Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to the second, so-called Balanced Budget Downpayment Act (H.R. 3019). This bill represents a Republican charade; Republicans have still not acted in good faith to restore devastating cuts made to education, housing, and environmental programs. After spending half of last year debating contract legislation, and debating 11 continuing resolutions, the Republican-controlled 104th Congress has become the most inefficient, ineffective, inconsequential Congress in the history of the United States since the Depression. H.R. 3019 is a phony new deal that embodies the saying, ``the more things change, the more things stay the same.'' In classic Republican tradition, this new budget offer would still assault families, children, and the American worker. On the surface, H.R. 3019 appears laudable in that it provides an extra $4.3 billion for four of the five appropriations bills that have not passed by last year's deadline of October 1. But upon closer scrutiny of the bill's provisions, $3 billion of these new funds will only be provided when offsetting funds are determined by cutting welfare and Medicaid. In other words, this bill is a blatant Robin Hood in reverse where the poor are being robbed to pay for the Republican tax cut which has generated a situation of phony scarcity. The more fair and sensible approach would be to attack the more than $80 billion in annual corporate tax loopholes and corporate welfare to restore funds to significant programs. It appears that Republicans are saying we cannot afford the programs that are so vital to the future of our Nation's children, but we can afford the corporate pork which is clogging the arteries of our democracy. We cannot afford to ensure that our children receive a healthy, productive, head start, but we can afford to entertain proposals that would shield some of our most prosperous American companies from paying any taxes at all. How dare the Republicans use this transparent approach to continue the course of dismantling vital social programs. H.R. 3019 would pit programs of significance to America's social and fiscal security against one another. Republicans insist that Congress must first agree to abolish the safety net for our most vulnerable; Congress must then agree to deny health care coverage to the most needy. If Congress supports these measures, then, and only then, will $420 million be released to fund housing programs, $961 million to title I compensatory education and $390 million to the goals 2000 National Educational Standards Program. This is a crude form of fiscal blackmail. Even more ominous to this approach is the fact that even if Federal protections are removed from welfare and Medicaid, draconian cuts would still take effect. For example, LIHEAP, the program that provides heat to our senior citizens would be terminated after this fiscal year. The Summer Youth Employment Program would be eliminated, whether or not entitlement reform becomes law. The Legal Services Corporation would be cut by more than 30 percent; any listing of new species under the Endangered Species Act would be barred; the successful Cops-on-the-Beat Program would be replaced with a newly created law enforcement block grant; and no funds would be provided to create or renovate additional units of affordable housing for the more than 20 million Americans who already lack such housing. I strongly urge my colleagues to vote against this Republican ambush of much-needed safety-net programs. I further challenge my colleagues to join me and others to ensure that, at the very least, funding for education and training is restored to its current level. I call upon my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to seriously consider one painless action which would help to resolve this situation. Let us demand that the recently discovered $2 billion in unspent funds at the Central Intelligence Agency be utilized for more positive purposes. Transfer $1.1 billion in CIA funds to title I, $300 million to HeadStart and $600 million to the Summer Youth Employment Program; and vote ``no'' on the second Balanced Budget Downpayment Act.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to join thousands of my constituents and friends in Brooklyn and New York in saluting Mary Ellen Phifer- Kirton as a point-of-light for all Americans. ``First Lady of Brooklyn CORE'' is the title we assigned Mary Phifer in the turbulent sixties, when Brooklyn's chapter of the CORE movement was on the cutting edge of the boldest actions. More than 800 people were arrested challenging discrimination in the construction industry at Downstate Medical Center. We dumped garbage on the steps of Borough Hall to demand better collection in Bedford Stuyvesant. We organized over 100 buildings with rent strikes. Through it all Mary Phifer was our inspiration in Brooklyn CORE. Mary Phifer moved to Brooklyn from Kannapolis, NC, in 1948. As a single parent she has raised four sons--John, Willis, Bernard, and Quentin--a daughter Teresa, plus several nieces and nephews. In 1975 she married Randolph Kirton. During the entire period of her residency in New York, Mary has always resided in Brooklyn. This adopted daughter of Brooklyn obtained an AA in public administration from Kingsborough Community College and a BS in public administration from Medgar Evers College. A very special person, Mary Ellen Phifer-Kirton is retiring after 28 years of dedicated service with the New York City Community Development Agency. Mary has been a committed community advocate and volunteer. She serves on the boards of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now [ACORN], the Brooklyn chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Fort Greene Senior Citizens Council, the Mutual Housing Association of New York, and the United Communities Democratic Club. She is also a member of the Greater Bibleway Temple, 100 Women for Major Owens, and the League of Women Voters, Midwood chapter. In addition to her lifetime of activism in the world community, Mrs. Phifer-Kirton has devoted 28 years of her civil service career to community action at the New York City Community Development Agency [CDA]. During the 6 years that I served as commissioner of the CDA, Mary was a staff member. Mary has been in the field since April 1967 when she began her first assignment at CDA monitoring the neighborhood summer programs. By May 1981, she was the district officer of all of the CDA funded agencies in the borough of Brooklyn. Individuals like Mary are all too rare. She cares deeply about the community, so much that she has devoted over two decades of struggle in the fight to improve the lives of others. At a time when voluntarism and community involvement is decreasing, it is appropriate that we join with Mary's friends and family in celebrating this point-of-light in the 11th Congressional District. Before she relocates to Kannapolis, NC, friends and followers of Mary Phifer are assembling for a special tribute to Mary Phifer on Friday, March 8, 1996. We all welcome this opportunity to show how much we appreciate Mary's life of service in New York. She will always be ``First Lady'' in our hearts. And for the people of the Nation Mary Ellen Phifer-Kirton is a great point-of- light.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we are now in our second week following the recess, a recess where every Member had an opportunity to consult with his constituents, and I think that most of the Members had the same kind of experience that I had. That was an experience of talking with constituents who displayed in their commonsense reasoning far greater wisdom than is often displayed here in this institution. This body seems to have lost touch with common sense. Common sense of the people says clearly that education is a No. 1 priority. They have been telling us this in many ways for the last 5 years. For the last 5 years, education as a spending priority has ranked in the top five priorities as designated by the American people in public opinion polls. They clearly have shown that education is very important. Seventy-two percent of the people recently interviewed said that if there are going to be cuts made in the Federal Government, then the cuts should not be in education. Education should not be one of the areas where you streamline or downsize. They clearly stated that this was not desirable. We have common sense repeating over and over again what ought to be clear to everybody that is in a decisionmaking position in Government. We have a crisis. We have a situation that ought to be clear by now, where technological change is escalating. Technological change, the telecommunications revolution, the information age revolution are all upon us. As they take hold, it is quite clear that we need more and more educated people. It is quite clear that the people who are educated now need to have an upgrading and different changes in their education. In order to meet the present upheaval, in order to be able to deal with it, the minimum need is a massive education and job training program. Common sense tells us we need a massive education and job training program. Without any further research, that is quite clear. Nobody knows where this technological information is going, this age of information, the age of telecommunications. Nobody can really predict where it is going to go and what we should do. Nobody can lay out a detailed plan as to exactly where we are going to be able to take hold of the situation and not have it wreck our economy. It is a revolution that is displacing large numbers of workers. We have seen large numbers of blue collar workers displaced over the last 20 years, but now we have the middle-management workers, clerical workers. Large numbers of them are being displaced, certainly temporarily dislocated, and there is no solution in sight to this. Large amounts of money are being made in a booming economy. The economy is booming if we look at it in general. These are very prosperous times. So if in very prosperous times we are losing large numbers of jobs and there is a great deal of dislocation and upheaval in the job market, then what is going to happen if we fall into a recession and the boom is no longer there? We have a boom which is unprecedented, in that profits are higher than ever on Wall Street, and yet at the same time people are less secure than ever before. More jobs are being lost than ever before. I would certainly call to the attention of all the Members of this House an article which is must reading. It is a series of articles that started in the Sunday New York Times, March 3 New York Times. It is called, ``On the Battlefields of Business, Millions of Casualties.'' That is the title for this particular article which is the beginning of the series: ``On The Battlefields of Business, Millions of Casualties.'' This is a series which is called ``The Downsizing of America'' and this is the first of 7 articles. It is must reading for all Americans, must reading for decisionmakers in Washington, and must reading for Members of the House, because it talks about mostly middle-class people, mostly people who were employed as of 2 or 3 years ago in very good jobs, and the kind of suffering they are going through and have gone through as a result of this technological escalation, the age of computers and telecommunications displacing large numbers of people. It has not yet moved to the point where they are offering remedies, but I think previous editorials in the New York Times and a few other of our leading newspapers have quite clearly come down on the side of more education. Nobody understands all that has to be done, as I said before, but everybody who is thinking about the problem clearly understands that there will have to be a greater amount of investment in education, a greater amount of investment in job training. It is self-evident. If the experts cannot see what is self-evident, then certainly the common sense of the American people has repeatedly reinforced and underlined the fact that it is self-evident to them that we need a greater investment in education and a greater investment in job training. National security now must be defined not in terms of our military strength and not in terms of our economic prowess, but the things that support that military strength, economic prowess, leadership in the world. Underneath it is an educated populace. Nothing is more important than an educated populace. Nothing is more important for the security of the country. Nothing is more important to the quality of life in the country. Nothing is more important in terms of maintaining our central humanity than a massive investment in education. Instead of a massive investment in education which is going forward, this present Congress is proposing that we disinvest, that we deescalate, that we downsize the commitment in education. Part of that disinvestment argument is that the Federal Government should get out of the business of education. We have had the Republican majority propose that the Education Department be totally dismantled, that we get rid of the Department of Education. They put zero in one of the budgets for the Department of Education. You know, no sane industrialized nation walks away from its commitment to education to that extent. Every industrialized nation, on the other hand, really has a far greater commitment to education at the central government level. There is not a single industrialized nation that does not have a substantial commitment to education, and it is reflected in some kind of single government coordinating body at the top, whether they basically are highly centralized, as they are in Japan and Germany, France, or whether they are moving away from a centralized model and having more flexibility and greater innovation at the local level, as they are in Great Britain, and they still have very strong centralized departments of education to give some kind of guidance and direction. In this country, traditionally we have had a strong central department of education. I am certainly not advocating that we have one now. I am not advocating that we go to the other extreme, that we have zero, nothing, because our involvement at the central government level in education is minimal. At its very height, when the Department of Education was even funded at a higher level than it is funded at now, we had a very minimal commitment to education at the central level, and the operation of education in this Nation remains in the hands of local education agencies and local school boards. It still does. Our commitment to education at this point at the Federal level is less than 8 percent of the total amount spent on education, 8 percent of the total. You know, more than $360 billion was spent on education last year, and of that $360 billion, most of it was spent by State governments and local governments. Only 7 percent, between 7 and 8 percent, was provided by the Federal Government. A large part of that 7 to 8 percent provided by the Federal Government comes in the form of commitments to higher education through the loan programs and grant programs at the higher education level. So, when you are talking about Federal commitment to education at the elementary and secondary level to the schools across America, you know, at the local school boards and local school districts, you are talking about a very minimal commitment. That minimal commitment, however, sets a tone. It sets a direction, a sense of direction, a sense of tone. It has been very important in the last 10 to 15 years in stimulating reform, in stimulating more activity that is positive at the local and State level. The fact that our national government, the Federal Government, now is choosing to back away from that commitment and to downsize and to cut education at the Federal level has set off a domino reaction at the State levels and at the local levels to cut education fiercely in some places, and in my home State of New York, large cuts are being proposed in education aid from the State to the city of New York and in the upstate district also, but greatly the cut impacts most on the city of New York. In the city of New York itself, the city government, the mayor has waged a war against the board of education, and in his attempt to balance the budget of the city, the board of education is being made to pay a higher price than most other city agencies. So, what started at the Federal level has set off a chain reaction which has been carried through devastating proportions at the State and local level. I give New York as an example, but across the country this phenomenon has taken hold in most big States. There are cutbacks in most big cities. There are cutbacks, and we are going in just the opposite direction than we should be going. There should be an escalation of investment and an escalation of activities in the area of education, and we are going in just the opposite direction. Today the Education and Economic Opportunity Committee, the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunity, what we used to call the Education and Labor Committee; the new Republican majority went to great lengths to take out the word ``labor,'' not have ``labor'' appear anywhere. I am glad they at least left ``education'' in the title of the committee; the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, Democratic members held a hearing, a forum, you cannot actually call it a hearing; it was a frustration forum, because out of frustration, the Democrats had to set aside time and recruit witnesses for an unusual kind of exercise. It was not an official hearing, because the people that we have sought to call for all of the official hearings have not been accepted by the majority. In fact, the majority, not following the tradition and the pattern set by the Democratic majority, which always allowed a reasonable number of witnesses from the minority in ration to the majority witnesses, the majority has chosen to limit the minority, the Democratic minority has been limited in our committee to no more than one witness at each hearing. You know, one witness has been all we have been limited to as we proceeded to discuss revolutionary changes in education, and even the number of hearings has been limited. The hearings that are stacked in favor of the majority witnesses and opinions that are only favored by the majority have been all too few. So we are proposing revolutionary changes, gigantic budget cuts, changes in structure, elimination of the Department of Education, the restructuring of the School Lunch Program, the restructuring of the careers program, total revamping of education for individuals with Disabilities Act, all of those sweeping changes have been proposed and are under way without any reasonable number of hearings. We have spat upon the democratic process. We have just denigrated the democratic process, which at least called for an opportunity for controversial ideas and new proposals to be discussed. The Republican majority has not permitted that. So we had to have our own hearing out of frustration, and large numbers of people were called on one day, kind of an overwhelming enterprise that we had to undertake today. I do not recall exactly how many witnesses, but I think there were more than 20, 20 witnesses called by five panels, and some of the witnesses, of course, were outstanding spirits, outstanding philosophers, outstanding advocates for education. We are quite proud of the fact that we finally had the opportunity to have them go on record in this very critical year of decisionmaking. This is a critical year of decisionmaking because even through the Republican majority has not been able to go through the usual democratic legislative procedure and work its will, they have not been able to get many of the revolutionary changes they wanted passed. They have chosen the appropriations route, the budget-making and appropriations route, to work their will. They cannot get the reauthorization of certain laws. They cannot get many of the items that they passed at the level of the House of Representatives passed in the other body. So they have turned to the appropriations process and legislate through the denial of funds to certain activities, denial of funds to the Department of Education, cutting back at a certain level, the denial of funds to title I. You do not like title I, you do not have the opportunity to get ride of it fully, revamp it in the way you want it, so you cut it be $1.1 billion, about a 25 percent cut. And you follow that pattern with other programs. Even Head Start, which is frowned upon unfavorably by certain sectors of the Republican majority, and Head Start gets the first cut in the history of the program. Ronald Reagan did not cut Head Start. He increased the amount of funds for Head Start. George Bush did not cut Head Start. No President has cut Head Start. Only now does the Republican majority in the House venture to cut Head Start by $300 million. Summer Youth Employment Program, which is on the border between education and job training, very important for education because it sends a positive message to the young people during the summer. They can be employed. It says to them that their Government cares something about them. It has been program that has been cut down, whittled down over the years. Ten years ago, in New York City, 90,000 young people were employed in the summer youth employment program. Last year, 32,000 were employed. It has been steadily cut down to lower and lower levels over the years. Now we do not know what is going to be funded for the coming summer or not. There is a shadow over it. It is in the continuing resolution, like everything else, but when it is not mentioned specifically, it say it is funded at 75 percent of last year's level. In the case of the Summer Youth Employment Program, we cannot really determine what last year's level is, because there was a move to phase out the program, and the amount of funds appropriated was an amount needed administratively to phase it out. So there is a big question mark. This is March 5. Summer youth employment programs usually go into motion sometime this month in terms of administrative planning, the recruitment, et cetera. As of March 5, we do not really know what is going to happen in the Summer Youth Employment Program. We have, through the budget process, through the back door, been able to Whittle down very critical education programs. We have done all of this, as I said before, without going through the democratic legislative process. We have treated the process with great contempt. To compensate for the contempt that the majority has shown for the democratic process, the Democrats on the committee called today's forum, which is, again, not an official hearing. It does not have minutes and records of the same type as we have in official hearings. It does not or did not have both parties there, and only the Democrats were there. So it is not a substitute for what should have happened. But it is an opportunity or was an opportunity for people who have opinions, people who are advocates, people who have been around a long time who have experience. They should have their voices heard in this process of changing education radically. The radical changes are unnecessary. I always frowned on radical approaches when they are not necessary. Revolution is a dangerous operation always. Revolution, things can always get more chaotic and more people can end up suffering if you take the revolutionary route. So, revolution should only be undertaken when it is necessary. It is not necessary to have a revolution in education, however bad things may be. We were moving forward in an evolutionary way. I think proposals that have been on the table for a long time, made a lot of sense, starting with the Republican President, George Bush, and his proposal for America 2000 and his establishment of the six goals, the Clinton program of Goals 2000, are not so far from the Bush Program of American 2000. There was some continuity. Democratic Governors and Democratic legislators were involved in both processes. All of that was moving forward. Standards were being established which were first proposed by the Republican administration, and they are now being established under a Democratic administration. We did not need a revolution. The evolutionary process needed to be speeded up. The evolutionary process needed to have some resources put behind it. All of the structural changes were not being accompanied by proposals to increase the investment. We needed more money. You know, to keep changing the structure and playing with standards to institute new evaluations and do all the kinds of things that are proposed in the Goals 2000 legislation does not really allow education to be impacted in the way it should be impacted. During the process of these negotiations and discussions on Goals 2000 last year, not last year, year before last, when the Democrats were in the majority, during those discussions we had long debates about opportunity to learn standards. Everybody was interested in standards for teaching the subject matter. Everybody was interested in standards for testing. But we talked about opportunity to learn standards, and opportunity to learn standards means that you have to provide the resources for young people to be able to measure up to the standards that are the educational standards and to be able to pass the tests. If you do not have science equipment, then do not ask youngsters to pass a test which is a strenuous test about science if they do not have science equipment, if they do not have the books, if you do not have the necessary physical plant. We have many schools across the country where it is just unsafe to have young people in the schools, let alone they do not have proper lighting, they do not have proper ventilation. We have asbestos, in many cases, still around when it should not be around, unsafe school as well as schools that are not conducive to study. All of those factors we try to build into the standard setting process. There is a great debate, and we had a compromise. At least the phrase ``opportunity to learn'' is built into the standards. If you follow the course of action proposed by Goals 2000 and deal with standards for curriculum, course content, you deal with standards for evaluation and have some kind of uniformity so you can compare from one district and one State to another. And if you deal with standards for opportunity to learn, if you move in that way, then you put some funding behind the opportunity to learn standards. You have to have some money. You need more money for science equipment, you need money for books. We have libraries in New York that have books that are 35 years old, history books that are 35 years old. What can you teach a youngster from a history book that is 35 years old that is going to allow them to really deal with 1996 and history standards being promulgated for the rest of the country, where the rest of the country has books that are up to date. So in numerous ways, investment is needed. You need to put money behind the effort. Among the people testifying today at our forum was the distinguished author, Jonathan Kozol. Mr. Kozol has written many books, and I think the most famous and current of the two is ``Amazing Grace.'' Before ``Amazing Grace'' is his recent book which was released last year, before that a book called ``Savage Inequalities.'' I think that there is no more appropriately entitled book than ``Savage Inequalities.'' Mr. Kozol spent the day with us, since he testified. In fact, he is here right now in the audience. I think nothing was more penetrating than his statement that you cannot keep asking the question that most conservatives use. The favorite statement of the Republican majority, the favorite evasion of the Republican majority, the favorite evasion of the Republican majority, is ``You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them. You can't solve the problems related to urban education by throwing money at them.'' One is supposed to cringe and fall back in the face of that kind of statement and apologize for asking for more money. I think Mr. Kozol made it quite clear that the answer to that statement is, Oh, yes, you can. Oh, yes, you must. You must have more money, more resources applied to the problem, or you definitely will not solve it. We do not try to solve any other problems in this Nation or this society without the appropriate resources. I think this country would sort of applaud itself for its high-technology military machine that we have, a military unlike any that the world has ever seen. We are continuing to perfect that high-technology military machine. We are throwing a lot of money at that. We have thrown billions and billions of dollars at the military in order to have the military solve problems and come up with some gadgets that nobody really needs and continue to throw money at the military. We are building another Seawolf submarine in Connecticut, and the only justification for that submarine is we want to keep the technology alive. We want to keep the workers' ability to deal with that technology current and alive. That is the justification for building another Seawolf submarine, which costs $2.1 billion. We are throwing $2.1 billion at a problem that is really not a problem anymore, because we already have enough Seawolf submarines. The Soviet Union does not exist anymore and is not building new submarines. We are throwing money at it. That is a problem that the establishment, a problem that the people who are hypocritical about streamlining the budget, choose to designate as a problem. So they throw money at it. We are throwing money in the sky at F-22 fighter planes. In Marietta, GA, the Speaker's district, we are building F-22 fighter planes that are not needed. There are high-technology fighter planes unlike anything the world has ever seen. We already have the best fighter planes in the world. We already have fighter planes that nobody is challenging. The Soviet Union is not building any new fighter planes to challenge the ones we have. Why do we have to throw money at the problem of high-technology fighter planes? But we are throwing money at it at Marietta, GA. It might not be a problem we need to throw money at to solve the problem. By throwing money at the F-22's in Marietta, GA, in the Speaker's district, we are certainly solving the problem of employment in that district. That district happens to be the district that receives the greatest amount of Federal aid in the country. The county that the Speaker represents receives the greatest amount of money per capita of any county in the whole country. So by throwing money in that direction, we certainly are solving a problem of prosperity and employment in that country. So why not provide appropriate resources, or even, if you must have a phrase, throw money at education, if you want to solve the problem of education? We need money to build schools, because some of them are literally unsafe and falling down. Many of them are, if not unsafe, are not conducive to learning. We need money to throw at that problem and get new schools built. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun and I introduced a bill 2 years ago which would provide for the introduction of a program just to repair dilapidated schools and maybe build a few. It was passed in the Senate she even got an authorization of $600 million, which is a small amount when you are considering physical renovations and construction. But the other body passed it. Later on they cut that down to $100 million, and it passed both the Senate and the House in the reauthorized legislation that we passed in the fall of 1994, before the Republican majority took over in January 1995. That money has been totally wiped out of the budget, $100 million to deal with asbestos problems, to deal with lead in the water, to deal with unsafe conditions, $100 million zeroed out completely. It is not even under discussion anymore. We needed to throw money at the problem of asbestos and lead in the water. We needed to throw money at unsafe conditions in certain schools. So I want to salute Mr. Jonathan Kozol today when he said, Despite all that we face in education, we face the strange phenomena of being asked repeatedly by those who spend as much as $20,000 yearly to enroll their children in exclusive private schools, whether money really matters when it comes to the education of the poor. Can you solve these kinds of problems, we are asked, by throwing money at them? I think that no more appropriate statement could be made than to begin the dialog on whether Americans in decisionmaking positions are serious about wanting a society which is a fair society, a society which is feasible in terms of being able to maintain a sense of justice and some kind of law and order that everybody can live with. To continue from Mr. Kozol's testimony, I always find this a strange question, but especially when it is asked by those who do precisely this for their own children. Money cannot do everything in life. It cannot buy decency. It obviously does not buy honesty or generosity of spirit. But if the goal is to repair a roof or to install a wiring system or remove lead poison or to pay for a computer or persuade a first-rate teacher to remain in a tough job. I think money is a fine solution. Money is a fine solution. If money is a solution for the military machine, then why is it not a solution for the building of a society where the most important resource is an educated population? An educated population is the most important resource of a great power. Mr. Kozol goes on to point out that many people use as an example some urban district somewhere which has a high per capita education expenditure, but is not working. This is using an example of why money does not solve problems. I doubt if you can find three or four education systems where you have a higher amount of money being spent per capita than is being spent in the suburban districts across the country. Where people have money, they choose to spend large amounts on their schools. There per capita rates are much higher. In New York State, the highest per capita rate is $17,000 per pupil. That is only one district. Many other districts spend $12,000, $11,000, $10,000 on their schools per pupil. In New York City they barely eke out $7,000 per year per child. When studies are done on how the $7,000 per child per year is spent, there is a clear indication that it is lopsided from one district to another. New York City has a student body of 1 million pupils, 60,000 to 65,000 teachers. It is a mammoth system, shifting things around. You will find the poorest neighborhoods and the lowest grades which have the most difficulty in teaching children have the least amount of resources. They are not spending $7,000 per child simply because the biggest expenditure in any budget is the personnel budget. The personnel budget is driven by the length of time that teachers are in the system. The districts which have the children which need the help most, they have the least experienced teachers, because they have the most difficult school systems, difficult jobs. Many teachers, as soon as they qualify for tenure, they move out of those districts, they get transfers, so you have an ongoing condition where the districts that need the help most and the best teachers have the least experienced teachers. The most experienced teachers move out, and subsequently the amount of money being spent per child is lower and lower in the districts that need the most expenditures. That is just one basic phenomena which explains expenditure difference, even in a city where the average is $7,000 per child. You have in the poorest districts, in Brownsville, which is in my district, or the South Bronx, which is in Congressman Serrano's district, you will have the expenditure down as low as $3,000 per child, because of these disparities in personnel salaries. So it is far too low in many cases, and in many cases, of course, there are always ways in which you can improve the distribution. So I want to go back to the basic thesis, is if we are in times which require greater and greater amounts of education, where individuals cannot survive, families cannot survive unless they have wage earners who do have exceptional education, wage earners who have the kind of education which allows them to fit into this high-tech telecommunications information age society, we need those people, and the only way you are going to get those people is to have an education system which allows them the opportunity to get the kind of education necessary to qualify for these jobs. This is something that planners have understood for a long time, professors in universities have understood a long time. The people in the street understand it, too. They keep crying. They cry out for more and more resources to be devoted to education. Whenever they are asked a question or given an opportunity to express their opinion, they make it quite clear that education ought to be one of the highest priorities in Federal expenditures. We keep ignoring them. It is amazing how we just turn our back on the will of the people in a democracy. The great question is when are the people going to wake up and understand that they have the power? They have the power, if they really believe that education is a priority and it has been that way for the last 5 years, it is ranked in the top four or five. Health care was once a priority 3 or 4 years ago, but education was No. 2 or No. 3. Recently the New York Times and USA Today and some others did polls which show that education had eclipsed everything. It was at the very top for a while, over health care, over crime. So people keep telling us again and again that their commonsense knowledge tells them that we ought to be investing more in education. But we refuse to do it. We let these savage inequalities that Jonathan Kozol talks about, savage inequalities that are destroying young people, continue year in and year out. We are reminded of Shakespeare's words in King Lear, ``Fool me not so much to bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,'' which in street language means somebody ought to get mad, ought to get very mad. This is rotten. Smells to high heaven. Why are our mayors cutting education when the people said that education should be the highest priority expenditure? Why are Governors cutting education when the people in the States said education ought to be the highest priority? Why does our Federal Government insist on cutting education when the people across the Nation said education should be the highest priority? What is going on? What is going on in our democracy? Somebody ought to get very mad, and I hope that every parent, every person who cares about America, will understand that we ought to get angry at decisionmaking which completely ignores priorities that are set by the people. Education is that clear priority. We had testifying today Deputy Secretary of Education Madeleine Kunin, and she only echoed what the other witnesses had said before. I quote from the testimony of Deputy Secretary Kunin: As Secretary Riley and I meet with parents, students and business and community leaders around the country, we hear what you hear, that education is America's top priority because it is America's greatest concern. The public understands what education means for our children's future and for the future of our Nation. As they see companies downsizing, their own jobs threatened or lost, they look around and they see who is left standing: the men and women with the highest computer and technical skills. In short, Americans are seeing that the greatest job security belongs to those who have the best and most advanced education. Education is the currency of the future. I continue to quote Deputy Secretary Kunin. ``As the President has often said, how much you learn determines what you earn.'' Few Americans argue with that conclusion. Many Americans, however, argue with the approach that the majority in Congress has taken in cutting support for education at the very moment when the demand for higher and more education by all Americans is growing at an unprecedented rate. Demand is growing on two fronts. Sheer numbers tell part of the story. We are going to be educating more children in elementary and secondary education than ever before. We expect growth to increase by a million students next year, nearly 6 million students by the year 2005, a 10 percent increase nationwide, including a 22 percent increase in California alone. Continuing to quote Deputy Secretary Kunin: Just to imagine present class sizes, which already are too large, 50,000 new teachers will have to be hired for the coming school year. Fifty thousand new teachers have to be hired just to keep up with the growing numbers. If we want to move to improve the ratio of teachers to students and have lower class sizes, smaller classes, then of course we would need more than 50,000 new teachers. To continue to quote Secretary Kunin: Today every student has to reach here or his full potential. No mind can be wasted. Without a high school degree today, you can't earn a decent living. Even with a high school degree, you have a tough time in the job market. K-12 is becoming K-14 as technical schools and community colleges are providing first-generation college students with the skill they want and they need. Our ability to meet this avalanche of demand for education depends on support from all levels of government aimed at providing better educational opportunities for children. All those who have an impact on education must join hands. Together we must build this village in which to raise our children. There is no time for the politics of blame or for demonizing the Federal Government. It is hard to understand why the majority in Congress would decrease resources in the face of rising demand for education. the House appropriations bill would create a massive education deficit, and among the victims would be our children and our Nation's future. Their cuts are in the areas of highest priority to the American people: support for basic skills, safe and drug-free schools, raising standards, better training for teachers, getting technology into the classroom, and access to college and post-secondary education. To continue to quote the Deputy Secretary: For example, the House-approved appropriations bill would take away $3.7 billion from education. That is for one year, the coming fiscal year. Sadly, the loss of these funds will have the greatest impact on children who need to read better, who want to prepare for a career, and who may attend schools where standards are still low, and these children can catch up and do well if they are given extra help, the extra help that they need. Why should we take this chance away from them? Indeed, the purpose of title I programs is to help these needy children succeed. How odd it is then that this program takes such a big hit in the budget fight. Education takes a 17-percent cut across the board. In some communities with a high percentage of poor children, the impact of this cut will be as high as 25 percent. If these cuts are enacted, some 40,000 to 50,000 aides and teachers will have to be let go. The Washington jargon, continuing resolution it is called, has a different meaning for the children served by these aides and teachers. For them it is a discontinuing resolution, stopping their education just when many were getting started. Let me give you a few examples of what these cuts mean in classrooms across this country. ``Last year I was in California,'' I am quoting Madeleine Kunin, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Education: Last year I was in California meeting with San Francisco School Superintendent Bill Rojas and mayor Willie Brown. They told me that these cuts would force elimination of 12 schools from the title I program, affecting 4,162 students who need to learn the basics to pass and get ahead. The remaining schools of the title I program could face the elimination, would face the elimination of teacher aides, library staff, computer labs, and the gutting of reading labs through the loss of reading specialists, materials, and equipment. Their story is not unique. New York City, while we have seen great success recently in improved test scores, will lose $67 million in title I funds. And those dollars support 1,500 classroom teachers. These cuts come at a bad time, right when the new chancellor announced that he is determined to make sure that every third-grade child reads at grade level. Secretary Riley, in his state of education speech last week, called for the entire Nation to focus on helping our children read, a goal that will not be achieved if these budget cuts stay in place. The same story is true in Philadelphia. A loss of $13 million, 300 teachers and aides as well as services. In Chicago, these title I cuts could translate to layoffs of 600 teachers. In San Diego, 11,000 students could be denied title I services. Perhaps the most disastrous impact will be felt by our youngest children at the highest poverty levels. At McNair school in north Charleston, 80 percent of the students live in public housing. The school receives $455,000 in title I support. What will change without this money? The Charleston Post and Courier report that the programs at risk include all-day kindergarten, special reading programs, the schools' computer lab, staff development, and a 6-week summer enrichment program. These cuts will be real and painful if the Congress does not act to prevent them. Already schools are being forced to take action because they must plan ahead. As you know, the education budget is forward-funded, and for good reason. Schools must get budgets passed in their own communities and sign contracts and buy books for next year. Such local decisions are made in the springtime, months after Congress usually enacts an education appropriations bill for the next school year. But this springtime, time is running out. It makes no sense that some of the same people who say government should be run like a business are willing to let school principals, superintendents, legislators, and school boards twist in an uncertain wind with no sense of how much Federal aid they can expect. The result of this uncertainty is that decisions to cut back on education are being made at school board meetings around the country as we speak. In Boston, school officials had to submit their draft budget for next year 4 weeks ago. If nothing changes, teachers must be notified by May 15 of any layoffs. Monroe County, WV, receives 25 percent of its district budget from Federal funds and would have to announce teacher contracts by April 1. Right now, they plan to lay off 15 to 20 teachers in six schools. Moreover, the House-approved appropriations bill would actually eliminate all funding for Goals 2000, ending excellence grants to thousands of schools around the country which are trying to raise their academic standards, involve parents in communities and education, and they are preparing teachers for the challenges of the 21st century classroom. At a time when 72 percent of Americans say drugs and violence are serious problems in local schools, it is not easy to understand how the House could approve a 55-percent cut in the safe and drug-free schools program, reducing funding in this program by nearly $200 million. The impact of budget cuts will be felt on higher education as well. If direct lending is capped or killed, students and schools in the program will be deprived of a streamlined program that has worked, making access to student loans easier and cheaper and enabling them to pay their loans back more readily. We also have a difference of opinion with the congressional leadership on Pell grants. We are pleased that a $100 increase was approved, but we must do more and raise the grant to $2,620 as more students depend on financial aid to further their college education. I am still quoting from the Deputy Secretary of Education, Madeleine Kunin: From my own life, I know the value of education. I came to this country as a child who could not speak English. My mother believed that anything is possible in America and our access to education made her more than an idol dreamer. It made her a prophet. What was there for me and for you must be there for this generation of children. That is what this budget battle is all about. It is about making hope more than rhetoric, making it a reality. I end the quote from the testimony of the Deputy Secretary of Education, Madeleine Kunin, and I return to the statement of author Jonathan Kozol and the spirit of the testimony of Jonathan Kozol. The spirit of the testimony of Jonathan Kozol is that we have a moral dilemma. We have a situation where the powerful decisionmakers of America have made a decision to throw overboard large numbers of children, a large percentage of the population, just forget about them. We have a situation in America where large numbers of decisionmakers, people in power, are choosing to take care of their children, send them to the best schools, appropriate money and resources or make available money and resources through private sources for their own children, while the rest of America, a large part of it, goes down the drain. I think Mr. Kozol used the word ``triage.'' Triage is something that originated in war. It is a French term where when you had large numbers of wounded congregated, they had to make some decisions about how to use their meager resources. They had a limited number of doctors, nurses, and medicine, so they would line people up, and those who were only partially wounded or not so serious were put in one category and not given much attention, and those who were so far gone that it was felt that resources should not be wasted on them were put in another category and left to die, and those in the middle, of course, who belonged to neither category were given attention. Well, we have decided to do something similar in a situation where there is no need for it. We are not on a battlefield. There is no emergency. We do not need a revolution. We do not need to balance the budget overnight in ways which force us into a situation where we have to participate in triage. But triage is going forward because the majority in this House and the majority which controls the Congress at this point has decided that America should be an America for an elite group. We are going to go into the pampering of an oligarchy. A small group will be placed into the situation where they will be able to make unlimited profits, they will be able to live without any disturbances from the rest of the population. Ten percent of the people will make all the money they can make. Ten percent of the people would not have to be bothered with any taxes which fund the programs that make the Nation go. Ten percent of the people are going to be parasites on the national tradition and on all that has gone before them. People are making large amounts of money on Wall Street on telecommunications investments, investments in computers, investments in cable television, investments of all kinds of gadgets which are driven by modern technology which was developed by the American people's money. Taxpayers financed the development of telecommunications. At the end of World War I and World War II, we invested billions of dollars to develop radar, to develop miniaturization, to develop ways in which you could use frequencies more effectively. All of this was developed by the resources and the taxes of the American people. And the American people deserve to have a share of that investment. We now have frequencies, spectrums above our head. I have used this example many times, and I do not think I can say it too often. The spectrum belongs to the American people. The air over our heads, the atmosphere over our heads, nobody has the right to claim that. It belongs to the people. The Government should not give that away. The Government should use it in ways which benefit all of the people. If we are going to sell it, we should sell it at prices which benefit all the taxpayers. I certainly propose we do not even sell it, we lease it, so nobody thinks they own the spectrum, they own the frequencies up there. It is like the early America, where we had the great land rush, and there was land which we claimed that nobody owned, and we gave it to white American settlers. The native Americans, they owned it, so it was taken from them. But without getting into that argument, at least there was a democratic process of allowing people to participate in the land rush. Black people were not allowed to participate, even after the slaves were freed. They could not participate in the land rush, but all white Americans could participate in the land rush. Immigrants who were white could participate in the land rush. They were given land, land that belonged to the people, that belonged to the Government. So we have a similar situation above our heads with a spectrum as invaluable as land. Let us not cry about the lack of resources. Let us not tax American families anymore. Let us make the corporations who want to use those frequencies and want to use those spectrums, let us let them pay for it. It is a way to justly derive revenue, revenue which can then be used to pay for more education. Why do we not have a dedicated tax for all the Internet transactions above a certain amount of money, commercial transactions above $10, put a tax on them of some percentage, and have that tax on the Internet transactions become a way to finance the information access that is needed for the rest of the public? We need to have access for everybody, so we need libraries and schools to be wired, we need computers to be available in some public centers, public telecommunication centers, or in libraries where people can go in and make use of the information age, regardless of their income. All of this could be financed painlessly by attaching a dedicated tax to transactions that take place over the Internet, or various other electronic communications transactions. We could have a trust fund. We call it the information superhighway, so let us use the analogy. We have a highway trust fund very successfully. The highway trust fund is based upon a tax that is placed on gasoline. That tax money is used to build highways, a successful interstate net across the country. We have the best highway system in the world, because we had a dedicated tax to take care of that. Now we are on the information superhighway, and why not have that funded in the same way: establish a trust fund through dedicated revenue, give the revenue that we have derived back to the States on a per capita basis. If we want to hand things down to the State, there is a situation where we could easily, without a bureaucracy, hand down the money that is collected through this dedicated revenue process to the States on the basis of the number of people in each State. I say that because I would like to see New York State for a change get a fair shake in some kind of Federal program. We have the phenomenon in New York where we are still paying far more into the Federal Treasury than we get back in aid. You would not believe that when you hear them talk. We get large amounts of aid from title I, a large amount of aid from Medicaid and Medicare. People look at all that and say ``New York gets more than anybody else.'' New York has more people, and New York chooses to spend its money on Medicaid and on Medicare, instead of on F-22 planes or Sea Wolf submarines. I can think of no more noble way to spend money than to spend it on the health of people. Yes, you can always get rid of some waste, some corruption; you can always streamline the process. But if you are spending money on the health care of New Yorkers, that is money well spent. In New York, we should raise our heads high, because our share of what we are getting from the Federal Government is being used to help people in various positive ways. We are not building weapons systems that will no longer be needed, weapons systems that are very expensive and obsolete. New York State in 1994 gave, through a tax collection process, the Federal Government $18.9 billion more than it got back in Federal aid. You might say ``Why did you calculate it that way?'' We have been following this for a few years. The Kennedy School of Government has a table which shows that consistently, New York has given more to the Federal Government then it has gotten back in terms of aid. We do not have any big defense plants, any Sea Wolf submarines, any aircraft carriers, so we do not get back large amounts of money like Marietta, GA, does. The southern States altogether get back $65 billion more from the Federal Government than they pay into the Federal Government. I am mentioning this because we have a dogma here about States rights and block grants to the States, the States can do it so much better. New York could probably exist far better if you were to give it back its own money. If we had $18 billion, almost $19 billion that is ours to spend as we see fit, we can solve all the budget problems of New York State. Those who talk about States rights and passing education programs and school lunch programs and AFDC, Medicaid, passing it down to the States, you had better stop and think twice about placing such a high priority on States rights in running programs and funding programs. On education, there are many States that would be shortchanged if they have to pay for their own costs without Federal funds. Many of the Federal funds flow out of the northwest States like New York and Michigan; midwest States like Michigan and Wisconsin. They are still paying far more to the Federal Government than they get back. Let me conclude by saying what we need is leadership that recognizes that triage will not work. No part of the population should be thrown overboard. If you are not going to throw a portion of the population overboard, then you invest in education. You must face the realities of 1996. There is a technological revolution. There is an information age revolution. There are going to be large dislocations that you have always in the work force. We want to have certain kinds of value systems developed. We want to have fairness across the board, and everybody participate in the prosperity of America. The only way we know at this point to do that, the way we are certain will have a direct impact on that problem, is education, more investment in education, more investment in job training. Some genius may come along later on and find some other way to deal with the problem in addition to investing in education and job training. It may be there may be a pill people can take to help solve the problem at some time in the future. I do not know. We do not have any way to predict the wonders of technology and medicine. But we do know education and job training are absolutely necessary in order to cope with the current difficulties we are facing in this society, whether you are talking about crime problems, AIDS problems; you name the problem, and education is part of the solution. Let us go forward and reject the philosophy of the Republican majority. Let us not disinvest in education at this point. Let us follow the trend of the thinking of the people who appeared at our forum today. Twenty people came from all walks of life. They said ``The American people say that common sense dictates that we should invest more and more in education.'' I hope we will go forward and do that.