certainly African-Americans in America should understand that we cannot survive without coalitions. Coalitions are our only means for survival. Yes, we have had a lot of progress, and of course we are trumpeting and paying tribute to some of the progress that has been made as a result of some of the people like Arnold Aronson, but the message to the young people should be that this is the way it was then, this is the way it has to be now, this is the way it must continue to be. Coalitions. You win with coalitions. The caring majority in America is larger than any other group. When you put it all together, the caring majority is big, the caring majority can make America work. Most people in America do not want to live by somebody else's sweat, they do not want to live by somebody's else's blood. They do not want to be unfair. Most people in America are ready to follow leadership that calls out the best in them. But unfortunately, the leadership that gets the high visibility, the leadership that gets the media attention, the leadership that gets the microphone most of the time are leadership members who are calling for the worst in people. This is true unfortunately not only in the majority, but also in some minorities. In our own minority we have had loud voices that have called for separatism, isolationism; loud voices that have gone into extremism; loud voices that have sought to tear asunder long-existing coalitions. Arnold Aronson behind the scenes was one of those people who was always working to knit together that coalition and to make that coalition effective. Throughout history there have been a whole lot of them. White men, white women, have played a major role in the liberation of black people in America. When slaves were totally powerless, when slaves had no organization to form coalitions with, it was the abolitionists, it was the whites who had to carry the ball. In the crucial days following the end of the Civil War, it was white Thaddeus Stevens from Pennsylvania, it was white Charles Sumner and others who had to forge ahead and against evil forces that were seeking to undermine the victory won in the Civil War, the end of slavery. They had to forge ahead and help push the 13th amendment and the 14th amendment and the 15th amendment. Whites had to do that, and whites did it, in many cases all alone. The abolitionists formed coalitions, and those coalitions began to take root after blacks were able to organize. But we are here, and for all of those young people who think we have not gone far enough: too much lack of opportunity, too much discrimination, economic oppression now is the problem, and therefore they want to become cynical about attempting to move forward in coalition with others, I say to those young people, history unfortunately moves too slow. History unfortunately is a captive of strong men who sometimes are evil men. History unfortunately does not realize the full potential of the human spirit, but history does move forward like an inchworm. Maybe it is a wounded inchworm sometimes, but it moves forward. We would not be where we are today if it had not been for history moving forward. It is made to move forward because there are people like Arnold Aronson that we do not hear about. They swarm like beautiful butterflies; we do not know they are there, but we only need leadership to call them forth. And among our young people, they could be and should be part of those swarming butterflies moving together to make America great; behind the scenes, unsung, doing the hard work necessary to realize the dreams that are here. We have a great potential in this country. We are the richest country that exists on the face of the earth. Productivity, prosperity, everything is booming forward at this point. Why are there so many people suffering? Why are there such evil ideas being put forth? It is because so many people have given up; so many people do not recognize that when we put the coalition forward, we are the majority, we do not have to be beggars. Arnold Aronson understood that. He understood the price we have to pay in energy and time and patience to make the coalitions work. I salute Arnold Aronson, and I hope the young people will go searching; when they do their book reports and they make their various presentations during Black History Month, as well as any other time, that they single out people who have not been highlighted in the encyclopedias enough, people who have not been portrayed on the calendars, but the people who have made history what it is in terms of the positive movement forward in America, people like Arnold Aronson. I congratulate Arnold Aronson on his 86th birthday. I congratulate Arnold Aronson on his 86th birthday. I thank the gentleman for being here.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, it is time to end corporate welfare as we know it, and many of the kinds of tax cuts we are talking about before for individuals, certainly the capital gains tax on homes, would be eliminated or could be eliminated if we were to go after our Tax Code and make the necessary adjustments and close the loopholes and end corporate welfare. It is time to end corporate welfare as we know it. Great injustices have been done over the past 2 years as we have sought to cut back on expenditures. We have gone after the poor, we have used a microscope and focused it on the weakest and poorest of Americans. A great injustice has been done in the welfare cuts. It is estimated that as many as 2 million children will go hungry as a result of welfare cuts. A great injustice has been done in the immigration reform. The cuts that take place as a result of immigration reform are elderly people who are not citizens, who in large numbers will end up going hungry, and some will starve, you know. And now we have a situation where we place a microscope on the poor who receive Social Security and other groups that receive a cost of living index increase from year to year, but mostly it is people on Social Security. A lot of us worry about tampering with Social Security. Yes, they are tampering with Social Security, they have already tampered with it when they made a great cut and took away the entitlement for Aid to Families with Dependent Children. That is part of the Social Security Act. Now the CPI discussion, the discussion about how to change or tamper with, sabotage, the Consumer Price Index is another method, another tool, for oppressing the poorest and the weakest people in our society. The microscope is now on the poor people who receive cost of living increases. Most of those people are on Social Security. So instead of doing that, you know, why do not we go after the really big money? Instead of squeezing the little people, you know the cuts in welfare produced small amounts of money because you were dealing with 1 percent of the total Federal budget. If you go after corporate welfare cuts, you are dealing with the really big money. The big money is in corporate welfare. The big money is in the Tax Code, the tax giveaways, and today I am going to talk about the big money is there because the Internal Revenue Service refuses to enforce the Tax Code properly. Mr. Speaker, their refusal to enforce the Tax Code properly wastes large amounts of money. We can get as much as $70 billion in this present year if they would just enforce the Tax Code properly. We can realize a $70 billion windfall as a result of enforcing the Tax Code properly. That 70 billion or more, I am going to talk about that in a minute. I wanted to emphasize two important dates. One date is March 12, tomorrow, Wednesday, when the progressive caucus will launch the war against corporate welfare. We are being joined by members of the Black Caucus. There are a number of other Members that do not belong to any caucus. We are being joined in launching a full-scale war against corporate welfare. That is going to take place tomorrow with a press conference to start the process where we will list 15 items, 15 corporate welfare items, items where large amounts of money will be generated. Now, we are doing this under the aegis of the Progressive Caucus, but we are happy to announce and would like to call the attention to everybody that the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, Mr. Kasich, is also waging his own small-scale war on corporate welfare. At least he is using the right language, but he does not want a real war; he wants a few brush fights. We want to go further and lay it out for the American people: Yes, your taxes ought to be cut. I agree with the substance of what the gentlemen were saying before. We ought to cut taxes for ordinary individuals, we ought to cut taxes for families. The problem is that the swindle comes when you have had over the last 20 years a tremendous increase in the taxes on families and individuals while corporate taxes have gone way down. Corporate taxes were almost at 40 percent at one time while individual taxes were 27 percent. Now corporate taxes are down to the level of about 11 percent, and individual taxes and individual family taxes are up at 44 percent. So one of the days that we want you to watch is tomorrow when we launch the war against corporate welfare, and we will lay out the details as to where you can get billions of dollars from the loopholes that will be closed and the various other programs that will be eliminated that constitute corporate welfare. We are going to add to that, and part of that list is a step to enforce the Tax Code that exists now which does not require any legislation. The other day I want you to remember, and you cannot forget it, is April 15. April 15 is the deadline for filing income tax returns. Nobody forgets that. Most Americans, vast number of Americans, the great majority, obey the Tax Code. We have more tax compliance in this country than we have in most other industrialized nations. Americans obey the Tax Code; they respect the law. Individuals and families respect the law, and they obey the Tax Code. On the surface corporations obey the Tax Code, but if you look closely, there are some instances where not only are the corporations not obeying the Tax Code, the Tax Code that already exists, but they are also not being bothered by the IRS. The Internal Revenue Service is not seeking to enforce the Tax Code. We are going to talk about that. Why is the focus always on the poor and extracting more from the poor, and we never seem to see the obvious, and that is that great amounts of money are being wasted in the Tax Code. Great amount of moneys are not being collected. We are giving a free ride to corporations. Now I have sent out, and this is complicated. I intend to take it slow and submit for the Record, for those who are interested, a number of documents that will help you if you want to find out what the background is all about. I have sent a letter to my colleagues asking all of my colleagues who are interested to sign this letter to the Internal Revenue Commissioner. We have sent out a letter to the Honorable Margaret Milner Richardson, and we are going to send a letter out as soon as we get some additional signatures, and this letter is just saying Dear Commissioner Richardson, please enforce the law; please read the Tax Code and enforce the law. There is a simple section of the Tax Code, Sections 531 to 537 of the Internal Revenue Code, which deals with violations related to unreasonable accumulation of surplus, and that is the part we want you to enforce, and if you enforce that, we will realize a minimum of $70 billion in this year because we are talking about the law not being enforced for the past 3 years. If you go back and look at the failure to enforce the law, you will find that a number of corporations have violated in large numbers, and if you apply a penalty, and it is a pretty stiff penalty, the penalty is 39.6 percent. That is a penalty. If you apply the penalty for the people who have violated it, it will generate a windfall of $70 billion. This is a letter to my colleagues asking them to sign on, and I hope that those who are listening will take a look at the letter to Commissioner Richardson and will sign the letter. Needless to say, we are preparing detailed proposals for the expenditure of this windfall of revenues resulting from enforcement of the law and the collection of the penalties. We want to deal with this year's budget in the process of balancing off expenditures against revenue. The progressives and liberals have not dealt with revenue in a proper fashion over the last 50 years. We have always been concerned with how will the Government take care of the needs of the people in terms of expenditures. We have not looked enough at how the revenue side works, where the taxes are coming from and what the injustices are there. The pattern I have described repeatedly here is that over the years because of the fact the progressives and liberals and people who care about the majority of Americans have not looked at the tax side, they have swindled us by steadily reducing the tax burden of corporations while they steadily raise the burden on individuals. So I want to call this letter to your attention, and for those who are interested I want to submit it in its entirety. Mr. Speaker, I want to submit 2 items for the Record. One is a Dear Colleague letter to my colleagues in the Congress asking them to join me in this communication with the Tax Commissioner, and the other is the letter, the actual text of the letter to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson. Now this is part of the opening war against the war that will begin tomorrow against corporate welfare. Mr. Speaker, I submit in its entirety for the Record, these two documents: February 12, 1997. Dear Colleague: I am writing to request your support and signature for a letter to the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service which may immediately generate more than 70 billion dollars in revenue. No legislation is required. No new rule-making is required. This effort only requires the Department of Internal Revenue to enforce existing law. Please read the attached letter. In summary, it contends that many corporations have been acting in violation of the law. Since these corporations have been purchasing large quantities of their own stock, they have been acting in violation of the ``unreasonable-accumulation-of-surplus'' provisions of sections 531-537 of the Internal Revenue Code. At present these violations are accelerating. Please read the attached letter thoroughly. Within five days we will be forwarding it to the Internal Revenue Commissioner and we need your signature. To offer your support please call Kenya Reid or Jack Seder at (202) 225- 6231. Needless to say, we are preparing detailed proposals for the expenditure of the windfall revenues resulting from an enforcement of the law and a collection of the penalties. Probably we will propose that one half of all such penalty revenues collected should be used to reduce the deficit. The remaining half should be used for one-time capital expenditures for education, job training and job producing work projects. A clearly enunciated, innovative but practical tax and revenue policy is a long overdue need for Progressives, Liberals and all others who represent the Caring Majority in America. Before the completion of the budget and appropriations process we must enunciate such a policy. While a wise, compassionate and practical spending program must remain a priority, we must elevate our advocacy of tax and revenue measures to the same priority level. At the center of the Caring Majority's policy must be the commitment to significantly reduce taxes for middle and low- income families and individuals in America. To offset such reductions in the overall income tax revenues we must increase income taxes paid by corporations. It must be noted that the overwhelming reliance on income taxes is a subject that deserves thorough discussion. It is time to examine more closely the possible revenues that might be derived from selling and/or leasing the spectrum which is owned by all Americans. Greater revenues from the sale and/or lease of other citizen owned property must also be on the agenda of prospective sources. A ``value added'' or some similar big ticket item consumer tax must not be ruled out. These are all tax and revenue considerations to be discussed over the next few weeks. The business at hand now is the enforcement of the present tax code. This should be the core of our 105th Congress budget and appropriations program. