Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor the Brooklyn Chinese-American Association [BCA] during their Ninth Anniversary Celebration. The members of this organization have tirelessly dedicated themselves to addressing the growing needs of the Asian immigrant population in Brooklyn and to providing residents of this community accessible bilingual and multicultural services. BCA is a great Point-of-Light whose contributions to the community must not go unappreciated or unnoticed. On January 19, 1988, BCA was formally established in response to the expanding Asian-American community in the Sunset Park, Borough Park, Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, and Sheepshead Bay neighborhoods in Brooklyn. At its inception, the association received no funding and nearly single-handedly, Mr. Paul P. Mak, the president and CEO of BCA, worked on a voluntary basis to initiate and provide a bilingual social service program for the Asian immigrant community. With 9 years of hard work, intense exploration and struggle, BCA has grown from a one-person service project to the borough's most comprehensive bilingual, multi-human service and community development organization. Currently, BCA delivers services at various centers in Brooklyn such as the Main Community Services Center; Senior, Youth and Cultural Center; Employment Training Center; Day Care Center; Avenue U District Community and Senior Center; and at numerous school sites. In the past few years, because of the lack of Government funding and personnel, BCA has undergone several crises and struggles to keep the organization afloat. It is the dedication, enthusiasm and painstaking efforts of BCA's staff, its board members and the community that have sustained BCA and enabled it to develop rapidly. Today, BCA serves over 500 clients a day. BCA's many human services and programs include social services; senior services; day care and youth services; adult education programs; adult and senior employment programs; services for the mentally retarded and developmentally disabled [MR/DD]; and community economic development programs. The past year has marked another turning point in BCA's expansion. BCA's work force has remained the same but the association has expanded, reaching a much wider community than ever before. In May 1996, BCA opened a new District Community and Senior Center delivering bilingual multi-human services to the increasing Asian immigrant population in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood, an area that is becoming the second largest Asian community of Brooklyn. BCA has also been actively involved in registering voters and in educating the community on voting policies and procedures. 1996 is also the year in which BCA initiated the Community Revitalization Project that serves as a master development scheme for the community. This summer, 10 traffic lights were installed as a result of BCA's constant lobbying efforts. In addition, BCA is working with the New York City Police Department to prepare and distribute educational materials on crime prevention, the CAT Auto Program and business residential security surveys. These are major steps toward making a better and much safer community in which to live. One of BCA's accomplishments this year is the educational Neighborhood Clean-Up Project. More than 150 youth participated in cleaning up the 8th Avenue neighborhood and providing informative materials to community residents and merchants. Recently, BCA also assisted in upgrading a garment factory in the neighborhood and has long supported promoting the economic progress and stability of the garment industry in Brooklyn. Moreover, a Tree Planting project was implemented to further beautify Brooklyn. Two hundred trees are scheduled to be planted along 8th Avenue in the spring of 1997. In a further attempt to improve the living environment, a Graffiti Removal Campaign will also be initiated in the spring 1997 with the community Boy Scouts. Two town hall meetings were sponsored in November, one at Sunset Park, Borough Park, and the Bay Ridge Chinatown area and the other at the Sheepshead Bay and Bensonhurst neighborhood, to provide an opportunity for the communities to voice their concerns. In recognition of its many contributions to the Brooklyn community, the Brooklyn Chinese-American Association received the 1996 Welcome Back to Brooklyn Award for Outstanding Civic Leadership and Economic Development in Brooklyn. This honor was presented to both BCA and the 1996 Nobel Prize winning scientist. In the past, this age old annual award has always been presented to distinguished individuals and celebrities; however this is the first time in history that an Asian organization received the prestigious honor. Furthermore, the Brooklyn Historical Society also honored BCA this year with the Brooklyn History Maker Award. As we approach the 21st century, this Nation is becoming more ethnically and racially diverse. Any endeavor that maximizes the participation of immigrants into society is worthy of commendation. The Brooklyn Chinese-American Association's efforts to address the needs of the Asian population of Brooklyn deem it a great Point-of-Light not only for the people of Brooklyn, NY, but for all of America.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, with the 1996 election behind us, this Nation has completed another cycle for the ongoing democratic process which makes America great. The electoral process and the public officials selected through this process are invaluable assets in our quest to promote the general welfare and to guarantee the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is important, however, Mr. Speaker, that we also give due recognition to the equally valuable contribution of nonelected leaders throughout our Nation. The fabric of our society is generally enhanced and enriched by the hard work done year after year by ordinary volunteer citizens. Especially in our inner city communities which suffer from long public policy neglect, local grassroots leaders provide invaluable service. These are men and women who engage in activities which generate hope. I salute all such heroes and heroines as Beacons-of-Hope. Dr. James A. Malone is one of these Beacons-of-Hope residing in the central Brooklyn community of New York City and New York State. Dr. James Malone currently serves as a professor of counseling and director of the Academy for Intergenerational Education at John Jay College. He taught 2 years in the Newark, NJ public schools before moving to John Jay College where he held the following positions: SEEK director, dean of students and vice president of administrative services. Throughout the years, Dr. Malone has worked diligently in top positions that uplifted his community. His past civic offices include the president of the board of Weeksville and member of the District School Board #17 and Community Board #9. Dr. Malone is a member and trustee of the Church of the Evangel. In 1971, Dr. Malone developed the city sponsored Hawthorne Corners Day Care Center where he served as the first board president. Dr. Malone also helped to develop the Rutland Road Block Association and was elected the second president. He headed a research effort, ``They're All My Kids,'' which reaffirmed the necessity of commitment to our children, our schools, and our community. Dr. Malone received a bachelor of science degree from the University of Akron; master of science in social work from Rutgers University; and a doctorate of philosophy in higher education from Union Graduate in Cincinnati, OH. James Malone is a Beacon-of-Hope for central Brooklyn and all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, with the 1996 election behind us, this Nation has completed another cycle of the ongoing democratic process which makes America great. The electoral process and the public officials selected through this process are invaluable assets in our quest to promote the general welfare and to guarantee the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is important, however, Mr. Speaker, that we also give due recognition to the equally valuable contribution of nonelected leaders throughout our Nation. The fabric of our society is generally enhanced and enriched by the hard work done year after year by ordinary volunteer citizens. Especially in our inner-city communities which suffer from long public policy neglect, local grassroots leaders provide invaluable services. These are men and women who engage in activities which generate hope. I salute all such heroes and heroines ad BEACONS-OF-HOPE. Lorrelle Henry is one of these BEACONS-OF-HOPE residing in the central Brooklyn community of New York City and New York State. Ms. Henry served as the director of libraries for the New York City school system until her retirement. She now serves as an adjunct professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Although retired from the school system, Ms. Henry continues to work as an advocate for children. Ms. Henry serves as president of the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission; vice president of the New York City Martin Luther King Commission; treasurer of the Brooklyn Women's Political Caucus; member of ALA Caldecott Committee, which selects outstanding children's books; member of the Coretta Scott King Award Jury, which selects outstanding children's books by black authors; member of the board of directors of the Great Day Chorale; member of the Lincoln Place Block Association; and member of the Award of the Americas Committee, which selects outstanding children's books portraying Latin American and Caribbean life. Moreover, she is a recipient of numerous awards including the School Library Service Award and the New York State Martin Luther King, Jr. President's Award. Lorrelle Henry is the oldest of two children and grew up in Harlem during the exciting times of Langston Hughes, Adam Clayton Powell, and others. Lorrelle's parents always emphasized the necessity for donating time and energy to neighbors and community. In addition, her parents encouraged their children to be political activists. Lorrelle Henry is a native New Yorker who attended the city's public schools. She later graduated from Brooklyn College and obtained a master's in library science from St. John's University. Ms. Henry is the mother of three children, Michelle, Gairre, and Scott. And she is the proud grandmother of Kahlil, Shaniqua, Naren, and Jordan. Lorrelle Henry is a BEACON-OF-HOPE for all of central Brooklyn and for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, with the 1996 election behind us, this Nation has completed another cycle for the ongoing democratic process which makes America great. The electoral process and the public officials selected through this process are invaluable assets in our quest to promote the general welfare and to guarantee the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is important, however, Mr. Speaker, that we also give due recognition to the equally valuable contribution of nonelected leaders throughout our Nation. The fabric of our society is generally enhanced and enriched by the hard work done year after year by ordinary volunteer citizens. Especially in our inner-city communities which suffer from long public policy neglect, local grassroots leaders provide invaluable service. These are men and women who engage in activities which generate hope. I salute all such heroes and heroines as BEACONS-OF-HOPE. Evy Papillon is one of these BEACONS-OF-HOPE residing in the Central Brooklyn community of New York City and New York State. Throughout the years, Evy Papillon has worked diligently in positions that she found to be beneficial to the community. She is directly responsible for community enhancement efforts that impact the social-human services and health care. Every Saturday, Ms. Papillon devotes her time toward feeding the homeless at her own expense. A member of Foyer Chretien since 1993, she assists Haitians and Haitian-Americans with problems regarding illiteracy and financial challenges. She also helps individuals obtain visas, gain residency, and encourages them to fulfill civic responsibilities. Recognizing the importance of early detection of breast cancer, Evy Papillon brought the annual Community Health Fair to her church, St. Catherine's of Genoa in Brooklyn. Her socially conscious political work has brought her talents to a number of important organizations. She is one of the founding members of two organizations: Caribbean Women's Health Association and Community Action Project [CAP]. Ms. Papillon's community focus continues in her work with the Community Affairs Department of the New York City Police 67th Precinct. She is also an enthusiastic member of 100 Women for Major Owens; second vice president of the Martin Luther King Commission; member and past membership chair of the Brooklyn Women's Political Caucus, and a liaison for the Democratic Party for Haitian-American Democrats in Brooklyn. Among the many awards and commendations received by Evy Papillon are: Kingsboro Psychiatric Center Family Care Program Award; New York City State Employees Federated Appeal Recognition Award; Director's Award, Kingsboro Psychiatric Center; and the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission Award. Evy Papillon emigrated to the United States from Jeremie, Haiti in 1959. She is a graduate of St. Joseph's College LaChine at the University of Montreal where she received a bachelor of arts degree in nursing and attended St. Joseph's College in New York where she received a bachelor of arts in 1983, and a master of arts in 1986 in health administration. Evy Papillon is a BEACONS-OF-HOPE for Central Brooklyn and for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, with the 1996 election behind us, this nation has completed another cycle for the ongoing democratic process which makes America great. The electoral process and the public officials selected through this process are invaluable assets in our quest to promote the general welfare and to guarantee the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is important, however, Mr. Speaker, that we also give due recognition to the equally valuable contribution of non-elected leaders throughout our nation. The fabric of our society in generally enhanced and enriched by the hard work done year after year by ordinary volunteer citizens. Especially in our inner city communities which suffer from long public policy neglect, local grassroots leaders provide invaluable service. These are men and women who engage in activities which generate hope. I salute all such heroes and heroines as BEACONS-OF-HOPE. Edena C. Gill is one of these BEACONS-OF-HOPE residing in the central Brooklyn community of New York City and New York State. During the 1960's, Ms. Gill became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and was motivated by such mentors as Jitu Weusi, Al Vann and many others who were involved in the Ocean Hill Brownsville fight. She even worked with assemblyman Roger Green on his first campaign. Currently, she is a member-at-large of the Thrugood Marshall Democratic Club; recording secretary for the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission; member of the 100 Women for Major R. Owens; and member of the First Baptist Church of Crown Heights. Among her other affiliations, Ms. Gill is involved with the National Association of Business and Professional Women's Club, Inc. where she serves as President. Elena Gill also became active with the Lefferts Avenue Mothers, an offshoot of the Lefferts Avenue Block Association. She joined the Melvin Walker Democratic Club which later became part of the Partners for Progress Democratic Club. Married and a mother of two, sons Kyle and Gary, Edena Gill has distinguished her life as one of dedication to community, God and to family. Edena Gill is a BEACONS-OF-HOPE for Central Brooklyn and for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, with the 1996 election behind us, this Nation has completed another cycle for the ongoing democratic process which makes America great. The electoral process and the public officials selected through this process are invaluable assets in our quest to promote the general welfare and to guarantee the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is important, however, Mr. Speaker, that we also give due recognition to the equally valuable contribution of nonelected leaders throughout our Nation. The fabric of our society is generally enhanced and enriched by the hard work done year