Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, a U.S. Government English-only policy would, at best, be counterproductive, isolationist, and simpleminded; at worse an English-only policy is an elitist, bigoted, and racist policy. English plus, the amendment to be offered later by the gentleman from New York [Mr. Serrano], is the way we should go. Yes, English is the official language of the country. We do not have to proclaim that. But English plus is the way we should go if we want to go into the 21st century with the advantage that we need for international trade purposes. This bill originates from the people who brought us GATT and who brought us NAFTA, who emphasized international trade. Why would these same people want to go backward and deemphasize bilingualism? Why not salute the people who speak additional languages? Why not have every American try to become bilingual? Let us go in the opposite direction for purposes of trade, for purposes of commerce, for purposes of international tourism. There are a billion Chinese in the world. We certainly should appreciate every Chinese-American; we should see them as an asset to help teach us Chinese. There are Slavic people who are now in the middle class traveling to this country as tourists. We should be learning the Slavic languages and any Slavic-speaking Americans, Russian, Yugoslavian, Hungarian; all of those people should be seen as assets in the country, assets. Let them teach us the language so that we are better able to be able to deal with those people who come over here as tourists to spend their money and to make our economy go. For the sake of the prosperity of the country, for the national security of the country we need bilingual citizens. We need English plus, not English only.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, America needs a raise; most of America needs a raise. Really, the CEO's are doing very well in America. The stockholders are doing very well. This is a time of prosperity and a great deal of growth. it is time to share the wealth, however. American workers are stagnated and some are faced with decline in incomes. Here is a small step that we can take. I wish that we could have both Republicans and Democrats resolve between now and the end of this session, at least we will do no more harm to workers than has been done already this year. The tiny steps that we can take is to move from $4.25 an hour to the first step in this two-step raise which will be 45 cents a year over a 2-year period, just 90 cents, to move from $4.25 to $5.15. What all the economist say, if you factor in inflation and you look at the way that the cost of living has been raised over the last 20 years, we are way behind. To really stay level with the cost of living, this minimum wage increase should go to something like $6.30 an hour. So even after we give the two-step increase over a 2-year period, 90 cents to bring it up to $5.15 an hour, we will still be way behind what we really had 20 years ago with the minimum wage. This is the least we can do. The war that has been declared on workers this year, starting with the November victory in 1994 of the Republican majority, is an unprecedented war. At least we can call a halt between now and November, try to stake some small steps to communicate to the American people that we do care about working families, that when we talk about moving from welfare to work, we want to make work rewarding. We have taken the rewards out of work by having people who earn the minimum wage earning less than you get if you are on welfare, and in many cases you are better off if you are on welfare and have Medicaid because at least you have a health care plan. Let us end the war on workers and raise the minimum wage without further ado.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the message of this bill this morning is to the workers of America, ``The Republicans want your overtime pay,'' from the same people who brought us streamlining, downsizing, the tremendous gap in income. The same people who have attacked the National Labor Relations Board, who have attacked OSHA, who refused to pass a minimum wage bill, they now want your overtime. As the ranking member of the committee responsible for this legislation, I have listened to the hearings. We have debated at markups, and the bill is flawed at its center, and that is the assumption that you can have mutual consent between the employer and the employee as to whether they want overtime in terms of dollars or whether they want it in terms of comp time. In my State, we recently passed a law which said that any female who is assaulted in a prison is automatically considered to be a rape victim. Any-time there is a sexual relationship between a female inmate and a prison guard, the prison guard is automatically charged with rape because in a relationship where all the power is on one side and the other person is powerless, automatically there is no mutual consent possibility. There is no mutual consent possible when the employer has an incentive to keep the money. You can invest the money that you do not pay in overtime. Overtime wages that are not paid can be invested. So the great incentive will be to keep the money and to force all workers to take comp time. Ninety percent of the employers will want workers to take comp time. Any worker who does not take comp time when the employer obviously wants him to take comp time will be labeled as a bad team player. You are not a team player and sooner or later they of course will find themselves without a job. In a job market and in a situation where people are under tremendous pressure, who will choose to exercise their right to take overtime had they known the employer wants comp time? At the heart of the bill, the assumption is wrong. This will not work. It is another attempt to make war on American workers. We have had enough of it in this Congress. We have tried to stop them from raiding the National Labor Relations Board's authority. We have stopped them from taking away the safety provisions of OSHA. Now we have to stop them where it matters most; that is, taking money out of the pockets of American workers in terms of overtime pay. The Republicans want your overtime pay, and the Democrats are here to guarantee that we do not have more assaults on working people and working families. You need your overtime pay. The overtime pay buys shoes, it buys clothes, it buys refrigerators. It buys what workers need. Workers, on the other hand, cannot afford to provide an investment pool for the employers. There will be no escrow accounts where you have to put all the overtime pay into an escrow account and know that it is there. No; the employers can invest that and they will. And you will have billions of dollars already that is unpaid for overtime under the present rules and regulations, where it is pretty clear that employers have to pay overtime in dollars. How are we ever going to police a situation where it is comp time, taken at the pleasure of the employer? There can be no mutual consent. There is no mutual consent between a slave and a master or an inmate and a prison guard. There will be no mutual consent between an employer and an employee. The employee is at the mercy of the employer, and we do not need to do any more harm than we have already done to the workers in this area. This is a year where war has been declared on workers by the Republican majority. No, Mr. Speaker, it is now time to stop the war on workers.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today the common sense of the ordinary American people came home here to the Chamber, and a fraudulent campaign reform bill was voted down by the majority of the Member of this House. It was a fraudulent bill. It was an insult. It was an insult to common sense, and I think most of the Members joined the American people in exercising some common sense. It was a bill to make politics the province of the rich in America. Under the guise of campaign reform, we would have had advantages all given to the richest Americans while disadvantages would be compounded for the poorest. I think that the majority of the Members did not see themselves going back and facing their constituents with that kind of fraudulent construction. So common sense came home and common sense is rising from the great masses out there and more and more is beginning to infiltrate into Washington and infiltrate into this Chamber. People are beginning to understand that the mass of Americans have this quality of understanding of what is really going on. They understand that they are in an economy which is booming for a handful of people, relatively speaking, the top 20 percent in America, while it is stagnating or even declining for the bottom 80 percent. They understand this. There is no way you can get around that with your statistics and your charts and your graphs. That cannot get you around the basic common sense understanding of the people of this Nation that the economy is locked into a number of contradictions. They understand that something different ought to be happening. They do not know what it is, but they understand. They understand that the Republican majority which came into power at the beginning of this session has moved in very extreme ways to make life more difficult for the average American out there. They understand this. They understand that at this point as we are nearing the end of the most active part of the 104th Congress, we still do not have a minimum wage bill. We do not have a minimum wage bill yet. They understand something is radically wrong if you cannot increase minimum wages by 90 cents over a 2-year period from $4.25 an hour to $5.15 in a 2-year period. if we cannot do this as leaders of this great Nation in a time of great prosperity where corporate profits are higher than ever before, something is radically wrong. Common sense tells the American people something is wrong here in this Chamber. They understand that a group of leaders who took control of Congress and chose to wage war, and I am using the Speaker's terminology, that politics is war without blood. Speaker Gingrich has said that several times. The way this House has proceeded in the 104th Congress, it certainly is evident that there is a belief that politics is war without blood, and war is being made on the least powerful in our Nation. The people who are the most vulnerable, the poorest, they are the victims of this war. They understand that the Republican majority first declared war on schoolchildren who needed lunches, fee lunches. Federally funded free lunches were attacked first, and the American people understand that that was the beginning of a highly visible exposure of where the mean-spirited Republican majority was coming from. It was a mean-spirited act. They understood that. They understood later on when proposals were made to eliminate the Department of Education, because education is for poor people. Public education is for poor people, and for the majority of the people, the 80 percent. The preoccupation of this particular leadership in Congress is not with the 80 percent, it is with the 20 percent of the elite who can afford to to go private schools. They understand that war on the Department of Education hurt the vast majority of our people. They understand that when you cut title I, the $7 billion Federal aid program, the only major aid program of the Federal Government that goes to elementary and secondary education, a program that impacts and has some small part of its benefits in 90 percent of the school districts in America, they understand that when you attack that kind of a program, you do not have the best interests of the average American at heart. Common sense has come home to illuminate what other people have shrouded in very complex statistics. We have heard the majority of Republicans stand up with their charts and show how they are really not cutting school lunches. We have heard the majority stand up and say education will not suffer if you cut title I. They even went as far as to cut Head Start about $300 million. Ronald Reagan, that was one of his favorite programs. No other President since the inception of Head Start had ever proposed cuts in Head Start. In fact, as I said before, Ronald Reagan increased the Head Start budget. But this group decided to cut Head Start. The average American out there understands what this says and what revelation this is about the heart and soul of the majority in this House. The majority of Republicans are elitists. The majority of Republicans do not represent the majority of Americans. They understand this. Of course, I think that the commonsense wisdom of the American people came home to the majority of Republicans. They retreated. They did not cut Head Start after all. They did not cut title I by $1.1 billion. They did not cut a number of education programs, including Goals 2000, in the first budget of this session. They finally backed down. The cuts are in there again for Goals 2000 and a few other programs, but there is no proposal now to cut Head Start. There is no proposal to cut title I again. The common sense of the American people resonated, came home, and the leadership of the Republican majority understood that. They are not tampering with education anyone. There is no more talk here in this House about the eradication of the Department of Education. There is no more talk about wiping out the Department of Education. We would be the only industrialized nation or one of the only nations in the world, really, of any substance--even the developing nations have departments of education. Whereas we do not have a Department of Education as big as Japan's or as big as Germany's or as big as France's, we do not want to have that kind of centralized bureaucracy running education in all parts of the country. We are a long ways from that, and to eliminate it totally would be to go to an extreme. Maybe France, Germany, Japan, their bureaucratic structure for centralized education departments is at one extreme, but to have none would be at another extreme. We do not spend but 7 percent of the education budget. The only percentage of the education budget that is really covered by the Federal Government at this point is 7 percent of the total amount spent on education. That means that the States and the localities finance most of the education in America. If you want to increase the Federal participation by some additional percentage, even get it up as high as 25 percent, that 25 percent Federal participation in the funding of education would still be a small percentage. The 75 percent controlled by the State governments and the local governments would mean that just as they are putting up 75 percent of the funding, they have 75 percent of the control. If you had a greater participation of the Federal Government in the funding of education, it would not mean that education is controlled by the Federal Government. It still would be controlled by the States. It would be controlled by the localities. So we could afford to spend much more. Not only should we not be contemplating elimination of the Department of Education, we should be contemplating a greater participation in education. I think most Americans understand that. As the members of the Republican majority have gone home and really talked about their extreme proposals in education and some other areas, the people out there with common sense have educated them. So it goes on. We are in a period now where Medicare cuts are still on the drawing board. I cannot say that there has been a retreat; just as they have retreated from cutting Head Start, that they have retreated from cutting Medicare. No, Medicare cuts are still on the drawing boards, and most people should understand that. Medicare cuts are on the drawing board now. They are still proposing huge cuts for Medicare. At the same time, they are proposing to give back taxes to large numbers of rich people. A large percentage of the people who pay the highest taxes will get a tax cut. The tax cut and the Medicare cut are very close to each other in terms of it is robbing one in order to fund the other. That is a fact we pointed out a long time ago. It is still the case. So common sense on Medicare still has not come home. They still do not understand that the average American knows what they are doing when they talk about great cuts in Medicare. In the name of saving Medicare from bankruptcy, they are proposing huge cuts. At the same time, they are proposing that there be huge cuts in the taxes of the richest people. They are correlated. You do not have to be a genius to make that correlation. The American people have a grasp of that, but somehow that has not come home yet. There is a need for more people to communicate with their legislators what the commonsense position is, to let them know we understand that Medicare is being threatened, still. Medicare is little more than 30 years old. We had this past summer a birthday party for Medicare in about 10 senior citizen centers in my district. We made up a little card, which actually had the bill, a photostat of the bill, signed by Lyndon Johnson 30 years ago. People have Medicare very much on their minds now. I hope they still remember that the fight is not over. This present Republican budget, this present Republican-controlled Congress, in their appropriations bills they are still going after Medicare. Medicare is still on the chopping block. The commonsense wisdom has not come home to the members of the majority. They still do not understand that the American people know what they are doing. You have to talk a little louder, I guess, scream a bit. They are obfuscating the problem with medical savings accounts and all kinds of language about going bankrupt, and they are going to save us from bankruptcy. But look at it straight. I have used several times the example of the sophomore who came home from college, and he was sitting at the table, and his very ordinary working-class father was at the table, and the other kids, and the mother was there. The sophomore wanted to show off his knowledge of philosophy. He told his father that, really, you know, there are two chickens on this table. I can prove to you, Dad, there is not one chicken on this table, there are two chickens. I can prove that to you, Dad. It is all a matter of your a priori assumptions, and if you get into the right syllogism and we move from the hypothesis to the conclusion, et cetera, and he was going on. His father said, wait a minute, son. Hold it for a minute. If you can prove there are two chickens on this table, why don't we just eat this one, and we will leave the other one for you to eat. That is the simplest way to solve the problem. I think that kind of commonsense wisdom is out there. It is a feature of American society. There are senior citizens who understand, you are taking our Medicare money and you are moving it to give a tax cut. There will be another example tomorrow on the floor of the House. I understand that the comp time bill that was postponed today will be up tomorrow. Comp time means compensatory time for your overtime. A better way to state what is happening tomorrow is that the same Republicans who went after the school lunch program and the Title I program, the same Republican majority that tried to cut Head Start, the same Republican majority that went after Medicare, is still going after Medicare, they now want your overtime pay. The Republicans are coming for your overtime pay. That is what the comp time bill tomorrow is all about. Instead of paying you for your overtime, as is done in private industry and has been done for years, and the whole economy of working- class people is structured on how much overtime can I make, how much cash can I bring home in my paycheck to pay for some shoes and to pay for a new refrigerator; you have to have cash to meet necessities, it is not a luxury, where you can afford to take it in comp time, have a bank of comp time. You work so many hours this week, so in 6 months we will give what you accumulated this week and what you accumulated next week, give it to you all in one lump sum, and you can go off in the wintertime, when the factory is slowed down and our inventory is high, we do not need you, and we will give you time off, or you can take a long vacation. But you do not have any money. The Republicans are coming for your overtime, because if they do not pay you cash, they may set it up so their friends, the elite that already earn the highest incomes--and the people who own the factories are not making minimum wage, the CEOs of corporations who will benefit from this, they are not making minimum wage, they are making very high salaries--they are going to take your overtime, what they should have been paying you in cash, and keep it and invest it. They can have a whole lot of things: Stocks can be bought, bonds can be bought, speculation; various things can happen with the money they normally shell out to you in overtime. In the meantime, you are left in anxiety about maybe you will get your overtime in compensatory time, maybe you will not, because there are no safeguards in this bill that is coming up tomorrow against bankruptcy. If a company goes out of business, how do you get your overtime? You just lost. You can go to court and sue, but try suing a bankrupt company. Many corporations disappear. Small businesses, the smaller they are, the more likely they are to just disappear. All kinds of things happen with your compensatory time. There is no protection in the bill that is going to be on the floor tomorrow about that. It is just one more piece of evidence of the heartlessness of this Republican majority, the heartlessness which common sense can clearly understand. Nobody out there needs to be told that your overtime is needed to buy shoes, to buy the things that you need right now. There is another provision that says, well, this is voluntary. If you work in private industry and you now are paid dollars for your overtime, you do not have to agree to a provision that you have to take it in comp time; instead of you taking dollars, you can take time off later on. You do not have to agree to that; it is voluntary. Common sense will tell anybody who has ever worked in a real job that you do not confront your foreman or the owner of your company with an unpopular preference. One way to lose your job is to say, well, you want me to take overtime, but I choose not to, and law says I do not have to take compensatory time. I can take it in cash. How long will the employees who choose to take their overtime in cash last on the job, versus those who choose to cooperate with the management and take compensatory time? You do not have to be a genius, you do not have to major in psychology, you do not have to study Machiavelli, to understand that here is a policy situation. The owner of the factory, the boss, is in a situation where if he says, ``I suggest strongly that you take your overtime in comp time instead of in cash,'' 99 percent of the employees who need their jobs, and most people who are working, they need their jobs, they will agree, oh, yes, we will take it in comp time. There is a provision in the bill which says that the choice of when you take your comp time has to be mutually agreed upon by the worker and the person who owns the business or who is in charge. So how many of you think that if you choose to take your comp time in July, when your children are out of school and you want to go on a vacation and you prefer the sun instead of the snow, but the inventory is such that it is to the best interests of the company to keep you working, that you are going to work out a mutual agreement whereby the company will let you go at a time which is disadvantageous to them? When your kids are in school in January and the snow is on the ground and you cannot take the kind of vacation you want to take, but the inventory is high, the company will choose to tell you, that is the best time for you to take your comp time. If they have this kind of wisdom that they offer you, how many employees are going to argue with the management and say, no, I want my comp time in the summertime. I want to go swimming, I want to go the beach, I want to be with my kids? How many employees, for how long, will be able to take advantage of this so-called mutual agreement, this voluntary arrangement? If we look at the bill that is going to be on the floor tomorrow, which is a revision of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was established by Franklin Roosevelt under the New Deal, there are a lot of provisions in there, but one provision is clear: Anybody who works more than 40 hours during the week is eligible for overtime, overtime pay. Overtime pay is time and a half. That is cash. There has a lot been made about the fact that in the public sector, municipal government, State government, Federal Government, we have comp time provisions now already. Comp time provisions are there, they have always been there because the government is not in the business of earning a profit. The government does not have any extra margin. The government for various reasons is not in the same position as private industry. People who go into government traditionally have accepted the fact that you do not have the same provisions that you have in the private sector because the government has been traditionally a more secure place to work. Security was traded for the paycheck advantage that you have in the private industry. So having the security of a long-term Government job, having the pensions that Government jobs had, having the health care plan that a Government job had, there are a number of reasons people traded off and decided not to worry about being paid in cash. What is happening nowadays is that the municipal systems and the State governments and the Federal Government are becoming less and less secure. We are behaving more and more like private industry, so it is probably altogether fitting and proper that we change and have government pay overtime in cash. We are going the wrong direction. We are not going to give people job security. Their pensions are no safer because we are playing around with pensions in some government units. Health care we want to tamper with. If we are going to behave as the private sector behaves, then maybe everybody should be paid in cash instead of having this tradeoff where you accept the situation of comp time. But we are going the opposite direction. We are about to move in to take the overtime away from working people in an atmosphere which is hostile. I serve on the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities which is responsible for this particular provision of the law, the Fair Labor Standards Act. In fact I am the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections which is directly responsible for this piece of legislation, and there are some adjustments that probably could be made. I do not think that we should ever pour concrete over any set of rules and regulations. I do not think we should ever be so inflexible that we cannot adjust anything. But in the present atmosphere where the Republican majority has attacked working families and workers consistently since January of 1995 when they came into power, there is no reason to believe that there is a good faith glue that might help make some of the onerous provisions of this bill better. There is no reason to take anything for granted. If you do not have protections for people who are working overtime and prefer to have cash instead of comp time, if there is no way to guarantee that they have an equal choice there and that the management cannot bully them, then why go into it? If there is no way to guarantee that they are going to be able to take the comp time off when they want to or reach some kind of reasonable settlement or agreement with the management, then why go into it? Why in a period where we have a party in power operating on behalf of an elite business community which refuses to give us 90-cent increase in the minimum wage over a 2-year period, which attacks the Occupational Safety and Health Agency, Americans across the country benefit from the provisions of OSHA. That was attacked, I forgot to mention. Very early OSHA was put under attack. One-third of the budget was cut in the bill that the President vetoed. Finally they brought the cut down. There is still less funding for OSHA now than there was before the attack was launched by the Republican majority. Davis-Bacon provisions are under attack still by this Republican majority. Why in an atmosphere where the National Labor Relations Board, they proposed to cut its budget by one-third and they backed away from that but there is a cut and there are less resources now for the National Labor Relations Board than there were before. In an atmosphere where every organ of government that benefits working people is under attack, why should we accept any proposal for a good faith effort on taking away your overtime? The Republicans are coming for your overtime and you should be aware of that. Republicans are coming for your overtime. You should send a common-sense message to the Congress, Republicans and Democrats, that you understand what is going on. I understand that the focus groups, the polling groups and all the experts that politicians pay large amounts of money to, they are reaching the conclusion that I discussed here 6 months ago, that common sense says we have a party in power that cares very little about working people. Common sense says that we have a party in power that wants to help the rich to get richer. Common sense says that the gap in the incomes of the richest Americans which has greatly increased over the last 10 years is not just some piece of statistics on a paper, it is symbolic of the kind of anxiety that American families feel. Common sense says that people who brought us streamling and downsizing, common sense says that the same people who are tampering with our pension funds in corporations, common sense says that they cannot be trusted to give us a new deal on our overtime and it benefit the workers. It will not benefit the workers. The workers are under attack and the tampering with the Fair Labor Standards Act that is being proposed tomorrow on this floor is just one more example of how the Republican majority has not gotten the commonsense message yet fully. They have gotten it in education, so they modified their approach on education cuts. But they have not understood that the average constituent out there understands that these are policies which benefit an elite minority. These policies which support streamlining, downsizing and now want to take your overtime pay, that is one more piece of money, pot of money that whey will have to invest. Your overtime pay, instead of being given to you, will be invested somewhere by the people who are already earning a great amount of money off their investments. Common sense says no. You need to communicate that. They are getting the message slowly here in the Chamber. The vote on the Campaign Finance Reform Act says that it is coming home. Common sense is telling the legislators that you cannot swindle the American people. You cannot set up a system where the richest people are given free rein to spend as much money as they want to, to contribute to campaigns in greater numbers, and the poorest are confined to raising the money within their district. If you happen to live in a poor district, you are going to have to raise money just in that district. At least half of the funds have to come from there. There are various mechanisms which are thrown out there which look good on the surface, yet when you look behind it and you understand that the cap is being taken off the rich and they can spend more and more to influence the way our democracy works. It does not take a genius to understand that kind of swindle. Mr. Speaker, I received a fax last time, I receive lots of faxes after the comments I make on these special orders, but the last time, it was very interesting, I received a fax from some gentleman who said in the fax, ``You are a true believer. You are dangerous because you really believe in what you are saying. You are naive but you believe what you are saying.'' That seems to shock him that I should believe. That night I talked about the Families First agenda and I talked about the fact that the critical problem is jobs and the companion problem is education, the two inextricably interwoven. When I came to Congress, I asked to be placed on the Committee on Education and Labor because my district needed jobs more than anything else, and I understood that they would not be able to get jobs unless they got better education and you had to mix the two. So I was talking about jobs and education. I talked about that segment of the Families First agenda, and he said, ``You really believe that stuff.'' Yes, I do believe it. It is not just a construct that minority leader Dick Gephardt put together. It is not something that is out there swinging in the wind as a slogan to attract, as bait to attract people who would vote for Democrats. It is common sense that nothing is more important at this particular juncture in our society than jobs and education, and the two go together. Nothing is more relevant than jobs and education. I have some people in my district who talk about, you go into these special orders, what does it have to do with a poor person in your district? I have a district which is not all poor, there is some diversity, but two-thirds of the people in the district are poor. Those who are working are making minimum wage. What relevant does this speech have? Well, it has a great deal of relevance. I am concerned about jobs and the failure of our economy to create more jobs for people who are poor, who do not have education, who would have to take entry level jobs, as we call them. I am very concerned about that. I am concerned about the fact that those entry level jobs get more complicated all the time and that really if you want to help somebody to get out of poverty, they are going to have to have more education. It has a relevance to the people in my district. The poorest parts of my district need jobs and there are ways to create those jobs, and I am concerned about the fact that what goes on down here in Washington does not address those needs. At the same time that the Republican majority was proposing to eliminate the Department of Education which would greatly hurt the people who want education back in my district, at the same time they were proposing to do that, they cut out the Department of Tourism in the Commerce Department, a very small unit. Of all the industrialized nations, we had the smallest effort going forward in terms of promoting tourism. Tourism is a gold mine for a Nation like this which is admired throughout the world. Tourists want to come from all parts of the world. There are many municipal governments that understand this and they are working hard to attract tourists. There are many States that understand this and they are working hard to attract tourists, tourists from one part of the United States to another and tourists from overseas. Tourists are a very important part of New York City, probably the largest industry in New York City, at least the second largest. It changes. The finance sector may have the largest one year, tourism another. But tourism is a huge industry, an industry that does not require pollution. You do not have to have big factories polluting the air. It does not require natural resources being located nearby so you can haul the iron ore and the coal and mix them together and get a product. Tourism is a very unique kind of industry which has a great growth potential in a place like New York City and most of America. People want to see the Grand Canyon, the cities out west, small towns, all kinds of things are on the agenda for tourists within the country and tourists from outside of the country. Most people want to see America at one time in their lifetime. They cannot do it unless they belong to the middle class. The middle class groups are the only ones who have the leftover income, that discretionary income that can allow them to travel. But the middle classes across the world are increasing. I give the example to the people in my district. It is relevant to New York residents that the tourism trade flourish, because when people come to a big city like New York, they all eat in restaurants, so the jobs in the restaurants, whether it is washing dishes or cooking, all those jobs increase; waiting tables, all those jobs increase. When people come to New York, they go to the stores and buy retail products. Those jobs increase. When they come to New York, they go to places of entertainment, small and large. Those jobs increase. So the person in my district, whether they are uneducated and have to take an entry level dishwashing job or whether they have some skills and can take a job as a chef in a hospital, it is very relevant. In fact, there was a young man that I have known for a long time who recently told me about his catering business. I saw him about 4 years ago and he was down and out, working hard, going to work every day, but he was depressed. Even his physical demeanor communicated depression and defeat, the same kind of defeat and depression that so many black males feel in America. There was an article in the Washington Post yesterday about suicide among black males which was astonishing, shocking, frightening. Suicide among black males has greatly increased in the last few years. I am black, I have been black all my life, born black, and in our folk culture, we swear that black folks do not commit suicide. No matter what happens, we adjust, we cope, we love life. We do not commit suicide. Well, that is just one of those pieces of folk wisdom that has gone by the way. The statistics are there, they are horrifying, large numbers of black males are committing suicide. They are depressed. Whatever the reasons, I will not go into this point, it is a subject for a later discussion. But here is a black male in his thirties, early thirties, two kids, a wife, going to work every day, not getting anywhere, he decided to go to school, get a food handler's license, then go further, get training. Now he is a chef, a chef at a hospital. In addition to being a chef at a hospital, he is developing his own catering business. The difference in the demeanor, the sunshine that comes out of his face and the change in his voice, everything is a transformation. He is going places, his catering business is going places. He has to rent kitchens on the weekend. In New York, they have lots of people and people are always eating, so the catering business is a good business. More tourists come, of course there will be more people who have to eat, various kinds of functions. There is a future there, great future. So what I am saying is relevant to him. The more tourists we get, the more our economy grows, the more people there are to feed in situations which require caterers. It is relevant. Everything all falls in place. It is relevant that he had an opportunity to go to school. He had to pay for the courses himself. He chose to make that investment, but he has become a chef. Beyond being a chef, he is going to be a businessman. I say all this to say that the person who said to me, you are a true believer, you are dangerous, and some other people say what you say on the floor of this House, this empty Chamber, is not relevant, is very relevant. It is relevant because we are in a transition period in this Nation, and what we do here in the House of Representatives and what we do in the other body, and we are not just a few people around talking, we are very powerful people. If you look at the 100 Members of the Senate and 435 Members of the Congress, you are talking about 535 people who are like vice presidents of the world's most powerful corporation. People like to play games out there and talk about we spend too much money on our mail, we spend too much money on our phones, we rent cars for too great an expense. They like to play around the edges and like to trivialize the Members of Congress, as they do all politicians. But we are very powerful people. We make decisions which are life and death decisions. We are at a critical period in this country where we have people in power who are making the wrong decisions, and it is important to take advantage of the opportunity at least to have a discourse, and if you can, do nothing more than point it out and verbalize it, talk about it. I want to talk about the great mistakes that are being made. It was a mistake to talk about abolishing the Department of Education. We have backed away from that. We abolished the Department of Tourism and the tourism unit in the Department of Commerce, how small it was, has been abolished. That was a great mistake. We are making humongous errors in not going forward to fund higher education at a higher level, escalating level. We need to be investing tremendous amounts of money in all education, and certainly in education, in higher education, but right across the board our investment in education should be escalating instead of stagnating and actually suffering cuts in many ways. We are at a period in history where if we do not take the flood, as Shakespeare said, there is a time when you have to act. We are at a critical period where 80 percent of the population is getting more and more anxious, and some elements of the population are getting angry. Some elements of the population are committing suicide because they are bottled up in an economy and they see plenty all around them advertised on television, millionaires and CEO's making fantastic salaries. The anxiety and the tension is unhealthy for Americans in general. People who have something now still