Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay homage to an individual who serves as an inspiration to many. Her life of 101 years leaves an indelible impression on all with whom she comes in contact. Her life is a testament that humanness is a factor that matters most in life. Mrs. Janie A. Greene is a model human and a great point of light whose contributions to this Earth must not go unacknowledged. For over 55 years, Mrs. Greene has worked tirelessly for the People's Institutional A.M.E. Church. She is a pillar of support in the church and has become a reliable church laborer. Throughout her five-decade service, Janie Greene has been involved with the Shut-In Club and the South Carolina Club. She has been a member of the stewardess board, trustee, auxiliary, and the missionary society. Presently, Ms. Greene is a charter member of the South Carolina Club and a member of the Virginia Smith Missionary Society. Admirably, Janie Greene is one who knows how to enjoy life in its purest form: She is the matriarch of a prosperous family. She serves as a guiding light to those whom she welcomed into this world: her children, Thelma Greene McQueen, deceased, Clifton S. Greene, Oreda Greene Dabney, and Myrtle Green Whitmore; 11 grandchildren and scores of great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. At the very least, Walley Greene, Janie's husband who passed on in 1931, has a lineage which is very well preserved. Born in Georgetown, SC, to Prince and Clara Browne, Mrs. Janie Greene has been a beloved resident of Brooklyn for over 60 years. During this time, Janie has lived in appreciation of every hour of life. This is evident in the way she chooses to enjoy precious moments. Under no circumstances does she reserve enjoyment to those her junior. Janie enjoys gardening, reading, listening to the radio, and watching television. Mrs. Greene's favorite pastimes further include attending public events, shopping, and decorating. Preparing daily brunch for the family and sending greeting cards are also regular forms of recreation for Janie Greene. Service to God, family, and community can be a difficult task to accomplish. Consistently, Janie Greene has made it appear to be effortless. I sincerely appreciate the richness, beauty, and dedication that mark Mrs. Greene's life. Janie Greene is a great point of light for all of the people of America to revere.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for taking this special order. I serve on the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities as the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Workplace Protections, which is directly responsible for the minimum wage, so I have quite a file on the minimum wage and have been living with it for some time. The bill that is presently out, sponsored by Minority Leader Gephardt and the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, Mr. Clay. That bill calls for an increase of 90 cents over a 2-year period, and I must say that I am awfully sorry that at its last count we only had about 125 people who are cosponsors of the bill. I hope we will have more cosponsors, not only from the Democratic side, a complete cosponsorship, but also some of the Republicans who have decided that this is the humane and sensible thing to do will also join us and will get on with the business of giving the lowest paid workers in America a 90-cent increase over the next two years. It is a very conservative approach. We have an economy right now that is booming. From Brownsville and Brooklyn in my district, to Mapleton, GA, from California to New York, we have an economy that is booming. Most of the workers in this economy are not paid minimum wage. They are paid above minimum wage. Yet the businesses that these workers work for are thriving. Everybody wants to get into the American business climate. We appreciate that our entrepreneurs and small businesses make up a tremendously large segment of the economy. Small businesses employ more workers than anybody else, but they are doing quite well from coast to coast. And restaurant businesses in the parts of the country where the labor supply is less, it is a matter of supply and demand. Where you have more labor, they can afford, the businesses can afford to get away, or they can get away with paying lower wages. That is what happens. They have a lot of people who want jobs, so they pay the lowest wages. Yet the restaurant businesses in the areas where they are paying the lowest wages, they are able to survive. And they cry, if we talk about increasing the minimum wage, that they will have problems, they may go out of business. And yet the same kind of restaurant business in another part of the country, where they are paying higher wages, is thriving also. When the wages go up in another part of the country because the supply of labor is not plentiful and they have to pay more, they continue to profit. Businesses do not stay around if they do not profit. Nobody stays in business if they are not making a profit. The size of the profit and whether or not a business stays viable or not is not dependent on just the wages paid. McDonald's and Burger King and a number of fast food restaurants are able to supply fast foods at tremendously low prices. In fact, there is a lady in my district that says she finds it cheaper to feed her kids at McDonald's. She cannot buy beef at the prices they pay for their beef, and she cannot feed her kid hamburgers at that price.

Mr. OWENS. No, I will not yield now. There are some other factors that are involved that drive the prices down so low, as there is in many businesses. There are many other factors involved than the wages paid. We have a thriving economy, and we owe it to our workers to try to get a fair wage for them in those areas where the supply of labor is so great until the entrepreneurs, the business owners, are able to exploit that. They can get labor cheap, so they get it cheap. Most people in the country are in areas where the labor supply is not so cheap and they have to work for a minimum wage. There are about 13 million people who still work for minimum wage, unfortunately, because they are in situations where they have to compete in a labor supply pool where they cannot get higher wages; or, in some cases, they may have a situation where if they were organized, they might be able to demand high wages because the supply of labor is not so much greater than the demand. But the organization of workers has been thwarted in this country by our poor labor laws. Of all the industrialized nations, we have the worst labor laws. We make it more difficult for people to organize and for people to bargain than any other industrialized nation in the world. So we keep down the wages. And by having a minimum wage, a floor, we are only protecting ourselves as a Nation. The Constitution talks about promoting the general welfare. Well, promoting the general welfare means the welfare for everybody, not just the entrepreneurs or businesses, or people who make a lot of money, who keep crying crocodile tears about taxes and about regulations. They are quite well off. And there are whole cadres of business people from all over the world who want to get into this economy and into this business environment, who think they can make a lot of money. I do not know why we have so many crocodile tears being cried by entrepreneurs in this business environment which is so favorable toward entrepreneurs. It is not favorable toward workers. And one way you help workers on the very bottom is by having this much needed increase in the minimum wage which, when you look at inflation, we are still at an all time low in terms of the wage level of people on the bottom.

Mr. OWENS. I have been listening to the gentleman bemoan the fact, as a businessman, he is persecuted in America by taxes, by paperwork; he has to make out paychecks, and that is a painful experience. You should live the experience of the people that do not have any money to make out checks for. There are large numbers of people who would love to have your pain and your grief in terms of the difficulty of making out checks for payroll.

Mr. OWENS. I am not accusing anybody of anything. We need entrepreneurs and people to be successful.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, last Thursday we passed a large appropriations bill which completed the process of budgeting and appropriations for the fiscal year which began last October 1. It is finally all over and I have read the boast in the papers and heard them on television and radio of the majority party, the Republican majority, that they have cut the Federal budget by $23 billion this year, $23 billion since they came into power; $23 billion has been cut out of the Federal budget. And one would say, well, it is wonderful that all that waste has been trimmed, but when we examine the nature of the cuts, we find that the places where one knows there is a great deal of waste have not received any great cuts. On the other hand, when we go to look at the fine print of what we passed last Thursday, we find there are many, many people on the bottom, the folks who need the most in our society, who are going to be hurt. They are the victims of the $23 billion in cuts. It is quite interesting just to pick up today's paper, the New York Times, and see a contrast in articles. On one page we have an article which talks about the Freemen. You might say, well, I am getting off the subject. The Freemen are out there in Montana and surrounded by the FBI, there is a standoff, there is a possibility that we may have some kind of violent explosion there. What does it have to do with the budget of the United States? What does it have to do with the fact that the Republican majority are boasting they cut the budget by $23 billion? Well, the article that I am referring to that appeared in today's New York Times is headlined as follows: It says ``Freemen Depended on Subsidies. Evicted Anti-Tax Rancher and Partners Got $676,000 in U.S. Aid.'' These are people who are angry with the government and have been yelling loudly to outsiders that they want the government off their back. The latest sign that has been posted by the leader of this group calls the U.S. Government a corporate prostitute. Nevertheless, they are the beneficiaries. The Clark family is the beneficiary of $676,000 in U.S. aid. This category certainly has not been hurt much by the $23 billion in cuts because the $23 billion in cuts that have taken place under the leadership of the Republican majority do not involve drastic cuts in the programs that the Freemen were beneficiaries of, agriculture programs of various kinds. There is a whole slew of agricultural beneficiary programs that have been flowing to the farmers, the agribusinesses, for many years and they are not being drastically cut in this $23 billion cut this year. The farmers programs are going to be phased out over a 7-year period. That is the public relations hype that we have been told: Do not worry, they are going to be phased out over a 7-year period. But they are still absorbing billions of dollars in waste. And I will read on in this article and we can see what kind of waste I am talking about. In the case of Mr. Clark, Ralph E. Clark is the leader of the Freemen. It is his ranchhouse that is surrounded. ``Mr. Clark, a Freeman in a cowboy hat, nailed to a fence post a manifesto denouncing the Federal Government as a corporate prostitute.'' I am quoting. ``Corporate prostitute'' is his language. But to read on in the New York Times article obviously April 30, 1996, which I will enter into the Record, to read on, quoting from the article, ``But tarnishing this image of rugged individualism, a new study of Federal payments indicates that over the last decade Mr. Clark and his ranch partners received $676,082 in government checks to cushion a variety of farming setbacks.'' We, the government, we the people we the taxpayers have been cushioning the setbacks of Mr. Clark and his family over the last 10 years. They were dependent on the helping hand of the government, just like everybody else up there in agriculture, said Kenneth Cook, who is the President of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit group in Washington that researches farm subsidy programs. Quote, continuing: But even by the standards of agriculture, hundreds of thousands of dollars over 10 years, that is substantial, added Mr. Cook, who is an analyst who compiled the figures on Friday after studying computer files on farm subsidy checks issued by the Department of Agriculture from 1985 to 1994. Documents filed at the Garfield County courthouse also offer glimpses into the heavy reliance on government aid by the 65-year-old farmer who now symbolizes the antigovernment Freemen group. In the 1994 foreclosure sale of Ralph Clark's 960-acre homestead, court documents show that Mr. Clark signed a 10-year contract in 1990 to receive an annual payment of $48,269 under the Conservation Reserve Program and was paid through 1994 under that program. Under this program, which is highly popular in Montana, farmers agreed to suspend production on steep slopes and other land highly subject to erosion, planted it with grass that will not be grazed or cut for hay. Critics of the program, which began in 1985, often call the program paying farmers not to farm. I would go even worse, I would go even further. Sounds like a racketeering enterprise. To pay farmers to select steep slopes in their land and plant grass instead of planting something else in order to keep it from eroding, to pay them large amounts of taxpayers' money, I consider that a racketeering enterprise with the government participating. Mr. Speaker, they found an excuse, they found an excuse to pay these farmers large sums of money. You would be a fool not to take it. I continue to quote from the article. You would be a fool not to take it. Nick Morner, the Garfield County attorney, said of the subsidy money, referring to the skill in winning subsidy payments. He added, everybody in the county knows that is what they have been doing with a population of only 1,300 people. Garfield County received $63 million in farm subsidy payments from 1985 to 1994. A population of only 1,300 people in Garfield County received $63 million of your taxpayers' money in farm subsidy payments from 1985 to 1994. Stop and think about what that means. Now, these are not the people being cut in the 23 billion dollars' worth of cuts that the Republican majority is so loudly proclaiming victory about. These people are not being cut. These programs are not being cut. Whether it is in Montana or in Kansas, in Montana or in Kansas, these are not the programs being cut. One of the programs that is receiving a big cut this year is the 23 billion dollars' worth of cuts in public housing, housing for poor people, housing for the homeless. I am going to switch to another New York Times article that happened to appear on the same day. Today, Tuesday, April 30, the article reads: Dole calls Public housing one of the last bastions of socialism. Dole calls public housing one of the last bastions of socialism. You know, what is my theme for today? My theme is that it appears that, if there is a benefit available for very poor people, people that are on the very bottom of our economic strata, then automatically it is a horrible program and anything they get is too much. Anything that people on the bottom get is too much. Anything the average American, the needy American gets, that is too much. Mr. Speaker, on the other hand, it appears that there is a group of people in America which never have enough, and more and more is always projected and that is still not enough. We cannot give the farmers too much. More and more is projected and that is not enough. Nobody calls the agriculture program, which is rampant in Kansas, the State of Kansas, nobody calls that socialism. But there, the Senator from Kansas in this article in the New York Times today is saying that public housing is one of the last bastions of socialism. It seems that there is a group of people that I choose to call the overlords of America. You cannot talk about then in simple class warfare terms. Class warfare is an obsolete notion. It does not tell us anything. We talk about class warfare. You have to define people as being in the middle class and the upper class and the lower class. That does not describe what is going on in the world at all. There is a class of overlords in the world. Overlords are people who have certain privileges and seem to have access to public funds and the public treasury, and they have their own agents in public places, and we can never give them too much, the overlords. Among the overlords are the farm program recipients. Overloads are not always millionaires. There are a lot of millionaires that are taken care of by the agents of the overlords. Greenspan is an agent of the overlords. The Federal Reserve is part of a government banking industrial complex, and Greenspan sits on top of that. He guarantees that the banking overlords will always be taken care of, even if it means suffering for large numbers of Americans who are out there in the work force. Greenspan makes certain that as the level of unemployment drops, if our economy is doing very well, lots of people are unemployed. Greenspan puts the brakes on, tightens up on the money and the investment lessens and unemployment goes up because people are not expanding industry. They cannot hire people, and the unemployment goes up. The suffering of workers becomes a barometer for progress for Greenspan, who is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank and the agent of the banking overlords. So the overlords for agriculture, I suppose, the chief overlord is the Secretary of Agriculture. They got a whole lot of public complex boards and various entities that make judgments about who is going to get Farmers' Home Loan mortgage money, who is going to have money forgiven. I have talked before about the fact that we forgave $11 billion in Farmers Home Loan mortgages over a 5-year period. I still have not found out how the rules are made for forgiving loans in the Farmers Home Loan mortgage program. But obviously the rules are not for ordinary common Congressmen to know. I am not a member of the overlord group. Agents of the overlords do not have to tell how they decide who gets all of this farm subsidy money, Farmers Home Loan mortgage money. But when it comes to my district, the 11th Congressional District in New York City, in Brooklyn, the 11th Congressional District has one of the poorest communities in America located within it. Brownsville is primarily made up of public housing units. There are about 20,000 people in Brownsville who live in public housing, some of the best public housing in the country, by the way, well-kept. The New York City housing authority over the years, for the last 30 years, certainly since public housing expanded, has been one of the leading public housing authorities in the country in terms of the way public housing is operated and kept. A lot of problems, but still there is a long waiting list. People want to get that public housing in New York City. So, public housing is good housing for poor people in Brownsville. They have to listen now to the Senator from Kansas, who happens to be the presidential candidate for the other party call public housing one of the last bastions of socialism. Agriculture, which funnels billions of dollars to the Ralph Clarks of the world, billions of dollars to agribusiness, is never seen as socialism, but now public housing is one of the last bastions of socialism. Well, perhaps it is, and my answer to that is it is good socialism. What is wrong with socialism for ordinary people? If you are going to have socialism for agribusiness, then why do we not have socialism for the homeless, socialism for the people who might be homeless if they did not have public housing. Socialism for senior citizens. I was at a meeting last Friday called to take a look at what is happening here in Washington with the committee on housing and banking. The people in my district have been told that the Brook amendment, which says that no more than 30 percent of your income, if you are