after year by ordinary volunteer citizens. Especially in our inner city communities which suffer from long public policy neglect, local grassroots leaders provide invaluable service. These are men and women who engage in activities which generate hope. I salute all such heroes and heroines as Beacons-of-Hope. Annie Nicholson is one of these Beacons-of-Hope residing in the central Brooklyn community of New York City and New York State. Since 1982, Annie has served as case worker for Congressman Major Owens. She has gained critically needed emergency services for people in need, and she has recovered thousands of dollars in entitlement funds for citizens who have been unjustly treated by government agencies. Few people know their way through the social service bureaucracy as well as Annie Nicholson. Ms. Nicholson is a rare combination of case worker and community activist. She is a member of the board of directors of the Paul J. Cooper Human Services Center; a member of the board of the Atlantic Avenue TAP Center; and a member of 100 Women for Major Owens. Annie Nicholson is a native of Gulfport, MI where she graduated from the 33d Avenue High School. She later attended Kingsboro Community College and received training for manpower and career development counseling; welfare advocacy; and legal service advocacy. Annie is also the proud mother of two sons--Jerry and Rodney Nicholson. Annie Nicholson is a Beacon-of-Hope for central Brooklyn and for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, with the 1996 election behind us, this Nation has completed another cycle for the ongoing democratic process which makes America great. The electoral process and the public officials selected through this process are invaluable assets in our quest to promote the general welfare and to guarantee the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is important, however, Mr. Speaker, that we also give due recognition to the equally valuable contribution of nonelected leaders throughout our Nation. The fabric of our society is generally enhanced and enriched by the hard work done year after year by ordinary volunteer citizens. Especially in our inner-city communities which suffer from long public policy neglect, local grassroots leaders provide invaluable service. These are men and women who engage in activities which generate hope. I salute all such heroes and heroines as Beacons-of-Hope. Kenneth Taylor is one of these Beacons-of-Hope residing in the central Brooklyn community of New York City and New York State. In 1982, Mr. Taylor offered his services as a volunteer in the office of Congressman Major Owens and later rose to the position of deputy district director. During the course of his tenure there, he assisted thousands of constituents with various problems. He became an expert at resolving immigration problems and was recognized throughout the city. After nearly 13 years with Congressman Owens, Mr. Taylor retired; however he remains active in his community. Kenneth Taylor also devotes much of his time to music. He serves as an organist, composer, and arranger for his church in Brooklyn. Moreover, he is vice president of the 100 Men for Major Owens; member of District 65; and member of Sigma Alpha Delta. Shortly after his arrival from his native country of Cuba, Kenneth Taylor enlisted in the United States Army and was stationed in France and Germany. At the end of his enlistment, he received an honorable discharge. He, thereafter, attended Bernard Baruch College where he graduated with a bachelor of arts in management. He also received a certificate in paralegal studies from Long Island University and completed an internship with the corporate counsel of the city of New York. Kenneth Taylor is a Beacon-of-Hope for central Brooklyn and for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, with the 1996 election behind us, this Nation has completed another cycle for the ongoing democratic process which makes America great. The electoral process and the public officials selected through this process are invaluable assets in our quest to promote the general welfare and to guarantee the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is important, however, Mr. Speaker, that we also give due recognition to the equally valuable contribution of nonelected leaders throughout our Nation. The fabric of our society is generally enhanced and enriched by the hard work done year after year by ordinary volunteer citizens. Especially in our inner city communities which suffer from long public policy neglect, local grassroots leaders provide invaluable service. These are men and women who engage in activities which generate hope. I salute all such heroes and heroines as Beacons-of-Hope. Randall Bloomfield is one of these Beacons-of-Hope residing in the central Brooklyn community of New York City and New York State. Few doctors in central Brooklyn can match the impeccable record of achievement of Dr. Bloomfield. Dr. Bloomfield is directly responsible for many community empowerment efforts. His vision, sincerity, and competence have resulted in the writing of proposals and the presentation of various studies that have educated the community. Over the years, he has made dozens of scholarly presentations on subjects such as ``Current Approaches to Gynecological Chemotherapy.'' In addition, he is coauthor of a proposal which gained funding for the Provident Neighborhood Health Center and has written numerous articles including one on Legislator-Physician relationships. Throughout the years, Dr. Bloomfield has worked diligently in several positions that he found to be beneficial to his community. He currently serves as the chairman of the Moya Medical Scholarship Fund and is the co-chair of the Medgar Evers Medical Program. Born in New York City, Dr. Bloomfield has served 2 years in the Army. He is a graduate of City College of New York and Downstate Medical Center. He is married to Edris L. Adams and the father of Diane Elizabeth and Robert Randall. Randall Bloomfield is a Beacon-of-Hope for central Brooklyn and for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, with the 1996 election behind us, this Nation has completed another cycle for the ongoing democratic process which makes America great. The electoral process and the public officials selected through this process are invaluable assets in our quest to promote the general welfare and to guarantee the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is important, however, Mr. Speaker, that we also give due recognition to the equally valuable contribution of nonelected leaders throughout our Nation. The fabric of our society is generally enhanced and enriched by the hard work done year after year by ordinary volunteer citizens. Especially in our inner city communities which suffer from long public policy neglect, local grassroots leaders provide invaluable service. These are men and women who engage in activities which generate hope. I salute all such heroes and heroines as Beacons-of-Hope. Asquith Reid is one of these Beacons-of-Hope residing in the central Brooklyn community of New York City and New York State. While Asquith Reid has served as an electrical engineer employed with the telephone industry, most of his time is spent as a political engineer. He has guided campaigns for district 18 school board candidates; for Assemblyman Nick Perry; Councilwoman Una Clark; and Congressman Major R. Owens. Mr. Reid's most recent victory was the triumphant election of John Sampson for New York State Senator. Undoubtedly, Mr. Reid's political engineering has yet to reach its peak. Throughout the years, Asquith Reid has worked diligently in top positions to the benefit of his community. He currently serves as chairman of the New Era Democratic Club; vice chair of District 17 Neighborhood Advisory Board; board member for the Husain Institute of Technology; and president of the Donna Reid Memorial Education Fund. Mr. Reid was born in Hanover, Jamaica. He graduated from Kingston Technical High School and served in the U.S. Air Force from 1963 to 1967. He later graduated from Kingston Technical College with a degree in electrical engineering. Asquith and his wife, Dean, are the proud parents of two children, Michelle and Sharon. Asquith Reid is a Beacon-of-Hope for central Brooklyn and for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, with the 1996 election behind us, this Nation has completed another cycle for the ongoing democratic process which makes America great. The electoral process and the public officials selected through this process are invaluable assets in our quest to promote the general welfare and to guarantee the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is important, however, Mr. Speaker, that we also give due recognition to the equally valuable contribution of nonelected leaders throughout our Nation. The fabric of our society is generally enhanced and enriched by the hard work done year after year by ordinary volunteer citizens. Especially in our inner city communities which suffer from long public policy neglect, local grassroots leaders provide invaluable service. These are men and women who engage in activities which generate hope. I salute all such heroes and heroines as Beacons-of-Hope. Currently, the dean, director and chairperson of the SEEK program at CUNY's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Dr. Rubie Malone has tirelessly dedicated her life to making our society better. She is directly responsible for community enhancement efforts that impact education, social/human services, and health care. Dr. Malone's civic contributions began at an early age when she began working with high school seniors at Bethany Baptist Church. After transferring to the Church of the Evangel United Church of Christ, she continued working with youth and adult groups. In the Brooklyn Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., she has served as president and second vice-president and coordinator of committees and projects including School America, voter registration, health fairs, book and college fairs, teen lift, social action and political awareness, and oratorical contests. She is a member of the Brooklyn Chapter of Links, Inc., where she serves as parliamentarian and is involved in various community projects. Dr. Malone is also a former president of jack and Jill of America. Dr. Rubie Malone, who is the eldest of twelve children, received a bachelor of science in mathematics from Clark College; a master's degree from CUNY's Hunter College; and a doctorate of philosophy in social services from Columbia University. Rubie Malone is a Beacon-of-Hope for central Brooklyn and for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to introduce a bill that would protect patients and health care providers in hospitals across the country. While Congress is debating the feasibility of universal service, and implementing incremental health-care reform bills to increase portability, the health-care industry is completely re-engineering itself. As a part of the transformation to remain competitive and save money, hospitals are replacing nurses with lesser-trained, lower-paid aides. Recent reports have noted that this de-skilling of America's hospitals has had an adverse and even fatal effect on unsuspecting patients. My proposal, the Patient and Health Care Provider Protection Act would ensure that patients, as well as nurses, aides, and doctors are armed with the adequate weaponry to fight the hazards associated with the restructuring of the health care industry. When any of my constituents enter a hospital, care may be administered by someone who looks like a licensed nurse, but is called a patient care aide, clinical care partner, patient care assistant, medical technician, patient care technician, or monitor technician. These aides may be charged with checking vital signs, inserting intravenous tubes, drawing blood, inserting catheters, and performing electrocardiograms--procedures usually reserved for licensed nurses. Unfortunately, in too many instances such responsibilities dealing with the direct care of the patient are being undertaken without proper training, and the results are astonishing. At Allegheny General Hospital, a patient care aide mistakenly hooked up a feeding tube to an opening in a patient's neck that helped him breathe. The liquid nourishment got into the lungs of the 81-year-old patient and he died a few days later. At Presbyterian University Hospital, a ``monitor technician'' failed to notice a patient's accelerated heart rate for 4 to 5 minutes. The patient later died of heart failure. At Rhode Island Hospital, an aide mistakenly filled a syringe with potassium chloride instead of saline to clean out an intravenous line. The potassium chloride killed the 11-month-old infant. This bill would avoid these catastrophes in three ways: first, the Patient and Health Care Provider Protection Act would ensure that patients are well-informed about who is treating them. Currently hospitals are not required to make pertinent information available to the public. As a result of this bill, hospitals would have to maintain and disclose daily staffing levels to the public. Second, this legislation would ensure that the Department of Health and Human Services issue staffing guidelines that hospitals could use as benchmarks to decide which levels of staffing do not jeopardize patient care. Third, all staff in hospitals would be mandated to wear identification tags with the name and licensed or certified position of the individual. Obscure and deceitful titles such as technical care partner would be unlawful. Moreover, the Patient and Health Care Provider Protection Act would ensure that the changes that are taking place in the health-care industry are studied on a national level. While massive hospital- restructuring efforts are taking place in such states as California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Texas, Rhode Island, Washington, and in my State of New York, we cannot point to a single comprehensive study that shows whether or not the industry has taken a turn for the better or worse. My bill would assure that national and systematic compilation of pertinent medical data is being undertaken to evaluate reform efforts on a periodic, on-going basis. The public would be privy to all information that is reported. The Patient and Health Care Provider Protection Act would further create a nongovernmental, independent, nonprofit body to advocate on behalf of health care consumers in each State--the Office of Consumer Advocacy for Health [OCAH]. OCAH would set up a step-by-step process that consumers could easily follow when they have any complaint about the health care services they are receiving. OCAH would assist people who had grievances with their health plans and needed information about available health care services. It would also serve as a screening center for situations necessitating the emergency intervention of Federal officials. By calling a number such as 1-800-BAD-CARE, patients and health care workers could disclose any information about life- threatening situations in a hospital. If the situation warrants, such as the case in Tampa, FL, when the Health Care Financing Agency sent our an emergency team to a hospital that amputated the wrong limb of a patent, then OCAH could call upon HHS to investigate. Moreover, each health plan would be required to form a consumer- dominated Independent Consumer Advisory Committee [ICAC]. This committee would provide outreach to its members--patients--by holding hearings, and forums to facilitate discussion between a health plan and the community. ICAC would help establish safe staffing levels, and quality-care criteria to which the health plan must adhere. Members of ICAC would be selected by a classified lottery procedure. Health plan members interested in serving would be placed not four categories: senior citizens, parents of children under 18, individuals with disabilities, and all other health plan members. Finally, the Patient and Health Care Provider Protection Act would outlaw the gag order on nurses and doctors who must be free to communicate effectively with their patients. This bill contains strong whistle blower protections that prohibit the discharge, demotion, or harassment of any nurse, doctor, or other health care professionals who assist in an investigation of his or her employer. There are many bills floating around that accomplish some of the goals outlined here, but in piecemeal fashion. Patient safety cannot be achieved in this way. A comprehensive approach is necessary to make sure patients are aware of who is treating them, are knowledgeable about the effects of a hospital's restructuring plan, are armed with a potent voice to affect the policies of the health plan, and possess some recourse if their safety is endangered. At the same time, the value of nurses' work must not be undermined. As individuals on the front lines of the health care delivery system, nurses and aides must be well-trained and free to act in ways that foster, rather than compromise, the quality of patient care. Mr. Speaker, I strongly urge all of my colleagues to support this bill as a bold form of advocacy for the health care consumer--the patient. It is budget-neutral and would be financed by requiring health plans to contribute only 1 percent of their revenues to fund the Office of Consumer Advocacy for Health and the Independent Consumer Advisory Committees in each State. This is a small price to pay to protect patients, and to protect the integrity of such data on which the medical community should base its decisions. Congress has unequivocal role in assuring that cutting costs and increasing one's profit are not priorities of health care delivery at the expense of patient care quality and safety.