have anxiety because they see it slipping away. We are in a period where we need to take a bold step and say the salvation of this society is education. The salvation of this society is an explosive investment in education which will also be followed by an explosive investment in new kinds of jobs that people can qualify for. There have been two periods in American history where we have been fortunate enough to have visionaries on the scene and listened to those visionaries long enough to let them put in place a revolutionary concept that has transformed the nature of our society. People do not talk much about the Morrell Act. The Morrell Act created the land grant colleges in all the States. The Morrell Act guarantees that every State would have a college, a university which was committed to practical education. The Morrell Act was a revolutionary idea. Thomas Jefferson, when he founded the University of Virginia, spoke in terms of he would like to see every State have a university, but he was in no position to act upon it. Morrell, whose name very few people know, the act very few people know about it, created a situation where the Federal Government invested in higher education in every State of the Union. Every State has a land grant college or university. They went beyond that and gave a mission to these colleges and universities, so the universities spawned experiments in agriculture. Experiments that took place in agriculture in the theoretical structure of the university, and then they developed agriculture experimental stations, they developed the county agents who took what the agriculture experiment stations had learned and took it out to the farmers, into the fields, and showed the farmers how to apply it, and as a result, the one place where this Nation has been unchallenged for the last few decades, nobody comes close to America in terms of its production of food. Our agriculture industry stands alone. We have the cheapest food in the world. We export food. It all started with education, folks. Nobody understands it is not just that our soil is better than the European soil or our rain is better. There are some advantages that a few places in the country have, but we have suffered floods and famines and all the folks' problems that they suffer in other countries, but the wisdom which led to the application of the principles learned in the classroom to experimentation and then down to the actual farmer's field, that has made all the differences in the world, the Morrell Act, an act of Congress that very few people understand which transformed education in America. In addition to agriculture, engineering is what you will find in every land grant college. Very early they went into engineering and the kind of industrialized might that Adolf Hitler had to face when America entered the war did not happen overnight. It was built up through the complex of education institutions that had been developed long before a world war was ever contemplated by any American, the Morrell Act. Another great revolutionary act that is not given due credit is the GI bill of rights. When the large numbers of soldiers returning from the Second World War were given the right to go to school, not just to college, but also to trade schools, not just to college, but also to trade schools, and any soldier had a right to go to school and the Federal Government would pay for most of that education, that was another revolutionary act that you do not understand. Large numbers of people were interjected in our society with educations to keep building our industrial base in very sophisticated ways. The Soviet Union never knew what hit it when it began to rival the United States in production, in achievement, scientific engineering achievement. It had to face the combination of the Morrell Act and the GI bill of rights, a massive infusion of dollars for education which produced the desired results, the massive number of educated people. We are at a period now where that kind of transition is what we need. So it is relevant. Democrats talk about paycheck security, helping families to get the paycheck they deserve. They are not just talking about tomorrow's fight on the floor of the House to keep the Republicans from taking away the overtime cash payments for people. We are not talking just about that; we are talking about paycheck security in terms of providing for people to upgrade their skills, to get more education in this complex society. Probably education has to be a permanent feature of the life of every family, of every person getting more education to stay up, to keep up. That is absolutely necessary. So paycheck security is relevant to everything else I have been talking about. It is relevant to keeping the Department of Education and the Department of Labor active so that they can stay on top: What kind of training do we need for the year 2000? How are we funding that so that it is not just an elite minority that gets help, not only people who are going into academic training but the guy who wants to be a chef? There are more of them out there and they are needed. The people who want to go into electronics, we are going to need more and more people who can really fix computers, VCR's. Half the families I know who have computers will tell you they are not working or one part of it is not working, they are using only a tiny part of the capacity because part of it is not working or they cannot figure out how to work it. So there are large numbers of possible job opportunities out there for people who go into electronics and deal with these gadgets and keep up with the complications that have developed, are developing all the time. Auto mechanics are not what they used to be. They have to be very well-educated and deal with very complex systems. You think you are talking to a physics professor sometimes when you go into a garage. This is the way things are now, the way they are going to be. If we do not give the educational opportunities, if they are not there, we are going to have a society that is crippled, because we have great needs out there that cannot be met in terms of functions. At the same time, we have a need for people to earn a living. The welfare bill that we passed last week, when we start talking about welfare reform now, people's eyes glaze over. Nobody wants to hear all the detailed discussions. But the problem with the welfare bill is at the heart of the bill that calls for reform, to put people to work, is a big lie. The provisions for work are not there. The provisions for the development of jobs, the provision for job training, the provisions for child care for people who go into job training or work, they are not there. The Congressional Budget Office has said we need $9 to $10 billion to just do what you say in that bill. The Republican bill has language, they have rhetoric in there about work and job training, but if you do what you say you are going to do, you need $10 billion more over the next 6 years. This is not the wild-eyed liberal from New York, Major Owens, talking. This is the Congressional Budget Office. The Congressional Budget Office did not say it that way, but that there is fraud in the whole construct. Every time we hear people talk about welfare reform, they talk about putting people to work, and yet the provisions for guaranteeing that the people are given skills that they need and the competencies they need in order to match up with the jobs that are available, it is not there. The provisions for the creation of new jobs is not there. We need lots of things in this society. There are jobs out there, there is work to be done, but if you do not pay for it, it is not a job. The Federal Government needs to pay for the building of schools during this transition period, so a lot of people get work building schools. The Federal Government needs to pay for some of our infrastructure improvements in terms of highways and roads. More needs to be done that would provide jobs during this transition period. All of these things are necessary to make work a reality. There are no jobs in Brooklyn. There are no jobs in my 11th Congressional District. Every time somebody announces a job, long lines of people form, and only a handful can get the few jobs that are available. There are jobs that are being lost in my congressional district. Every hospital is laying off people. The largest employer in the 11th Congressional District in Brooklyn that I serve is a hospital. The biggest hospital in Brooklyn is Kings County Hospital. It has been in existence for more than 100 years. They are talking about closing Kings County Hospital. Thousands of people work there in many different capacities. Do we need fewer hospitals? Maybe we do, but there is a wholesale movement on to rush into privatization of health care that is going to destroy those jobs before we are really certain as to what is going to replace them. These are things that are happening. We need ways to train the new medical personnel if we are going to have personnel in a different setting. The people will not go away. They still have health care needs. You need new kinds of people to carry out those health care needs. What I am saying is that it all holds together. What I talked about is practical. It applies to people in my district who are suffering from a lack of jobs and job opportunities. We have taken some steps in my district to combat some of the hysteria surrounding the move for privatization. The Republican majority here in the Congress is not alone. There are Republicans in city hall in New York, there are Republicans in the Governor's chamber in New York, and because people have come alive, because common sense in New York is manifesting itself and communicating itself, we have just gone through the passage of a State legislative budget where no further cuts in tuition at any of the State colleges will take place. The City University of New York, the State University of New York, a total of more than 400,000 students, they will not have to face another tuition increase. That is a victory, because the projections were they were going to have to face new increases. Certain hospitals projected to be closed by the Governor, one in my district, Kingsborough Psychiatric Hospital, serving 2.5 million people, the only one in the district, 2.5 million people need a psychiatric hospital. They were proposing to close it down, because the people have become aware, because common sense has said ``no,'' they backed down. They are not closing that hospital. So we have a check that is built into democracy. If it can operate fast enough, the common sense of the people communicates to the leaders, who are off in their own extremist dream land agenda, and the leaders, if they are listening to the people, they respond. There is a correction. There is a need for a great correction in course. We have been pushed off course by the philosophy that politics is war without blood; have been pushed off course by the philosophy that you need to attack and eliminate a whole segment of society. We need to wipe out labor unions, organized labor, workers, the power that workers have to make decisions. That is the wrong way to go. We need a correction. We need to recognize that we are going into a transition, and that kind of foolhardy approach, that kind of extremist approach, only moves us away from the building of a kind of Great Society that we wanted to build. The families first agenda addresses this by trying to bring the extremists back down to earth. We talk about paycheck security, about healthcare security. Healthcare security means you have to stop tampering with Medicare. The medical savings account is a way to erode Medicare, take away the healthiest people from the pool and guaranteeing that there will be a collapse in the Medicare system, if you only have to pay for the sickest people. Healthcare security is a very vital part of the families first agenda. Opportunity is absolutely vital. Educational opportunity, making college and vocational schools tax deductible and other ways for parents to make sure their kids get better paying jobs. Educational opportunity means that you should not have as many college students who are going back to college in the fall now facing situations which are more difficult with respect to getting loans. We want to eliminate that. We want to latch on to the proposals that have been made by the President for tax deductibility and for tax credits related to education. We want to adopt the President's proposals about merit scholarships. All of this is part of the understanding that we are in a transition period and we need to have a different set of priorities. We cannot pour another $13 billion into defense while we are cutting the education budget. I want to close by saying that I am a believer. The Families First agenda, which emphasizes security, opportunity, responsibility, is a practical agenda. It is worth fighting for. It is an agenda which is humane. It is an agenda which develops human beings and promises a society which is just and fair for everybody. It is an agenda which will bring us prosperity and growth. Prosperity and growth is directly linked to the number of people educated. Nothing is more important to our society than an educated population. The educated population has to be a healthy population. We cannot say we care about people if we are willing to take away their food stamps and to deny Aid to Families with Dependent Children. I think most people out there do not understand that Aid to Families with Dependent Children, what is normally called welfare, is about 1 percent of the total Federal budget. More important, most people do not understand that Aid to Families with Dependent Children is part of the Social Security Act. It started with the Social Security Act, as a part of the Social Security Act. It is all under the Social Security Act. That is where Medicare is also under. Medicaid is also under the Medicaid act. I get senior citizens that say to me, ``Please don't let them touch my Social Security.'' There is no direct assault on what you call Social Security, your check that comes in the mail, yet. The fact that welfare in the form of Aid to Families with Dependent Children is going to cease if this bill passes and the President signs it, there will be no more entitlement for Aid to Families with Dependent Children. That is a part of the Social Security Act that has been chopped away. That sets up the stage for more of the Social Security Act to be chopped away. We do not talk about that, but I think you ought to come to that realization. If they are willing to go after Medicare, if they are willing to transfer the dollars in Medicare to provide for a tax cut for the rich, then they certainly eventually will not mind chopping away at Social Security. Let us get ready. If they are willing to go after young children and declare that we have no responsibility for them as a Federal Government anymore, the entitlement is gone. They are setting up a situation where the governors will be able to not only play with the dollars that are given for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, but the governors want to play with Medicaid money. There is not enough money in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, so there is a move to get their hands on the dollars in Medicaid, to take the money meant for the poor and do other things to meet the needs at the state and local level. I am going to conclude with a little rap poem I wrote sometime ago in connection with the way we are treating children. There is a great deal of clamor about choice versus the right-to-life. I wish we would care about life for the children who are already here. This little rap poem, which I already have placed in the Congressional Record some time ago, which is called ``Message From the Newborn to the Fetus.'' The newborn is talking to the fetus. Message From the Newborn to the Fetus Man stay in there The womb is where its at Until tots slide out and breathe The right-to-life is guaranteed You never had it so good Out here in America They don't treat us Like they promised they would Right away at the hospital They put us out Cause my welfare Mom Didn't have no clout Stay where you are man The womb is where its at A smart fetus can live Like a rich lady's cat No food stamps for immigrants But long picket lines protect Our pre-birth rights The womb they glorify Outside they watch us die The womb is where its at Curled up in that nice nest You always get the very best But out here only fear They'll take my entitlement Man stay in there Cash in on this fetus fetish Be a hero embryo Pro-life politicians Offer nine months of love But at birth's border Immigrants from heaven Receive a hellish shove Until tots slide out and breathe The right to life is guaranteed Long protest lines protected Our pre-birth rights We crave the medals they gave When we were hidden Intimately way out of sight The womb is where its at Safely grow soft and fat Immigrant school lunches are now gone Budget cuts down to the bone Newborns sound the trumpet This land is littered With ugly infant tombs Babies must unite in battle Make war to regain Our wonderful respected wombs The womb is where its at Until tots slide out and breathe The right-to-life is guaranteed We appeal to the United Nations We cry out to the Almighty Pope The holy right of return Is now our only hope Man stay in there The womb is where its at.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today we passed the Republican majority's welfare reform bill, H.R. 3734. I think this triumph of the Republican majority again proves what we have said all along, that Democrats put families and children first, Republicans put families and children last. The Republicans are at least open and consistent, I appreciate their honesty. They are open and consistent in their extremism. As Speaker Gingrich has said, politics is war without blood. The Republicans have declared war on families and children and they do not hide it. They have declared war on working people. They do not hide it. They are consistent. The American people will have a clear choice in November. There is no camouflaging of their intentions. The Republicans have done more than they said they would do but they clearly have laid out a pattern which shows that they are not for families, they are not for children. They use the rhetoric, they use the slogans, but the proof is in their actions. Today's welfare reform legislation certainly proves that. I am all for welfare reform. I am in favor of reforming any program and any function of government, in fact. That is part of our vital function here, to keep the process of reform going. There is not a single government program or a single function of government that cannot stand improvement. The process of reform should be a permanent, ongoing process, and welfare certainly needed reforming. It did not need reforming because the poor people have ruined it because poor people do not administer anything. Poor people have no power. Poor people have no say in how we have administered any program, and certainly they have had no vital function here in the administration of the welfare program. If the welfare program needs reform and needed reform, and I think it did, it is because the people who are running it, including the policymakers in our Congress and our various State legislatures and city councils, it needed reform because we have not operated properly. Did it need such extremism as we have seen today, in today's Republican welfare reform bill? It can best be described, I think, and I will read this little description from the Democratic whip notice. I think it describes it quite well and summarizes some of the problems quite well. The Welfare Budget Reconciliation for Fiscal Year 1997 is what the title of the bill is. It creates a welfare block grant to replace the current Aid to Families with Dependent Children and three other related programs. The bill is tough on kids and weak on work. More than 1 million children will be pushed into poverty, and in 70 percent of these families, one of the parents is working. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Republican bill provides $10 billion less than what States need to meet its work requirements. The bill has certain requirements for work but there is a need for funding for those requirements and they have $10 billion less than what is needed by the requirements of the bill according to the Congressional Budget Office. This bill makes it less likely that child support orders will be updated regularly. It actually weakens current law on deadbeat parents while increasing Federal costs. In addition, emergency funds for use during a recession are inadequate. There was also an amendment to the bill which passed which Members ought to know about which limits the lifetime use of food stamps. There is a lifetime limit of 3 months for the use of food stamps. Individuals, families who have fallen into hard times for a brief period and need to eat, something as basic as food will be denied. You have got 3 months for your lifetime, regardless of your circumstances, the Federal Government will help you eat and stay alive for only 3 months. We do not say we have 3 months, or that there is a limit on the amount of earthquake assistance we give. If people live in zones where they have earthquakes, no matter how many earthquakes you have, the Federal Government will always rise to the occasion and there will be aid for people who suffer from disasters that are natural disasters, like earthquakes. No matter how many hurricanes or tornadoes come, there will be Federal aid for people who are in the path of a hurricane or tornadoes. There will be Federal aid for people who are in flood plain zones. Even if they have had floods there before and people know the danger, and they continue to build houses there, there is still Federal aid. There is no limit on the amount of Federal aid you can get. Over the last 3 years, we have paid out quite a bit of Federal aid for natural disasters, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. But individual disasters, family disasters, which are economic and which will come, we all admit. We have a fluctuating economy, an economy which is constantly in motion, and there will be temporary losers. That is a certainty. But the temporary losers now will have a limit on how much you can get in food stamps. The most elementary and the least thing that the Federal Government can do for you is to give you an opportunity to eat. That is going to be limited. That is what this bill does. I am not going to spend all my time talking just about this bill. I want to bring a commonsense perspective to the whole welfare debate. This great triumph of the Republican majority today which will certainly be repeated in the Senate, and we can expect this bill to go the President's desk. He has said he will veto it as it is, but the perspective that should have been brought to the discussion and the debate today, we could not bring it there because there was so little time to debate the bill. I have had a lot of comments from people who watch these special orders, and there are a lot of good people out there who watch them. I am always surprised at the number of people who say that they do watch the special orders. They want to know why you are talking in an empty room. Why bother to talk to an empty Chamber? Two things: They do not know for most of the time debate is going on and during the regular session, the Chamber is almost empty. But more important than that, this is an institution, a special order institution, which allows us to bring some perspective to the debate, to talk in terms which will allow the American people to understand what is going on here. It is an opportunity for those of us who care about making commonsense decisions and making reasonable decisions with the best information that we can get. We take advantage of this opportunity to give real information to people. We do not talk about the things that are really important in this country. We do not give the time we need to the life and death kinds of public policy decisionmaking. People think that food, clothing, and shelter are the three necessities of life, and that is the way it is and that is the way it always has been. Well, food, clothing, and shelter are three basic necessities, but information to make informed decisions is as vital as food, clothing, and shelter. In a democracy, the public policy decisions made will often determine whether you will get food, clothing, and shelter. Certainly nothing offers a better example of that than the bill that passed today, which deprives people who are in desperate circumstances of food stamps. So I am here because this is an opportunity to help bring a perspective to the situation that I could not bring otherwise. Why did I not talk during the debate? I talked during the debate for 2 minutes. I had to beg for 2 minutes. That is the best I could get. You can understand if there are 435 Members of the House, and seldom do 435 Members of the House all want to speak on the same subject, let us say 200 Members of the House want to speak, and they are given 1 minute apiece, that is 200 minutes. I think we should have the 200 minutes. Maybe we should all get 5 minutes apiece. You need at least 5 minutes to make a decent statement. We cannot get 5 minutes apiece if 200 people want to speak on a subject. In fact, you might be interested to know that on this very important topic of welfare reform, where we are making vital decisions about the entitlement to subsistence, this is a matter that was decided in the 1930's under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, when the Social Security Act was passed. We gave people an entitlement to help when they are in desperate need. Families were given this entitlement. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children is an entitlement which in essence says children in need must be helped and the Federal Government is going to stand behind you and guarantee that help. The States are obligated to make their contribution in this process. So the entitlement is taken away by this legislation. Something as vital as an entitlement is gone. I am happy to report that the entitlement for Medicaid, which they are trying to steal also, the Republicans are quite honest, they do not pretend to care about families and children. They put families last. Democrats put families first. And they have not camouflaged their intentions. They wanted to take away the entitlement for Medicaid as well as take away the entitlement for Aid to Families with Dependent Children. When we take away the entitlement for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, we begin to chop away at the substance and foundation for Medicaid, because if you are not deemed eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children--and the States have a block grant, they have a great deal of freedom and leeway in making the decisions about who actually gets designated as a person in need--then they will be able to lower their Medicaid bill by refusing to certify that people are eligible for AFDC. The families are eligible for help. So we have already begun to chip away at Medicaid, which is the first and most important step this Nation has ever made toward universal health care. So, as I say, we had 2 hours of debate allotted for this, 1 hour for the Republicans and 1 hour for the Democrats. Two hours allotted for debate, in a Chamber which has 435 people. So you can see how important this institution is of special orders. When 435 people are there, there is no time to actually give a discussion which makes sense. I think we should allocate more time for debate on the floor. I do not know why we cannot spend more time in session. You might be interested to know that Roll Call, the newspaper here which is focused primarily on the coverage of activities in the Congress, Roll Call does periodically a little chart called Congress at Work, and they give the work load figures for the first half of the year. Here is a comparison of Congress' effort so far this session against the same period in 1994. To compare the Senate and the House, they have the number of days that we have been in session, the House of Representatives, with 435 people who need time to deliberate and speak. The House has been in session for 82 days this year, from January 3 to June 30, 82 days in session. The Senate with only 100 people has been in session for 90 days. The House, with 435 people who have to have time to deliberate and to debate, has spent 615 hours in session from January 3 to June 30 with its 435 members, while the Senate has spent 651 hours, more hours with only 100 members. So just that little item tells you that something is very strange about the way we operate. Are we afraid of debate? Are we afraid of discussion in the House? Why can there not be more time allotted on the floor for an issue as vital as life and death matters related to food stamps, related to children, aid to families with dependent children. That is just what it says, it is aid to families with dependent children. No matter how many stereotypes we have thrown at us about welfare mothers, and there are excesses and abuse, it is primarily a program to help children. If they do not have children, they do not get AFDC. The money is really there for children. We have taken away the entitlement, the Federal Government's participation guaranteeing that everybody will get it. We left it to the States and the localities to decide who gets it, who does not, and how much. We have made a radical change. This is an extreme change. We could have had welfare reform without such extremism. We did not have to go to that extreme, but we have taken an extreme step, and we only had 2 hours of general debate on the floor. There was another hour to debate a Democratic substitute, 30 minutes on one side and 30 minutes on the other. So you have these far-reaching public policy decisions which will mean life and death for numerous families, numerous individuals in the future. If not life and death, for many others it will mean a lot of suffering that cannot be relieved in some reasonable way. And all we had was 2 hours to debate. So we need an opportunity to set this thing in perspective. I would like to put it in the context of other developments in this 104th Congress. Let us take a look at this great triumph of the Republican majority today. They passed a bill which is going to hurt families and children. They put families and children last, as they have done from the very beginning. We had the same phenomenon in the fall when the school lunch programs were being discussed. They started with their attack on school lunches, and, to some degree, they relented because we exposed them. They started with their attach on education programs, title I. They wanted to cut it by $1.1 billion. Head Start they wanted to cut by $300,000. Many other education programs are wiped out completely, a total of more than $5 billion in cuts. But we took that case to the American people, and the voters out there in their districts let every Member of Congress, regardless of their party, know that those education cuts were not acceptable. So they backed down and they did not cut it. But they did make the attempt in their war against families, in their war against children. They had to capitulate. Even Hitler's Wehrmacht had to capitulate in a few cases in its early days. They thought they had victory after victory after victory, and when they invaded Russia, it looked as though they were going to march all the way to Moscow. But because of the resistance in certain pockets, they had to capitulate and yield. Finally you had the counterattack at the doors of Moscow, which sent them into a whole series of defeats and left them in the Russian winter. But despite this capitulation temporarily on education, the are back again this year with more cuts on education. The war on children, the war on students, the war on education continues. They are not saying anymore, the Republican majority is not as extreme as they were when they started at the beginning this 104th session. If you recall at the beginning of the 104th session, the Republicans proposed to abolish the Department of Education, eliminate it, wipe it out, send a signal across the country that the Federal Government has no role in education. Then there was the assault on workers. In the Contract With America, the Republicans never said that they were going to assault workers. They never said they were going to go after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA was never attacked in the Contract With America. But the minute they gained power the attack on OSHA began, to wipe out the safety regulations and the agency responsible for the safety and health of workers all over the country. The the attack on Davis-Bacon, which calls for prevailing wages to be paid on Federal construction programs underway in any neighborhood, any city across the country, to pay people what the local wages are. There is nothing unreasonable about Davis-Bacon, but they attacked Davis- Bacon. They attacked the National Labor Relations Board, which is responsible for guaranteeing that there is a collective bargaining process and it moves along smoothly. Finally, they have recently attacked the overtime pay you get. The Republican want your overtime pay. The Fair Labor Standards Act, they want to change in order to force people to accept compensatory time in private industry instead of a cash check. The Republican want your overtime. They have come for your overtime. So they have been very consistent. The attack on families, the attack on children, has been very consistent. Republicans put families and children last, and they have not hidden that fact. Who do they put first? Well, you have got evidence clearly in the budget. They have not attacked spending for defense. They increased that by $13 billion, at a time when they were determined to balance the budget and were making all of these cuts in education programs and school lunch programs, in Head Start. They were making these cuts in the name of fiscal responsibility. They wanted to balance the budget in order to eliminate the possibility that we would continue to have a rising national debt. The pace of the national debt started by Ronald Reagan in a Republican administration, they wanted to end that. We are all in favor of that. We do not want to continue to do what Ronald Reagan started. The deficit was about $60 billion in the last year of Jimmy Carter's administration. In the last year of Ronald Reagan's administration, it was up to $400 billion. That is the annual deficit. This means under Ronald Reagan all those years, the deficit kept increasing. The national debt, of course, goes up as a result of each year's deficit. So we are all in favor of ending that. But do you have to attack children and do you have to attack families in order to end the increase in the national debt? Why not cut the defense budget, or at least leave it as it is. Why add $13 billion to the defense budget, as we are doing in the present budget that recently passed? Why go after families in the name of cutting the budget, when you do not go after farm subsidy programs, farmers home loan mortgages? Billions of dollars have gone down the drain in farmers home loan mortgages. Nobody bothers to collect them, it is just a gift. Billions of dollars have been given to the farmers, and nobody is out there trying to collect them anymore in the farmers home loan mortgage program. Farm subsidy programs, paying farmers not to plant crops, not to plow up the soil, and various other little subsidy programs, have given farmers across the country a handout for years. We do not propose to cut those handouts drastically. But Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which is about 1 percent of the total budget, has been under attack. There is a hysteria that has been generated about welfare and giving aid to families with dependent children. So we rushed into scapegoating, we rushed into persecuting the poor. Welfare reform was needed, but you did not need to persecute the poor. You did not need such extremism. Let us look at this matter again in context. Welfare reform has been touted as a way to put the bums to work, take people off the dole and put people to work. That is a big lie, because most of the people on welfare are not able to go to work. The whole theory behind Aid to Families with Dependent Children is you are giving the aid to the mother who is there to take care of the child. If you did not have a mother to take care of the child, you offer day care for those mothers who go to work while they still have young children. Well, you have to pay for the day care then. You offer job training. You have to pay for that. The important thing is that the whole notion that people are out there on the dole and they are there because they do not want to go to work means that there are jobs out there and that they should use those jobs, or that they are able to go to work and it is cheaper for them to go to work. Leave the child with a day care program and we, the public, will pay for the day care program and go into a training program if you do not qualify for a job now. The public will pay for the training program. And finally you get a job. The question is, Will there be jobs there when you go through the training program, make the arrangements for your child's day care? Will there be jobs? No, we do not have jobs in the places where we have the largest concentrations of people on aid to families with dependent children. Let us assume we did have the jobs. If the Republicans cared about families, if they did not put families last, they would not be opposing the minimum wage. We would like for the jobs to pay enough for the mother to be able to go to work, put the child in a day care program an pay part of that, I guess, and be able to take care of the family. I suppose if they do not have health benefits on the job, they have to pay for their health benefits. But in order for this to happen, they have to have something above the minimum wage pay. The current minimum wage pay will give an individual about $8,400 a year if you work every hour of a 40-hour week of the year. Never lose time. Never lose pay. You work every hour for a 40-hour week every week of the year, and you come out with $8,400. That will not support a mother and child. That will not support a mother and child. We propose a minimum wage which would help matters a little bit more, where an individual would be making, instead of the $4.25 an hour, which produces $8,400, an individual would be making $5.15 an hour, a 90-cent increase, which would be granted over a 2-year period. which does not improve things that much but it is one small step forward. You would be making a little more than $9,000 a year if you worked 40 hours a week every week of the year. So minimum wage makes sense if you really are sincere about wanting to provide work opportunities for people who are on welfare. Minimum wage makes sense. Minimum wage coupled with health care makes even more sense. Really, we need to give that combination of the minimum wage plus a guarantee of health care in order to really make sense for families that are poor with children to take are of. Aid to Families with Dependent Children makes a person automatically eligible. If the receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children, they are automatically eligible for Medicaid. If they are not receiving AFDC, they are not eligible for Medicaid anymore. They lose their health care benefits. Are you going to get a minimum wage job that also has a health care benefit? Most of them do not have health care packages. Most minimum wage jobs are the ones that are rudimentary and not in a structure which would provide for a minimum wage plus a health care package. So many people find ways to stay on welfare just to hold on to their health care. The Republicans have made it clear that they do not really believe in work because they are not willing to pay a minimum wage. They are not willing to reward work. Work at the very bottom at least deserves a minimum wage as a reward. Now, the majority in this House finally capitulated to common sense. The people out there have a lot of common sense. If more of that could be communicated in a more intense form, we would have a great improvement of what happens here in Washington. But the problem is America's common sense does not come through often. When it came to the minimum wage, people clearly understood that, if we care about people and care about work and if we want to promote the work ethic, then the guy on the street, the person on the street out there understood that the least we could do is raise the minimum wage from $4.25 an hour over a 2-year period to $5.15. That is a minimum. That is the least we could do. That is a tiny improvement, to go from $4.25 an hour to $5.15 an hour. Most American workers are making more than that, but there are more than 10 million who are making minimum wage only. That number is growing, of course, as we move from more people into a service economy where minimum wage is more likely to take place. So America's common sense was communicated up through the focus groups, up through the public opinion polls. It was so strong and so clear and so consistent that even a Republican Party that had sworn that it did not want to pass the minimum wage had to relent. So we passed a minimum wage bill here in the House after some people said it would never happen. Some Republican leaders said over their dead bodies would we even put the bill on the floor. But America's common sense and pressure and communication of their common sense to the Members of Congress resulted in the passage of a minimum