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely Yours, Major R. Owens, Member of Congress.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk primarily today about the Supreme Court decision with respect to voting rights in New York City. They have of course come down with a decision in New York that obeys the Supreme Court decision and the precedent it set. So the courts have ordered that one district, the district of my colleague, the gentlewoman from New York [Ms. Velazquez], the 12th Congressional District of New York, be redrawn; and the courts have said this must take place by July 30. The legislature has until July 30 to redraw the district. I think that this process has been going on for some time now. We understood that the Supreme Court, when it made its decision on the Georgia case and the North Carolina cases and the Texas case, all those cases let us know that it was almost inevitable that eventually some district in New York that was being challenged would be struck down and the district that has the oddest shape of course was the 12th Congressional District, presently held by Congresswoman Velazquez. We knew it was coming but nevertheless my neighbors seemed very alarmed. In the surrounding area, people are alarmed. The whole city is alarmed, asking questions as if this was a brand new situation. So for that reason, I find it important to comment. I have been on about four radio stations, and the kinds of questions I receive show that previous discussions of this matter, and I have spoken on the floor at least twice about the Voting Rights Act and the implications of the Voting Rights Act, the reason for the Voting Rights Act, the justice of the Voting Rights Act, but at home it has not come through because they did not feel it concerned them. It was in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Louisiana, recently Virginia. Now it has come home to New York. So it is important, and I think that the fact that Congresswoman Velazquez is appealing the decision is important. She knows that the likelihood that that appeal will be upheld, the likelihood that her appeal will receive success is very slim. She wants to make the point that the decision has come down, and it is a district court ruling in a matter that they consider consistent with the Supreme Court and the inevitability of that is one thing but the justice of it is another. It is not just that the Supreme Court that set the process in motion was wrong, that it was a 5 to 4 decision. Any 5 to 4 decision should be questioned and requestioned. The morality of it, the legality of it, all should be questioned, and she did not want to accept that. So we set in motion a process of having a dialog in New York that should have been going on all along because there is something more at stake here than just the redrawing of lines at one time. The whole act, the Voting Rights Act and the essence of the Voting Rights Act is now in jeopardy because the principle applied to congressional districts is also to be applied to State legislative districts and also city council districts and any other jurisdiction of the government, same principles would be applied. So it is a matter that deserves extensive discussion. Now, in the process of this discussion, I want to also talk about a few other things that seem unrelated but I intend to put them together, I assure you. I want to talk about some good news that has taken place in the past 24 hours. The Swiss Government announced that they were going to set up a $5 billion fund to compensate or to help victims of catastrophes, especially victims of human rights violations, such as victims of the Holocaust. Let me just make it clear that this is a Swiss Government taking this action, following an action that was previously taken by the Swiss banks. The Swiss banks already established a fund, I think, of 100-some million dollars, a fund to directly compensate victims of the Holocaust. Now the Swiss Government, the President of Switzerland has gone further, and that act of reconciliation is what I want to talk about. Where does reconciliation come in the process of evaluating the justice or injustice of the Voting Rights Act? What is the Voting Rights Act all about? Why was the Voting Rights Act, why is the Voting Rights Act being questioned on the basis of race, on the basis of its denial of equal rights? Justice Sandra Day O'Connor argues in the majority opinion that we cannot draw a district with predominant consideration of race. That violates the equal protection clause in the 14th amendment. What Justice Sandra Day O'Connor does not tell us is that the 14th amendment is not about equal protection for everybody in a colorblind society. The 14th amendment is about a remedy of slavery. The 14th amendment came about as a result of the need to take care of the long pattern of injustices established in 232 years of slavery. And when the Civil War was fought and finally won, Congress had to pass first the 13th amendment, which freed the slaves. Abraham Lincoln freed a certain segment of the slaves in the Emancipation Proclamation, but he did not free all the slaves and it was not a constitutional matter. A President can issue an Executive order. When he goes out of office, the Executive order no longer applies. So the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves permanently. It was the 13th amendment. Following the 13th amendment was the 14th amendment, which talked at great length about slavery. Most people think the 14th amendment is a little line about equal protection under the law. That is only one tiny part of the 14th amendment. The 14th amendment is about slavery and certain steps that the Government had to take to remedy the effects of slavery and to deal with the people who are now the descendants of slaves. So the Swiss Government's action is a process of reconciliation dealing with what they did not do 50 years ago, 50 years ago when the Nazis invaded most of Europe. The Nazis subjected the Jews to the Holocaust, 6 million people being wiped out. They stole their money and their goods and so forth. A lot of the gold and the money of Jewish victims of the Holocaust ended up in Switzerland. It was generally understood for the last 50 years that that had happened. Only now is Switzerland, under great pressure, finally beginning to deal with that. And I would like to applaud the positive step taken by the Swiss Government. Was it justice? I doubt it. It is at least a positive step in the process of reconciliation. And I will come back to that. Most important of all, I would like to show how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the South African Government is a model that even America ought to take a look at, because we have all these leftover problems resulting from 232 years of slavery and we are not able to deal with the problems in an effective, honest, and just way unless we admit that there was a great crime committed; unless we admit that there was a great problem created for 232 years; that the descendants of African slaves for 232 years they were enslaved and they have some problems and the Nation owes them something and we ought to talk about that. We ought to talk about what we are going to do to rectify those problems. And even before we get to rectifying the problems, let us at least tell the truth about it. Let us at least have a national exploration of what it meant to have 232 years of slavery, 232 years where people could not acquire wealth, 232 years where there was an attempt to obliterate the humanity of a certain group of people in order to make them more efficient and effective as beasts of burden. I am repeating myself. I have said this a couple of times on the floor before. But I think it is important to review these things, because in New York they are just beginning to wake up to the fact that we have a problem with respect to the Voting Rights Act. A lot of the people I talk to, and a lot of people who called into the radio shows said, well, it is only fair that we not consider race, that we not consider color. We should have a colorblind society. It is hard to deal with that discussion unless we deal with history. Now, I am not a historian. I majored in mathematics. I was never that fond of history, but I have as I have grown older begun to understand and appreciate the power of history. And history is what civilization is all about. If we do not remember history, or respect history or learn from history, then we are not able to build a civilization. We cannot deal with truth unless we have it in the context of history. So the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission seems like it is a long way away from the Voting Rights Act and it does not seem related. It may seem like it is not related to the Swiss Government action today, but it is all a part of what I want to talk about today. I want to go further and talk about beyond the Voting Rights Act; that there is a need for a whole lot of other actions and activities of Government that now will never take place unless we begin to look at the impact of 232 years of slavery, and, after that, about 150 years of special discrimination, oppression. The fact that the reconciliation process is gaining momentum, the fact that the reconciliation process is now accepted, beginning to make an impact, an imprint on our overall world civilization is very important. It may be that the steps being taken are only tiny steps, but what was the liberation of Haiti all about? The liberation of Haiti was accomplished because we made promises that we would not punish, we would not seek justice, we would just seek the truth and reconciliation. Punishment of the people who had thrown out the legal Government of Haiti and terrorized the people for 3 years; our Government said that should not take place. And Aristide and the Government of Haiti agreed. We will not emphasize punishment, we will emphasize reconciliation. What happened in Bosnia? We had to have some agreement among the fighting parties that they would not pursue justice over reconciliation. Yes, there is a clause which says that war criminals will be sought, but the definition of war criminals makes it pretty clear we are talking about a very tiny amount of people. Most of the people who participated in the terror, in the war crimes, and the devastation of the Balkan countries involved, the old Yugoslavia, parts of Yugoslavia, they will not be punished. We are pursuing reconciliation there. The Swiss Government's action is another act of reconciliation. In Uganda, where they massacred a half million people in a short period of time, one tribe after another, we are trying to pursue reconciliation. Reconciliation is being pursued in Uganda, but the courts are holding forth, cases are being tried, they are trying to get the truth of what happened. It is important before they go forward. What I am saying is that unless we have a bedrock of truth on which to build the future, building the present and future gets kind of wobbly. We threw away the Voting Rights Act and said no group should be treated in a special way. Well, we moved from the Voting Rights Act to the set-asides. Set-asides for minorities and women have now been discouraged by the Supreme Court because that is treating a group in a special way. The Supreme Court did say that the Federal Government had a right to pursue any remedies it wanted to with respect to past injustices. So Federal set-asides were accepted, whereas local set-asides would only be accepted if they proved there was immediate discrimination or past discrimination that could be proved. It was a complicated way of diluting the understanding that if there are injustices that have gone on for a long time, Government has a duty to try to correct and adjust the situation in order to compensate for those injustices. The German Government is made up of people who are living and breathing now, citizens paying taxes, many of them were not alive during the Nazi era, yet the Germans have steadfastly paid reparations to certain identified Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Germans have had to pay for a number of other things, because a nation is considered a continuing body and we do not drop whatever is happening because it was a group called the Nazis or the Gestapo. The German Government has to assume that responsibility. The Swiss Government of today was not the Swiss Government that was there when they capitulated to the Germans and they acted in concert with the Germans in the looting of certain fortunes and a number of things that went on, which the Government of Switzerland is not even acknowledging today, but they are saying we understand something went wrong and today we are going to move forward and try to, in the spirit of reconciliation, do something positive. The principle of special treatment to deal with special past crimes, special past injustices, special past investigations is what I am talking about: special treatment in the Voting Rights Act, special treatment we need in the emergency funding of education right now. The same people that were victimized by 232 years of slavery are the descendants of those people, and they are the ones being victimized in our big cities right now. They are being victimized because children are being forced to go to school in buildings that are unsafe. Not only are they not conducive to learning but the buildings have asbestos problems, they have lead poisoning problems, they have problems of overcrowding which affects the psyche as well as the physical health of children. Those things are going on right now in America. The need to deal with that on an emergency basis and understand that there is a need to do that because the situation results from past injustices and past failures must go forward. There is a need for more empowerment zones. We came up with a good solution, which the Republicans and Democrats both bought into, when the President proposed that we have empowerment zones in big cities and also in rural areas where we have a large amount of poverty. The empowerment zone concept was considered a great step forward because it combined the private sector effort with the public sector effort. When empowerment zones were first proposed, the number 50 was the magic number. For a long time they talked about 50 empowerment zones. A good idea that everybody endorsed then, and it is a good idea still to endorse. But we went from 50 empowerment zones on the drawing board down to 9 empowerment zones when they finally enacted the legislation, 6 in the big cities and 3 in rural areas. The President began to talk during the election of our increasing the empowerment zones from 9 to 20, which we thought was still too few, but in his State of the Union Address he fell back from 20 to talking about 6 additional empowerment zones. So empowerment zones are part of an effort to correct past injustices, part of an effort to deal with the special problems created by oppression and the victimization of people. And empowerment zones should be pushed forward and expanded. We need more of them and we need them now, not a trickle-down approach where by the year 2000 we may have 20. We need to deal with the problem right now. Empowerment zones rightly focus on the poorest areas in the country. We have to prove poverty. In my district we have census tracks, which are the census tracks from which most of the children with asthma come. They are the census tracks from which most of the children who have not graduated from high school come. They are the census tracks which have the largest numbers of people in the prisons in New York State. There is a correlation between extreme poverty. We have census tracks with a large number of low-income housing developments. Low-income housing developments are there because people need housing, but it groups people in low income and there is a correlation between the low income and the low education. There is a correlation between the crime rate and the health