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. At that time, Mr. Speaker, there was a partisan defense of farm subsidies. I am happy to report that yesterday on the floor that partisan defense crumbled, and we had legislation, amendments being offered by both sides of the aisle which sought to break through the hypocrisy of corporate welfare for agribusiness. Common sense is on the rise, you know. We should be pleased. In this great democratic process, common sense raises its head from time to time, and common sense is our greatest hope. If this great democracy of ours is to endure, and I think it will endure, because of the fact that built into the structure are opportunities for common sense to come forward. I think the fact that our legislators and Members of Congress have gone home and spent several weeks at home had something to do with the fact that there was a breakthrough and a recognition that agriculture, the agribusiness, is corporate welfare, and that we should get off the dole. Billions of dollars down the drain, billions of dollars down the drain, in contradiction of marketplace, the marketplace economy; a command structure similar to the Soviet Union's command structure. The problem is the Soviet bureaucrats would end it. But there is still much work to be done. Until we are able to deal with farmers' home loan mortgages and other farm loans out there to the tune of $10 billion or $11 billion that are going to be forgiven, we have only begun to scratch the surface. I think we ought to cancel the Whitewater hearings, cancel the hearings on the travel office at the White House, cancel the hearings on the travel problem at the Department of Energy. I do not say there is not a problem there. I am not going to get involved in trying to deal with the complexities of the White House travel office and the fact that the spoils system, which has been practiced for the entire time this Nation has existed, went into motion in a very crude kind of way, and has become a big, big, problem. Taxpayers' money should no longer be spent to probe the travel office at the White House, when we have $10 billion or $11 billion outstanding in the farm loan programs. We ought to focus. The same committee responsible for investigating and probing in great detail the travel office problems, scandal, whatever they want to call it, that same committee is responsible for oversight for the Department of Agriculture loan programs. In fact, I first learned of the great outstanding number of delinquent loans in the farmers' home loan mortgage program and other programs as a member of that committee sitting there and hearing them talk about it. I was almost certain that we would have a return of the people who were there from the Department of Agriculture to tell us more about all of those billions of dollars, all those billions of dollars of outstanding loans. It seems that there are certain places in our United States Government and our executive branch and here in Washington where billions of dollars misused, abused do not matter. You have $60 million at stake in Whitewater. The taxpayers have to shell out $60 million as a result of the collapse of the Whitewater bank, a savings and loan venture which, in the constellation of savings and loan operations, was tiny, you know. We had one that collapsed that owed the taxpayers $2 billion. The taxpayers had to bail it out for $2 billion. One in Denver, CO, almost $2 billion. Quite a few collapsed for almost $1 billion, another $900 million. We have a whole lot of savings and loan collapses that we have not even discussed that we ought to be really examining. But the committee chose to deal only with Whitewater for some reason. I said before I had a report, one of several reports that has been done on the savings and loan scandal, and one is the Department of Justice Financial Institution Fraud Special Report put out by the special counsel for financial institution fraud. And they give actual case histories in here, case highlights of things that happened during the saving and loan investigations and the kind of results that they got. There is a piece in here, a case history, on Charles Keating. It is called ``The High-Flying Financier.'' Charles Keating, sentenced to over 12 years in order to pay $122.4 million for costing the taxpayers $2 billion. Keating was sentenced to 12 years and ordered to pay $122.4 billion. And it goes on to tell in summary what happened to Keating. Then there are other examples of great amounts of money lost, and finally what happened in most cases, we lost the money as taxpayers and it was not recovered. Keating will stay in jail for less than 12 years, and when he gets out, he will find a way to pay some of his $122.4 million. I am sure he has money salted away in various places, and he will live happily ever after. But he is one of the few that was even prosecuted. He is certainly one of the very few in the billionaire category that received a jail sentence. So there is a lot of unfinished business that we should be addressing in Congress in order to deal with the fair dispensation of the taxpayers' money. I do not want to dwell on that too long. I just want to make the connection between the excesses in the agribusiness and the corporate welfare subsidies for agribusiness and the other excesses that our Government, we have permitted, and now common sense is moving to address. I mentioned common sense before, I think, in connection with the phenomenon that has happened in the Republican primaries. Normally I do not comment on the other party's primaries and I will minimize my comments. But the phenomenon of Pat Buchanan is everybody's business because Mr. Buchanan offers a very unusual development. A new dynamic has taken place within the Republican primary, and part of that dynamic relates to the fact that only Mr. Buchanan among the candidates has bothered to talk about what has been happening to workers in America, what is happening with respect to the average middle-class family. The Republican majority speaks incessantly about its concern for families. ``Families'' is a code word used over and over again in a thousand different ways. But when it comes to the economic security of families, the economic opportunity for families, what Mr. Buchanan has demonstrated is that there is a great vacuum. There is no discussion out there of the insecurity that families feel, that middle-class families now feel. I have a great proportion of my district of people who are poor, working-class people who were actually quite poor and they felt insecurity all their lives. In certain communities in this country, the Depression never went away. It has been there since 1930, and the pain and the struggle is there on an ongoing basis. But there are large numbers of middle-class families, both black and white and various ethnic groups, middle-class families who have been enjoying a measure of security. They worked at a plant 15 years. 20 years, they could look forward to staying there and retiring and being able to spend their old age comfortably. They could look forward to having their children come behind them and get similar jobs, and it went on for a couple of generations. But now the person has worked there for 15, 20 years, finds that there is a threat to their pension funds. They cannot even look forward to retiring without problems, or they are suddenly dismissed at just the point where they qualify for the pension funds. All kinds of tricks are played and that dream is shattered. Then many others find that they will not get close to the retirement age because the streamlining and downsizing has begun to take place in large corporate organizations. Streamlining, downsizing, is said to be necessary in order to make corporations more efficient, more effective. Streamlining and downsizing are necessary in order to maximize profits so that on Wall Street the stock offerings will be more attractive. Streamlining and downsizing accomplish all of those things, of course. Streamlining and downsizing is really seldom for the purpose of ending a structure, eliminating positions. Actually, they are going to hire new workers in most places. They are going to hire workers at much lower wages. They are going to hire workers that do not have seniority and have not accumulated certain benefits. Many of the downsizing and streamlining organizations are going to hire, rehire workers, but they are going to rehire them at much lower wage levels. Others are not going to rehire workers in the United States. They are going to hire workers in foreign countries. They are going to hire workers in Mexico. They are going to hire workers in Bangladesh. They are going to contract out to China certain parts of their processes. Whatever the reason, there is a great dislocation in the economy created as a result of the behavior of these corporations. The Democrats know it, Republicans know it. Members of Congress certainly know it. And yet we have not placed it high on the agenda. Oh, yes, there are some Members of Congress who have placed it high on the agenda. It is the leadership, it is the majority who have not. But the Progressive Caucus for some time has been talking about the need for a jobs program, a job creation program, a job training program. We have been talking for some time about that. We put legislation in. One of the first questions I was asked by my constituents was where is the Democratic program? Why doesn't somebody match Pat Buchanan's interests and his concern? Why doesn't somebody indicate that they understand that there is a wage gap, there is an income gap that keeps growing; that while 10 or 20 percent of Americans are making more than they made for great amounts, their incomes are escalating, they are getting more wealthy all the time. The rest of the 80 percent are in a stagnant position, they cannot gain on the cost of living. Cost of living is way ahead of them. Insecurity is there for a good reason. Those who have jobs are actually not able to maintain the standard of living they had before. Those who have jobs are very anxious about their ability to keep those jobs. We have been aware of this, and there are many voices raised that are concerned. Certainly David Bonior here in this House among the Democrats led the attack on NAFTA and the consequences that NAFTA would bring, and there were nearly 175 Democrats who consistently voted against all provisions related to NAFTA, and then they followed the same pattern with GATT. We understood that NAFTA and GATT were being stampeded through in order to guarantee that there was a minimum discussion of consequences. NAFTA and GATT, we knew, would bring problems. Not all of us. I think most of us were not trying to turn back the clock and back away from the globalization of the world's economy. Most of us were not trying to turn back the clock, as Pat Buchanan wants to do, and throw a ring around the United States, build walls, tariff walls, and resort to measures that are kind of crude and would maybe do more harm to the economy of this country as well as the world than they would do good. Not all of us, not most of us were concerned about those kinds of measures. We were concerned about the fact that the steamrolling of NAFTA and GATT would result in a dislocation for large numbers of American workers. We were concerned about the fact that nobody was willing to discuss building into the provisions for NAFTA and GATT some safety nets for workers in terms of education, in terms of opportunity. We were concerned about the fact that the technological revolution which rolls on, technological revolution which is fueled by the taxpayers' research and development efforts 20, 30 years ago, that that technological revolution would be to the benefit of a handful of people and that no provision would be made for the other people, the other Americans who certainly participated and were a critical part of the process of creating the technology which is so beneficial to the telecommunications industry and the computer industry and the information industry. We were concerned about the fact that human beings and human resources were the lowest thing on the list of the people that were pushing for the approval of NAFTA and the approval of GATT. We were right. The problems have only been compounded. And now as the problems are compounded and workers found an opportunity, middle-class people who are concerned found an opportunity to express it, even one election in New Hampshire, immediately we have some visibility for the issue. Immediately there is a discussion on ``Nightline,'' there is a discussion on all the Sunday talk shows, everybody suddenly has discovered there is a problem in America. There is a problem of anxiety. There is a problem of insecurity. There is a problem of seeing no effort to deal with the losers. There is a problem with the concept of inevitable losers. The people who negotiated GATT and the people who negotiated NAFTA will tell you, well, we knew there would be losers. There will be some workers who are going to lose their jobs, some entrepreneurs put out of business. There are going to be losers. What is happening now is that the losers are revolting and saying we did not volunteer to lose. We have not accepted the status of losers quietly. We are Americans. We helped to build this country. We helped to build this economy and we do not want to be thrown overboard casually by people who say there have to be some losers. Now, there are nations and there are economies, there are societies that do not accept the theory that there have to be losers. They do not accept that theory in Japan. You want to know the difference between the Japanese negotiators at the table dealing with GATT or dealing with bilateral trade agreements between the United States and Japan? The great difference is that every one of the negotiators from Japan knows that they are at the table to protect every strata of their society. They do not want to have losers. When they negotiate agreements, they are protecting small merchants, they are protecting categories of workers. The pattern of Japan has been quite pronounced. It is not a subtle thing anymore. Everybody knows that Japan negotiates to protect its own interest and it considers its human beings, the workers, the merchants, the small business people, the corporations, you know, but mainly the folks who need the most protection are the small business people. Consumer prices are very high in Japan. The price of a pear or an apple or a piece of fruit is very high. The price of rice is very high. You know, it is a commodity that everybody needs and uses. They keep certain prices high, and they keep certain things in place in order to guarantee that certain classes of people are not ever in need of a safety net. They erect barriers in terms of inspection of our products, in terms of licensing, in terms of requirements of safety. They do all kinds of things to keep our products from flowing in rapidly into their market, because they are protecting their people. They do not want losers. Japan probably does it better and has done it better than any other economy. But they certainly do it in France, they do it in Germany. The negotiators at the table who are negotiating GATT for all the other countries, or NAFTA for all the other countries, they made certain their people were protected. So we do not want to accept the premise that there have to be losers. The losers happen to live in my district. I do not want to be the district where the losers are. They have been losers for too long in the 11th Congressional District in New York. They have been losers for too long in Brownsville. They have been losers for too long in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They have been losers for too long. I would like to have a government dedicated to the proposition that we want to protect them as much as we want to protect corporate interests. So what I am saying is nothing new. We were aware of the problem, and we have introduced legislation. I myself introduced several pieces of legislation, and one of them I introduced at the request of the progressive caucus. The progressive caucus has worked on the problem of insecurity among workers, of dislocation of workers, lack of jobs, for some time, and we developed a whole set of legislation. One of the pieces that I was asked to introduce was the Job Creation and Invest in America Act of 1995, the first year of the 104th session of Congress. I introduced the Job Creation and Invest in America Act of 1995. That is there with a proposal for creating jobs in every area, for dealing with the needs that exist in our economy, for infrastructure changes, infrastructure improvement, surface transportation improvement, aviation improvements, railroads. We go into the nonphysical sector and deal with the need for postsecondary education training lifelong learning and the need to fund that and provide jobs in that area while you are providing more services, the need for early childhood, youth and families to be taken care of, the need to improve the health and environment. It was a comprehensive bill, came out to a lot of money. But at the same time we were preparing this bill, we read Japan had proposed a bill similar. It is a stimulus. It is a stimulus bill, a job creation, a job training bill, an education bill all wrapped in one. But overall it is a stimulus package. Japan introduced a stimulus package at the same time, and their economy is much smaller than ours, for $90 billion. They have introduced a $90 billion stimulus package, which was going to do similar things, focus on improving their infrastructure, because when they improve railroads and highways and airports, they know that it is going to redound to the benefit of the economy eventually anyhow. So it is not a waste. So Japan was doing something similar. But we were not without ideas here in Congress. The progressive caucus and myself have repeatedly discussed after the introduction of this bill ways in which some portion of this stimulus package might be introduced. There is a Federal Housing Trust Fund Act that I introduced which called for some new ways to get affordable housing by changing the way we finance housing, low-income housing, and it would create jobs as well as create housing. There is a Creative Revenues Act that I introduced, Economic and Educational Opportunities Act, several acts that I have introduced and other people have introduced which deal with education and deal with job training. And, of course, the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget focused primarily on opportunity, job opportunity, job training, and education. We had a 25-percent increase in the education budget bill into our Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget. We were pleased when the President announced that he, too, would make education a priority, and there is a great increase, I think, in the President's first 7-year budget. He had $47 billion in increases for job training and education over a 7-year period. I was quite pleased. I was shocked, then, when I found out, of course, just before we went on recess, that an agreement had been made for an extension, continuing resolution, which actually agreed to the cuts that the Republicans had proposed for certain critical education programs. They cut title I by $1.1 billion by saying that it had to come in at 75 percent; it could operate only at 75 percent of previous funding. That was a 25-percent cut. They cut Head Start. They cut other programs. The Summer Youth Employment Program is still a shadowy kind of commitment. We do not know exactly how much money is there for it, and I mention these programs over and over again because they are critical. They are very important. If we do not have job training programs, as meager as the Summer Youth Employment Program, job training and provision of income for the lowest-income families in the country, if we do not have that, then we are not moving at all to fill up the vacuum that Pat Buchanan has exposed. The least we could do is keep programs alive which exist already. The least we could do is to energize our job training programs that are already in existence while we try to convince the Congress and everybody related that we need a massive education program, we need a massive job training program, we need a massive undertaking to deal with the fact that we are in a transition. We need a program which deals with something as basic as minimum wage. You know, that is a tiny step. If we cannot get a massive response to the kind of dislocation and anxiety that exists, then certainly we ought to take a small step. The meager step of an increase in the minimum wage, common sense says that we ought to do that. All of the polls taken in this country have shown repeatedly that Americans favor an increase in the minimum wage. They want to move the minimum wage from $4.25 an hour up in various parts of the country; it varies as to how they want to move it. But the meager proposal, the basic rock-bottom, proposal made by Congressman Gephardt, our minority leader, that has also been endorsed by the White House, has been an increase of 45 cents an hour per year for 2 years, 90 cents an hour over a 2-year period. Now, the least we could do for our workers is to indicate that we recognize that $4.25 an hour is no way to try to earn a living in this present economy. That comes out to about $8,400, I think, a year for a person who is working 40 hours a week. And you bring home $8,400 gross pay, you cannot support a family on that. But common sense says we ought to change it. Why does the Congress not listen to common sense? When are we going to have a breakthrough. I am optimistic now. We had a breakthrough yesterday. Suddenly, we could see that corporate subsidy for agribusiness is bad, suddenly we do not want to face the American people again and try to convince them we should pay farmers who earn $100,000 or more, $50,000, for doing nothing. Suddenly, we made that break. I am optimistic. I think in the next 30 to 60 days we may have some real movement on a minimum wage increase. The power of common sense is pushing from the bottom. The power of common sense says that no legislator can stand before his constituents and make an argument with a straight face that the minimum wage should not be raised. I know there are some legislators, some Members of Congress who have said that the minimum wage will be raised ``over my dead body.'' There are others who said we cannot afford to raise the minimum wage because you are competing with the workers in Mexico, we are competing with workers in Bangladesh and China. Common sense says in this economy, if you are going to have some kind of semblance of order and law and justice, you ought to pay people a little bit more than $4.25 an hour. Common sense has broken through at the local level. There is an article here that states, and this is from the Wall Street Journal of Friday, February 23, ``Minimum wage issue heads to the ballot box. Supporters of an increase skirt the unfriendly Congress.'' What they are saying in this article in the Wall Street Journal on February 23, 1996, is that in towns and cities and States people are taking steps to increase the minimum wage. They are disgusted with the lack of concern and the failure to act on the part of Congress. So you have, in a place like California, a coalition of unions and community groups gathering signatures to place a measure on the November ballot that would raise the minimum wage, which is now $4.25, to $5 in March 1997 and $5.75 a year later. That is an issue being brought, an initiative being brought in California. In Idaho, the State AFL-CIO has filed an initiative to raise the minimum wage, now $4.25 an hour, by 50 cents for each of the 4 years beginning July 1, 1997. A separate bill to raise the minimum wage has been introduced in the State legislature. The AFL-CIO has filed the initiative. They are going to try to get the voters to do it. The State legislature has gone ahead in Idaho to file a bill to raise the minimum wage. In Minnesota, the State legislature is considering a measure to raise the minimum wage, now $4.25, to $5.35. In Missouri, the community group ACORN is gathering signatures for a State initiative in November that would raise the minimum wage, now $4.25, to $6.25 an hour in January 1997 and by at least 15 cents annually thereafter. In Montana, a coalition of labor and community groups is collecting signatures to place a proposal on the November ballot to raise the minimum wage, now $4.25, for all workers to $6.25 an hour by the year 2000. In Texas, a rare State in which cities hold authority over the minimum wage, Texas, the cities actually govern the minimum wage, signatures are being gathered in Texas for a November ballot initiative in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and El Paso to raise the base pay for all workers in those cities from $4.25 to as much as $6.25. In Washington, the State of Washington, Gov. Mike Lowry backed legislation raising the minimum wage from the current $4.90 to $5.30 an hour. But this month business interests killed the measure. Supporters are likely to counter the business killing of the measure with a ballot initiative for November. Common sense is breaking through. The people are forging forward to make this democracy work for all of the people. Common sense. There is every reason to be optimistic that common sense will prevail. It moves slowly, and there is a lot of suffering that takes place because we have people in power who have been elected by the people who do not have common sense. But common sense eventually breaks through. Common sense has broken through, and common sense prevails in a number of areas, like Medicare and Medicaid. The people who want to cut Medicare and Medicaid will do so at their own risk. The level of common sense is so great until they are likely to punish those who disobey the loss of common sense and persist in those cuts. We should not have to have a demagog like Pat Buchanan to raise the level of visibility for issues of this kind. We should not have to have a demagog like Pat Buchanan to bring to our attention the fact that here in Washington we are ignoring common sense. The Washington wisdom is stuck in the rut. The Washington wisdom is obsolete. Conventional wisdom here just does not seem to understand. The danger of having a Pat Buchanan as the general on the white horse riding out there to defend the interests of the middle class and the workers is great, because this is a general who is a deceptive general. He does not really care enough about the workers to provide the solutions to the problems that he highlights. Pat Buchanan has raised the issue of the income gap, but he does not want to deal with the problem of the minimum wage. He is not proposing a raise in the minimum wage. Unless he has done so within the last 24 hours, Pat Buchanan has not addressed the issue that we want a simple two-step increase in the minimum wage. He is not dealing with that. Pat Buchanan is not dealing with the fact that corporations are paying a very small percentage of the total tax burden, the income tax burden. Corporations now pay about 11.4 percent versus the tax burden borne by individuals, which is at 44 percent. He talks about corporations taking jobs overseas, which we applaud. We applaud him for his ability to command the media and make the media pay attention to the injustices and the foolishness, the wrecking of the economy that takes place as a result of taking jobs overseas while you do not deal with compensating workers, while you do not deal with the adjustments necessary and the kind of transition program that you need. Pat Buchanan does not really deal with the workers in this country in terms of the environmental laws that are necessary, in terms of the attack by his party on the Occupational Safety and Health Act. He does not deal with the need to guarantee that workers are safe. He does not deal with the Striker Replacement Act, the fact that the right to strike has been abrogated, almost wiped out, by the striker replacement phenomena taking place across the country where management replaces strikers. Although they have the right to strike, collective bargaining is a right under law, if the strikers can be replaced, how can we argue that they have a right to strike? So Pat Buchanan is not the answer. So I close by indicating that the hypocrisy of Mr. Buchanan when it comes to concern for individuals and concern for workers is revealed in his own statements. He has not denounced himself, he has not walked away from his own statements that have been repeatedly made. The people on the bottom are of no concern to Pat Buchanan. I have a number of quotes. I do not have time for all of them. In the days ahead we should pay attention to what Pat Buchanan has said about justice, we should pay attention about what Pat Buchanan has said about immigrants, about African-Americans, and understand that this general on a white horse will lead the troops into great danger. This general on a white horse does not care about the majority of American people. This general on a white horse waves a flag that is a hypocritical flag. Certainly when it comes to African-Americans, Pat Buchanan, according to the Daily News of October 1, 1990, made it quite clear where he stood. He was a White House advisor to President Nixon at that time, and in a memo to President Nixon about the visit to Coretta King, who was the widow, of course, of Martin Luther King, on the anniversary of the assassination, Pat Buchanan advised Nixon not to visit Mrs. King. He said a visit to Mrs. King would ``outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagog and perhaps worse. Others consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history.'' That quote appears in the New York Daily News on October 1, 1990. Buchanan has repeatedly insisted that Ronald Reagan did so much for affirmative action that civil rights groups no longer need to exist. Pat Buchanan said, ``George Bush should have told the NAACP Convention that black America has grown up, that the NAACP should close up shop, that its members should go home and reflect on John F. Kennedy's aspiration, `Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather ask what you can do for your country.' '' That quote is in his syndicated column of July 26, 1988. There are many, many quotes that show that Pat Buchanan is not the person to lead the people who are suffering in America, those who are insecure and uncertain. You cannot be led by a demagog who makes these kinds of statements and called Capitol Hill ``Israeli-occupied territory'' in the St. Louis Dispatch in October, 1990. He referred to Capitol Hill as ``Israeli-occupied territory.'' In a 1977 column, Buchanan said despite Hitler's antisemitism and genocidal tendencies, he was an ``individual of great courage. Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.'' The Guardian of January 14, 1992, is the source of that quote. I cite all of these because we are at least making the breakthrough on the issues. But the issues would be thoroughly confused, the issues that relate to working people, the issues of concerns to those people who are experiencing anxiety and who are the victims of the dislocation, the people suffering because our Government is guilty of great waste. Our Government is guilty of continuing corporate welfare for agribusiness, guilty of continuing to overfund the defense industry. Our Government is guilty of continuing to fund an overbloated CIA that loses $2 billion in its petty cash fund. Our Government is continuing to not pay attention to the kind of priorities that common sense has set forth. Common sense says we should put more money into education, we should not be cutting title I by $1.1 billion. We should not be cutting Head Start, we should not be dillydallying around with the Summer Youth Employment Program. Common sense says we ought to maximize our programs for educational opportunity. Common sense says we ought to maximize our job training programs. Common sense says we ought to pay attention to the fact that a technological revolution is going to cause a lot of suffering, and no one has a right to make a judgment that some people are expendable, that some people should be thrown overboard, that in the process of streamlining and downsizing, either the Government or in the private sector, human beings do not matter. Common sense says no. I am happy that common sense is on the rise. That common sense in the final analysis will save this democracy. This Nation will probably endure for 1,000 years because of the fact that there is a process built in which allows common sense to percolate and allows common sense to rise to the top. Ever so slowly the process takes place, but it is underway, and I think that it will have an impact; a revolution that is underway, pushed by the Republican majority, will hear from the people out there who will fall back on the wisdom of common sense. That common sense will prevail.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we have just passed the Agriculture Reauthorization Act that reauthorizes farm programs, and I think it is very important to take note of an unprecedented development. We had a bipartisan breakthrough of the truth in respect to agricultural subsidies and the agribusiness welfare program in America, and this deserves to be noted. Been a lot of frustration for a long time experienced by those of us who recognize the fact that the agribusiness among all the recipients of Federal subsidies was the one that was most hypocritical. It received great amounts of money for a small number of people, and they made lengthy speeches about getting government off their back and not being a part of a welfare program. So we finally made a breakthrough, I think, in that not any great changes were wrought. The bill that passed has a lot to be desired; the bill that passed is loaded with agribusiness welfare. The bill that passed is not a great reform measure, as it is touted to be. The bill that passed will probably be vetoed by the President. It pleases only segments of the population. Large numbers of the people are displeased with it. But the phenomena that took place on the floor of the House yesterday is what I am rejoicing about. I rejoice that truth broke through and there was a real honest discussion of the nature of the welfare subsidies that have fueled the agribusiness for the last three decades. The truth broke through, and there were very close votes. We almost got rid of several subsidies that were terrible and have been going on for some time, and, most important of all, it was not partisan. You know, you could find no pattern of partisan voting. Both sides supported a breakthrough of the truth. The debate was a real debate in that it was not locked into some kind of ideological dogma, it was not a ceremony where, no matter what you said, one side or the other side was not listening. I think for the first time, for one of the few times on the floor the House, the minds of some Members were actually changed by the course of the debate. So we rejoice that the agribusiness is now being honestly examined, and the agribusiness and the tremendous amount of corporate welfare that the agribusiness has enjoyed is now up for scrutiny. The common sense of the American people can be allowed to examine it, and I expect that you will have an escalating amount of concern from ordinary people that common sense is now going to take hold of the situation, and we are going to have a real look at the kind of money that has been poured into the agribusiness empires over the last three decades. Of course, you know most people do not realize that this bill, which was mainly focusing on cash subsidies and the details of crops and particular commodities, this bill does not even touch the surface of some of the most generous corporate welfare that has been heaped upon the agribusiness. We were not talking about the Farmers Home Loan Mortgages. We were not talking about a whole set of loan programs that feed into the farm economy. And they say farmers. I think it is a misnomer to call anything related to agriculture now on a large scale farmers. They are not farmers. It is agribusiness. The farmers long ago were moved from the land. You know when Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest Democrat probably in history, when Franklin Roosevelt conceived of the crop support programs and provided support for poor farmers across the Nation, if was very much needed and very much in order, and for a long time it did serve the purpose of keeping the family farm alive, allowing poor farmers to survive. It was very important. But long ago the agricultural subsidies ceased to keep family farms alive and provide help for those that needed it most. That ended a long time ago. That is not the case any more. It is a great business, a great corporate welfare program, and some of us have complained about it for years. It has a dual evil. The taxpayers are forced to pay for the agrabusiness program subsidies, the corporate welfare, on the one hand. On the other hand, the fact that they pay for them to keep the prices up means that the people in other parts of the country that are not farmers pay higher prices for foods and commodities than they would if they were not propped up with special programs. We had a command and control structure for agriculture second to none. I think the Soviet Union bureaucrats would probably envy the command and control structure of the Department of Agriculture and how agriculture over the years has evolved into this kind of protective command structure with farmers home loan mortgages and all kinds of goodies being fed to farmers and agribusinesses and establishing their own standards. We had situations were $11 billion over a 5-year period, $11 billion in loans, were forgiven under the farmers home loan mortgages program. When you try as a citizen or as a Congressman to find out exactly what criteria was used and who authorized the giveaway of $11 billion of American money, you know, they forgave the loans over a 5-year period to the tune of $11 billion, and the process of forgiving, writing down, adjusting is still going on. We have delinquent loans outstanding right now related to agriculture which reached the proportion of $11 billion or $12 billion, more than $10 billion, right now outstanding in delinquent loans for agriculture. The giveaway took place more than 5 years ago, so that brought down the outstanding delinquencies greatly, but it was as high as $23 billion at one time. I have some statistics here. They are not always easy to read, because the way they give it to you, they do not clearly explain themselves. You have to read between the lines. The various farm loan programs, they call farm programs direct loan fund activities. This is a report that took me some time to get. It is still very incomplete. At one point the outstanding delinquencies were up to $27 billion, as high as $27 billion, the outstanding delinquent loans. They forgave a lot of these loans, forgave them. If you forgave $11 billion worth of loans in New York City to homeowners and the owners of property and buildings, that would be a great boost to the economy of the neighborhoods. I find it hard to conceive of the Government giving away $11 billion to any group, but this was done and it has never been discussed. Congress, I thought, would at least have hearings on it, when we first brought it up as a result of an article which appeared on the first page of the Washington Post, which talked about the $11 billion which had been forgiven in loans. They talked about four or five of the recipients of the loans that had been forgiven. They talked about the fact that they were millionaires. Several were multimillionaires that have been the recipients of this generosity of the American taxpayers. I thought we would have hearings. I thought--you know, Whitewater is dealing with $60 million. We are talking about $11 billion. I thought we would be inundated with hearings, the Committee on Agriculture, the Committee on Ways and Means, the Committee on Appropriations. I thought all the committees would want to know how was $11 billion of the taxpayers' money forgiven, and why were millionaires involved in receiving these loan forgivenesses, the generosity of the loans, and what was the criteria. You still find it sort of like the savings and loan swindle. It is one of those things that got swept quickly under the rug. All our numerous media outlets and commentators and analysts, all of a sudden they just lost interest and it never surfaced. To this day it has not surfaced. So anything related to agriculture has been sort of mysterious, and it has sort of been out of the reach of ordinary people. For that reason I was quite pleased that we made the breakthrough, and yesterday for the first time the Congress came to grips with the corporate welfare program that feeds agribusiness. We ought to be applauded. It was a bipartisan activity. I hope that it certainly continues. My frustration began some time ago, and I thought I would go back and take a look at some of the things that I had said over the past. One of the items that I have placed in the Congressional Record to lament my pain and suffering as a result of watching the agricultural lobby and the agricultural complex ride herd over us, I went back and pulled it out of the Congressional Record. On July 20, 1990, I think it was the day after, I was very frustrated when I saw on the floor a bill which was a very reasonable bill which called for farmers, agribusiness earning more than $100,000 a year to be dropped from the subsidy program. I thought that my colleagues who were interested in saving money and streamlining Government and guaranteeing that the waste would be removed and that every dollar taxpayers pay would be spent wisely and efficiently and effectively, I thought my colleagues would rally to that; but, you know, when the gentleman from New York, Chuck Schumer and I proposed the bill, we were shocked with the number of votes that we received. As a result of that, I wrote my lament. I am just going to re-read that, because today is February 29, 1996. This was written July 20, 1990. I spoke at that time. I am quoting from my entry into the Congressional Record: ``Mr. Speaker, during the deliberations on the Schumer-Armey amendment,'' and it is very interesting that at that time it was also a bipartisan attempt, and of all people, you had the gentleman from New York, Chuck Schumer, the New Yorker, on one end of the spectrum, with the gentleman from Texas, Dick Armey, honestly waging war against waste in the U.S. Government through the agriculture program. I said: ``Mr. Speaker, during the deliberations on the Schumer-Armey amendment to the Food and Agriculture Resource Act of 1990 (H.R. 3950), I joined with a number of other colleagues in seeking to convince the Congress that the time has come to use common sense and make some reasonable changes in the farm subsidy program. Although numerous changes are needed in the obsolete subsidy formulas, the amendment proposed only one small correction. Farmers earning more than $100,000 in adjusted gross income would be dropped from the subsidy program and would no longer be eligible for a government check of up to $50,000. ``Despite the fact that the authors of the amendment could prove that no family farmers would be hurt; despite the fact that less than 3 percent of the present acreage would be impacted by the change; despite the fact that it was demonstrated that the people in greatest need within our country--the children, the homeless, and the unemployed--are not eligible for $50,000 government checks; despite these and many other illuminating facts, the Agriculture Committee refused to accept the amendment. On a floor vote, the committee was overwhelmingly supported by the Members of Congress. ``* * * it is obvious that we have learned nothing from the pattern of massive waste in military spending and the monstrous giveaways to the savings and loan crooks. ``There was a clear statement to the electorate of America. Let the people suffer but we have to do our deals.'' That was the statement. I offered the following as a concession speech to the powerful Agriculture Committee, and I added a little rap comment here which I call Let the People Suffer. Let the People Suffer (A concession speech to the powerful Agriculture Committee) Let the people suffer! But we got to do our deals When hungry babies holler Make them swallow bitter pills. We got to do our deals: Family farmers are really quite rare But lawmakers never despair We let millionaires profit From the myth that farmers are there. Let the people suffer! Subsidize fat farmers Guarantee corrupt banks Cut kids' anti-viral vaccinations But we must maintain our tanks. Let the people suffer! They fully understand Why all our foreign embassies Are built to look so grand. Let the people suffer! Let the children feel the pain Government can't do it all, So leave the homeless in the rain. Let the people suffer! But we have to do our deals Leadership lacking strong wills Rule against creative minds Then stumble into old binds This budget is stale stew Nothing is really new Our current game Is still insane The present message Is too much the same: Let the people suffer! But we have to do our deals.