wage bill here on the floor of this House. And the Senate finally got around to it. They passed a minimum wage bill also. But what is happening now? During the same period where we are waging war against families by reducing food stamps, by taking away the entitlement for Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the Republicans are holding the minimum wage bill hostage. It has passed the Senate and it has passed the House. They are determined it will not go unless we pay ransom for it. Let me just read from the communications from our leader, Dick Gephardt. It is called Outrage of the Week. And I agree with the communications leaflet that comes from our Democrat leader's office: When you're losing the game, change the rules: Republican leaders ignore majority vote, put stranglehold on minimum wage. Republicans proved this week that they will go to any length to stop 12 million American workers from getting a modest raise in their wages. After the Senate voted overwhelmingly 74 to 24 to pass a bill increasing the minimum wage by 90 cents, one month after the House had approved a similar bill, Senate Republican whip Don Nickles intervened to stop the bill dead in its tracks. Nickles told reporters Tuesday that he wouldn't allow the minimum wage bill to proceed to the next legislative step until he got his way on a health insurance bill that's currently bogged down by Republican attempts to add a special perk for the Golden Rule Insurance Co. Said Nickles: ``My intention is to see that we don't have conferees appointed on the minimum wage bill until after we have conferees appointed to the health bill.'' Republican leaders made good on their threat Thursday, blocking the minimum wage bill from going to conference by trying to attach unacceptable strings like the controversial health bill. Now, the health bill is one item on the agenda which has a lot of good pieces in there. Everybody is in favor of a health bill which allows you to move your portability of your health care package and plan from one place to another. The end to discrimination on people with preexisting health conditions. There are a number of good things in there. But in that health bill, when they talk about a perk for the Golden Rule Insurance Co., they are talking about the medical savings accounts, medical savings accounts which will allow certain healthy people to opt out of the Medicare system as it is now and receive a reward for being healthy. That is good, receiving a reward for being healthy. But the whole principle of the Medicare insurance is based on a pool of people being there. If we take the people out of the pool that are the healthiest and leave only the sickest people, it means that the pool is going to be paying money to take care of the sickest people and the pool is not supported by the insurance premiums paid by the people who are healthiest. The whole principle of the insurance pool collapses. If we would allow that in other insurance situations, we would find insurance companies would go out of business. But we are going to destroy Medicare. The same people who said they want to save it will destroy it by placing this special item in there, and that is one insurance company which specializes in medical savings accounts. That is Golden Rule Insurance Co. So Senator Nickles wants to hold the minimum wage bill hostage because he wants to make room for the Golden Rule Insurance Co. to capitalize on a provision to have medical savings accounts. Why is Senator Nickles so determined to sink this minimum wage bill? I am continuing to read from the Democratic leader's communication. Why is Senator Nickles so determined to sink this minimum wage bill? Here's a countdown of the three key reasons: He's mad because he lost a key vote on the Republican amendment to gut the minimum wage bill, by denying the increase to millions of otherwise eligible workers. A similar amendment had also been defeated in the House in May. What Senator Nickles had proposed is the elimination of small businesses. A large number of small businesses would be eliminated. And that is where we have millions of the people who earn a minimum wage, no higher than minimum wage. They are working in small businesses. He wanted to eliminate the requirement that small businesses pay minimum wages and trap all of these people in a situation where they would not be covered by the minimum wage. He lost that vote in the Senate. Another reason that Senator Nickles is upset is, Republicans don't believe in the minimum wage. They just do not believe in it. As I said before, they do not hide their feelings. They do not hide their policies. They have been quite clear to the American people that they are against families and children, they are against poor people, and they are against working people. They do not hide it. They started the year by saying we do not want the minimum wage, and some people said over my dead body will we even put the minimum wage bill on the floor. So the Republicans do not believe, as the Republican Senate aide said to the New York Times on Tuesday, ``Republicans don't believe in raising the minimum wage. We voted for it because it was killing us.'' As I said before, common sense was killing the Republicans, common sense that was communicated by the people out there back to the Senators, back to the Members of the House, which said we see the minimum wage as being a fair proposition. If you care about work, you want to reward work. If you want to encourage the work ethic in America, then you have to pay a higher wage and have that wage be rewarded. So they had to respond. It was killing them. And finally, Senator Nickles is determined to sink the minimum wage for the following reason: Special interest money is just too good to pass up. Senator Nickles' strategy is directed at two special interest groups, both of which gave big bucks to the GOP. The first is the Golden Rule Insurance Co., which would reap huge profits from the medical savings account provision Republicans want to add to the health bill. The second is business and industry lobbyists, who loathe the minimum wage bill as much as Republicans do. The New York Times confirmed this, reporting Wednesday after the vote on the Republican amendment to gut the minimum wage bill that Republicans said they hoped to use yesterday's vote to win donations from small businesses. They are referring to the vote that took place in the Senate, which would have exempted small businesses, and one of the reasons was to win donations from the small businesses. This is a communication from the Democratic leader, Dick Gephardt, called ``Outrage of the Week.'' It is an outrage. It is outrageous the position that consistently is taken by the Republicans against families, putting families last, and against children. If we are going to set this welfare vote that took place today in perspective, what do we want poor people to do? If we are not going to help them by giving aid to children, then we need to provide jobs and job opportunities. The first step is not there. There is no provision to increase the number of jobs. Let us assume that jobs are there. The jobs need to pay a living wage. A living wage is really above the present minimum wage plus a health care package. A health care package is a vital part of a living wage. A job is not a job of any substance for a family unless in addition to providing the minimum wage, it also provides the health care package. The Republicans are determined that neither one of those will be there. The welfare reform needed to take place. We needed to reform welfare. We needed to make better use of the dollars spent to help children. We needed to make better use and end waste in the way we handle our food stamps. There are a number of things about welfare reform that had to take place. But this welfare reform bill is an extremist bill. It starts with the very extreme step of eliminating the entitlement. Poor people are no longer guaranteed that the Federal Government will be there to give you help when it is needed. The Federal Government will be there to give you help if you are a victim of an earthquake. The Federal Government will be there to give you help if you are the victim of a flood. The Federal Government will be there if you are the victim of a hurricane, some other weather, which is proper, altogether fitting and proper that the Federal Government should be a participant in the process. Maybe the States should do more in helping hurricane victims themselves. They do not have any State or local provisions for that. Maybe the States should do more in being responsible for their earthquake victims. Maybe the States should do more to be responsible for their flood victims. The Federal Government should participate. Right now it is the primary participant in providing relief for people who suffer from natural disaster. So people who suffer from economic disaster deserve at least some help from the Federal Government, and we have taken away the Federal Government's participation. In perspective, this is consistent with what the Republicans have been doing. In perspective, their attack on education is another part of the problem. Educational opportunity must be provided to poor people if you want to guarantee that they do not have to ask the Federal Government or the State government or the local government for help. Let us provide some fishing lines. The statement that if you really want to feed a person, you do not keep supplying them with fish. You buy them a hook and line and teach them how to fish. Let us teach people how to fish. Let us follow the evidence that is clear that everybody who has an education in America is able to make a contribution back to both himself and the economy. Certainly when it comes to college graduates, this evidence is quite clear and overwhelming. Most college graduates are able to support themselves and also to pay income tax, which supports their government, pay income taxes and other taxes. College graduates, graduation up to now almost guarantees that you are going to get some kind of job. So why not have the Federal Government play a greater role in education instead of a lesser role? From our House Democratic leadership there is another communications which bears out my oft stated hypothesis that Republicans are the enemies of public education. Republicans are consistent, though. This is the way to help families, this is the way to help children. They do not want to do that. In this communication we call it the Republicans' raid on education. Republicans in Congress get an F. The GOP fails to meet growing educational needs of America's children. While the needs of our children and schools are increasing, the GOP Congress has failed to grasp this important reality. Indeed, at the end of the 1995-96 school year, the GOP Congress has failed America's children and has earned an F once again for failing the American educational system. Specifically, the fiscal year 1997 budget resolution narrowly passed in the House and Senate and the fiscal year 1997 Labor-HHS appropriations bill that the House will vote on this week, just the same old song from last year. This was a week ago, cutting back on programs important to educating our Nation's children when we need to be moving forward to meet their growing educational needs. Only this time it is a little better disguised than the cuts were in the previous budget. While Republicans claim to have moderated their course, the performance of the GOP Congress on education in 1996 is consistent with the extreme cuts in education that they voted on in 1995. Indeed, many of the education programs the GOP is proposing to cut, freeze, or eliminate this year are the same priority education programs that they tried to last year. Indeed, the record of the GOP Congress shows that rather than working to expand the access to a college education and to maintain Federal support for local schools, the GOP Congress continues to move in exactly the opposite direction. They have flunked in every aspect of meeting America's educational needs. While Republicans claim to freeze spending on education in the fiscal year 1997 budget resolution, the reality is that they do not understand the fundamentals of math. The fiscal year 1997 GOP budget resolution freezes spending on education and training programs below the fiscal 1996 level for the next 6 years and cuts spending on education by 21 percent in real terms by the year 2002. Such a large 21-percent cut in real terms will result in deep cuts in services to children and education. Furthermore, the resolution provides no allowances for helping schools meet the challenge of projected enrollment increases of 12 percent over the next decade. Republicans put families and children last. Republicans are against public education being used as a way to help people out of dependence on government at any level. There is a rumor that there is going to be a new initiative taken by the Republicans on education, that the Republican candidate for President is going to announce his new initiative next week or this weekend. I hope so. I hope that the Republicans will take the initiative on education and the attack on education, because we used to have far more bipartisan cooperation on education. There were differences in many areas but when it came to education, we sort of came together and understood that probably more important than any other function of our Government's local, State, and Federal governments is the function of education. Education has become even more important now that the world has changed and the competition in the world does not revolve around military strength and military hardware, military preparedness. Competition in the world revolves around the quality of education the population has, which enables that population to compete and be productive, which enables that population to understand the complexities of world trade and the complexities of modern life so that people themselves do not become a burden on their society because they are overwhelmed by the complexities. The only answer to that being overwhelmed by the complexities of modern life and the only avenue and instrument for being able to make yourself productive for yourself and make yourself productive so you can make a contribution to the society is education. Education was always the answer. Among the newly freed slaves, it was clearly understood in the African-American community that education was the answer. From the very beginning slaves understood that if the slavemasters had passed legislation that it was bad to teach them to read, prohibited the teaching of reading to the slaves, then it must be indeed a powerful weapon, this reading must be a powerful thing. Education must be a powerful thing. So it was understood by all that they wanted to have a piece of this education process, and it has been of value in the African-American community since then. The African-American community believes strongly that education is important. The problem is that there is a lot of confusion about how you guarantee that their children get an education. There are a lot of battles that have to be fought with the bureaucracy, especially in our big cities like New York, to guarantee that children are given an education which is going to be relevant to guarantee that children are given course work which makes them feel that their education is relevant. To guarantee that children are given some kind of course work and built into the curricula are items which will motivate those children, build up their self-esteem and make them feel that they are important and feel that they have some hope and feel that education is going to be important so that they themselves will contribute more than half of what is needed in that education process, regardless of what teachers do or what kind of equipment you have or what kind of schools you have. If the children are motivated, they will overcome, they will move forward. The big problem is that we do not have an education curriculum in most of our big cities that motivates children to begin with. Just as important as the motivation, of course, is the need for concrete opportunities to learn by providing a decent building, conducive to learning. The lighting in the school classroom has to be proper. The atmosphere in the school has to be safe. The water has to be free of lead and not poison the children. The ceilings have to be free of asbestos. We have a situation now where schools across the country are in serious trouble. Half the schools across the country have some kind of health hazard. The health of young people who attend these schools is jeopardized by the fact that an asbestos problem or lead in the water problem or a problem with the way the lighting is and the ventilation. The President recently announced an initiative, again, I hope the Republicans will join this initiative, an initiative to begin to offer some Federal help on school construction. It is long overdue. Half the school buildings in America need help, not just with repairs; a lot of them need to be torn down and rebuilt. The President before that announced an initiative in the State of the Union Message. In the State of the Union Message the President talked about wiring all the schools in America by the year 2000. He first talked about by the end of the year 20 percent of schools in California were going to be wired and they are using volunteers to accomplish a lot of this in the wiring process. I think that that objective and that estimated goal of the President with respect to California has proven true. They have gone on and done that. Twenty percent of the schools are wired. But the big problem of wiring all the schools in America so that they can receive the kind of help that you get with the Internet going into the classrooms, the classrooms being able to have the latest educational technology, all of that is still to come. And we see on the horizon in many of the inner-city schools, like the schools in my district, no hope that that is going to happen unless you have more help from the Federal Government. Yes, volunteers may help to some extent, but I am not sure that in the context of a big city you are going to get enough of that to have any significance whatsoever in overcoming the problems faced by our schools that do not have proper wiring to be able to install the computers and be able to have the Internet and the educational technology that is needed to keep pace and guarantee that our children will get the benefits of the best and the latest in education. All of these things can happen only if you have some help with the construction and the physical environment that our schools exist in, so the President's initiative is welcome. I hope the Republicans will join the initiative. I do not think it is enough because it is talking about Federal Government picking up the interests on part of the cost of construction of schools. I think we need a grant program to jump-start our schools across the country and rebuild the infrastructure by giving maximum help instead of the minimum. But at least this is a start. The construction program offered by, proposed by, President Clinton begins the process, and I hope the Republicans will join us. Today we had our first planning meeting for National Education Funding Support Day. We joined last year in conjunction with the National Commission for the Education of African American Children. We had a National Education Funding Support Day last November. Today we launched the first planning meeting, and the effort will go forward this year. The date for the National Education Funding Support Day is October 23. October 23 has been chosen because we want to have a whole month of activity, and October 23, National Education Funding Support Day, will kick it off. Citizens will be encouraged to go right through to National Education Week, which takes place in the middle of November. You have a month of activity designed to raise the level of awareness of the average American, the person out there on the street who is not a part of the education family. Yes, last year we had participation by the teachers, we had participation by the teachers' unions, we had participation by the companies that do business with schools. People who are in the education family responded to our initial effort in National Education Funding Support Day, and this year we want to go beyond that. We want to make certain that the churches are involved. We want to make certain that the fraternities and sororities and religious organizations of various kinds are involved. Civic organizations. The need is to communicate again to our decision makers the way you have just communicated on the minimum wage bill. The public understood the vital necessity of increasing the minimum wage. The public understood that the man on the street, the women on the street, everybody understood that if you got a paycheck and you are getting $4.25 an hour and a proposal is made to raise that to $5.15 an hour, that makes sense. So the public supported raising the minimum wage. We want the public to understand that education needs Federal help, education needs more resources, and regardless of what you hear, money comes first, resources come first. There are a lot of problems that have to be solved in education reform. There are a lot of problems, and they will be there for a long time, and we have to work at them, but before you can get those problems resolved, you are going to have to have resources, you need money. The favorite statement of people who want to oppose funding social programs or funding nondefense programs is you cannot solve the problem by throwing money at the problem. They throw money at the Department of Defense all the time. They constantly throw money at the Department of Defense because they know you cannot solve a problem in the military unless you do have money. They make a lot of errors, and a lot of gross boondoggles take place there, a lot of errors that have cost people, cost the American people as much as $2 billion and $3 billion on weapon systems that never got developed. Even when they say they developed certain smart weapons like the ones used in the gulf war, later evaluations showed that the smart weapons which cost a great deal did not prove their value. I mean they did not perform at a level to justify their cost. So they throw money at the Defense Department. And I do not like the phrase: throw money. But that is what they do in the case of defense. In education they do not throw money; they never throw money at social programs, they never throw money at education. The amounts of money that any social program has received has always been compulsory in connection with the need, and in the case of education the Federal Government's participation at this point is less than 7 percent. You know, the total education bill, which is above $360 billion now annually, that bill is borne mostly by the States, that cost is borne mostly by the States and local governments. Local governments fund and support most of the expenses for public schools. State funding supports most expenses for public schools. For public higher education institutions, States are the primary funding sources. So the Federal Government's participation is all too small already, 7 percent. At least it will be increased. At least it will be increased at every level. We need more money for day care, we need more money for elementary and secondary school, we need more money for higher education. It will never be the overwhelming part, the funds spent for education. You will always have local control, and local governments will always pay most of it or State governments will always pay most of it. But why can we not raise the Federal participation and funding for education from 7 percent over the next 4 years to 25 percent? Why cannot we go between now and the year 2000 up to 25 percent of the total cost of education? The States and localities will still be funded at 75 percent. If they have 75 percent of the funding power, they will have 75 percent of the control. The control will still remain with the States and local government. But we will be providing the kind of resources necessary to carry us into the 21st century on education. So what I am saying is that the President's proposals, whether you are talking about wiring schools or providing new funds for construction, they are welcome, they are necessary, they are all too inadequate. We need more. And in order to have the public understand this, we need to have ways to communicate to the public the importance of common sense getting involved here. If common sense gets involved, if the average person out there begins to understand what the costs are for providing education at a level necessary to go into the 21st century, and they communicate that to the congressmen, they communicate that to the Senators, we will get some action. So National Education Funding Support Day on October 23 is designed to get down to the street level and have people understand that you need to communicate to your government at every level, and certainly the Federal Government is key because the Federal Government, despite its small percentage of the funding for education, sets the tone. We need to set the tone so that the cuts that are taking place at the State level in education and the cuts that local governments are perpetrating on education, like New York City has had a 5-year string of cuts in education, New York State now has had dramatic cuts in education; they take their clue from the Federal Government. The Federal Government starts making cuts, then the importance of education seems to go down on the priority agenda of the Governors and of the mayors. So we need to start first at the Federal level. So in order to get the Federal Government moving, they need to hear from the very bottom. National Education Funding Day, then, is like the National Night Out Against Crime. We took our cue from the National Night Out Against Crime. Citizens put together a National Night Out Against Crime where on a single night, Tuesday night I think it is, in August, everybody across the country demonstrates that they care about what is going on in their neighborhoods in terms of crime and protection, and they want their police departments and their district attorneys and all the people who are professionally responsible for the criminal justice system to understand that they are upset. They want some new action. They want some new resources. They want to make certain that we do not continue the way we are. That National Night Out Against Crime effort has been very successful. Communities all over the country do turn out. They show up. So we want to capture that same spirit in a National Morning Out For Education. A National Morning Out For Education on October 23 means that whatever can be done, whatever activities that take place which send a message to your government, your city government or the State government, or send a message to the Federal Government, do it. If it means buying some gifts for the children in the school, they are publicizing that so that they have in schools like the ones in my district who do not have crayons, who do not have erasers, they have a problem with Xerox paper; they will get some gift which highlights the fact that they are not being supplied properly by the government. If it means that day care centers are brought to the attention of local merchants so that occasionally they will help the day care centers in some way, then let that be the way we do it. If it means the police department and the various law enforcement agencies are going to guarantee the safety of children going to school and they want to highlight their support for education, schools that way, let them do it. There can be a thousand ways to show your support for education and, in this process, send a message to both the Republicans and the Democrats that education is important. And finally it makes sense in the context of everything I have said before. Education, minimum wage, all that has to play a role if you want to move people from welfare to sufficiency in a humane way.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Chairman, welfare reform is very much in order. The business of policymakers is reform. As legislators, the constant improvement of Government functions and programs is our job. Reform is a permanent, ongoing process. There is not a single Government program in existence that cannot use some reform. But reform should not be driven by manufactured hysteria and scapegoating. Welfare reform should not become the oppression and persecution of the poor. At the heart of the welfare program is the aid to families with dependent children. Children are the primary recipients. The survival and development of children is what aid to families with dependent children is all about. Children are our Nation's greatest resource, and the AFDC program is about the salvation of those children. Welfare reform can be accomplished without the kind of extremism and the persecution of the poor which is involved in the Republican reform bill. Put the problem in perspective. We are talking about 1 percent, approximately 1 percent, of the total Federal budget. There are many other subsidy programs we should be looking at which would cost us far more. The farm subsidy program, farmers home loan mortgages, and the subsidies to farmers not to grow grain or plant or plow fields; those are very expensive subsidies. We give aid to people who are in earthquake zones, we give aid to people who are victims of hurricanes and floods. We have numerous places where we subsidize people. There are also other areas where there is definite waste in Government that we should take a hard look at. The CIA found they had $3 billion they did not know they had in a slush fund. The Federal Reserve Board has $3 billion for rainy days, and they have not had a rainy day in 79 years. So we have a lot of places to look for waste and improving Government and reforming Government. We do not have to persecute the poor in order to get rid of waste. AFDC is a program for children. It has been badly administered. It is not administered by poor people. we can improve the administration of it. We can find ways to improve it in many ways, but we should not persecute the poor. We should not persecute children in the process. This is about developing children, and we should be about the business of developing children.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, Democrats are insisting that we put families first. Republicans are insisting that we put families last. Republicans have continued their attack on American families, but now with a double-barreled shotgun. They are attacking minimum wage again. The Senate is threatening to derail the passage of minimum-wage increase. They have loaded up the bill with poison pills to guarantee that it will not be signed by the President. The Senate passed a bill yesterday, but it is a hoax. It will not lead to a minimum wage increase in America. On the other hand, education is being attacked again by the Republicans. The education cuts we fought so hard against last fall, and the American people made it quite clear that they do not want cuts in education, again we have millions of dollars being cut in education by this Republican House majority. We do not need to attack families with a double-barreled shotgun. Do not go after them with education cuts and at the same time go after them with minimum wage cuts. Nobody can live on $8,400 a year for minimum wage, and our students cannot meet the challenges of this high-tech economy unless they have every possible opportunity to get an education. Let us support American families. Put families first.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk today about the families first agenda of the Democrats, recently announced. Of course we have between now and November to really get to understand and fully digest what this agenda is all about, but I am very excited about it because it does crystallize and place in one package some of the very important points that I have been trying to get across for the last 18 months. I think the families first agenda is a good statement as to what is most important that is going on here in Washington at this point. It talks about what is happening with working families and workers in the workplace and what we need to do to deal with guaranteeing that we place families first by seeing to it that working families have an opportunity to survive with dignity and that people in the workplace have a fair chance to make a living. That is one very important part of it. Another part of the families first agenda, of course, deals with education. Nothing is more important than education at this particular point in the history of this Nation. We are in a critical transition period. This is a period where high tech know-how has taken over. It is a period where skills that were relevant and useful and could command a great price in the marketplace 30, 40 years ago are no longer able to command that price. For that reason we have a great gap in our income structure, and more and more people are sinking to lower and lower levels in terms of their income while the country is really prospering and a handful of people are getting richer and richer. The families first agenda was developed by the Democratic Caucus under the leadership of Minority Leader Gephardt. I think he did a great job, and we certainly would expect from Democrats that kind of agenda. I want to start by indicating that there is an editorial that appeared in the Atlanta Constitution that was not developed by Democrats, was not developed by the Democratic Caucus. In fact I do not think you could ever accuse the Atlanta Constitution of being a group of wild-eyed liberals. This editorial, I think, could very well be an introduction to the families first agenda. The families first agenda could benefit greatly from this editorial, which is labeled the ``Shrinking Middle Class.'' It appeared in the Atlanta Constitution of Friday, June 21. I am going to talk about this editorial and then move into the families first agenda. Before I do that, I did want to make a few comments about the topic that I discussed just before we adjourned for the July 4th holiday. I got a lot of comments as a result of my last 60-minute presentation. I talked at that time about another subject which was close to education, educating children. I used the situation with respect to Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who has been the focus of a controversy in Prince George's County. There were some board members of the local school board who objected to Justice Thomas addressing a group of youngsters who were receiving awards. Prince George's County and this particular school in particular is predominantly black, overwhelmingly black. The board member, Mr. Kenneth Johnson, had raised the issue of considering the kinds of positions that Justice Thomas has taken, which have hurt black people so much, have hurt the African-Americans in this country so very much, should he be allowed to come to a school of predominantly black children and not have a situation where he could be questioned or there could be a discussion. Should he be allowed to come in and serve as a role model without anybody making any effort to see to it that youngsters understand that there is a controversy surrounding Mr. Thomas which definitely impacts on their lives and that you ought to have some different kind of format. I praised Mr. Johnson's action, and he was not trying to deny Supreme Court Justice Thomas the right to speak. He wanted a different format. I think it was most appropriate. I got a lot of criticism for that. A lot of people called in. One lady called in teary-eyed, saying that she never thought she would see the day where a black Congressman would sit on the floor of the House and criticize a black Supreme Court Justice. My answer to that is it is very difficult, I assure you, but these are very difficult times. These are very complex times. The world is not simple anymore with respect to civil rights. The fact is that everybody who fought in the civil rights struggle had a common goal and you had clear objectives, people were being denied the right to drink at water fountains. They were being denied hotel accommodations. They were being denied the right to take a job even when they were qualified for the job. They were openly discriminated against. It was all very obvious, very blatant, and we were all marching to the tune of one drum against these insults and against the disadvantages that they posed. It was much clearer. Now, you have a situation where people who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action, like Supreme Court Justice Thomas, have attacked the same affirmative action that he was a beneficiary of. Supreme Court Justice Thomas has begun to help turn back the clock on many of the progressive steps that were taken and made by African-Americans in this country. So, if he is handing down decisions which attack the Voting Rights Act, decisions which attack affirmative action, decisions which make new law and that law is very much to the disadvantage and the detriment of black people in general and certainly black children, then I think Mr. Johnson, the school board member who raised the issue, has a legitimate point. This man should not be held up as a role model without question. Yes, when I was the age of these school children in the eighth grade, any black who achieved anything was held up as a model. Be somebody was a very general statement. Be somebody, achieve, rise to any level. It did not matter what kind of philosophy you had when you got there; ideology, those things were too complicated. It did not have to be discussed because just about any black who was a role model also was against segregation, they were also against discrimination. Things were very simple. But when you have a situation as complicated as the kind of decisions that have been handed down by the Supreme Court, certainly the latest set of decisions on the Voting Rights Act and then my last discussion I talked about the Voting Rights Acts decisions. I talked about the attack on affirmative action. I talked about how these kinds of actions on the top are generating a spirit of something to do with the kind of extremism you see acted out at the bottom with the burning of black churches. There is a relationship. These kinds of actions are radical actions being taken by the Supreme Court. The Voting Rights Act decisions that have been handed down by the Supreme Court, they break with the current law. They break with the trend in law. The break new ground because the general progressive movement forward of American law as interpreted by the Supreme Court has not taken the kind of positions that the Supreme Court now has begun to take. The Supreme Court is using the 14th amendment to justify striking down programs which are very much in step with what the 14th amendment was designed to accomplish. The Supreme Court leadership, the majority on the Supreme Court have chosen to use the 14th amendment as a battering ram to wipe out any legislation designed to benefit the descendants of African-American slaves. That is a radical departure from the way the law was being interpreted before. The Supreme Court, this majority on the Supreme Court, joined by Justice Thomas, also refuses to follow a simple procedure that every other Supreme Court and most other courts of law have held up as a very necessary procedure. That is to examine any law or any part of the Constitution and try to determine what the Founding Fathers meant at the time that item was placed in the Constitution or what the Congress meant at the time a law was passed. The intent of Congress, the intent of the Founding Fathers has always been one of the foundations of the analytical process that goes on when the law is deliberated at the level of the courts. So, the intent of the 14th amendment is very important. The fact that this majority has chosen to totally ignore the intent of the 14th amendment and use it as a battering ram to push a color-blind philosophy, it is an ideology, a color-blind ideology of Sandra Day O'Connor and the other members who join her repeatedly in insisting that the 14th amendment says that we must have a color-blind society, that has no foundation in the 14th amendment. It may be that the general implication of what America is all about and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, everything says that we should have a color- blind society and that is implied. But the 14th amendment certainly is not the place where you should ground that kind of theory. Just the opposite, when it comes to people who are descendants of African slaves. The slaves were the subject of the 14th amendment. The slaves were the concern of the 14th amendment. I had to move through this very rapidly last time. So, for the benefit of people who are upset about my argument, I just wanted to repeat it. Again, it relates to education, which I want to talk about later as my primary topic. It relates to the education of our children. Nothing is more important as history and having children understand history in a proper manner. Nothing is more important than having children understand that role models are determined not by people's position in the hierarchy but by what that position means, the philosophy of the ideology, the kind of actions that these people take. So to take the 14th amendment and twist it and distort it and to have the 14th amendment being used as a justification for wiping out the Voting Rights Act, to have the 14th amendment being used as a justification for getting rid of affirmative action, that is a heinous misuse and abuse of the 14th amendment. The 14th amendment was designed to