problems. Clearly, it qualifies for an empowerment zone. There is no problem once we get the opportunity. But if we only have nine empowerment zones in the whole country and only six of those empowerment zones are urban areas, and the other gentleman from New York, Charlie Rangel, was the author of the bill, so he has the one in New York City, in Harlem, which is a long way from Brooklyn. Just across the river in psychological terms, but Brooklyn, NY, is part of New York City. It has 2.5 million people, 2.5 million people. If it was a separate city, it would be the fourth or fifth largest city in the country. We have problems there which are concentrated. And if the empowerment zones were to be distributed in an equitable and just manner, we would get an empowerment zone. I have told my constituents this is the No. one priority on my agenda, an empowerment zone. But in the process of trying to get an economic empowerment zone, we are up against the philosophy that seems to be prevailing that we should not give special treatment to people in need. That same philosophy that mitigates against the Voting Rights Act, mitigates against the set-aside laws, is now operating in anything where we propose to help people in great need, except of course in the case of earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. When we have storms or natural disasters, we immediately rush to the aid of people. We have appropriated like $8 billion in aid to California in the last 3 years, $6 billion for Florida, and $6 billion for Midwestern States for floods. Florida suffered from hurricanes. We quickly respond and understand people are in special need when natural disasters occur, but 232 years of slavery and the byproducts of that, the poisonous legacy of that, we do not want to consider. So we need emergency education funding, we need economic empowerment zones, we need workfare to end and have Federal job creation programs instead of putting people on workfare, which is a prelude, a prerequisite for a new kind of slavery because you are working people for less than minimum wage, no fringe benefits, dehumanizing them. Workfare becomes a prelude to slavery if it has no opportunity at the end, if there is no job training promise, if there is no attempt to build a situation in the economy where jobs will be available, public sector jobs are not being created. Then you are moving in a direction of slavery. Mr. Speaker, the cruelty of the welfare reform and the immigration reform is coming home to my district. My office is packed with people, old people who have been in this country for 20 or 30 years, for one reason or another did not become citizens, no chance now that they are going to be able to meet the requirements, pass the tests, answer the questions. They are going to now have to starve because they cannot get food stamps, they cannot get any benefits, SSI is closed to them. They cannot get into nursing homes when they get sick. All of that goes down the drain. The cruelty of it is unnecessary. Perhaps the average American citizen would not sit still and accept this if they understood what it is all about in terms of the legacy of injustices and past failures and how that produces a large number of people in this kind of condition. As I said before, I want to talk primarily about the Voting Rights Act and its impact on New York City in terms of the need to draw new lines and the implications of the fact that the courts have now chosen to abandon any special considerations in the drawing of those lines, special considerations that are needed with respect to race. So I have a potpourri of things I am throwing in here that all relate back to the same subject. I go a little further, I would like to call attention to the fact that the Chinese criticize human rights violations in America today. Some of us have voted year after year that we should not have most favorable trading status with China because China on a massive scale violates human rights. They have got more humans in China, so they can violate rights on a scale that makes everybody else appear to be playing games. When you have more than 1 billion people and you violate human rights, you are violating quite a number of humans, the rights of quite a number of humans. So China has been criticized, but the present administration, our administration, the Democratic administration, and I think the leadership of the Republican Party also approves it. They place trade and business first, and they keep certifying China and allowing it to have most favorable nation status. Mr. Speaker, China is not grateful for the fact that we criticize them but still give them the most favorable nation status. They have now fought back and they are criticizing the United States for violating human rights. They say we violate human rights by not providing for food, clothing and shelter for all the people, for health care for all the people, for jobs for all the people. China has slapped back at the United States. They have even gone so far as to criticize our election process. The latest criticism of China is that we are allowing people to buy elections, that the large amounts of money that go into our elections constitute bribery. That is the charge of the Chinese. I think that we should take note. Although I do not agree with the Chinese, I think our arrogance in criticizing the rest of the world should be tempered. There are a lot of problems wrong here. We need to take a close look at ourselves. What I am saying is that that is what we need in order to put in perspective problems relating to voting rights, problems related to appropriations for education, appropriations for jobs, economic development, problems related to our fantastic hostility toward the poor as expressed in welfare reform, immigration reform. We need to take a step back and take a look at the richest nation that ever existed on the face of the Earth and say to ourselves, how are we really behaving. A truth and reconciliation commission would help us do this. If we understood ourselves and understood the history of this Nation and how it did not come into being automatically, by some magic process and waving of the hands of God, there were a lot of things done right by our Founding Fathers, and there were a lot of things done wrong in the economic sector. Slavery was an engine that built the Nation, helped to build the Nation economically. The wiping out of large portions of the Native American population also helped to build a new Nation economically, but it was built on the blood and bones of people who did not deserve what they got. So we need to take a step back and look at our history and evaluate it. Ken Burns has a documentary that played a couple of weeks ago on Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was a very complex man, also a very great man, a giant; so ordinary people are not expected to be able to really understand the psyche of Thomas Jefferson fully. He was the kind of individual who comes only once or twice or a few times in a century. He was equivalent in politics to Einstein in science as far as I am concerned. Mr. Speaker, if there had been no Thomas Jefferson, I do not think there would be an America as we know it today. We would have a very different constellation. So Thomas Jefferson ranks with Lincoln, competes with Lincoln as the greatest American President in my opinion. Perhaps Lincoln is greater because he acted decisively in very complicated, trying circumstances, and Thomas Jefferson acted decisively in some times but he backed away from many other battles; and that may be the difference. But historians have ranked Presidents, and I think Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln, they all rank in the top three, one way or another. Jefferson certainly was a great President. Jefferson, however, did have slaves. He was a southerner. He was a plantation owner. Jefferson also, documents show, had a 38-year love affair with one of his slaves named Sally Hemings. Sally Hemings is sort of blotted out of history, but researchers have reconstructed enough about her to let us know that she had a relationship with Jefferson for 38 years. I think a truth and reconciliation commission would help us to unearth that, and we would benefit a great deal. It is a love story that I think needs to be told, the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. It would help the Nation a whole lot to know exactly how this great man, why this great man maintained a relationship with a slave woman for 38 years. If that could happen, I do not think it should be seen as something to be hidden or something to be proud of. Obviously it was no passing passion. Obviously it was no exploitation of one human being over another. You do not do that for 38 years. Obviously Sally Hemings was a very exceptional person even though history has blotted out a lot of what she was, and we do not know because certain Jefferson letters and documents are mysteriously missing, et cetera. But Ken Burns' documentary on Jefferson has titillated a lot of discussion. Certainly my interest, which started like 10 years ago, in Thomas Jefferson has been renewed. This is a part of our history that a Truth and Reconciliation Commission should take a look at. We may be proud and learn a lot from an examination of the intimate life of Thomas Jefferson as well as the rest of his life. I think that factual history has a major role in this process of reconciliation. Factual history would make us understand more about what 232 years of slavery meant. Factual history, as we examine the facts more closely, if we funded a commission and they looked at it more closely, you might understand what I mean when I say that 232 years of slavery was an obliteration process, an attempt to obliterate the humanity of a set of people to make them more efficient as workers, as beasts of burden. The facts of history would help us understand that. The facts would lead us to do some of the things that have been done recently in the study of the children of Romania. In Romania, the Communist Government of Romania decided that children were better off raised in orphanages. Large numbers of children were put into orphanages. They could have found families in many cases for them, but it was a policy of the Government: Maximize the number of children in orphanages; let the State raise them. What you have is a kind of small Holocaust related to little children. Large numbers of American families have attempted to adopt some of those Romanian children since the wall went down in Romania and the dictator who started all this was executed by the people of Romania. They have gone in, large numbers of Americans wanting to adopt children. In many cases the children were physically beautiful, a little malnourished and pathetic looking but physically beautiful, and they have run up against a very interesting problem. Many of them have found when you try to transport children of Romania into America, give them the nurturing and do everything that a parent could do, and most of these are middle-class people because it costs about $10,000 to go through the process of getting them adopted, so they have some means. They take care of the kids very well. They run up against the problem of the children cannot do certain things, that something has happened to them that makes it impossible for them to relate in the usual human ways. Some of the parents have had to give up the children, have just found that it is impossible. Psychiatrists have been brought in to study the situation. They have actually taken photographs, taken x-rays of the brains of the children. They have found a pattern where parts of the brain atrophy, they shrink because of the lack of human contact. These people were put in places where they were in pens. They had only other children there of their same age, very little human contact except to feed them. And often they were not fed on time and deprived. But the big thing is the lack of the human contact has led to a condition that can be documented. The brains have been affected on most of the children. There are a few exceptions, which is a testament to the human spirit and the human endurance that is there, but the majority of them are in a situation where they do not come back. You cannot deal with the problem that the brain has already shrunk. They have documented evidence of this. I saw it on public television. I watch a lot of public television, and I saw it. They actually had the graphs and the charts, the picture of the brain, et cetera. I asked myself, what happened to the brains of all these slave children who were put in situations where they were taken care of in the same way, only in worse conditions. They did not have pens. They were put on dirt floors. They were put on floors that in the wintertime only were covered with straw. They were fed like pigs. They would put the milk and the cornbread together and spread it in a trawl the way they feed pigs. They went through all these kind of inhumane conditions, they were sold back and forth from their parents, all kinds of things happened. What if we were to really get a thorough documentation of what that phenomenon was like and then begin to understand what impact it had on generations, to have all those babies who became adults, who went through that process. Mr. Speaker, how much of that is a part of the problem that we are experiencing? And what a great thing it was that the human spirit of most African-Americans who are alive today, they are still alive because their ancestors overcame those kinds of conditions. But that is just one horrendous example. Why do we not have an economic study of what it means to have a slave family, 232 years ago, that is about seven or eight generations we are talking about. And each generation, because they are slaves, cannot pass anything on to the next generation. There have been studies that show clearly that most wealth in America has been accumulated from inheritance. One generation passes money down to the next. They invest that or they find ways to expand on that, they pass it down to the next. So wealth in America is primarily, and probably all over the world, is primarily the result of inheritance. Bill Gates is a great exception. There are a number of people who have sort of broken out of the mold, made billions of dollars due to technological advancements. They are very fortunate. But in general, studies have shown that wealth is a product of family, inheritance. Two hundred thirty-two years went by where African-Americans and their descendants inherited zero. Nothing. They are different from the immigrants who came here who might have had a suitcase full of clothes. You had wealth if you came with a suitcase full of clothes. The African Americans came, and an attempt was made to deprive them not only of everything they had--they were automatically deprived of every physical thing they had, but their language was considered a problem. So they were divided up in ways which placed people who spoke different languages together in order for them not to be able to generate conspiracies. They were in every way deprived of any heritage, traditions, folkways, mores. All that was deliberately blotted out. So what if we really studied that seriously, had a commission which had some funding, and were to see the impact of it? What impact would that have on our policy making, our attitudes toward policy making? We might discover some good things, you know, in the process. There was an article I read recently which talked about the south's hidden heritage. We discovered some positive things and some of the stereotypes that we have might be overcome, because there was an article that was in the New York Times on February 16 of this year, 1997, by Eric Foner. I picked it up and I saw the name Eric Foner, and I was very interested in the article because I have a book in my office by Eric Foner. It is a study of mulattoes, the mulattoes and the impact of mulattoes, the offspring of the slave holders, the slave owners and slave women, and he has a long catalog of various mulattoes and what happened to them and their impact, et cetera. So Eric Foner's name attracted my attention. He is a teacher at Columbia University, teaches history there, and he is also