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, that was the result of my frustration on July 20, 1990. I am happy to report that some movement has taken place since the awesome power of the Committee on Agriculture came down on that amendment on that day before July 20, on July 19. The agriculture lobby came down and squeezed the opposition to death. I think we got less than 60 votes for that amendment, which said simply that any farmer which had an adjusted gross income of $100,000 would not be eligible for the subsidy program. Then again on March 7, 1995, I wrote a piece, placed a piece in the Congressional Record, which also reflected my continuing frustration over the power of the agribusiness lobby and the agribusiness empire, the agribusiness industrial complex. On that day, Tuesday, March 7, 1995, I said: ``Mr. Speaker, American agribusiness is one of the most successful industries on the face of the earth. Due to the vision and foresight of the Congress which enacted the legislation which created the land grant colleges, the agricultural experiment stations, and the county agents, government research and development made it possible for our farmers to leap way ahead of the rest of the world. No other Nation's agricultural industry is even close to the U.S. when it comes to farm output and efficiency. Let us applaud the Department of Agriculture and all of the nameless workers who over the years have done such a magnificent job in supporting our farmers. ``But now, Mr. Speaker, most of that work has been done. The mission has been accomplished. We have a monumental success and we can relieve the taxpayers of the burden of helping the agriculture industry, especially the rich corporate farmers. Let's have a means test and from now on let's support only the few remaining poor farm families. Let's stop the indiscriminate subsidies. Let's end the crop insurance. Let's stop the special mortgages. Let's leave the marketplace alone and end the crop subsidies and price supports. Let's get the fat farmers off the dole. The time has come to drastically downsize the Department of Agriculture. We must end farm welfare as we know it. We owe it to the American taxpayers. In this Congress let us work hard to get fat farmers off the dole.'' The following poem summarizes and conveys the seriousness of the situation. I call it ``Farmers on the Dole.'' Farmers on the Dole Republican patriots Come play your role Keep fat farmers On the dole Helping cuddly honey bees Coddling cattle grazing fees Meat a city orphan Never eats Dole for welfare Dole for cheats Congress sink your fork Deep into Republican pork Hypocrisy over all Drives you up the wall O beautiful spacious skies Small town editorials Festering full of lies Farmers on the dole Farmers on the dole Hi-ho the dairytake Rich farmers on the dole Decades over And over it repeats Dole for welfare Dole for cheats The story's never told About farmers on the dole Seeds not sown Wheat not grown Plow the dollars Deep in the dirt Hide the shame Cover hypocrisy's hurt Farmers on the dole Farmers on the dole Confess to free money's role Rich farmers on the dole Mortgage the barn Until it drops Timid taxpayers Insure the crops Rural swindlers High on the hog Food for the homeless Thrown to the dog The story's never told About farmers on the dole Republican patriots Come play your role Keep fat farmers On the dole.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, let me just read a few items from this article. I will not read it all. 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 Deutsch, 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. I do not know how it can be an excellent organization; if they cannot keep track of their money any better than that, I do not have any faith in anything else they are doing. I doubt there is great competence anywhere else if you cannot keep track of your books. If you lose $2 billion, then how many other blunders and errors have been made, is the question. Any American citizen can ask that question and be on sound ground. Common sense should ask that question. But here we are praising these people. They run an excellent agency, except they lost $2 billion in their petty cash fund. A Government official close to Mr. Deutsch, who is the head of the CIA, said ``The intelligence chief had lost confidence in the officials' ability to manage the reconnaissance office's secret funds.'' That is the understatement of the year, that they lost confidence. The office is a secret Government contracting agency that spends $5 billion to $6 billion a year. It is a secret, so you do not know exactly how much. They run the Nation's spy satellite program. The auditors told Mr. Deutsch 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 surplus in its ledgers have gone unreported. I will not read anymore. I commend you to the New York Times of February 27, 1996. This is happening in your Government. This is one of the pieces of Government that conventional Washington wisdom has said should not be downsized, should not be streamlined. The era of big Government lives on in the CIA. I want the $2 billion that has been discovered to go to education, to job training, to the summer youth employment program. Washington obsolete out-of-step reasoning says the income gap is not important. The minimum wage is not important. The minimum wage proposal is on the table. We have a piece of legislation which is sponsored by the minority leader, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt] and I am cosponsor, but at last count we did not have all of the Democrats on it, so I cannot really criticize the majority of Republicans for not supporting the minimum wage bill until we get all of the Democrats on it. A large number of Democrats are not supporting an increase in the minimum wage. The bill says that we shall raise the minimum wage by 45 cents per hour over a 2-year period, twice; a total of 90 cents an hour over a 2- year period, so we will move from $4.25 to 90 cents more. It is a minimum, a meager effort to move forward in an era when the income gap is growing. In an era when wages are stagnant, we cannot even agree to move the minimum wage. NAFTA, GATT, all these things were quickly moved through the process, the legislative process. There was a minimum of public discussion of what it means to have Mexican workers making $1 an hour in a job in which other people make $10 an hour; what it means to have Mexican plants not have to comply with environmental standards, while American plants have to comply. All of that was rushed through. Suddenly Pat Buchanan raises the question, and it is now on the radar screen, and common sense says we ought to discuss it. Regardless of how you feel about Mr. Buchanan, you ought to discuss it. Pat Buchanan's bombshell has shattered the smugness and serenity of Washington conventional wisdom. There is an economic revolution, and it is fueled by rapidly escalating technology changes. A global economy is being created. The problem is that losers have not volunteered to be sacrificed. Everybody says there must be some losers. Now we have a revolt of the losers. Losers want to vote for somebody else, somebody who is willing to talk about their dilemma, their problem. Why should losers accept their fate quietly? Why do losers have to be losers when we could have a transition process where we have education programs and job training programs which help people through the period where downsizing, streamlining, has taken place and all these technology changes are taking place? The Buchanan media domination over the last few days has certainly captured attention of all sectors. People in my district who have no use for Mr. Buchanan and his racist, anti-Semitic opinions want to listen to him when he talks about the effects of NAFTA and the effects of GATT. The commonsense questions are being raised by the people in my district and many others. They wanted to say, ``Why aren't you doing something about the fact that so many workers are losing their jobs, and there is no job training for them? Why aren't you doing something about providing some kind of help for these people?'' Those are the questions that are being asked, and I have answers. We are. We are attempting to. We do not have the high visibility of media star Pat Buchanan or Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, but the Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, we have legislation there. The legislation is there to call for a stimulus program that would have job training and get us through this transition period. Nobody is a genius, and nobody proposes to know all the answers as to where we are going to come out after this technology global economy revolution takes place. We cannot predict that. We can come up with programs that help human beings get through the process, and we have legislation that is proposed. In the Congressional Black Caucus budget, the alternative budget that was put on the floor of this House, the two areas that were increased were education and job training. The proposals are there. They have been offered. They are still there, but no consideration by the leadership. The majority Republican Party controlling this House does not want to make these considerations. Maybe the high visibility we have gained through Mr. Buchanan's candidacy, maybe that high visibility will at least stimulate some discussions of an increase in the minimum wage. Maybe it will at least stimulate some discussion of a minimum job training program that might move us forward a little bit. But we are grateful. God and the American political process work in mysterious ways. We are grateful for this high visibility that the problems have been given. Out of the mouths of racists and anti-Semites some common sense can be heard. This is a great secret that is not so secret among demagogs and demagoguery. Demagogs know that you have to make some sense to people. You have to show common sense. Mr. Buchanan shows common sense. Demagogs know that you have to address some practical, real, concrete problem. You have to do that. Demagogs know that you have to pretend to care about people's suffering. You have to pretend, at least. Demagogs know this. So this demagog is raising the high visibility, and for that reason we are grateful. We are not grateful enough to follow a person who has a whole history of anti-Semitic statements, a whole history of racist statements. We will not be carried away, but the issues have been raised. The Washington conventional wisdom has been shaken. We will go forward to try to be positive about filling the vacuum that we have refused to recognize up to date. We should support workers. We should make certain that there are no losers that suffer unnecessarily. We should have a transition program that we solidly back in order to carry forward our economy and all the people in our economy.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we are returning to session after several weeks of being able to remain in our districts and intermingle with the people who voted to put us here, and that is a very good phenomenon. It is one that I am certain that every Member has benefited from greatly. I have certainly benefited from it. I think it is very important to have the opportunity to allow the common sense of our constituents to irrigate the deliberative legislative process that takes place back here in Washington. Common sense is a shorthand expression for, I guess, wisdom of the people. It is the wisdom of the people that we absorb when we go back home, and the wisdom of the people is very much needed to counteract the Washington conventional wisdom, which is very much stuck in a rut. The Washington conventional wisdom, and I speak of a bipartisan wisdom, there is a lot of agreement here on some things that represent conventional wisdom that certainly needs to be challenged by ordinary common sense. I think that we recently have experienced a phenomenon with respect to the Republican primaries that has certainly placed common sense on the radar screen. The rise of media star Pat Buchanan, a candidate for the Presidency, has certainly lifted certain basic issues into an area of high visibility. On the radar screen you have a discussion of certain issues that Washington conventional wisdom has refused to recognize. Problems that just were not accepted as being problems are now being discussed. So the conventional wisdom has been shaken up, and that is good. God and American politics work in very mysterious ways. If some issues which deserve to be projected on to the center of the stage are projected by a conservative, rightwing Republican candidate running for President, then so be it; some good can come out of any set of circumstances. The leadership here in Washington is stuck in a rut and that is very dangerous because when leaders, in their conventional wisdom, refuse to move off dead center because of the fact they are leaders and have great power, it is very dangerous. It is all right if my grandmother gets an ornery notion and refuses to budge, or my neighbor down the street who has certain odd ways wants to go off on his tangent, you know. That is an individual kind of thing that really won't hurt anybody. But when we get stuck in a rut and refuse to recognize certain problems here in Washington, it can do great harm, it can cause great suffering. The same is true, of course, across the world. When you have leadership in command of nations, leadership in command of armed forces, leadership in command of MiG fighter planes, you can have a great deal of harm done when that leadership is stuck in a rut in terms of their own thinking. Fidel Castro represents that kind of leadership, stuck in a rut and very dangerous. You had a situation that occurred which is something out of a bygone era. You do not expect MiG planes to be sent out to shoot down unarmed planes that are part of a peaceful protest. Yes, it was a protest. Yes, it was civil disobedience. Because they were probably violating the airspace of Cuba, the planes were shot down by Castro's MiGs. Yes, they knew what they were doing. It was a civil disobedience act in the air. Any civil rights veteran, any person who has gone through the 1960's, as I have, knows that you take a chance. You take a risk when you set out on a civil disobedience venture, but you do not assume that the very worst is going to happen. Yes, Bull Connor ordered the civil rights marchers in Birmingham to get off the streets, and maybe he was the law and the order there. He was a commissioner and they were disobeying him. So they were disobeying the law and he set dogs upon them and he set fire hoses upon them. But Bull Connor had machine guns, and Bull Connor had rifles, and he could have shot them down. He did not go that far. Yes, Gandhi against the British in India certainly angered a large number of military-minded British commanders and commissioners and so forth. They did put him in jail and they did all kinds of things to his followers, but they did not bring in the machine guns and shoot them in cold blood. Civil disobedience is a risk. You take a gamble, but you assume that in a civilized society, you will be punished but the punishment will not be death. What Castro and his MiGs have done is committed cold- blooded murder against people who were engaging in civil disobedience. You do not have to agree with the civil disobedience or not. It is not for us to pass judgment in order--on the action and the politics of it. It was murder no matter how you put it, unnecessary cold-blooded murder that belongs to another era. You talk about a new world order, you hope that we really have a new world order. The new world order involves some new kind of thinking where nobody would murder in cold blood a group of people who were conducting a civil disobedience action and that has happened. So Castro and his leaders in Cuba, Castro and the pilots of the MiGs are stuck in a time bind. They are very dangerous. They are in another era. That is the storm trooper mentality. Very dangerous. There is no way you can justify. Yes, you commit civil disobedience, some punishment is going to happen. But here it was murder. So my point is that it may not be that the stakes are as high, and the immediate murder is not the problem when we commit errors here in Washington, but we are causing a great deal of harm and a great deal of suffering because we just refuse to accept certain obvious premises. We refuse to accept the fact that there is a tremendous income gap in America and it is getting wider and wider. We refuse to accept the fact that wages are stagnated even among those lucky enough to have jobs. Even among middle class people with college degrees, wages are stagnating. We refuse to accept the fact that there is a great deal of anxiety among people who have college degrees and are in middle- management jobs, technical jobs, because they are finding that the layoffs and the streamlining and the downsizing affects them, too. It is a time of great anxiety for good reason. At the same time, we see the anxiety being created by the insecurity. We see the stagnation at the other end of the pole, at the Wall Street level. We see the executives making salaries that are larger and larger, you know, now 200 times the average worker's salary is what the CEO's are making. We see tremendous profits being made overnight by new information industries that are capitalizing on technology that has been created by the entire society, the technology that is used by Netscape and a few of these other information giants who overnight went public on Wall Street and they become billionaires just because it is known among the people who know about information technology and technological communication, telecommunications, they know that these efforts are going to pay off in the near future. They are going to pay off and they are going to pay off big. Tremendous amounts of money being made at the same time others are suffering and this insecurity is being increased. We refuse to recognize that as a fact here, we refuse to address that. We have gone out and negotiated agreements on the world trade stage. GATT was negotiated. Then closer to home, we had NAFTA negotiated. Yes, it may be true, I voted against NAFTA, I voted against GATT. If I had to make the vote again, I would do the same thing again, but it was not because I am against free world trade. It is not because I do not recognize that we have a global economy taking place and that we cannot afford to build walls around ourselves and expect to survive or to be leaders in that global economy. I recognize all that. You cannot stand in the road and stop progress. I recognize that we had to move. But the problem is when we tried to get some kind of reasonable attachments, some reasonable built-in processes that would take care of the fact that there was going to be a great dislocation in the work force, there is continuing, continuing problems that must be addressed in terms of loss of jobs, retraining, loss of security, all kinds of things which could have been addressed in the preparation of the NAFTA and the GATT agreements. We could have had side legislation which dealt with problems that we knew were going to result. We were asking for some kind of humane approach to the debris that would be created by this great revolution. It is a revolution that is underway now, a revolution which is an economic revolution. And in revolutions, somebody is going to suffer. I was at a conference, a seminar in Canada last summer, and there were large numbers, a significant number of people there who were there to discuss trade, world trade, the impact upon the United States' economy and workers, and some of them were from the current administration, some of them had participated in the negotiation of the GATT and NAFTA agreements. And repeatedly you kept hearing the phrase there are going to be some losers. You cannot avoid having losers. And I recognize that. It is a fact of life. You are going to have some losers in a great upheaval, an economic revolution. But they would say there are going to be some losers, and they would shrug their shoulders as if so, you have to have some losers. There was no sympathy for the losers. There was no understanding that government has a duty to try to minimize the losses. Government has a duty to care enough about people to want to take a program which provides the necessary resources to get people through this transition with a minimum amount of dislocation and a minimum amount of suffering. We have that conventional wisdom which locks into yes, there are going to be losers and, you know, we can not do much about it. Yes, we have to move forward and there is going to be some suffering, some people have to be thrown overboard, and our answer is no. You can have GATT, you can have NAFTA and you can make it a humane step forward instead of a step backwards where the winners take everything and there are so many losers. I will return to that in a minute, but I think I would like to cite another example of being--of where the leadership in Washington is stuck in a rut. There is a general acceptance here that the era of big government is over, that government automatically is a monster and, therefore, if you downsize government, you have created some kind of new public good. I do not accept that premise. The era of big bureaucracy ought to be over. The era of bureaucracies fumbling and stumbling, and bureaucracies that have lost their purpose, their sense of purpose, should be over, but we should not back away from the era of governmental commitment. A government must be a guardian of the people who are in harm's way. The people who need government should have government there, the workers who are caught in the middle of the road as the steamroller of technological change comes down. As the steamroller of the global economy comes down, those workers desire to have government as a guardian. Government, the era of big government ought to be certainly treated across the board in some kind of uniform way. If we really were serious about ending the era of big government and we really downsized on a sincere and reasonable level and a sincere and reasonable way, then you will be talking about downsizing the Pentagon and downsizing the CIA, and if you were downsizing all those humongous, monstrous agencies that have lost their reason for being, then you would generate funds in that process of downsizing those agencies which would be available. The funds would be available then for the job training, for the education, for the transition, the necessary transition items, necessary transition programs and projects that would allow people to adjust to the new age of information and the age of technology, age of telecommunications. But the wisdom here is that big government is over, the era of big government is over, but it is a phony statement. The era of big government is not over. The Pentagon is as big as it ever was. The majority, Republican majority in the Congress, insisted on adding $6 billion to the Pentagon budget. I understand they are building new buildings and new facilities. The CIA is as big as it ever was. Recently, the CIA discovered that it has a slush fund, a petty cash fund of $2 billion that they did not know they had. So you know, big government is over in the area that helps people. Big Government may be over in AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. They want to cut down on that. Big Government may be over, they would like to see it end in the area of Medicaid and cut back on the health care that is available for poor people. But on the other hand, the Big Government goes on and on and on in areas that are considered highly profitable by the Members of the Republican majority. If they were just sincere, we could downsize across the board and accumulate funds that could deal with the real problems that Mr. Buchanan's campaign has inadvertently kicked to the top of the agenda. There is another Washington, piece of Washington conventional wisdom that is ridiculous and needs to be challenged, and that is that States can do it better. Block grants and State control is suddenly some kind of virtue in league with the 10 Commandments. I never heard States praised so much as the fountains of good government. This runs contrary to all the history that we can dig up for practically every State. The history of State government is littered with scandals and inconsistencies and incompetence. State government gave us the problem of young men going to the draft in World War I and World War II who were physically not fit to fight, you know, because of the fact that they had not been given free lunches, those poor people who needed them, had been malnourished, maltreated, no health services. State government gave us that. State government gives us waste year after year of monumental proportions. In New York State, for example, State government is at an all-time low. State government is being led by the administration, happens to be a Republican administration, a Republican administration that has tried to turn the State of New York into a giant clubhouse. The executive branch of government is acting as if it is running a giant clubhouse. They are going to move State facilities around and State functions around in ways which accommodate their loyal constituency. The way you hand out patronage to the clubhouse, they are going to seek to hand out State services and State agencies as if they were a giant clubhouse. And they had the right to reward their workers by handing them that agency or handing them a hospital or handing them some set of functions in their particular area and taking it away from another area. The government of New York State has proposed to move certain facilities out of the State capital. Why do you have a State capital if it is not efficient and effective to have all of the pertinent services, administrative agencies grouped together. But he is going to take part of the State capital functions and move them to his home area of Poughkeepsie, NY and put them in facilities there because that is where his constituency is. Those are the people who voted for him and he wants to build up the economy of the area where he came from. And he is going to do this in a 4-year period, sort of throw the whole State government out of kilter by seeking to reward his loyal supporters while he punishes the people in the Albany area, the area of the capital, because they did not vote for him in as large numbers as people in Poughkeepsie voted for him. It is an obvious move. Everybody is talking about it. What baffles me most is how and why nobody has brought a court suit or threatened to arrest the Governor. I do not know how you can so blatantly and so openly misuse public resources and be allowed to remain in office or not be challenged. That is going on now at the level of New York State government. This Governor has gotten ahead of the Contract With America in many ways. He is already trying to change the standards in nursing homes, and he has already proposed a giant cut in Aid to Families with Dependent Children. He is already going after the poor with a vengeance. So he is ahead of the Contract With America and proving just how horrible the fate of the people who need government most will be under State governments. So block grants to the States and State control of certain programs will only mean horror stories and great suffering for large numbers of people. Yet, the wisdom here seems to be give it to the States, give it to the States. The Governors have spoken. The Governors are unified. The Democratic Governors are with the Republican Governors on Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The Democratic Governors are in agreement with the Republican Governors on Medicaid. Well, this Nation was not constructed, the Government was not constructed the way it is for no good reason. If they wanted Governors to legislate nationally, it would have been simple to have the Governors of all the States compose the legislature of the United States, but that is not the case. The Governors are now very greedy. They do not want to wait until the power is handed down to them. They have taken the initiative, become very aggressive, and now they want to take over the function of Congress. So the Governor of Montana, the Governor of Maine, the Governor of Nevada, States with very little in terms of population, they have very few people, so they have very little representation in Congress. We have New York, Texas, Florida, California with large numbers of Representatives in Congress, according to population. That is the way the Constitution constructed it. The Constitution may need some correction and adjustment with respect to the Senate, because we do not have one man vote in the other body. It is every State has two votes regardless of its population. That itself is something that ought to be on the agenda for the next decade to deal with. But, certainly, there is a good sense, common sense counterbalance in terms that the House of Representatives is proportioned according to population. So how can 50 States, one Governor from each State, usurp the Congress' right and begin to make legislation with each one of those Governors having an equal vote? They broadcast this all over. We agree, all of us agree, all of us agree. The Governor of Montana agrees with the Governor of Maine who agrees with the Governor of New York. We are here, and we are here representing constituencies and congressional districts. And we reserve the right to make the decisions ourselves and not have the Governors usurp the powers of the Congress. Let them wait until this process runs its course. Let us see how much power we are going to hand down to the States. Let us see how the people respond. Let us not assume that the Governors are already in charge. We have leadership stuck in a rut here in Washington. We have leadership stuck in a rut in Albany, in New York, and lots of other State capitals. We have leadership stuck in a rut in New York City. The mayor of New York City insists on continuing to cut education programs. Over and over again he goes after education, creating more and more problems in a city that cannot survive unless it has a more educated population. The city is losing jobs. The only hope is in the area of high, technology jobs, telecommunications. Only educated people are going to keep the city of New York alive. They mayor of New York City continues to make cuts. He is stuck in a rut in terms of how to approach a budget and how to set priorities. The police, they will not be cut. The police represent a great deal of inefficiency because you have a lot of police who are doing the work that civilians should be doing. We were moving in the direction of civilianization of the police department, but because of political considerations, the mayor cuts education while he bloats the salaries of the police department who ought to be out fighting crime. And you could replace them with lower paid civilian workers. So we have this phenomenon of people in responsible positions, when they are stuck in a rut and their conventional wisdom is all that you have to work with. They cause great suffering and great destruction. The Washington obsolete, out-of-step reasoning sets a pace for all the others. Washington is so off base in the last year, since this Congress began, until they knock everything else out of kilter. Other jurisdictions, States and municipalities pick up. Washington serves as a negative role model, and we have a great deal of incompetence, blundering, dishonesty, bullying oppression, waste, right down the line as a result of the example set here in Washington. We waste money on a monumental scale. Whitewater hearings, for example. I understand there is an effort to keep the Whitewater hearings going on indefinitely. Whitewater is as great an example as you will want to find of a complete turnover of an official government function to a partisan party consideration. If the Whitewater hearings are continued, they certainly should be paid for out of the Republican Party's campaign funds, because it is a political campaign that is being waged through an official congressional hearing. If Whitewater really was sincere, if Whitewater had any credibility and Whitewater meant anything other than a way to harass the President by the other party, if Whitewater was really focused on savings and loans scandals, then I would be the first to applaud Whitewater. Because if ever there was a piece of American history that has been smothered and kept out of the view of the public, it is the savings and loan scandal. Whitewater is cited by the people who are conducting the Whitewater hearings as being very important because I think $60,000, $60 million, I have forgotten, 60 million, 60,000, in a minute you will understand why neither one impresses, 60 million is considerably more than 60,000. That is a lot of money. Whitewater lost that, the bank lost it. There is nothing that says the President or the First Lady had anything to do with those losses, but it is a good idea to have savings and loans, banks investigated and to have the spotlight thrown on the savings and loan scandal. As I have said many times here on this floor, the savings and loan scandal was the biggest swindle in the history of civilization. In the history of mankind, never have so many gotten away with so much and walked off scot-free as in the savings and loan scandal. If you were serious about investigating the savings and loan scandal, if you were serious about exposing to the American people the great cost of the savings and loan scandal, then you would have a hierarchy of hearings. You would start with hearings related to the banks that lost the most money. If you were serious, you would start with Mr. Keating's bank. Mr. Keating has so much exposure and he did so many rotten things beyond what other savings and loans crooks did. After he ran out of FDIC funds, funds that were guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Mr. Keating had his people go out and swindle senior citizens of their money, and it had no FDIC backing. So the State of California went after him in such an obvious way that the U.S. Government had to fall in line and go after him. So Keating and his whole savings and loan empire, they got exposed; and Keating, for a liability of a minimum of $2 billion--you will see why $60 million was so-so, did not register well in my mind--when you start talking about $2 billion, you can see why Whitewater's $60 million pales in comparison. Two billion dollars, what Keating's empire cost at a minimum. The FDIC had to cough up that much money in order to bail out the banking empire that Keating had thoroughly looted. So Keating got 12 years in jail. With good behavior he will soon be out. But at least he got some jail time. At least it was exposed. So Keating's S&L scandal ought to be investigated a little bit more, and we ought to have hearings about that just to let the American people know what the dimensions of it were, that if you steal $2 billion, you will get 12 years in jail. If you are the victim of a great deal of publicity, if six Senators are accused of helping you, then you can't, you will end up getting 12 years in jail. At least the American people ought to clearly have the Whitewater hearings people throw Whitewater aside and focus on that, No 1. And then banks that lost a billion and a half would come next. Let us have hearings on all the savings and loans banks or all the other banks, because in the process of correcting the savings and loan scandal, there were many regular banks that were not savings and loans that also were involved in the same kind of chicanery, same kind of crooked deals, same kind of racketeering enterprises. So take all the banks that cost the taxpayers a million and, a billion and a half and have hearings on them next, and then after that, all the banks that cost the American taxpayer a billion, and then after that go down to the $900 million and then the $900 million. I think if you did it that way and were sincerely interested in exposing to the American people exactly what we lost in these savings and loans swindles, exactly how it worked and how we should guard against it for the future, and how private enterprise is not the great, efficient, honest capable productive sector that we make it out to be, a whole lot of lessons could be learned if you took those kinds of hearings and substituted that for the focus on Whitewater. You would get to Whitewater eventually. Probably in 10 years we will get down to the $60 million level. After you go through all the ones that lost more than a billion and a half, those that lost a billion, those that lost $900 million, then you come down systematically, maybe you will get to Whitewater in 10 years. Then we can say that we have an investigation and a set of hearings that are truly serving the public interest, and they are not partisan fishing expeditions designed to harass the President. Then we could say that, and it would be a great thing for America and a great thing for civilization, because the kind of swindle that was pulled with the savings and loans swindle is something that we should know as much as possible about in order to guarantee that never again will it happen. It is estimated that no less than $300 billion, $300 billion, the American people have lost no less than $300 billion. It may be as high as $500 billion. They do not account for it. What we need hearings for on the savings and loans is to make them sit down and tell us at one hearing what the summary figures are at this point in February 1996, how many banks have you sold off, how much money have you recovered, how much restitution has been given by individuals, what happened with Silverado bank in Denver, CO? Silverado bank comes second probably to Keating's bank. I think they lost close to $2 billion. The son of the President at that time, Neil Bush, sat on that board, and I read accounts of how he was indignant when they investigated and said to him, this board has been so irresponsible and maybe so crooked that you can't ever sit again on another banking board. He got indignant. Then later I heard that he calmed down, and they fined him. What did they fine him? I think they fined him $40,000. Silverado Bank had lost $2 billion. I think one of the board members named Neil Bush was fined $40,000. That is the bank where there was an incident where a building was bought by a realtor for $26 million, and the building was appraised for $13 million. The bank told the purchaser we will loan you $26 million, and you deposit half of it in the bank because the orders are coming soon and we need that money to show. So they loaned them $26 million, $13 million more than the building was worth, in order to have the books show that they had a little more money in the bank. If that is not racketeering, you know, I do not know what it is. But we cannot just talk about this in a special order; we need hearings, we need ongoing hearings, and we need to start at the very top with the banks that have lost the most money, and maybe we will get to Whitewater in my lifetime if you use that hierarchy. I doubt it. The Washington conventional wisdom says let us go after Whitewater, which is just a pebble in the stream, and that is what is happening. Washington wisdom says we should balance the budget on the backs of the powerless, and that is passed down to the States and down to the city. Great harassment is taking place in New York. Anyone who applies for welfare has to wait several weeks, has to fill out very complicated forms, has to go through all kinds of bureaucratic harassment. They are harassing the poorest people because they have the least amount of power. That starts here in Washington. We go after AFDC, we go after Medicaid, we go after the areas where the people are the poorest at the same time we increase the budget of the Defense Department by $6 billion, $6 billion. At the same time we refuse to deal with it, the fact that the agribusinesses are on welfare and the agribusinesses are spending billions of dollars, are receiving billions of dollars in cash payments for not growing grain, for not planting anything, for not doing any work, and they do not have to pass a means test to prove that they are poor. We turn our backs on obvious waste while the conventional wisdom tells us to beat up on the poor, beat up on children who are receiving aid to families with dependent children. Washington conventional wisdom promulgated by the majority, Republicans, say that the workers of America are a threat to the economy, that the workers of America are a drag on our forward progress, that not only do you have to keep the workers wages low, and they refuse to discuss an increase in the minimum wage, the majority, Republicans, would not even discuss it. I serve on the committee, the Committee on Education and labor, a name which I choose to continue to give to the committee, although the official name now under the Republican majority is Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. The word labor is such a horrendous word that they do not want it in there anywhere. The certainly do not want worker, term worker, around anywhere. For some reason, although I did not read it anywhere in the Contract With America, for some reason the majority of Republicans have chose to wage a relentless assault upon workers. Workers and their families are being attacked on every front. They refuse to raise the minimum wage, would not even discuss it. They go after the Fair Labor Standards Act, which deals with wages and overtime, et cetera. They want to radically change that. They go after OSHA, which provides for safety in the workplace. They are going after the Labor Relations Board. There is nothing, no component of American Government which is designed to help workers that has not been placed on the greater tack by the Republican majority. The assault on workers and their families as enemies of the American economy and the American people continues. No wonder Pat Buchanan gets a response from workers out there when he dares to mention some of their problems. He only dares to mention some of them. Pat Buchanan talks about the fact that there is a gap, but he does not talk about how to close the gap. He would not support an increase in the minimum wage. When he is asked the question, he avoids the question. But he recognizes there is a gap, and every worker applauds. At least somebody would have visibility, somebody that the media covers recognizes that there is a great gap between most Americans, the great majority of Americans and the people at the very top; it ought to be closed. Somebody recognizes that this gap is caused partially by the global economy movement, which has been greatly enhanced by the passage of NAFTA and the passage of GATT. Somebody recognizes that when you have Mexican workers making a dollar an hour on a job where American workers may make $10 to $15 an hour, naturally the factory is going to move to Mexico. Any fool could tell you that, and you do not have to be an economist from Harvard to know that when you pass NAFTA and create those conditions, you are going to make life difficult for American workers who had those jobs before. At least Pat Buchanan has raised it up on the radar screen, and the workers now have somebody who indicates that they exist. There is a lesson in this for all the Democrats at every level to pay attention to the fact of the assault on the workers has created a siege mentality among workers and a siege mentality among the middle class who do not like to be called workers. But the technicians and the professionals and the middle management people, they too are caught up in the siege mentality because they have concrete anxieties, definite causes for concern. Washington obsolete, out-of-step conventional wisdom says that education and job training programs should be cut. Nobody was more shocked than I was when I heard that an agreement had been made in the continuing resolution process. The White House had agreed that the continuing resolution should contain cuts for education that we had been fighting all along and the President had indicated he would never accept. You know the $1.1 billion cut of title I is there, it is still there. The cut on Head Start is there, it is still there. The agreement that every program should operate at 75 percent of its last year's budget means that there is a cut, at least $1.1 billion for Title I. The cut is there. If you accept that 75 percent of last year's budget will determine the continuing budget level for title I education funds, title I is the only program that funnels money from the Federal Government to elementary and secondary education. It is very important. It is important because the mayor of New York City is cutting education drastically, it is important because the Governor of New York State is cutting education drastically, and even though education funds that come from the Federal level are only 7 percent of the total, if they are taking heavy cuts at the city level and the State level, then the Federal dollars assume a new importance, and the increase--there was a slight increase in title I funds for most of the school districts across the country. That increase plus what they had before was very important in helping to maintain some kind of stability, and now with the leadership of the Federal Government the cuts at the local level, the State level, are larger than they would have been otherwise. Their philosophy comes from the Federal Government, the Congress of the United States. The majority, Republicans, in the Congress have indicated that education should not even be a Federal function, that we should get rid of the Department of Education. They have made a frontal assault on education, and it is one of the smallest agencies, smallest activities, in Government. Yes, they sometimes have a large budget because they have student loans and student grants, but when you look at the agency as a whole, it has the least number of employees, and it is a smallest, one of the smallest, bureaucracies. So why have an assault on education in an era when job training and education are needed more than ever? The assault on education following the assault on workers, it all leads to a situation where large numbers of people in our Nation, voters, think that they are under assault, they are under siege, and they are right. The commonsense observance is more on target than the Washington wisdom. The conventional wisdom here in Washington says it is not enough of a problem to discuss. But the commonsense reason of the people says we have got a real problem and we will even go with all the liabilities represented by a Pat Buchanan candidacy to get some attention. Education and job training cuts are outrageous at a time like this. I understand that the continuing resolution with respect to education and labor cannot clarify really whether we are going to have a summer youth employment program this summer. Summer youth employment program has already been cut over the years down to a minimum program, whereas New York City used to receive money enough to give 90,000 jobs to young people during the summer. In the last few years it has been cut all the way down to about 30,000 jobs, and now we are in danger of losing the 30,000 jobs. And New York City has 8 million people, a lot of young people. Now we are about to lose the meager 30,000 jobs because it is not clear in the continuing resolution what the funding level is for the summer youth employment. There is some talk about being funded at 75 percent of last year's level, but the summer youth employment was singled out last year to be phased out, and I think that last year's level is defined as the amount of money that was appropriated for phasing it out. So it is not the same amount as it was the last operational year. We are still trying to clarify that, but the fact that it is even in jeopardy and there is a question shows how far afield the Washington wisdom is. The fact that the White House has not rushed to clarify that or rushed to make clear that in its agreement of a continuing resolution, it certainly did not mean to jeopardize the Summer Youth Employment Program. But I have a solution. We have these cuts in education and the cuts in job training, summer youth employment. The solution is at hand. It has been supplied by the CIA. We have said that these cuts are being made because we must downsize government, streamline government, we want to end the era of big government, and I say that that is an acceptable goal. But if you do not do it across the board, then you are going to generate dislocations and suffering in the wrong places, and we have done that. By cutting education, by cutting job training, we are cutting in the wrong places, we are greatly crippling our efforts to move forward in the global economy and make America competitive. Education is key, job training is key. So why do not we cut the CIA? I proposed this for 2 years in a row. I have had legislation on the floor saying we should cut the CIA by 10 percent per year over a 5-year period, and the legislation has gotten very few votes, 57 votes I think we got last time, which means that both parties, Democrats and Republicans, are stuck in a rut with their conventional wisdom. They will not vote to cut CIA. CIA existed primarily to spy on the Soviet Union. At least half of its resources were devoted to that enemy. The Soviet Union now; you know, we have them over here in our missile sites and the space program we are running jointly with them and all kinds of interactions taking place. Why do we need to have the same amount of money dedicated to the CIA as we had when the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire and we needed to keep tabs on them? You know, why do we need it? So we have not been able to win the battle of cutting the CIA. The budget is not known, it is still a secret, and the Russian secret service, its equivalent of the CIA, they have exposed a lot of things, they have opened up a lot of their files, but we are strictly secret even to the point of not telling the American people what the budget is. A Member of Congress cannot get to know what the budget is unless he goes to a little room and looks at the budget and when he comes out he is sworn to secrecy and he cannot discuss it. So I refuse to go into the room. I refuse to go into the room. I accept the estimates of the New York Times, the estimates that the conventional, across-the-board most reliable sources say the budget of the CIA and the intelligence agencies under the CIA all come out to about $28 billion. So a $28 billion cut, a 10-percent cut of a $28 billion agency would be a $2.8 billion cut over a 5-year period. You could have a sizeable amount to put back in. What I am here to propose is that we lost the fight. The CIA is not being downsized, not being streamlined. The era of big government, as far as the CIA is concerned, still is intact, but the CIA recently found $2 billion outside of the budget. They had $2 billion that they had not used over several years that they lost track of. It was in a petty cash fund. The American people, try to comprehend a petty cash fund of $2 billion. Try to comprehend how an agency of the Government can lose $2 billion; how the Director of the agency can have $2 billion in his budget and not know about it. Try to comprehend that. I find it very difficult to comprehend, but let us not dwell on comprehending it. Listen to my proposal. My proposal is that you have $2 billion that you did not know you had. You have $2 billion outside of the attempt to balance the budget, outside of downsizing. You have $2 billion, and education needs about $2 billion; $1.1 billion can go to maintenance of the budget at the same level for the title I program, $1.1 billion; $300 million can be restored to Head Start. We still have not used the whole $2 billion. The rest of it can go for the Summer Youth Employment Program, and we are even. No sweat, no pain. You do not have to hurt anybody. This is lost money that has been found, and now we can celebrate and take care of the young people of America in the school and in the Summer Youth Employment Program. That is a solution. Let us throw aside the Washington conventional wisdom, because I heard that there are plans to let the CIA reprogram the money. They are going to be rewarded by being allowed to reprogram the lost petty cash. The slush fund will be given to the people who created the slush fund. There is an article in the New York Times which shows that maybe that will not happen. Maybe it will not happen. Suddenly, somebody has become indignant. Suddenly, there is talk about firing the people who lost $2 billion in their petty cash fund. Mr. Speaker, I will include in the Record an article from today's New York Times entitled ``Spy Satellite Agency Heads Are Ousted for Lost Money.'' The article referred to follows: [From the New York Times, Feb. 27, 1996] Spy Satellite Agency Heads Are Ousted for Lost Money (By Tim Weiner) Washington.