ameliorate the crimes of slavery. It was designed to make some compensation for what had gone on before the 14th amendment was passed. The 14th amendment came right after the 13th amendment. Mr. Speaker, the 13th amendment freed the slaves. The 14th amendment dealt with guaranteeing that nobody would misunderstand that these slave persons have equal rights. Not all Americans have equal rights, all other Americans had equal rights. They have always had them under the Constitution. It was a new group of Americans who were being elevated to the point where they, too, would have equal rights. Originally the Constitution spoke of slaves only as three-fifths of a person in the counting of the populations of the States. The Constitution states that the slaves shall be considered three-fifths of a person. Well, the 14th amendment makes it clear that no longer is that true, that each person in the United States, a person shall include slaves, slaves shall be considered as persons. That was the primary thrust of sections 1 and 2 of the 14th amendment. What you have is the Supreme Court, the majority on the Supreme Court, the Sandra Day O'Connor majority, the Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O'Connor majority insisting that only one section, in fact, one sentence is relevant. And that is section 1 of the 14th amendment, which talks about all persons born and naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. Why did the 14th amendment have to say that? It said it already in the Constitution before. Who were they talking about? What were they clarifying? When they say all persons born or naturalized, they mean a new group of people now that must be recognized, those people who had before been considered only three-fifths of a man. They now must be recognized as full citizens of the United States. No States shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. That is the part of the 14th amendment which O'Connor and Thomas and company insist is the basis for the establishment of a color-blind United States of America. Well, you did not need to say that people should not be denied equal protection of the law. That was the case for all other people except slaves. Only the newly freed slaves had to be included, and the 14th amendment wanted to make it clear that the newly freed slaves must not be denied equal protection of the laws. Now that is section 1 of the 14th amendment. What the O'Connor-Thomas majority on the court ignored completely are the following: section 2, section 3, section 4 and section 5. Section 2 makes it quite clear that this 14th amendment is concerned primarily about slaves. Section 2 talks about Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State. This is section 2 of the 14th amendment. As I said before, the primary business of the 14th amendment is to rectify, to take care of, the conditions that had been created by slavery and the conditions that the Constitution had recognized. Why do you have the statement in the section 2 of the 14th amendment which talks about counting the whole number of persons in each State? Because before some persons in each State, those who were slaves, were not counted as a whole number. Three-fifths of a slave was counted as a person for the benefit of taking the census, and the census, of course, determines what the voting power and electoral college would be of each State. The census would, of course, determine how many Representatives each State would have. The great compromise was to allow slaves to be counted at all. That is why the three-fifths number was arrived at. Section 2 in the 14th amendment, it goes back to make the correction, and it says you must count the whole number of the persons. It also went on to say that when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President or Vice President, Representatives, in other words, for any Federal office, when the right for any Federal office is denied or for any State office is denied to these people who now are not going to be counted as three-fifths, but be counted as a whole, you shall have a problem if you deny anybody the right to vote, especially these new slaves, new citizens who were former slaves. You should have a problem, and your proportion in the House of Representatives would be reduced by the number of such male citizens to the male citizens of the total State. You shall have a reduction if you are guilty of denying the right to vote to these citizens. Why would this be included if you were not talking about a new group of citizens? If it is confusing, I will read the whole thing: But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of a legislature thereof is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State being 21 years of age and citizens of the United States are in any way abridged except for participation in rebellion or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens 21 years of age in such State. That is section 2 of the 14th amendment. Notice that they are concerned about denying the right to vote to one group of people, those who participated in rebellion or other crime are denied the right to vote. If you do not understand what that means, go on to read section 3. Section 3 is more concerned about people who participate in rebellion. Again I am reading this only to make the point that the 14th amendment was primarily concerned about the Civil War, the aftermath of the Civil War or the War of the Rebellion, whatever you want to call it, and the conditions of slaves, the freedom of slaves, the recognition of the freedom of slaves, the recognition of full citizenship for slaves, and it also wanted to make it clear that people who had rebelled did not have certain rights. The part that is totally ignored in the 14th amendment is section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elected President or Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States or under any State, who have not previously taken an oath as a Member of Congress or as a officer of the United States or as a member of the State legislature or as an executive or judicial officer of any State to support the Constitution of the United States and then shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof; those persons shall not hold office except the last sentence of section 3 of the 14th amendment: But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house remove such disability. This is part of the 14th amendment which Sandra Day O'Connor keeps citing as an amendment to make America colorblind. This is an amendment which dealt with the problems related to slavery and rebellion against the Government of the United States which causes civil war. And then finally, section 4, the validity of the public debt of the United States authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. This is in the 14th amendment. They are talking about the debts incurred in fighting the Civil War, the pensions owed to soldiers who fought the Civil War, who fought against the rebellion. They are going to clarify that the other side is not included in the next sentence: But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid or insurrection, rebellion against the United States or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave. All such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void. Section 4 of the 14th amendment; if you do not understand before you get to section 4 that the 14th amendment is about slavery, it is about correcting the injustices of slavery. It is about the War of the Rebellion, it is about dealing with people who had rebelled, denying them the right to hold office, making provision for some of them to hold office if the Congress votes by a two-thirds vote, and it is about debts that were incurred in the Civil War, debts that were incurred on the Union side, on the side which upheld the Constitution of the United States, all being made legal and debts that were incurred by the people who were rebelling being made illegal. It is in the 14th amendment: Neither the United States, nor any State, shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid or insurrection, rebellion against the United States or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave. But all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void. I am not going to go on. I do not want to refight the Civil War. My concern is if you want to deal with a Supreme Court that sits there and interprets the law and ignores more than 75 percent of the 14th amendment to come out with a conclusion based on one sentence in the first, in section 1, and say that that Supreme Court is a legitimate institution, that the majority there is acting in a respectable way, that no one should challenge what they do, that Clarence Thomas is not part of a conspiracy to distort the Constitution, distort the 14th amendment; if you want to take that position, I am trying to tell you you are not on sound ground. Those of us who challenge the majority in the Supreme Court in their voting rights decision based on the 14th amendment certainly have a legitimate argument. We certainly have a right to challenge Clarence Thomas, Justice Clarence Thomas, on the position that he takes on the voting rights amendment. When you combine that with the position he is taking on affirmative action, we certainly have a right to challenge him to be held up as a role model for black children. I have taken the time to do this because I got so many inquiries and so many comments on the comments that I made the last time I was here for a special order. I was talking then about how you educate children. I talked about history and how important history is in the education of children. Education is a major part of our families first agenda, and I want to talk now about the families first agenda. Education, history, math, science, all of it is important. We had a situation where during this 104th Congress an absurd proposal has been made by the majority to abolish the Department of Education. Not only do they come with billions of dollars in cuts for education programs, but they have proposed to totally abolish the Department of Education. This same majority, the Republican majority, has chosen to wage a relentless war on the working families and workers in their workplace. The kind of antilabor legislation that has been proposed and, in some cases, passed on the floor of this House are indicative of what the other side, the Republican majority, thinks about working families. So the working families first, families first agenda of the Democrats, is an answer, an appropriate answer to the positions that were not stated in the Contract With America, but certainly have been taken de facto by the Republican majority. We are defending American workers. Families first agenda is a defense of American workers. I go back to the Atlanta Constitution editorial, which could easily be a good introduction to our Families First agenda. The Atlanta Constitution editorial on June 21 is about the shrinking middle class, and I will read parts of it. It is reporting on the fact that an analysis by statisticians at the U.S. Census Bureau has confirmed and expanded on reports of a growing economic inequality in the United States. Expressed in stark English, the report says that the rich are getting richer and the rest of America is getting poorer. Now, you have heard that before, but this comes from the Atlanta Constitution, which is not a New York liberal paper but pretty much respected in circles that criticize us New York liberals. Continuing to read from editorial: Expressed in numbers the news is no better. Between 1974 and 1994 the share of national income going to the richest 5 percent of American households rose by 33 percent. Meanwhile the share of national income going to the bottom 60 percent fell by 14.3 percent. That trend can be traced back more than 20 years and has seemed to accelerate rather than slow over the past 5 years. The implications of that ongoing transformation are tremendous and ought to inform public policy on the gamut of social issues from welfare reform to crime, but it does not. For example, we know that education matters over the past 20 years, incomes of those with advanced college degrees have risen while incomes of those with less than a college degree have fallen sharply. Yet the trend in Congress has been to cut financial aid that would make college possible for many poor and middle-class students. I am continuing to read from the Atlanta Constitution editorial of June 21: We also know that the minimum wage, which sets the floor for workers at the bottom of the economic scale, has failed to keep pace with inflation. The falling real minimum wage in turn contributes to the declining income share of the working poor. Yet Congress continues to balk at raising the minimum wage. Now, we know now that the Senate is still considering the minimum wage; the other body. We did pass the minimum-wage increase in this House after much hand-wringing and threats. Finally, common sense prevailed. The focus groups told the Republican majority they had to do it. The public opinion polls told the Republican majority that they ought to listen to the public for a change. So we got a bill passed here in this House, but it still faces a difficult time in the Senate. Returning to the article, the editorial in the Atlanta Constitution: The Census Bureau data also raised a series of fundamental questions that we ought to be asking ourselves. At what level does economic inequity threaten the social stability of our Nation? ``And does the rising crime rate and growing alienation among our young people suggest that we may have already reached that point?'' Let me re-read this. This is a paragraph from the Atlanta Constitution editorial entitled ``Shrinking Middle Class.'' ``The Census Bureau data also raises a series of fundamental questions.'' The first question is, ``At what level does economic inequity threaten the social stability of our Nation, and does the rising crime rate and growing alienation among our young people suggest that we may have already reached that point?'' No. 2, ``If falling incomes make it more difficult for young men to raise families, at what point do they begin to abandon the joys and responsibilities of fatherhood? Have we perhaps reached that point already, as evidenced by the rising rate of illegitimate births?'' Point three, ``Does the growing economic strain on the bottom 60 percent of Americans account in some way for the growing anger among many white men, who have been told that their problems are the fault of the Government, of minorities, or of foreign trade?'' The next point, ``At what point does the inequality between rich and poor begin to undermine the democratic character of the United States, a nation that long prided itself on the relative equality of its people as compared with nations in Europe and elsewhere? Today, income inequality in the United States exceeds that of any other industrialized nation.'' ``Today, income inequality in the United States exceeds that of any other industrialized nation. Are we still the country we believe ourselves to be? Unfortunately, to even raise such questions is to risk being accused of fomenting class warfare in this country.'' I continue to quote from the Atlanta Constitution editorial. ``Unfortunately, to even raise such questions is to risk being accused of fomenting class warfare in this country. It is a laughable charge. A quiet class war is already underway, and it is being fought largely because of technology. The computer revolution is altering the relationship between human beings and machines. It is making human labor less valuable and machines more valuable. Corporate downsizings and stagnant wages, accompanied by soaring corporate profits and a recordbreaking stock market, are the first visible symptoms of that largely invisible process. It concentrates wealth in the hands of those with money to invest in computer technology, and to a lesser degree, among those with the education to serve or build computers. Meanwhile, it impoverishes those attempting to make their living by their own hard work. Trying to halt that technological revolution would be futile. We do not have the power. We do have the power, however, to mold and guide technology to ensure that American values and ideals are honored. We also have the power to adjust social policy to economic reality. But we have failed to do so.'' I end the article, the editorial which appeared in the Atlanta Constitution on June 21, 1996. I include the entire editorial into the Record.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to many of the provisions in the VA-HUD-Independent Agencies Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 1997--H.R. 3666. While this bill is a major improvement over last year's VA-HUD appropriations debacle, H.R. 3666 still lacks adequate Federal provisions to address the housing emergency in this country, especially within the inner cities. The passage of various amendments that will be offered by many of my Democratic colleagues today may make this legislation more palatable. However, the basic right of our most vulnerable citizens to sleep comfortably at night must not be compromised. H.R. 3666 would continue a devastating trend which began in 1995--not funding any new section 8 incremental vouchers. These vouchers could be used to house additional families--many of whom are homeless--who are in dire need of housing assistance. Currently, over 70 percent of the families who quality for low-income housing assistance are not receiving it. These 20 million families are simply forced to deal with substandard housing conditions with serious building code violations such as dangerous electrical wiring and inadequate plumbing; exorbitant rent; and even homelessness. These families, who could qualify for housing assistance, are simply placed on waiting lists. H.R. 3666 would not enable HUD to provide for these families. This bill completely ignores the Department of Housing and Urban Development's [HUD] recently released ``Worst Case Rental Housing Needs'' report. The report disclosed that the number of households with unmet worst-case housing needs reached an all-time high of 5.3 million in 1993. Of this number, more than 1 million were households headed by an elderly person, and more than 1 million were working-poor families, including many with children. In my State of New York, there were more than 350,000 households with worst-case unmet housing needs. More than 144,400 of these households were families with children. Ironically, Congress responds to this crisis by ending its 20-year record of funding annual increases in the number of renter households assisted through HUD programs. Furthermore, H.R. 3666 would slash elderly and disabled housing by 29 percent--a $319 million cut. H.R. 3666 would appropriate only $769 million in a new account to fund the section 202 Elderly Housing and section 811 Disabled Housing programs. There is no justification for decreasing housing opportunities for senior citizens and persons with disabilities. We must recorder our priorities and halt the rollbacks of crucial Federal protections. H.R. 3666 would continue the assault on the successful Americorp program by cutting the program's funding by $36 million--compared to fiscal year 1996. And there are a host of amendments that will be offered to terminate the program. After four independent evaluations have validated the benefits of Americorp, and after thousands of volunteers have attested to its success, Republicans have refused to accept Americorp as a cost-efficient, public-private, community investment that deserves our support. Finally, H.R. 3666 would underfund another highly regarded program-- youthbuild. The youthbuild program educates and trains our youth, renovates our housing, and improves our community by giving young adults the opportunity to construct and rehabilitate housing for homeless or low-income people while simultaneously developing their own academic and vocational skills. Since fiscal year 1995, this program has had to sustain a 50 percent cut. H.R. 3666 would continue this unwise trend and freeze funding at the fiscal year 1995 level. No, this year's VA-HUD appropriations bill does not contain those ridiculous legislative environmental riders. However, H.R. 3666 would apply a freeze philosophy and fund most programs at or near their fiscal year 1996 appropriation level. At a time when the number of households with worst-case unmet housing needs has reached an all-time high of 5.3 million, at a time when more than 7 million children and adults are homeless, and at a time when a baby is born into poverty in this country every 32 seconds, additional Federal resources are necessary--not a freeze. Unsurprisingly, this freeze philosophy was not applied to the National Defense Authorization Act--H.R. 3230--which authorized $12 billion more than the administration requested and $2.4 billion more than fiscal year 1996 funding to defense programs. The Federal Government can and must do much better in ensuring that its people, even those who are the least fortunate and least economically stable, have safe, decent and affordable housing.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today we passed the Church Arson Prevention Act, and I think practically every Member present voted for that act. It is to the credit of this Congress that this is a bipartisan effort to deal with a heinous set of crimes and to let the message go forth from the leadership of this Nation that we will not tolerate such acts. There is a disease out there that every now and then manifests itself, and the leadership of the Government has the duty and obligation to let it be known that we will not encourage it, we will not condone it, and we will do everything possible to make certain that those who are guilty are punished. I want to talk a little bit about the burning of black churches in the south, but I want to talk about four other things that also relate to it, although it is not obvious how closely related they are on the surface. I want to talk about the recent controversy surrounding the standardization of a national curriculum for history, especially for American history. I also want to talk about the controversy surrounding the invitation to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to speak at a Prince George's County school and what happened as a result of that controversy. I want to talk about a man named Kenneth Johnson, who objected to Justice Thomas speaking there. Mr. Johnson is a school board member, and he felt that there was some problems there, and I think Mr. Johnson's allegations and his concerns deserve to be looked at more closely. I also want to talk about the recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act. And, finally, I want to talk about the extremist budget cuts of the Republican majority, and I want to insist that all of these things are related and show how they are related. I think the overall theme of what I am trying to say relates to a bigger issue of what approach should we take to the teaching of current events and of American history. What approach should we take to the teaching of current events and American history? What was the controversy in Prince George's County all about? Why did Kenneth Johnson object as a school board member to Justice Clarence Thomas speaking at the school in a ceremony where people would not have a chance to question Justice Thomas; in a situation where children would be left with the impression that Justice Thomas was being offered as a role model and that they should pattern their lives after him? Prince George's County is predominantly a county made up, the schools are predominantly African-American children. The school where Justice Thomas was speaking was composed primarily of African-American children. Kenneth Johnson, the school board member, was saying that African-American children should not be led to believe that Justice Thomas was a role model; that that would be really a slap in the face, considering the kinds of rulings that Justice Thomas has made, the kind of record Justice Thomas made before he became a Supreme Court justice, and the controversy which presently surrounds Justice Thomas and the decisions that he is making. What does this have to do with church burnings and what does it have to do with Supreme Court decisions? Well, Supreme Court decisions relating to the Voting Rights Act are probably Justice Thomas's most controversial decisions. The Voting Rights Act is an act which probably makes more sense than any other effort ever undertaken to remedy the situation caused by 232 years of American slavery. Two hundred thirty-two years of American slavery was a most criminal enterprise. Probably nowhere in the history of the world have we had a situation like those 232 years of American slavery. We are very critical of Germany in that the current practices of Germany seek to minimize what happened in the Nazi era; that Germans do not rush to discuss what happened in the Nazi era. They do not rush to discuss the holocaust and what happened to 6 million Jews. They do not rush to discuss what happened to people with disabilities and what they did to gypsies and other people they labeled as political undesirables. They do not rush to talk about that and they do not rush to teach about that. They have been criticized, and yet American slavery is far more ancient than the recent history of the Nazi era. The Third Reich took place in the 1930's and 1940's. Hitler was defeated in 1945. But the Civil War ended in 1865, and the Civil War was a war to end slavery. A lot of people call it different things. One of the problems they are trying to teach history nowadays is the fact that people do not want to face up to the fact that the Civil War was a war to end slavery. The Civil War ended a cruel and inhuman set of circumstances. It ended 235 years of forced labor. It ended 235 years of the destruction of human beings. All of that is part of what we wrestle with when we try to set a new curriculum for the teaching of history. We had a lot of controversy in trying to establish a new curriculum for the teaching of history, especially American history. I sit on the Committee on Economic and Education Opportunities. I know that for some time now that the effort has been going forward to develop standardized curricula in various areas that were almost standardized so that you could compare the teaching from one State to another and then we could have a curriculum where we have a body of knowledge and we can expect all Americans to know. Immediately there was agreement on a curriculum, a national standardized curriculum for the teaching of science. Math also, there was no great controversy over the teaching the math. I even think the arts came up with a curriculum that was pretty much accepted across the country, although it was not part of the official process. But when it came to the teaching of history, a great deal of controversy has resulted. One of the reasons is that history has to deal with what is right and what is wrong. History has to deal with treading on people's holy ground in terms of what it is that they certify as being legitimate actions taken by their ancestors. So American history with its controversial problems with the Native Americans and what happened to them, American history with its very controversial problems related to 235 years of slavery presents us with a problem. The problem manifests itself immediately in a current event related to how shall you handle current events as related to decisions of the Supreme Court. How should you handle current events as related to a controversial Supreme Court Justice who is making decisions which directly impact in a negative way on African American people. How should you handle the invitation to that Supreme Court Justice to come to speak to an African American school when he has made several decisions since he arrived on the court which directly move African American people in this country backwards from the forward progress that was being made over the last 10 years. How shall you handle a betrayal of Justice Thomas. What does it have to do with burning black churches? There is an atmosphere that has been established in the last 5 or 6 years, it has been growing, escalating, an atmosphere of hate, an atmosphere of racism, coming in many different forms and directions. Some of that racism has come directly from the Supreme Court. Nobody has stepped forward to point a finger at the Supreme Court and said that this is a racist majority, that these decisions are racist. It is difficult to say that, when a black man is sitting there, when Clarence Thomas is sitting there, it is difficult to call it the way it is, that these decisions are racist with respect to affirmative action, setasides, school integration, and with respect to the Voting Rights Act. Nobody has challenged the fact that the Voting Rights Act decisions and the other decisions related to segregation and discrimination remedies, remedies that are being attempted to take care of, to compensate for years of discrimination and years of segregation. Nobody has challenged the court's reasoning and the fact that the court seems to be hell bent on ignoring the intent of the law. The court has repeatedly used the 14th amendment as the justification for its decisions that nothing which is race based, nothing which takes race into consideration is acceptable or constitutional because the 14th amendment is an amendment which calls for equal protection under the law. Everybody should be treated equal. So the court has distorted that equal protection intent of the 14th amendment to mean that we should have a color-blind America, and the 14th amendment's purpose is to establish a color-blind America. I think any sophomore who studies American history, certainly any law school student can look at the 14th amendment in the Constitution and clearly state that the 14th amendment, the 14th amendment was all about correcting the injustices caused by slavery. The clear intent of the law, the time in which it was established, makes it certain that it was there to deal with slavery. So because you have Justice Thomas there, the Supreme Court's logic, the Supreme Court's obvious refusal to interpret the Constitution in the context of what the framers intended, what the Congress intended at the time that it initiated the 14th amendment, what the States intended at the time they ratified the 14th amendment, the refusal to recognize that is a blatant omission that has to have a racist motivation. They are hell bent on destroying affirmative action programs, setaside programs, and they really want to strike down the entire Voting Rights Act. Recent decisions related to Texas, related to North Carolina are moving in that direction. Pretty soon you will have the Supreme Court probably saying the whole Voting Rights Act must go because it militates against a color-blind America, where race should not ever have been considered. The 14th amendment is used as the rationale for that, and the 14th amendment certainly does not do that. The 14th amendment is established, was created and conceived, executed within the context of trying to remedy the past wrongs of slavery. Mr. Speaker, there was a 13th amendment which freed the slaves. There was a 14th amendment which gave them, the salves, equal rights. There was a 15th amendment which gave the slaves the right to vote. If you want to look at the Constitution, you will see that the 14th amendment says much more than is usually quoted when the Supreme Court talks about equal protection. The 14th amendment really goes into other problems related to slavery. The 14th amendment talks about certain kinds of property arrangements and criticizes, and makes it clear that it is concerned with other aspects of correcting injustices done by slavery. So I want to come back to the Constitution and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. I also want to take a look at another reference to race within the Constitution, which came earlier. Article I of the Constitution refers to three-fifths of all of the persons, which everybody knows meant slaves, and that is still in our Constitution. Our Constitution is not without reference to slavery. Our Constitution clearly shows that we have a problem, America has a problem that should be remedied. Part of the remedy was undertaken in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution after a terrible Civil War has been fought over the issue of slavery. The burnings of the black churches in the South relate to the fact that we still have this unfinished business that nobody wants to take care of. So from time to time we do things, we get into an era of 4 or 5 years where we are going backwards on race relations. We are saying and doing things at high levels of government that encourage the people at lower levels who have problems out on the fringes of society who believe in violence, who have deep-seated hatreds and prejudices that they cannot control. They get out of hand because they hear a message coming from the top that we want to roll back the clock and deal with these people in a different manner. It happened in Hitler Germany. It happens from time to time in this society. Mr. Speaker, the best remedy for it of course is what happened today. That all the leadership, Republican, Democrats, the Speaker, the Democratic minority leader, everybody moved in immediately to try to send another message about the violence that is occurring. Immediately we want to make certain that they understand that we are not in favor of those kinds of actions. On the other hand, we are undertaking from day-to-day activities which send a different message. When you have extreme budget cuts and those budget cuts fall primarily on the poorest people in our society and 60 to 70 percent of the poorest people in our society happen to be the descendants of slaves, they happen to be African Americans, I mean 60 to 70 percent of the descendants of slaves happen to be poor. African Americans are in that category, living in large cities. The hostility toward large cities is clearly manifest by the kind of legislation that has been promulgated by the Congress over the past 10 years, hostility toward the cities where we are taking away resources, destroying programs that help the populations in the city, the urban population from transportation programs to programs for housing, you name it. Clearly everything that benefits people in the cities has been dealt with in a very negative way over the last 10 years. So these kinds of policies economic policies, budget policies, coupled with attacks on affirmative action, attacks on the Voting Rights Act, attacks on set- asides, when you couple them all together, it sends a message that we really do not want to deal with atoning for the terrible sins of slavery. We do not want to deal with trying to compensate for 235 years of forced labor, brutality, murder, rape. We do not want to deal with that. I do not want to be misunderstood that I do not appreciate and am not grateful for the action taken today. I certainly think we acted in the most noble way in dealing with the burning of black churches in a forceful piece of legislation today. I agree wholeheartedly with the statement made by Democratic leader Gephardt last week when he called upon the Speaker to take immediate action to vote on a resolution condemning the burning of African American churches throughout the South. Mr. Gephardt stated that we are here today, quoting from his statement of last Wednesday, June 12, we are here today for a very simple reason. There is no criminal act, no criminal act more cowardly, more outrageous, more offensive than the burning of places of worship. When these acts are motivated by racial hatred, the offense is even greater. We believe that the U.S. Congress has an obligation to condemn the recent rash of church fires and then to impose tougher laws to crack down on the people who perpetuate these crimes. We are asking Speaker Gingrich to schedule an immediate vote on a resolution condemning the burnings of African American churches throughout the South. The American people should know that their Representatives are united against such baseless acts and are willing to do everything in their power to prevent and punish them. The next step is passing the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996, to make it much easier to prosecute and punish those who burn, desecrate or damage religious property. We believe this can be done on a bipartisan basis. When these kinds of crimes occur, it is not just the churchgoers who suffer; it is our conscience as a Nation. The right to worship in freedom and safety regardless of race, religious faith or ethnic origin is the very foundation of our country. We pledge to do everything in our power to protect that right for all Americans at all times. I include Mr. Gephardt's full statement for the Record: Statement by House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt Urging House Resolution Condemning Church-Burning ``We're here today for a very simple reason: there is no criminal act more cowardly, more outrageous, more offensive than the burning of places of worship. When these acts are motivated by racial hated, the offense is even greater. ``We believe the United States Congress has an obligation to condemn the recent rash of church fires, and then to impose tougher laws to crack down on the people who perpetrate these crimes. ``We're asking Speaker Gingrich to schedule an immediate vote on a resolution condemning the burning of African- American churches throughout the South. The American people should know that their representatives are united against such baseless acts, and are willing to do everything in their power to prevent and punish them. ``The next step is passing the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996--to make it much easier to prosecute and punish those who burn, desecrate, or damage religious property. We believe this can be done on a bipartisan basis. ``When these kinds of crimes occur, it is not just the church-goers who suffer--it is our conscience as a nation. The right to worship in freedom and safety--regardless of race, religious faith, or ethnic origin--is the very foundation of our country. We pledge to do everything in our power to protect that right for all Americans, at all times.'' I think that we did it today. We passed that piece of legislation, the Church Arson Prevention Act. It may be interesting to note a few facts about the church burnings. More than 30 black churches in eight States from Louisiana to Virginia have been burned in the past 18 months. That is a very important fact. It has been escalating in the last 2 months, but now more than 30 black churches in eight southern States have been burned. The largest percentage of those burnings have taken place in South Carolina. South Carolina, I will mention later, is a special State in terms of the kind of discussion that I am putting forth about American history and the need to confront the issue of slavery and what the impact of slavery has been on our Nation and what the consequences of slavery have been on the African-American population. The State of South Carolina still flies the Confederate flag above its capitol. It has something to answer. It has some important questions to answer. What does it do to have the flag, the Confederate flag flying over the capitol, which is the capitol of South Carolina for all the people of South Carolina, including the descendants of slaves? Another fact that we ought to consider is that almost all those arrested so far, there have been churches burned and there have been no people arrested. They have not caught any suspects or perpetrators, but those who have been arrested have been young white men. They have been typically members of hate groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan nation and the skinheads. These are facts that are very important. There are people out there on the fringes of society who have these deep seated hatreds, prejudices, and who believe in violence, and they are acting out at this time, and I say the reason that they are acting out is something that we should look at very closely. We should not just be content to pass an act today which is going to deal with what is happening right now which will contain them. That is important, to send them a message we are not going to tolerate, they do not have any sympathy in high places. We also ought to look behind the causes and understand what is going on in order to prevent a spread, an escalation, of these kinds of activities out there with respect to the acting out of race hatreds and prejudices. Another factor is that experts say that a volatile mix of polarizing social and economic events, pitting citizens against government and white against black, has exploded in a kind of domestic terrorism that has left these churches burning across the South polarizing social and economic events and political events. The fact that South Carolina has had a great debate over the removal of a Confederate flag, the fact that there are economic tensions in that part of the country as well as most of the country because of the fact that jobs are leaving and there are fears of losing jobs and all kinds of economic fears of this generation about what is going to happen to their children; those are all parts of these events that end up pitting citizens against citizens and citizens against government, and added to that is a message being sent that in particular there is an evil related to the Voting Rights Act, there is an evil related to the set-aside programs to affirmative action. The messages are being sent that these things are part of a problem and certain people are being encouraged