the curator of an exhibition at the South Carolina Historical Museum. At Columbia University, New York, he is a teacher, but he is a curator of an exhibition at the South Carolina Historical Museum. That is an odd combination which I found very interesting. And his article is about the south's hidden heritage. If we had a truth in reconciliation commission we might find out things like this, and they may contribute a great deal to the dialog and the reconciliation process. He points out in his article, which I will not read in great detail, but he points out that Mississippi, which is often singled out as being an example of the worst race relations and the worst historical--historically the worst of the slave States, that Mississippi had more Mississippians who fought for the Union than for the Confederacy. That is an interesting fact, it is an odd fact; it is a fact, I think, which if it was placed into the hopper of a reconciliation process may do some good, you know. He points out that during the Civil War 200,000 African Americans, most of them freed slaves, fought in the Union Army. Tens of thousands of Mississippi slaves were recruited in the Union forces. Several thousand whites from Mississippi also fought under the stars and stripes. In fact more Mississippians fought for the Union than for the Confederacy. And he goes on to talk about other Civil War monuments in the south that celebrate the south's history one way or another. He talks about the fact also that Gen. James Longstreet, a famous general for the Confederacy, General Longstreet has no monuments to him in any southern towns because after the war was over General Longstreet supported rights for the newly freed slaves, so his name up to now is mud among his compatriots in the south. A truth in reconciliation commission might appreciate that fact, might unearth the achievements of General Longstreet after the war, and it might lead to General Longstreet being a positive force in a dialog and the development of reconciliation in America. What am I going on with this potpourri for? It is all about trying to make the point that the Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act is a landmark decision, it is a dangerous harbinger of things to come. If we do not deal with the distorted notions behind it, the philosophy of it, and understand what it is all about, we are in danger of losing other kinds of policy institutions. We fought hard for certain institutions to be put in place. We fought hard to get the Voting Rights Act, we fought hard to end segregation in the schools, we fought hard to get set-asides established so that in Government contracts a small percentage, a tiny percentage of contracts were awarded to minorities and to women. A lot of that is being rolled back. Affirmative action is being challenged, and a lot of the same arguments that are used by the Supreme Court in its promulgation of this wrong decision are used in all of those cases, that America should be a colorblind society. Everybody is equal. Therefore you cannot take steps to remedy anything on the basis of past injustices. You must treat everybody equally. That may be a dream that will take place some day, but it is not a fact and a reality now, and the fact that we close our eyes makes the process of building a great Nation more difficult. We may have serious problems if we continue to go down this road, but we will not acknowledge that schools in inner-city communities which have the greatest bulk of the descendants of African slaves need special help. Empowerment zones in inner-city districts need special help to create jobs and create opportunity. We cannot run away from that responsibility. In the Supreme Court decision, I think I pointed out Supreme Court decision that was related to the Georgia case, and was used as the backbone and the ultimate decisionmaking as within the context of the Supreme Court decision for all other cases, including the recent case of New York. Nydia Velazquez's 12th District has been subjected to the same reasoning that was used in the Georgia case, and therefore at this point I want to go back to a statement I made on this floor before: The Georgia case was a case decided by a five to four configuration. Five members voted for it, and four members voted against it. Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the opinion for the minority; Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion for the majority. Justice Kennedy based his ruling on another case which said that you can not have any consideration of race when the Government is involved. Justice Ginsburg challenged this and said this is not so self-evident, it is not common sense. It was not obvious to Justice Ginsburg, and I will repeat what I said on the floor before: The law, as the law is made and the intent of the constitutional amendment as examined, it is not at all clear to Justice Ginsburg that the 14th amendment is primarily concerned with being colorblind and not concerned with remedying past wrongs, which the full, legal immigration of the African Americans, the former slaves and their descendants into American life, require. Let me read a few excerpts from Justice Ginsburg's dissenting opinion directly. Quote: Legislative redistricting is a highly political business. This court has generally respected the competence of State legislators to attend to the task. When race is the issue, however, we have recognized the need for judicial invention, the judicial intervention, to prevent dilution of minority voting strength. Generations of white discrimination against African Americans, as citizens and voters, account for that surveillance. In other words, the courts did get involved with redistricting after hundreds of years of, say, you know, we are not going to draw lines. Legislatures can do a better job with that. They got involved only because there was an injustice that continued from one generation to another in representation for minorities, in most cases for the descendants of African slaves. In other words, what she is saying is that we have generally kept our hands off the judiciary. The judiciary kept its hands off the reapportionment process. There was a series of cases that established clearly that it was better to leave the State legislatures alone to do this, and the only regular systematic intervention of the courts came in the case of the Voting Rights Act. They upheld the Voting Rights Act as being constitutional originally and proceeded for a long time to accept it and support it. We reauthorized the Voting Rights Act for 25 years. I think it has about 15 more years to go because the Congress, after having tested it, reauthorized it 2 or 3 times for 2 years, 4 years, 5 years; finally decided to reauthorize it for 25 years. But to quote Justice Ginsburg again: Two years ago in Shaw versus Reno this court took up a claim analytically distinct from a vote dilution claim. Shaw authorized judicial intervention in extremely regular reapportionments. To continue quoting Justice Ginsburg: Today the court expands the judicial role, announcing that Federal courts are to undertake searching review of any district with contours predominantly motivated by race. Strict scrutiny will be triggered not only when traditional districting practices are abandoned, but also when those practices are subordinated to and given less weight than race. Applying this new race as predominant factor standard, the court invalidates Georgia's districting plan even though Georgia's eleventh district, the focus of today's dispute, bears the imprint of familiar districting practices. Because I do not endorse the court's new standard and will not upset Georgia's new plan, I dissent, says Justice Ginsburg on the occasion of the court case that set the precedent for what has been decided now in New York. Nydia Velazquez would not have been ordered to redraw lines in this case, if the court had not ruled on the Georgia case in this manner. To continue quoting justice Ginsburg: We say once again what has been said on many occasions. Reapportionment is primarily the duty and responsibility of the State through its legislature or other body rather than of a Federal court. Districting inevitably has sharp political impact, and political decisions must be made by those charged with the task. District lines are drawn to accommodate a myriad of factors geographic, economic, historical and political, and State legislatures as arenas of compromise, electoral accountability, are best positioned to mediate competing claims. Courts with a mandate merely to adjudicate are ill equipped for this task. The lines have been redrawn in New York City, have been ordered redrawn because the court which is ill-equipped with the task is interfering with the process, and they have never done that before. She points out geographic, economic, historical, political and number of factors go into drawing the lines of a district, a congressional district, State Senate district, assembly, all under the same process. It is a political process. Barney Frank offered the other day when I was looking for examples of strangely shaped districts, oddly shaped districts that have nothing to do with the Voting Rights Act, Barney Frank offered his district. It is one of the oddest shaped districts in the country. It is in Massachusetts. Had nothing to do with the Voting Rights Act. Historically there have been stranger creatures drawn as districts than anything that we have seen put forward in these voting rights act cases, but suddenly esthetics becomes important. The odd shape, if it had something to do with race maybe, requires strict scrutiny. I quote Justice Ginsburg again. Federal courts have ventured now into the political thicket of reapportionment when necessary to secure to members of racial minorities equal voting rights, rights denied many States including Georgia until not long ago. The 15th amendment which was ratified in 1870 declared that the right to vote shall not be denied by any State on account of race. That declaration for many generations was often honored in the breach. It was greeted by a near century of unremitting and ingenious defiance in several States including Georgia. The defiance in Georgia and several southern States was open, well known, poll tax, lynchings of people who tried to assert their right to vote. You wanted to vote at one point, you had to recite the constitution without stopping. In one State they require that you tell how many bubbles there are in a bar of soap. They came in with all kind of ridiculous questions for black voters who were seeking to vote. So that is legendary. We know about that. What you do not know is that in places like New York, New York City with a large black population, they have for years, for many decades, drew lines where they went to the black community and put the pin down in the middle of the community so that a large black community would be a part of four different districts. They would have no power in any one of those four districts because they are only a small part of all those districts. It was a pattern repeated over and over again in big cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, all across the country. So the politicians had the power to do that and they did it and they were allowed to do it. The 15th amendment, ratified in 1877, said the right to vote shall not be denied by any State on account of race. That declaration for many generations was offered under the breach. After a brief interlude of black suffrage enforced by Federal troops but accompanied by rampant attacks against blacks, Georgia held a constitutional convention in 1877. Its purpose, according to the convention's leader, to quote the convention leader of the Georgia Constitution in 1877, was to fix it so that the people shall rule and the Negro shall never be heard from. This is part of the history that Justice Ginsburg quoted in order to deal with the Georgia case. She continues, in pursuant of this objective, Georgia enacted a cumulative poll tax requiring voters to show their past as well as current poll taxes paid. One historian described this tax as the most effective bar to Negro suffrage ever devised. In 1890, the Georgia General Assembly authorized white-only primaries. Keeping blacks out of the Democratic primary effectively excluded them from Georgia's political life. The victory in the Democratic primary in those days was tantamount to election. Early in this century Georgia Governor Hoke Smith persuaded the legislature of Georgia to pass the Disenfranchisement Act of 1908. As late as 1908, they passed the Disenfranchisement Act of 1908. True to its title, this measure added various property, good character and leadership requirements that as administered served to keep blacks from voting. This result, as one commentator observed 25 years later, was an absolute exclusion of the Negro voice in State and Federal elections. I am citing all of this to let my colleagues know that this is the Georgia case that is the decisive case, the basis for striking down districts in Virginia and Texas, in Louisiana and Florida, and now in New York City. If my colleagues want to know the history, if my colleagues want to know the other side, this is the other side argued by Justice Ginsburg. She did not agree with Justice O'Connor, she did not agree with Justice Clarence Thomas, and she wrote a brilliant statement that every person in New York who is concerned about justice ought to read. Disenfranchised blacks have no electoral influence; hence, no muscle to lobby the legislature for change, and that is when the court intervened. She is saying that the court intervened and the Voting Rights Act was created because the processes were being used to exclude and to oppress a particular group. It was a violation of the 15th amendment. Justice Ginsburg makes it quite clear that the equal protection clause does not rule out extraordinary measures being taken by the Federal Government to deal with past wrongs and to compensate for what happened in 232 years of slavery and the period of disenfranchisement that followed. She argues, Justice Ginsburg argues, with the basic principle that is established by Justice O'Connor in Shaw versus Reno, she argues against that principle; she does not accept that premise. But then Justice Ginsburg moved to another area and she showed that the 11th Congressional District that was being challenged in Georgia had better lines, less crooked lines, less strange lines; the shape was better, more rectangular than most of the other Georgia districts. So the district of the gentlewoman from New York [Ms. Velazquez] has been called the Bullwinkle district in New York. It is called the Bullwinkle district because it looks so strange; somebody says it looks like Bullwinkle. It is a big joke. But I assure my colleagues that throughout history there have been many Bullwinkles and Bullwinkle's relatives that never have been challenged. We also know that right now across the Nation, of the 435 districts drawn, some of the strangest safe districts have nothing to do with the Voting Rights Act, they have nothing to do with race. So I come back to my original concern. People of New York, people of my district understand this Voting Rights Act is in jeopardy; the fact that a colleague of mine has been ordered to redraw her district. The question has been asked many times, how will this affect you? It will affect me immediately because I have some boundaries with the gentlewoman from New York [Ms. Velazquez]. I am on the boundary of people who do have boundaries with her. So they may, in the process of redrawing the district, impact upon my district as it is now. There are several plans that have been proposed, very modest plans. Some involve adjustments where they move the lines around a bit and a few districts will be impacted and that is it. That is one scenario. The problem could be resolved with the simple scenario of adjusting lines in a few districts. Another scenario is that since the State legislature has ordered the redrawing of all of the lines; not all of the lines, but redrawing of the lines for her district, the State legislature can choose, if they wish, to redraw all of the lines in the whole State. They have that option. They