in public housing, you do not have to pay more than 30 percent of your income for rent. And that has been eliminated by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate has not acted on it yet, but it has been eliminated by the Republican majority here in this House. So they are concerned. Mr. Speaker, at that meeting the room was full of senior citizens. Yes, in the area of Brownsville, there are many young families also that live in public housing. But I suspect the problem with some of the younger families is that, unlike the senior citizens, they do not know of a time when they did not have the public housing. Every senior citizen in that room knew that when they were born, federally financed public housing did not exist. They know it did not exist before they were born. They know that it is possible to lose it, that when they die it may be gone. And they are ready to fight for it. The people who take it for granted are the ones who came on the scene, they found public housing, and they really do not understand that it came out of Democratic efforts. It came out of the New Deal. It came out of Franklin Roosevelt's grand design to help poor people, the same Franklin Roosevelt that created public housing, socialism in housing, if you want to call planning, appropriating public funds, giving people housing according to their needs, charging them only according to their income, if you want to call that socialism, then that is one brand of socialism, I guess. It is better than the brand of socialism that the Agriculture Department applies. Agriculture does not require people to be poor. Everybody who owns some land, by the fact that they own land, Mr. Clark owned thousands and thousands of acres, it did not stop him from getting large subsidies from the Agriculture Department. In fact, the more you own, the bigger you are, the more you get from the taxpayers of America, the more you get from the Government. So that is a socialism you might call big belly socialism. The belly of that socialism is enormous. That socialism, indiscriminately showering its socialism on the rich and the few poor farmers left. Of course, there are a few poor farmers left in America, and we certainly want to see they get some kind of help from the Government. In fact, that is what Franklin Roosevelt intended when he created the farm subsidy program. The same man who created the subsidy program in housing created the subsidy programs in agriculture, all to help poor people. The same man who created subsidy programs in housing and subsidy programs in agriculture also created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to safeguard the money that every American puts in the bank. When Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrat, the New Dealer, the socialist, when he created the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which is socialism in banking, you might say that the Federal Government stands behind your deposits, insuring that your deposits up to a certain point will not be lost because the Government stands behind it. When Franklin Roosevelt first created it, it was $10,000, a reasonable amount. The banking overlords took it over, and the banking overlords have raised the $10,000 amount up to $100,000. And the banking overlords can play the game so that it is $100,000 in each bank. If you are rich, you can go from bank to bank and you can end up with several million dollars in the banks insured by the FDIC so that the taxpayers are going to cover your millions of dollars under this socialized banking program. Mr. Speaker, so socialism for banking is all right because the overlords benefit. Socialism for agriculture is all right because the overlords benefit. But all of a sudden socialism in housing is under attack and will be a leading target, one of the major targets in the coming political campaign. Socialism in housing, giving housing to poor people: Well, that also fits, I suppose in some kind of bizarre pattern, some kind of bizarre maze. Mr. Speaker, we do not hear any attacks on the situation that created the monstrosity in Montana, the Freemen out there go home free. They are not being attacked. They are not being targeted. Probably the Democratic-Republican campaign in the coming election will completely ignore the economics of the situation that created the crisis in Montana. With a population of only 1,300 people, the taxpayers were being swindled out of $63 million in farm subsidy payments over a 10- year period. Let me continue to read from the article about the standoff in Montana and show you how the standoff in Montana relates to the $23 billion in budget cuts that impact mostly on the poorest people of America and do not cut waste because these are the recipients of waste. In the same period that Garfield County received $63 million in farm subsidy payments, the section of Jordan where the Clarks live, 76 farmers in that section, 76 farmers, received $7.3 million from 31 different farm subsidy programs. I said before that there are a lot of different pieces in the farm racketeering setup, a lot of different pieces: The Farmers' Home Loan Mortgage, which is very seldom discussed. We talk about the farm subsidy program on the floor of the House a great deal, but we do not talk about all those other pieces. But there were 31 different farm subsidy programs that the racketeers in Ralph Clark's gang tapped into. Continuing to read from the article, quote: ```What stands out about Ralph Clark is the complexity. Ordinarily a family farm is not that complicated.' ``Over a 10-year period, Federal checks went to 11 entities with interest in the main Clark homestead here--first, to Mr. Clark; then, from 1988 to 1993, to a corporation in which Mr. Clark was a stockholder, and then, in 1993 and 1994, to a revocable trust in which he had an interest. ```Around 1992, they were setting up revocable trusts as a means of avoiding income taxes, State taxes,' Mr. Murnion, The County Attorney, said, referring to one of a series of strategies Mr. Clark tried over the last 15 years to avoid losing his farm.'' ``Mr. Clark's financial problems date to 1978, when, following the trend of the time, Mr. Clark borrowed heavily to expand his holdings, adding 7,000 acres to his original homestead.'' Now, if you have the image of a struggling farmer out there in the New Deal days, when President Roosevelt first created the farm subsidy program, reaching out to the Federal Government to get much-deserved assistance to keep family farms alive, and then using that to maintain a family farm to not only take care of his own family but to provide to the overall economy, to keep the cost of food down, we know all the good things that flow from an agriculture program that is working properly, but not Mr. Clark. He went into heavy debt in order to expand his farm, which was already very large, by 7,000 additional acres. In May of 1982, the Farmers' Home Administration, however, had to call in his entire outstanding debt of $825,000 because the greed, the greed that drove Mr. Clark to expand his farm, to buy more land, evidently was not based on anything sound. In fact, it was probably part of a racketeering plot. He knew the land he was using was not going to produce anything. They just wanted the money. Why do I say that? I am only reading from the New York Times because in another section here I am going to skip, remember the entire article will be entered into the record, if you are interested, and I am going to skip to another section which describes the behavior of Mr. Clark in case you are weeping for the man who had his farm foreclosed because he owed the Federal Government $825,000 in outstanding debt. Do not weep. Save your tears for the people who are denied the minimum wage. Save your tears for the homeless out there who will have fewer public housing units. Save your tears for the people who really need it. Mr. Clark, to continue reading from the article, quote, ``When Mr. Clark and other Freemen farmers had money, they did not always spend it wisely, neighbors said. After winning one stay of foreclosure from the Farmers Home Administration, they recalled, he bought,'' Mr. Clark bought, ``a Lincoln Continental. Bill Stanton, a 65-year-old neighbor who joined with the Freemen, was known by neighbors to have spent his Federal subsidy checks on things like a helicopter, a motor home and gambling trips to Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Bahamas.'' Taxpayers, you want to know what you should get angry about? You want to know what should drive you into a rage? This is not atypical of the way farm subsidies, Farmers home loan mortgage money has been used. Two years ago, we had an article on the front page of the Washington Post that talked about four millionaires, four or five millionaires; I do not remember the exact number; who were doing worse things than this. They had airplanes, they had airfields, they had all kinds of things that they were using the taxpayers' money to finance. Mr. Clark bought a Lincoln Continental, his neighbor bought a helicopter, a motor home, and he took gambling trips to Las Vegas, NV, and the Bahamas. But he is in the overlord group. No one is criticizing him. He will not be a target in the upcoming political campaign. Agricultural socialism is acceptable socialism obviously, and the candidate who has said that we got to get rid of housing socialism is from a State where there are large amounts of this agricultural socialism. I am sure in Kansas there are a large number of Randolph Clarks, probably smarter than Randolph Clark because they have not gone off their rocker. They have not completely lost their senses. Mr. Clark is such an overlord and has been an overlord for so long, he has gotten so much from the Government, that he really believes that he has a divine right. You are talking about a divine right of farmers to swindle the American taxpayers. That is what Mr. Clark is upset about. I have the right, and therefore the fact that I owe $825,000, why are you bothering me? You know, why come bother me after all these years of largess, of laying down millions of dollars? Why bother me? I am going to go to war. So they are at war. They have got rifles. They are ready to kill people. Do not get between them and their right to the taxpayers' dollars. Continuing to read from the article: ``In the 1980's, opposition to Federal aid became heresy here.'' In Jordan, where these people live, anybody who came along and said they opposed Federal aid was in trouble. There was a group that came along and talked about getting rid of Federal aid, and their windshield was smashed. A smashed windshield greeted Bob Scott, a Montana environmentalist, when he visited Jordan in 1987 to propose that local ranchers be weaned from Federal aid through the creation of a huge deer and bison hunting preserve. Let me read that again. Here is an environmentalist who comes along who also obviously cares about waste in Government. He wants to see Government streamlined and downsized. He wants to see it done honestly. He does not want to see streamlining and downsizing done on the backs of people in public housing, done on the backs of children's lunch programs. He does not want to see streamlining done by decreasing the number of jobs available in the Summer Youth Employment Program. You know this $23 billion that has been trimmed from the budget this year has come from the peasants on the bottom, the untouchables of America, and I use this because this is just a psychological labeling. It is the way things are developing. It is nothing very simple. You cannot put your hand on it. Persons untouchable today could be an overlord in a few years. In fact, that is part of why the old class warfare nomenclature does not apply. You cannot talk about America in terms of class warfare because the folks on the bottom are dreaming that one day they will be overlords, and therefore it governs the way they think, it governs the way they resist the overlords, and it governs the way they react to the agents of the overlord. Large numbers of people may think I may one day be an overlord, so let us leave the system in place. What they do not know is that the evidence has shown that there are fewer and fewer people rising from the bottom, the middle class, to become overlords. At any rate, ``Increasingly the subsidy checks became crucial for the survival of the Clark clan,'' quoting from the New York Times article. ``Increasingly subsidy checks became crucial for survival of the Clark clan. In January 1994, the Clarks led a group of armed men to stone the county courthouse here. At issue was a Federal subsidy check that the former wife of Richard E. Clark, Ralph Clark's nephew, was seeking in a divorce payment.'' They were fighting among themselves over a farm subsidy check, and they stormed the courthouse. It was the beginning of the great revolution of the Freemen in Montana. It all relates, my colleagues. These people who say they want to get Government off their back, people who say that Government does not owe them anything, Government should not help anybody, God helps those who help themselves, leave me along, I will do my own thing. Thousands and thousands of them exist out there, receiving farm subsidy checks in large amounts. They say everybody else is the recipient of socialism, but they receive socialism in gigantic amounts. The overloads, the agricultural overlords, they do not receive nearly as much money as the banking overlords. The oil industry overlords; we have higher gasoline prices right now. There are a dozen ways in which the Government could act to bring down the price of gasoline just by making it a level playing field for the consumers versus the oil industry. But oil prices have been kept inflated for a long time now in order to pay for investments and to pay certain rate of returns. So the socialism of the oil industrial complex is why we are having a great increase in gasoline prices that will go on for a while, a little while, while they make large amounts of money, and they will cut it off because the outcry will be so great until they have to bring down the price of gasoline probably within about 3 or 4 weeks. Anyway, I want to conclude this article. I did not mean to go on for so long. This is an article, I say for anybody who joined us late, that appeared in the Tuesday, April 30, today's New York Times, and it is labeled ``Freemen Dependent on Subsidies, Evicted Anti-tax Ranching and Partners got $676,000 in U.S. Aid,'' and the article concludes by saying ``Two weeks ago, surrounded by Federal agents, embittered by Federal justice and cut off from Federal aid, Mr. Clark ordered a follower to nail to his fence the manifesto,'' that proclaimed, quote, ``Freemen are not a part of a de facto corporate prostitute, a.k.a. the United States.'' The overlords of the agriculture industry have gone berserk, and they are biting the hand that has fed them for so long, and now they even want to get violent with the people who have fed them for so long. Americans in the rest of the country, Americans who are not on the agricultural dole, listen carefully, understand where your money goes. Most of this was not cut. It is still flowing to people like Randolph Clark and to folks who are really much better than Randolph Clark but still they are willing to sit there and take the socialism of the agricultural industry and complain that they want to get Government off their back, complain about Government spending too much money on the homeless, they complain about Government providing jobs for poor kids during the summer. These same people are guilty of monumental hypocrisy, and the Representatives that come from their States are guilty of monumental hypocrisy when they go on the floor or go anywhere and make statements about public housing being the last bastion of socialism. Public housing may be good socialism, but it is not the last bastion. It is not the worst bastion, it is not corrupted bastion. The corrupted bastion of socialism in America is agriculture. The overlords of agriculture must be examined very closely, the whole set of activities that are occurring in America based on the overlord assumptions, assumptions that certain people owe them more and more. Have you ever read an article in the New York Times, the Washington, Post, or most of the establishment newspapers which criticized the corporations for making more profits? On the contrary, when the corporations lay off people, downsize, streamline, merge, for whatever reason they lay off large numbers of people, they lay off thousands of people, the articles that appear on the editorial page are usually articles that say, we are sorry, we mourn the fact that people have been laid off; however, in the global economy, American corporations cannot survive unless they are tough. They cannot survive unless they do what they have to do. Unless they downsize or merge or streamline, they cannot continue to provide the good things that they provide to America. The New York Times, the Washington Post, none of these entities are blind or stupid. They know that thousands of workers are being laid off. Why do they not write editorials and say that people are losing jobs as a result of these actions being taken by these corporations? What they are saying in the case of the proposal to raise the minimum wage is, Do not do it, it is silly, it is stupid, because people will lose jobs if you raise the minimum wage. The same newspapers that have no concern about the jobs that are lost as a result of merging, downsizing, and streamlining are very concerned about jobs that will be lost because we raise the minimum wage by 1996. The theory is that if you raise the minimum wage by 1996, employers out there will not be able to afford the workers, so they will lay off some; so crocodile tears are being cried about the possibility that people will be laid off because the economics of the situation are such that to give more to the people on the very bottom will produce a situation where people lose jobs. If we are concerned about people losing jobs, let us start at the top and say, Do not have anymore streamlining, layoffs, or downsizing, because people will lose jobs. All of a sudden the media, the newspapers, have come to the aid of the overlords. They can do no harm by streamlining. If they want to make more profit, then they are applauded. That is great for America. But if you want to take care of the untouchables and the peasants down at the bottom all of a sudden, do not do it. We have an overlord versus the untouchables mentality. I said last week that in too many activities the overlord versus untouchable mentality crops up. The people with disabilities in America are suddenly labeled as untouchables. We have a whole series of policies being formulated, being pushed by the Republican Party, going after people with disabilities. You want to go after their Social Security benefits, you want to go after them through Medicaid, and have them defined by each State as to who has a disability or not. The latest attack on people with disabilities is an attack on children with disabilities. In my committee, the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, a bill has just been passed by the subcommittee which deals with cutting back drastically on services, Federal assistance for children with disabilities. All of a sudden, they must save money here. We must trim money here for children with disabilities. We can no longer have a commitment by the Federal Government. There is a commitment in the authorizing legislation which says that the Federal Government will pay 40 percent of the excess costs. The difference between what it costs to educate a child who does not have a disability and what you pay additional to educate a child who does have a disability, the Federal Government is committed by the authorizing language of the law to pay 40 percent. We have never paid that much, because the appropriation process has always kept it down. The most we pay is, we pay 8 percent. But 8 percent is still a sizeable commitment. In the current legislation, it caught me by surprise, because when I spoke last week I did not realize that in the current legislation, somehow any discussion of the obligation of