--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 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 last 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 surplus 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. Hall 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.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the front-page article of the New York Times today, which talks about the CIA, has implications for the war to remake America that is going on in this Capitol now. Speaker Gingrich has declared that politics is war without blood, and they have waged a relentless war. My colleagues who spoke before about the threat of a default have indicated how serious this war is. The threat of a default is very serious. A default itself, of course, would be a disaster, but even a threat shakes the confidence of the world economies in this country and shakes the confidence of Americans. Already the confidence of Americans has been shaken in their Government by two shutdowns of the Government. So I think it is very serious. The following article that appears on the front page of the New York Times certainly has implications for what is going on with respect to streamlining and downsizing the expenditure side of the battle to remake America. It also has very serious implications with respect to the revenue side of the battle to remake America. The New York Times article of today, January 30, says that a secret agency's secret budgets yield lost billions, officials say. Let me repeat that. A secret agency's secret budgets yield lost billions, officials say. Budgets, not just one budget. This secret agency has several budgets, and it has lost billions. The lost billions have been discovered, fortunately, at least as far as we know nothing has been stolen and whisked away from the American taxpayers, but it is there. This $2 billion slush fund, you know, with the Super Bowl for football over, but this $2 billion slush fund at the CIA is the super blunder, the symbolic super monster of this year's policy struggles. It is a symbol that we ought to take a close look at. Mr. Speaker, how can an agency of the U.S. Government have $2 billion lost in secret funds? How can an agency that has several different budgets, and the head of the agency, not know that those budgets exist? It is worth reading some sections of this article. I will not read all of it, but Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to enter the article in the Record. The article starts by saying that the National Reconnaissance Office, the secret agency that builds satellites, lost track of more than $2 billion in classified money last year, largely because of its own internal secrets, the intelligence officials say. That they lost $2 billion, it means obviously that that is $2 billion that they did not need, $2 billion that they did not spend. This threat of default looms because we have a group in control of the Congress, the Republican majority in control of the Congress, that is threatening to push the American Government into default because they want their version of the remaking of America to prevail. That version of the remaking of America is, they say, concerned with cutting the cost of Government, cutting the cost of Government, streamlining Government, downsizing Government. The President says the era of big government is over and we all agree that the era of big government should be over. But when you examine today's article on the front page of the New York Times where an agency of the Federal Government has a $2 billion slush fund, then you wonder where is this streamlining taking place. The implications of a blunder here are very important. We must stop and take a close look. It says to us that if you have an agency of the government that has a $2 billion slush fund that has just been discovered, obviously $2 billion that they did not need, then the streamlining process is not really taking place across the board. In fact, the places that have the most money obviously are not being streamlined. The downsizing is not taking place. There is some kind of hypocrisy going on here. It says to us that the era of big government is not over. The continuing resolution that was passed last Thursday did not touch the CIA budget at all. Last Thursday we passed a continuing resolution that keeps the Government in business, I think for about 45 more days, and that continuing resolution in my opinion sets the pace, sets the tone for what is probably going to prevail for the rest of this year. We are not going to move far from those figures, those numbers that are passed in that budget. I am very dismayed, very disappointed, very angry because that continuing resolution cut the budget for education by $3.1 billion. The education budget has been cut. The people who want to remake America, the Republicans in the majority, have won. They have cut education. They said they wanted to cut the Department of Education. They went after education with a vengeance, despite previously we have had bipartisan support for education. President Reagan initiated the Nation at Risk study. President Bush can out with America 2000 and held a big conference and set goals. We have always had bipartisan cooperation. Suddenly this year the Republican majority came to power and education was the enemy, education was under attack. Abolish the whole department, they said, When they could not do that via authorizing legislation, they went after education in the appropriations process. So we have not only the administration of the Education Department being cut drastically but you have programs that are proven, the Title I program that provides funding mainly to disadvantaged communities across the country, but really 90 percent of the school districts in America get some part of the Title I funding. So Title I is cut by $1.1 billion over an annualized figure. That cut stands. It stands as it is. Head Start is cut. The Head Start cut stands in the continuing resolution. What was won in the continuing resolution--and I guess in the present atmoshpere, with the revolution to remake America going forward, we have to be satisfied with any gains--we did get back Goals 2000, which had been reduced to zero in the appropriations bill by the Republicans in the House of Representatives here. We did get back some semblance of some other programs that were there. I think we got the funding for the summer youth employment program back. I am not sure. The continuing resolution says that any program that is not zeroed out or not specifically mentioned as a program to be defunded will get 75 percent of the funds it got last year, so I hope the summer youth employment program is included. But the language bothers me because the summer youth employment program is not specifically mentioned and some other programs are mentioned. AmeriCorps is specifically mentioned as being one of those programs that will get 75 percent funding. There is a fuzziness here about the summer youth employment program which troubles me. It not only troubles me, it makes me very angry when I look at the headlines, the front page article of the New York Times. In the CIA slush funds, in the slush fund you have $2 billion that could have been applied to education and job training programs; $2 billion are there that could be applied to education and job training programs. In the continuing resolution, the CIA budget is not touched. The CIA budget has certainly been discussed on the floor of this House, because I have joined with some colleagues of mine to bring a resolution to cut the CIA budget by just 10 percent per year over a 5-year period, so that that $28 billion which is the figure that is acknowledged to be the minimum that is going to the CIA, the intelligence budget, that $28 billion would be cut by $2.8 billion per year over a 5-year period and the agency would be cut to half its size within 5 years. We have had that resolution on the floor twice and it has been soundly defeated. We have never gotten more than 60 votes. I think 57 is the highest number of votes we got for this agency that now has a $2 billion slush fund that is discovered. So that $2 billion is very important. What does it say about the sincerity of the people who are staging, waging this revolution to remake America? What does it say if they have not even bothered to cut any portion of a CIA budget, which is a budget obviously which ought to be looked at closely, since it was fashioned during the cold war and the cold war was primarily a war with the Soviet Union. Half of all of our military and intelligence resources were directed at the Soviet Union. Why is it that after the Soviet Union has fallen, the CIA budget cannot be cut? Well, the Soviet Union's intelligence agency at least is no longer a secret agency totally. People say, ``Well, they're only revealing certain things to us.'' At least they reveal a few things to us. I do not want the CIA of the United States, the intelligence agency of the United States, to reveal all of its secrets to us. I would just like to know the budget. I think the American people deserve to see the budget. We do not want the safe houses revealed, we do not want the agents provocateurs named, the femme fatales, we do not want the information sources, we do not want any of that revealed. We would just like to see the budget. The budget is a secret. Because it is a secret, nobody can really deal with cutting the budget. It turns out that not only is the overall intelligence budget a secret but within the CIA, there are secrets within the agency that even the CIA Director does not know about. Listen to this article. ``Critics of the National Reconnaissance Office, the secret agency that builds spy satellites, lost track of more than $2 billion in classified money last year largely because of its own internal secrecy, intelligence officials say.'' The National Reconnaissance Office is a secret agency within the whole intelligence operation. It is under the supervision and oversight of the CIA Director, but it has so much secrecy, even within its own confines, the reconnaissance agency, that it lost track of $2 billion last year. We have heard this story before when it was just germinating, and they leaked out it was at least $1 billion and then some sources said $1.5 billion. Now it is up to $2 billion. ``Critics of the reconnaissance office said today that the money had been hidden in several rainy day accounts that secretly solidified into a slush fund.'' Listen to the language. This is not some Monty Python novel. This is a description of what the statements were of the U.S. Government Intelligence Agency. ``Critics of the reconnaissance office said today that the money had been hidden in several rainy day accounts that secretly solidified into a slush fund.'' How does a slush fund secretly solidify? How do rainy day accounts become a secretly solidified slush fund? Let us look at this from every angle. What is a rainy day for the CIA? What does that mean? Can the education agency have a rainy day fund? Can we have a rainy day fund for the School Lunch Program? What does a rainy day fund for the CIA mean? To read on from the article itself, ``The NRO,'' the National Reconnaissance Office--this is the National Reconnaissance Office which is a major part of the whole intelligence operation--``NRO's top managers themselves had no idea''--no idea--``how much money lay unspent in their classified coffers, Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat who is the panel's vice chairman, said in a prepared statement.'' These two Senators have the oversight for the Agency, and they are telling us that not only did they not know but the top managers of the National Reconnaissance Office themselves said they had no idea. What kind of administrators are these? I once was the commissioner for the Community Development Agency of New York City. The Community Development Agency had responsibility for the antipoverty program which was so unpopular with the establishment, and we had audiences every day. You had one set of reports required from one set of agencies, another set required from another set. At one time it was pointed out that for the Community Action program nationwide there were 100 major auditors, while at that time the Pentagon had three auditors. This was pointed out by an article in the New York Times at one point. So I cannot see how a small community action program--I think at the height of the program we had $70 million in New York City. At the height of the program it might have been $1 billion in funding for the whole country. That program was constantly under scrutiny. How do you have a multibillion-dollar agency where the top managers themselves can have no idea how much money is unspent in their coffers? And how do you accept that calmly? How many people are being fired today? They used to close down agencies, and they used to bring in the FBI and investigate small agencies who had a few thousand dollars that they could not account for, and people sometimes went to jail for a few thousand dollars that they could not account for. How does it happen that the National Reconnaissance Office can have a solidifying slush fund where the top managers cannot account for it and we are not in motion all over this Capitol to deal with it? How many hearings are being called to look into this National Reconnaissance Office's top managers' failure to keep account of billions of dollars? Whitewater, we are spending millions of dollars to conduct a hearing on Whitewater. I am told that $60 million was lost by the taxpayers when they went in to bail out Whitewater. $60 million is a lot of money, I have heard that said over and over again in the Whitewater hearings. Yes; it is. I wonder why they did not have hearings about Silverado. Silverado was a savings and loan in Colorado that failed and they lost $2 billion. The taxpayers lost $2 billion. We have not had any hearings on Silverado. Neil Bush, the son of former President George Bush, was involved. He was on the board of the bank of Silverado. I think he was later fined a few dollars for some conduct of that board with respect to the failure of that savings and loan association. But we never had hearings here in Washington to go on and on about Silverado. Whitewater is suddenly important. I mention this only because it is important for the American people to get into perspective what is going on. If a $2 billion failure of a savings and loan bank called Silverado did not elicit any hearings at all, then why do you think we are having hearing after hearing about Whitewater when $60 million is involved? There must be something else they are looking for. They are not concerned really about the integrity of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. They are not concerned about the vast sums of money that Americans have had to spend to bail out savings and loan associations. The sum that we spent to bail out savings and loan associations is probably totaling something now close to $300 billion. Has any hearing been held to take a look at all of the Resolution Trust Corporation's operations? Where are we? Is there a progress report that is comprehensive about the billions of dollars we lost in the savings and loan associations? I know I am diverting from the subject, but the savings and loans is the biggest scandal in the history of mankind. Civilization has never had a swindle near that proportion. Even this National Reconnaissance Office scandal pales beside the savings and loan scandal, but maybe we can comprehend the hypocrisy of what is going on if you come back to the National Reconnaissance Office. What I am saying is that while we are cutting Head Start by $300 million, while we are cutting title I by $1.1 billion, which is one- seventh of the total, while we cannot clarify the funding of a summer youth employment program that provides jobs for the poorest young people in the country, while we have difficulty doing all that, while this revolutionary majority in the House is threatening to push the country into default in order to get their way in cutting Government expenditures. While all this is going on, $2 billion cannot be accounted for, and there seems to be no excitement about it. I have not heard of a press conference being called by the leadership in the Senate or the House to deal with the implications of this super-blunder under the present situation. Let me just continue to quote from the article that appeared in the New York Times today, January 30: The amount of money was larger than anyone had known, well over $2 billion, or more than the annual operating budget of the State Department, several military and intelligence officials said. Just the language, just absorb the description of what is going on, the amount of money is larger than anyone had known, well over $2 billion, or more than the annual operating budget of the State Department. It is hard for people to conceive. What is $2 billion? What is $2 billion? How many welfare families can live for a year on $2 billion? How many school lunches will $2 billion buy? How many persons on Medicaid can receive medical attention for $2 billion? Let me just continue with the article: One Senate Intelligence Committee aide described the misplaced money as a severe accounting problem. I should say so, a severe accounting problem, ``that had grown because of a lack of accountability.'' Listen to the language, you have a severe accounting problem that has grown because of a lack of accountability, in turn created by the extraordinary secrecy under which the Reconnaissance Office works. A team of auditors was dispatched by the Director of Central Intelligence, John Deutsch, and found the money in a series of investigations nearing completion. Great, Mr. Deutsch, I hope we can recover some of that money. Maybe you can give $300 million to Head Start, maybe give a billion to title I. More than $1 billion was tracked down and identified last year, in 1995, you know, less than 30 days ago. Now that the money has been found, it will be used to help pay for Pentagon programs, we are told. I do not know how those decisions are made. Does the Congress have to get involved in making, after you discover that you have squirreled away $2 billion? You know, in an atmosphere when we are trying to streamline and downsize Government, in an atmosphere where we want to show the American people that the era of big government is over, why do we let an agency that has squirreled away a slush fund of $2 billion decide how they are going to spend it? When do we come in? Can we use this money to guarantee that there will be a summer youth employment program in the big cities of America where the poorest children are where they need those jobs? Can we use the money to guarantee we will not cut the Head Start Program? I am concerned, because the education deal that was made last Thursday was a shocking one. The protestations that came out of the White House, the leadership, everything indicated that education was a high priority and would be protected in negotiations, and then, you know, there was a rapid deterioration of the situation, and before we knew it, we were on the Floor voting for a continuing resolution which drastically cut education. It just so happened a few days before the continuing resolution was brought to the Floor there was a poll which was dramatized and publicized highly on the front pages of USA Today. A USA-CNN poll showed that the American people had rated education as the No. 1 priority concern. The No. 1 concern of the American people was education. I think that education had 68 percent over 67 percent of crime. Crime is still a great concern. Large numbers of people, 67 percent said that was No. 1, but a slightly higher number said that education was a primary concern. People have great anxiety about their own education in order to keep up with the changing job environment, the downsizing, the layoffs. People have greater concern about the education of their children, whether or not their children are going to receive an education that is adequate to keep pace with this increasingly complex society. So when you consider that the polls that all politicians are supposed to look closely at, the polls show education is a No. 1 concern, it was just incomprehensible to me how we could come to the Floor and vote for a continuing resolution which cut education by $3.1 billion, there is something wrong in this democracy. On the other hand, we get news that the National Reconnaissance Office has squirreled away $2 billion. Let me just continue for a moment with the article: This same National Reconnaissance Office is the agency that secretly spent more than $300 million on its new headquarters outside Washington, a sum that the Senate Intelligence Committee said in 1994 was a shock to discover. The Central Intelligence Agency, which has oversight responsibility for the National Reconnaissance Office which is part of the Central Intelligence Agency's responsibility, said it was shocked. The National Reconnaissance Office spent $300 million on a building. You know, this is a physical structure. They were actually building a building outside this city of Washington. I think it is near Dulles Airport. They were spending $300 million to build a building. That was a secret. How can you have a secret building? You must bow to the skills of an agency which can produce a secret building for $300 million, and the people in Washington who are supposed to oversee it not know anything about it.'' The reconnaissance office still operates in the deepest secrecy of any Government agency financed by the $28 billion a year black budget, or classified above top secret, or military intelligence programs. It spends an estimated $5 billion to $6 billion annually, outside analysts say. This sum varies from year to year depending on how many satellites the agency is funding or building. I am just going to conclude now the reading of the article by going to the last two paragraphs. ``Mr. Deutsch, who is now the head of CIA who has responsibility for oversight of the National Reconnaissance Office, states when Mr. Deutsch took over as director of Central Intelligence last May, he vowed to control these classified accounts. On paper he is the chairman of all intelligence agencies as well as the CIA. In reality, the Reconnaissance Office has been its own fief for more than three decades, the critics like Mr. Pike say. Mr. Deutsch has sought and may receive.'' He may receive, ``Mr. Deutsch,'' who is in charge of the intelligence operations of the United States, ``has sought,'' and the article says he may receive real power over the budgets he now controls in name only. Presidential and congressional panels studying the intelligence community are likely to recommend that. Just listen to the language in this great democracy of ours, with very responsible people making decisions. How do you get language like that, that the head of an agency may receive, even now with the scandal obvious and public is not certain that he will receive power over these secret budgets, and yet we go on with the blitzkrieg against programs for low-income people. The blitzkrieg rolls on. Welfare as we know it, aid to families with dependent children will fall in the next 10 years. Certainly when this continuing revolution is over, I do not expect to see aid to families with dependent children still standing as an entitlement. I am sorry to be pessimistic. All the protestations that are being made lead in that direction, in my opinion. I think that will fall. I hope we can protect Medicaid as an entitlement. It is very important to at least hold onto Medicaid as an entitlement, because it Medicaid is not an entitlement for poor people, then there is no hope ever of having universal health care. Education, I hope, can be renegotiated back to a level that is acceptable in terms of the continuation of Head Start and title I and some other very important programs in the labor budget, especially the Summer Youth Employment Program. I hope all of those things can go forward, but when you look at this phenomenon of the super blunder of the CIA which has received so little attention here, none of the members of the Republican majority leadership have made any statements about this, and yet they vehemently insist that school lunches must be cut, aid to families with dependent children must be cut, meaning the poorest children in America have to pass a means test, you have to prove you are poor before you can get the aid to families with dependent children, you know, all of these things are indications that this struggle, this war to remake America is about more than money. If they are really concerned about money, they would be very concerned about the CIA's $2 billion. The concern is not about money. The concern is about the destruction of a certain class of people. There is not a class war in America. There is a class massacre going on. A war means you have two contending parties. The poorest people in this country cannot defend themselves and they are being massacred by this new majority in the Congress. The massacre goes on. If we were concerned about streamlining government, we would be talking downsizing the Pentagon. We would have some rooms in the Pentagon available for the homeless soon. We would be talking certainly about the National Reconnaissance agency changing drastically. The last thing we would be talking about is cutting education if we were concerned about really an American that is going to go forward and be able to carry its own weight. Education is the primary tool by which that is accomplished. People help themselves when they get an education. In New York City, they have always understood that. Even during the Depression we had a city university which was totally free. During the Depression, where did the revenue come from to keep it a totally free university even during the Depression? Now, of course, there are tremendous cutbacks new tuition increases, et cetera. I want to spend the rest of my time, the second half of my 60 minutes, discussion the implications of the CIA super blunder on the revenue side. You know, we have a discussion that ought to be always conducted with two major components. Where liberals or progressives have lost out in the past is that they have left the revenue discussion, the tax discussion, to the conservatives. Somehow that has been dirty business for us, and we have not spent enough time discussing revenue. The flat tax is a major issue within the Republican primary. Tax proposals were first initiated by Republicans. The dominant discussion is about ways in which really you can fashion the taxes, the revenue gathering process, to benefit the richest people in America. Where is the revenue counterproposal from the other side? Where are the proposals for revenue to be gathered and how it should be gathered and how we can maintain a revenue stream that finances all programs that are important to the American people? And what does that CIA problem have to do with that? Well, the National Reconnaissance Office is an example of a tremendous investment made by the American people in new technology, new technology. Billions of dollars have already been poured into the National Reconnaissance Office. They use new technology. They got it to maximize the use of satellites and other electronic devices in the spying operations across the globe. They perfect computers, they perfect radar. Everything that is happening in the state-of-the-art technology you will find in the National Reconnaissance Agency or the taxpayer-financed space program. As you have found it in years past in all sectors of the military, the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, they have perfected new technology with the dollars that Americans have generated through their taxes. So what does this have to do with revenue? A major problem we have in terms of the quest for new revenue or the quest for a revenue stream is that we are always talking in terms that are obsolete. The only place that new revenue can come from we believe is from the pockets of the American people. The workers must pay income tax, and income tax is the primary way we finance the Government. Should the income tax continue to be the primary way to finance the Government? I do not think so. Even if you have tax justice and corporations begin to pay more taxes, a greater share of corporations are now not paying their fair share of the income taxes. As I have said many times on this floor, individuals and families are paying about 44 percent of the income taxes. Corporations are now paying 11.4 percent. Corporations at one time under Ronald Reagan in 1983 were paying as little as 6.4 percent of the total tax burden. That year, the tax burden for individuals and families went up to 48 percent. There are figures that need to be repeated over and over again. So we need to have corporations pay a greater share of the taxes, because an undue burden has been placed on families and individuals. A tax cut for families and individuals is long overdue. We need a tax cut for families and individuals. But can we get revenue which can pay for Medicare? Can we get revenue you need to pay for Medicaid? Can we get the revenue we need to pay for education? Can we get the revenue we need to pay for the system that President Clinton mentioned in his State of the Union Address? I think we heard him say in California they had a pilot project going where 20 percent of the State schools would be wired up so they could participate on the information superhighway. They would be able to join the Internet and do other things because they have computers, proper wiring for those schools. The President also said by the year 2000, he expected all of the schools of America to be able to participate in this program. We are going to have all the schools wired up with computers, and they will be able to join the information superhighway by the year 2000. That is a great program. I heartily endorse it. I do not think we should reduce I in the meantime or Head Start, but we need to go forward with a program to lead our schools into the 21st century and have them become a part of the information superhighway. That is going to cost money. Any investment in education will cost money. No matter how much you downsize, as you should be doing in the Pentagon or should be downsizing in the CIA, the downsizing and the streamlining of our expenditures so that we get rid of the real waste in places like the CIA, we get rid of a $2 billion slush fund, that kind of downsizing will not end the necessity for more revenue. So we need a program. Progressives, liberals, and Democrats, and I am a liberal, proud to be a liberal, we need to tackle the revenue problem head on. I proposed in a bill that I introduced on October 24 of last year to create a Revenues Commission, a Creative Revenues Commission. The Creative Revenues Commission would facilitate the reform of the Federal tax system. The Creative Revenues Commission would go beyond a flat tax on the incomes of corporations or individuals and look at the whole situation. We are now in 1996. We are just 4 years away from the beginning of the 21st century. Let us look at the whole tax situation, look at the whole revenue producing situation. Let us determine whether or not we need to continue to throw overboard large segments of the population. Do we have to, in America, throw overboard young people that need an education and help from the Federal Government in order for their schools to function properly? Do we have to continue to throw overboard young people who do not have the proper wherewithal, for various reasons, and they need aid to dependent children? Do we need to continue to throw overboard elderly people who will have Medicare, but in the States Medicare is already being reduced? New Jersey just took away prescription allowances. New York took away certain benefits several years ago, eyeglasses, prescriptions, a number of things. More cuts like that are going to take place. Do we need to keep trimming the health care in order to have a viable economy in order to balance the budget? Balancing the budget is not my favorite remedy, but balancing the budget seems to have caught hold. Let us have a balanced budget. If we are going to have a balanced budget, then let us look at the revenue side and be more creative about the revenue we produce. So I introduced a bill, H.R. 2526, to create a Creative Revenues Commission. This commission will deal with the whole spectrum of possible revenue sources. In the findings we state that many proposals have been offered to reform the Federal tax system, including a national sales tax, a flat tax, a value-added tax, and a tax system exempting savings from taxation. These proposals have merit and they deserve to be examined. Nonetheless, none of these proposals address the fact that the Nation's tax burden has shifted dramatically over the past five decades from the shoulders of corporate America to the backs of American workers. Ways to correct this imbalance must be developed and implemented. For the first time in American history, median wages of full-time male workers have fallen for more than two decades, therefore making it necessary to reduce taxes on wages. For the first time in American history a majority of workers have suffered real wage reductions, while the per capital domestic product has advanced. Then I state, what is new. Technology advances have created important potential new revenue sources. Important potential new revenue sources have been created by technology. We can now derive revenue from the selling or leasing of the radio frequency spectrum. When I first proposed that on the floor of the House, a member of the majority later that day called it a joke. He said ``Here is a Democrat who proposes taxing the air above us.'' There is a spectrum up there. There are frequencies up there. There are valuable things up there in the air above us. The air above us is owned by all of the American people. I see no reason why we cannot derive revenue from the people who are going to use that for various profitmaking endeavors. Why should not the Government and all the people benefit from what happens to the air above us? These must be thoroughly explored. It was a joke, but I noticed that when the President came in with his balanced budget proposal, he had added quite a bit of money to the possible revenues to be derived from the selling or the leasing of the spectrum. So it is a joke that already has become a serious matter. I want it go further than just to look at the environment, the air above us. By the way, for the American people to derive an income from the air above us is nothing new. The land that was here when we got here, the Government still owns part of that land, and we are deriving some revenue from grazing lands, we are deriving tiny amounts of revenue from mining. All of those kinds of possible revenue sources have to be reexamined. A great debate has been waged here. The interior appropriations bill has been held up here because we are tired of having mining lands given away. Mines which bear millions of dollars of ore gold and various other substances, those mines have been almost given away in the past 20 or 30 years because of deals that have been cut with often foreign mining companies. So we should realize revenue from those mines and from any other lands still owned by the Federal Government. The Government once regulated the way land was given out, the great land rush and stakes for land a number of processes were used to parcel out land in early America. I might note, however, that even after the slaves were freed by the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were passed, blacks were not allowed to lay claim to such lands. Nevertheless, the land was there and the Government regulated how the land was given out. So why cannot the Government regulate what happens to the air above us? Why can we not have as much income for all the people derived from what happens to the resources the Government still controls as we can? It belongs to all of us. What I am proposing in connection with the technology is a bit more complicated. I am saying that one of the things that the Creative Revenues Commission ought to look at is the establishment of a system of royalties. Royalties ought to be paid by companies that are benefiting from publicly financed research and development. The technology that is being used to make billions of dollars, and Wall Street is booming, technology stocks are way up, various other profits are being maximized by automation, by computerization, by miniaturization, all of these things were developed by the U.S. citizens through the financing of research and development in the military. We would not have radio as we know it today if the Navy had not taken a great interest in the new inventions related to radio. The U.S. Navy played a major role in the development of radio, and all the things that came from radio could not have happened without that. Radar was a military concern, and whatever happens with radar is a military product. All of these ventures were financed by the American people, by the taxpayers. We should be able to derive some continuing amount of money from the investment that the taxpayers made. There ought to be royalties on products that clearly come from a stream of research and development activities run by the Government. The National Reconnaissance Agency, which has all this money squirreled away, the National Reconnaissance Agency, which is wasting money, is also producing some very useful technological products. The satellites that they generated and developed and pioneered, satellites are now used in civilian purposes more than for military purposes. Satellites made it possible for 750 million people to watch the Super Bowl all over the globe. Satellites make it possible for us to communicate in a matter of minutes to all parts of the globe. Those satellites, privately owned up there, were made possible by the research and development costs financed by the American taxpayers. Every satellite ought to have some sort of surcharge on it. The profits made from the satellites ought to have an a surcharge, a royalty. Something should be done to derive some income from the investment made by the American people. In private life, in business, nobody makes investments and suddenly allows the abrogation of their investment, the returns on their investment. You make an investment ad you do not expect anybody to tamper with your right to receive the return on that investment to the degree you have invested. The American people have invested in technologies that are making tremendous amounts of profits, and there ought to be a royalty considered, some kind of way to tap into the products, the sales of each product, or to tap into the profits made on these products that are financed by the American people. There ought to be some laws related also to companies that have grown very big and as a result of technology have begun to absorb their competitors and establish monopolies. We have laws against monopolies. Why not take a look at monopolies and certain companies as they grow big, and if they have monopolies in certain areas and there are no competitors on the products they are selling, to the degree they lose the competition, perhaps they should have a surcharge, a surcharge on monopolies. Mr. Speaker, maybe beginning at 25 percent when a company gets 25 percent of the market, maybe we can begin a surcharge. Certainly if it has a 100-percent monopoly, it ought to be paying some kind of surcharge, which relates to the fact that its expenses are less. It has access to a market, total access to a market. All of these may seem like far-out ideas, but I wish to put them forward in order to have a creative revenues commission examine them. We do not need to continue to listen to the cries that the Medicare fund will be insolvent by the year 2002. The Medicare fund can be partially financed by other revenues if that is necessary. We do not need to listen to the cries that the American people cannot afford to invest in education. Sure, education is not one of the items mentioned as a function of the Federal Government in the Constitution. Education is not mentioned at all, but the promotion of the general welfare means that we have to do whatever is necessary to promote the general welfare. The national security is a major concern of the Constitution, and all avenues of the Federal Government, all of the agencies of the Federal Government are concerned with national security. Education becomes one of those ways in which the general welfare is promoted and the national security is maintained. We cannot survive, and I think it has been said over and over again that, probably education has become more important in our national security than the military might of America. The threat to America and its institutions, the threat to America and its economy, is no longer a military threat. Unless we are predicting that there is some superior intelligence in outer space that might come in, there is no threat on the Earth that makes it necessary for us to maintain the kind of military power that we have now, or to be fearful of ever being overwhelmed by any other military power. I know that all of us have read recently where certain planets have been discovered that we did not know about before. Obviously there are certain solar systems that are there that we did not know about before. The universe is larger and more mysterious than we thought it was. It is possible that out there in outer space there are some creatures who might be able to come in and attack the United States. That is a possibility. Maybe we ought to take a closer look at that. In the real world of the solar system that we inhabit right now and on the planet Earth, there is no force that can overwhelm America militarily, but there are forces at work all the time undermining our economy. Therefore, we should deal with the period between now and the year 2000 as a transitional period, a period where you can have maximum profits being made on Wall Street. Corporations are booming, going forward because technology is feeding the profits. We can have that at the same time we have maximum dislocations beginning in the workforce, at the same time that we have large amounts of workers that are being laid off. Those who are working find that their wages are stagnating. Those who are at the bottom of the level in terms of wages find that there is no way to get an increase in even the minimum wage. So, the creative revenues commission appointed by the President or appointed by the Secretary of Treasury, or some method by which we get some of the most experienced people in the country--experts in taxation, the economy, whatever--we need a cross-section of very brilliant minds. That commission would be allowed to come back with recommendations, given a finite period of time. It should be a short period of time. Instead of Steve Forbes being the expert on the flat tax, and the only people who can challenge him are candidates who are running against him with their own point of view and their own vested interest in wanting to knock down his version of the flat tax, let us have some kind of commission that every American voter and taxpayer can look at and make a determination as to what is reality, and what is credible and what is useful. Let us have a commission that says, we have a National Reconnaissance Agency that can afford to hide $2 billion and nobody discovers it. If we have a National Reconnaissance Agency that is going forward creating satellites and new technology, spending billions of dollars per year, then not only do we need to look at downsizing that National Reconnaissance Agency and bringing it under control as we do every other aspect of Government, if we are going to have the end of the era of big Government with respect to expenditures, then certainly the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Agency ought to be part of the downsizing, part of ending the era of big Government. In addition to looking at the National Reconnaissance Agency and the superblunder and what the implications are, look also at the revenue implications, all of that investment by the American people in the National Reconnaissance Agency and how many ways can the American taxpayers realize a profit from their investment, a dividend from their investment? How can that investment pay off for us? How can we make the previous investments in technology through the space agency pay off in terms of revenues for the American people? How can we make the investment by the military in radar, in radio, in television, in computers? How can we make all of those investments pay off for the average American instead of just feeding billions of dollars into the coffers of the richest Americans who happen to be in a position to make use of the technology? Those are relevant points as we go forward contemplating, fearing a shutdown of the Government. There is going to be a default. The worst kind of shutdown would be a default. If the issue of that default is the determination of the majority party to get their agenda across, they want to downsize the Government, they want to streamline the Government, if this is the issue, then let the majority in this House address itself to the superblunder of the day, the CIA's discovery of $2 billion in a slush fund. If we are serious about addressing the era of big Government, let the President come forward with a special commission to investigate what is going on in the National Reconnaissance Agency. Let us take a look at where our great investment is being made. If we are not investing in education, if the American people have indicated in a poll that they want a greater investment in education, they want education to be a priority for the Government, then we are ignoring the priorities set by the American people. We are going forward not only in the Federal Government, but at the State level. In New York, Governor Pataki has a series of cuts in education, not only cuts in the elementary and secondary schools but also big cuts in the university system. In New York City, we have the mayor projecting another round of cuts for the city's schools, many of which are literally falling apart physically. Overcrowding is the dominant factor in many of the schools. Mr. Speaker, all this is going forward in an era when we are able to have Government agencies squirrel away $2 billion and nobody asking any questions about how it happened and why it happened and why we cannot recapture that $2 billion for worthwhile programs like education. The superblunder of the year is the blunder of the CIA. The superaction of the year would be to take some real steps to correct that kind of blunder, to seriously downsize our Government for the benefit of the American people, and to examine the activities of major Government agencies like the National Reconnaissance Agency, as they move technology forward, and create with American taxpayers' dollars new technological advantages for companies that make tremendous profits and give nothing back to the American people. Everybody deserves to benefit from both the downsizing of wasteful agencies like the National Reconnaissance Agency and the CIA. Everybody deserves the benefit from the good work that these agencies do in terms of new technology that we all have a stake in and we should all be able to receive some benefits from.