can choose to draw lines as far away as several thousand miles, in Buffalo, on the border of Canada if they wish. They have that option. Being told by the courts to redraw lines mean they have an option. Some people in the State legislature, powerful people, the Governor is powerful, the majority leader in the senate, they are powerful Republicans, they may try to get revenge on the Democrats who won in districts that were primarily Republican, who had a large percentage of Republicans, and they may try to draw boundaries in ways which impact on those districts. Some Democrats may choose to want to make some adjustments and get even with some of their enemies by redrawing some lines somewhere. Mr. Speaker, the scenario that does not make sense is also possible. It does not make sense to do that. The wild scenario of drawing lines throughout the State is one possibility. The scenario of common sense is to just make adjustments downstate in the area of New York City. Now, I say all of this because it is important if people have questions, they want to know is my district in jeopardy? Why am I concerned about this? I am not concerned primarily because it impacts on my district at all. I am concerned about the future of the Voting Rights Act. I am concerned about the principle of effective Government policies to focus on problems that exist as a result of past Government behavior, past wrongs that were done, past official policies. When the Constitution was written and they made slaves, they did not even refer to slaves. They said other individuals would be counted as three-fifths, other Indians would be counted as three-fifths of a man. We enshrined in the Constitution a grave error, and the policy decision, the wrong policy decision was perpetrated from then on. We failed to include in the Declaration of Independence the long section that Jefferson wrote condemning slavery. It was taken out as a compromise. So we failed again in our public policy to deal with the problem. Later on, Jefferson attempted to pass a bill which banned slavery in all of the States that would be added to the Union and it lost by 1 vote in Congress. It lost by 1 vote. We failed in public policy again. It went on and on until you have the blood bath of the Civil War. So we have a responsibility to correct the results, the by-product of past Government failures. What the Swiss are doing finally, in their offering of a fund for $5 billion is saying that we accept some of that responsibility in the case of what happened with the Jews in the Second World War. The Swiss are setting a great example. I was speaking to some bankers this morning at a breakfast and I said, look, you bankers who worry so much about the Community Reinvestment Act and the small amount of money you put into big cities and minority neighborhoods, you worry about every penny and you nickel and dime us to death. Why do you not look at the example now being set by the Swiss? Why not have the American millionaires and the tremendous amounts of accumulation of American wealth in America respond to some human needs in America in the same way the Swiss now begin to respond? It took the Swiss 50 years. Switzerland is a beautiful little country; I have been there twice. It is amazing how clean it is, how orderly it is; law and order is fantastic in Switzerland. Switzerland has a very educated population. In Switzerland the people dress nicely, they look nice and they act nicely, but that does not govern morality. There is no correlation between sanitation and cleanliness and morality. They behaved abominably. They behaved like the worst of humanity by operating in cahoots with the Germans to take the wealth of all of these helpless people. They denied entry into Switzerland to people who were running from the terror of the Holocaust. They did terrible things. Some people have said, well, they have $5 billion they are now willing to put up. That is not enough. They want justice. Let us calculate how much they have earned and all the money they stole and make them pay up. I do not think we should ask for justice, it has taken so long to this point. Reconciliation is greater than justice, reconciliation is more important than justice. Justice we may never have. Steps have been taken toward reconciliation; let us accept those steps. I think I have said before that sometimes it seems that civilization is not going forward. Terrible things have happened in a nation like Germany, with large numbers of educated people, leaders, the history of producing the greatest musicians in the world, the greatest scientists, the greatest mathematicians. A nation like Germany created also some of the greatest crimes against humanity on a scale that no other set of terrorists have ever been able to accomplish in the world.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor an individual who devoted his life to public service and community charity. Charles Inniss' life of 61 years has left an indelible impression on all with whom he came in contact. Although he has passed, his life will remain a testament that human compassion is one of the virtues that matters most in life. Charles Inniss was a model human being and a great ``point of light'' whose contributions must not go unacknowledged. He was a business administrator, a creative technician, and an artist all combined. He could walk with kings and never lose the common touch. Throughout his professional life at Brooklyn Union Gas. Mr. Inniss was viewed as dedicated, committed, and caring. He joined Brooklyn Union in 1979 as assistant manager in public relations and communications and retired in 1995 as vice president of the urban affairs division. Before joining Brooklyn Union, he served as assistant district service manager at Dun & Bradstreet, executive director of Studio Museum in Harlem, director of area development for the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corp., administrator of Brooklyn Model Cities, and director of public information and development at the Brooklyn Public Library. It has been Mr. Inniss' humanitarian deeds that have earned him the greatest respect and admiration of those lives he has touched. He devoted his life to public service by serving on more than 25 charitable organizations. He served actively in the following organizations: the Brooklyn Arts Council, the board for the Brooklyn Children's Museum, the board for the Marcus Garvey Nursing Home, the American Association of Blacks in Energy, the Staten Island Zoological Society, the board for Catholic International, the Mayor's New York City Advisory Cultural Commission, and the Black Officers Association. Throughout the years, Charles Inniss worked diligently in positions that he found to be beneficial to the community. He was cofounder of Career Opportunities for Brooklyn Youth, director and past chairman of the Studio Museum in Harlem, chairman of Neighborhood Artists, and past chair of the American Gas Foundation. In 1992, he was appointed by the Governor to the City University of New York board of trustees and served as chair of the university's construction fund. Mr. Inniss has been recognized for his contributions to a broad spectrum of cultural, educational, and social services agencies, institutions and organizations. The Franciscan Sisters for the Poor named their new residence for homeless men the Charles E. Inniss St. Joseph Franciscan House in honor of his dedicated service to the organization. In addition, Mr. Inniss received an honorary doctorate of laws from St. Joseph's College, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Forsythia Award, the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor Heritage Award, and the President's Medal for Kingsborough Community College. Probably the most outstanding feature of Charles Inniss' character and style was his refusal to be shackled by formality and bureaucracy. He supported programs in need when his own eyes and ears told him they were positive and productive. A lack of paper work and the appropriate statistics never prevented funding activities deemed useful to the community. Mr. Inniss made Brooklyn Union one of the earliest sponsors of the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission which is now in its 12th year of service to the community. Mr. Inniss was born in Harlem, NY and spent the formative years of his childhood in the east Bronx. He is a graduate of Evander Childs High School and served as captain of the 369th Artillery Battalion. He received a bachelor of science degree and master of public administration degree from New York University. Charles Inniss is survived by his wife, Marge; a brother, Wilbur; two sisters, Norma and Frances; a sister-in-law, Madelaine; one niece, Wendy Woodland; one nephew, David; two grand-nephews, Christopher and Bryan; and a host of beloved and other family members. Service to community is an unselfish and difficult calling. Consistently, Charles Inniss has made it appear to be effortless by playing a pivotal role in virtually every aspect of the lives of the people of New York. I sincerely appreciate the richness and dedication that marked Mr. Inniss' life. Charles E. Inniss is a great ``point of light'' for all of the people of America to revere.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we are again quite pleased to observe that the bipartisan consensus on education is rolling forward. I heard this morning a colleague speak of a new initiative to get Congressmen to go into the classrooms. We have had such initiatives in New York, where they want you to be a principal or teacher for a day, for some time. These kinds of initiatives are minuscule in terms of the overall problem of improving education, but they are important. It is important to have as much contact as possible. I understand over the weekend there was a special conference held in Chicago on education as it impacts upon the black community. Nowhere is it more important than in the black community that we take a close look at what is happening with education. The crisis in education is very much the number one crisis in the African-American community. Anybody who takes any look at what is happening there, any proposals that are put forward, any new initiatives related to the mobilization of the institutions within the African-American community to deal with education, is doing a great service. It ought to be a priority for all of our churches, it ought to be a priority for all of our civil rights institutions, our fraternities, our local community-based organizations. Nothing is more important in the African-American community than education. Nothing is more important in America as a whole right now than education, but there is a particular crisis in the African- American community, because the great majority of African-American children live in the inner city communities of America. The inner city communities have had a situation where the education effort has been devastated over and over again. I speak of the education effort in New York City, I speak of the education effort in Chicago and Philadelphia, in Los Angeles. All over, where you have the greatest concentration of African-Americans and minorities, you are going to have a major crisis, and it is related to power and politics. The people who have the power, the people who make the decisions about education funding, have moved out of the cities. They live in the suburbs. They live outside of cities. They run the State government and they run the municipal government. Even when they live outside of municipal areas or city areas, they control the institutions. They are the heads of the organizations. They have the political action funding. They are in charge of cities. Cities are not ruled by the people who live there, they are ruled by people that have power, and the people who have power have residency in the suburbs, but they have the power base still, they control the power base in the city. Of course, State governments are primarily responsible for the funding of education. State governments have the primary responsibility for education. City governments only exist at the pleasure of State governments. The role of city governments, municipal governments, in education is a role that is worked out with the State. The State has the last word. State governments are primarily controlled by people who are concerned about suburban and other than urban communities. Right across the country we have had for years a situation where State governments have systematically swindled city governments out of education money. Education funding has been based on a formula that has been repeated from one place to another. In the city of Chicago, in the city of New York, in the city of Philadelphia they are confronted by a situation where the State government rules that money for education shall be distributed on the basis of attendance. A simple formula like that swindles the city, because large numbers of youngsters in the inner city communities come from poor homes, and people in poverty, wherever they are, regardless of what group they are in, go to school less. They are likely to be absent for one reason or another: The kid did not have a decent pair of shoes, the mother was sick and he had to stay home to take care of the mother, the little brother was sick and the mother wanted him to stay home because she had to go somewhere; all kinds of problems happen in families that are under pressure. There is a correlation between attendance at school and poverty, a direct correlation. The States know this but they take advantage of it by insisting that the formula for the distribution of dollars is based on attendance, not enrollment. If you changed that little formula, and the distribution of money to the school systems in the States was based on enrollment instead of attendance, you would automatically get an increase in the replacement of funds available from State governments to city governments. But that is a swindle well known. That is why it has been a pattern right across the country. They all do it. So the power lies somewhere else. Unfortunately, and it is a bit of a barbaric observation, the concern with children goes with the power. They are not as concerned with the children who are not theirs. The people making the decisions are not as concerned, and you have a distribution of resources that follows this pattern. The schools in the surrounding suburbs in New York City are schools of tomorrow. You can find some of the best schools in the country in the suburbs of New York City. But just across the border in the city limits you will find the worst schools in the Nation in New York City. Probably the pattern is repeated in California, too. I have two examples I would like to discuss briefly here this morning, or this afternoon. I want to do this because, despite the fact that we have a great deal of agreement that education should be a high priority, despite the fact that I am optimistic about both Republicans and Democrats going forward in this session of Congress to grapple with problems related to education as we have never done before, Federal aid is not the answer, of course, but Federal aid is an important part of the problem. Federal involvement, Federal advice, Federal influence, is very important. Federal influence will never dominate the process. We do not have to worry about that. Education in America is local. Right now the Federal Government's total expenditure on education is about 8 percent of the total, 8 percent. A large part of that 8 percent of the expenditure by the Federal Government goes to higher education, higher education. So local education gets a very small percentage of its funds from the Federal Government. Education is primarily a State and local function. There is no danger that the Federal Government is ever going to take over education. There is a need that they participate more. Let us move from the 8 percent funding to at least 25 percent. If we had 25 percent funding, giving help to States and cities that are distressed and stretched out, they cannot find anymore sources for education funding, if we had that kind of funding it would not result in more Federal control. Or if you measure control by dollars, OK, maybe we would have 25 percent of control if we