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, these are the closing days of the 104th Congress. I just wanted to again congratulate the American people or their common sense. As we close out the 104th Congress, the situation in American political life is very different from what it was when we opened up the 104th Congress in January 1995. These are the closing days. It is important to note that we are going through the process of a large number of suspension bills. The public does not understand that fully. Suspension bills means that we suspend the rules and do not follow the rules. These are not bills that have necessarily gone though the full procedure. They are expected to be so popular that there will be overwhelming approval, to the point where two-thirds of the people will vote for them and they will be able to pass. The suspension process this year, large numbers of suspension bills at the very end of the session, is fraught with danger, because the abuse of the rules that has gone on all year in the 104th Congress is also taking place here, with some very important items that are being slipped into some of the suspension bills. That is nothing new. The abuse of the rules is one of the characteristics of the 104th Congress. The biggest action is yet to come, in the next day or two. We hope tomorrow the continuing resolution will be on the floor. that continuing resolution will take all of the agencies and programs that have not yet had appropriations bills passed and lump them all together in one resolution, and will go forward, I hope, without having the agony of a shutdown. I think my colleagues who spoke earlier, the gentlewoman from Connecticut [Ms. DeLauro] and the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone] did a very good summary of the highlights of what has happened during the past year. They talked at some length about the agony of the shutdown of the Government because of the refusal to deal with the budget in a responsible way by the 104th Congress. The Republican majority of the 104th Congress will go down in history as being one of the most unreasonable groups. They sought revolution through a budget process. They sought to blackmail and force the President to do something that should have been debated, discussed, and negotiated. Despite all that, we have something big we hope to celebrate when this continuing resolution comes forward. There are rumors, and I hope that they are true, that within the continuing resolution that is coming there may not only be a sustenance here, maintenance of some very vital programs that we feared might be cut, but there may be some increases in the budget for very important programs, especially in education. There is a rumor that at least $1 billion in increases will take place with respect to education programs, and maybe more. That is something to celebrate. The 104th Congress can go out celebrating the fact that it found its way. It got lost for a while, the Republican majority was lost, and they came into the 104th Congress insisting that the Department of Education should be eradicated. They attacked education programs across the board: student loans, Head Start. There was nothing that was sacred enough for them to leave it alone in terms of budget cuts. That is a fantastic turnaround. It ought to be celebrated. I congratulate the Republican majority for seeing the light. But it really is a result of the American people's common sense manifesting itself. What I really want to do is congratulate the American people again for their common sense. In our polling procedures now that move so rapidly, we are able to determine what people are thinking very rapidly. we do a lot of studying of polls, and there are focus groups beyond the polls, and various other devices to measure what people are thinking. So what you are thinking as a public gets measured rapidly, regularly, and congratulate you on the fact that you have indicated that some of the extremist actions taken by this 104th Congress are totally unacceptable, are repugnant, and they have responded. What they have done or proposed to do to education you indicated was totally unacceptable, and the biggest turnaround of the Republican majority in this 104th Congress has been its position on education. If it is true, and I think it is, that we may have a large increase in the Federal assistance to education, then I am happy that they did turn around. I hope we can go back to a policy of bipartisan support for education programs. While we may be able to celebrate the increase in education programs, we must mourn the eradication of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children. if there is a low point to be identified unquestionably, the lowest point in the 104th Congress is the eradication of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which is a part of the Social Security Act, by the way. It has existed for 61 years, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated the New Deal, as part of the Social Security Act, which most people do not understand. Aid to Families with Dependent Children is part of the Social Security Act. Medicare is part of the Social Securiy Act. Medicaid is the part of the Social Security Act. When you worry about what is going to happen with Social Security, your worry is well-placed. You should worry. Because if we are going to take away the entitlement for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, take away the entitlement which says that any children who are poor in America, and they can meet the means test--it is a means-tested program--they deserve the help that their government can give. They are entitled to it. There cannot be any negotiation, there cannot be any favoritism shown by States or local governments. They are entitled to it. Entitlement means just what it says. Well, that is gone. That is gone. We did not have welfare reform. We had the eradication of a very vital part of the Social Security Act, the eradication of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. That is the low point. We must mourn that just as we celebrate the fact that there has been a turnaround in education programs. The 104th Congress opened with a bang, and it is closing with a whimper. That is because again the American people had the common sense to see that this is an extremist majority. The Republican majority moved with great extremism. It was not so much in their Contract With America, where they at least had written down what they were going to do, tried to reshape that, but it is all the other things that were not in the contract that they came on so strongly with that led to the opening of the eyes of the American people, with the help of the Democratic minority. We helped to open the eyes of the American people, we helped to bring forth the common sense of the American people by highly visible efforts to expose what was going on here. We had an unprecedented set of actions which showed our resistance to the extremism, and the response of the American people was to understand better what is going on here. So we are closing with a whimper because the American people understood. We are closing with a whimper because the Democratic minority took the case to the American people, and enabled them to understand and, in their understanding, they showed they were disappointed and revolted by certain things that were going on. I understand a large number of Republicans are now carrying ice buckets around, and the Speaker of the House was on television citing as one of his great achievements the ending of the practice of delivering ice daily in the House of Representatives. I want to congratulate the Speaker. I think that in the age of refrigerators, as he said, we do not really need to have ice delivered every day. And that was a good reform. So congratulations, Mr. Speaker. The 104th Congress, Republican majority, will be known for its ice delivery policy. If we are going to carry ice buckets around, we might join you. It is a good policy, your ice delivery polity, and the Speaker said maybe they saved $200,000 between the ending of delivery of ice and the privatization of the barber shops and beauty parlors. He might have saved $200,000, but he added $13 billion to the defense budget; $13 billion more than the President wanted was added to the defense budget. So I think your common sense, the common sense of the American people can look at the saving of money on items which agreeably were obsolete, the delivery of ice. But on the other hand, adding $13 billion to the budget when the President, the Commander in Chief of the country, said we do not need it, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a whole lot of other people saying we do not need certain items in this budget and they kept adding those items, so the waste goes on despite the fact that we have a new ice delivery policy. So congratulations on the ice delivery policy. Let us look at a more practical way at where we are wasting money by adding to the defense budget things that the military experts say we definitely do not need. The Republican majority will also be remembered for its honesty. I want to congratulate them on their honesty and their openness. They did not camouflage their intentions. They came on very strong, highly visible with their policy. They were highly visible with their intent to wipe out organized labor. They did not mince words and their actions showed that they were going to wipe out the benefits that organized labor and workers--let us forget about organized labor, because the benefits that workers have gained are spread throughout, whether you are in a union shop or not. OSHA is a benefit you have. The Occupational Health and Safety Agency benefits all workers, and an attempt to wipe that agency out or bring it to its knees and throttle its effectiveness would have hurt all workers. They attempted to bring the National Labor Relations Board to its knees. On and on it goes. One of the chief advocates of getting rid of OSHA even said openly in the Washington Post that he had promised businessmen in his State that he would do it and he was rewarded with an immediate set of contributions from the businessmen in his State of $65,000. So it was quite a phenomenon. They were honest, they have been honest. And by being honest, they have presented the American people with some clear choices. The 104th Congress Democratic minority continued to have faith in the common sense of the American people and not mourn its loss of power. It might have been a bit mournful in the first 3 or 4 months. We did not quite know what to do, it seemed. But I think that the Democratic minority is to be congratulated. Our leadership under Minority Leader Gephardt was fantastic in rallying the troops and probably the turnaround point in this 104th Congress came in the summer of 1995, when the horror of the Republican extremists came home to the American people because the members of the Education Committee, the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities they call it now, the members put up a resistance to the cuts in the school lunch program. The school lunch programs was a first battleground, the first time we took the battle to the American people in a highly visible way, about $2 billion over the 7 years of the budget period that was being proposed to the year 2002, $2 billion would have been gained from savings on the backs of the little children in America who use the school lunch program. That $2 billion was slated to go into the infamous Republican majority's tax cut fund. They needed large amounts of money, $2 billion was just a drop in the bucket, and before it is over they were going to need something like close to $300 billion, the latest scale back, but large amounts of money were needed to provide a tax cut to the few. The Republican majority made it clear from the very beginning that they were the government of the elite, that they had no qualms about proposing public policies which would benefit a small group of Americans, those who already have the largest amount of the wealth in the country. They own most of the wealth; 10 percent of the people own 90 percent of the wealth. You have this terrible gap that has been growing between the richest Americans and the poorest Americans. It used to be that Great Britain had that kind of gap with its lords and ladies and landed gentry, but America, the home of the brave, the land of the free, where the common man can get ahead and so forth. All of a sudden we are among the industrialized nations of the world the very worst in terms of the gap between the rich and the poor. The gap is bigger in America now than it is anywhere else in the world. That is most unfortunate. But we had in the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities resisted the cuts. I just want to remind us, none of us should forget that 1 year ago, about this time, Federal education programs were facing a $4 billion cut. Among the cuts that we were facing was a cut in the school lunch program. The records in our heads should be corrected to show that it was the fight against cuts in the school lunch programs, led by members of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, which began to change the public opinion polls in favor of the Democrats in Congress. The model of highly visible and personalized resistance used to fight the school lunch cuts was later adopted by the Medicare and Medicaid campaigns to stop the cuts. We used the same approach in terms of going straight to the people, getting examples of how people were going to be hurt, just as we had gone to school lunchrooms and talked to children, eaten lunch with children and dramatized for the American people the fact that this was the kind of cut we did not need. The fight for aid to education was the pivotal point in the war to take back the Congress. In those days, in the summer of 1995, we did despair sometimes, it was difficult to believe that the American people were going to come to our rescue, we did not understand how strong the tradition of common sense is out there among our people and how they would definitely rise to the occasion. At that time, I remember on Tuesday, April 4, one of the low points in the discussion, the swindle of the children's lunches, I entered into the Record the following notation with a little rap poem. I said: The very conservative but thorough Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the Republicans will capture slightly more than $2 billion from their block-granted School Lunch Program. This will be $2 billion more to go into the tax cut for the rich. This is a scenario filled with horror. It conjures up the image of the poster where Uncle Sam is pointing his finger and saying to potential military recruits: ``I need you.'' While the Republicans advocate a $50 billion increase in the defense budget--at that time it was $50 billion--and turn their backs on welfare for corporations and rich farmers, they are saying to the children of America: ``This Nation needs your lunch.'' Kids of America There is a fiscal crunch This great Nation Now needs your lunch To set The budget right Go hungry For one night Don't eat What we could save Be brave Patriots stand out Above the bunch Proudly surrender lunch There is a fiscal crunch This Nation