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we are about to begin the business of the 104th Congress again, the second year of this session. Tomorrow we will hear the State of the Union Address from the President. I look forward to that State of the Union Address. The State of the Union Address, I think, will point us the way for the immediate future. The State of the Union also might certainly size up where we are at this point. There are a lot of good things that can be cited in that State of the Union Address. A lot of great things have been accomplished by this President. The Union is in a much better state in many ways and the world is in a much better state in many ways than it was before he became President. I take this opportunity to celebrate the liberation of Haiti. Haiti has a situation now which has moved like clockwork toward a permanent democracy. Everything that was promised by General Bertrand Aristide and his leadership has been allowed to unfold. Elections have been held. President Aristide will be resigning, stepping down next month. President Aristide will be replaced by a president who has been elected by the people of Haiti. The entire hemisphere benefits from this stabilization of Haiti because it sent a message to all the other criminals who wanted to take over. All the criminal military regimes that might have wanted to raise their ugly heads and try to take over their governments from duly elected representatives have certainly not done so. We have a more stable hemisphere. We can look forward to have democracy expanding in this hemisphere as a result of the courageous actions taken by this administration in Haiti. Also, I want to pause at this point to congratulate General Bertrand Aristide on his wedding. He has recently gotten married, I think it was yesterday. I take time to do that because on this floor on many occasions I have cited the wonders of the intellect and the temperament of General Bertrand Aristide, and in many cases it may appear that he may be some kind of little god. I have cited the fact that the man speaks eight languages. I have cited his long campaign against the oppression in Haiti, how he was nearly killed three times, guns were pointed at his head on three different occasions. I have cited wondrous things that have happened to him and wondrous things that he has made happen. I think his marriage brought out some facts that shows that he is after all quite human. The announcement of the marriage said he was 40 years old. For the first time I realized that he is much younger than I am, this man that has accomplished so much for his country and set such a shining example for democratic leadership in this hemisphere. So we want to congratulate President Aristide and congratulate the people who belong to his Lavalas Party in Haiti. We hope that they will not flinch, that they will, regardless of the circumstances, go forward and insist that democracy, the principles of democracy on which this liberation was based, will be carried forward by that government. I also think it is time to celebrate the world being better off because of this courageous President's leadership in Yugoslavia. In Bosnia things are almost going like clockwork. We certainly are happy to see that deadlines that were set are being met. The Army of the United States, the military of the United States is there to assist in making peace happen. There is a clear framework for peace, and that peace is going forward. I am proud of the fact that our Army could have no more noble mission in Yugoslavia. They will be feeding the hungry. They will be aiding the sick. They will be clothing the naked. They will be helping to provide shelter for the homeless. I can think of no more noble mission for an army than that, no more noble mission for a nation. So they represent a great deal of what this Nation is all about, and we salute them for that. The state of the world is better, and we are proud of the fact that we had the leadership of a President who made that happen. Nineteen ninety-six will be a tumultuous year. There is no way we can avoid that. We hope that the Government would get back on track, that the legislative process will be allowed to go forward as it has for all the years that this Nation has existed, that there would be an end to the abuse of power by the leadership of the Republicans in the Congress, that that abuse of power we thought had sort of played itself out and that the common sense of the American people had indicated that they were not impressed and indeed they were quite upset by this continual abuse of power that is reflected in the shutdowns of the Government to obtain legislative goals, legislative ends. The shutdown was an attempt to blackmail the executive branch. That blackmail did not work. The American people with all of their common sense could clearly see that the blackmail was coming from one side and attempted to distort the democratic process. I think that the polls clearly show that the common sense of the American people has prevailed and that they clearly see what is happening. So I am shocked to hear that perhaps there may be a shutdown. The shutdown this time may go even further than the previous shutdown. There may be another shutdown. This time it may lead to a default, the Government of the United States defaulting on its debts, on its obligations. A shutdown is abuse of power, and a large number of people have been hurt by that abuse of power. A large number of human beings out there who did not deserve to be hurt had to go through a whole holiday season with no checks or only one check, weekly pay, all kinds of things which mean a great deal to people who are on an income based on weekly wages or monthly wages. They could not afford, they could not reach into a big bank account. They could not live off their investments. There are a whole lot of people in the Republican Party who do not understand this. But they created a whole lot of misery. People suffered. It is all right to suffer for a good purpose, but it was totally unnecessary. In addition to this abuse of power causing such suffering, we are now going to cause a hemorrhaging of our economic system here in this country. A default will certainly have terrible consequences. A default is economic suicide. I hope that the leaders of the Republican Party who are now waving the threat of default in order to get more concessions will reconsider and let the debate go forward. The Speaker has clearly stated that the objective of the Republicans in this House is to remake America. They want to try to remake America in 2 years. That is their goal. I think it is unfortunate that remaking America is a goal to begin with. I think it is more unfortunate that they are going to try to remake America in 2 years. I do not think America needs to be remade. I think we have institutions, we have agencies, we have programs, we have a large number of things that could be improved. There ought to be a process of refining. There ought to be a process of adjusting. There ought to be a process of trimming, streamlining. There are a number of things that can go forward without having the kind of revolutionary proposal that is embodied in a call to remake America. But if that is the way it is, the Speaker has the power and the leadership of the House has the power to set the parameters and determine the environment that we have to exist in, and that is the way it is. Let us go forward in 1996 and deal with the drive to remake America. Let us look at the vision of America projected by the Republicans who control the House of Representatives and the Senate. Let us look at the vision of America projected by the President. I think the President will project some of his vision of America in his State of the Union Address tomorrow. I think the President in his behavior, the way the President has handled the budget certainly is a projection of part of his vision of America. The President has stood fast and insisted that in this remaking of America we shall not dump overboard the poorest Americans, we shall not dump overboard the powerless Americans. We shall not dump overboard the helpless Americans like children. I think we heard earlier, less than an hour ago, a message of the President vetoing the Personal Responsibility Act. The Personal Responsibility Act is one of the most misnamed acts we might consider in a long time. The President vetoed it and said: I want welfare reform; I started it. The President started the movement for welfare reform. I may not agree with all of his proposals. I certainly do not agree with the proposals made by the Republican majority in this House, but welfare reform is needed; reform, refinement, adjustment, streamlining, elimination of ridiculous parts of the program, making it work more effective administratively. There are a lot things we need in welfare reform that are going to go forward, and the President is committed to that and it will happen. But I thank the President for vetoing the bill that was sent to him because it is not welfare reform. It is a destruction of a program to help the poorest people in our Nation. Why have we used a hammer to bang on the program that provides aid to families with dependent children? The welfare reform program that was sent to the President by the Republicans was a program that was most cruel to children. It was a program which sought to end and still seeks to end the entitlement for children, the entitlement that is built into a part of the Social Security law. There is a lot of concern about, are we going to tamper with Social Security, is Congress going to tamper with Social Security? Are the Republicans going to tamper with Social Security? Is Social Security safe? The answer is no, because most people do not know it, but aid to families with dependent children is part of the Social Security Act. Medicare is part of the Social Security Act. Medicaid is part of the Social Security Act. They are all part of Social Security. The part of Social Security which helps the people on the bottom, those who are deemed to be the least powerful, who are not voting, who do not vote, certainly, for Republicans when they do vote, that is the part that we have bludgeoned already with a hammer. Aid to families with dependent children, $16 billion is the amount of money estimated for this program, aid to families with dependent children. That is less than we give to the farmers. The subsidies that go to farmers in various ways, cash subsidies, home mortgages and all kinds of various programs that go to farmers, those subsidies total far more than the aid to families with dependent children. The farmers do not have to pass a means test. People who get welfare, aid to families with dependent children, they must prove first that they need it. They must prove first that they are poor. So why are we bludgeoning them with a heavy hammer, when we refuse to touch these subsidies that farmers get who do not pass a means test? We tried to pass a bill on the floor of this House. I joined with the gentleman from New York [Mr. Schumer], on two occasions, a simple bill which said farmers who have income from whatever source of $100,000 or more per year should not qualify for the cash subsidy program. I think we got about 60 votes the first year we tried to pass that and about 57 or 58 the second time we tried to pass that. So the overwhelming sentiment, Democrats and Republicans, was do not touch the cash subsidies for the farmers whether they are in need of it or not. But let us go after the people on welfare. It is not because they are getting more than anybody else. It is not because they are unworthy really. It is because they have no power. It is because they do not vote for Republicans. It is because in too many cases they do not vote for anybody, and that is a message I hope that the people who are, the parents of those poor children who get the aid will understand. In America, in the final analysis, you have a weapon. In the final analysis, the fact that you do not vote is the critical action that you take. By not acting, you act. So every person out there who is an adult responsible for receiving the benefits for children who are in the aid to families with dependent children, you owe it to the children, you are neglecting the children when you do not vote. You are neglecting the children when you do not participate in the political process. If you start voting and you vote blindly for anybody who gives you some kind of divergent argument, you are also neglectful of the children. Vote for the people who say that they are interested in children and back that up with their votes on programs like aid to families with dependent children. I hope that as we go forward for the rest of 1996, there will be an election, you are aware of it, in November 1996. Before we get to November, of course, there are many other elections that are taking place. In Iowa, in New Hampshire, et cetera, this is an election year. So I hope that in this election year, we can continue to discuss the budget. I would like to see a budget agreement reached. I think the President has gone as far as he can go, however, I would not cry, if we do not reach one, if it is going to have to be reached at the expense of the people on the bottom and the President is going to have to give even more. I think the President has come a long way, and I am not happy and a lot of Democrats are not happy with the compromise that he has offered, which I think goes too far. But I admire him for stepping out there and trying to meet the Republicans halfway. I think he has gone more than halfway. I hope that we do work out an agreement whereby we have a budget this year. The principle of a balanced budget, I do not agree with that, but it seems that most other people agree with it. So we will have a balanced budget. I serve as the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget task force. We put a balanced budget on the floor of this House. We had to do it. In order to bring our budget and be able to discuss any of our ideas and our proposals, we had to come forward with a balanced budget. So we came forward with a balanced budget. The balanced budget we have submitted for the Record. It is in the Record. We balanced the budget without cutting Medicaid. We balanced the budget without cutting Medicare. We balanced the budget and we increased education expenditures. We increased expenditures for job training. What we did was we cut defense, and that is a very reasonable proposition to cut defense, when the United States of America is spending more than all the other industrialized nations in the world put together, we are spending more than they are put together on defense. So it is possible to cut defense. This does not in any way hamper us in conducting noble missions like the liberation of Haiti or a mission to save the people of Bosnia from ethnic genocide. There is still plenty of room for that, even if you cut the defense budget. So we cut the defense budget. But most of all we raised the tax burden of the corporations. We did two things. We closed corporate loopholes and we insisted that there be an increase in the taxes in certain places on corporations because corporations have steadily paid less and less of the income tax burden over the last 20 years. From 1943 to 1995, they have dropped from a corporate tax burden percentage of nearly 40 percent to a corporate tax burden now of about 11 percent, while individuals have gone up from their percentage of the tax burden being 27 percent to 48 or 49 percent in 1983, and now it is still as high as 44 percent. So we balanced the budget by implementing what I call revenue justice. Let us have the revenue flow from the place where the most revenue is being generated. Corporations are making enormous profits. That sector of the economy is booming. Individuals and families are suffering. Their incomes have stagnated. They are not making as much in terms of real terms when you look at inflation as they were making 10 years ago. Minimum wages are far too low, way behind inflation. With all those factors under consideration, we hear tax cut. For families and individuals starting with the families and individuals at the bottom of the scale, in our Congressional Black Caucus budget we started at the bottom of the scale with families and individuals who are working families. We started by giving them some tax relief. What is being proposed now by the Republicans is just the opposite. They are proposing to change the earned income tax credit which the Congressional Black Caucus fought very hard to expand 2 years ago. They want to change the earned income tax credit which means they are increasing the taxes on the poorest people. At the same time they want to give huge tax cuts for the richest people. They have their opinion. The Republicans in the House and Senate, they have a position. It is a clear position. I want to congratulate them for clearly enunciating and setting forth exactly what their vision of America is. They think America should provide more and more for the rich who have gotten more and more out of our economy over the past 20 years. They want to give them even more. They are clearly willing to state that. They are not hedging. They are not fudging. So there is a clear choice being presented to the American people. I hope that we will keep our eyes on this process and keep the debate going. If they insist, if they want the tax cut at the same level that they have it, let us keep focused on that. Let us not back away from the argument about the level of taxes. Let us talk about the flat tax. Let us talk about the possibility of a national sales tax, value added tax. Let us talk about changing tax rates. Let us take a hard look at the tax policies across the board, because what has often happened in the 13 years that I have been here, I am in my 14th year, is that the tax policies and whatever dealt with taxes was discussed behind closed doors, was decided behind closed doors. They had some hearings and long lines of people would line up to go, and you could barely get into the Ways and Means meetings. And then when they made the final decision, of course, they had closed meetings. Then they would come to the floor and you would have 1 or 2 hours to debate the most important issue in the country; that is, how are we going to get the revenues to run the fiscal affairs of the Nation. The shortest period of time to debate the most important topic. I understand that one of my colleagues in the Democratic Party has proposed that special orders be taxed, that every Member who makes special orders should pay the cost of special orders, that whatever it costs to keep the staff here and the guards and the light bill, whatever, we should be charged that, each Member should have to pay that out of his budget. My first reaction to that proposal--it came from a Democrat that I respect a great deal, it is not trivial. I understand her concern. My first reaction to that is that I would gladly, I would gladly advocate that there be no special orders of any kind if you will give every Member of Congress the right to speak for 5 minutes on any issue that is on the floor that they want to speak on. When the important issues come to this floor, if I had the right to speak for 5 minutes, I would surrender any other compensatory arrangements like 1-minutes and 5 minutes and 60 minutes, who needs it? The problem is that we are 435 Representatives of this Nation, people from across the Nation, and we seldom have a chance to speak on the most important issues. The 435 people in this House of Representatives spend less time talking on this floor than the 100 Members of the other body. The 100 Members of the other body spend more time debating on the floor than we spend for 435 Members in the House of Representatives. The time is so tightly controlled. We have a Committee on Rules. And the amount of time spent on the floor here debating issues is in direct proportion to the importance of the issue as perceived by the leadership. If the leadership perceives an issue to be really important, they shorten the time greatly. You can check this with the records. This can be verified. It is not an empty statement that I am making. On issues that they do not consider very important, we have open rules, unlimited debate. But never has a Ways and Means bill come to the floor in the 14 years that I have been here where there was an open rule, an unlimited debate. If I had that privilege and that right to have at least 5 minutes to speak on a Ways and Means bill, at least 5 minutes to speak on a defense bill, by the time, if you have only 1 hour for each side, and there have been some times when there is only 30 minutes for each side, but if you have 1 hour for each side, by the time you get through the committee, the committee of jurisdiction and any Committee on Appropriations members who also relate to that particular item, the time is used up. If you are not on defense, if you are not on Ways and Means, on those important issues you cannot say, you cannot even get 1 minute. So those who propose that we eliminate special orders, I am with you if you will join me in a fight to guarantee the right of every Member of Congress, which it ought to be taken for granted, we are elected by the people, we should have 5 minutes, just 5 minutes on any issue that we deem to be important. If every one of the 435 Members want to speak for 5 minutes, I assure you if you look at the calendar, it will not lengthen the session of Congress. We have a lot of down time, a lot of waste of time where nobody is doing anything on this floor. The Senate spends more time, as I said before, on the floor than we spend here. The other body, in terms of per Member time on the floor, is way ahead of us. So I pause to say that that is very important. I would like to have us keep our eyes on the budget/fiscal debate. Let us go forward and talk about taxes and where they come from. Let us talk about revenue. Let us go forward and talk about expenditures. Let us keep the debate going. I would like to see a pledge to avoid lapsing into diversionary issues. As we look forward toward November 1996, let us not back away from a discussion of revenue, taxes, programs, budget cuts, balancing the budget, et cetera. Let us keep the debate going. It is a very complicated nation that we have. It is a complicated budget. These are complicated times. We should not try to oversimplify. For the first time I think many Americans are getting some indication of what it is all about. For good or ill, regardless of whether you agree with the position taken by one party or another or one individual or another, the debate is very healthy. Can we keep this debate going? I hope we will. I hope that the President's State of the Union Address tomorrow will be a statement which allows us to go forward and consider his vision of America and what America would look like when he remakes America, if he had the opportunity to remake America, versus the vision that is envisaged in the Contract With America that was set forth by the House Republicans. Beyond the Contract With America, the House Republicans have done a lot of things that are not in that contract. The attack on organized labor, the attack on workers safety, the refusal to even deal with minimum wages, all of that was not stated in the contract, but some terrible things have happened. But those are worthy items. If you want to debate the budget and talk about the fact that the Republicans, because they could not get certain things through the authorization process, because they are frustrated by the fact that the Senate will not approve some of the measures that they have passed because they are not reasonable, because the Senate wants to stay closer to the common sense agenda of the American people so they have reverted to the appropriations process. They do not like the fact that we have an agency called OSHA, which is responsible for the occupational health and safety of workers. They want OSHA out of business. They have made a compact with some of the worst kinds of business people who want to avoid having to meet their responsibilities to provide a safe workplace. Ten thousand workers died last year; 10,000 workers died in the workplace. We can debate about other workers who died as a result of conditions in the workplace. They contracted illnesses and then they died later or they had an accident and it led to complications and they died later. But on the job, on the job 10,000 workers died. This is not a trivial matter. It is a critical matter. Yet because they do not want to disturb the business community, which unreasonably insists that OSHA is a bother, OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has enough employees to inspect the businesses of America. And when you take the number of businesses of America that are in the category that need to be inspected and you divide that by the number of people who are employed by OSHA to do the inspections, it will take 87 years, given the number of employees that OSHA has before the budget cuts, it would take 87 years for each one of the business sites in America that are supposed to be inspected to be inspected by that group of inspectors, 87 years. They are going to cut OSHA drastically. So that means that it will take 100 years to get around to inspecting each business. So the argument that the businesses are being harassed and OSHA is a regulatory burden and that an attempt to provide safe workplaces for workers results in empowering or hindering the economy, these arguments are ridiculous. But they go forward. Let them keep proposing that and saying that we need to save money at the cost of risking more lives of workers. Let them say that between now and November. Let us keep that going. Let us debate it. You decide. Let the American people decide. Let them continue to tell us that school lunch programs are not being cut; it is the rate of growth that is being decreased. Let them keep telling us that, and we will tell you that if you are cutting, putting money to cut the rate of growth of the program in dollar terms, you are not looking at the rate of growth in terms of youngsters, the number of children who are enrolled in school. They ignore the fact that the number of children enrolled in school is increasing. You cannot cut the rate of growth of the program without reducing what is available for the children who are there unless you take into consideration the fact the number of children is increasing. They tell us immigrant children should not be given free lunches and that the schools should go and search out the immigrant children and create an atmosphere of terror within certain schools while they search for immigrant children to deny them the school lunch program. Let this debate go forward. It is about saving money on the one hand, but if you look at it closely, there is more to this than just saving money. There is more to this than just saving money; there are some attitudes. I think President Clinton made it quite clear in his budget message. The President had a veto message, and then the President has also sent a message down with his new balanced budget. Let us look for a moment at what is happening here, and again, it is going to be a long year. It is going to be a long debate. Please do not lose faith. Keep the faith. Keep listening, because this is all about the remaking of America; and your faith is involved here, your children's faith is involved here. The President was accused of not being sincere about a balanced budget. He submitted a balanced budget one time and then he said, according to CBO estimates, it is $400 billion out of balance; over a 7-year period, the President is still spending $400 billion too much. So the President has come back with a budget that balances in 7 years, and it also has a surplus at the end of the 7 years; and now we are being told that is totally unacceptable. We are going to shut down the Government because we do not like the way you balanced the budget. Now, was the call to balance the budget in the beginning, when they asked the President to submit a balanced budget, did they say, submit a balanced budget that we like; submit a balanced budget that is good for America; submit a balanced budget that you like? The President submitted a balanced budget he thinks is good for America, and in his message he says the following: His balanced budget upholds our values, upholds America's values. We want to balance the budget to limit the debt, the burden of debt on our children. We want to protect Medicare and Medicaid to honor our duty to our elderly, to people with disabilities and to children. We want to invest in education and training to honor our duty to our children and families. We want to protect the environment and public health so our children grow up in a clean and safe world. We want to reward work by not raising taxes on working families. We want to provide tax relief for middle-class families. Now, that is the message that came back with the newly balanced budget of the President, which, as I said before, ends in 7 years with a surplus. By the way, the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget, which I put forth on the floor of the House, the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget also had a surplus at the end of 7 years. We had a surplus of $16 billion at the end of 7 years. I told you we balanced our budget without cutting Medicaid, without cutting Medicare, and we increased the amount of money for job training and education, and we did this using assumptions and figures that were certified by the Congressional Budget Office. The Republican majority would not let us bring the budget to the floor if we had not used assumptions that were set forth by the Congressional Budget Office. So we balanced the budget. The Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget is a long way from where the President is right now. I am not happy with the President and the fact he is going to cut Medicare far more than we stated in the Congressional Black Caucus budget it should be cut. Let us forget about that. Later on there was a bill introduced by Democrats that said, OK, a commission study showed that there are problems with the Medicare program, and by the year 2002 you may have a real problem, so let us cut the budget by $90 billion. I think the study said it would be a problem of $89 billion. This bill proposed cutting the budget by $90 billion over a 7-year period. The $90 billion cut would be focused on waste, streamlining more administrative efficiency, and cutting waste, $90 billion. The President is far beyond that $90 billion. There is a group called the Blue Dogs who have a proposal that also goes beyond the $90 billion. The President does not please me by cutting more than $90 billion, but I congratulate him on making the effort. He is stretching as far as he can in order to accommodate and reach a compromise with the Republicans. But this compromise, this stretch, has not impressed the Republicans. They say we are going to shut down the Government, and go even beyond shutting down the Government; we are going to tamper with the economy of the United States and maybe the economy of the world by going into default if you don't give us what we want. Now, clearly, understand, you out there with your common sense, the American people should clearly understand the power that is being wielded here. The Republicans are saying, we will threaten to shut down the Government, we will throw the Nation into default if you do not give us what we want. And even after you do that, if you meet us part of the way, we are going to do something selective. We are going to reach in and provide funding for only those programs that we approve of; we are going to strangle, through the appropriations process, those we do not like. We do not like funds for education. We have a cut. Republicans are proposing to cut Head Start about $300 million. They will reach in and strangle Head Start a little bit. We do not like title I, which is the largest Federal program providing aid to elementary and secondary schools. Ninety percent of the school districts across America get some portion of the title I program. They do not like it, so they will reach in and strangle that by cutting it $1.1 billion. That is about \1/7\th of the total. That is a huge cut; out of $7 billion, they are going to cut $1.1 billion. So these are horrendous actions, but at least they obvious, open. The CIA is not involved here, so they are not hiding what they are doing. It is an open position. It is up to the American people to go forward and look at what they are doing and come to some conclusions. They are not interested just in saving money or balancing the budget. The argument that every family balances its budget and so forth, the Nation therefore should balance its budget, that argument makes a lot of sense on the surface, but that is really not what it is all about. In the first place, very few families balance their budget in a year. In a year's period, your family's budget is not balanced and you know that too. You have not paid for your home fully. Rich people can, but we are talking about 10 to 15 percent of Americans who can go out and pay cash for a car and cash for a condominium or for a house. That number of people is very much in the minority in America. Most Americans have to get mortgages. Most Americans have to get loans to buy cars. So very few families have a balanced budget where exactly what they take in during a year is what they spend during a year. They have debts that are carried over, long-term investments and items, and it is just ridiculous to insist we have to have a balanced budget. But that is where we are. I will not bore you anymore by explaining the weaknesses in the argument that we have to have a balanced budget. That is accepted. Let us start out, that that is an assumption. Everybody now is basically agreed that we will have a balanced budget. The President has agreed that we will have a balanced budget. The President has moved to put forth a balanced budget which the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office and everybody who has to sign off, they all agree the numbers and assumptions are correct. Nobody can accuse the President of not following the assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office regardless of whether they are sound or unsound or how uncomfortable the White House may feel about it. They have gone forward and done that. So, now, let the debate go forward and let the American people make judgments about the arguments that are being made. The President says that his budget reflects the values of the American people. One of the latest polls taken, I think there was a poll taken by the Washington Post, which shows that 50 percent, according to the poll, 50 percent of the American people agree that the President's position is a sound position and they want to support that position. I think this was January 7, not too long ago. The poll finds that 50 percent approve of how Clinton is handling this dispute, and 22 percent approve of the way the Republicans are handling it. 50 percent. So we are not talking about what Congressman Owens and the Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the members of the Progressive caucus, the liberal Democrats, we are not talking about their position at this point. We are talking about the position of the President, which is consistent with the position of 50 percent of the American people. They approve of his tremendous effort to stretch and meet the Republicans. I just hope that he understands that they do not want him to go any further. I hope the President does not disappoint the American people by stretching further, because any further stretching would be disastrous, any further stretching. Because if you stretch further, what you are doing is abandoning the values of the American people and moving to the values of the Republican elite. The Republicans do not value the same vital commitments in Medicaid. The Republicans want to eliminate the guarantee of quality nursing home care and meaningful health care benefits for older Americans. They want to eliminate it for individuals with disabilities. They want to eliminate it for pregnant women and poor children. All this is not necessary to balance the budget, we are saying, but they want to do that. They want to leave a lot of their dirty work to the States. They want to say, well, let the States make the decisions. People have come up with this argument, of course, that States can do a better job. The closer you get to the people, the more likely you are to have effective government. There is nothing in the history of government which shows that State governments are more effective than the Federal Government, or that local governments are more effective than the Federal Government. Some of the worst corruption and the worst mismanagement and the worst incompetency you find in America can be found at the local level. In New York State right now, at this very moment, we have Governor Pataki, who sits in the Governor's mansion of New York, a Republican Governor, who has turned the State government into a clubhouse patronage meal. Never before in the history of New York State government has any Governor so blatantly used the treasury, used the State apparatus, the administration of government, to bolster partisan concerns. He has openly said he will pick up certain parts of the government in the capital; Albany is the capital of New York State. He is going to move certain programs out of Albany into Poughkeepsie, where he lives, and into other areas where he got large amounts of votes. This Republican Governor is not pretending to be a good-government advocate. He is openly doing this. He is openly allowing certain members of his cabinet who are responsible for certain contracts to solicit in fundraising. There are all kinds of things happening that Democrats might have done, but they never were so blatant about it; and some things, Democrats have never done in New York City. We have a Republican mayor, Mayor Giuliani, and we have had some strong mayors in the history of our city. One of the most famous ones, who was accused of being arrogant, many times he behaved like an emperor, he was a former Member of this House, Mayor Koch. But Mayor Koch insisted on a merit system for the selection of judges. Whether he liked it or not, there were judicial panels that appointed judges, and he lived with those appointments. He followed the recommendations of the panels. Mayor Dinkins, who followed him, did the same thing, merit appointments. And the newspapers, the good-government organizations, applauded all this. Along comes Mayor Giuliani, Republican mayor, and he ignores or challenges the findings of the judicial review panels and appoints two people, who, in the opinion of many of the judges, the legal people who sit on the judicial review panels, are not qualified. He boasts about it, and he is going to do more of it. In New York City the remaking of government is already going forward, the harassment of people who want to get on welfare. If you apply for welfare, there are all kinds of extra roadblocks thrown in your way, so that if you want to cut the welfare rolls, one simple way to do it is to make the paperwork more difficult. No matter how poor you are, if I insist that I am not taking your application unless you sign on just the right line, unless you answer every question, unless every ``T'' is crossed, and every ``I'' is dotted, I can keep you off welfare for months just through those technicalities. In other words, if you have a system of values where you do not want to feed the hungry, you do not want to provide housing for the homeless or clothe the naked, you are totally out of sync with the Judeo- Christian values of this Nation, then you can proceed at the local level even with present regulations in place. At this moment, people are still entitled to Aid to Families with Dependent Children. They are still entitled. The entitlement has not been taken away yet. It has been proposed by the Republicans in this House; it has been passed by the Republicans in the Senate, and a lot of Democrats in the Senate voted for it. So entitlement probably is going to be gone this time next year; the people who are poor families with children qualifying for Aid to Families with Dependent Children will not have a Federal entitlement. That will probably be gone next year. I fear that that is one of the concessions that the President will make. I hope he will not, but I fear that will be a concession he will make. But it is not gone yet. It is still there. At the local government level in New York City, we have a mayor who has gone ahead and is already doing the kinds of dirty work you can expect once that entitlement is gone. He has taken it upon himself to come up with tricks and various means to keep people off the welfare roll and deny them even when they have great needs. So that process is going forward. Medicaid. The Governor has proposed, and then he backed away, that the standards for nursing homes in New York be watered down, that the requirement that every nursing home has to take a certain percentage of poor people be eliminated. He has backed away temporarily, but those proposals are coming back, if the States are going to have an opportunity to administer Medicaid without the guarantees. Let us understand States already administer these programs, localities already administer these programs. What they are trying to do is take away the Federal guarantees that if you are eligible, you should get it. They want to take away the Federal appeal procedures. They want to take away the Federal guidelines. They want to take away the Federal oversight. They want to be free to take taxpayers' money and use it the way they want to use it toward their own ends. An example is being set by Mr. Pataki in New York State and Mr. Giuliani in New York City. Those are examples of the kind of thing you can look forward to: abuse of power, abuse of the poor, balancing the budget on the backs of the people who do not have political power. So the President says the Republicans do not value these vital commitments, and between now and November 1996, November of this year, keep watching. Do not lose your gaze. Keep your eyes on the prize. Where are the American values? Do they say, we want to cut Medicaid and leave the poorest people without health care, leave the people who are disabled without health care, leave pregnant women and poor children without health care? Are those American values? In Medicare, the President says the Republicans want to charge 37 million Medicare recipients higher premiums and change the system so that it benefits the healthiest and wealthiest while allowing the traditional Medicare Program to wither on the vine. That is a quote from one of the great leaders of the Republican Party, even though it is not necessary to balance the budget. The Republicans want to charge 37 million Medicare recipients higher premiums and change the system so that it benefits the healthiest and the wealthiest while leaving those who need it most in a state of stress. I know the stress because I get more questions in my district about Medicare and Medicaid than about any other programs. People are feeling the stress already as they contemplate what is being proposed. In education, the Republicans call for cuts in aid for smaller classrooms, cuts for Head Start. They call for cuts in basic skills and higher standards while ending the direct student loan program. What does the direct student loan program have to do with balancing the budget? Almost nothing. In fact, just the opposite. We will end up spending more money by ending the direct student loan program, but that is an activity which is offensive to the banking community, certain favorite communities that support the leadership, and they are out there making arguments that the student loan program, the direct student loan program is some kind of evil when it has obvious benefits. Environment. They continually put the special interests over the environment and they want to take the environmental cop off the beat. These are Republican values versus American values. The American people indicate that they are with the President. They are with the President. Let us keep our eyes on the two sets of values, the President's values versus the Republican values, as we go forward toward November 1996. Do not take your eyes off the prize. The budget debate, the fiscal debate, the tax debate, that is it; that is what we have to focus on. I keep insisting that we ought to keep our eyes on the prize and Americans ought to welcome the opportunity to remake America or to refine America or to adjust America and make it a better America, because I know the surprise that is coming. The Republicans are planning to back away from these very important issues and move into diversionary tactics. They are going to try to ambush the voters with the usual diversionary issues. What are the diversionary issues? Prayer in the schools, gun control, affirmative action, set-asides, voting rights, gays in the military. Those have nothing to do with the remaking of America in terms of fiscal and budget and tax issues, but they are going to switch to those and we have to be aware that as we go forward in 1996, these are very important issues. Prayer in school is important. It is important to talk about guns. I am all in favor of more gun control. I understand the position of those who want less; I understand their position. I disagree with it thoroughly. The murder rate has gone down in general, but among young people the murder rate, the rate of people being shot with guns, is dramatically increasing. So you have a young population using guns, and that young population is coming to the point where they are going to be a greater percentage of the overall population. So the decrease in crime we are watching now will be accompanied by an increase in crime later on as these young people using guns reach the critical teenage ages. That is where we are going. So we have to keep our eyes on the prize and beware of the diversionary issues. We have to keep our eyes on the prize and not let introductions of arguments about people being subhuman be introduced. I was shocked that one of our leaders commented on a brutal crime in Chicago, indicating that a woman would not have been murdered and had the baby ripped out of her stomach if it was not for the welfare culture. That really shocked me greatly. I did not see any connection between the welfare culture and a brutal crime like that. There are a lot of brutal crimes taking place in our country and across the world where people are not on welfare. Immorality has nothing to do directly with whether or not a person is on welfare or not. Nobody has commented on the fact that Princess Diana and Prince Charles have chosen not only to commit adultery, but to go on television and discuss it. That is being done by people who have never been on welfare, and it is the kind of horror that there is no excuse for. It is bad enough that people have sins, and all of us sin, but to go on television and parade your sins, especially when you know you are a role model. They are role models for people in Britain. They insist on having this royal family, and sometimes Americans envy the fact that Britain has a royal family and we do not; but I think that is one great example why we do not need a royal family. But Americans use the Royal Family of Britain as role models. Children use them as role models. Princess Diana, I am sure a lot of teenage girls identify with her, and on and on it goes. So if welfare determines people's morality and we must get rid of welfare in order to have people become more moral, then how does the Royal Family behave this way, and they have never been on welfare? They have never worked for a living either. Maybe they have it too easy. Maybe we are talking about decadence at a level which may be something that sociologists and psychologists and psychiatrists can deal with, but I just do not see why that has any bearing. We are going to be talking about morality. We are going to be talking about sin versus nonsin. We are going to be talking about Whitewater. Nobody wants to talk about the real crime involved in the savings and loan association debacle. We talk about Whitewater having something to do with the savings and loans crisis. Occasionally they mention that. Most people just think it was invented by the Clintons. The Clintons lost money on a savings and loan venture in Whitewater; they lost money. Let us look at Silverado in Colorado. I have a whole book here. I am a student of the savings and loan swindle, because the savings and loan swindle was the greatest swindle in the history of civilization. In the economic history of civilization, nothing like this has ever happened before. And yet in America we do not even talk about it anymore. It is nearing a close, as far as the people who want to cover it up are concerned. The greatest crime in terms of economic thievery was committed right here in this country through the savings and loan association swindle and the accompanying banks swindle. Other banks that were not savings and loan associations did the same things, the misuse of the public trust. They took out deposits backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which meant that if anything happened, you, the taxpayer, stood behind it. They took that; they abused and misused that, and billions of dollars were lost. In fact, one estimate by Stanford University said we are talking about a loss of $500 billion, a cost to the taxpayers eventually of $500 billion. There has been a process of going through the Resolution Trust Corporation and cleaning these things up, and negotiating out various arrangements, and it is all coming to a quiet close. That is real criminality. That is real dishonesty. That is real thievery. I have two reports. I read about them and I called for them. One is from the Department of Justice, Financial Institution Fraud, Special Report, Special Counsel for Financial Institution Fraud. That report I have looked at, am still looking at it. Another is called ``Attacking Financial Institution Fraud.'' It is from the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Office of the Attorney General. It is a report to Congress that is required. As I look at both of these reports, what strikes me is that they are deliberately confusing. They deliberately do not ever state clear facts. It is very hard to find out exactly how much money have the American taxpayers had to pour into bailing out the savings and loan associations. It is very hard to find out exactly how much. I know on the floor of this House, when we appropriate in one bill $50 billion for this, it is $70 billion for that, and yet they do not talk in those kinds of numbers here. They talk about bringing this whole thing to a close; and you are not talking about hundreds of billions, you are talking about a few billion here and a few million there, and I cannot make them add up. They have deliberately not reported anything in a summary fashion. I am still studying these reports to find out more about one of the greatest swindles that ever took place. So if we get into discussions of morality and discussions of swindling, if we are going to continue the Whitewater discussions, then I think it is only fair to talk about the savings and loan association swindle in all of its dimensions and talk about the Silverado, $2,286,901,934. That is the figure that they have said they ordered to be recovered. We were talking about $150 billion. Why has only $2 billion been ordered to be recovered? You will hear more about this later. This is the kind of morality discussion, if we are going to have a morality discussion, that we should get into. But my final comment is, Mr. Speaker, let us keep our eyes on the prize, continue to focus on the budget, taxes, and expenditures. It is a discussion that the American people deserve.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I, too, want to thank my colleague from Connecticut for this special order and focus particularly on senior citizens. Senior citizens in New York, senior citizens in my district, certainly are experiencing an atmosphere of terror. No matter how many times we reassure them that their Social Security checks will not be affected by the shutdown; the fact that the shutdown involves the Department of Health and Human Services, the fact that Donna Shalala has been on television talking about the kinds of things that have been happening, even though she reassures people it will not affect their Social Security checks, we keep getting the calls about the Social Security checks. New York, of course, has to bear the burden of a mean-spirited and extreme approach at three levels. Not only do we have a shutdown in Washington, but we have a mean-spirited approach in Albany, where the Governor is trying to get ahead of the Republicans here in Congress and has started imposing new rules on nursing homes already. And a mayor who is also in sync with the cuts of Medicare and Medicaid. They are applauding. So when we have a mayor and Governor and we have a shutdown in Washington, they live in a state of mental terror. Nobody is going to do them physical harm, and probably New York State and New York City, they are big enough to borrow the money to keep the Meals on Wheels program going and any other program going, but the state of terror is such that some people are going to have their lives shortened just from worrying themselves to death. They are worried because the mayor has said he wants to sell hospitals. And when he cannot get buyers for the hospitals, now he is willing to lease hospitals. Recently the Governor announced he is going to close down one of the largest psychiatric centers, Kingsboro Psychiatric Center, in my district. It is a large hospital, located in a big hospital center, so people think he is going to close down Kings County Hospital, which is the biggest municipal hospital in the city. The rumors generate and people are very much frightened when they hear Medicaid being thrown into the hopper. And if there is no Medicaid entitlement, that means they are not guaranteed nursing homes. New York State has one of the biggest Medicaid and Medicare programs in the country, and they hear on television our State being criticized for being so generous. I am not so sure we are too generous. We have some very good programs and take very good care of senior citizens. With all the generosity with respect to health care, New York State still sends to the Federal Government $18 billion more. In 1994 we sent $18 billion more to the Federal Government than we got back. Before that it was $23 billion. And for the last 20 years New York State has sent more money to the Federal Government than it has gotten back. There are a whole wealth of States in the South and Southwest that have gotten $65 billion more in 1994 than they paid to the Federal Government, but we consistently pay more into the Federal Government than we get back. So Medicare, Medicaid, that is one of the ways our citizens get back some of their tax money. People are terrified with the thought that all this is going to change. Because if Medicaid is no longer an entitlement, then two- thirds of our Medicaid money, which goes for nursing homes, is up for grabs. And I think this kind of special order helps to reassure them that at least Democrats here are fighting. This is a profound debate. It is also a desperate debate. We are desperately fighting to protect some very profound and concrete benefits for people who need them, and I thank the gentlewoman very much for this opportunity.