to focus on black churches as being the citadels of the movement or the institution which holds together black communities. When you strike at black churches, you are striking at the heart of the black community. One other factor that ought to be pointed out is that since early 1995 the ATF has probed 25 suspicious fires at mostly white churches. In addition to predominantly black churches or all black churches, there have been 25 suspicious fires of mostly white churches. Now the word ``mostly'' is the one you look at closely. A mostly white church means that it is a white church that has black members also. It means that it is a white church that was predominantly white or almost all white before that has admitted black parishioners or black members to the congregation. Nothing is hated more in the South by the racists and by the people who are capable of this kind of activity than integration. So a mostly white church is a church that has admitted black members. That is definitely going to be a target; they are in the same category as the black churches as far as being targets of hatred. So it is the same phenomena. I think that if you are going to get to the heart of what is happening and not have it continue to escalate, you have to go back and take a look at the history of the South, the history of this Nation and what is going on with respect to race relations. One of the irritants that keeps occurring with respect to race relations in this country is favorable of the perception that favorable treatment of African- Americans, favorable treatment of the descendants of slaves, is wrong. This upsets people and angers them a great deal. It is wrong to have affirmative action, it is wrong to have set-asides, the rewarding of contracts, it is wrong to have a Voting Rights Act which, in my opinion, is a very conservative political remedy for a very clear problem that was identified for decades. The Voting Rights Act was fashioned as a result of trying to deal with the fact that for more than a hundred years people of African- American descent, descendants of slaves, were not allowed to vote in the south. All kinds of tricks were used. We have to wage all kinds of legal battles in the courts, we have to have sit-ins and marches and demonstrations, and on and on it went for a long time before the simple matter of allowing a black person to go to a poll and vote could be accomplished, and the Voting Rights Act was an attempt to remedy the fact that as a result of that denial to vote, a right to vote, you had circumstances that generated a situation where there was no adequate representation by blacks in government at any level. At city levels and State levels and at the Federal level you had grossly inadequate representation as a result of all of these injustices related to voting rights that have been perpetrated for more than a hundred years. The Voting Rights Act was to correct that. So the Voting Rights Act is part of the remedies that are necessary to deal with what has happened in American history with respect to slavery. When we teach history to children in schools like the one that Clarence Thomas visited, the school that had an awards night and invited Justice Thomas; when you teach history to those children, how do you deal with the fact that most of the history books do not discuss this 235 years of slavery and the implications of having a population enslaved for 235 years? Most of the history books do not talk about slave labor and the fact that slaves had to work for nothing. Most of the history books do not talk about the fact that for 235 years the slaves were prevented from acquiring assets. They were prevented from acquiring property. For 235 years one generation had nothing to pass on to another generation. Most of the history books do not talk about that. Most of the history books do not want to deal with the economic consequences of 235 years of slavery. A youngster who is black in a school with whites, whites who have a history of having had assets, property handed down from one generation to another, most people in America who have assets, overwhelming majority of people who have assets, have property in the form of homes or real estate that was handed down from one generation to another or was sponsored and financed by the older generation. Couples have parents who either give or loan them the money for the mortgage. They have situations where furniture and property, stocks and bonds, various assets are passed down from one generation to another. If you have 235 years where you have nothing, where you are not allowed to own anything, you do not have any property, you are forced to work for nothing, then you start 235 years behind, and every black youngster in a school ought to know that your self-esteem and your sense of self-worth should not be impacted, should not be affected without taking that into consideration. You cannot compare yourself with your peers who have the benefits of all of this hand-down from one generation to another, who had the benefit of what goes along with assets and property and wealth. There is a correlation which is clear, and nobody questions it, between assets, wealth, and education. The people who have more income get better education. There are recent studies that confirm the relationship between income and achievement regardless of race. A lot of statements have been made about the fact that middle class black youngsters do not achieve in the same way that middle class white youngsters achieve. Well, when you study middle class and you define it more closely in terms of real income, and when you make the comparisons by income and you compare the income on the basis of what was the income on a steady basis throughout the life of a child, was it there when they were young and most formative? Did they lose the income as they got older? There is a study which has been done which has been very useful in this respect, and they give the big lie to the theory that income does not impact on all groups regardless of race, religion or color, including African American children. They are as susceptible to the impact of income. When they have the income in black families, they behave in just the same way as children in white families. There is a study that recently was concluded by Greg Duncan at Northwestern University National Institute of Childhood Health and Human Development which talked about, which is entitled, Family and Child Well-being Research Network, and it is part of the effort of family and child well-being research network, and their conclusions are that when you compare the income and you study it closely and you see that in the most formative years of life children have a certain income, those white children and black children who have the same income in the formative years of life, early years of schooling, they preform in much the same way regardless of race as they grow older. When you have youngsters who lose, who do not have the income that supports a certain level of family life at the early ages, and they later acquire it when they get into high school, then you do have a problem. The change is quite significant. Those whose families had inadequate income when they were in early education situations and later acquired it when they went to high school, they do not perform as well. The income is the variable. It is the same among whites who do not have the right income level that supports the right kind of nurturing environment at early ages. The same problem results in white families and with the white children as it does with the African American children. Studies like these are sort of widely introduced into the academic stream, and there is not much said about it. There was a book put out called the Bell Curve, which was greatly celebrated, and the Bell Curve was out to demonstrate what scientists have generally disproven over the years, that there is definitely a correlation between IQ and achievement and race, and that black people, people of African decent, are inferior with respect to achievement and with respect to IQ. These studies will show you differently and show you that there is a factor of income and a factor of nurturing that goes with income and a factor of educational level that goes with income that has a great impact on how children achieve and on their IQ. So, if you have a situation where for 232 years nothing was passed down, for 232 years there was no property, income was at a measly level, then the recent prosperity of African Americans in the middle class is not enough because they do not come from a tradition that was handed down that was nurtured where there was books, where there was wisdom passed all around the table by people who were already educated. There is a whole culture that comes with income at a certain level, and the culture was not there to nurture educational achievement and to nurture IQ. So the youngster, the child, who is African American in a public school needs to know that there is a whole history back there you have no control over. There is a whole history where you were deprived of the opportunity to pass on assets and property, and for that reason, for that reason, it is not a great shame for the society to develop programs which are going to seek to compensate for those 232 years and the tradition that they failed to hand down for those 232 years and the property that they fail to hand down. Affirmative action compensatory education programs become vital if you are going to try to remedy the evils of 232 years. Justice Clarence Thomas says no. All of a sudden, although he is the beneficiary of compensatory programs, all of a sudden they are programs that might make people too reliant or too dependent. He has benefited in many ways, but now he joins with a group of racists on the Supreme Court to interpret the 14th amendment to mean that you cannot take race into consideration in trying to foster programs which are seeking to remedy and to compensate for and to counteract 232 years of slavery, and 100 years after that, by the way, of very intensive pressure. There is an article that appeared in the Washington Post this past Sunday by Lynn Cooper, and that article talked about slavery that existed long after the Civil War, after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, slavery that was permitted by governments in the South, slavery that never was sufficiently challenged by the National Government, the Federal Government. He talks in great detail. It is a long article this past Sunday, June 16, in the Washington Post Sunday Style section by Lynn Cooper. It gives concrete examples of what happened as the share cropper system and the peon system and various other systems developed, which endured for almost 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. So all of these things become a part of what history should teach, and if it fails to teach, it denies a basic ingredient to the public discourse and the public dialogue which one day might get it all straight and be able to deal in a more intelligent way and a more sympathetic way and a way which is more in the national interest and than we are presently doing. If you do not look at history and acknowledge the truths of history, you are going to make decisions which are going to be distorted and continue to warp the public discourse and the public decision-making process. We are in that period now. We are right now in a period where the Voting Rights Act is about to be struck down, and yet that is probably the one piece of legislation which is most crucial to the correction of the 235 years of criminal slavery and the aftermath of that slavery. The Voting Rights Act does put, not only in the Congress but in the State legislatures and in the local councils and local governments, put in place people who represent the descendents of slaves and who will be able to take action on an ongoing basis to have a point of view which is going to help correct some of the numerous problems that still exist in our society as a result of those 235 years of slavery. The church burnings are there because at the top the Supreme Court is saying, blacks, you have been too arrogant. Blacks, you have demanded too much. Blacks, you do not deserve special treatment. Blacks, you are taking away from other people. The Supreme Court sends down that message. The Congress of the United States says, blacks, you do not deserve to have programs which provide aid to poor people. A large percentage of your people are poor, but that is a crime that you have committed, being poor. Being poor has nothing to do with 235 years of slavery. Being poor has nothing to do with schools that for a long time were not equal. They were separate but not equal, schools that right now are still in horrible shape in our urban centers, where most black youngsters go to school All this has nothing to do with your condition. All this has nothing to do with the crime rate. All this has nothing to do with the high rate of blacks on welfare. Let us dismiss all of this. Let us not accept it as being there. It is not real. In South Africa they have a truth commission. The truth commission has been appointed, not to get revenge, and not even to punish many people who are still living who committed gross and obvious crimes during the period when apartheid existed. They just want to tell the truth. They want to get it out. Nobody is going to be punished in many instances, but just tell the truth as to what is happening with the police and oppression, what is happening when people were put off their land by trickery and by various devices that were developed by the government. Tell the truth, no vengeance. I said before on a couple of occasions here, especially in connection with Haiti, that reconciliation is more important than justice. Reconciliation sometimes is the only thing possible. You cannot get justice. In Haiti, they do not even have the resources to build jails and prisons for all the people who murdered people over a 3-year period after President Aristide was kicked out of Haiti. Five thousand people were killed, 5,000 people brutally murdered. Other people were tortured. All kinds of things happened. But if they put their meager resources to work building prisons, trying to set up a court system, and paying attention only to getting justice, they would have nothing left over to build an economic system, to develop jobs and do other kinds of things that have to be done. They have to give up. There will be no justice. Reconciliation is what President Aristide is forced to preach. It probably makes a lot of sense. The deep philosophy of Christianity, that vengeance belongs to God and turning the other cheek, a lot of things that have been ridiculed about the Christian religion, makes a lot of sense in the context where if you are in a situation where you do not have the capacity to get justice, then certainly life must go on and reconciliation becomes the only possibility. I think Abraham Lincoln when he said malice towards none understood that very clearly; that to seek justice would have led to more chaos, guerrilla warfare, all kinds of confusion, but the malice towards none, and the fact that the Congress in the next 10 years proceeded to absolve all of the people who rebelled against the central government from any crimes, to give back property that had been threatened, all kinds of things were done to smooth it all out, going to an extreme. The malice towards none led to wiping out, taking a position of amnesia, that there was no crime committed. There were no crimes, there are no victims. The 40 acres and a mule was promised by the Freedmens Bureau. The Freedmens Bureau was a social program, the very first social program the Federal Government ever financed. It probably had the shortest life, also. It endured for about 10 years a little less than 10 years. But the Freedmens Bureau was attached to the Union Army, and they at one point started experiments where slaves were given 40 acres and a mule in order to farm the land that had been owned by the Confederates, people who supported the Confederacy. That was an extensive measure that probably went to the extreme. President Johnson wiped all that out with a decree, and Congress later on gave back all the lands. They went from one extreme of taking everything away from the southern plantation owners to giving everything back to them and making no provision for the slaves who had labored for 235 years for no compensation. So we went from one extreme to another, and then we went into a period of amnesia, wiping it all out and acting as if it does not exist, so much so that when the Confederate flag is flown now, people do not understand why the victims, the slaves or the descendants of slaves, should be upset in South Carolina. Why should they care about the Confederate flag being flown? After all, brave men died. We do not want to trample on memories and deeds of the brave men who died under that flag, but we do not think you are acknowledging history properly if you insist those brave men's flag must fly over the State Capitol and be the flag that has to be honored by the victims who, in large numbers their descendants still exist. In fact, South Carolina, the State where you have the most church burnings, also happens to be the State that had the largest slave population. There is a book called Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson which breaks out the populations for slaves in this country during certain periods when they were counting, and it talks about the fact that each State had a certain percentage of the population that was a slave percentage. There were times in America where certain States had more slaves than other States, and South Carolina probably was in the worst shape. South Carolina is the State which has the most church burnings. South Carolina is the State which has a Confederate flag flying. There has been a lot of controversy about it. The oppressive previous government of South Carolina before the Civil War, everybody has amnesia about that, does not want to acknowledge that. They were heroes, the flag must be flown. In 1708, 57 percent of the population of South Carolina were slaves, according to the records that were offered in this very thorough book called ``Slavery and Social Death'' by Orlando Patterson, published in 1982 by Harvard University Press. If you would like to get it, it is in the Library of Congress, and I am sure it is in other libraries. South Carolina in 1708 had 57 percent of its population that were slaves. In 1720, 64 percent of the population of South Carolina was slaves. In 1830, they still had 54 percent of the population who were slaves. In 1860, 57 percent of the population were slaves. These are official counts that the States themselves used, because each State benefited by properly counting its slaves, or sometimes maybe overcounting them, but they were willing to offer these figures, and they were verified to some extent by national census takers. In 1860, 5 years before the end of the Civil War, 57 percent of the people of South Carolina were slaves. More slaves existed there than other people. This is significant because if we look at the other Southern States we find similar patterns where large percentages, and at one point Virginia had as much as 45 percent of the population who were slaves. Mississippi had 55 percent in 1810, and Louisiana had 51 percent in 1830; you know, populations of slaves greater than the other people, and yet all of these victims and their descendants are sort of not to be regarded in the present situation which exists where we want to ignore and forget about the existence of slavery. What am I trying to say? It is kind of complicated, but what I am trying to say is that all these various items that I have talked about here relate. The burning of the black churches is a symptom of a disease that runs in the blood of America. Every now and then that disease breaks forth, and the boils and the canker sores show themselves. They will get worse if you do not take action. We took action today to start reversing that, but the disease has to be dealt with. We are not dealing with the disease when we have Supreme Court decisions which strike down the Voting Rights Act. We are not dealing with the disease when we attack affirmative action. We are not dealing with the disease when we go after set-asides for Federal contracts. We are not dealing with the disease when we have extremist budget cuts which cut programs that benefit the descendants of slaves who live in big cities on a regular basis. The hostility shown by the Congress and its policies are aimed at that population. We are not dealing with the disease in the blood of America. We are not dealing with the disease when we fail to teach history that at least tells the truth and states the facts so you would have a chance of getting at the truth. We are not dealing with the disease when we allow black children to accept a Supreme Court Justice like Clarence Thomas as a role model without challenging that. It was challenged, and that is part of what I want to talk about, because it all relates. When Justice Thomas was invited to speak to an awards ceremony at a school in Prince Georges County by a teacher, a school board member, once he heard about it, it happened to be a school in the district that he represented, once he heard about it, he challenged it. He said, given the fact that this is a predominantly black district, these are children who are black, they ought to know more about Clarence Thomas and the kinds of decisions that he is making, and we ought to have a way to communicate that if he is going to come to the school. An awards ceremony where he comes and makes a presentation and nobody has a chance to talk about him or he talk and answer any questions, so forth, that is not the appropriate arena for having a controversial figure like Clarence Thomas come and interact with black children. I think this was a most appropriate challenge by Kenneth Johnson of the Prince Georges County Board of Education. I think Mr. Johnson was right in questioning. I do not think this was a matter of questioning free speech prerogatives of Mr. Thomas or the people who wanted to hear Mr. Thomas who were adults. However, we always apply free speech differently when we are dealing with children. We do not allow free speech to predominate on our airways or in any arena, books. Nowhere do we say that free speech should be the order of the day when we are dealing with children. We make exceptions for children. If children should not see pornographic films, if children should not read pornographic passages in books, if children ought to be protected from pornography, if one of these days we are going to get around to properly protecting children from violence on the screen and violence in books and so forth, children are in a different category. We do not protect adults. It is pretty clear. The Supreme Court says you do not have a right to apply those same standards to adults but you do have a right for children. So children should be protected against political fraud. They should be protected against the situation where they are asked to accept someone as a role model when that person is taking actions which directly are detrimental to them and their parents and to future generations. How do you handle that? I think Mr. Thomas should clearly have been allowed to come to speak once he had been invited, but I think that the school board and the people responsible should have taken the responsibility of setting up an alternative forum of supporting Mr. Johnson and having it known exactly what Mr. Johnson was concerned about. There is the bigger issue of how is Mr. Thomas going to be handled in the curriculum in the future. He can be handled in one way in the curriculum, and standardized curriculum across the whole country. You can handle it straight factually: He is a conservative, he is a man who turned his back on affirmative action that helped him, he is a man who is very hostile to policies and programs that promote opportunities for his own people, opportunities that are designed to correct the past injustices of slavery and discrimination and oppression. You could say factually that is the case. But there should be an addendum to that curriculum in areas where black children are being taught. There should be clearly an opportunity to have a greater discussion of what that means. There should be a clear way to discuss the fact that large percentages of the black population have branded Justice Clarence Thomas as a traitor to his own people. What does it mean to be a traitor? Benedict Arnold was a traitor. Everybody accepts that. Benedict Arnold was a traitor. I do not think that necessarily the British schoolchildren of that time would call Benedict Arnold a traitor. Benedict Arnold may be called a hero in England in the service of the king. Benedict Arnold might have been given some great justification for his actions. The king and the people who supported keeping the American colonies as part of the British Empire might have argued that Benedict Arnold was a champion of law and order, that the colonists had no right to rebel against the lawful government of England. They could argue that, and make a case for it, and make him a hero in the schools for the children of the British back in England. clearly he was a traitor here, because we had already taken another course. Right and wrong had been defined by the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson talked about certain inalienable rights. He talked about self-evident truths. He did not deal with the fine points of English law. If he had continued to try to negotiate with the King and negotiate with the British, we would still probably be a colony of England. But he called upon higher powers and declared that there are some self-evident truths, that there are some inalienable rights. There is a right and a wrong. This Nation said when Abraham Lincoln was mourned and lifted up as one of the greatest Presidents of the United States, there is a right and a wrong. Abraham Lincoln who presided over the war against slavery, he represents the right. The whole civilized world looks to Abraham Lincoln as a person who was right in a controversy that some people want to still argue about. It was right to end slavery in America. It was right to go to war and have the bloodiest battle ever fought by Americans, fought on the soil of America, to get rid of that slavery. America would be in a very different position if two nations existed, one slave and one free, at the time Hitler came to power. We might have had on our very continent allies for the kind of philosophy that Hitler was advocating. All kinds of things could have happened if the rightness of Lincoln's position had not been enforced by a challenge to the Confederacy. There is a right and a wrong internationally. Lincoln is a great hero. The Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, the first Prime Minister after Communist rule was overthrown, visited the White House and Mrs. Bush, upon the occasion that the Congressional Black Caucus was visiting the White House, she explained that when he came into the room where Lincoln had stayed and where the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, he looked at the Emancipation Proclamation and he broke down in tears. Here is a man from Czechoslovakia, a man who had been under Communist rules, had been in prison, his great idol was Abraham Lincoln, and the Emancipation Proclamation, which was a Presidential Executive order that set the slaves free, brought him to tears immediately. So internationally, in the court of international morality and justice, Abraham Lincoln was right and the other folks were wrong. Slavery was wrong. We have made that decision. Our textbooks are to reflect it that way. We are to recognize that that is the national norm. If slavery was wrong, then remedies to correct the aftermath of slavery, remedies to correct the residue of the criminal actions of slavery, they have to have some kind of validity. The Voting Rights Act has to have validity. The Constitution has to have interpretation and must not be distorted by a racist Supreme Court that refuses to recognize that race in the Constitution is mentioned. We are mentioned several times, starting with article 1, where they talk about three-fifths of all other persons, they are clearly referring to slaves. Everybody knows the intent of the Constitution. Nobody has challenged the fact that three-fifths of all other persons means three-fifths, that each slave, male, should be counted as three- fifths of a person when you are counting the population of America. And they correct that when they get to the 13th and 14th amendment where they set free the slaves in the 13th amendment. The 13th amendment states: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. That is the 13th amendment. The 14th amendment, which is the subject of controversy, the 14th amendment which is being used by Sandra Day O'Connor and her colleagues on the Court as justification for calling for a colorblind America, the 14th amendment has section 1, section 2, section 3, section 4, and section 5, and I want to submit for the Record, just to have people reminded, the whole 14th amendment. Mr. Speaker, I submit for the Record the whole 14th amendment. Amendment XIV \1\ Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified July 9, 1868. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void. Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 1 states: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Who are they talking about particularly, specifically? The 13th amendment that came before freed the slaves, but the 14th amendment is talking specifically about slaves, or people who were just freed from slavery, and the 14th amendment is there primarily to deal with the descendants of slaves. To argue that it is there to promote a colorblind America is to distort the Constitution, to throw out any concern about what the Congress meant when they wrote this, what the States meant when they drafted it. We never do that on any other laws. We are always looking for the intent of the Framers, what the law says. All that is important. Why all of a sudden is it not important that the 14th amendment was drafted, written, ratified in response to correcting the ills of slavery, establishing the fact that these people who have just been set free shall also have equal right, equal protection under the law, these people are the people who were slaves and their descendants. Section 2, this is in the same 14th amendment. If you want to challenge my contention that the 14th amendment is about slavery and correcting the ills of slavery, take a look in section 2, section 3 and section 4. Take a look at what they say. They are talking about situations which are related to correcting the upheaval, the situation that resulted as a result of rebellion against the United States. In Section 2, I will not read it all, they state: ``But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being 21 years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number'' except in rebellion, participation in rebellion. When the 14th amendment was written, they still had rebellion of the Confederacy on their mind. Section 2 makes it clear that they had that in their mind. I will read all of section 3: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. They were concerned about the carryover and what was left over from the situation of the Civil War which was fought to end slavery. Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void. The 14th amendment was not concerned and preoccupied with colorblind America. It was preoccupied with slavery, the Civil War, the aftermath of the Civil War, with dealing with people who had rebelled against the Federal Government. I offer this in the hope that somebody would go back and reread it, and especially the Supreme Court Justices who dwell on one section and refuse to accept the 14th amendment in its total context. It is distorted and twisted. Kenneth Johnson did a great service when he pointed out that Justice Thomas is a part of this process of distorting the 14th amendment in what results in a racist series of decisions by the Court to roll back the clock and end various constructive kinds of things that have gone forth as a result of interpreting the 14th amendment in the proper way and understanding that the 14th amendment was the chance to deal with the problem of slavery in the proper context. Mr. Speaker, I was going to also give an example of how a recent book by Daniel Gohagen called ``Hitler's Willing Executioners'' confirms the kind of situation I am talking about where if you fail to deal with underlying prejudices and hostilities in a society, it will blossom forth in a diseased way and sometimes it will get out of control. Certainly, if the central government and leaders of government condone it and encourage it, it gets out of control. I would like to end my remarks by saying, by taking actions against the church burnings in a forceful way today, we have shown that the leaders of this central government will take firm action against such activities and elementary and rudimentary efforts have been taken to stamp out this disease. We need to go further and try to get to the root causes.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, on May 22 of this year, the Senate, the other body, heeding the voices of more than 21,000 construction contractors and millions of American workers throughout the Nation, voted to reject any plans to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. By the overwhelming margin of 99 to zero the Senate endorsed bipartisan reform to preserve Davis- Bacon. I think that is very significant that the Senate, the other body in this Congress, has taken a strong stance in favor of reform, with the assumption that any law, any institution, any structure would benefit from reform. But the Senate is not following the lead of the House and demanding that there be a repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act. I think this is a vindication of the system that was set up by the Founding Fathers when they said that we needed two Houses, one which could accept, and the analogy was made of the saucer and the cup, the pouring of tea or coffee into a saucer to cool it off; and the other, of course, would generate the heat that is in the cup. I think the House of Representatives is a body where there is a great deal of heat and energy. We have 435 Members, after all. When you multiply even the minimal energy of one person by 435, you get a great deal of heat and energy. The heat and energy in this body sometimes spins out of control. We need the wisdom and the patience of the Senate to sometimes bring us back to reality. I want to congratulate the Members of the Senate, all 99 Members who voted that Davis-Bacon should not be repealed, that the Davis-Bacon Act should be reformed. Mr. Speaker, I stand before this body, and today I would like to dispel the myth that the prevailing wage determination in the Davis- Bacon Act is inflationary, and that it adds billions of dollars to the Federal budget. I have talked before about Davis-Bacon and racism. Davis-Bacon is not the source of racism. If there is racism in the construction industry, Davis-Bacon is certainly not generating or not nurturing it. Davis- Bacon is the antidote. Davis-Bacon has done more to counteract the impact and the effects of racism than any other Federal law or local law on the books. It is through Davis-Bacon that we have maximum cooperation between unions and contractors, and through the maximum cooperation of unions and contractors that we have gotten the kind of training programs that have begun to slowly but surely and steadily increase the number of minority workers who are qualified in the various skill areas in the construction industry. Prevailing wage laws were enacted to maintain community wage standards. They were enacted to support local economic stability, and they were enacted to protect taxpayers from substandard labor on State and Federal projects. These laws set clear parameters to ensure that contractors bid on public projects on the basis of skill and efficiency, and not on how poorly they pay their workers. As I have stated before, Davis-Bacon was created by two Republicans. Both Davis and Bacon were Republicans. Both Davis and Bacon were concerned primarily about the middle class. Both Davis and Bacon were concerned about families and communities. The Davis-Bacon Act, when it was created in the early 1930s, was there to help stabilize communities. It was there to guarantee that families are not destabilized, and families are not subjected to the kind of wild things that happen when you can transport workers from one area under substandard wages and pay them substandard wages and be able to have unscrupulous contractors bid on projects at very low levels, and take over the work of the local contractors, who are paying good wages to local workers who are part of a local community and stabilize that community. That was what we were trying to avoid in the early 1930s. Davis-Bacon continues to help to stabilize communities and to guarantee that the pool of construction workers, their skills, and their incomes will be there to help stabilize their families and their communities. Unfortunately, the House Republicans, the Republican majority here in this House, is driven by antiunion hysteria, which I do not understand. There is some kind of contract with an unscrupulous group of contractors, I think, in the case of Davis-Bacon, because they will not let up. Certain House Members keep going and they refuse to recognize the facts. They come from areas that are certainly not paying very high wages. If you look at the Davis-Bacon wages of the areas that many of the Republican majority Members come from, you will find that they are very low wages and sometimes close to minimum wages. And they cannot really complain about Davis-Bacon driving up the cost of local construction. But the facts do not seem to matter. There is a kind of hysteria determined to reverse the fair and equitable standards that Davis-Bacon has established. They have worked themselves into a feeding frenzy, and they made absurd charges about Davis-Bacon. Davis-Bacon is racist. These charges are made by people who normally are not concerned with racism, but they use this as a charge to be able to belittle and denigrate Davis-Bacon. They also charge that contractors are forced by Davis-Bacon to pay inflated wages, and that this has been the result of what Davis-Bacon has accomplished. The gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling], who is the chairman of our Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, appearing before the appropriations subcommittee on the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services earlier this year, stated that quote, quoting representative Gooding, the chairman of our committee: The 1931 Davis- Bacon Act drives up construction costs for any Federal construction projects valued over $2,000 by requiring contractors to pay a government-determined wage rate. Chairman Goodling's remarks before the appropriations subcommittee is proof positive that Republicans are not ready to really listen to the facts and take responsibility for leading this body in a move to have labor and contractors, labor and management come together for the benefit of stabilizing communities and for the benefit of stabilizing workers whose families very much need this kind of stability. The actual wages of construction workers is going down. They are as much a part of the wage gap and the wage stagnation in America as any other set of workers. If you take away Davis-Bacon, many of them will be subjected to violent swings in the conditions that set their incomes and their salaries. The Republicans have put on a sneak attack and fright campaigns in the hope that the American people will buy into a conspiracy theory, a theory that Davis-Bacon is out there conspiring to drive up the costs by guaranteeing workers something that is unreal. Chairman Goodling suggested that there is some kind of institutionalized and entrenched collusion at the Department of Labor. And to quote him again, ``There appears to be a deliberate effort to manimpulatee data for political gain.'' There appears to be a deliberate effort to manipulate date for political gain. If you look at the Department of Labor and the history of the Department of Labor, if you examine the surveys that they do in determining prevailing wage rates, you will find that it is impossible to establish that there is any kind of collusion or any kind of conspiracy. In fact, there are many cases where the surveys done by the Department of Labor actually lower the wages of construction workers relative to the highest-paid workers in that particular area. I am going to talk about that in a few minutes. Mr. Speaker, we have a booklet here which shows the results of some of the surveys that are done. They show that often the construction workers are paid below the wages of the average salary for workers in similar kind of jobs in given localities. Further evidence of the dream world existence among the Republicans who are fighting Davis-Bacon is that many of them have bought into the party rhetoric that Davis-Bacon inflates wages. Again, this is our primary topic today, to look at the wages, look at what is really happening with Davis-Bacon wages. It comes as no surprise that many of the most vociferous foes of Davis-Bacon comes from States that have extremely low wage determinations which include no health or pension benefits. No only do we have in States like North Carolina very low wages paid to Davis-Bacon workers, workers who are covered by Davis- Bacon on Federal construction