the Federal Government to that 40 percent has been omitted. Children with disabilities are on the bottom. They are untouchable in the eyes of the Republican majority here. They are not overlords. They do not deserve to be protected. Let me just close by specifically looking at the overlord untouchable mentality at work, the attitude at work in the budget cuts last week; the final touch, the completion of the process for the budget for the fiscal year that began on October 1 of 1995. That is completed now, and as I said at the beginning, the Republican majority are happy. They are parading through the streets with a banner which says, ``We cut the Federal programs. We cut the Federal Government by $23 billion.'' Let us take a look at those cuts in more detail. In education, where at first they wanted to cut $5 billion out, but on the floor of this House there was a great campaign mounted to let the American people know the nature of those cuts. There are people who say that if you are in the minority, then who needs you? If you are in the minority, you are of no use to the Nation. But the campaign mounted by the minority, the Democratic minority, against the cuts in education is one example of why you always need the loyal opposition, why you always need a minority, because the interests of the people out there in the final analysis, if it is properly understood, if the people, if the voters understand where their interests lie, they will impact on the decisionmaking process in a democratic government. It takes a lot of talking, a lot of illustrations, a lot of charts, a lot of repetition to do it, but it was done. So, $5 billion in proposed education cuts were beaten down. We did not get them because day after day, night after night, on the floor of this House, a campaign was mounted to educate the American people about what was happening and how harmful it would be to the children of America. From the school lunch cuts to the cuts in title I, the cuts in Head Start, we kept banging away at it. There are people who say you waste time when you go on the floor during special orders, it is a waste of public money, et cetera. We get very little time during the regular session, so we need special orders. This House, with 435 Members, meets far less than the other body, which has 100 Members. The time spent on the floor by the other body is far greater than the time spent on the floor by this House. So we get the time we can get in order to educate the American people about what is going on. It paid off. In the case of education, we beat back $5 billion in cuts to very vital programs, but we did not win totally. For $1 billion dollars was cut from the Pell grants. Pell grant carryover money was used to make up $1 billion. That was not known. That was a hidden cut. So you have the poorest college students, and Pell grants are for disadvantaged, low-income students, the poorest students contributed $1 billion in cuts that they did not know about. The Perkins loan also took a substantial cut, from $176 million to $113 million. The money goes to disadvantaged students seeking college aid, again the untouchables people at the very lowest rungs, and they are the people who fueled this $20 billion in cuts. In the Health and Human Services budget, the low-income heating assistance program lost $14 million. Yes, we did raise our voices about that, and I am glad that we beat back an effort to cut it totally, but they lost $14 billion. In the housing area, which the Senator from Kansas is calling socialism today in the New York Times, there were 20 separate authorizing provisions put into the housing program. This is an appropriation bill, and the rule says you are not supposed to authorize on an appropriation bill, but rules and parliamentary procedure, democracy, in this Congress has all been thrown away long ago. So in the housing appropriations, there are 20 separate authorizing provisions, which move us closer and closer to the time when there will be no public housing as we know it. HUD lost $1.1 billion in grants for homeless housing; $1.1 billion was taken away from grants to assist homeless people, $1.1 billion from the untouchables, the people at the very bottom. The Legal Services Corporation lost 31 percent of their funding. About a third of the neighborhood law offices will have to be closed across the country. Legal services is for the poor, people on the very bottom who want to be able to take advantage of our great democracy and the court system. If you do not have a lawyer, it is usually impossible for you to do that. This is only for civil cases, not for criminal cases. A campaign was mounted by the Republican majority and it succeeded, so some of that $23 billion is to take away any legal assistance for poor people. The Department of Labor took a 7-percent cut overall. The Department of Labor took a 7 percent-cut. The Department's deepest cuts, where did they fall? You can guess. The Department's deepest cuts fell in employment and training programs that help disadvantaged adults and laid-off workers. The deepest cuts fell in employment and training programs that help disadvantaged adults and laid-off workers. The pattern is clear. The untouchables, the people on the very bottom, not the overlords, have to bear the burden of the $23 billion in cuts. We are still going to hear more later on about tax cuts, which is like giving to the overlords. That $23 billion we have cut out, we are going to take part of that and make a gift to the overlords in terms of a tax cut for the rich. Some of the other programs that were cut, I want to be specific about education, since education is the committee that I serve on. We heard the gentleman before me talk about education and how it is awful that the Federal Government is involved in education to the extent that it is. Of all the industrialized nations, the United States of America is the least involved in education at the central government level. We give the least amount of money. Less than 7 percent of our education budget is supplied by the Federal Government. They talk about the Federal Government trying to run our schools. If you are giving 7 percent of the money, and most of the programs that you fund with the money are voluntary, how can you be running local schools through the Federal Government? But they cut magnet schools. Magnet schools made a contribution of $16.5 million to the $23 billion cut. Howard University, Howard University made a contribution of $22.3 million to the $23 billion cut. If you have a chessboard, you can look at the rook, the knight, the queen, et cetera, and you can see as they take it away--they took magnet schools off, they got that; they got Howard University; health professions, $19.6 million; Healthy Start, $11.2 million; dislocated workers assistance, $131 million; adult training, $146.8 million; I said Perkins loans before; State student incentive grants, $32 million; aid for institutional development lost $34 million; graduate fellowships lost $11 million. Libraries, libraries get a very tiny amount of money in the total budget to begin with, they lost $11.7 million. The Center for Substance Abuse lost $118 million; substance abuse prevention lost $148 million; developmental disabilities, $7.6 million; the Administration on Aging, $46.6 million; vocational education, $22.9 million. The little people on the bottom lost. The overlords gained. Mr. Speaker, I have to end on an optimistic note, so within all the darkness, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I close with a final appreciation of the fact that our hard work paid off in education, and title I was not cut, so title I education funding is now at the same level as it was last year. New York City schools will receive $395 million, an increase of $67 million over the $328 million level in the House-passed bill. If the House-passed bill had gone through we would have lost tremendous amounts of money, but we have now regained. We are where we were last year. The schools in New York will get the same amount of money. Drug-free schools is restored at the 1995 level. Bilingual education, $75 million has been added to the House level for a total of $128 million. This is an increase over what the House had cut before. New York City will receive $15.3 million of that bilingual education funding. Summer jobs, unfortunately, I have overstated that in the last week. I thought we were exactly at the same level, but we are going to lose some jobs because the amount of money received by New York City will not be $29.9 million which was received last year, it will be $21 million, which means it will be a pretty substantial cut in the number of jobs that youngsters will be able to get this year. After all, they are on the bottom. These are poor, disadvantaged youngsters, part of untouchable class, not part of the overlords. So they have been cut. They have to make their contribution to the $23 billion in downsizing. The good news is that Head Start received additional money and New York City will receive $97 million, an increase of $3.8 million over last year's figure. There is one place where we gained, Head Start for poor children, one place where the untouchables, the people at the bottom were able to gain. Cops on the Beat, $1.4 billion is included for Cops on the Beat, compared to zero that the House had cut it to at one time which means that New York City will likely get about 2,200 additional police officers. The good news is that when you fight and you really raise your voice and you carry the message to the American people, the American people out there in all those 435 congressional districts have a lot of common sense, and they will respond. Obviously they responded to the districts of Democrats and Republicans and they let it be known they did not want the cuts in education. They understood what was happening. It was not so complicated. And they decided that we, the ordinary people, do not want the cuts. ``Don't treat us the way you treat other untouchables. Treat us the way you treat overlords. We don't want the cuts.'' Mr. Speaker, I will enter in its entirety in the Record the article that appeared in the New York Times on today, April 30, entitled ``Dole Calls Public Housing One Of Last Bastions of Socialism.'' Mr. Speaker, I close with one negative note. In addition to cutting $23 billion, the Appropriations Committee in the overlord atmosphere, they acted like agents of overlords and they usurped the power of the authorizing committees and they got rid of a concept called Opportunity to Learn Standards. It is just a concept really because it was in the Goals 2000 legislation and it said that in addition to testing children to see how much they have learned, in addition to establishing standards across the country so that you could compare what is being taught from one State to another and then testing young people from one State to another, to compare to see how they are doing, you ought to also have something called Opportunity to Learn Standards so that you look at from one State to another what opportunities to learn are being provided. Are you providing decent schools, safe buildings that do not have lead poisoning and asbestos? Are you providing laboratories for science teaching and science equipment? Are you providing library books that are up to date so that kids are not reading books 30 years old and history and geography which do not have the latest countries that have been established over the last 15 years in them? Are you providing qualified teachers so that you do not have a situation like the one in New York City which 3 years ago a survey showed that in three-quarters of the city where Latino and African-American children went to school, all the teachers of math and science had not majored in math and science in college so they were not qualified to teach math and science in junior high school so the kids went into high school crippled because of the fact they did not have a good foundation in junior high school. Opportunity to Learn Standards would have taken care of that. The arrogant Appropriations Committee abused its power and it went into authorizations. It cut out the Opportunity to Learn Standards. We debated this for 6 months when the bill was reauthorized. We argued with the Senate in conference for 2 more months. It was a deliberative process which concluded with language that kept the concept in there and educated Americans as to what is happening overall in educational reform. The arrogant, abusive, over-lord-minded Appropriations Committee cut it out. It reduces the rest of us and all the authorizing committees to untouchables in the Congress. We do not have any real power. In the final analysis all decisions are going to be made by the Appropriations Committee. It bodes ill for the process. The overlord philosophy, the overlord ideology will destroy democracy in America if we do not confront it. Understand what is happening. There are overlords, and there are untouchables. America was built for everybody, made for everybody, and we have to go to war. I do not mean physical war but political war to make certain that the overlords do not dominate and destroy us. Overlords must be stopped first in the budget process and in the appropriations process. [From the New York Times, Apr. 30, 1996] Freeman Depended on Subsidies evicted anti-tax rancher and partners got $676,000 in u.s. aid (By James Brooke) Jordan, MT, April 26.--Striding to the edge of Ralph E. Clark's ranch here recently, a Freeman in a cowboy hat nailed to a fence post a manifesto denouncing the Federal Government as a ``corporate prostitute.'' But tarnishing this image of rugged individualism, a new study of Federal payments indicates that over the last decade Mr. Clark and his ranch partners received $676,082 in Government checks to cushion a variety of farming setbacks: droughts, hailstorms and low prices for wheat wool and barley. The flow of Federal money was not enough to prevent foreclosure on the ranch two years ago, but Mr. Clark refused to leave, setting the stage for a siege that is now in its fifth week. ``They were dependent on the helping hand of Government, just like everybody else up there in agriculture,'' said Kenneth Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit group in Washington that researches farm subsidy programs. ``But even by standards of agriculture, hundreds of thousands of dollars over 10 years--that's substantial,'' added Mr. Cook, whose analysts compiled the figures on Friday after weeks of studying computer files on farm subsidy checks issued by the Department of Agriculture from 1985 to 1994. Documents filed at the Garfield County Courthouse also offer glimpses into the heavy reliance on Government aid by the 65-year-old farmer who now symbolizes the anti-government Freemen group. In the 1994 foreclosure sale of Ralph Clark's 960-acre homestead, court documents show that Mr. Clark signed a 10-year contract in 1990 to receive an annual payment of $48,269 under the Conservation Reserve Program. Payments were made through 1994 the Environmental Working Group said. Under this program, highly popular in Montana, farmers agree to suspend production on steep slopes and other land highly subject to erosion, planting it with grass that will not be grazed or cut for hay. Critics of the program, which began in 1985, often call it ``paying farmers not to farm.'' ``You'd be a fool not to take it,'' Nick Murnion, the Garfield County Attorney, said of the subsidy money. Referring to the Clark clan's skill in winning subsidy payments, he added, ``Everybody in the country knows that's what they have been doing.'' With a population of only 1,300 people, Garfield County received $63 million in farm subsidy payments from 1985 to 1994, the Environmental Working Group said. In the same period in Brusett, the section of Jordan where the Clarks live, 76 farmers received $7.3 million from 31 different farm subsidy programs. ``What stands out about Ralph Clark is the complexity,'' said Clark Williams, an analyst for the Washington group. ``Ordinarily, a family farm is not that complicated.'' Over a 10-year period, Federal checks went to 11 entities with interest in the main Clark homestead here--first to Mr. Clark; then, from 1988 to 1993, to a corporation in which he was a stockholder, and then, in 1993 and 1994, to a revocable trust in which he had an interest. ``Around 1992, they were setting up revocable trusts as a means of avoiding income taxes, state taxes,'' Mr. Murnion, the County Attorney, said, referring to one of a series of strategies Mr. Clark tried over the last 15 years to avoid losing his farm, which had been in his family since 1913. Mr. Clark's financial problems date to 1978 when, following the trend of the time, he borrowed heavily to expand his holdings, adding 7,000 acres to his original homestead. But interest rates soared to 21 percent in 1979, drought struck in 1980 and hail flattened his wheat and barley crops in 1981. By May 1982, the Farmers Home Administration was calling in his entire outstanding debt of $825,000. ``Someone like Ralph didn't start out hating the system,'' recalled Sarah Vogel, a lawyer who helped him to postpone foreclosure in 1982 and who is now North Dakota's Agriculture Commissioner. ``He was a genuine, old timey rancher, who grew up without a telephone, who used to deliver mail by horseback because they didn't have roads.'' In dealing with the Federal bureaucracy, Ms. Vogel recalls, Mr. Clark labored under a hidden handicap: he had never learned to read or write. ``He never admitted it,'' she said. ``I remember driving to the hearing, and he said, `I forgot my glasses at home, could you tell me what that street sign says?' '' To handle the paperwork of modern farming, he relied on his wife, Kay, or on his son, Edwin. Ms. Vogel's defense of Mr. Clark drew an article in Life magazine and a report by Geraldo Rivera on the ABC News program ``20/20.'' Following this publicity, charitable donations flowed from around the nation to help the beleaguered farmer. Neighbors said financial help and counseling also came in the late 1980's from Farm Aid, a support group now in Cambridge, Mass. ``Ralph flunked out of grade school, but he had an ability to mesmerize people,'' said Cecil Weeding, a neighboring rancher who is married to Mr. Clark's sister Ada. ``He was a natural con man.'' When Mr. Clark and other Freemen farmers had money, they did not always spend it wisely, neighbors said. After winning one stay of foreclosure from Farmers Home Administration, they recalled, he bought a Lincoln Continental. Bill Stanton, a 65-year-old neighbor, who joined the Freemen, was known by neighbors to have spent his Federal subsidy checks on things like a helicopter, a motor home and gambling trips to Las Vegas, Nev., and the Bahamas. In the 1980's, opposition to Federal aid became heresy here. Jordan, with only 450 people, is at the center of a semi-desert expanse called the Big Open, where 3,000 people are scattered over 15,000 square miles. A smashed windshield greeted Bob Scott, a Montana environmentalist, when he visited Jordan in 1987 to propose that local ranchers be weaned from Federal aid through the creation of a huge deer and bison hunting preserve. ``I remember the Clarks as the ones being the most xenopobic, with the most bizarre ideas,'' Mr. Scott recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Missoula. ``One of the Clarks said we were a cult group that was going to bring AIDS into the area.'' Increasingly, subsidy checks became crucial for the survival of the Clark clan. In January 1994, the Clarks led a group of armed men to storm the county courthouse here. At issue was a Federal subsidy check that the former wife of Richard E. Clark, Ralph Clark's nephew, was seeking in a divorce payment. But time was running out for the Clarks in the conventional courts of the land. On April 14, 1994, Ralph Clark's homestead farm was sold for $50,0000 to an out-of-state creditor bank. In October 1995, K.L. Bliss, a local rancher, paid $493,000 for the 7,000-acre spread that Mr. Clark bought nearly 20 years earlier. But two years ago, Mr. Clark gave up on the courts and stopped leaving his farm. From his homestead, renamed ``Justus Township,'' he signed his name to a series of pronouncements setting up a parallel ``common law'' system of marshals and grand juries. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Clark farm compound also began to compete with the Federal Reserve, issuing its own currency in the form of millions of dollars in bogus checks. Two weeks ago, surrounded by Federal agents, embittered by Federal justice and cut off from Federal aid, Mr. Clark ordered a follower to nail to his fence the manifesto that proclaimed: ``Freemen are NOT a part to the de facto corporate prostitute a/k/a/ the United States.'' Dole Calls Public Housing One of `Last Bastions of Socialism' (By Adam Nagourney) Washington, April 29.--Senator Bob Dole called today for an end to Government-assisted housing programs, terming public housing ``one of the last bastions of socialism in the world'' and attacking the Clinton Administration for regulatory excess that he likened to the ``thought police.'' Mr. Dole called for the elimination of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and declared that Government had an obligation to maintain basic services for the poor, but he added: ``These programs have failed in that mission. They have not alleviated poverty. They have not; in fact, they've deepened it. ``Public housing is one of the last bastions of socialism in the world. Imagine, the United States Government owns the housing where an entire class of citizens permanently live. We're the landlords of misery.'' With his speech to a convention of real estate agents here this morning, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee signaled his third attempt in two weeks to define differences between himself and President Clinton. And again, he did so by portraying the two men as occupying opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. He had previously attacked Mr. Clinton's record of judiciary appointments, and over the weekend, he called for a rollback of the 4.3 cent gasoline tax that Mr. Clinton had pushed through as part of the 1993 deficit-reduction package. Mr. Dole's remarks about public housing were at the heart of a speech that included both a broad range of criticism of Mr. Clinton's record as well as a defense of Mr. Dole's ties to the Republican Congress. Aides to the Kansas Senator believe that Mr. Dole's recent political difficulties, suggested by his poor standing in public opinion polls, have been caused, at least in part, by his association with House Republicans and the difficulties he has encountered in trying to run the Senate as majority leader while running for President. Mr. Dole made clear today that he intended neither to step down from his position in the Senate, nor to step away from his colleagues in the House. ``I've read lately that all those radical ideas that we had are the reasons we may be in difficulty,'' said Mr. Dole. ``First of all, I don't think we're in difficulty but secondly, they're not radical ideas.'' He mentioned in particular the attempts by Congress to balance the budget over seven years. ``We thought it was a pretty good idea,'' Mr. Dole said, ``and it wasn't radical, wasn't some crackpot idea that Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole thought of at midnight some--one night, and said, `Oh, let's do this,' And we did it.'' Still, Mr. Dole's speech showed the difficulties he has encountered trying to find a middle ground between Mr. Clinton's policies and those of conservative Republicans in Congress. Even as he pointedly rejected suggestions that his political difficulties were caused by this association with Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Dole made a point of saying that he thought Government ``has an obligation to maintain a safety net.'' And even as he offered a broad criticism of the Department of Housing and Urban Development he offered some praise for the organization he was attacking. ``I think we've certainly downsized it a great deal, and I've said before we could abolish it,'' Mr. Dole said. ``But I think their goals are commendable. They want to reduce the number of homeless; they want to expand housing opportunities and open housing markets to minorities.'' Mr. Dole suggested that the public housing programs be replaced with a system of vouchers, under which people eligible for public housing assistance would be awarded certificates that they could use to pay for rent in private housing. To clear the way for the elimination of the housing agency, Mr. Dole proposed that homeless assistance programs should be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, and enforcement efforts be turned over to the Department of Justice. Henry G. Cisneros, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said that his department had tried to push the voucher program through, but had encountered resistance from Republicans in Congress. He rejected Mr. Dole's statement as ``election-year simplistic answers. What about all those units, and all those people, and what has been a 60-year consensus on house policy?'' Beyond policy, Mr. Dole singled out for criticism a senior official in the Department of Housing and Urban Development-- Roberta Achtenberg--as an example of liberal excesses. He noted that she has lead an effort by HUD to investigate groups that had fought the agency's efforts to build public housing. Mr. Dole was referring to two instances in which HUD investigated citizens who sought to block public housing projects by writing letters of protest and gathering petitions. Both investigations were scaled back in response to criticism, on orders of Mr. Cisneros. Mr. Dole, recounting the incident today, likened HUD to the thought police and said that in his administration, ``There is no room for discrimination, but there will also be no room for intimidating and intrusive actions.'' Ms. Achtenberg was the only HUD official Mr. Dole mentioned by name. Her appointment was noteworthy because she was the highest-level open lesbian appointed by the President, and her appointment has been opposed by some conservative Republicans, notably Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who is a longtime friend and supporter of the Kansas Senator. Mr. Dole's aides said the Senator has singled her out only because she was in charge of the department behind these inquiries, and they were not trying to revive the controversy over her appointment.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the Republicans are attacking the lowest wage earners in America, the people at the very bottom, on two fronts. First, they deny them an opportunity for an increase in the minimum wage; an in this legislation, which this rule concerns, they are attacking people and preventing them from getting an education by stealth assassination of a concept called Opportunity to Learn. They have usurped the role of the authorizing committee and they have ruled out Opportunity to Learn standards in this legislation. Opportunity to Learn means that the Federal Government will collect information, it is all voluntary, collect information about what our school systems are doing to guarantee that children have an opportunity to learn. How are they providing decent books, decent buildings, decent science labs, qualified teachers who can teach science? How are they doing this? This is strictly voluntary. Nevertheless, after 6 months of debate, the authorizing committee decided to do this, and now in a few meetings the conference report tells us that Opportunity to Learn standards are stricken. That is against the rules, it is illegal, but it will prevail because they have the votes.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the omnibus appropriations for fiscal year 1996 (H.R. 3019) represents a partial victory for common sense and the Democratic Party. We have forced the Republican Majority to cancel devastating cuts in programs such as Title I; Head Start; Drug-Free and Safe Schools; the Summer Youth Jobs Program and the School-To-Work Program. The children of America have won a temporary victory and vital funding will now flow smoothly. We applaud this incomplete but positive step forward; however, the fact that the Appropriations Committee has usurped the power of the authorizing Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee and promulgated reactionary setbacks for educational reform must be exposed. If the closed door, secretive actions of the Appropriations Committee are not curbed we will soon be confronted with a situation where all authorizing committees are rendered irrelevant and obsolete. The scenario which began with the irresponsible campaign to abolish the Department of Education has now reached a backdoor climax through the appropriations process. By gutting the authorizing education reform legislation passed in the 103d Congress, the powerful Appropriations Committee has removed the reason for the continued existence of the DOE. The results of all existing public opinion polls indicate that an explosion of public indignation is likely to greet this monstrous result of Republican blackmail at the negotiating table. Voters have consistently ranked education as one of the top three priorities for public funding. The following is a summary of the scarred and mangled education reform program left after the illegal actions of the Appropriations Committee: The conference agreement amends the Goals 2000: Educate America Act. Specifically, the agreement includes language: Which permits school districts, in States that elect not to participate in the Goals 2000 program, to apply directly to the Secretary of Education for Goals 2000 funding, if the State education agency approves; eliminates the requirement that States submit their improvement plans to the Secretary of Education for approval; deletes the requirement for the composition of State and local panels that develop State and local improvement plans; eliminates the National Education Standards and Improvement Council; removes the requirement for States to develop opportunity-to- learn standards; and clarifies that no State, local education agency, or school shall be required, as a condition of receiving assistance under the title to provide outcomes-based education, or school-based health clinics. A special and particular target of this arrogant usurpation of the powers of the authorizing Education Committee was the requirement for States to develop opportunity-to-learn standards. Like all standards this was a voluntary one and merely called for the inclusion of a discussion of the steps being taken to provide adequate resources for learning to the students being required to take tests that are compared from State to State. This stealth assassination of the concept means that the months of debate that took place during the authorizing process will be thrown into the garbage and at the Federal level there will be no discussions of the obligations of States to provide safe buildings, up-to-date library books, science labs and qualified teachers. Black children will be tested and tested and tested until they are driven from the education process. But no one will be held accountable for not providing adequate resources. The group with the least knowledge and wisdom about educational reform has assumed the greatest amount of decisionmaking power and prevailed in removing any chance at the establishment of accountability through visibility. For the moment the neanderthals have triumphed; however, when pearls are thrown into a pig pen and the boars gang up to urinate on the pearls, the value of the pearls is in no way diminished. The power of the idea of opportunity-to-learn standards will one day soon be resurrected.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I am sorry that the gentlemen of the Budget and the Appropriations Committees ended so abruptly. I was about to ask a few questions and have them address those questions. They are still in the Chamber so I will go ahead and ask the questions. Maybe they will give me the answers later. In the process of revamping the budget, do they realize that--they realize above all that money comes into Washington and then flows out. Why does Louisiana, why does Louisiana get so much more money from the Federal Government than it pays into the Federal Government? The gentleman who heads the Committee on Appropriations is from the State of Louisiana, and Louisiana gets $6.4 billion more from the Federal Government than it pays into the Federal Government. You can downgrade Washington and talk about Washington spending money, but Washington does not spend money in Washington. The Federal Government is merely a transit, an exchange. They pull in the money and they appropriate it out as it is needed for various functions, and it flows into the States across the union. There have been studies done that I have quoted here on this floor on several occasions about how much each State pays into the Federal Government and how much each State gets back. Among the high roller States, the States that get more back from the Federal Government than they pay into the Federal Government, is Louisiana. Louisiana gets $6.4 billion more from the Federal Government. These are the 1994 figures, the only year the complete figures are available for. And these figures come from a study done by the Kennedy School of Government, a very thorough study which looks at all of the Federal expenditures for military installations, the salaries of servicemen, the various military related functions that are carried out by the States, as well as programs like food stamps and Medicaid. It is all totaled up. Louisana is a big gainer. After this great revamping of the budget and revamping of the appropriations process, where they have saved so much money, will Louisiana be paying more of its fair share. Will Louisiana shoulder its own burden? New York, on the other hand, my State, pays $18.9 billion more into the Federal Government than it gets back from the Government. New York, New York. I heard Mr. Kasich, the head of the Committee on the Budget, say that we do not need Government telling us what to do. Our neighborhoods should decide; our neighborhoods should be left alone. The neighborhoods of New York would like to have that $18.9 billion back and we could divide it up and take care of our own problems, but we are paying it into the Federal Government and not getting back an equal value. In fact, we are the State of the Union at the very top of the list of the States that pay more than they get back. California is the largest State in the union. But whereas New York, in 1994, paid $18.9 billion into the Federal Government more than it got back, California only paid $2 billion more to the Federal Government than it got back. California has had earthquakes and mud slides and large amounts of Federal money have gone to California in order to relieve those problems, but over the past 4 or 5 years, California has steadily paid less into the Federal Government than New York, although California is the largest State. Mr. Kasich comes from Ohio, and Mr. Shays, who joined them at the last minute, he is from Connecticut. Ohio and Connecticut, like New York, are donor States. We pay more into the Federal Government than we get back from the Federal Government. My great question is, after all of these changes are made, after they have cut the school lunch programs, after they have downsized and cut the housing programs, after they have gone after the Medicaid program, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, after food stamps have been cut, after they have made all these cuts of relatively small programs, they have not cut defense very much. In fact, these same gentlemen who stood here before us and talked abut a revolution in the budget and appropriations making process did not cut defense. They increased defense by $6 billion. At a time when the Soviet Union no longer exists and the threat to America is less than ever before, we have an increase of $6 billion. The President did not want 46 billion more for defense. The President did not want a B-2 bomber. The President did not want extra money for certain kinds of programs that were beneficial to members of the Committee on Appropriations and members of the Committee on the Budget for their States. We have a lot of waste in the defense budget, and these gentleman did not attack that at all. So I think it is very important to what I have to say today to recognize the fact that there is an America, this is a particular era in America where we have 2 basic approaches being taken, maybe 2 mentalities being shown. One is a big shot mentality which says that the rich and powerful can do no wrong, the rich and powerful should be allowed to waste money on a wholesale basis, because when you increase the defense budget by $6 billion, it is already above $200 billion, what are you doing? You are increasing the amount of money available to go into the payment for manufactured weapons and for supplies and for various items that are bought from huge corporations. And the corporations are owned by people who have stock on Wall Street. So you are feeding the richest people in America. They have their hooks into the defense, the military industrial complex. So every dollar that goes for defense is a dollar you know is going to help rich people get richer, to help powerful people get more powerful, because there is a relationship between dollars and power. Those programs are not being cut, only the cuts for the people at the very bottom. There was a hearing today in the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, a markup at the subcommittee level dealing with a program for people with disabilities, the IDEA, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This is providing education for children in America who have probably the greatest needs. Extra money has to be spent to educate these children because of the fact that they have great needs. They have problems, learning disabilities, physical disabilities. And the amount of money that the Federal Government contributes to this program is very small. It is 7 percent of the total. States and local governments contribute more, most of the money. Nevertheless, the committee is chipping away at the small amount of money being spend on children with disabilities all across America. They are chipping away at the programs. A great deal of time and energy has gone into nitpicking about this costs too much for attorney's fees, it costs too much to run a parents program where the parents have an opportunity to get educated about what the program is all about and they can, they are empowered to work with the schools in order to get a better education for their children, all these things suddenly cost too much. These are programs for little people. These are programs for ordinary Americans, we the people. We the people do not seem to count very much. We the people are always the object of intense scrutiny. The microscope of the Committee on Appropriations, the microscope of the Committee on the Budget is focused on these little programs that have very small amounts of money, and they are trimming away at these little programs in order to save America from going bankrupt. It is rank hypocrisy, rank hypocrisy. These same committees, the great Committee on Appropriations, the great Committee on the Budget, are not concerned at all about facts that are introduced by other entities. You know we do not find out here in Congress; other people have to tell us. The General Accounting Office tells us the CIA has $2 billion, at least, in money that it did not spend over the years and it had lying around in the petty cash fund. The CIA has that kind of money lying around. An audit revealed that they had $2 billion, $2 billion that the director of the CIA did not know about, $2 billion that the President did not know about. Two billion dollars is a lot of money; ask these gentleman here. You know, $2 billion, we can stop the cuts in the school lunch programs with $2 billion for more than a year. Two billion dollars would mean that we could fund the title I programs for schools, provide money, the only money we provide, to elementary secondary education school, education. I mean most of the money comes out of the title I program. A $7 billion program, and they were