needs your lunch Pledge allegiance to the flag Mobilize your own brown bag The enemy deficit Must be defeated Nutrition suicide squads Are desperately needed Kids of America There is a fiscal crunch This great Nation Now needs your lunch. We had to resort to a little humor to save our souls during those difficult days, to keep our spirits up because it was the kind of horror we never expected to experience. And the American people felt the same way. They reacted with great horror and immediately there was a chain reaction that was set in motion about the cuts in education programs in general. Every education cut aroused great indignation and we began to move in a way which has resulted in our being able to celebrate at this time the fact that a proposed $1 billion increase is about to take place, more than a $1 billion increase in education programs. We are moving toward a pivotal election, and it is very important that this common sense not lose focus. It is very important that the blitzkrieg that is coming, of advertisements on television, all kinds of devices will be used to try to confuse the American people, that we keep our sense of direction and understand that we still need to close the income gap, we still have a problem with income stagnation, it has to be halted. We still have a problem with the elitism, the idea that it is quite all right for 10 percent of Americans to own 90 percent of the wealth. That still must end. We still need a more creative taxation policy. I have talked about all these things during the course of this 104th Congress and I want to reemphasize the fact that they are still relevant. We have a good report also that came from the Census Bureau. They recently reported, I think today or yesterday, that household income is up, family income is up, people in poverty have gone down, the poverty rate is down, the elderly poverty rate is down, the child poverty rate is down. But when you look at their statement, you will find that they are down by very small amounts and the great celebration and the reason that the Census Bureau is trumpeting these new figures and the reason that the Democrats are now trumpeting them is that it has been so long since we had any increases. A typical household's income is up $898 in 1995. That is the largest increase in the whole decade. It is not much money, $898 will not close the income gap. It will not really compensate for all the income stagnation that has taken place. But it is the only increase we have had in the last 10 years, in the last decade. The same thing is true of the family income going up and the poverty rate going down. It is small figures, there is no great deal of change to report, but the fact that change has taken place at all is something to celebrate and certainly the Clinton economic policy can take credit for what is happening. The Democratic Family First initiative insist that we continue to do the kind of things that were initiated by President Clinton in his first 2 years. The economic policy which was certainly buttressed by a bill that not a single Republican voted for, that economic policy must continue. Our Family First initiatives dealing with economics and job creation, our family first initiatives which deal with education, are all designed to guarantee that this forward increase in terms of economic benefits and growth will continue. Mr. Speaker, we were cut down because of the division in time. I am going to wind up in a few minutes, because I want to share the time and yield to my colleague from Illinois, Mr. Jackson, for a tribute to one of our departing members. I emphasize he has not departed, he is departing. He will rise again. In fact, he has not disappeared from the public scene. He will be here for a long time and doing magnificent work. I will close now by saying that it is important to keep our perspective and keep the common sense of the American people focused. We have learned a lot this past year. We are grateful for the fact that the Republican majority in their extremism made everything crystal clear, and that our response to it, by taking it beyond the halls of this House and exposing it, allowed the American people to see what was going on. Therefore, we are coming to the end of this session in a very different spirit than the way we started it. I want to just give a few examples of where we have to go in the future. The President talks about building bridges to the future. We must understand that we are going to have to be bold, and the 105th Congress is going to have to behave very differently, and the next 2 years must be different. In building the bridge to the future, we should not hesitate to rely on the examples of the past. I was looking the other day at a documentary about the West. When they talked about the building of the railroads and how the building of railroads was critical in making our Nation one nation, really from the Atlantic to the Pacific we became one nation only as a result of the railroads. The railroads were a highly subsidized venture. The railroads involved Government to a great degree. Government and private enterprise worked hand-in-hand, with the Government supplying the contracts and the private enterprise doing all of its usual tricks, including California having hired an expert to declare certain land was mountainous when it was really not mountainous so they would get a higher rate. Another example is Congress working to establish land granted colleges across the Nation. It was a huge program that has a great benefit and made a big difference in this country, just as the GI bill later on was a large Government program which focused on education and had a great benefit. We have a telecommunications revolution coming now, and we hope that we are going to move forward in the age of telecommunications and hear the President's initiatives on education in light of the fact that the opportunities for jobs will come through the telecommunications revolution. The next 105th Congress should be about jobs, jobs, and jobs, and education of course is inextricably interwoven into any attempt to create jobs in this very complex, modern economy of ours. Mr. Speaker, at this point I want to change for us and yield for a tribute to our departing member of Congress, one in particular, but I just want to note we have several in the Congressional Black Caucus who are departing. I would like to note we are going to very much miss Harold Ford of Tennessee. Earlier there was a discussion on Mr. Ford's achievements. I happen to come from the same hometown. I represent New York now, but I was born in Memphis, TN, where Harold Ford has represented the people of Memphis ably for a long time. We also have departing Cardiss Collins, who is the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. She has done a magnificent job of maintaining the resistance, speaking out loudly, clearly, in a highly visible fashion, to keep the American people informed as to what is going on there, excellent leadership by Cardiss Collins. Barbara Rose Collins is departing, from Michigan; and we earlier lost Kweisi Mfume from Maryland; and we are also now going to discuss Mr. Cleo Fields. Cleo is very special in many ways. I like to remind people that one of my favorite education programs is called the TRIO program. Cleo is a product of that program. He is an alumnus of that program. The TRIO program provides special attention for youngsters to guide them into a college career. It creates a whole environment as well as inspiring them. It provides tutors and practical steps toward entering college. Cleo is one of their alumni. They can be very proud of him. Cleo, in the face of adversity, brought on by the fact that suddenly America has decided that drawing districts which don't look aesthetically beautiful is not good. Since the history of the country, we have always had strange-shaped districts for Congress. But all of a sudden the Supreme Court says if a district looks strange, they want to examine the district and see if race had anything to do with it. Race has always had a great deal to do with drawing of districts all across the country. It is nothing new. It just so happens we are open and honest about the fact that you need to draw some districts and a way to correct the past imbalances and the past injustices, and the honesty has led to a change in policy which put CLEO's district on the line. He has been undaunted and kept going in the face of that, provided great leadership in a number of different areas, including the fight to bring relief to the black churches that are burning across the Nation and to guide us into some kind of policy of resistance on that issue, as well as many others. Mr. Speaker, I salute Cleo Fields. As I said before, he is not departed, he is departing. He will rise again. He will maintain his visibility in public life. At this point I would like to yield to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Jackson] to carry on the rest of the special order. (Mr. Jackson of Illinois asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) General Leave

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, I would like to express my support for H.R. 3877, as amended, which designates the U.S. Post Office in Camden, Arkansas, as the David H. Pryor Post Office Building. It is cosponsored by the Arkansas delegation and is a fitting honor and duly notes the political contributions of this dedicated public servant, David Pryor. David Pryor is considered one of the most influential advocates in Washington for older Americans. Starting in 1989, he served for 6 years as chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging and now serves as the top ranking Democrat on that committee. He also is a nationally recognized leader in the fight to save the Social Security system, to reform our nursing home industry, to bring down prescription drug prices and to make government institutions preserve the essential dignity of the senior citizens in this country. Beyond Camden and the State of Arkansas, he is a hero. Certainly he is a hero to many senior citizens in New York and in my district. His name has been mentioned in numerous town meetings by senior citizens over the years because of this great fight against high prescription prices. David Pryor issued an information paper to assist indigent patients with access assistance programs sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. He issued a report card in 1992 on drug manufacturing price inflation, in 1993 a hearing on marketplace reform, in 1994 a briefing on equal access to discounts, in 1993 a briefing on cost containment in other industrialized nations with respect to prescription drugs, in 1993 a briefing on pharmaceutical pricing, also in 1993 a briefing on medication costs for older Americans. Before that, he had a landmark hearing on drug prices in 1989. He is the author of the 1992 Veterans Health Care Act, which lowered the cost of drugs purchased by the VA, the Department of Defense, public health clinics, disproportionate share hospitals, et cetera. That was enacted, that act. He was also the author of many other acts. I rise to salute him not only in terms of his being a favorite son of Arkansas, but throughout the Nation senior citizens are quite appreciative of the contributions of David Pryor. He is a hero for all the Nation. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the serious problems we face with the African-American community in most inner cities, one of the problems is no jobs. But I think more important than the fact that there are no jobs is the drug problem, which is more devastating, because the drug problem leads to criminal activity, including murder. The drug problem decimates families. The drug problem leaves a legacy of babies. We are back to a problem of babies in the hospitals who are being abandoned, and many of these babies have problems as a result of their mothers being addicted, and there are high health costs. It devastates the community in many ways. Mr. Speaker, we have had people on the one hand in the housing projects call for a National Guard to intervene in order to deal with the fact that the housing projects, certain projects are inundated with drug dealers. At the same time, other factions within the housing projects would be very much against it because it is their sons, their sons who are involved in the drug trade. It is a problem that is interwoven so much into the community until you cannot separate it out. There is a lot of money flowing from the drug dealers that is held out to people for investment, and on and on it goes. They are in charge. They are the kingpins. They have an infrastructure now. What started with the Nicaraguan trade and the encouragement of the CIA, the CIA does not have to be involved anymore. They allowed it to make enough money to build their own infrastructure, so they have an infrastructure which has a seemingly unlimited amount of money, and they have all these gangs that they can play against each other. There are the Colombians and the Dominicans in New York, and the so-called Jamaican Posse. What is happening is that the people behind all this, they play one group off against another. When it gets too hot for one, they shift the action to another, and it just goes on and on forever. I do want to caution the gentlewoman from California that we must keep the heat on, because the CIA is quite a formidable foe. We may have a seeming acceptance of cooperation now. They want to investigate this fully. Certainly you may be confronted with a stone wall, as you were in the case of Haiti, where the CIA actually financed the people who stopped our troops from going in early in the implementation of the President's Haitian policy, and we had to wait for months and months after that. More and more people died, because we have been stopped from initiating a peaceful process for changing the government in Haiti. The very person who did that, Emanuel Constans, who confessed that the CIA paid him to do it, and he was in charge, was held in jail for a while in this country and now he has been released. He is free in Queens, NY, for some strange reason. They do not explain why he is released. They will not explain why the papers that were captured from this same organization when the United States troops went into Haiti, why those papers will not be released to the Haitian Government. They have a way of suddenly deciding that whatever is not in the interests of national security they will withhold. The danger is that we will get a stone wall here if the outrage of the American people is not expressed. If we do not understand the connection between what has happened here and the present political cry that President Clinton is the cause of drugs being used by more young people now, and just do not do it, please just say no; if you are going to deal with that kind of surface political situation without going deep and thoroughly investigating this, you are really not dealing with what is not jeopardizing just the inner cities, but it is jeopardizing youth everywhere. It spreads from the inner cities all over. I hope we will pursue it relentlessly.