jobs, but those workers, the same workers in those areas have no pension benefits, they have no health benefits. I was in a hearing this morning covered by the Employer-Employee Relations Subcommittee of the Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee, and the hearing was focused on pensions. They pointed out the fact that there are only a small percentage of Americans who are covered by pensions. Two-thirds of the people do not have pensions of any kind beyond Social Security. For more and more people, the coverage for people is going down. There are more and more people who are uncovered as the years go by. We had more people covered 20 years ago who had pensions and pension benefits than have it now. So there is a whole category of construction workers who not only have no health benefits; they have no pension benefits as well. These are the same people, the same people who want to criticize the Davis- Bacon prevailing wages also are the people who fought against the minimum wage. Minimum wage at least establishes a floor. Unfortunately, in many areas the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage rate is close to the minimum wage rate. Minimum wage, as we have pointed out before, is too low. It is presently $4.25 an hour, and we voted a few weeks ago on the floor of this House to raise the minimum wage. And after we raise it, if we get the other House to pass the bill, after we raise it, it will go from $4.25 an hour over a 2-year period to $5.15 an hour. This is very low, but there are many Davis-Bacon workers, people who are covered by Davis-Bacon who are very close to this minimum wage. Mr. Speaker, how can $4.25 an hour with no benefits be called inflationary by any rational and thinking person? How much longer can he go? At those rates, no one can support a family. Surely none of my esteemed colleagues would want to maintain that you can live on $4.25 an hour, working 40 hours a week every week of the year. Construction workers, as we know, do not work on a regular basis like other folks. They have very uneven working periods due to the weather and a number of other factors. So here we have a situation where the Republicans in the House, the Republican majority in the House is insisting that we must go ahead and do something radical again. We have a situation where extremism is the only answer to the problem. The Members of the Senate have looked at the problem, and they have said: We need to have some reform, and we are willing to go forward with reform. But they did not say we need to be radical and extreme, and we need to repeal Davis-Bacon. They started with that discussion. There were people in the Senate who were maintaining that we should repeal Davis- Bacon. What happened on May 22, 1996, just a few weeks ago? They started with a discussion of a repeal of Davis-Bacon. And then it was proposed by Senator Santorum that they once and for all for this session of Congress decide that we are either going to repeal or reform. He was in favor of reform. Senator Santorum, and I quote him, I quote him from an ad that appeared in Roll Call, and it is available for all who want to see it. Senator Santorum said, ``We have just voted, we just voted on whether to repeal Davis-Bacon. Many of us are not for repeal of that. We believe that there need to be reform of the Davis-Bacon law and that we, in fact, should assume that for the purposes of the budget we are going to be reforming Davis-Bacon. I think there is bipartisan support for reform of Davis-Bacon. I wanted the Senate to go on record for that reform measure.'' That is what Rick Santorum, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said on May 22, 1996, as a result of the leadership taken by Senator Rick Santorum, formerly a Representative from this body, a Republican, as a result of the leadership that he took the Senate voted 99 to 0 for Davis-Bacon reform, not repeal, Davis-Bacon reform. The Senate voted for Davis-Bacon reform because they understand that Davis-Bacon should be kept alive and remain in force because it encourages the private sector to invest more than $400 million in vital training programs, $5.75 billion for privately funded health care, and $4.3 billion for privately funded pensions. The Senate understood that Davis-Bacon is not racist. In fact, national civil rights organizations and the Congressional Black Caucus strongly support Davis-Bacon because it provides training and employment opportunities for minorities through apprenticeship programs. Davis-Bacon does not mean union rates. Unfortunately, I do not think that is so great. I think we should have union rates because union rates are far closer to what reality is in terms of people needing a decent wage, because Davis-Bacon does not seek to solve that problem. Davis-Bacon was not designed to solve the problem of collective bargaining, just as Davis-Bacon has nothing to do with racism or civil rights. It was not designed for that purpose. It has, as a byproduct, produced a situation where you have contractors and unions willing to work together. Because Davis-Bacon helps to stabilize the industry, you have had great benefits flow for civil rights for the improvement of the opportunities for minorities to work in the construction industry. But that is not what it is about. Davis-Bacon is not for civil rights, not designed to correct the problem of racism. We need lots of measures to go to work on correcting problems of racism throughout our whole society, and certainly some problems within the construction area, but this is not what Davis-Bacon is designed to do. Mr. Speaker, Davis-Bacon was not designed to replace collective bargaining. Davis-Bacon does not mean union rates. Seventy-one percent of prevailing wage rates issued by the U.S. Department of Labor are nonunion rates. Eighty percent of the wage decisions issued by the Department of Labor contain a rate of $10 or under. Davis-Bacon does not set the wage rate; it reflects existing community standards. Mr. Speaker, I submit this statement of the Senate's vote, 99 to 0. It appeared in advertisement form in Roll Call. I submit the material for the Record. Why Did the Senate Just Vote 99-0 for Davis-Bacon Reform? On May 22, 1996, the United States Senate, heeding the voices of more than 21,000 construction contractors and millions of American workers throughout the nation, voted to reject plans to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. By the overwhelming margin of 99-0, the Senate endorsed bipartisan reform to preserve Davis-Bacon. The Senate voted for Davis-Bacon because: It encourages the private sector to invest more than $400 million in vital training programs, $5.75 billion for privately funded health care and $4.3 billion for privately funded pensions; Davis-Bacon is not racist. In fact, national civil rights organizations and the Congressional Black Caucus strongly support it because it provides training and employment opportunities for minorities through apprenticeship programs; Davis-Bacon does not mean union rates: 71% of prevailing wage rates issued by the U.S. Department of Labor are non- union rates. 80% of the wage decisions issued by the Department of Labor contain a rate of $10 or under. Davis- Bacon doesn't set the wage rate, it reflects existing community standards. Ultimately, the U.S. Senate rejected the scare tactics and misinformation employed by Davis-Bacon's detractors: We just voted on whether to repeal Davis-Bacon. Many of us are not for repeal of that. We believe that there needs to be reform of the Davis-Bacon law and that we, in fact, should assume that for the purposes of the budget. I think there is bipartisan support for reform of Davis-Bacon. I wanted the Senate to go on record for that reform measure--U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), Congressional Record, May 22, 1996. Stop the lies. Reform Davis-Bacon now. Pass H.R. 2472/S. 1183.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, there are efforts afoot, and part of this comes from the same committee, the committee I serve on, the Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee. It comes from a subcommittee I serve on, the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, an effort to promote a concept called the TEAM Act where they try to say that they want to take steps to give management and labor a chance to work more closely together, and they think we need to legislate this. Those of us who oppose the TEAM Act say that the legislation and the context of union-busting that is taking place in the country now is another form of intimidation, another form of ambush that can be set for workers and that we do not need a TEAM Act; what we need is more freedom to organize. We need new regulations, and perhaps a change in the law, not perhaps, but certainly a change in the law which would allow workers to organize more freely and without having to go through the tremendously long waiting period and the bureaucratic struggle they have to undertake now in order to organize, get a vote, and be recognized. The advantage at this point is on the side of management, and management has used that advantage in many ways. So, we oppose the TEAM Act. Mr. Speaker, here is another way to have management and labor work together without interfering with the collective bargaining process and without interfering with the union organizing process. The contractors in Davis-Bacon, those who are part of the process of building Federal buildings and have for years found the stability of the Davis-Bacon Act and the kind of environment that it creates to be good for business, not for higher profits necessarily, but for stability which gives them a workforce that has skills, a workforce that is stable and will be around, that allows them to treat their workers in some kind of humane way and give fringe benefits like health care and pensions. The Davis- Bacon employers are very different from the non-Davis-Bacon employers. The contractors who are against Davis-Bacon are the ones who are the most unscrupulous contractors seeking to maximize profits by exploiting workers. They want to take one group of workers in one part of the country at very low rates and move them to another part of the country, and capitalize on the fact that they are exploiting those workers. Usually those workers are not as skilled as the people who come up in a situation under Davis-Bacon, and they usually provide a whole series of problems. They generate a whole series of problems in construction. They do not do as good a job, they have many problems. We have some very substandard buildings that have been constructed and others that have to be corrected. There are problems when you have workers who are working at the very lowest wages, workers who do not have health care benefits and workers who cannot look forward to a stable long-term job and any pension benefits. So, we have instead, a situation where contractors, employers, management, have taken the initiative to put forward the best possible condition for workers. Workers, on the other hand, have responded and they have in many cases made alliances to the benefit of the total community. It is the total community that Davis-Bacon is concerned with, and it is not inappropriate for the Federal Government to be concerned about the total community. When it goes to build a building, building a building or constructing any project within a community or a locale is not the only thing the Federal Government should be concerned about. The Federal Government has to be concerned about what it does to that community and what the response is in terms of the labor market and the total environment of that community. This is not anything unusual. We have a defense budget which has been slowed down. We have not dealt with closing bases in a helter-skelter manner. Closing bases has been a slow process. We appointed a commission. We have taken every precaution to make certain that the closing of bases, which are military bases, be done in ways which do not injure communities, be done in ways which minimize the dislocation of workers. So the Federal Government is in the business of defending the country. Military bases are constructed as part of a process to contribute toward the defense of the country, but the Federal Government does not ignore what our military posture and our military changes with respect to bases or the movement of any facility does to communities. Why should it be any different in the construction of large Federal projects, whether you are constructing highways, bridges, or you are constructing buildings? Why should it be different? Why should the Federal Government not try to maximize the impact on that community? I congratulate Senator Santorum because he comes from Pennsylvania. Davis came from New York, Bacon from Pennsylvania, vice versa. I do not remember, but one of them is from Pennsylvania, one is from New York. It is altogether fitting and proper that a Pennsylvania Senator should take the initiative at this time and provide some light on the subject for his fellow colleagues in the Senate. Let me just talk a bit about the Contractors Coalition for Davis- Bacon and some of the statements that they have made. These are businesspeople. I do not think the Republican majority wants to be in a position of turning its back on small businesses or large businesses. They are the ones who say that the future of the country is certainly tied up with what happens in the private sector. I do not exactly agree that the private sector can make magic, but I think a partnership between the private sector and the public sector is very much in order, and in Davis-Bacon you have a great partnership between the Government and the private sector, between management and labor, and that is what some of these contractors are talking about. I want to just quote from a few of them. Thomas H. Parkinson, president of the Burris Construction Co., Mount Laurel, NJ: The Davis-Bacon Act insures that we are bidding on a basis that will allow the use of skilled labor. To think that merely reducing the cost of labor will provide a cheaper product is ludicrous. Matthew Card, president of KEC Engineering, Corona, CA: Davis-Bacon provides added value to virtually every facet of our lives, from the superior quality of our public improvements to a more stable productive society that has the ability to contribute constructively to the future of our great country. Fair wages are a requirement to attract high quality people to provide high quality construction products. One only has to look outside our borders to see the destabilizing and potentially dangerous effects of widespread low wages and poverty. Ronald J. Becht, executive director of the Northern California Drywall Association based in Saratoga, CA: As you know, the Davis-Bacon Act does not specify union or nonunion nor should it; it does, however, establish a minimum wage to be paid all workers which enables those contractors who have made the commitment to pay for worker training and who are able to retain their work force by paying a higher wage, to at least compete with those who are not willing to fund the future of their industry. Elimination of the Davis- Bacon Act which stabilizes wages would only serve to exacerbate the current problem of skill shortages in the construction industry. Since the public entity is required to award to the low bidder, low wages would be further depressed by unscrupulous contractors in a mad scramble to underbid each other in order to win public contracts--to the detriment of all. Troy T. Comer, Jr., executive vice president, Associated General Contractors of Indiana: This is going to be a tough issue for the Congress to address, because there is a lot of misleading and incorrect information floating around which would give the impression that repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act would save the taxpayers heaps of dollars. We disagree. Quality of construction and the taxpayers are well served with the Davis-Bacon Act. Judith L. Striebinger, president of Eastern Steel Constructors, Inc., Fallston, MD: To think that not maintaining a standard for wages and benefits will, in any way, be an asset can only be mentally developed by people who are outsiders looking in and not aware of the complexities of the industry. Experience increasing difficulty in executing projects leading to higher cost and extended construction schedules at a time when our industry is under severe cost pressure. That is a quote from W. Douglas Ford, executive vice president of Amoco Corp., in the BNA Construction Labor Report on November 22, 1995. I quote from Robert Gasperow, executive director, Labor Research Council: Attracting qualified young workers has to be the biggest long-term problem the industry has. It is possible that the industry has sufficient numbers of workers but their quality is not good enough. And the final quote from Matthew Brown, Associated Press, in the Salt Lake Tribune: Beyond the upbeat statistics for soaring construction employment and a doubling in the value of commercial construction over the past 3 years is a desperate campaign to find workers with enough skills to get the job done. We have a problem in the quality of work that is being produced by the fact that too many unscrupulous contractors are already at work in the construction industry and seeking to now destroy Davis-Bacon protection. Mr. Speaker, I submit in its entirety a statement called Contractors' Coalition for Davis-Bacon--Reform Yes, Repeal No. Contractors' Coalition for Davis-Bacon ``Reform--Yes, Repeal--No'' Here's what some of our contractors have to say about the Davis-Bacon Act: Thomas H. Parkinson, President, Burris Construction, Mount Laurel, NJ: ``The Davis-Bacon Act insures that we are bidding on a basis that will allow the use of skilled labor. To think that merely reducing the cost of labor will provide a cheaper product is ludicrous.'' Matthew Card, President, KEC Engineering, Corona, CA: ``Davis-Bacon provides added value to virtually every facet of our lives, from the superior quality of our public improvements to a more stable productive society that has the ability to contribute constructively to the future of our great country. Fair wages are a requirement to attract high quality people to provide high quality construction products. One only has to look outside our borders to see the destabilizing and potentially dangerous effects of widespread low wages and poverty.'' Ronald J. Becht, Exec. Director, Northern CA Drywall Contractors Association, Saratoga, CA: ``As you know, the Davis-Bacon Act does not specify union or non-union nor should it; it does, however, establish a minimum wage to be paid all workers which enables those contractors who have made the commitment to pay for worker training and who are able to retain their workforce by paying a higher wage, to at least compete with those who are not willing to fund the future of their industry. Elimination of the Davis-Bacon Act which stabilizes wages would only serve to exacerbate the current problem of skill shortages in the construction industry. Since the public entity is required to award to the low bidder, low wages would be further depressed by unscrupulous contractors in a mad scramble to underbid each other in order to win public contracts--to the detriment of all.'' Troy T. Comer, Jr., Exec. Vice President, Associated General Contractors of Indiana, Inc.: ``This is going to be a tough issue for the Congress to address, because there is a lot of misleading and incorrect information floating around which would give the impression that repeal of the Davis- Bacon Act would save the taxpayers heaps of dollars. We disagree. Quality of construction and the bottom line are what really count, and we think the taxpayers are well served with the Davis-Bacon Act. Judity L. Striebinger, President, Eastern Steel Constructors, Inc. Fallston, MD: ``To think that not maintaining a standard for wages and benefits will, in any way, be an asset can only be mentally developed by people who are outsiders looking in and not aware of the complexities of the industry.'' John D. Porada, Exec. Director, Associated General Contractors of OH, Cleveland Div., Cleveland, OH: ``The construction industry is a highly competitive and high risk business that must attract the most productive workforce in the quest to be the lowest responsible bidder. Joint labor/ management apprenticeship training programs provide the resources needed to train workers and is primarily self sufficient without the need for major financial assistance coming from the government. Repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act could have a very negative impact on the continuance of this type of joint apprenticeship training programs.'' Dominick J. Graziano, President, Dominion Construction Services, Inc., New Kensington, PA: ``We have had no problem complying with the intent of the Davis-Bacon Act and wish to add that it has in turn guaranteed those municipal or governmental bodies a higher degree of quality and conformity with the design intent by eliminating just anybody who wished to call himself a contractor. It has functioned as part of a base to provide experienced contracting and insure that all contractors bidding on prevailing wage projects bid in an air of equal and fair process with respect to such expenditures of public revenue.'' Kimberly Igo, President, Kim Con Inc. Sarver, PA: ``Repealing Davis-Bacon would destroy the equal bidding process and would cause the loss of many skilled tradesmen which I have access to with a mere phone call. This would also hurt the families of the people who put Congress members in office. Like you, they too deserve a fair wage.'' John Busse, Chairman, Master Builders' Association of Western PA, Pittsburgh, PA: ``The absence of the prevailing wage will force employers to drive down wages to the lowest possible level in order to compete for federal construction projects. Further, repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act will negatively impact training, health insurance, pensions, federal and state taxes, social security and local economics.'' Ned W. Bechthold, President, Payne & Dolan, Inc., Waukesha, WI: ``Welfare reform must be accompanied by an atmosphere that will allow minorities and others to work in our central cities at rates of pay that will permit them to raise families. Davis-Bacon accomplishes this.'' Francis X. McArdle, The General Contractors Association of New York, Inc. ``Our heavy construction contractors survive and thrive on the effectiveness of their workforce, not on the shine of the equipment. The best assets leave each day at the end of the shift. Those assets are most productive when they are paid enough to work without family worries and are able to contribute to their communities.''

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by congratulating the Children's Defense Fund and Marian Wright Edelman and all of the other sponsors of Stand for Children which took place here in Washington last Saturday, June 1. They came from all over, all parts of the Nation. They came from every ethnic group, every religion, every race, they were all together, children and families, making it clear that in America the great caring majority stands for children and American policies. Government policies at this point in our Nation's history reflect this fact. They reflect the fact that this Nation stands for children. The policies of the Government stand for children. Mr. Speaker, the problem that they did not talk very much about on Saturday is the problem of the present attempt to change those government policies, to turn our policies around and make this a Nation whose policies are hostile toward families and children. In contrast to the Stand for Children that was taking place in Washington here, more than 200,000 people by the official estimates, in contrast to that Stand for Children, let us consider for a moment the problem of Brazil and Colombia, where large numbers of children are being found dead in the streets every day. They are being found dead as a result of being shot the night before. They are killing children in Brazil. They are killing children in Colombia. They are killing children in certain other South American countries. Mr. Speaker, I do not mean child abuse in the usual sense. There is a high degree of child abuse in these nations, but there is a phenomenon which we have not yet experienced in America. That is they are shooting children at night, and you find the dead bodies the next day. The elite classes of Brazil and Colombia and certain other South American countries are the classes of people that are envied by our Republican majority here in this country. We have an elitist philosophy driving an attempt by the Republican majority to change the policies that have an impact on children. The previous speakers talked about they were not cutting school lunch programs because after all the figures, the numbers will show that there is an increase in the numbers over the years. They do not tell you that the number of children will increase faster than the dollars that they have put in the budget will increase. If you did a simple mathematical calculation of dividing the number of children into the number of dollars available, you will see that the amount of dollars available, you will see that the amount of dollars per child will go down as a result of the cuts that they are proposing. They are also taking out large blocks of children and saying that immigrant children shall not be served and we are going to just leave them on their own. We are going to leave them to fend for themselves. So the contrast is very important, to take into consideration the fact that in this Nation at this point in history, the majority of Americans still stand for children. They stand for children regardless of what the Republican majority in the Congress right now is trying to do. They are going to reject the attempts wholesale to change the policies which favor children and families. They are going to reject it in November, but in the meantime we have a serious problem of trying to beat back the threats to the policies and the programs in our Government which support families and children. There are three examples I would like for you to consider. Consider the fact that in America we do stand for children. Still our Government policies are favorable to children and families. In Brazil, Colombia and certain other South American countries, they do not have the safety net for families and for children, so they have gone in the opposite direction. They have created so many problems with families and children that large numbers of children roam the streets day and night, and they have begun to hate those children. They have begun to demonize those children. They are wiping out those children at night through vigilante groups. Many groups involved are even considered to be close to the police, or in a few examples the police themselves have been accused of murdering children at night. These children become a nuisance because they steal in the daytime. They obstruct the beauty of the sidewalks. They do a lot of things which make people very upset with them. Society will not deal with them in a rational way. Society will not provide programs which will guarantee that they have a decent home or decent meal, school lunches, will not guarantee that they have some safety net so that families are not thrown into the streets, that society ends up at the other extreme, exterminating children, large numbers of children are being killed. Contrast the societies of the industrialized nations that the United States is in economic competition with. Brazil, not Brazil, Italy, England, France, Germany, those societies have safety nets which are far greater than any safety nets that we have here in America. They treat children far better. Recent articles in the newspaper, the New York Times talked about in Italy the mothers under the provisions which allow family leave have abused it to the point where certain mothers have stayed off a whole year from work and gotten paid. That was an example of abuse. But then they described the kinds of programs that they have for family leave in a country like Italy. They showed how a person who wanted to abuse the system could do that. What they were saying is that there is a very strong family net there for people who have children. In this country, which has a gross national product which is smaller than ours, Italy is not a rich industrialized nation, as rich as the United States, but in Italy they have policies for families which are far better. In France, they are always citing the day care programs in France, unparalleled, no parallel programs anywhere in the world to the kind of day care programs they provide in France. In Germany, the programs for workers that allow vacations and sick leave and so forth are unparalleled in terms of any workers anywhere in the world. So on the one hand you have families and children in certain industrialized nations who are far better off and supported far more by the government and the country as a whole than we have in this country. On the other hand, you have the other extreme, the elite minorities of South America, the rich leadership of South America who are envied by the elite minority here in this country. They do not pay very much taxes. They are not bothered with the nuisance of taxes. You have billionaires in South America who are scot-free from responsibilities of trying to guarantee that there is a safety net for children and families, and our Republican majority here wants to create a situation for our elite minority to have a similar situation. They want more and more advantages for the rich, less and less taxes, less and less disturbing their abilities to make maximum number of dollars in profits. In South America they do not have environmental laws. They do not have a number of things which force our corporations and businesses to act in a more humane way, ways which are supportive of life in general and of families and of children. So they have gone to the extreme in places like Brazil and Colombia. On the other hand, we are at least in the middle. We have some safety net programs. Right now we are at a critical point in our history where a Republican majority in control of the Congress is striving to try to eliminate those safety net programs. Mr. Speaker, I am going to talk in a little while about specific examples of programs for children that the Republican majority has attempted to eliminate, programs for families that the Republican majority is attempting to eradicate at this very moment. One of the most important programs of course is Medicaid, the Medicaid entitlement. Families will be hurt a great deal if the program passed by the Republican majority in this House were to be signed into law. Last Thursday there was another program, the reauthorization of IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. That, too, was under the hammer by the Republican majority. They are chipping away at that program now and creating a situation where it is possible that the Federal Government may pull out of its support for children with disabilities, the education, completely. I will talk more about that later. Mr. Speaker, let me just go for a moment to some clippings related to Brazil. I want to make the point clear here that, if a society takes the route of accepting no responsibility for the poor families within that society, the society takes the route that it is against minimum wage. So those who are working cannot earn a decent living and then takes the route that those who are not, those who cannot find jobs and are on unemployment do not deserve any help from government. If it takes the route of cutting back on job training programs as all of these routes taken by the Republican majority here in this Congress, you take that route, you are eventually going to end up in a situation where the children are demonized and hated because they are running out there without any support. Families cannot keep them at home. Families cannot keep them. Families cannot house them. Families cannot clothe them. So they are on the street. Where do they go if not onto the streets? And once they are on the streets, they become scum in the eyes of the general population. It is not surprising that it is the police that sometimes end up being involved in trying to eradicate these children. These are not my words. Let me just quote from a story that appeared, a United Press International story, on April 25, 1995. I use this story because it is an example of a situation where they caught, for the first time they caught some of the people who were doing the eradication of children. Children have been dying, being shot, like flies. You know, they have been dying in large numbers and being found on the street dead, shot in large numbers, and nobody has been held responsible. This is the one example where there was a witness, and they actually arrested people, and a trial was taking place last April related to the killing of these children. Let me just read from the United Press International article of April 25, 1996. A former military police agent in Brazil confessed Thursday to his part in the 1993 killings of eight street children as they slept outside the Candelaria Church in Rio de Janeiro and said people scheduled to go on trial are innocent. The police agent was one of those accused, and as he came up for trial, he confessed, but he said certain other people that were accused were not innocent. The important thing about this is that the prosecutor, Jose Muinos Pineiro, said that this trial was the first ever in the case of the killing of street children, and the trial was to begin as planned, and it would be a landmark in Brazil, although for years they have been finding children shot in the streets in the morning, and nobody has ever been punished. So this was the first case. Mr. Santos, who was a former policeman, confessed, said he decided to confess because of conflicts of conscience, conflicts of conscience. The witness who identified Mr. Santos and the others is a boy named Wagner dos Santos, and Wagner dos Santos, the little child who identified the assailant, the assassins, has suffered two assassination attempts since the time he identified them and the time of the trial. He has been so threatened that he had to be moved to Switzerland and kept there between the time of the assassinations of the children and the time of the trial; the only trial being held; only time they have caught the killers of children in the streets of Brazil. Now, am I exaggerating the situation? Here is another article dated October 12, 1995 from Inter Press Service, and it states that a study, according to the article, a study by the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, reported that Colombia's average of 2,219 child killings each year now outstrips the more notorious death by violence of children in Brazil, where the figure was 1,533 annually. Now, I am not talking about child abuse, I am not talking about child deaths as a result of neglect. We are talking about children being shot in the streets, children being shot like rats. The Colombian city with the highest children's death rate in Medellin, with 64 children murdered for every 100,000 inhabitants. The city of Cali, the third largest city, has 13 deaths per 100,000 children. We know some of these names because they are drug centers in Columbia. In the capital of Colombia, Bogota, they have a better record: Eight children die violently each year per 100,000 inhabitants. Now, I quote these statistics to let you know, you know, in a civilized society, and these are civilized societies, they are quasi- democracies in some cases, but the situation has deteriorated to the point where instead of standing for children, the citizens stand against children, enough of them stand against children to allow this to go on day in and day out, night in and night out, and the children are picked up in the morning like rats, dead rats. Human Rights Watch stopped short of describing the widespread murder of street children as government policy, but it did state that the police agents are involved in a broad range of abuse against minors, including torture, corporal punishment and widespread killings. Human Rights narrated the story of Frankie, a Bogota street urchin who had managed to escape three social cleansing operations. It also discussed the case of Andres, a child prostitute who, according to three friends, was taken out of the center when he was working by three armed men dressed in police uniforms, and several days later this body was found on the outskirts of Bogota. The report notes that the most extreme attack took place November 15, 1992, when eight children and one adult who were members of a community group were murdered in Villatina, a marginal barrio of Medellin, in the northwest of Colombia. According to witnesses, the youths were gathered at night on a street corner in the barrio when 12 men in three vehicles approached and demanded that they lie on the ground, and opened fire on them. One of the victims reportedly managed to tell his mother before dying that he recognized his killer as a member of the judicial police. One human rights organization linked the Villatina massacre to the deaths of two police officers the same day and said that because those police officers had been killed, they were out to get revenge on the children before this massacre took place. Now, I only mentioned police and make a point about police because police are an agent of government. Police are the front line of what people really want. And when societies have degenerated to the point where they are killing children and policemen are involved or turning their back, refuse to investigate, then you know that the society is culpable. It is not something out there on the outskirts, on the edges of society, taking place that does not have approval from a large number of citizens. You know Daniel Goldhagen has written a book called ``Hitler's Willing Executioners,'' and in the book, ``Hitler's Willing Executioners,'' Daniel Goldhagen says that what Hitler did could not have happened if the Nazis had not taken over the government. They had control of the government, and they had power over people, but the extent to which the mass murders occurred, the massacre of 6 million Jewish people occurred, they also had to have a willing population, and that too many people in the German population cooperated because they had come to the point where they demonized Jewish people and saw them as subhuman, and because they saw them as subhuman, they could participate in these outrageous acts without any conscience. When a society reaches the point where frustrations and failure of government and failure of institutions is such that children become a nuisance, a threat, and the society begins to demonize its children, then they can do unspeakable things to its children, like murder them in the streets like rats. Mr. Goldhagen also makes some references to slavery. Slavery took place in a situation where large numbers of human beings were treated in a outrageous subhuman, criminal manner for 232 years in America. Slavery in South America lasted longer. Slavery in South America was more brutal. Slavery in South America did not have the constriction of early laws which forbade the import of slaves, so for a much longer time in South America they were importing slaves. And South America was much more brutal in the treatment of its slaves because they were expendable, they did not try to keep their property alive the way the American slave owners did, they did not set up breeding farms and try to breed slaves and take care of female slaves because they were valuable property. In South America they had an access to large numbers of incoming slaves, and the tradition was they just worked them until they worked them to death. The brutality was so much greater and the heritage of that brutality probably has something to do with the fact that they are shooting children down in the streets of certain South American countries right now. I might add, my colleagues, that in these South American countries there is a black population. Colombia has, I learned on the radio this morning, 6 million, at least 6 million, people who are of African descent. In Brazil at least half of the people in Brazil are of African descent, and probably, if you use the general yardstick that is applied in America that if you have one drop of African blood you are of African decent, the majority of people in Brazil are of African descent. The children who are shot down in the streets are usually black or mixed children in the streets of Colombia; it is the black and the mixed children who are being murdered in the streets of Brazil because they are the bottom of the economic ladder, they are the despised ones who have no safety net, there is no welfare program, there is no school lunch program, there is no Medicaid, there is no program for children with disabilities. So they are thrown into the streets. This is my introduction to my discussion of the Stand For Children. I applaud the Stand For Children because it says a lot about where the majority of Americans are at this point. There was one thing that happened with Stand For Children that disturbed me. Marian Wright Edelman, who is the organizer of this Stand For Children, on last Saturday did a brilliant job, and we all know Marian Wright Edelman on the Hill very well. Republicans and Democrats are familiar with the work of the Children's Defense Fund, and they have done a great job, and they are very knowledgeable about the political process. They are nonpartisan, and sometimes they have appealed to us to act in a bipartisan way, but they are political. I was disturbed in