proposing earlier in the year to cut it by $1.1 billion. But $2 billion for the CIA could have ended that cut for 2 years. They were going to cut it by $1.1 billion per year. So that meant that in 2 years it would have been $2.2 billion. Take the money that the CIA has laying around, waste it, and you could end the cut, most of the cut, on title I. The Federal Reserve Board, another big-shot agency, an agency where big shots, the rich and the powerful, run the agency. The rich and the powerful have money lying around to the tune of $3.7 billion. The General Accounting Office found that the Federal Reserve has $3.7 billion lying around that it has not used. They call it their Rainy Day Fund. In 79 years, in the last 79 years, the Federal Reserve has never needed to use that Rainy Day Fund. They have never had any losses, never had any crisis or problems in 79 years. So why do they need to have $3.7 billion lying around? How much interests would you get on $3.7 billion to offset the payments on the deficit? If that $3.7 billion had been given to the Treasury, where it belongs, we would not have a situation where you pay interest on $3.7 billion worth of debt. You would have that much less to pay. Combine the $3.7 billion in the Federal Reserve slush fund with the $2 billion in the CIA slush fund, and they have large amounts of money that could be appropriated for education. Gentleman stood there and they talked about how proud they were that they made cuts in the education program. They were not just talking about cuts. But one of them said we, we, want the parents of America to know that we have stopped the Federal Government from telling them what to do by cutting out the Goals 2000 program. Well, there are several things wrong with that statement. The gentleman is assuming that the Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on the Budget have all knowledge. The Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, of course, authorized the legislation which contains Goals 2000. The Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities authorized the legislation which contains Opportunity To Learn standards. I serve on the Education Committee. I know the process. We debated for 6 months the Opportunity To Learn standards. We debated for 3 months the Goals 2000 general program. We debated for another 2 months with the Senate. And the back and forth in the Senate conference and the House conference went on for 2 months on the Opportunity To Learn standards alone. With all this deliberation and all of this marshaling of facts, hearing testimony that the authorizing committees went through in the Senate and the House, along come the lords of the appropriation committee, and they are in the appropriation process going to tell us it is no good. They have all the knowledge, they have all the wisdom, it is no good. The implication is that we should just abolish all of the other committees of Congress. You know, we do not need a Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. We do not need that. We do not need other committees if the Committee on Appropriations, after its large-scale deliberation on numerous topics and numerous programs, is going to come to the conclusion that they can wipe out a program in the appropriations process. We all know that that is against the rules. We all know that the Committee on Appropriations has no authority to wipe out a program like Goals 2000, like Opportunity To Learn standards, and yet we have seen again and again on the floor of the House when we challenge the Appropriations Committee, we say you have violated the rules. They said, yes, we violated the rules; you do not like it, appeal to the Chair. And, of course, they have the numbers to vote down every appeal of the ruling of the Chair. You know, every attempt to get the Chair to enforce the rules is frustrated by the fact that they have the numbers and they use those numbers. You know if we were in another arena, it would be illegal to use the numbers to do illegal things. Of course, the House rules are the House rules. You violate the House rules, and there is no punishment. We cannot put a committee in the little jail cells we have down in the Capitol. In this Capitol we still have from the old days, had some jail cells that they used to keep to put rowdy staff members and Congressmen. We do not use that any more. So when the Committee on Appropriations violates the rules, there is no enforcement mechanism, and the majority vote can always back up the Committee on Appropriations. So what we are talking about tonight is America, does America exist for the rich and the powerful only, is there an America where we the people are still in charge, is there an America where we the people matter? We the people have a little program helping children with disabilities. You know, does it cost $2 billion? No, it does not even cost $200 million. Tiny program, helping children with disabilities, a program that was supposed to deal with rural communities where children with disabilities were totally out of touch with the program, urban communities where poor people were out of touch and they were not being served, they were not participating. That tiny program was singled out today in the process of the markup of the subcommittee and wiped out, does not exist any more if that markup goes through. They also cut other provisions. They also implied that the commitment of the Federal Government for children with disabilities is too great. You know, in this great, rich country where we can afford to have a Federal Reserve keep a slush fund of $3.7 billion an the CIA have $2 billion lying around, we cannot afford to take care of the needs of children with serious disabilities. Is America for the rich and powerful only? Are we a Nation of big shots versus ordinary, everyday people where the big shots walk away with everything, nothing is too good for them, anything is too much for ordinary people? That is the way the Republican majority in this Congress has proceeded. The omnibus bill that they are bragging about and crowing about is a bill which has gone after little people, a bill that is focused on the small programs. They also implied the big shots can never waste too much, big shots should never be chastised. They do not make speeches about the Federal Reserve Board having $3.67 billion lying around. They do not make speeches about the CIA having $2 billion lying around. It is worse than that, of course. There is a much worse problem that we have to deal with. A friend of mine, my colleague from New York State, Carolyn Maloney, has done a study of all the debt that is owed to various Federal agencies, debt that is owed that is uncollected. Now, here we are cutting school lunch programs, here we are going after the Medicaid Program, a program for health care for poor children, a program that takes care of nursing home people, poor and cannot afford to pay for nursing homes. Here we are going after programs that are vitally needed by people who are in great, and we are not paying attention to the fact that $55 billion, according to the study done by my colleague, Carolyn Maloney, Congresswoman Maloney, on the Government Oversight Committee has done, a study which is fantastic, and she really should be commended for the great work she has done in this area. She has pinpointed, and she has documented, and I have the charts here. She goes agency by agency and shows, according to the last data that was available, and things might have gotten worse since then, the last data that is available, what is owed in the Farmers' Home Loan Mortgage and other programs in the Department of Agriculture, one of the major offenders. Large amounts of money are owed in the farm programs. The Farmers' Home Loan Mortgage Program is the worst offender. Large amounts of money, debts have been forgiven, forgiven in the Farmers' Home Loan Mortgage Program. I cannot find out yet what is the criteria for forgiving someone who owes a debt to the Federal Government. Who makes those decisions? From my poor constituents in Brownsville, and East New York, Crown Heights, back in Brooklyn, I am sure they would like to know who is the person you see that forgives debts when they are owed to the Federal Government. There are people out there who owe a few thousand dollars to the IRS, and they are being continually pursued. There some people, a head of small programs, programs that have funds, and they did not quite know how to handle the bookkeeping. So they were in a situation where the grant funding came late from the State, and they needed supplies, and they needed various things, and they spent the money that they should have been each quarter sending to the IRS. IRS now wants its money. So it is some of the programs have gone out of business, so they are going after the homes of the members of the board of directors, these little people who came out to help make these programs work. They did not get paid; they were just members on the board. They must now have their homes jeopardized because the IRS wants to let unpaid taxes from that agency. And yet talking about a few thousand dollars here. You know, you are not talking $1 million, not talking about a $100,000. Talking about a few thousand dollars that they are being pursued for. But in the Farmers' Home Loan Mortgage forgave over a 5-year period $11 billion, $11 billion they forgave. How does that happen? I have asked questions for the last 2 years and tried to get answers as how do you go about forgiving that kind of debt? But in the Department of Agriculture somebody has the power to forgive. On occasion we had the Department of Agriculture representatives before us in the Committee on Government Oversight, and we asked basic questions like how does it happen that people get so delinquent in the payment of there mortgage loans? You know. My mortgate is not paid in 1 month, you know I get a big penalty, and I get a notice second month that they are ready to start foreclosing procedures. How do millions of dollars accumulate for farmers home loan mortgage situation? I was told by the man standing there who was a high ranking official that, you know, sometimes the addresses change, people move, and you just cannot find them when their addresses change. Now I do not know how anybody with a mortgage on a piece of property can have his address change so radically that you cannot find him. The property is still there, they still own it. How can you sit before a committee of Congress and give an answer like that, that we have a hard time finding people because their addresses change? But it was done, you know, and I am not one of these guys who bashes the Federal Government and the bureaucracy, but that was a low point in the Federal bureaucracy when they give that kind of answer. Of course State bureaucracies, city bureaucracies, are just as bad. We heard all the discussion here about how terrible it is that money flows into Washington and it is not spend properly. Washington, you know is not alone. Probably Washington does a better job. Its bureaus and bureaucracy does a better job than most State governments and most municipal governments. The spotlight of course is on Washington. One of the greatest things about the Federal Government is that it is always a gold fish bowl because there is the national media, and there are all kinds of people who are watching critically, but at the State and city level there are terrible things that happen in silence. Nobody says anything. A lot of terrible things happen, and it is not hidden, but everybody seems to be paralyzed. In New York City, the mayor of New York City who prides himself on reestablishing efficient government, who has a deputy mayor who comes out of business, and he is always pounding away at expenditures by little people and little agencies driving the welfare rolls down by making a long application and requiring people who are hungry to wait 2 or 3 months before they can ever be interviewed. There are all kinds of ways they use to oppress the little people at the bottom. On the other hand, they let out a contract to an agency for $43 million. The City of New York, the Giuliani administration, they put out a contract for $43 million to an agency and the board of directors of the agency never saw the contract. The chairman of the board said he never saw the contract. A staff member of the agency negotiated the contract and signed the contract. Of course it was later discovered that people in the agency that let the contract, negotiated the contract at the city level, they had some of them go and get jobs. They got jobs at the agency with which they had negotiated, so it is obvious that something more than mismanagement was going on here. We had mismanagement and corruption. We have not heard of a single person being arrested as a result of this $43 million contract. Oh, yes, they took back the contract, they canceled the contract, closed down the agency, a lot of furor about ``This cannot be,'' but no real answer as to why or how does an agency have a staff member negotiate a contract for $43 million. I do not think you would have that happen in the Federal Government. Whatever things that you might find wrong, you will not have that kind of blatant violation of ordinary sophomoric rules of contracting, but it happens often at the level of municipal government. It happens often at the level of State government. In our State, we have a governor who openly is saying he is going to move the functions of government around the State and place those agencies that employ large numbers of people in the areas where he got the most votes. It is no secret. It is all out there. How can a State allow the functions of government or the agencies of government, the resources of government, to be used for partisan purposes? But big shots seem to be able to do this. In America now where the big shots can walk away, do anything they want, they owe the Federal Government millions of dollars. When the Farmers Home Loan Mortgage story was first broken, the Washington Post had a front page story and they talked about 5 millionaires who were perpetrators, who were guilty, 5 millionaires. One of them was sitting on a board appointed by President Reagan that made decisions about who got to keep and who got additional loans. Five millionaires. I do not know of a single millionaire that was arrested, has been tried or convicted of anything, among those millionaires who were cited. They were named. The Washington Post named them. Four or five. At least four, who were named. Yet the rich and powerful were not worthy of a hearing. I do not know of any hearings that were held to deal with that story. The chairman of the committee, one of the members of the committee I saw shortly after the story, the Committee on Agriculture here in Congress, I saw him shortly after the story broke. I asked him what he was going to do about it. He said, ``You better believe we're going to hold some hearings and get to the bottom of this.'' I do not see any record of any hearings being held which got to the bottom of it. Even now when I call and have my staff try to get information about where we are now with the Farmers Home Loan Administration program, you get vague answers. The figures are right now that at least $10 billion is outstanding, delinquent, at this point right now, $10 billion. How much of that will they forgive? They still will not tell us the rules of forgiveness. They still will not tell us how you get that. We can go after children with disabilities, we can try to wipe those programs out because America cannot afford them. We imply that children with disabilities would bankrupt America. There is a smear campaign going now on all the special education programs. There is a lot of furor being generated about children with disabilities not being held to the same standard as other children in the school. Yes, they are protected by law. You cannot suspend them or expel them in the same way you do children who do not have disabilities, so they have used that as pretext to smear the programs. There is a great problem, they say. What if the kid brings a gun to school, a child with a disability brings a gun to school? That is a major problem, it has been played up now. We have got to get rid of guns in the hands of children with disabilities. Ask the question, the simple question, how big is the problem? How many instances of children with disabilities having guns do we have? The answer is that we do not have any studies, nobody has collected any information. We just have one or two incidents that they can cite. You can cite one or two incidents to show or prove anything. You can cite some incidents but the problem when you probe a little further, the problem is minuscule. There is no great problem of children with disabilities bringing guns and weapons to school. But a crisis has been manufactured because this is one more way to smear the programs of children with disabilities. It is one more way to play into a situation where local superintendents and administrators are upset because they have to spend more on the education of children with disabilities than they spend on other children. So they would like to be able to get their hands on that money, and they would do anything to discredit the program for children with disabilities. I am not saying that the program for children with disabilities does not have some problems. I have been a major critic of certain kinds of excesses. The way they are administered, the way they are handled in New York City has resulted in large numbers of children with a delinquency problem, a discipline problem. They should not be in the program for children with disabilities. It is a dumping ground for teachers who want to get rid of children who are a problem, but they are discipline problems. There ought to be some way to deal with it. We ought to provide them with some way to better deal with discipline problems, but there are not problems with disabilities. That has been an ongoing criticism that I have of the program. It is a valid criticism that most of them cannot answer. So we need to deal with that. We need to deal with each problem as it arises. But to smear all of the programs for children with disabilities, and to set the children who do not have disabilities and their education against the smaller percentage of children who do have disabilities, and to try to take the money away from the disability programs in order to solve budget problems in the larger school budget, is unworthy of Americans. Really we have a problem with funding for schools. These gentlemen here who pride themselves on having cut the budget have cut education funding. Oh, yes, they are gong to put back the $1.1 billion they cut for Title I. I applaud that. I congratulate them. They will put back the $1.1 billion. But they have cut training programs, teacher education programs, a number of programs that still will not get the money back, and we should have been increasing the amount of money available for education. We should have been increasing it. We should not be standing here proud of the fact that we made dramatic cuts in education. Instead of the citizens out there, teachers and children and administrators, all uniting to demand of their governments at every level, whether it is the city governments or the State governments or the Federal Government, instead of demanding at every level that they fund education programs consistent with 20th century demands before we go off into the 21st century, they fund money to bring the school buildings up to date so they can be wired properly and have high-tech equipment like computers and science equipment that is needed. Instead of making the demand on the government, instead of waging the war on the people who make decisions in our government, too many of them are willing to engage in cannibalism. Too many are willing to try to eat what exists. They are going to eat up, devour the special education programs in order to satisfy the needs of the rest of the budget. I think that is a harsh way to put it, but I can think of no other way except to say that that is happening. Right now the programs for children with disabilities are in great trouble because that is being used as an