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I want to congratulate the gentleman and thank him for holding this special order. I know he is almost out of time, and I just want to be associated with the remarks that were heard before from my colleagues, especially the anger and the indignation that I heard expressed here. It is time to be angry. It is time to be indignant. This is a cruel and heartless exercise being perpetrated on people who can accept it the least, the least of our people, people who are working for wages, people who are contract workers. There are a whole lot of people out there who do not have any cushion at all. They cannot afford to be without a paycheck. As the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, I can tell my colleagues also that there are very few nonessential employees in the Government agencies which carry out inspections of the workplace. OSHA, for example, 10,000 workers lost their lives on the job last year. About 56,000 workers died as a result of injuries experienced on the job or diseases contracted on the job, a very serious matter. Without OSHA inspections, all of these things increase. They have never had enough people. This is one area where we did not need downsizing and streamlining in the first place. But since the Republican majority took over here, they have shown great contempt for workers. They have gone after OSHA. They have gone after the Department of Labor. They have let it be known that although it is not in the Contract With America, they do not value workers in this society very much. They want a class war. They are waging a class war. The workers do not know, they are not fighting back yet, but there is a class war being waged against them. To have the civil servants, the Government workers, held as hostages in a situation like this displays in dramatic form, very specifically, that contempt for workers that is unAmerican. It is unAmerican to be as heartless as they are in this exercise. It is not in keeping with our tradition to use people in the way they are being used. I just want to make certain, and I will continue this at a later date, that we understand that workers are suffering a great deal in many different ways. Certainly those Government agencies, the bureaus and the units of the Department of Labor which are involved in activities which deal with workers, not only OSHA but also Fair Labor Standards Act and a number of others, they are essential and we need them now for many reasons. Workers should not be treated with such great contempt by the Republican majority.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to the conference report on welfare reform. The destruction of entitlements. That is the goal of the Republican majority. But only the means-tested Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC] entitlement is being wiped out by these high technology barbarians. Rich farmers and agricultural businesses will still retain their entitlement to farm subsidies. Entitlements to homeowners and business owners for flood relief, hurricane relief, and earthquake relief will remain in place. But families and children who experience economic disaster, the neediest among us will be denied Government assistance. There are many reasons to vote against this phony reform package. But the single most important reason is that it sets a precedent by ending a means-tested entitlement. A beachhead is established by the barbarians. The next target is the means-tested Medicaid entitlement. In this bill the automatic right to Medicaid presently available to all AFDC recipients is eliminated. In the reconciliation bill of the majority, the means-tested Medicaid entitlement is eliminated totally. This Christmas 1995 is not a Merry Christmas. Millions of Tiny Tims will suffer and die in the years to come as a result of the overwhelming meaness of the House Republican majority.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the conference report. The only entitlements being taken away by the Republican majority are means-tested entitlements to the poorest people in America. I hope we vote ``no'' on this bill.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I have been patiently waiting here just in case there was no one here to take the Republican hour, and I am happy to make additional comments about John Dingell, the icon of this institution. I came here in 1983 with a very large freshman class, I think it was something like 57 Democrats and a total of 80, and about two-thirds of the members of my freshman class all wanted to serve on the Committee on Commerce. I had a mindset for education and labor, so I was not a part of that group. I can speak objectively, because I am not a member of the Committee on Commerce, I am not from Michigan, but I would like to add my voice to those who paid tribute to John Dingell tonight. I could go on and on and talk about the Individuals with Disabilities Act, a piece of legislation which a number of enemies swore would never get past the Committee on Energy, but it of course got past the Committee on Energy, and in the end, all of the Members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, joined in making that act pass as a result of the kind of leadership shown by John Dingell. On term limitations, somebody has already spoken. I think John Dingell's 40 years in the Congress certainly answer the assertion made that we have people here too long. I have always argued that term limitations are a bit silly. Nobody goes out to look for a lawyer fresh out of law school to take a case that is important; you do not go to surgery expecting a doctor fresh out of medical school to put your life in their hands; and certainly it should not be done in a complex job like this. The legislative process is just as complex, and those who insist that you do not need to stay here long to understand it are misunderstanding the process. I think John Dingell shows that in order to succeed in the legislative process here in America you have to have the wisdom and skill of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, combined with the skills of Machiavelli and Jesus Christ all together. It is a very complex process and it takes a great deal; and just as nobody would say that Einstein, because he had a head of white hair and looked very old, should step down because of term limitations, I think John Dingell will never be asked to step down, in deference to some kind of theory of term limitations. John Dingell is the Einstein of the Federal legislative process, and it is a pleasure for me to and an honor for me to raise my voice with others to pay tribute to John Dingell, Mr. Chairman, from the State of Michigan.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the Hamilton amendment. The deployment of American troops in Bosnia is a very serious undertaking. It is a very risky action. As policymakers, it is appropriate that we move with reluctance and hesitation, but this serious risky action is a vitally necessary action. Military criminals, thugs with weapons of mass destruction, should not be allowed to butcher innocent thousands of civilians as they recklessly grab for power. On Tuesday in this Chamber, Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel paid tribute to America with the following words: As the end of this twentieth century is nearing, it can verily be described as the American century. The United States has built strength and used it to save the globe from three of its greatest menaces: Nazi tyranny, Japanese militarism, and the Communist challenge. You saved freedom. You enabled many nations to save their democracies, even as you strive now to assist many nations to free themselves from their nondemocratic past. You fought many wars. You won many victories. Wars did not cause you to lose heart. Triumphs did not corrupt you. You remained unspoiled, because you rejected the spoils of victory. End of quote by Shimon Peres. The American people and its armies should not again and again be called upon to make great sacrifices in order to save the civilized world. Our Nation should make it known that American resources and American soldiers will not always be available for every just cause. But Bosnia, we have a most appropriate time to respond. This is a landmark in modern civilization. Our troops are being deployed within the context of a well-developed blueprint for peace. Our troops are being deployed to smother and contain the virus of ethnic cleansing and racism. Our troops are being deployed to provide an opportunity to survive for hundreds of thousands of grieving men, women, and children. Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``yes'' vote on the Hamilton amendment.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the Dornan amendment. There is no more noble a purpose and no more practical a purpose for the use of American military strength than the purpose for which the troops are being deployed in Bosnia. Blessed are the peacemakers and peacekeepers. All armies are created and mobilized for the purpose of achieving peace. Troops fight to win wars in order to realize peace. To conquer an enemy is to achieve peace. If peace is always the objective, then why do we belittle and challenge a use of American troops to maintain the peace in a situation where peace has been negotiated? Every soldier who serves in Bosnia should be saluted as a hero. The soldiers who keep the peace deserve all the medals and as much glory as the soldiers who fight hot wars. Peace is always the objective of honorable military action. Certainly there are great risks. From day one in training camp, every soldier enters a world where risks are far greater than in the civilian world. In any foreign theater, a soldier's risks are greatly increased. But in Bosnia the risks are being taken to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and to provide shelter for those who have been made homeless over and over again by the actions of military criminals. We spend nearly $250 billion a year to maintain the world's greatest military force. The American armed forces of 1995 should be declared an Army for peace. For all the years to come it should be understood that we are armed to promote and preserve peace. Bosnia should not be seen as a waste. The deployment of troops in Bosnia is a necessity to send a message to the military criminals of the world that thugs will not be allowed to rule any part of the world and go unchallenged. American soldiers should not be asked again and again to do this in the world, but this is a clear and present situation. This is a situation that has been negotiated. This is a situation where peace is achievable. Let our Army help to achieve that peace.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, for convening this special order on Joseph Rainey on the occasion of Joseph Rainey's 125th anniversary upon being elected to the House of Representatives. On December 12, 125 years ago, Mr. Rainey took his seat in this House as the first black to be elected to the House of Representatives. Shortly before that, Mr. Hiram Revels had taken a seat in the Senate, on February 25. I think it is very important, and I want to thank the gentleman from South Carolina for taking this occasion to give us a brief snapshot of some very important history. It was a lecture that I learned quite a bit from. It was only too short. One of the advantages in celebrating an occasion like this, the anniversary of the seating of the first African-American to take a seat in the House of Representatives, is you can review some history and deal with some little known facts that are very seldom related, and you can also make an analysis and apply it to our present day problems. I think our friend from South Carolina [Mr. Clyburn] has just done a marvelous job of not only adding some significant facts to the little known, but also applied it to the present. I think it is very important that we try to envisage the situation that existed when Joseph Rainey came to take his seat here in this House. I think it is important that young people understand what that must have been like. I think it is important for some of us who are caught in the present grip of a situation where there is a driven home to remake America, the Republican majority here is moving to remake America, and they are focusing on the budget right now and making it appear that the most important thing in the remaking of America is a reduction in the expenditures, a balanced budget, which creates a perfect excuse for cutting a lot of programs which benefit African-Americans, the descendants of slaves, because those descendants of slaves happen to be in a situation where economically they are still the poorest of Americans. There is a direct relationship between slavery, the institution of slavery, some people call it an institution, I call it a criminal industry, the criminal industry of slavery which existed for 232 years. Let me just repeat that. The criminal industry of slavery existed in America for 232 years. Suddenly there was emancipation. Thank God for Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, which set the stage for the freeing of the slaves, but did not free the slaves. It was the 13th amendment after the surrender of the Southern rebels, the 13th amendment that was enacted by the Congress which freed the slaves across the country. But the precedent had within set by the Emancipation Proclamation. There was no turning back after Abraham Lincoln made his historic unpopular move in freeing the slaves as a strong President, taking an action that was not approved of by the Congress, that was not approved of by his own cabinet, but it was the right thing to do. It was a shinning moment in American history. The important thing is to put all those facts together. The 232 years of slavery. We are the descendants of people who were kidnapped and brought here, and for 232 years they were enslaved, 232 years. When Joseph Rainey took his seat, the Civil War had not been over for very long and the slaves had not been free for very long. It is almost a miracle that you could find anyone among the slaves who could qualify, who could organize, who could go through the political process to the point of going through the State legislature in South Carolina and then coming to the U.S. Congress. It is almost a miracle, because during that 232 years there was a determination to keep the slaves enslaved. There was laws made it a crime to teach a slave to read. Most of the Southern States, had laws, and the Southern States are where most of the slaves were concentrated, had laws which would imprison you, you could be put in prison for teaching someone to read. So the miracle is that you had enough who had learned to read, who had learned something about how to organize, to be able to bring the contingent to Congress that came in during the Reconstruction period. It was a great example of the phenomena that existed from the very first when the slaves were packed into slave ships and brought to the shores of the United States. They did not come here like other immigrants. Our forefathers did not come here like other immigrants. They were packed into slave ships like sardines. There are disputes about how many came. Very interesting, our friend, the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Clyburn], was talking, and he indicated one time in South Carolina, if I heard him correctly, there were more slaves than there were slave owners and whites, more descendants people of African descent, than there were whites in South Carolina. I remember reading some figures in several books where Williamsburg in Virginia at one point had a slave population greater than the white population. Many other States had slave populations that were almost equal or perhaps even greater. I imagine the people that took the census at those times would not let such a situation exist. There was a conflict, of course. Any Southern State wanted to have representation in Congress, so they had three-fifths of a man and each slave was allowed to stand for, which led to probably more an accurate account or, maybe some inflation of the figures sometimes, but it was to their advantage to count the slaves, because those three-fifths added up to more representation in Congress. But in truth in many cases the blacks outnumbered the whites in some Southern localities and in some Southern States, a fact which is seldom revealed. The laws that made it a crime to teach a black to read were not the only laws. There were other laws that related to any other kind of process which allowed for the socialization of blacks. There were laws which forbade marriage among slaves. For 232 years most of the enslaved population could not even legally get married. It was not surprising then that there were breakdowns in family structures, that slaves struggled so hard to hold together after emancipation. It is not surprising there is a legacy of problems related to families. It is not surprising there is a legacy of problems related to economics, just plain money. If you came here as a slave, you did not come with any relatives in the old country who could send you money, any relatives who could make arrangements with relatives already living here to take care of you for a little while. If you did not have relatives, some group, other immigrants who came, they found someone here. We were not immigrants, but the immigrants who came, they found someone here they could relate to. Whether they were relatives or not, if they came from the old country, they helped. So those people were relatively rich compared to slaves, who were deliverately torn from their tribes and torn from their ethnic backgrounds. Deliberate attempts were made to wipe out their identity, to put them together from different tribes so they did not speak the same language, and deliberately chaos was fomented. This was the heritage they came with, economically, zero, nothing. For 232 years, since slaves were owned by somebody else, they could not accumulate any wealth. There are recent studies that have shown that blacks in this country right now, even the middle-class blacks who have jobs and incomes which are comparable to whites with comparable education, the income gap has closed a great deal. We can say that we have made great strides and that equality is just over the horizon in terms of the income earned by middle-class, educated blacks, versus middle-class, educated whites. But there is a great gap in wealth. A recent book shows that the gap in wealth is due to one important phenomena that exists among all other people, and that is inheritance; that even a small inheritance passed down from one generation to another, it builds up wealth. Most of the homes, which account for a large part of the wealth of new couples, most of the homes bought by new couples who are white are paid for by the down payment, or some large part of the home is paid for by the parents of the couple on one side or the other. They help. They pass on that kind of capital. There are many other examples of capital belongings that are passed on which account for wealth. But here you have slaves, and we are the descendants of slaves who passed on nothing for 232 years. And then 100 years after that 232 years, the oppression was so great that the ability, the capacity to earn anything to pass down, was almost zero still. So is it surprising that the economic conditions of blacks in America at this very point, with all of the efforts that have been made to try to improve them and to close the gaps, they remain very serious in terms of capital and assets. Even the best off blacks, the middle-class blacks, do not have capital assets. What does that boil down to? It means that if we streamline and we downsize and we take a job from a middle-class black, in a few months that middle-class black will be in poverty. There are no assets to back them up and to sustain them over a long period of time. So 3 to 6 months can spell disaster for a middle-class black earning a decent salary with a decent education. The implications of this, I think, are not irrelevant to the discussion of Joseph Rainey. Joseph Rainey happened to be a situation where his father purchased his freedom. And I think it is to the credit of American slavery--there were some features in North American slavery that did not exist in South American slavery. One of the things about North American slavery versus South American slavery was that in South America, the pattern of slavery for a long time was that slaves were brought over in large numbers and they were worked until they were worked to death. There was no attempt made to try to group slaves together and breed slaves and have offspring from the slaves, et cetera. The pressure in North America, always there was a pressure, very early, this improvement of slavery so that the numbers that would come in were slowed down. And, finally, there were laws against more slaves coming in. And, finally, a law was passed which made slavery illegal and freed the slaves. There was a law to limit the number coming in. So the slave masters, the slave owners, the slave business in America did breed slaves. It found value in keeping the slaves alive. And in a sort of perverse way, that was a benefit. Another benefit was, because of the pressure, the moral pressure, there were large numbers of slave owners who began to allow their slaves to purchase their freedom. It was a way to earn some extra income, I guess, in many cases. But for whatever reason, the purchase of the freedom by slaves even in South Carolina was a possibility. And the father of Joseph Rainey purchased his freedom, became a barber. Rainey became a barber. He had some sense of free enterprise. Rainey was forced into the Confederate war machine later and he escaped. And, of course, I think we have related the story already of how he went to the West Indies and then came back after the war was over. But the implications are what concern me most. I just want to close by trying to picture, again, and hoping that young people, both black and white, will try to picture a situation where slaves suddenly are able to move into politics. Slaves are begrudgingly admitted to the House of Representatives. And this House of Representatives, which has always prided itself on being quite civil, was pretty mean and pretty nasty to the first black Congressman who came here. I just want to read from a book, which I will commend to those who are interested. Being a librarian, I cannot help but pass on some knowledge of where one can get some more knowledge. This is book called ``Black Americans in Congress, 1870 to 1989.'' And the book is printed by the Government Printing Office, because it is a product of the Office of the Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, and it was put together when Lindy Boggs was the chairman of the Bicentennial for Congress. So this is a very good sketch of all the black Congressman from 1870 to 1989. And the introduction of this is by Ron Dellums, who was at that time, when the book came out, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. I want to read one or two paragraphs of this. ``The 19th Century black Congressmen, who unanimously adhered to the Republican party''--that is one of the ironies of history, is that all of the Congressmen who came here, Senators and Congressmen, were Republicans, because Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. It was the Republicans who freed the slaves. How history has changed. The 19th Century black Congressmen, who unanimously adhered to the Republican party, which had championed the rights of freed men, often found the struggle for political equality continued after their election. Many of them faced contested elections and spent a good deal of their time defending the legitimacy of their claim to a House seat. Others found it difficult to speak on the floor or were subject to the hostility of various colleagues on the floor. I think our colleague, Mr. Clyburn, noted before that there were all kinds of tricks employed to get rid of the black Congressmen, and they finally succeeded in getting rid of all of them for a long period of time. But every step of the way there were tricks employed, even in States where there was an overwhelming number of blacks, there were still more whites in many of the State legislatures and political offices than there were blacks, and there was still a situation where Mr. Rainey found himself challenged in election after election when he came here, due to the trickery and the various ways of denying representation. I will not accuse the Supreme Court of trickery, but sometimes attitudes and postures, leanings, ideological bents, whatever we want to call them, can be just as poisonous as the kind of trickery that kept the number of black Congressmen very low and created misery for those who were here. The Supreme Court, all of a sudden, as was pointed out by my colleague, Mr. Clyburn, all of a sudden the Supreme Court has become interested in the aesthetics and the shape of congressional districts. Now, for years, since the beginning of the Republic, the aesthetics have been bad, because always incumbents and people in power, parties in power, drew the lines to get the best benefits for themselves. So if we look over history, and we have some booklets that have the shapes of congressional districts over history, the worst shaped districts do not exist right now. There have been some far worse ones that have existed. The voting rights area districts that are being challenged now, those that happen to have black congresspersons or persons of African descent elected from them, they are not the worst that exist now. There are much worse, much more oddly shaped districts. Suddenly the aesthetics have become a problem and we have a Supreme Court ruling that when we have these odd-shaped, strange-shaped districts, then something probably is wrong and we have a right to challenge them. And certainly if race is involved, that becomes a major factor. We have a problem in this second period of reconstruction, when blacks finally began to get numbers in Congress which are consummate and comparable to the numbers of the population. We have officially, I think, about 13 percent of the population. Probably more, but about 13 percent. But we do not have 13 percent representation in Congress, but we are moving in that direction. We have 10. We are moving toward 10 percent. And as we move in that direction, we have these new challenges and this concern for aesthetics. It is a new kind of trickery. I will close with the fact that the participation level in history by blacks must be raised. We must look back more carefully and more intensely at our history. Not just blacks but all Americans. I think a great statement was made today by the Prime Minister of Israel about the greatness of America. We are a great country. There are many great attributes, and the greatness of America flowered in the 20th century. It was not the 19th century, as we came out of slavery, I assure you, but the 20th century. We have a lot to be proud of, but we should look back on some of the history which is not so glorious and use the lessons of that history to take care of some of the problems that keep manifesting themselves in the mean-spiritedness that is exhibited in the budget debate and in the coming set of diversions that will take place as we move toward the election of 1996. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we have 10 days left on our countdown until the budget deal is made. Ten days left, and it appears certain that there will be some great disappointments among a majority of the American people. The majority will be swindled by this budget deal, but I am here tonight to send a message that we should not be discouraged. The budget deal that is going to be made is not a surrender, it is a retreat. It is temporary. The dream and the vision of the American people to have a better society, a society which makes use of all of the resources of our tremendously rich industrialized economy should not be surrendered. It still can be realized. Last year we drove for a while, for the first two years of the Clinton administration, toward a national health care plan. The national health care plan's dream was to realize universal health coverage for the first time in the United States of America. Most of the industrialized nations of the world do have universal health care coverage, or something close to it. Because of the fact that the legislation which is before us now, the legislation which is likely to be agreed upon, the negotiations dealing with the legislation and the appropriation when it is all finished, we will be a long ways away from that universal health care dream. We should not surrender the dream though. We should only understand that it is a temporary stalemate. It is a retreat which we continue to insist that this country is rich enough, this country has the resources, and the people of this country deserve a national health care plan which guarantees health care for all who need it. That is a next step in our civilization that we should not ever turn our backs on. The fact that the deal is going to be made and we are going to be far short of that should not deter us. The deal will be made and no matter what it is, [[Page H 13987]] it certainly will leave us without universal health care coverage. I only hope that we are not so far away that it may take us another 10 years to regain the territory that we lose. I only hope that we do not lose the Medicaid entitlement. The Medicaid entitlement is the first step that was taken 30 years ago toward health care coverage for all who need it. If we lose the Medicaid entitlement, if we no longer are willing to say to every poor American that if you are in need of health care and you are poor, you qualify by a means test, which tests whether or not you really are eligible, if you qualify, you get the health care coverage, you get taken care of. You are not left to die. You are not left without a nursing home, if you cannot afford it. Medicaid pays for health care for poor families, but Medicare also pays for most, two-thirds of Medicare goes for nursing homes and the care of the people with disabilities. So people with disabilities and the elderly who need nursing homes are as much beneficiaries as poor families of Medicaid. So we should not forget that. The Medicaid brings us closer to the realization of universal health care than any other Government program in health care. If Medicaid entitlements are lost, we will experience a great setback. So step one is to hope that in the negotiations which grow more questionable each day, there is less to negotiate with as the days go by. We had the defense appropriation as part of the negotiation at one time and as long as the President did not sign the bill, we were waiting for him to veto the bill, then you had the possibility of a $7 billion process there, $7 billion that the President clearly felt was not needed. It was not in his budget, $7 billion which represented things like the B-2 bomber that everybody agreed we did not need. We had the flexibility of at least starting negotiations with $7 billion on the table that could be transferred from wasteful defense expenditures to expenditures that were more meaningful in education or health care, et cetera. That is gone. The defense bill has become a part of law. The defense appropriation now has been, sort of by default, since the President did not veto it, the time period lapsed and now that is off the table. So without a doubt, we are in a little weaker position than we were before the defense bill was allowed to pass through. That is why I say that as we move toward the deadline of December 15, every day of the countdown brings us a little closer to a situation where we are weaker than we should be. And, therefore, the outcome is inevitably going to be a dissatisfactory one. It is going to be a disappointing one. It is only a matter of how much are we going to give up, how much are we going to hold on to. Whatever the outcome is, we should insist that it is only a temporary setback. It is only a retreat. It is not a total defeat. We will not surrender. We will insist that we come back and, when the Democrats regain the House of Representatives in 1996, health care will be back on the table. We will move again toward universal health care coverage. It cannot be surrendered. We cannot envisage an America which does not care about the sick, an America which does not care about the elderly and what kind of nursing homes they have. We have to insist on maintaining that standard for our civilization. We have to get back to the fight, and we have to get back to it with gusto. The majority have made it clear that they do not want to retreat on health care. The majority have made it clear that they do not want the Medicare and the Medicaid cuts. More than 70 percent of the people have said that they do not want the health care cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. The majority have said they do not want cuts in education. The majority have said they want the President to veto many of the bills that he has already signed, but certainly those that are left, basically the health, education, and human services budget, certainly the one they most of all want him to veto. The majority has made it pretty clear that they think that the movement of the Republican majority to dismantle the programs that were created by Franklin Roosevelt in the New Deal and by Lyndon Johnson in the Great Society, the rapid movement of the Republican majority to dismantle and to wreck these programs, the majority has indicated they do not agree with. They do not think that this kind of extremism is necessary. They do not accept the artificial crisis that has been created. The majority have made it clear that they are not on board and they are very much against this. Yet it sort of creeps forward because that is the way our Republic works. The people who have been elected can ignore the majority for a while. They can get away with it. So I want to just reaffirm the fact that we need health care for every American. We can have health care for every American. The country can afford it, and we should not accept whatever happens when the deal is finally completed as being final. Health care in many cities and many areas of the country right now is already undergoing some drastic changes for the worse. Even while the debate is taking place and no final decision has been made about what funds will be available and what new rules will be in place, health care systems are being dismantled in rural areas. Health care systems are being drastically changed in urban areas. And in New York City, there is a great dramatic change taking place now. Health care administrators in large numbers are leaving. Restructuring of hospitals is taking place. Super HMO's are being developed to swallow up small HMO's. All of it represents a great deal of energy, a great deal of change, which has very little to do with the improvement of health care. The restructuring is all about how the funding will take place. The restructuring is about who will make profits. The restructuring is about how will you save money by giving the patients minimum service and maximizing the profits for the providers. It is a very unfortunate situation. There was an article that appeared in the New York Times on Friday, November 3, which I think sort of sums it up, ``Can Someone Save My Hospital,'' is the op-ed article's title. The dismantling of New York City's health care system has already begun. The mayor has a plan to privatize and drastically change the hospitals. They are going to be closing city hospitals. Many of the city hospitals are getting ready to sell themselves or to be sold. HMO's are being developed that will compete with each other for patient dollars. I will just quote from this article, ``Can Someone Save My Hospital,'' by Gary Calcutt who is a physician. He is medical director of a special care AIDS clinic at North Central Bronx Hospital. And one paragraph in his article reads as follows: This plan will no doubt take some time to carry out, but in fact the dismantling of the city hospital system is now underway. Because of State Medicaid cuts and a reduction in city subsidies, the Health and Hospitals Corp. has had a budget shortfall of $950 million over the last 2 years, forcing it to slash services and to cut personnel. Twice in the past year nearly all the agency's employees have been offered a severance package. The second buyout offer in May was accompanied by a letter from Dr. Bruce Segal, who was then president of the Health and Hospitals Corp., strongly urging employees to take the severance package in order to avoid layoffs. The agency's managers must approve each layoff but in North Central Bronx Hospital, I don't know of any employee who has been denied a severance buyout. This has led to devastating losses in some crucial departments. He goes on and on. I have had my constituents come to me and say, look, you must come and visit Kings County Hospital. I go there quite often, but they wanted me to make a special visit and walk around in various departments and look around carefully. They said, you can visit, you can see the chaos, you can see why patients are bound to be suffering because the chaos is so great; the overworked personnel are so obviously tired. There is so much, the morale is so low until it is visible. And they were right. You could feel it in the hospital. You could feel that this hospital is no longer the way it once was. I have been there many times. Kings County Hospital has a history of being one of the finest hospitals in the Nation; 40 years ago people came from all over the country to be treated at Kings County Hospital, a public hospital. But now it is in chaos, and it may be in better shape than many of the city's hospitals. So the process has begun. The suffering has begun. But I am saying we [[Page H 13988]] should not surrender. I am saying that this too must pass. When the budget deal is made, we should not surrender. We should not give up on health care. We should not give up on education. We know already that the Federal Government only pays a small percentage of the total educational bill. The total funding for education, over $360 billion the last year, is borne by State governments and local governments. The Federal Government is responsible for only about 7 percent of the bill. So when you look at the cuts in education and you say that there is $4 billion cut in 1 year, it is a large amount to cut from the Federal budget. I think it is a 16-percent cut. But it does not represent a 16-percent cut across the Nation in education expenditures by itself. But what has happened is the Federal Government's cut, its statement that education is of less importance, the Republican majority's indication that education is of less importance, that we pay lip service to the fact that education is an investment in the future of the country, education guarantees that young people will be able to survive in a very complex society, they will be able to qualify for the high technology jobs created, we have all of the rhetoric on both sides, Republicans, Democrats say the same thing. But the Republican majority has indicated they really do not believe it. If you can make cuts of that magnitude at the Federal level, you send a message down to the State levels and the local levels. So they have begun to cut, too. In New York City, the school system has been cut by almost $2 billion over the last 2 years. New York City has almost a million students, and the budget at one time was up to $8 billion for the million students. But those drastic cuts have taken place so you have obvious hardships. When the school term started last September, 8,000 youngsters in the New York City high schools had no place to sit. Right now there are classes of 40 and 45 students. And there are still problems with just getting places for children to sit. An editorial recently in the New York Times talked about the fact that every time it rains, the New York City schools literally wash away. You have the rains going through the crevices of the old buildings and the sand and the cement is drained away. The bricks start to fall. So after every rain you have large numbers of bricks falling from these old buildings. So the New York City schools are literally falling down. There is no hope in sight in terms of new construction because the budget cuts in construction preceded the other cuts. All of this is taking place in education. But I say, we should not surrender. We should not accept the fact that the Federal Government is retreating in this one budget. Which is under the control of the Republican majority. We should hold onto the dream that the Federal Government, although it never will play a major role in funding of education, it has a role to play. It never will play the predominant role but it has a major role to play. The Federal Government still is the only place where you are going to have any long-term research and development to improve schools. The Federal Government is still the only place where you are going to have the kinds of financing for higher education that you need, infrastructure of colleges and universities are in deep trouble, updating of equipment of colleges and universities. There are a number of things that need to be done on a scale that will require help from the Federal Government. Otherwise, the help will not be coming. Private industry and private donations will not be able to do it, and certainly States and localities will not be able to do it. We should not surrender and say that it is never going to be done by the Federal Government. We should not say that we are forever going to have B-2 bombers that are not wanted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense does not want it. The President does not want it. We are going to forever continue to fund B-2 bombers and neglect education. We should not surrender and believe that that is going to happen. I do not think it is going to happen. The majority want education to be made a priority in the expenditure of Federal funds and Government funds at every level. The majority will ultimately prevail. We must hold on and understand that the fight has just begun, the public opinion has just begun to manifest itself. They are just waking up here in Washington to the fact that the American public means it when they said that education is a top priority for Government expenditure, they mean it when they say that health care is a top priority. It is not just an idle piece of energy thrown away when people reply to polls. They are replying to polls and telling them the truth, we mean it. Education ought to be a top priority. Right now it is No. 1 in the polls; health care, No. 2. From week to week they rotate, they alternate. Health care and education clearly are No. 1 priorities. If the decisionmakers here in Washington, if the Republican majority, respected the majority of American people, then certainly we would not be in this dilemma. So the majority should not sit, but the majority should not give up. They should wait, and in the process of waiting we should assert ourselves. The majority should continue to make certain that the public opinion polls register what you believe. In the process of continuing the fight I think I cannot stress too often that there is a bedrock basic piece of information that we should always fall back on. We should not accept the theory that America is in a state of fiscal crisis. We should not accept the notion that the country is about to go bankrupt, that Medicare and Medicaid cannot be funded. We should not accept the notion that the Federal Government will go bankrupt because it helps poor people. All of this is just not true. We should understand that there is a problem, there is a problem in terms of taxes being too high for individuals with families, and we should deal with that problem. There is a problem of waste in Government, and we should deal with waste wherever waste is. The waste is in the B-2 bombers that nobody wants. The waste is in the CIA that continues to spend at the same level it was at during the cold war while it does more and more harm. Mr. Speaker, the CIA is one example of an agency that ought to be streamlined and downsized before it does more harm. The CIA's latest revelation about the incompetence and the evil of the CIA has been manifest in a ``60 Minutes'' expose of a fact that the CIA had on its payroll the head of the organization in Haiti called FRAPH. FRAPH is an organization that demonstrated, and brought guns and terrorized the pier in Haiti when the first ships were sent to Haiti with Canadian and New York City personnel, New York State--I mean United States personnel, some police from Canada and police from the United States, and engineers from the United States Army were supposed to be the first peaceful contingent landing in Haiti, and that was part of a peaceful plan that had been agreed to at Governors Island. But they were greeted on the docks by this demonstration of men with guns who roughed up the Embassy officials from the United States Embassy in Haiti, and they made all kinds of threats, and the Harlan County ship decided to turn around and not dock at the port there in Port-au- Prince, Haiti. They did not dock because the intelligence that we received was that that group that was demonstrating on the dock was a very dangerous group. The intelligence that come from the CIA was that great harm would come to American personnel and Canadian personnel if they had landed that day. That was what the CIA said. Mr. Penizullo, who was then the President's envoy for the Haitian problem, he was dealing with the Haitian problem. He insisted that it was just theater, that this group had no depth, that there was no danger from this group, and that the Harlan County should go ahead and dock, we should proceed with the implementation of the Governors Island agreement as we agreed upon it. But the CIA insisted that, no, this group represents a real threat, great harm could come to America forces, and since this incident was following the Somalia debacle where 18 Americans have lost their lives in Somalia, the President accepted the advice of the CIA and ordered the Harlan County to turn around. So you had a great American ship being turned around by handful of thugs in the Port-au-Prince harbor because the CIA had said that those thugs represent a large armed threat. The CIA insisted on this, and it turns out that all along the CIA knew better. The CIA knew because the leader of the group that met the Harlan County ship in the port was on the payroll of the CIA. They knew who Emmanuel Constant was because Emmanuel Constant had been recruited by the CIA, and the CIA had its own policies separate from the White House's policies and programs, and the CIA thwarted the first peaceful attempt to restore the legiti- [[Page H 13989]] mate Government of Haiti to power. That peaceful attempt, if it had been allowed to go forward, would have saved the United States at least a billion-and-a-half, maybe $2 billion, because a year later almost exactly a year later, the liberating forces of the United States went into Haiti, 20,000 strong, armed with equipment, et cetera, because of the fact that the first plan, a peaceful plan which would have cost much less, would not have involved large amounts of troops, and equipment, and et cetera. That plan had been thwarted by a group that the CIA knew was a very small group because they had recruited it and they had the head of the group on the payroll. Emmanuel Constant is now in prison here in the United States. Emmanuel Constant has confessed and told all as to how he was recruited, how he was urged to run for President of Haiti, and I believe the story 100 percent. The CIA of course has not denied it; they just have no comment. They do admit that they sometimes hire people in foreign countries to get information from them. The implication is that Emmanuel Constant might have been on the payroll of the CIA, but all they wanted from him was information. There was no further plot to undermine the legitimate Government of Haiti. I cite this one example as just one more of several examples I have cited over the past of blunders of the CIA which are costly and also dangerous. I need not go back and tell the story of Aldrich--and recount the story of Aldrich Ames. Mr. Ames is in prison now. Mr. Ames even recently, with all of his arrogance, wrote a book review on a spy novel, and the book review was in, I think, the Washington Post, a book review of a spy novel where he chastises the author of the novel as being an amateur, et cetera. I found it sickening that a man who was in prison as a result of serving for 10 years as a Russian spy; you know, he was in charge of CIA spying on the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, and he was in the employ of the soviet Union in Eastern Europe. They admit that at least 10 agents lost their lives as a result of Mr. Ames' betrayal of his country. There is nothing lower than a traitor, you know, and I cannot see how this traitor is now being allowed in prison to write book reviews and to parade his ego over the pages of the media showing what a smart guy he is. But Aldrich Ames was there for 10 years. Aldrich Ames was not detected despite the fact that he was an alcoholic, he used the CIA safe houses for his trysts, his rendezvous with his women. He did all the things wrong that you are not supposed to do, even failed a lie detector test, and still the CIA did not detect that he was spying for the Soviet Union. He had a bank account which allowed him to own very lavish homes and cars, something he could never afford on the CIA salary, the CIA on his salary of course, but who knows what the CIA has paid. All things which affect CIA are secret, so you really do not know what was paid, but it was agreed that Aldrich Ames really did not earn enough money to have the kind of luxurious lifestyle that he had. Despite all that, alcoholic, betrayal of CIA codes with respect to sex and safe houses, lavish living, he was only accidentally sort of discovered, and of course there are still revelations about the harm that was done by Aldrich Ames. Not only did at least 10 agents die as a result of his betrayal and his activities, but we now know that he passed on information from some of the agents that were in question that was not correct information, and he led the United States Government to expend large sums of money on various activities, probably like star wars, and counter warfare, submarine warfare, and a number of things that were based on information deliberately fed to our Government to make our Government spend money on activities to counteract Russian achievements in military hardware which did not exist. So in every way Aldrich Ames is an example of a blundering CIA that not only is costly, but is also dangerous. The other example I have given of the CIA blundering is the fact that they