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentlewoman from California for taking up this special order. It is very not that we understand that this is a window of opportunity; the San Diego Mercury has given us that opportunity by bringing together some very important facts by exploring some court records and doing some interviews, and they have the embryo here of a truth that is very important for our community. I was asked a question by several reporters yesterday, Why is this matter so important now? What difference does it make? The crack cocaine epidemic is out there. What difference is it going to make it these people are punished or not? This is not about punishing a handful of people; this is about seizing this window of opportunity to fully expose one of the ways in which the African-American community has been victimized, one of the ways in which the inner-city community has been victimized. We have been victimized in so many different ways, starting with 232 years of slavery for which nobody was compensated, that free labor, 232 years where we could not acquire property, 232 years where family structures were not permitted. You could not pass down traditions. That is just one of the ways we were victimized. Now the colored victimization takes place in various forms. We have the victimization through neglect. They do not have any policies or programs which allow our cities to get their fair share of the tax dollar. We do not have any programs which can help cities, although cities are where most of the people in America live. We have an anticity attitude in part of the Congress, especially the other body, and then we are victimized by blunders by Government programs and Government agencies. They make mistakes that mess up programs, and then the people who are the beneficiaries of those programs, they are the ones who suffer as a result of badly run programs. Here is victimization again, probably by conspiracy, conspiracy. There was an agenda that they had, an agenda which they felt was more important than the welfare of the people in the inner cities, more important than the welfare of people in the African American communities. So masses of people in the inner cities and African American communities have been put at jeopardy because they felt it was necessary to make an emergency deal in order to get funds to finance a war in Nicaragua, the Contras against the Sandinista government. Let us just take a look at the sequence when the Contras first launched their war against the Nicaraguan Government which was in control of the Sandinistas. At that time there was no American aid. There was no aid from this country officially, no American aid passed by the Congress. When they first launched the war, we certainly supplied money through the various back door mechanisms that are available, through the CIA, their pockets deep but not deep enough to keep financing a war in Nicaragua interminably without some kind of new device. We certainly probably supplied money to the Contras through El Salvador, where we were funding the El Salvador Government, and the records show that the connection between the El Salvador drug trade and the key people in El Salvador with the Nicaraguan drug trade and the people involved in this story is a very close knit record. There is a connection there that comes up again and again. So we were doing that through these back door methods, but that was not enough. They needed more money. This is then the first period of the Contra war against the Sandinistas. They needed more money. So here was an opportunity to sell drugs in the cities of America and take those profits and fund the Contras. And the CIA and American Government agents were needed to allow the Contras to get this avenue of funding from the cities of America. We were all surprised at the swiftness with which crack cocaine came into the inner-city communities. Yes, there had been a drug problem for years, we have a problem with marijuana, a problem with heroin. It took decades for the problems of marijuana and heroin to really take a foothold in the communities. They were actually on their way out. You had a decline in the use of drugs in inner city communities at the point where crack cocaine entered. Crack cocaine entered, and for $5 you could get that high, and it began this spread as an epidemic which continues until this day. Probably the Nicaraguan forces are not financing it or behind it today, but what happened was they had an opportunity to fund an infrastructure. They built their own infrastructure as a result of the opportunities given them by the CIA and Nicaraguan drug connection in the early days of the distribution of the crack cocaine. So you had that era and then you had a period where we officially, Congress, authorized money for the Contras. $100 million we started out with under Reagan, authorizing money for the Contras, $100 million. So we officially, openly began to fund the Contras for a period. And then we cut that off. I was in the Congress at that time. We cut off the funding for the Contras. The $100 million plus was cut off. It was no more. And then what happened? We had the Iran Contra deal from the basement of the White House, we know as a fact. It is important to know that these facts because these facts have been clearly established by the special prosecutor, they have been clearly established by the joint investigation and the joint hearings of the Senate and the House. They are clearly established. Nobody refutes the fact that Oliver North was the mastermind of a scheme, hatched in the basement of the White House and then carried out, which was to supply money to fund the Contras. How did they do it then? They went to sell weapons to Iran. While public policies were protesting that Iran was an evil empire, Iran was a terrorist nation and we would do no business with Iran, the deal was being hatched in the basement of the White House to sell weapons to Iran. And they did it. They sold weapons to Iran, and they used the profits from the weapons sold to Iran to fund the Contras. That is in phase 3. That is so well established in fact. Nobody was punished for it. Oliver North came into the hearings and acted as if he was America's chief Boy Scout. He stood up to them and flabbergasted a set of people that should not have been flabbergasted by his tactics, but he stood up to them and said he did it and he did it for America, but it was done. Nobody denied the fact that we went so far as to develop a deal with the evil Iranian Government in order to generate profits for the Contras, to fund the war in Nicaragua. If we did it on the tail end, there is no reason to believe we did not have the same kind of fanaticism and the same kind of extremist reasoning did not take place at the beginning. Only they did not have an Iran Contra deal. They had a crack cocaine deal that started in Los Angeles with one set. I am sure at the same time they had another set of people who started in New York, on the east coast. It was not necessarily spread from Los Angeles. They probably spread from both ends of the Nation. But this was to earn money when there was no other means to earn money, given the fact that at the tail end they were willing to go so far, and almost got an indictment of the President of the United States, who kept saying he did not remember, and I will not go into all that. Of course Oliver North came in and was pretty much exonerated in terms of, ``He did it, but so what?'' He ran for Senator and almost won a Senate seat in a neighboring State here. Things were that bad. But he did it, and we know that profits to fund the Contras was the objective. So why can we not believe, why can we not accept the fact that profits to fund the Contras was also an objective at the beginning of the Contra war, and that objective was met on the backs of the people of the African-American community, the inner city communities. Crack cocaine, a drug epidemic unlike any that has ever probably existed in the history of the world. For $5 you can get a high. For $5 you can begin the process of addicting people so that they have got to have it, and then on and on it goes to the point where they become murderers, prostitutes, they war against each other, they kill each other, shoot down innocent people. Murder on a mass scale in our big cities, and policymakers look at the cities and say there is something genetically wrong with the African-American people. You have the bell curve theory being promulgated, that they have low IQ's. There is nothing you can do about it. All these theories are there because the truth is not known. So what Congresswoman Waters is doing is important, to just get the truth out there, the fact that the inner-city collapse of the social order, collapse of families is partially due to the blunders of the Government, partially due to the neglect of the Government and partially due to the conspiracy, a conspiracy in which the Government has participated. Dealing drugs is probably the lowest form of conspiracy that we have seen yet that our Government has participated in. I would like to come back later and talk about reparations and why it is important to talk about this, so we can talk about getting to the bottom of this with an investigation that the CIA director, Mr. Deutsch, has said he has already launched. But there will be other investigations, getting to the bottom of it, so that we can establish that a great deal of harm has been done here, a great wrong has been done and some reparations are necessary for this reason; many other reasons why reparations are necessary, but certainly for this reason.

Mr. OWENS. This ``just say no'' slogan; was it not originated about the same time that the other hand of the Government, the CIA, was encouraging the sale of drugs?

Mr. OWENS. The 1980's, same time.

Mr. OWENS. Will the gentlewoman yield for 1 minute?

Mr. OWENS. Is it true that the Justice Department has already concluded that they do not need to investigate?

Mr. OWENS. So the Justice Department will not conduct its own independent investigation; it is going to cooperate with the CIA Inspector General?

Mr. OWENS. You have the overwhelming support of the African-American community. Our community overwhelmingly supports this effort. They want to see the truth come out. They want to get to the heart of this problem.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, we are moving toward adjournment. There is a rumor that we may be adjourning the 27th or the 28th of September. And there are some very important unfinished business items that relate to education which I would like to discuss tonight. The session is coming to an end, and it is kind of hard to get information. We seem to be treading water, and I suppose behind the scenes there are some fruitful negotiations taking place. This is the end of the 104th Congress, the Congress that came in like lightning in January 1995. We came in and we had sessions at one point every day of the week and for 6 months a nonstop agenda. Now as we draw to the end of the session, the close of the session, there is a great calm that has settled over us. I hope it is not the calm before the storm. But the last few months, things have been sort of slowing down. I want to congratulate the American people for having made that happen. Things have slowed down. The rapidity of the movement, the extremism that characterized the first few months of this session, we can all do without. It is just as well that we do not have it anymore. It is the public; it is the people out there with the common sense that should take the credit. Everybody in Congress, everybody who is in politics knows how to measure public opinion. They listen to public opinion, and what happened in this case is that the extreme agenda was not a subtle agenda. It was quite open and honest. I congratulate the leaders of the 104th Congress, the majority Republicans, they were honest with their agenda. They laid it out there and people knew just what was going on. They knew that drastic cuts were going to be made in education, drastic cuts would be made in jobs programs, drastic cuts would be made in housing programs. They knew that Medicare, Medicaid would be cut. They knew the agenda and, with the help of some spokespersons from the Democratic side to get them to understand it, slowly public opinion began to manifest itself and the people who listened to it on both sides, including the Republican majority, have come to the conclusion, I think, that in certain areas they are not going to hold, they are not going to continue the kinds of contempt for public opinion that was manifested in the first half of the 104th Congress. Public opinion had been out there all the time making certain things clear. It is not that this is some new development. The public has always made it clear that they prefer education to be a priority of the government at every level. The polls have shown that for the last 5 years. Education has always been one of the top five priorities. It moved to the top, last 2 years one of the top three priorities. So for the leadership of the 104th Congress to insist that drastic cuts were going to be made in education was to sort of hold the public opinion process in contempt and to turn their back on the common sense of the American people. Finally they have heard. Finally, as we move toward the resolution of the first budget, the budget for fiscal year 1996, after the two shutdowns and a lot of drama, one of the things that happened was that the cuts in education were rescinded. They were given up they gave up on the cuts in education. Yes, there were humongous cuts in other areas, extreme cuts in other areas. I think the most extreme cuts probably took place in housing. But there were cuts in job programs, job programs. There were a number of cuts, 22 billion dollars' worth of cuts still took place, despite the retreat on education, $4.5 billion for education and labor, and they retreated on most of those related to education. Head Start was not cut. The title I program was not cut. So we had an acknowledgment by the Republican majority that the common sense of the American people, which said over and over again education should not be cut, education is priority, they bowed to that. They bowed to that, and I hope they continue to bow to it. We do not know for certain, because in the appropriations bill that passed the House of Representatives before we went out for recess, there was an appropriations bill for the health and human services, education, health and human services, and in that bill there were still some drastic cuts for education programs. No, they did not cut Head Start any more, and they did not cut title I any more. Those are too highly visible. They did cut Goals 2000. They did a number of other cuts, and you still had a kind of war with the common sense of the American people in respect to education being made a priority. That situation still exists today. The appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives is there waiting for action by the Senate, and we have heard that there is good news. Rumors are that the Senate may agree with the Democratic amendment that proposes to restore the cuts made by the House of Representatives in the House of Representatives budget, and not only to restore them, but to increase them. It means that the leadership of the Senate, the Republican leadership of the Senate, is listening, above the heads of the Democrats in the Senate, to the vast majority of the American people out there. Madam Speaker, public opinion, common sense is registering. They have heard, and it looks at if we may come out of the 104th Congress with all the cuts restored and, perhaps, an increase. There is a rumor that the amount of money for education may be increased above what the House bill passed, substantially above that amount. It is very good news, and it is a victory for the common sense of the American people. The American people are to be congratulated for consistently insisting that education is a priority. We came into this 104th Congress with the Republican majority proposing that the Department of Education be eradicated. It was that extreme; in 1995 we had a proposal on the table that the Department of Education be eradicated. The superpower of the world was going to do without a Department of Education at the Federal level. It will be the only government of any of the industrialized nations that has no central agency at all relating to education. It would have been a very barbaric and primitive kind of action to take, but it was proposed. It was proposed seriously. I serve on the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. That is the name that it has now, but for the other 12 years that I have been here it was called the Education and Labor Committee; and before our committee earlier in the session, in 1995, we had two men who should have known better come before the committee and testify that they wanted to abolish, eradicate, the Department of Education. We had Lamar Alexander, the ex-Secretary of Education. He was the Secretary of Education under George Bush in his last 2 years. Mr. Alexander was proposing that we abolish, eradicate, the Department of Education. We had Mr. Bennett, who had been the Drug Czar, and he had once also been head of the Department of Education before also proposing that this civilized Nation, the leader of the industrialized free world, should not have a Department of Education. So we are a long way from that kind of extremism; you know, the kind of extremism which followed that proposal with a proposal that we cut school lunches to the bone and that we take title I, one-seventh of the funding for title I, $1.1 billion; that we cut Head Start, which has never been cut in the history of its existence. That kind of extremism was rampant in the first half of the 104th Congress. As we come to a halt, as we near the end, I am pleased to observe that we are going out