excuse by certain decisionmakers here in Congress for chipping away at these tiny programs that are already too small, that serve children with disabilities. Big shots, nobody wants to talk about that. We have not had a single hearing on the Federal Reserve slush fund. If the CIA oversight committee has had a hearing, then I have not heard about it. The Intelligence Committee probably is dealing with that but they do not tell us, so I cannot say a hearing did not take place. Some people, however, have challenged me. Some people who have heard me talk about this before have called and said, ``You know, you make these charges against the CIA. How do you know? On what basis do you make these charges?'' I want you to know that I am not a member of the Intelligence Committee, so I have no oversight responsibilities there. I do not get a chance to see the actual figures, and I am like any other American, I read the New York Times and I read the Washington Post, and I read other newspapers who have their sources. On several occasions, in several of these papers, I have read that at least $2 billion was found in an audit of the CIA, and going beyond just stating that $2 billion was found in an audit, there was an article which appeared in the New York Times on Tuesday, February 27, 1996 which talked in great detail about actions taken to remedy the situation: ``Spy Satellite Agency Heads Are Ousted For Lost Money.'' That is the headline for this article. ``The top two managers of the National Reconnaissance Office, the secret agency that builds spy satellites, were dismissed today after losing track of more than $2 billion in classified money.'' That is the first paragraph of this article by Tim Weiner. It does not say it is alleged. It does not say ``sources say.'' It states it as a fact. ``The Director of Central Intelligence, John Deutsch, and Defense Secretary William Perry announced''--oh, there was an announcement-- ``that they had asked the director of the Reconnaissance Office, Jeffrey K. Harris, and the Deputy Director, Jimmie D. Hall, to step down.'' Then it goes on and explains how $2 billion got lost and the President did not know about it and the director of the agency did not know about it. Mr. Speaker, I include this article that appeared on February 27 in the New York Times in its entirety in the Record because I do not want people to continue to question my accuracy. Here is an article which I think names names, talks about announcements, and it clearly establishes that $2 billion was lost. [The New York Times National, Tuesday, Feb. 27, 1996] Spy Satellite Agency Heads Are Ousted For Lost Money (By Tim Weiner) WASHINGTON, Feb. 26--The top two managers of the National Reconnaissance Office, the secret agency that builds spy satellites, were dismissed today after losing track of more than $2 billion in classified money. The Director of Central Intelligence, John Deutch, and Defense Secretary William J. Perry announced that they had asked the director of the reconnaissance office, Jeffrey K. Harris, and the deputy director, Jimmie D. Hall, to step down. ``This action is dictated by our belief that N.R.O.'s management practices must be improved and the credibility of this excellent organization must be restored,'' Mr. Deutch and Mr. Perry wrote in a statement. A Government official close to Mr. Deutch said the intelligence chief had lost confidence in the officials' ability to manage the reconnaissance office's secret funds. Keith Hall, a senior intelligence official who has managed satellite programs for the Pentagon, was named today as deputy director and acting director of the reconnaissance office. The reconnaissance office is a secret Government contracting agency that spends $5 billion to $6 billion a year--the exact budget is a secret--running the nation's spy satellite program. The satellites take highly detailed pictures from deep space and eavesdrop on telecommunications; everything about them including their cost, is classified. The secret agency is hidden within the Air Force and is overseen jointly by Mr. Deutch and Mr. Perry. But overseeing intelligence agencies, especially an agency as secretive as the reconnaissance office, whose very existence was an official secret until 1992, is no easy matter. Well-run intelligence services deceive outsiders; poorly run ones fool themselves. This apparently was the case with the reconnaissance office. Its managers lost track of more than $2 billion that had accrued in several separate classified accounts over the past few years, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee had thought the sum was a mere $1.2 billion until auditors called in by Mr. Deutch found at least $800 million more in the reconnaissance office's secret books this winter. The auditors told Mr. Deutch that the way the reconnaissance office handled its accounts was so arcane, so obscured by secrecy and complexity and so poorly managed that a $2 billion bulge in its ledgers had gone unreported. ``Deutch did not know, Perry did not know and Congress did not know'' about the surplus, an intelligence official said. ``There was a lack of clarity as to how much money was there and how much was needed.'' The audit is continuing and is expected to be completed by April. The reconnaissance office also spent more than $300 million on a new headquarters outside Washington in the early 1990's. The Senate intelligence committee, which appropriates classified money for intelligence agencies, said it was unaware of the cost. In the only public hearing ever held on the subject of the National Reconnaissance Office, Mr. Hill testified in 1994 that the construction of the building was a covert operation and the money for it had been broken into separate classified accounts to conceal its existence. The reconnaissance office is one of 13 intelligence agencies under Mr. Deutch. All will be covered in a report to be issued on Friday by a Presidential commission on the future of intelligence. The report will address the question of whether government spending for intelligence--an estimated $26 billion to $28 billion a year--should continue to be officially secret. Of course the Federal Reserve Board has not denied the fact that $3.7 billion or more, it may be close to $4 billion that the Federal Reserve Board had on hand, unused, as part of its rainy day fund. That has not been denied. I will not quote articles. There are plenty of documents around which validate that. Why do I go on like this? What does it have to do with the 11th Congressional District in Brooklyn? The 11th Congressional District in Brooklyn is made up of people, a large percentage of which are poor. We are 1 of the 25 poorest congressional districts in the country. It varies, of course. There are some areas where we have middle class homes and people who have a little more substance, but in a community like Brownsville, for instance, or in a community like East Flatbush, for instance, there are large numbers of poor people. Then there are also middle-class people who have enough money to try to buy a co-op in a large building. There is a building that I was in last Saturday which has more than 100 units. We have some pretty big buildings in my district. In fact, I have the smallest congressional district in the country. My congressional district covers only 10 square miles, 581,000 people in 10 square miles, so you can imagine how many tall buildings I must have in my district. Here is a building that I went into at the request of lieutenants where, of the 100 units, a process was begun several years ago to co-op the building, so the owner of the building started selling co-ops. Twenty people paid down their down payments and they got their loans and they owned their apartments. Along comes the savings and loan debacle. Remember that one? That, I have talked about so often, is this big shots again. I have talked about the savings and loan swindle, the biggest swindle in the history of mankind, where the total might become as high as a half a trillion dollars, $500 billion, before it is all over. Savings and loans will be in front of us again soon. I understand we have to vote on a thrift fund package. The thrift fund package is a package established to help bail out savings and loan units. They sold bonds, and now the bonds will come due and there is no money to pay. It is very complicated. I talk about it because I am not concerned with high finances and I am not concerned with trying to do the job of the Banking Committee. I am only concerned about the little people in my district in this building who are the victims of the ultimate slime, the ultimate feces that goes down as a result of failure of big banks that were loosely regulated, badly regulated, and they were allowed to give these loans without proper collateral. They were allowed to let landlords and owners do very tricky financing, so that in addition to a mortgage being on each apartment in this building that was sold, the landlord had a wraparound mortgage for the whole building. When the collapse came as a result of there not being the kind of value there that he had been allowed to assert was there, it was a savings and loan institution that had to suffer the collapse. It was a large organization like Freddie Mac here in Washington that ended up buying the building, and Freddie Mac is now the owner of the building. The 20 people who had equity, money invested, have lost all of their money, because through the complicated maneuverings of the high finance and the real estate financing, which I do not pretend to understand, the building reverted back to a rental building totally. So it is a rental building now, and the people who thought they owned their apartments who owe $90,000, $60,000 to $90,000 on their apartments, now own nothing, unless something drastic is done. In addition to that, Freddie Mac, and Freddie Mac is a Washington- based institution, a national institution, and I am citing Freddie Mac because Freddie Mac, I intend to come after you. I want you to help resolve this problem. The little people in my district, little people, in this case who are working people, who have enough assets to be able to have started the process of trying to own their own apartment, they are out there in the cold. And Freddie Mac and its cohorts have hired rental agents and managing companies and they are trying to get their money by neglecting the building. The plumbing in the building is outrageous. I was carried on a tour through the building, and I saw the building which is 10 stories high, it means the plumbing is bad, it is bad all the way down that line. And the people on the bottom, I guess they get the worst of it. And one lady talked about having to use boots in her apartment for a long period of time before they did some repairs. But the repairs have by no means been completed. The ceilings are open, the drips are still there. What does this have to do with savings and loans swindles, what does it have to do with the failure of the Congress to properly regulate savings and loans? What does it have to do with the fact that most savings and loan crooks got off without going to prison, paying the money back? What does it have to do with the fact that we cannot get a decent clear report as to the status of the savings and loan bailout now? What does it have to do with the fact we are going to be voting very soon again on another appropriation for the savings and loan bailout, while we are cutting programs for children with disabilities, cutting programs for opportunities to learn education? How does it all tie together? How does it all tie together with my assertion that the rich and famous and powerful seem to get away with everything, while we scrutinize and oppress the people at the very bottom? The people who are the tenants in this building, the people who thought they were owners of those co-ops, they are the people at the very bottom. They are in my district. I will not waste my time here on these high financial matters trying to reform government or expose the fact that there is no reform, that big government is as big as it ever was when it comes to the rich and powerful, and nobody is seeking to really bring the rich and powerful to heel. Nobody is dealing with the uncollected debts that amount to $55 billion. Nobody is dealing with the savings and loan scandal that keeps going, quietly. We are taking care of that. But every time the savings and loan debacle says to Congress we need more money, we appropriate more money. We get a message, it has to happen. The financial markets are going to collapse if we do not appropriate more money. A very interesting matter arose in Japan. Here I am going across the water. You think I am rambling? No. In Japan they have a savings and loan scandal. They have a banking scandal similar to the American savings and loan scandal, a huge situation where large numbers of banks are collapsing, real estate markets are collapsing. The government is called upon to bail out the situation. I thought it was very interesting the reaction of some Japanese legislators. You know, we sweethearted the process here in America. Both parties, together, became mum and they never had hearings to expose the criminality of the savings and loan banks and the other banks that were also more regular banks collapsed. Savings and loan, we called it the savings and loan debacle because they started it. There were other banks, larger amounts of money, and they were also regular banks under the jurisdiction of the FDIC and Federal Reserve Board. We had all these controls and regulations, and still there was so much collusion from one level to another, the decision makers in bed with the regulators, and the regulators in bed with the banks. It was a once-in-the-history-of-mankind situation. No swindle has ever been pulled off as great as that, and no swindle has ever taken place where so many people got away with it. So much crime that did pay. It paid billions of dollars. But in Japan, you have a very unusual thing that happened. The story in the New York Times says that one Japanese party staged a sit-in in the legislature. They blocked the chambers where the debate was taking place on the bailout for the banks. Very interesting. If you want to know what the possibilities are, what more we could have done, then I will quote this article a little bit and you will see what the Japanese did, faced with the same situation. The savings and loans collapsed, real estate market collapsed, it resulted in little people at the very bottom suffering greatly, like the people in my district who were suffering in this one building. All their money gone down the drain, now they have to fight a landlord and a management company that will not even repair the pipes. A group of tenants were taken to court on Monday, and I went down to the court. They postponed the case. Those people had all taken off from work to go. Now the case is postponed and they have to come back. The little people are harassed even by the court system. How does it all relate back to Japan and the politicians in Japan becoming so militant and so angry that they staged a sit-in? Some of Japan's leading politicians are spending their time in a sit-in. This was reported in the New York Times on March 16, 1996. ``It is a battleground, said Kojimoro Moto,'' quoting from the article: a member of the House of Representatives who is also an organizer of the sit-in which at the time of this report was in its second week. When they said it is a battleground, that is a bit of an exaggeration perhaps, but there is no mistaking the seriousness of the conflict. Those protesting are the main opposition group, the New Frontier Party, and they have succeeded in paralyzing the Japanese budget process. The New Frontier Party's aim is to block the passage of the budget bill for next year. The party objects to an unpopular provision in the bill to use about $6.8 billion in taxpayer money to absorb losses in the liquidation of seven of the nation's bankrupt mortgage lenders. Let me just repeat that: The New Frontier Party was sitting in in the legislature of Japan blocking the budget process from going forward, and their aim is to block the passage of the budget bill for next year. The party objects to an unpopular provision to use about $6.8 billion in taxpayer money to absorb losses in the liquidation of seven of the nation's bankrupt mortgage lenders. This is a bailout for the banks similar to the savings & loan bailout in this country. Now, I was in Congress when the bailout began here for the savings & loans in this country. We never had a figure as low as $6.8 billion. I think the first bailout money was $7 billion, and it got higher. It got to $50 billion, $75 billion, and we kept being told ``it is off budget, so don't worry about it.'' Off budget does not mean the taxpayers do not still pay. That means in the calculations for the budget that year, you do not have to figure it. It becomes part of the deficit. We appropriated never as little as $6.8 billion. But the Japanese members of the legislature, the equivalent of Congresspersons, were sitting in to block that from going forward. We are going to have on this floor within a few days a bill to continue the bailout of the savings & loans called the Thrift Fund. While we are cutting programs for children, programs for the elderly, while we are going after Medicaid, Medicaid is on the agenda, Medicaid will be cut, the bargaining process that goes on between the white House and the Republican majority here is such that the Republican majority always wins something, and every step of the way they have won some cuts, so we can expect Medicaid will be cut. That is the least that we can expect. The most that we can expect is that Medicaid will be given to the States. All the Governors, both Democrat and Republican, have decided, voted, they wanted Medicaid to be made a block grant. Take away the entitlement and give it to the States. So those cuts are going to go forward at the same time we have voted for a $6 billion increase in defense, and we are now going to be voting to bail out more of the banks. It is going to be billions of dollars. They will not come with a few hundred million, I assure you. Let me go back to the Japanese. To quote from the article about the Japanese sit-in, ``Critics of the bill say that $6.8 billion is just the beginning of the bailout, for the banks are saddled with at least $400 billion in bad debt. The provision has prompted a public outcry against bankers and bureaucrats, who many believe are responsible not only for the nation's bad debt, but also for the stagnant economy. I will not read any more at this time. I just want to draw the parallel. Nobody on this floor has ever mentioned the fact that the Japanese have a swindle, a scandal, of the same dimensions, did you hear what I just said, the $6.8 billion is just the beginning. They think they have a problem of at least $400 billion. In this country, we never got a figure, but it always kept growing. Stanford University at one point, who had more of the figures that anybody else, estimated that the savings & loan bailout in America, the greatest swindle in the history of mankind, would cost the American taxpayers $500 billion, half a trillion dollars, before it was over. We cannot yet clear reports. We do not know how close we are to the $500 billion yet. But it is affecting everybody at the lower levels in this country, the ordinary Americans. You are being made to suffer for what the rich and powerful have walked off with. Even the $5.15 per hour minimum wage now is being seen as a threat. We are told that the American economy will suffer. Industry is trembling because we have a proposal to raise the minimum wage by 45 cents per hour per year, 45 cents per hour in one year and 45 cents an hour in another year, which means after 2 years the minimum wage increases would go from $4.25 to $5.15 per hour. $5.15 per hour is called a threat to the American economy. The little guys on the bottom, every-thing is too much for them. The guys on the top can get away with billion dollar slush funds, they can wreck the banking economy and the taxpayers are forced to bail them out through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. But