discovered that the CIA had a slush fund, a petty cash fund, of at least $1.5 billion. Everything is secret again, but we know they confessed, and the press has pretty much established that it was at least $1.5 billion in petty cash or in an account that was treated like a petty cash account that nobody knew about in high places. The Director of the CIA did not know about the petty cash account, and the President did not know about the petty cash account. How can you have a fund of $1.5 billion and it not be known in the circles above you, the supervising circles that are there? Who had it and where are they? Who was put in jail as a result of harboring this $1.5 billion slush fund? And if they had a $1.5 billion slush fund that nobody knew about, the likelihood that they were also at the same time had more money and were misusing funds is great, but of course, everything is secret, and we still do not know exactly what happened. I am only giving this example as an example of a place where there is obvious waste, there is dangerous waste, and, if you want to save money, then downsize the CIA, streamline the CIA, cut the budget of the CIA. It is just one example of many where you can cut the budget appropriately. So we should not surrender, we should not admit, that it is impossible. We should not accept the big lie that it is impossible for America to ever provide health care for everybody, you cannot have universal health care in America. You can have it in Germany, you can have it in Japan, you can have it in Italy, you can have it in France, but you cannot have it in America. You can never have education paid for all the way through 4 years in college as they have in France or a few other nations. You cannot have that in America. We are too poor. Do not accept that big lie no matter what happens in the budget negotiations and where we end up on December 15. I am saying the majority of the American people, the great majority out there, people who I call the caring majority, should never accept this. The dream should not be surrendered. We should just understand it is a temporary setback and we will continue. We will continue the quest for Federal involvement in education at every level, we will continue the quest to guarantee that our society provides maximum opportunity for all and that we also meet the threat of a changing economy which requires job training and readjustment for large numbers of people. I wanted to talk about continuing the process of forging ahead and not accepting the temporary setback without having to use my chart tonight. I think you probably have grown weary of seeing the chart which reflects a large part of the answer to the problem of both the deficit and the excessive taxation of Americans. I hope you have not grown weary because it needs to be branded into the memory of every policymaker in America. It needs to also be clearly branded into the memory of every American voter. There is a basic story told by this chart, and whereas I wanted to sort of take a recess and not bring it tonight; today I read an article in the New York Times. I was a little late in reading the Sunday Times, and I read an article which really upset me greatly, and I in the process of reading that article determined I have to go back one more time before this session is over and explain this chart. I have to explain the chart because the writer of the article in the New York Times; it was Sunday, December 3, and the name of the author is Keith Bradsher; it is not a op-ed page article, so I assume he is a journalist, a reporter, or an analyst for the New York Times. He chose to write an article about Democrats and Republicans and how we have created the deficit together over the last three decades. The title of the article is ``Deficit Partnership,'' and the subtitle is ``The Republicans and the Democrats Dug the Budget Hole Over Three Decades.'' [[Page H 13990]] As I read the article, I could not help but boil with fury because of the fact that here is a very long-winded analysis. They use a large chart here showing over a period from 1965 to 1995, a 30-year period, what happened. A lot of thought has obviously gone into the article. Why a journalist, an analyst of this caliber, maybe he has some economic training, why or how he can discuss this problem of the deficit over a 30-year period and not deal with the whole problem of revenues and the problem with the fact that the American people were swindled in the methods used to collect revenues. He talks only about expenditures. The Republicans and the Democrats dug the budget hole over decades. He talks about how Republicans and Democrats together have increased the expenditures. He does not talk about what happened with the revenues and how, while expenditures were increasing for various reasons, some of them good, a great drop took place in the revenues; and the revenues did not drop in the area of personal or individual and family income taxes, the revenue went up in the area of individual and family income taxes. The revenue dropped drastically in the area of corporate income taxes. The story of the great drop in corporate income taxes as a percentage of the revenue collected by the Federal Government is a story that nobody wants to tell. The New York Times reporter, analyst, journalist, whatever he is, does not want to talk about it. You will not find the commentators on television, the talk show hosts, nobody wants to talk about the fact that taxes in 1943, and I did not go back as far as he went and this article went back, actually this article went back to 1965, 30 years; 1943 goes all the way back, World War II was still underway in 1943. The income taxes being paid by corporations were up to 39.8 percent, almost 40 percent, while the income tax being paid by individuals and families was 27.1 percent. I have gone over this many times, but you just have to get the red bar and the blue bar clearly focused in your mind in order to understand the nature of the great swindle that took place. In 1943 corporations were paying 40 percent of the burden, the income tax burden, but in 1983, 40 years later, the corporations are paying only 6.2 percent of the tax burden. Only 6.2 percent of the income tax burden is being borne by corporations, and the individual's share of the taxes has shot up from 27.1 percent to 48.1 percent. That was the highest point of taxes on families and individuals. This was when Ronald Reagan was in his heyday on his trickle-down economics, the rising tide will lift all boats, and if you will cut the taxes for corporations they will create jobs, and those jobs will fuel an economic revolution, a miracle, and everybody will benefit. Mr. Speaker, individuals and families did not benefit. They ended up paying more taxes. They paid 48.1 percent of the taxes in 1983, while corporations dropped to an all-time low of 6.2 percent. Now corporations are up, up from 6.2 percent to 11.2 percent, which is, thank God, a slight increase, but individuals are still up at 43.7 percent. We have Mr. Bradsher discussing the deficit partnership and how the deficit took place, and at no time does he talk about this dramatic change that took place in the tax structure, in the burden, the percentage of the tax burden that shifted from corporations to individuals. How can a learned journalist, analyst, economist make such a discussion without discussing the obvious? If the physical sciences, physics and chemistry, proceeded in the same way, we would probably be 30 or 40 years behind in our technology. If you take a major factor in a discussion and ignore it completely, then you certainly cannot be said to be participating in any scientific reasoning process. You certainly be said to be proceeding in a logical manner when you just leave out a great portion of the argument. Mr. Bradsher is intent on blaming both Democrats and Republicans. I would concede that from the beginning. Whatever has happened in America over the last 30 years, 40 years, it certainly has been both Democrats and Republicans. Yes, in 1983 Ronald Reagan was President and that is why you have corporations' share of the income taxes go down to an all- time low of 6.2 percent, but Democrats were in control of the House Committee on Ways and Means, where all tax policies originated, so if we had a scandalous situation where the income taxes for individuals and families went up to 48.1 percent while the taxes for corporations dropped to 6.2 percent, then both the hands of the Democrats who controlled the Committee on Ways and Means and the Democrats in the House who voted for it are dirty in this situation where the American people as a whole, the great majority, were swindled. This is something that I would concede. Mr. Bradsher, from the very beginning, I would say yes, the Democrats and Republicans were both guilty. My problem is not with that assertion. The problem is why do you go on and on and you do not even mention the fact that there was a great revolution taking place in terms of the shifting of the tax burden. I am going to read a few paragraphs, excerpts from Mr. Bradsher's article: Democrats in Congress have repeated for years the mantra that President Reagan pushed the deficit out of control by cutting taxes while raising military spending. Democrats have said that. That is true. To continue with Mr. Bradsher, though; Republicans have recited just as regularly the view that Democrats voted for ever-larger deficits during their 40 years of control in the House. The deficits did get larger, but when Jimmy Carter left office, it was less than--it was around $70 billion per year versus when Ronald Reagan left office, it was almost at $400 billion per year, the deficit. But he is right, the deficits did get larger: Among experts who have studied the history of American budget deficits, there is fairly broad agreement that both sides are partly right. Neither party has clean hands, and the slower economic growth over the last 20 years has made the situation worse. The current budget negotiations between the Republican Congress and a Democratic President, stalled in large measure over handling the deficit, are a reminder that the budget policy of the United States is made by compromise. Yes, that is true. Some of the biggest decisions that continue to feed the budget deficit were made by Republican Presidents with Democratic Congresses, notably during the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan administrations. He goes on to point out what I have just already conceded, that both Democrats and Republicans were guilty. But all Mr. Bradsher discusses in terms of the creation of the problem is expenditures. He talks about the fact that-- There was a competition between the Republicans and Democrats at one time on expenditures for the elderly, a rivalry between Richard Nixon and Wilbur Mills. Wilbur Mills was the Democratic chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means who made a brief bid for the Presidency in 1972. That rivalry between Nixon and Mills contributed to the decision to increase payments to Social Security recipients by 15 percent in 1969, by 10 percent in 1970, and by 20 percent in 1972. In each case the administration advocated a generous increase, and the Congress added a little more. I am not going to criticize the Congress or Nixon for the increase in Social Security payments. They were far too low. I think that is an example of expenditures going up that was very badly needed. The expenditures were far too low for Social Security recipients who were in very dire straits, and that increase was certainly a noble increase, a reasonable increase, a justifiable increase. As Medicare and Social Security costs have grown they have squeezed out Federal spending on other programs like transportation and education. Medicare and Medicaid expenditures, however, were raised when the Congress and the Presidents competed in terms of increasing expenditures in the area of expanding Medicaid to include pregnant women, pregnant women who were not necessarily on AFDC, the elderly in nursing homes, and all those expenditures were added to Medicare after it had first been created. I would not quarrel with the Democrats or the Republicans for adding those uncovered people who were very important to the Medicare Program. Those expenditures I think were justifiable. All of the expenditures that are cited in terms of domestic discretionary expenditures in this article are not necessarily justifiable, but 90 percent of them are. He is talking about [[Page H 13991]] expenditures for people, expenditures as an investment in education, an investment in health care, an investment in programs for the elderly. If he were talking about expenditures for Sea Wolf submarines or for F-22 fighter planes and for star wars, then he would be talking about expenditures that we could have done without. If he was talking about expenditures for the CIA and the intelligence operation on a large scale after the cold war was over, then I would say he was talking about expenditures that we could certainly do without. The point is that Mr. Bradsher goes on and on about expenditures and never does he once cite the fact that a revolutionary change in revenue collection took place, that we fell in our revenue collection from 39.8 percent for corporations and went up to 48 percent for individuals in 1983. Even now, in 1995, after some adjustment was made by the Clinton administration, corporations are paying only 11.2 percent of the total tax burden and individuals are paying 43.7 percent. Why is this important? Because this is the bedrock of the dilemma that we face. This is where you end as you go backwards in the discussion to its foundation. The agreement that is going to finally be made by the Democratic President and the Republican-controlled Congress is going to have to do something about the question of tax cuts. Who will get the tax cuts is the question, or should anybody get tax cuts? That is the question that emerges from the editorial pages of more and more newspapers. We are down to a situation now where if you are going to have a balanced budget in 7 years, then you have to surrender the tax cut. I am a Democrat. I am described as an old-fashioned liberal, but I think the American people ought to get a tax cut. I think you ought to have a tax cut for families and individuals. I think the tax cuts proposed by President Clinton that were related to education are very much appropriate. I think the tax cuts proposed which relate to children are very appropriate, if you were to rewrite them in a way which allows families that do not owe taxes to also benefit. To rewrite the Republican tax bill would be almost impossible. I think you could build a compromise on President Clinton's tax cut proposals. Those tax cut proposals would give some relief to the American families and individuals who have financed the cold war and gone through quite a bit, and saw their taxes rise from 27 percent in 1943 to 48 percent in 1983, and to 43 percent, almost 44 percent, today. They deserve some relief. Individuals and families should get a tax cut. When all is said and done and the deal is made, individuals and families need some tax cut. It ought to be the individuals and families who are at the lowest levels in the economic strata, the middle-income and lower-income people, who get the tax cut. At the same time, you cannot balance the budget unless you deal with the fact that everybody insists on ignoring, and that is that corporations have gotten away with a big swindle. If you follow the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget, you can raise this 11.2 percent be first ending all subsidies to corporations by the taxpayers. We have a situation where taxpayers' moneys are used to subsidize corporations in certain activities. You can raise this amount by getting rid of those subsidies. You can raise the amount again if you close tax loopholes, starting with the loopholes that deal with foreign corporations. Foreign corporations have advantages that our own home-based American corporations do not have. There are a number of loopholes that can be closed which have been developed over the years, with the help of the Committee on Ways and Means and Ronald Reagan, primarily, while he was in office. Those loopholes can be closed now. If we merely raise the corporate share of the revenues from 11.2 percent up to 16 percent, we could lower this 43.7 percent, at the same time we raise the corporate up to just about 16 percent, and thereby give a tax cut. When we do this, according to the calculations that were accepted using CBO figures, the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget shows, we do not have to cut Medicare and we do not have to cut Medicaid. We do not have to cut Medicare and we do not have to cut Medicaid, and we can increase education. The dream does not have to be surrendered on universal health care. We can keep the entitlement for Medicaid, and we can go further in terms of an additional amount of involvement of the Federal Government in education. The Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget increased education by 25 percent. The President says that he wants to increase education by even more. Over a 7-year period, he talks about an increase of more than $40 billion in education. I have not figured the percentage on that, but the President is on course. The President is following the rhetoric of both the Republicans and the Democrats. We all say that education is an investment in the Nation's security. Education is also an absolute necessity if our economy is to be able to compete, and what the President is doing is following the rhetoric and the philosophy and the ideology instead of ignoring it, although both parties have expounded along the same lines. Education was deemed a priority by Ronald Reagan. He was the first one who sounded the trumpet and said, we are a nation at risk if we do not act to revamp our entire education system. Ronald Reagan was the one who led the way. George Bush followed by saying he wanted to be the education president. He called a conference and set forth six goals. Bill Clinton was at that same conference. He continued what George Bush started. So why are we on the verge of a $4 billion cut in education for the next budget year? Why are we on the verge of a tremendous 20 percent or more cut in education over a 7-year period? We can give that up. We do not have to have those cuts. If we were to take a look at the hard facts of what has happened in America from 1943 to 1995, we would see that we have allowed ourselves to be swindled. The share of the taxes paid by corporations could go up and nobody would suffer. Wall Street is booming. Everybody has indicated that we are in an unprecedented growth period. The Dow Jones average is above 5,000. A record-setting pace has been established. So who is making the money? The corporations. The red bar is where the action is. The red bar is where the money is. Why did Slick Willie rob banks? Because that is where the money is. If we want to revitalize the American economy, then the revenue should come from the bustling sector of the corporate world where the money is. That is where we can solve the problem of the deficit: We can give a tax cut, and at the same time we can avoid the draconian cuts in programs. Mr. Speaker, we are going to destabilize the whole society. We are refusing to recognize that poor people need health care, poor people need education. We have a problem with the minimum wage, that I talked about last time, which does not contribute to the deficit at all, has very little to do with this chart, except if we were to increase the minimum wage, the profits of corporations would go down a little bit. However, at the same time, we would benefit greatly by having to expend far less on unemployment compensation and various other benefits that are provided to poor people, food stamps, et cetera. Mr. Speaker, in short, I want to conclude by saying, we are 10 days from a final budget deal, and the outcome of that deal is going to be disappointing. We expect our Democratic President to make certain that we do not have a total debacle. We will not have a Dunkirk; we do not expect to surrender the Philippines. There are a lot of terrible things that will not happen, but it is going to be disappointing, it is going to be a temporary setback. The important thing to remember is that the majority of the American people have already made it clear in the public opinion polls. They do not think that we have a crisis that merits the draconian cuts that are taking place. They do not think that we need to move against the elderly and cut Medicare. They do not think we need to move against the poor who are sick and cut Medicaid so drastically. They do not think we need to throw away our [[Page H 13992]] education policies of the last two decades and desert public education or desert higher education. All of these draconian moves are being made by people who have a vision of America which is an incorrect vision, a vision that is not the vision of the majority of the people. The caring majority knows that their welfare and their best interests lie in rejecting these cuts. That is why the polls clearly show that at least 60 percent of the American people want the cuts to be vetoed and rejected. At least 70 percent of the American people do not want Medicare and Medicaid cut. If we were to follow the common sense of the American people, they would make the budget cuts in the areas where there is real waste instead of insisting that the defense budget be increased by $7 billion while we are cutting the education budget by $4 billion. They would insist that we cut the CIA and obviously wasteful agencies instead of making the cuts in the area of Head Start, summer youth employment programs, and Medicaid. The current majority knows that the Medicaid entitlement means exactly what it says. People are entitled to health care if they are poor; if they pass a means test and they qualify for the service, they are entitled to health care, the legislation that is before the President now. The appropriations bill before the President will take away that entitlement. We have already almost lost the entitlement for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and now on the chopping block we have the entitlement for Medicare. We should not surrender that entitlement. Everything possible should be done. Everybody should make certain that they register their opinions and that they communicate with their Congressmen and the President and the White House, everybody, to let it be known that one clear indication of a giant step backwards that cannot be accepted by the American people is a surrender of the entitlement for Medicaid. We will not surrender that entitlement. However, even if there should be a catastrophe happening and we have a loss of that entitlement, I am here to say that it is only a setback, it is only a retreat. The majority will win in the end. We should get our forces and begin to reassemble and march on toward the dream. America can have universal health care; America can have a budget which is a budget which seeks to take care of the interests of all of the people. This is the richest nation that ever existed in the history of the world. There is no reason why every American cannot have opportunity and decent health care, and we dedicate ourselves to that purpose, no matter what happens on December 15.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I will take 28 minutes and would like to yield the balance to the gentleman from Hawaii [Mr. Abercrombie]. Mr. Speaker, I think today is November 30. A continuing resolution has been passed which will take us to December 15. So, the countdown that I mentioned on Tuesday now moves forward. We have about 16 days left before the budget decision will be made. Hopefully there will not have to be another continuing resolution. So the countdown continues, and tonight I would like to talk about two basic questions related to what is going on here as this budget process unfolds. The negotiations are taking place in various quarters, and we will expect probably next week to begin to see the outlines of some proposed negotiating positions by both the Democratic White House and the Republican-controlled Congress. There are two basic questions I would like to ask tonight which relate directly--not so directly, but certainly indirectly, to the budget process that is going forward. One of these questions relates to the minimum-wage issue. This morning we had a forum on the minimum wage. We called it a response to the 100 leading American economists, a congressional forum on minimum wages. One hundred and one leading American economists said more than a month ago that the American economy could not only benefit from a minimum-wage increase, but it was highly desirable, and we have not responded here adequately on Capitol Hill to that statement by the leading economists in the country. We have a bill here, H.R. 940, sponsored by the minority leader, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt], which calls for an increase in the minimum wage in two steps; 45 cents an hour 1 year, and then a second year, another 45 cents, so a too-little 90-cent increase in the minimum wage would take place under the Gephardt bill. The Gephardt bill has only 110 sponsors, only slightly more than the 101 economists, so there is a big question about why there is not more enthusiasm, on the one hand, among Democrats since we have 195 Democrats. I hope soon we will be joined by my good friend, Jesse Jackson, Jr., and there will be 196 Democrats, but the 195 Democrats are hesitating. Only 110 are on the minimum-wage bill; so there is a question there. The President has endorsed the Gephardt minimum-wage bill. The President has endorsed the increase in the minimum wage to 90 cents over a 2-year period. But there is a great opposition. First of all, there is not much enthusiasm among the whole Democratic Party, and then there is a great opposition among the Republicans, the majority Republicans refusing to even have a hearing on the minimum wage. I am on the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities which has direct responsibility for the minimum-wage law. I am the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee of Workforce Protections which has even more specific jurisdiction over the minimum-wage law, and we have not been able to get a hearing. So we had an unofficial forum today to replace the kind of thing that would have happened at a hearing. Why is there such great opposition? Why cannot we have at least a discussion of an increase in the minimum wage? Why does the majority leader of the Republican Party here in the House state that not only is he against any increase in the minimum wage, but he would like to see the minimum wage abolished altogether? He would like to see the law repealed. What does this have to do with balancing the budget? You know, what does it have to do with the Contract With America? The balancing of the budget will not be impacted in any significant way by an increase in the minimum wage. You know, it is not--taxpayers do not pay workers; you know, the various enterprises where they are engaged, they pay the minimum wage. So why if there is a great concern about balancing the budget, why do we have to go off to the side and wage war against workers by saying that we will fight any increase in the minimum wage? Why? You know, it is a question that needs to be answered. The other question I want to ask is also why do we have such tremendous cuts in the education budget? You know, I think that, you know, jobs and education are inextricably interwoven. That is why when I came to Congress I signed up for the Committee on Education and Labor, as it was called at that time, it was not the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, because you cannot separate the two. Education and the ability, the capacity, of people to qualify for jobs and to stay, to keep up with this fast-moving economy and the complexities of our present highly technological world, make education absolutely necessary in order for people to be able to take advantage of jobs, and the employment question cannot be separated from the education question. Today the Committee on Education funding has dubbed this day as Save Education Day, and they are battling to save education from $4 billion in Federal cuts, $4 billion, and the $4 billion in Federal cuts have stimulated a wave of cuts across the country at the State level and the local level. So why is education being cut? Why are we trying to abandon the public education system? The polls show that the American people clearly favor education as a high priority for government expenditures at every level. The polls show this. They show it this year, and as a matter of fact right now the No. 1 priority, according to the taxpayers and the voters that we serve, the No. 1 priority is education. Education is ahead of health care, and health care is a great concern; but now education is the No. 1 priority. So why are politicians refusing to read the polls? Why is there talk about a compromise at the White House where they are not going to insist that we not accept these $4 billion in education cuts? Why was it placed on the chopping block in the first place? After years of bipartisan support for Federal involvement in education and Federal support for education, all of a sudden education is placed on the chopping block, despite the fact that the American people say that is a priority we want to support. We want to support education. So these are two basic questions. There is something happening here in this Capitol which is not related to balancing the budget. There is something else going on. In fact, balancing the budget becomes questionable when you look at these other activities. Why is there war being waged against workers in terms of the OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Agency? Why are we so determined to make the workplace less safe? Why is the Republican majority driving so hard to take away safeguards against accidents in the workplace? Why is there is war being declared on the Fair Labor Standards Act which determines what the hourly wages are going to be and also the conditions under which we set those wages in terms of overtime and various other provisions? Why is there an attack on that? Why is there an attack on the National Labor Relations Board? What does that have to do with balancing the budget? Yes, it is true they have cut the budget, partially, of the National Labor Relations Board. It is such a tiny budget. The cuts clearly have nothing to do with trying to get more revenue out of the system in order to help balance the budget, the cuts are punitive. The cuts are designed to make the agency work less effectively. So the war against labor has nothing to do with balancing the budget. There is a class war going on here, maybe; I don't know. Every time you mention class war, the Republicans on the floor get very upset. ``How dare you accuse us of waging a class war?'' I am not accusing the Republicans of waging a class war; it is not a war, it is a massacre. When you have a war, you have contending parties of some kind of equal strength. What we have against the working people of America is a massacre. They are using their overwhelming power against the workers in every way. Whether you are talking about OSHA and worker safety, fair labor standards or the National Labor Relations Board activities, or you are talking about minimum wage, there is a massacre going on directed against the American working people. It is not a class war, but certainly there is great contempt being shown for working people. There is great contempt being shown for the people at the very bottom in this society. Yes, Wall Street now, the Dow Jones industrial average I think is up above 5,000. The boom is going on and on, great amounts of money are being made, executives are being paid the highest salaries ever. Everything is great for the management class, the ruling class, the elite that controls the House at this point. Why can there not be some generosity, some sense of sharing? Why can we not give a lousy 90-cent increase in the minimum-wage law? Why can we not have a 90-cent increase over a 2-year period? The history for this minimum wage is that since 1938 we have had about six increases, and right now the last increase took place 6 years ago. That is when we last enacted legislation increasing the minimum wage. At that time the Senate majority leader, who is the leader of his party in both the House and Senate, and right across the country, he made a statement which I will quote. Six years ago Senator Dole said: This is not an issue where we ought to be standing and holding up anybody's getting a 30 to 40 cents an hour pay increase at the same time that we are talking about capital gains. I never thought the Republican Party should stand for squeezing every last nickel from the minimum wage. That is the end of the quote by Senator Dole 6 years ago. Apparently the Republican Party has changed their minds. Today it seems the Republican Party does stand for squeezing every last nickel and every last penny from the minimum wage. As I said before, the Republican majority leader of the House of Representatives has recommended that we repeal the minimum age law completely, wiping it out. We are talking about pennies, 90 cents an hour, 45 cents this year and 45 cents next year. But beyond the money and the pennies at stake here is more than money. It is the work ethic itself. When we permit the value of the minimum wage to erode, as we have in recent years, we not only cause economic pain to working people, we do violence to the work ethic that we all profess to revere. Our words as elected officials exhort Americans to work hard, but our actions ridicule them by making work pay less and less year after year. The value of the minimum wage is now at its second lowest level since the 1950's. It has lost nearly one-third of its value over the last decade. When Speaker Gingrich graduated from high school in 1961, the real value of the minimum wage was $5.41. That is $1.16 cents more than it is today in value. When Speaker Gingrich completed higher education in 1971, the wage was worth $5.67. That is a value of $2.42 more than it is today. In 1978, the year Mr. Gingrich was first elected to Congress, the wage was worth $6 an hour, fully $1.75 cents or more than 41 percent more than it is worth today. We had some people testify who bring home this whole matter of how important this 90 cents per hour is. We had a gentleman who I would call a noble American worker, the best that we can offer, who testified today. I am proud to cite Mr. Donald Knight of Elizabeth, PA, who had to endure quite a bit of hardship to get to our hearing, our forum today. I am going to read Mr. Knight's testimony in its entirety because I think it drives home the fact that we are not talking about something which is paltry. It may seem that 90 cents an hour does not mean much to a lot of people, but for the people out there making minimum wage, it means a great deal. Mr. Donald Knight, I quote: My name is Donald Knight. I am 61 years old. I live in Elizabeth, PA. My wife Barbara and I have raised three sons. Life in my area was good for as long as I can remember: Good jobs, and friendly communities. When your kids grew up, they got good jobs and you could depend on them in your old age. All of that changed in the 1980's. All of the good jobs in the steel mills and other manufacturing industries disappeared when the companies closed. For years there were almost no jobs, especially for someone like me in their fifties. Now there are jobs, but they don't pay much and there are few benefits. We had an economic recovery, but it was a minimum wage recovery for us. Our kids, the ones that didn't leave the area for jobs somewhere else, they can hardly take care of their own families. I started working in 1952 at a glass factory. In 1966 they closed down, and I went to work in a steel mill. From then until the 1980's I worked for U.S. Steel. We had layoffs and it wasn't always easy to support my family, but the mills always called us back to work. In 1982, U.S. Steel laid me off from the national tube mill, and when they closed that place in 1984 I knew things were going to be different. My unemployment checks ran out in 1984 and my wife and I were forced to swallow our pride and take welfare. I cashed in my pension in 1987 to help us survive but that money went to bills and we were back on welfare soon after. My wife and I took any jobs we could get. Some were under the table and all were temporary. We cleaned houses, got paid to walk other people's picket lines. Then in 1990 I finally got a permanent job. It was for Allied Security as a guard. I worked many different places, guarding other people's property. I even guarded a slag dump where they put the waste from steelmaking though I never understood why someone would want to steal the slag. The only problem then was that I never made more than $5.00 an hour and have had no health insurance for myself or my family. I have no pension and last made $4.80 an hour for Allied Security after 5 years with the company. My wife and I had bought a house and had it paid for by the time I lost my first good job. But over the last 10 years I haven't been able to take care of it. The water main broke and the water has been shut off for 3 years. The thermostat broke and we have had to use a kerosene heater for 2 years. Now my house has been condemned and all of the housing projects where we have tried to get into have waiting lists for at least a year. My eyesight and hearing are getting bad and my wife has back problems but we can't afford to go to a doctor. They tell me I got clinically depressed when all the good jobs left my area but I never could find any place to go get help. When we absolutely have to, we go to the emergency room and somehow try to make payments on the bills. My wife and I were shocked to hear the Republicans here in Congress say that we don't need national health insurance because the current system is working fine. They say ``let the private sector run things'' but I can't find out who that is to go get the help I need. We guess they just don't know what it is like out where we live. So working at about the minimum wage allowed us to survive, always falling further behind in our taxes and bills, but able to eat and buy kerosene. If a person makes a lot of money, the increase in the minimum wage proposed by President Clinton of 90 cents an hour might not seem like a lot. But to my family the additional couple thousand dollars a year would make a big difference. I probably couldn't pay all my debts but I would not be falling further behind all the time. Just one final thing. Last week, just before Thanksgiving, I got fired from my job. After making my rounds I was sitting in my shanty and put my feet up on the table. Someone turned me in and said I must have been sleeping and the company fired me. I hope the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee can help me get unemployment checks and they told us about food stamps and medical assistance so I guess we will survive. I only hope I can hang on until July next year when I can get Social Security. That and another minimum wage job will be the best standard of living Barb and I have had in more than 10 years. Lots of people, friends and family have helped us over these tough years but I always took pride in taking care of my family. A higher minimum wage would help me help myself. That is the testimony of Mr. Donald Knight of Elizabeth, PA at our forum on minimum wage this morning. There were other people who testified; a Mrs. Wong, a Mandarin garment worker from New York. Mrs. Wong spoke in Chinese and had to have an interpreter. Mrs. Wong told us that she would be happy to work for the present minimum wage, but the present minimum wage law is not being enforced in Chinatown in New York, so people are being forced to work below the minimum wage. She would like just to have greater enforcement of the minimum wage. Why are we opposing a 90-cent increase in the minimum wage, which would help these very poor people who are trying to help themselves? I think perhaps most of the Members of Congress have lost contract with what real working people are all about and with what poverty is all about. They do not understand that an increase of 90 cents can make a great deal of difference. On the other hand, we are closing off the opportunity for the people who are forced to work at minimum wage to move beyond the level where they have to work at minimum wage. The only road out for people who are on poverty, in poverty now, is education. So I ask the second question. In addition to us having a situation where the Republican majority opposes, adamantly opposes, an increase in the minimum wage, that same Republican majority is calling for great, deep cuts in education. Why are we cutting education when the American people have clearly said, ``We don't want education cut, we would like an increase instead''? Recently 71 percent of those polled say that President Clinton should reject a budget if it makes major cuts in Federal support for public education. Seventy-two percent said he should not accept any budget that cuts the student loan program and makes it harder for the middle class to afford college. This is reported by Peter D. Hart Associates, November 15, 1995. Americans ranked education as the top legislative priority for Congress, 39 percent did, and improving education as the most important goal for the Federal budget, 35 percent. Lowering taxes and balancing the budget ranked last in the six choices. This is an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll taken September 16 and 19 of 1995. Ninety-two percent of all Americans believe that the Federal Government should spend the same or more on education, and 68 percent of those polled believe that the Government should spend more than current levels. Only 8 percent answered that the Government should spend less money on education. This was an NBC News and Wall Street Journal poll, again of January, 1995. Seventy-eight percent of Americans polled opposed cuts to Federal aid in education as a means of reducing the budget deficit. This is a New York Times poll and CBS News poll that was taken in December 1994. Every time you take the polls and ask the question, education comes up clearly as a high priority. Why is the Republican majority insisting on cutting education so drastically? Where in the Contract With America is there a promise, a commitment to cut education? There is something happening here which has nothing to do with balancing the budget. There is something happening here that has nothing to do with economics. There is something vicious happening here that needs to be looked at more closely. I enjoy watching the animal movies, the nature movies. I do not have any children, so I do not have an excuse for watching them. I will have to confess, I like to watch them myself. There is a particular animal movie about the competition between lions and hyenas, and maybe some of you have seen it, because it has been shown over and over again, a lot of reruns, and it is fascinating because what it says is that in the jungle, in the jungle, in nature, animals sometimes behave as irrationally as human beings. We always thought, I was always raised to believe that the animal kingdom is pure. They only kill for food, when they need food. They do not get into revenge and hatred. But the competition between the hyena and the lion, the hyenas and the lions, it demonstrated that there was something else at work, something else was happening other than the battle for survival, other than the desire to survive from day to day, and the competition for food. They were not necessarily in competition for food. They fought each other like human beings fight each other in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. There is a kind of hatred there which makes them almost human, unfortunately. The hyenas taunted the lions, and one hyena is murdered by a lion because he gets caught while he is taunting the lions, not trying to get food. The hyenas find a lioness out by herself and they murder her, not to eat her, but they murder her because they want revenge. There is an evil at work there. There is something that has not been figured out by the naturalists and the people who study animals in biology. There is something at work here in Washington that we have not quite put our hands on also. It has nothing to do with saving money. It has nothing to do with streamlining the budget. It is something else. There is a contempt, a hatred for working people, a desire to wipe out a segment of the population. A lot of the budget cuts are not designed to save money, they are designed to destroy programs. They are not designed to reform, they are designed to wreck. There is a mentality that the elite minority deserves to have an America that belongs just to that elite minority. Otherwise, how do you justify the intense opposition against an increase in the minimum wage? How do you justify the Republican majority fighting a 90-cent increase in the minimum wage? How do you justify the Republican majority waging war on education programs, cutting education when our future is clearly wrapped up in our educational advances and the possibility that we will be able to survive in the future will depend on the degree of education that we have? That is pretty much understood. National security is very much interwoven with our ability to educate the population and to stay ahead of the tremendous unfolding of more and more complex knowledge all the time. Mr. Speaker, we need to have the best educated, the most educated population possible. The rhetoric clearly understands this. Speeches that have been made by Republican presidents, started by Ronald Reagan and then continued by George Bush, have always said that America is at risk, that we are a nation at risk if we do not provide proper education, and yet the Republican majority has undertaken budget cuts that are devastating. If enacted, this will be the largest setback in education in our history. They will be cut by 17 percent, while overall spending is only being cut by 4 percent. We need to come to grips with why is this being done by the Republican majority. The proposal would deny millions of America's children, youths and adults precious opportunities for education. They would slash funding for basic and advanced skills. The bills would deny access to college by eliminating student aid Pell grants for 280,000 students. The budget bill would jeopardize the education of children with disabilities by shifting some $1 billion in Medicaid costs for health-related services for more than 1 million children with disabilities to the States. The legislation would eliminate help for safe and drug-free schools, eliminate most of the program that exists throughout the school system all over the Nation. The legislation would halt progress on school reform and innovation. The cuts would deny access to Head Start for 180,000 children in the year 2002, compared to the present 1995 enrollment in Head Start. These are devastating cuts, the combination of the two. Why do we have the assault on the minimum wage, the assault on workers in every way, minimum wage, safety, Fair Labor Standards Act? Why do we have these cuts in education which would allow the poor to help themselves, allow the poor to get into the mainstream and be able to become part of the great middle class? America has built a middle class over the years through education, something called the GI bill of rights which helped hundreds of thousands all in one program. Then we had aid to higher education that existed long before we had aid to any other form of education. Mr. Speaker, I am going to close at this point and yield to my colleague, but the question here I want to end with is, what is it at work here in Washington that goes beyond a concern with balancing the budget? What is at work here that goes beyond a desire to streamline government? There is a desire by an elite minority to wipe out a certain segment of the population. A massacre has been organized against the defenseless people at the lowest rungs in our society, and that has to be examined closely if we are to understand where we are going in the next 16 days. In the next 16 days, the people out there who have let it be known through the polls that they support education, in the next 16 days the people out there who have overwhelmingly supported an increase in the minimum wage, they have to let it be known that they are watching; and their common sense should prevail over the kind of strange behavior that is predominant here among the Republican majority who control the House of Representatives.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, there have been several explosive developments in Haiti in the last few weeks. The wisdom of President Aristide, no matter what course these developments take, is still the greatest asset of Haiti. The wisdom of Jean-Bertrand Aristide is still necessary for this country to have a new birth. Recent statements by President Aristide and recent behavior by President Aristide are clearly understandable in the light of certain recent developments. It is important for us to remember that the liberation of Haiti still represents one of the moral and humanitarian mountain tops of United States foreign policy. This Nation took a giant step forward and we did the right thing. Americans set new standards for the hemisphere, and we set new standards for international law and order. Criminals will not be allowed to seize control of a nation, take over its legitimate government, oppress its people, and terrorize its people. Criminals aided by the United States and an army set up by the United States will not be allowed to do this in one of the countries in this hemisphere. We clearly established that policy. The policy has already succeeded. I congratulate the Clinton administration. But, still, so much more can be done to facilitate democracy, peace, and progress in Haiti. So much more can be done without any great costs, additional costs. The most basic needs of Haiti right now are judges, jails, and electricity. We have the capacity, the United States and the United Nations forces which are still in Haiti have the capacity, to deliver those three items, those three basics: judges, jails, and electricity. Haiti needs jails because there are many wrongdoers from the previous regime who are moving about with impunity. They have no fear of the government whatsoever. There are many that have been seized and many that have been judged and put in prison who just walked away because they do not have decent jails or stockades. One thing the U.S. Army or military force can do is build some jails and stockades, but we have refused to do that. If would not cost very much. Haiti needs an improved criminal justice system. The judges were run out of Haiti. They are spread out among the world; 1 million Haitians are in France, the United States and Canada. They will come home if a clear system is set up with the backing of the United Nations and United States. We can give them judges and jails. And Haiti needs electricity. That is the basic necessity for industry in Haiti. We promised to do that when we went in there. We have not delivered on that capacity. Understand if we have these basics in place, you would have an atmosphere and environment established which would create trust between the Haitian people and the United Nations that are trying to help the people. Instead of those few basics being met, what we have is the kind of situation where the United States is withholding documents that it seized from the Haitian [[Page H 13772]] military criminals, documents which show who committed the murders of 3,000 people, documents which show who armed the groups that drove our forces away from the pier in Haiti when we first went to Haiti peacefully. All those documents show who the perpetrators are, who financed the coup. Yet our army, which seized those documents, is refusing to share them with the Haitian Government. It is a kind of racism. I know of no other situation where a country has gone in to liberate and help another country, seized documents which would lead to the prosecution of those people who are guilty of committing serious crimes in the country, and claimed those documents as their own. The Haitian people are suspicious. Jean-Bertrand Aristide is suspicious. The cousin of Jean- Bertrand Aristide, who is a member of parliament, was recently assassinated in broad daylight. When you add up these kinds of situations, our Government refusing to share documents which would prosecute the wrongdoers, and then a resurgence of violence so strong and so bold as to shoot down the cousin of the President, who is a member of parliament, then you can see what great suspicion sets in, where the Haitian Government under Aristide is wondering what is happening now. The CIA in the past has not seemed to be operating hand in hand with the White House. The White House and the people there would say one thing, and the CIA would do another. The organization called FRAP, which created so much havoc in Haiti just before the return of Aristide, it was financed by the CIA it turned out. These kind of contradictions and strange happenings lead to a bewildering array of activities that raise suspicion and eliminate what trust did exist. We can return that trust by providing judges, jails, and electricity, and giving back to the Haitian Government any documents which rightfully belong to that government.