not with a bang, but with a whimper. We appreciate the whimper. We have had enough extremism. Extremism is not good, and the Founding Fathers understood the need to have a check on any kind of rapid movement, any kind of blitzkrieg of ideas, a blitzkrieg of programs when they created the two Houses. They knew that one House would have sort of a calming effect on the other. Certainly the Senate, a more deliberative body with a longer term, was to be kind of a brake on extremism, and I think we should applaud the Founding Fathers again. It has worked; the other body has been a brake on the extremism in this House. And now the other body has come to the rescue of the education appropriations. We are probably, according to rumors, going to get from the other body an increase in the education budget paid for by some very innovative program that I had mentioned 6 months ago, the possibility of using the income from the spectrum to help with our revenue problems, and I see that that is coming to pass. It is a concrete proposal in the Senate that the income from the spectrum should be used to fund this additional amount of money for education. So we hope this key bill will really move forward in accordance with the rumors, that the positive kinds of things that are being talked about in the rumors will become reality and that the next few days, before we leave, we will see an appropriations bill emerge from the floor of the Senate, which will then go to conference, and we will have--we hope that the Members of the House will still be listening to the voice of the people, the common sense of the American people, and that they will be reasonable about returning education to a status of being nonpartisan activity. Probably more important than foreign policy, education should be a bipartisan and nonpartisan activity. You know, we used to have a sort of unwritten rule that was understood that foreign policy was bipartisan, you know, or even nonpartisan. That rule has been broken quite a bit by this present Congress, but maybe it applies, or should apply more so, to education. And we return to a situation that did exist when I first came to Congress where on the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities there would be intense arguments about how to do something, about which way we wanted to proceed to improve education, but there was no argument about the fact that we needed an education department. We needed a Department of Education, and we needed to have an investment in education. How we would do it was a great bone of contention, but nobody ever proposed that we have drastic reductions in the role of the Federal Government in education. Congress must keep its eye on this prize. Education ranks high in the minds of the people because they understand, they have a wisdom that endures, and they understand what is important and what is not important. This has now been translated into the platforms of both parties. I think both parties have some strong statements about commitment to education. I do not think you still have in the Republican Party platform anything about eradicating the Department of Education. I think you have very strong statements in the Democratic platform, and you have very strong statements that are being made every day by the President about the commitment we need to make further to advance this Nation on its education agenda. It is understood that national security, a great part of national security, is what we do in education. It is understood that the H.G. Wells statement that history is a race between education and catastrophe is truer than ever before, that we will have catastrophe if we do not rise to the occasion and make certain that this leader of the free world, this leader of the industrialized world, has the best possible education. An educated populace is our most valuable asset. An educated populace is our first line of security. We should not have what has occurred in this 104th Congress; that is, a Congress proposing a $13 billion increase in the defense budget while it proposes a $4 billion cut in education programs. That is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. Our defense, our security, is very much tied up with education. And I want to note, you know, that there are many people who understand this. Because there are so many different groups in America who understand this and have become more and more vocal, they have heard the call for help, they have heard the call to protect. We needed to protect ourselves from the extremism, and more and more the widespread and diverse support for education has manifested itself, and that is good. You know, let all flowers bloom; you know, let everybody who is interested in education come forward and participate in the process of getting a clear sense of direction as to where we should go with education. It is not enough just to support it, it is not enough just to applaud the restoration of the funding at the Federal level. We must have a clear sense of direction as to where it is going to go. We must have a clear sense of how we are going to behave in our localities, the municipal governments, and a clear sense of how we are going to behave with our State governments and just what kind of commitment we are going to make for education as we go toward the 21st century. The President has a good vision, but the Federal Government is only a small player in the whole education drama. The Federal Government, at most, has spent about 8 percent of the total education budget. At the height of Federal spending for education it did not get beyond 8 percent. The rest of the money is provided by local governments and State governments. What is most important for the Federal Government is that it be the role model, that it be the drum major, that it set the tone; and that has been a positive development over the years that came to a halt with the advent of the 104th Congress. The tone was just the opposite. That the tone here in Washington was that the Federal Government should back away from the commitment, and, as a result, you have had commitments, retreat from commitments, in a number of States and a number of localities. Certainly in the locality that I represent in New York City there has been a great retreat, a movement away from the commitment to education of the kind needed. We have in New York right now a good example for all of America to take a hard look at as to what happens when you have a retreat from a commitment to an investment in education. There were 91,000 young people who reported for school on the opening school day who had no place to sit in New York City. This is hard to describe to most people throughout the country because 91,000 people, 91,000 students, is greater than the number of most school districts. Most school districts, you know, are in the 10,000 to 20,000 range, and many are much smaller than that, school districts. But here we have the New York City school district which has more than a million pupils. You know, at the height of the New York City enrollment, it once reached 1.2 million. So we are not at a point now where there are more children than the city has ever had. We once had 1.2 million in the enrollment of the New York City schools. But the city is not prepared right now to take care of 1.6 million pupils. It is not because they have never had the situation before; it is because we have leadership that has no vision, a leadership that chose to not listen to the voices of common sense, to not listen to the constituency of the city, to the parents. We had a chancellor of the schools who laid out the problem very well 2 years ago. He laid out the problem, he proposed a solution; he proposed a program to make the kind of repairs that were necessary so schools could be repaired, he proposed to build schools where they were needed, and it was all there. So it was not that the vision had not been laid out by someone, an educator who understood what was going to happen. His name was Ray Cortines. He spent some time in Washington. He was a superintendent on the west coast at one point. He was well respected as an educator. Well, he was kicked out of the city hierarchy. He was hounded to the point where he had to resign because he insisted that you have to prepare for the problems that you are going to face with respect to schools that are too old and crumbling, not safe, and we need to replace those, and we have a situation where, in certain areas of the city, the population is growing at a rapid rate. So we were not prepared. Came the opening of school, and 91,000 young people had no place to sit, because the vision was not there. If, in a highly visible situation like this, if there are no places to sit, if space, if the capacity to seat the children is not there, then you know that many other elements of the educational system also are in disarray. You cannot see the quality of teaching, you cannot easily see the quality of equipment and supplies, but if the basic space capacity is not there, then everything else is suspect. There is a collapse in the education system in New York because of bad leadership, because leadership was extreme in another direction. The mayor was intent upon making tax cuts. The mayor was intent on sending a message that we would not spend as much for education as we have been spending in the past. It was a new mayor, a Republican mayor. He had some extremist views on certain items, and he put blinders on. Now the reality is there, the children had nowhere to sit. In the midst of the reality, what has happened? We have had a refusal to recognize the reality. There is a great debate that the mayor has started about placing 1,000 of the 91,000 youngsters in parochial schools. There is a great debate about the fact that the parochial schools, the Catholic schools, have specifically said, we will take 1,000 youngsters, not just for this year but we will take them and we will take your worst youngsters, your most difficult in learning, et cetera, and we will keep them through our whole 6 years or a whole 8 years of schooling. You have to pay for them, though. You pay us what you spend per child. That is another form of choice. In this case a religious school is involved, and there are questions of the constitutionality of it arising. All of that was pushed to the side because private industry said, we will pay for them. We will raise the money. You do not have to use public funds. The mayor is busy applauding himself and going on to take care of 1,000 youngsters, and I want to congratulate him publicly for getting the private sector to put up money to educate 1,000 young people. I hope the private sector is going to provide $2 million per year, not just for this year but to keep the kids in the Catholic schools. We are interested in children being educated. I do not think anybody should stand on ceremony and say this is not the right solution, it sets a precedent. One thousand of the 91,000, good luck. We congratulate the mayor for saving 1,000. But what about the other 90,000? What are we going to do about them? So I come back to my original concern here; that is, that if the Federal Government is going to drift back on track, if the public common sense is going to penetrate the beltway, if the public common sense is going to penetrate the House of Representatives' leadership, if we are going to come back to the reality that the people want education to be made a priority, that the people want an investment in education by every level of government, starting with the Federal Government, that the Federal Government is going to begin to set an example and become a role model again, then my concern is that we understand that this is not enough. We applaud the President and his long platform related to education. We applaud the proposal that something be done about construction. It is a proposal that comes kind of late, but let us hope we can get it off the ground next year, with a small amount of money the Federal Government proposes to stimulate investment and construction for schools. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun and I, 3 years ago, authored a provision in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act which called for $600 million to be spent for construction and repairs, especially in situations where you had asbestos and you have lead in the water and you have unsafe conditions in the schools. The $600 million that was authorized was cut down immediately in the appropriation process to $100 million. That was in the 103rd Congress. When the 104th Congress came in, one of the things they zeroed out right away was the $100 million for emergency repairs and construction. So there is nothing existing in Federal law right now which will give any aid to localities that need help with buildings, with space, with asbestos problems, with lead poisoning problems, with fire violations. The city of Washington, DC, had several schools closed down on the opening day of school because they had fire code violations. The mayor of New York says that, really, we do not have a problem with 91,000 youngsters; that really there are places for them to sit on the floor. There are just not desks for all of them; or that maybe there are places for them in other schools. New York is a big city. It has 8 million people. If you bus kids around to places where they have a few empty classrooms or empty seats, if you get it all together, you can find seats for half of the students. Madam Speaker, I applaud that. If you can get it together, Mr. Mayor, please do, because you have 1,000 that you have taken to parochial schools; there are 90,000 left. If you can take half, move them around in buses, however expensive that may be, or however disadvantageous that may be for young children, if you can do that, then you have 45,000 taken care of. But what about the other 45,000? And when you get through placing them, you acknowledge, the mayor acknowledges, the school board acknowledges, that many of them are in gyms. And they consider that normal now, because they have been in gyms holding classes for several years now. Many of them are in closets. Many of them are part-time in the cafeteria. Many of them are in small auditoriums. There are various innovations that have been accepted as normal. So what if you began to meet the fire code violations, the fire code, and end some of the violations which must exist if you have youngsters packed into some of these spaces? Or health code violations, ventilation problems, where you do not have youngsters in a room with the proper ventilation? If you ended all those, our 45,000 of student problems would increase back up to 60,000 easily. We have a major problem. We have a major problem. No matter what happens here in Washington, no matter how positive the appropriations bill is when it comes finally to the floor, and we will be finished with the appropriations process for this year, it will not help that situation very much, because we do not have anything in the appropriations bill for construction, for repairs. So there is a need to call upon the Federal Government in the future, yes, but there is a need right now at the local level, at the State level, to deal with an emergency. We have got a generation of children, we have 90,000 young people, who, if we do not solve the problem this year, we partially solve it and it impacts them next year and the next year, what kind of education are you providing for those 90,000 young people? They cannot wait. The Mayor has said this situation is going to be with us for quite some time. Let us understand, we cannot solve it overnight. Whose children are involved? If your child was involved, would you be as calm as the mayor is, and say you cannot solve the problem overnight? Or would you be angry? Because we had a chance with Abe Cortines who predicted 2 years ago that we have a problem, and he was driven out of town by the harassment of this same mayor. One of the items that I have on my agenda tonight is a discussion of National Education Funding Support Day, and that has a lot to do with Washington, of course, but it has more to do with the local level. What I am trying to do, and this is a project that was conceived of by the National Commission for African American Education, the project was designed to try to engage local communities in the fight for getting more funding for education, to wake up people to the fact that education is something that is very essential, but we cannot take it for granted. You cannot take for granted that the local officials are going to do what