the little guys on the bottom asking for $5.15 per hours for their labor, it does not even come out of the Treasury. The American Government does not have to pay the $5.15 per hour. The Government does not subsidize wages paid by industry. It does not come out of the taxpayers' money. It comes out of the industries that hire the people. But there are some here in the leadership of the recommend and majority who have indicated that they will not have any hearings or discussions on a minimum wage. They indicated that earlier in the year. And that if we pass the minimum wage increase this year, it will be ``over their dead body.'' That strong statement was made by a leader of the Republican majority. Fortunately, public opinion in America is galloping forward. Fortunately, public opinion understands that this is ridiculous. Public opinion is comparing the prosperity on Wall Street and the large amounts of money being paid to stockholders and the large amounts of money being paid to corporate executives, my colleague here before from Chicago was talking about the gap between the corporate pay of executives and the amount of money people are earning at the very bottom, and Americans are not dumb. Fortunately, public opinion, by more that 76 percent, says that we ought to have an increase in the minimum wage in America. Fortunately, the hearts of the American people are still not so hard and so corrupted that they cannot understand the arithmetic of $5.15 per hour, which comes out to a little more than $9,000 per year. Right now people are making about $8,000 a year on minimum wage. They would be making about $9,000. Another thousand dollars would make a big difference in the lives of people in terms of groceries on the table, shoes for the kids, the payment of a light bill, the phone bill. It is not a small amount for poor people, for those at the very bottom, and most people cannot sympathize here in this Congress. We can forgive billions of dollars in loans for farmers' home loan mortgages, but we cannot see the need to give $5.15 as a wage, hourly wage, for people who are working. We have had many attacks on welfare mothers, which is a misnomer, because the Federal Government does not pay money to mothers. The mothers of children who are considered dependent children receive the checks on behalf of the children. Aid to Families with Dependent Children has been under one steady stream of attack. It is all over just about now. They are going to take away the entitlement. They have made the cuts. But it is a small program. It is a tiny program compared to the farm subsidy program, for example. The farm subsidy program, which allows Louisiana, part of the reason Louisiana gets so much money, and I am going to tie this together now, part of the reason Louisiana gets so much money from the Federal Government is because not only does it have military installations there, but it also has farm subsidies it gets from Washington. The State that gets the highest amount of money from the Federal Government per capita is New Mexico. In terms of what it pays in, New Mexico gets back more per person than any other State. Why? Because New Mexico has the largest, a large number of farm subsidies, programs that receive subsidies from the Federal Government. New Mexico is at the top per capita, $3,255 more per person they get from the Federal Government than they pay into the Federal Government. What did the gentleman who was speaking here before from the Committee on the Budget and the Committee on Appropriations, what do they do about the fact that New Mexico is at the top of the list? Farm subsidies for the rich and the powerful, because farmers do not have to prove they are poor in order the get subsidies. Farmers do not have to prove anything except that they are farmers and they have land. They get paid for not plowing the land or not planting grain and nobody asks them how poor are you or how many in your family. Farmers just get it. They are rich and they are powerful or they are hooked into organizations that are powerful. So in America the rich and the powerful are definitely not subjected to the kinds of budget cuts and the scrutiny that the children in the lunchroom are. We are going to force teachers to walk around the lunchroom and pick out immigrant children and make sure no immigrant child gets a free lunch paid for partially by the Federal Government. I want to make a correction here on my statement on minimum wage. The Republican majority said they would not have any hearings, no discussion on minimum wage at the beginning of this Congress. But because the pressure has been applied steadily by the American people, because common sense has said you ought to discuss it and you ought to pass and increase the minimum wage, we now have a situation where the Republicans are willing to discuss minimum wage and a proposal is being made. Some Republicans, I think about 20, have introduced a bill which says they want to raise the minimum wage by not 90 cents over 2 years but a dollar over 2 years. That is a small group of the Republican majority, about 20 people. The leadership of the Republican majority has introduced a proposal. They do not want to increase the minimum wage. You will do that over their dead bodies, they say. But they have a proposal called the Minimum Wage for Families Act. I have a copy of the outline in my hand. And this proposal, which is going to sidestep making industry pay more than $4.25 per hour, will have the Federal Government step in to subsidize the wages. Let the industries keep hiring people at $4.25 an hour, the Federal Government will then step in and give people additional money who are working. You talk about a farm subsidy; now we are going to have a subsidy for industry, corporations and businesses. You will get a subsidy, and every person who has one child will not get $4.25 hour, the Federal Government will give them an additional $3.75, so that they will get $7 an hour. And if they have two or more children, the Federal Government will give them enough money to make their pay come out to $8 an hour. Now, can you see millions of workers across America having the Federal Government involved in their pay? This is an intrusion by Government that we have never had before. It will be on a scale greater than telling the farmers what to plant and telling the farmers how to grow their crops because they are getting money from the Government. We are going to have millions of workers involved in a program where the Government is going to help industry bring people's wages up. How is it going to do this? The Government is going to take the money from the earned income tax credit. They want to raid the earned income tax credit and use it for working people in these industries and have the Internal Revenue Service, on a regular basis, every 2 weeks, the Internal Revenue Service will now have the job of paying the difference between the $4.25 per hour and the amount due to each person in accordance with what has been decided by the Government. Can you imagine what kind of bureaucracy we are talking about there, in a Congress that prides itself on downsizing the Federal Government? The Federal Government will be intruding like it never has before in the lives of working people. Why do not we just give the $4.25 to each worker out there who is working? Why do not we just give it to the little people? Why are we going to put the people on the bottom? Because if you are making $4.25 an hour, economically you are on the very bottom. Why are we going to put them through that when we do not put farmers who receive subsidies? In Kansas they say the subsidy averages about $40,000 a year per family. That is the average. Many get much more than that. Forty thousand dollars a year per family. They do not get through a process of scrutiny by the Federal Government to determine whether you have one child or two children or whatever. Let me summarize. What I am saying is that we have allowed a situation to arise, generated by the majority in this Congress, where there are two sets of Americans, the 80 percent who are ordinary people struggling to make a living, the 80 percent are a part of what my colleague, Mr. Lipinski, was talking about, from Chicago, he was talking before I got here, 80 percent who are struggling to make ends meet are being given a hard time in every way by their government. I think this 80 percent constitutes a caring majority and all together they have enough common sense to see what is happening. I think the caring majority all together will rise to take matters into their own hands at the polling places. I think the caring majority have had enough. I think the people with disabilities are not beggars. They are not people that we have to treat with charity. They have votes. There are almost 40 million people in this country with disabilities, so when we treat them in a cavalier way in legislation, we are going to reap what we sow. I am confident that the average American on the bottom out there, we the people, will rise and at the ballot box demonstrate that this is a country still for the people and not for the rich and powerful. We are going to have justice and those who ignore this will have to suffer the consequences.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for taking this special order on the minimum wage. The kind of quote that the gentlewoman just read, that ``the minimum wage is a very destructive thing. I will resist a minimum wage increase with every fiber in my being,'' that is House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who is at least honest enough to say what he believes. The danger now is that we have entered a new period where there are people now who recognize that the common sense of the American people, as expressed through opinion polls, and I am sure people are on the phone calling their Members of Congress, common sense says that people deserve an increase. We are talking about pennies here, a 90 cent increase over a two year period. But that adds up over a whole year, and there are people that say, ``That would put some more food on my table and make it easier for me to pay my bills, so I want the 90 cents.'' Having recognized that there is a rising tide out there among the voters for a minimum wage increase, we have now some Members of the Republican majority who want to pretend they are concerned about an increase. They want to pretend, and then come with obfuscating, devious moves, to bog down the debate. I sent out a special alert today to all my Democratic colleagues. I serve as the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee on Workplace, Protections, which is responsible for the minimum wage as an issue, and I thought that I should alert them right away as to what is coming. I got a letter from the Republican side that showed that we are not going to see any rapidly escalating recognition of the will of the people resulting in a passage of the minimum wage. We are going to see a new kind of diversionary tactic. So I sent out this item which I called ``Special alert. Republican wage ambush is coming. The diversionary quagmire.'' Dear Colleague: Pretending to be suddenly concerned about livable wages for workers the Republican majority is preparing a legislative obstacle course to forestall the passage of meaningful legislation. We must avoid this quagmire of quicksand. A simple Straightforward Increase Is Best for America. Our current position must be reaffirmed and kept focused: we demand an immediate increase in the minimum wage. Step by step let us go rapidly all the way to $6.25 per hour which would bring the lowest paid person even with inflation. Step one requires passage of a 90 cents increase to $5.15 per hour. No bureaucracy, government intrusion, and no cannibalizing of EITC should be allowed to take place behind the banner of raising the minimum wage. Hearings may be scheduled very soon to promote a Byzantine proposal that makes a mockery of livable wage legislation. It proposes more corporate welfare through wage subsidies for employers, it imposes government intrusions on a scale greater than the present socialism of the farm subsidy programs, and, finally, the Republicans propose to raid the EITC program and siphon funds away from low income workers into a tax cut. Emergency action is needed. I am calling on all the Members of my party, Democrats, to sign up to cosponsor the true minimum wage increase bill, the Gephardt-Clay bill, H.R. 940. Now, what am I talking about? What did I receive from the Republicans? What did I have sent to me by somebody? It is a letter which is sent by my chairman of the Subcommittee on Workplace Protection, the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Ballenger], and another member of the committee, the gentleman from Arkansas [Mr. Hutchinson]. I am going to read portions from their letter to give them equal time. I am quoting from the letter sent out by Mr. Ballenger and Mr. Hutchinson. It reads as follows: We will be introducing legislation which would accomplish the goal of helping America's working families, while avoiding the economic pitfalls associated with a minimum wage increase. ``The Minimum Wage for Families Act'' would fundamentally redesign the Earn Income Tax Credit (EITC) by: converting the large annual lump sum EITC payments into monthly payments so as to more practically supplement family income; by denying credit to undocumented workers; by eliminating credit for childless adults; by increasing the support credit for parents; by renaming the EITC the Working Families Support Credit. If you believe that those people who are in need of wage assistance are America's working families, as opposed to teenagers employed during their summer vacation, please join us in support of this proposal. This is a proposal coming from the Republican side. This is the ambush that is waiting for us before we get to that goal of a minimum wage increase. They propose a three-tiered minimum wage. They want individuals to be employed at $4.25 an hour, and families with one child would get $7 an hour, and families with two or more children would get $8 an hour. How does it work? Employers would be able to hire as many job applicants as possible at the current starting wage of $4.25. The Federal Government would provide families with children a monthly cash payment to bring these families up to the $7 or $8 level as outlined above. The payments would be administered through the Internal Revenue Service. You talk about the intrusion of government into lives of Americans? You talk about corporate welfare? Here are two blatant examples of it. They are going to subsidize the salaries so the corporations can hire people at $4.25 an hour. Then they are going to have the government get involved in determining who should make $7, who should make $8, and the Internal Revenue is going to be the administrator of all this. The proposal is expected to be scored by the Joint Tax Committee they say, and it is going to save, according to the Republicans at least $15 billion over six years. Now, this is really a quagmire we are headed into. I am reminded of the story of the young sophomore who came home from college, and he sat down at the table with his father, who was a factory worker, and the rest of the family, and they had a big chicken on the table they were about to eat. The young sophomore had just taken a course in philosophy. So he told his father, dad, there are really two chickens on this table. I can show you starting with the right a priori assumptions and using ontological progression and based on epistemological reasoning, I can show you where there are two chickens on this table. His father looked at him for a while and listened, and suddenly reached over and grabbed the chicken, pulled it to him, and started carving the chicken and said, ``Look, son, if there are two chickens on this table, I am going to carve this one, and we are going to eat this one, and you can have the other one all by itself.'' This is what we have here. The Republicans are giving us a chicken in a pot, a dodo in a pot, to confuse the issue, and we are going to have long-winded sermons about how EITC is the answer to the minimum wage problem. Never before have I seen a proposal which so much ran against the grain of the Republican ideology. They are going to put government in the business of subsidizing wages and have government administering the difference between the $4.25, determining who should get the $7 and who should get the $8. So I think we have a long way to go. I was getting very optimistic myself about the rising tide of public opinion and how everybody suddenly is responding. There are 20 Republicans proposing a bill to increase the minimum wage by $1, not 90 cents, and I was getting euphoric about the democratic process. But now I see we are going to get bogged down, and only the image of being concerned is what they are after. They want to appear to be concerned about working Americans and play with the lives of working Americans, and play with it with all of these highfalutin proposals to have government put people through some kind of obstacle course or maze and finally come out with an EITC that is going to be robbed in order to create some more money for a tax cut. So I agree very much with the gentlewoman, that we must keep our eyes on the price, and focus, because the kind of straightforward statement that Mr. Armey has made, we should be grateful for that. We are going to have something far worse to deal with in the days ahead, the ambush that is being prepared for the minimum wage.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, our children are our most precious possessions. Both Republicans and Democrats theoretically and philosophically agree on this self-evident, but nevertheless profound truth. In practice and policymaking with respect to programs that benefit children; however, there is a deep chasm of disagreement between the two parties. Since it gained control of the House of Representatives the Republican majority has waged a cruel and unrelenting war on children. While trumpeting its support for the ``right-to-life'' for unborn children, the Republican majority has made survival much more difficult for living children. Aid to Families with Dependent Children has been eliminated as a Federal entitlement in House legislation. Within the next few weeks it is expected that the White House will surrender and agree to remove this Federal protection for poor children that has existed since the New Deal. The entitlement for MedicAid which protects the health of our poorest children is also under attack with all of the State's Governors voting to eliminate it. The new Government-health care industrial complex has already begun to endanger the lives of newborn infants and their mothers by forcing them out of hospitals within 24 to 48 hours after birth. Immigrant children will now be searched out in schools and denied school lunches if Republican legislation prevails. And, of course, immigrant children will be denied access to Medicaid. Cuts in funding for education threaten the provision of opportunity for all poor children. Republicans have proposed to cut even the very successful HeadStart Program. Teenagers who have benefited from the Summer Youth Employment Program for more than 20 years may be the victims of the zero funding passed by the Republican majority and find there are no jobs in this summer of 1996. Children in poor working families will continue to suffer despite the fact that their parents go to work every day but are still unable to adequately provide for their families on the present hourly minimum wage. The ``right-to-life'' is just an empty slogan unless it is accompanied by programs and policies which provide an even playing field of opportunity for all children. On June 1 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 that 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.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. People in the poorest parts of my district would welcome an increase of 45 cents or 50 cents. We really need more. They do not care where it comes from Republicans or Democrats. There are people who are suffering that need that increase in the minimum wage.