give them 25 percent of the funding, but they still have 75 percent of the control. State government would still have 75 percent of the control. So this bogeyman that States and local governments are in some way threatened by the Federal Government in this bipartisan session of Congress, a Congress with a bipartisan spirit, let us get rid of that bogeyman and understand that the local school systems for the State control of education will not in any way be harmed by more Federal dollars or more Federal participation, more Federal advice, more Federal research, shared by the Federal Government with the States and with the local governments. It is not a problem. We must understand that as we go forward in our bipartisan effort, that we need to stick to substance and not be content with photo opportunities and headlines. I started by saying that initiatives in Chicago on the African- American heritage this weekend, initiatives proposed by my colleague on the floor that Congressmen go to classrooms and any other initiative that you might take--and each fall, in October or November, I belong to an organization called the National Commission for African-American Education, and we sponsor an education funding support day. It is a major initiative to get laymen involved, to get public officials involved, so we cannot have too much of that. We cannot have too much involvement. However, if we allow the involvement on a surface level, the photo opportunities, the headlines, the teacher for a day, the principal for a day, to go forward without any substance underneath it, then we are doing a great disservice. We are corrupting a process. It is important that we have finally gotten the attention of the elected officials, from the President on down. Hurrah. The President is proposing an increase in education which is about a 20-percent increase. That is getting close to the Congressional Black Caucus budget, which last year proposed a 25 percent increase, so hurrah. We are going in the right direction. But let us not just propose it and then not fight for it in the budget. Let us deliver on those funds. Let us not let the public think they are going to get a 20-percent increase and it never happens. It is just announced and it is headlines, but it is not delivered. We want to deliver. Let us not get involved with photo opportunities and headlines and forget that there are concrete problems that are still unresolved. The two examples that I want to give, in California and New York we have a problem where headlines are predominating over substance. In New York we had a situation where the State did its assessment of all the schools in the State and they announced that New York City schools have declined drastically in the last 10 years. Whereas the problem in New York City used to be its low-income neighborhoods, New York City is a city of 8 million people, there are 60,000 teachers, there are a million children in schools. So you are talking about a lot of different situations when you talk about education in New York. The problem has always been the portion of the youngsters attending school in low income communities. It has always been related to poverty, where the scores of the youngsters in the poverty, the schools that have the greatest amount of poverty, were the lowest scores. And they were struggling to get up to the average. We have always had high performing schools in the other parts of the city. Some of the highest performing schools in the State have been in New York City. Some of the best performing schools, high schools in the country have been in New York City in terms of the Westinghouse science projects, anything related to national competition. We have schools traditionally in New York that have excelled across the Nation and beat out their competitors across the entire Nation. What they found in the last evaluation is that the quality of all of the schools in New York City have dropped. It is not poverty related anymore. The decline in the performance is not poverty related. All of the schools in New York City were beginning to perform at a rate, at a level below the schools in the suburbs and the rest of the State. Let me repeat that. All of the schools, the high performing schools in the higher income areas were also lower than their counterparts in the rest of the State. Now, what happened? While you have lip service being given to the effort to improve education, in New York you had a dastardly plot to drain funds out of education and put them somewhere else. It was not such a secretive plot because the elements were clear as to what was going on all the time. We had a chancellor named Cortinez who proposed a number of reforms and had the schools moving in the positive direction. But one of the reforms he proposed was not necessarily reform. It was a basic foundation item. He proposed that we have a building plan which would renovate the schools that are unsafe, and it could be renovated and build new schools because the statistics showed that there would be a population jump in the school system in the next 5, 6 years. He laid it all out in a multi-billion-dollar plan, the multi-billion- dollar plan went all the way from putting gas heat in coal-burning schools. We have some schools in New York that burn coal. In spite of all the environmental regulations, all the knowledge we have about what it does to the lungs of people especially children, we still have coal- burning schools. Let us not talk about industry polluting the air. We still have schools that pollute the air right near where the children are attending school. Is it any wonder that we also have one of the highest asthma rates in the Nation? Children with asthma problems are higher in New York City than anywhere else in the Nation. There is a correlation. But Cortinez proposed a building plan that would get rid of the safety hazards like coal-burning furnaces. It would get rid of the last asbestos problem. We still have problems with asbestos. Three years ago we had a photo opportunity, headline-grabbing effort to get rid of all asbestos. The schools opened 2 weeks late. They opened 2 weeks late because of asbestos contamination problems. All the schools were just about closed down because so many had problems. They just closed the whole system down, and it opened 2 weeks late. They declared that the asbestos problem was resolved, but the asbestos problem is still there because the Governor announced September 21, 1996, just this past fall, that there would be a NetDay. Many of you heard the NetDay across the country. NetDay is a day the Clinton administration developed, the whole approach to volunteers, wiring schools for telecommunications so that there is a NetDay operation which is nationally operating. They get the equipment, the wires and the gadgets, and they buy them in bulk. And you can get for $500 enough of what you need in terms of equipment and supplies to wire a school. The definition of wiring a school is you have to wire five classrooms and the library of the school. Then we consider the school wired according to the NetDay definition. This all started in California. They did a massive job in California. On a Saturday volunteers go out, and they wire the schools using this $500 worth of equipment and supplies. And we had NetDay in New York because many Governors across the country picked up on what had been done in California, and they all wanted the headlines and the photo opportunities. And some of course seriously pursued the objective of wiring the schools. It was a photo opportunity, headline-grabbing situation in New York because the Governor, even before the day began, announced that 3000 schools in New York State had been wired. I have not been able to get a count of what the number of schools were wired outside of New York City. I have not been able to get a count to find out how many were wired in the rural parts of New York State or in the suburbs. I cannot dispute part of that 3000, but New York City has 1000 schools, 1000 of the schools in New York State are in New York City. In my district, I have 75 elementary schools and 10 high schools. Only one of those schools was wired. Two were scheduled and one was supposedly wired. The one that was not wired was not wired because it has asbestos problems. The asbestos problem raises its head when you start drilling holes. Simple holes to put the wires through will result in asbestos contamination if the asbestos is still there in the walls and the insulation, whatever. I later learned that many of the schools in New York City that had been scheduled to be wired on NetDay were stricken from the list because they have an asbestos problem. We still have the need for the plan that Mr. Cortinez developed which would get rid of the asbestos contamination, the coal-burning furnaces. There is a lead problem in some of the old school pipes. We are subjecting children to unsafe conditions. But what happened to Mr. Cortinez and his multi-billion-dollar plan over a 5- to 7-year period? He conflicted with the mayor, and he was driven out of town. I mean, he resigned but he was constantly put under pressure by the mayor, ridiculed by the mayor. Finally he gave up. He left town. The following fall, after Mr. Cortinez was driven out of town, we had a situation where, on the opening of school, 91,000 children did not have a safe place to sit; 91,000, it said, were not properly taken care of. That was the situation. The mayor, pursuing his policy of headlines and photo opportunities, immediately seized upon the need to have parochial schools and private schools come to the aid of the city. And he is still doing that. There is still a running discussion of the fact that the mayor is going to find places for 1,000 youngsters in parochial schools. A foundation has been set up to provide tuition for 1,000 youngsters at parochial schools. The obvious question that any sophomore or even a kindergarten kid would ask is, if you are taking care of 1,000, what is happening to the other 90,000? What is happening to the other 90,000? What has happened to the other 90,000? In the schools which have been evaluated by the State board to be going down, declining, what has happened to the safe place for 90,000 children? Well, when you go to inquire now as to what is happening with 90,000, you get an answer like this: That was just a statistical formation. That was a statistical metaphor. We did not really have seats for 91,000 youngsters. We merely looked at the capacity of our schools, and we compared that with the total enrollment. When you look at the capacity of the schools in bulk and you compare that with the total enrollment, you find that you do not have a place for 91,000. That was just a statistical analysis. Well, my question then is, What is wrong with that statistical analysis? It is pretty sound. If your overall system has a capacity and you have an enrollment, you compare your enrollment with your capacity, and you conclude that you are over capacity by 91,000. That is pretty sound reasoning. You do not have to go into calculus or differential equations to figure that one out. It is pretty simple. What you were saying was true. No, they said no, school by school that is not the situation. If you go school by school, you will not find that you can count up 90,000 that do not have seats. All right, we said. Let us go look at the empirical evidence. Let us go team by team to visit some schools. I belong to an organization. I founded an organization which serves as my education advisory committee called the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission. Members of the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission went out to look at some schools to talk to some principals. One principal said, no, you have heard that my school has twice as many youngsters as it was built for. The school has about 1,500 youngsters. It was really built for 800. He is right. It has twice as many. He said, no, it has that, but we have places for all but 250. We only have a problem with 250 kids. The same schools I visited before, and I found out that the young people, the students go to lunch. They have three lunch periods. Students are forced to go to lunch at 10:30, that is the first lunch period. And then they are still in the lunch room until 2:00. The last students are in the lunch room at 2:00. So you have three lunch periods. If you are not over capacity, Mr. Principal, I said, why do you have three lunch periods? Obviously something is wrong here. Why do you make children eat lunch at 10:30? I think that is child abuse, and I intend to pursue that; but it is kind of hard to pursue because many schools in New York City have regimens which make youngsters eat lunch at 10:30. They just had breakfast. I am not a health specialist, a nutritionist specialist, but surely there is something wrong with pouring everything into your system on top of each other and then there is going to be this big gap between lunch and dinner at home. How many children of Congressmen go to schools where they are forced to eat lunch at 10:30 in the morning? Why is it that this condition will be accepted by a principal as normal and he is saying, we do not have a problem, we do not have an overcapacity problem except for 250 youngsters. That is a large number. If you are from the outside, you know that many schools do not have 500 or 600 youngsters in elementary schools. So a problem with 250 is still a large problem. That is the admitted problem. But if you have lunch periods which started at 10:30, you know there is another problem there. The United Federation of Teachers brought a suit against the board of education in the city on overcrowding in individual classrooms. They had thousands of grievances where individual classrooms were overcrowded, and they also have situations where young people, children are being educated in closets, supply closets in hallways, in the cafeteria and the auditorium. They do not have places to study which are conducive to study, and in many cases they do not have places to study, to learn, which are safe. There is one thing, safety is what every child should be guaranteed. Safety is what the New York City Department of Health, the fire department, they should be concerned about the way we have conditions in schools which would never be tolerated anywhere else. This is part of the collapse, just a physical provision of safe space and space conducive to learning. That is first. Second, is that in the mayor's drive to cut the budget of the Department of Education, at least 10,000 teachers and administrators were seduced into taking early retirement. We provided incentives for the most experienced people to take early retirement. That saves money, and of course corporations downsize, but I doubt if any corporation in the process of downsizing commits suicide. They do not leave it wide open and tell everybody, here is the package, very attractive package that you can retire and get this bonus if you just get out of the system. We want you out of the system because you are making the highest salaries. They wanted the teachers that have been in the longest, who have, on the stairstep of increments, begun to make the highest amount of money. Corporations do not behave that way in private industry. The last people to be downsized are the people who make the most money because corporations attach value to people who make the most money. The CEO, the CEO in every corporation has the greatest value attached to him. Then his subordinates have great value attached to them. The CEO, we know in America, we have the highest paid CEO's. In Germany, Japan, the chief executive officers make something like one-tenth of the amount paid to the average chief executive officer in America. We pay millions of dollars to CEO's. We give them stock options and insurance and all kinds of benefits. So they are the last people that get laid off. The officers of corporations are the last people laid off. I imagine key people in the finance department, middle management, they do not lay off people at random in corporations. If a downsizing takes place, I assure you it has been carefully done to minimize the harm done to the corporation's ability to function. But in New York City, when we offer downsizing