they have to do to plan to avoid having 90,000 kids in New York City not have seats. You cannot take for granted. There must be an involvement at all times by citizens, not just the parents but all of the citizens. So National Education Funding Day, Funding Support Day, is designed to try to allow an opportunity for the businesses, for the labor unions, for the churches, sororities, all of them to get involved. We encourage them to do something for education. It is kind of a plagiarism on the National Night Out Against Crime. The National Night Out Against Crime started, and it leaves it up to the locality to be innovative. You decide what you want to do to show that you are not afraid of criminals. You decide what you want to do to protect the fact that maybe the government is not doing enough about crime. So we saw that phenomenon take place across the country and it caught on. People came out and they are very much active in the National Night Out Against Crime. I think it is on a Tuesday night in August. So we are calling for a National Morning Out for Education. The date is October 23 this year. It was earlier than last year, which was November 14. National Morning Out for Education is what we are calling for National Funding Support Day. Let any organization take part. Hopefully they will relate to an education institution, not just schools, but day care enters, Head Start centers, colleges, from kindergarten to graduate school. Let us do some things as laymen which show that everybody is concerned about education, we understand the importance of education. By doing that as laymen, we send a message to the decision-makers. The elected officials, the people who are supposed to make decisions, will maybe begin to understand that what we have read in the polls is real. They have ignored the polls. The polls say that people at every level set education as one of the high priorities for government investment. They keep saying that. But for some reason the decision- makers are blind, or refuse to recognize that fact. I do recall with great joy that we had a problem with libraries in New York City for years, getting enough funding. Public libraries were not being funded properly. I am very close to the situation because I am a librarian. I worked for the Brooklyn Public Library for 8 years before I went into city government. We organized and we showed the elected officials for the first time that the best bang for the buck that you get in public life is through public libraries. You get more out of what you spend for public libraries than you do for any other activity, certainly any other educational activity. More people participate, use the books, use the facilities. The ratio of the dollars you spend to the good you achieve to the kind of help you give people is fantastic. We finally made a breakthrough, and in the last mayoral election both candidates were vying with each other to see who could do the most for the libraries. That is the kind of breakthrough that I am optimistic about for education in general. I think we are facing a golden age, that we have seen the worst. The early days of the 104th Congress were the worst days for education. Nobody in the future will ever propose that we eradicate the Department of Education again. I do not believe that is going to happen again. I think we are on the verge of a new education-industrial alliance, that business understands that it is not going to be able to just offer rhetoric about the need to have improvements in education. It is going to have to be consistently more involved, that business is going to have to be involved in terms of supporting the kind of government investment in education that is necessary, which if that means more taxes, maybe they will follow the example of the Senate and come up with more creative ways to get taxes, like using the sale of the spectrum. Why not? The spectrum belongs to all of us. Why have we allowed it to be used for free all these years? The big broadcast industries have used the spectrum up there. It belongs to all of us. They have made billions of dollars. Why did it have to be given away to them for free? Yes, we did, in the early days of the Nation, we had land grants. We had various ways that we gave land to people, so I guess giving the spectrum away was sort of following that. The only problem with giving the spectrum away to the broadcasters is that there were only about four major broadcasters. Land grants went to thousands and thousands of people, and the grants of the spectrum, which were not seen as grants, they were given away to four major big broadcasting networks. So we ought to come back to using that kind of revenue, capturing that revenue to put it into productive activities like education. People like Felix Rohatyn, I like to cite him because he is no wild- eyed liberal, he is a businessman, a multimillionaire, maybe a billionaire, and when he makes proposals people listen, because he has demonstrated in their milieu, the hard-nosed milieu of finance and business, that he knows what he is doing. So the latest proposal of Felix Rohatyn, who was considered at one point for the Federal Reserve Board, but the name was dropped because of opposition it was felt it would meet from the Republican-controlled Senate, but Felix Rohatyn's ideas have been talked about for quite a while in a number of circles, conservative and liberal. He has come up with a simple proposal that ought to strike home here. Viewing the chaos in New York in respect to schools and space and knowing that we have an extreme situation in New York, but it is not so different in Chicago, in Philadelphia, in Los Angeles, all of our big cities are in trouble in terms of aging infrastructures for schools. Big cities happen to be where most of Americans live. Most people want to dismiss cities as being lost causes. If you dismiss cities as being lost causes in America, what you are doing is dismissing the majority of the American population as being a lost cause, because the majority of the American population, overwhelmingly they live in cities. Cities drive our cultures and cities have a lot to do across the world and throughout history with progress and advancement and the cities' role, you cannot substitute any other entity for the kind of role that cities play. If cities decline and cities decay and cities are no longer functional, then nations will no longer be functional. I hope that some day that gets through to our political decisionmakers. Rohatyn understands this. Rohatyn has been involved when New York City was in fiscal trouble, he became the head of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which is something like the Washington Financial Control Board that we have in this city now, and after his term there, he was still interested in the city and he proposed some concrete proposals that were not listened to. One of them related to schools. I am going to read from an article that Rohatyn wrote for the Wednesday, September 11 issue of the New York Times, an op-ed piece by Felix Rohatyn. I will just read some sections of it. Rohatyn says that a decade ago, and, remember, he is responding now to the fact that 91,000 young people did not have a place to sit in New York city schools when they went to school. A decade ago, in response to the abysmal state of New York City's public school buildings, the Municipal Assistance Corporation, with the support of Mayor Edward I. Koch and Gov. Mario Cuomo, committed $400 million of its surplus funds to creating a new School Construction Authority. This became the cornerstone of a five-year, $4.5 billion construction program aimed at providing decent schools and allowing for increasing enrollments over the next few years. Yet today the system is more overcrowded than ever. The buildings are often decrepit and, in many cases, dangerous for the children and the teachers. In part, this is the result of poor management * * *. In 1994, Ramon Cortines, then the Schools Chancellor, and the city's Commission on School Facilities and Maintenance Reform, led by Harold O. Levy, submitted a $7.5 billion, 5- year capital request. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, struggling with the city's budget gap, gradually reduced this request to $2.9 billion, and later to $1.4 billion, and even the $1.4 billion is now no longer guaranteed. Such problems are not limited to New York City or to schools. Practically, every large city and state face deteriorating schools, roads, bridges, mass transit systems, sewers, and pollution-control plants. Few have the money to make repairs or build anew, and many have legal restrictions on their debt capacity. They need Federal assistance-- specifically a program that would return an existing source of Federal revenue over to state and local governments. During the Presidential campaign, the 4.3 cent-a-gallon increase in the gas tax that was included in President Clinton's 1993 budget package has come under attack. Repealing it would be bad energy policy and bad economic policy. But it is worth considering a better use for the gas tax than Federal deficit reduction: making it available to state and local governments for public investment. Localities could spend the money directly on construction and renovation, or leverage the funds with secured borrowing. State and city governments have been cutting back on public investment because of budgetary problems and legal limits on their abilities to issue bonds. The income from a 4.3 cent Federal gasoline tax has the benefit of being highly predictable. It would provide about $5 billion to States every year, making it ideal for very long-term bonds issued for public investment. Nationwide, this could comfortably support from $75 billion to $100 billion in new programs by state and local governments over 5 years, assuming that they would pay an additional 20 percent to 25 percent of the cost beyond their take on the gasoline tax. With its share, New York State could generate $5 billion to $7 billion over the period. Each state would decide how best to use the money, but a significant portion would be committed to new schools and education technology. Such a program could result in more than buildings. It could create at least 2 million new jobs, public and private. Most would likely be well-paying jobs related to construction. Others would be less specialized jobs that could be opportunities for young people who need a chance to break the cycle of welfare. Under the new Federal law, finding work for welfare dependents is a hidden time bomb for state governments. Yes, the money will be lost to the Federal treasury. But replacing $5 billion each year in a $1.5 trillion Federal budget is a small challenge compared with the benefits of $100 billion of additional investment in cities over 5 years. The program would undoubtedly receive strong support from mayors and governors, Republicans and Democrats, business and labor. A program that would give city and state governments $75 billion to $100 billion would provide only a fraction of the more than $2 trillion needed nationwide for public improvements. But, if successful, the program could be extended and increased over time. President Clinton has recognized the need for Federal assistance to state and local governments by signing the bill sponsored by Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, Democrat of Illinois, providing interest rate subsidies for local school construction. This was a good beginning, but it is not nearly enough. Mr. Clinton has long called for public investment, yet neither party has put forth a program to meet the challenges facing urban America. Turning the revenue from the gas tax into schools and other badly needed public buildings would be a large part of Bill Clinton's bridge to the 21st century. End of the article by Felix Rohatyn in the September 11th New York Times. I said before Mr. Rohatyn is a businessman. He is a millionaire, he has to pay lots of taxes. He understands very well what he is proposing. The gas tax exists already. We have had a lot of controversy about repealing it. He says leave it in place, distribute it to the States and local governments, and he thinks the State governors and the mayors of municipalities will be quite happy to have this kind of innovative action by the Federal Government which will stimulate them to match them it to a certain degree and move for some improvements, including improvements on much needed educational facilities. I have not even talked about the deterioration of the infrastructure of our colleges. We have a municipal college system, city college, City University of New York has 200,000 students. They have a problem with buildings, too. I have not talked about that. My point is that I hope that we can look forward to some good news in the appropriations bill that comes from the conference of the Senate and the House. I hope that that will be a signal that we are ending the era of the attacks on the Federal role in education. I hope it will be signal that we are back on track, that education will again be a bipartisan activity. If nothing else comes out of this election year except that one positive feature, it will have a lasting impact on where the country is going. We are talking about a revolutionary time where education is really as important as the rhetoric says it is. We have had rhetoric about how important education is for decades, for centuries, but it has never been more important than it is now. I was fortunate enough to visit Russia, the former Soviet Union, this past summer, a seminar in Leningrad. Among the many things that I noted, one is of course the entrepreneurial spirit that has blossomed so quickly among Russians. Human beings are natural entrepreneurs and decades and decades of communism does not wipe out that spirit. So you are very impressed with how quickly it comes alive. The other thing that is most impressive is the tremendous degree to which the population is educated. It is a tremendously educated population. I do not just mean literacy. This is an industrial nation. This is a nation with a population that has an industrial education, a technological, scientific education. Yes, they had the worst political scientists in the world, but do not take that to mean that they do not have good scientists otherwise. The problem was political scientists are never given much credit, they are not celebrated like the other scientists, but the Soviet Union existed and plodded along and finally collapsed the way it did because they had the worst political scientists in the world. But they had scientists who put the space station up there that we are now rendezvousing, our astronauts are now going to their space station, and we should not forget that, that the kind of education, higher order education, theoretical, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, whatever you want to name, in a modern, industrialized, scientific society, it exists in Russia. They understand computers very well. They are far behind us because their political scientists did not want to have an Internet. They did not want to allow a mass production of computers. They did not want to have decent telephones because they did not want people to communicate with each other. The political scientists wrecked the economy and almost wrecked the society once and for all, but it did not wreck it to the point where the education, especially the scientific and technological education, is not there. So you have Russia, you have other eastern European countries, you have Germany, you have numerous stations where education is far superior for the masses, far superior to the education that we provide here. We talk about global competition, we talk about a small world, we talk about being able to hold our own in very loose terms, but it is very real. An educated population is our only guarantee that our society will be able to hold its own in terms of maintaining its market share, maintaining its standard of living. It can be drastically undercut. If you can have mass production of computer scientists in some other country, not just the Soviet Union, Russia, or Germany and the industrialized nations but in a nation which is a developing nation like India. India has computer scientists on a par with computer scientists anywhere in the English-speaking world. So you have many computer companies who need computer programmers hiring people from India to work for wages of one year which is equal to one month's salary for American computer programmers. In fact, they call Bangalore, India