Marian Wright Edelman's final speech, her closing speech on Saturday when she said to people, ``Go back home,'' and she asked them to follow God. ``Don't follow politicians, follow God.'' Now, by all means they should follow God. But I wonder why she had to say do not follow politicians. It struck me as strange and sounded dangerous because in my community I have had a problem with people putting down politicians, not wanting to get involved in the political process, not even bothering to go out and vote because they are so fed up with following politicians, they are fed up with the political process, they do not participate, and therefore the people who do participate and those who have the power are making rules and laws which are very much to the detriment of those people. ``Don't follow the politicians.'' You know it is strange in many ways because it lets all of us off the hook. All politicians, Members of Congress, city council members, members of State legislatures, you are off the hook if you do not have responsibility for children because we have been told, the people have been told, not to follow us. I do not think Marian Wright Edelman meant this at all; I am positive she did not, because nobody has more political sophistication in America than Marian Wright Edelman. But it came over that way. For a layman listening, it sounds as if we should not follow politicians, that God, you know, cannot be for politicians. Some politicians are not following God. You know, the scenario, as I see it, is God is up front there, and if you want to get something done through the political process, you have to have certain laws change, you have to have programs in this country and public policy in this country which benefit children; then to do that you got to get behind the politicians. God is in front, the politicians are behind God; some of them are, some of us are. We are the advocates of God's work, we are the advocates for children. You have to get behind us. If you are going to go in another arena, you want God to be up front. If you want educators and teachers to be up front, get behind them. If you go into the arena where you are talking about health care and you want the doctors in the health care system and the nurses, God is up front and the doctors and health care system and nurses are behind God. If you want to accomplish something in this world, you have to do it through men and women who make decisions. God is not a dictator. God is not totalitarian. God has left us with free will. God will not intervene in America and deal with whether the Medicaid entitlement stays in place or not. God is not going to come down and deal with that directly. God will act through agents. There are some advocates that follow God and will fight to guarantee that we keep Medicaid, because it is a life and death matter. We must keep the Medicaid entitlement. There are some advocates who are on the side of God, who are behind God, who will guarantee that we have children with disabilities be supported by the Federal Government. God will not get involved. God will not intervene. That is what free will is all about. I am not a theologian or deep philosopher, because we have gone through that over and over again. The decision has been made that God leaves mankind free to make certain decisions. God sits and watches, and he is disappointed sometimes. He must spend a lot of time crying about the kinds of decisions that we make. From time to time horrible things are done by men and women who are making the decisions. Horrible things are done by men and women who have the power. God must be very disappointed. On the other hand, there are men and women who do things that God, I am sure, appreciates a great deal and supports, and in the final analysis I think that those people who are following God, doing God's work, will triumph. But never tell people not to follow politicians, follow God. Tell them to follow the politicians who are in line behind God, and it makes much more sense. The Children's Defense Fund certainly knows that the political process requires that you talk to politicians, that you confront the Members of Congress, confront the Senators, confront the Members of the House. All that is necessary in order to get things done. I think that the Children's Defense Fund does its homework very well. Some of the documents they put out clearly show that they do not believe that politicians should not be followed. Or maybe what she is really saying is do not follow them, push them; get behind them and push them. Or maybe it meant that you should get in front of them with some ropes and pull them, because the Children's Defense Fund certainly engages us. We are engaged in problems with children, and I applaud them for that. I applaud them for engaging us year in and year out on problems related to children. They gave us a list. They sent it around to all the Members of Congress. This list says, ``Who's for Kids and Who's Just Kidding?'' This came from the Children's Defense Fund, the top 10 kids' votes in the 104th Congress. In after school and summer programs for kids, they give a record of how the Congress voted on the after school and summer programs for kids. Cut school lunch, that is another vote that was taken. They give a record of how Republicans and Democrats voted. Cut basic education and Head Start and summer jobs, a third vote that was taken which directly impacts on children, on families. Allow parents to block out violent or sexual TV shows. That was a vote that directly affects children and families. If you stand for children, they indicate that you would have voted yes on that vote. No. 5, cut student loans and children's health and nutrition programs. We heard a discussion before from our Republican colleagues, that they really are not cutting student loans and they are not cutting children's programs. The amount of money is increasing, but they do not tell us that the number of children, the number of students, is increasing, and when you divide the number of children for these programs into the amount of money, as the children increase, the amount of money is going down per child. No. 6, restore $3.1 billion in education cuts. We restored that, yet the vote to do that is important. Cut education by $3 billion, that was a vote taken. She is recapitulating past history over the last few months, where the Republicans tried to cut education and to cut job training and to cut summer youth programs and to cut school lunches, and we stood firm. We took our case to the American people. We made it clear to everybody out there what was happening, and they backed down. But she is recounting how the votes went down. These were votes against children. Accept the Senate's proposal for higher spending on education. That is a vote that is important. Provide a $5,000 adoption tax credit. That is a vote for children on which I think we almost had unanimous consent, we almost had every person on both sides of the aisle voting for the $5,000 adoption tax credit. They note that. That was a vote for families and for children. Cut funding for basic education and Head Start by 20 percent. Originally the Republican majority voted to cut Head Start by $300 million. I am happy to say that we had yet another vote where we put it back in. I do not know how many Republicans voted to put it back in, but the bill passed which put the money back in for the Head Start cut. Those are concrete things the Children's Defense Fund, the stand for children people, sent around as examples of votes that impacted on children. They understand the political process. They understand clearly. In another place they make it clear that the Republicans have come up wanting as a party. As a fact, they say, and it is not that they are bipartisan, they are not Democrat or Republican, but they state the facts clearly. I am going to quote from an item in a letter of March 27, 1996, signed by Marion Wright Edelman. This is when the Children's Defense Fund first announced it was the prime sponsor for the Stand for Children. ``Every child in America needs and deserves a healthy start, a had start, a fair start, a safe start, and a moral start in life. Yet this year's book shows that we continue as a Nation to leave millions of our children behind. Despite overwhelming evidence of child suffering and neglect, proposals pending in Congress would return America to the past rather than prepare children for the future; weaken rather than strengthen the guaranteed safety net for children and families during times of need, recession, and disaster; and decrease rather than increase cost-effective child investments in order to give a tax cut to the non-needy. At a time when more than 15 million children are poor, over 3 million are abused and neglected, and more than half a million drop out of school, it is essential that Congress strengthen rather than shred the Federal guaranteed safety net for children. ``I hope that you will find this information, including State by State tables contained in the Appendix, valuable as a resource and as a guide for future action on behalf of America's children. If I or my staff can be of assistance, please contact,'' et cetera, et cetera; a letter from the Children's Defense Fund in March of this year, saying that we still are taking steps that threaten children and threaten families. Here is a statement that came out just last week, along with a copy of the top 10 votes for kids. I read from the statement: ``The record of the Republican-led 104th Congress on protecting our children is truly an outrage. While Republicans talk about a pro-family agenda, they have voted repeatedly to slash funding for education programs, student loans, child nutrition, health care for children, foster care and other child protection services, and aid for disabled children. The Republican agenda of the 104th Congress has been everything but kid- friendly. In fact, it's been hostile.'' Continuing to quote from the item distributed by the Children's Defense Fund last week, it says ``This Republican agenda threatens the education and well-being of our Nation's children, effectively abandoning the promise and future of America. Without healthy children in good public schools, our businesses will not be able to compete in the new global economy, and yet throughout, the Republican agenda essentially balances the budget on the backs of our Nation's future.'' We heard our Republican colleagues talk before about how important it is to get rid of the deficit and to deal with the budget so children in the future can not have the burden of having to pay for those programs. The debt must be eliminated because of the children in the future. It seems to be a pattern of the Republican Party that is escalating. It is the children in the womb, they are very much concerned about unborn children. We all should be, because you do not have children unless they get born. But they are excessively preoccupied by the unborn children, but the minute the children arrive and get here, they abandon them. They do not care what happens to them in terms of the WIC program and the program for infants and mothers. They do not care what happens in terms of mothers who have to stay home to take care of their children. They do not care what happens when the children go to school and have a school lunch program. It is the unborn child, and then it is the child in the future, posterity. Republicans are concerned about children who are unborn and they are concerned about children who have not been conceived yet, those in the far future. There is something wrong with the sudden lapse and the gap between the child who arrives here and the child in the womb and the children of posterity, there is something radically wrong with the reasoning. I wrote a little rap poem on April 19 which talked about this, and said that it seems that we are sending a message to the fetuses, and I place the situation in terms of a message from the newborn to the fetus. The newborn is saying ``I've arrived here and I find all this hostility. Stay in there. Don't come out here. Don't come into this mean world, you know. ``There is a real danger here.'' The people who talk about a right to life make the right to life just an empty slogan unless it is accompanies by programs and policies which provide an even playing field of opportunity for all children. At that time I was announcing on April 19, 1996, my support, my applause for the Children's Defense Fund's call for a Stand for Children. Quoting from my entry into the Congressional Record on that day, I said, ``On June 1st the Children's Defense Fund is sponsoring a great summit in Washington called Stand for Children. This is a gathering which deserves the support of all Members of Congress. We should all join the Stand for Children on this specific day, and for all the days before and after June 1, Congress should refocus on the business of protecting our most precious resource, children outside of their mothers wombs, as well as children inside the wombs.'' The I go on to give the rap poem which I will read later. To close out this particular item that was circulated last week by the Children's Defense Fund, and I quote again from it, ``Fortunately, the Democrats in Congress and the Clinton administration have successfully fought off many of the damaging cuts that the Republicans have put forth. For example, Democrats have successfully restored most of the education cuts endorsed by the GOP, and President Clinton has vetoed many damaging cuts in children's programs in the GOP welfare and budget reconciliation bills.'' This is material that was distributed, despite the fact that this is a nonpartisan group. They just stated the facts. Those are the facts. This is a nonpartisan group that said they did not want any politicians to speak. I accepted that. I was there Saturday. I did not think it was a great problem that politicians could not speak, Republicans or Democrats. There were many other voices that ought to be heard. But I do have a problem if you tell people not to follow politicians, not to follow any politicians, to put us all in one category. That is very unreal and dangerous. Let me just return to this list. In this list of the top 10 votes in the 104th Congress, there are some things that are left out. There are some things that we need to add. If needs to go beyond 10. We need to bring to light the fact that programs that will impact on children go beyond these 10 areas. The cuts in public library aid, public libraries receive very tiny amounts of Federal money, but those amounts are very important. We even cut those tiny amounts. We get the best bargain in education in public libraries. For the amount of money spent we get a greater return than anywhere else. They were cut. Summer youth employment, they did mention that in the 10 points that were made. The destruction of opportunity to learn standards. Most people do not know that the Congress passed a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which had in it an item which called for States to establish opportunity to learn standards. This is all voluntary. States do not have to do it, but if States are going to participate in the program where they establish curriculum standards and they establish testing standards, the curriculum standards and testing standards focus on the children. The onus is on the children to live up to the curriculum standards. They are going to be tested. We added, after much debate, a set of standards called opportunity to learn standards. Opportunity to learn standards mean exactly what they say, the opportunity to learn. You must have standards which talk about what opportunities to learn are you providing at the State level. Are the teachers qualified? That is an important opportunity to learn standard. Are the buildings safe and conducive and modernized so that learning can take place? Does the library have books that are current, or do they have 35-year-old history books or geography books that are dangerous for children to read, because they read the wrong information? Do they have laboratories for science and math? That is important. Do they have laboratories for science? Do they have supplies for the laboratories? All of these things are basic, commonsense items. That is what opportunity to learn standards are all about. We had a great debate during the time when we were reauthorizing the Elementary Secondary Education Act, a great debate among ourselves in the House. Then when the bill was in conference, there was a great debate between the House and the Senate, and those of us who are in favor of opportunity to learn standards prevailed in the authorization process in the 103d Congress. Lo and behold, it violated all the rules. The appropriations process, this Republican majority, through a stealth attack, in the conference process took out the opportunity to learn standards. They do not want to talk about ways in which we can help children to learn and have that discussed openly the way we discuss testing children. We want to test children until they are tested right out of school, but we do not want to provide a discussion of what are qualified teachers and what is an appropriate set of learning aids in science and math. We do not want to deal with the responsibilities of the local education agency, the responsibilities of the State government, and the responsibilities of the Federal Government. So the destruction of opportunity to learn standards should be added to this list of votes that hurt kids. Last Thursday, in the reauthorization of the Individual with Disabilities Education Act that I referred to before at the committee level, the Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee reauthorized a bill which has a drastic set of cuts and a drastic set of negative provisions which do not advance current law but, in my opinion, they build a beachhead for later destruction of the Federal Government's participation in programs to educate children with disabilities. I sit on that committee, and I am very much aware of the dangers there; and, of course, the Children's Defense Fund could not know exactly the extent of what was happening at the committee level, because the process has gone on for several weeks. I congratulate the chairman of the committee for holding up the process for 3 weeks while a number of programs that deal with children with disabilities, representatives of organizations, tried to get them to change critical parts of the bill. They at least entered into a dialogue, and for 3 weeks the process did not go forward while the debate took place and the groups were involved. Finally, in very critical areas, the majority of the groups agreed; and they were overridden by two or three who did not agree on certain critical provisions of the bill. One of those critical provisions was the provision related to the cessation of services for children. Children with disabilities now are protected in current law. You cannot expel them and throw them out on the streets no matter what happens in terms of their problems in the classroom. You have to, if you are going to remove them from the classroom, most all States now under the Federal law are obligated to provide alternative education. You cannot just throw them out. In many States, they have State laws which say you cannot throw children out. Whether they have disabilities or not, you cannot throw them out of school without providing them some alternatives. But there are many States that do not have it. Those children who have disabilities and would for some reason be expelled would be thrown into a situation where it would be very difficult for them to, without the support of public schools and public education, get an education or to get acclimated. They would be thrown out there on the streets and abandoned. That is the worst thing we can do. We do not want to go in the direction of Brazil and Colombia, South American nations which, by ignoring their children, set up a situation where later on their children are despised and demonized, and later on they are murdered. We want to maintain some sense of civilization as reflected through how we care for the least among us. So I made a statement at the beginning of the markup, which to save time I will just read it here. It summarizes some of my concern with IDEA, Individuals with Disability Education Act reauthorization. I said, and I quote, at the beginning of this markup, ``It would be useful for all concerned if we made a sincere effort to move away from sensational headlines about special education and establish a more objective perspective as advocates for public education.'' I am talking about sensational headlines that appeared related to special education being too costly or special education threatening mainstream education because it takes money away from the children who are in regular classrooms. That is a situation that has been generated from this Capitol. This is a situation that the Republican majority has blown out of proportion and made it appear that there is a great threat out there to mainstream education flowing from special education concerns. ``This markup is for the purpose of reauthorizing a program for the most needy children in America. In the overall constellation of Federal funding, IDEA receives only a tiny amount of money. $2.3 billion is proposed for grants to States in fiscal year 1996. Please consider this amount within the context of recent exposures of an unaudited slush fund at the CIA which totaled $4 billion.'' Some $2.3 billion is proposed for grants to the States in the fiscal 1996 budget for children with disabilities. That is less than the $4 billion that the CIA had unaudited in the slush fund that they did not know they had. Let us keep our perspective straight. How can we be bankrupting America by providing $2.3 billion to the States for children with disabilities when we have lying around in the CIA $4 billion that we do not even know we have? ``At the Federal Reserve Bank the GAO discovered an unaudited rainy day fund which totaled $3.7 billion even though that agency has not had a rainy day in 79 years.'' The rainy day fund has been there. They have been adding to it. That $3.7 billion is far more than we appropriated for children with disabilities, sitting around at the Federal Reserve Bank unutilized. Let us keep our perspective and understand. The problem is not that there is too much money going to special education needs. The problem is there is too little money going to education as a whole. The problem is that we have to be concerned, members of the Education Committee and members of all other committees, with where the money is going. Education cannot be examined in isolation. The people in the education community have come to see the budget for education as being the universe that they have to deal with. So they are looking at the total amount for education at present and saying that special education is getting too much of what is available. Let us make more available so that you do not have to cannibalize each other. You do not have to take from one to give to the other. We have the money in the CIA. We have the money in the Federal Reserve Bank. We have the $13 billion additional funding for the Defense Department. My colleagues from the other side who spoke before never said a word about increasing defense by $13 billion. We talked about the need to balance the budget and need to be more responsible in government expenditures, but nobody said anything about $13 billion more than the President asked, which for has been added to the defense budget this year. Quoting again from my own statement, ``Against the background of continuing monumental waste in B-2 bomber programs and excessive farm subsidies, we should alert all members of the education community to the fact that there is no need to participate in cannibalization among education programs. Special education will not bankrupt the overall education budget. Long overdue increases for all education programs is the solution. Demonization and scapagoating special education promulgates a disaster for overall education funding. ``This bill,'' the reauthorization of IDEA, which is to come to the floor of the House in the next two weeks, ``attacks special education as if it was an enemy. This is a fatal flaw.'' ``At the time I think it is appropriate to consider the conclusion of Kathleen Boundy, Co-director of the Center for Law and Education, and I quote from her and her closing comment on the present reauthorization bill. `` `Despite the earnest efforts of many who have attempted to improve this bill and existing law, it is our view that such efforts have ultimately been unsuccessful in both the Senate and the House, and that Part B of IDEA, regardless of its shortcomings, should be left alone in 1996.' '' It is a bill that was not broken, did not need to be repaired, but is being drastically overhauled in the direction of cutting back on the commitment of the Federal Government. It will be to the detriment of children. The neediest children in America are children who are in special education programs. It is to their detriment that we have embarked upon a course which may end up cutting back on a long-term commitment to children in special education. The Senate has a bill that has not yet passed the House. It passed out of committee. We hope that the Senate is understood by all the people out there that care about education and care about children, we hope they understand that it is not too late. Certainly people in the Children's Defense Fund ought to put this on their list and consider calling it to the attention of people that care about children in America. If you stand for children, it is still possible to deal with the House legislation H.R. 3268 and the Senate bill S. 1578, part of the revisions of special education law, Public Law 94-142. It is still possible that we can wake up the decisionmakers here in Washington to the fact that they will hurt children if they go ahead with the provisions in this bill which call for a cessation of services completely for children who are disciplined for certain problems. Without getting into a debate about what those particular kinds of problems are, there are some, and I agree with them wholeheartedly, who take the position that we should never cease services for children, services of any kind. Cessation of services, the throwing of children in the street, will lead us step by step into where Brazil and Colombia are at this point. The provision which relates to the cessation of services is due to the fact that it is perceived that large amounts of disruption in classrooms is ruining the education process, and they want to stop disruption, whether it is by children with disabilities or anybody else. Discipline is a major problem in education. Discipline is what I hear teachers talk about all the time. In this Capitol, we ought to address the problem of discipline. The States do not seem to be able to solve the problem and bring it down to reasonable dimensions. The cities, the local education agencies are not able to deal with it and bring it down to a reasonable dimension. It goes on and on, the problem with discipline. So why not deal with the problem of discipline without invading special education? Special education suffers because large numbers of children who are discipline problems are classified as having a disability. I have complained year in and year out about large numbers of African-American males who have problems of one kind that lead to discipline problems being shunted off into a category called emotionally disturbed. We took steps when we reauthorized the bill several years ago to begin to deal with this in a constructive way. We wanted to bring more African-American teachers into the system. We had grants for that. Historically, black colleges were encouraged to get involved in training of teachers of children with disabilities. We wanted to get mothers and families and communities more in tune to what was involved in the way programs for children with disabilities, special education programs operate so that they would not be victimized one way or the other. The children who needed the service should have the proper identification, and they should be placed. Children who did not need special education should not be shunted there because they have certain discipline problems. All of those things are cut out of the bill. The cessation of services was one very important item that we lost on. The majority of the groups that had debated the problem, had discussed the problem with representatives of the Republican majority in the final analysis said they could not accept the reauthorization bill as it is considering that it has the cessation of services. Mr. Speaker, I would like to submit for the Record a letter addressed to the Honorable William F. Goodling, chairman of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, from the long list of organizations which includes the National Association of School Administrators, the National Education Association, National Parent Teacher Association, Council for Exceptional Children and many, many others. I would like to enter it in its entirety into the Record. May 22, 1996. Hon. William F. Goodling, Chairman, Committee On Economic and Educational Opportunities, House of Representatives, Washington, DC. Dear Mr. Chairman: Our organizations believe that all students, even those who break school rules, should receive educational and related services. In that spirit, we urge your strong support for including provisions in the reauthorization of the IDEA that ensure all students have access to appropriate educational opportunities. Providing quality educational opportunities to children and youth is a critical component in the development of both individual achievement and in achieving a highly skilled, competitive workforce. The fact that students with disabilities have unique needs is recognized through the policy and practice of collaboration and individualized education programs. (IEPs). Our organizations support provisions that would help schools balance the rights of students with disabilities with the need to maintain order and discipline in the schools through preventive measures such as appropriate behavioral interventions, additional classroom and student supports, adequate financial support and other intervention strategies. Should preventive measures not prove adequate, however, we believe it is imperative that continuing educational and related services be provided to all students--even those who need to be served in alternative settings due to suspensions or expulsions from the regular settings--in order to help such students better adapt socially and educationally. We urge you, as the author of the reauthorization bill for IDEA, to include language that will ensure access to educational and related services for all students with disabilities, even when they violate school discipline rules or policies. Sincerely, American Association of School Administrators, National Education Association, National Parent Teacher Association, Council for Exceptional Children, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Easter Seal Society, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, National Association of Protection and Advocacy Systems, Learning Disabilities Association, Brain Injury Association. American Psychological Association, Adapted Physical Activity Council, National Consortium of Physical Education and Recreation For Individuals with Disabilities, National Therapeutic Recreation Association, National Coalition on Deaf-Blindness, American Council of the Blind, Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorders, American Occupational Therapy Association, American Association on Mental Retardation, Federation of Families for Children's Mental Health. American Academy of Audiology, National Mental Health Association, National Association of Developmental Disabilities Councils, National Parents Network on Disabilities, Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired, National Association of School Psychologists, American Foundation for the blind, American Association of University Affiliated Programs, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Justice For All, The Arc, Council of Great City Schools, National Association of the Deaf, Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf, American Speech- Language-Hearing Association, National Association of School Nurses, Washington PAVE, Project PROMPT, Vermont Parent Information Center. Special Education Action Committee, Parent Information Center of Delaware, Federation for Children with Special Needs, Connecticut Parent Advocacy Center, Inc., Very Special Arts, American Counseling Association, American Physical Therapy Association, Council of Schools For The Blind, National Council On Independent Living, CAUSE. Center for Access to Resources and Education, National Coalition For Students With Disabilities Education and Legal Defense Fund, National Down Syndrome Congress, Systematic Training of Military Parents, Washington State Special Education Coalition. On the other very important controversial point that I spoke on, personnel standards, children with disabilities are now in a situation where they require people who have special training. That has been recognized for decades. We have steadily had programs to develop more teachers, to develop more people who are able to deal with these problems. This legislation all of a sudden, we not only cut out the development programs and the requirement for personnel development but the Republican majority has put in a waiver of the requirements, the qualifications can be waived for individuals. The waiver is an open door to a complete retreat from any quality standards for the personnel. Just as children who are in math and science classes should be taught by teachers who majored in math and science in college, we think that children who have special problems with respect to disabilities ought to be taught and handled by teachers and personnel who have had training in that area. The waiver says that you do not have to do it anymore. Yes, the waiver says that it is for a 3-year period, that unqualified individuals can teach children who have disabilities for 3 years only. For 3 years you can destroy a lot of lives. And the waiver is such that large numbers of people will get these 3-year waivers. The problem is money. School boards and local education agencies will see themselves saving large amounts of money by accepting unqualified people, giving the waivers, saving the money. In the meantime the children are the victims of unqualified personnel who do not know what they are doing. Mr. Speaker, I again made a statement which I would like to read in its entirety: This amendment concerns a provision which is at the core of the Federal Government's commitment to a free and appropriate education for children with disabilities. Without properly trained personnel, the best that children with disabilities can expect is to be warehoused. The worst that will happen under the tutelage of the untrained and inexperienced will be psychological and emotional damage, as well as a substandard education. In a letter from the Center for Law and Education which I am attaching to this statement, a co-director concludes that we should just abandon this effort and leave the bill alone. I would like to strongly echo these sentiments. IDEA, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, was not broken. The current law did not need to be overhauled. The current law did not need to be replaced. This bill is not a reauthorization. The bill that passed out of committee last Thursday is an attack to establish a beachhead. From this beachhead the Republican majority, which has already drastically indicated its contempt for all public education, will attempt a total annihilation of Federal support for special education. Like a sledgehammer pounding away at a thumb tack, massive power is being brought to bear on programs for the education of children with disabilities, a very tiny component of public education in America. A slander campaign waged against special education has generated distorted perceptions which scapegoat a very productive and beneficial program. Despite these distorted perceptions, special education is in no way a threat to mainstream education. This tiny minority deserves fairer treatment at the hands of the education majority. This minimal program for the most needy students also deserves continued support from both Democrats and the Republican majority. I congratulate the community of people with disabilities and their consensus group which launched a monumental effort to maintain workable legislation consistent with the original intent of the law and bowing to no partisan dogmas. The language before us is in many ways improved beyond the original doctrinaire attack as a result of the efforts of these negotiators. But the revisions do not go far enough in several fundamental areas. Personnel standards is one of these areas. This bill, with premeditated stealth, wrecks the carefully developed protections which have been thoughtfully crafted over many years with the input of both recipients and providers of service to children with disabilities. Obliteration of these requirements is a contemptuous and hostile act against children with disabilities. No member of this committee would ever support the wholesale waiver of standards for science and math teachers in the schools located in his or her district. Waiving personnel standards only serves one ignoble purpose: Compliance can be achieved cheaply. For less money, the quality of teaching and other services will most likely be adulterated. Mr. Speaker, I wish to submit the statement in its entirety for the Record. Statement of Hon. Major R. Owens ``Restoration of Personnel Standards'' May 30, 1996 This amendment concerns a provision which is at the core of the federal government's commitment to a Free and Appropriate Education for children with disabilities. Without properly trained personnel the best that children with disabilities can expect is to be warehoused; the worst that will often happen under the tutelage of the untrained and inexperienced will be psychological and emotional damage, as well as a substandard education. In a letter from the Center For Law and Education which I am attaching to this statement the Co-Director of the Center, Kathleen Boundy, concludes as follows: ``Despite the earnest efforts of many who have attempted to improve this bill and existing law, it is our view that such efforts have ultimately been unsuccessful in both the Senate and the House and that Part B of IDEA, regardless of its shortcomings, should be left alone in 1996.'' I would like to strongly echo these sentiments. IDEA was not broken. The current law did not need to be overhauled. The Current law did not need to be replaced. This bill is not a reauthorization. This bill is an attack to establish a beachhead. From this beachhead the Republican Majority, which has already dramatically indicated its contempt for all public education, will attempt a total annihilation of federal support for Special Education. Like a sledge hammer pounding away at a thumb tack, massive power is being brought to bear on programs for the education of children with disabilities, a very tiny component of public education in America. A slander campaign waged against Special Education has generated distorted perceptions which scapegoat a very productive and beneficial program. Despite these distorted perceptions, Special Education is in no way a threat to mainstream education. This tiny minority deserves fairer treatment at the hands of the education majority. This minimal program for the most needy students, also deserves continued support from both Democrats and the Republican majority. I congratulate the community of people with disabilities and their consensus group which launched a monumental effort to maintain workable legislation consistent with the original intent of the law and bowing to no partisan dogmas. The language before is in many ways improved beyond the original doctrinaire attack as a result of the efforts of these negotiators. But the revisions do not go far enough in several fundamental areas. Personnel standards is one of these areas. This bill, with premeditated stealth, wrecks the carefully developed protections which have been thoughtfully crafted over many years with the input of both recipients and providers of service to children with disabilities. Obliteration of these requirements is a contemptuous and hostile act against children with disabilities. No member of this Committee would ever support the wholesale waiver of standards for science and math teachers in the schools located in his or her district. Waiving personnel standards only serves one ignoble purpose: Compliance can be achieved cheaply. For less money the quality of teaching and other services will most likely be adulterated. Children will most certainly be shortchanged. But on the surface, the letter of the law will be met. In this bill funding for staff recruitment and development has been gutted. Efforts to overcome the critical shortage of minority staff have been abandoned. The problem of qualified staff shortages will be solved superficially and dishonestly by simply ignoring the need to employ persons who are qualified. We are civilized leaders agreeing to a savage solution. We would never take the same route to resolve a problem of a shortage of airline pilots or a shortage of open-heart surgeons. At this point it should be noted that the current law contains a component which would have offset the negative consequences of the waiver of personnel standards, but this has also been greatly reduced. Provisions which facilitated the recruitment, training and certification of personnel have been adulterated. During the negotiations with the Consensus group it was generally assumed that these provisions would remain substantially as they are in current law. The Republican Majority, unfortunately, violated the good faith effort of the negotiators and destroyed and most relevant parts of this component. In summary, I urge the adoption of this amendment as the first giant step away from this bill's oppressive posture against children with disabilities. This oppressive posture of the Republican Majority generates an impact which is destructive and deadly. Let us move forward in a bi-partisan spirit to ensure that this body creates the proper federal legislation and resources to provide quality programs and quality staff for children with disabilities. Mr. Speaker, I would like to say that standing for children means that you stand for children with disabilities, and you stand for policies that are going to promote children across the board. We are fortunate in this Nation that we presently do stand for children. Never let us go to the other extreme and be in the position of Brazil and Colombia where they are killing children instead of standing for children. We stand for children and we should continue to stand for children.