Mr. OWENS. Just the opposite has happened. The common denominator is becoming the prison laborer in China, the workers in Bangladesh, the workers in Mexico. The philosophy behind the assertion by the Republican majority that we need to keep our wages low is that in order to be competitive, the lowest wages in the world is what we are competing with. So just the opposite has happened as a result of GATT and NAFTA. We are pulling down the standards of the American workers. I thank my colleagues for joining me on the special order on minimum wage. I hope everybody understands we are moving forward and common sense will prevail. I hope our colleagues on the other side of the aisle will soon join us in increasing the minimum wage.

Mr. OWENS. I thoroughly agree with both of my colleagues. We have a moral duty, and we are charged as public officials by our Constitution to promote the general welfare. If you look at it in hard, cold terms in terms of promoting the general welfare, Henry Ford was a smart man. He might have had some problems with unions, et cetera, but he came to the reality that if he is going to sell his cars in large amounts, he has got to pay his workers enough wages to buy his cars, and that is just plain old American common sense. We have serious problems in our economy right now with consumer spending. The retail establishments are suffering. Why they are suffering is because the people on the bottom, from the bottom up, are the ones who spend the money in the stores because they need immediate necessities. They need food, clothing, shelter, they need refrigerators, they need the kinds of things that you buy from our stores. The people at the very top who are drawing large amounts of profits from Wall Street, they are the rich and the famous who pick up and travel around the world, and spend their money all over the world and buy real estate all over the world, buy diamonds, jewels, and certain kinds of things that do not feed back into the economy. They do not turn the money over. The great locomotive of the free world economy has been the American consumer. We are about to destroy the American consumer and end the great economy that has fed the free world for all these many years. If you do not have those consumers with basically good salaries on a steady basis, then you are going to take the heart out of what drives our economy. Other economies recognize this more so than we do. A higher standard of living of workers now is not in America. It is in Germany. Japan, with all of its economic difficulties, has a far lower rate of unemployment than America. Japan does things to protect its workers, and its workers are considered a large part of its middle class. Japan does not have to spend large amounts of money on prisons, on crime prevention or crime detection. They do not have to spend large sums of money on drug rehabilitation and drug-related crimes. They do not spend almost any money on guns and the results of people being destroyed, mangled, injured by guns. We have got something like 16,000 people killed by guns 2 years ago. The statistics are complete. At the same time less than 100 people were killed by guns in Japan. A more stable society, including gun control laws, by the way, a more stable society with a middle class preserved. We criticize Japan a lot about the way they resist our imports coming in. They have all kinds of tricks to slow down the flow of goods from the outside because they protect each industry, the middlemen and all the folks down at every level in their economy to maintain a middle class. The biggest part of that middle class are the workers in the factories who earn wages which are good enough to make it unnecessary for them to have to have EITC or food stamps or all the other benefits that we have to generate as a result of our failure to pay our workers. In Japan, in Germany, in France, in all of the industrialized nations, the executives, the chief executive officers and the middle management earn far less than the chief executives in the United States corporations. Far less. You will have to look for a long time to find a chief executive officer in Japan who was paid more than $1 million in compensation last year. You might find a few more in Germany but you will not find them in Japan. Let us make a comparison. If Majority Leader Armey is really interested in doing what is good for the economy instead of saying he wants to abolish and eliminate minimum wage, let us put some kind of hold on the unbridled, forever escalating amount of money that the chief executive officers of corporations are earning. Of course the chief executive officer earns, what is it, the top guy is $20 something million. AT&T or Disney, I forget, somebody is past $20 million in compensation per year.

Mr. OWENS. Now the problem is we have a kind of elite minority decadent reasoning that takes place. Even though it does not cost the government one penny, the elite minority reasoning is that you do not want to do anything which might lessen the profits of the people who are making all the money already. The corporations are making tremendous amounts of money. We are in a boom cycle. You got a bull stock market, you know. Why are they watching so closely to see to it that the bottom line should be kept so low? Why are they trying to keep our wages in this country at the same level of the wages in Bangladesh or China, Mexico? Or why are they trying to bring down the American workers? Why not let everybody share in the prosperity? We have this kind of decadence that has been made into a very complicated philosophy. We have Alan Greenspan adding to this decadent economics. But Alan Greenspan argues that whenever you have unemployment up, that is good because it means that it keeps inflation in check, but unemployment goes down, it is bad because inflation will increase because the number of workers out there, if the supply is less than the demand, and when the supply is less than the demand and the workplace that drives up the ability of the wages because the workers can negotiate for higher level of wages. So our Federal Reserve has been pursuing a policy of keeping wages low, keeping unemployment high. You know, we have the body that is set up to promote prosperity for everybody, deliberately joining forces with the kind of reasoning that says wages should be kept at the present level or not increased in order to keep down the amount of money paid by corporations to the lowest-level workers in America. These are decadent institutions they must be challenged head on. The American people need to understand. We recently had Mr. Greenspan up for reappointment, and he sailed through. Everybody agrees that Alan Greenspan should be reappointed. And he is the great untouchable on the Federal Reserve Board. But I think we better stop and take a look at the policies being promulgated by the Federal Reserve Board, especially since that same Federal Reserve Board which is responsible for keeping our economy well managed, for seeing to it that we have policies which promote prosperity, for seeing to it that we minimize waste, that same Federal Reserve Board was found by the GAO to have $3.7 point billion in a slush fund. They have $3.7 billion lying around that they are not using that they have not returned to the Treasury. If we had that $3.7 billion in the Treasury, the deficit would be decreased by $3.7 billion. Why is the Federal Reserve holding on to the money? I have an answer, Mr. Greenspan, but the General Accounting Office points out they say they keep the money for a rainy day, they keep the money in case their operations, which are quite huge, they earn money on the interest they charge the banks, they earn money on the services they provide the banks. In the last 79 years they have never had a rainy day, the last 79 years they have never had a loss, never broken even. They always have a surplus, but the surplus is now increased to the point where it is $3.7 billion. Now, Mr. Greenspan is in charge of this, the same mentality that says keep unemployment up, keep wages low, also said that, ``I need $3.7 billion around in my slush fund just because I might have a rainy day.'' We ought to do something about that. The American people ought to listen closely to what is happening. You know, it is just like what happened in another one of those sacred cow agencies, the CIA; they found $2 billion lying around in a petty cash slush fund of the CIA, you know. If we get all of these slush funds cleaned out, you know, we could balance the budget properly. You know, my friend from New York, Carolyn Maloney, has done a study, and she shows that the debts owed to the U.S. Government by the Farmers Home Loan Mortgage, which is one of the worst perpetrators, and many others, section A, the royalties that are due by companies that are supposed to pay, oil companies that are supposed to pay royalties to the Government, when you add it all up, there is $55 billion out there uncollected that, if we were to pursue with more zeal, we could get that money, help balance the budget, and we would not be talking about keeping the economy in check with inflation so that it can generate for profits; hopefully those profits would be taxed, and that is the way we get our revenue. Let us bring down the deficit. Let us take care of the minimum wage. Let us begin to manage our economy better, and let us not have a balancing of the budget, a driving of the economy by shortchanging the people who are at the very bottom who are earning the minimum wage. It is a decadent scenario that ought to be challenged by every fair- thinking American.

Mr. OWENS. I think it is very important to note that 20 percent of those living on the minimum wage the last time it was raised in 1991 were in poverty. An additional 13 percent were near poverty. In 1993 the President expanded the earned income tax credit which we noted the Republicans have tried to cut out completely, but they certainly decreased, and it raised income to 15 million families that helped many working families move above the poverty line. Yet to complete the goal of insuring the full-time working families, getting them out of poverty, we need to raise the minimum wage. Recent analysis by the economic policy institute and preliminary work by the Department of Health and Human Services suggest that 300,000 people would be lifted out of poverty if the minimum wage was raised to $5.15 an hour we are proposing. The figure includes 100,000 children who are currently living in poverty. The current poverty line for a family of four is $15,600. A family of four with one worker earning $4.25 an hour and working full-time year round earn $8,500, and they will receive a tax credit of $3,400 under the 1996 provisions of the earned income tax credit. They would collect food stamps worth $3,516 and would pay $615 in payroll taxes out of what they earn. This family would end up $834 below the poverty line. With all that help, they go to work every day, they get the help from the food stamps, they get the earned income tax credit, they are still $835 below the poverty line. On the other hand for a family of four with one worker earning $10,000, $300 a year, that would be a full-time worker on $5.15 an hour after the increase takes place. The EITC, the earned income tax credit, would provide the maximum tax credit of $3,560, food stamps would provide $2,876, and they would pay $788 and payroll taxes. The increase in the minimum wage, along with EITC and food stamps would lift this family out of poverty. A family of four with those kinds of, that kind of, assistance, plus working every day would be lifted out of poverty.

Mr. OWENS. I think it is important to point out at this point that I said earlier that there are rumors that the Republicans or some Members who are beginning to generate a bill calling for an increase in the minimum wage. In fact, the increase, as you pointed out, they are calling for a 50 cent per year for 2 years which means maybe a $1 increase. I welcome that, and I hope that the American voters out there will also begin to encourage their Congressmen, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, to go forward. We need this increase. And some of the brightest moments of my 14 years here in Congress have been the times, all too few, when Republicans and Democrats have come together on something that makes sense. We did it in terms of sanctions against South Africa, very tough sanctions against South Africa. We did it to pass the law which created the Martin Luther King birthday. We have done it on the occasion of the Americans With Disabilities Act; you know, Republicans and Democrats coming together to do something that makes sense and benefits large numbers of people. In the next few days and weeks nothing would make me happier than to see the Republicans join us and do the right thing. You know, let us go forward on a minimum wage increase.

Mr. OWENS. There is a Republican majority in power for the first time; they are presiding over it.

Mr. OWENS. Would the gentlewoman yield to correct that? We are not presiding over it.

Mr. OWENS. I think $8,400 a year is what the present minimum wage comes out to. Eight thousand four hundred dollars a year. And we just pointed out about 4 million of these people are the sole wage earners in their families.

Mr. OWENS. Most Americans do not realize that this is not a budget issue. An increase in the minimum wage will not cost the taxpayers a single penny. We are not talking about the Government paying an increase in the minimum wage. It is the people working out there for employers in the private sector who would receive the wages. It is not an item we put in the budget to increase the minimum wage. So we are not talking about downsizing the Government or helping to get rid of the deficit. We are talking about a humane action to make it possible for every American to pursue happiness The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence talk about the right to pursue happiness. They need to have a decent wage before they can pursue happiness.

Mr. OWENS. Would the gentlewoman yield for just a minute?

Mr. OWENS. Forty-five cents.