the capital--and I have mentioned this before--Bangalore, India, is called one of the capitals of computer programming because if they do not bring the Indians from there to our companies here, if they have a problem getting them past immigration and getting enough into the country to do the things they want to do, they take the work to Bangalore. Large numbers of American corporations are taking their computer programming work to Bangalore, India. They speak English, they understand science, computer science and so forth, and they are major competitors to people in the computer programming world in America. There will be more of these kinds of developments. So education in terms of market share, in terms of staying ahead of the curve scientifically, et cetera, it becomes of utmost importance. Of course last night at the Committee for Education Funding dinner where 5 retiring Members of Congress were honored, Pat Williams spoke about education to prevent civic decay. That is not a small thing. In our country, which is a democracy, if we do not educate the populace, the very democracy itself will become an enemy if we do not have people who understand how this democracy works. So nothing is more important. We have activities that are going forward to try to get this across at many levels. Within the beltway and among people who know what the education agenda is, there are certain kinds of activities at work. The Committee for Education Funding has a National Education Call-In Day which is tomorrow, September 18, 1996. They are giving everybody the capital switchboard, 202/225-3121, asking them to call the Members of Congress--Members of the House and Members of the Senate--and talk about the fact that we need help from the Federal Government to meet the challenges of growing enrollments, more students with special needs, new educational technology and a changing economy. That will work for certain groups of people as it has in the past and we hope that folks will call in and alert their Congressman to the fact that the appropriations bill for this year has not been passed. Fiscal year 1997 begins on October 1st, and the education programs are not funded. We hope that either through a continuing resolution or an agreement on the appropriations bill we are going to reach the point where this is resolved, but it will not come automatically. So call in. Call in and remember that the Committee for Education Funding has some very hard facts that you ought to bear in mind. Madam Speaker, I am going to read a few of those facts that the Committee for Education Funding put forward. Committee for Education Funding has about 80 different organizations in the country, national organizations, which have united under one umbrella to fight for more investment in education. So, they speak with great authority. School boards are represented, teacher unions, all kinds of organizations concerned with education. At high education level, at the preschool level, they are all there. The fact sheet of the Committee for Education Funding reads as follows: It wants to remind us that over the last 2 years, education suffered cuts of more than $1.1 billion. Despite the fact that we stopped many cuts, it still suffered cuts of more than $1.1 billion over the last 2 years. The fiscal year 1997 budget resolution, which is the one I am talking about now, passed by Congress this year, cuts education and--I am sorry, the budget resolution; in the budget resolution, which guides the appropriations process, we cut education and training by 17 percent in real terms over the next 6 years according to the Senate Committee on the Budget. While calling for some program consolidation reductions, President Clinton's fiscal year 1997 budget request does propose to increase the investment of education back to $2.8 billion in fiscal year 1997 and maintains that level of investment over the next 6 years. Madam Speaker, I will not go on and on with these facts. I just wanted to say that the call-in sponsored by the Committee for Education Funding is a very good idea. It is one way to have people demonstrate that the public opinions are real, the public opinion polls are real; that there are real human beings out there behind those public opinion polls. Every politician is concerned about public opinion polls and focus groups and really being in sync with public opinion. So it is kind of a contradiction, a paradox, that they will not listen to the public when it comes to education. We have to end that paradox. We have to hit the politicians, the decision-makers, and elected officials, the candidates, hit them with a sledgehammer and make them understand we mean business when we say education is a priority, ought to be a priority. One way you hit them with the sledgehammer is to keep banging away in every way possible. Make the telephone calls on October 23rd when we have the National Education Funding Support Day. Organize some kind of group and demonstrate your concern by going to a school and linking up with a school. Some people have gone to schools and provided books, gifts. Other people have helped programs in schools. There is one group of parking agents who have said they will provide a week of safe conduct to certain schools in certain parts of the cities that have had trouble with kids not being able to get to school safely. Whatever your particular organization can do, do it. We are urging that churches adopt a school and link up with what we call net day. There is a net day project that most of you have heard about. Net day means that that is a day when a locale or a State pledges to wire all of its schools, to provide the wiring necessary for the schools to have appropriate computers and for the schools to link up with the Internet. A minimum net day effort is to wire the library of the school and five classrooms. So let us have some net days on October 23. If you cannot do it by October 23, then for the period between October 23 and the middle of November, in the middle of November we have National Education Week, from October 23 to the middle of November. Try to mobilize and get together the necessary ingredients and elements to wire your school, to wire the library and wire four classrooms. That is what net day is all about. At the same time, you might consider the fact that there is a campaign on called the campaign to get the E rate. The E rate means a rate for the wired schools, for their being able to utilize the services, whether they are online services or whatever to come in the future at a reduced rate. All schools and libraries, according to the law passed by the Congress, we passed the law which says the FCC must work out a way for all schools and libraries to get a reduced rate, to be accommodated. It does not spell out how the FCC should do that, so the Secretary of Labor has proposed that they do it for free to all schools and libraries. It will be easier to administer that way, and what the companies will be doing is developing future customers. Madam Speaker, we have massive numbers of customers that, if they make it easy for them to get the necessary wiring and the cost of using the Internet and the various services is zero for the schools, then the kinds of people they will develop in the schools will be customers in the future forever. People spend 12 years in school, but they live two or three times that long. If they learn how to use these various facilities, they will be creating a market for themselves. So we say the E rate should not just be a discount rate, but for schools and libraries why not have it completely free? And that is one proposal I would like to see us support. Secretary Riley has a proposal. If we do not get that, then there are various discounts that are being proposed that we will also fight for. The FCC will make this decision sometime within the next 2 months, so it is important, as we participate in National Education Funding Support Day, to understand how important that is. That is a once in a generation time activity. Once you get that kind of benefit, it goes on and on, and it has implications for many years and many generations to come. We talk a lot about how costly these new educational technology items are, computers, et cetera. And it is true they cost so much more than a desk and chair and book. In New York City we are struggling with the problem of just providing a desk and a chair. But we cannot get locked into a situation where we do not discuss educational technology, computers, online Internet, because we have not solved the problem of the desk and the chair. If every city in America had decided it would not build an airport until it fixed all the roads and all the sidewalks, then very few cities in America would have airports. They would be in very bad shape if they did not have airports. So you have to look to the future and get involved in the new technology and what it can do for the imaginations of the youngsters who are in our schools and make certain that the schools in the inner city communities, like New York City, like my district in Brooklyn, one of the poorest districts, is not left behind because they do not have the computers and they do not have the access to the Internet. Madam Speaker, all of it has to go together. We have to fight for the desk and fight for the chair, fight for the space in a building, fight for the safety in the building, the end of the violations related to asbestos or lead poisoning, ventilation. We have to fight for it all at one time. It costs money. It will cost money, but it is not half as costly as some of the modern expenditures that we are accustomed to. We are ready to appropriate $13 billion more to the Department of Defense. In fact, that is what the majority, Republican majority has done. They have added $13 billion to the President's request for defense. A new attack submarine costs $775 million. A B-2 bomber, we can give 7 million more children an opportunity to become productive citizens for the cost of three B-2 bombers. We could double the safe and drug-free schools program for the cost of the Seawolf submarine program. America could hire an additional 267,000 elementary and secondary schoolteachers for a billion dollars. For a billion dollars we could spend an extra $23 on every elementary and secondary school child in the country. We could purchase 398,000 multimedia computers for a billion dollars. You say a billion dollars is a lot of money. A billion dollars is what--the CIA had $2 billion in its slush fund that they could not account for. It had gotten lost. To let you know, $2 billion for the CIA was not very much, but $2 billion would go a long way in terms of spending for our school children. Modern costs are high, but we should not get overwhelmed. We should understand that, if education is a number one national security item, if the people of the country, in their commonsense wisdom, have decided education ought to be the highest priority, then let us not hesitate to make the investment in education, to take us across that bridge to the 21st century. Our children deserve it, our great Nation needs it. I think we can do not less than what our capacity allows us to do.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor David Minkin, an individual whose concern for his fellow man and worthy philanthropic pursuits over the past six decades have earned him the love, respect, and gratitude of the many individuals he has touched. His life is a testament that human compassion is a factor that matters most in life. Mr. Minkin is a point of light for all Americans. Throughout his professional life as a real estate developer, builder owner and manager, Mr. Minkin has been viewed by those with whom he has been associated with as a fair, sincere, and loyal person. However, it has been his philantrophic deeds that have earned him the greatest respect and admiration of those whose lives he has touched. For the past 64 years, David Minkin has worked tirelessly in improving the health care for the residents of the Flatbush section of Brooklyn by continuing the fundraising efforts for the Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center begun by his parents Rose and Bernard Minkin in 1932. Throughout the past six decades, Mr. Minkin has held many key offices at the facility. He served as president of Kingsbrook until 1995 when he stepped down to assume the role of president emiritus and he remains the faculty's chief benefactor, leading fundraising efforts and contributing millions of dollars for the center. Mr. Minkin's first major contribution to Kingsbrook was the construction of an acute care facility named in honor of his parents in 1967 in which he raised and personally contributed several millions of dollars. He later spearheaded the construction of the last three buildings of the nine-building Kingsbrook complex. During his life David Minkin has been recognized for his contributions to a broad spectrum of religious, cultural, educational and social service agencies, institutions, and organizations. His participation and recognition for many of these worthy efforts cross religious boundaries with recognition in the Catholic community as well as in his own Jewish faith. In 1976 Kingsbrook named a facility for skilled nursing care and rehabilitation services, the ``David Minkin Rehabilitation Institute'' in honor of his contributions and dedicated service to the facility. In addition, David was awarded the Medical Society of the County of Kings 19th Annual Citizen's Award, in appreciation of his tireless efforts in improving the health and well-being of the citizens of Brooklyn through his unstinting devotion to Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center. Among his many other honors, David was awarded the Prime Minister's Medal from State of Israel Bonds, as well as the Ubi Caritas Award from Catholic Charities. A generous contribution to the Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens resulted in a residence that would provide 100 units of supportive housing for the elderly. In appreciation the organization named the facility in David Minkin's honor. At a time when charitable giving is decreasing, it is appropriate that we join his friends and family in celebrating this point of light for all Americans--David Minkin.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I agree with the gentlewoman from Connecticut [Mrs. Johnson], my classmate, my Republican colleague, that this is a ``see'' change. This is a very important change. This Congress should congratulate itself. We did in a bipartisan way finally come to grips with the common sense of the American people. The common sense of the American people came home to us. The polls showed that almost 90 percent of the American people wanted a minimum-wage increase. This is important for people at the very bottom of the rung. It does not seem like much, an increase of 90 cents over a 2-year period. But it will buy shoes, it will buy beans, it will buy rice. This is very important to these other people that have been left out while prosperity soared in America. It is very important that we begin to reward work. There are a lot of very powerful people who have spoken loudly about moving from welfare to work in the last few weeks. Well, the burden of proof is on them. Will there be work or jobs? In my district you mention a job, and people line up in long lines and hundreds of people go away disappointed because there are only a few jobs. So let us create the jobs first, and let us make the jobs pay minimum wage. There is a lot of work to be done, but work is not a job unless it is paid properly. We need the minimum wage plus a health care package. A real job is minimum wage plus a health care package. It is up to us to try to create that. Start with the minimum wage. We also want those health care packages for everybody. People on welfare find they are better off not going to work because they lose their health care. Let us finish the job, but begin with the minimum wage. We want work. The tremendous economic gap exists, with the top 5 percent of the American people, income earners, earning huge profits while at the very bottom they have found their wages have gone down in the past 20 years. If we really increase the minimum wage to a level where it would keep pace with inflation, we would be talking about a $6.25 increase. Mr. Speaker, let us reward work and pay what it is worth so that people will go to work. MR. ARCHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Ramstad], a distinguished member of the Committee on Ways and Means.