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, this Employee Commuting Act is a cheap device being utilized to sabotage the effort to increase the minimum wage by 90 cents over a 2-year period. This Employee Commuting Act is one more attack on American working families. This is guerrilla warfare. It is an ambush of the workers. This bill forces workers to do work for which they are not paid. This bill allows employers to coerce employees into agreements to work without getting paid. The number of workers who drive vehicles to and from work that are owned by the company may be relatively small, but the principle here, the principle at stake here is monumental when you consider the implications of forcing people to work without getting paid. This act pilfers the wages of workers. This is a mandate for picking the pockets of defenseless workers. Against this petty thievery, Democrats must rise again to defend American working families. For some reason, during this whole year, the Republicans have waged an onslaught on working families. they have attacked OSHA for the safety of workers. They have tried to establish teams that would replace unions. They have attacked the National Labor Relations Board. They have attacked Davis-Bacon. For some reason the Republicans are determined to wipe out the gains that workers have made over the last 50 years. This is just one of many attacks. But this is a side attack, a guerrilla attack to pick the pockets. It is very petty but it is very damaging in terms of the precedent that it sets. If you let employers get away with forcing workers to work without getting paid on this occasion, on this particular set of circumstances, then you will do it again and again. The minimum wage is what they really want to get. They want to cloud the issue, confuse the American public. A mere 90 cents increase in the minimum wage over a 2-year period, that is what is at stake here. The Republicans want to declare war on working families, in this case when it does not even involve the budget of the Government. The Government will not be out one penny as a result of increasing the minimum wage. The minimum wage increase will not lead to a decrease in the number of jobs. The minimum wage has been increased in the State of New Jersey, and their industry has gone forward. They have more employment than ever before. They are prospering from the fact that they paying higher wages. Just as Social Security did not destroy the economy, just as the creation of the minimum wage bill, minimum wage act in the first place did not destroy the economy, just as all of the other benefits that workers have come to enjoy have not destroyed the economy but instead created a consumer class, a working class unlike anywhere else in the world, that has made our Nation prosper, the minimum wage will not hurt the economy. The minimum wage will help working people on the bottom who very much need a raise. Minimum wage will help those people that you are throwing off welfare into work because they will have an opportunity to work for a decent wage. America needs a raise and it needs it right now. We do not need these kinds of actions. The portal to portal bill takes wages out of the pockets of workers. I urge Members to reject this Employee Flexibility Act.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment. The CIA is out of control. It is not just the $4 billion that they had lying around that they did not know that they had. There are many other ways that the CIA is out of control, and the CIA would greatly benefit from some downsizing and some streamlining. The CIA would greatly benefit from a cut in the funds that they have while they reorganize and regroup. This is the CIA that did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is the CIA that could not predict the most momentous event of our century. This is the CIA that could not see a dinosaur event, like the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is something radically wrong with the CIA. It has been wrong for a long time. It is amazing that people would come to this floor and defend an agency which has lost track of $4 billion, lost track of $4 billion, and to talk about them as if they are heroes now because they are going to let some of that $4 billion be spent taking care of the war in Bosnia, somewhere else. They are not heroes. And do not talk about the fact that this is just mismanagement. It is more than mismanagement. We do not know. Anybody here who has ever been the head of any kind of organization, if they have ever been an administrator of a public agency or they are the owner, the administrator of a private sector business, they know that when money cannot be accounted for, if it is lying loosely around and the head of the department did not know it, the head of the CIA did not know it, the President did not know it, somebody did steal money. We can assume there is a lot of stealing going on, because if we do not have any accountability, human beings always will steal. This is the CIA that for a number of reasons should be downsizing, reorganizing, and streamlining. Nobody has mentioned Aldrich Ames here. We have discussed the $4 billion, although the $4 billion is something that the administration has admitted. They fired two people. It was on the front page of the New York Times. Some people did not know it. They fired two people, so mismanagement was occurring. For the first time they fired the people, openly stated their names, so we know it took place, and it upset the administration a great deal because, they publicly fired the people. That is a well-documented example of great waste, monumental waste and probably corruption also. But what we do not know, what is not talked about more is Aldrich Ames, the implication of the fact that Aldrich Ames was the head of intelligence for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and he was the biggest spy of the century for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Aldrich Ames was there for numerous years, and they never detected him and finally announced it was the FBI which really trapped Aldrich Ames. Out of control, something is radically wrong there. It is a welfare agency, in that they have a lot of incompetent people there who are not doing their job, or not doing a job which is going to benefit the welfare and protect the security of the United States. Something is radically wrong. Incompetence must be monumental in that agency. This is the agency that paid the salary of Emanuel Comstonce, who was the man who led the demonstration on the docks in Haiti when we were sending ships down there. We sent ships down there with a peacekeeping mission which had police, engineers, et cetera. They led a demonstration where they were shooting guns, intimidating the Charge d'Affaires of the U.S. Embassy. It was led by a man named Emanuel Comstonce, who was on the payroll of the CIA. Emanuel Comstonce is right now in prison here in this country. They want to keep him here. They want to keep him isolated and quiet because he has confessed and he is telling: ``I was on the payroll of the CIA.'' This is an agency that is obviously out of control. It needs to be reexamined, downsized, streamlined. In modern society, any institution that operates in secrecy is in danger. Our complex society is such that any complex institutions needs to be open, so that other folks from outside the decisionmaking circles can be able to look at what is going on and offer some objective criticisms. The Soviet Union collapsed because its whole society was a closed circle of decisionmaking, and they made monumental errors which we are still discovering and still suffering from. Chernobyl, they did not have a nuclear commission that was open and people could talk to. They did not have a environmental movement. They would suppress anybody who tried to have a movement critical of anything, so they ruined their environment. The CIA is a closed circle of decisionmaking. The secrecy in the CIA guarantees that is always going to be a big problem. We need to open up as much as possible, not tell everything, but we can have a discussion of the budget. We should know the full amount of the budget. The New York Times estimates it is between $28 and $30 billion. We are talking about a 10-percent cut on $28 to $30 billion. We are talking about a 10-percent cut which will at the most amount to $3 billion.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, it has already been pointed out a 10-percent cut, which would amount to $3 billion, is less than the amount of money they lost track of. They lost track of $4 billion. They put a spin on it, they said it was $1 billion, then it became $2 billion. Now they are admitting $4 billion, and we do not know how honest they are because it keeps mounting. If they have lost track of that kind of money, they certainly can afford a 10-percent cut. We have been offering this amendment now for the last 4 years. If they accepted it in the first place, we might be much further along the way in terms of streamlining the CIA. I think we need the CIA. We certainly do not need the monster, the dinosaur that we have had so many years, that could not detect the changes of the Soviet Union, that gave us Aldrich Ames, that gave us Emanuel Comstonce, and then had $4 billion lying around while we are cutting the budget of Head Start, and cutting the budget of the school lunch program, and we are cutting the budget of title I, and we are cutting the budget of public housing. We are cutting all these budgets while they have $4 billion lying around unused. We need to get control of the CIA, Mr. Chairman. We need to get control of the CIA.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, there is a move afoot to pass labor legislation in this half of the 104th Congress through a kind of guerrilla warfare process, antilabor legislation, I should say antiunion labor legislation, antiworker legislation. We had a very interesting development take place as the Republican majority assumed control of the 104th Congress. We had what might be called a sneak attack on American workers. I say it is a sneak attack because there was a Contract With America which laid out in great detail what the Republican majority would do once they took control, and it spelled out the issues, and that is the basis on which they went to the American people and were able to win the majority of that small number of people who came out to vote. They won a majority of the 39 percent of the people who came out to vote, and they had a clear bill of particulars, a clear agenda, and it was felt that whether you agreed with that agenda or not, it would be that agenda that the 104th Congress would operate on. It is to their credit that they have moved forward on their Contract With America. But what has been surprising, what has been shocking, is the fact that there were items that were not in the agenda that have been pursued with great hostility, with great vengeance. The attack on the American workers and the working families of America was unexpected, totally. It was not expected that the Republican majority would attempt to wipe out the Davis-Bacon Act. The Davis-Bacon Act protects workers who for the most part are middle income workers, middle class workers, or they used to be when their wages were held at a decent level. As wages have been depressed and gone down, more and more construction workers who happen to be fortunate enough to be under the Davis-Bacon Act protections, are quite poor, as I will point out in a few minutes. Nobody expected the Republican majority to assault Davis-Bacon, or any other programs that are protecting workers. They never said that they would go after OSHA. OSHA, which protects the safety of all workers, those in unions and those not in unions. As you know, unfortunately, in America right now a great majority of workers are not in unions. That is unfortunate, because that is part of the reason that the wage level is going down for all workers, because there are not enough unionized workers. Unions are good for workers and good for America, but they are now every much on the defensive in terms of their numbers. They are decreasing. It will not help to have the Republican Party clearly out to destroy that basic underpinnings or protection for workers. Nobody ever said when they developed the Contract with America that they would go after, over time, the Fair Labor Standards Act and the provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act that provide for overtime. They now want your overtime. They are coming for your overtime. Nobody ever said they would go after the very heart of the collective bargaining process by coming up with a thing called the TEAM Act. The TEAM is a way to officially and formally recognize company unions and to move in such a way that eventually you would destroy all existing unions and have the unions tied to the management. So nobody ever said that in the Contract With America. They never stated that that was what they were going to do. Yes, certainly they were developing secret contracts on the side, obviously. There were contracts that were not contracts with America, but they were contracts with somebody. They were contracts with the bosses, contracts with unscrupulous management. There is a whole lot of businesses and corporations in America that accept the fact that we have some very civil laws which help protect workers, and by protecting workers, the corporations are better off. The businesses are better off. Not all bosses, not all businesses, are ready to make war against worker protections, but the Republican majority had this as a secret agenda. We know they made some contracts on the side, because they have told us, they confessed, one Member, a chairman of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, the chairman of that subcommittee was quite honest and forthright. He was forthright in his discussion with the Washington Post reporter about the fact that although they did not put it in the Contract With America, on the side they made deals with business people. They made dealings with certain corporations, certain corporate entities and certain business people which said in essence if you contribute to our campaign we will go after OSHA, we will go after Davis-Bacon, we will wipe out certain aspects of the Fair Labor Standards Act. This was in the Washington Post. It was a direct quote of the subcommittee chairman. He did not deny it. He was honest enough to say it and honest enough not to deny it. There was a figure of $65,000 mentioned in his State alone, $65,000 was collected as part of the secret contract to go after labor. So what you had was, much to the surprise of the American people, what you had was what happened at Pearl Harbor. The Speaker has often compared politics to war. We do not like the comparison, but that is sort of the language of the 104th Congress. So politics are compared to war; politics is war, without blood. In this case it was not stretching the imagination at all to say that what we had was a Pearl Harbor sneak attack. A massive attack. They threw everything they could at us at Pearl Harbor. A massive attack, but it was a sneak attack. There was nothing that said ahead of time that the probability was that the Japanese would attack America at Pearl Harbor. In fact, the admiral who headed the Japanese Navy was a Japanese who had been educated at Harvard, Admiral Yamamoto. Admiral Yamamoto was educated at Harvard and known as a great card player at Harvard. He had lots of friends. You talk about deception made intimate, deception on a one-on-one basis, the fact that Admiral Yamamoto commanded the Japanese Navy in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the most humiliating defeat our Nation has ever suffered was instructive. We should look at that. That is a good instruction as to what has happened here, because what has happened here is that the Republican majority have staged a sneak attack on the American workers, a sneak attack of great force. They are moving across the board attacking everything at once. The Davis-Bacon Act must be repealed. Nobody ever said that in the contract, but now they are saying the Davis-Bacon Act must be repealed. They are saying that they want your overtime. We do not want overtime. We want to have compensatory time instead. Substitute compensatory time for overtime and make that part of a Fair Labor Standards Act, changing the requirement that overtime must be paid after working a certain number of hours. They wanted to go after the National Labor Relations Board, which makes it possible to organize workers, and they wanted to put the National Labor Relations Board in a straitjacket fiscally. They moved and cut it by one-third, proposed to cut it by one-third, but that did not prevail. They are moving again to put pressure on the National Labor Relations Board, Some of the Members are writing letters to the National Labor Relations Board. One member of the Committee on Appropriations said your appropriation will be coming from me, and I am going to get you. In so many words he was saying that he would stop the National Labor Relations Board from functioning because it rendered some decisions that he did not like. That was one member, but the spirit of the entire Republican majority has been that kind of spirit, to bring to a halt those parts of the American Government, laws that exist that have been built up over the years which help to protect working people. Mr. Speaker, Pearl Harbor was a massive attack. I say it was because it was launched at the beginning of the 104th Congress, and it did not succeed. So to replace the Pearl Harbor sneak attack, Admiral Yamamoto was defeated. Now they are resorting to the guerrilla warfare. Some members of labor assume that, since they did not prevail in the first half of the 104th Congress, that the Republicans will now break off the attack and leave labor alone, that the scorched earth policies that started the session will no longer be pursued. That is not the case. It is guerrilla warfare now. They are waging the same, have the same objectives, but they are waging the war in a different way. But it is instructive, and I hope that labor leaders, union members, workers in general will understand how the sneak attack was promulgated. The sneak attack was forced upon us by a group that pretended to be friendly to labor. A lot of labor legislation in the last 10 years, certainly since I have been here in this Congress, has been bipartisan legislation. Even when the legislation was not bipartisan, after the legislation was passed without Republican votes, throughout the country Republicans have snuggled up to labor leaders and pretended that they cared about working people. They have pretended in the back-slapping kind of manner, in the one-on-one friendships, they pretended to be friends of labor. It is Admiral Yamamoto, the spirit of Admiral Yamamoto has been there and wooing labor into an ambush. That is what Pearl Harbor was. They ambushed our forces on a Sunday morning. Admiral Yamamoto had gone to Harvard. He knew the habits of Americans. So he knew very well that a Sunday morning attack, when Americans like to sleep late and they enjoy Saturday night, et cetera, he knew the habits. So we have a group of leaders in the Republican majority who have been very friendly with labor in the past. They knew the habits. They wooed labor. Even Members who belong to unions voted uncharacteristically in large numbers for Members of the Republican party. Mr. Speaker, the shift over the years has been away from working class people voting almost 90 percent or 85 percent Democratic to a gradual shift led by Ronald Reagan where working class people have voted in much larger numbers for Members of the Republican majority. They have wooed the working class vote very well, but now the sneak attack has come. In an overwhelming force it has come down for the first half of the 104th Congress and we have beat it back. We have stopped them on Davis-Bacon. They have not yet succeeded in repealing Davis-Bacon although a bill was introduced very early to repeal Davis- Bacon, just repeal it outright, wipe it out. No reform of Davis-Bacon, no adjustment of Davis-Bacon, wipe it out; that was the cry, wipe out Davis-Bacon. The same legislation called for wiping out the national service contract. The service contract is a companion bill, companion act to Davis-Bacon, which came along late which protects workers in Federal installations, the actual people who do the janitorial work, and the cleaning ladies. Various people at the very lowest rungs are protected by also applying the principle of paying the prevailing wage to those people as well as paying prevailing wages to the people who work on construction on Federal contracts. Mr. Speaker, it was quite surprising, but an all-out attack has happened. The friends of Davis-Bacon, both on the workers side, the labor side, as well as on the business side, and there are thousands of contractors who support Davis-Bacon as a reasonable, rational piece of Federal legislation, Federal protection. It protects not only workers. It protects the quality of life and the standard of living in certain areas. It protects contractors from the assault that they are constantly under from unscrupulous contractors who do not want to pay their workers decent wages, unscrupulous contractors who do not want to pay fringe benefits, unscrupulous contractors who will cut corners and do shoddy work in order to do the job cheaper, employ workers who did not do the job with the same kind of skills and place at risk the entire job. They are constantly fighting against those. So there are people on the management side, the contractors, the owners of construction industries who support Davis-Bacon as well as the construction workers themselves who support Davis-Bacon. So the attack is on them, too. Admiral Yamamoto has attacked not only the workers, he has attacked businessmen who have been doing a good job of carrying out the process of constructing Federal buildings, at the same time providing decent wages for their workers. Mr. Speaker, let us take a look at the history of Davis-Bacon. It is far from being a radical piece of liberal legislation, concocted by wild-eyed radicals, not at all. Davis-Bacon is a piece of legislation which was designed to protect the wages and the standard of living of middle class workers. Probably most of them were Republicans that they were protecting. But certainly the originators of the Davis-Bacon Act were Republicans. Who was Davis, who was Bacon? Representative Robert Bacon was a Republican from New York. New York, my home State, is always associated with radicals and liberals, and nothing for the middle class, nothing for the working population comes out of New York, if you accept the kind of stereotype that has been painted of New York by certain people. But out of New York came a bill to protect construction workers. Robert Bacon, Representative Robert Bacon of New York was a Republican. Senator James Davis of Pennsylvania, another east coast State, not with a radical reputation like New York, but it is on the east coast, and you might say that that is where the liberals live, that is where progressives live. That is where the people who gave us the New Deal and the Great Society, all came from the east coast. No, Senator James Davis was a Republican from Pennsylvania, and Representative Robert Bacon was a Republican from New York. Senator James Davis had served as Secretary of Labor in the Cabinets of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Listen, Senator James Davis had been Secretary of Labor in the Cabinets of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The act was adopted, the Davis-Bacon Act was adopted in 1931 at the urging of Herbert Hoover. Let me repeat that. Two Republicans, Representative Robert Bacon of New York and Senator James Davis of Pennsylvania, two Republicans, created, authored the Davis-Bacon Act. The act was adopted in the Hoover administration, Herbert Hoover was President, in 1931. This Davis-Bacon Act requires that Federal construction contracts specify the minimum wage rates to be paid to the various classes of laborers working under those contracts. Minimum wages are defined as those rates of pay found by the Secretary of Labor to be prevailing, prevailing in the locality of the project, prevailing for similar crafts and skills on comparable construction work. It does not say that they must pay union wages that have been negotiated in a collective bargaining process. It does not. It says whatever the wages are, the prevailing wages, if the area has low prevailing wages. As we will see later on in the discussion, it can sometimes drag down the prevailing wage. Prevailing wages are very close to minimum wages in some instances because the prevailing wage in the Davis-Bacon wage is very close to minimum wage because that is the prevailing wage in the area. Mr. Speaker, the act does not require that collectively bargained union wages be paid unless such wages happen to be prevailing in the locality where the work takes place. It is most unfortunate; I wish the act had required that collective bargaining rates have some role in guiding the level of the Davis-Bacon wages, but they do not. So Davis-Bacon is under attack. The Republican created Davis-Bacon Act, the Davis-Bacon Act signed by President Herbert Hoover, a Republican President, under attack. And even later, the Republicans showed their support for Davis-Bacon under the most popular Republican President probably in history, save since Abraham Lincoln: Ronald Reagan. Under Ronald Reagan Davis-Bacon was reinforced. Ronald Reagan said he did not want the Davis-Bacon Act tampered with. He wrote a letter in September 1981 to Mr. Robert Georgine, President of Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO. Ronald Reagan wrote a letter which says: Dear Bob, I want to acknowledge the Building and Construction Trades Department letter of September 11 concerning efforts to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. I have asked the Secretary of Labor to respond directly, but I want to assure you and your general president that I will continue to support my campaign pledge to not seek repeal of the act. With best wishes, very sincerely, Ronald Reagan. So here we have a history, not ancient history, but recent history, and Ronald Reagan is in support of Davis-Bacon. If you look at the records of the House of Representatives, you will find the last time a vote was taken on Davis-Bacon on the floor of the House it was bipartisan. There were democrats and Republicans voting for it, and Democrats and Republicans voted against it. Always bipartisan. So why did we wake up following the victory of the Republican majority and have Admiral Yamamoto-style Pearl Harbor secret attack on working people in general and Davis-Bacon in particular? Why? Mr. Speaker, the attack now has become very well orchestrated. As I said before, Pearl Harbor was an open onslaught. Pearl Harbor was not guerilla warfare. That was direct attack. They threw everything they had from the air on Pearl Harbor. They did not succeed in winning the war in the Pacific. They did not succeed in winning the war. Warfare of that kind is seldom now. From that point on, after World War II, with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the defeat of the Japanese, very seldom has anybody contemplated, except the Soviet Union, an all-out war directly being waged on the United States of America. But we have suffered greatly in guerilla warfare type actions. Vietnam was guerilla warfare, not a direct onslaught. They did not come out and face American military power head on but guerilla warfare. Now we have the guerilla warfare against Davis-Bacon and other workplace protection legislation. The guerilla warfare is deadly. It is poisonous. Most of all, it takes advantage of the fact that now there is an atmosphere of optimism, of an optimism that is not justified. There is an atmosphere of optimism which is seeping over the progressive Democrat friendly to labor forces in this Congress. All too early we have declared that the Republicans have lost and the American people understand clearly what is at issue here and that the Democrats are going to roll to victory, working people need not fear, the legislation will not be wiped out, they will be saved. It is a premature declaration of victory because now that the Yamamoto Pearl Harbor-style attack, only it was not a sneak attack, it was still a direct attack, has failed, they are pursuing guerrilla warfare, and the guerrilla warfare means that in every possible way they will be attacking labor from behind the lines, from the side, from underneath. We had a housing bill on the floor a little more than 2 weeks ago, and in the bill which dealt with public housing, the part of the bill that dealt with public housing, the construction of public housing with Federal funds, there was a clause written in there which said that Davis-Bacon would not apply to housing units, to housing, which has less than 12 units. If you had a certain number of units, below that number you did not have to apply Davis-Bacon. That was just sneaked into the legislation and caught everybody by surprise. It was a guerrilla warfare tactic, and by the time the forces that want to see Davis-Bacon continue recovered, I am afraid they were too dizzy, too shaken, to really reason straight because there was a compromise made, and that is part of the law now. Public housing units; I think 10 or 12 or 20, I do not remember exactly; if it is below that number of units, then Davis-Bacon does not apply. We do not know what dollar figure is related. For constructing public housing in certain parts of the country, you may be talking about $5 million or $6 million for that number of units. We do not know how that translates. We do not know whether when you start talking about units in public housing, later on it is going to be other kinds of units applying to office buildings that are being constructed by Federal money by construction workers. It is a guerrilla warfare tactic that paid off, in my opinion. There is some that think it is not difficult, did not do that much damage, but it is indicative of the kind of guerrilla warfare tactics that are being waged, the kind of tactic that we are going to see take place on the floor of the House this week where they are proposing to put the minimum-wage law, an increase in the minimum wage, will be placed on the floor some time this week, and that increase in the minimum wage which is proposed by the Democrats to be 90 cents over a 2-year period, it may be more or less as the Republicans put it on the floor, but that increase that they are proposing will be tied to another guerrilla warfare attack on workers. The Team Act is going to be part of it, or it may have the Team Act and the Porter Act. What is the Porter Act. It is a small matter relating to the requirement that when you are asked by your employer to take care of a vehicle overnight, and you may take it home with you, whatever, it is necessary to take care of it, you do that, and you may be required to do some other things like check or take it by the station to check the oil, various other things, or you may be required instead of going home to make a stop on the way. Instead of coming straight from the home to the job, you may be required to drive an extra amount of miles to some other location. Whenever there is that extra requirement which means that you are doing labor for your employer, you have to be paid for it under the law. But now they are proposing a change which would require that that never apply. If you are taking it overnight, the employer can dictate the terms and not pay for your extra work and your extra time and the extra travel miles that you may put in. That may be attached to the minimum wage. You may have two items, two attacks guerrilla warfare- style, on workers in the minimum wage bill. Puts everybody on the spot. You all want a minimum wage increase. The fact it is coming on the bill means that the Republican majority is finally not treating the American public with contempt. They are finally going to bow to the wisdom and bow to the common sense of the American people. You know more than 74 percent of the American people say that we need to raise the minimum wage at this point, that nobody can live on $8,400 a year. Even if you put in all of those 40 hours every week for 52 weeks, that is all you get, $8,400 a year. Now, know by Republican standards we have heard certain spokesmen, spokespersons, on the floor who are Republicans who talked about, you know, middle class starts at $100,000, so they have lost their sense of perspective as to what people need to live on, and they just do not believe that it is true that there are people out there who only make $8,400 a year under the minimum wage. Minimum wage is $4.25 an hour; that is what it comes out to. Well, it is not going to be more than about a thousand dollars more once you get the 90 cent increase that the Democrats are proposing, but at least it is going forward. A family that is very poor can certainly use another thousand dollars to buy some groceries, some shoes for the kids, and a thousand dollars goes a long way when you are poor. I will have you know that my father was very skilled in the furniture making business, in the mill department, highly praised by his foremen and his bosses when they brought in new machinery and he figured out how to make it work, and only he could make it work and not have the boards burning. And they, one time they got angry with him for some reason, they laid him off, and so many boards were burning in the mill department until they came to get him a few days later so that he could get the assembly line started again and stop the boards from burning. There was a little trick that he had that he told me about, about how you slap a little glue on the end of the boards as they are going out, and it keeps the boards from burning, that he never told them about. But at any rate, with all that kind of basic, fundamental skill in what was called an entry-level, nonskilled job, but really required some skill and some know-how and some common sense, he never made more than the minimum wage. They never paid the workers at the Memphis Furniture Factory more than the minimum wage, and only when the minimum wage went up did he get an increase. So there are jobs in this country still like that where you do not get more than the minimum wage in certain parts of the country, so the fact that there are large numbers of workers who make above the minimum wage, there are a great percentage of workers in America who make above the minimum wage, does not mean that the 20 million or more out are on minimum wage cannot use an increase. So I applaud the wisdom, the common sense, of American people who in the polls keep saying you need to give a minimum wage increase. I applaud that. We are going to have it on the floor because the Republican majority has finally bowed to the wisdom of the American people. But in that package there will be a guerrilla war poison pill. There will be a land mine, a couple of land mines maybe, but at least one. They are going to wage that kind of guerrilla war fare, and Davis- Bacon, of course, is one of the victims. One of the things that have decided to do is to go after Davis-Bacon by undermining the basic concept in terms of it is an effort to keep the level of wages in a given community at the level of the wages in that community by not having a Federal project come in and pay less and undermine that wage structure. Instead, the Federal project is governed by what is prevailing already, and unfortunately I would like to see Federal projects raise the level of wages but unfortunately they do not do that. What they do is merely seek not to undermine the level of wages. So Davis-Bacon is not going to be allowed to do that if the Republic guerrilla tactics could work. What they are saying is first is costs the American people too much; second, and I will not go into all of the particular guerrilla warfare attaches that are being staged at this point, we will just talk about one today and maybe we will pick up on some of the others later. Today I would like to talk about the charge that Davis-Bacon is racist. Now, stop for a moment and consider the fact that the Republican majority of this 104th Congress is now waging a guerrilla attack on Davis-Bacon, and its tactic, one of its tactics, is to accuse the Davis-Bacon Act of being a racist act, the Davis-Bacon program of being a racist program. All of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden, we have a great concern about racism being manifested from the Republican majority side of the aisle. All of a sudden there is a concern with racism. We have suffered from the Republican majority's attacks on affirmative action all year long, ever since they came to power in the 104th Congress, November of 1994, one attack after another on affirmative action. on set-asides, on the Voting Rights Act. You name it, anything related to trying to give some relief from the horror of racism, from the disadvantages of racism, from the long history of racism, from the effects of 232 years of slavery and a hundred years of de facto oppression that went on in certain parts of the country, the rampant discrimination that prevailed throughout the Nation. You know, no relief will the majority, Republican majority, allow. They want to roll back all of the laws and all of the provisions that have been made which proposed to give relief to people who have suffered from racism, particularly the African-American community, and I say ``particularly'' because the African-American community is a special community among the minority groups. The African-American community is unique because the African-American community is made up of the descendants of slaves. The descendants of slaves are people who were brought here, not as immigrants; they did not come voluntarily. They were brought against their will. The descendants of people who were brought against their will here, the descendants of slaves, were made to suffer for 232 years. Immigrants come, and they have difficult, hard times for a couple of generations, maybe. But nobody else in the fabric of American life has been made, no other group has been made, to suffer 232 years of legal slavery, legal enslavement, and then, after that, all kinds of forms of subslavery and oppression. So we are unique. The Republican majority has refused to provide any relief. They have offered nothing new, and they have attacked everything that exists that was generated by the New Deal, the Great Society, the civil rights movement. Everything is under attack related to discrimination and racist relief from discrimination and relief from racism. But the same people who placed it under attack are now saying that they do not like Davis-Bacon, they want Davis-Bacon to be repealed, destroyed, because it is racist. How great can the degree of hypocrisy become? You cannot surpass that in terms of the hypocrisy. That is unabashed, blatant: ``Davis-Bacon is bad because it is racist.'' Even if it were true, one could just dismiss the Republican majority's utilization of that as a ploy because they cannot be about relieving anybody from the scourges of racism. But it is not true. It is a big lie that is being generated, and they are going to try to use the big lie technique, like Herman Goebbels under Hitler: If you say it often enough and keep saying it, then people begin to believe it is true. So over and over again you hear that Davis-Bacon is racist, Davis-Bacon is racist. What is the germ of truth there that they are utilizing? One germ of truth there is that when Mr. Davis and Mr. Bacon, Senator Davis and Representative Bacon, two Republicans, when they developed the Davis- Bacon Act, they were trying to protect local workers in neighborhoods throughout the country, mainly those neighborhoods in the Northeast that has higher standards of living than other parts of the country. And what was happening is that unscrupulous contractors, people who have the same mentality as the plantation owners, were taking advantage of the fact that was 1931, a period where people were desperate for work; all over the country workers were desperate for work.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums].

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Watt].

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from North Carolina [Mrs. Clayton].