to the teachers and the board of education, it was maximizing the benefits for the people who had the most experience, the most know-how, the greatest skills in teaching, and in many cases the most dedication. So what did we do? We pulled them out of the system. Is it any wonder that we would have a situation where the State evaluation now shows that our schools have declined; that even the best schools are not up to par? They are worse than their counterparts in the rest of the State. Can you pull out the best teachers, your principals and assistant principals, all the best, can you pull them out and expect not to have a collapse in the system? So what we have is a collapse. The efforts to improve the system in New York City has collapsed because the political apparatus, the power brokers, starting with the mayor, have decided the most important thing is to save money. If you have as your main objective to save money then are you surprised when the collapse takes place? When the evaluators come in and say the schools are declining, all of them, middle income neighborhoods as well as low income neighborhoods, can you not see what everybody else knew; that your best teachers were in your better income neighborhoods? Because teachers have seniority. After they get through their 3-year periods and have tenure, they always want to transfer to the best neighborhoods, with the least problems with the children and the greatest benefits in terms of parking, in terms of less worry about crime. So the best teachers were transferred into the highest income neighborhoods. Is it any wonder that they would suffer great losses if you pull out the best teachers, the best principals, the best assistant principals? They are going to come out of the best schools in terms of performance. But the headline grabbing, photo opportunity politicians, the mayor of the city, have accepted this collapse of the system by continuing to emphasize the fact that he is going to find places for 1,000 youngsters in parochial schools. And the newspapers, who love him, continue to write up the stories about how they are getting it together, the foundations have the money now and the children will get money and they will start going to parochial schools in the fall. The big question now is how do you select the children? They are talking random lotteries and all kinds of things because they have many more applicants for the 1,000 places than they have places. The question is still what about the other 90,000 young people? What about the other 90,000 students? The New York City school system has collapsed and we have to put it back together again and we need the President's initiatives, we need all the help we can get from every level. Across the country, in California, a similar situation has happened also, and big city schools in California, of course, are the ones who suffer the most. Always the inner city schools where you have the least amount of power will get the most disadvantage out of policies and legislation developed by people in power who do not live in those cities and do not care about all the children in the State. They make a great mistake. We have to care about all the children in the State. We have to care about all the children in the Nation. We are making a great mistake by continuing to pursue policies geared to those who do come out and vote, those who do have involvement in the political system. That is very good for those who needed rewards. Some of the President's policies in terms of higher education funding will go to middle class families that do need help and should get help, but the greatest need is in the lower class families who need an opportunity to get into college. Middle class families will get there. They will get help in paying tuition and costs, and they should have that, but at the same time we need to boost the amount of opportunity available for low-income people because the whole Nation needs as much education as possible. The Nation has to understand the value-added theory of education. Everybody who gets an education has value added to them and they add value to the function of our Nation. It is not the airline pilot you have to worry about when you get on a plane. The airline pilot gets the best training in the world. They pay more to train airline pilots than they do any other sector of the work force. Airline pilots get good training, but we need to worry about the mechanic who tightened the bolts and the nuts and the guy who put the fuel in and a whole lot of other people who needed to have training and education so that they will have value added to them and do their jobs very well. In our complex society all those pieces have to be in place. Unfortunately, we have some news recently about the people who design airplanes and we have a major design flaw in the 737's. It is quietly kept, but it is out there. The 737's have a design flaw in the rudder system. We probably would have avoided that if we had more engineers, more geniuses, even at that level of people who design these complex aircraft who do the work. If there were more of them, maybe we would have fewer mistakes in these complex aircraft. We should stake our future as a civilization on the people who are educated. The number of people who are educated will drive our civilization. A nation that will be predominant will be the nation that decides it wants to educate all of its citizens to the maximum and also finds ways to do that, to implement it. We just had a discovery in Australia, I think it is, Australia or New Zealand, anyway a discovery which for years has been debated and discussed and many scientists concluded was impossible: Cloning, where you can clone, take a part of a living being, a living thing, and you can clone from that part, from that part you can clone an individual, a thing which is the same as the thing you cloned it from. That was science fiction stuff 50 years ago, 25 years ago, even 10 years ago when the discussion was a little more advanced and people who had the right kind of degrees and credentials were willing to discuss it. But now it is a reality. They have cloned a sheep. A sheep has been cloned in Australia or New Zealand, wherever, by a scientist, and the sheep is exactly the same as the pieces of the sheep from which the pieces of living matter were taken. What are the implications of that? We know it is a reality. It is like the discovery of electricity took place a long time before we ever had the light bulb. It was discovered you had these magnetic forces that could generate electricity. It took thousands of years to work it all out to the point where you could get a light bulb and you could transmit energy, electrical energy, over long distances. All that took a long time because at that time the information was not being passed around rapidly about electricity and you did not have a place, an organized educated society, that could pick up on a discovery like that and go in terms of the application of it. Nowadays we have the possibility of taking a discovery and picking up on it and working through all of the possible positive applications, and some negative applications, too. Nuclear energy and Einstein's formula, all that was very theoretical until it was decided it had a function in war, it could be used in war, and we raced to beat the Germans to the point where we could implement the theories of Einstein through the explosion of a bomb. Because we were worried about them and because we wanted to maximize our weaponry, we put the people to work to do it. Oppenheimer and all the best scientists in the country were supported by technicians who were supported by people under them who had education. All kinds of educated people were brought together to make the atom bomb happen rapidly. And that is the way the world should go from now on. Whenever we want to make something happen, hopefully positive, then the people ought to be there and available to do it. But we need educated people to do it. We do not know exactly when or where we will need them, but assume that everybody ought to be educated who can be educated. Our maximum resource on the face of the Earth are human beings. Before we start exploring space, before we put colonists in space, which is almost inevitable, too, let us get the maximum resources moving on Earth. We have a job to do on Earth before we get to outer space. The cloning of a sheep means that we can clone maybe parts of the body. We can take a piece of somebody's heart and clone it so that we can replace a defective heart with a heart that will not be rejected by the rest of the body because it came from the same body. The cloning of the sheep means that maybe we can clone an arm of a person that loses an arm and you can clone the part and put it back on them. All kinds of possibilities are opened up in terms of the reality that cloning is possible. They did not just clone a bacteria, they did not just clone a mouse, they cloned a mammal. They cloned a sheep. The step from a sheep to a human is inevitable. Do not let anybody say God will never permit that. We do not know what God has designed. God likes to play with us and likes to see what we can do. I think he enjoys watching us fulfill our potential. If we are made in his image, then he knows so much more he does not have to worry about our knowing more than he does, but he must rejoice in our discovery of all there is to be discovered. I am sure God is not unhappy if we learn how to clone human beings. He will not be unhappy. He is unhappy because we are so far behind in our social sciences, in our relationships with each other and our ability to make laws and our ability to be merciful and compassionate toward each other. I am sure God must spend a lot of days weeping when he looks down on us, especially Americans. In America we have a nation which for the first time has full stomachs basically. We have a little piece of heaven on this continent. America is as close to heaven as you will ever get on Earth. We have all kinds of luxuries, all kinds of benefits. Even poor people live better than most of the people in the rest of the world. But we still have this insistence that we are going to hate each other, we will put barriers in people's places, we will oppress welfare mothers while we let the people in the CIA continue to earn high salaries while they steal secrets from us. We cut the budget of welfare when the CIA has a budget of $28 billion or more, and we knew nothing about that. We add $13 million to the President's military budget while we try to cut the budget for school lunches. Our social sciences, our welfare is way behind our physical science and our understanding of the universe. So God must spend a lot of time weeping when he beholds the way we behave. God will not be afraid of cloning, but if we are going to go forward and take advantage of cloning or any other scientific advances, and genetics is already into a situation where it is only a matter of time and work. My daughter is a geneticist. She is in the field of genetics and works for a firm, and the process they are going through is almost routine. They know the outcome that they are going to discover more and more. They will have an opportunity to apply the benefits of genetic engineering to more and more situations. It is just inevitable. It is going forward by leaps and bounds. It is possible for some people to begin to live almost forever. It is possible that they will reach that point in my lifetime where we will have the facilities, the tools available to almost guarantee some people can live together or live far beyond the kinds of time span expected. They can stop the aging of our organs. All that is possible. All that is possible, but it will not happen unless we have a vast array of educated people involved. In addition to the scientists and the technicians who are involved directly in that, we need a vast array of people who are lawyers, lawmakers, who can keep our society from exploding in upon itself. Look at the Soviet Union and how they were way ahead in science. There was no problem in science in the Soviet Union, science, engineering, astronomy. They put a person in space long before we did. They were way ahead in many ways, but the system, the political system, the stupidity of a control and command system, where they thought a group of people who had all power could run the society, was stupid. It was monumental stupidity, and the monumental stupidity came crashing down on them so that all their science systems have been rendered a bit ridiculous. The head of the nuclear energy program in Russia recently committed suicide. A couple months ago he got a gun and shot himself because the system has collapsed and the people in his institute were not paid for 3 months, and when the money came for their pay it was only a month's pay. It was the last straw. He took a gun and shot himself. But that is symbolic of where Russia is. Not Russia, but the former Soviet Union, where science and scientists, highly educated people are in that society. Because the social science infrastructure, the political science infrastructure, economic infrastructure was based on stupid assumptions and they failed. So we need educated people right across the board. I have talked a little bit about New York's collapse, how our system collapsed in New York. Let me just mention California. I am reading from a publication called Editorial Notebook. It is opinion on the editorial page by Brent Staples of the New York Times. Staples on Monday, February 10 wrote this article which I submit in its entirety for the Record, Mr. Speaker. [From the New York Times, Feb. 10, 1997] How California Betrayed Its Schools--Starved Them of Cash, Then Fed Them Fads (By Brent Staples) Through most of this century, California served as a symbol of boundless promise and possibility. At the close of the 1960's, a breathless Time magazine described it as ``El Dorado'' and a ``mirror of America as it will become.'' The promise turned dismal with the tax revolt of the 70's. It fractured the civic structure and savaged support for California's universities, libraries, children's programs and, most tragically, its public schools. Teeming with new Immigrants, California's classrooms were suddenly among the most crowded and neediest in the country. States with similar problems increased spending, but California stood pat. It now ranks 43d nationally in education spending--well behind such states as Texas, New York and Pennsylvania--and spends about $30,000 less per classroom per year than the national average. Penury has taken a toll. In 1995, the United States Department of Education ranked California's fourth graders at the very bottom, tied with Louisiana's, in reading skills. Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature have pushed through laws aimed at easing overcrowding and strengthening both teacher training and reading instruction. Still, it could take 25 years or more to reverse the damage of the tax revolt--if it can be done at all. Governor Wilson's reading initiatives are for the most part excellent. But the class-size measure lacks money and was poorly thought out. In April of 1995, the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress painted a distressing portrait. Reading scores were stagnant in the lower grades and had declined for high school seniors nationwide. In California, about 60 percent of fourth graders fell below the minimum reading level, compared with 44 percent nationally. Typical were the fourth graders at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in Sacramento, some of whom could not decode even the instructions to a simple vocabulary test. The instructions read: ``Write a definition for each term.'' For these children, reading a book is out of the question. Many Californians sought to blame Mexican immigrants for the poor test scores. But Asians, Latinos, blacks and whites all scored near the bottom when compared with the same groups nationally. Even the children of college graduates--a group that generally scores well--placed near the bottom when compared with the same students in other states. Funding cuts set the stage for this tragedy, but educational fads played a role as well. In the 1980's, most California schools ceased to issue grades in primary school and gave up on standardized tests. These were replaced by touchy-feely performance descriptions that avoided the question of whether or not the children were learning. Most destructive of all was a reading curriculum that abandoned the phonics, spelling and vocabulary development that many children need, turning to fashionable but unproven methods like ``creative spelling.'' After a politically tinged feud known as ``the Reading Wars,'' the state revamped reading guidelines. Teachers are being retrained, and the colleges that educate them are being prodded toward change. The colleges are resisting and the state may eventually force the issue. The new training and reading strategies are long overdue. But California's plan for reducing class size is likely to backfire. The law encourages schools to shrink classes in the early grades, but makes no provisions for new classrooms. Classes are being held two to a room. Computer labs and libraries are being sacrificed. To create smaller classes in the lower grades, the schools must strip money from the upper grades, where victims of the past are struggling to catch up. The new initiative has increased the demand for teachers without increasing the teacher supply. Inner-city systems that have trouble attracting qualified teachers are likely to suffer more as applicants flock to jobs in affluent districts. Some even suspect Governor Wilson of wanting public schools to fail--to make way for a voucher system that would offer private school education at public expense. California offers a warning for states that would bleed public education for short-term gain. The schools are easy to destroy, but costly and devilishly difficult to rebuild. In addition, I will read some parts of it. It begins as follows: How California Betrayed Its Schools, Starved Them of Cash, Then Fed Them Fads. Through most of this century, California served as a symbol of boundless promise and possibility. At the close of the 1960's, a breathless Time magazine described it as ``El Dorado'' and a ``mirror of America as it will become.'' The promise turned dismal with the tax revolt of the seventies. It fractured the civic structure and savaged support for California's universities, libraries, children's programs, and, most tragically, its public schools. Let me just read one part of that: ``It fractured the civic structure.'' The tax revolt of the seventies fractured the civic structure. It did not affect the physics professors or the chemistry professors or the laws of nature, but the civic structure was fractured. They took a wrong turn. As a result they have wrecked the schools, the public schools of California. I resume quoting from the article: Teeming with new immigrants, California's classrooms were suddenly among the most crowded and neediest in the country. States with similar problems increased spending, but California stood pat. It now ranks 43rd nationally in education spending, well behind such states as Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania, and spends about $30,000 less per classroom per year than the national average. This is California, that was described in the 1960's as being in the leadership in America in areas related to education. Resuming the quote from the article: Penury has taken a toll. In 1995, the United States Department of Education ranked California's fourth graders at the very bottom, tied with Louisiana's, in reading skills. Governor Pete Wilson and the Legislature have pushed through laws aimed at easing overcrowding and strengthening both teacher training and reading instruction. Still, it could take 25 years or more to reverse the damage of the tax revolt, if it can be done at all. Governor Wilson's reading initiatives are for the most part excellent. But the class-size measure lacks money and was poorly thought out. In April 1995, the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress painted a distressing portrait. Readers scores were stagnant in the lower grades and had declined for high school seniors nationwide. In California, about 60 percent of fourth graders fell below the minimum reading level, compared with 44 percent nationally. Typical were the fourth graders at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in Sacramento, some of whom could not decode even the instructions to a simple vocabulary test. The instructions read: ``Write a definition for each term.'' For these children, reading a book is out of the question. Many Californians sought to blame Mexican immigrants for the poor test scores. But Asians, Latinos, blacks, and whites all scored near the bottom when compared with the same groups nationally. Resuming the quotes from the article: Even the children of college graduates, a group that generally scores well, placed near the bottom when compared with the same students in other States. If you are shortsighted, if you are mean-spirited, if you are powermongers who are determined to help only those that can keep you in power, here is the kind of society you create. You bring it down for everybody. No man is an island and this applies in particular to your children. Your children cannot exist in a society which is based on elitist assumptions that you can take care of a small part of the population of a certain age and not take care of the rest. Resuming the quotes from the article: Funding cuts set the stage for this tragedy, but educational fads played a role as well. Funding cuts set the stage for this tragedy, but educational fads played a role as well. In the 1980's, most California schools ceased to issue grades in primary school and gave up on standardized tests. These were replaced by touchy-feely performance descriptions that avoided the question of whether or not the children were learning. Most destructive of all was a reading curriculum that abandoned the phonics, spelling, and vocabulary development that many children need, turning to fashionable but unproven methods like creative spelling. After a politically tinged feud known as the Reading Wars, the State revamped reading guidelines. Teachers are being retrained, and the colleges that educate them are being prodded toward change. The colleges are resisting and the State may eventually force the issue. The new training and reading strategies are long overdue. But California's plan for reducing class size is likely to backfire. The law encourages schools to shrink classes in the early grades, but makes no provisions for new classrooms. Classes are being held two to a room. Computer labs and libraries are being sacrificed. To create smaller classes in the lower grades, the schools must strip money from the upper grades, where victims of the past are struggling to catch up. Let me repeat: ``To create smaller classes in the lower grades, the schools must strip money from the upper grades, where victims of the past are struggling to catch up.'' One of the findings in New York City when they did a review of the budget of schools, school by school, one of the findings was that the expenditure for high schools was lower than expenditures for elementary schools. We have had our attempts at photo opportunities and headlines by doing certain things at the lower grade levels. We have also had a situation where the decentralization of the school system in New York means that every community has a community school board. There are 32 community school boards. The community school boards have fought budget cuts with more zeal than the central board which controls all high schools. The central board which controls high schools has acquiesced to the mayor's demands for budget cuts so you have less expenditures for high school students per pupil than you have for elementary schools. Everywhere else in the country, in places where high school students are graduating at a high rate, with a better education, they spend more on high school students per pupil than they spend on elementary school students. California follows the same pattern. When you turn it loose, the politicians, the demagogues, the tax cut in California was not the product of the politicians. It was a product of lay demagogues. Laymen took over. People who were not politicians, had no experience, took advantage, and they whipped up mass hysteria and they cut the budget. So what you are doing is destroying institutions in the process. The public schools are not the only institution being destroyed, but the public schools probably are the most vital institution and they are being destroyed as a result of political decisions. Who were the voters who went out and voted for the proposition? Many different, confused reasons resulted in that vote but nobody has had the guts to turn it around. Everybody in New York City thinks it is a great idea that we are reducing taxes. They think the Board of Education should have less funding. But the result is that in every neighborhood, low income, high income, everywhere, there is a decline in the performance of the students. You cannot take away the best teachers, you cannot take away the best administrators, downsizing, saving money, you cannot refuse to build decent classrooms, safe classrooms, and it not have an impact on education. Finally, I want to read the last paragraph: ``The new initiative has increased the demand for teachers.'' This is called the Band-Aid approach, patching. The problem with President Clinton's plan is that we are glad we got his attention, we are glad the public opinion polls showing that education was a high priority got his attention and got the attention of the Republican leadership, it got the attention of the Democrat leadership. All the politicians are focused on education, but if you have this approach, where you are going to have a great reading program here, every kid is goings to learn to read by the third grade and over here you are going to give tax cuts, tax credits to people going to college, patching it up is better than nothing, but unless you have an all-out effort to improve the schools, the new initiatives are going to create problems in other places. There are people in the education area, there are people on the Education Committee here in this Congress who know what a comprehensive, broad approach is like and what is needed. If the headlines push them out, then you are going to have a lot of photo opportunities and headlines but no progress. Continuing the quotes from the article: The new initiative has increased the demand for teachers without increasing the teacher supply. Inner-city systems in California that have trouble attracting qualified teachers are likely to suffer more as applicants flock to jobs in affluent districts. Some even suspect Governor Wilson of wanting public schools to fail. I am quoting from the New York Times op-ed piece on Monday, February 10, 1997. Some even suspect Governor Wilson of wanting public schools to fail, to make way for a voucher system that would offer private school education at public expense. California offers a warning for States that would bleed public education for short-term gain. The schools are easy to destroy, but costly and devilishly difficult to rebuild. The schools are easy to destroy, but costly and devilishly difficult to rebuild. I am in favor of experimentation, with charter schools and a number of other initiatives. I think we should try a variety of approaches, but beware. If we go the route of headlines and photo opportunities, we will destroy schools that we cannot rebuild. We will destroy systems that we cannot rebuild, and the entire society is going to suffer, not just the people on the bottom. I want to end by paying tribute to Albert Shanker who died a few years ago at age 68. Mr. Shanker was the leader of the American Federation of Teachers. Before that he was the leader of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City. Mr. Shanker and I had some great disagreements in the early part of his career, and there were disagreements on methods, style, not the ultimate goal. Mr. Shanker was a dedicated educator who wanted the schools to educate all the children. Mr. Shanker was a dedicated educator who knew you cannot have teachers in an oppressive atmosphere where dictatorial administrators and managers disregard the priorities and imperatives of education. Mr. Shanker knew that school power, teacher power, meant getting the balance where you force the whole system, the policymakers and the administrators, to listen, to work out situations. Mr. Shanker got the first union contract in the country for teachers. There are many teachers who still do not like the idea of unions. They belong to an association which acts just like a union. The American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, they are pretty much similar right now in terms of they are the leading advocates for children. They are the leading advocates for education. Their interests are closest to the interests of children and parents. It is to their credit that they were singled out for criticism by the Republican candidate for President because he felt the power that they are beginning to exert and the influence. It will all balance out. Shanker made it possible. Albert Shanker made it possible for the teachers union to be recognized on a national level as a force. Most of us feel it is a force for good. It is a force for education and a force for children. The United Federation of Teachers in New York City, founded by Albert Shanker, brought a court case against the Board of Education and the city recently to force them to reduce class sizes and deal with overcrowding in schools. Some of the facts that they have discovered, some of the cases that they brought have been very enlightening as to how bad the situation is. But it is a union operating on behalf of the children for education. The United Federation of Teachers has nurtured power professionals, people out of the low-income areas who go into the classrooms as assistants without a college education and later on, after a long period of going to college part-time, become teachers. That is a program that has been nurtured by the United Federation of Teachers. There are numerous things that they are doing and have been doing that puts education in the city of New York in a better position. But they, like the rest of us, are now under great pressure from a Governor and a mayor that have indicated that they are not particularly concerned about doing all that has to be done to educate the children of New York City. At the national level, the American Federation of Teachers, certainly, that also was captained by Albert Shanker during his last years, has also been a very vital force. They have done all kinds of positive things pushing to get education reform that is meaningful. I think teachers and teachers' unions will be the first to tell you that there is a danger in having a great deal of attention focused on education if the people who are supplying that attention have a great deal of power and they are only concerned about headlines and photo opportunities. They can make a mess. Things can get worse. It is our hope that things will not get worse, that we will not have fads substituting for substance, as there will be a real attempt to move forward and grapple with the need to improve education in America all across-the-board: suburbs, rural areas, inner cities; but most of all, education improvement has to come to the aid of the desperate children of the inner cities of America and do it soon. It is a desperate situation. We need opportunities to learn. Across- the-board we need a commitment, we need the resources, we need politicians, decisionmakers, powerful people who care about children because only in caring about children will you improve America and guarantee that our society will live up to its full potential. There is an unlimited world out there, and we need educated people to go forward to realize that world of unlimited possibilities.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I lived in the South for 20 years. I was born in Memphis, TN. I know all about the kind of courage it took to stand up at that lunch counter. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Donald Payne, the distinguished former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.