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as we have heard from previous speakers, the countdown has begun on the budget negotiation process. It is a countdown of greater significance than we have ever experienced probably in the history of the Nation. It is a countdown to the remaking of America. We are not just talking about budgets and appropriations. We are talking about a drastic overhaul, a remaking of America. We are not just talking about reforms, we are talking about destruction. We are talking about the wrecking ball that has to precede any rebuilding that may take place. As we move toward December 15, we have gone through a period where a gun was held at the head of the American Government. The Republican majority refused to allow a continuing resolution to go forward until it extracted certain promises from the Democratic President in the White House. That is a most unfortunate way to proceed. The general way of proceeding is to have appropriations bills passed, the President acts on those, Congress reacts, and we go through an orderly constitutional process. But a crisis was created this time and we have gone through that, and now we have a new framework established. The new framework says that we have until December 15 to work out the budget process, and in the process we must adhere to certain parameters that have been established. The framework is established. The environment for negotiations is set. We must negotiate within the parameters of the establishment of a balanced budget by the year 2002. In 7 years we must balance the budget. We must negotiate this. If we do not, we will not be able to continue the Government beyond December 15. The same kind of crisis that was artificially created a week ago will be recreated. So we are negotiating with a psychological bomb threat hovering over the process. Is this a logical and scientific way to remake America? No, but it is the conditions that have been set by people who have enormous amounts of power, and the process goes forward. The engagement is on now. The engagement is between the Democratic President and a Republican controlled Congress. The crisis in a revolutionary atmosphere has been created artificially and does not improve the decisionmaking process. We cannot expect a better America to emerge under the kind of atmosphere that has been created, a kind of bomb threat hovering over. I do not think the decisionmaking is going to be the best that we are capable of. I do not think the decisionmaking is going to be the kind of decisionmaking that the American people deserve, but that is the crisis and the revolutionary atmosphere that has been created. Those that have created the crisis obviously do not trust a rational step-by-step decisionmaking process. They do not agree with the process. They think that we have to have a crisis, we have to have a bomb threat hovering over the process. They are intellectual cowards who have nothing but contempt for the deliberative process of democracy, but they are in power. They have created the situation. That is the way it has to go forward as we count down toward December 15. Reform is not on the agenda of this controlling group. The Republican majority is not interested in reform. They talk about reform. They come to us in the clothing of reform, in the camouflage of reform, but what they really mean is they want to wreck and destroy. Wrecking and destroying is on the agenda of the Republican controlled Congress. They want to wreck what has been put together over the last 60 years. They want to wreck Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. They want to wreck Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. They want to wreck Medicare. They do not really want to save Medicare. There are quotes which clearly show that they never believed in Medicare. The Republican votes were never there. Medicare was created 30 years ago. It is an infant program. In the life of nations, 30 years is a very short period of time. But now, Medicare must be slowly strangled. The reforms are not to save Medicare. It is hoped that Medicare, ``would wither on the vine.'' There are other people that felt that Medicare was an idea that never worked anyhow, so the fact that they are attempting to make drastic cuts in Medicare now should surprise no one. It is logical. They are wrecking and destroying. The original Contract With America came camouflaged in the clothing of reform, but destruction is the objective. Destruction is the goal, and destruction is the mission of the present Republican-controlled Congress. The framework has been established. The countdown has begun. But each American voter, each constituent out there is not condemned to merely be a spectator. They do not have to be merely a spectator in this process. Their common sense has a vital role to play. Their common sense is already having a profound impact here in the distorted world of Washington decisionmaking. I want to thank the American people for raising their voices. I want to thank them for letting it be known that they can clearly understand the language of political used car salesmen. They can understand when they are being swindled. The public is far more intelligent than a lot of the professional decisionmakers here in Washington. I want to thank the American public. There are people who say that, ``Well, things are improving.'' Unfortunately, some within the Democratic Party. They say, ``Things are improving, and the public is coming around to seeing things the way Democrats see them and, therefore, we should lower our voices and we should not be shrill.'' Mr. Speaker, I do not understand that reasoning at all. I think that raising voices has led to American voters [[Page H 13719]] listening to each other. It has led to citizens out there waking up to the dangers that exist. It is not by accident that the polls now show that more than 60 percent of the American people do not want the cuts being proposed by the Republican majority in Congress. More than 60 percent. More than 70 percent do not want the Medicare and Medicaid cuts. Common sense is prevailing. People raised their voices and they heard each other. I do not think anybody wants to be shrill unnecessarily. For God's sake, understand what is at stake here. For the sake of the American people, for the sake of our families and our children, and for the sake of the greatest Nation that ever existed in the history of the world, it is necessary to raise our voices, wake each other up. Common sense is going to play a major role in what happens here. Common sense is going to be at the table in the White House, if it is kept highly visible and if the polls continue to record the truth of what the American people think out there. We have a problem and common sense will help us with that problem. We have a collision of visions. I heard this phrase used on the floor by one of my Republican colleagues. I do not remember exactly who the gentleman is, I cannot attribute it to him properly, but I liked what he said. I wrote it down. Definitely, there is a collision of visions. We heard the speakers before talk about their vision of America and one of them said that the government does not create wealth. The government has not created wealth. It has no role. Workers create wealth. I am glad the gentleman gave workers some credit. That is the first time I have heard workers being praised by that side of the aisle. Well, I would like to think that it is great that workers are given credit for the creation of wealth, but wealth is created by a number of different forces, and where there is no government, there is no wealth. Government is the key component of the preservation of wealth. Where would America be if there were no government to put the armies in the field to defend the principles of capitalism and the principles of democracy? Where would America be if we had no government to protect private property; if there were no government to maintain the kind of conditions which make it possible for some men to labor in the fields and sweat and others sit in their offices and earn their living by their ability to think of new kinds of ideas, and others to sit in offices and invest the money of other people? There is a whole range of activities that would not go on unless we had the government. When we had no control over the process of investment on Wall Street, we had the Great Depression brought on by the collapse of the stock market which was the result of no government, no government properly controlling. Of course, in all the wars that have been fought where American soldiers, ordinary people, sons and daughters of ordinary people have gone out to fight, if they had not gone out to fight those wars, we would have a different world. We would not have a world where America is basically economically in command and basically in a position of great privilege and advantage. That position is not there because some individual was able to use his mind and his advantages and his opportunities to create individual wealth. It all goes together. The Constitution had the focus of the idea of promoting the general welfare. Had the Constitution not made a commitment to facilitate the pursuit of happiness, we would have a different kind of America and a different kind of government, and a lot of the wealth that exists would not exist. The government also, in many other ways, has developed wealth. Science, technology, the organization and management of human resources; if there had been no American research and technology initiatives, if they had not been monumental, no individual corporation, no individual person could have financed and organized the kind of research and technology which went into the effort to win World War II and to maintain the edge, the technological and scientific edge on the Soviet Union following World War II. That great effort, all the research that developed radar and computerization and miniaturization and all the kinds of things that private industry now uses as a matter of fact and takes advantage of, all that wealth would not exist if it were not for government. So, the vision of those who say that government is in the way, and government is the problem, and government does not create wealth, that vision has to be challenged. Because if we do not believe that government is important, then we are saying that the great majority of the people who live in this society under the government are not important. Only those who can fend for themselves and are lucky enough to have reaped the benefits of all the previous efforts of government are worthy of existing. There is a collision of visions, definitely. And there is a collision of values. There is definitely a collision of values. The values of the Republican Majority go in the direction of abstract, hypothetical children of the future. They say, We are going to save the children of the future from having to pay debts. We are going to crusade and pressure the present system. We are going to create a crisis. We are going to make children go hungry in the present, so that the hypothetical children of the future will not be saddled with hypothetical debts. We are not going to recognize the fact that wealth is increasing geometrically. We are going to focus, instead, on the fact that there are scarce resources and create an atmosphere where it is believed that resources are scarce and there is not going to be enough for everybody and, therefore, we must squeeze the system and certain people will be squeezed out and thrown overboard. There will not be enough for the elderly who need nursing homes and there will not be enough for all the children who need lunches. We are going to create a finite number of lunches available for poor children, and when that number runs out, then the rest will have to go hungry. We are going to subscribe to elitism. The collision of values says that the Republican Majority believes that elitism is good for the country; a certain small minority has the right to control all the resources; they have a right to benefit from what is happening in America. We have a great shift in wealth in America where a small percentage of the people control most of the wealth. That shift has gone on at an escalating rate. Great Britain used to be the place where the ratio of the wealthiest to the poorest was the greatest. They had this great divide between the wealthy and the poor. Now, America has taken over. It has surpassed all the other countries in that notoriety. The difference between the wealthiest Americans and the poorest Americans, their income, is greatest, and it is increasing at an alarming rate. So, greed is good. If you have the value that greed is good and those that have the most should get the most and keep the most and not share and not even be bothered with a minimum amount of taxes; let the corporations continue to get away with paying the least amount of taxes, while individuals and families pay more and more taxes; then your value system certainly supports that of the Republican majority. There is a collision. There are Democratic values which say we ought to have a minimum wage, as small as it may be. There are millions of people who are paid on the basis of that minimum wage and that minimum wage is way, way behind in terms of the cost of living. We only want to increase the minimum wage by 90 cents over a 2-year period and we cannot even get more than 110 cosponsors on the bill. The Republican majority refuses to let it be discussed in committee. Increasing the minimum wage has not been discussed in my Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, which has jurisdiction. My Subcommittee on Workforce Protections has jurisdiction, but we cannot get the majority to even have a hearing on the minimum wage. The value system is such that greed is great; those who have, let them have more. It has nothing to do with balancing the budget, by the way. Increasing the minimum wage does not impact on this great process of balancing the budget. But, Mr. Speaker, the public is the savior of the situation, the American people, the voters out there. Their common sense should continue to be focused. They set their common sense against the monstrous blunders that continue to go on here. [[Page H 13720]] Both Republicans and Democrats have to look over their shoulder and watch the polls. The polls reflect the common sense of the American people. As I said before, the polls have shifted. The polls show that the word is getting out. The double-talk is being understood. The used car salesmen are being exposed. The public's common sense will save us. I urge those who are listening to continue to raise their voices and maintain a steady focus on the critical life-and-death situation that is taking place here. This is no ordinary congressional session. This is no ordinary year. Keep focus on the budget. The Republican remaking of America is an appropriation and expenditure revolution. This is war without blood, but there will be many casualties through this process of the way we appropriate money and the way we expend money. Many people will suffer and die. The process is beginning to take place already. So, Mr. Speaker, I say to those listening tonight, ``Raise your voice and maintain your focus, because what is happening here is more important than anything else that is happening in America today, or anything else that is going to happen in a long time.'' I think Bosnia is important and we must make some critical decisions about Bosnia, because our government is a part of a world of governments and we cannot exist as if we were on an island by ourselves. We have to deal with that situation. I am not saying it is not important, but nothing is more important than the budget negotiation process that has begun now between the Democratic White House and the Republican-controlled Congress. Let common sense lead us to keep our eyes on the prize, and we should refuse to yield to any diversions. Between now and November 1996, ``It's the budget, stupid.'' ``It's the appropriations process, stupid.'' ``It's the expenditure process, stupid.'' How we spend the taxpayers' money is the issue of the 1996 campaign. The campaign for Members of Congress, the campaign for the Presidency, the campaign for the other body. That is the issue. Do not let anybody divert us from that issue. Keep the focus. Do not let Bosnia be used as a diversion. Do not let affirmative action, set-asides, voting rights be used as diversion. Do not let them abuse religion. Come with a hypocritical focus on family values. We must not allow at this critical moment anybody to move away from the focus of the budget, the use of the American taxpayers' funds to provide for priorities that are determined by the American people. This countdown is everybody's business, and you can place yourself at the negotiation table. That is what I am trying to say. Keep your voices up, understand that you belong there. If you are not there, then terrible things will happen that will affect you right away and will affect your children and grandchildren, posterity. The framework is established, environment for negotiations is set. I am happy that the chief of staff of the White House hugged the chairman of the Committee on the Budget of the House of Representatives. I am happy that they hugged when this agreement was made and the parameters were set for the negotiations. I wonder if we are not in a situation similar to that faced by the Greeks who made the Trojans happy when they said: Look, we are going to stop all this fighting and in order for us to show that we no longer have any animosity toward you, even though we came over here to take your gold and to plunder your fields and to do everything we could to enrich ourselves, we use family values as an excuse, somebody stole somebody's wife, so that was a great excuse, we did all that, we came over here. We have slaughtered your young people. We have killed your great hero, Hector. Now we have a stalemate. We would like to show you that we are no longer angry at you for all the terrible things you let us do to you. We want to give you a horse, and we have constructed a horse, and we will push it inside your walls. So the Trojan horse was pushed inside the walls of the city of Troy. The Trojans who had fought against the awesome might of the Greeks for so long found themselves overcome by a situation where a few men slipped out, inside the Trojan horse slipped out, then locked the gates and all heck broke loose. Troy was sacked. Every male child was murdered, and so forth. The legend goes on and on. I hope we understand that there is a danger that a Trojan horse is here, that the people who want to remake America are in a hurry to make a revolution and are not going to accept a mere balancing of the budget by standards that deal with accounting only. People who want to remake America want to destroy certain programs. They want to destroy aid to families with dependent children. They do not want to reform it. The President came into office saying he wanted to reform welfare as we know it. But he did not say he wanted to destroy welfare. He did not say he wanted to destroy the part which deals with children. But we have now reached a point where the entitlement which says that every poor child who meets a certain criteria and shows that they are poor is eligible for Federal aid. They have taken the entitlement away. Yes, the final has not been signed, it has not been, but on the President's desk, but the agreement was made. The agreement has been made by all who are concerned. We cannot bring back the entitlement for aid to families with dependent children. It is dead. It is dangerous to expend a great deal of energy mourning for that entitlement because the entitlement for Medicaid is now on the table. I cannot stress it too much. The entitlement for Medicaid is on the table. The beast has devoured the entitlement for aid to families with dependent children. And now the beast is hungry. The taste of entitlements is too strong to resist. The beast wants to devour the Medicaid entitlement. We have had discussions about trimming the budget and balancing the budget for the last 13 years. I have been in Congress for 13 years. Since my first year here, there was a classmate of mine named Tim Penny. His name has been used often in the last year. I saw his picture in the paper recently. Tim Penny is a part of a group that is trying to get together an independent run for the Presidency. So I take my hat off to Tim for his integrity. I take my hat off to Tim for his consistency. I take my hat off to him for his persistence, Tim Penny and the people who surrounded him and from the very beginning were pushing for more budget sense and wanting to trim the waste from the Federal Government and wanting to move toward a balanced budget. Tim Penny always started his dialog by saying, we must trim the entitlements that are not means tested, the entitlements that are not means tested. He did not talk about the means tested entitlements. By means tested, I mean you have to show you are poor before you can qualify. You cannot get aid to families with dependent children unless you prove you are poor. You cannot get Medicaid until you have proven you are poor. Those are means tested entitlements. I even think at one point our Budget chairman, Mr. Kasich, was a part of the same group. They always emphasized not going after the means tested entitlements. In the process of balancing the budget now and moving towards a balanced budget, all we hear about now is the destruction of the means tested entitlements, the destruction of aid to families with dependent children, an accomplished fact almost, and the destruction of the entitlement for Medicaid. We are not talking about the entitlement for farm subsidies, various farm credit programs, farmers' mortgage, all kinds of programs out there which go to farmers regardless of whether they are poor or not. In fact, there is no means test whatsoever. On two occasions, Congressman Charles Schumer, a colleague of mine from New York, has offered amendments, and I supported those amendments which said: Look, let us take away the farm subsidies from any farmer who makes $100,000 or more. Farmers who make $100,000 or more should not be given a government handout. Each time that bill was on the floor, it went down to inglorious, inglorious [[Page H 13721]] defeat. I think we got less than 70 votes out of 435. Recently, the last time the agriculture appropriations were on the floor, several bills were offered to take away subsidies for tobacco and for mines and for a number of things. They went down to defeat also. The means tested entitlements have been put on the chopping block. One has been devoured already, and the others are about to be devoured. But the entitlements which do not relate to means testing--and there are some others that have not been put on the chopping block at all. The corporate welfare programs have not been put on the chopping block. The subsidies to corporations, the corporate tax loopholes have not been put on the chopping block. They are not even under discussion. They refuse to discuss my chart. The best way to destroy an idea and to defeat an idea is to ignore it. Here is the most ignored chart in Washington. Here is the most ignored chart which is definitely a part, could be a part of the solution to the budget balancing problem. Here is a chart which says that the revenue stream in America which flows primarily from income tax comes in two directions. It comes from families and individuals. And it comes from corporations. Yes, there are other taxes which make up the revenue, but the income tax comes from families and from corporations. Here is a chart that shows what has happened over the last 50 years. In 1943, this chart shows that families and individuals were paying a very small percentage of the revenue of the taxes; 27.1 percent was being paid by families and individuals; 39.8 percent was being paid by corporations. In 1983, that is the blue line, that is the families and individuals. And the red line is the corporate, corporations. In 1983, under Ronald Reagan's regime, the amount of money paid by families and individuals jumped all the way to 48.1 percent. This is from 27.1 percent in 1943 to 48.1 percent in 1983; at the same time watch the red bar. The red bar dropped all the way down to 6.2 percent; corporations, their income taxes dropped drastically. Do you want to know why we have a deficit? Do you want to know where your taxes went? Do you want to know why people are angry about taxes? They ought to be angry. Individuals and families have been swindled. I said this before and I will say it again and again, but nobody wants to talk about it. Finally, in 1995, is the situation drastically improved? No. Watch the blue bar and the red bar, and you still have 43.7 percent being paid by families and individuals and 11.2 percent being paid by corporations. This is fact that nobody wants to discuss in Washington. This is a fact that everybody wants to ignore. I invite you, the American public, the voters, to use your common sense and interpret what this means, especially in 1995. In 1995, individuals and families are suffering drastically from downsizing and streamlining. People who lost their jobs in industrial enterprises have gone to work in service enterprises at much lower salaries. Individuals are suffering but the economy is booming. The economy is booming. So corporations are making tremendous amounts of money as a result of their application of the science and the technology which has been developed by the American government, building on telecommunications, radar, computerization, miniaturization, all the things which our space program and our military program helped to design. Corporations are able to take advantage of that. And nobody wants to begrudge them. Let them make money. That is what capitalism is all about, making money. Why do they not pay their fair share? Why do not corporations pay half the total revenue that is derived from income taxes? They are the one sector that could afford it. They are the one sector that would hurt the least if they were to pay. So here is the kind of fact that is destroying the kind of idea that does not exist because it is ignored. I urge you, the American people, to use your common sense and put this back on the agenda. Ask the question. Ask the question everywhere. Ask the Congress the question. Ask the Members of Congress. Ask the President the question. We are going into a situation now where the negotiations are going to take place within very narrow parameters. They will not even put this on the table. There are certain kinds of cuts that will not be on the table. The farm subsidies will not be on the table. The farm subsidies that go to people who are not poor, entitlements that go to people and they are not means tested, they will not be on the table. In 1990, we had a similar situation where there was a gridlock between the Congress and the President. The President at that time happened to be a Republican, President Bush. And the Congress was controlled by Democrats. At that time you had the same kind of negotiations initiated at the White House. On May 24, 1990, I entered into the Congressional Record the following extension of remarks, and I find it so relevant at this moment that I am going to bore you by reading part of it. In Extension of Remarks I submitted the following. Mr. Speaker, the White House budget summit now underway is a process saturated with pitfalls. These discussions generate great fear among those Americans who have been repeatedly neglected or violated by similar deal making. Since 1981, under the cloak of sweet reasonableness, we have watched the Democratic leadership being swindled. Tax reform gave more breaks to the rich while payroll taxes increased, resulting in the poor paying a greater percentage of their income than the rich. Let us not forget also that the Gramm-Rudman conspiracy almost drove a life threatening dagger into the heart of certain vitally needed, low-income safety net programs. Remember Gramm-Rudman? Senator Gramm is still around, Gramm-Rudman. Vigilance by the Congressional Black Caucus thwarted the vicious intent of the Gramm-Rudman conspiracy. It was through the efforts of the Congressional Black Caucus that seven low-income programs were exempted from the budget cutting axe of Gramm-Rudman: AFDC, school lunch and dependent care food program, commodity supplemental food program, food stamps, Medicaid, SSI, and WIC. They were all exempted from the Gramm-Rudman cuts. Remember the Gramm-Rudman cuts went across the board and cut everything equally, but we will manage to exempt these safety net programs. Thank God for Tip O'Neill and his wisdom. He responded positively to our requests that the safety-net programs which are now under attack, which are now being destroyed, that they be exempt from Gramm-Rudman and not cut drastically. Mr. Speaker, these same crucial low-income programs are now in danger. This I am reading from my May 24, 1990, entry into the Congressional Record: White House spokesmen have announced that they want to ``close the Gramm-Rudman loopholes.'' Our interpretation of this threat leads us to believe that a tradeoff will be offered. Defense cuts will be on the table in exchange for low-income program cuts. Beggars will be robbed and all who are present will be pressured to accept this goal as a reasonable exchange. Mr. Speaker, the fear of the budget summit process in the streets of my district is very real. I would like to use the language and the attitude of a street constituent to sum up this deeply felt concern. And it is at this point that I entered a rap poem into the Record, a poem that I wrote from the point of view of a constituent in the street out there watching the process. The Budget Summit All the big white D.C. mansion There's a meeting of the mob And the question on the table Is which beggars will they rob. There's a meeting of the mob Now we'll never get a job. All the gents will make a deal And the poor have no appeal. Which housing for the homeless will they hit? School lunches they will cut all the way to the pit. There's a meeting of the mob! Big ballouts they will cheer Cause the bankers they all fear. Closing loopholes is their role But never mind the S and L hole There's a meeting of the mob! Medicaid is against the wall Watch health care take a fall [[Page H 13722]] There's a meeting of the mob! These good fellows won't be frisked But welfare children are being risked There's a meeting of the mob! Not a cent will be left for AIDS When they finish with their raids Let addict babies remain with their pain This gang will deal a budget that is certainly insane There's a meeting of the mob! These bosses lack logic but they all have clout Old folk's COLA's will rapidly get rubbed out There's a meeting of the mob! At the big white D.C. mansion There's a meeting of the mob! Now we'll never get a job All these gents will make a deal And the poor have no appeal There's a meeting of the mob! This was in May 1990. History has gone slowly, in unfortunate circles, and we are right back to where we were in May 1990, only the situation is far worse. An agreement has been made already that the budget will be balanced in 7 years, and it is required that the beggars must be robbed. Nobody is talking about taking away anything from the entitlements that exist for the middle class. It is the beggars who must be robbed. In my district right now there are poor people who are on welfare, home relief. The constitution of the State of New York requires that they take care of poor people, and home relief cannot be abolished, so there are people on relief, home relief, who are being forced to work for their welfare check. I have no problem with having anybody work for their check, their income. It is altogether fitting and proper that everybody should work who can work. There are able-bodied people who cannot find jobs and for various reasons are on welfare, and the workfare that has not been thrust upon them would be appropriate if they were being paid the minimum wage. But they are being made to work more hours than are necessary if they were making minimum wage to generate the equivalent of their welfare check. What does that mean? That means they are working for less than the minimum wage, they are moving toward a situation which you might call semi-slavery. When you are forced to work for your food and your basic necessities, and arbitrarily you are told that you must do a certain amount of work, even if it is inconsistent with the minimum wages that would be paid for that amount of work, then you are in a very serious situation, and that is a situation that exists in New York City right now. We have no problem with the workfare programs; the streets are cleaner, there are a number of things that are going on as a result of people being put to work. It should have happened a long time ago, but why not compensate them to the level of minimum wage, minimum wages? It is so slow anyhow. We are fighting to get minimum wages on the agenda here in the Congress. The President has stamped his approval on a minimum-wage bill, an increase of 90 cents per hour over a 2-year period, 45 cents one year and 45 cents the next year. The minority leader, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt], is the sponsor of the legislation, and yet we can only get 110 people signed on. There is suffering already as a result of the double-barreled agenda which has a lot to do with more than balancing the budget. New York hospitals are suffering already as a result of the atmosphere that has been created. They know the cuts are coming. The mayor has moved to drastically overhaul the hospital system; privatization is on the agenda. Whether it improves health care or not is of no concern. It will save money, so large numbers of administrators and supervisory personnel of hospitals are bailing out. They are leaving the system already. We have a lot of chaos and confusion in the city's hospitals now that could be avoided if we did not have this revolutionary atmosphere created that frightens everybody at various levels of government. Cost of Federal Government is a primary ingredient in the income of these hospitals. They are thrown into panic almost by the fact that so much change over such a short period of time is being projected. Schools are crumbling literally. There was an editorial in the New York Times yesterday which talked about every time it rains New York City schools get washed away or a little bit more. That is on the editorial page, and you think, well, what kind of joke is this? You look at the article more closely, you read more carefully, and they are literally describing a process whereby every time it rains and the rain runs through the crevices of the bricks and washes away the remaining dry cement, the bricks begin to fall off, and they have falling bricks. At a lot of schools you have ceilings falling, you have literally brigades of people in New York City schools carrying buckets and various newly fashioned aluminum vessels that collect rain. It is the truth described in the pages of the New York Times. Schools are crumbling, and there is no relief in sight in terms of new construction. At one time we had a bill that was passed here that called for the Federal Government to begin a program of physical assistance to exist in the physical plants of schools. It was a small program by Federal standards. The authorization, and Senator Carol Moseley-Braun and I worked on it, and we had an authorization of $600 million to begin a process of emergency repairs in various schools that had emergencies; $600 million, a small amount of the total Federal budget. Well, that was cut down in the appropriations process to $100 million, and when the rescission bill came, it was cut down to zero. So the Federal Government might have stimulated a process, might have kept a process going and encouraged the State government and the city government to approach the physical plants of school buildings in New York differently, but it provided no stimulus. I cannot blame the Federal Government for what New York is failing to do or the State and city are failing to do, but the Federal Government certainly in education has been a stimulus and lost a great, we lost a great, opportunity. In this crisis and revolutionary atmosphere no one is willing to make any decisions about building new schools. There is nothing on the drawing board of consequence. As I said before, the crisis and revolutionary atmosphere does not approve of decisionmaking. It panics people not only here in Washington, but at the local level and at the State level, the panic sets in, and we are not having the best government at any level as a result of the kind of crisis atmosphere that has been created. Reform is not on the agenda. If it was reform, it would go at a slower pace. There would be a more deliberative situation. I am all in favor of getting rid of waste as fast as possible. It is the duty of every elected official, everybody who is in government at any level, to constantly try to get the maximum output for every dollar that is put into any program. We are in favor of reform, but reform is not on the agenda. It is wrecking and destroying that is on the agenda. If we wanted to reform, we would not have to throw programs down to the level of the State government. One of the ways to destroy programs for the poor is to block grant them to the State level. The States had the responsibility before the Federal Government assumed that responsibility for most of the history of the United States of America. States have had the responsibility for programs for poor people. States have had the responsibility for health care. States have had the responsibility for nutrition programs. When World War II came along and they had to enlist large numbers of men over a short period of time, they found thousands of American males not fit for the process of training to go into combat. They were malnourished, they were weak, they were undeveloped as a result of the tremendous crisis in feeding programs throughout the country. The States had ignored the fact that their populations were not receiving proper nutrition. The States had produced a situation which endangered the security of the Nation because you did not have healthy bodies to deal with the crisis created by World War II. The States were in charge, the States have been in charge of health care, and their charity hospitals kept us going for a long time, but we know there were great gaps in services provided by charity hospitals or by the Hill- Burton Act which later came on from the Federal Government level and offered funds. [[Page H 13723]] The States had had responsibilities before, but they are now being handed back, and States have done a very poor job. Now if we really wanted to make some improvements and to reform, we would not have this blanket determination that give it to the States and let them handle it. If you want to destroy programs, then give it to the States, and let them handle it. It is an ideological decision, not an administration decision. It is understood that the States will let Medicare wither on the vine. It is understood that the States will ignore large numbers of poor people, and welfare as we know it will certainly be gone in 5 to 10 years if the States are in charge. States have made monumental blunders. States have been guilty of horrific corruption. I served in government at all three levels. I was commissioner in New York City government for 6 years. I was a State senator for 8 years. I have been in Congress now for 13 years. And I will tell you that the level of government which is the least efficient, the level of government which is most unreal, the level of government where you have the greatest amount of waste, is at the State level, not the municipal and local level where people in the government have to meet face to face with the people they are serving, not at the Federal level where you are forced to a process of competition. Believe it or not, 435 people from all over the country do generate a kind of creative competition in working out programs, and oversight, and a number of other things that we do right, but at the State level, this sort of in between, they have a lot of power and no responsibility, and if you want to cut out one level of government and save money, you find the State is a level you could cut out, and you would not miss it. Just give the money directly to the local governments, and you save a lot of money, but States have moved in to use their powers, the Governors are using their powers to grab a great segment of the American Treasury. We have a Balkanization of America about to take place. It is very dangerous when you start dividing up the responsibilities at the Federal Government and giving them to the States. You set in motion a process where States will begin to compete with each other, and in the case of services to the poor, Mr. Speaker, they will all strive to reach the lowest common denominator most rapidly. In other words, the State which provides the least amount of services to the poor, the worst Medicaid that is provided will become the norm because every other State will be moving in a way to prevent citizens from one State which provides lower levels of service from moving to their State. You will have a situation where Mississippi, which is at the bottom of the rung in so many ways, will set the level for the rest of the country. The States right around Mississippi in the South will be pushed into a situation where they have to lower their standards to keep Mississippians from moving out of their States, and then those States in the South, the surrounding States that surround them, will lower their levels, and it will go right across the country, where everybody will have the lowest possible level of service in order to defend themselves against people seeking better health care services trying to survive. You may even have tremendous tension created between the States. There was a time in our history shortly following the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, where slaves were moving across the country, not wanted in any State or city, and large amounts of people were driven out with violence, large amounts were murdered, from one locality to another. They pushed them around because nobody wanted to take responsibility for poor people who had nowhere else to go. You may have that kind of situation. You may even have a situation which results in the largest States using their muscles to force the smaller States to not drop their people off on them. You have a situation now where the United States of America is one America. You have a situation now where FDR, or Franklin Roosevelt, who started the New Deal, looked at the richest on the east coast. Franklin Roosevelt was a New Yorker. He clearly understood that New York is much richer than Georgia or Tennessee or Mississippi. He clearly understood if you create a new deal, if you have a Federal Government taking revenue from the richest States and you need to supply funds for programs in the poorer States, that it is going to come from the richest States and go into the poorer States. Franklin Roosevelt was not stupid, not naive. He clearly understood that America is one America, and where there are riches and surplus, where people can give, they should not mind assisting the rest of America. That is what happened. It even endures until today, the unevenness in the distribution of Federal funds I have talked about previously. There is a study that is done every year by the Kennedy School of Government and Senator Moynihan, who originated the study in his own office. Jointly Senator Moynihan and the Kennedy School of Government do a study of how the revenues of the Federal Government are distributed throughout the States. They list States which give more than they receive. They list States that receive more than they give also. The pattern is shown, and I read from that booklet from this podium, and the pattern is clear. It is the Northeast States, it is the Midwestern States, the Great Lakes States, which even until today are giving much larger amounts of money to the Federal Treasury than they receive from the Federal Treasury. The pattern is clear at the other end, the Southern States, all of them except Texas, and whether that is Southern or Western, it is not clear which category they fall in, but all of the Southern States are recipient States. They receive large amounts of Federal money, much more than they pay into the Treasury. New York State, almost $19 billion in 1994, almost $19 billion more flowed from New York State taxpayers to the Federal Government than went back to the New York State people in terms of Federal services and expenditures; $19 billion. Now, if you have a balkanization of America and every State is allowed to reclaim some of what they pay in, if you had a revenue justice program, a revenue justice act, maybe the New York legislators ought to join me in creating a revenue justice act, where every State will get back at least half of what it overpays. New York would be receiving, if it got half of $19 billion, they would be receiving $9.5 billion. $9.5 billion would balance the budget of New York State. We could solve all of our budget problems if we had $9.5 billion. If we had the whole $19 billion, New York State would be a paradise. Prior to that, there was $16 billion more paid by New York State the year before than they received back. Prior to that, $23 billion more was paid into the Federal coffers than New York received back. So, the question is, who benefits by the balkanization of America, if you start giving the States the power, if the States are going to run it. Where does it lead to? The Southern States receive $68 billion. The collective Southern States receive $68 billion more from the Federal Government than they pay into the Federal Government. The Southern States, they lose if you balkanize America. What is the great advantage of this process of handing it down to the States with the hope that the States are going to destroy the programs? It is dangerous precedent. It is not needed to accomplish the process of balancing the budget, but it is part of the destruction of programs. The framework has been established, the countdown has begun. But, as I said before, each American, each constituent out there, is not condemned to be merely a spectator. Common sense has a vital role to play. Your common sense is already having a profound impact. Stop and consider what some of the commonsense impacts are. If you or your child who is a sophomore in high school, or maybe they are just in the fourth grade, were to take out a pencil and paper and look at the options, take a look at the chart that I showed you before, would you not consider that it makes a lot of sense to help balance the budget by lowering the level of income taxes for families and individuals [[Page H 13724]] while you raise the level of income taxes paid by corporations? Would not your common sense tell you that ought to be one of the answers to increase the amount of money paid by corporations into the Federal coffers? Corporations are making all the money. Let them pay more in revenue as a part of the way to solve the problem. Using your common sense, would you not say that even though there has been an agreement to do all of this in 7 years, that there is no magic to 7 years? If you have to, in order to do it in a more humane way and lessen the suffering, if you have to do it in 10 years or 9 years, why not do it in 9 or 10 years? Your common sense would tell you that. Yes, your common sense has told you over the years that something is wrong in Washington. You wanted to eliminate the high price toilet seats that the military was putting in their planes. You want to eliminate the $600 coffee pots. Common sense has always been against waste. Medicaid waste, Medicare waste, food stamp waste, Embassies abroad wasting money, all of that waste, your common sense tells you to eliminate. So let us bring our common sense into this debate, keep it focused. Look at the CIA. The CIA has blundered and is now a danger to our foreign policy, a danger to America. It makes so many blunders, until we would be better off if we did not have a CIA. Yet the CIA goes on. Recently the CIA was exposed as having a petty cash slush fund that nobody knew about, the Director of the CIA did not know about it, the President did not know about it. It was at least $1.5 billion . We have proposed on this floor several times that you cut the CIA budget by just 10 percent a year. If you cut it by 10 percent a year over a 7-year period, take out your pencil and paper, and you will see that the CIA cut by 10 percent a year, and the admitted amount is at least $28 billion, 10 percent is $2.8 billion a year, times 7 years, you will end up with $19 billion in 7 years. The CIA would still exist, but it would only be cut 10-percent a year over that seven-year period. If you take that $19 billion that you get from the CIA cut of 10 percent over a 7-year period, and you add to that the $1.5 billion slush fund that the CIA discovered that it had and nobody knew about, you would have $21 billion, and $21 billion is more than you need to make up for the education cut. Education is being cut by $4 billion next year. $21 billion is not quite enough. Take the B-2 bomber and add that. The B-2 bomber over the period of its life will cost about $33 billion. One-third of that is $11 billion. You add the $11 billion of the B-2 bomber to the $21 billion of the CIA, you have $32 billion. Education cuts are going to be $4 billion left over, if you take out your pencil and paper and use common sense and get rid of real waste. But nobody is discussing a cut of the CIA. The CIA goes on blundering and nobody cuts it. We must raise our voices, maintain a steady focus on the critical life and death target here in Washington. It is the budget. The Republican remaking of America is an appropriation and expenditure revolution. This is a war without blood, but there will be casualties. The common sense of the American people is necessary to minimize the casualties and to save America. We must raise our voices. We must maintain a steady focus. Do not let anybody tell you to lower your voice. Scream and scream loud.